I can't speak to their political views or their propensity to comply with c&d letters or the DOJ, but Hurricane Electric meets all of your other criteria.
For $9.95/month, you get full shell access with SSH, up to 11 POP3 mailboxes, and a bit of web space and traffic. The URL for http can be your own private domain, and I don't think they charge extra for that.
I've been using he.net for about five years now and only one time have I ever failed to reach the server because *it* was down. Since it was 11pm on a Sunday night, I was stunned when an actual human answered the phone after one ring. He had already been alerted to the problem and was connecting to the console server as I called. Five minutes later, all was well.
I *highly* recommend Hurricane Electric, but only if you're a self-starter. They're not into holding the hands of newbies.
I sometimes upgrade my system, without buying a new copy of windoze. That's legal, right? Since Linux runs better on less hardware, it goes on the older systems.
Yeah, you can believe that...on your way to jail and/or the unemployment line.
The old "drink lots of water" trick hasn't worked for a long time. Even 10 years ago, when I worked in an addiction treatment center, the latest generation of tests were incredibly sensitive to all sorts of drugs. Most people couldn't drink enough water to mask them out. Even if you *do* drink that much water, how stupid do you think these people are? There are several ways to mask drugs in urine, but all of them are obvious to even the most casual observer, no matter how mean their intelligence. If you mask, you'll be asked to retest. If you mask the second time, you may be asked to come in and spend the day with them while they observe your fluid intake.
If you don't want to get caught with a piss test, then you pretty much have to arrange it so you don't *take* a piss test.
Of course you could always just stop it with the drugs.
JVC has been selling an MPEG recording DVHS player for about 18 months now. The one from JVC has a built-in satellite receiver and records the digital stream directly from the satellite onto tape. DVHS is an industry standard, albeit an obscure and probably ultimately useless one.
I had one of these gadgets and there's not enough difference to matter one damned bit between analog and digital playback.
The difference between Oracle8 and Oracle8i is that Oracle8 is actually Oracle 8.0.x and Oracle8i is Oracle 8.1.x and anything newer. It's a silly marketing ploy. Even if you're not doing internet stuff, 8i is markedly superior (to 8) in just about any way you could name.
WebDB is unrelated to the change from 8 to 8i. WebDB is also a huge steaming pile of fecal matter that deserves to languish in obscurity.
Eagle Creek makes a great line of bags that are tough and very casual looking. I don't want to look like a corporate drone with a laptop either and I just bought a "Data Port" bag by EC. It will hold the new OmniBook 900 with tons of room to spare and I can even squeeze the old Inspiron 7000 into it with millimeters to spare. It was even relatively inexpensive at $55. I got the black one but it comes in green and something called "Berry" as well.
I pretty much disagree with everything said in the article above.
I read the newspaper every single day. I throw out the sports section and the classifieds, then I go through every other section of the paper. I don't read anywhere near all the articles, but I look at every page.
I read a lot of news on the web and I watch TV news every evening. Each source has a different set of spinmeisters and a different focus.
TV news is about sound and video bites and wouldn't begin to know how to cover a story in depth if they ever had the inclination to try.
News on the internet is usually niche-focused and spun like a fusion powered top. A lot of web sites go into great detail, but only as events relate to the subject matter to which the site is devoted.
Newspapers are almost as partisan as web sites, but they're not nearly so subject-driven. I'll watch TV news to get the headlines from the talking heads and look for the meat in the following morning's paper.
My only real grip with newspapers is that they're run almost exclusively by screaming liberals and I get really sick of the shameless slant they put in their stories. I live in the San Francisco bay area and I refuse to read any of the yellow rags printed by the Alameda Newspaper Group. The San Jose Mercury is a very good paper, so I guess I'm lucky to have some source of printed news. If the SJ Merc worked even harder at showing less bias and doing more in-depth reporting, it'd be as close to a perfect paper as I'd ever hope to see.
I know it's too late to make a long story short, but I have to say: Newspapers aren't dead...they're not even seriously ill. Remember, news isn't all about immediacy. If you only listen to 10 seconds of yammer from a TV news anchor or read 500 words on a web site, you really only get the precis and not the actual news.
I agree with Ebert and his twit sidekick, in this case.
"Bicentennial Man" is vapid and useless, except for its visuals and some of its cutesy jokes. It is one of those films that makes you feel good about how enlightened you are when it brings up social issues and then completely fails to explore them in any way whatsoever.
The first hour was mildly entertaining, but the second hour was incredibly dull and pointless.
VAX does decode as an acronym: Virtual Address eXtension. It was invented at DEC (or invented by somebody else and used *heavily* by DEC. They called it an architecture, but it was more like a line of CPUs which were all more or less instruction set compatible. They were obsoleted by DEC's Alpha chips in the early 90's. The VAX computers all ran VMS, AFAIK.
I got my start in the PDP world (RSTS/E anybody?) then moved to VAX/VMS, then Alpha/VMS, then Sun Solaris. Why did I wait so long? 8)
Read the pages, dude. The page that lets you enter your root password specifically recommends AGAINST doing so! No security hole at all if you pay just the tiniest smidge of attention.
Actually, 8.1.5 is faster than 8.0.5, though not by a hell of a lot. It also has a couple of new abilities that have been missing for a long time. A great many people are upgrading to 8.1.5 without calling it 8i. If you ignore all the internet sh*t, it's a definite improvement over 8.0.5 for all users. The java stored procedure thing is neat, but not compelling.
Frankly, I don't see your problem. I moved to CA five years ago and I was being paid less than $40k at the time. I had no problem whatsoever making ends meet and I lived alone. I was looking for a new place not too long ago and I checked in with the complex I lived in at that time. The rent on an apartment just like my old one had gone up by about $200/month which isn't bad for five years.
Y'know, if people didn't think they needed 3000 square feet, a big honkin' SUV, and ski trips every weekend, $40k is certainly a living wage in this area.
I still live in SV (Santa Clara) and in five years I've gone from $40k/year to $170k. Contrary to the assertions of some euro-trash twink elsewhere in the thread, I did it through technical excellence and hard work, not through marketing and politics.
If you're making $43k now, you can make $70k in a year or two if you work at it. Of course, if you got terminated from any tech job in this area, either your company went toes up or you gave them an outrageously good reason to fire you, like incompetence, intransignence, or maybe just really really bad personal hygiene.
The people who get the shaft here aren't the tech workers. The people in the sh*t are the unskilled ones. Those people working at Burger King or cleaning up your trashy high-tech office are the ones getting a raw deal. So are cops, firemen, and teachers. I don't know how *that* problem can be solved, but I do know that I can hardly stand to hear whining from incompetent and/or lazy tech workers when they could *easily* do better!
Read up, bub. Food availability increase = population increase. It has always been so. The UN tries to talk people into using condoms, norplant, the pill, whatever and they promptly get their *ss whipped by the Catholic church (among others) and idiotic fools saying that 3rd world birth control is genocide.
Programs to feed the hungry are and always have been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean we should stop trying but it also doesn't mean that we'll ever solve anything by handing out free rice 'n beans!
The e-mail tax is stupid because it's unenforceable AND because it's an inappropriate goal AND because it's technically untenable. It doesn't matter a damn where you plan to spend the money that you'll never get.
I used to work for a company that used a water cooled IBM mainframe. The coolant pumps were in the basement and the mf was on the ground floor. As you've probably guessed, one day one of the coolant pipes burst. 8] To make matters worse, it was on the output side of the pump and the low pressure cutoff failed. The pump emptied ALL the water into the basement in about 90 seconds. The final straw came when it was discovered that all the toner for city bus sized laser printer was stored directly on the basement floor next to the pump. "bad things, man!"
I couldn't disagree more with you point about education. Users should *NOT* have to know anything about pop,imap,mime, or any of the other fecal matter what we geeks enjoy so much. Computers should be like toasters where the average non-technical user is concerned. Not only do people not give a damn about the underlying substrate, they shouldn't have to!
The solution to this problem is to not solve it. It sucks when it happens, but it's always going to happen so deal with it. Some sort of "invisible" backup system (like "GoBack") might mitigate the damages, but that's the best you can do.
I'm an oracle dba and I'd have to say that ebay's problems practically *have* to be human fsck-ups! I've never had big problems recovering oracle and even fewer problems keeping it going. What's this crap about failing hard disks? Where's the mirroring? I've had 3 disk mirror sets when it was very important to have 99.999% up time. One of my clients has oracle running on a 2 process ultra (unclustered) with NO disk mirroring and their system and database have been up for over 10 months now.
the idea overshot the mark
on
Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 1
I've spent a hell of a lot of time in the last year looking for a SMALL computer that I could buy two or three of, put them on a shelf, and use them for specific purposes (NAT, Samba, and Oracle development). I want separate computers because that's the way I want it. I want them small because it's STUPID (IMHO) to waste all that space on single-purpose gadgets. I'd like them to be as quiet as possible. I won't pay extra for color because if I want'em colored I'll damned well paint'em myself!
I don't particularly care about expansion slots if there are USB and/or firewire devices to do what I need. A firewire-to-ethernet gadget would be lovely and the bus is more than up to the challenge. Heck, with the next generation or two of firewire, there's no reason you couldn't put the video card on the 1394 bus! Think about it...you buy a monitor that has a replacable video card, and you just plug a pure digital cable into the back of your PC.
Intel is doing what it's doing because Intel wants to destroy any chance of 3rd parties taking over its part of the business. I don't like that. I don't particularly like the specifice devices they've designed. HOWEVER, I *do* like the design "direction" if they'd just turn it down a notch. Give me a small PC with limited expandability at a low cost. Then I can buy five or six of the little buggers and do with them whatever I wish!
Most of the complaints I've read here are from people who are obsessed with the current way of doing things, hardwarily. It's kind of disappointing because this same crowd is pretty much rife with people who want to innovate softwarily! Why do you have to have slots IN the computer if you have externally available buses that can handle all the bandwidth you need?
Please forgive me for the post that rambles all over the place. It's a stream of consciousness thing.
It's funny you should say that, since Quote.com, Inc has been doing all those things you mention using a load-balanced multiple web-server environment. What's more, they've been doing it for at *least* three years.
It's not a naive solution...it's very workable, sensible, and much more affordable than the "one giant box" business model.
Do a little more research...load-balancing is far more involved than just slapping multiple IP addresses into a DNS record.
At my company, we'd really like to replace exchange and outlook with something unix and standards based. However, after searching for a couple of months, no good replacements are apparent. Remember, outlook doesn't just do mail, but scheduling and contact managements (glorified address book). We need ONE client program that handles scheduling, e-mail, and addresses. It needs to be as easy or easier than Outlook. It needs to be usable offline (not connect to any network in any way). It also needs to be inexpensive, since Outlook is distributed by M$ on the virus model as far as I can tell.
I don't like Outlook and I *really* detest Exchange and NT. As soon as I find an adequate replacement, I have my boss' full support in removing the last vestiges of M$ from the server room. Can anybody help me?
Btw...I'd be more than happy to smack with a dead fish the first person who suggests anything involving emacs. 8]
Since when DOESN'T poetry matter for nerds? Every geek friend I've ever had has enjoyed poetry and music of all sorts. Shakespeare has always been popular, too. Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss have been fixtures in my life. I'm 33 years old and I still love the works of both.
C'mon kid, creativity is where you find it. The hallmark of a good code-grinder is creativity. Laziness is the other main one! 8)
Y'all might not give a damn, but Sierra (Havas) has also closed a division in the SF Bay area. Books That Work makes (made?) Sierra's home design software, including "Complete Home." BTW is on of the few money-making divisions in the stable and their home design product absolutely leads its market segment in sales and reviews.
Sierra's not really the culprit, IMHO. Havas is probably the big bad stinky french bad guy here.
I'm an Oracle DBA by profession, and I'd have to say that almost nobody really needs Oracle on *any* platform. It's EXTREMELY fast when properly tuned and has just about all the functionality that anybody really needs. However, it's very difficult to tune right since it has literally hundreds of adjustable parameters, some of which are undocumented. It's not a database that you can set up and forget about...you have to fiddle with it pretty frequently, or right dozens of scripts to do the fiddling for you.
99% of the DB programs out there either use auto-commit or a simulation thereof. Because of that, transactional stuff is wasted on most people.
I think MySQL lacks other important functionality, so I favor PostgreSQL. However, etiher one is a pretty good database for web use (most of the time).
IMHO, the Perl Resource Kit is a waste of money. It didn't give me anything much that I couldn't get for free from CPAN. If you don't have any internet connection at all, it might be worth-while, since it's pretty much just a shovelware distribution of CPAN.
Slashdot Mirror
For $9.95/month, you get full shell access with SSH, up to 11 POP3 mailboxes, and a bit of web space and traffic. The URL for http can be your own private domain, and I don't think they charge extra for that.
I've been using he.net for about five years now and only one time have I ever failed to reach the server because *it* was down. Since it was 11pm on a Sunday night, I was stunned when an actual human answered the phone after one ring. He had already been alerted to the problem and was connecting to the console server as I called. Five minutes later, all was well.
I *highly* recommend Hurricane Electric, but only if you're a self-starter. They're not into holding the hands of newbies.
I sometimes upgrade my system, without buying a new copy of windoze. That's legal, right? Since Linux runs better on less hardware, it goes on the older systems.
Yeah, you can believe that...on your way to jail and/or the unemployment line.
The old "drink lots of water" trick hasn't worked for a long time. Even 10 years ago, when I worked in an addiction treatment center, the latest generation of tests were incredibly sensitive to all sorts of drugs. Most people couldn't drink enough water to mask them out. Even if you *do* drink that much water, how stupid do you think these people are? There are several ways to mask drugs in urine, but all of them are obvious to even the most casual observer, no matter how mean their intelligence. If you mask, you'll be asked to retest. If you mask the second time, you may be asked to come in and spend the day with them while they observe your fluid intake.
If you don't want to get caught with a piss test, then you pretty much have to arrange it so you don't *take* a piss test.
Of course you could always just stop it with the drugs.
I nearly always make more than my manager. I usually get more stock options, too. You just have to be willing to dig in and negotiate. 8)
JVC has been selling an MPEG recording DVHS player for about 18 months now. The one from JVC has a built-in satellite receiver and records the digital stream directly from the satellite onto tape. DVHS is an industry standard, albeit an obscure and probably ultimately useless one.
I had one of these gadgets and there's not enough difference to matter one damned bit between analog and digital playback.
The difference between Oracle8 and Oracle8i is that Oracle8 is actually Oracle 8.0.x and Oracle8i is Oracle 8.1.x and anything newer. It's a silly marketing ploy. Even if you're not doing internet stuff, 8i is markedly superior (to 8) in just about any way you could name.
WebDB is unrelated to the change from 8 to 8i. WebDB is also a huge steaming pile of fecal matter that deserves to languish in obscurity.
Eagle Creek makes a great line of bags that are tough and very casual looking. I don't want to look like a corporate drone with a laptop either and I just bought a "Data Port" bag by EC. It will hold the new OmniBook 900 with tons of room to spare and I can even squeeze the old Inspiron 7000 into it with millimeters to spare. It was even relatively inexpensive at $55. I got the black one but it comes in green and something called "Berry" as well.
I pretty much disagree with everything said in the article above.
I read the newspaper every single day. I throw out the sports section and the classifieds, then I go through every other section of the paper. I don't read anywhere near all the articles, but I look at every page.
I read a lot of news on the web and I watch TV news every evening. Each source has a different set of spinmeisters and a different focus.
TV news is about sound and video bites and wouldn't begin to know how to cover a story in depth if they ever had the inclination to try.
News on the internet is usually niche-focused and spun like a fusion powered top. A lot of web sites go into great detail, but only as events relate to the subject matter to which the site is devoted.
Newspapers are almost as partisan as web sites, but they're not nearly so subject-driven. I'll watch TV news to get the headlines from the talking heads and look for the meat in the following morning's paper.
My only real grip with newspapers is that they're run almost exclusively by screaming liberals and I get really sick of the shameless slant they put in their stories. I live in the San Francisco bay area and I refuse to read any of the yellow rags printed by the Alameda Newspaper Group. The San Jose Mercury is a very good paper, so I guess I'm lucky to have some source of printed news. If the SJ Merc worked even harder at showing less bias and doing more in-depth reporting, it'd be as close to a perfect paper as I'd ever hope to see.
I know it's too late to make a long story short, but I have to say: Newspapers aren't dead...they're not even seriously ill. Remember, news isn't all about immediacy. If you only listen to 10 seconds of yammer from a TV news anchor or read 500 words on a web site, you really only get the precis and not the actual news.
I agree with Ebert and his twit sidekick, in this case.
"Bicentennial Man" is vapid and useless, except for its visuals and some of its cutesy jokes. It is one of those films that makes you feel good about how enlightened you are when it brings up social issues and then completely fails to explore them in any way whatsoever.
The first hour was mildly entertaining, but the second hour was incredibly dull and pointless.
VAX does decode as an acronym: Virtual Address eXtension. It was invented at DEC (or invented by somebody else and used *heavily* by DEC. They called it an architecture, but it was more like a line of CPUs which were all more or less instruction set compatible. They were obsoleted by DEC's Alpha chips in the early 90's. The VAX computers all ran VMS, AFAIK.
I got my start in the PDP world (RSTS/E anybody?) then moved to VAX/VMS, then Alpha/VMS, then Sun Solaris. Why did I wait so long? 8)
Read the pages, dude. The page that lets you enter your root password specifically recommends AGAINST doing so! No security hole at all if you pay just the tiniest smidge of attention.
Actually, 8.1.5 is faster than 8.0.5, though not by a hell of a lot. It also has a couple of new abilities that have been missing for a long time. A great many people are upgrading to 8.1.5 without calling it 8i. If you ignore all the internet sh*t, it's a definite improvement over 8.0.5 for all users. The java stored procedure thing is neat, but not compelling.
put in a real e-mail address and I can send you lat/long for CO's in the south bay.
Frankly, I don't see your problem. I moved to CA five years ago and I was being paid less than $40k at the time. I had no problem whatsoever making ends meet and I lived alone. I was looking for a new place not too long ago and I checked in with the complex I lived in at that time. The rent on an apartment just like my old one had gone up by about $200/month which isn't bad for five years.
Y'know, if people didn't think they needed 3000 square feet, a big honkin' SUV, and ski trips every weekend, $40k is certainly a living wage in this area.
I still live in SV (Santa Clara) and in five years I've gone from $40k/year to $170k. Contrary to the assertions of some euro-trash twink elsewhere in the thread, I did it through technical excellence and hard work, not through marketing and politics.
If you're making $43k now, you can make $70k in a year or two if you work at it. Of course, if you got terminated from any tech job in this area, either your company went toes up or you gave them an outrageously good reason to fire you, like incompetence, intransignence, or maybe just really really bad personal hygiene.
The people who get the shaft here aren't the tech workers. The people in the sh*t are the unskilled ones. Those people working at Burger King or cleaning up your trashy high-tech office are the ones getting a raw deal. So are cops, firemen, and teachers. I don't know how *that* problem can be solved, but I do know that I can hardly stand to hear whining from incompetent and/or lazy tech workers when they could *easily* do better!
Read up, bub. Food availability increase = population increase. It has always been so. The UN tries to talk people into using condoms, norplant, the pill, whatever and they promptly get their *ss whipped by the Catholic church (among others) and idiotic fools saying that 3rd world birth control is genocide.
Programs to feed the hungry are and always have been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean we should stop trying but it also doesn't mean that we'll ever solve anything by handing out free rice 'n beans!
The e-mail tax is stupid because it's unenforceable AND because it's an inappropriate goal AND because it's technically untenable. It doesn't matter a damn where you plan to spend the money that you'll never get.
I used to work for a company that used a water cooled IBM mainframe. The coolant pumps were in the basement and the mf was on the ground floor. As you've probably guessed, one day one of the coolant pipes burst. 8] To make matters worse, it was on the output side of the pump and the low pressure cutoff failed. The pump emptied ALL the water into the basement in about 90 seconds. The final straw came when it was discovered that all the toner for city bus sized laser printer was stored directly on the basement floor next to the pump. "bad things, man!"
I couldn't disagree more with you point about education. Users should *NOT* have to know anything about pop,imap,mime, or any of the other fecal matter what we geeks enjoy so much. Computers should be like toasters where the average non-technical user is concerned. Not only do people not give a damn about the underlying substrate, they shouldn't have to!
The solution to this problem is to not solve it. It sucks when it happens, but it's always going to happen so deal with it. Some sort of "invisible" backup system (like "GoBack") might mitigate the damages, but that's the best you can do.
I'm an oracle dba and I'd have to say that ebay's problems practically *have* to be human fsck-ups! I've never had big problems recovering oracle and even fewer problems keeping it going. What's this crap about failing hard disks? Where's the mirroring? I've had 3 disk mirror sets when it was very important to have 99.999% up time. One of my clients has oracle running on a 2 process ultra (unclustered) with NO disk mirroring and their system and database have been up for over 10 months now.
I've spent a hell of a lot of time in the last year looking for a SMALL computer that I could buy two or three of, put them on a shelf, and use them for specific purposes (NAT, Samba, and Oracle development). I want separate computers because that's the way I want it. I want them small because it's STUPID (IMHO) to waste all that space on single-purpose gadgets. I'd like them to be as quiet as possible. I won't pay extra for color because if I want'em colored I'll damned well paint'em myself!
I don't particularly care about expansion slots if there are USB and/or firewire devices to do what I need. A firewire-to-ethernet gadget would be lovely and the bus is more than up to the challenge. Heck, with the next generation or two of firewire, there's no reason you couldn't put the video card on the 1394 bus! Think about it...you buy a monitor that has a replacable video card, and you just plug a pure digital cable into the back of your PC.
Intel is doing what it's doing because Intel wants to destroy any chance of 3rd parties taking over its part of the business. I don't like that. I don't particularly like the specifice devices they've designed. HOWEVER, I *do* like the design "direction" if they'd just turn it down a notch. Give me a small PC with limited expandability at a low cost. Then I can buy five or six of the little buggers and do with them whatever I wish!
Most of the complaints I've read here are from people who are obsessed with the current way of doing things, hardwarily. It's kind of disappointing because this same crowd is pretty much rife with people who want to innovate softwarily! Why do you have to have slots IN the computer if you have externally available buses that can handle all the bandwidth you need?
Please forgive me for the post that rambles all over the place. It's a stream of consciousness thing.
It's funny you should say that, since Quote.com, Inc has been doing all those things you mention using a load-balanced multiple web-server environment. What's more, they've been doing it for at *least* three years.
It's not a naive solution...it's very workable, sensible, and much more affordable than the "one giant box" business model.
Do a little more research...load-balancing is far more involved than just slapping multiple IP addresses into a DNS record.
At my company, we'd really like to replace exchange and outlook with something unix and standards based. However, after searching for a couple of months, no good replacements are apparent. Remember, outlook doesn't just do mail, but scheduling and contact managements (glorified address book). We need ONE client program that handles scheduling, e-mail, and addresses. It needs to be as easy or easier than Outlook. It needs to be usable offline (not connect to any network in any way). It also needs to be inexpensive, since Outlook is distributed by M$ on the virus model as far as I can tell.
I don't like Outlook and I *really* detest Exchange and NT. As soon as I find an adequate replacement, I have my boss' full support in removing the last vestiges of M$ from the server room. Can anybody help me?
Btw...I'd be more than happy to smack with a dead fish the first person who suggests anything involving emacs. 8]
Since when DOESN'T poetry matter for nerds? Every geek friend I've ever had has enjoyed poetry and music of all sorts. Shakespeare has always been popular, too. Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss have been fixtures in my life. I'm 33 years old and I still love the works of both.
C'mon kid, creativity is where you find it. The hallmark of a good code-grinder is creativity. Laziness is the other main one! 8)
Y'all might not give a damn, but Sierra (Havas) has also closed a division in the SF Bay area. Books That Work makes (made?) Sierra's home design software, including "Complete Home." BTW is on of the few money-making divisions in the stable and their home design product absolutely leads its market segment in sales and reviews.
Sierra's not really the culprit, IMHO. Havas is probably the big bad stinky french bad guy here.
I'm an Oracle DBA by profession, and I'd have to say that almost nobody really needs Oracle on *any* platform. It's EXTREMELY fast when properly tuned and has just about all the functionality that anybody really needs. However, it's very difficult to tune right since it has literally hundreds of adjustable parameters, some of which are undocumented. It's not a database that you can set up and forget about...you have to fiddle with it pretty frequently, or right dozens of scripts to do the fiddling for you.
99% of the DB programs out there either use auto-commit or a simulation thereof. Because of that, transactional stuff is wasted on most people.
I think MySQL lacks other important functionality, so I favor PostgreSQL. However, etiher one is a pretty good database for web use (most of the time).
IMHO, the Perl Resource Kit is a waste of money. It didn't give me anything much that I couldn't get for free from CPAN. If you don't have any internet connection at all, it might be worth-while, since it's pretty much just a shovelware distribution of CPAN.