I use SpeakEasy too. After getting burned by Flashcom and their HORRIBLE service, Speakeasy has been a dream come true. Four static IPs, a 384kbit pipe, and dialup to use when the high-band is down, although the only times that has happened have been when FUCKING VERIZON PIECE OF SHIT TECHS unplug us.
I live in an apartment building, and twice in the last year our DSL has died. When Covad comes to look at it, the first time the wire was unplugged from the block, and the second time it was unplugged and actually cut, in three places. Apparently Verizon techs will cut Covad wires if they see them, because the Covad guys are not union. The second time this happened we had to pay $200 for repair. ARGH!
My first bad experience with them involved shipping a ham radio antenna to someone. Because I did not have a tube big enough to pack it in, I took the antenna to Mailboxes Etc and had them pack and ship it via UPS. The short story is that the person I sent it to received nothing but an empty tube with no end on it. Because the antenna was only worth about $99, I got that amount back from UPS, but I was still incredulous that the package got to him empty. Think of how many peoples' hands that tube had to have passed through, completely empty, with no cap on it. Not one of them thought "hmmm, this isn't right."
More recently, my roommates and I have had immensely irritating problems with packages being shipped to the wrong address. We live at 133 "this street." Somehow, one in five things that are shipped to us is delivered to 133 "that street," which is around the corner. Unfortunately, the place that these things end up is a hospital, so we have to wait for them to return the package to the shipper and then for the shipper to re-send it. AND hope that UPS doesn't misdeliver it again. I have complained about this over and over. Nothing ever changes. Our driver also seems to like to claim that he made a delivery and we "weren't home," even though we were here at the time specified, and no "missed delivery" notes were left.
For some truly impressive horror stories, see E-pinions.
Lately I've been reading a lot of these sorts of news pieces which discuss the Open Source movement, and one thing I don't understand is their typical explanation of what the GPL is.
"...a cornerstone of the Free Software model that requires companies that incorporate GPL software in their own programs to, in turn, make those programs freely available to others..."
I find the term "freely available to others" rather misleading. As far as I know, there's nothing in the GPL that says anything about not charging money for open source software. I guess this is just the free as in beer vs. free as in speech debate, but I do think that for people unfamiliar with open source, "freely available" carries monetary connotations.
I live in Boston, and when I called Verizon they told me the same thing; they couldn't wire me for DSL because there was fiber in the line between my apartment and the CO. We asked a few other DSL companies, and Flashcom said they could do it. When we spoke to a technician, he said that they could have Covad run a "dry line" from our location to the CO, and they did it for free.
Then Flashcom tanked, we switched our service to Speak Easy, and everything is smooth as silk. Of course, now everyone says Covad is about to tank as well, so who knows if they will still do this. But it might be worth a shot.
I predict that dialup internet access will be nonexistant within the next 5 to 10 years. More and more non-techies are getting high-speed access because it is affordable and basically makes the internet significantly more useful than it is with a modem. The cost for this type of access is falling steadily and availability is increasing.
DSL will likely not survive either, unless the limitations on distance from the CO, and general issues with the physics of forcing a lot of data down a piece of copper. If it does live on as a viable access method, it will only be with the RBOCs (ie Verizon, Pac Bell, etc etc).
So what I'm saying is that in my opinion, starting your own business as an internet access provider is probably not going to lead you to success. High speed access is the future, and it's not the kind of thing that your average entrepreneur can break into.
Most software licenses actually don't provide any sort of warranty for "mercantability or fitness for any particular purpose." I did tech support for a software development company, and once had to deal with a guy who claimed that installing our software had munged all of the data on his hard drive, rendering it useless. Apparently during the installation process, the system hung, and when he reset the system it wouldn't boot. His closing remark was "I am sending the drive to a data recovery company, and will send (name of my employer) the bill."
I laughed a lot about this, first because I knew that it was pretty unlikely that our installer had anything to do with his data loss, and also because his attitude was so indignant. In the end, our lead developer and co-founder of the company replied and basically said "if our software caused problems like this, we would be bankrupt and out of business by now due to the ensuing lawsuits." But even there, he acknowledged that in fact the user license specifically states that we don't warrant the software for anything at all, and that we're not responsible in any way for problems that it might cause with your system.
Imagine if I could sue Microsoft for time lost, data lost, and sanity lost due to having to reboot my Windows 95 box six times a day.
I hate those goddamn porn popups too. I used to get cracks for shareware programs off a certain site, but clicking to download the cracks usually brought up a porn popup. This could have been potentially really bad when I was doing this at work, so often times I would either IM a friend and ask them to do the download for me, or warn those around me that I was about to do this, and assure them that I was not surfing for porn at work. Of course, when you work in an office with half-height cubicle walls that allow you to see at a glance what your co-workers are doing, most people have the good sense to wait until they get home.
I don't think that Apple would be as happy selling Yellow Dog Linux boxes as they would OS X boxes. Just because OS X has a BSD core doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a lot invested in it. In my opinion, it's in their best interest to have people using the Apple OS (whatever its components may consist of) as much as it is to have people buying their hardware.
Why is this modded up to three? Obviously you run your machine with the cover on to prevent things from getting inside it. Like dust, loose screws or change, orperhaps a spilled beverage.
One of my brilliant friends discovered that his computer had temperature monitoring capabilities, and installed Motherboard Monitor or something. Then he freaked out because his CPUs were running at 100F, so he took the cover off his case to keep it cooler. A few days later he knocked a can of Mountain Dew off the desk, and it fell right into the case, spilling everywhere, nuking the entire system.
The worst part? 100F is actually pretty cool for a CPU.
"I applaud Linus for the tremendous work he's done over the years in developing Linux and championing Open Source, but if you want to convince folks that Open Source is a kinder, gentler way to compute, saying Mach is crap might not be the best approach."
To me, this embodies one of the common misconceptions that people have about Linus, and about Linux in general. Linus has said a number of times that he's not out to change the world, save the world, or even do anything in particular for the world. Linux is his, and as long as he is the sole arbiter of what goes in and what stays out, he will run the ship in the best way that he sees fit.
If you read the LKML regularly and read some of the "frank exchanges of viewpoint" that he has with other developers, you begin to understand that he'sa regular guy just like the rest of us. He's not a deity; he can be childishly stubborn sometimes. On the other hand, he's very capable of admitting his mistakes and is always willing to reconsider a decision if someone asks him to and presents reasonable evidence supporting their opinion.
My point is that I think too many people expect the development of Linux to be run like a business. It's free software, it's open source, and it's hacked by thousands of people for free; how much LESS like a business could it be? I'll even go out on a limb and say that Linus doesn't consider himself a businessman; he considers himself a programmer, and to that end, he's going to be honest and straightforward when he expresses his views.
What I'm getting at is, Linus isn't out to drum up support for Linux. He's not going to not say things, or put "spin" on his statements, because he considers deception and deceit to be more detrimental to his goals than striaght up honesty.
My apologies. Write after I posted that I realized that of course I was wrong; when I first researched DSL for myself I found that Verizon/Bell Atlantic/NYNEX/Insert this week's name here offers 7.1 megabit DSL in Boston.
I guess over the course of two years I just forgot.
I think you've got your numbers wrong.
A cable modem typically gets 1.54 megabits. This is roughly equivalent to T1 speed.
I know of no US DSL provider who is offering anything better than 2 megabits, and I'm almost positive that no one in Boston is getting more than that, AT THE MOST.
What service is your friend using? Because the only way I can see to get 7 megabits in Beantown is with a couple of concurrent T1 connections.
I live in Boston too, and I share your pain with regard to getting high speed access. I signed up for Flashcom when I first moved into my apartment near the Fens, because they were the only ones who would arrange to have a "dry" line run from the CO to my apartment just for DSL service. My POTS circuit wouldn't qualify, probably because the wiring is 50 years old or there are repeaters or fiber somewhere along the route.
Of course, Flashcom's actual service is a complete and utter joke, and I'm just happy that they went belly-up and cut me loose from my contract 8 months early. Now I use Speakeasy DSL. They cost the same, but I get multiple static IPs, and they're a lot more friendly to power users.
Still, the fastest residential-type high speed access you can get around here is 1.5 megabits over a cable modem. And of course that's subject to availability (ie you can get it almost anywhere in the state other than Boston - WTF?!), and to line sharing issues. Still, if I could get a cable modem, I would. They're only $40/month for typically 600 - 800kbit speed, sometimes higher. I pay $50 for a pokey 384kbit link. Booooo!
If you are a parent, and you want to keep your children safe on the internet, one of the easiest ways to start doing that is by NOT using AOL. Think about it.
"So easy to use, no wonder it's number one." How many millions of people have AOL accounts? Ten million? Twenty? I lost count somewhere around 1997. My point is that AOL is a very poor vehicle for internet access. The reason for this is that it's in the best interests of the company to keep its users away from the internet as much as possible, and point them towards their internal content instead. An example? Think of how often you see a TV ad that has both a web site and an "AOL Keyword." Those companies pay extra for that area on AOL, and AOL wants to make sure they get their money's worth.
What I'm getting at here is that if you turn your children loose on AOL, they are not going to go to the Homework Help areas, they are not going to go check out "Kids Only Online." They head for the chat rooms because chatting is fun. It's not educational, however, and it does have the potential to be threatening.
If you want to give your kids access to the internet for research purposes, then get an account with an ISP. A system like that is really not hard to learn, and actually lets you access the internet, not AOL's warped version of it. Yes, you still need to be careful about the sites your kids visit (hint: avoid www.nasa.com), but you don't have to worry about who they're talking to while you're in the kitchen making dinner.
He's still hanging on because he spent less than a year in Northeastern's CS curriculum. When he dropped out of school to found Napster, the product was in its very early infancy. Read: it sucked. Transfers always timed out, half the time you couldn't even log in, etc. But he got noticed, the right people thought the idea was good, and they threw money at it.
I suspect that at this point his role in the company is mostly that of "poster boy." I doubt he's doing much if any of the actual programming because he's probably not very good at it. If he bailed, it's doubtful that he could move on to something else without coming back to school. I think he got lucky, he knows it, and he's milking it for all it's worth.
I attend Northeastern University in Boston. I looked forward to living in the dorms Freshman year and enjoying a 12 Mbit fractional T3, but became almost instantly frustrated with the design and administration of the network.
1. Each residence hall exists as a subnet off of one router. Within each hall, the interconnection of rooms is done using hubs positioned in wiring closets on each floor. This means that not only can I sniff the ethernet traffic (including juicy IM conversations) of everyone else in the building, but the overall congestion on the LAN is very high.
2. The head sysadmin is very concerned about student hackers, to the point where data on most "non-standard" outgoing ports is filtered out before it leaves our domain. Yet the chosen ports make no sense. Students can't use SSL, finger, telnet, or SSH, but Napster traffic runs rampant.
3. Probably the worst thing about the whole arrangement is the lack of communication with students about things they can do to make their use of NU's internet services simpler. For example, all students have shell accounts on our local mail server, which they can telnet or ssh to to retrieve their mail using pine. However, the University also has POP and SMTP servers set up, so that we can use mail clients like Eudora or Outlook to simplify this process. Despite this, students aren't told how to set up such clients, or in fact that they even have that option. Instead, everyone complains about how "archaic" the telnet system is, and the school responds be implementing Lotus Domino for the mail server, and migrating the student body to Notes for their mail.
I have little doubt that a core of tech-saavy students would do a much better job managing this system than the current group of know-nothing bozos.
Personally, aside from my friends that have been using Linux longer than I have, the best source of answers to questions, for me, has been IRC. Specifically, #linpeople, #linuxhelp, #kernelnewbies, and other channels on the openprojects network. X-chat comes with Red Hat, so fire that baby up, add irc.openprojects.net (I think...) to the server list, and log in. You will always find helpful people who will walk you through things if you ask nicely.
Is it just me, or have individualistic kids always been shut out, made fun of, or otherwise hassled? I'm bothered by the fact that JonKatz constantly takes it upon himself to bring these incidents to our attention, as though he's the spokesperson for legions of down-trodden teenage weirdos. I had it tough in high school too because I chose to be different, and I do think that schools need to do a better job of making an acceptable learning environment for all students.
However, the root of this problem is not with high school administrators, but with parents who do not teach their children by example that teasing and harassment of those who are different from them are unacceptable behaviors. I hate to perpetuate the old saying that "there's no such thing as bad people, just bad parents," but at least in this case I believe it's true.
I take comfort in the fact that the three kids who made my teenage years so unpleasant by spreading rumors that I was gay and making fun of my choice of hair and clothing styles now work for the local septic tank pumping company, while I'm pursuing a degree and working part time at an internet startup.
My personal favorite of the Fox hard hitting journalism stories was, "Cranes are crashing down all over the Bay State!" Every day I walk to work on Congress street past lots of Big Dig construction, and cower in fear of the 500' tall cranes that could fall on me at any moment.
News like this appeals to unintelligent people who live in perpetual fear of the world they live in and rely on TV news to tell them what the latest and most horrible things happening in the world are. The best part is always the fact that these stories offer no hope of things ever getting better. "Stay tuned for continuous updates about how the world is falling apart all around you."
I've found that newspapers are still the best place to turn for real news with the least amount of bias. News on the internet tends to be poorly written and reported, in the interest of breaking the story as soon as is humanly possible after it happens. I'd rather get the whole story 24 hours later than stay glued to my CRT watching the updates come in. "Concorde crashes!" "Concorde crashes with mostly German passengers!" "Concorde crashes with 100 German passengers!" "Concorde goes down in flames! Click here for pictures!" "Concorde goes down in flames, killing many Germans! Click here for RealVideo!"
Slashdot Mirror
I use SpeakEasy too. After getting burned by Flashcom and their HORRIBLE service, Speakeasy has been a dream come true. Four static IPs, a 384kbit pipe, and dialup to use when the high-band is down, although the only times that has happened have been when FUCKING VERIZON PIECE OF SHIT TECHS unplug us.
I live in an apartment building, and twice in the last year our DSL has died. When Covad comes to look at it, the first time the wire was unplugged from the block, and the second time it was unplugged and actually cut, in three places. Apparently Verizon techs will cut Covad wires if they see them, because the Covad guys are not union. The second time this happened we had to pay $200 for repair. ARGH!
UPS definitely sucks.
My first bad experience with them involved shipping a ham radio antenna to someone. Because I did not have a tube big enough to pack it in, I took the antenna to Mailboxes Etc and had them pack and ship it via UPS. The short story is that the person I sent it to received nothing but an empty tube with no end on it. Because the antenna was only worth about $99, I got that amount back from UPS, but I was still incredulous that the package got to him empty. Think of how many peoples' hands that tube had to have passed through, completely empty, with no cap on it. Not one of them thought "hmmm, this isn't right."
More recently, my roommates and I have had immensely irritating problems with packages being shipped to the wrong address. We live at 133 "this street." Somehow, one in five things that are shipped to us is delivered to 133 "that street," which is around the corner. Unfortunately, the place that these things end up is a hospital, so we have to wait for them to return the package to the shipper and then for the shipper to re-send it. AND hope that UPS doesn't misdeliver it again. I have complained about this over and over. Nothing ever changes. Our driver also seems to like to claim that he made a delivery and we "weren't home," even though we were here at the time specified, and no "missed delivery" notes were left.
For some truly impressive horror stories, see E-pinions.
Are there pictures of it anywhere? I can't imagine what this thing looks like.
Lately I've been reading a lot of these sorts of news pieces which discuss the Open Source movement, and one thing I don't understand is their typical explanation of what the GPL is.
"...a cornerstone of the Free Software model that requires companies that incorporate GPL software in their own programs to, in turn, make those programs freely available to others..."
I find the term "freely available to others" rather misleading. As far as I know, there's nothing in the GPL that says anything about not charging money for open source software. I guess this is just the free as in beer vs. free as in speech debate, but I do think that for people unfamiliar with open source, "freely available" carries monetary connotations.
Any thoughts?
I live in Boston, and when I called Verizon they told me the same thing; they couldn't wire me for DSL because there was fiber in the line between my apartment and the CO. We asked a few other DSL companies, and Flashcom said they could do it. When we spoke to a technician, he said that they could have Covad run a "dry line" from our location to the CO, and they did it for free.
Then Flashcom tanked, we switched our service to Speak Easy, and everything is smooth as silk. Of course, now everyone says Covad is about to tank as well, so who knows if they will still do this. But it might be worth a shot.
Boy, that sure was insightful...
I predict that dialup internet access will be nonexistant within the next 5 to 10 years. More and more non-techies are getting high-speed access because it is affordable and basically makes the internet significantly more useful than it is with a modem. The cost for this type of access is falling steadily and availability is increasing.
DSL will likely not survive either, unless the limitations on distance from the CO, and general issues with the physics of forcing a lot of data down a piece of copper. If it does live on as a viable access method, it will only be with the RBOCs (ie Verizon, Pac Bell, etc etc).
So what I'm saying is that in my opinion, starting your own business as an internet access provider is probably not going to lead you to success. High speed access is the future, and it's not the kind of thing that your average entrepreneur can break into.
Most software licenses actually don't provide any sort of warranty for "mercantability or fitness for any particular purpose." I did tech support for a software development company, and once had to deal with a guy who claimed that installing our software had munged all of the data on his hard drive, rendering it useless. Apparently during the installation process, the system hung, and when he reset the system it wouldn't boot. His closing remark was "I am sending the drive to a data recovery company, and will send (name of my employer) the bill."
I laughed a lot about this, first because I knew that it was pretty unlikely that our installer had anything to do with his data loss, and also because his attitude was so indignant. In the end, our lead developer and co-founder of the company replied and basically said "if our software caused problems like this, we would be bankrupt and out of business by now due to the ensuing lawsuits." But even there, he acknowledged that in fact the user license specifically states that we don't warrant the software for anything at all, and that we're not responsible in any way for problems that it might cause with your system.
Imagine if I could sue Microsoft for time lost, data lost, and sanity lost due to having to reboot my Windows 95 box six times a day.
I hate those goddamn porn popups too. I used to get cracks for shareware programs off a certain site, but clicking to download the cracks usually brought up a porn popup. This could have been potentially really bad when I was doing this at work, so often times I would either IM a friend and ask them to do the download for me, or warn those around me that I was about to do this, and assure them that I was not surfing for porn at work. Of course, when you work in an office with half-height cubicle walls that allow you to see at a glance what your co-workers are doing, most people have the good sense to wait until they get home.
I don't think that Apple would be as happy selling Yellow Dog Linux boxes as they would OS X boxes. Just because OS X has a BSD core doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a lot invested in it. In my opinion, it's in their best interest to have people using the Apple OS (whatever its components may consist of) as much as it is to have people buying their hardware.
Why is this modded up to three? Obviously you run your machine with the cover on to prevent things from getting inside it. Like dust, loose screws or change, orperhaps a spilled beverage.
One of my brilliant friends discovered that his computer had temperature monitoring capabilities, and installed Motherboard Monitor or something. Then he freaked out because his CPUs were running at 100F, so he took the cover off his case to keep it cooler. A few days later he knocked a can of Mountain Dew off the desk, and it fell right into the case, spilling everywhere, nuking the entire system.
The worst part? 100F is actually pretty cool for a CPU.
"I applaud Linus for the tremendous work he's done over the years in developing Linux and championing Open Source, but if you want to convince folks that Open Source is a kinder, gentler way to compute, saying Mach is crap might not be the best approach."
To me, this embodies one of the common misconceptions that people have about Linus, and about Linux in general. Linus has said a number of times that he's not out to change the world, save the world, or even do anything in particular for the world. Linux is his, and as long as he is the sole arbiter of what goes in and what stays out, he will run the ship in the best way that he sees fit.
If you read the LKML regularly and read some of the "frank exchanges of viewpoint" that he has with other developers, you begin to understand that he'sa regular guy just like the rest of us. He's not a deity; he can be childishly stubborn sometimes. On the other hand, he's very capable of admitting his mistakes and is always willing to reconsider a decision if someone asks him to and presents reasonable evidence supporting their opinion.
My point is that I think too many people expect the development of Linux to be run like a business. It's free software, it's open source, and it's hacked by thousands of people for free; how much LESS like a business could it be? I'll even go out on a limb and say that Linus doesn't consider himself a businessman; he considers himself a programmer, and to that end, he's going to be honest and straightforward when he expresses his views.
What I'm getting at is, Linus isn't out to drum up support for Linux. He's not going to not say things, or put "spin" on his statements, because he considers deception and deceit to be more detrimental to his goals than striaght up honesty.
My apologies. Write after I posted that I realized that of course I was wrong; when I first researched DSL for myself I found that Verizon/Bell Atlantic/NYNEX/Insert this week's name here offers 7.1 megabit DSL in Boston.
I guess over the course of two years I just forgot.
/me lashes himself with a wet noodle.
I think you've got your numbers wrong. A cable modem typically gets 1.54 megabits. This is roughly equivalent to T1 speed. I know of no US DSL provider who is offering anything better than 2 megabits, and I'm almost positive that no one in Boston is getting more than that, AT THE MOST. What service is your friend using? Because the only way I can see to get 7 megabits in Beantown is with a couple of concurrent T1 connections.
I live in Boston too, and I share your pain with regard to getting high speed access. I signed up for Flashcom when I first moved into my apartment near the Fens, because they were the only ones who would arrange to have a "dry" line run from the CO to my apartment just for DSL service. My POTS circuit wouldn't qualify, probably because the wiring is 50 years old or there are repeaters or fiber somewhere along the route.
Of course, Flashcom's actual service is a complete and utter joke, and I'm just happy that they went belly-up and cut me loose from my contract 8 months early. Now I use Speakeasy DSL. They cost the same, but I get multiple static IPs, and they're a lot more friendly to power users.
Still, the fastest residential-type high speed access you can get around here is 1.5 megabits over a cable modem. And of course that's subject to availability (ie you can get it almost anywhere in the state other than Boston - WTF?!), and to line sharing issues. Still, if I could get a cable modem, I would. They're only $40/month for typically 600 - 800kbit speed, sometimes higher. I pay $50 for a pokey 384kbit link. Booooo!
Just for kicks, check out http://www.bb2w.com.
Why is this marked "interesting?" It's obviously sarcasm...
If you are a parent, and you want to keep your children safe on the internet, one of the easiest ways to start doing that is by NOT using AOL. Think about it.
"So easy to use, no wonder it's number one." How many millions of people have AOL accounts? Ten million? Twenty? I lost count somewhere around 1997. My point is that AOL is a very poor vehicle for internet access. The reason for this is that it's in the best interests of the company to keep its users away from the internet as much as possible, and point them towards their internal content instead. An example? Think of how often you see a TV ad that has both a web site and an "AOL Keyword." Those companies pay extra for that area on AOL, and AOL wants to make sure they get their money's worth.
What I'm getting at here is that if you turn your children loose on AOL, they are not going to go to the Homework Help areas, they are not going to go check out "Kids Only Online." They head for the chat rooms because chatting is fun. It's not educational, however, and it does have the potential to be threatening.
If you want to give your kids access to the internet for research purposes, then get an account with an ISP. A system like that is really not hard to learn, and actually lets you access the internet, not AOL's warped version of it. Yes, you still need to be careful about the sites your kids visit (hint: avoid www.nasa.com), but you don't have to worry about who they're talking to while you're in the kitchen making dinner.
He's still hanging on because he spent less than a year in Northeastern's CS curriculum. When he dropped out of school to found Napster, the product was in its very early infancy. Read: it sucked. Transfers always timed out, half the time you couldn't even log in, etc. But he got noticed, the right people thought the idea was good, and they threw money at it.
I suspect that at this point his role in the company is mostly that of "poster boy." I doubt he's doing much if any of the actual programming because he's probably not very good at it. If he bailed, it's doubtful that he could move on to something else without coming back to school. I think he got lucky, he knows it, and he's milking it for all it's worth.
I attend Northeastern University in Boston. I looked forward to living in the dorms Freshman year and enjoying a 12 Mbit fractional T3, but became almost instantly frustrated with the design and administration of the network. 1. Each residence hall exists as a subnet off of one router. Within each hall, the interconnection of rooms is done using hubs positioned in wiring closets on each floor. This means that not only can I sniff the ethernet traffic (including juicy IM conversations) of everyone else in the building, but the overall congestion on the LAN is very high. 2. The head sysadmin is very concerned about student hackers, to the point where data on most "non-standard" outgoing ports is filtered out before it leaves our domain. Yet the chosen ports make no sense. Students can't use SSL, finger, telnet, or SSH, but Napster traffic runs rampant. 3. Probably the worst thing about the whole arrangement is the lack of communication with students about things they can do to make their use of NU's internet services simpler. For example, all students have shell accounts on our local mail server, which they can telnet or ssh to to retrieve their mail using pine. However, the University also has POP and SMTP servers set up, so that we can use mail clients like Eudora or Outlook to simplify this process. Despite this, students aren't told how to set up such clients, or in fact that they even have that option. Instead, everyone complains about how "archaic" the telnet system is, and the school responds be implementing Lotus Domino for the mail server, and migrating the student body to Notes for their mail. I have little doubt that a core of tech-saavy students would do a much better job managing this system than the current group of know-nothing bozos.
Just think of what that says for the state of human affairs in general, never mind Fox ;-)
You spelled "fourth" wrong.
Personally, aside from my friends that have been using Linux longer than I have, the best source of answers to questions, for me, has been IRC. Specifically, #linpeople, #linuxhelp, #kernelnewbies, and other channels on the openprojects network. X-chat comes with Red Hat, so fire that baby up, add irc.openprojects.net (I think...) to the server list, and log in. You will always find helpful people who will walk you through things if you ask nicely.
Also, remember what happened to Usenet? I dunno about you, but alt.alien.vampires.flonk.flonk.flonk isn't what I'd call a good use of that service.
Is it just me, or have individualistic kids always been shut out, made fun of, or otherwise hassled? I'm bothered by the fact that JonKatz constantly takes it upon himself to bring these incidents to our attention, as though he's the spokesperson for legions of down-trodden teenage weirdos. I had it tough in high school too because I chose to be different, and I do think that schools need to do a better job of making an acceptable learning environment for all students.
However, the root of this problem is not with high school administrators, but with parents who do not teach their children by example that teasing and harassment of those who are different from them are unacceptable behaviors. I hate to perpetuate the old saying that "there's no such thing as bad people, just bad parents," but at least in this case I believe it's true.
I take comfort in the fact that the three kids who made my teenage years so unpleasant by spreading rumors that I was gay and making fun of my choice of hair and clothing styles now work for the local septic tank pumping company, while I'm pursuing a degree and working part time at an internet startup.
My personal favorite of the Fox hard hitting journalism stories was, "Cranes are crashing down all over the Bay State!" Every day I walk to work on Congress street past lots of Big Dig construction, and cower in fear of the 500' tall cranes that could fall on me at any moment.
News like this appeals to unintelligent people who live in perpetual fear of the world they live in and rely on TV news to tell them what the latest and most horrible things happening in the world are. The best part is always the fact that these stories offer no hope of things ever getting better. "Stay tuned for continuous updates about how the world is falling apart all around you."
I've found that newspapers are still the best place to turn for real news with the least amount of bias. News on the internet tends to be poorly written and reported, in the interest of breaking the story as soon as is humanly possible after it happens. I'd rather get the whole story 24 hours later than stay glued to my CRT watching the updates come in. "Concorde crashes!" "Concorde crashes with mostly German passengers!" "Concorde crashes with 100 German passengers!" "Concorde goes down in flames! Click here for pictures!" "Concorde goes down in flames, killing many Germans! Click here for RealVideo!"