While I've used local credit unions for years for personal accounts, my business bank account is at a nation bank. Most credit unions are severely lacking in the online services department. They tend to outsource their online banking systems to a third-party who apparently was the lowest bidder on the project. Even in 2009, you're lucky to get a website that works in anything other than IE and lets you do anything more than check your balance.
Local credit union can also be somewhat of a mickey mouse operation. A couple years ago my credit union migrated their organization to a new banking ERP system (or whatever that industry calls it). Their solution was to shutdown the entire credit union, including online banking, for an entire week. No deposits, no withdraws--nothing. I can't believe that the board of directors approved that move. I would have have laughed the CIO out of the room for even suggesting that plan.
For the lazy: Call (866) 483-9600 to opt out with Verizon. It's automated and you'll need the the primary phone number on the account, the account name, plus you'll have to leave voicemail that states the primary name on the account, billing address, the name of the caller, and a callback number for the caller. It seems that they're determined to make this as painful as possible.
Thanks for the comment. While it's true that something is worth what others are willing to pay, I feel fairly confident in saying that the house is "worth" $300k even today if it weren't a bank-owned property. It's in excellent condition (only missing appliances), the insurance company is basing my premium on a replacement cost of $321k, the house sold for $400k when it was new (6 years ago), and the much smaller house next door is listed for-sale-by-owner for $295k.
This is in semi-rural Michigan. While we have economic issues of our own depressing housing values a bit, we've been largely insulated by both the rise and fall of the housing bubble. It's a four bedroom house and we are currently without kids, so I suspect that we'll be in the place for a while to come, so we should have plenty of time for prices to rebound a bit too.::crosses fingers::
Hopefully this week I should be closing on my first home purchase. It's a foreclosure that I'm picking up for $260k that likely has a market value of around $300k. My wife and I are in our early 30's and have practically no debt and both have good jobs. All of the DTI calculators and things that I've read indicate that we should be able to afford a $450-500k house. But we got a good deal and a 5.375% 30-year fixed mortgage to go with it. I can totally understand the disdain that people have here for stupid people living outside their means. But you also have to understand how these things were sold to people:
"Hey, you normally wouldn't be able to afford this nice of house. So what I recommend that you do is an ARM with a teaser rate. This will allow you to get into the home you want today. When your rate is due to adjust, you just be able to refi into a 30-yr fixed. Your payment will go down and you'll likely be making more money then too. In the worst case scenario you can sell the home for a huge profit (have you seen real estate prices over the past few years?!). It's really a win-win situation."
So, while there certainly was some Cribz-driven indulgence going on, a lot of the advice seemed to also have a bit of financial logic behind it. At least on the surface. I've lived and breathed this for five months and have learned an enormous amount about the house buying process. Quite honestly though, I'm not sure that I wouldn't have made the same the mistake a lot of people made back then either.
Why do people always cry for class actions? Lawyers get millions and you get a coupon for $4 off your next purchase. Worse, you're pretty much stuck with that coupon and are unable to press for other compensation unless you specifically opted out.
A much better solution is to sue them in small claims court. It's very easy and cheap to do, and almost always gets the company's attention. If your suit has any merit, 9 times out of 10 they're just pay you off to avoid having to pay a $300/hr. lawyer to spend the afternoon waiting around the courthouse.
So you're not personally familiar with python-based web development. There are a great many people out there that are though: Django, Pythons, Turbogears, Zope are all great places to start.
Because you don't just declare your workers to be independent contractors when you treat them like employees. The IRS is *very* specific about worker classifications. If you're misclassified as an independent contractor, the company can be hit with serious fines and potentially face criminal tax evasion charges. I know this because I am currently fighting my 1099 classification with a former employer. Check out IRS Form SS8 for more information about the guidelines.
Not saying that there might be some merit here, but this was hardly a scientific study. Someone simply looked at the number of downloads of a single album, by a single band and said "downloads == good." Sure, you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say, but this isn't even trying.
Secondly, it's no longer "pirating" if it's condoned by the copyright holder, eh? So, we're now expecting labels to just let everyone freely copy music? The problem here is that labels own the copyright and make their money from album sales. Merchandising and concert revenue, on the other hand, typically go into the bands' pockets. So of course there are bands out there that would love to use albums as a loss leader for their concerts. This kinda screws the labels though since the only reason so many people attend the concerts or buy the t-shirts is due to a heavy promotional investment by the labels.
I can't actually believe that I'm spending a few minutes of my life to defend major record labels, but we do need a bit of intellectual honesty and middle ground in this discussion.
Please, please stop thinking of version control as some sort of backup. When we initially started mandating the use of version control software, developers would just using the "commit" button instead of the "save" button. It makes it *much* more difficult to traverse through the repo when you have three dozen commits per day, per developer, each commented with "ok. really should be fixed now." The worst offenders were issued an Etchasketch for a week while their notebooks went in for service *cough*. Problem solved.
I drove on expired plates for over a year and without car insurance for over three years. I certainly did not have any type of substance abuse problems; I simply could not afford it. At first I was unemployed and then I was struggling as a self-employed computer geek. While driving, I was paranoid most of the time, but that $150/mo. was *huge*. I spent less than that on food (ramen, eggs, and peanut butter) each month. Yes, it was foolish, but those are the choices I was faced with.
Now that I've had a fulltime job for a couple of years, I carry auto insurance, renter's insurance, dental/vision/health, plus I even pay for supplemental AD&D coverage. If an ininsured motorist would hit me, I'd certainly be pissed, but I'd also empathize. Not everyone without insurance is a drunk/crackhead as you imply.
$4M might be a tax dodge. I might even be willing to consider $40M to be a tax dodge. But when you start talking tens of *billions*, I somehow doubt that taxes are even on Bill's mental radar. Oh, I'm sure he's aware of his tax liability in the abstract and has a team of accountants handling the details. But when you have enough money to literally change the world, your ambitions extend beyond trying to hide a few bucks from the government.
Hrm?
(12,000 laptops per week) * (30% recovery rate) = 436,000 laptops per year that vanish into the void. Sounds like someone got the decimal point wrong.
Das keyboard's claim to fame is that it's available with completely blank key caps. Get one of those and you can have your Dvorak layout without the manual labor of swapping keys.
His wife of 37 years died of liver cancer in 1997. I suspect that was partly the reason his work became more bitter and more focused on death around that time.
I once had a first date with this *very* right wing girl I met at a party. When I picked her up, there was a typical uneasiness in the car so I switched on the radio for background noise. I immediately jumped to turn it off when I realized that I had left my Carlin CD in my CD player. She'd never heard any of his stuff and prompted me to turn it back on. I warned her that his stuff isn't for everyone but she insisted. Well, ok then...
::sound of audience clapping as Carlin takes the stage::
(slight pause as he waits for the applause to die down)
"Why... Why is it that most people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?"
That was truly one of the greatest facepalm.jpg moments of my life. Suffice to say that the rest of the evening was a bit awkward.
What happened to the promise of "consumer-produced content?" (I always hated that marketing oxymoron). Youtube has been in the public consciousness, what, five years now? High quality video cameras are pretty cheap, as is digital editing software. There's also a boatload of money to be made in advertising (comparatively speaking, for a small project). Why hasn't a single movie or video series captured the public's attention like countless "viral videos" have? I would have thought a hit that compared to at least the viewership of a lukewarm network show would have appeared by now.
I think you inadvertently bring up the biggest problem about this whole debacle: that so many people feel that this issue is a matter of politics.
Another near-useless book review.
on
Running Xen
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't know why I keeping reading/. book reviews; I never feel like I get much information in exchange for my two minutes. Who is the target audience of this book? What kind of Xen experience did the reviewer have prior to picking up this book? What did he actually learn when he was finished with it? There's too much verbiage attributed to how he "felt" about the book or the style it was written in and not enough hard information.
In my personal experience, Xen isn't that hard to get working. I think I read a single HOWTO and was up and running in an afternoon. I subscribe to the mailing list which is a great resource for the more arcane problems (passing a PCI telephony card to an Asterisk domU, for instance). The developers and veterans are very patient and quite helpful. I was hoping this review would tell me why I should or should not spend money on another Xen resource. Since I feel like I still don't know anything about the book, it has failed to do so.
This "service" is simply placing a fraud alert on your credit report. When a creditor pulls your report, they see this alert which means they ought to do a bit more manual verification of your ID before granting credit. Most creditors will go the extra mile to win the business, but some of them will just throw the credit app in the trash. The bureaus have been bitching left and right about Lifelock, because they're gaming the system. A FA is only supposed to be used if a credit report (CR) is suspected of containing fraudulent information. Anyhow... the point is, you can call a credit bureau (Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion) and place a FA on your file for free. You don't even have to call them all, a FA will in short time propagate to all three.
(Note: a FA is different from "freezing" your CR, which prevents it from even being pulled at all by potential creditors. A freeze is a one-time fee ($10 I think) and is an even better protection against ID theft than a perpetual FA. The downside is you have to pay that $10 per bureau and it can be a pain in the ass if you ever to legitimately apply for credit.)
combat pay == "good deal of free money?" Weird... I can relate. I play with computers all day and mysteriously some company keeps depositing a lot of free money into my back account twice a month.
About when Bioshock came out, I had just built a $5k gaming rig. I spared no expense: water cooled, six hard drives, PC Power & Cooling power supply, Deck keyboard, top-of-the-line Soundblaster, 4GB of RAM, etc, etc... I was all excited to go out and buy Bioshock to push my machine to it's limits. However, I then read about the moronic DRM scheme that would prevent me from fully getting my money's worth. So I downloaded it off of TPB and thoughly enjoyed it on my own terms.
I am 30 years old and have a nice paying job, so the $60 or so wasn't even a consideration. I'd much rather pay for it than have to dick around with trying to piece together a decent download off of BT, then finding a working crack, plus hope that none of this stuff was infested with a trojan. I'm old enough now where my spare time is worth more than a reasonable amount of money. But I *hate* being treated like a criminal when I'm an actually a paying customer. That's like paying for abuse.
I was really looking forward to both Mass Effect and Spore. And again, I wouldn't think twice about paying retail for them. But it looks like I'll be shopping at the TPB again once someone manages to crack the DRM (which should take about a week--always does).
Ext3 tops out at 32 tebibyte (TiB) file systems and 2 TiB files, but practical limits may be lower than this depending on your architecture and system settings--perhaps as low as 2 TiB file systems and 16 gibibyte (GiB) files.
Is this really the case? I created a 100GB file on ext3 earlier this week. It contains a virtual machine image that I am currently running under Xen. I haven't yet had a problem. I would guess that >16GB files are pretty commonly used in the world of Xen.
SASL Authd, Radius, etc. With BSD and OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and Samba, you can get it working pretty well but you still have to deal with changing passwords in two or more places, different password expiry schemes that all have to be kludged together sometimes with spit and baling wire...
I'm doubting that you have Kerberos properly implemented if you're having problems unifying authentication since that's the whole point of Kerberos. OpenLDAP for directory services and Kerberos for authentication works just peachy.
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While I've used local credit unions for years for personal accounts, my business bank account is at a nation bank. Most credit unions are severely lacking in the online services department. They tend to outsource their online banking systems to a third-party who apparently was the lowest bidder on the project. Even in 2009, you're lucky to get a website that works in anything other than IE and lets you do anything more than check your balance.
Local credit union can also be somewhat of a mickey mouse operation. A couple years ago my credit union migrated their organization to a new banking ERP system (or whatever that industry calls it). Their solution was to shutdown the entire credit union, including online banking, for an entire week. No deposits, no withdraws--nothing. I can't believe that the board of directors approved that move. I would have have laughed the CIO out of the room for even suggesting that plan.
For the lazy: Call (866) 483-9600 to opt out with Verizon. It's automated and you'll need the the primary phone number on the account, the account name, plus you'll have to leave voicemail that states the primary name on the account, billing address, the name of the caller, and a callback number for the caller. It seems that they're determined to make this as painful as possible.
Thanks for the comment. While it's true that something is worth what others are willing to pay, I feel fairly confident in saying that the house is "worth" $300k even today if it weren't a bank-owned property. It's in excellent condition (only missing appliances), the insurance company is basing my premium on a replacement cost of $321k, the house sold for $400k when it was new (6 years ago), and the much smaller house next door is listed for-sale-by-owner for $295k.
::crosses fingers::
This is in semi-rural Michigan. While we have economic issues of our own depressing housing values a bit, we've been largely insulated by both the rise and fall of the housing bubble. It's a four bedroom house and we are currently without kids, so I suspect that we'll be in the place for a while to come, so we should have plenty of time for prices to rebound a bit too.
So, while there certainly was some Cribz-driven indulgence going on, a lot of the advice seemed to also have a bit of financial logic behind it. At least on the surface. I've lived and breathed this for five months and have learned an enormous amount about the house buying process. Quite honestly though, I'm not sure that I wouldn't have made the same the mistake a lot of people made back then either.
Why do people always cry for class actions? Lawyers get millions and you get a coupon for $4 off your next purchase. Worse, you're pretty much stuck with that coupon and are unable to press for other compensation unless you specifically opted out.
A much better solution is to sue them in small claims court. It's very easy and cheap to do, and almost always gets the company's attention. If your suit has any merit, 9 times out of 10 they're just pay you off to avoid having to pay a $300/hr. lawyer to spend the afternoon waiting around the courthouse.
So you're not personally familiar with python-based web development. There are a great many people out there that are though: Django, Pythons, Turbogears, Zope are all great places to start.
Ever think that whoever wrote the Wikipedia article got their info from watching the broadcast?
Because you don't just declare your workers to be independent contractors when you treat them like employees. The IRS is *very* specific about worker classifications. If you're misclassified as an independent contractor, the company can be hit with serious fines and potentially face criminal tax evasion charges. I know this because I am currently fighting my 1099 classification with a former employer. Check out IRS Form SS8 for more information about the guidelines.
Not saying that there might be some merit here, but this was hardly a scientific study. Someone simply looked at the number of downloads of a single album, by a single band and said "downloads == good." Sure, you can make statistics say whatever you want them to say, but this isn't even trying.
Secondly, it's no longer "pirating" if it's condoned by the copyright holder, eh? So, we're now expecting labels to just let everyone freely copy music? The problem here is that labels own the copyright and make their money from album sales. Merchandising and concert revenue, on the other hand, typically go into the bands' pockets. So of course there are bands out there that would love to use albums as a loss leader for their concerts. This kinda screws the labels though since the only reason so many people attend the concerts or buy the t-shirts is due to a heavy promotional investment by the labels.
I can't actually believe that I'm spending a few minutes of my life to defend major record labels, but we do need a bit of intellectual honesty and middle ground in this discussion.
Please, please stop thinking of version control as some sort of backup. When we initially started mandating the use of version control software, developers would just using the "commit" button instead of the "save" button. It makes it *much* more difficult to traverse through the repo when you have three dozen commits per day, per developer, each commented with "ok. really should be fixed now." The worst offenders were issued an Etchasketch for a week while their notebooks went in for service *cough*. Problem solved.
I drove on expired plates for over a year and without car insurance for over three years. I certainly did not have any type of substance abuse problems; I simply could not afford it. At first I was unemployed and then I was struggling as a self-employed computer geek. While driving, I was paranoid most of the time, but that $150/mo. was *huge*. I spent less than that on food (ramen, eggs, and peanut butter) each month. Yes, it was foolish, but those are the choices I was faced with.
Now that I've had a fulltime job for a couple of years, I carry auto insurance, renter's insurance, dental/vision/health, plus I even pay for supplemental AD&D coverage. If an ininsured motorist would hit me, I'd certainly be pissed, but I'd also empathize. Not everyone without insurance is a drunk/crackhead as you imply.
$4M might be a tax dodge. I might even be willing to consider $40M to be a tax dodge. But when you start talking tens of *billions*, I somehow doubt that taxes are even on Bill's mental radar. Oh, I'm sure he's aware of his tax liability in the abstract and has a team of accountants handling the details. But when you have enough money to literally change the world, your ambitions extend beyond trying to hide a few bucks from the government.
Hrm? (12,000 laptops per week) * (30% recovery rate) = 436,000 laptops per year that vanish into the void. Sounds like someone got the decimal point wrong.
Das keyboard's claim to fame is that it's available with completely blank key caps. Get one of those and you can have your Dvorak layout without the manual labor of swapping keys.
His wife of 37 years died of liver cancer in 1997. I suspect that was partly the reason his work became more bitter and more focused on death around that time.
I once had a first date with this *very* right wing girl I met at a party. When I picked her up, there was a typical uneasiness in the car so I switched on the radio for background noise. I immediately jumped to turn it off when I realized that I had left my Carlin CD in my CD player. She'd never heard any of his stuff and prompted me to turn it back on. I warned her that his stuff isn't for everyone but she insisted. Well, ok then...
::sound of audience clapping as Carlin takes the stage::
(slight pause as he waits for the applause to die down)
"Why... Why is it that most people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?"
That was truly one of the greatest facepalm.jpg moments of my life. Suffice to say that the rest of the evening was a bit awkward.
What happened to the promise of "consumer-produced content?" (I always hated that marketing oxymoron). Youtube has been in the public consciousness, what, five years now? High quality video cameras are pretty cheap, as is digital editing software. There's also a boatload of money to be made in advertising (comparatively speaking, for a small project). Why hasn't a single movie or video series captured the public's attention like countless "viral videos" have? I would have thought a hit that compared to at least the viewership of a lukewarm network show would have appeared by now.
I think you inadvertently bring up the biggest problem about this whole debacle: that so many people feel that this issue is a matter of politics.
I don't know why I keeping reading /. book reviews; I never feel like I get much information in exchange for my two minutes. Who is the target audience of this book? What kind of Xen experience did the reviewer have prior to picking up this book? What did he actually learn when he was finished with it? There's too much verbiage attributed to how he "felt" about the book or the style it was written in and not enough hard information.
In my personal experience, Xen isn't that hard to get working. I think I read a single HOWTO and was up and running in an afternoon. I subscribe to the mailing list which is a great resource for the more arcane problems (passing a PCI telephony card to an Asterisk domU, for instance). The developers and veterans are very patient and quite helpful. I was hoping this review would tell me why I should or should not spend money on another Xen resource. Since I feel like I still don't know anything about the book, it has failed to do so.
This "service" is simply placing a fraud alert on your credit report. When a creditor pulls your report, they see this alert which means they ought to do a bit more manual verification of your ID before granting credit. Most creditors will go the extra mile to win the business, but some of them will just throw the credit app in the trash. The bureaus have been bitching left and right about Lifelock, because they're gaming the system. A FA is only supposed to be used if a credit report (CR) is suspected of containing fraudulent information. Anyhow... the point is, you can call a credit bureau (Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion) and place a FA on your file for free. You don't even have to call them all, a FA will in short time propagate to all three.
(Note: a FA is different from "freezing" your CR, which prevents it from even being pulled at all by potential creditors. A freeze is a one-time fee ($10 I think) and is an even better protection against ID theft than a perpetual FA. The downside is you have to pay that $10 per bureau and it can be a pain in the ass if you ever to legitimately apply for credit.)
combat pay == "good deal of free money?" Weird... I can relate. I play with computers all day and mysteriously some company keeps depositing a lot of free money into my back account twice a month.
About when Bioshock came out, I had just built a $5k gaming rig. I spared no expense: water cooled, six hard drives, PC Power & Cooling power supply, Deck keyboard, top-of-the-line Soundblaster, 4GB of RAM, etc, etc... I was all excited to go out and buy Bioshock to push my machine to it's limits. However, I then read about the moronic DRM scheme that would prevent me from fully getting my money's worth. So I downloaded it off of TPB and thoughly enjoyed it on my own terms.
I am 30 years old and have a nice paying job, so the $60 or so wasn't even a consideration. I'd much rather pay for it than have to dick around with trying to piece together a decent download off of BT, then finding a working crack, plus hope that none of this stuff was infested with a trojan. I'm old enough now where my spare time is worth more than a reasonable amount of money. But I *hate* being treated like a criminal when I'm an actually a paying customer. That's like paying for abuse.
I was really looking forward to both Mass Effect and Spore. And again, I wouldn't think twice about paying retail for them. But it looks like I'll be shopping at the TPB again once someone manages to crack the DRM (which should take about a week--always does).
I don't think that word means what you think it means.