Slashdot Mirror

Like this for instance

http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/terrorist2.html

Verizon does the same thing in the US. I know of one ISP that actually tells its users that it's cheaper to go directly to Verizon than go through them (though they'll still accept people that want to pay more, and for business customers who want a static IP, they're still cheaper). Verizon offers 3.0/768 at $29.95/month, and charges $37.50/month to connect you to a different ISP.

2500 gallons is like 10 TONS of water.

I'll make a couple of suggestions, I have various family members using one or the other, both use standard PPP dialup software:

• FlexNet
• Highstream

I used to get dialup, then dsl from flex until roadrunner came into my town. They were, and probably still are, the best dialup isp in Hawaii. The AOL rant was the main reason I signed up.

It would be nice if there was a similar discount cable isp that didn't need to send out two guys just to turn on dhcp.

the GURU ISP, make the user take a test if they want to open an account. If they cannot answer some reasonable networking questions, tell them thanks and refer them to another ISP.

You must mean like this one. Selected quotes:

We don't have a tech support staff, so you have to know what you are doing. When you do sign up, you will just get a USERNAME, PASSWORD and MODEM PHONE NUMBER. Nothing else.

We don't run Microsoft stuffs (like FrontPage, IIS or Access) and never will.

56K connections are the bane of all ISPs. 56K is so dependent on line conditions. You get what you get. No ISP in the world can gurantee 56K speeds, or anywhere close to it.
If you say that your "other" ISP had better 56k connections, then you best go back to that ISP. Really folks, a 3K or 5K difference in connection speed is nothing.

do you want to bitch and bitch, or connect?

No need to tell us anything, so please don't. I get way too much email as it is.

If your question could have been answered by you reading these pages, then most likely I'll just delete your email without a response.

And the winner....
"As a general rule, America Online users are not computer savvy or it seems, capable of the level of technical sophistication necessary to operate a computer outside of an AOL environment."

FlexNet is an ISP that has been doing just that for a long time. No, I'm not afilliated with them in any way either, just came across them awhile ago, though I don't remember how...

Check out http://www.flex.com/sign_up/ if you are in Hawaii. $10 a month for unlimited dial up. No tech support. They give you the numbers you need and that's it. Best of all, they bash AOL users and post their hate mail :)

Yes, flex.com or known as shaka.com or virtualwebsite.com or some other ones.

I used them for about a year before I moved away from the islands. They're such an awesome ISP. A buddy of mine knew the admin, del, and he's a very funny guy. I guess del is just sick and tired of computer illiterate people.

It is funny, though. If you dig into their site, there's a rant and rave list of emails from their customers.

Also, for those who don't know Hawaii's pidgen talk, the letters are very humorous... only because I always though pidgen was silly. (A mixture of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese... basically all your Asian immagrants to Hawaii during the plantation days trying to speak English).

--
Neafevoc

Yes, flex.com or known as shaka.com or virtualwebsite.com or some other ones.

I used them for about a year before I moved away from the islands. They're such an awesome ISP. A buddy of mine knew the admin, del, and he's a very funny guy. I guess del is just sick and tired of computer illiterate people.

It is funny, though. If you dig into their site, there's a rant and rave list of emails from their customers.

Also, for those who don't know Hawaii's pidgen talk, the letters are very humorous... only because I always though pidgen was silly. (A mixture of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese... basically all your Asian immagrants to Hawaii during the plantation days trying to speak English).

--
Neafevoc

Faradic.net has an amazingly sensible price list that includes background daemons, IRC bots, and the like.

The one thing that is kind of limited is the disk space. The default ($9.95/month, $7.95 if paid annually) shell account only has 30 MB of quota, and additional space is ordinarily kind of dear ($0.25/MB/month), but I suspect that price just hadn't been adjustted lately and a few GB is negotiable.

They appear to be allergic to hand-holding, but do keep things working just fine.

Speaking of which, for a real change of attitude, see FlexNet in Hawaii. They offer zero tech support with attitude. You get a username, password, and phone number. Their NOC phone number is fairly easy to find, and they promise to hang up on you rudely if you call about anything except a problem at their end.

This is kind of an irrelevant plug, because they don't offer shell service (AFAIK), and I'm nowhere near Hawaii. I just think anyone who starts their main web page with "So that things are clear to you, please read this Letter From a Disgruntled Customer." is cool.

Faradic.net has an amazingly sensible price list that includes background daemons, IRC bots, and the like.

The one thing that is kind of limited is the disk space. The default ($9.95/month, $7.95 if paid annually) shell account only has 30 MB of quota, and additional space is ordinarily kind of dear ($0.25/MB/month), but I suspect that price just hadn't been adjustted lately and a few GB is negotiable.

They appear to be allergic to hand-holding, but do keep things working just fine.

Speaking of which, for a real change of attitude, see FlexNet in Hawaii. They offer zero tech support with attitude. You get a username, password, and phone number. Their NOC phone number is fairly easy to find, and they promise to hang up on you rudely if you call about anything except a problem at their end.

This is kind of an irrelevant plug, because they don't offer shell service (AFAIK), and I'm nowhere near Hawaii. I just think anyone who starts their main web page with "So that things are clear to you, please read this Letter From a Disgruntled Customer." is cool.

Faradic.net has an amazingly sensible price list that includes background daemons, IRC bots, and the like.

The one thing that is kind of limited is the disk space. The default ($9.95/month, $7.95 if paid annually) shell account only has 30 MB of quota, and additional space is ordinarily kind of dear ($0.25/MB/month), but I suspect that price just hadn't been adjustted lately and a few GB is negotiable.

They appear to be allergic to hand-holding, but do keep things working just fine.

Speaking of which, for a real change of attitude, see FlexNet in Hawaii. They offer zero tech support with attitude. You get a username, password, and phone number. Their NOC phone number is fairly easy to find, and they promise to hang up on you rudely if you call about anything except a problem at their end.

This is kind of an irrelevant plug, because they don't offer shell service (AFAIK), and I'm nowhere near Hawaii. I just think anyone who starts their main web page with "So that things are clear to you, please read this Letter From a Disgruntled Customer." is cool.

...it is forced on them by circumstances ultimately stemming from customer choice.

tech support person providing polite and effective help for half an hour receives the same wage as a tech support person providing intimidation and ridicule for half an hour

...right up until they are fired for taking an hour and a half with each customer, and having frequent repeat callers, when the jerk next to you is taking 5 minutes and his callers never use tech support twice. You can't take the attitude that the customer is more important than your manager; you get to treat the customer well when the manager tells you to do so.

As a tech writer, what's best for the customer is always best for the company. Those documents only need to be written once, and the better they are, the fewer support calls and returns they will get. You are in a privileged position to be able to follow your natural inclination to be helpful, unless you are hired by a particularly incompetent bastard.

But the pressure to be rude to the customers comes directly from the customers themselves.

The customers select only the cheapest service, this puts pressure on the business to cut costs, which puts pressure on the tech support managers to squeeze more clients for the same tech support dollar, who then start firing tech support guys who take too long to get people off the phone. The jerks succeed, the nice, helpful people get tossed. Some are naturals, while many more are changed by the pressure ("Augh! This idiot is going to cost me my job! I'm under quota! How can I make him go away?").

Of course, the pressure from the customer comes in part from misinformation handed to them in advertising.

I applaud open and honest advertising like this. If more people saw that good tech support is too expensive for cheap products and services, they might start making informed decisions about whether they are willing to pay for it or would be better off learning to handle things for themselves.

Well, they get what you deserve for watching an hour of advertising each day. Of course you're going to make bad decisions based on all that misinformation. I hate paid advertising.

--------

Oops. Yep, that's the one. I thought it was a joke, at first!
http://www.flex.com

I'm really not sure that I want the cable company deciding on what security policy is appropriate for my home network. Either it's going to be worthless and do something boneheaded like not block 139 or it's going to be so tight that I can't take advantage of the fact that I have a fast connection with a pretty much static IP address. I want to be able to have ports 22 and 80 open if I decide that I want that functionality. I want to be able to host my own e---------ma il domains if I decide that I want to do that. I want to be able to set up my own NAT box and set policies in the way that I see fit. I really don't believe that that's going to happen if the cable company sets things up for me.

What people need to start realizing is that an always on broadband connection to their home is a completely different ball game than any connection through AOL. The only hope I see at this point for broadband being useful to /.ers and for general users is if the market really does become open and we start to have real choice in ISPs with broadband. That way we can have ISPs like FlexNet for those of us who just want a raw internet pipe with none of the extras and AOL for those who want their online experiencefiltered down and spoon fed to them.
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them

uuh... should they not be trying to register flex.com? After all they are not an orginization. And the Hawains don't need the internet anyway.

It was just a matter of time before someone jumped on the "YOUR CYBERSQUATTING!" band wagon with no good reason.
-----
If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.

For any HDL hobbyists out there, or anyone who would be intersted in a bare-bones verilog simulator check out the VBS (Verilog Behavioral Simulator) project. You can download the Linux binaries and/or and source code. There's a pre-processor avialable too. This program works pretty well, I had it running on a Linux box of mine for a bit last year. I even wrote a CGI front end for it so I could run some simulations remotly over the web. That was cool. :)