I prefer the Sapphire Reserve to the Amex because of the ultimate rewards system. The 3% I earn on travel spent then has a 50% bonus if you book more travel via UR; making it a full 4.5% back. Can’t beat that.
The 100,000 UR points ($1,500 worth of travel) when I signed up didn’t hurt either. With a $450 annual fee, and then $300 back in travel credit, that makes the net annual fee $150. The signup bonus covers that for 10 years, even if I don’t use one additional benefit or earn any other points.
Great card - best deal I’ve seen in years.
As For the free Amex cards, looks like aevan has that list covered.
I have several cards in my wallet as well. All of which have a $0 balance, but what I'm buying dictates which card I use.
Hotels/Rentals/general purpose goes on the Sapphire Reserve. Airline travel goes on the United card. Groceries, gasoline and Costco purchases on the Costco card.
I can maximize the returns this way. Again, all carry no balance - don't pay any interest - and the (at first glance) high fee on the Sapphire card ($450/annually) is immediately offset by the $300 in travel credit + Global Entry fee reimbursement + many of the other benefits (i.e. travel insurance, lounge access, the fairly rare *primary* rental car insurance etc.)
Then there's a no-fee AmEx that I use once a year just to keep the account open in case I need an AmEx. It's also the oldest card in my wallet (>20 years) so helps keep a long credit history.
So they all serve a purpose - and let me maximize the spend I'm going to make anyway....
That is EXACTLY what this is about. This is about supply chain theft, and theft of phones activated with a fake bank account/credit card/etc.
If someone orders a phone on an installment payment plan, with an attached line of service - it ships right out. Now let's say that was done using a stolen credit card. It might take a few weeks before it's discovered, and the charges reversed. Now Verizon is out a cell phone, some poor schlub has his identity stolen, and some guy overseas has a brand new iPhone that Verizon paid for.
So I totally get it - funny that the 60 days they are asking is also the limit of a bank's liability on fraud, isn't it?
That's what this is about - preventing either supply chain theft (which is very much real) and account identity fraud. It's actually sensible with no real customer impact.
Anyone surprised by this must have not been around during the UltraSPARC days....
I must’ve replaced 1000+ of those damn chips when the “Sombra” modules came out. Mirrored SRAM to protect against the ecache bit-flips. Kernel panics due to “ecache parity errors” were so common....
Cache scrubbers in the Solaris kernel. Replacement CPUs. All of it helped.
This stuff is real and painful if you had a data center full of gear susceptible to it.
I'm not posting anonymously, and I agree wholeheartedly. Their code is CRAP. I used to be responsible for a server farm running their Interscan messaging antivirus SMTP products on Unix.... what a trainwreck of software. We had this oddball corporate security policy in place that we would have to quarantine any inbound messages with attachments for 1 hour before letting them through the virus scanner; some executive thought that'd give the AV companies enough time to update their signatures. Anywho... the software was so stupid that after releasing from the quarantine, it would just move it to the top of the queue, hit the quarantine rule, and re-quarantine it. So I had one set of SMTP gateways that would ingest, quarantine and then hand off to the second set that would do the actual scanning. It was atrocious, atrocious code. All written in China, as I recall.
Replaced a couple of racks of Sun gear doing mail handling with a pair of Ironport appliances. Done.
TiVo works great.... we've got a BOLT+, two Romios, and 4 Minis scattered around the house. All of which are completely seamless - work amazingly well, combine linear and streaming TV just spectacularly well.
One of my favorite pieces of technology in a house loaded with it... everything from Sonos to SmartThings and everything in-between... and yet I love my TiVo more than any of them.
My wife still uses an AOL email address... and why the hell not?
It still works just fine; nobody has a problem reaching her - she hasn't had to make anyone change an address book in 20+ years.
She connects to it via IMAP with a real mail client, and has been doing so for at least the last 15 years, and POP3 before that.
Having an @aol.com address has zero reflection on function, form, appearance or anything else of her email... it's, after all, "just" an IMAP server. No reason to change whatsoever. What's the benefit? Believe it or not, the AOL IMAP servers are pretty stable - no more or less so than any other service. So, no technical or feature upside to doing so.... Why go through the hassle of changing?
Completely NOT unrelated. We've made a very deliberate decision to keep these platforms around - and continue to invest in them - as a hedge against monoculture.
Doesn't matter if Oracle has another SPARC chip coming or not -- Fujitsu does in the ~2020 timeframe.
Solaris 11.4 coming in 2018. Have you installed the weekly builds? I have. Will be supported till at least 2034.
Brought SPARC M8's to production? I have.
POWER - same kind of thing. POWER9 just launching, starting with AI.
Sure, this stuff isn't mainstream, but neither are our workloads. People would (literally) die if our systems went down hard. Same reason we use multiple databases - Oracle, DB2, Postgres, mySQL all have a role to play, as well as some other more esoteric ones. Same reason we use multiple network vendors, multiple power suppliers, etc. All about avoiding monoculture.
So yes -- some people actually DO think ahead of events like this.
This is why we run our mission critical workloads on SPARC and Power along side Linux. Solaris and AIX. Diversity -- in operating system, in processor, in manufacturer - is healthy. The SPARC T8's are blazing faster, secure, and don't have this nonsense. Neither do our POWER8's. Having all your eggs in the Intel+Linux basket could be a major shitshow here... meanwhile, we'll keep chugging along.
That doesn't surprise me in the least... they come from the "get sh!t done quickly" group...
As I've aged, I've gotten to the "if it works..." stage with technology. These guys have been using AIM for two decades because the damn thing works, solves their problem and does so without causing any heartburn. We actually use it at work for very similar reasons. Sure, we have Slack and Jabber and Skype and email and all that -- but most of my team clings to AIM because it works...
I totally get it... not sure Young Me would have, but Older and Wise Me sure does.
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I prefer the Sapphire Reserve to the Amex because of the ultimate rewards system. The 3% I earn on travel spent then has a 50% bonus if you book more travel via UR; making it a full 4.5% back. Can’t beat that.
The 100,000 UR points ($1,500 worth of travel) when I signed up didn’t hurt either. With a $450 annual fee, and then $300 back in travel credit, that makes the net annual fee $150. The signup bonus covers that for 10 years, even if I don’t use one additional benefit or earn any other points.
Great card - best deal I’ve seen in years.
As
For the free Amex cards, looks like aevan has that list covered.
I have several cards in my wallet as well. All of which have a $0 balance, but what I'm buying dictates which card I use.
Hotels/Rentals/general purpose goes on the Sapphire Reserve.
Airline travel goes on the United card.
Groceries, gasoline and Costco purchases on the Costco card.
I can maximize the returns this way. Again, all carry no balance - don't pay any interest - and the (at first glance) high fee on the Sapphire card ($450/annually) is immediately offset by the $300 in travel credit + Global Entry fee reimbursement + many of the other benefits (i.e. travel insurance, lounge access, the fairly rare *primary* rental car insurance etc.)
Then there's a no-fee AmEx that I use once a year just to keep the account open in case I need an AmEx. It's also the oldest card in my wallet (>20 years) so helps keep a long credit history.
So they all serve a purpose - and let me maximize the spend I'm going to make anyway ....
That is EXACTLY what this is about. This is about supply chain theft, and theft of phones activated with a fake bank account/credit card/etc.
If someone orders a phone on an installment payment plan, with an attached line of service - it ships right out. Now let's say that was done using a stolen credit card. It might take a few weeks before it's discovered, and the charges reversed. Now Verizon is out a cell phone, some poor schlub has his identity stolen, and some guy overseas has a brand new iPhone that Verizon paid for.
So I totally get it - funny that the 60 days they are asking is also the limit of a bank's liability on fraud, isn't it?
That's what this is about - preventing either supply chain theft (which is very much real) and account identity fraud. It's actually sensible with no real customer impact.
Anyone surprised by this must have not been around during the UltraSPARC days ....
I must’ve replaced 1000+ of those damn chips when the “Sombra” modules came out. Mirrored SRAM to protect against the ecache bit-flips. Kernel panics due to “ecache parity errors” were so common ....
Cache scrubbers in the Solaris kernel. Replacement CPUs. All of it helped.
This stuff is real and painful if you had a data center full of gear susceptible to it.
I'm not posting anonymously, and I agree wholeheartedly. Their code is CRAP. I used to be responsible for a server farm running their Interscan messaging antivirus SMTP products on Unix .... what a trainwreck of software. We had this oddball corporate security policy in place that we would have to quarantine any inbound messages with attachments for 1 hour before letting them through the virus scanner; some executive thought that'd give the AV companies enough time to update their signatures. Anywho... the software was so stupid that after releasing from the quarantine, it would just move it to the top of the queue, hit the quarantine rule, and re-quarantine it. So I had one set of SMTP gateways that would ingest, quarantine and then hand off to the second set that would do the actual scanning. It was atrocious, atrocious code. All written in China, as I recall.
Replaced a couple of racks of Sun gear doing mail handling with a pair of Ironport appliances. Done.
So glad I'm out of the day-to-day IT business ....
Just replying for a hearty "AMEN!"
TiVo works great.... we've got a BOLT+, two Romios, and 4 Minis scattered around the house. All of which are completely seamless - work amazingly well, combine linear and streaming TV just spectacularly well.
One of my favorite pieces of technology in a house loaded with it ... everything from Sonos to SmartThings and everything in-between... and yet I love my TiVo more than any of them.
Not if it supports IMAP IDLE.
And for the record, AOLâ(TM)s mail server works great with iOS in push mode.
How did I ever come to defending AOL?
My wife still uses an AOL email address... and why the hell not?
It still works just fine; nobody has a problem reaching her - she hasn't had to make anyone change an address book in 20+ years.
She connects to it via IMAP with a real mail client, and has been doing so for at least the last 15 years, and POP3 before that.
Having an @aol.com address has zero reflection on function, form, appearance or anything else of her email... it's, after all, "just" an IMAP server. No reason to change whatsoever. What's the benefit? Believe it or not, the AOL IMAP servers are pretty stable - no more or less so than any other service. So, no technical or feature upside to doing so.... Why go through the hassle of changing?
Not one of those Signal data packets wouldâ(TM)ve gone anywhere without Diameter..... go study IMS.
I work in the tech industry in NY Metro area and consistently run into the same crowd over and over.
Canâ(TM)t tell you how many times my paths have crossed ways with the same people in different roles/capacities/positions.
A burned bridge here can absolutely sink you ....
So, Intel demos a halfassed SPARC chip.
Even freakinâ(TM) Oracle can ship a 32-core, 5GHz monster of a chip ...
Intel needs a gigantic cooler for a one-shot demo of a chip with less cores and no DAX accelerators.
My how the mighty have fallen.
... yes. At scale, yes.
Completely NOT unrelated. We've made a very deliberate decision to keep these platforms around - and continue to invest in them - as a hedge against monoculture.
Doesn't matter if Oracle has another SPARC chip coming or not -- Fujitsu does in the ~2020 timeframe.
Solaris 11.4 coming in 2018. Have you installed the weekly builds? I have. Will be supported till at least 2034.
Brought SPARC M8's to production? I have.
POWER - same kind of thing. POWER9 just launching, starting with AI.
Sure, this stuff isn't mainstream, but neither are our workloads. People would (literally) die if our systems went down hard. Same reason we use multiple databases - Oracle, DB2, Postgres, mySQL all have a role to play, as well as some other more esoteric ones. Same reason we use multiple network vendors, multiple power suppliers, etc. All about avoiding monoculture.
So yes -- some people actually DO think ahead of events like this.
This is why we run our mission critical workloads on SPARC and Power along side Linux. Solaris and AIX. Diversity -- in operating system, in processor, in manufacturer - is healthy. The SPARC T8's are blazing faster, secure, and don't have this nonsense. Neither do our POWER8's. Having all your eggs in the Intel+Linux basket could be a major shitshow here... meanwhile, we'll keep chugging along.
That doesn't surprise me in the least... they come from the "get sh!t done quickly" group ...
As I've aged, I've gotten to the "if it works..." stage with technology. These guys have been using AIM for two decades because the damn thing works, solves their problem and does so without causing any heartburn. We actually use it at work for very similar reasons. Sure, we have Slack and Jabber and Skype and email and all that -- but most of my team clings to AIM because it works ...
I totally get it... not sure Young Me would have, but Older and Wise Me sure does.
My one and only accepted story submission turned out to be the launch article for apple.slashdot.org
My little piece of Slashdot history .... otherwise, my comments have been consistently useless for 20 years now.
That didn't exist in 1994, when I established my current surfing habits. Now get that new fangled "expose" stuff off my lawn.
(ps - if I had my way, I'd have focus-follows-mouse Ala OpenWindows....)
The days when Mirsky ruled the web, and a googol was still a number.
Who needs tabs? Still rocking stacked windows Netscape 1.1N style ... OpenApple-N for new window, OpenApple-` to cycle through them.
Been browsing this way for 20+ years, since my TCP/IP gateway ran Banyan VINES ... not changing now.
(and let's not talk about the fact that I don't use bookmarks either ...)
You are 100% correct. Don't feel the trolls - this is clickbait headlines and a BS story. If you believe in security, this is a good thing.
Low uid in the hundred thousands? WTF?
Plex. Plex runs on the 'modern' TiVos (i.e. Roamio / Bolt) and does a splendid job streaming media from the Plex server running on my Synology NAS.
TiVo is about as perfect a central media device as I've seen. It's not perfect, but a helluva lot better than ANYONE else's.
Seriously ... And oh, how the tides have turned.
I had the first submission that kicked off 'apple.slashdot.org' about, oh, 15 years ago now? How exciting things were then.
None of the Apple hate. Mac OS X was just getting started, and had so much potential.
Let's not forget how revolutionary it really was. The real UNIX for the desktop. Good stuff.
Part of me misses the simplicity of PowerBook Titaniums and iPods with scroll wheels.
6-digit UID?
Newbie.
Interesting to note that Mac OS X's default shell was tcsh. I forget which version changed to bash.