2. There was a big problem with what Red Hat did to KDE in it's 6.0 release. Putting it in/usr? I personally like it in/opt. Anyhow, this created a lot of problems for me (and I'm sure it did for lots of programmers), because I tried to install several applications for KDE from RPM, but because they were older (i.e., for Red Hat 5.x) they installed into/opt. Is there going to be some kind of rule or way that such things will be prevented in the future?
Use the relocatepkg option of rpm. I forget the syntax right now. I think it is something like relocatepkg=/opt/kde
This is what I did and it (almost) worked great. I just had to make a few symlinks for some config files from/opt/kde/share to/usr/kde/share (like for kdm). For some reason, there seemed to be some hard-coded locations inserted during compile time.
This also means, however, that you can't upgrade the whole RH distribution automatically. you have to upgrade kde separately with the relocatepkg option.
I only upgraded to Win 98 back in Sept because I HAD to (bought a laptop with DVD, and had trouble networking the W98 laptop and W95 desktop)
Encrypted passwords dude. W98 has the SMB passwords encrypted by default. Has been since OSR2. Go to HKLM\System\Currnet\ControlSet\Services\VxD\VNSETU P, add a new DWORD of EnablePlainTextPassword and set the value to 1.
IIRC, they are not even the world's largest software company, depending on how you define it. They may indeed be the world's largest PC software company or sell the most number of individual software licenses, but in terms of dollar sales, I read that IBM sold more software than M$. Of course this is due to huge dollar mainframe operating systems and software, but it still brought in more $ than M$ raked in. At least a year or so ago, when I read this.
The only reason my company switched from 100% wordperfect to a WP/MS-Word mix (and still trending more towards word, unfortunately)is that our clients demanded it. We exchange documents all the time. If your clients can't read your documents, then you don'e have any more clients or a job.
I remember when AMD had quite a lot of respect a long time ago. I don't know what their big product was back then, but back in the mid-80s, when I was in grad school in the Bay Area, AMD was always in the news for their high-flying annual (christmas?) parties. They would rent out the whole Cow Palace and put out these huge spreads for all their employees. I was under the impression that this wasn't the only great employee perk they offered. What did they make back then that made them so much money?
Yeah they look nice, and Linus and Rasterman use them, so they are porbably pretty good.
However, why don't they let you customize them to any significant degree? their web page at http://vaiodirect.sel.sony.com/ allows some customization, but when you go with the lower processor (always the way to save money, put the $ in memory instead!), it only lets you go up to 96 MB of RAM. Then is says in the details section that RAM is expandable to 160 MB, but they apparently won't let you buy it when you purchase the machine. Nor could you upgrade to a 14 inch screen if you stick with the celery processor.
I think I will instead go with a Dell Insrpiron 3500 instead, where you can pick exactly what you want!
Yeah, that's what I thought until I upgraded to glibc 2.1 (thru RH6.0), which broke SO5. Instead of running ten years, try more like a few months since I downloaded the whole 70 MB of it.
SO5.1 fixes this of course. I decided to support Star and actually bought the product, to encourage more linux software. Then they got bought out the next week! I wouldn't have bought it if I knew Sun was going to buy them. I still can't figure out why they would want to support Linux.
Not only is this probably exactly what they are looking out for, but this is also the first I've ever seen sex used to sell Linux!
Re:The land of the free (well, maybe not...)
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
A dude was running a listserv or news service for bike racing results, called something like, velo-results. There is a print rag called VeloNews. Well, they figured out the internet one day and wanted to try and assume the "velo-results" trademark as their own. Luckily the velo-results guy had enough lawyer-types out there willing to work pro bono if VeloNews wanted to get serious about their cease-and-desist order, and VeloNews backed down
Ah, Velo-net, now there's an interesting story. Sort of a "history of the internet and how it lost its innocence" in a nutshell. Velo-Net (not velo-results) was started by a cyclist on a Stanford server back in the early 90's as a resource for all cycling-related info. This was pre-web (at least on wide scale), and was a gopher service. He then also started offering majordomo service for free to bike clubs. I remember when he made the announcement that he was dropping the gopher services since there was this new thing call the web that seemed more appropriate. But then problems arose. First, there was the velo-news incident that you mentioned above. Although velo-news backed down at first, several months later, they came back and made him drop the velo-net name. He had already registered and was using the cycling.org domain even though his service was called velo-net, and so he ended up just being known as cycling.org, although this was before being known as a dot-something was cool. So he actuallly lost that round.
Things got worse from there, however, when spammers got ahold of his mailing list addresses, and took down the server. So eventually, this guy who was just trying to provide a free service for the good of everyone got shut down (he was still just borrowing space and bandwidth from Stanford).
The site eventually got picked up by a commercial concern, cyclery.com. Actually, both http://cycling.org and http://www.cyclery.com both give the same page, but now with lots of advertisement, etc.
Actually, I hate people who just say "man whatever" as a response, but I'm not at my linux box, and I forgot the syntax. You have to rdev the kernel to know which harddrive has the root partition. Note, you don't have to recompile, just rdev it.
If you alreay know this and tried it, then ignore this post.
I'm not at a W98 box, but I understand that there is a checkbox nested down in some dialogue boxes that allows you to run the basic UI stuff in a separate process (right word?) from IE5. The default is that since win explorer and other basic UI tools use IE5 libraries/code, if you have IE 5 running, they share processes, so that if IE dies, so does windows.
I probably have all the details and terms wrong (someody clarify, please), but supposedly running these separate (using more memory, of course), makes things more stable. Or at least IE is free to crash without taking down the whole GUI, and thus the OS.
BTW, do you use the standard MS telnet to go to your linux box? I have some sort of curses problem trying that with MS telnet. Says something like terminal not supported. Same with the enhanced version of hyperterminal used as a telnet client. Interestingly, hyperterminal doesn't have this problem if I use is a "dial up" client though a serial cable to the linux box. This is with the same hardware setup: connected by serial cable, used either as a dial in connection, or if a TCP/IP connection is esatblished over the serial cable originated with Win95 DUN (using the null modem driver available out there on net somewhere). Same getty running on ttyS0.
And don't kid yourself, it will cool down someday. About 15-20 years ago it was chemical engineers who were red hot. And about 5-10 years ago they couldn't find jobs for anything.
Tell me about it (B.S. 1982, Ph.D. 1987, both ChemE, Ph.D. from Berkeley). I actually caught the environmental consulting wave of the late 80's/early 90's, but that is now deader than dead. I am still at the consulting firm, but it's boring as hell. All reports and bureaucracy, and not much technical. I think this technical boredom is what lead me to allow Linux to take over my life three and a half years ago. For my vacation last week, I bought O'Reilly's "Apache, the Definitive Guide" as the best book I could find at Borders for good reading by the lake (and it was great!) (and no, I don't run a web site).
So of course, I wonder all the time whether I should continue to waste away as a consultant, or try to get paid for what I spend a hell of a lot of time on as a hobby: namely Linux (or other computer) stuff. Although my first programming was on a PDP-8 in Junior High, other than acing the CS101 as a freshman, I didn't do much programming (remember, we were still using punch cards as undergrads). But it still fascinates the hell out of me. I currently don't do too much programming even now, since I don't have too many "itches to scratch". But when I do, I can dive right into it. A few years ago (just before I got into Linux), I wrote a fairly complex database frontend/query developer, etc. in Paradox's ObjectPAL without any prior experience (I got a ObjectPAL reference book to help). Maybe this is trivial, I don't know.
But what really ges me more interested is networking issues. I of course have my house networked (just because I could, don't really need it), and the networking O'Reilly books are the ones that I usually end up picking up for light reading.
But I'm going on 39 now, which puts me way over the hill. Should I even consider jumping into the computer field? I realize I'll have to take some classes first, both for the content themselves, as well as for the resume. I know I'll have to take a pay cut. But, given what is said in this thread, does it make sense to even consider this. The arguments in favor of the "older" (35+) coders is their experience, but I'd be coming in a the 20-y.o. experience level. Would going after a networking position make any more sense?
> But wouldn't it be cheaper slap linux with > say StarOffice or KOffice on these 486's and > have a stable environment for users to work in?
StarOffice on a 486? To make a stable environment?
OK, disclaimer first: I am a MS-hating (for their business practices, mainly) Linux user, who just used staroffice for a big project. I will always use Linux + Staroffice over MS Office on principle.
But, running it on a 486 is pretty much unusable (I've tried). And I found SO to crash much more frequently than MS Office (which I have to use at work). Granted that a SO crash doesn't take down linux, or even X. But still, stability is not the reason to use SO on linux, and forget it on a 486.
I think the key item here is the "SX". Windows almost never uses the FPU, but as I understand it, X does quite a bit (especially for fonts, in my experience).
As for the RAM, I totally agree. Back when I got into linux, I readily shelled out the $300 to go from 8 to 16 MB RAM (man, does it hurt to think about that now!) for significant improvements in performance on a 486SX.
On the other hand, I don't know how well Win 95 holds up under low RAM either. While the box I described above dual booted into Win3.1 (which ran fine with 8 MB), a 486SX laptop I have and still use dual boots into Win95. I found that machine pretty useless with 8 MB RAM with Win95 (actually trashed the HD from all the swapping). I run it now at 20 MB (its max). X performance really depends a lot on the WM and the extent to which you have to emulate the FPU.
> The Haroldson is a much tastier apple than the > Macintosh, IMHO. But I suppose "Haroldson" just > doesn't have that 'chic appeal they needed to > sell the Mac
I thought I remember reading somewhere that "Macintosh was just their internal name for the machine (like "chicago" for Win95 or any of those rivers for x86s), and they were going to call it something mundane. But the name just stuck anyways, so they ended up calling it that. Then again, they did name the Lisa "Lisa" (after someone's daughter I think) and not just some alphanumeric name.
Which router are you using? My Netgear allows up to eight ports to be forwarded to separate boxes. And this is on top of the forwarding for things like Quake (haven't tried) and Real Audio (works great).
I'd say the height of the dead, IMHO, was the 80's, not the 60's. Right up until 1987's "in the dark" got them too popular with the general population, and they had to stop playing the small venues. 70's were OK, but I think things really improved when they got rid of the Godchauxs.
And just because it is the 90's now doesn't mean that all the concert tapes aren't any more desireable. There are a lot of high quality recordings available that can be distributed endlessly now without degradation thanks to digital technology. I've always lived with analoge and hiss, but with MP3s, the incremental cost is negligable (say compared to a DAT deck), so it's much easier to go digital.
And of course, tapes are all we got now. Life hasn't been the same since 1995.
I've still got a floppy with NS 0.7 on it (for windows 3.x). That was one with the rotating mobile-type thing for an animation. That was the best animation that NS ever had. Don't kow why they ditched that for the pulsing N.
The fact that it doesn't too a very good job reading word documents other than text with rather simple formating. Tables, especially are crap, and I work with a lot of tables.
My company is slowing moving from Wordperfect to Word, and I've already had to boot windows once rather than Linux to do work at home. Not a good trend.
I understand there's an update to SO5 with better filters, but you have to d/l hte whole freaking ~65 MB or so again. Arg!
OK, I'm doing my homework before upgrading. No I haven't downloaded the src yet, but have read the docs at linuxhq. This is the first I've seen about the Virge. I'm stuck with one of those. Is this only a problem trying to run fbcon? Is it still possible just to run "the old way" with a "regular console" and the S3V X-server (I know SVGA server works too, but Redhat's install put in the S3V a little too automagically, but it seems to work fine)
And what's fbcon 1.0 vs. fbcon 2.0? Isn't fbcon just aprt of the kernel source, or is it like ftape where later versions are available outside the stock source? Nothing about this in http://www.linuxhq.com/doc21/fb/
While actual user policies apparently vary by location, my area (BA, NY) doesn't allow hubs. The web page says single machine only (at least it did last time I checked a few weeks ago). This in contrast to their ISDN pages which tout its use for a home network.
BTW, the clueless level of BA was just as bad with my recent ISDN install. Not only did they not know anything, but actually gave out wrong information. This across the board; everyone i talked to, and I talked to a lot. Fortunately isdn has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratio newsgroups out there on usenet that I've found.
DOVBS finally worked for me (trunk issues over which I had no control finally got cleared up), so ISDN is now at least affordable (no per minute charges for DOVBS). But while DOVBS was not working, I was wondering if I'd make the jump to DSL when it became available here. The trick would be just to have them install it in an old 486, then later plop another NIC in there, reboot into linux, and use it as a router for your home LAN. You might want to do that for security reasons anyway (rather than having the DSL feed into your main machine), setting up some firewalling measures. You can get an old 486 for just about nothing now, (no monitor required). Hell, the second NIC may cost you more!
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2. There was a big problem with what Red Hat did to KDE in it's 6.0 release. Putting it in /usr? I personally like it in /opt. Anyhow, this created a lot of problems for me (and I'm sure it did for lots of programmers), because I tried to install several applications for KDE from RPM, but because they were older (i.e., for Red Hat 5.x) they installed into /opt. Is there going to be some kind of rule or way that such things will be prevented in the future?
/opt/kde/share to /usr/kde/share (like for kdm). For some reason, there seemed to be some hard-coded locations inserted during compile time.
Use the relocatepkg option of rpm. I forget the syntax right now. I think it is something like relocatepkg=/opt/kde
This is what I did and it (almost) worked great. I just had to make a few symlinks for some config files from
This also means, however, that you can't upgrade the whole RH distribution automatically. you have to upgrade kde separately with the relocatepkg option.
For a humorous look at the human genome patent idiocy, take a look here
I only upgraded to Win 98 back in Sept because I HAD to (bought a laptop with DVD, and had trouble networking the W98 laptop and W95 desktop)
U P, add a new DWORD of EnablePlainTextPassword and set the value to 1.
Encrypted passwords dude. W98 has the SMB passwords encrypted by default. Has been since OSR2. Go to HKLM\System\Currnet\ControlSet\Services\VxD\VNSET
I got this from te SAMBA book. Worked great.
IIRC, they are not even the world's largest software company, depending on how you define it. They may indeed be the world's largest PC software company or sell the most number of individual software licenses, but in terms of dollar sales, I read that IBM sold more software than M$. Of course this is due to huge dollar mainframe operating systems and software, but it still brought in more $ than M$ raked in. At least a year or so ago, when I read this.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
Read the MS-Findings document. It was political. At least for Quicken; don't know about quickbooks.
The only reason my company switched from 100% wordperfect to a WP/MS-Word mix (and still trending more towards word, unfortunately)is that our clients demanded it. We exchange documents all the time. If your clients can't read your documents, then you don'e have any more clients or a job.
back to work....
I remember when AMD had quite a lot of respect a long time ago. I don't know what their big product was back then, but back in the mid-80s, when I was in grad school in the Bay Area, AMD was always in the news for their high-flying annual (christmas?) parties. They would rent out the whole Cow Palace and put out these huge spreads for all their employees. I was under the impression that this wasn't the only great employee perk they offered. What did they make back then that made them so much money?
Anybody try one of these? $299 for an upgradable box sound pretty good. Is their quality any better than E's?
Yeah they look nice, and Linus and Rasterman use them, so they are porbably pretty good.
However, why don't they let you customize them to any significant degree? their web page at http://vaiodirect.sel.sony.com/ allows some customization, but when you go with the lower processor (always the way to save money, put the $ in memory instead!), it only lets you go up to 96 MB of RAM. Then is says in the details section that RAM is expandable to 160 MB, but they apparently won't let you buy it when you purchase the machine. Nor could you upgrade to a 14 inch screen if you stick with the celery processor.
I think I will instead go with a Dell Insrpiron 3500 instead, where you can pick exactly what you want!
Yeah, that's what I thought until I upgraded to glibc 2.1 (thru RH6.0), which broke SO5. Instead of running ten years, try more like a few months since I downloaded the whole 70 MB of it.
SO5.1 fixes this of course. I decided to support Star and actually bought the product, to encourage more linux software. Then they got bought out the next week! I wouldn't have bought it if I knew Sun was going to buy them. I still can't figure out why they would want to support Linux.
This ad on eBay
Not only is this probably exactly what they are looking out for, but this is also the first I've ever seen sex used to sell Linux!
A dude was running a listserv or news service for bike racing results, called something like, velo-results. There is a print rag called VeloNews. Well, they figured out the internet one day and wanted to try and assume the "velo-results" trademark as their own. Luckily the velo-results guy had enough lawyer-types out there willing to work pro bono if VeloNews wanted to get serious about their cease-and-desist order, and VeloNews backed down
Ah, Velo-net, now there's an interesting story. Sort of a "history of the internet and how it lost its innocence" in a nutshell. Velo-Net (not velo-results) was started by a cyclist on a Stanford server back in the early 90's as a resource for all cycling-related info. This was pre-web (at least on wide scale), and was a gopher service. He then also started offering majordomo service for free to bike clubs. I remember when he made the announcement that he was dropping the gopher services since there was this new thing call the web that seemed more appropriate. But then problems arose. First, there was the velo-news incident that you mentioned above. Although velo-news backed down at first, several months later, they came back and made him drop the velo-net name. He had already registered and was using the cycling.org domain even though his service was called velo-net, and so he ended up just being known as cycling.org, although this was before being known as a dot-something was cool. So he actuallly lost that round.
Things got worse from there, however, when spammers got ahold of his mailing list addresses, and took down the server. So eventually, this guy who was just trying to provide a free service for the good of everyone got shut down (he was still just borrowing space and bandwidth from Stanford).
The site eventually got picked up by a commercial concern, cyclery.com. Actually, both http://cycling.org and http://www.cyclery.com both give the same page, but now with lots of advertisement, etc.
and the spam's still there on the mailing lists!
man rdev
Actually, I hate people who just say "man whatever" as a response, but I'm not at my linux box, and I forgot the syntax. You have to rdev the kernel to know which harddrive has the root partition. Note, you don't have to recompile, just rdev it.
If you alreay know this and tried it, then ignore this post.
I'm not at a W98 box, but I understand that there is a checkbox nested down in some dialogue boxes that allows you to run the basic UI stuff in a separate process (right word?) from IE5. The default is that since win explorer and other basic UI tools use IE5 libraries/code, if you have IE 5 running, they share processes, so that if IE dies, so does windows.
I probably have all the details and terms wrong (someody clarify, please), but supposedly running these separate (using more memory, of course), makes things more stable. Or at least IE is free to crash without taking down the whole GUI, and thus the OS.
BTW, do you use the standard MS telnet to go to your linux box? I have some sort of curses problem trying that with MS telnet. Says something like terminal not supported. Same with the enhanced version of hyperterminal used as a telnet client. Interestingly, hyperterminal doesn't have this problem if I use is a "dial up" client though a serial cable to the linux box. This is with the same hardware setup: connected by serial cable, used either as a dial in connection, or if a TCP/IP connection is esatblished over the serial cable originated with Win95 DUN (using the null modem driver available out there on net somewhere). Same getty running on ttyS0.
And don't kid yourself, it will cool down someday. About 15-20 years ago it was chemical engineers who were red hot. And about 5-10 years ago they couldn't find jobs for anything.
Tell me about it (B.S. 1982, Ph.D. 1987, both ChemE, Ph.D. from Berkeley). I actually caught the environmental consulting wave of the late 80's/early 90's, but that is now deader than dead. I am still at the consulting firm, but it's boring as hell. All reports and bureaucracy, and not much technical. I think this technical boredom is what lead me to allow Linux to take over my life three and a half years ago. For my vacation last week, I bought O'Reilly's "Apache, the Definitive Guide" as the best book I could find at Borders for good reading by the lake (and it was great!) (and no, I don't run a web site).
So of course, I wonder all the time whether I should continue to waste away as a consultant, or try to get paid for what I spend a hell of a lot of time on as a hobby: namely Linux (or other computer) stuff. Although my first programming was on a PDP-8 in Junior High, other than acing the CS101 as a freshman, I didn't do much programming (remember, we were still using punch cards as undergrads). But it still fascinates the hell out of me. I currently don't do too much programming even now, since I don't have too many "itches to scratch". But when I do, I can dive right into it. A few years ago (just before I got into Linux), I wrote a fairly complex database frontend/query developer, etc. in Paradox's ObjectPAL without any prior experience (I got a ObjectPAL reference book to help). Maybe this is trivial, I don't know.
But what really ges me more interested is networking issues. I of course have my house networked (just because I could, don't really need it), and the networking O'Reilly books are the ones that I usually end up picking up for light reading.
But I'm going on 39 now, which puts me way over the hill. Should I even consider jumping into the computer field? I realize I'll have to take some classes first, both for the content themselves, as well as for the resume. I know I'll have to take a pay cut. But, given what is said in this thread, does it make sense to even consider this. The arguments in favor of the "older" (35+) coders is their experience, but I'd be coming in a the 20-y.o. experience level. Would going after a networking position make any more sense?
Any advice?
> But wouldn't it be cheaper slap linux with
> say StarOffice or KOffice on these 486's and
> have a stable environment for users to work in?
StarOffice on a 486? To make a stable environment?
OK, disclaimer first: I am a MS-hating (for their business practices, mainly) Linux user, who just used staroffice for a big project. I will always use Linux + Staroffice over MS Office on principle.
But, running it on a 486 is pretty much unusable (I've tried). And I found SO to crash much more frequently than MS Office (which I have to use at work). Granted that a SO crash doesn't take down linux, or even X. But still, stability is not the reason to use SO on linux, and forget it on a 486.
I think the key item here is the "SX". Windows almost never uses the FPU, but as I understand it, X does quite a bit (especially for fonts, in my experience).
As for the RAM, I totally agree. Back when I got into linux, I readily shelled out the $300 to go from 8 to 16 MB RAM (man, does it hurt to think about that now!) for significant improvements in performance on a 486SX.
On the other hand, I don't know how well Win 95 holds up under low RAM either. While the box I described above dual booted into Win3.1 (which ran fine with 8 MB), a 486SX laptop I have and still use dual boots into Win95. I found that machine pretty useless with 8 MB RAM with Win95 (actually trashed the HD from all the swapping). I run it now at 20 MB (its max). X performance really depends a lot on the WM and the extent to which you have to emulate the FPU.
> The Haroldson is a much tastier apple than the
> Macintosh, IMHO. But I suppose "Haroldson" just
> doesn't have that 'chic appeal they needed to
> sell the Mac
I thought I remember reading somewhere that "Macintosh was just their internal name for the machine (like "chicago" for Win95 or any of those rivers for x86s), and they were going to call it something mundane. But the name just stuck anyways, so they ended up calling it that. Then again, they did name the Lisa "Lisa" (after someone's daughter I think) and not just some alphanumeric name.
> hell's team will win the stanley cup first
Well, you got to remember we have Satan playing for the Sabres, and they won tonight.
Go Sabres!
Which router are you using? My Netgear allows up to eight ports to be forwarded to separate boxes. And this is on top of the forwarding for things like Quake (haven't tried) and Real Audio (works great).
I'd say the height of the dead, IMHO, was the 80's, not the 60's. Right up until 1987's "in the dark" got them too popular with the general population, and they had to stop playing the small venues. 70's were OK, but I think things really improved when they got rid of the Godchauxs.
And just because it is the 90's now doesn't mean that all the concert tapes aren't any more desireable. There are a lot of high quality recordings available that can be distributed endlessly now without degradation thanks to digital technology. I've always lived with analoge and hiss, but with MP3s, the incremental cost is negligable (say compared to a DAT deck), so it's much easier to go digital.
And of course, tapes are all we got now. Life hasn't been the same since 1995.
I've still got a floppy with NS 0.7 on it (for windows 3.x). That was one with the rotating mobile-type thing for an animation. That was the best animation that NS ever had. Don't kow why they ditched that for the pulsing N.
> What's wrong with using StarOffice?
The fact that it doesn't too a very good job reading word documents other than text with rather simple formating. Tables, especially are crap, and I work with a lot of tables.
My company is slowing moving from Wordperfect to Word, and I've already had to boot windows once rather than Linux to do work at home. Not a good trend.
I understand there's an update to SO5 with better filters, but you have to d/l hte whole freaking ~65 MB or so again. Arg!
OK, I'm doing my homework before upgrading. No I haven't downloaded the src yet, but have read the docs at linuxhq. This is the first I've seen about the Virge. I'm stuck with one of those. Is this only a problem trying to run fbcon? Is it still possible just to run "the old way" with a "regular console" and the S3V X-server (I know SVGA server works too, but Redhat's install put in the S3V a little too automagically, but it seems to work fine)
And what's fbcon 1.0 vs. fbcon 2.0? Isn't fbcon just aprt of the kernel source, or is it like ftape where later versions are available outside the stock source? Nothing about this in http://www.linuxhq.com/doc21/fb/
While actual user policies apparently vary by location, my area (BA, NY) doesn't allow hubs. The web page says single machine only (at least it did last time I checked a few weeks ago). This in contrast to their ISDN pages which tout its use for a home network.
BTW, the clueless level of BA was just as bad with my recent ISDN install. Not only did they not know anything, but actually gave out wrong information. This across the board; everyone i talked to, and I talked to a lot. Fortunately isdn has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratio newsgroups out there on usenet that I've found.
DOVBS finally worked for me (trunk issues over which I had no control finally got cleared up), so ISDN is now at least affordable (no per minute charges for DOVBS). But while DOVBS was not working, I was wondering if I'd make the jump to DSL when it became available here. The trick would be just to have them install it in an old 486, then later plop another NIC in there, reboot into linux, and use it as a router for your home LAN. You might want to do that for security reasons anyway (rather than having the DSL feed into your main machine), setting up some firewalling measures. You can get an old 486 for just about nothing now, (no monitor required). Hell, the second NIC may cost you more!