They're human powered, and if we all started responding with interest we would waste so much of their time, get a good laugh, and lessen the number of people who get suckered by this crap.
Just make a fake email account, and start correspondence. Have fun, try to get them to meet you at the airport to pick you up. Then tell them you went on to the hotel, then you changed hotels. Try to get them to go somewhere in the city they recommend that has a webcam, and get some photos for the album.
If I had the time I would write something to automate this, and invite everyone to forward their Nigeria 419 emails to it, and start the automated correspondence.
This scam hurts the worst of all. This is how it usually goes down. He would really send you a cashiers check for the amount he said. You would deposit it and wait a couple days. Then you'd call the bank, and they'd tell you everything is great. You'd send him the car, and the difference. Then after a few weeks the bank would call you and tell you, 'sorry, that cashier's check was a fraud, we're debiting the amount from your accounts, please bring in X dollars.' And you, my friend, would be completely out of luck. Owing the full amount to the bank, and the scammer would have your car, and the extra money you sent him/her/it.
IMO, this is the saddest one, because it sounds more legit, and there is practically nothing unsuspecting people can do about to thwart it.
I thought my post was funny.
Originality is an illusion. Everything has been done before, and claiming something isn't original is just being a history snob. I, for one, am not fond of history snobs.
Also, if you think about it, redoing the same thing someone has done is in some ways original, isn't it? I mean, the idea to redo something is in itself an original idea. The idea to take a story and change it is an original idea? Why get hung up on it? You liked the movies or you didn't. They meant something deeply spiritual to you, or they didn't.
What does calling the creator of something a rip off achieve?
It makes you look "cool" or smart, and trying to elevate yourself by putting down others is 3rd grade immature and wrong. As a side note, it's the one thing that turns me off to most artists, and the "art regime" that rules modern art and high society.
na-nah-na-na-naahhh-na
I don't think with the war being over the equation will need continued balancing.
Since the problem was choice, and people would reject the programming was the end bad result, and this would go away. When the architect says, "they'll be freed of course", this is what he's referring to. Instead of try to make the equation balanced and force the program on everyone, they'll have peace with the humans and let whoever wants to go free.
If it was another level to the Matrix, I don't see it being a level controlled by the machines. The park they were sitting in at the end was inside the Matrix.
It would solve lots of problems, but in a supply/demand free market like the stock market, once you have more buyers than sellers you raise the price. So your buyout would look like $150Million, but really would cost $1.5Billion, and would make the SCOsters rich.
OTOH, you could probably raise the money privately, or get people to commit to the investment, then offer SCO a full buyout for cash. This, of course, would have to get past their boards logic meters, and probably hasn't happened for a reason. If IBM thought this was possible for a reasonable nuissance price, they probably would have done it by now.
Mozilla-rightclick on any image -> block images from this server.
Do it, reload your page, do it again, keep doing it till all the servers are blocked. Works great for centralized banner ad sites.
I, however, do not use it frequently. I block all popups (built into Mozilla also), but I allow almost all banner ads. If a site is annoying, or I don't want to support them in any way (like they're democrats or something) then I'll block their ads.
Another Mozilla built in that I turn on is image looping, I set it to only once. So I frequently see crap that says If this is flashing, you win! that isn't flashing. I love that part.
Commercialization is upon the Internet, deal with it.
People also have the right to fast forward through commercials & block any ads.
Did you see the sunglasses too? I mean that's a total rip off of me and my friends, we wear sun glasses. And did you see the guns? Sheesh, I like guns, and own some.. total rip..
Did you see the sentinals, they're totally just rip offs from mother nature's octopus... lame
Oh, what about the computers, duh, I'm on one now..
Where has all the originality gone...?
I read Neuromancer, and actually enjoyed it quite a bit, but please, everything is a rip off of something else. This wasn't blatent plagarism, it was a completely original story. I'm sure you think every Fantasy author ripped off Tolkien, who just invented out of thin air everything he wrote..
wake up.. you're retarded
I'm a Matrix fan. I've loved every Matrix movie that's come out. Highly entertaining, wildly energetic, and beautifully played out. The Agent Smith fight scene had amazing visuals that stood independent of the special effects. The story continues the Reloaded twist, without throwing any unsuspected curve balls into the mix.
If you're a Matrix fan, of course you'll see it, and I recommend you do.
Neo wakes up inside a section between the Machine word and the "Real" world, called the train station. His body is still lying in sick bay and he shows brain activity like someone jacked in, but they search the Matrix and can't find him. He meets a "family" of AI who were making sacrifices to save their "daughter".
They are doing it because they love, and Neo learns that programs can have the same connection as humans do that they call love.
There's some real connecting done in the train station that provides the basis for the hope of peace between the machines and the humans.
Morpheus and Trinity are summoned by the Oracle, who has a new body, it's later implied that frenchie (the Marovingian? sp?) forced her to.
They meet with her, she tells them where Neo is, and take her body gaurd kung foo guy with them to find the train driver, to rescue Neo.
They find him and give a short chase, but he gets away. He goes and picks up the family at the train station, and tells Neo he doesn't get to go.
Neo acts like he doesn't want to throw the guy a beatin, but the train guy tells Neo how he built this place and he's god there, and apparantly he is, and Neo gets a good stomach punch into the wall from him. Neo's stuck, and Morpheus, Trinity and kung foo body guard guy dont know what to do. Kungo foo joe recommends going back to the Oracle, and Trinity says why, we konw what to do. They go beat their way into the techno S&M club where the Marovingian hangs, and negotiate a trade. He wants the Oracles eyes for Neo's release.
Trinity gets impatient and they crack some skulls, and she ends pulling off an awesome catch of a mid air Berretta and putting it firmly in the Marovingian's forehead.
She negotiates a new deal, and it cuts to them rescueing Neo from train station. Meanwhile the physical world agent smith has woken up, and "doesn't remember anything".
Commander tough recommends the doctor give him something to help, and it's back inside the Matrix where they're rushing to get out, when Neo says he has to see the Oracle. He meets her, they talk. He asks some good questions, the gist is she chose to help them out, and is taking some big risks because she wants what Neo wants, peace. Then on to Neo getting unjacked from the Matrix. Quick note, when did they jack him in?
He was in the Matrix from the train station, where he arrived when he used his powers outside the Matrix. They ask Neo some questions but he says he needs some time, and retires to his crappy little room to think. Occaisonally there are flashes of him thinking and crazy electrical lines all over, and then the recurring theme of the 3 power lines running off into the mountains.
After they question human agent smith, they meet and decide to head back to Zion.
Neo comes in and tells them he knows what he has to do. He has to take a ship and go to the machine city, commander tough thinks he's crazy, and tells him no way he's gettin his ship. Naiobi lets Neo have her ship, which just needed a jump start after they found her and her crew. Back to sick bay, the medic chick goes to give
the agent smith guy a shot, he asks what its for, she says to help him remember, he says what if he don't wanna remember, what if he did the EMP blast, he'd be scared, which means he doesn't want the shot, so she should be scared, then he stabs her with a scalple, and she promptly dies. He takes off. Captain tough guys ship is going to be piloted by Naiobi through some really tight holes so they can sneak past the sentinals to get back to Zion, and Neo and Trinity, who insisted on going with Neo, are going to the machine
late answer, but I'm basing this on public statements made by Novell about SCO's claims.
First they said, you don't have the rights to do half of what you claim, then they retracted that and said, we think, based on our contract review, that you do. Now, it wasn't specifically about SCO's rights to terminate licenses, it was about SCO's ownership of the Unix IP. But if they've reviewed it, and said, 'yeah, looks like you own the IP', then it sounds to me like they have full right to terminate Unix licenses.
It's GPL'd free software. Your 1 week is polite vs. 2 days is unethical bullcrap just doesn't fly. I am disappointed in Mandrake for holding back themselves and their users by this 2 week "early" download for club members. If it was like the days of old when the bandwidth used was theirs, and was killed by everyone trying to download from them, then fine, limit it. That makes sense to me. But if it's bittorrent where more people makes more download speed for everyone, who does this help?
If I am a club member and I download it, and burn cd's for everyone in my office, is that also "rude"? Should I have waited 7 days? Is this some biblical time reference that I'm just missing here?
What does the 7 day time window you're asking for give anyone?
I'm very interested in hearing some kind of logical reason as to why 2 days is "rude" and 1 week is not, so please don't let me down.
Coherence is overrated.
Mandrake CHOSE to contribute to the GPL party, and they know the rules. Downloading their stuff for free is in NO WAY unethical. Maybe not donating if you use their desktop isn't very nice, but unethical? Please. Installing pirated versions of M$ Office is UNETHICAL, and ILLEGAL. Participating in an Open Source community the way you're meant to is completely ETHICAL, and should be encouraged.
I download every version of Mandrake in hopes it can be good, or I can recommend it to a friend. I've done so since Mandrake was a RedHat knock off. I run 0 computers Mandrake Linux 24x7. So I dot not donate. If I get 9.2 and it's good I think I'll talk my dad into running it, and get him to join the Mandrake club. I do donate the Gentoo, and other open source products that I use.
It strikes me that large companies aren't sweating the Unix licensing issue enough. SCO seems to have full legal right to terminate IBM & SGI's Unix licenses, and they have done so.
I completely replaced my home phone with packet8's VoiP product. I have wireless internet where I get 384k/384k for $50/month with a steep $700+ setup fee. I pay $19.95/month for unlimited calls to any phone in the US/Alaska/Hawaii/Canada. That's the POTS (Plain Old crappy Telephone Service) network. If anyone I knew had a packet8 phone we could call back and forth unlimited for free.
Now, Packet8 uses considerably less bandwidth than a Vonage (like 8k/sec), but sounds pretty good usually. Sometimes I'm amazed at the clarity, and sometimes there's echos. Sometimes there's bad distortion like a choppy cell phone call, but not normally. Sometimes the thing stops receiving incoming calls and needs a reboot.
I dont use my home phone that much, but going all cellular seemed like we were missing the essentials, so this is a happy middle.
We dont have a few features, like the Caller ID only works for the number, no names. Vonage apparently has names both ways (in/out). It's not a big feature for me, so I'm ok with it. The voicemail light stays on if I get a message until I reboot the device (which takes about 5 seconds). Sometimes I try to dial out and get a busy signal, rebooting the device usually fixes it.
What did I do to switch? Sign up for service, at packet8.net or vonage.com. Wait for your device to come. Test it with 1 phone, once you're happy it works good enough to ditch the phone company, call & cancel the phone service. Make sure your home line is dead, disconnect the incoming line from your phone system, and plug in your packet8/vonage box in like a normal phone. Now ALL YOUR HOME PHONES WORK using VoiP!
How much money did I save? Well I was paying $120/month average. Barely using long distance, but I did have DSL which was $40 for just the line and I paid another isp $20/month. So I went from $80/month with limited long distance to $19.95/month with no surprises and no stupid Spanish-American war leftover taxes.
Screw you Qwest!
Screw you Sprint!
Screw you MCI!
You ripped me off one time to many, and your customer service SUCKED!:P
Here is a comparison of some VoiP features. He's wrong on some things, and ignore the VoicePulse entry, they're only available in like 3 states, unless you live in one of those states.
Also, read the VoiP
forums
at dslreports.com for good info on VoiP.
because if you ran out of gas during speedy freeway driving you could crash!
This is evidence of a flaw in modern thought. This is why new drugs can barely make it past FDA while smoking remains legal.
Just because it's new means it has to be safe, and perfect. I say we abondon this whole heartily. It's time for products to be dangerous again. Consumers need to be informed of the dangers, and they can take their lives into their own hands. It's our soppy, pany-waste sissy society's fault, and I for one am FED UP.
Give me the information, and let me decide. I don't want to be protected from products, I want to be informed about them and decide my own level of risk.
My home phone is a VoiP one through packet8. My Internet connection is a 384k/384k (with static IP) through broad band solutions. I'm not in a dense area and know for a fact I can get wireless access from at least 1 other provider. It's about $50/month and the setup was steep(~$750). But it's yet to go down from someone smashing their car into the box (like my old ISDN did at least once), or due to "technical difficulties" (like my cable did at my old house).
All in all the voice quality of packet8 is good. Sometimes you get an echo and sometimes you get mushed vocals, but it's better quality than my cell phone.
We averaged $80/month for phone, voicemail, call waiting, caller ID, long distance. Our bill was $120 normally with the $40/month DSL charge.
We now pay $50/month for wireless, and $19.95/month for phone, voicemail, caller ID, long distance.
So we save $50/month. Now, I admit, the steep setup is a drawback. For me it wasn't an issue since work paid for it. But about 3 months after I had the access a new wireless ISP knocked on my door and their service was comparable, but no setup fee if you signed 2 year deal.
Now all we need is REAL broadband, starting at 2MBPS/2MBPS for $20/month. To get that the backbone providers need to stop rate fixing.
I use privista
They have instant access to your Equifax credit report, and ID Safe alert system to monitor for changes (weekly emails), and several other nice things.
It's $49.95/year (used to be $19.95/year) and I'd say worth every penny. Every time I read a horror story I feel a little safer becuase I get a weekly email notifying me of changes to my credit report.
It's probably not pro-active enough, but it's better than what cringley
Our fast four way was under $32k, I threw in the price of the x300 storage array we bought with it and the 4 CPU licenses for DB2 EEE 7.2 we bought for $11.5K each (half off the SRP).
Our db2 does over 15,000 rows/second in BATCH mode. It was a sad day when we had to log our transactions to text files for batch processing.
We did end up hiring a good DBA to help us with our DB2. It's worth noting that we didn't have this extra cost or need with our PostgreSQL setup.
I'm curious about anothers experience with DB2 on Linux, as I assume you're running on.
Tell me, what versions do you run? What kernel? What kind of reliabity do you get?
We initially ran DB2 on a Redhat 7.3 setup with a severely modified kernel, 2.4.15 I think it was. We went to RHAS 2.1 with the RedHat kernel after so many stability problems in DB2. The new version didn't fix the problems, it only threw in a slew of new problems relating to the hardware. Our new setup is Gentoo 1.4 with a 2.4.21 kernel. It runs much faster, sees all HT enabled processors and throws no APIC errors, and hasn't crashed.
So, what are your experiences with DB2 on Linux.
If you're not runing on Linux, what are you running on?
I run DB2 on Linux.
It's been the largest pain in the ass I've ever had managing servers.
MySQL spanks DB2, as does postgreSQL.
Our DB2 on Linux crashed so much we spent months before we had a production ready system. We were replacing PostgreSQL and we had to rethink everything. It couldn't handle our insert load, and we were going from 4 dual 733 intel boxes to two large quad xeon boxes with 15,000 rpm disks.
We spent $100,000 on DB2 license (that with the discounted half price DB2 EEE for linux). We are now in the process of migrating to MySQL after some large benchmarks. With a few simple indexes MySQL inserts twice as fast as DB2 and selects in 0.00 seconds on any row, vs. DB2's.460 seconds for any row in a 22 million row table.
Throw in the support scam they pulled on us, and IBM is a joke of a company. If they weren't pushing Linux they'd annoy me more than Microsoft does. The support scam went like this. We purchased 8 CPU licenses for DB2 EEE In 8/02. In 3/03 we start recieving calls from salesmen to get our upgrade business since our 1 year support contract expires on 5/1/03. I call IBM with a serious chip on my shoulder and get the story that our anniversary date automatically defaults to any dates held by previous contracts, "it's easier that way". We had some AS/400's (talk about poor performing overpriced junk). So they wanted about $50K for "support" for another year. We declined their offer and considered suing. At $50k/year losing 4 months of support isn't acceptable to a small business.
So I am bitter at IBM. But not without reason. During our first 3 painful months deploying DB2 I opened 15 PMR trouble tickets. Of the 15 I resolved 14 while either on hold or waiting for a call back from them. ALL of the PMR's were opened with status "critical, production down". The last PMR IBM claimed to either be a bug in the Linux kernel or in DB2, they didn't know, but when I pressed, they did offer a patched version that we could "try out" on our production box to see if it worked. Throw in that clustering didn't work as advertised (not at all under moderate load), and DB2 is a pile of junk.
As the IT geek the fault landed squarely at my feet, so I did some thorough investigation and benchmarking. default config DB2 is considerably faster than both PostgreSQL and MySQL at everything but inserts. But throw in a few indexes and MySQL and PostgreSQL owns DB2's sorry excuse for a database.
I AM bitter, and this probably is flamebait. But I'm past caring about IBM and their scam operation. I'm sticking with what works, and so far NOTHING from IBM has worked.
I wasted 3 months of 7 day work weeks averaging 12 hour days on DB2 and it's so called Linux support.
Slashdot Mirror
So is Elvis
Just make a fake email account, and start correspondence. Have fun, try to get them to meet you at the airport to pick you up. Then tell them you went on to the hotel, then you changed hotels. Try to get them to go somewhere in the city they recommend that has a webcam, and get some photos for the album.
If I had the time I would write something to automate this, and invite everyone to forward their Nigeria 419 emails to it, and start the automated correspondence.
IMO, this is the saddest one, because it sounds more legit, and there is practically nothing unsuspecting people can do about to thwart it.
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
Originality is an illusion. Everything has been done before, and claiming something isn't original is just being a history snob. I, for one, am not fond of history snobs.
Also, if you think about it, redoing the same thing someone has done is in some ways original, isn't it? I mean, the idea to redo something is in itself an original idea. The idea to take a story and change it is an original idea? Why get hung up on it? You liked the movies or you didn't. They meant something deeply spiritual to you, or they didn't.
What does calling the creator of something a rip off achieve?
It makes you look "cool" or smart, and trying to elevate yourself by putting down others is 3rd grade immature and wrong. As a side note, it's the one thing that turns me off to most artists, and the "art regime" that rules modern art and high society.
na-nah-na-na-naahhh-na
Since the problem was choice, and people would reject the programming was the end bad result, and this would go away. When the architect says, "they'll be freed of course", this is what he's referring to. Instead of try to make the equation balanced and force the program on everyone, they'll have peace with the humans and let whoever wants to go free.
If it was another level to the Matrix, I don't see it being a level controlled by the machines. The park they were sitting in at the end was inside the Matrix.
I don't think Neo is dead, because when the little girl asked the Oracle if they'll see Neo again she said she thinks so.
OTOH, you could probably raise the money privately, or get people to commit to the investment, then offer SCO a full buyout for cash. This, of course, would have to get past their boards logic meters, and probably hasn't happened for a reason. If IBM thought this was possible for a reasonable nuissance price, they probably would have done it by now.
I, however, do not use it frequently. I block all popups (built into Mozilla also), but I allow almost all banner ads. If a site is annoying, or I don't want to support them in any way (like they're democrats or something) then I'll block their ads.
Another Mozilla built in that I turn on is image looping, I set it to only once. So I frequently see crap that says If this is flashing, you win! that isn't flashing. I love that part.
Commercialization is upon the Internet, deal with it.
People also have the right to fast forward through commercials & block any ads.
Did you see the sentinals, they're totally just rip offs from mother nature's octopus... lame
Oh, what about the computers, duh, I'm on one now..
Where has all the originality gone...?
I read Neuromancer, and actually enjoyed it quite a bit, but please, everything is a rip off of something else. This wasn't blatent plagarism, it was a completely original story. I'm sure you think every Fantasy author ripped off Tolkien, who just invented out of thin air everything he wrote..
wake up.. you're retarded
I'm a Matrix fan. I've loved every Matrix movie that's come out. Highly entertaining, wildly energetic, and beautifully played out. The Agent Smith fight scene had amazing visuals that stood independent of the special effects. The story continues the Reloaded twist, without throwing any unsuspected curve balls into the mix.
If you're a Matrix fan, of course you'll see it, and I recommend you do.
Neo wakes up inside a section between the Machine word and the "Real" world, called the train station. His body is still lying in sick bay and he shows brain activity like someone jacked in, but they search the Matrix and can't find him. He meets a "family" of AI who were making sacrifices to save their "daughter".
They are doing it because they love, and Neo learns that programs can have the same connection as humans do that they call love.
There's some real connecting done in the train station that provides the basis for the hope of peace between the machines and the humans.
Morpheus and Trinity are summoned by the Oracle, who has a new body, it's later implied that frenchie (the Marovingian? sp?) forced her to.
They meet with her, she tells them where Neo is, and take her body gaurd kung foo guy with them to find the train driver, to rescue Neo.
They find him and give a short chase, but he gets away. He goes and picks up the family at the train station, and tells Neo he doesn't get to go.
Neo acts like he doesn't want to throw the guy a beatin, but the train guy tells Neo how he built this place and he's god there, and apparantly he is, and Neo gets a good stomach punch into the wall from him. Neo's stuck, and Morpheus, Trinity and kung foo body guard guy dont know what to do. Kungo foo joe recommends going back to the Oracle, and Trinity says why, we konw what to do. They go beat their way into the techno S&M club where the Marovingian hangs, and negotiate a trade. He wants the Oracles eyes for Neo's release.
Trinity gets impatient and they crack some skulls, and she ends pulling off an awesome catch of a mid air Berretta and putting it firmly in the Marovingian's forehead.
She negotiates a new deal, and it cuts to them rescueing Neo from train station. Meanwhile the physical world agent smith has woken up, and "doesn't remember anything".
Commander tough recommends the doctor give him something to help, and it's back inside the Matrix where they're rushing to get out, when Neo says he has to see the Oracle. He meets her, they talk. He asks some good questions, the gist is she chose to help them out, and is taking some big risks because she wants what Neo wants, peace. Then on to Neo getting unjacked from the Matrix. Quick note, when did they jack him in?
He was in the Matrix from the train station, where he arrived when he used his powers outside the Matrix. They ask Neo some questions but he says he needs some time, and retires to his crappy little room to think. Occaisonally there are flashes of him thinking and crazy electrical lines all over, and then the recurring theme of the 3 power lines running off into the mountains.
After they question human agent smith, they meet and decide to head back to Zion.
Neo comes in and tells them he knows what he has to do. He has to take a ship and go to the machine city, commander tough thinks he's crazy, and tells him no way he's gettin his ship. Naiobi lets Neo have her ship, which just needed a jump start after they found her and her crew. Back to sick bay, the medic chick goes to give
the agent smith guy a shot, he asks what its for, she says to help him remember, he says what if he don't wanna remember, what if he did the EMP blast, he'd be scared, which means he doesn't want the shot, so she should be scared, then he stabs her with a scalple, and she promptly dies. He takes off. Captain tough guys ship is going to be piloted by Naiobi through some really tight holes so they can sneak past the sentinals to get back to Zion, and Neo and Trinity, who insisted on going with Neo, are going to the machine
It's GPL'd free software. Your 1 week is polite vs. 2 days is unethical bullcrap just doesn't fly. I am disappointed in Mandrake for holding back themselves and their users by this 2 week "early" download for club members. If it was like the days of old when the bandwidth used was theirs, and was killed by everyone trying to download from them, then fine, limit it. That makes sense to me. But if it's bittorrent where more people makes more download speed for everyone, who does this help?
If I am a club member and I download it, and burn cd's for everyone in my office, is that also "rude"? Should I have waited 7 days? Is this some biblical time reference that I'm just missing here? What does the 7 day time window you're asking for give anyone?
I'm very interested in hearing some kind of logical reason as to why 2 days is "rude" and 1 week is not, so please don't let me down.
Coherence is overrated.
I download every version of Mandrake in hopes it can be good, or I can recommend it to a friend. I've done so since Mandrake was a RedHat knock off. I run 0 computers Mandrake Linux 24x7. So I dot not donate. If I get 9.2 and it's good I think I'll talk my dad into running it, and get him to join the Mandrake club. I do donate the Gentoo, and other open source products that I use.
What could happen?
I completely replaced my home phone with packet8's VoiP product. I have wireless internet where I get 384k/384k for $50/month with a steep $700+ setup fee. I pay $19.95/month for unlimited calls to any phone in the US/Alaska/Hawaii/Canada. That's the POTS (Plain Old crappy Telephone Service) network. If anyone I knew had a packet8 phone we could call back and forth unlimited for free.
Now, Packet8 uses considerably less bandwidth than a Vonage (like 8k/sec), but sounds pretty good usually. Sometimes I'm amazed at the clarity, and sometimes there's echos. Sometimes there's bad distortion like a choppy cell phone call, but not normally. Sometimes the thing stops receiving incoming calls and needs a reboot.
I dont use my home phone that much, but going all cellular seemed like we were missing the essentials, so this is a happy middle.
We dont have a few features, like the Caller ID only works for the number, no names. Vonage apparently has names both ways (in/out). It's not a big feature for me, so I'm ok with it. The voicemail light stays on if I get a message until I reboot the device (which takes about 5 seconds). Sometimes I try to dial out and get a busy signal, rebooting the device usually fixes it.
What did I do to switch? Sign up for service, at packet8.net or vonage.com. Wait for your device to come. Test it with 1 phone, once you're happy it works good enough to ditch the phone company, call & cancel the phone service. Make sure your home line is dead, disconnect the incoming line from your phone system, and plug in your packet8/vonage box in like a normal phone. Now ALL YOUR HOME PHONES WORK using VoiP!
How much money did I save? Well I was paying $120/month average. Barely using long distance, but I did have DSL which was $40 for just the line and I paid another isp $20/month. So I went from $80/month with limited long distance to $19.95/month with no surprises and no stupid Spanish-American war leftover taxes.
Screw you Qwest! Screw you Sprint! Screw you MCI! You ripped me off one time to many, and your customer service SUCKED! :P
Here is a comparison of some VoiP features. He's wrong on some things, and ignore the VoicePulse entry, they're only available in like 3 states, unless you live in one of those states.
Also, read the VoiP forums at dslreports.com for good info on VoiP.
This is evidence of a flaw in modern thought. This is why new drugs can barely make it past FDA while smoking remains legal.
Just because it's new means it has to be safe, and perfect. I say we abondon this whole heartily. It's time for products to be dangerous again. Consumers need to be informed of the dangers, and they can take their lives into their own hands. It's our soppy, pany-waste sissy society's fault, and I for one am FED UP.
Give me the information, and let me decide. I don't want to be protected from products, I want to be informed about them and decide my own level of risk.
All in all the voice quality of packet8 is good. Sometimes you get an echo and sometimes you get mushed vocals, but it's better quality than my cell phone.
We averaged $80/month for phone, voicemail, call waiting, caller ID, long distance. Our bill was $120 normally with the $40/month DSL charge. We now pay $50/month for wireless, and $19.95/month for phone, voicemail, caller ID, long distance.
So we save $50/month. Now, I admit, the steep setup is a drawback. For me it wasn't an issue since work paid for it. But about 3 months after I had the access a new wireless ISP knocked on my door and their service was comparable, but no setup fee if you signed 2 year deal.
Now all we need is REAL broadband, starting at 2MBPS/2MBPS for $20/month. To get that the backbone providers need to stop rate fixing.
They have instant access to your Equifax credit report, and ID Safe alert system to monitor for changes (weekly emails), and several other nice things.
It's $49.95/year (used to be $19.95/year) and I'd say worth every penny. Every time I read a horror story I feel a little safer becuase I get a weekly email notifying me of changes to my credit report. It's probably not pro-active enough, but it's better than what cringley
Our fast four way was under $32k, I threw in the price of the x300 storage array we bought with it and the 4 CPU licenses for DB2 EEE 7.2 we bought for $11.5K each (half off the SRP).
Our db2 does over 15,000 rows/second in BATCH mode. It was a sad day when we had to log our transactions to text files for batch processing.
We did end up hiring a good DBA to help us with our DB2. It's worth noting that we didn't have this extra cost or need with our PostgreSQL setup.
I'm curious about anothers experience with DB2 on Linux, as I assume you're running on. Tell me, what versions do you run? What kernel? What kind of reliabity do you get?
We initially ran DB2 on a Redhat 7.3 setup with a severely modified kernel, 2.4.15 I think it was. We went to RHAS 2.1 with the RedHat kernel after so many stability problems in DB2. The new version didn't fix the problems, it only threw in a slew of new problems relating to the hardware. Our new setup is Gentoo 1.4 with a 2.4.21 kernel. It runs much faster, sees all HT enabled processors and throws no APIC errors, and hasn't crashed.
So, what are your experiences with DB2 on Linux. If you're not runing on Linux, what are you running on?
It's been the largest pain in the ass I've ever had managing servers.
MySQL spanks DB2, as does postgreSQL.
Our DB2 on Linux crashed so much we spent months before we had a production ready system. We were replacing PostgreSQL and we had to rethink everything. It couldn't handle our insert load, and we were going from 4 dual 733 intel boxes to two large quad xeon boxes with 15,000 rpm disks.
We spent $100,000 on DB2 license (that with the discounted half price DB2 EEE for linux). We are now in the process of migrating to MySQL after some large benchmarks. With a few simple indexes MySQL inserts twice as fast as DB2 and selects in 0.00 seconds on any row, vs. DB2's
Throw in the support scam they pulled on us, and IBM is a joke of a company. If they weren't pushing Linux they'd annoy me more than Microsoft does. The support scam went like this. We purchased 8 CPU licenses for DB2 EEE In 8/02. In 3/03 we start recieving calls from salesmen to get our upgrade business since our 1 year support contract expires on 5/1/03. I call IBM with a serious chip on my shoulder and get the story that our anniversary date automatically defaults to any dates held by previous contracts, "it's easier that way". We had some AS/400's (talk about poor performing overpriced junk). So they wanted about $50K for "support" for another year. We declined their offer and considered suing. At $50k/year losing 4 months of support isn't acceptable to a small business.
So I am bitter at IBM. But not without reason. During our first 3 painful months deploying DB2 I opened 15 PMR trouble tickets. Of the 15 I resolved 14 while either on hold or waiting for a call back from them. ALL of the PMR's were opened with status "critical, production down". The last PMR IBM claimed to either be a bug in the Linux kernel or in DB2, they didn't know, but when I pressed, they did offer a patched version that we could "try out" on our production box to see if it worked. Throw in that clustering didn't work as advertised (not at all under moderate load), and DB2 is a pile of junk.
As the IT geek the fault landed squarely at my feet, so I did some thorough investigation and benchmarking. default config DB2 is considerably faster than both PostgreSQL and MySQL at everything but inserts. But throw in a few indexes and MySQL and PostgreSQL owns DB2's sorry excuse for a database.
I AM bitter, and this probably is flamebait. But I'm past caring about IBM and their scam operation. I'm sticking with what works, and so far NOTHING from IBM has worked.
I wasted 3 months of 7 day work weeks averaging 12 hour days on DB2 and it's so called Linux support.
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