In Southern California, I get my aDSL from Pacific Bell. The installation charge was $200, but if you sign up for a year (which I did) they waive that. The equipment (splitter, modem, NIC) was $199, but you can provide your own. I couldn't get the same stuff for cheaper, so I just got it from them.
I pay $39 a month for their service. If I wanted their ISP, it would cost me another 10 bucks a month, but I basically have a $9.99 email address that I don't want to give up and use my localhost for everything. It works out really nice.
The phoneline is a completely different thing. The DSL is charged to your regular phone bill (in fact, they $199 is spread out over four months), but it doesn't interfere/affect DSL at all.
There is a VERY GOOD HOW-TO on DSL that should be in all the normal Linux places (at least on the SuSE CD's) that takes about 90% of the document to explain what DSL is and how it works, and the other 10% to tell you how to get it working on your system. It explains more than you'd ever want to know about it, and if you're thinking of getting DSL, it's a worthwhile toilet read (took me two sessions.)
Civil rights? Pfffft on you! Who's civil rights have been violated? Last I checked, information gathering had nothing to do with civil rights. It's when the information is *used* against you that your rights can be violated, not before. This system has been implemented for 50 years by most accounts, and I can't recall a single news item, ever, that outlined someone's rights being violated by any government with information obtained through it. I challenge any of you to point me to anything indicating such rights violations have ever occurred.
Do any of you people eat tuna? When the commercial fishing boats go out to catch fish for tuna, they put big nets out, and basically catch anything that they can. Some of the fish isn't fit to be made into tuna. They also catch many other creatures that you wouldn't want to eat, so they are discarded. Killed. They weren't fit to be tuna. They died so that *you* could get good, safe tuna. It's the price you pay for good tuna.
If you're worried about Eschelon, then don't be a tuna!
Wahhhh! Have you opened a Game Developer lately? Every other page has some 3D super-accelerated kick-ass modeling API. I can't find a 'standard' among them. Read the postmortem articles and you can see that there aren't two games out there that use the same tools, much less ActiveX. Just because Mesa is the best right now doesn't mean everyone should abandon development. It's competition and the challenges of beating out the other guy that make things better. Believe me, there are better browsers out there than Lynx, but twenty years ago everyone thought it was the browser to end all browsers. Was it?
The only reason ActiveX has any semblance of being a 'standard' is because Microsoft says so, per usual. If it's all you have available, then you use it, right? Windows in general makes it difficult to 'think outside the box', if you pardon the cliche, so the less innovative and groundbreaking game makers throw in the towel and use ActiveX.
These new entries into the Linux game world need our suppert, not our 'you're not as good as xxxx' sentiments. How is that 'tude going to encourage people to make things better? Don't we want something better than ActiveX for Linux? We gotta start somewhere, and unfortunately for the impatient, that somewhere is here and now.
By the way, as long as I'm on the soapbox, the grim reality is that development of games and software in general takes money. I praise the open software movement, but look at your history. The first open source software was written by government employees and contractors that were being paid to do so! It was their job! I don't know where GPL'd software authors find the time to write free software. I'd personally like to thank every one of them, but this 'gimme gimme' attitude isn't going to last much longer, and there's a plateau of quality out there that most people won't want to pass without compensation.
I've hated Microsoft since before I ran Linux, since before I was ever on the Internet. In the original "Triumph of the Nerds" on PBS, Steve Jobs said something to the effect of 'I don't fault Microsoft for being big, and selling a lot of software. I fault them for making shoddy products...'. Anyone that's had to use MS tools for building software can attest to the lack in quality, and that's what I think the point of the White Paper was.
Until the government started to ignore open source as a viable paradigm in the late 80's, software was good. It was utilitarian. It followed standards and people evolved software to the point that there was a consensus of what quality was. Bad software generally didn't exist.
Microsoft just happens to be the biggest purveyor of bad software. The article insinuated that there are more companies, in the Unix world even (HP, SUN, SGI, etc.) that have damaged the 'movement' by constructing proprietary, closed versions of the OS. MS just happens to be the biggest target, so they're easy to hit.
I'll admit that the web site that hosted the document is very anti-Microsoft, and the slant of the article was obvious, but if you look past that, the question that arises concerns the fact that a shrinkwrapped box of software at CompUSA, which I have to pay good money for, has *worse* quality than something I can download for free on the Internet. Why is that? Why did good software go away? Why is it coming back? How can we help it come back faster? Why do we need it so badly now?
It's a shame that people have to home in on 'Microsoft this', 'Microsoft that' and miss the essence of the article.
I second your comments on programming with Dvorak layouts. It's actually not that much different than qwerty, in that all the punctiation is on the 'outskirts', but the braces in particular are far away (albiet right next to the parens, now.) If typing braces with your right pinky is a real issue, you might look at one of the on-handed Dvorak layouts. The left-handed one has the braces on the left side, although a bunch of the other punctuation is still on the right.
-or-
switch back and forth on the fly as needed. Sometimes, I switch back to qwerty to type certain things that use a lot of braces and backslashes, etc. I can do this because my keyboard has both sets of keys and a toggle switch that works much like a numlock or capslock, except it's a Dvorak lock! I can't say enough good things about my dvorak keyboard. I paid 70 bucks for mine six months ago, but now I see that they're down to 50. Not *much* better quality than a $25 CompUSA board, but you get the best of both worlds without funny drivers or modmaps, and you don't have to deal with the keys being the wrong height after you pop them off and move them around:
http://www.dvorty.com
Good places to check out if you're interested:
Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/
A Basic Course in Dvorak http://www.zocalo.net/~danwood/abcd/
I'll shut up now, but if you want me to go on and on even longer, feel free to e-mail me.
Slashdot Mirror
They asked me the same thing, but I told them to keep their grubby paws off my machine, because I didn't want their noses poking around my computer.
It took about three seconds to compile tulip.c into my kernel and turn the computer back on.
I've got nothing but high marks for Pac Bell.
-mattyj
In Southern California, I get my aDSL from Pacific Bell. The installation charge was $200, but if you sign up for a year (which I did) they waive that. The equipment (splitter, modem, NIC) was $199, but you can provide your own. I couldn't get the same stuff for cheaper, so I just got it from them.
I pay $39 a month for their service. If I wanted their ISP, it would cost me another 10 bucks a month, but I basically have a $9.99 email address that I don't want to give up and use my localhost for everything. It works out really nice.
The phoneline is a completely different thing. The DSL is charged to your regular phone bill (in fact, they $199 is spread out over four months), but it doesn't interfere/affect DSL at all.
There is a VERY GOOD HOW-TO on DSL that should be in all the normal Linux places (at least on the SuSE CD's) that takes about 90% of the document to explain what DSL is and how it works, and the other 10% to tell you how to get it working on your system. It explains more than you'd ever want to know about it, and if you're thinking of getting DSL, it's a worthwhile toilet read (took me two sessions.)
-mattyj@cts.com
Civil rights? Pfffft on you! Who's civil rights have been violated? Last I checked, information gathering had nothing to do with civil rights. It's when the information is *used* against you that your rights can be violated, not before. This system has been implemented for 50 years by most accounts, and I can't recall a single news item, ever, that outlined someone's rights being violated by any government with information obtained through it. I challenge any of you to point me to anything indicating such rights violations have ever occurred.
Do any of you people eat tuna? When the commercial fishing boats go out to catch fish for tuna, they put big nets out, and basically catch anything that they can. Some of the fish isn't fit to be made into tuna. They also catch many other creatures that you wouldn't want to eat, so they are discarded. Killed. They weren't fit to be tuna. They died so that *you* could get good, safe tuna. It's the price you pay for good tuna.
If you're worried about Eschelon, then don't be a tuna!
-mattyj@cts.com
Wahhhh! Have you opened a Game Developer lately? Every other page has some 3D super-accelerated kick-ass modeling API. I can't find a 'standard' among them. Read the postmortem articles and you can see that there aren't two games out there that use the same tools, much less ActiveX. Just because Mesa is the best right now doesn't mean everyone should abandon development. It's competition and the challenges of beating out the other guy that make things better. Believe me, there are better browsers out there than Lynx, but twenty years ago everyone thought it was the browser to end all browsers. Was it?
The only reason ActiveX has any semblance of being a 'standard' is because Microsoft says so, per usual. If it's all you have available, then you use it, right? Windows in general makes it difficult to 'think outside the box', if you pardon the cliche, so the less innovative and groundbreaking game makers throw in the towel and use ActiveX.
These new entries into the Linux game world need our suppert, not our 'you're not as good as xxxx' sentiments. How is that 'tude going to encourage people to make things better? Don't we want something better than ActiveX for Linux? We gotta start somewhere, and unfortunately for the impatient, that somewhere is here and now.
By the way, as long as I'm on the soapbox, the grim reality is that development of games and software in general takes money. I praise the open software movement, but look at your history. The first open source software was written by government employees and contractors that were being paid to do so! It was their job! I don't know where GPL'd software authors find the time to write free software. I'd personally like to thank every one of them, but this 'gimme gimme' attitude isn't going to last much longer, and there's a plateau of quality out there that most people won't want to pass without compensation.
So there.
Mailbox open for flaming...
-mattyj
I've hated Microsoft since before I ran Linux, since before I was ever on the Internet. In the original "Triumph of the Nerds" on PBS, Steve Jobs said something to the effect of 'I don't fault Microsoft for being big, and selling a lot of software. I fault them for making shoddy products...'. Anyone that's had to use MS tools for building software can attest to the lack in quality, and that's what I think the point of the White Paper was.
Until the government started to ignore open source as a viable paradigm in the late 80's, software was good. It was utilitarian. It followed standards and people evolved software to the point that there was a consensus of what quality was. Bad software generally didn't exist.
Microsoft just happens to be the biggest purveyor of bad software. The article insinuated that there are more companies, in the Unix world even (HP, SUN, SGI, etc.) that have damaged the 'movement' by constructing proprietary, closed versions of the OS. MS just happens to be the biggest target, so they're easy to hit.
I'll admit that the web site that hosted the document is very anti-Microsoft, and the slant of the article was obvious, but if you look past that, the question that arises concerns the fact that a shrinkwrapped box of software at CompUSA, which I have to pay good money for, has *worse* quality than something I can download for free on the Internet. Why is that? Why did good software go away? Why is it coming back? How can we help it come back faster? Why do we need it so badly now?
It's a shame that people have to home in on 'Microsoft this', 'Microsoft that' and miss the essence of the article.
-MattyJ
I second your comments on programming with Dvorak layouts. It's actually not that much different than qwerty, in that all the punctiation is on the 'outskirts', but the braces in particular are far away (albiet right next to the parens, now.) If typing braces with your right pinky is a real issue, you might look at one of the on-handed Dvorak layouts. The left-handed one has the braces on the left side, although a bunch of the other punctuation is still on the right.
-or-
switch back and forth on the fly as needed. Sometimes, I switch back to qwerty to type certain things that use a lot of braces and backslashes, etc. I can do this because my keyboard has both sets of keys and a toggle switch that works much like a numlock or capslock, except it's a Dvorak lock! I can't say enough good things about my dvorak keyboard. I paid 70 bucks for mine six months ago, but now I see that they're down to 50. Not *much* better quality than a $25 CompUSA board, but you get the best of both worlds without funny drivers or modmaps, and you don't have to deal with the keys being the wrong height after you pop them off and move them around:
http://www.dvorty.com
Good places to check out if you're interested:
Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard
http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/
A Basic Course in Dvorak
http://www.zocalo.net/~danwood/abcd/
I'll shut up now, but if you want me to go on and on even longer, feel free to e-mail me.
mattyj@crash.cts.com