There are already some 2% cash back cards -- off the top of my head, Fidelity and Capital One (Venture card) both offer them. Although, the Capital One card has a $60/year annual fee.
I think there are some other 2% cash back cards in the market.
Your eligibility for these cards may depend on a great credit score and they tend to have high interest rates. They are mostly designed for people who have high monthly charges and pay their bills in full each month.
This might be taking the need to air gap your backup disks a bit too far. On the other hand, I wonder how long it will be before the disks are hacked and 30 million pages of data found lying around on the moon are exposed?
For their next demonstration they are going to track a shipment of apples (the fruit). This will allow them to claim that chain has conclusively proved that you really can compare apples to oranges. (The next press release.)
If you have corporate clients, you really can't go too far wrong with any of the corporate-style Window machines (Dell Latitude, Thinkpad, MS Surface) and W10.
Buy a subscription to O365 E3. Last thing you want to explain to a client is why they can't open your "almost compatible" document, presentation or spreadsheet or all the formatting turned to mush. The $21 a month for O365 E3 gets you skype for business and teams (both likely what your clients are using) and reliable email.
Don't cheap out. Saving $500 on the laptop or "free software" isn't worth losing a client.
I was hoping for a rant with how Excel handles comma value separated files. Rather than using a normal escape character, they double quotes and have other funky rules.
The telcos know the originating company. If it's a company that agrees to not allow spoofed caller id your carrier could pass along the caller id, if not your carrier could set the caller ID to LIKELY FRAUD CALL. If not preventing spoofing, it would certainly discourage it and put the recipient on alert for a likely fraud.
The problem is that the telco have almost no incentive to cut down on fraud calls. They get paid the same for a fraud call as a legit one, so why not carry them all?
Three alternatives (lacking a deep technical knowledge of the implementation issues)
--Calls from carriers that are only willing to pass authenticated caller id could be flagged as "authenticated". Calls passed thru carriers who don't authenticated would show up as "possible scam". This would make the calls more obvious.
--Along with caller ID pass along the originating carrier (or perhaps the last identified carrier). I'd be a lot less likely to answer a call for a carrier I didn't recognize than one I did. (On the other hand, I almost never answer calls unless I recognize the number.)
--It seems that on-net calls (e.g., Verizon to Verizon, or AT&T to AT&T) would be easy to authenticate and the calls could be flagged as "not spam".
The mobile carriers (and legacy landline) are doing everything possible to kill voice as an option. How long before there is a mobile without any voice option (other than over data).
They should have redundant chillers, air handlers and environmental controls. Especially as cooling is critical to data center functionality.
A well designed data center has (at a minimum) redundant power feeds from two separate power networks, redundant network connections (from three or more providers) and cooling capacity. Losing a chiller or air handler should not take out the data center.
Isn't this what backup generators and N+1 infrastructure is for? I can understand Joe's hosting and bait shop emporium going down, but power and HVAC are pretty well solved sciences. The weather in Texas is hot -- this is not a surprise. There are lightning storms in Texas, this is also not a surprise.
It seems like if you a positioning a data center in Texas (which there as some reasons for), you prepare for both heat and lightning. I could understand if there was an incredibly unusual weather event (asteroid landing on data center, or death rays from the moon) but hot is not unusual in Texas.
However, when major cloud service providers it does provide an excuse for everyone else who manages a data center -- even the biggest cloud provider occasionally has an outage, so when our data center has an issue it's no worse. We say thank you Microsoft/AWS/Joe's!
Is this tech news? Yesterday's hot news was that Apple was releasing the iPhone in 3 (or 5) new colors. Today's news is that Microsoft has reskinned a website to use darker colors.
I guess that it is news, but I struggle to really care. Has tech really become this boring?
The other problem with DC power has to do with fire safety and arcing. With AC, the current goes to zero and arc are self-quenching. Not true with DC, so you have a greater likelihood of fire. It also has to do with safety if you get shocked by DC versus AC your chances of injury are much greater.
The ease of transforming voltages with transformers gives AC an advantage. And if you look around your home, you'll see a fair number of high current devices -- heat producing, or motors (ovens, ranges, toaster, coffee pot, A/C, blowers, washing machine, dryer) that would need very heavy cables to power at 12 or even 48v.
Regulatory requirements -- especially true in highly regulated industries like financial services or medicine. Although almost every business has regulatory needs from trucking to manufacturing.
Competitive pressure -- our competitor has a cooler widget and we are losing customers so we need one too.
It's remarkable how many most incompatible messaging/conferencing apps there are. It's as if the various email domains were unique and you couldn't email wasn't interoperative. Even on Windows, they generally don't play well and are hard to install/update.
Depending on who we are trying to meet with, off the top of my head, there is Skype, S4B, WebEx, Zoom, AT&T Connect, GoTo meeting, Chime, Google Something, Adobe Connect, Sametime and probably lots more.
It's a pain if you are the one who is stuck using whatever your clients ask for. It's even worse as some of these require admin rights to install, and many seem to have "critical" updates weekly (which also require admin rights).
The choices for 16:10 desktop monitors is rapidly dwindling. I've always prefered 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors to options like 1680:1050 and 2560:1440. Dell still makes some 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors, but not many others do.
The advantage lining up a 2560:1600 and a 1600:1200 (oriented vertically) is that the screens align perfectly and you get a lot of real estate.
If this is really a robotic dog clearly the answer is either a fire hydrant or a squirrel. Oh look, it's a squirrel, and I need to check out that fire hydrant over there.
If you want easy to use languages that teach the concept of programming (as opposed to ones for developing professional applications) there are better choices.
I think there needs to be a distinction between intro languages and ones used for developing complex, large applications. It's great to give beginners (whatever their age) an intro to programming and maybe Swift is the language for this.
This is sort of the same as the woodshop class for 7th graders that doesn't use power tools. Great intro to woodworking, but not the approach you'd use if you were building a house. The class might inspire kids to learn more about the field -- which is all you are looking for.
They usually don't accept gold for payment at "Gold as an investment" conferences either... but no one calls that ironic.
Same is true at securities (stocks and bonds) investment conferences
If alternative currencies are going to succeed (beyond the next get-rich-quick scheme) they need to address: - Transaction costs -- I can quickly & securely send value internationally using wire transfers for less than $20 (probably less than $10, if I did it a lot); domestically it's a few cents to write a check or use ACH - Security - the bitcoin banks seem to get "hacked" way more than traditional banks; rarely (if ever, do you hear of Americans losing their money at a bank because of theft in the bank's processing, and for most bank accounts the value is insured for a few pennies by the FDIC against fraud, theft) - Portability and acceptance - between cash, credit cards, checks and online payments it's easy to carry around a store of value -- this is partially why gold and cattle are generally not used as a medium of exchange any more
The credit card fee is just one of the "fees" baked into your purchase. If you go down the fees that are added to the cost of an item, that you may or may not use, credit card fees are just one of them.
For example, many shops offer "free" parking. If I walk to the store, I'm still having the "free" parking baked into the cost. Perhaps other stores offer a very generous return policy. If I'm the kind of person who buys something and rarely returns it, then I'm paying for the return policy. Same is true for good customer service--if I walk in and know exactly what I want, I'm still paying for the knowledgeable staff.
In general, the "baked in" fees should average out. On some transactions you might not need the service, and on others you take advantage of free parking, credit card, generous return policy and knowledgeable staff. If you feel that the merchant is charging you for services that you never use, perhaps you're shopping a store that is targeting a different customer.
For as much as everyone knocks Outlook as an email client, not download images has been the default since at list O2003 (and I think O'97). This may be the origin of Marketing's reported open (read) rates.
Gmail rewrites your img tags to point to a google server. This is done to speed up emails (the images are loaded off a google server) and to cache the images (if multiple emails download the same image, google only needs to fetch the image once). Google also claims to check the images to make sure they don't contain an malicious code.
In this case, it looks like every email is read (as the images are always downloaded). The browser string also reports as google, and the IP address of the download is also a google IP address. Not very useful for tracking.
Many corporate email systems use something like Barracuda which also downloads the images and re-writes the image tag. When you look the reader's IP address, you'll see it's one of barracuda's servers. Barracuda also check all the hyperlinks to make sure that they don't point to malicious sites. They also rewrites on the email links, so they are checked in real time when the recipient clicks on them. (The links are turned into a Barracuda link, then Barracuda checks the link at the time the user clicks on it to make sure it is still not malicious. If it's ok, the Barracuda link does a http redirect.
Open rates pretty much a bogus statistic these days, although we still talk about them. Between Barracuda- and Google-like approaches, if someone tells you they didn't read your email, they may be telling the truth.
It seems to me that the last-mile providers are trying to charge three time for their service:
First, when you buy internet access you're paying for access at 50/mbps (or whatever speed I want). It seems like this should give you access to the pipe at that speed.
Second, the content providers are paying thousands (millions?) of dollars for their "upload" access. They are contracting with Level 3, or buying their own fiber to provide their content.
And now thirdly, the ISPs want to charge the content providers additional fees to deliver their content (initially, it will be fees for "faster", next it will be fees for "not slowing it down" and finally, the fee will be for "delivery").
The water utility analogy (sorry, no cars), is that if you first bought water from a water supplier (not your local utility), then the local water company charged you for a pipe that could deliver 100 gallons per hour, then the utility charged you for delivering the water that you've bought from the supplier, and finally, the local utility charged the company that supplied the water a fee for delivering it.
From the operating system's perspective it wasn't a crash. The job (aka, task) merely abnormally ended but everything else was fine.
From the mainframe days...//URMISAMP JOB (*),"tutpoint",CLASS=6,PRTY=10,NOTIFY=&SYSUID,// MSGCLASS=X,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),TYPRUN=SCAN,// TIME=(3,0),REGION=10K
Slashdot Mirror
There are already some 2% cash back cards -- off the top of my head, Fidelity and Capital One (Venture card) both offer them. Although, the Capital One card has a $60/year annual fee.
I think there are some other 2% cash back cards in the market.
Your eligibility for these cards may depend on a great credit score and they tend to have high interest rates. They are mostly designed for people who have high monthly charges and pay their bills in full each month.
This might be taking the need to air gap your backup disks a bit too far. On the other hand, I wonder how long it will be before the disks are hacked and 30 million pages of data found lying around on the moon are exposed?
For their next demonstration they are going to track a shipment of apples (the fruit). This will allow them to claim that chain has conclusively proved that you really can compare apples to oranges. (The next press release.)
Tell me again why bitcoin is so much more secure than the traditional banking system.
If you have corporate clients, you really can't go too far wrong with any of the corporate-style Window machines (Dell Latitude, Thinkpad, MS Surface) and W10.
Buy a subscription to O365 E3. Last thing you want to explain to a client is why they can't open your "almost compatible" document, presentation or spreadsheet or all the formatting turned to mush. The $21 a month for O365 E3 gets you skype for business and teams (both likely what your clients are using) and reliable email.
Don't cheap out. Saving $500 on the laptop or "free software" isn't worth losing a client.
I was hoping for a rant with how Excel handles comma value separated files. Rather than using a normal escape character, they double quotes and have other funky rules.
It's nearly impossible to parse a CVS file.
The telcos know the originating company. If it's a company that agrees to not allow spoofed caller id your carrier could pass along the caller id, if not your carrier could set the caller ID to LIKELY FRAUD CALL. If not preventing spoofing, it would certainly discourage it and put the recipient on alert for a likely fraud.
The problem is that the telco have almost no incentive to cut down on fraud calls. They get paid the same for a fraud call as a legit one, so why not carry them all?
Three alternatives (lacking a deep technical knowledge of the implementation issues)
--Calls from carriers that are only willing to pass authenticated caller id could be flagged as "authenticated". Calls passed thru carriers who don't authenticated would show up as "possible scam". This would make the calls more obvious.
--Along with caller ID pass along the originating carrier (or perhaps the last identified carrier). I'd be a lot less likely to answer a call for a carrier I didn't recognize than one I did. (On the other hand, I almost never answer calls unless I recognize the number.)
--It seems that on-net calls (e.g., Verizon to Verizon, or AT&T to AT&T) would be easy to authenticate and the calls could be flagged as "not spam".
The mobile carriers (and legacy landline) are doing everything possible to kill voice as an option. How long before there is a mobile without any voice option (other than over data).
They should have redundant chillers, air handlers and environmental controls. Especially as cooling is critical to data center functionality.
A well designed data center has (at a minimum) redundant power feeds from two separate power networks, redundant network connections (from three or more providers) and cooling capacity. Losing a chiller or air handler should not take out the data center.
There is no cloud, just other people's computers.
Back in my day, we called this time sharing. Now you kids get off my lawn.
Isn't this what backup generators and N+1 infrastructure is for? I can understand Joe's hosting and bait shop emporium going down, but power and HVAC are pretty well solved sciences. The weather in Texas is hot -- this is not a surprise. There are lightning storms in Texas, this is also not a surprise.
It seems like if you a positioning a data center in Texas (which there as some reasons for), you prepare for both heat and lightning. I could understand if there was an incredibly unusual weather event (asteroid landing on data center, or death rays from the moon) but hot is not unusual in Texas.
However, when major cloud service providers it does provide an excuse for everyone else who manages a data center -- even the biggest cloud provider occasionally has an outage, so when our data center has an issue it's no worse. We say thank you Microsoft/AWS/Joe's!
Is this tech news? Yesterday's hot news was that Apple was releasing the iPhone in 3 (or 5) new colors. Today's news is that Microsoft has reskinned a website to use darker colors.
I guess that it is news, but I struggle to really care. Has tech really become this boring?
The other problem with DC power has to do with fire safety and arcing. With AC, the current goes to zero and arc are self-quenching. Not true with DC, so you have a greater likelihood of fire. It also has to do with safety if you get shocked by DC versus AC your chances of injury are much greater.
The ease of transforming voltages with transformers gives AC an advantage. And if you look around your home, you'll see a fair number of high current devices -- heat producing, or motors (ovens, ranges, toaster, coffee pot, A/C, blowers, washing machine, dryer) that would need very heavy cables to power at 12 or even 48v.
The other (and frequently more common) reason are
Regulatory requirements -- especially true in highly regulated industries like financial services or medicine. Although almost every business has regulatory needs from trucking to manufacturing.
Competitive pressure -- our competitor has a cooler widget and we are losing customers so we need one too.
Cost saving might be the third or fourth reason.
It's remarkable how many most incompatible messaging/conferencing apps there are. It's as if the various email domains were unique and you couldn't email wasn't interoperative. Even on Windows, they generally don't play well and are hard to install/update.
Depending on who we are trying to meet with, off the top of my head, there is Skype, S4B, WebEx, Zoom, AT&T Connect, GoTo meeting, Chime, Google Something, Adobe Connect, Sametime and probably lots more.
It's a pain if you are the one who is stuck using whatever your clients ask for. It's even worse as some of these require admin rights to install, and many seem to have "critical" updates weekly (which also require admin rights).
The choices for 16:10 desktop monitors is rapidly dwindling. I've always prefered 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors to options like 1680:1050 and 2560:1440. Dell still makes some 1600:1200 and 2560:1600 monitors, but not many others do.
The advantage lining up a 2560:1600 and a 1600:1200 (oriented vertically) is that the screens align perfectly and you get a lot of real estate.
If this is really a robotic dog clearly the answer is either a fire hydrant or a squirrel. Oh look, it's a squirrel, and I need to check out that fire hydrant over there.
If you want easy to use languages that teach the concept of programming (as opposed to ones for developing professional applications) there are better choices.
I think there needs to be a distinction between intro languages and ones used for developing complex, large applications. It's great to give beginners (whatever their age) an intro to programming and maybe Swift is the language for this.
This is sort of the same as the woodshop class for 7th graders that doesn't use power tools. Great intro to woodworking, but not the approach you'd use if you were building a house. The class might inspire kids to learn more about the field -- which is all you are looking for.
They usually don't accept gold for payment at "Gold as an investment" conferences either... but no one calls that ironic.
Same is true at securities (stocks and bonds) investment conferences
If alternative currencies are going to succeed (beyond the next get-rich-quick scheme) they need to address:
- Transaction costs -- I can quickly & securely send value internationally using wire transfers for less than $20 (probably less than $10, if I did it a lot); domestically it's a few cents to write a check or use ACH
- Security - the bitcoin banks seem to get "hacked" way more than traditional banks; rarely (if ever, do you hear of Americans losing their money at a bank because of theft in the bank's processing, and for most bank accounts the value is insured for a few pennies by the FDIC against fraud, theft)
- Portability and acceptance - between cash, credit cards, checks and online payments it's easy to carry around a store of value -- this is partially why gold and cattle are generally not used as a medium of exchange any more
The credit card fee is just one of the "fees" baked into your purchase. If you go down the fees that are added to the cost of an item, that you may or may not use, credit card fees are just one of them. For example, many shops offer "free" parking. If I walk to the store, I'm still having the "free" parking baked into the cost. Perhaps other stores offer a very generous return policy. If I'm the kind of person who buys something and rarely returns it, then I'm paying for the return policy. Same is true for good customer service--if I walk in and know exactly what I want, I'm still paying for the knowledgeable staff. In general, the "baked in" fees should average out. On some transactions you might not need the service, and on others you take advantage of free parking, credit card, generous return policy and knowledgeable staff. If you feel that the merchant is charging you for services that you never use, perhaps you're shopping a store that is targeting a different customer.
For as much as everyone knocks Outlook as an email client, not download images has been the default since at list O2003 (and I think O'97). This may be the origin of Marketing's reported open (read) rates.
Gmail rewrites your img tags to point to a google server. This is done to speed up emails (the images are loaded off a google server) and to cache the images (if multiple emails download the same image, google only needs to fetch the image once). Google also claims to check the images to make sure they don't contain an malicious code.
In this case, it looks like every email is read (as the images are always downloaded). The browser string also reports as google, and the IP address of the download is also a google IP address. Not very useful for tracking.
Many corporate email systems use something like Barracuda which also downloads the images and re-writes the image tag. When you look the reader's IP address, you'll see it's one of barracuda's servers. Barracuda also check all the hyperlinks to make sure that they don't point to malicious sites. They also rewrites on the email links, so they are checked in real time when the recipient clicks on them. (The links are turned into a Barracuda link, then Barracuda checks the link at the time the user clicks on it to make sure it is still not malicious. If it's ok, the Barracuda link does a http redirect.
Open rates pretty much a bogus statistic these days, although we still talk about them. Between Barracuda- and Google-like approaches, if someone tells you they didn't read your email, they may be telling the truth.
It seems to me that the last-mile providers are trying to charge three time for their service:
First, when you buy internet access you're paying for access at 50/mbps (or whatever speed I want). It seems like this should give you access to the pipe at that speed.
Second, the content providers are paying thousands (millions?) of dollars for their "upload" access. They are contracting with Level 3, or buying their own fiber to provide their content.
And now thirdly, the ISPs want to charge the content providers additional fees to deliver their content (initially, it will be fees for "faster", next it will be fees for "not slowing it down" and finally, the fee will be for "delivery").
The water utility analogy (sorry, no cars), is that if you first bought water from a water supplier (not your local utility), then the local water company charged you for a pipe that could deliver 100 gallons per hour, then the utility charged you for delivering the water that you've bought from the supplier, and finally, the local utility charged the company that supplied the water a fee for delivering it.
From the operating system's perspective it wasn't a crash. The job (aka, task) merely abnormally ended but everything else was fine.
From the mainframe days... //URMISAMP JOB (*),"tutpoint",CLASS=6,PRTY=10,NOTIFY=&SYSUID, // MSGCLASS=X,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),TYPRUN=SCAN, // TIME=(3,0),REGION=10K
Perhaps they just ABEND (but you have to be an old OS/360 mainframe guy to get the joke).
Or perhaps they just
try {
}
without a catch