If I wanted a GUI interface, I would have looked for a MS based solution. Isn't that obvious?
Not to me. Maybe YOU have tons of free time to tinker with a PBX, but me, I want to install, configure, and get to the next paying job.
I have been working with Linux for years, but one of the most frustrating things about using an OSS product that you aren't intimately familiar with is that you generally have to search FAQs, forums, and mailing lists to find information that SHOULD have been documented up front. Some decent GUI configuration tools would go a long way to helping OSS gain acceptance.
This is like thinking everyone wants to compile everything. Or choosing to plug headphones and a mic into your soundcard rather than buying a VOIP phone.
Interesting you should mention Toshiba. I have a 2 year old Toshiba laptop. In December I wanted to install a mini PCI wireless card so I wouldn't have to keep removing the PCCard every time I put it in it's case. But since Toshiba has already discontinued the 11b card (and hasn't released an 11g card), all I could find were outrageously expensive. So I picked up a card that was supposed to be compatible with many Toshiba's and Dells off of eBay. When I put it in my laptop, not only does it NOT work, but my laptop refuses to power up. I wrote it off as a less than compatible (or defective) mini PCI card, and figured I'd test it in my Mom's newer Compaq. Maybe hardware compatibility isn't the only thing I need to be worrying about.
- Don't bother users with stuff that can be automated.
Some expansions:
Don't require user responses for things that don't matter. For instance, I have an app that pops up a dialog box saying 'file saved' and requires you to hit Ok.
Another application asks 'are you sure you want to exit', despite the fact that if you accidently exit you lose nothing. The app starts up quickly and you're right back where you were.
Re:Developers Are Not Good Judges of Their Own UI'
on
What Makes a Good UI?
·
· Score: 1
... This is not meant as a slight to developers. Those who are intimately aware of how every detail of the program works cannot shift perspective and see it from the point of view of someone who neither knows nor cares about the inner workings.
It might not be meant as a slight, but it is one. It's also wrong. Developers can be good judges, but it requires them to do work. They actually have to sit down and understand what the users are trying to accomplish. Then test their own apps.
Saying developers are poor judges is as much of a cop-out as the earlier post that said UIs couldn't be uniform because users are eratic. If you work on windows, tell me, where should you always be able to find a button to close the current window? If it's not there or doesn't work, then you know a bad UI. What you are describing are developers that design applications to manipulate data, not one that performs a user function.
BTW, I agree with you on user customization. I have a special place for most authors of 'skins'.
Testing + observation + refinement + more testing.
Not that I've ever had the budget to do something like that.;-( As a result, probably most of the UI's I've designed are mediocre -- not bad, not wonderful either. With one or two exceptions maybe.
You might consider a different development process. If you are working with internal customers an incremental release approach works good. The sooner in the development process you can get your UI into the users' hands, the better it will be. The trick is finding users that will play with it and aren't afraid to tell you what it needs, shouldn't have, or doesn't work as expected.
I have 200,000 - 300,000 on most of ours now. I've had as many as 11 in production, plus the 5Si, printing picking tickets and packing slips at our distribution centers.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but unless you are familiar with the printers you won't be servicing the fuser and feed rollers yourself. I can do it, but my users can't. (and it doesn't make a lot of sense pulling a developer to do printer maintenance) Calling in a service company will put a fuser install closer to $250 and $50 to do feed rollers. I also only get around 50k pages on rollers, but I do work in a pretty dirty environment.
Another thing to consider is the higher the print count, the more problems you are likely to have. We've had some of the network cards die as well. The original poster recommended buying one from eBay for $400. I'd be very careful about that. If it has been well maintained, it might be a deal. But at 1/3 to 1/4 of the original price, I wouldn't bet on it.
I don't know, maybe I'm more cautious because production depends on these printers. You can't ship an order without a packing slip.
While I wholeheartedly recommend HP 4xxx printers. 100k pages on one of these is getting to be a lot. It's getting to the point that it is nearing one of it's maintenance points, and they can be rather expensive. Aside from that, toner and feed rollers are all they ever need. Even in dirty environments.
Someone else compared them to the 5Si, which isn't really fair. The 5Si is a much larger printer. Although if I'd had the choice, I'd have traded our 5Si for 4000s any day. My 5Si has had the feed rollers in the lower tray replaced 3 times. The first time about a month out of warranty.
used bits of IT technology are usually in fine working order
I've seen several comments like this.... This is fine for your personal use or experimenting. But this guy wants to build something to support a business. How does that business handle an equipment failure on something they bought out of someone's basement? Do they buy spares and then provide a place to store them, or just pray they can find someone else who has some gathering dust when their network is down? If one of my AP's antenna was damaged, I could contact my vendor and have a replacement the next morning.
Bad advice. Antennas don't magically amplify the signal strength. Antennas focus the power from the transmitter. An omni antenna has a donut shaped pattern. A sector (or panel) will cover a 60-180 degree portion of that donut. And a directional, like the one recommended, is a point to point antenna. In other words, it has to be pointed directly at the receiving antenna. When they are installed they have to be aligned. If the wind catches them, or anyone on this working farm bumps them, they will have to be re-aligned.
1000' isn't really that far. Some manufacturers of 200mW radio actually rate their equipment for that range outdoors with omnis. So it would be reasonable to expect a consumer AP with a 90 or 120 sector to provide good service. Without having to worry about alignment problems later.
Designate a channel for WLAN coverage and another for backhaul. You'll need two APs per building, one for WLAN and one for backhaul. Connect your backhauls using narrow sector antennas. Crossover out of the backhaul AP into the WLAN AP. Cable length can be up 100 meters of CAT 5. Put omni antennas on the WLAN AP. Almost forgot, make sure your backhaul APs work in client or bridging mode.
The way this works is the PCs in the building talk to the WLAN AP. It forwards across the cable to the backhaul AP, which then forwards it on through the backhaul network.
And if you're worried about range, stick with the b protocol rather than using g.
Once they dropped it to $25, I started ordering from them all the time; frequently I'll have $20 worth of stuff and throw in another book to get free shipping.
Isn't that what the Wish List is for? To keep track of all the things you'd like to have, but don't need bad enough to order right now. Filler items.
Purchasing a shipping company is quite a stretch. Besides, why would they want something so far out of their core business. With the volume they ship they can leverage very good deals out of established carriers, particularly with the new programs that are being offered. For instance, as their volume increases, they can contract with TL/LTL carriers to take truck loads or pallets to bulk mail centers and then have the postal service handle the last mile. The postal service does a pretty good job of delivering packages quickly in a local area.
Other companies are doing this as well. Dell Business, for instance, loads a complete trailer and then drops it at a regional center for a parcel carrier. They used to use Airborne for final delivery, but I think they have changed.
from the admins might have been to unleash a fearsome monster with an insatiable appetite for naked gnomes. Or may be just some old fashioned thunderbolts.
No mod points today, but this is truly insightful. It raises the question; didn't they include mechanisms to protect the server from crashes in the event that too many people congregated in one area? My previous MMORPG, AC, handled that with portal storms. Once a threshold was passed, random toons were randomly portalled.
But I can see a system where once a safe threshold is reached, an automated message is sent to players to disperse. And then once it reaches another level, a GM would be free to instantiate a WoW appropriate beast that dealt out penalty free/no corpse death.
It is, in fact, more important for a warrior to be able take damage than deal damage.
I completely agree, with a couple exceptions. A warrior can be built as either offensive or defensive. Dual wield for instance, is an offensive choice. You trade your shield (defensive) for another weapon (offensive). You also make choices when you apply your talent points.
Also, as far as being able to take damage, I'm not convinced that armor helps as much as it should. Warrior are an equipment dependant class, and it seems like its much better to have stamina boosting armor than higher AL. A 1000 AL warrior should take significately less damage than a 400 AL hunter. (mail vs leather)
I don't mean this as a flame, but I have to wonder if people who talk about an 'end-game' really understand MMORPGs. They tend to be the group that rushes to the maximum level in a month or two and then complains about lack of content before they move on.
MMORPGs tend to develop communities, that's why they have guilds and allegiances. They are just as much about interacting with other players as they are about achieving levels.
Also, since there are so many different ways to build a character, classes can have their strengths at different levels. For example, there's a lot of talk about how powerful Paladins are. But I found my paladin difficult to play solo at level 17 (compared to my hunter, warrior, or mage) and eventually rerolled him into a rogue. There is something wrong with a toon that has 1000 armor level not being able to stand up to the same creatures as a equal level mage wearing cloth. It seemed like I was wasting all kinds of gold on abilities that were designed solely for group play, with very few offensive/defensive abilities. My play style made the paladin inferior to every other class I have played.
Then there is issues with the game being stable, people dropping, respawn rates,
No kidding on those respawn rates. They've made some serious changes in the way mobs respawn in the last month. It's common now to walk into an area that appears 'safe', completely empty, only to have the entire area respawn and get gang raped. Often with severe lag as all the new creatures are created. I created a new Elf rogue this week and got caught at the bottom of the Barrow's Den. There was no place to revive that was out of aggro range and I died 3 times before I worked my way to an area that was empty enough I could activate stealth.
My biggest complaints are the loot problems from mining/herbalism and the way they broke targeting in December. If you have ranged weapons (guns, bows, spells) you can often shoot farther than you can target. Unless you use your mouse and click on your target, which is less than optimal if your target moves a lot or move erratically. I have also found while trying to charge with my warrior that some creatures have a longer aggro range than your targeting/charge range. That makes the charge ability nearly useless. I really miss the targetting of AC where you could hit one key to target the closest mob and another key would cycle through all targets that were in view. And it worked every time.
Shouldn't that couple percent be applied to the next bill (so as to encourage them to hire you again)?
That probably wouldn't be much of an enticement. It's a known amount vs an unknown amount. First, the person writing the check may not know whether they will be hiring you again. And second, a $100 today is more valuable than $100 next year.
On top of that, you would have to track all the outstanding discounts and it's easier to say "you didn't pay early" when you receive the check than it would be months down the road when they tried to use the discount.
You could provide more locations to access it. Why don't Stormwind and Darnassus have auction houses that are connected to the one in Ironforge?
Or you could move it to it's own landblock, off-loading it onto separate hardware like Asheron's Call did. That would also benefit the areas around it.
You can make a living as a programmer but you have to reinvent yourself every 3 years.
If you're looking to keep changing jobs, then you might have to reinvent yourself. If you are looking to advance in your current job or industry, then after you become a competent programmer, your programming abilities become less important than your knowledge of the business. Higher levels of IT require a better understanding of business processes and goals. Positions such as Systems Analyst, Business Analyst, Project Leader, and even Programmer/Analyst are not too concerned whether you know the latest hot language.
Some companies are also recognizing that good programmers want to advance, but don't necessarily have the capabilities or desire to be managers, so they are creating higher levels of programmers. The *-Architect positions are a good example. And the reason they are doing this is because it's better to keep an experienced problem solver than it is to replace them with 2 or 3 code monkeys.
When you're running month-end and an application crashes, they want to be able to call someone who can fix the data, patch(kludge) the application, and get the business back online. Not someone who can tell them all the neat features of OO PHP.
Of course, if all you want to do is hack code all day, you'd better get used to the treadmill.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there is more to it than 'lost to rent' and 'building equity'. I heard that argument a lot before I bought my home, I have a friend that used to be a realtor. But it's really more complicated than that.
I went from a one bedroom apartment at $600 a month to a home with a $1000 a month mortgage payment. I paid ~$150 a year for renters insurance and I pay $1100 a year for homeowners. I now pay $1200 a year in property tax. Roughly $500 of my monthly payment goes to interest and $40 is lost to PMI. I do get to write off the interest and property taxes on my income taxes, but the amount that it saves me barely covers the cost of maintenance. I also went from a maximum $50 a month electric and $40 a month gas to a level pay $130 a month gas/electric plus $30 water/sewer/trash. Not to mention the bonuses of having to shell out $1000 for new guttering or coming home to a broken water heater. You can save money by doing repairs yourself, but some of that will be offset by the new tools you need to have.
The money factor isn't as good as people make it out to be. You have to look and see if other factors are important to you. Home ownership, investment, freedom to make changes (such as rewiring the computer room or painting the walls). BTW, you can still have noisy neighbors, but now you have no Apt manager to deal with them. Thump, thump, thump. "are the windows supposed to rattle like that?"
It's better than what a saving account earns now, but not necessarily more that it would have earned in the past.
And yes, you can take out a loan against a savings account. I have known people who did it in the past when they had difficulty building a credit record.
However, a saving account doesn't appear to be able to keep the rain off your head or give you a place to store all of your toys.
Why is it necessary to subscribe to any provider to get directory services? Sure, if you want inbound/outbound POTS service you need to subscribe to a gateway. But now that even grandma has the fancy new broadband, why can't we just make direct calls to other VOIP users?
I still think VOIP directories should be available through services like ddns. I don't have to subcribe to any service to do a DNS lookup so I can visit someone's website. Just think how much simpler life would have been if instant messaging had a standard protocol and public directory servers.
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If I wanted a GUI interface, I would have looked for a MS based solution. Isn't that obvious?
Not to me. Maybe YOU have tons of free time to tinker with a PBX, but me, I want to install, configure, and get to the next paying job.
I have been working with Linux for years, but one of the most frustrating things about using an OSS product that you aren't intimately familiar with is that you generally have to search FAQs, forums, and mailing lists to find information that SHOULD have been documented up front. Some decent GUI configuration tools would go a long way to helping OSS gain acceptance.
This is like thinking everyone wants to compile everything. Or choosing to plug headphones and a mic into your soundcard rather than buying a VOIP phone.
Interesting you should mention Toshiba. I have a 2 year old Toshiba laptop. In December I wanted to install a mini PCI wireless card so I wouldn't have to keep removing the PCCard every time I put it in it's case. But since Toshiba has already discontinued the 11b card (and hasn't released an 11g card), all I could find were outrageously expensive. So I picked up a card that was supposed to be compatible with many Toshiba's and Dells off of eBay. When I put it in my laptop, not only does it NOT work, but my laptop refuses to power up. I wrote it off as a less than compatible (or defective) mini PCI card, and figured I'd test it in my Mom's newer Compaq. Maybe hardware compatibility isn't the only thing I need to be worrying about.
- Don't bother users with stuff that can be automated.
Some expansions:
Don't require user responses for things that don't matter. For instance, I have an app that pops up a dialog box saying 'file saved' and requires you to hit Ok.
Another application asks 'are you sure you want to exit', despite the fact that if you accidently exit you lose nothing. The app starts up quickly and you're right back where you were.
... This is not meant as a slight to developers. Those who are intimately aware of how every detail of the program works cannot shift perspective and see it from the point of view of someone who neither knows nor cares about the inner workings.
It might not be meant as a slight, but it is one. It's also wrong. Developers can be good judges, but it requires them to do work. They actually have to sit down and understand what the users are trying to accomplish. Then test their own apps.
Saying developers are poor judges is as much of a cop-out as the earlier post that said UIs couldn't be uniform because users are eratic. If you work on windows, tell me, where should you always be able to find a button to close the current window? If it's not there or doesn't work, then you know a bad UI. What you are describing are developers that design applications to manipulate data, not one that performs a user function.
BTW, I agree with you on user customization. I have a special place for most authors of 'skins'.
Testing + observation + refinement + more testing.
;-( As a result, probably most of the UI's I've designed are mediocre -- not bad, not wonderful either. With one or two exceptions maybe.
Not that I've ever had the budget to do something like that.
You might consider a different development process. If you are working with internal customers an incremental release approach works good. The sooner in the development process you can get your UI into the users' hands, the better it will be. The trick is finding users that will play with it and aren't afraid to tell you what it needs, shouldn't have, or doesn't work as expected.
Oh yea, Axapta (Navision) is a joy of usability. If you strive for mediocrity.
Besides, he doesn't appear to be looking for software, he's looking for GUI design best practices.
And while Axapta may make "you sit up and stare in amazement", it will morely that likely be from the shear stupidity of the interface.
I have 200,000 - 300,000 on most of ours now. I've had as many as 11 in production, plus the 5Si, printing picking tickets and packing slips at our distribution centers.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but unless you are familiar with the printers you won't be servicing the fuser and feed rollers yourself. I can do it, but my users can't. (and it doesn't make a lot of sense pulling a developer to do printer maintenance) Calling in a service company will put a fuser install closer to $250 and $50 to do feed rollers. I also only get around 50k pages on rollers, but I do work in a pretty dirty environment.
Another thing to consider is the higher the print count, the more problems you are likely to have. We've had some of the network cards die as well. The original poster recommended buying one from eBay for $400. I'd be very careful about that. If it has been well maintained, it might be a deal. But at 1/3 to 1/4 of the original price, I wouldn't bet on it.
I don't know, maybe I'm more cautious because production depends on these printers. You can't ship an order without a packing slip.
While I wholeheartedly recommend HP 4xxx printers. 100k pages on one of these is getting to be a lot. It's getting to the point that it is nearing one of it's maintenance points, and they can be rather expensive. Aside from that, toner and feed rollers are all they ever need. Even in dirty environments.
Someone else compared them to the 5Si, which isn't really fair. The 5Si is a much larger printer. Although if I'd had the choice, I'd have traded our 5Si for 4000s any day. My 5Si has had the feed rollers in the lower tray replaced 3 times. The first time about a month out of warranty.
used bits of IT technology are usually in fine working order
I've seen several comments like this.... This is fine for your personal use or experimenting. But this guy wants to build something to support a business. How does that business handle an equipment failure on something they bought out of someone's basement? Do they buy spares and then provide a place to store them, or just pray they can find someone else who has some gathering dust when their network is down? If one of my AP's antenna was damaged, I could contact my vendor and have a replacement the next morning.
Well it's alright to over build the antenna.
Bad advice. Antennas don't magically amplify the signal strength. Antennas focus the power from the transmitter. An omni antenna has a donut shaped pattern. A sector (or panel) will cover a 60-180 degree portion of that donut. And a directional, like the one recommended, is a point to point antenna. In other words, it has to be pointed directly at the receiving antenna. When they are installed they have to be aligned. If the wind catches them, or anyone on this working farm bumps them, they will have to be re-aligned.
1000' isn't really that far. Some manufacturers of 200mW radio actually rate their equipment for that range outdoors with omnis. So it would be reasonable to expect a consumer AP with a 90 or 120 sector to provide good service. Without having to worry about alignment problems later.
Designate a channel for WLAN coverage and another for backhaul. You'll need two APs per building, one for WLAN and one for backhaul. Connect your backhauls using narrow sector antennas. Crossover out of the backhaul AP into the WLAN AP. Cable length can be up 100 meters of CAT 5. Put omni antennas on the WLAN AP. Almost forgot, make sure your backhaul APs work in client or bridging mode.
The way this works is the PCs in the building talk to the WLAN AP. It forwards across the cable to the backhaul AP, which then forwards it on through the backhaul network.
And if you're worried about range, stick with the b protocol rather than using g.
Once they dropped it to $25, I started ordering from them all the time; frequently I'll have $20 worth of stuff and throw in another book to get free shipping.
Isn't that what the Wish List is for? To keep track of all the things you'd like to have, but don't need bad enough to order right now. Filler items.
Purchasing a shipping company is quite a stretch. Besides, why would they want something so far out of their core business. With the volume they ship they can leverage very good deals out of established carriers, particularly with the new programs that are being offered. For instance, as their volume increases, they can contract with TL/LTL carriers to take truck loads or pallets to bulk mail centers and then have the postal service handle the last mile. The postal service does a pretty good job of delivering packages quickly in a local area.
Other companies are doing this as well. Dell Business, for instance, loads a complete trailer and then drops it at a regional center for a parcel carrier. They used to use Airborne for final delivery, but I think they have changed.
from the admins might have been to unleash a fearsome monster with an insatiable appetite for naked gnomes. Or may be just some old fashioned thunderbolts.
No mod points today, but this is truly insightful. It raises the question; didn't they include mechanisms to protect the server from crashes in the event that too many people congregated in one area? My previous MMORPG, AC, handled that with portal storms. Once a threshold was passed, random toons were randomly portalled.
But I can see a system where once a safe threshold is reached, an automated message is sent to players to disperse. And then once it reaches another level, a GM would be free to instantiate a WoW appropriate beast that dealt out penalty free/no corpse death.
It is, in fact, more important for a warrior to be able take damage than deal damage.
I completely agree, with a couple exceptions. A warrior can be built as either offensive or defensive. Dual wield for instance, is an offensive choice. You trade your shield (defensive) for another weapon (offensive). You also make choices when you apply your talent points.
Also, as far as being able to take damage, I'm not convinced that armor helps as much as it should. Warrior are an equipment dependant class, and it seems like its much better to have stamina boosting armor than higher AL. A 1000 AL warrior should take significately less damage than a 400 AL hunter. (mail vs leather)
I don't mean this as a flame, but I have to wonder if people who talk about an 'end-game' really understand MMORPGs. They tend to be the group that rushes to the maximum level in a month or two and then complains about lack of content before they move on.
MMORPGs tend to develop communities, that's why they have guilds and allegiances. They are just as much about interacting with other players as they are about achieving levels.
Also, since there are so many different ways to build a character, classes can have their strengths at different levels. For example, there's a lot of talk about how powerful Paladins are. But I found my paladin difficult to play solo at level 17 (compared to my hunter, warrior, or mage) and eventually rerolled him into a rogue. There is something wrong with a toon that has 1000 armor level not being able to stand up to the same creatures as a equal level mage wearing cloth. It seemed like I was wasting all kinds of gold on abilities that were designed solely for group play, with very few offensive/defensive abilities. My play style made the paladin inferior to every other class I have played.
Then there is issues with the game being stable, people dropping, respawn rates,
No kidding on those respawn rates. They've made some serious changes in the way mobs respawn in the last month. It's common now to walk into an area that appears 'safe', completely empty, only to have the entire area respawn and get gang raped. Often with severe lag as all the new creatures are created. I created a new Elf rogue this week and got caught at the bottom of the Barrow's Den. There was no place to revive that was out of aggro range and I died 3 times before I worked my way to an area that was empty enough I could activate stealth.
My biggest complaints are the loot problems from mining/herbalism and the way they broke targeting in December. If you have ranged weapons (guns, bows, spells) you can often shoot farther than you can target. Unless you use your mouse and click on your target, which is less than optimal if your target moves a lot or move erratically. I have also found while trying to charge with my warrior that some creatures have a longer aggro range than your targeting/charge range. That makes the charge ability nearly useless. I really miss the targetting of AC where you could hit one key to target the closest mob and another key would cycle through all targets that were in view. And it worked every time.
Shouldn't that couple percent be applied to the next bill (so as to encourage them to hire you again)?
That probably wouldn't be much of an enticement. It's a known amount vs an unknown amount. First, the person writing the check may not know whether they will be hiring you again. And second, a $100 today is more valuable than $100 next year.
On top of that, you would have to track all the outstanding discounts and it's easier to say "you didn't pay early" when you receive the check than it would be months down the road when they tried to use the discount.
The AH in Ironforge is packed on my server,
That's an easy thing to address;
You could provide more locations to access it. Why don't Stormwind and Darnassus have auction houses that are connected to the one in Ironforge?
Or you could move it to it's own landblock, off-loading it onto separate hardware like Asheron's Call did. That would also benefit the areas around it.
You can make a living as a programmer but you have to reinvent yourself every 3 years.
If you're looking to keep changing jobs, then you might have to reinvent yourself. If you are looking to advance in your current job or industry, then after you become a competent programmer, your programming abilities become less important than your knowledge of the business. Higher levels of IT require a better understanding of business processes and goals. Positions such as Systems Analyst, Business Analyst, Project Leader, and even Programmer/Analyst are not too concerned whether you know the latest hot language.
Some companies are also recognizing that good programmers want to advance, but don't necessarily have the capabilities or desire to be managers, so they are creating higher levels of programmers. The *-Architect positions are a good example. And the reason they are doing this is because it's better to keep an experienced problem solver than it is to replace them with 2 or 3 code monkeys.
When you're running month-end and an application crashes, they want to be able to call someone who can fix the data, patch(kludge) the application, and get the business back online. Not someone who can tell them all the neat features of OO PHP.
Of course, if all you want to do is hack code all day, you'd better get used to the treadmill.
See voipuser.com etc.
.COM and .NET sites are parked domains. (And the .ORG requires the WWW)
Did you mean voipuser.net? The
What about un-employed hackers?
five percent of zero is still zero.
Well since you asked so nicely, we'll give you a 25% raise this year. You can be the leader in the industry.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there is more to it than 'lost to rent' and 'building equity'. I heard that argument a lot before I bought my home, I have a friend that used to be a realtor. But it's really more complicated than that.
I went from a one bedroom apartment at $600 a month to a home with a $1000 a month mortgage payment. I paid ~$150 a year for renters insurance and I pay $1100 a year for homeowners. I now pay $1200 a year in property tax. Roughly $500 of my monthly payment goes to interest and $40 is lost to PMI. I do get to write off the interest and property taxes on my income taxes, but the amount that it saves me barely covers the cost of maintenance. I also went from a maximum $50 a month electric and $40 a month gas to a level pay $130 a month gas/electric plus $30 water/sewer/trash. Not to mention the bonuses of having to shell out $1000 for new guttering or coming home to a broken water heater. You can save money by doing repairs yourself, but some of that will be offset by the new tools you need to have.
The money factor isn't as good as people make it out to be. You have to look and see if other factors are important to you. Home ownership, investment, freedom to make changes (such as rewiring the computer room or painting the walls). BTW, you can still have noisy neighbors, but now you have no Apt manager to deal with them. Thump, thump, thump. "are the windows supposed to rattle like that?"
It's better than what a saving account earns now, but not necessarily more that it would have earned in the past.
And yes, you can take out a loan against a savings account. I have known people who did it in the past when they had difficulty building a credit record.
However, a saving account doesn't appear to be able to keep the rain off your head or give you a place to store all of your toys.
Why is it necessary to subscribe to any provider to get directory services? Sure, if you want inbound/outbound POTS service you need to subscribe to a gateway. But now that even grandma has the fancy new broadband, why can't we just make direct calls to other VOIP users?
I still think VOIP directories should be available through services like ddns. I don't have to subcribe to any service to do a DNS lookup so I can visit someone's website. Just think how much simpler life would have been if instant messaging had a standard protocol and public directory servers.