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Let the Simpsons be Your Free ISP
Anthony Fuentes writes "Looks like Homer and company are getting into the free ISP business, click here for details. Offer applies to win32 users only." Probably because Homer uses Windows - and Internet Explorer, of course, because that's the only browser you can use with this service.
Doh!
Was this posted before? I seem to remember seeing this a few days ago...of course, it could be the voices inside my head again...
Check out Greg's Bridge Page!
Does this mean that Bill Gates is going to show up with goons and "buy him out?" Can it allow me to download nude pictures of Captain Janeway any faster?
"Gee, they have the Internet for computers now! What will they think of next?"
It seems quite fitting that homer uses ie. Afterall, he will he get to "doh" at the ever present crashes.
On the same note, i wonder if homer recomends you accept cookies from strangers...
...what about apletts?
homer also has an intel cpu in his head.
_______________________________________________
There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
If Homer has anything to do with this, I'd steer WAAAAYYYYYYYYY clear. Imagine happily surfing along and all of the sudden your connection gets dumped. Give a quick ring to tech support, the line gets picked up, and the only thing that you can hear is Homer screaming at the top of his lungs, "Oh, the Humanity!"
Mike Liska, Electrical Engineering Technology and Computer Engineering Technology Undergrad, Purdue University.
Reminds me of the episode homer starts his own dot com business and Bill Gates comes to shut him down. :)
-- Virtual Windows Project
There are lots of internet ad-based businesses coming out now, but I don't think they're going to hang around a lot longer. People just don't look at internet ads, and very rarely do they click on them. There is some chance of making money at it with a website that is cheap to run and has thousands and thousands of visitors per month, but there is no way is this advertising worth the cost of running and supporting an internet provider. Advertisers will learn this sooner or later.
Follow this link for a good article on this.
I looked at the site, and didn't see any "Used with permission from 20th Century Fox" or similar boilerplate. Their little "bar" has a Fox link, but again, no licence information.
:-)).
:)
Is this ISP using the media and characters without permission? 1stup.com doesn't sound like a Fox affiliate, and could be in a bit of trouble if they've not worked out the proper deals.
Anyways, it looks to be a standard "watch adds, receive free dialup" service.. And, like Altavista's service, it looks to be easily spoofed (just dialup, and have a little daemon pulling certain content
Not that I condone that kind of activity.. I'm on a cable modem, after all
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The catch is you have to run an advertising bar. Worse, the advertising bar has a "health" meter that slowly decreases unless you interact with the ad bar. Run out of health, get disconnected.
Why do you have to have remote access services installed with NT?
Click-through value will suck mightily, as customers will be forced by the "health bar" to click through an ad or other button every once in a while, and will immediately return to their previous surfing. This will cost the advertisers money, as wasted bandwidth, not produce additional sales.
You: "How many servers will you have? When will it be ready in Alaska?" Homer: "Can I have my money now?" When you use Homer's ISP, it takes you back in time to the pre-Microsoft era. Remember, any little change you make may effect the Microsoft Monopoly in the the present. (Does your petty codes matter after you die?)
I wonder how they intend to stop hackers from hiding the health bar and sending it auto-click messages?
-- Virtual Windows Project
All i can say .. or quote is...
Doh!
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
Why do I have trouble using the software if I have AOL 5.0 installed?
Welcome to the new addition to ISP based FAQ's all over the internet.
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
Well, in the free ISP biz, you get what you pay for...
But I have found 1stup.com to be one of the more reliable free ISP services.. and I have experience with a bunch of them. Of course, your mileage may vary based on your location, dialup, and network traffic...
I am using altavista's free ISP which is a co-branded 1stup.com offering. They have free tech support, and the one time after a new upgrade when I was having trouble with the behaviour of their software and the connection, the guy was very friendly, understanding, and helpful; they were also quite aware of the problem and it was fixed shortly thereafter. [note I do not work for them, have no connection with them other than using them as an ISP.]
Lately, (for a month and a half) it has been the most reliable free ISP out of all the ones I have tried. And I have tried:netzero, yahoo-bluelight, freei.net... I also have experience with a friend's free-pc, which is pretty good, but since they no longer are offering free computers OR free access to new customers, that is kind of meaningless at this point.
My personal suggestion is to try them all, starting with NetZero - NetZero has an easy 5-disk sneakernet install that is easy to download and install on a computer that does not have any access yet, and go from there..
I'll be using free ISPs until I save up and/or decide to dive in for the Cable Modem or DSL line. And yes, I'm using windoze.
And the points it makes are still valid (read through his more recent articles, and you'll hear him say "told you so!" several times).
/. is just such a one; it's the posters who create 95% of the value).
Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones.
And the vast majority websites which advertise make pocket change with it (I remember banner advertising network uses the slogan "it's found money!"). The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! A very tiny proportion of them actually support employees and such producing the content. Profitable websites are mostly ones which leverage the work of others (no offense, but
You wouldn't really think that such services would make any money, but we all know that AOL made heaps of cash, even when the transition to flat-rate service was pinching their subscription-fee cash flow. If they can even provice comparable service to AOL, but for free, they might just do alright. Frankly, AOL's interface (esp. after v5) sounds plenty worse than an ad bar floating on my desktop. Sure, I wouldn't put up with it, but it's not exactly being marketed to me, either.
Disclaimer: I'm on a school net, and hardly in need of a dialup ISP.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Consider the following: Bill Gates and Montgomery Burns, teamed up in the internet business....
Burns: Who is that man, Smithers?
Smithers: It's, ahhh, Homer Simpson, sir. The irresponsible network administrator responsible for the twenty system outages this week.
Burns: Ah, yes. Keep up the good work, Simpson!
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To continue, please press any key.... Which key's the 'any' key??
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Yea, then he tired to seel out to Bill Gates who had hired thugs trash his office. Rather true to life.... "Well, you didn't think I got rich by writing checks did you?" www.mcicet.com Leave a message!
Oh, wait... I forget I am a fool...
Fools of America, unite! Join the
there is a thing like the birdies -- or indeed several of 'em. I don't know much about them personally, but my boyfriend uses them with his free isp and get-paid-to-click services.
:)
might be worth it with a script like that. now all someone needs to do is figure out how to emulate the software for linux/bsd/mac/solaris/irix/xxxx
Lea
By merit of the simple fact that they are already on the web(how else could they view slashdot?), I don't think that most slashdotters have grounds for complaints. I know *I* have *my* internet access already, and it's cable. Why would I want "free"(except for the fact that you sell your privacy and soul to advertisers) internet access? You get what you pay for. TANTAAFL. Whatever. Get a damned job.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Bad studies rate advertising on the web as good for branding. They ask the user to look at websites they wouldn't normally look at, and with no purpose beyond "evaluating" them. The bored user looks at the most interesting thing on the page: the banner advertisements.
Good studies give people access to the web and let people screw around and do whatever they want (or at least give them realistic tasks to perform), while tracking which ads were viewed. The result: web surfers never even look at ads, unless they are really bored or the ads are cleverly disguised in a form the viewer hasn't seen. Believe the data.
Claiming that because studies disagree they are, as a whole, inconclusive is a well known logical fallasy (the name of which escapes me).
He mentions negative margins a lot.. And he's right.. You do run Internet Junkbuster, don't you?
:^)
.X10. No need to advertise, as most people will find the information themselves through a convienient search engine. So, if not to inform, what purpose do adds serv? They serv only to create want and need, and unless you're the mental age of a 10-year-old, they won't work on you.. Only the momentum of the "consumerism" of the 1950s through 1980s keeps people advertising in this day and age. I can't wait for it to die.
"Typical click-through rates have fallen to under 0.5%, and are continuing to fall. Advertising networks are shifting to pay-per-click systems, from pay-per-impression ones."
Which is much worse, as it forces users to load things without them really wanting to (in most cases).. Kinda like those popup windows you find on "shadier" sites, like Netscape.com. Portals? Basically repackaged push that doesn't require a special client.
"The reason so many sites advertise is because it's free and easy to do so, and if it brings in some cash, great! "
This is why things like Cybergold or AllAdvantage are starting up. Paying a person for advertising impressions.. They are trivially defeated, of course, as you can't ever trust a client on a nonsecure machine
What they don't seem to understand is that advertisements don't work, and never really did. Now adays, it's easy for a person who recognises a need to go out and find information on products. Need some way of turning off lights remotely, and don't like "the clapper" ? Simply go and find a site about
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
nothing original or creative in it ?
Side Note: The FAQ also says that all traffic is monitored so they can "tailor" their advertising banners. That probably doesn't sit too well with folks around here.
This is pretty base commercialism on the part of the Simpsons. They seem to have lost any counterculture satirical edge they may once have had. Now they're just another plastic lunchbox.
There's no reason for a sig here.
Case study: shareware. It has existed for over two decades until being effectively over-shadowed by opensource. Hordes of cr4ck3rz were churning out cracks on a regular basis. Did that stop anyone from writing shareware? Not really. The average consumer never really delved into the black-hat world, never heard of (let alone used) the cracks, and really didn't care less about a $20 fee for a decent piece of software.
Same is happenning with the banners. Yea, there're some of us out there messing with little mouse-movement macro utils and variations thereof to turn off annoying ads. So what? Ten times as many users will never have heard of these techniques. And even if they had -- the advertisers wouldn't notice until much later, and they'd still pay for click-thrus. The whole system, it seems to me, rests on two basic human characteristics -- laziness and stupidity. No, scratch that, just one -- laziness. The rest is being too lazy to go out and learn how to get around the minor annoyances which are the banner ads.
// zyqqh
*chuckle*
Probably the only post on the page that made me laugh....
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
If I'm not mistaken, Gateway and others have, for a little while, at least, been giving a year's worth of "free" access with the purchase of certain models from them.
Like many others around here, I don't expect this trend to disappear any time soon. How many co-branded credit cards are there, anyway?
One positive thing about their service is that although you have to use Win32, you get a choice of email clients, which is more than I can say for MSN (yes, I fell for that trap). You see, I didn't like the way Outlook Express handled replies (the Right Way (IMO) is to put the reply and signature after the quoted text), so I downloaded Netscape and gave it a try. Imagine my surprise when it failed to connect and retrieve my email! I checked and compared between the MS and Netscape, and the only significant difference between the two configuration screens was an option for something called Secure Password Authentication. I later found a HOWTO-like document telling how to access MSN from Linux. (I became interested in Linux after I got my computer and fell for the trap.) It turns out that UUNet actually provides the connectivity. A couple items in the document explained things, though:
and (near the end): Things seem to be turning out all right, though, as I've just started a new job at an ISP (and get free access (even DSL after I've been there a little bit!)), and MSN has been unable to charge my credit card (tee hee!). (They haven't mentioned anything about the $400 yet. I've got to check my contract, though, after that Slashdot story a couple weeks back -- one of the postings told of someone in Columbus, OH who was able to get out of his contract with no strings attached!)Alas, I fear I've started to ramble. Perhaps a combination of sleep deprivation and caffeine OD.
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This post brought to you by the elements N, H, C, and O, and the alkaloid caffeine.
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
Now that I've ensured a few -1's, I'l be serious for a moment...
I wouldn't feel so left out with their Windows-only support. There are a couple of "free" computing options out there. In one corner, you can get a free computer by locking yourself into a three year contract of paid dialup access. In the other, you can get a free dialup ISP of your choice by paying for the entire computer.
Either way, you have only two free beer choices -- skunky or skunkier. Financially, free Internet seems like the better option, because you'd recoup the $400 "rebate" in half the time of a three year, $22/mo. contract. OTOH, AOL and Compuserve aren't quite as annoying about advertising as NetZero and company, but you also get locked into a contract for an inferior service with poorly specified upgrade options to DSL, which they aren't doing (much of?) anything with, or AOL/Time Warner cable access.
Dialup sucks anyway. The only thing that would get me to go back to using dialup (spare necessity) would be ~$50/mo., so I could have a separate phone line and a Win9x dialup box so I could have a cool "@TheSimpsons.com" email address. It's likely that free Internet businesses are struggling to get revenues of $15 per head just to cover their costs, so I doubt that's ever going to happen.
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E2 IN2 IE?
I hope this doesn't work, I really do. Then maybe these corporations will look at their other ad campaigns(TV, Radio, print). Then they'll probably realize that they've saturated the market. Nobody watches ads any more. We've completely tuned them out. At least I have. Then maybe they'll send those billons on improving their products, so they won't need to tell people how good it is - they'll already know.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
If anyone is interested in learning more about free ISPs, you can visit The FreeNET List Home Page or The USA's Free ISPs page
Explanations here:
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There's NO SUCH THING as "token ring ethernet," what kind of crack is that fat mother smoking???
Yeah! This is disgusting! And all the people are drawn in Yellow. And do they really expect us to believe that someone can withstand that many knocks on the head.
Although thats not the worst offender. I saw this cartoon called Road Runner. The physics in that were shockingly inaccurate. At one point, the road runner - Who I believe was the title character - even managed to walk along air without any support.
But free ISPs like this one run banner ads. What they run is even worse than banner ads: they're banner ads with forced click-through.
A better example of effective web advertising is affiliate programs. Give people valuable content, then try to sell them something related to that content right there, integrated with the content.
This post is another example. I'm advertising the link at the bottom of the post, and getting a pretty damn good click-through, at that (my apologies, BTW, to people who anyone who went through the previous evil link, which I will now erase from my memory to go on with my life). Not by spamming, but by posting the best stuff I can come up with and still have something to say (my karma has doubled since last week).
In the last few days, I've put up more posts on slashdot.org than in the last few weeks before that, because I've got a new web page that I want to promote. Usually I have to slap my own hands to keep myself from wasting too much time slashdotting, but for the moment I consider it productive. (yes, there's a certain irony to this which you'll understand if you look at my site - my site with banner ads, and broken ones at that... ^_^ )
Is it just me, or are virtual ISPs starting to seem even scarier than the ``monopolistic'' media companies?
-Chris
I keep hitting that reply button instead of the preview one...
"Believe the Data" was the title of the article, not a suggestion regarding the article.
The ISP itself is an add for the Fox TV network and for it's show The Simpsons. Who would use such an ISP but someone who had heard of the TV show? Now thing, you live in some hick town, everyone you know is getting on the internet. You see this ISP, hey what do you know IT'S FREE! I just have to click on a few ads, no big deal. And hmm, it's called The Simpsons like that TV show. And pretty soon you are watching that TV show or your kids are watching it. Not to mention the fact that many free ISPs keep track of what sites you visit. Data mining for whoever has the cash to pay for the data. It would be nice if we could figure out a way to make the internet free to anyone and everyone without the evil that corporations bring.
The advertiser-supported ISPs are going to have a hell of a time staying in business. A quick look at the business model:
Income: Web Advertising rates. Common rates for a banner add are in the 1 to 10 cents per "eyeball", or pair thereof, depending mostly on how well-targeted the ad is. Absent very sophisticated (and rare on an ISP level) profiling, the ISP cannot really identify what the user is interested in, in order to carefully target ads. Moreover, the free-ISP user demographic is likely to be mostly internet newbies, which is the kiss of death for an e-commerce site. So it's very unlikely that a free ISP will be getting more than 1 cent per ad. Click-throughs can be worth as much as 25 cents in some cases, though it's likely to be much less, especially since a forced click-through doesn't signify real interest and is therefore less valuable to the advertiser than a voluntary click-through. Porn sites, which often use pop-up windows to essentially force a click-through, rarely get more than 3 or 4 cents per click-through. And porn is very profitable. Posit a maximum of 5 cents per click-through of revenue.
Expense: Based on Earthlink's SEC filings, and the data of other companies (including my own employer), it is generally accepted that about $13 per user per month is the minimum cost for an unlimited time or > 15 hrs per month dialup account. That covers only direct costs, not advertising. Moreover, that level of efficiency requires on the order of 1 million users. Cost per user looks more like $20 per month for most smaller companies. Further, it tends to cost about $15 - $20 in initial costs (including advertising) to get a user. 18 months is a fairly average length of time for a user to stick with an ISP, so the ISP *must* recover its initial investment within that time to make a profit. Given the annoyingness of ads, it's unlikely that a free ISP will have a better retention rate. Let's suppose J. Random Free ISP is doing about $15 per month, at best. Further, they need to recoup $18 (to be simple) in 18 months. So they need $18 per user per month to break even. Add another 10% to make it sufficiently profitable to bother, and you need $20.
That's 2,000 ads or 400 click-throughs (or some combination thereof) per user per month. At best. Our average unlimited-time user logs about 15 hours a month. At that rate, the free ISP needs to serve each user 125 adds an hour (or 24 click-throughs) to break even. That's a pretty weak proposition. I wouldn't put any money on it.
Steve Ballmer walks into Bill Gates' office.
*Ballmer* We've succeeded in grinding the competition into the ground again today sir. We've even added a half-dozen brand new annoyances to Windows 2000!
*Gates* Excellent Smithers^H^H^H^Good job Steve.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Some services are motivated by generosity, personal enthusiasm, and other altruistic goals. I'm not talking about those.
For-profit corporations do not willingly lose money. If they're not selling something to you, they're selling you to someone. Would you rather be they customer or the product? Which do you think gets better treatment?
Ermm actually a .sig should be "-- " So that's 2 minus signs and a space. Not 3 minus signs and a dot.
Normaly, a sig is on every post. If you click the little link that says 'user info' you will see that it is not on every post. Therefor it is not a sig.
The only conclusion I can draw here, is that you are an idiot
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The first free ISP here, X-Stream (unfortunatly w32 clients only), though was and is funded through advertising, taking up a couple of lines at the top of the screen.
They have also been trialling free phone calls for the past month or so, supposedly 24/7 access, although I have only had success during evenings and weekends...
One simple way to bypass the ads is by using W98SE's Internet connection sharing - the adds only appear on your host, the clients displays are clean!
The first free ISP here, X-Stream (unfortunatley w32 clients only), though was and is funded through advertising, taking up a couple of lines at the top of the screen.
They have also been trialling free phone calls for the past month or so, supposedly 24/7 access, although I have only had success during evenings and weekends...
One simple way to bypass the ads is by using W98SE's Internet connection sharing - the adds only appear on your host, the clients displays are clean!
How many slashdotters use tools like JunkBuster, SleezeBall or others to cut banners and don't see any advertisment *at all*?
:-)
Maybe time for a poll?
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
Hey, Q! Someone is dissing you and your continuum...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
yahoo.com averages over 300 million hits per day (at least it did recently; maybe they went downhill since google started?).
I dunno about the US, but I believe all the dialups for Canada are identical as those that Altavista uses. I know they are identical for my area code. And the fact the website is called cobrand.1stup.com makes me think it is they have just repackaged everything and slapped the Simpsons on it. At any rate, I've already circumvented the advertising for Altavista so if you're gonna post about free isps tell me about one I don't have yet. And yes it works under Linux. But they're useless to me what I need is free cable modem access. I hope that free dsl stuff comes to Canada.
I dont think that I have ever even looked at an ad in a search engine, or any other general-audience web site. However, web sites that target their ad banners to their specific audience will have much more effective banners.
I think a good example of this is slashdot. All the banners I have seen on slashdot have been geek or linux oriented.
Some companies, like ThinkGeek, I clicked on because their banners looked neat (and who doesn't want a 'grepmaster' mug?) and I'll probably buy something from them.
Other banners, like the one for AIBO, put the product name in my head, but I would never actually buy one.
Then there are banners for stuff that you would buy, but you already have one, like computers from Penguin Computing. It would be much more effective if they could sell in computer stores alongside the windoze PCs, but that is a very exclusive market.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
I have been using them for the last few months, besides the busy signals, which I can put up with, their technical support is POS. I accidently went over my *2meg* quota, and suddenly lost all access to my mailbox. Any attempts to connect, to check my mail or delete old mail, results in a "Connection broken by host".
Their $15/incident live tech support is laughable, but it took 3 emails (the final being very stern), and over a week of no email (and everyone receiving messages that my box is over quota) before they contacted me back, at my work email, saying that they can wipe all my mail out.
As of this date, I still have no email access.
And don't get me started on NetZero. Their nav bar had serious memory leaks, and would lock any of our computers solid if we ever went into command.com.
There has yet to be, IMO, a reliable free ISP. You can't live off advertising forever.
Remeber that episode when he started the company super-hyper-mega-cyber-power-net? They should have named it that, from the show, then it would have been funnier.
Ok this from the daemon (correct spelling) of typographical errors... :)
[Daemon as in Unix background program NOT demon as in biblical evil being]
Anyway
It is posable the problem is in Slashdot not the poster...
Keep in mind ANY CGI has to do some filtering and transformation to keep crackers from sending garbage...
I don't actually exist.
Hey if you are looking for a good junkbuster script there is a pretty effective one posted in the Tuning section at linux.com.
V
It sure looks to me like they reserve the right to sell your name, address, e-mail address, etc.
Contrast this with the policies for NetZero, FreeI, FreeWWWeb. In fact, FreeI doesn't even collect personal identification data in the first place.
Crack the software that runs the ads.
Set up a daemon that fakes a click on every nth advert.
Surf for free indefinitely.
In fact - even better, generate a Linux client that fakes the clicks, run that on your firewall (you do have a firewall system, right?) and use your desktop box for regular surfing.
And yes, this is (sort of) about evolution. These companies have set up an environment which is subject to exploit by those who live within it. Learn to exploit that environment better and you'll survive better :-)
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
Nevermind that they're an ISP or ads or whatever...
thesimpsons.com is a craptacular webmail client too... just cancel the download and goto mail.thesimpsons.com
Doh!
The Toronto dialup numbers are the exact same numbers as PSI Canada, my former ISP.
For an ISP with a good newsfeed, that's probably all local traffic from their NNTP server to the dialup user. For an ad-supported ISP, that's probable all remote traffic to a third-party NNTP (or NNTP-via-HTTP, I'd guess through a server presenting decoded binaries as downloadable URLs to the end-user) provider.
My guess is that both ISPs are losing money. But which one is losing it faster, and why? (The big ISP, despite all the traffic being local, or the "free" ISP with clickthrough revenue, but having to pay for all the offsite traffic *and* probably not having the installed base of lines to support as many leeches as the pay-ISP?)
A good part of that 300 million hits per day could be generated by the clueless users who have Yahoo installed as their homepage.
..."?
I used to work for a division of Hewlett-Packard that has a counter on their Intranet web startup page. The standard, IT-installed browser (IE) would be configured to start up on that page. That gives IT some impressive bragging rights to page usage, value of their content, LAN traffic, etc. as one office worker after another started IE each morning and went somewhere else. Every "Open a New Browser Window" command would prop up IT's position. Heck, every one of the many system-wide failures would be good for more "hits".
What's that old saw about "statistics don't lie, but
--
Joe
there is a thing like the birdies -- or indeed several of 'em. I don't know much about them personally, but my boyfriend uses them with his free isp and get-paid-to-click services.
:)
might be worth it with a script like that. now all someone needs to do is figure out how to emulate the software for linux/bsd/mac/solaris/irix/xxxx
I hacked up a quick program in Delphi (doing one in C++ now) to keep Alladvantage fooled for me. It takes about 30 seconds to make something that will move the mouse from the top of the screen to the bottom, click the banner, and start over. Works real well too.>:)
Kintanon
Shameless plug follows:
www.alladvantage.com
EBS-939
Sign up and kneel to the all powerful lord of rampant consumerism! All hail the dollar!
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Hmmm, it does have a nice ring to it.
I also should mention that while I haven't used Opera extensively, I haven't had any problems with it. One last thing I left out of my previous message: I have high hopes for Mozilla. Long live the lizard!! =)
Sincerely,
Ryan Taylor
What Slashdot said:
Anthony Fuentes writes "Looks like Homer and company are getting into the free ISP business, click here for details. Offer applies to win32 users only." Probably because Homer uses Windows - and Internet Explorer, of course, because that's the only browser you can use with this service.
What the actual ISP page said:
You must have a copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 4.0 or higher, to access the free Internet system, but you may surf the web with any browser. Click on the following link to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.
Wow... there's a difference. Slashdot reports that Internet Explorer is the only browser you can use with this service, where the actual page says that you can use any browser to surf the web, but you must have a copy of IE 4.0. Maybe because Microsoft bundled additional libraries with IE 4.0 in the form of a service pack? You think?
I object to this editorialization of "news". Why does the news on Slashdot have to be anti-Microsoft? "News for Nerds"? Or "News for Linux users"? Why don't we call it what it really is? I run Linux on a dedicated Linux box. It's really stable, hasn't crashed in 3 months. Linux is nice, I like it. But face it: it's a cheap Unix hack. That's all it was designed to be, that's all it will ever be, until they make it "user-friendly." "Intuitive". It's not, and no one can successfully argue with me.
So let's start being a little less biased in reporting "news", shall we?
- Burton Simmmons
mrwhite@d198-192.uoregon.edu (linux box)
Wow, this AC reminds me a lot of Homer... I doubt many others would spend nearly as much time replying to their own comments. I think the AC's a bit smarter though, Homer probably couldn't have gotten all the way through the whole alphabet ;-)
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Oh no! This is an _illegal_ sig! It has three dashes instead of two!
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Since it requires windows
shouldn't that be "Win-DOHs!" ?
I think the entire idea of free isps is good but 1stup.com is stupid. Did anybody notice that when exicte realsed their "Free ISP Service" it turns out to the be the same as the Simpsons one. "WOW" Also what the heck is that "health meter" at the side, "Refill by clicking an ad"? Whats stupid is that most of these services say 56k free. When sometimes I get 19k. If anyone has used netzero, one of my friends has "cracked" it so now there is no bar with ads. Goes to show you that "Free ISPS" will make no money or lose it.
no one will probably read this or it has already been mentioned but i noticed that they DO use php3 which is pretty good anyway. it suggests that they rent complete micro-sellouts.
plus the simpsons rock.
"Sure Marge. Everything looks bad when you REMEMBER it!"
Actually, i am a windows user, and find it to be a good (yes i did just say that on slashdot) OS. as for IE, while it is much more stable than ever before, i am quite ofter confronted with illegal operations during and at the shutdown of IE.
However i must admit that IE is faster and in many ways better than netscape (tho whether this is due to good coding or hidden api's i can not say).
Any way, there is a different way of doing it, which is used by companies such as iFreedom which has a patent pending software and business model, and cover USA and Canada.
I use them in the Greater Toronto Area, and they are good, except that they suffer busy signals at times.
They give you Windows software (just like any other Free ISP), but the differences are:
Of course, there is no Linux version (and nothing for any other operating system except Windows).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Lucky you, I guess. I work with a number of sophisticated sites and IE 5.0 with NT 4.0 and the latest service pack crashes an average of three times a week to as often as three times a day. [Just a guess, but the commonality seems to be that the Microsoft JVM gets confused if you have more than one java enabled page open in a window at the same time.]
Not that Netscape 4.7 is any better in terms of crash frequency, but Explorer doesn't win any extra points at all in my experience.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...