I've had Vonage for almost a year now. The technology works great for me, aside from a very rare echo on the line during a call. Their customer support is lacking. They're email contact form turns you away about half of the time, saying something like it's too busy or something, and you have to wait on hold for WAY too long before you get to talk to someone.
However, I tried out their competitor, Packet8, for a month because Vonage couldn't get me a local number and Packet8 could. Packet8's technology is much worse. Their website is not as feature rich as Vonage's. Their phone functionality isn't as slick either. Vonage is great a figuring out what your'e doing when dialing a number. Dial a 10 digit long distance number without the "1", no problem. Dial with the "1", no problem. Dial 7 digits for a long distance number in your same area code... and no "1", no problem. Packet8 was real simple. If you wanted to dial long distance, it was "1" plus the 10 digit number, period. If you wanted to dial a local number, dial the 7 digits only, period. Anything else was borked. Oh, and by borked I mean get a busy signal, not the "we're sorry, I couldn't connect you" message. I pissed away a whole afternoon waiting for someone's phone line to free up, only to realize they weren't on the phone.... it wasn't actually busy.
Almost all of my calls on packet8 had echo's etc. on the line during the call. I'd have to wait 30 minutes on hold to speak to a customer service rep with Packet8 as well, and while they'll happily take and email from you, they don't respond.
Packet8 also holds you to the terms and conditions, no exceptions, period. You get a 30 day grace period to return the equipment with no penalties. That 30 day grace period starts when you order the service, not when you get the device and plug it in. So, not realizing the 30 days started when I ordered the service,I called 2 days too late and got nailed a $65 cancellation fee plus I have to ship them back their equipment. "Too bad, so sad" was about all the sympathy I got from them. They know when your equipment hits the door, because you have to jump through hoops to get it hooked up and get a working dial tone etc., so they use the order date just to screw you out of a week of trial period.
Oh, and of the 4 times I called them they hung up on me/connection was dropped twice (I think accidently both times). So, it took three phone calls and over an hour on hold just to find out how bad I was going to be takin' it in the rear to cancel the service.
Is Vonage perfect? No. Are they as good/better than their competition? In my experience yes.
VMWare's ESX server, and Xen as well, are called hypervizors. As I understand it, that's just a fancy name for a specialized appliance like OS. Basically, you can't do much with a hypervizor except get virtual machines up and running.
From the article it sounds like OpenVZ requires the full blown Linux kernel as well as most of your basic GNU/Linux code. So, if I understand correctly, you could use the "host" as an actual computer as well as a virtual machine manager. Sounds like you get some COW type features etc. too, allowing for some file sharing between the host and the guest(s), if I understood the article correctly.
I'm sure there are some people who believe that God sprang from nothing, but (and I'll use Christianity here as that's what I am) that is not the basis of the "philosophy". The bible makes it clear that God has no begining and no end, so Christians well versed in the bible making the argument that complex strucutres couldn't have evolved from simple ones is not a conundrum at all.
Of course. Lawyers follow the money. It's just disapointing that Wal Mart is losing. This is going to make them (Wal Mart) stop printing pictures of higher quality... bad for the consumer.
Correct, but they can be considered equal to negatives, especially at the 6 megapixel and above size. Obviously the professional photographers consider them equal, or they wouldn't be using that technology to store the pictures they take.
Exactly. Most places like that assume you own the pictures if you have the negatives. If the professional was stupid enough to give you the negatives when he/she didn't want you to have the copyright, too bad.
Why can't it be the same for digital prints? If you're stupid enough to give out an 8 megapixel "proof", then you should switch back to film, rather than suing people just for being smarter than you are.
The "clear scientific evidence" of evolution isn't proven fact. It's theory. That's why it's called the "theory" of evolution. It's a house of cards.
God did not place this stuff there to test our faith, the scientific dating etc. doesn't account for a world wide flood. Therefore things appear to be older than they are based on how deep they were buried etc. None of the fossils ever found can be PROVEN to represent a less evolved version of any of the current species. You can only dig down so far before you stop finding any fossils of any kind. Where's all the fossils of the lesser evolved entities .
Furthermore, the first and second laws of thermodynamics throw a huge dent into the theory of evolution.
I enjoy finding out "how" God did things as well, and we discover things like that every day. I, however, stop where the theories diverge from the Bible. In the case of evolution, how powerful can God be if he has to clumsily go through a process of evolution to get his working model "ready for production".
From a scientific point of view, Creationism/ID is no more "provable" that evolution is. My beef is why did I get brainwashed as a child that this "theory" was scientific fact, when it's not. I say present all the theories to our youth and let them form their own opinion.
Any kind of a comment like "it's notorious for it's speed" definitely falls into the "trolling" category, but the general consenus by its user base is that "it is faster".
Whenever the speed of optimization is refuted, the gcc flag "-O2" or "-O3" is mentioned. What about the "-march" flag? Does optimizing for your CPU not help that much either? I'm no CPU expert, but why would intel bother engineering new optimized instructions etc. into their chips, if the benefit is marginal?
The other point of argument is usually comparing one app against its un-optimized self. Perhaps that is negligable, but I've got two identicle dell systems with P-III CPUs. The system running the Fedora Core 2 distro is a dog compared to it's twin running Gentoo. It's about an optimized system with every single piece of code running optimized.
OK, fine, let's say it's a wash and there's no performance gain. That's not the only reason to choose Gentoo.
http://forums.gentoo.org/ The user community registered to this site is amazing. Everyone's very willing to help a person in need. This counts huge in my book. I can't remember ever not getting resolution to a problem I was having from this site. Usually, I don't even have to post my own request for help. Someone else has already had the same problem and the solution's out there. I've tried a lot of distros, and their user community help systems. This one's the best in my opinion.
The gentoo wiki site http://gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page and how-to docs on http://www.gentoo.org/ are also great. They walk you through everything from the most basic things that most every system needs, to the very specialized tasks like user mode linux or selinux.
OK, it can take a while to compile a new system from scratch. Keep in mind that barring a hard drive crash on a system with no backup solution, you only have to do this system wide compile once. Every other distro I've used requires an upgrade to get from the current version to the next. While these upgrades are continually getting better, historically they were so bad that most people felt it was safer to just do a fresh install instead. Ok, Gentoo has a type of upgrade that you need to do periodically. It's real tuff. You delete/etc/make.profile and relink it (ln -s) to the new profile. Whew! Time for a coke.
Got two systems? Use distcc to help speed up compiles.
Still not fast enough? Install from the stage 3 tar file and run an "emerge -e world" later when you've got more time and the system won't be doing anything except burning electricity anyway.
Just don't want to have to wait to start surfing tghe web? Boot Knoppix instead of the gentoo live CD. While all the bootstrapping and compiling is going on, fire up firefox and pass the time with a functioning system.
Got 50 machines that have identicle hardware? Suffer through the compile once, and use one of "emerge -B/-b" or "quickpkg" to quickly install the rest with pre-compiled, optimized, binaries.
Bottom line, it's not a panacea. It's not your Grandma's distro. It's not without the occasional problem, but we Gentoo fans like our distro so Back Off!:) You're free to use another.
South Park did this, only for music, with one of their episodes. It showed how the various members of the band Metallica were suffering due to lost revenue from music swapping. It was quite funny.
I don't know if you can do something like this in Qmail, Postfix, and the like, but in Sendmail I use a combination of giving diffrent entities different email addresses (spam1@, spam2@mydomain.com, etc.) and putting entries in the/etc/mail/access file to send 550 "user not found" smtp error messages to anyone attempting to send mail to that address.
Essentially I turn my MTA off for that email address. It's suprisingly effective. After a month or two, I can remove an entry from/etc/mail/access and recycle that email address.
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However, I tried out their competitor, Packet8, for a month because Vonage couldn't get me a local number and Packet8 could. Packet8's technology is much worse. Their website is not as feature rich as Vonage's. Their phone functionality isn't as slick either. Vonage is great a figuring out what your'e doing when dialing a number. Dial a 10 digit long distance number without the "1", no problem. Dial with the "1", no problem. Dial 7 digits for a long distance number in your same area code ... and no "1", no problem. Packet8 was real simple. If you wanted to dial long distance, it was "1" plus the 10 digit number, period. If you wanted to dial a local number, dial the 7 digits only, period. Anything else was borked. Oh, and by borked I mean get a busy signal, not the "we're sorry, I couldn't connect you" message. I pissed away a whole afternoon waiting for someone's phone line to free up, only to realize they weren't on the phone .... it wasn't actually busy.
Almost all of my calls on packet8 had echo's etc. on the line during the call. I'd have to wait 30 minutes on hold to speak to a customer service rep with Packet8 as well, and while they'll happily take and email from you, they don't respond.
Packet8 also holds you to the terms and conditions, no exceptions, period. You get a 30 day grace period to return the equipment with no penalties. That 30 day grace period starts when you order the service, not when you get the device and plug it in. So, not realizing the 30 days started when I ordered the service,I called 2 days too late and got nailed a $65 cancellation fee plus I have to ship them back their equipment. "Too bad, so sad" was about all the sympathy I got from them. They know when your equipment hits the door, because you have to jump through hoops to get it hooked up and get a working dial tone etc., so they use the order date just to screw you out of a week of trial period.
Oh, and of the 4 times I called them they hung up on me/connection was dropped twice (I think accidently both times). So, it took three phone calls and over an hour on hold just to find out how bad I was going to be takin' it in the rear to cancel the service.
Is Vonage perfect? No. Are they as good/better than their competition? In my experience yes.
VMWare's ESX server, and Xen as well, are called hypervizors. As I understand it, that's just a fancy name for a specialized appliance like OS. Basically, you can't do much with a hypervizor except get virtual machines up and running. From the article it sounds like OpenVZ requires the full blown Linux kernel as well as most of your basic GNU/Linux code. So, if I understand correctly, you could use the "host" as an actual computer as well as a virtual machine manager. Sounds like you get some COW type features etc. too, allowing for some file sharing between the host and the guest(s), if I understood the article correctly.
I'm sure there are some people who believe that God sprang from nothing, but (and I'll use Christianity here as that's what I am) that is not the basis of the "philosophy". The bible makes it clear that God has no begining and no end, so Christians well versed in the bible making the argument that complex strucutres couldn't have evolved from simple ones is not a conundrum at all.
Of course. Lawyers follow the money. It's just disapointing that Wal Mart is losing. This is going to make them (Wal Mart) stop printing pictures of higher quality ... bad for the consumer.
Correct, but they can be considered equal to negatives, especially at the 6 megapixel and above size. Obviously the professional photographers consider them equal, or they wouldn't be using that technology to store the pictures they take.
Why can't it be the same for digital prints? If you're stupid enough to give out an 8 megapixel "proof", then you should switch back to film, rather than suing people just for being smarter than you are.
The "clear scientific evidence" of evolution isn't proven fact. It's theory. That's why it's called the "theory" of evolution. It's a house of cards. God did not place this stuff there to test our faith, the scientific dating etc. doesn't account for a world wide flood. Therefore things appear to be older than they are based on how deep they were buried etc. None of the fossils ever found can be PROVEN to represent a less evolved version of any of the current species. You can only dig down so far before you stop finding any fossils of any kind. Where's all the fossils of the lesser evolved entities . Furthermore, the first and second laws of thermodynamics throw a huge dent into the theory of evolution. I enjoy finding out "how" God did things as well, and we discover things like that every day. I, however, stop where the theories diverge from the Bible. In the case of evolution, how powerful can God be if he has to clumsily go through a process of evolution to get his working model "ready for production". From a scientific point of view, Creationism/ID is no more "provable" that evolution is. My beef is why did I get brainwashed as a child that this "theory" was scientific fact, when it's not. I say present all the theories to our youth and let them form their own opinion.
Whenever the speed of optimization is refuted, the gcc flag "-O2" or "-O3" is mentioned. What about the "-march" flag? Does optimizing for your CPU not help that much either? I'm no CPU expert, but why would intel bother engineering new optimized instructions etc. into their chips, if the benefit is marginal?
The other point of argument is usually comparing one app against its un-optimized self. Perhaps that is negligable, but I've got two identicle dell systems with P-III CPUs. The system running the Fedora Core 2 distro is a dog compared to it's twin running Gentoo. It's about an optimized system with every single piece of code running optimized.
OK, fine, let's say it's a wash and there's no performance gain. That's not the only reason to choose Gentoo.
http://forums.gentoo.org/ The user community registered to this site is amazing. Everyone's very willing to help a person in need. This counts huge in my book. I can't remember ever not getting resolution to a problem I was having from this site. Usually, I don't even have to post my own request for help. Someone else has already had the same problem and the solution's out there. I've tried a lot of distros, and their user community help systems. This one's the best in my opinion.
The gentoo wiki site http://gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page and how-to docs on http://www.gentoo.org/ are also great. They walk you through everything from the most basic things that most every system needs, to the very specialized tasks like user mode linux or selinux.
OK, it can take a while to compile a new system from scratch. Keep in mind that barring a hard drive crash on a system with no backup solution, you only have to do this system wide compile once. Every other distro I've used requires an upgrade to get from the current version to the next. While these upgrades are continually getting better, historically they were so bad that most people felt it was safer to just do a fresh install instead. Ok, Gentoo has a type of upgrade that you need to do periodically. It's real tuff. You delete /etc/make.profile and relink it (ln -s) to the new profile. Whew! Time for a coke.
Got two systems? Use distcc to help speed up compiles.
Still not fast enough? Install from the stage 3 tar file and run an "emerge -e world" later when you've got more time and the system won't be doing anything except burning electricity anyway.
Just don't want to have to wait to start surfing tghe web? Boot Knoppix instead of the gentoo live CD. While all the bootstrapping and compiling is going on, fire up firefox and pass the time with a functioning system.
Got 50 machines that have identicle hardware? Suffer through the compile once, and use one of "emerge -B/-b" or "quickpkg" to quickly install the rest with pre-compiled, optimized, binaries.
Bottom line, it's not a panacea. It's not your Grandma's distro. It's not without the occasional problem, but we Gentoo fans like our distro so Back Off! :) You're free to use another.
South Park did this, only for music, with one of their episodes. It showed how the various members of the band Metallica were suffering due to lost revenue from music swapping. It was quite funny.
I don't know if you can do something like this in Qmail, Postfix, and the like, but in Sendmail I use a combination of giving diffrent entities different email addresses (spam1@, spam2@mydomain.com, etc.) and putting entries in the /etc/mail/access file to send 550 "user not found" smtp error messages to anyone attempting to send mail to that address.
Essentially I turn my MTA off for that email address. It's suprisingly effective. After a month or two, I can remove an entry from /etc/mail/access and recycle that email address.