Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Online Money Management
Do you have several places your money is coming from and going too? Is it hard to keep track of all of your money? Would you like to take your little check book to the world of the web? Then I recommend the totally free and totally amazing Mint.com!Currently on Mint.com I am tracking my two credit cards, my checking account, savings account, retirement account, and my student loans. When a payment is due for my CC or (starting in a couple of months) my student loans, it will automatically e-mail me or I can have it SMS me (all optional).
Not only that but it also helps budgetting by automatically categorizing all of your purchases and Mint will tell you if you go over your budget. To lazy to make a budget? Well Mint will make one for you based on your average for each category.
If you are smart your next question would be: "Justin, isn't unsafe to store all of your bank/CC/Loan/Investment information on one website? What if you get hacked?" Mint does not actually store any of that information, so if someone got into your Mint account all they would see is how much money you have (or do not have) and would not be able to do anything malicious. http://www.mint.com/safe.html has more info.
So anyway, this post is now finished, and believe it or not I am not even getting paid to do it. Mint.com is totally free and the above mentioned features are only some of the things it has to offer, and more stuff is on the way. I been using it for a year now, so I thought I would share it all with you.
Labels: internet, money, technology
¶ 11:00 PM - 0 Comments - Links to this post
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Verizon to Buy Alltel
In the news now is the possibility that Verizon Wireless will be buying Alltel for $27Bil. This means there are two wireless giants, Verizon and AT&T with some lessers such as T-Mobile, (the "T" stands for terrible), Sprint (because you gotta get out of their contracts as fast as possible) and Virgin (that's just to easy). My point is, if you want reliable service you basically are forced to go with Verizon or AT&T. Personally I would never do business with AT&T so I am a Verizon customer, but there is something seriously wrong with the trend of phone companies consolidating. Cingular (Bell) buys AT&T wireless, then AT&T buys Bell (along with Cingular) Verizon buys Alltel, Sprint buys Nextel, where is the compitition?It is a simple fact, when there are more companies offering products than they compete for customers by both increasing the quality of a product while offering it for less. It is great, that is why we have anti-monoply laws, the same laws that broke AT&T up years ago, and broke Bell up years ago, but it is the same laws that have since faded away due to certain political groups being into office that have allowed the re-emergance of telephony giants, so much so now that there is really only two contenders, and this is not good.
It is not good for phones, but the growing trend in media is also bad. Regardless of what paper you read or what tv channle you watch, you are really only seeing one of maybe four or five companies, and once independent papers like Wall Street Journal are even being eaten by evil corporations, and it is a trend that should stop. That is why blogs are so cool, because they are not owned by group, just cool individuals or small groups :)
Labels: internet, politics, technology
¶ 7:33 PM - 2 Comments - Links to this post
Thursday, May 29, 2008
MediaDefender - The Modern Day Villain
Revision3 is a web based television channel that offers free and original content shows that is supported by donations and advertisements. They offer a great asortment of shows, mostly involve tech stuff, some other geek culture stuff like comics. The shows I watch are Diggnation and The Totally Rad Show. Because all of there shows need to be downloaded and the show size can range from 100mb to 500mb each (because they offer HiDef versions) they use bittorrent technology to help reduce the cost of distributing their content. The benefit of bittorrent is that it large files can download quickly and cheaply because everyone downloading a file downloads bits and pieces from other people downloading it. One of the major problems (or benefits) is that bittorrent is often used for illegal download from sites like ThePirateBay, MiniNova, or Demonoid, to name a few :) Although these sites do use bittorrent to distribute copyrighted material, Revision3 uses it for legal purposes. Enter stage left: MediaDefender.MediaDefender (one shitty website, by the way) is a company that is dedicated to ridding the internets of illegal content, and they do this in a shady way. The comptuers found Revision3 bittorrent and swarmed it with fake files. Revision3 took the files off, because they were not official Rev3 content. As a result MediaDefender started a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on Rev3 this past, memorial day, three day, three days when no one works, weekend. As a result of the DoS attack, Rev3 site went down, corporate e-mail went down, and nothing could be done because MediaDefender could not be contacted because they were on holiday break, as was their ISP. Rev3 runs a legitimate business and is ruined for a three day period, lost three days of ad revenue, and not to mention the poor tech men and women who worked all weekend to fend of the attack.
A lot of people today are on the anti P2P/Bittorrent rampage thus companies like MediaDefender can operate legally using illegal means (DoS attacks are illegal in the US). Companies like Rev3 become casualties in the crossfire. The FBI claims to be looking into the matter yet I doubt anything will happen from it. MediaDefender champion themselves as the protectors of content yet not only do they use illegal means to this but they actually hurt some legitimate means of distributing content! This is not acceptable! I just hope Rev3 to get lost revenue and for wages for the workers and just to show the bastards that they are not above the law, no matter how righteous they believe their cause to be!
You can read more about this attack at the Rev3 blog: http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3
Labels: internet, rev3, technology
¶ 8:57 PM - 0 Comments - Links to this post
Friday, May 16, 2008
$1.8 Billion Dollar Mistake
I love technology and love the internet and I realized that I have yet to post anything relating to it so here I go:It has recently be reported that CBS purchased Cnet for $1,800,000,000, and no I did not add extra zeros in there. Cnet was a cool site seven years ago. Now they are just another company who does reviews on technology products like phones and computers and they became just a corporate company who was clearly biased in their reviews and now with CBS running things it will probably get worse.
Now, that is just why I think Cnet sucks, now why I think it is a bad move on CBS's part. The future of the internet is not content like this, where someone submits a review of a product, the future of the internet is connectivity and socialization because socialization is so much easier over the internet! Digg.com is a great example of a website that would be a better purchase than Cnet. Not only does Digg do news which is similar to CBS but it has a dedicated and growing fan base and this is because of the social features that are involved. People add each other as friends to see what each other likes in the news realm which makes it a bit more fun. People can comment on stories and this creates a strong community. Cnet may have some features like this but they are weak, they are also history because they are going to be left in the dust.
CBS should have followed in the feet of Rupert Murdoch (I cannot believe I just said that). He purchased myspace.com and in doing so is gambling on the future of the internet and in my opinion made the right choice, they just bought a crappy website (myspace sucks, by the way). CBS could have forked over some money for Facebook (worth a lot more than $1.8B and rightfully so), or payed less for a Digg.com and been able to actually make an intelligent purchase. Some other smart purchases are Google's buy of Blogger, (because blogging is the future too!) and youtube.com because all these sites rely on the community, almost grassroots like, work of the power internet users!
For CBS's sake, I hope this pays off well for them. I like CBS, they have some good shows, but frankly $1.8 Bil is a price tag that is giving a dying company (Cnet) more credit than it is worth.
Labels: internet, politics, technology
¶ 2:33 PM - 0 Comments - Links to this post