My phone is as stupid as a phone can be, but you can drop it or get it wet and it will still work.
My two-year-old dropped my iPhone 3gs in the dog's water bowl. From the time I heard the *ploink*, realized what I had heard, and ran to the kitchen and pulled out the phone out, it was completely submerged in disgusting dog water for at least 15-20 seconds.
The touch screen was so wet that I couldn't swipe to unlock in order to power down. The phone was on at least another 1-2 minutes. I finally turned it off (obviously can't pull the battery with an iPhone) and let it dry out for a couple days. On day 2, I put it in a ziploc baggie with some silica gel packets. During the drying process it would occasionally--randomly!--turn itself on with no interaction from me.
After 2 days of drying, it was good as new. Fully functional, no visible damage, screen fine, touch response fine, etc.
That's my point. How many people have ever contributed a line of code to Firefox. I don't know? 2000 (or at least within an order of magnitude of that)? Those are the people who should be caring about the why of constant extension breakage. How many million users does Firefox have?
For the vast majority of those actual users, the "why" is irrelevant.
Who cares WHY extensions are breaking? If enough people are complaining about breakage (which they clearly are), then it's a problem!
Personally, I have completely stopped installing Firefox (I, like millions of others, have gone to Chrome) because I got tired of the updates and breakages. I never could seem to keep the HTML validator extension working for more than a few days at a time!
I wouldn't call this [battle.net] excellent execution. Unless, y'know, you're into that sort of thing.
WoW is by far the most successful and most played MMORPG that has ever existed. Almost universally, since day 1 of its release, it has been praised for its execution. You may not like it, you may not care for the new expansions (I certainly don't), but that doesn't change the facts.
But, I digress. What is more important is that it seems you are misreading genre as medium. Tepples comparison of Katamari Damacy to Bubbles [wikipedia.org] is really spot on if you actually bother to look up what he's referring to.
No, the point is -- it doesn't really matter!
On the other hand, comparing the an internet forum to courier messaging (an odd reduction since a physical forum would seem to have been more fitting) is so obtuse I'm not really sure where to begin.
Obtuse? It seems quite simple and straightforward to me. I'm not the first one to come up with this argument, incidentally...
To illustrate, let's take what you're implying Tepples was doing and apply it. The end result would be saying Call of Duty is basically the same as the historical battle of Thermopylae whereas Tepples' assertion was more along the lines of saying 'we haven't come up with many more innovative ways of killing each other since the atom bomb' if we want to stick with a morbid theme.
No, I disagree completely with you. If you wanted to make a similarly silly reductionist argument to the one I made, Call of Duty is a war video game that was basically the same as... (go back one or two prior video games). Then the question is, what was the FIRST computer game that was a "war game" -- did it have a physical analog? Cowboys and Indians? Hide and go seek? etc.
I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.
And by that standard there has NEVER been a movie with an original plot and all of the works of fiction of our lifetimes are just hackish copies of the same stories that existed thousands of years ago.
We're a culture that loves the new and sometimes the innovative. When it really comes down to it, there's not that much that's truly new (at least by your standards for video games!). I don't really like the argument, and it's kind of reductio ad absurdum, but posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else. So were any of these things truly innovative? People have been relaying messages for tens of thousands of years!
Beyond that, I would say video games don't really HAVE to be innovative. Again, by your standards, World of Warcraft was not at all innovative. Very little in Warcraft was new, innovative, or unique (see EQ, UO, MUDS, etc). But it was all done really damn well! Sometimes excellent execution of a well-liked idea/game/plan is good enough!
Yeah, I've only seen the one program that won't run on Intel, but I've only ever TRIED two programs. This one (http://www.kytek.com/) and Photoshop. If you need PPC, you can always virtualize Leopard and run PPC apps on there (ironic, no?). I'm not saying it's not unfortunate that PPC support is gone, what I'm saying is that for the vast majority of mac users (myself included), it just really doesn't matter. Apple hasn't sold PPC macs in over 5 years. They made it extremely easy for developers to develop for both platforms. The kind of tradeoffs you are talking about are made by developers all the time. You're absolutely right that as a developer you're wise to not forget about Leopard -- that's still nearly 20% of Mac users. Like Apple, you'll eventually have to make the decision about how long to support old versions of hardware/software. At what point will it no longer be useful for you to ignore newer APIs and stick with just 10.5? 10% of users? 5% of users? (after all, you're ignoring the 6% of users who are still on Tiger or before.)
It's relevant for those Mac users who have PPC apps they want to keep using, and particularly so for those than have no upgrade path
What I'm saying is, before making a huge deal out of this, it would be useful or informative to actually quantify the issues. For instance, I would hazard a guess that 99% of current Intel mac users never use PPC emulation/rosetta. I don't know if that's true or not, but like I said, I would bet that for most users, it's a non-issue.
Photoshop CS is nearly 9 years old. Yeah, I'm sad it won't run on the latest computers, but it still runs just fine on my G4 Powerbook, our G5 Powermac, our Intel Mac Pros, and my Mbp. If you rely on ancident software, don't upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware. Just doesn't seem like that big a deal! Incidentally, I recently bought Pixelmator for $30 and it's a HUGE upgrade over Photoshop CS.
Why drop the PPC emulation at all? Wasn't broke. Didn't need fixing
It was broken for me. The one real "legacy" application (a server application) we have at my office doesn't run under Rosetta and needs a $4000 upgrade to support OSX/Intel. So we've kept several old G4/G5 computers around as spares and for parts. My guess is that there were several reasons for dropping Rosetta: 64-bit mode issues, limited usage in the wild, and the cost to continue testing and maintaining it. Same goes for classic mode. Same goes for dropping 68k support back in the day.
In a way it kind of goes back to an issue faced by OS/2. Not sure if you're familiar with OS/2 or not, but back in the day it was a really fine operating system. Excellent performance. I remember with my computer at the time I could run 7th Guest in DOS very choppily. In OS/2 it ran smoothly! I assume it had to do with caching, but I'm not sure. Anyway, with OS/2 Warp you could literally use your win3.1 install disks to have full win3.1 support in OS/2. Retrospectively, a lot of people think that this ended up hurting OS/2 by stifling the native ecosystem. People just relied on windows applications, so developers didn't want to develop just for OS/2. The end result being -- dead OS/2.
How about because.... Lion breaks a whole lotta stuff (like, every PPC app and driver anyone ever owned) on top of what Snow Leopard broke [wikidot.com] ? Oh yeah. That would be why.:o)
We have one computer at work that runs Leopard and still has an ancient PPC version of an early Photoshop CS. But really, for most mac users, is this even remotely relevant?
Also, that's why there are nearly twice as many people still using Leopard (10.5.8), at about 30%. Because Lion is a lousy release on top of another lousy release: Snow Leopard. This is true even though if they upgraded today, they'd get those 250 Lion features plus the Snow Leopard features. [wikipedia.org]
Again, do most Mac users (beyond the power users) ever upgrade their OS? Heck, according to one of your links, 6% of all Mac users are still running 6+ year old system software! At my office we don't upgrade windows computers to new major versions, and we VERY RARELY upgrade macs to new major versions. We've got a tiger system and a win2k system still going. FWIW, I started using a Mac with 10.3 and I have always upgraded my OS pretty soon after release. I have opted not to buy Lion, mostly because I don't care for the download, but also none of the features are particularly compelling to me.
Really, the only fitting comparison would be to compare Leopard upgrade numbers to Snow Leopard upgrade numbers to Lion numbers. I don't know how that would like. Snow Leopard over Leopard is probably my favorite OSX upgrade.
I really think this has far more to do with your personality and organizational type than geek vs non-geek. It's pretty well established that people organize in different ways (stackers, spreaders, filers, etc). I guess it's probable that there's some correlation in that perhaps computers geeks are more likely to be filers, but that's not been my personal experience.
I keep a ton of files on my Desktop at any one time. I don't think that in any way disqualifies me from being a geek! Likewise, one of the artists I work with NEVER has a single sheet of paper on her desk (beyond the one or two she is currently working on) and has only a single icon on her desktop. Does that make her a geek?
Hah, I recently drove the South Carolina to Wisconsin (about 20 hours) with both a two year old AND a pregnant woman. We stopped no more than every 3 hours on average. Thank God it wasn't during the third trimester...
1. Actually, the blogger doesn't cite any such experience.
Not that one post no. Go talk to any researchers in the field, come back then, mkay?
2. Go talk to someone who works in the business. I did. I worked for 7 years at one such place, developing their software, so no, it's not just "anecdotal evidence". To do the work, I obviously had to talk to my boss, equifax, etc.
So ok, still not a single source that you can cite. I appreciate your attempt to relay your position, but you're really not good at this. I mean, you can find people on the Internet who advocate molesting children, but you can't find a single reference that aligns with your feelings on this issue? Ok...
Yeah, given that the blogger I cited (and others) have, through experience, found that closing credit cards can hurt your credit score, along with what's been said publicly by Fair Isaac, and the best you can come up with is "go talk to someone who actually works in the biz, mkay" I'm going to call bullshit. Your feelings about what you feel ought to be the way FICO scores are calculated, while perhaps interesting as an academic topic, just really don't matter at all.
If you can find a single source--anything!--that says closing a credit card does not hurt your credit score, and, in fact, could positively affect your score, post away! If you still don't have any sources and are just going to rant more about "my way of thinking" or "confusing credit with wealth" (which is just extremely irrelevant to the question at hand), my part of this conversation is done.
I don't get it, are you trolling me? You're very good at describing what you feel but you've provided absolutely no sources to back up your guesses.
Since you don't like financial bloggers or wikipedia's explanations, let's go right to the source (very clearly linked to on the wikipedia article). Myfico.com. Myfico.com is run by Fair Isaac.
Section, "Amounts Owed" (30% of total score): "Proportion of credit lines used (proportion of balances to total credit limits on certain types of revolving accounts)". Revolving accounts--credit cards.
I appreciate your input, but given that you've been unable to provide any citations or references, I'm going to keep believing what I've always read. Moreover, even the wikipedia writeup on FICO score EXPLICITLY says the opposite of what you're claiming.
30%: Credit utilization—The ratio of current revolving debt (such as credit card balances) to the total available revolving credit or credit limit. FICO scores can be improved by paying off debt and lowering the credit utilization ratio.[7] Alternatively, applications for and receiving the credit limit increase will also drive down the utilization ratio. The closing of existing revolving accounts will typically adversely affect this ratio and therefore have a negative impact on a FICO score.
Let's say you have $2000 debt, and $20,000 available credit, split between two credit cards. If you close one credit card ($10k), your ratio goes from 2000 : 20,000 to 2000 : 10,000. Credit utilization counts for 30% of the FICO score! Do you disagree with this?
Do you have any references to back up your statements? I literally have never heard that before. One example of a blogger stating the opposite of what you're saying:
Secondly, you didn't answer my question at all about monthly fees? What are you talking about?
Also, even if you pay your balance every month, you're still paying in higher costs. Merchants have to pay 2% to 4% to the card company. Take 3% of what you spend every year and multiply it by a hundred million people. That's a LOT of money. And if you're going to pay by cash or debit card, you can always ask for a discount. On a $1,000 purchase, paying $40 less is a "Good Thing".
I do agree--to an extent with this. I think 4% is a little high from my own experience, but yes, it's not at all an insubstantial amount. I spend cash wherever possible. I use credit cards to get gas and for any electronic/appliance purchases. I use an Amex that gives an extra one year to the warranty. Online purchases I use credit cards (no cash for Amazon!). Other than that, I'm just about entirely cash.
I've always read that closing credit cards -- reducing your maximum available credit -- and therefore also increasing your ratio of current debt to maximum credit, can temporarily hit your credit score.
This is a dirty little secret the banks won't tell you unless you really push them, because they make more profit off those monthly basic fees than they do from any other operation.
What monthly fees? I probably have 12-15 credit cards that I've signed up for because of various promotional reasons. I only use one of them. One of them (Chase Sapphire) I actually just cancelled 2 months after getting the card due to annual fees, waived in the first year. The rest, I don't pay anything, and I don't use them. I also don't pay anything. For me, it's a win win.
Who is giving 2.5% interest on checking now? That seems pretty nice. I'm getting ~1.1% on a money market linked to checking right now at a credit union.
I don't think I agree with you on that. Apple even introduced a feature that transcodes lossless to 128kbps aac on-the-fly when you sync. FLAC/ALAC still takes up a LOT more space than lossy formats.
You're right, I think a lot of the whining done here is bizarre.
The Microsoft tax doesn't affect me; I choose to no longer use Microsoft products.
The Apple tax and Apple walled garden affects me; I choose to use Apple products.
Nobody is MAKING me do either thing. I, as an individual, can make decisions. It's obvious that a very large percentage of the human race doesn't like it when other people make contrary decisions.
Why does someone--in this case "nashv"--care what product I use ("Ok , ok, I couldn't resist showing my distaste for those infernal locked down devices.")? Why does he care what type of cord a product he doesn't like uses? It's just mere human tribalism and partisanship. It's an "if you're not with me, you're against me" mentality. Beyond my that, just how unbelievably minor and petty, that so many people seem to need to come online and bash somebody's choice of cell phone or music device.
Slashdot Mirror
My phone is as stupid as a phone can be, but you can drop it or get it wet and it will still work.
My two-year-old dropped my iPhone 3gs in the dog's water bowl. From the time I heard the *ploink*, realized what I had heard, and ran to the kitchen and pulled out the phone out, it was completely submerged in disgusting dog water for at least 15-20 seconds.
The touch screen was so wet that I couldn't swipe to unlock in order to power down. The phone was on at least another 1-2 minutes. I finally turned it off (obviously can't pull the battery with an iPhone) and let it dry out for a couple days. On day 2, I put it in a ziploc baggie with some silica gel packets. During the drying process it would occasionally--randomly!--turn itself on with no interaction from me.
After 2 days of drying, it was good as new. Fully functional, no visible damage, screen fine, touch response fine, etc.
I was very impressed.
That's my point. How many people have ever contributed a line of code to Firefox. I don't know? 2000 (or at least within an order of magnitude of that)? Those are the people who should be caring about the why of constant extension breakage. How many million users does Firefox have?
For the vast majority of those actual users, the "why" is irrelevant.
Out of curiosity, what's it being bundled with? I don't use a PC as my main desktop anymore and I don't think I've ever run into Chrome inadvertently.
Who cares WHY extensions are breaking? If enough people are complaining about breakage (which they clearly are), then it's a problem!
Personally, I have completely stopped installing Firefox (I, like millions of others, have gone to Chrome) because I got tired of the updates and breakages. I never could seem to keep the HTML validator extension working for more than a few days at a time!
I wouldn't call this [battle.net] excellent execution. Unless, y'know, you're into that sort of thing.
WoW is by far the most successful and most played MMORPG that has ever existed. Almost universally, since day 1 of its release, it has been praised for its execution. You may not like it, you may not care for the new expansions (I certainly don't), but that doesn't change the facts.
But, I digress. What is more important is that it seems you are misreading genre as medium. Tepples comparison of Katamari Damacy to Bubbles [wikipedia.org] is really spot on if you actually bother to look up what he's referring to.
No, the point is -- it doesn't really matter!
On the other hand, comparing the an internet forum to courier messaging (an odd reduction since a physical forum would seem to have been more fitting) is so obtuse I'm not really sure where to begin.
Obtuse? It seems quite simple and straightforward to me. I'm not the first one to come up with this argument, incidentally...
To illustrate, let's take what you're implying Tepples was doing and apply it. The end result would be saying Call of Duty is basically the same as the historical battle of Thermopylae whereas Tepples' assertion was more along the lines of saying 'we haven't come up with many more innovative ways of killing each other since the atom bomb' if we want to stick with a morbid theme.
No, I disagree completely with you. If you wanted to make a similarly silly reductionist argument to the one I made, Call of Duty is a war video game that was basically the same as ... (go back one or two prior video games). Then the question is, what was the FIRST computer game that was a "war game" -- did it have a physical analog? Cowboys and Indians? Hide and go seek? etc.
I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.
And by that standard there has NEVER been a movie with an original plot and all of the works of fiction of our lifetimes are just hackish copies of the same stories that existed thousands of years ago.
We're a culture that loves the new and sometimes the innovative. When it really comes down to it, there's not that much that's truly new (at least by your standards for video games!). I don't really like the argument, and it's kind of reductio ad absurdum, but posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else. So were any of these things truly innovative? People have been relaying messages for tens of thousands of years!
Beyond that, I would say video games don't really HAVE to be innovative. Again, by your standards, World of Warcraft was not at all innovative. Very little in Warcraft was new, innovative, or unique (see EQ, UO, MUDS, etc). But it was all done really damn well! Sometimes excellent execution of a well-liked idea/game/plan is good enough!
Yeah, I've only seen the one program that won't run on Intel, but I've only ever TRIED two programs. This one (http://www.kytek.com/) and Photoshop. If you need PPC, you can always virtualize Leopard and run PPC apps on there (ironic, no?). I'm not saying it's not unfortunate that PPC support is gone, what I'm saying is that for the vast majority of mac users (myself included), it just really doesn't matter. Apple hasn't sold PPC macs in over 5 years. They made it extremely easy for developers to develop for both platforms. The kind of tradeoffs you are talking about are made by developers all the time. You're absolutely right that as a developer you're wise to not forget about Leopard -- that's still nearly 20% of Mac users. Like Apple, you'll eventually have to make the decision about how long to support old versions of hardware/software. At what point will it no longer be useful for you to ignore newer APIs and stick with just 10.5? 10% of users? 5% of users? (after all, you're ignoring the 6% of users who are still on Tiger or before.)
It's relevant for those Mac users who have PPC apps they want to keep using, and particularly so for those than have no upgrade path
What I'm saying is, before making a huge deal out of this, it would be useful or informative to actually quantify the issues. For instance, I would hazard a guess that 99% of current Intel mac users never use PPC emulation/rosetta. I don't know if that's true or not, but like I said, I would bet that for most users, it's a non-issue.
Photoshop CS is nearly 9 years old. Yeah, I'm sad it won't run on the latest computers, but it still runs just fine on my G4 Powerbook, our G5 Powermac, our Intel Mac Pros, and my Mbp. If you rely on ancident software, don't upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware. Just doesn't seem like that big a deal! Incidentally, I recently bought Pixelmator for $30 and it's a HUGE upgrade over Photoshop CS.
Why drop the PPC emulation at all? Wasn't broke. Didn't need fixing
It was broken for me. The one real "legacy" application (a server application) we have at my office doesn't run under Rosetta and needs a $4000 upgrade to support OSX/Intel. So we've kept several old G4/G5 computers around as spares and for parts. My guess is that there were several reasons for dropping Rosetta: 64-bit mode issues, limited usage in the wild, and the cost to continue testing and maintaining it. Same goes for classic mode. Same goes for dropping 68k support back in the day.
In a way it kind of goes back to an issue faced by OS/2. Not sure if you're familiar with OS/2 or not, but back in the day it was a really fine operating system. Excellent performance. I remember with my computer at the time I could run 7th Guest in DOS very choppily. In OS/2 it ran smoothly! I assume it had to do with caching, but I'm not sure. Anyway, with OS/2 Warp you could literally use your win3.1 install disks to have full win3.1 support in OS/2. Retrospectively, a lot of people think that this ended up hurting OS/2 by stifling the native ecosystem. People just relied on windows applications, so developers didn't want to develop just for OS/2. The end result being -- dead OS/2.
And what about Mame? it exists.. http://sdlmame.parodius.com/
How about because.... Lion breaks a whole lotta stuff (like, every PPC app and driver anyone ever owned) on top of what Snow Leopard broke [wikidot.com] ? Oh yeah. That would be why. :o)
We have one computer at work that runs Leopard and still has an ancient PPC version of an early Photoshop CS. But really, for most mac users, is this even remotely relevant?
Also, that's why there are nearly twice as many people still using Leopard (10.5.8), at about 30%. Because Lion is a lousy release on top of another lousy release: Snow Leopard. This is true even though if they upgraded today, they'd get those 250 Lion features plus the Snow Leopard features. [wikipedia.org]
Again, do most Mac users (beyond the power users) ever upgrade their OS? Heck, according to one of your links, 6% of all Mac users are still running 6+ year old system software! At my office we don't upgrade windows computers to new major versions, and we VERY RARELY upgrade macs to new major versions. We've got a tiger system and a win2k system still going. FWIW, I started using a Mac with 10.3 and I have always upgraded my OS pretty soon after release. I have opted not to buy Lion, mostly because I don't care for the download, but also none of the features are particularly compelling to me.
Really, the only fitting comparison would be to compare Leopard upgrade numbers to Snow Leopard upgrade numbers to Lion numbers. I don't know how that would like. Snow Leopard over Leopard is probably my favorite OSX upgrade.
I really think this has far more to do with your personality and organizational type than geek vs non-geek. It's pretty well established that people organize in different ways (stackers, spreaders, filers, etc). I guess it's probable that there's some correlation in that perhaps computers geeks are more likely to be filers, but that's not been my personal experience.
I keep a ton of files on my Desktop at any one time. I don't think that in any way disqualifies me from being a geek! Likewise, one of the artists I work with NEVER has a single sheet of paper on her desk (beyond the one or two she is currently working on) and has only a single icon on her desktop. Does that make her a geek?
Hah, I recently drove the South Carolina to Wisconsin (about 20 hours) with both a two year old AND a pregnant woman. We stopped no more than every 3 hours on average. Thank God it wasn't during the third trimester...
1. Actually, the blogger doesn't cite any such experience.
Not that one post no. Go talk to any researchers in the field, come back then, mkay?
2. Go talk to someone who works in the business. I did. I worked for 7 years at one such place, developing their software, so no, it's not just "anecdotal evidence". To do the work, I obviously had to talk to my boss, equifax, etc.
So ok, still not a single source that you can cite. I appreciate your attempt to relay your position, but you're really not good at this. I mean, you can find people on the Internet who advocate molesting children, but you can't find a single reference that aligns with your feelings on this issue? Ok...
Yeah, given that the blogger I cited (and others) have, through experience, found that closing credit cards can hurt your credit score, along with what's been said publicly by Fair Isaac, and the best you can come up with is "go talk to someone who actually works in the biz, mkay" I'm going to call bullshit. Your feelings about what you feel ought to be the way FICO scores are calculated, while perhaps interesting as an academic topic, just really don't matter at all.
If you can find a single source--anything!--that says closing a credit card does not hurt your credit score, and, in fact, could positively affect your score, post away! If you still don't have any sources and are just going to rant more about "my way of thinking" or "confusing credit with wealth" (which is just extremely irrelevant to the question at hand), my part of this conversation is done.
I don't get it, are you trolling me? You're very good at describing what you feel but you've provided absolutely no sources to back up your guesses.
Since you don't like financial bloggers or wikipedia's explanations, let's go right to the source (very clearly linked to on the wikipedia article). Myfico.com. Myfico.com is run by Fair Isaac.
http://www.myfico.com/CreditEducation/WhatsInYourScore.aspx
Section, "Amounts Owed" (30% of total score): "Proportion of credit lines used (proportion of balances to total credit limits on certain types of revolving accounts)". Revolving accounts--credit cards.
I appreciate your input, but given that you've been unable to provide any citations or references, I'm going to keep believing what I've always read. Moreover, even the wikipedia writeup on FICO score EXPLICITLY says the opposite of what you're claiming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FICO_score#Makeup_of_the_FICO_score
Let's say you have $2000 debt, and $20,000 available credit, split between two credit cards. If you close one credit card ($10k), your ratio goes from 2000 : 20,000 to 2000 : 10,000. Credit utilization counts for 30% of the FICO score! Do you disagree with this?
Do you have any references to back up your statements? I literally have never heard that before. One example of a blogger stating the opposite of what you're saying:
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/more-inactive-credit-cards-being-closed-protect-your-fico-credit-score.html
Secondly, you didn't answer my question at all about monthly fees? What are you talking about?
Also, even if you pay your balance every month, you're still paying in higher costs. Merchants have to pay 2% to 4% to the card company. Take 3% of what you spend every year and multiply it by a hundred million people. That's a LOT of money. And if you're going to pay by cash or debit card, you can always ask for a discount. On a $1,000 purchase, paying $40 less is a "Good Thing".
I do agree--to an extent with this. I think 4% is a little high from my own experience, but yes, it's not at all an insubstantial amount. I spend cash wherever possible. I use credit cards to get gas and for any electronic/appliance purchases. I use an Amex that gives an extra one year to the warranty. Online purchases I use credit cards (no cash for Amazon!). Other than that, I'm just about entirely cash.
Oh that's funny, I actually live about a mile from a Coastal Credit Union.
Are you happy? I don't think I would be able to get that rate because I don't do 30 debit card transactions in a month, but that's tempting!
I've always read that closing credit cards -- reducing your maximum available credit -- and therefore also increasing your ratio of current debt to maximum credit, can temporarily hit your credit score.
This is a dirty little secret the banks won't tell you unless you really push them, because they make more profit off those monthly basic fees than they do from any other operation.
What monthly fees? I probably have 12-15 credit cards that I've signed up for because of various promotional reasons. I only use one of them. One of them (Chase Sapphire) I actually just cancelled 2 months after getting the card due to annual fees, waived in the first year. The rest, I don't pay anything, and I don't use them. I also don't pay anything. For me, it's a win win.
Who is giving 2.5% interest on checking now? That seems pretty nice. I'm getting ~1.1% on a money market linked to checking right now at a credit union.
Well, no wonder--you didn't use a possessive apostrophe after Linus Torvalds! Amateur mistake...
Wow, I thought that was one of the least trollish things I've ever written on here :-P
Possibly this indicator points to a Republican president in 2012 (or FEAR of a Republican president)?
Zombies/Vampires for Republicans/Vampires
Interesting, I don't think I've ever seen one.
I don't think I agree with you on that. Apple even introduced a feature that transcodes lossless to 128kbps aac on-the-fly when you sync. FLAC/ALAC still takes up a LOT more space than lossy formats.
You're right, I think a lot of the whining done here is bizarre.
The Microsoft tax doesn't affect me; I choose to no longer use Microsoft products.
The Apple tax and Apple walled garden affects me; I choose to use Apple products.
Nobody is MAKING me do either thing. I, as an individual, can make decisions. It's obvious that a very large percentage of the human race doesn't like it when other people make contrary decisions.
Why does someone--in this case "nashv"--care what product I use ("Ok , ok, I couldn't resist showing my distaste for those infernal locked down devices.")? Why does he care what type of cord a product he doesn't like uses? It's just mere human tribalism and partisanship. It's an "if you're not with me, you're against me" mentality. Beyond my that, just how unbelievably minor and petty, that so many people seem to need to come online and bash somebody's choice of cell phone or music device.