The amusing part of all this hassle you went through is, if the lenders and the school had more complete databases and records about student loan applicants, it could all be handled on the same day... but then Mr. Katz would surely cry "foul" for invading your privacy.
If you have a student loan and make the payments, that should be more than enough credit history for anybody.
As for identifying students by SSN... It used to be extremely common, but a lot of schools are starting to wise up. I guess Penn State is a little behind the curve on that one.
you can't build credit without borrowing, so you could never get that car or house loan.
That is a dangerous myth. When you apply for a house loan, the house is held as collateral, and you often pay lender's insurance, so unless you have BAD credit, the loan will fly through. Even if you have never had a credit card in your life, a record of paying your apartment rent and utility bills on time is usually strong enough for approval.
Also, you should avoid borrowing when you buy your first car. Get a POS car that you can afford. Not only will you save a lot of money, but you will learn a lot about cars in the process of keeping it running. The car-loan payments that you are not making can build up into an impressive savings towards the car you buy when you are older (and presumably will have a better job and longer credit history). Some truly frugal people go their whole lives without ever getting a car loan... and there is nothing like the feeling of buying a new BMW or Mercedes with cash!
the better your credit, and the more money you borrow, the better rates you get, so your money goes further.
Again, not true. What matters is your HISTORY of good credit, not the ammount that you have borrowed. If you use your credit cards almost like debit cards (spending only when you already have the money in the bank, and paying the whole balance off at the end of each month), and and are ultra-conservative about using your cards, your credit will be just as good (and your available borrowing rate just as low) as it would be for carrying a $3000 credit balance and making the "required" monthly payments.
Okay okay... about a half-dozen of you have, correctly, put me in my place on the point about the timing of student loans. Sometimes you gotta play their game.
I stand by the rest of my point, though. People often make bad credit situations worse by relying on credit they can't really afford.
In my case, the stolen card had not even been activated yet. It was on my desk, still in the envelope it had arrived in. Some gas station honored it anyway, and I had to call the company to get the charge removed.
Due to sloppy record-keeping on their part, the charge re-appeared (with late fees) three times over the next several months.
Needless to say, that credit company no longer has my business.
I now belong to a credit union, and do all my banking, borrowing, and car buying through them... best decision I ever made.
I didn't say you should never use credit cards. I said you should not carry a balance on them and live within your means. Paying off your credit card bill in full at the end of each month establishes good credit history just as well as carrying debt does, and saves you a lot of interest charges.
I'll give you the same advice I would give a teenager. Go to Sears or Target and get one of their in-store credit cards. Use it occationally for stuff you would have bought from them anyway, and pay off the bill comepletely at the end of each month. Since you will not be carrying a balance, you won't get rocked with a lot of interest charges.
After a year or two of doing that, you will have established a history that shows you pay your credit bills, and getting a Visa or Discover card will be no problem.
Most kids going in to college have a "red flag" or two in their credit report. If you can get a parent to co-sign the loan, what you did or did not do with a CD-of-the-month club bill several years ago becomes meaningless.
As for this particular kid's problem... what the hell was he doing signing up for classes before his loans cleared? How would he have handled it if the loan was rejected for a legitimate reason?
A credit card of mine was stolen during a break-in once, and clearing the charges on the stolen card took me almost a year... so I know how frustrating the stituation can be, but a lot of people make things worse by actually relying on credit. Every financial advisor in the world will tell you the same thing: Live within your means. You should not carry an ongoing balance on your cards, and should only borrow long-term for a house, education, and maybe your car. As spiffy as the new Apple G4 may be, you should try to get along with your P133 Linux box unless you have the cash to buy something new.
If people did not overextend themselves on credit, debtor errors would be less of a personal tragedy, and more of a mere inconvenience.
A little negativity injection...
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 3
A lot of theories have been offered, and one of them could be right, but allow me to put on my cynic hat and explain why most of these ideas are either wrong, or simply won't work out:
Personal Transport (hover/copter/sterling-driven/bike/scooter/wheelch air/backpack) has no chance of generating $60 billion in 5 years at $2k a pop. In order for it to make that much money, pretty much everybody in America needs to buy one. In order for that to happen, it needs to be a 100% replacement for a car, because most people will not spend two grand on a second vehicle in addition to their car.
Cars protect from the elements (rain, cold, etc); they provide some protection in accidents (metal frame, air bags, seat belts, etc); they allow you to carry passengers and luggage; they can travel at high speeds (as in >30 MPH) over long distances; they are hard for a non-expert theif to steal.
Given that criteria, a personal craft that can not take you from L.A. to Vegas at 70 MPH, be driven comfortably through Detroit in January, and crash into a garbage truck head-on without killing you... will never replace cars, and therefore will be nothing more than a toy for yuppies and the "Earth First" crowd.
Teleporter - The problem I have always had with sci-fi transport devices is that they don't actually move you. They disintigrate you and then replicate you. Most of us would rather not be destroyed and simultaniously replaced with a copy that has our memories. Also, it can't be done with current knowledge.
Power generation - I could see that becoming a popular option. A lot of home-owners, including me, would have gone solar a long time ago if it was cheap enough. However, nobody can make $60 billion in the home appliance market. The margins are simply not high enough, and if they were you would face stiff competition within a year or two. Also, most urban dwellers live in apartments, where power and utility costs are usually hidden in their rent payments.
Waste Disposal / Water Delivery / etc. faces the same problems as the generator theories.
It seems to me that for "IT" to live up to the hype, it must be something that none of us have thought of, or ever thought we would want. After all, nobody thought we would want to do our computing with a mouse-driven GUI before the XEROX engineers thought of it, and nobody thought they could sell one until Jobs visited PARC labs... but now it is hard to imagine selling any sort of client software without it.
Not so fast yourself, spunky. If you had read my response to connorbd before ripping into my post, you would have seen that I am the proud owner of the very same tons-o'-buttons mouse. Yes, it's spiffy... but no, it is not needed. As I said in that reply, I am thinking of picking up an new Apple mouse for my tower and plugging the MS mouse into my PC, where I actually need the buttons.
At home I use the Microsoft all-the-buttons-we-could-fit-on-the-damed-thing mouse on my old G3 tower, and I have grown accustomed to using it. When we got a new Mac at my office, I wondered if I should pick up a multi-button mouse, but I decided to give the new clear "no button" mouse a try. I was stunned at how much I did not miss the other buttons. Contextual menus are not the life-blood of the Mac OS the way they are in windows, and the Mac GUI text handling is actually a little nicer (IMHO) than the Gnome "middle-click" pasting method.
Now I'm actually tempted to pick up another one of these new Apple mice for my home system, and move the MS optical button-cluster mouse over to my PC.
That said, I'd still like to see a subnotebook one of these days, as PowerBook Duos are not always easy to find
I have an old Duo. It weighs over 4 pounds. The Titanium Powerbook weighs about five and a half pounds. Seems like a good trade-off for about triple the battery life and about triple the screen size.
Second, more slots in the G4.
The new G4 has been bumped up from 3 PCI slots to 5, and the PCI bus has been improved. I am, however, a bit ambivalent about returning to single-processordom
If you buy the 533 G4, you can get a second CPU for $300.
I don't know what is funnier, the way they treated all no responses as an "error", or the fact that they had the balls to send such an irritating message out to spam-averse customers.
The management at eBay is either really stupid, or else they just don't give a rats ass about people who don't accept spam. Either way, I got a good laugh out of it.
Come to think of it, that would be a fun question to ask a marketing rep from eBay... "You recently sent out a message that can not possibly result in anything other than infuriating your customers. Do you dislike your them, or have you just failed to understand them?" Could we set up a Slashdot interview?:)
When I was a kid, I remember replacing my Vic with a C64... That was cool stuff. A 300-baud accoustic coupler salvaged from a friend's parent's office, and Zowie! I could connect to other computers! Ah... the thrill of it all.
Was I the only one who also bought that two-octive keyboard and synthesizer software for it? IIRC, the keyboard plugged right into the RS-232 port on the back, and the software had all the on-screen controls to mimic the dials of the Moog synths.
Last month, I found out that my parents still had all that long-lost hardware in their basement. I hauled it all over to my house, and plan on firing it up again for old time's sake. If it all works, I'll probably play around with it until I get bored and then sell/give it to some younger, more ambitious hacker.
Yet another AC makes me glad that I still read with a threshold of zero. Your point is exactly right, and nobody else here seems to have caught on. LinuxPPC is a great way to breath life into those old boxes, by turning them into servers. And any remaining hardcore LinuxPPC users probably consider themselves to be "UNIX users" rather than "Mac users", and will be thrilled with the idea of using the best of both worlds without dual booting.
Personally, I plan on buying OS X and installing it the very day it comes out, 1.0 bugs and all!
$799 for a system you can duplicate with Wintel for $400.
Bullshit.
Find me a $400 Wintel box that comes with USB, Firewire, 10/100 Ethernet, a monitor, 3D video, and gets anywhere close to MIPS. Can't do it? Didn't think so.
$1299 for a system you can duplicate with Wintel for $800.
You obviously have not read the specs on the G4 towers, or you would not say something as ignorant as that.
Mac hardware is slightly more expensive, but your numbers are way off.
Also, when it comes to laptops, nobody provides more bank for the buck than Apple (especially for Linux users). A Powerbook running LinuxPPC kicks ass.
There are plenty of Telnet and SSH clients out there for the Mac. I am using one on a Mac in my office today. I think the problems you hare having with the MacOS lie somewhere between the office chair and the keyboard.
That reminds me of the time that an overzealous newspaper editor in Washington (I can't recall which of the papers it was) blindly changed the text of a business report to read that the market was expected to soon be "in the African-American".
I have now seen enough previews to know for sure that this movie will be a complete piece of shit.
Warning: rant starting
Tim Robbins was great in The Shawshank Redemption and all, but I have a hard time believing that idiot could run a neighborhood reading group, let alone be an Evil Corporate Execitive. In the scenes shown during the previews, he does everything short of mustache twirling to make sure you know he is a bad guy.
Just once, it would be nice to see a high-tech thriller that is not completely built around the Baby Boom Generation's irrational fear of computers, corporations, and/or suburban life.
What these Hollywood dicks fail to see is that normal Americans, especially young people who go to a lot of movies, don't fear technology. At all. Even if some nefarious Evil CEO(TM) wanted to sneak a camera into my PC, how would an actual hacker kid react? "Yay! Free camera! I bet I can hack this!"
Out here in the real world, corporations don't give a shit about who you are our what you are doing. They only care about what they can sell you and how much you will pay for it.
Every year, Hollywood makes another crop of movies to tell us that the Star Chambers of Wall Street are out to destroy us... but most of us know that Corporation is the river by which wealth and prosperity flow to us. Without corporations, there would be no Hollywood productions to complain about them, and no customers with enough money to go to the movies. So shut the hell up, Tim Robbins. Nobody cares about what frightens you.
A NON-ERGONOMIC optical mouse with ONE FREAKING BUTTON!
Make that the most ergonomic mouse around with no buttons. You obviously have this mixed up with the old Apple mouse from a year ago.
There are no ergonomic 3-button mice, because they all force you to keep three fingers poised over their respective buttons with either your palm pushing the mouse, or else your thumb and pinky clamped onto its sides... very un-ergonomic. The buttonless Apple mouse is a dream, to use... especially since the OS does not really require multiple mouse buttons. I like my MS Intelimouse, particularilly the spiffy scroll wheel in the middle, but the new Apple mouse is much more pleasant to use. (For the record, I still use the MS mouse on Win and Linux boxes, and I think MS makes some of the best mice on the market.)
I make one asside comment about the belief held by some people that the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon didn't really exist... without even weighing in with my own opinion on the debate... and I get 3 snippy replies.
Gawd... no wonder there are so many trolls on Slashdot. With so many touchy, reactionary people, it must be like shooting fish in a barrel!
He's not in a list of top 10 books because he didn't write any books. Poems, sonnets, scripts, yes... but no books.
Hamlet was a play, and can't be on the list. The Harry Potter books are novels, and can be on the list (but shouldn't).
Also, there is a popular theory that he never really existed, and the plays attributed to "Shakespeare" were written under a pseudonym by either the Earl of Oxford, or else by a variety of lesser-known playwrites.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I got a good chuckle out of that. :)
The amusing part of all this hassle you went through is, if the lenders and the school had more complete databases and records about student loan applicants, it could all be handled on the same day... but then Mr. Katz would surely cry "foul" for invading your privacy.
As for identifying students by SSN... It used to be extremely common, but a lot of schools are starting to wise up. I guess Penn State is a little behind the curve on that one.
That is a dangerous myth. When you apply for a house loan, the house is held as collateral, and you often pay lender's insurance, so unless you have BAD credit, the loan will fly through. Even if you have never had a credit card in your life, a record of paying your apartment rent and utility bills on time is usually strong enough for approval.
Also, you should avoid borrowing when you buy your first car. Get a POS car that you can afford. Not only will you save a lot of money, but you will learn a lot about cars in the process of keeping it running. The car-loan payments that you are not making can build up into an impressive savings towards the car you buy when you are older (and presumably will have a better job and longer credit history). Some truly frugal people go their whole lives without ever getting a car loan... and there is nothing like the feeling of buying a new BMW or Mercedes with cash!
the better your credit, and the more money you borrow, the better rates you get, so your money goes further.
Again, not true. What matters is your HISTORY of good credit, not the ammount that you have borrowed. If you use your credit cards almost like debit cards (spending only when you already have the money in the bank, and paying the whole balance off at the end of each month), and and are ultra-conservative about using your cards, your credit will be just as good (and your available borrowing rate just as low) as it would be for carrying a $3000 credit balance and making the "required" monthly payments.
I stand by the rest of my point, though. People often make bad credit situations worse by relying on credit they can't really afford.
Due to sloppy record-keeping on their part, the charge re-appeared (with late fees) three times over the next several months.
Needless to say, that credit company no longer has my business.
I now belong to a credit union, and do all my banking, borrowing, and car buying through them... best decision I ever made.
I didn't say you should never use credit cards. I said you should not carry a balance on them and live within your means. Paying off your credit card bill in full at the end of each month establishes good credit history just as well as carrying debt does, and saves you a lot of interest charges.
After a year or two of doing that, you will have established a history that shows you pay your credit bills, and getting a Visa or Discover card will be no problem.
As for this particular kid's problem... what the hell was he doing signing up for classes before his loans cleared? How would he have handled it if the loan was rejected for a legitimate reason?
A credit card of mine was stolen during a break-in once, and clearing the charges on the stolen card took me almost a year... so I know how frustrating the stituation can be, but a lot of people make things worse by actually relying on credit. Every financial advisor in the world will tell you the same thing: Live within your means. You should not carry an ongoing balance on your cards, and should only borrow long-term for a house, education, and maybe your car. As spiffy as the new Apple G4 may be, you should try to get along with your P133 Linux box unless you have the cash to buy something new.
If people did not overextend themselves on credit, debtor errors would be less of a personal tragedy, and more of a mere inconvenience.
Personal Transport (hover/copter/sterling-driven/bike/scooter/wheelch air/backpack) has no chance of generating $60 billion in 5 years at $2k a pop. In order for it to make that much money, pretty much everybody in America needs to buy one. In order for that to happen, it needs to be a 100% replacement for a car, because most people will not spend two grand on a second vehicle in addition to their car.
Cars protect from the elements (rain, cold, etc); they provide some protection in accidents (metal frame, air bags, seat belts, etc); they allow you to carry passengers and luggage; they can travel at high speeds (as in >30 MPH) over long distances; they are hard for a non-expert theif to steal.
Given that criteria, a personal craft that can not take you from L.A. to Vegas at 70 MPH, be driven comfortably through Detroit in January, and crash into a garbage truck head-on without killing you... will never replace cars, and therefore will be nothing more than a toy for yuppies and the "Earth First" crowd.
Teleporter - The problem I have always had with sci-fi transport devices is that they don't actually move you. They disintigrate you and then replicate you. Most of us would rather not be destroyed and simultaniously replaced with a copy that has our memories. Also, it can't be done with current knowledge.
Power generation - I could see that becoming a popular option. A lot of home-owners, including me, would have gone solar a long time ago if it was cheap enough. However, nobody can make $60 billion in the home appliance market. The margins are simply not high enough, and if they were you would face stiff competition within a year or two. Also, most urban dwellers live in apartments, where power and utility costs are usually hidden in their rent payments.
Waste Disposal / Water Delivery / etc. faces the same problems as the generator theories.
It seems to me that for "IT" to live up to the hype, it must be something that none of us have thought of, or ever thought we would want. After all, nobody thought we would want to do our computing with a mouse-driven GUI before the XEROX engineers thought of it, and nobody thought they could sell one until Jobs visited PARC labs... but now it is hard to imagine selling any sort of client software without it.
Not so fast yourself, spunky. If you had read my response to connorbd before ripping into my post, you would have seen that I am the proud owner of the very same tons-o'-buttons mouse. Yes, it's spiffy... but no, it is not needed. As I said in that reply, I am thinking of picking up an new Apple mouse for my tower and plugging the MS mouse into my PC, where I actually need the buttons.
Now I'm actually tempted to pick up another one of these new Apple mice for my home system, and move the MS optical button-cluster mouse over to my PC.
I have an old Duo. It weighs over 4 pounds. The Titanium Powerbook weighs about five and a half pounds. Seems like a good trade-off for about triple the battery life and about triple the screen size.
Second, more slots in the G4.
The new G4 has been bumped up from 3 PCI slots to 5, and the PCI bus has been improved. I am, however, a bit ambivalent about returning to single-processordom
If you buy the 533 G4, you can get a second CPU for $300.
Looks like you got all your wishes.
Alas, it was once thought to be a crime for a UNIX user to think they even needed a mouse at all.
It's not a Gnome box, or even an X-Windows box... it's an OS X box. This GUI does not need a third button, or even a second button. Get over it.
The management at eBay is either really stupid, or else they just don't give a rats ass about people who don't accept spam. Either way, I got a good laugh out of it.
Come to think of it, that would be a fun question to ask a marketing rep from eBay... "You recently sent out a message that can not possibly result in anything other than infuriating your customers. Do you dislike your them, or have you just failed to understand them?" Could we set up a Slashdot interview? :)
Was I the only one who also bought that two-octive keyboard and synthesizer software for it? IIRC, the keyboard plugged right into the RS-232 port on the back, and the software had all the on-screen controls to mimic the dials of the Moog synths.
Last month, I found out that my parents still had all that long-lost hardware in their basement. I hauled it all over to my house, and plan on firing it up again for old time's sake. If it all works, I'll probably play around with it until I get bored and then sell/give it to some younger, more ambitious hacker.
Sounds like a typical rave party to me. :)
Personally, I plan on buying OS X and installing it the very day it comes out, 1.0 bugs and all!
Bullshit.
Find me a $400 Wintel box that comes with USB, Firewire, 10/100 Ethernet, a monitor, 3D video, and gets anywhere close to MIPS. Can't do it? Didn't think so.
$1299 for a system you can duplicate with Wintel for $800.
You obviously have not read the specs on the G4 towers, or you would not say something as ignorant as that.
Mac hardware is slightly more expensive, but your numbers are way off.
Also, when it comes to laptops, nobody provides more bank for the buck than Apple (especially for Linux users). A Powerbook running LinuxPPC kicks ass.
There are plenty of Telnet and SSH clients out there for the Mac. I am using one on a Mac in my office today. I think the problems you hare having with the MacOS lie somewhere between the office chair and the keyboard.
That reminds me of the time that an overzealous newspaper editor in Washington (I can't recall which of the papers it was) blindly changed the text of a business report to read that the market was expected to soon be "in the African-American".
Warning: rant starting
Tim Robbins was great in The Shawshank Redemption and all, but I have a hard time believing that idiot could run a neighborhood reading group, let alone be an Evil Corporate Execitive. In the scenes shown during the previews, he does everything short of mustache twirling to make sure you know he is a bad guy.
Just once, it would be nice to see a high-tech thriller that is not completely built around the Baby Boom Generation's irrational fear of computers, corporations, and/or suburban life.
What these Hollywood dicks fail to see is that normal Americans, especially young people who go to a lot of movies, don't fear technology. At all. Even if some nefarious Evil CEO(TM) wanted to sneak a camera into my PC, how would an actual hacker kid react? "Yay! Free camera! I bet I can hack this!"
Out here in the real world, corporations don't give a shit about who you are our what you are doing. They only care about what they can sell you and how much you will pay for it.
Every year, Hollywood makes another crop of movies to tell us that the Star Chambers of Wall Street are out to destroy us... but most of us know that Corporation is the river by which wealth and prosperity flow to us. Without corporations, there would be no Hollywood productions to complain about them, and no customers with enough money to go to the movies. So shut the hell up, Tim Robbins. Nobody cares about what frightens you.
Make that the most ergonomic mouse around with no buttons. You obviously have this mixed up with the old Apple mouse from a year ago.
There are no ergonomic 3-button mice, because they all force you to keep three fingers poised over their respective buttons with either your palm pushing the mouse, or else your thumb and pinky clamped onto its sides... very un-ergonomic. The buttonless Apple mouse is a dream, to use... especially since the OS does not really require multiple mouse buttons. I like my MS Intelimouse, particularilly the spiffy scroll wheel in the middle, but the new Apple mouse is much more pleasant to use. (For the record, I still use the MS mouse on Win and Linux boxes, and I think MS makes some of the best mice on the market.)
Gawd... no wonder there are so many trolls on Slashdot. With so many touchy, reactionary people, it must be like shooting fish in a barrel!
Hamlet was a play, and can't be on the list. The Harry Potter books are novels, and can be on the list (but shouldn't).
Also, there is a popular theory that he never really existed, and the plays attributed to "Shakespeare" were written under a pseudonym by either the Earl of Oxford, or else by a variety of lesser-known playwrites.