Immediate access and high yield are conflicting requirements. For immediate access with reasonable yield and limited downside risk, it is hard to beat a savings account. Stay away from the stock and real estate markets unless you are investing for 5+ years. One option for short to mid-term (6 month - 3 years) investing is a ladder of US Treasury Bills. You can set up an account at TreasuryDirect, tied directly to your bank account and run everything electronically: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/indiv.htm
Yields on recent T-bills are 5% for 1 mon, 5.1% for 3 mon and 5.265% for 6 month. You can set them to automatically rollover (reinvest) when they mature, or if you decide you need the cash, cancel the rollover. You can also buy 2, 5 and 10 year T-notes, but the yield is no better than the T-bills, so why bother? Note that returns on treasuries are state tax, but not federal, deductible.
So, you get reasonable liquidity, some tax leverage, better than savings account rates, and easy managability. As others have suggested, compare the return you can get with that on your loan, factoring in tax effects. You may be better off paying off loans first.
Watch out for the pros, particularly one that is working on brokerage commissions. They will send you off into mutual funds that pay them the best kick-back. They will get you to churn the account to maximize your fees. For something simple like you are asking about, read a book or Money magazine article and do it yourself. If you have something more involved, hire a fee-based advisor who isn't also brokering. Then implement the advice yourself in a low-overhead account like Schwab, E-Trade, Ameritrade, etc.
A got to have for any collection. One of the earliest electronic watches from the 1960s - used a tuning fork for timing, very accurate for the time. You can hear the hum if you listen closely. The Spaceview had a clear face so you could see the tuning fork and all the guts. My scout master had one (and a GTO), and we thought he was a very cool guy. I bought one in the early 70's.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~fotoplot/acc.htm
Another vote for IPCop. Been using it on home network for about a year. Running on an old 400 MHz PC. Never a problem. Easy to install. Easy to upgrade. Easy to tweak iptables (I use fcrontab to shut off Internet access for my son at midnight.) Just added an Orange subnet for a wireless leg, using an OpenVPN addon for access back into the secure network. It just works.
Re:Microwaving it should make it invalid
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 1
Passports are valid for 10 years. Once they cut in this RFID'd versions, they will still need to accept the paper versions in parallel for 10 years until current versions expire.
Many places you travel won't have the readers. The document will need to be a valid paper document. The RFID device can only be for additional security. If the device dies, the paper must still suffice.
Anyone see Tom Hanks in The Terminal? If you require a working RFID device to reenter the country, we will have many folks living at the airport.
Being fed up with noise, and needing a new PC, I set an objective to build a quiet, well-performing, cost effective machine. After previous experience with attempting to retrofit an existing machine, I use quiet as an upfront criteria in selecting all parts for this machine:
- Antec Sonata case w/quiet pw + 120 mm fan
- P4 3.0 GHz with Zalman cpu fan
- Seagate Baracuda disk
- Radeon 9600 fanless video card
This machine is QUIET! (mostly) There is a little low frequency, but it is easily dampened by stinking the machine under a desk. I can't tell it is there. After this, the fan noise on my HP laser stood out like a sore thumb and now gets turned off when not in use. Worst problem is now the DVD drive when it is active - probably should have shopped a little harder for quiet here.
I built a PC for my son about a year ago with no pre-thought given to noise - ASUS mbo w/Northbridge fan, AMD XP2400+ w/stock fan, GeForce4 Ti4200 w/fan, vanilla Enlight case/ps, WD disk, etc. Good components, and it was FAST (for the time), but boy was it noisy! So, 6 months ago I did a retrofit to a Nexus power supply, Zalman cpu and case fans and melamine foam sound proofing. Major Improvement! - but still a nasty high pitch whine from the Ti4200 and some disk noise. I added buffering around the outside which helped the the disk, but the video fan still cuts through. Lesson learned - design it to be quiet from the start, and pick all parts to be low noise.
Here are some other sites:
Yahoo Silent-PC group
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Silent-PC/
EndNoise.com
http://www.endpcnoise.com/
SilenX
http://www.silenx.com
From what I have read, Apple purchases most of the technology for the iPod from outside. Their primary value added is the circular UI, which is cool but only a limited part of the package. So, hardware cost may be low, but Apple has significant royalties flowing out to the originating technology providers. The cash to Apple's bottom line is not as large as might be suspected.
Did you read the recent article about medicine being offshored? (Time, BW or similar) Thailand is building a multimillion $ hospital to cater to foreign patients. Some guy from Nebraska got a knee replacement + 3 weeks on the beach for $5K, about 1/4 what it would cost in the US. Your own personal paramedic meets you as you get off the plane. An Indian cardiologist who spend 20+ years in a top NY hospital has returned to southern India to setup a hospital catering to foreign patients. The hospitals are being certified by the same institutions that certify US and British hospitals.
I set up a software development center for our company in India (Bangalore) in 1993-94. Before choosing India, I considered China (Shenzen)/Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Phillipines, Russia, etc. I visited India, Singapore and Shenzen to meet local business and goverment officials. In the end, I chose India. In the end, there was no contest for three reasons -
I found many talented software developers with real world product experience. China and Russia has very smart programmers, but with no clue what a product is about.
They all spoke English in India. We could work directly with the engineers rather than through interpreters. (India is the 2nd largest English speaking country in the world, after the US.)
The country has a tradition of democracy and (relative and improving) free enterprise. The government bureaucrats want to help rather than cream off a share. (This wasn't true before the early 1990s).
It will take these other countries some years to duplicate these fundamental factors. I don't think there is a near-term threat to India's strengths in software development.
My experience supports C# aps performing much better than equivalent Java aps. I understand C# is never interpreted, but always run as native code out of the JIT compiler. Also, the JIT compiler generates optimized native code to take advantages of the specific CPU you are running on. Mono's performance will obviously depend on their implementation of this, but I'd love to see C# on a range of platforms.
Linux is best and most competitive as a server operating system. It is not yet ready for prime time on the desktop of non-techie users, including those of students at Portland and Riverdale. I think Paul and Scott of the article are speaking from the point of view of the IT techies, not from the point of view of those who have to use this stuff - sure it may cost them a bit less to install it, but if it isn't usable, the ROI isn't very good.
My kids attend Portland schools with these Linux labs - they report they sit idle most of the time. Their applications aren't compatible with the wordprocessors, spreadsheets, presentations, etc that they use at home, so they can't move their work back and forth. The applications work different than the applications they have at home, and there are no classes to teach them how to use them. The teachers are even more clueless about these machines than the students. No one at the school knows anything about them, so if something goes wrong it takes days for someone to come out and fix it. When teachers can't count on this stuff, they can't design it into their curriculums. If our high school students & teachers can't handle this stuff, how in the world is joe-average going to manage?
From what I understand Torvald, ODSL and the Linux community fully understand the desktop problem. I see various intentions for programs to improve Linux for the desktop. Some say this should be a priority for the 2.8 kernel. Gurus at last summer's Open Source Conference held in Portland estimated Linux might become a competitive non-techie desktop within about 5 years, but a lot of work is required to get us there.
Linux's strengths are as a server. But as a server, it is primarily threatening Sun and other UNIX server vendors more than Microsoft. When you look at market share statistics, Linux server is growing, MS server is growing, UNIX whatever is shrinking. We are headed to a bipolar MS vs Linux world. Yes, MS should be concerned, but the story to date is how Linux is wiping out UNIX competitors. When Amazon says they are saving millions with Linux, it is because they rolled out the Suns, not Windows.
Do you realize the irony (and potential danger) of IBM backing and potentially getting in front of the Linux parade?? IBM was the Microsoft of the world before there was a Microsoft!
On the connect/reconnect reset, on more modern cable modems, the ISP can remotely reset your modem. On older ones, you would need to do this manually. So, either they know you have an older modem, or are just working off least-common-denominator.
I haven't received an official Comcast notice, but recently noticed that my IP address changed. I know they do this when they need to rebalance the load. I had read that Comcast is increasing their bandwidth to help resist the downward pressure on price. Anyway, I decided to recheck my bandwidth. Back last Sept I had 316kbps on download and 223 kbps on upload. As of mid-December I had 1.7 Mbps download and still around 247 kbps upload. A nice improvement, and it does take away some motivation to shop for better prices.
Try "The Age of Spirtual Machines" by Kurzweil
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
There was a big deal sometime back about MPEJ-4 royalties, a key technology in Quicktime. There was a royalty of so many cents per hour per steam back to the MPEJ-4 technology patent holders. This added up to $Ms to someone like NPR. Because of this, Apple was delaying release of Quicktime 6, trying to negotiate a better deal. (Real and MS use alternative technology and aren't subject to the royalty.)
I think I read the hourly rate was reduced, but still significant. Can't find a recent article on how this finally ended up.
I teach computer science in a high school and we cover "social and ethical issues of technology" in a discussion forum. I introduce the topic in a classroom discussion and then the follow-up discussion is online over a two-week period. We cover about 6 topics a semester and 12 a school year.
Here are topics we have covered over the past three years.
1) File sharing piracy? (was The Napster Dilemma)
- A good one to start the year. Gets everyone fired up. Most students have no concept of copyright law or what happened when it was done away with after the French Revolution.
2) Technology's Role in Terrorism - Tool or Defense?
- I first introduced this the week after 9/11. Are encryption, steganography, airplanes, cell phones, etc dangerous weapons that need to be controlled, or are they just tools like any others?
3) Internet Privacy - Do you and should you have any?
- We review amendment IV to the Bill of Rights and discuss whether this should apply to the Internet. We touch on FBI's Carnivore, web cookies and spyware, the lack of legal protection behind "privacy pledges", future cell-phones with GPS, and the movie Minority Report. Big brother's vision is getting better and better.
4) Microsoft - Aggressive Competitor or Network Effects Monopoly?
- Partially an economics lesson. Is MS just the winner of the inevitable consequence of network effects saying there can only be one dominant OS? Is this any different than ATT in the early days of telephones, or Intel with microprocessors, Cisco with network equipment, AOL with instant messenger, Ebay with online auctions or Visa/Mastercard with credit cards? Should these types of industries be managed as monopolies (eg the power and phone companies) or what?
5) Cyber-Relationships - displacing or enhancing our real world?
- Do new technologies improve degrade, or displace personal relationships? If you can't speak to someone because they have a cellphone in their ear, is that bad? If you kids mostly know their grandmother through email, is that good? Can you really get to know someone you have never met? Can you know someone who shares their innermost thoughts anonymously through a blog better than their best friends do? Where might The Sims Online lead? (Have you read Stephenson's Snow Crash?)
6) Aibo, A Cute and Frisky Robot Dog
- Can you form an emotional bond with a robot? Is this robot smarter than your dog? Is this the pet of the future? With the projections of Moore's Law, might a future Aibo be your child's calculus tutor?
7) Computer Games as Heroin-ware
- "Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn't being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game "EverQuest," and that was all that mattered at the time."
- My students debate this from a lot of personal experience.
8) The Digital Divide - Internet Haves and Have-Nots
- About 1/2 of the US population doesn't have ready access to the Internet. Most are lower income, older or minority households. As the Internet becomes an essential tool in our daily lives as consumers, workers and citizens, are they being left out? The divide is even more dramatic on an international scale. Will this accelerate the trend of rich countries become richer and poor countries becoming poorer? Should anything be done to shrink the divide, or will it take care of itself?
9) Sealand - Rebel Outpost on the Fringe of Cyberspace
- Does the Internet overturn the sovereignty of countries? Historically, countries have had sovereign authority over its citizens. The Internet cuts across national boundaries disrespecting all national laws. Should the Chinese government be able to block access to the exile government of Tibet website? Should the French government be able to block the sale of Nazi paraphernalia on the Yahoo auction. Should the US or state governments be able to block online gambling or c
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Got this same problem. Very interested, but need it to work through CPanel ideally or at least WHM.
I use an EnGenius EOC-3220 for long range connections when traveling in my RV. It could be configured as a bridge to work in your case:
http://www.engeniustech.com/datacom/products/details.aspx?id=171
Includes a high powered transmitter, extra sensitive receiver and hi-gain antenna.
Immediate access and high yield are conflicting requirements. For immediate access with reasonable yield and limited downside risk, it is hard to beat a savings account. Stay away from the stock and real estate markets unless you are investing for 5+ years. One option for short to mid-term (6 month - 3 years) investing is a ladder of US Treasury Bills. You can set up an account at TreasuryDirect, tied directly to your bank account and run everything electronically:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/indiv.htm
Yields on recent T-bills are 5% for 1 mon, 5.1% for 3 mon and 5.265% for 6 month. You can set them to automatically rollover (reinvest) when they mature, or if you decide you need the cash, cancel the rollover. You can also buy 2, 5 and 10 year T-notes, but the yield is no better than the T-bills, so why bother? Note that returns on treasuries are state tax, but not federal, deductible.
So, you get reasonable liquidity, some tax leverage, better than savings account rates, and easy managability. As others have suggested, compare the return you can get with that on your loan, factoring in tax effects. You may be better off paying off loans first.
Watch out for the pros, particularly one that is working on brokerage commissions. They will send you off into mutual funds that pay them the best kick-back. They will get you to churn the account to maximize your fees. For something simple like you are asking about, read a book or Money magazine article and do it yourself. If you have something more involved, hire a fee-based advisor who isn't also brokering. Then implement the advice yourself in a low-overhead account like Schwab, E-Trade, Ameritrade, etc.
A got to have for any collection. One of the earliest electronic watches from the 1960s - used a tuning fork for timing, very accurate for the time. You can hear the hum if you listen closely. The Spaceview had a clear face so you could see the tuning fork and all the guts. My scout master had one (and a GTO), and we thought he was a very cool guy. I bought one in the early 70's. http://members.iinet.net.au/~fotoplot/acc.htm
Another vote for IPCop. Been using it on home network for about a year. Running on an old 400 MHz PC. Never a problem. Easy to install. Easy to upgrade. Easy to tweak iptables (I use fcrontab to shut off Internet access for my son at midnight.) Just added an Orange subnet for a wireless leg, using an OpenVPN addon for access back into the secure network. It just works.
Passports are valid for 10 years. Once they cut in this RFID'd versions, they will still need to accept the paper versions in parallel for 10 years until current versions expire.
Many places you travel won't have the readers. The document will need to be a valid paper document. The RFID device can only be for additional security. If the device dies, the paper must still suffice.
Anyone see Tom Hanks in The Terminal? If you require a working RFID device to reenter the country, we will have many folks living at the airport.
Just zap that little chip
either as a social protest, or just to convert it back to a paper-based document.
Interesting that the copyright date at the bottom of the home page is 2003. Probably took this long to get through the censors.
Being fed up with noise, and needing a new PC, I set an objective to build a quiet, well-performing, cost effective machine. After previous experience with attempting to retrofit an existing machine, I use quiet as an upfront criteria in selecting all parts for this machine:
- Antec Sonata case w/quiet pw + 120 mm fan
- P4 3.0 GHz with Zalman cpu fan
- Seagate Baracuda disk
- Radeon 9600 fanless video card
This machine is QUIET! (mostly) There is a little low frequency, but it is easily dampened by stinking the machine under a desk. I can't tell it is there. After this, the fan noise on my HP laser stood out like a sore thumb and now gets turned off when not in use. Worst problem is now the DVD drive when it is active - probably should have shopped a little harder for quiet here.
I built a PC for my son about a year ago with no pre-thought given to noise - ASUS mbo w/Northbridge fan, AMD XP2400+ w/stock fan, GeForce4 Ti4200 w/fan, vanilla Enlight case/ps, WD disk, etc. Good components, and it was FAST (for the time), but boy was it noisy! So, 6 months ago I did a retrofit to a Nexus power supply, Zalman cpu and case fans and melamine foam sound proofing. Major Improvement! - but still a nasty high pitch whine from the Ti4200 and some disk noise. I added buffering around the outside which helped the the disk, but the video fan still cuts through. Lesson learned - design it to be quiet from the start, and pick all parts to be low noise.
Here are some other sites: Yahoo Silent-PC group http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Silent-PC/ EndNoise.com http://www.endpcnoise.com/ SilenX http://www.silenx.com
From what I have read, Apple purchases most of the technology for the iPod from outside. Their primary value added is the circular UI, which is cool but only a limited part of the package. So, hardware cost may be low, but Apple has significant royalties flowing out to the originating technology providers. The cash to Apple's bottom line is not as large as might be suspected.
Did you read the recent article about medicine being offshored? (Time, BW or similar) Thailand is building a multimillion $ hospital to cater to foreign patients. Some guy from Nebraska got a knee replacement + 3 weeks on the beach for $5K, about 1/4 what it would cost in the US. Your own personal paramedic meets you as you get off the plane. An Indian cardiologist who spend 20+ years in a top NY hospital has returned to southern India to setup a hospital catering to foreign patients. The hospitals are being certified by the same institutions that certify US and British hospitals.
I found many talented software developers with real world product experience. China and Russia has very smart programmers, but with no clue what a product is about.
They all spoke English in India. We could work directly with the engineers rather than through interpreters. (India is the 2nd largest English speaking country in the world, after the US.)
The country has a tradition of democracy and (relative and improving) free enterprise. The government bureaucrats want to help rather than cream off a share. (This wasn't true before the early 1990s).
It will take these other countries some years to duplicate these fundamental factors. I don't think there is a near-term threat to India's strengths in software development.
My experience supports C# aps performing much better than equivalent Java aps. I understand C# is never interpreted, but always run as native code out of the JIT compiler. Also, the JIT compiler generates optimized native code to take advantages of the specific CPU you are running on. Mono's performance will obviously depend on their implementation of this, but I'd love to see C# on a range of platforms.
My kids attend Portland schools with these Linux labs - they report they sit idle most of the time. Their applications aren't compatible with the wordprocessors, spreadsheets, presentations, etc that they use at home, so they can't move their work back and forth. The applications work different than the applications they have at home, and there are no classes to teach them how to use them. The teachers are even more clueless about these machines than the students. No one at the school knows anything about them, so if something goes wrong it takes days for someone to come out and fix it. When teachers can't count on this stuff, they can't design it into their curriculums. If our high school students & teachers can't handle this stuff, how in the world is joe-average going to manage?
From what I understand Torvald, ODSL and the Linux community fully understand the desktop problem. I see various intentions for programs to improve Linux for the desktop. Some say this should be a priority for the 2.8 kernel. Gurus at last summer's Open Source Conference held in Portland estimated Linux might become a competitive non-techie desktop within about 5 years, but a lot of work is required to get us there.
Linux's strengths are as a server. But as a server, it is primarily threatening Sun and other UNIX server vendors more than Microsoft. When you look at market share statistics, Linux server is growing, MS server is growing, UNIX whatever is shrinking. We are headed to a bipolar MS vs Linux world. Yes, MS should be concerned, but the story to date is how Linux is wiping out UNIX competitors. When Amazon says they are saving millions with Linux, it is because they rolled out the Suns, not Windows.
Do you realize the irony (and potential danger) of IBM backing and potentially getting in front of the Linux parade?? IBM was the Microsoft of the world before there was a Microsoft!
On the connect/reconnect reset, on more modern cable modems, the ISP can remotely reset your modem. On older ones, you would need to do this manually. So, either they know you have an older modem, or are just working off least-common-denominator.
I haven't received an official Comcast notice, but recently noticed that my IP address changed. I know they do this when they need to rebalance the load. I had read that Comcast is increasing their bandwidth to help resist the downward pressure on price. Anyway, I decided to recheck my bandwidth. Back last Sept I had 316kbps on download and 223 kbps on upload. As of mid-December I had 1.7 Mbps download and still around 247 kbps upload. A nice improvement, and it does take away some motivation to shop for better prices.
Sometimes reality is more amazing than fiction.
I think I read the hourly rate was reduced, but still significant. Can't find a recent article on how this finally ended up.
As a user, I really had the QT nags. What a pain.
Here are topics we have covered over the past three years.
1) File sharing piracy? (was The Napster Dilemma) - A good one to start the year. Gets everyone fired up. Most students have no concept of copyright law or what happened when it was done away with after the French Revolution.
2) Technology's Role in Terrorism - Tool or Defense? - I first introduced this the week after 9/11. Are encryption, steganography, airplanes, cell phones, etc dangerous weapons that need to be controlled, or are they just tools like any others?
3) Internet Privacy - Do you and should you have any? - We review amendment IV to the Bill of Rights and discuss whether this should apply to the Internet. We touch on FBI's Carnivore, web cookies and spyware, the lack of legal protection behind "privacy pledges", future cell-phones with GPS, and the movie Minority Report. Big brother's vision is getting better and better.
4) Microsoft - Aggressive Competitor or Network Effects Monopoly? - Partially an economics lesson. Is MS just the winner of the inevitable consequence of network effects saying there can only be one dominant OS? Is this any different than ATT in the early days of telephones, or Intel with microprocessors, Cisco with network equipment, AOL with instant messenger, Ebay with online auctions or Visa/Mastercard with credit cards? Should these types of industries be managed as monopolies (eg the power and phone companies) or what?
5) Cyber-Relationships - displacing or enhancing our real world? - Do new technologies improve degrade, or displace personal relationships? If you can't speak to someone because they have a cellphone in their ear, is that bad? If you kids mostly know their grandmother through email, is that good? Can you really get to know someone you have never met? Can you know someone who shares their innermost thoughts anonymously through a blog better than their best friends do? Where might The Sims Online lead? (Have you read Stephenson's Snow Crash?)
6) Aibo, A Cute and Frisky Robot Dog - Can you form an emotional bond with a robot? Is this robot smarter than your dog? Is this the pet of the future? With the projections of Moore's Law, might a future Aibo be your child's calculus tutor?
7) Computer Games as Heroin-ware - "Dennis Bennett was failing his college classes, his marriage was in trouble, and he wasn't being much of a father to his 1-year-old son. But he had progressed to Level 58 as Madrid, the Great Shaman of the North, his character in the online role-playing game "EverQuest," and that was all that mattered at the time." - My students debate this from a lot of personal experience.
8) The Digital Divide - Internet Haves and Have-Nots - About 1/2 of the US population doesn't have ready access to the Internet. Most are lower income, older or minority households. As the Internet becomes an essential tool in our daily lives as consumers, workers and citizens, are they being left out? The divide is even more dramatic on an international scale. Will this accelerate the trend of rich countries become richer and poor countries becoming poorer? Should anything be done to shrink the divide, or will it take care of itself?
9) Sealand - Rebel Outpost on the Fringe of Cyberspace - Does the Internet overturn the sovereignty of countries? Historically, countries have had sovereign authority over its citizens. The Internet cuts across national boundaries disrespecting all national laws. Should the Chinese government be able to block access to the exile government of Tibet website? Should the French government be able to block the sale of Nazi paraphernalia on the Yahoo auction. Should the US or state governments be able to block online gambling or c