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Saturday, February 24, 2007

Again on can you copyright an idea?

Deb,
I was ON PURPOSE provocative and joking.
The fact is that THERE is simply nothing to do with people who copy.
Take it the way I do.
Studying for me (as for anybody else) was studying what the ones before me had to say and write.
I learned from them and after copying one day I was able to say somethng that was "mine".
Every generation hands to the next one its discoveries so that we never begin from the beginning.
That is what makes progress, that is what makes the world go on.
And it is positive that somebody copies you.
It helps to spread what you think and say.
That is what progress is made of.
Was there somebody who paid any copyright for using the letters of the alphabet? And they were a much bigger invention of what we can say in a blog...
Can you copyright an idea?
You could, but an idea makes new ideas and new ideas make the progress...
Don't you want to be part of it?

More about IPTV

Streaming video is what we - a generation of TV viewers – grew up with. You watch what is broadcast when it’s broadcast as it’s broadcast. You blink; you miss something. Something disrupts the signal; a fragment of what you’re watching is gone forever. Doesn’t matter whether the content is as fresh as today’s sports event or as stale as a Bogart movie; it comes streaming at you. That’s what broadcast TV technology delivered and that’s what we consumed.
It’s absurd, however, to assume that streaming video is what we want. This absurd assumption is nevertheless behind much of the planning – especially by traditional telecom carriers – for the next generation of Internet.

Tom Evslin

Tom, you miss the important feature of the Internet: Interactivity!

That is what makes IPTV alluring.
Communication, do you remember? It's all what we are screaming and shouting since long.
Internet is the network of networks, it can put together people who are millions miles away, it gives voice to ones who wouldn't have one...

You forget that the most requested feature in EVERY entertainment IS being a part of it...
If you download and you look at it you have a may be cheaper, may be more comfortable, may be more used copy of the actual TV.
But we want something DIFFERENT, don't we?

Friday, February 23, 2007

Can you copyright an idea?

Last week I posted an article offering tips for choosing a blog name. Yesterday morning, I’m checking out Technorati when I notice a blog has linked to my article. “How cool!” I thought. Since this gig is relatively new, it’s nice to know others are reading. A click on the link brought me to a “Science and Technology” blog which had the whole piece posted in its entirety, without permission. Not too cool after all.

The blog conveniently offered no way for me to contact the blogger to have my post removed, all I could gather was that my piece was stolen and posted by a “Mr. Blogger.” I posted to Mr. Blogger’s comments letting him know he used my article without permission and requested its removal. Mr. Blogger responded by posting a teeny-tiny “source” link under his post.

I commented again that my article was being posted without permission. Though I never received the courtesy of a reply, Mr. Blogger’s response was to post an even bigger “Original Post” link to the bottom of his post, which still contained my article, in its entirety and without my, or About’s, permission. I contacted Blogger.com who, I’m sure, will be in touch with Mr. Blogger. I think I'm going to contact Adsense too.

I’m choosing not to offer up a link to Mr. Blogger’s Science and Technology blog because I don’t want to send traffic his way. I did notice there are plenty of articles with teeny tiny “source” links underneath, leading me to believe I’m not the only victim. Mr. Blogger has also turned on comment moderation so no one will know about his stolen content.

On a more delicious note, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Blogger isn’t all that intelligent. You see, he left all my links in my articles. If not for them, I never would have found his plagiarized content. Unethical and stupid!
From Deborah Ng,

Deborah,

Let people — no, encourage — people to remix your stuff. They’re doing it anyway. They’re taking a paragraph from here and a quote from there — or video from here and audio from there — to tell the story from their perspective. Stop thinking of that as theft and start thinking of it as a compliment. If you’re not being remixed, you’re not part of the conversation. And the conversation is the platform of the today. So feel free to set some rules — it’s only polite to attribute and link — but then open the doors and let people create more great stuff on not only your finished product but also your raw material...

Nicely written, I do not remember where I copied it... Patrizia

Again and again about IPTV

I forgot to mention the second advantage of TV on IP

2) TV on IP can be the REAL interactive TV.
You can forget that with YouTube. That has nothing to do with IPTV.
It is just a copy of P2P...

Democracy "Italian Style"

Yesterday night Our ex Minister Romano Prodi declared himself the new "King of Italy".
From today Italy has suddenly become a Monarchy.
This is "Democracy Italian Style":
You can say whatever you want as long as it is WHAT I WANT...

Looking for a millionaire

What is the reason why you would eventually look for somebody on the Internet?
Ask this question to 100 people and 99 will answer:
Because I am looking for somebody who understands me, who loves me, who can share his life with me and so on...
One would answer: Because I am looking for a millionaire...

With such a survey you would think most of the people are interested only in spiritual virtues.
Nothing of that kind.
This proves only that the majority of the people do not say the truth...
And if you belong to the majority I have a good address for you:
Millionaire Dating

May be you won't be able to find a millionaire ( it depends also on what you can offer...) but you surely will find somebody who understands you, who loves you, who can share his life with you and so on...



This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

"Happy motoring"

“One of the farmers who organized the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's annual meeting put it nicely: "The ethanol craze means that we're going to burn up the Midwest's last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks."

The truth is, we will never be energy independent as long as we remain a car-fixated society. It's that simple. If we can't let go of the sunk costs associated with Happy Motoring, we're probably not going to make it very far into the future, either as a nation or a viable economy or as an orderly society. By sunk costs I mean our previous investments in car-oriented infrastructure.”
Jim Kunstler

The problem is that the most read paper in this world IS NOT the Financial Times, but the electricity bill, the gas bill, the fuel meter and the best piece of news is the one that tells that life is going to go on the same way, even better, it’s enough to change “energy supplier”.

As long as there will be the huge amount of interest behind the “Happy motoring” your post will stay what it is:
A nice, amusing, truthful report on life, made on a high ranked and highly frequented Blog.
All the rest is just normal life…

Why using VoIP?

To foresee the different outcome and evolution of VOIP we must consider three different scenarios.

1) Evolution of the actual system. Softphone, IP phone, Gateway connecting the Internet line to a PBX or normal telephones. Free IP to IP calls, rates per minute or flat rates for termination.

This is the existing model in which an Internet provider or VoIP telephone company, (Skype, Vonage, Lingo...) more or less copies the business model of the existing Telecoms and provides alternative telephone services at lower cost, using the Internet for long distance and the local PSTN for last mile (local) delivery of voice.

The competition is getting tough, the number of customers is growing slowly, the quality of the calls is directly chained to the cost of the service.
The less you pay, the less you have.
In this way VoIP potential is highly underused, the chances of getting a good quality alternative service are getting narrower and proportionally decreasing together with the cost of the call.

The chances that VOIP will fast grow are daily fewer, also because VoIP itself is NOT a Mass market product.
The actual providers fail to understand that the fight is NOT on prices, but ON Services.
For an enterprise could be more convenient having a higher quality/cost VoIP service that would allow it to use only one line (convergence of both data and voice line) than having a cheap and low quality VoIP service that would oblige it to keep the voice line for quality reasons.

2) The business model of the VoIP providers changes.
Higher cost calls, but more and better services.

Actually VoIP is more a niche market than a mass market, even though the niche is of considerable proportions.
Since for its nature VoIP is mostly competitive on pricing on international and intercontinental calls, the priority usage is on the enterprise's side.
Private people tend to have mostly the need to call locally or nationally, service usually provided by Telecoms at good prices and very often at a flat rate.

The need for quality is higher.
And the need for new applications will be the successful spring of this new technology.
When a new product is offered to the market and aims to be competitive with the existing ones either is offered to a lower price or promises and delivers better features.
This is exactly the case of VoIP.
Using the Data line not only means lower cost, but also more power.
Instead of a simple device like a telephone at both end of the data line we can have two sophisticated hardware, completely programmable and able to deliver unlimited features.

3) Customers' owned network.

This scenario will be the natural evolution of the second one.
It will give quality and in the meantime it will be competitive to the first one, because it will offer "free termination" to any call.
It will make possible to the user to exchange his last mile with anyone's in the world, transforming any international and intercontinental call in a local call at cost Zero.

The world will be a big Network in which any user will be connected to the Net and use any other network member's local telephone line.

It will be a real P2P VoIP network in which everybody will share minutes instead of files.
And the infrastructures will be very cheap and easy to build.

Every enterprise will need:

1) A connection to the Net
2) A connection to the local telecom
3) A gateway to connect the Net to the PSTN line and his telephones.

He can use his gateway for his VoIP and let the other members to use his PSTN line through it.
He will share as many lines as he decides to as well as many minutes.

The following step could be to connect our Wireless base station and using a wireless phone (5KM. coverage) connected both to the PSTN and Internet line.

In a future hopefully not so far away, we will have most of the calls as IP to IP, but the third scenario will highly accelerate VoIP towards this.
A good and very cheap mean of communication will open the door to always new and alluring features.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

The Value of Money

"What we need now is a Free Money Movement comparable to the Free Trade Movement of the 19th century, demonstrating not merely the harm caused by acute inflation...but the deeper effects of producing periods of stagnation that are indeed inherent in the present monetary arrangements.
I still believe that, so long as the management of money is in the hands of government, the gold standard, with all its imperfections, is the only tolerably safe system but it is better to take money completely out of the control of government.
The only way to save civilization will be to deprive governments of the power over the supply of money."

Friedrich August von Hayek, The Denationalization of Money, 1976

Saving civilization depends upon wresting the power over monetary issue from government. Hayek was not alone in this view.
Ayn Rand expressed a similar sentiment in her famous novel Atlas Shrugged.
Earlier still, E.C. Riegel objected to government having issue power over money in his A New Approach to Freedom and again in Flight from Inflation.
All these authors have in common a healthy and well-motivated cynicism about government monetary policy.

Why? Because governments have always inflated the currency, devalued the currency, run enormous budget deficits, and set trade policies to cause massive trade deficits whenever governments have had issue power over money.
It is illogical and necessarily foolish to suppose that any government will prove trustworthy where this most important power is concerned.

So, how do we go about having a Free Money Movement, or, as we prefer to term it, a "free market money movement"? Fortunately, we don't have to go far out of our way. The free market money movement is here.

As part of the Internet boom of the late 1990s, numerous private currency and value transfer services were originated.
Among the various endeavors to offer an online payment system was a 1996 venture called e-gold.com.
It turns out that e-gold had discovered something that beenz, flooz, and other ill-fated currency ventures had not.
It turns out that if a currency is redeemable for gold or silver or other metal, it will be widely accepted.
It is not so much that people make a great effort to redeem e-gold for gold, but, rather, the fact that they can which makes them feel secure in the knowledge that the money is "good for" or redeemable for something, and therefore encourages them to accept it in free enterprise exchanges.

Going backward is not always good, loking backward is always a must.
Because studying what happened, how things evolved, how the others behaved before us, their goals and their failures teaches us to go on.

Every generation has handled the next its knowledge, its discoveries.
So that every generation did not start all over from the beginning but somewhere from the arrival point of the previous.
Money has been the need to symbolize the value, a currency the way to exchange values.

Real or Virtual is not so important.
A piece of paper has not more value than a number on a computer screen.

The value is given by the reality of the meaning.

That is to say: 1 dollar paper could have the same meaning and value of a Virtual dollar providing that it has a real counter value in reality.

That is what we are looking for.

A trustable source.

Feeling "lighter"

You can fee better for many reasons, one of them is undoubtedly the fact of having sorted out your financial problems.
One of the most common of today's life is accumulating debts without realizing it.
One day you see your bank account and think something wrong must have happened.
Somebody must have made a big mistake, for it's not possible being so low...
But then you begin to mentally count and it looks probable just a little while before looking damned right.
You have too many debts, and what's worst, you pay too high interest rates on them, so that repaying them is getting so painful to be almost impossible.
This is the exact moment in which you need a Bad Credit Debt Consolidation and you need it fast.
There are two types of people who will likely be viewed as a credit risk to most credit issuers: those who have a bad credit past and those who have no credit past.
If you belong to one of these, do not despair. Fortunately for you, bad credit credit cards can help to build a positive credit history and have a brighter credit future.
Or if you have a bad credit, a bad credit personal loan is the best option for you in the world of personal loans. Bad credit may happen to one for different reasons, like, loss of a job, failure on the repayment front, excessive borrowings, and so on. But with the assistance of a bad credit personal loan you can pull your credit back on track again.
For any case of Bad Credit you can find a special solution at Credit Loan .
And do not think you are the only one with similar problems...

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.






Wednesday, February 21, 2007

How nice it would be

How nice it would be to have enough imagination to live in a dream world.

Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute the world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wonder freely and in full knowledge of the really real.

Imagination, an unimaginative person once wrote, is what happens when a drunk looses his watch and has to get drunk again to find it.
Although fantasy and make-believe flourish in childhood they rapidly atrophy as one is moulded to fit the adult's grey consensus of reality.
A child, out on a walk with his mother, suddenly points and cries out, "Look a purple cow".
The mother perhaps rather tired and domestically harassed, snaps: "Don't be silly" And then delivers the crunch line:" There's no such thing as purple cows".

So the child, a vagabond in the backwoods of rationality, is brought up to see the world in the prosaic terms of grown-ups and eventually forgets it ever saw a purple cow.
Now purple cows walk around unseen by anyone.

Reengineering the way of doing business

"Information technology has brought the convenience of revolutionary change to everyday life, from ATM machines at banks to global transfers of funds, from 800 telephone services to personal home computers, "e-mail", and the worldwide Internet computer telecommunications system. Whatever its problems, the information technology revolution is upon us. It is the most powerful tool for change in the modern era.

American businesses, particularly the smarter ones, are taking notice. Computers and telecommunications are reshaping the basic structure of American enterprise, and any competitive business must realize the new technology either to improve its products and services or to create entirely new ones.
The private sector is employing information technology to reengineer the way it does business, using human and material resources more efficiently and competing more effectively."

AIMpromote lead management system is the fastest growing lead management and website analytics software provider on the market. Whichever plan you choose, you will receive all the features.
The total cost of ownership of AIMpromote into an existing business process is far lower than competing products, and they provide the very best in customer support and business consultation.

The AIMpromote lead management and lead tracking system goes far beyond standard ROI, ROAS, and CPA tracking.
You will know more about every visitor that comes to your site than ever before. Your reports will let you know what browser, screen resolution, and media players your visitors are using.
Where your visitors are coming from, what they searched for, and how many pages they visited.
You will have all the information you need to tailor your site specifically to meet their needs.
Their objective is to make your business grow as fast as possible, so take advantage of your full featured free trial now and see why so many have chosen AIMpromote as their lead management solution.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Can the Web beat big Media?

The most popular content remains in the keep of a small and shrinking bunch.
Why is this so? The answer is obvious, say critics of deregulation: A firm that owns a great swath of the traditional media has phenomenal leverage on new platforms.
A Web site may be great but it becomes even greater, and only really valuable, when you also own TV stations and newspapers.
"Having a lot of people jumping around with Web sites doesn't prove that a monopoly doesn't have power," says Robert McChesney, a media scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "If in fact the growth of all these Web sites and cable channels and satellite radio and blogs and instant messaging -- if it meant that owning a TV station didn't give you any power, why would people be spending $300 million buying a TV station when they could build a hundred Web sites instead?" Why? Because TV still matters.
Newspapers still matter. And the Web, while it's growing in importance, is still no match.

There are moments when hair CAN be a problem

Erotic032

Let's be honest, is there a woman who never felt that too much hair in the wrong places can be a problem?
Especially in Summer, when you would like to wear that special bikini, or that special dress, or wear nothing at all, in that SPECIAL moment?

Is there a woman who wouldn't like to solve the problem once and for all, just getting rid of it and never think about?
Today it is possible, and, believe me, is going to be one big problem less...
Just go on NaturalWellbeing.com - Online Hair Removal Store and you'll find all the information about all the hair removal treatments available now a day.
I am for Electrolysis Hair Removal . Home electrolysis is an option for those who want permanent hair removal but don't have the time to book regular appointments, and it is cheaper then professional electrolysis.

Or you can begin trying Epilators that are cordless, hand held electronic razors for body hair removal.
( I use them also for the face, and I assure you it is just a great way to remove all the unwanted hair in a few seconds, and with much less pain than on the legs...)
Or you can try Hair growth inhibitors that are the easy and painless way to eliminate unwanted body hair. They are the most effective alternative to expensive laser treatments and electrolysis.

Or what about classic Hair removal creams / depilatories

Did you ever hear about Sugarin ? the good medium/long-term hair removal solution. Similar to waxing, but the sugaring gel only sticks to the hair and not the skin. It can be done at home and is inexpensive.

And finally Waxing the highly effective hair removal treatment for legs, bikini lines, face, eyebrows and upper lips. Waxing can be done at home, is fast and inexpensive.

Well, you really have NO EXCUSE to keep that ugly, unwanted hair!





This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

How much bandwidth for IPTV?

Good post, as usual , Mr. Evslin.
And, as usual, Patrizia has something to say.
It's amazing how you always touch subjects I am very fond of and my husband is working at.
How much bandwidth is needed?
On the receiving site: Since, as you say, you are supposed to watch at a channel at a time, and since when you watch is most likely that you do not surf, considering the high and good compression available on the market today, you can have a stream of 1 Mbps steady bandwidth. (which is much more than you need for surfing, because it is STEADY) That is what most broadband connections allow now a days.
Providing that NOT all the ISP users are watching TV at the same time, because 1 Mbps of STEADY consuming bandwidth would crash most of the networks, admitting that if it is not possible right now, it will be possible in the near future (and I am talking about big cities, for small town it will still be a dream for long, at least in Europe...)but then : how much bandwidth is needed on the sending site?
And I am talking about real TV, the full screen at a quality close to the TV now.
I mean looking at TV on a decent monitor size, sitting on a couch, a full movie or a TV program for at least one hour or more of STEADY streaming... that is TV and not Youtube or all the similars, short clips of a size of a cell phone screen, sitting in front of your PC monitor.
Of course you agree, you cannot talk about TV in this case.
Well how much bandwidth on the sending side?
So huge nobody right now can afford, at least the TV we are talking about.
And very likely not tomorrow and not the day after tomorrow.
So what?
You have to create something that gives on one side the chance to see full screen at a decent quality, using less than 1Mbps bandwidth and on the sending side THE SAME.

It is not possible, you say. It is possible, and we are working on that and hopefully we will be succesful one day soon.
Believe me THAT is the only possible WAY to have real IPTV

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Cell Phones and Plans

"Actually, Verizon seems to separate contract terms/renewal from Telephone replacement.
They generally extend contract terms - insist on it ; for any change in your service. For example, if you want to go from a $50 plan to a $75 plan with more minutes, they re-start the contract from the date of the change in service.

Yet every two years they offer to provide you with a $100 credit toward new phone. My contract goes until sometime in 08, while my "phone renewal" is up this November and I can get new phone with the $100 credit."

Sam


I think the way this works is that you can get a cell phone at a below-market price from your service provider in return for a one- or two-year contract, OR you can buy your phone elsewhere and get the service without a contract (or maybe a contract of shorter duration). So this is a trade-off, you get a price break on your instrument in return for a longer contract. But you don't have to take this; you can still avoid the lengthy contract by buying your own phone at a market price.

Why is this a problem? If you don't like the long contract, then don't take the price break on the phone. Seems to me a perfectly legit deal.

Now let's be honest here. If you sign a contract to get the cheaper phone, then as soon as you actually have the phone you want to get out of the contract, and this seems to be what this is all about. "Gimme the cheap phone, then I'll whine about how I'm being exploited by a long-term contract". Pretty cheesy.

But there is a third choice.
You can evaluate all the available opportunities in #1 Seller of Cell Phones and Wireless Plans.
There you can find not only the new cell phones but all the available wireless plans.
They have Unbeatable prices, free shipping and a satisfaction guarantee.
It is really worth to pay a visit...www.wirefly.com.


This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

About security

The fact that it is actually quite easy to find dangerous information using just a search engine and some intelligent guesses is not exactly news to people who think about security professionally.
But I'm afraid that there are many uneducated folks putting content onto Web servers that they think is hidden to the world, when it is in reality anything but.

We have two seemingly opposite problems at work here: simplicity and complexity. On the one hand, it has become very easy for non-technical users to post content onto Web servers, sometimes without realizing that they're in fact placing that content on a Web server.
It has even become easier to Web-enable databases, which has led in one case to the exposure of a database containing the records of a medical college's patients.

Even when people do understand that their content is about to go onto the Web, many do not fully think through what they're about to post. They don't examine that content in light of a few simple questions: How could this information be used against me? Or my organisation? And should this even go on the Web in the first place?

Well, of course ordinary users don't think to ask these questions!
They're just interested in getting their content out there, and most of the time are just pleased as punch that they could publish on the Web in the first place. Critically examining that content for security vulnerabilities is not something they've been trained to do.

And really, that's what it comes down to: we have to get folks thinking.
Sure, those of us responsible for security can try to shut everything down and turn everything off that could pose a threat - and we should, within reason.
But those pesky users are going to do their job: use the systems we provide them, and some we don't provide. We need to help them understand the threats that any Web-enabled technology can provide.

www.realeverything.com

Well, it is not its real domain, but could be.
Probably was not available or they didn't think about it.
I'm talking about this new classifieds website.
This is a matter of finding most of what you are looking for in just one place.
And everything is free!
It is a UK focused classified ad site that also offers blogs, web page hosting, events calendars and dating.
There have been some photo competition and there are some wonderful photographs in the archives.
You can also find weather forecast and the latest news.
They surely haven't neglected any issue you can be looking for.
What could I say more? It is worth having a look at...

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a method for allowing Internet users to automatically obtain up-to-date information from their favorite sources.

The concept was conceived in 1999, but unknown to most of us until 2004, the year of the weblog. The bloggers who hounded the presidential candidates and humbled Dan Rather used RSS to broadcast their words. Now, nearly every media company in the world is imitating them, with RSS ''feeds" sent from their websites to millions of subscribers.

The vlog -- audio and video programming was created by independent authors and hosted on the Internet. Again, it's RSS time.
A fan of Al Franken need never miss his radio show. He can use a bit of RSS-based software to check for each new episode and automatically download it for later listening.

Consumers can enjoy the benefits of RSS without paying a dime. Software to let you subscribe to RSS website feeds can be downloaded free; one such program is built into the popular Firefox Internet browser. You can also get free podcasting and vlogging programs.
The latest version of Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes software includes listings for about 20,000 podcasts.
Click a button, and the iTunes music player locks onto the correct RSS feed and downloads the podcasts of your choice.

Liberally taken from Bob Adams

Monday, February 19, 2007

RayBan Sunglasses

This is a post I am particularly fond of writing.
RayBans glasses were one of the first things I bought with my very first salary.
And their shape was exactly the one (in Italy we called it "pear style") that is in the picture at the bottom of this post.
Needless to say that they are (at least in my opinion) very stylish and endless.
If you consider that my first pair was dated 1975!

You can find them
RayBans at BestBuyEyeglasses.com They have the largest selection of RayBan sunglasses at the best prices anywhere.
All orders come with the comfort of an easy return policy.
You can even get your prescription eyeglasses made at the same time - simply provide your prescription information and the optical experts at BestBuyEyeglasses.com will customize your lenses for you.
Plus, use this discount code and get an extra 5% off of their already discounted prices: ETP5P






This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Patriotism is the last refuge of Monopoly

The smartest idea was to call it:

Telecom Italia

As they called France Telecom, Swisse Telecom and so on.

When a big business goes wrong and doesn't make any profit and a lot of debts, the State and the patriotism of the citizens is called to its rescue.

Isn't it the first duty of the Italian State to save Alitalia?

Isn't our Big Nation entitled to have its own Airline?
At any cost of course, also if that means emptying pockets that are already empty.
And if in the middle a few politicians take advantage out of it, they are Italians...aren't they.

Don't the Italian people have as principal duty the one to bring our Nation all over the world?
Don't the Italian people have the duty to use Italian cars or Italian telephones?

That is why our economy is going so bad, people nowadays do not have the spring to patriotism any more.
They do not love their country, they do not want to die for it anymore.

Well, may be they are just beginning to open their eyes...


Patrizia

The One account

Is there a way I could repay faster my mortgage and lower the amount of interest I pay on my borrowing?
Yes, it is called the One Account.
How does it work? It's very simple, but it can have amazing consequences on my finance.
It brings together my mortgage, current account, savings, loans and credit cards.
It works when I have together, into the same account, my income and savings as well as my mortgage. In this way I can reduce my mortgage balance and pay interest on a lower amount. This helps me to save almost a fortune over time and cut years off my mortgage.
The One account is like a normal current account, infact I can get hold of my cash anytime I need, just like if they were my savings.
And if I happen to have some extra money, I can transfer it to my One account, so I only pay one low mortgage-style interest rate on everything, cutting my monthly interest bill. In this way there's no need to pay sky-high rates on loans and credit cards.
All you need to open this kind of account is:
1) Being aged 18 or over.
2) Being a UK resident and more than 5 years away from retirement.
3) Own, or be about to buy, a property in England, Scotland or Wales.
3) Agree a borrowing limit of £30,000 or more.
4) Be happy to repay your borrowings by the agreed date.
5) Pay valuation and any relevant legal fees.
In principle nothing more than what you would have to agree for any other kind of mortgage.
You can see the rates and fees , as well as a mortgage calculator.
You can see all details about home and life insurances and the repaiment protector.
Well, if you are considering buying a property in England, this could be a good opportunity to fulfill your dreams.

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

The real, objective scenario for IPTV

Local cable TV system has 100,000 paying customers. Their any-time-of-the-day pay-per-view movie department must be able to handle up to 100,000 requests for a single movie at once.
They need a 10,000-transaction-per-second database machine in their garage and an unbelievably wide driveway connecting them to the superhighway just to handle Friday night.

Idea number one is to boost contemporary database machines from 1,000 tps to 10,000 tps. To solve this annoying little problem, we need a tenfold increase in transaction processing. This should keep the database machine vendors busy for at least a decade. Now, suppose each of the 100,000 customers orders the standard 2.4-Mbps service. The 1-gigabit superhighway starts to look like the Ventura Freeway at rush hour. Idea number two is for cable TV companies to buy a telephone company because telephone companies are the only data truckers in business today with sufficient switching capacity.

Scenario 2. The superhighway is so much fun that 100 million people get on it every night to play interactive games.
They not only send/receive 2.4 Mbits of data each second, but they also do some actual computing. For example, they might play against an expert system, or they might exercise a best-selling 500-variable world-economic model while waiting for the microwave to defrost dinner: simple stuff like that.
Suppose each player needs 100 Mflops of raw compute power. That adds up to a potential of 10 billion Mflops of compute power! So let's convert Rhode Island into a massively parallel processor with silicon circuits etched on every square acre.
Alternately, we could use up the idle cycles on all those unused Apple Newtons
connected to each other by wireless networks. RISC or not, future computer architects have job security.
Scenario 3. The renaissance era of super libraries arrives.
We no longer have to lower our blood pressure by biking to the local library because everything we ever wanted to know is just a keyboard and telephone (cable) away.
In fact, 2.4 Mbits of raw data is streaming past our doorway each second. If only we could convert this raw data into information.

Idea number one is to create a whole new industry of knowledge workers who filter raw data and convert it into information. This reduces the flow rate to a few thousand facts per second. Idea number two is to create the twenty-first-century electronic publishing industry. Packaging a few thousand facts per second into meaningful amusement for the Simpson family should keep all of us busy for a few decades. And creating entirely new industries stimulates the economy.


The data superhighway is only the tip of the integrated circuit.
Sure,computers need more I/O capability, but they also need more storage, more processing power, and more connectivity. Instead of solving one problem, the superhighway may well create so many technical challenges that the skills of Computer's readers will remain in great demand until the year 2094!


Liberally taken by Ted Lewis.

Let the music play

There are thousands of musicians with music to sell and no effective way to do that without an online presence.
A "music store" web site that could be customized and dropped onto any server would at least get them on the air.
And even local/regional musicians, who currently have a relatively small audience, probably have *someone* in that audience who would be thrilled to help them out by setting up and running such a site.

There already is such a service. It has global reach and wide name recognition, and it puts small labels on a nearly-even footing with the big names.
And has all categories of music. If you for example browse Trip-Hop Bands you can find among many others Absynthasis and listen to their music.
Unsigned.com is the new voice for independent Artists looking for the chance to be discovered! For bands and solo artists, Unsigned.com provides you with an outlet to be heard by an ever-growing fan and listener base.

The Beta release of Unsigned.com is the result of feedback from Artists and Listeners, and will provide unparalleled choices for Artists to showcase their music... and for Listeners to discover new talent!



This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

TV is still the "Queen"

"Television of the future will look much more like Network2 than Comcast or DirecTV."

And:"But all of the above still isn’t TV as we know it and doesn’t replace it (yet):
1) Most of the content we can get on network and cable TV is not available on the Internet.
2) Most Internet content is low def, certainly not the high definition stuff that makes you run out and buy an expensive LCD screen.
3) With the exception of baseball, you can’t get realtime major league sports or much else in real time (except webcams).

Fractals of Change

Television on the Internet for the moment is, either a bad streaming (for lack of bandwidth, mostly on the sender site) or a good quality download, something you see later.
But it has the big advantage of not being anymore "one size fits all".
In the sense that it can provide a huge selection of any kind of videos.
Also in this case, due to copyrights, the huge selection is just in "fieri"and, if you do not count the P2P, the legally available is not so much.
In principle Youtube or Network2 are nothing new.
Napster was the real innovative and killing app. All what came later was just a (better) copy of it.
The increase of storage space and the availability of broadband has brought us to a step further, but still far away to be a competition to the Real TV.

Yes, you can look to a short video, a few minutes of the best of, but the majority of enterteinment's fans still prefer the TV screen and the couch to the computer.

You say we can have set top boxes, we can connect the PC to the TV screen, we can see the baseball game on the notebook, we can do a lot, but...in this case "Content is King" and TV is still the Queen...

Erotic: seeing without seeing...

Sarda Lingerie

How to wrap the best gift...

It really doesn't matter what you wear as long as you wear "Italian".
May be we are not "technologically speaking" at the top, but when it comes to humanity, let me say: WE ARE THE BEST!

Friday, February 16, 2007

Intelligence.

Intelligence is a matter of conceptualizing rather than calculating.

In a chess game while a human can evaluate three moves a second, a computer can evaluate millions.

But the advantage is reversed when it comes to improvisation.

A computer would find it difficult to understand a strategy based on calculated irritation.

Good Music is Good Business

There is a shop sign in Santa Monica that says: "Quality doesn't cost more, it pays more".

No doubt about paying of course...in both senses.

But everybody agrees that quality and beauty are invaluable.
So what would you expect if told that Peter Belisi, the name synonymous with all things beautiful, has launched a new online radio station featuring today’s hottest artists, music legends, progressive lounge tracks, jazz, and rock favorites?
Belisi Radio is the attempt to take the same qualities he looks for in fashion, sophistication, class, beauty, into music.
But what is real beauty?

"Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols.
Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-colored world."
Beauty can be a flower, can be a color, can be a poem, can be a music.
If beauty is harmony, then music is notes that follow a perfect harmony.
And if you love beauty you love all expressions of it.




This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Reinventing computing?

Interesting perspective from Peter Clare of Oracle fame
"The problem w/ this approach philosophically (I think) is that most layered abstractions in real life undergo paradigm shifts as you move from one domain to another. Sure, you can describe cooking via atomic reactions, or even chemistry, but who cares – I guarantee you that a chemical model of cooking won’t likely taste as good as a traditional mixing ingredients w/ a pinch here or there approach.


The same is true for computer paradigms. Every (computer) modeling language is designed to solve a particular set of problems, and will likely be miserably inadequate for problems outside the domain for which this language was intended. Sure, pgmrs can do amazing things w/ languages using techniques that the language designers themselves didn’t forsee – but this is just stretching the limits, not making any fundamental paradigm shift.


I have always tho’t that computer weenies want to play at being God, and that our systems reflect this basic arrogance and prejudice.
Somehow, we feel that this modeling Deus ex Machina is going to solve some implausable problem by inserting the genius of Our-New-Computer- Language-in-God’s-Image into the mix. I am skeptical.


The real world seems rather complex to me and we seem to have varying degrees of comfort and discomfort using many different (internal) systems and models to navigate our way through The Maze. Such is the World.


If we look at the evolution of computer-as-language today, we use a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms ranging from Imperative to Dialogue to point-and-click Exploration to You-Name-It. At the end of the day, most of these linguistic mechanisms are basically proxies for communicating our intent to other people, usually communally through space and time, much as literature communicates intent through space and time.


If we look at the chaos that is the current landscape of ways to communicate our intent via these linguistic automatons, it is pretty easy to see that computer language mechanisms are evolving much the way natural languages evolve – via our ad hoc social systems that determine in a willy nilly way what works and what doesn’t over long periods of time."

May be the approach is wrong.
May be we still do not know the right way.
It happened with the written language.
I have a theory about it.
The first written language was made with idioms (as the Chinese and Japanese still are)which reproduced the concept instead of the sound.
The letters were the biggest improvement in the way of written language.
Because with 26 (Italians, 22)letters we can express all what we think and say.
Simplifying the way of writing allowed many more to access culture and the other bigger step was printing.
Now a days in many countries the basic culture is a matter of wanting more than affording.

The real reinvention of computing will come when the languages instead of using basic data format (string)will use simpler letters with which it will be universally possible to build a common language understood by all computers.
Simplifying computing will make informatics more a matter of wanting than affording.
I regret one thing: that I was born too soon...

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Cool tools for advertisers and good revenue for bloggers

What exactly IS blogging?

It's one person's voice -- one author's journal of original ideas, brief commentary on news, technology, law, politics, whatever.

It's a journal for anyone who wants to devote the time and energy. Some authors spend hours a day preparing their postings. Costs are virtually nil, thanks to the Net.

The successful ones are read daily by thousands of folks, many influential, including leading reporters in the mainstream media.
Often you read articles in The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal where the story idea clearly came from a blog.

Postings can be frequent -- maybe daily, maybe more, with an archive of past issues.
The technology of blogging is fundamentally pretty simple. You've got tools that free the author from thinking about layout or HTML codes while posting his or her daily bleat. You've got RSS to syndicate the content. And Google to search across 'em all and find out what the buzz is.

So, besides writing for writing, why not making some cash out of it?
Everybody does. With ads, articles, suggestions...
Isn't it a case of "you can't believe everything you see and hear”, regardless of whether someone actually discloses their influences?

The more your blog is ranked the more you can get.
And of course the more posts you write, the more you earn.
Since blogging became alluring for advertisers it meant the dawn of a new kind of Internet's companies: the "Buzz providers".
They have the task to look for advertisers on one side and for bloggers on the other.
One of them is PayPerPost where you get paid to blog.
They award bloggers with high traffic blogs. You could make $1000 for a single sponsored post!


Chiropractic

I am a pharmacist and I should suggest people to take drugs, but I don't.
I mean, when you really need them, and when they are really useful, you MUST take them, but there are many illnesses that can be cured simly changing your lifestyle.
I know, its much easier to say than to do...
Like loosing weight, it is mathematically simple, eat less calories than what you consume...as if our mouth and stomach understood mathematics...
But what I am talking about: New York Physical Therapy Office is really simple and most than everything EFFECTIVE.
At Spine and Sports Medicine, conveniently located in Midtown Manhattan, NYC, they treat a wide variety of conditions and disorders.
In 1991 Spine and Sports Medicine was established in New York to provide an integrated approach to pain relief using a powerful synergy of physical medicine, physical therapy, and chiropractic care for achieving and maintaining wellness.

They believe in caring for all aspects of patients’ comfort. Their staff members always greet customers with a smile. Their physicians, therapists, and dentist are among New York City’s finest healthcare professionals.
And that is very important.
Because this kind of treatment works if it is done by professionals.
Often we hear: I tried this or that and I had no result.
As we say, the problem is not the cure, it is the doctor...
They treat:
Sport Medicine Pain Treatment
Physical therapy
Chiropractic
Neurology
Orofacial pain
Sleep Disorders
Headaches
Medical Massage
Spine and Sports Medicine in Midtown Manhattan is New York City’s premier physical therapy and rehabilitation treatment center.
So, if you feel one of those symptoms, stop taking drugs and see them!

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Example of good, impressive advertisement

Fat woman


There are THINGS in life that you cannot change, the Blog you daily read IS NOT one of them.
BOOKMARK MY BLOG

Light is life

My eyes need light, my all being needs light, the more the better.
I have a colorful house and everybody likes it, but the colors are bright and warm because my house gets a lot of light.

And in the night?
I love warm lights. I hate the artificial, Neon or LED lights.
It is true, you can save on electricity, but every thigh looks different.
A warm, classic light is what MAKES a room, believe me.
If well chosen and well positioned it gives charm and style to any room.
I am a fanatic of home decoration, I spend more on decorating my home than myself.
I have a house who doesn't look its age, while my face and body do...
But I love to live in a comfortable and cozy place.
I feel good surrounded by nice and pleasant things.
Nice colors, nice furniture.
But, as I said, after many years, I found out that the right light makes a huge difference.
It gives the right shadows to the right spots...
So, it is with the utmost pleasure that I suggest you Home Lighting Fixtures and invite you to choose carefully, may be asking a professional, because this will make a huge difference to your house and to your life.
For example, if you have an old house like mine, something like Tall Wall Sconce 1Lt. Incandes will give that extra touch of” old".
I have a similar one in a very small bathroom. I used a blue and white old looking wall paper, same curtains and a golden wood framed old mirror.
Everybody likes it.
But if you have a modern house, with white walls and very simple and stylish furniture, something like Wall Mt 2 LT Incandescent will certainly look gorgeous.
Good luck in lighting your life!

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Men's only

February 14 is universally known as Valentine's day, so which date could be better than this to release the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue as well as exclusive cell phone wallpapers of SI swimsuit models available at SI Mobile?
A friend of mine once confessed:
"Every year when Summer comes I always have discussions with my wife regarding where to spend our holidays.
She loves mountains, but I prefer to go to the beach.
It is very good for my eyes...all those girls in bikini..."
Now thanks to the Internet with a few clicks of the mouse he can have the same good treatment for his eyes, without even having to go on holidays!
On Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue he can really find the best models he can dream of.
This year Beyonce was chosen as the 2007 cover girl.
In addition to checking out the issue, he can see his favorite SI models at any time by downloading cell phone wallpapers from SI Mobile. These images come straight from the photo shoots featured in the magazine, are only $1.99 each and are available for all major wireless carriers.
On the site are featured over 50 supermodels!
Just to mention a few: Bar Refaeli (who recently broke up with Leonardo DiCaprio), Victoria's Secret model Heidi Klum, Marisa Miller, Ana Beatriz Barros, tennis star Maria Sharapova and Molly Sims.
My friend is usually eager to find new models, but for the nostalgic are also available classic SI cover girl wallpapers from past years including three-time cover girl Elle Macpherson ('87, '88, '94) and Kathy Ireland ('92, '94).

If you ever decide to purchase cell phone wallpapers off the site, you will be asked to provide some personal information to ensure delivery.
You can be sure that your personal information will not be disclosed to any third party.(like wives or girlfriends and so on...)
To give you a hint of what you can find, look at the following pictures:







This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Done is a four letter Word

Done is a four letter Word...

"Still something to do" is a four words statement.

There are two terrible misfortunes in life.
The first is having a goal and not achieving it, the second, even worse, is to achieve it.

I hate having nothing to do, even worse, having nothing new to do.

I love planning my tomorrows and then having to re plane them.
Sometimes it looks like that my yesterdays walk with me and my tomorrows with somebody else. I just cannot see enough, or better, I see too much.

Imagination is something that haunts the people without a present.
At least they can think of a future.
It is like religion or faith.
The less you have in this life, the more you want to believe.

Dreaming is something that haunts the people without a future.
At least they can live what they do not have.
A reality which is better than any reality, because it is unreal.

"Bill Gates personally reviewed every significant product release. When he heard an estimated schedule, he didn’t like he could be quite harsh: the mildest thing he would say is that he could do it himself in VB over the weekend. "

The dreamer is a lucky man, because he can live what the normal man will never be able to live.
The important is that his dreams never become reality...

"Battle-blogging for profit"

AS BLOGS become big business, Internet giants have begun trying to profit from new forms of journalism.
The blogging phenomenon illustrates how some very smart people ended up being both very right and very wrong about a future just beyond the horizon.

Some time ago, blogs -- outside of the small circle of people who actually wrote and read them -- were regarded as the daily diaries of people with no real lives to chronicle in the first place. No more.
Blogging has become a new trend among technology companies hoping to show they're hip to the latest trends and that believe they might benefit from direct connections to potential customers.
The more important blogging, the more important it gets to reach a High Page Rank, which is nothing else that the way to quantifying Site Traffic.
There are many ways to improve traffic on a blog and if you are really interested in it, Zookoda can effectively help you.
First they offer FREE blog email which is an application designed specifically for bloggers.
Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your visitors inbox. That will make easier for them to know when you update it and in the meantime will make them remember that you are THERE.
You will be able to keep your blog audience informed in the form of an email newsletter.
Then you can build a visitor base with subscriptions. You can upload email addresses into custom mailing lists or build your visitor base by creating dynamic blog subscription forms.
You can also schedule recurring broadcasts including a feed refresh to update your email content. Promote your blog by sending one-off promotional emails.
You will also be able to have real-time reports that will provide you with a clear view of your email newsletter success.

Well the only thing you need to start is, as usual, a decent number of readers...


Quality in financial information

"Every day we are seeing new ideas, new inventions, and new imperatives that are dramatically reshaping our world.

An explosion of on-line information sources, real-time news feeds, and TV channels devoted to business news has reinvented how we gather and disseminate financial information.
Across the globe, a broad movement towards an equity culture has taken root as traditional bank financing takes a back seat to the emergence of globally interconnected capital markets.
A transparent and trustworthy global financial reporting has also become more important than ever.
Quality information is the lifeblood of strong, vibrant markets.
Without it, investor confidence erodes."
Fair and efficient markets need information quality. As the quantity of information increases exponentially through the Internet and other technologies, the quality of that information must be of ethical integrity.

If you have access to the information highway, Internet, and an interest in financial economics, the Financial Lombard Direct is designed for you.
There you can find all the financial news you need to know.
On their website you can either browse choosing the category you are interested in or just read the latest financial news.
Lombard Direct is a multi-categories electronic website for scholars and interested individuals in investment banks, banks, companies, government agencies, international agencies and universities.
But there are also interesting features for small investors and people interested in personal finance, like a loan calculator, suggestions how to protect your loan and all the important information's you can ask for.


This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

More and more bandwidth...

Just so, increasing the commonly available symmetric crosscut bandwidth won't make web browsing more popular---just like commonly
available T1s didn't make UUCP more popular and Fast Ethernet didn't make Gopher any more popular.
But AOL usage---"what everyone wants" in 1994---was under 20 kbps, for use on phone lines. Mr. Malik says the web currently works at about 1 Mbps. Of course 100 Mbps symmetric connections to the home won't make a difference in 1 Mbps web surfing---just like they don't make a difference in 20 kbps AOL usage.

But what else will they enable? Multiple simultaneous video streams? Immersive applications? Real-time collaborative software? Cheap,
easy reuse of spare cycles, a sort of NeighborsExcel@Home?

This seems intuitively obvious: As long as I'm regularly being limited by the bandwidth I have, I don't have enough!

It's a little harder to dispose of the server-side-throttling argument. Again, if the use is quite different from the current day,
why should we expect it to use central servers?

We really are AOL users, or perhaps telegraph operators, trying to predict the Web.

-Brian Sniffen


The Internet began with being web browsing and emailing and in most part of the World it is still just that, because most of the Internet is a low bandwidth network.

On one side broadband and on the other always better compressions allowed the use of images and videos on web pages.
May be most users forget what websites used to be just a few years ago and how full of images they are now.
It wouldn't be possible to access them with a modem.
We need always more bandwidth because we have always new applications for it.
And the future will be a totally different Network, thanks to more and more available bandwidth.

It was the same with electricity.
They began using it for a few bulbs, then came one after the other all the electric appliances and we still use more and more energy...

Multiple simultaneous video streams. Immersive applications. Real-time collaborative software and much, much more...
Let's not put limits to human imagination...

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

What to do with what you have

If you are 65 or above, if you begin to understand that however long your life is it is worth to begin to live, that your future is shrinking and your past is getting everyday bigger, that your only future is looking every day more like present than future, this is the right moment to change.
If you saved all your life and invested all your life, it is the time to enjoy what you saved.
And you can have wonderful opportunities to make the most out of what you saved.
For example, did you know about Life/Viatical Settlements? What is it?
Life Settlements are cash payments made to people who sell their life insurance for a percentage of the death benefit.
There are investors who want to buy life insurance policies in order to balance out their investment portfolio's.
These investors are willing to pay much more for a life policy than the insurance company offers as the "surrender value"; on average 3 - 4 times as much.
This can mean the difference between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars, to you...
Would you like to know how much you could eventually get out of your insurance?

There is a Life Policy Value Calculator where you can input all you data and will be able to see what you could get.
Secure Life Settlements has the knowledge and experience to get you the highest offer for your policy, because they know which banks to solicit given your specific needs. This allows them to generate the highest offers, at NO OBLIGATION or COST TO YOU; you decide whether or not to move forward - it's that simple.



This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Dreaming costs nothing...

That is what my friend always says, but I do not fully agree with it.
Sometimes you spend a fortune following a dream and still you do not realize it.

I also do not believe the people who assure you, if you really want something you will achieve it.

It usually takes much more than just dreaming and wanting.
Doing can be a hard a difficult job.
But nevertheless it is stupid to give up.
Because the real goal sometimes is the dream, not the reality.

Love is what makes the World go on...

I do not remember a time I have been without a boyfriend, since of course I had the age to need one.
And not because I am particularly attractive or intelligent, just because I hate to be alone and I enjoy being with the opposite sex.

I believe most of the people are like me, nobody likes to be alone.
Once you found your friends and boyfriends (or girlfriends) in school or in the place you worked, or where you went on your free time.
Now a days people, young people, spend most of their time on the Internet, so THAT is the place to meet.
And one of the best business on the Net is of course a dating service
I think it is also more intriguing and exciting to meet somebody in that way.
You are not just bound to the outside look (usually anyway when you upload a picture, you certainly upload a nice one) but you can ACTUALLY know much better a person writing and talking about life, interests and so on.
First you are a good friend and later you become something more, or not...
And if the Internet is the Future, so relationships of the future will be built on the Internet.
There is a high quality and truly free dating site: JustSayHi.com.
The features are as a good as any paid dating site yet it is really 100% free.
No credit card is ever required.
A REAL free dating site needs to exist this way and they built it. They surely can help people find the relationships that matter.
And especially on this Valentine's day, let me say one thing:
Love, friendship, communication are really and truly the only good reasons to live and not just survive.
And love is what makes the World go on..




This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Valentine’s Day Challenge

Filed under: Growth — Jerry Lopper

"In the spirit of love I challenge you to commit yourself to unconditional love. Pick one person in your life: your spouse, significant other, child, parent, or friend. Commit that from this day forward you will love that person unconditionally.

Write the following: Dear (name), from this day forward I commit to love you unconditionally. I will love you no matter what you do, what you say, or how you behave. I will simply and totally love you. I hope that you love me, too, but that is not a condition. There are no conditions. I love you.

After you have written this, notice how you feel. You might feel light, free, joyous, or even full-of-yourself for being so magnanimous. But if you sincerely committed to unconditional love, I think you’ll enjoy some wonderful feelings."

If I did something of this kind I would feel utterly, desperately, unconditionally... very stupid.

Calculators

I still belong to the generation where you had to calculate with your mind.
We spent five years of grammar school to learn mostly how to calculate.
Then they invented the calculators and all the fun was gone!
Let's be honest: what do you teach now in grammar school?
Simply how to use a keyboard.
As for the body, when they invented elevators there was no way to do a daily gym walking on the stairs, so for the mind you do not need to exercise your brain anymore: just a few strokes and the sum is THERE!

Well. to avoid people got too bored and abandon arithmetic’s, they invented many types of calculators.
So that every time is almost like doing a mental operation, you have to learn how to use this special calculator.
And believe me, you just have to choose!
Simply go to Credit Provide and you will find:

1)Mortgage Refinance Calculator
With it you can calculate how much you can save by refinancing your existing mortgage to a lower interest mortgage.
This calculator could also be used when consolidating additional debt into the new mortgage.

2) Simple Loan Calculator
With this you can calculate monthly payments and total interest paid.

3)Payday Loan Calculator
This reveals the monthly and yearly interest rate on a Payday loan.
Since these loans are short term, the cost of these loans may appear to be low, but the real interest rate will reveal the true cost.

But that is NOT ALL.
You can additionally find articles that explains what the calculators calculate(which I think is the first thing to understand)
You can find out what exactly is a Payday Loan which in simple words means that when you still have two weeks to go before your pay day and you urgently need cash, they tell you where to go and the Calculator tells exactly how much it is going to cost you...

And there is also an Education Center where they warn you of all the risks you are going into the moment you are looking for a loan or a mortgage.
Well, I think that now a days nobody, when making debts, should be allowed to say: I didn't know or I didn't know how much! You got all the possible calculators. But sometimes you still lack one:
The calculator of how to pay back...


This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

Our political representatives

The Italian political representative considers himself no business man, but a soldier acting in defence of justice and peace.
He is smooth and corteous; he smiles in a superior way; he is agreable and obliging.
There are various, centuries-old true Italian traditions to secure his behaviour.

1) All orders and directives to the public are worded in such a way that they should have no meaning whatever.

2) All official letters are written in such a language that the oracles of Delphi sound as examples of clear, outspoken, straightforward statements compared with them.

3) Political representatives never make decisions, they only promise to "consider", "consider favourably" or, and this is the utmost, "reconsider" certain questions.

4) In principle the Political Representative stands always at the disposal of the public.
In practice he is either in "conference" or out for lunch, or in, but having his coffee, or just out.
Some develop an admirable technique of going out for a coffee before coming back from lunch.

The Italian polical representative, unlike the rough bully we often find on the rest of Europe, is the Obedient Servant of the public.
In the rest of Europe rich and influential people, or those who have friends or cousins or brothers in law, tenants, business associates, often cannot have their requests fulfilled.
In Italy there is a certain degree of corruption and your obedient servant will do what you require, depending who you are.
And this is the real beuty of non-democracy.

How much have I made?

As usual, it depends on the point of view...
I think I made a lot, because it was fun working and when you like what you do, it's like a past time talking about sponsored content...

Everyday two opportunities, too bad I couldn't choose the ones I would have liked most.
Either they were already taken or I wasn't good enough.
Well I think it is fair.
If I was an advertiser I wouldn't want to waste my money in blogs where few people go or in posts I do not think will be effective.
And most of us bloggers are some kind of unprofessional.
On the other end, that is what makes this way of advertising something different.
It is not only the buzz, it is the way they propose the matter.
Some time ago I wrote about the difference between a journalist and a blogger.
And I said in my opinion sometimes bloggers can be better than journalists.
First they do not use a jargon, but they write the simple way people of everyday talk.
And that makes it easier to understand. And when something is easier to understand is also easily spread.( and people like it)
They complain people do not read enough newspapers or news.
The main reason is that they find them boring.
When they write about simple gossip they sell more.
So why not making news simpler, as we say "ad usum delphini"? ( which means translated in a way that the "delphinum" which is the prince as a pupil)?

Second feature of a blogger's advertisement is that it is written with a kind of personal involvement. "I tried it, or I faced this situation, or I thought about it..."and you feel it is true.
It is not like a famous actor who says I use this car, when everybody knows he wouldn't.
It is by far more convincing to say: "I would like to use this car, the problem is I cannot afford it, but if you can...lucky you!"
Going back to the subject.
As usual, since as I wrote in my other posts, I am not the "spending" and "enjoying to the full" type, I invested the PPP post money on my Paypal account to buy nice and cheap things on Ebay.com and I sold some of them on ebay.it.
I made happy six people:

1) The American who sold the staff
2) the Italian who bought it
3) Ebay.com
4) Ebay.it
5) Paypal
6) ME

And if you would add to the lot PAYPERPOST and the ADVERTSER who made me make the money, you can have a good idea of how a well organized marketing can make a booming Economy!!!!


Saturday, February 10, 2007

High page rankings

If I said I never cared for rankings I would say a lie, let's put it in this way: I never cared TOO MUCH about page ranking.
In principle it shouldn't be so difficult, you just have to fool a computer...
But IT IS.
It looks like that computer is quite smart, or at least the one who programmed it.
I asked around and had one answer: it is easy, just write the things people like to read.
As If I didn't know.
Of course when you write what people want to read it should be a natural consequence to have a lot of people actually reading your blog and hence the high ranking.
The problem is: I do not doubt that there are some people who like to read what I write (I would have liked to write many, but being humble prevented me), but If I do not have a high page rank and I am not in a good position on search engines, how can they find me and find what they would be happy to read?
I, on my side, am very sure there are out there a lot of blogs I would enjoy reading, but how to find them?

So, this matter of high page rank should be manged in a different way.

Italy, Italy

My country is very old and as all the old things, has much to say and also a lot of wisdom.
Wisdom is what you have when you lost everything else.
If you still belong to that category of people who believe that a big bank account makes life comfortable, you never met anybody from Napoli.
He will explain what life is and how to live it.

First:

Never ask what the future will be.
Live in the present and enjoy it.
Tomorrow somebody will provide for.
And, as a matter of fact, in spite of all the most tragical predictions about Napoli,it looks like people there still survive pretty well.

Second:

family and friends are the most important thing in your life.
Today I give and tomorrow I take.
That usually works pretty well.
Much better than: Today I take and tomorrow I still take.

Third:

never under evaluate the power of faith.
That is what saves you. Whatever happens you still have something to grab.

We are the country with the Vatican, and probably that helped and still helps.

But if you want to buy a property in my country there is nothing better than Toscana.
There you can have all kinds of landscapes in one small region.
You have wonderful and stylish beaches on the mar Tirreno (Viareggio, Fonte dei Marmi) you have a wonderful hilly landscape with beautiful trees and flowers, you can ski on the monte Amiata, you can even see the "butteri" (Italian cowboys) in the wild Maremma and you can visit the most precious treasures of Italy. Think of Florence, history and art.
If the Medici chose Tuscany to live I think a property in Tuscany will satisfy all the most difficult tastes..


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Why Open Source Isn't an Enterprise Solution...why it can be...

Albert F. Case, Jr. [Stamford Research LLC,SourcingWorld Partners




Excuse me for a moment while I pull the arrows out ... Ouch! I think I've discovered that many Open Source advocates, pundits and consultants either don't read - or don't like to be offered advice. I feel like a pin cushion - but, masochist that I am, I persist. And now, I think I shall go kick a open source hornet's nest, just for fun!

OK, So There Could Be Open Source Enterprise Applications After All
Yes, Virginia, there could be an open source enterprise application in your future, despite my dire predictions of the death of the software business at the hands of open source programmers - and the related death of viable, non-custom enterprise applications as well. However, as the "dot bombers" needed a viable business model, so too do the open sourcists who intend to storm the enterprise application beach head.

Martin Mickos in his December 30, 2004 AlwaysOn post, "Open Source: Is It Time to Sell Out?" is headed in the right direction with dual licensing. But along with a licensing model, we also need a comprehensive, and viable, business model.



Excuse me for a moment while I pull the arrows out ... Ouch! I think I've discovered that many Open Source advocates, pundits and consultants either don't read - or don't like to be offered advice. I feel like a pin cushion - but, masochist that I am, I persist. And now, I think I shall go kick a open source hornet's nest, just for fun!

OK, So There Could Be Open Source Enterprise Applications After All
Yes, Virginia, there could be an open source enterprise application in your future, despite my dire predictions of the death of the software business at the hands of open source programmers - and the related death of viable, non-custom enterprise applications as well. However, as the "dot bombers" needed a viable business model, so too do the open sour cists who intend to storm the enterprise application beach head.

Martin Mickos in his December 30, 2004 AlwaysOn post, "Open Source: Is It Time to Sell Out?" is headed in the right direction with dual licensing. But along with a licensing model, we also need a comprehensive, and viable, business model.

Elements of the Model

The model must allows open source to remain open and available - preferably without license fees.
The model must encourage adaptation and inclusion of elements by disparate contributors
The model must allow open source technology to be embedded within and linked to commercial software without forcing the entire commercial package to be placed in the public, open source domain.
If money changes hands as part of a commercial transaction (see #3), some of that money needs to go back to the appropriate open source community ... even back to the developer.
As Martin Mickos says, there must be a quid-pro-quo ...
Then we can have a viable model.

How a Transportable Source Model Works
The concept is relatively simple in design, but not so trivial to implement. The first step is the need for both paid and unpaid licenses for the same product. However, this is a potential nightmare - so we suggest a modified GPU license with provisions for the inclusion of open source software within commercial software solutions.


There would be no up-front license fee for this, since that could eliminate small players (exactly the type of innovators you do not want to alienate).

There needs to be a clearinghouse, similar to the copyright clearinghouse, for payments for open source software included in commercial solutions.

Software developers "register" their open source with the clearinghouse, and license under the clearinghouse terms and conditions.

Software developers, registering with the clearinghouse may patent their software - and may have both free and paid licenses to the patents.

A "price range" is specified when a license is issued for a commercial product that contains embedded open source using the new license structure. The range contains a "minimum" price, and potentially graduated prices as the license price of the embedded software increases.

The commercial organization makes payments to the clearinghouse within 30 days of collecting the fees for the license. All embedded open source payments may be made in a single payment to a single source.

The clearinghouse keeps a small fee (say 1% to 5% ) of the fee paid by the commercial software company and remits the rest to the developer/developer organization.

The clearinghouse fee is spent on promoting the library and on auditing the commercial software firms that use the service.

Win ... Win ... Win ...

Please blog my blog

It is funny.

Just yesterday I posted about important people who do not like comments on their blogs, or better, they want to CONTROL comments on their blog.

The facts are the following:

I tell you what happened yesterday.
I wanted to try a new strategy to upgrade my rankings.
Google says the only way is having links from important websites, so I tried to write some comments in the top blogs.
But it looks like that is the most difficult thing to do.
As a naïve and "bacterial" blog writer I mistakenly supposed that people would be happy to have somebody commenting on their website.
Nothing of that kind.
If you go for example in the blog "Hot air" which I would rename "hot air mixed to juicy arrogance" you find out that, first you have to be a "registered member" second, sorry, but the registrations are closed and not only, "they reserve the right to kick you out whenever it pleases them".
Well, I think one can easily survive without being a member of that "hot air mixed to juicy arrogance", nevertheless I was negatively surprised that so arrogant people could reach such a high ranking.

And I love commenting.
Besides looking for links (which I am not even sure really works)I am looking for ideas and reading is the best way to exercise your mind.
It comes without saying that I like to communicate and commenting on a blog is MY WAY to communicate.
For me going to somebody's website or blog is like being invited to his "virtual place", reading what he has to say, entering his thoughts and commenting is a polite way to say "hallo I am here, I agree or I disagree or allow me to say this or that..."
It is what makes blogging much better than writing an article on a newspaper.
It is what catches the audience and what helps to spread ideas to make new ideas that will catch other people who will transform those ideas in new words (hopefully and not JUST copying)and make new blogs to which there will be new comments and so on...
Then I finally come to the point.
What could I think of somebody who offers me a program that ACTUALLY pays when people blog about my blog, to promote my blog and build traffic?
My blog is called VoIP and not Hot air.
And VoIP means Voice Over IP and includes my voice, from my blog and not only on an alternative Telephone service...
I think that good ideas are the ones that make roots and make new ideas and new ideas make a new and hopefully better world.
Jeff Jarvis once defined advertise on blogs as an "insidious effort to buy bloggers’ voice and credibility in the name of buzz".
I see it as a challenge.
If I like to write about the things I like, would I be able to write about something else?
It is a much better way than just a passive review or an ad you put on your website. It is much more effective too.
It is also much more creative (and THAT IS THE FUN)
You decide what and how and when and also if...And you are even paid for!!!

PS But How to make people blogging about your blog? Suggestions welcome!

Friday, February 09, 2007

"Hot Air and Juicy Arrogance"

When you are nobody, or close to it, you have to pay to be talked about, when you are somebody you have to pay NOT to be talked about.

I was, as usual, looking around on blogs and found an interesting note on a TOP blog, Hot air:

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Registration is currently closed. That means if you're not already registered, you can't comment. We will let you know if and when registration re-opens. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

No comment...but a suggestion, I would rename it "hot air and jucy arrogance" because they actually do not give just Hot air, they mix it with plenty of arrogance...

The multitasking tool

Already a device of multiple disguises, from camera to music player and mini-TV, the cell phone's next trick may be the disappearing wallet.
After all, since more than a quarter of the people on the planet already carry around cell phones, and hundreds of millions are joining them every year, why should they bring along credit and debit cards when a mobile device can make payments just as well?


At the simplest level, all that's needed is to embed phones with a short-range radio chip to beam credit card information to a terminal at a store register. It's not unlike the wireless system used to pay tolls on many highways.
But how to choose the right cell phone?

The new BlackBerry Pearl with the right plans could be your faithful wallet.
By now you can get a discount on a phone when you sign a new cell phone contract, but these days the kinds of new phones you get for free are super hot. Wirefly's featured deals include a free BlackBerry Pearl (free at checkout, no rebates required!) and all types of RAZRs.
You can get up to 5 free cell phones with a T-Mobile FamilyTime Plan.

But there also are more ambitious visions brewing that contemplate the cell phone as a new focal point for managing your personal finances.
The phone would supplant not only credit and debit cards, but wallets, checkbooks, Web sites, computer programs, and online bill payment services such as PayPal.

So, it comes without saying that it is of the utmost importance to choose the right phone and the right plans.
Wirefly is the leading online retailer of cell phones and wireless service plans, offering more carriers, plans and phones, than any other online cell phone store.
They offer unmatched resources to help individuals and families pick the best phones, the best carrier, and the best wireless plans— and their cell phones are backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

As one of the most popular electronics shopping sites on the Internet, the award-winning Wirefly site makes the process of shopping for a cell phone simple and secure.
In fact, their e-commerce platform is used by many other online cell phone retailers like Radio Shack, Motorola.com, Buy.com, AOL Mobile and other online brands. Wirefly.com is certified by Trust-e, Scan Alert and VeriSign.





This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.

TV or Movie on a portable?

TV or Movie on a portable?Why not?

But I do not see it as direct streaming to a portable.
I see the portable more as a mobile device you bring with you and in which you store your movies or TV programs...

I know that won't bring rvenues to the mobile providers...but THAT IS EXACTLY the point.
Why should you pay to download on a slow, low bandwidth, highly expensive, wireless line when you can on the Internet?

You plan it, download it from the Internet, or from your computer and bring your mobile (I think a PDA would have a better size screen) and watch it, on a train, on a plane,(in the office) or wherever you want to...

That is the most probable future, or at least the most probable near future.
May be someday, somehow the technology will allow to see TV on your small screen, but not now, with 3 frames per second...(Telecom Italia TV on a portable phone...)

About eCards

A card has no heart, but plenty of colors...
An image is worth a K words.
So, if you are lazy, if you have no fantasy, no memory for birthdays, anniversaries, special dates and so on...but you have a girlfriend or a wife, or somebody else who cares, just let the expert do it.
Egreetings.com will do it for you.

There you can find the best assortment of funny, risque, animated eCards, including funny birthday eCards, Valentine eCards and other occasions.
All eCards on the site can be personalized with a message and pictures.
Besides customers can get a free 30-day trial membership to send unlimited eCards and a yearly subscription is only $13.99.
One of the main benefits of membership is that users can schedule eCards to arrive on a specific date, so it's possible to personalize a birthday or Valentine eCard whenever you want and schedule it to be sent immediately or on the exact date you choose. Without talking of the time and money you save sending eCards compared to buying and mailing traditional paper greeting cards.
Current popular eCards include birthday eCards like "Birthday Cleavage" and "A Birthday Wish (or Two)" (all new birthday eCards are viewable at Egreetings.com ).

And this is the special moment to send a special card to that special somebody...
You can play with traditional, funny and why not? Even naughty cards...
In other words: it is so much easier to express yourself with an ecard.
You choose, you write the name, a few words, if you like and just click!

This is a sponsored post, please read disclosure policy.








Valentine's Day eCard by "The Chins"

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Globalization

It was an article of Clyde Prestowitz in the Boston Globe, I have liberally taken from it.
It was talking about USA, but it fits Europe perfectly...

While European state governors extend financial incentives to attract investment, they have only peanuts to offer compared to foreign countries, and, of course, do not control their own currencies.
The EU government has long shown no interest in attracting foreign factories to or keeping EU factories on its shores.
Rather, Europe's emphasis is entirely on consumption-led growth. Banks aggressively offer credit cards to students with only part-time jobs.
Home equity loans with tax deductible interest payments are used to pay for vacation trips. Europe tells consumers it's their patriotic duty to buy more. Europeans at all levels really do believe that debt and deficits don't matter.

This has produced a world with one net consumer, Europe, which now consumes more than it produces.
All other major economies are net sellers.
Because Europe consumes more than it makes, it must borrow from abroad to finance its excess consumption.
To maintain global growth, Europe must consume and borrow ever more.
Consumers love the low import prices, Europe CEOs love the foreign tax holidays, and the Europe government loves the foreign lending that helps keep Europe interest rates low. But the chronically overvalued Euro and the foreign investment incentives also cause a steady transfer of production and technology abroad while putting downward pressure on wages and building large foreign claims on future Europe income. This results in political pressures and Europe charges of unfairness against trading partners with big surpluses.
Now the sustainability of the system has been put in question by the entrance of 3 billion new players from China, India, and the former Soviet bloc at a moment when the Internet and global air express have negated time and distance along with the long standard economic assumptions that labor, capital, and technology don't move between countries.

These new players are unusual. While having the low wages of developing countries, several hundred million of them have first world skills. That they are effectively next door and also planning to grow by exporting to Europe markets dramatically increases the pressure on an already stressed system. Even for Europe there are ultimate limits on consumption and borrowing.
Not surprisingly the global economy will be in deep crisis.
 
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