Actually, with the previous tax breaks I know of a couple general contractors that did buy Escalades and use them to haul tools and some supplies, along with being a non-work related vehicle. Granted this was back in 2004-2005 when money grew on trees and bushes.
The capabilities of online bill pay are important for me. Even though it's online, paper checks are still mailed from places such as checkfree and can cover those places that don't accept online payment or charge a crapload to process (I'm talking about you Georgia DMV!).
We go through about 100-200 checks a year, and like you, mostly for offertory at church. I was able to setup up payroll with the routing number and account number although it was mandatory a voided check be provided. The main reason? Proof I didn't screw up the numbers. A quick prenote of my account was enough.
With all the talk about USAA I was wondering is DCU would be mentioned. Back in my DEC days I used them but dropped off after leaving. Ironically, they have a local branch in Alpharetta (next to a good Indian food store, so two birds, one stone).
As you mention, the site isn't anything special, but the services match up with other banks and credit unions (heck, all use only a few back end services), but they are nice to work with. I really wish I could have reused my old account number for the DEC nerd cred.
I liked the Herakles center in Sacramento too. We also normally need SAS 70 Type II facilities. Those address mostly audit and security concerns, but a data center must be in good operational shape to stay current with a type II. the ones I normally run away from are central offices turned colocation. "Yeah, we are just finishing up our audit." Uh huh.
If you hit the caps or really need PBE traffic, there is always the business class service. I use Comcast business at an offsite location to stream rsync traffic 24/7.
Easy spin for Microsoft. SharePoint, or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) comes with each Server 2003 license/CAL. I guess Microsoft could say they've also sold 1.3B in DFS, 1.3B in LDAP/Kerberos authentication, etc.:)
Hell, why not just open each SharePoint site via WebDav and copy the documents to a CIFS share? Doesn't work for lists or retain the metadata, but as you've mentioned, it's not an arduous task.
I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pick up a replacement hard disk based iPod for years to come. May need to get it from w00t or other similar sites. I've had the exact opposite experience. My iPhone 3G and original Touch have been synced, upgraded, and I move 2-3GB of podcasts weekly. Plus email, calendar, etc. So far, so good.
My iPod Photo did the click-click-click of death about 6 months after I got it. Covered under Applecare though!
The difference between GV and the examples you gave is the termination type. GV uses the voice network to terminate both endpoints of the call and VoIP in between. For call quality, that is key (at least for me). Granted I'm trusting AT&T not to drop my call, but luckily in Georgia they are okay. I guess the old Cingular network provides for better coverage than our brethren in the SFO and other areas!
My point was about AT&T's dominance, hence the focus on US -> Intl. I've tested SIAX to my PBX at home with okay quality. Interesting note is that SIP and IAX work fine on wi-fi but no-go using SIP over 3G.
Visual voicemail is nice, but not a game changer. International long distance rates are a game changer though.
There are *no* mobile carriers that offer competative LD rates. Want to call Bermuda on AT&T? If you have World Connect ($3.99/mo) it's 0.19/min. Googe Voice: 0.09/min. If you don't have World Connect, you're looking at 1.49/min.
I've cut my international costs by over 50%. The only bitch is having to top off Google Voice in $10 increments with a $30 cap.
GV starts to change the way mobile devices are used. I don't care what Apple, AT&T or Google say, I'm convinced the reason is for AT&T to keep control and revenue, and for Apple to keep tabs on the interface.
I love Dropbox. The first thing I normally do is *not* store my home directory files in the default locations. It's easier to create a Vista/WIn7 favortite c:\My Dropbox, An OS X folder/home/user/My Dropbox, and then make entries in Explorer / Finder to make it easier to access.
I'm on the free plan at present, but Dropbox will get my money.
The ability to go back and restore files is nice too.
That and the umbiqutious magic quadrant tables. Which, for delving into new products or services can be useful. The problem is when management states that only products in the top-left quadrant are to be included, regardless of the actual business requirements and IT culture.
I used to work with one of my favorite Gartner analysts back in the 90s while at Philip Morris. I didn't trust his opinion then, and he's still out to lunch most days.
Gartner, Jupiter, and all the others add some value, but nowhere near the monthly subscription costs IMO.
Weird. I saw the announcement via rss.slashdot.org and was able to get in to MDSN (not Technet) and download with no problems. I guess I was ahead of the curve for once. I'm still need to grab that Ubuntu 7.04 tht I just heard about.
What about VDI? Let a virtual host start up and instantiate guests as needed. You can still use RDP (or even some of the extensions for better graphics performance) but still provide an individual desktop for those graphics users.
From a risk perspective, the merchant's bank is right to do this (reserves). The bank is on the hook in the event the merchant defaults and cannot pay the refund from a successful chargeback.
What does stink is the heavy handed approach banks take to the reserves. There seem to very few classes of merchants that they lump people into for reserves. Make sure to at least get compound interest on the rolling reserve!
My Nevo has the best balance of touch screen real estate and had buttons. The last time I programmed the damned thing was desktop build ago, so hopefully the old SL will still have some software that will load under Windows 7 (or in an XP VM!).
The Harmony's are nice though. Task-based approach works well.
The only two areas where a smartphone would be helpful is displaying relevant metadata such as what's playing, links, etc. or to navigate local media. That or as a virtual keyboard for quick entries ala Tivo season passes or searching for content.
The iTV app on the iPhone is durn near close to it already.
Pretty much the base for my ESX lab. Q6600 to support SMP guests, 64-bit O/Ss, whitebox config (Asus P5something or other, 8GB RAM, small SATA drive for ESX install and local vmfs storage) and an iSCSI / NFS server for testing vmotion and such.
It's ironic, but when my collegues and I do testing for consultant contracts, we have better lab environments in our basements than the companies for which we're doing work. It actually faster to mock up a design or implementation by RDPing to home and doing the work than "requesting" resources in the development labs.
For ESX, the only downside is testing desktop usability features like you mentioned (no aero in Vista/7, etc).
Check out the free offerings by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
I used to think this too. Then we had an ESX server, lose two drives (HP 146GB SCSI) within a 24 hour period. Didn't help that the first drive went down on a Saturday morning and the other (we think) early Sunday. Suffice it to say that Monday morning was restore day from the visbu backups on Friday night.
RAID 6 or 0+1 now, even if there is reduction in storage.
The failure times were closer than I've ever seen in the past (250-300 spindles across multiple servers and SAN with failures like yours, weeks apart). But once bitten I'm not looking to repeat that Monday morning if I can help it.
Slashdot Mirror
Cook's Illustrated. Sorry, extrans and I didn't check the preview....
An HP project manager I know had worked with the staff on Deep Water that didn't make it. Any idea if the report mentioned HP in any of this?
Actually, with the previous tax breaks I know of a couple general contractors that did buy Escalades and use them to haul tools and some supplies, along with being a non-work related vehicle. Granted this was back in 2004-2005 when money grew on trees and bushes.
You realize who owns Thawte????
Same burning complaints back in the early 00's and even the 99's. At least now we have tags that shed light on the subject (so to speak).
Tomorrow will a brighter day, especially on the Left Coast.
The capabilities of online bill pay are important for me. Even though it's online, paper checks are still mailed from places such as checkfree and can cover those places that don't accept online payment or charge a crapload to process (I'm talking about you Georgia DMV!).
We go through about 100-200 checks a year, and like you, mostly for offertory at church. I was able to setup up payroll with the routing number and account number although it was mandatory a voided check be provided. The main reason? Proof I didn't screw up the numbers. A quick prenote of my account was enough.
With all the talk about USAA I was wondering is DCU would be mentioned. Back in my DEC days I used them but dropped off after leaving. Ironically, they have a local branch in Alpharetta (next to a good Indian food store, so two birds, one stone).
As you mention, the site isn't anything special, but the services match up with other banks and credit unions (heck, all use only a few back end services), but they are nice to work with. I really wish I could have reused my old account number for the DEC nerd cred.
I liked the Herakles center in Sacramento too. We also normally need SAS 70 Type II facilities. Those address mostly audit and security concerns, but a data center must be in good operational shape to stay current with a type II. the ones I normally run away from are central offices turned colocation. "Yeah, we are just finishing up our audit." Uh huh.
If you hit the caps or really need PBE traffic, there is always the business class service. I use Comcast business at an offsite location to stream rsync traffic 24/7.
Easy spin for Microsoft. SharePoint, or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) comes with each Server 2003 license/CAL. I guess Microsoft could say they've also sold 1.3B in DFS, 1.3B in LDAP/Kerberos authentication, etc. :)
Hell, why not just open each SharePoint site via WebDav and copy the documents to a CIFS share? Doesn't work for lists or retain the metadata, but as you've mentioned, it's not an arduous task.
I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pick up a replacement hard disk based iPod for years to come. May need to get it from w00t or other similar sites. I've had the exact opposite experience. My iPhone 3G and original Touch have been synced, upgraded, and I move 2-3GB of podcasts weekly. Plus email, calendar, etc. So far, so good.
My iPod Photo did the click-click-click of death about 6 months after I got it. Covered under Applecare though!
The difference between GV and the examples you gave is the termination type. GV uses the voice network to terminate both endpoints of the call and VoIP in between. For call quality, that is key (at least for me). Granted I'm trusting AT&T not to drop my call, but luckily in Georgia they are okay. I guess the old Cingular network provides for better coverage than our brethren in the SFO and other areas!
My point was about AT&T's dominance, hence the focus on US -> Intl. I've tested SIAX to my PBX at home with okay quality. Interesting note is that SIP and IAX work fine on wi-fi but no-go using SIP over 3G.
Visual voicemail is nice, but not a game changer. International long distance rates are a game changer though.
There are *no* mobile carriers that offer competative LD rates. Want to call Bermuda on AT&T? If you have World Connect ($3.99/mo) it's 0.19/min. Googe Voice: 0.09/min. If you don't have World Connect, you're looking at 1.49/min.
I've cut my international costs by over 50%. The only bitch is having to top off Google Voice in $10 increments with a $30 cap.
GV starts to change the way mobile devices are used. I don't care what Apple, AT&T or Google say, I'm convinced the reason is for AT&T to keep control and revenue, and for Apple to keep tabs on the interface.
I like this FCC we have.
I love Dropbox. The first thing I normally do is *not* store my home directory files in the default locations. It's easier to create a Vista/WIn7 favortite c:\My Dropbox, An OS X folder /home/user/My Dropbox, and then make entries in Explorer / Finder to make it easier to access.
I'm on the free plan at present, but Dropbox will get my money.
The ability to go back and restore files is nice too.
That and the umbiqutious magic quadrant tables. Which, for delving into new products or services can be useful. The problem is when management states that only products in the top-left quadrant are to be included, regardless of the actual business requirements and IT culture.
I used to work with one of my favorite Gartner analysts back in the 90s while at Philip Morris. I didn't trust his opinion then, and he's still out to lunch most days.
Gartner, Jupiter, and all the others add some value, but nowhere near the monthly subscription costs IMO.
It's e-ink technology and only comes in monochrome at the moment.
Weird. I saw the announcement via rss.slashdot.org and was able to get in to MDSN (not Technet) and download with no problems. I guess I was ahead of the curve for once. I'm still need to grab that Ubuntu 7.04 tht I just heard about.
And that's why I Armorall all of my cables to and from the racks!!!!!
What about VDI? Let a virtual host start up and instantiate guests as needed. You can still use RDP (or even some of the extensions for better graphics performance) but still provide an individual desktop for those graphics users.
From a risk perspective, the merchant's bank is right to do this (reserves). The bank is on the hook in the event the merchant defaults and cannot pay the refund from a successful chargeback.
What does stink is the heavy handed approach banks take to the reserves. There seem to very few classes of merchants that they lump people into for reserves. Make sure to at least get compound interest on the rolling reserve!
My Nevo has the best balance of touch screen real estate and had buttons. The last time I programmed the damned thing was desktop build ago, so hopefully the old SL will still have some software that will load under Windows 7 (or in an XP VM!). The Harmony's are nice though. Task-based approach works well. The only two areas where a smartphone would be helpful is displaying relevant metadata such as what's playing, links, etc. or to navigate local media. That or as a virtual keyboard for quick entries ala Tivo season passes or searching for content. The iTV app on the iPhone is durn near close to it already.
Pretty much the base for my ESX lab. Q6600 to support SMP guests, 64-bit O/Ss, whitebox config (Asus P5something or other, 8GB RAM, small SATA drive for ESX install and local vmfs storage) and an iSCSI / NFS server for testing vmotion and such. It's ironic, but when my collegues and I do testing for consultant contracts, we have better lab environments in our basements than the companies for which we're doing work. It actually faster to mock up a design or implementation by RDPing to home and doing the work than "requesting" resources in the development labs. For ESX, the only downside is testing desktop usability features like you mentioned (no aero in Vista/7, etc). Check out the free offerings by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.
I used to think this too. Then we had an ESX server, lose two drives (HP 146GB SCSI) within a 24 hour period. Didn't help that the first drive went down on a Saturday morning and the other (we think) early Sunday. Suffice it to say that Monday morning was restore day from the visbu backups on Friday night. RAID 6 or 0+1 now, even if there is reduction in storage. The failure times were closer than I've ever seen in the past (250-300 spindles across multiple servers and SAN with failures like yours, weeks apart). But once bitten I'm not looking to repeat that Monday morning if I can help it.