You've made an important point. If the anonymous poster of the question had talked to more family they would likely have gotten farther back in the tree and had more success with Ancestry.com.
I'm not sure what the problem is with a subscription service. You should not take any source at face value, and that is true if you get it from a service or if you go hunt up the original document yourself. Ancestry has lots of copies of real documents, and I'm glad I did not have to hunt all over to get them. They also have less reliable data, like personal trees and stuff from books, but that does not mean the information is useless, it is just a lead to be examined. Part of being a genealogist is figuring out what sources are reliable and which ones aren't, and working with what you can get. A service like Ancestry can save a lot of work.
The question covers two things. Ancestry is both a genealogy database service and a genealogy program in the cloud. It is actually a pretty good database service, and the best single repository out there, but you have to get back to WW II for veterans or 1930 for people in the US to start getting good info. If you have younger grandparents you might ask to find out about their parents and search for them. This will be an issue whatever source you use, as 1930 is the most recent Census released.
As a cloud-based genealogy program Ancestry is just average, and not something you would normally use unless you want the service behind it.
I wonder about my tech friends when I see one has an aol address, but what concerned me more was when a tech friend sent out a message using his wife's email address. Having an aol address doesn't mean that you have dialup anymore, but using your wife's account when there are untold places to get free addresses of your own is completely baffling.
I switched from Linux to a Mac a couple of years ago. What I found was that I was spending a lot of time on system administration and wasn't benefiting myself or anyone else. There were too many cases where things wouldn't work unless I dug down and found an obscure file to update to make things work. And no, I'm not talking common ones like/etc/resolv.conf. The free software answer is to modify the code to improve the programs, but I don't have the time to do that. I tried a Mac that I inherited, then bought a Mac Mini, then finally a MacBook Pro. I still have my Linux computer, but it is in my closet turned off for over a year. I've installed Linux on a couple of desktops at work but don't really use them much, and when I have problems I'm reminded why I switched to a Mac.
I will say that Ubuntu is a lot more convenient than the plain Debian I used to run and I might like Linux on the desktop if I tried it again. I've found, though, that I have a lot more apps I rely on on the Mac than I did with Linux so it would be a lot harder to convert back to Linux than it was to come to the Mac.
It is true that some people want to recompile the kernel for new devices, but the vast majority of people don't. I've been a Linux user since sometime in the 90's when I bought Slackware. Recently I realized I was spending a lot of time just doing maintenance tasks like rebuilding kernels and hunting down obscure settings in configuration files. I gave up and decided I'll pay someone to write an OS that doesn't take up so much time so I bought a Mac. I'll keep Linux around and I use it at work, but decided I have better things to do at home than fight with an OS.
I use Life Balance for my todo list. It runs on both Windows and Palm OS for me and there is also a Mac version. I like it because it has a hierarchical structure so I can manage both single tasks as well as projects. Each task also has a place associated with it. This allows one to see all tasks that are relevant at home, at work, when running errands, etc. You can also set priorities at any level in the hierarchy to change the ordering of the tasks so it can help you determine what to do next.
Then they should have said something like "prefigured the spread of email, hypertext, and the digital revolution to offices". By making a broad statement they make it sound like email didn't exist at all before the Post-It Note.
While what Burnett is saying is possible, I'm guessing he wrote this column just to try to provoke discussion and that he probably just follows regular good security practices. Even though the article is dated on the 26th of April rather than the first, I don't see how someone can live for long with those kind of restrictions. In the end you have to balance security with real life considerations, and this article tilts things a bit too far on the security side.
The devices looked interesting until I saw the price. Most of them cost more than my camera, and the flash memory getting cheaper having a separate hard disk device just doesn't seem worth it. The screen on my camera may not be as nice, but at that price it is good enough.
I understand what you are saying, and I think requiring the organizer to pay a monthly fee will wipe out small groups and make it hard to start new ones. I think having organizers before when they didn't have to pay, though, was overall a good idea. If you only have a few people in the group and they don't know each other, it is good for someone to take charge. Also, some people are leaders and some are followers, so you can end up with a group where no one does anything. Of course the other side of the problem is that you may get an organizer who makes bad decisions, like the one who tried to move one of my groups out of the county. He eventually gave up and finally resigned once the monthly fee was announced.
Evite is geared toward bars, restaurants, and events rather than groups meeting for a common interest. I'm not quite sure how Yahoo Calendar offers anything like Meetup at all.
The $9 a month is a pain and it may be fatal to meetup.com, but only the organizer pays and they can collect from attendees.
Critical mass is definitely the problem. One of my groups, for the Investor's Business Daily, went from 2 to 10+ in one meeting for no obvious reason. It has done well since then. The other two aren't doing so well. The Chinese language group will get one or two people who decide it is a waste of time and quit going. Then one or two other people will go and decide the same thing. The trick is to get everyone to go at once, but that is hard to do. There's nothing like that loser feeling when you go to a meeting and you are the only one there.
They do now allow open email between members under the new arrangement.
What they offer is a place for someone to go to find groups to meet with on subjects they are interested in. Meetup provides an initial place to publicize the group, so someone can try starting one even if they don't know too many other people who share their interest. I organize the Spanish group in Akron and while there may not be a huge number of people who will see the meetup page for it it is more than will see a page I put together somewhere else, and it is easier to do.
The meetup isn't just targeted to the socially active. It is good for the socially inactive as a way to get out of the house. It is a lot easier to strike up a conversation among people with whom you share a common interest than it is to go to a bar and talk to random strangers.
Having said all that, I'm in three groups. They all started out with one or two people last fall. The Investor's Business daily group now gets 10+ and is pretty good. The Spanish group gets 5 or so some nights and just me on others. The Chinese language group is still at one or two and may fold since our dormant organizer quit once he found he was going to be charged. Meetup admits that the new fee structure will shake out some of the weak groups, which is probably a good thing.
They did fix some of your issues in last fall's overhaul. They don't cancel meetings with less than three people anymore. They created the role of organizer, who picks a location, hopefully by consulting with the others through email or the group message board. There is also a place to add a comment when you RSVP, so you can say that you can't make it because it is in the 'burbs. You can control the email you get and none of it is for confirmation, just reminding.
You still can't search by date, though, and you do have to belong to a meetup group to see what is going on with it.
I don't use Quicken to pull in transactions on my cards or checking account because I want to make sure that their numbers match mine. I just don't trust the banks and other businesses on the way to get everything correct.
I won't buy from a place that won't give me a receipt. I want a written record of my transaction, and I want to have a reminder to enter the transaction into Quicken later on. I don't mind a no-receipt option like some ATM's have though, for people who don't want the paper. I should be bothered by the signature not being needed, but I'm used to paying at the pump so I can't say anything there.
But the slow part involves getting out the card, answering the debit/credit question, printing the receipt, and signing it. If the goal is speed up the process the debit/credit question could be removed and the signature. I'm assuming people still want receipts, although I could be wrong there.
I used Union Telecard when my girlfriend was in China for month. It cost less than 3 cents per minute and you can register your phone number with them so you don't have to enter a code each time. I thought the connection quality was acceptable for the price, but not great.
It also runs on Crossover Office, although as in the case of Cedega I don't know if that means that it will run on regular Wine. The only problem I have seen so far is that I have a small black bar on the screen when I minimize the program. I just move it out of the way and ignore it.
I don't see anything either, just the brief article summary. I even tried registering when it asked but I still only got the summary. I'm glad I didn't give my real information.
Plan 9 from Outer Space is usually considered Ed Wood's worst filem and therefore the worst film of all time, but I think Glen or Glenda is a lot worse. A bad story about a tranvestite with bad acting. Pull the strings! Pull the strings!
I prefer Paypal because I'm reticent to give my credit card number to an unfamiliar organization. Having said that, anything that would increase their donations would be good so they probably should take your advice.
This is a depressing post to read. I'm supposed to be there now but after they tried rebooting the plane they still couldn't get it work and they had to cancel the flight. I'll at least be able to get there tonight and attend sessions Saturday and Sunday.
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You've made an important point. If the anonymous poster of the question had talked to more family they would likely have gotten farther back in the tree and had more success with Ancestry.com.
I'm not sure what the problem is with a subscription service. You should not take any source at face value, and that is true if you get it from a service or if you go hunt up the original document yourself. Ancestry has lots of copies of real documents, and I'm glad I did not have to hunt all over to get them. They also have less reliable data, like personal trees and stuff from books, but that does not mean the information is useless, it is just a lead to be examined. Part of being a genealogist is figuring out what sources are reliable and which ones aren't, and working with what you can get. A service like Ancestry can save a lot of work.
The question covers two things. Ancestry is both a genealogy database service and a genealogy program in the cloud. It is actually a pretty good database service, and the best single repository out there, but you have to get back to WW II for veterans or 1930 for people in the US to start getting good info. If you have younger grandparents you might ask to find out about their parents and search for them. This will be an issue whatever source you use, as 1930 is the most recent Census released.
As a cloud-based genealogy program Ancestry is just average, and not something you would normally use unless you want the service behind it.
I wonder about my tech friends when I see one has an aol address, but what concerned me more was when a tech friend sent out a message using his wife's email address. Having an aol address doesn't mean that you have dialup anymore, but using your wife's account when there are untold places to get free addresses of your own is completely baffling.
I switched from Linux to a Mac a couple of years ago. What I found was that I was spending a lot of time on system administration and wasn't benefiting myself or anyone else. There were too many cases where things wouldn't work unless I dug down and found an obscure file to update to make things work. And no, I'm not talking common ones like /etc/resolv.conf. The free software answer is to modify the code to improve the programs, but I don't have the time to do that. I tried a Mac that I inherited, then bought a Mac Mini, then finally a MacBook Pro. I still have my Linux computer, but it is in my closet turned off for over a year. I've installed Linux on a couple of desktops at work but don't really use them much, and when I have problems I'm reminded why I switched to a Mac.
I will say that Ubuntu is a lot more convenient than the plain Debian I used to run and I might like Linux on the desktop if I tried it again. I've found, though, that I have a lot more apps I rely on on the Mac than I did with Linux so it would be a lot harder to convert back to Linux than it was to come to the Mac.
It is true that some people want to recompile the kernel for new devices, but the vast majority of people don't. I've been a Linux user since sometime in the 90's when I bought Slackware. Recently I realized I was spending a lot of time just doing maintenance tasks like rebuilding kernels and hunting down obscure settings in configuration files. I gave up and decided I'll pay someone to write an OS that doesn't take up so much time so I bought a Mac. I'll keep Linux around and I use it at work, but decided I have better things to do at home than fight with an OS.
I use Life Balance for my todo list. It runs on both Windows and Palm OS for me and there is also a Mac version. I like it because it has a hierarchical structure so I can manage both single tasks as well as projects. Each task also has a place associated with it. This allows one to see all tasks that are relevant at home, at work, when running errands, etc. You can also set priorities at any level in the hierarchy to change the ordering of the tasks so it can help you determine what to do next.
Then they should have said something like "prefigured the spread of email, hypertext, and the digital revolution to offices". By making a broad statement they make it sound like email didn't exist at all before the Post-It Note.
While what Burnett is saying is possible, I'm guessing he wrote this column just to try to provoke discussion and that he probably just follows regular good security practices. Even though the article is dated on the 26th of April rather than the first, I don't see how someone can live for long with those kind of restrictions. In the end you have to balance security with real life considerations, and this article tilts things a bit too far on the security side.
The devices looked interesting until I saw the price. Most of them cost more than my camera, and the flash memory getting cheaper having a separate hard disk device just doesn't seem worth it. The screen on my camera may not be as nice, but at that price it is good enough.
I understand what you are saying, and I think requiring the organizer to pay a monthly fee will wipe out small groups and make it hard to start new ones. I think having organizers before when they didn't have to pay, though, was overall a good idea. If you only have a few people in the group and they don't know each other, it is good for someone to take charge. Also, some people are leaders and some are followers, so you can end up with a group where no one does anything. Of course the other side of the problem is that you may get an organizer who makes bad decisions, like the one who tried to move one of my groups out of the county. He eventually gave up and finally resigned once the monthly fee was announced.
Evite is geared toward bars, restaurants, and events rather than groups meeting for a common interest. I'm not quite sure how Yahoo Calendar offers anything like Meetup at all.
The $9 a month is a pain and it may be fatal to meetup.com, but only the organizer pays and they can collect from attendees.
Critical mass is definitely the problem. One of my groups, for the Investor's Business Daily, went from 2 to 10+ in one meeting for no obvious reason. It has done well since then. The other two aren't doing so well. The Chinese language group will get one or two people who decide it is a waste of time and quit going. Then one or two other people will go and decide the same thing. The trick is to get everyone to go at once, but that is hard to do. There's nothing like that loser feeling when you go to a meeting and you are the only one there.
They do now allow open email between members under the new arrangement.
What they offer is a place for someone to go to find groups to meet with on subjects they are interested in. Meetup provides an initial place to publicize the group, so someone can try starting one even if they don't know too many other people who share their interest. I organize the Spanish group in Akron and while there may not be a huge number of people who will see the meetup page for it it is more than will see a page I put together somewhere else, and it is easier to do.
The meetup isn't just targeted to the socially active. It is good for the socially inactive as a way to get out of the house. It is a lot easier to strike up a conversation among people with whom you share a common interest than it is to go to a bar and talk to random strangers.
Having said all that, I'm in three groups. They all started out with one or two people last fall. The Investor's Business daily group now gets 10+ and is pretty good. The Spanish group gets 5 or so some nights and just me on others. The Chinese language group is still at one or two and may fold since our dormant organizer quit once he found he was going to be charged. Meetup admits that the new fee structure will shake out some of the weak groups, which is probably a good thing.
They did fix some of your issues in last fall's overhaul. They don't cancel meetings with less than three people anymore. They created the role of organizer, who picks a location, hopefully by consulting with the others through email or the group message board. There is also a place to add a comment when you RSVP, so you can say that you can't make it because it is in the 'burbs. You can control the email you get and none of it is for confirmation, just reminding.
You still can't search by date, though, and you do have to belong to a meetup group to see what is going on with it.
I don't use Quicken to pull in transactions on my cards or checking account because I want to make sure that their numbers match mine. I just don't trust the banks and other businesses on the way to get everything correct.
I won't buy from a place that won't give me a receipt. I want a written record of my transaction, and I want to have a reminder to enter the transaction into Quicken later on. I don't mind a no-receipt option like some ATM's have though, for people who don't want the paper. I should be bothered by the signature not being needed, but I'm used to paying at the pump so I can't say anything there.
But the slow part involves getting out the card, answering the debit/credit question, printing the receipt, and signing it. If the goal is speed up the process the debit/credit question could be removed and the signature. I'm assuming people still want receipts, although I could be wrong there.
Why do I need a contactless transaction? What is so hard about running my card through the slot in the terminal?
I used Union Telecard when my girlfriend was in China for month. It cost less than 3 cents per minute and you can register your phone number with them so you don't have to enter a code each time. I thought the connection quality was acceptable for the price, but not great.
It also runs on Crossover Office, although as in the case of Cedega I don't know if that means that it will run on regular Wine. The only problem I have seen so far is that I have a small black bar on the screen when I minimize the program. I just move it out of the way and ignore it.
I don't see anything either, just the brief article summary. I even tried registering when it asked but I still only got the summary. I'm glad I didn't give my real information.
Plan 9 from Outer Space is usually considered Ed Wood's worst filem and therefore the worst film of all time, but I think Glen or Glenda is a lot worse. A bad story about a tranvestite with bad acting. Pull the strings! Pull the strings!
I prefer Paypal because I'm reticent to give my credit card number to an unfamiliar organization. Having said that, anything that would increase their donations would be good so they probably should take your advice.
This is a depressing post to read. I'm supposed to be there now but after they tried rebooting the plane they still couldn't get it work and they had to cancel the flight. I'll at least be able to get there tonight and attend sessions Saturday and Sunday.