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Is Your Jar Full?

When things in your life seem almost to much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar……and the beer.

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From Mexico to Florida and all the way across America to New York, swine flu has become a hot topic. As many as 75 students at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens got sick on Thursday. More got sick on Friday. What health officials want to know is was it swine flu or something more benign. The hype is on for any large numbers of people getting sick as a pandemic could cause great disruption and thousands of deaths. 

There are mounting fears about a deadly swine flu virus that is reported to have killed as many as 60 people in Mexico, one that health officials fear has already seeped into the United States. A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that spreads through populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide.

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Can You Protect Yourself From The Swine Flu?         

                         By Sandy Powers

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Telephone bills can add up, especially if a person makes a lot of long distance calls. Fortunately, thanks to advancing Internet technology there is an excellent calling alternative when people want to save on long distance. This alternative is called VoIP, (Voice over Internet Protocol). With VoIP voice travels through one’s Internet connection rather than the phone line.
VoIP’s main advantage lies in its extremely discounted price, if the service even charges anything. Free VoIP setups are typically the case when computer-to-computer communication is used, though there are a few computer-to-phone services available that are also free. In a VoIP arrangement where a price is charged, the fee is nominal, though can vary in payment method. For example, some VoIP services will work like a calling card or a prepaid cell phone. Users buy a certain number of minutes, with the amount being significantly higher than what would normally be available through calling cards or prepaid cell phones. Minutes for international calls might be slightly more expensive, but not much more. Other VoIP payment arrangements involve a person paying a monthly or annual subscription fee. These fees can range from $20 to $200, though the average price is around $25. In a subscription arrangement users get an unlimited number of long distance calls.
So, how does one go about finding a VoIP provider? They can start by investigating the VoIP services offered by their Instant Messenger. This is because most of the major messengers, (including Yahoo, AOL and MSN), will allow for some form of VoIP communication. Yet, if a person is not satisfied with what is available with their messenger, they could do a greater search by making inquires on a search engine. The best keywords to use are “VoIP”, “free Internet calls” or “Internet calling.” The quotation marks should be included, since they help tell the search engine to look just for these specific phrases. Alternatively, they could do searches on some of the most well-known VoIP services, such as Skype, Vonage and Ooma.
Once a provider has been found, a person will need to set up their computer for VoIP communication. There are two ways this is done. The first way involves using a microphone or headset for communication. The second way involves getting a VoIP telephone. Both methods work the same way when it comes to setup, at least if a person is using USB versions, (which is the most common format for modern-day computer devices). Anyway, with a USB connection, all a person has to do is plug in the device and it is automatically ready for use. Some additional configurations may need to be done within the VoIP service itself, so that the phone or microphone are detected, but this usually isn’t hard to do.
In conclusion, if a person is interested in saving money on their phone bill, they should look no further than VoIP communication. The service is cheap and pretty much easy to use and set up. The only downside is that sometimes the voice quality is not as good, but this can be greatly improved if a person uses DSL or cable Internet.
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7 Ways For Improving VoIP by Mark Allen1. Variety In The Dedicated Consumer Phone Box Space: Ooma Inc.’s appliance garnered lots of buzz when the fans of PhoneGnome came after it as a copycat device. The Ooma box has numerous extra features, but has a big selling point that PhoneGnome didn’t – it seamlessly integrates with land lines. Expect more variety in this space down the road, as the vendors and manufacturers compete on price, performance, call quality and feature set.Buy Now on eBay2. Microsoft Goes For VOIP: With the (much anticipated) rollout of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 in October, Microsoft has served notice to the rest of the industry that they’re coming. Microsoft always misses on the first two tries at something, but by the third time ’round, they’ll have made the adjustments needed to move into the space. Microsoft’s pitch? Voice will become just another application running on the network. Expect existential questions on the future of PBX systems in the near future.3. Making Transitions Seamless: Switchvox pulled this one – they made their premises-based IP PBX software available to its hosted PBX customers, so that when a small business outgrows the initial hosted offering and needs to bring their PBX server in-house, there’s no costly (and disruptive) transition of services to act as a barrier to entry. This is vendor lock-in at its smartest, and we expect it to become the norm down the road. 4. Open Source Vendors Focus On “Out Of The Box” Installs: Open-source IP PBX software suppliers Digium Inc., Fonality (trixbox) and Pingtel Corp. have shifted to productizing their offerings as stand alone, easy to install appliances, making it a one stop solution for Value Added Resellers. The price of the software is right, and the software itself is rock solid; whether it manages to get past the Open Source “by geeks, for geeks” inadvertent branding remains to be seen, but we’re hopeful.For Pricing & Selection of IP Phones, Go To The Voip Store5. Flat Rate Networking For Hosted VoIP: Junction Networks charges a flat rate for the entire business — no matter how many extensions, plus the actual cost of calls. This saves a lot of money once a business gets past about 20 extensions.6. Desk Phone GUIs For The Masses: IP desk phones with GUIs have been around for three years now; what’s changed is that competition on hardware has almost turned them into commodity items. Expect them to hit commodity status by the end of 2008. This removes another barrier to entry for companies looking to switch over.7. Mobile Call Transitions Break Carrier Reliance: Keeping a customer’s call during the walk from the parking lot to the desk just got easier. Several IP PBX vendors (Siemens AG, Avaya Inc.and Divitas Networks) call hand-offs seamlessly grab calls from dual mode cell phone/WiFi phones, routing them as a parallel call through the enterprise wireless LAN. Most impressively, this was done without cell phone carrier co-operation (indeed, it was done over cellular carrier intransigence.)
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