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The Sinking Ship that is AOL
EyesWideOpen writes "This article at Salon discusses the ways in which AOL is trying to stay afloat, with the release of version 8.0 of it's software, in a time when AOL (which recently merged with Time Warner) has had a string of bad press -- falling stock prices, SEC investigation, etc. -- attached to it's name. One of my favorite quotes from the article says of AOL: ''It was never really an Internet company. AOL was based on the idea that people needed to live in a halfway house while they became accustomed to the Net.'...If folks can get a better, faster, cheaper online experience by ditching AOL, they'll do it in a heartbeat.'"
Go with iPass if you can. They contract with a bunch of different ISPs around the world.
When you call, your "call experience" is logged and reported for billing but also for quality control. If the number you dialed was busy or poor quality, the number will drop down the list of numbers for that city for everybody using the dialer. Thus, the ISP has incentive to keep the lines high-quality (since they don't get paid if you don't use their lines) and you get the best known number wherever you travel.
Additionally, in a corporate setting, it uses radius for authentication. We use Steel-belted RADIUS to authenticate it against our Win2K domain, but you could use a built in tool.
No, I don't make money from them. In fact I pay money to them, but I'm actually satisfied with this one vendor.the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
half of the web?
I don't know where you surf, buddy, but I am using mozilla every day and maybe 1% of the sites doesn't work.
Yes, but for the mephistophelian price of installing AOL 6 (or 7 or 8 or whatever) and letting it take over all of your network connections.
The "most access numbers" statistic is sort of a chimera; you really only need 1 or 2 per metro area, it's the *traffic* on those numbers that's important. That said, I've had excellent experience dialing up to EarthLink in almost every (US) location I've ever been to, and I can almost always get a line by the 2nd call, while my brother across the room tries to dial the local AOL number for half an hour.
Also, as a plus over some of the "local + roaming" others are mentioning in this thread, I don't think EarthLink costs more depending on where you are. I've used a corporate account at several locations and had no complaints from the accounting department about charges.
I'm not a salesperson for EarthLink, but it just seems way preferable to AOL even if they technically have "more" dial up numbers.
Indeed.
:-)
When a customer switches from AOL to us, it's never because of our prices, (which are low, compared to the other services available in the area), but because they got fed up with AOL's customer service.
Usually, they'd been with them for years, but when they started having problems, they'd discover AOL's customer service doesn't do much more than give away additional months of service as retainers.
We've never, ever had someone switch to us from AOL because they wanted more powerful access.
We affectionately call them "AOL refugees."
What's this Submit thingy do?
Yeah, well when the telephone service is $50 a month minimum, they better charge $30 a month for DSL.
I used to live in Chicago. NYNEX was half the price when I moved there in '96.
The best part was their long distance charging. Anything over 7 miles was second tier long distance. I lived on the north side of Chicago, far north in Rogers Park which was about eight miles from dowtown. This was when the entire city was 312, so I had no idea based on number what was long distance or not. You would be charged long distance for calling within the SAME city.
New York City by law was 10 cents per call, anywhere in the city. Someone on city Island in the far northeastern corner of the bronx could call the southern most region in Staten Island 30 miles away for 10 cents.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Tech savy people have hated AOL, well, since its inception. However, as some cheer on for the ship to sink, they might want to remember a few of the passengers that are on that ship, such as Netscape and ICQ. You might say, Screw Netscape, we've got Mozilla. However, the Web development community is not going to provide W3C compliant web sites until there is a viable business reason to do so. 35 million AOL users with Netscape browsers is a viable reason. AOL going kaput and MSN picking up all of those users means that the web will never be W3C compliant; it will be IE6 compliant. You can forget ever having a page render correctly in Mozilla. You can forget being able to take advantage of interactive pages. You can forget streaming media on anything but Windows Media Player. I just don't understand our community sometimes. We are incensed by Microsoft products, protocols, and business practices, but we rail against the only viable alternatives (read Netscape and Java). This is why I don't mess with a computer for stress relief anymore; I go fly fishing. ;-)
Mozilla: AFAICT at least half of the development costs for Mozilla come from AOL still.
Winamp: They also own Nullsoft and allow them to put out a pretty good product ad-free for free.
It should also be noted that AOL uses OpenSSH internally and open sourced (a version of) their web server.
Sure, if they all had the rug pulled out from under them they'd probably limp along and find a new home, but that kind of disruption can't help rate of progress and all. And who likes "subscription models" that a lot of places seem to be resorting to?
Sure their marketing and their Windows IP stacks and their war against open Oscar and so on are pretty evil, but there's a lot of "good" in there, too.
(FWIW-I've never subscribed to AOL, but I've worked at companies contracted by AOL.)
I've found Usenet to still be worthwhile, actually. Certainly YMMV, especially depending on what groups you 'grew up with', but for the ones I started reading, the signal/noise is at *least* comparable to slashdot...(yes, I know some would argue that's setting the bar pretty low ;-)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Oh to be able to get DSL or cable... .
We have a second phone line and 28k access (the modem does 56k, but the quality of the phone lines isn't good enough to usually get more than about 29k... I'm ecstatic when I connect at 33.6k) because neither the cable companies nor the phone company believe that our corner of town exists.
Yes, broadband is worth it... but it needs to be universally available. Until then, some of us will still be sucking through a 28k straw.
[TMB]
Amazingly, nobody has considered the one reasonably positive aspect of AOL... its MAIL.
"he's off 'is rocker" I can hear as you are now pressing the "reply button" ready to flame me for such treasonous talk. However, I would ask you this:
for $23.95 a month, does ANY other ISP offer you 500+ mails, each with a 16MB attachment?
"what do you need that malarkey for" you may ask. Among the obvious statement of "thats how Email service SHOULD BE", there is another reason.
I make freelance 3D Animations for clients. These files are often huge. Often the clients are computer-unsavvy. Setting up an FTP site is impossible for them - it's all I can do to get them to understand how to decompress a RAR/ACE file... or I will simply send them 16Mb edited versions of the videos I make.
I cannot afford some special business Email from AT&T or Verizon... especially when AOL's is $23.95 a month. Webbased harddrives are too slow, and depend on a broadband connection - many of my clients are still on 56K modems. But, they all have AOL.
There is a lot to hate about AOL, to be sure. But they STILL have some wonderful services for the money.... I can't understand why they don't play up their email service, though.
No there's a Mac version. The one disadvantage on Mac is that under Windows, if you use a VPN client they'll even bundle it for you (well, they will if you're big enough) and launch it transparently to the user. That doesn't work with their Mac version and you have to launch the tunnel after the IP connection is up.
We use the Nortel Contivity client for PC and Mac with it and on the PC the user never knows they've launched a client. The Mac guys are fewer in our company and tend to be more clueful so the extra click hasn't been a real problem.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White