I've used Vonage for over 2 years (signed up in Feb 2004), and never had a single dropped call, never had any quality issues. I'm surprised to hear of people having these problems, to be honest. The only oddity I've *ever* had, was calling a 1-800 number once that forwarded calls to a "local" call center, and being in Los Angeles, it forwarded my call to a "local" copper line in New Jersey because my call got routed up there for some reason. I've used it on two different DSL setups, and two different cable modem setups, and never a dropped call. The amount of money I save on the features they bundle in alone marvel me, like having all calls ring both my home number and cell phone number at the same time at no extra cost... it's an invaluable feature for me that I've never had before. Couldn't live without it now.
If you have 6 credit cards, all with $1000 limits, and you have three cards with $500 balances, then you're using $1500 worth of $6000 total access to credit money, for a 25% ratio of debt to total credit availability. Say you close two accounts that are totally paid off, you still have $1500 debt on now $4000 worth of credit money, which is a 37.5% ratio. The higher that ratio goes, the lower your credit score goes. And if you have more than 50% of your credit limit used up on any one account, that can drop your score too, depending on the type of account (mortages and car loans don't count, generally).
I recently had a card from Providian who was bought by Washington Mutual and as a 'welcome to WaMu' bonus, they cranked my APR to 29.09%. Do I still use the card? Yes, for one purchase a month, for something I would otherwise have had on autopayment on my debit card - so when the charge shows up, I do a transfer the next day, and boom, perfect payment history, and I never get slammed with interest.
And if you read the fine print that comes with your credit cards, you'll see that by using the card you agree to their terms and conditions which typically specify that any negative or potentially negative information reported by the credit bureaus can signal that you're suddenly a credit risk, so they up your APR to 'protect' themselves.
As for the legality... check where your credit cards come from - they all come from Delaware and South Dakota - the only two states that have NO usary law on how high interest rates can go. They could declare a 500% APR and the Feds won't have much to say about it. Check out the podcast of averagejoemoneyshow.com - they covered the whole history of this a month or so ago.
I totall agree with this. My last job, we were stitching together a system where the user interface was in Flash, interacting via ActionScript with PHP with MySQL on the back end. There were two other programmers - one knew MySQL, the other knew ActionScript, but nobody knew PHP, so I gave my 2 weeks notice and literally slept overnight at the office 5 days a week for those two weeks doing last minute bug fixes and writing hundreds of pages of documentation on how I set up the MySQL replication, what every field in every table was for, how the actionscript talked to the PHP and how the PHP interpreted it all... and then the CEO paid me for a third week of time after I'd left the company because of the extra effort. So, yeah, being irreplaceable is a great bargaining chip. A few months later, the guy who knew actionscript decided to try the same thing, and he was escorted out of the building about 10 minutes after giving his resignation.
At my current job, I wouldn't say I'm irreplaceable, but I've developed things that will take time to teach to someone else if I ever felt compelled to leave, but hey, I have an awesome job, make an awesome salary, have awesome benefits, and an awesomely-bad 90 minute commute in each direction to balance out the karma of such a cool job;o)
Wasn't that the point of some of MS's monopolistic lawsuits years ago?;o)
Personally, I use Trillian at home on my only Windoze box, and gaim everywhere else, and seems like MS Messenger is like the Herpes virus of IM clients - impossible to get rid of. Sure it comes installed, but getting fully rid of it is a pain in the backside. The version of XP that shipped with my Toshiba laptop won't *let* me remove it, it says that it's needed for core functionality of the operating system or some such nonsense.
As for ICQ, I agree, a number is harder to remember since studies have shown that people can remember 7-digit numbers alright but anything over that and they really have to think about it... Good thing my "Universal Internet Number" (as they called it back in late '96) is barely over 300,000 - a 6-digit number for me and my family members made it pretty simple.
I stopped using ICQ as a separate client and switched to Trillian because it seems each IM client was using 15MB+ worth of memory when Trillian combined all of them in about 10MB. Sucks that you have to buy their Pro version to use Jabber to get GoogleTalk to work tho.
Monday's injunction would apply to more than 3 million prepaid users. BCGI said it plans to appeal the original ruling and has acknowledged that it may be forced into bankruptcy if appeals are unsuccessful.
If I recall, Virgin buys their mobile minutes from Sprint as an MVNO, and BCGI is also another MVNO. So I doubt it'll affect Virgin, unless BCGI sells minutes to Sprint to resell to Virgin?
I'd say either way, BCGI customers are screwed. BCGI will have to cancel in 90 days, shutting off the customers, but those customers may have a hard time getting refunds if BCGI has to declare bankruptcy.
From the blog link:
"Apparently I have underestimated the value of alcohol in coding, as it looks like it was present in abundance throughout the marathon coding sessions."
Wonderful, so not only is it a firefox ripoff, it's written while drunk... Can we charge them with DUI (debugging under the influence) ?
I'd prefer a 'free' version, even if it were limited a little, for personal use at home... I'd love a to-do list/bug tracking list for my own personal development, but couldn't justify a price tag if it's just for personal stuff. Just my $0.02 tho.
It's handy so far... it doesn't have all of the fields for queries that our Bugzilla has here at work (such as 'cc list') and I submitted a support request for a confusion in how our bugzilla handles our login vs assignment name, but man the interface is pretty slick. Works great on gentoo/gnome.
My PNY 1GB Attache flash drive survived a hot-warm wash/rinse cycle *and* a full run through the clothes dryer, and still works fine three months later.
I've enver read the short version, but I listened to the full unabridged audiobook of Ender's Game a few months ago and loved it. I had no idea that it had evolved into two series of books, and would be quite interested to watch a movie about it if one were made.
Facist or not (from the list you posted), the guy's a great author.
Well, since they've abandoned Win98, which is only two years older than Win2k, it makes me wonder if they're going to ditch Win2k at some point in the not-too-distant future (ie: in the two years it takes for Vista to come out, Win2k will be as old as Win98 is today)?
Wasn't there some talk a while back that some patches and fixes to IE were only going to happen to XP and nothing else? Maybe that was their first stage of alientating the Win2k users too in a move to get people in the mood to upgrade to something else?
Yeah, a company I worked at when I first moved to California had MANY problems with the 'deathstar' drives. We replaced many of them, RMA's a few, got refunds for others, what a hassle! I think we switched to Western Digital drives after that, other than some SCSI Seagate drives for a RAID-based database server.
well, not every situation in life is a team effort though - there are tasks that one must do alone at work from time to time, so being able to at least sludge your way through a project on your own can be a real benefit to the company.
My last job had a total of three programmers, and we all worked on different areas of the system, and only towards what was the eventual end of my employment there (I left for a much better job) did we actually interact and connect some of the pieces together.
You're right though, in a team situation, things can be done so much faster if you've got a team leader who can recognize skills and traits and assign tasks accordingly. But not every company will have a team of that many people on everything.
Even at my current job, where we have a very large development team, there are still individual jobs to get done, and there are other jobs that require a team of 3-4 or even collaboration between two or three whole departments.
My church is helping The Dream Center here in Los Angeles to house about 300 people relocated from New Orleans, give them job training (some of them will have jobs ready when they arrive).
Personally, I'd pay a monthly fee for a game that was free to download if it were decent enough.
I recently tried neocron 2 which was a free download, but after a month of play required you to pay, but I found the game too boring, and not as fun as some of the other fantasy-style genres I've been used to playing like EQ, EQ2, DAOC and WOW. I thought the cyberpunk genre would have interested me but it wasn't nearly as fun as I thought. Maybe it was just that game though.
But fembots has a point - I think if more game companies realized the HUGE monthly profit games like WOW or EQ/EQ2 are bringing in, I think we'd have cheaper games, I dunno. But fembots was also correct: it's a risk.
One could even make them in floater devices for the kiddies
They've had these out for like a decade... usually a wristwatch - the instant it gets wet it sets off an alarm somewhere else near the pool to alert someone else that the watch (and therefore, likely the child) has fallen into the pool.
Slashdot Mirror
-id
If you have 6 credit cards, all with $1000 limits, and you have three cards with $500 balances, then you're using $1500 worth of $6000 total access to credit money, for a 25% ratio of debt to total credit availability. Say you close two accounts that are totally paid off, you still have $1500 debt on now $4000 worth of credit money, which is a 37.5% ratio. The higher that ratio goes, the lower your credit score goes. And if you have more than 50% of your credit limit used up on any one account, that can drop your score too, depending on the type of account (mortages and car loans don't count, generally).
... check where your credit cards come from - they all come from Delaware and South Dakota - the only two states that have NO usary law on how high interest rates can go. They could declare a 500% APR and the Feds won't have much to say about it. Check out the podcast of averagejoemoneyshow.com - they covered the whole history of this a month or so ago.
I recently had a card from Providian who was bought by Washington Mutual and as a 'welcome to WaMu' bonus, they cranked my APR to 29.09%. Do I still use the card? Yes, for one purchase a month, for something I would otherwise have had on autopayment on my debit card - so when the charge shows up, I do a transfer the next day, and boom, perfect payment history, and I never get slammed with interest.
And if you read the fine print that comes with your credit cards, you'll see that by using the card you agree to their terms and conditions which typically specify that any negative or potentially negative information reported by the credit bureaus can signal that you're suddenly a credit risk, so they up your APR to 'protect' themselves.
As for the legality
I totall agree with this. My last job, we were stitching together a system where the user interface was in Flash, interacting via ActionScript with PHP with MySQL on the back end. There were two other programmers - one knew MySQL, the other knew ActionScript, but nobody knew PHP, so I gave my 2 weeks notice and literally slept overnight at the office 5 days a week for those two weeks doing last minute bug fixes and writing hundreds of pages of documentation on how I set up the MySQL replication, what every field in every table was for, how the actionscript talked to the PHP and how the PHP interpreted it all ... and then the CEO paid me for a third week of time after I'd left the company because of the extra effort. So, yeah, being irreplaceable is a great bargaining chip. A few months later, the guy who knew actionscript decided to try the same thing, and he was escorted out of the building about 10 minutes after giving his resignation.
;o)
At my current job, I wouldn't say I'm irreplaceable, but I've developed things that will take time to teach to someone else if I ever felt compelled to leave, but hey, I have an awesome job, make an awesome salary, have awesome benefits, and an awesomely-bad 90 minute commute in each direction to balance out the karma of such a cool job
Use gaim :) have the all posibilities of trilian and a lot more
If you re-read my post:
Thanks thoWasn't that the point of some of MS's monopolistic lawsuits years ago? ;o)
Personally, I use Trillian at home on my only Windoze box, and gaim everywhere else, and seems like MS Messenger is like the Herpes virus of IM clients - impossible to get rid of. Sure it comes installed, but getting fully rid of it is a pain in the backside. The version of XP that shipped with my Toshiba laptop won't *let* me remove it, it says that it's needed for core functionality of the operating system or some such nonsense.
As for ICQ, I agree, a number is harder to remember since studies have shown that people can remember 7-digit numbers alright but anything over that and they really have to think about it ... Good thing my "Universal Internet Number" (as they called it back in late '96) is barely over 300,000 - a 6-digit number for me and my family members made it pretty simple.
I stopped using ICQ as a separate client and switched to Trillian because it seems each IM client was using 15MB+ worth of memory when Trillian combined all of them in about 10MB. Sucks that you have to buy their Pro version to use Jabber to get GoogleTalk to work tho.
/rant off
My bad, BCGI is not an MVNO company themselves, rather they sell minutes to *other* MVNO companies. My apologies for any confusion.
If I recall, Virgin buys their mobile minutes from Sprint as an MVNO, and BCGI is also another MVNO. So I doubt it'll affect Virgin, unless BCGI sells minutes to Sprint to resell to Virgin?
I'd say either way, BCGI customers are screwed. BCGI will have to cancel in 90 days, shutting off the customers, but those customers may have a hard time getting refunds if BCGI has to declare bankruptcy.
"Apparently I have underestimated the value of alcohol in coding, as it looks like it was present in abundance throughout the marathon coding sessions."
Wonderful, so not only is it a firefox ripoff, it's written while drunk ... Can we charge them with DUI (debugging under the influence) ?
I'd prefer a 'free' version, even if it were limited a little, for personal use at home ... I'd love a to-do list/bug tracking list for my own personal development, but couldn't justify a price tag if it's just for personal stuff. Just my $0.02 tho.
It's handy so far... it doesn't have all of the fields for queries that our Bugzilla has here at work (such as 'cc list') and I submitted a support request for a confusion in how our bugzilla handles our login vs assignment name, but man the interface is pretty slick. Works great on gentoo/gnome.
My PNY 1GB Attache flash drive survived a hot-warm wash/rinse cycle *and* a full run through the clothes dryer, and still works fine three months later.
Facist or not (from the list you posted), the guy's a great author.
Wasn't there some talk a while back that some patches and fixes to IE were only going to happen to XP and nothing else? Maybe that was their first stage of alientating the Win2k users too in a move to get people in the mood to upgrade to something else?
Just my own speculation of course...
My favorite, paraphrased, is "We got to the *moon* on 32kb of RAM, and now I need 512MB of RAM just to boot my computer..."
Actually, wasn't there some subtle joke in the Eric Bana movie about purple spandex?
This was covered back in May
Yeah, a company I worked at when I first moved to California had MANY problems with the 'deathstar' drives. We replaced many of them, RMA's a few, got refunds for others, what a hassle! I think we switched to Western Digital drives after that, other than some SCSI Seagate drives for a RAID-based database server.
My last job had a total of three programmers, and we all worked on different areas of the system, and only towards what was the eventual end of my employment there (I left for a much better job) did we actually interact and connect some of the pieces together.
You're right though, in a team situation, things can be done so much faster if you've got a team leader who can recognize skills and traits and assign tasks accordingly. But not every company will have a team of that many people on everything.
Even at my current job, where we have a very large development team, there are still individual jobs to get done, and there are other jobs that require a team of 3-4 or even collaboration between two or three whole departments.
And that's my $0.02 ;o)
soan they use that to make ape batteries along with the cow batteries?
My church is helping The Dream Center here in Los Angeles to house about 300 people relocated from New Orleans, give them job training (some of them will have jobs ready when they arrive).
Sorry, couldn't be helped...
I recently tried neocron 2 which was a free download, but after a month of play required you to pay, but I found the game too boring, and not as fun as some of the other fantasy-style genres I've been used to playing like EQ, EQ2, DAOC and WOW. I thought the cyberpunk genre would have interested me but it wasn't nearly as fun as I thought. Maybe it was just that game though.
But fembots has a point - I think if more game companies realized the HUGE monthly profit games like WOW or EQ/EQ2 are bringing in, I think we'd have cheaper games, I dunno. But fembots was also correct: it's a risk.
The judge sounded very laid back, and sounds to me like he's read about a lot of these lawsuits and is willing to give this lady a chance.
me too!
They've had these out for like a decade ... usually a wristwatch - the instant it gets wet it sets off an alarm somewhere else near the pool to alert someone else that the watch (and therefore, likely the child) has fallen into the pool.