Drivers might drive somewhat more recklessly because they have seatbelts and airbags, but the solution to that isn't to get rid of these safety features.
As an IT worker, the message to bring home from this study is only this: employees will assume that you'll pick up the pieces for them. You need to either plan to do that, or dissuade them of their assumption.
And you can dissuade them. Saying, "don't do X, it reduces company security" will be met with yawns. But say "doing X is a terminable offense and people have been fired for doing it" gets people's attention.
I'm not sure whether you meant that the people who do the surveys market IT training or that third parties do so, but let me make one thing clear: SAGE is a nonprofit membership organization, and we do not have salespeople market to participants of the Salary Survey (for that matter, we don't even have any salespeople).
The Salary Survey is a service provided by SAGE to the public as part of our mission to "advance the status of computer system administration as a profession."
Have you seen the SAGE people at a trade show recently? They're there, right down the back corner in the cheap section, usually wedged in between the disk box salesmen and the customised mousepad drone. They're conspicuous by the fact that nobody ever pays them any attention.
I have no idea what the poster is talking about. SAGE has never been at a "trade show," to my knowledge (other than exhibit floors of the occassional conference with which we have co-sponsorship agreements). We run our own annual technical conference, LISA. I honestly can't imagine what we'd do at a trade show. We don't have anything to sell--we're a nonprofit, membership organization dedicated to advancing the profession of system administration.
I think I'll just ignore the rest of the poster's comment. Perhaps the poster is confusing SAGE with some other entity.
Trey Harris
Vice President, SAGE
Re:The model makes perfect sense for NYC
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Step 2, Groceries
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We store it in the freezer. Surely you have the space and money to drop $200 or so on one?
Money, sure. Space? Have you ever seen a Manhattan apartment, outside of a television show (where it is inconceivable, for instance, that a supposedly struggling writer like Carrie Bradshaw could afford her seemingly palatial apartment on the Upper East Side)? A 750 square-foot one-bedroom apartment is considered enormous and will run you a couple grand a month at the very least, more likely three. You're lucky to have space in your kitchen for both a microwave and a toaster. (Most people with a separate freezer put it in their garages or storerooms. No such things here.)
And besides, things that freeze well are the exception, not the rule. Meat, sometimes. Produce--you better have bought it frozen to begin with, and it will never be as good as fresh. Seafood? Don't make me laugh.
I use my meager freezer space to freeze things I make--stock, dough, soup bones, a casserole for when I don't have time to cook. I don't have the room to spare for ingredients simply to reduce the number of times I go to the store, at the cost of a much lower quality final product.
The model makes perfect sense for NYC
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Step 2, Groceries
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I guess they don't have refrigeration in NYC to preserve food. Good to see you like wasting time and getting raped by the small biz owners with their obscene prices.
Well... if you've ever been apartment-hunting in New York, you'd know that if a kitchen has a full-size refrigerator (i.e., the type that you find in 90% of homes in America), then it is probably a "luxury apartment." The typical Manhattan apartment has a compact refrigerator (the kind that's a foot shorter and a few inches narrower than usual). I've even seen apartments with "kitchens" that would, anywhere else, be called a "kitchenette" with a dorm-room sized fridge.
FreshDirect may, in fact, not be a service that would work profitably elsewhere. But given that
In New York, most people don't have cars, and if you do, it is an enormous chore to use it, since you probably had to park a dozen blocks away and it will take half an hour minimum to find a parking space (both near the grocery store and once back at home);
Kitchens are tiny, just like apartments in general, so there's no room to store quantities of food beyond what you need for a few days;
A cab round-trip to the store will be $6 minimum, the bus or subway will be $3; and
Every grocery store in Manhattan will deliver, meaning you do your shopping and then leave your bags with the cashier. The charge is usually $3.95 flat or $1/bag;
the FreshDirect model starts to make a lot more sense. You get to skip the inconvenience of carrying groceries back from the store for the same price as the grocery store--but you don't have to go to the store, either.
Another point that hasn't been raised here is that the founder of FreshDirect is the co-founder of Fairway Uptown. Fairway is well known for their amazing produce, spectacular cheese selection, great coffees, and butcher-quality meats and seafood. Many of us Manhattanites make a weekly trek of thirty blocks or more to Fairway to get food of the quality not available at the local supermarket. (To answer several other posters, the days of the corner butcher and green-grocer are largely over in Manhattan, as the high cost of real estate has driven them all out.)
FreshDirect offers Fairway selection and quality without the Fairway travel. This isn't about laziness, it's about equal or greater convenience and greater quality at the same price.
One final point--several people here have said that we "should" be buying groceries once or twice a month. Ignoring the lack of storage/refrigeration space in New York I mentioned earlier, do you guys not eat meat or fish or produce? Even if you buy specifically with an eye towards things that keep, it's pretty hard to buy fresh more than a week ahead, especially if you want to eat healthily.
What will you *not* put into Perl 6?
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Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 5, Interesting
What would you say has been the number one requested feature that you will not put into Perl 6, and why not?
If people are compensated for the number of pages visited on their site, the current tendency to split information into multiple pages will get much, much worse.
I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.
More important than any particular website or certification is a conference given every year by USENIX and SAGE, the Annual System Administration Conference (LISA).
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at that conference. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. There are three days of tutorials where these same experts teach about sendmail, perl, dns, security, etc. And then there's three days of invited talks and papers, too!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
More important than any particular website or certification is a conference given every year by USENIX and SAGE, the Annual System Administration Conference (LISA).
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at LISA. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. Those same experts give all-day tutorials for three days teaching about Sendmail, DNS, sysadmin, security, etc. And then there are three days of papers and talks!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
(In the interest of disclosure I should say that I'm involved with SAGE, one of the co-sponsors of LISA.)
I have a Season Pass (automatic recording of every episode) to the syndicated broadcasts of Law & Order on A&E... they show two episodes per day, one at 1pm and 7pm, and another at 11pm and 3am. It records the 1pm and the 11pm, never the 7pm or 3am (i.e., I get one and only one copy of each episode). TiVo support told me that it does scan program descriptions for duplicates. I wonder why CmdrTaco's getting them?
I felt a hallow space at the pit of my stomach when I read your question. In our results-oriented medical establishment, surgery is the first thing that comes to mind when someone is facing an injury as debilitating as CTS. But surgery really should be only used as a last resort.
You didn't give much detail in your question, but since you said you, not your doctor, are "almost convinced" of the need for surgery, I can't help but wonder if you're putting the cart before the horse. Have you really exhausted all other therapies?
Make no mistake--if you present yourself before a surgeon and show her your symptoms, she will most likely perform surgery. That's what surgeons do, and if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The phenomenon of costly, repetitive, and in the end ineffective or even damaging surgery is well-known in the CTS-suffering community.
But I hope you'll go to a general practicioner or family-practice physician first (your HMO, if you have one, will probably require you to do so) and explore other avenues of treatment.
Are you sure it's CTS? There are a number of keyboard-related injuries under the Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) rubric, and carpal tunnel syndrome is actually one of the rarest. Tendinitis and various types of extracarpal nerve damage are far more common. A self-diagnosis is almost always wrong, so make sure you see a physician.
When I first felt RSI symptoms earlier this year, I had the first thoughts that it sounds like you are having: it's carpal tunnel syndrome, and I need surgery. But then I did some reading and I learned that surgery is rarely the correct treatment option, that CTS was not necessarily my diagnosis, and that lifestyle changes combined with non-invasive treatment could largely restore the use of my hands.
This is something to keep in mind: surgery, even if it is indicated in your particular case, is never going to restore 100% of your pre-RSI function. And repeated surgeries are sometimes necessary in order to get full benefit. Similarly, the non-invasive treatment options and lifestyle changes that I mention below also do not allow you to go on nine-hour coding binges sprawled with your laptop on the floor. I assume you must have very painful, very frightening symptoms if you think surgery is for you. But don't go looking for some way to bring you back to 100%: there unfortunately isn't one in the current state of the art.
Among the less-invasive options that you should explore with your physician (in addition to surgery; it may, in the end, be indicated in your particular case):
aggresive physical therapy
ergonomic evaluation and adjustment (new furniture, new typing posture, etc.)
regular chiropractic adjustment
regular massage therapy (from a neuromuscular therapist, not the typical "relaxation" masseuse)
steroidal and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories
ultrasound treatment
iontophoresis (forcing of steroidals into soft tissue using an electric charge)
a comprehensive stretching and exercise regimen
or, more likely, a combination of the above.
When I saw a physician about my symptoms, which left me unable to type even the shortest email, I was initially diagnosed with forearm tendinitis (basically, a combination of golfer's and tennis elbow) and started on therapy involving aggressive physical therapy, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and posture therapy. During this period, I didn't even touch the keyboard (voice-recognition helped here!). As time went on, my symptoms improved, but in a kind of lopsided way, and I was rediagnosed, this time with extensor tendinitis (a broader diagnoses than forearm tendinitis including more tendons) and thoracic outlet syndrome (an injury of the nerves in the thoracic region of the chest). With the new diagnosis, I was started on various neurological therapies, and I added chiropractic and neuromuscular massage to my regimen.
And eight months later, I'm no longer in regular, ongoing therapy (though I continue the chiropractic and massage because I like it and it's an easy "maintenance" treatment) and I can type well enough--I typed what you've just finished reading, didn't I? I have a regular exercise program, and I am hyperaware of my ergonomic situation whenever I sit down to do work. I still have symptoms, of course. Sometimes my hands will go numb for no reason at all, or I'll experience pain when lifting a grocery bag. I still have to massage my sore upper arms and forearms at the end of the workday.
But I no longer worry that I'll lose my livelihood, or that I'll end up unable to even clothe, bathe, or cook for myself. I can't say the same for some of my friends who have forgone other therapies for surgery. Maybe surgery is right for you--but investigate all the options.
The way I remember Rich will be at conferences, standing at the front of a room where he has just presented, with a small mob of people around him, all eager to ask him some esoteric point of network programming or argue some vanishingly trivial point or just to shake his hand and tell him how much they admire him.
I learned more from Rich than from all my CS professors combined. Over lunch one day at a conference, I chatted with him about his plans for starting TCP/IP Illustrated all over again, rewriting it for IPv6. I remember being excited about these updates, and telling all my friends about them, even though they wouldn't be out for years.
It breaks my heart to think that these, and all the other good works that mind was capable of producing, will never come.
I strongly believe that censorship of the Internet is a battleground that will become increasingly important to religious fundamentalists as time goes on. When television, radio, paper and other traditional methods of media delivery are absorbed into the Internet (as is already beginning to happen), it becomes increasingly possible for people to live in a totally politicized infosphere, cut off from what we today think of as "mainstream media".
For example, imagine the Christian Coalition passing out copies of censorware to its members that blocked from their view any neutral or positive depictions of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, non-Christian religions, etc. These people--and, more alarmingly, their children and patrons of any public places like libraries they've been able to force to use this software--would effectively live in a world where homosexuality is evil and silenced, where women do not have a voice, and where religious diversity is unknown.
Our modern reality is largely constructed by the media. We know nothing firsthand about what is happening beyond the reach of our own two eyes and ears. Everything else, everything about our reality that we haven't witnessed ourselves, comes from the media. And censorware intimates the specter of a future where political groups--whether governmental or otherwise, benevolent or evil--can manipulate what the public perceives as reality, what people think is true about the world around them. It's the Catholic Index, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields, all over again, but this time in a way that could--theoretically--succeed in the long-term.
It's www.6bone.net, not 6bone.com. (Dunno what 6bone.com is--InterNIC doesn't even seem to have a listing.)
And as to your comment that the experimental network will become the official one--it can't. Unless we continue using IPv4 forever. The 6bone tunnels through the IPv4 network, overlaying itself on top of it. If IPv4 goes away, then the 6bone does, too. (This also means that some features of IPv6, such as anycast addressing and host mobility, cannot be fully realized until the underlying network is all-IPv6.)
Furthermore, the 6bone has a temporary TLA assignment. This means that only a fraction (an infinitesimal fraction, though still pretty huge by IPv4 standards) of the total address space is available in the 6bone. Going with the 6bone as the official network would radically reduce the total address space available. It would also enforce the current address allocation mechanism (which is very bad and intended to be temporary) forever.
In sum, you're wrong. And anyone who deploys production services on the 6bone risks getting bitten.
I had a chance to use the Aironet 11Mb card at the USENIX Technical Conference a couple of weeks ago, and the Linux driver worked very well. But those guys had several access points for a hundred or so cards--they were loaning them out to conference attendees. Definitely not the typical home-network setting!
My question is, if I were starting a new installation for a home network, which cards are easiest to set up? I notice that with the Proxim Symphony, you must have a Windoze machine available to configure the thing, as it must already be configured when you try to use the Linux driver and the configurator's only available in a Win32 GUI.
Also, do any of these have a NAT built-in? Most high-speed access solutions such as ADSL and cable modem only give you a single IP address, and charge steep rates for additional ones. So, you want a NAT (Network Address Translator) to make all your machines look like a single machine to your service provider.
If you wanted to NAT but the wireless access-point didn't do it, it seems to me you'd have to have two ethernet cards on a PC that would have the wireless access point on one card and your high speed connection on the other, running NAT software (ipchains would work, but there are other options) to translate between the two. That seems like a lot of work to me, and too many things to go wrong!:-)
The author rails against identity politics, in the way that many leftist activists do today, without really saying what's wrong with it. What she misses is that every politically significant minority group in this century has gotten its start in identity politics.
I certainly agree that the nerve that Jon Katz tapped smacks of a burgeoning identity politics. The dissemination right here on Slashdot of a shared experience mirrors turn-of-the-century feminist literature, the Harlem Rennaissance, or the gay press of the sixties and seventies.
Not everyone agrees on the names to apply ("geek", "dork", "nerd", etc.). Similarly, the civil-rights movement has shifted from one name to another ("Negro", "colored person", "black", "African-American"). The gay-rights movement's history can be divided chronologically by the dominant nomenclature at the time ("homophile", "homosexual", "gay", "gay, lesbian and bisexual", "queer"). The important thing about this, though, is not the naming itself. It is the profound feeling among the members of the group that they do form an identifiable group, whatever they call themselves. Labeling and identity often go together, but identity politics was precisely named.
So what's so offensive about identity politics? It's certainly gotten a lot done in its time, hasn't it? Absolutely. I assume the author's problem is what happens in the later stages of identity politics. The rough edges of identity politics don't begin to show themselves until the movement starts to make gains in the mainstream.
This is caused by the conflict between three forces: one, the radicals who started the movement to begin with (or are their ideological successors); two, the less radical policy-wonk lobbyist types who have taken over the established organizations (the NAACP, for example); and three, the rank-and-file minority person, who is now in a better position than he or she was when the whole movement started.
The radicals are irked at the lobbyists for "selling out", for becoming single-issue people instead of building the broad-based leftist coalitions they invision. The policy-wonks are most interested in amassing political power (one would assume with the intention of eventually vaulting over into mainstream politics). The rank-and-file are mostly just tired of the whole thing, and want to stop thinking about politics so much.
This is where the radicals feel the need to jettison identity politics. Once identity politics has reached the point at which national organizations are amassing power in the mainstream, it does little but for the people who already have power in the minority (and wish to transmute that power into mainstream power).
Where the author of the VV article went wrong is this: there's nothing wrong with identity politics, per se. Even noted identity-politics bashers like Cornell West and Urvashi Vaid admit that.
Identity politics is great for a newly-formed movement. It gives its constituency a sense of belonging, which in turn generates enthusiasm for the cause. Us-vs.-them is a great way to get people motivated, and identity politics' first contribution to political rhetoric is to identify who, exactly, us and them are.
Here, Katz's comparison to Stonewall is striking. When queer historians use "pre-Stonewall" and "post-Stonewall" as shorthand for points in gay-rights history, the important factor differentiating the politics is identity. Before Stonewall, there were a lot of men having sex with men and women having sex with women, but they usually didn't identify with any particular political movement. After Stonewall, they suddenly saw their commonality as something, not just personal, but political.
Identity politics isn't the best framework for an existing movement. But for a newly-politicized group, it isn't a bad start.
Check out the BAT Chording Keyboard. http://www.callamer.com/infogrip/bat.html
I got one and I love it. I'm a righty, and I BAT with one hand and mouse with the other. I actually type faster with my left hand on a BAT than I do with both hands on a qwerty Keyboard.
I notice from the picture on the Web site that this device seems to put the hand into both dorsiflexion and ulnar deviation -- a dangerous combination for RSI.
Also, you mention that you "actually type faster". This is not necessarily a good thing. One of the key reasons that RSI is so much worse of a public health problem now is the drastic increase in production expected by knowledge workers. A keyboard, unlike the typewriter before it, allows one to move at a pace fast enough for injury.
I'm only 24, and seven years of hacking and system administration -- two jobs I love dearly -- have totally ruined my hands.
I have extensive, disabling, and very painful forearm tendinitis. Months of physical therapy will be required just in order to get me back to where I can drive, clothe myself, and work a doorknob without pain. Using a keyboard will probably be months down the road.
And, you know what's the worst thing? I'm totally cut off from Linux, because DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking and other similar dictation products only run under Windows. If that's not a reason to adjust your behavior, I don't know what is.:-)
PLEASE don't attempt to treat yourself. While I'm well aware that most Americans do not get enough vitamins in their diets, vitamins alone will not prevent, and will certainly not reverse, severe RSI. I cannot say this strongly enough: PAIN IS NOT NORMAL WHEN TYPING. If you experience it, SEE A DOCTOR.
I speak from experience. I went many years with occasional pain in my hands and forearms. It was only after I could not type at all that I went to see a doctor, and I now have an injury that is disabling and very painful. It will take several months of physical therapy before I will even get past the pain. I may never be able to use the keyboard again extensively.
Trust me, you don't want this to happen to you. Don't attempt to selftreat. See a doctor, now.
There is a schism in Dvorak keyboards, albeit a minor one...the difference is in the keys between the top-row zero and the Backspace (the ones marked "-/_" and "=/+" on a QWERTY keyboard) and the second-from-the-left key on the top alpha row (the one marked "}/]" on QWERTY).
On some Dvorak keyboards (the one provided with Microsoft Windows, for instance), the QWERTY "-/_" and "=/+" keys correspond exactly to the two bracket/brace keys to the right of the P in QWERTY. So underscore corresponds to left brace, plus to right brace, dash to left bracket, equals to right bracket. Meanwhile, the equals/plus key is simply moved to occupy the space of the QWERTY "]/}" key. (All Dvorak keyboards have slash and question mark on the key marked "[/{" on QWERTY.)
On the ANSI Dvorak keyboard (which was the one you got from ftp.apple.com and on some Mac Goodies CD's in the late eighties and early nineties), those keys instead are "]/[", "=/+", and "}/{". That is to say, the equals/plus key is identical to QWERTY, and the right/left brackets and right/left braces are put on the underscore/dash and right bracket/right brace keys, respectively.
"How strange!" is the thought of many people on seeing this layout. It looks counterintuitive for the LEFT bracket or brace to require the shift key while the right ones do not.
But in fact, I like it better. It was designed for text typing, where it is very likely that if you are typing an opening brace or bracket, the next character you type will be upcase, and thus also require the use of shift.
Of course, that's not usually the case in coding. But it happens to work nicely in Perl--you're probably going to type a dollar sign after the open-bracket anyway.:)
Try both layouts and see which you like. If you're a Linux user and you don't have xkeycaps, for shame! RPMs and other packages are available everywhere. Unlike the Macintosh 'Keycaps' desk accessory, xkeycaps' primary purpose is not to display the current key layout, but to let you change it on the fly--getting it back to the default with a click.
Run xkeycaps and leave it running in the background (since you might get the keyboard into a state where you can't run xkeycaps again from the command line!) until you figure out how you like your keyboard. Then you can have it write out the current keyboard state into a file, all ready to be 'xmodmap'ed next time you log in!
(I keep on claiming to be a geek and sysadmin first and a linguist second, but why do I keep posting things about language?;)
You claim that a friend has a 2-year-old who doesn't talk, and rather babbles like the characters on Teletubbies. Assuming that this child does not have congenital brain dysfunction, you should recommend that your friend get the child to a neurologist right away.
2-year-olds should be way past the babbling stage. At 24 months, a child should be speaking with sentences, albeit simple and occasionally strangely ungrammatical ones.
Now, once the neurologist has seen the child, I'd then recommend that the child be taken to Steven Pinker or another language-acquisition expert at MIT or Stanford. If a child, surrounded by speaking people, loses the ability (or never acquires the ability) to speak simply from watching a half-hour of television every day, then every single theory about how language is acquired is dead wrong. Linguists would love to examine the child---he or she is clearly the key to shattering forty years of research.
Whoops! Repost with proper formatting
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OSI vs Taco Bell
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Sorry, I hit the Submit button when I meant to hit Preview, and look where it got me...
-------- Your argument denies some essential and self-evident facts about language. (Okay...for the sake of disclosure, my training is in linguistics, but I'm not claiming to be an authority on language.)
Let's look for a moment at your first assertion, i.e. that referring to somebody as gay may mean that they're joyful. However, the meanings of words change. And gay, when referring to a person, has not had the meaning "joyful" in at least two decades. When you use it that way, you are very apt to be misunderstood.
This is not "merely semantics". (As a linguist, I hate that phrase, because semantics isn't merely anything--it's probably the most complicated and inscrutable part of language.) If you were to say you "compiled several versions of the Linux kernel today", anyone who thought that you put them all in a document with annotations and indexing would obviously be out of his or her freakin' mind.
Pulling out the dictionary and noting that the first definition of the verb compile is "to compose into a volume" doesn't change the fact that, when dealing with programs, the verb "compile" always refers to a secondary meaning, "to run (as a program) through a compiler."
Similarly, just because the first definition of gay given in the dictionary is "merrily excited" doesn't mean that you can refer to a person as gay in this day and age and not have your interlocutor assume you mean he is homosexual.
This is controversial, however. There are many language purists out there who seek to preserve older meanings of older words. There's no need here and now to get into that intractable, and ridiculous, argument. I would merely point out that Slashdot is filled with words that no one would even think of reading with their "standard" meanings, e.g. broadcast, program, flame, cookie, page, site, develop, crash. Anyone who criticized the deviation from "standard usage" of one of these words in a Slashdot post would be flamed to hell, and rightly so.
Your second assertion, however, is ridiculous. If you mean sissy, then say sissy. To use a term which is hurtful to a group of people--knowing that it is hurtful to that group of people, when there are other perfectly good words for describing exactly the same concept--is either irrational or sadistic.
In case you're not aware of the origins of the word fag, let me enlighten you, as it may be illuminating as to why this word is unacceptable for conversational use. That it is derived from the word "faggot" is undisputed; this word first appeared in print no later than 1914 to refer to a male homosexual.
The entymology becomes hazier beyond this point. However, it is widely believed to be a coinage from the word faggot (ME fagotfaggots is the term for the bundles of kindling used in the burning of heretics. One group of heretics that were burned were male homosexuals.
You can see why the term is so objectionable. To use it to refer to a person (whether a homosexual person or to a, as you say, "sissy") insinuates to many that you believe that the person should be penalized for their behavior by being burned alive.
Though I'm well aware that geeks are by and large very "anti-politically correct", they also by and large have a strong libertarian streak. I would be very suprised if even a sizable minority of the readers of Slashdot have personally homophobic opinions. But referring to a document that uses such a damaging word in its very first sentence in an off-the-wall manner as "damn funny" is very hurtful to the many of us who identify as lesbian or gay.
I liked the wording of Chris's letter. Particularly important was the last paragraph, where she says, "I am prepared to seek legal action in Santa Clara county courts..."
Hear, hear! This is *exactly* the right way to word such things in letters of complaint. Saying you *will* sue if X is not done is considered a threat, and can in fact be actionable under the right circumstances. But saying that you are prepared to seek legal redress is completely fine, and probably the strongest way to express your intensions legally.
Hmm, I'm not sure I'd bother getting a POTS line just to test for ADSL. I talked to a software techie from BellSouth today (I can't personally vouch for his being a techie, but one of my coworkers referred me to him, so I think he is, he talked a good game anyway), to ask him why they say I can't have ADSL and when I might be able to get it.
He said that the issue is that BellSouth's current ADSL scheme relies on the presence of copper from wall jack to switch. If fiber intervenes (i.e., if some portion of the line has been upgraded recently), it won't work. It seems unlikely to me that by getting a new POTS jack installed, they'll install fiber that wasn't there before. But, then again, what do I know about telephones?
The good news is that he claimed they were working on a new type of service and they'd have ADSL service for all customers, even those "served by fiber" (his words) by late Q2.
I know nothing about telephone hardware and switching, and for all I know he was BS'ing me the whole way, but he sounded like a good guy.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Drivers might drive somewhat more recklessly because they have seatbelts and airbags, but the solution to that isn't to get rid of these safety features.
As an IT worker, the message to bring home from this study is only this: employees will assume that you'll pick up the pieces for them. You need to either plan to do that, or dissuade them of their assumption.
And you can dissuade them. Saying, "don't do X, it reduces company security" will be met with yawns. But say "doing X is a terminable offense and people have been fired for doing it" gets people's attention.
I'm not sure whether you meant that the people who do the surveys market IT training or that third parties do so, but let me make one thing clear: SAGE is a nonprofit membership organization, and we do not have salespeople market to participants of the Salary Survey (for that matter, we don't even have any salespeople).
The Salary Survey is a service provided by SAGE to the public as part of our mission to "advance the status of computer system administration as a profession."
Trey Harris
Interim Director, SAGE
I have no idea what the poster is talking about. SAGE has never been at a "trade show," to my knowledge (other than exhibit floors of the occassional conference with which we have co-sponsorship agreements). We run our own annual technical conference, LISA. I honestly can't imagine what we'd do at a trade show. We don't have anything to sell--we're a nonprofit, membership organization dedicated to advancing the profession of system administration.
I think I'll just ignore the rest of the poster's comment. Perhaps the poster is confusing SAGE with some other entity.
Trey Harris
Vice President, SAGE
Money, sure. Space? Have you ever seen a Manhattan apartment, outside of a television show (where it is inconceivable, for instance, that a supposedly struggling writer like Carrie Bradshaw could afford her seemingly palatial apartment on the Upper East Side)? A 750 square-foot one-bedroom apartment is considered enormous and will run you a couple grand a month at the very least, more likely three. You're lucky to have space in your kitchen for both a microwave and a toaster. (Most people with a separate freezer put it in their garages or storerooms. No such things here.)
And besides, things that freeze well are the exception, not the rule. Meat, sometimes. Produce--you better have bought it frozen to begin with, and it will never be as good as fresh. Seafood? Don't make me laugh.
I use my meager freezer space to freeze things I make--stock, dough, soup bones, a casserole for when I don't have time to cook. I don't have the room to spare for ingredients simply to reduce the number of times I go to the store, at the cost of a much lower quality final product.
Well... if you've ever been apartment-hunting in New York, you'd know that if a kitchen has a full-size refrigerator (i.e., the type that you find in 90% of homes in America), then it is probably a "luxury apartment." The typical Manhattan apartment has a compact refrigerator (the kind that's a foot shorter and a few inches narrower than usual). I've even seen apartments with "kitchens" that would, anywhere else, be called a "kitchenette" with a dorm-room sized fridge.
FreshDirect may, in fact, not be a service that would work profitably elsewhere. But given that
- In New York, most people don't have cars, and if you do, it is an enormous chore to use it, since you probably had to park a dozen blocks away and it will take half an hour minimum to find a parking space (both near the grocery store and once back at home);
- Kitchens are tiny, just like apartments in general, so there's no room to store quantities of food beyond what you need for a few days;
- A cab round-trip to the store will be $6 minimum, the bus or subway will be $3; and
- Every grocery store in Manhattan will deliver, meaning you do your shopping and then leave your bags with the cashier. The charge is usually $3.95 flat or $1/bag;
the FreshDirect model starts to make a lot more sense. You get to skip the inconvenience of carrying groceries back from the store for the same price as the grocery store--but you don't have to go to the store, either.Another point that hasn't been raised here is that the founder of FreshDirect is the co-founder of Fairway Uptown. Fairway is well known for their amazing produce, spectacular cheese selection, great coffees, and butcher-quality meats and seafood. Many of us Manhattanites make a weekly trek of thirty blocks or more to Fairway to get food of the quality not available at the local supermarket. (To answer several other posters, the days of the corner butcher and green-grocer are largely over in Manhattan, as the high cost of real estate has driven them all out.)
FreshDirect offers Fairway selection and quality without the Fairway travel. This isn't about laziness, it's about equal or greater convenience and greater quality at the same price.
One final point--several people here have said that we "should" be buying groceries once or twice a month. Ignoring the lack of storage/refrigeration space in New York I mentioned earlier, do you guys not eat meat or fish or produce? Even if you buy specifically with an eye towards things that keep, it's pretty hard to buy fresh more than a week ahead, especially if you want to eat healthily.
What would you say has been the number one requested feature that you will not put into Perl 6, and why not?
I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at that conference. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. There are three days of tutorials where these same experts teach about sendmail, perl, dns, security, etc. And then there's three days of invited talks and papers, too!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
I've personally found every job I've ever had from just meeting people in the hallway at LISA. The "hallway track" is the most important thing, because you get to rub elbows with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Aeleen Frisch, Paul Vixie, etc.--you can ask them questions and get the real dirt rather than just speculating with your friends and coworkers. Those same experts give all-day tutorials for three days teaching about Sendmail, DNS, sysadmin, security, etc. And then there are three days of papers and talks!
It's in San Diego the first week of December this year. You can read about it here.
(In the interest of disclosure I should say that I'm involved with SAGE, one of the co-sponsors of LISA.)
I have a Season Pass (automatic recording of every episode) to the syndicated broadcasts of Law & Order on A&E... they show two episodes per day, one at 1pm and 7pm, and another at 11pm and 3am. It records the 1pm and the 11pm, never the 7pm or 3am (i.e., I get one and only one copy of each episode). TiVo support told me that it does scan program descriptions for duplicates. I wonder why CmdrTaco's getting them?
when I read your question. In our results-oriented medical
establishment, surgery is the first thing that comes to mind when
someone is facing an injury as debilitating as CTS. But surgery
really should be only used as a last resort.
You didn't give much detail in your question, but since you said you,
not your doctor, are "almost convinced" of the need for
surgery, I can't help but wonder if you're putting the cart before the
horse. Have you really exhausted all other therapies?
Make no mistake--if you present yourself before a surgeon and show her
your symptoms, she will most likely perform surgery. That's
what surgeons do, and if you have a hammer, everything looks like a
nail. The phenomenon of costly, repetitive, and in the end
ineffective or even damaging surgery is well-known in the
CTS-suffering community.
But I hope you'll go to a general practicioner or family-practice
physician first (your HMO, if you have one, will probably require you
to do so) and explore other avenues of treatment.
Are you sure it's CTS? There are a number of keyboard-related
injuries under the Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) rubric, and carpal
tunnel syndrome is actually one of the rarest. Tendinitis and various
types of extracarpal nerve damage are far more common. A
self-diagnosis is almost always wrong, so make sure you see a
physician.
When I first felt RSI symptoms earlier this year, I had the first
thoughts that it sounds like you are having: it's carpal tunnel
syndrome, and I need surgery. But then I did some reading and I
learned that surgery is rarely the correct treatment option, that CTS
was not necessarily my diagnosis, and that lifestyle changes combined
with non-invasive treatment could largely restore the use of my hands.
This is something to keep in mind: surgery, even if it is indicated in your
particular case, is never going to restore 100% of your pre-RSI
function. And repeated surgeries are sometimes necessary in order to
get full benefit. Similarly, the non-invasive treatment options and
lifestyle changes that I mention below also do not allow you to go on
nine-hour coding binges sprawled with your laptop on the floor. I
assume you must have very painful, very frightening symptoms if you
think surgery is for you. But don't go looking for some way to bring
you back to 100%: there unfortunately isn't one in the current state
of the art.
Among the less-invasive options that you should explore with your
physician (in addition to surgery; it may, in the end, be indicated in
your particular case):
therapist, not the typical "relaxation" masseuse)
or, more likely, a combination of the
above.
When I saw a physician about my symptoms, which left me unable to type
even the shortest email, I was initially diagnosed with forearm
tendinitis (basically, a combination of golfer's and tennis elbow) and
started on therapy involving aggressive physical therapy,
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and posture therapy.
During this period, I didn't even touch the keyboard
(voice-recognition helped here!). As time went on, my symptoms
improved, but in a kind of lopsided way, and I was rediagnosed, this
time with extensor tendinitis (a broader diagnoses than forearm
tendinitis including more tendons) and thoracic outlet syndrome (an
injury of the nerves in the thoracic region of the chest). With the
new diagnosis, I was started on various neurological therapies, and I
added chiropractic and neuromuscular massage to my regimen.
And eight months later, I'm no longer in regular, ongoing therapy
(though I continue the chiropractic and massage because I like it and
it's an easy "maintenance" treatment) and I can type well enough--I
typed what you've just finished reading, didn't I? I have a regular
exercise program, and I am hyperaware of my ergonomic situation
whenever I sit down to do work. I still have symptoms, of course.
Sometimes my hands will go numb for no reason at all, or I'll
experience pain when lifting a grocery bag. I still have to massage
my sore upper arms and forearms at the end of the workday.
But I no longer worry that I'll lose my livelihood, or that I'll end
up unable to even clothe, bathe, or cook for myself. I can't
say the same for some of my friends who have forgone other therapies
for surgery. Maybe surgery is right for you--but investigate all the
options.
The way I remember Rich will be at conferences, standing at the front of a room where he has just presented, with a small mob of people around him, all eager to ask him some esoteric point of network programming or argue some vanishingly trivial point or just to shake his hand and tell him how much they admire him.
I learned more from Rich than from all my CS professors combined. Over lunch one day at a conference, I chatted with him about his plans for starting TCP/IP Illustrated all over again, rewriting it for IPv6. I remember being excited about these updates, and telling all my friends about them, even though they wouldn't be out for years.
It breaks my heart to think that these, and all the other good works that mind was capable of producing, will never come.
I strongly believe that censorship of the Internet is a battleground that will become increasingly important to religious fundamentalists as time goes on. When television, radio, paper and other traditional methods of media delivery are absorbed into the Internet (as is already beginning to happen), it becomes increasingly possible for people to live in a totally politicized infosphere, cut off from what we today think of as "mainstream media".
For example, imagine the Christian Coalition passing out copies of censorware to its members that blocked from their view any neutral or positive depictions of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, non-Christian religions, etc. These people--and, more alarmingly, their children and patrons of any public places like libraries they've been able to force to use this software--would effectively live in a world where homosexuality is evil and silenced, where women do not have a voice, and where religious diversity is unknown.
Our modern reality is largely constructed by the media. We know nothing firsthand about what is happening beyond the reach of our own two eyes and ears. Everything else, everything about our reality that we haven't witnessed ourselves, comes from the media. And censorware intimates the specter of a future where political groups--whether governmental or otherwise, benevolent or evil--can manipulate what the public perceives as reality, what people think is true about the world around them. It's the Catholic Index, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields, all over again, but this time in a way that could--theoretically--succeed in the long-term.
It scares me. I think it should scare you, too.
It's www.6bone.net, not 6bone.com. (Dunno what 6bone.com is--InterNIC doesn't even seem to have a listing.)
And as to your comment that the experimental network will become the official one--it can't. Unless we continue using IPv4 forever. The 6bone tunnels through the IPv4 network, overlaying itself on top of it. If IPv4 goes away, then the 6bone does, too. (This also means that some features of IPv6, such as anycast addressing and host mobility, cannot be fully realized until the underlying network is all-IPv6.)
Furthermore, the 6bone has a temporary TLA assignment. This means that only a fraction (an infinitesimal fraction, though still pretty huge by IPv4 standards) of the total address space is available in the 6bone. Going with the 6bone as the official network would radically reduce the total address space available. It would also enforce the current address allocation mechanism (which is very bad and intended to be temporary) forever.
In sum, you're wrong. And anyone who deploys production services on the 6bone risks getting bitten.
I had a chance to use the Aironet 11Mb card at the USENIX Technical Conference a couple of weeks ago, and the Linux driver worked very well. But those guys had several access points for a hundred or so cards--they were loaning them out to conference attendees. Definitely not the typical home-network setting!
:-)
My question is, if I were starting a new installation for a home network, which cards are easiest to set up? I notice that with the Proxim Symphony, you must have a Windoze machine available to configure the thing, as it must already be configured when you try to use the Linux driver and the configurator's only available in a Win32 GUI.
Also, do any of these have a NAT built-in? Most high-speed access solutions such as ADSL and cable modem only give you a single IP address, and charge steep rates for additional ones. So, you want a NAT (Network Address Translator) to make all your machines look like a single machine to your service provider.
If you wanted to NAT but the wireless access-point didn't do it, it seems to me you'd have to have two ethernet cards on a PC that would have the wireless access point on one card and your high speed connection on the other, running NAT software (ipchains would work, but there are other options) to translate between the two. That seems like a lot of work to me, and too many things to go wrong!
The author rails against identity politics, in the way that many leftist activists do today, without really saying what's wrong with it. What she misses is that every politically significant minority group in this century has gotten its start in identity politics.
I certainly agree that the nerve that Jon Katz tapped smacks of a burgeoning identity politics. The dissemination right here on Slashdot of a shared experience mirrors turn-of-the-century feminist literature, the Harlem Rennaissance, or the gay press of the sixties and seventies.
Not everyone agrees on the names to apply ("geek", "dork", "nerd", etc.). Similarly, the civil-rights movement has shifted from one name to another ("Negro", "colored person", "black", "African-American"). The gay-rights movement's history can be divided chronologically by the dominant nomenclature at the time ("homophile", "homosexual", "gay", "gay, lesbian and bisexual", "queer"). The important thing about this, though, is not the naming itself. It is the profound feeling among the members of the group that they do form an identifiable group, whatever they call themselves. Labeling and identity often go together, but identity politics was precisely named.
So what's so offensive about identity politics? It's certainly gotten a lot done in its time, hasn't it? Absolutely. I assume the author's problem is what happens in the later stages of identity politics. The rough edges of identity politics don't begin to show themselves until the movement starts to make gains in the mainstream.
This is caused by the conflict between three forces: one, the radicals who started the movement to begin with (or are their ideological successors); two, the less radical policy-wonk lobbyist types who have taken over the established organizations (the NAACP, for example); and three, the rank-and-file minority person, who is now in a better position than he or she was when the whole movement started.
The radicals are irked at the lobbyists for "selling out", for becoming single-issue people instead of building the broad-based leftist coalitions they invision. The policy-wonks are most interested in amassing political power (one would assume with the intention of eventually vaulting over into mainstream politics). The rank-and-file are mostly just tired of the whole thing, and want to stop thinking about politics so much.
This is where the radicals feel the need to jettison identity politics. Once identity politics has reached the point at which national organizations are amassing power in the mainstream, it does little but for the people who already have power in the minority (and wish to transmute that power into mainstream power).
Where the author of the VV article went wrong is this: there's nothing wrong with identity politics, per se. Even noted identity-politics bashers like Cornell West and Urvashi Vaid admit that.
Identity politics is great for a newly-formed movement. It gives its constituency a sense of belonging, which in turn generates enthusiasm for the cause. Us-vs.-them is a great way to get people motivated, and identity politics' first contribution to political rhetoric is to identify who, exactly, us and them are.
Here, Katz's comparison to Stonewall is striking. When queer historians use "pre-Stonewall" and "post-Stonewall" as shorthand for points in gay-rights history, the important factor differentiating the politics is identity. Before Stonewall, there were a lot of men having sex with men and women having sex with women, but they usually didn't identify with any particular political movement. After Stonewall, they suddenly saw their commonality as something, not just personal, but political.
Identity politics isn't the best framework for an existing movement. But for a newly-politicized group, it isn't a bad start.
Check out the BAT Chording Keyboard. http://www.callamer.com/infogrip/bat.html
I got one and I love it. I'm a righty, and I BAT with one hand and mouse with the other. I actually type faster with my left hand on a BAT than I do with both hands on a qwerty Keyboard.
I notice from the picture on the Web site that this device seems to put the hand into both dorsiflexion and ulnar deviation -- a dangerous combination for RSI.
Also, you mention that you "actually type faster". This is not necessarily a good thing. One of the key reasons that RSI is so much worse of a public health problem now is the drastic increase in production expected by knowledge workers. A keyboard, unlike the typewriter before it, allows one to move at a pace fast enough for injury.
I'm only 24, and seven years of hacking and system administration -- two jobs I love dearly -- have totally ruined my hands.
:-)
I have extensive, disabling, and very painful forearm tendinitis. Months of physical therapy will be required just in order to get me back to where I can drive, clothe myself, and work a doorknob without pain. Using a keyboard will probably be months down the road.
And, you know what's the worst thing? I'm totally cut off from Linux, because DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking and other similar dictation products only run under Windows. If that's not a reason to adjust your behavior, I don't know what is.
PLEASE don't attempt to treat yourself. While I'm well aware that most Americans do not get enough vitamins in their diets, vitamins alone will not prevent, and will certainly not reverse, severe RSI. I cannot say this strongly enough: PAIN IS NOT NORMAL WHEN TYPING. If you experience it, SEE A DOCTOR.
I speak from experience. I went many years with occasional pain in my hands and forearms. It was only after I could not type at all that I went to see a doctor, and I now have an injury that is disabling and very painful. It will take several months of physical therapy before I will even get past the pain. I may never be able to use the keyboard again extensively.
Trust me, you don't want this to happen to you. Don't attempt to selftreat. See a doctor, now.
There is a schism in Dvorak keyboards, albeit a minor one...the difference is in the keys between the top-row zero and the Backspace (the ones marked "-/_" and "=/+" on a QWERTY keyboard) and the second-from-the-left key on the top alpha row (the one marked "}/]" on QWERTY).
:)
On some Dvorak keyboards (the one provided with Microsoft Windows, for instance), the QWERTY "-/_" and "=/+" keys correspond exactly to the two bracket/brace keys to the right of the P in QWERTY. So underscore corresponds to left brace, plus to right brace, dash to left bracket, equals to right bracket. Meanwhile, the equals/plus key is simply moved to occupy the space of the QWERTY "]/}" key. (All Dvorak keyboards have slash and question mark on the key marked "[/{" on QWERTY.)
On the ANSI Dvorak keyboard (which was the one you got from ftp.apple.com and on some Mac Goodies CD's in the late eighties and early nineties), those keys instead are "]/[", "=/+", and "}/{". That is to say, the equals/plus key is identical to QWERTY, and the right/left brackets and right/left braces are put on the underscore/dash and right bracket/right brace keys, respectively.
"How strange!" is the thought of many people on seeing this layout. It looks counterintuitive for the LEFT bracket or brace to require the shift key while the right ones do not.
But in fact, I like it better. It was designed for text typing, where it is very likely that if you are typing an opening brace or bracket, the next character you type will be upcase, and thus also require the use of shift.
Of course, that's not usually the case in coding. But it happens to work nicely in Perl--you're probably going to type a dollar sign after the open-bracket anyway.
Try both layouts and see which you like. If you're a Linux user and you don't have xkeycaps, for shame! RPMs and other packages are available everywhere. Unlike the Macintosh 'Keycaps' desk accessory, xkeycaps' primary purpose is not to display the current key layout, but to let you change it on the fly--getting it back to the default with a click.
Run xkeycaps and leave it running in the background (since you might get the keyboard into a state where you can't run xkeycaps again from the command line!) until you figure out how you like your keyboard. Then you can have it write out the current keyboard state into a file, all ready to be 'xmodmap'ed next time you log in!
You claim that a friend has a 2-year-old who doesn't talk, and rather babbles like the characters on Teletubbies. Assuming that this child does not have congenital brain dysfunction, you should recommend that your friend get the child to a neurologist right away.
2-year-olds should be way past the babbling stage. At 24 months, a child should be speaking with sentences, albeit simple and occasionally strangely ungrammatical ones.
Now, once the neurologist has seen the child, I'd then recommend that the child be taken to Steven Pinker or another language-acquisition expert at MIT or Stanford. If a child, surrounded by speaking people, loses the ability (or never acquires the ability) to speak simply from watching a half-hour of television every day, then every single theory about how language is acquired is dead wrong. Linguists would love to examine the child---he or she is clearly the key to shattering forty years of research.
--------
Your argument denies some essential and self-evident facts about language. (Okay...for the sake of disclosure, my training is in linguistics, but I'm not claiming to be an authority on language.)
Let's look for a moment at your first assertion, i.e. that referring to somebody as gay may mean that they're joyful. However, the meanings of words change. And gay, when referring to a person, has not had the meaning "joyful" in at least two decades. When you use it that way, you are very apt to be misunderstood.
This is not "merely semantics". (As a linguist, I hate that phrase, because semantics isn't merely anything--it's probably the most complicated and inscrutable part of language.) If you were to say you "compiled several versions of the Linux kernel today", anyone who thought that you put them all in a document with annotations and indexing would obviously be out of his or her freakin' mind.
Pulling out the dictionary and noting that the first definition of the verb compile is "to compose into a volume" doesn't change the fact that, when dealing with programs, the verb "compile" always refers to a secondary meaning, "to run (as a program) through a compiler."
Similarly, just because the first definition of gay given in the dictionary is "merrily excited" doesn't mean that you can refer to a person as gay in this day and age and not have your interlocutor assume you mean he is homosexual.
This is controversial, however. There are many language purists out there who seek to preserve older meanings of older words. There's no need here and now to get into that intractable, and ridiculous, argument. I would merely point out that Slashdot is filled with words that no one would even think of reading with their "standard" meanings, e.g. broadcast, program, flame, cookie, page, site, develop, crash. Anyone who criticized the deviation from "standard usage" of one of these words in a Slashdot post would be flamed to hell, and rightly so.
Your second assertion, however, is ridiculous. If you mean sissy, then say sissy. To use a term which is hurtful to a group of people--knowing that it is hurtful to that group of people, when there are other perfectly good words for describing exactly the same concept--is either irrational or sadistic.
In case you're not aware of the origins of the word fag, let me enlighten you, as it may be illuminating as to why this word is unacceptable for conversational use. That it is derived from the word "faggot" is undisputed; this word first appeared in print no later than 1914 to refer to a male homosexual.
The entymology becomes hazier beyond this point. However, it is widely believed to be a coinage from the word faggot (ME fagotfaggots is the term for the bundles of kindling used in the burning of heretics. One group of heretics that were burned were male homosexuals.
You can see why the term is so objectionable. To use it to refer to a person (whether a homosexual person or to a, as you say, "sissy") insinuates to many that you believe that the person should be penalized for their behavior by being burned alive.
Though I'm well aware that geeks are by and large very "anti-politically correct", they also by and large have a strong libertarian streak. I would be very suprised if even a sizable minority of the readers of Slashdot have personally homophobic opinions. But referring to a document that uses such a damaging word in its very first sentence in an off-the-wall manner as "damn funny" is very hurtful to the many of us who identify as lesbian or gay.
I liked the wording of Chris's letter. Particularly important was the last paragraph, where she says, "I am prepared to seek legal action in Santa Clara county courts..."
Hear, hear! This is *exactly* the right way to word such things in letters of complaint. Saying you *will* sue if X is not done is considered a threat, and can in fact be actionable under the right circumstances. But saying that you are prepared to seek legal redress is completely fine, and probably the strongest way to express your intensions legally.
Hmm, I'm not sure I'd bother getting a POTS line just to test for ADSL. I talked to a software techie from BellSouth today (I can't personally vouch for his being a techie, but one of my coworkers referred me to him, so I think he is, he talked a good game anyway), to ask him why they say I can't have ADSL and when I might be able to get it.
:)
He said that the issue is that BellSouth's current ADSL scheme relies on the presence of copper from wall jack to switch. If fiber intervenes (i.e., if some portion of the line has been upgraded recently), it won't work. It seems unlikely to me that by getting a new POTS jack installed, they'll install fiber that wasn't there before. But, then again, what do I know about telephones?
The good news is that he claimed they were working on a new type of service and they'd have ADSL service for all customers, even those "served by fiber" (his words) by late Q2.
I know nothing about telephone hardware and switching, and for all I know he was BS'ing me the whole way, but he sounded like a good guy.