Uh, without addressing your other points: You _do_ pay around 12.5% of your gross income to SS. 12.4% to be precise. You haven't fallen for that "employer pays half" line, have you?
True, especially in local contests like that one, and also primary votes, etc. Local elections are frequently decided by very small margins, since the turnout is small. I've done some election results reporting, and also seen lots of the details on an election where my father was a candidate. I have seen cases where the election hung, literally, on a single vote.
Amazon doesn't necessarily give you time to cancel though. At least once, Amazon shipped my order - or at least, the order got to the part of their process where they can't stop it from being shipped - between the time it took for me to place it, get an ack email from them, and for me to write a quick message back to them and get it read - that is, within 10 minutes or so. They can be pretty quick.
Recently I've been using Amazon to find music I want to buy, then hitting Cheap-CDs to make the purchase. Cheap-CDs usually beats Amazon by a buck per disc or so at least, and ships via US Mail, which I need - Amazon doesn't let you specify mail (they'll ship by mail if they want to, but you can't reliably tell them to use it). There are plenty of alternatives out there.
As I understand it, one of the guiding principles behind e-gold is the idea that things ought to be valued in gold itself - you shouldn't be thinking in terms of exchange with other currencies. The thinking is that fiat money - dollars, Euros, etc. - are manipulable by governments, aren't true stores of value, and other things. This thinking comes out of some of the more hard-core elements of the libertarian / anti-government movement. Lots of gold bug literature goes into this - lots of doom and gloom about what'll happen with the government inevitably mismanages the currency. (it's happened lots of times in history so maintaining some of one's assets in some sort of commodity hedge, like gold, isn't such a bad idea. I do.) So, anyway, the performance of gold vis-a-vis USD isn't supposed to be relevant, because you're using gold as your base currency, not as an investment vehicle.
I haven't checked the e-gold site in a while, but as I recall some of the "why?" literature there was along these lines. At any rate, many e-gold supporters come from this viewpoint.
My personal take on e-gold is
it's a neat idea, but in the end at best all it'd
do is introduce yet another currency, and as long
as it's under the control of one firm (which
charges absurd exchange fees - you could buy/sell
any currency in the world for less spread than
they charge, even for small amounts), it can't
amount to anything. Maybe what we need is
OpenGold:-) ?
Yeahbut, no one who should have access has access either. I wasn't implying that the site isn't _secure_ - I have no idea whether or not it is, or how much so. But, if e-gold wants to be taken as seriously as a currency, it has to be as available as other currencies, meaning that if I need to do a transaction, it can be done. Dollars don't "go down". If I misplace my wallet, that's my fault... but people still trade cash. When e-gold
's servers go down, the entire e-gold economy goes with it. This isn't good, or acceptable for serious use.
Gold in this context is a currency, like any other, except that its value relative to other currencies isn't easily under the control of any one government - rather, it's manipulable by _many_ entities (note what happens when, for example, a large central bank announces it's going to be selling part of its gold reserves).
It's not subject to inflation per se - but in a world of multiple, competing currencies, in which few things people are interested in buying are priced in gold, it's hardly a rock solid store of real-world value. Look at, say, this chart, best I could come up with in 10 seconds on Google:-) - finding a comparable chart for USD inflation is left as an exercise for the reader - but note that USD inflation peaked during the periods between points 3 and 5 on the graph - coincident with a spectacular decline in the gold price. Gold was US$296 in 6/1982 (in 1982 dollars). It's slightly under that now I think. That's in 2000 dollars. What was that about inflation again?
In an environment where gold (or some other designated commodity) were the standard currency that everyone used, e-gold might make sense. But as things stand now, where everything you want to buy is priced in dollars (or Euro or pounds or yen etc.), the friction of buying and selling e-gold and the metal storage costs make e-gold impractical.. and the stuff about gold being a valid inflation hedge and it not being subject to government manipulation is IMO hooey (see above).
I was talking about this with people at a conference I was at earlier this year... as I recall, I think what I said was e-gold would make more sense if the e-gold marketplace itself were open - so that the buying, selling, and storage or metal was handled by multiple competing companies, rather than the one gold firm that was behind e-gold. I can't check the site to see if the market has been opened up - I doubt it given the absurd spreads they were charging. With real competition spreads (the difference between buy and sell) might go down and using e-gold as an exchange medium behind real-world transactions would start to make sense. I still wouldn't use it unless there was a way to, say, earn interest on my idle cash, er, gold, and do other things I can normally and easily do with dollars. 'Till then, I think it's just for the gold bugs.
There is, or used to be, a great, and active, discussion section on e-gold over at Free-Market Net.
How "safe" can it be if I can't get at your site, right now, and access my money? Don't have that problem with cash in my wallet... and haven't so far with my online bank.
A lot of the logos-on-clothes thing is because you can't get intellectual property protection for a design or a "look" (look-and-feel perhaps?), but you can for brand names and logos. Major fashion marketers like DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger were getting killed by knockoff products, so they (skillfully IMO) made their brand and logos the status-conferring thing that people want to wear. Hilfiger couldn't do much about knockoff Tommy-ish clothes, but they can, and do, prosecute knockoff makers who infringe the Tommy logo and trademarks. Being a walking Tommy billboard says to the world, "I can afford to be fashionable", because knockoffs are, in theory, less common. Genius marketing IMO - attacks the knockoff problem _and_ has people walking around promoting your brand - and they pay you!
Repealing the Second Amendment and then passing laws that make bearing arms illegal would, in fact, make bearing arms illegal (by definition), entirely within the constitutional framework.
Of course this has nothing to do with one's right to bear arms, which exists whether or not the Constitution enumerates it, as you rightly point out. And if the Second Amendment (or any other in the BoR) were to be repealed, it would be an excellent idea to start exercising this right.
The "hacker culture" that the Net largely originated from had (and has) a strong libertarian undercurrent. Perhaps the influence of many of the net's founders and early adopters continues to be felt politically. Al Gore excepted, of course.
Claiming (or) building islands to start new countries has been done a bunch of times in the past - famous examples include the Republic of Minerva, which I think is detailed in the Loompanics book someone mentioned. I was looking at this stuff for fun recently - some entertaining links about independence and micronation movements include: Footnotes to History, this Micronations Page, and Homelands - many more exist (sites and pages, not successful micronations unfortunately); it's a popular libertarian topic.
Each of those Baby Bills would certainly be able to compete WITH EACH OTHER. However, Corel Office would still not be able to compete with any office suite that was written by the same company that wrote the closed-source OS
Corel, maybe not. But what's to stop Larry's Oracle (or some other big fish) from going out and buying a Baby Bill? The resultant company would probably turn toward focusing on high-end Windows servers (hehe) and database products. The other Bills might go separate ways toward different areas of the industry.
Not that I'd support any of these options (I'd leave MS alone, to wither in sclerosis as large companies eventually do), but there's lots of possible outcomes.
I thought most music acts still make most of _their_ money from live performances - as most of the money from record sales goes to the label, especially for newer acts. Not so anymore?
All of this well predates UUNET (founded by Rick Adams when seismo, a crushingly overloaded mail and news gateway, was about to go the way of ihnp4 [as in, shut down as having no justifiable business purpose]. Nice way to fall into a massive fortune!).
At the risk of self-plugging, I wrote up a bit about my experiences with our public-access Unix effort in NYC (Big Electric Cat) during the mid-80s, here. By the time our site was operating, public-access Unix wasn't all that uncommon anymore - Chinet, the Soup Kitchen, and others had been around for a bit, but I think we were among the earlier sites to make more of an effort to acclimate the general public (rather than hackers) to the net.
This thread has been a neat bit of history. Thanks to everyone..
"Books worldwide by web order" is a nice idea. It becomes a "sound business idea" when someone figures out how to earn profits doing it. Amazon hasn't, yet.
Even if it's not required by law, IMO Slashdot should take the spirit of equal access into consideration and try to run comparable interviews with the other candidates' organizations, IF the results of this interview turn out to be a political statement (rather than something technical, or social commentary, or whatever that doesn't specifically flog the Algore message).
The Bush campaign, we'll recall, clearly had a net strategy early on. McCain is raking the net for money as we speak. The other campaigns clearly have also given their Internet presence a lot of thought and should be heard from.
"... the dominant "orthodoxy" today is a secular liberalism with a hearty dose of new age/neopagan/neognostic spirituality.... "
This may be true in parts of the USA (say, the domains of the so-called "Urban Elites" - NYC, California, so on), but it's by no means the case nationwide - rather the opposite, I really think. Spend some time in the deep South - some form or another (and yes it varies very widely) of Christianity is what most people would say is the dominant force in their lives.
What I do think is the case, though, is that the Christian consensus you mention is largely gone from the so-called "elites" (you know, those people the Republicans are always railing against) - the people setting policy in government, the media, etc. I think this is where the perception that the USA is no longer Christian-dominated comes from, and I think it's also where a large part of the disquiet and distrust (vis-a-vis those elites) that Christian conservatives feel comes from.
(I'm a borderline atheist libertarian myself, but a day doesn't go by that my relatives from Florida don't dump some Xtian tripe on me. The spirit is alive and kickin' down there..)/rs (writing from that epicenter of the secular liberal media elite, New York City..)
Hmm.. now you've got me curious - I'll actually have to watch some TV tonight and see who's advertising on who. (needed an excuse..) I'm curious as to whether the cable networks advertising on broadcast channels are the same ones associated with the broadcast channel owners. Needs research:->
.. with the cable advertising analogy: The ownership structure of cable channels differs fundamentally from that of traditional broadcast (VHF 2-13 in the US mostly) channels in that many cable channels share common ownership. So, seeing an ad for, say, TBS while watching CNN isn't really a case of CNN's management accepting an ad from a competitor - it's all Time Warner. They may have some internal accounting thing where "money" moves, but it's not a competitive relationship from management's point of view.
I can't recall an instance of seeing, say, an ad for an ESPN program (Disney) during, say, a segment of CNN/SI (TimeWarner).
The ads that local cable operators can sell may subvert this a bit as they'd see anything that promotes more viewing as a plus - I don't know - in my area, TW owns the local cable operator too so I wouldn't see this behavior if it exists.
.. but, as far as the ads go, with most cable channels now (all the ones I get, anyway), you get the ads too. What you're paying for isn't freedom from ads - it's (supposedly) better, or at least more, content.
It's SOP in large companies to blow off paying bills 'till absolutely necessary - good for cash flow management. Pay slow, and try to collect as fast as possible.
It's also pretty standard for bills, statements, etc. to get routed to the wrong places, get set aside, and generally have all sorts of delaying things happen to them.
I used to do consulting work for a large bank.. they routinely were 2+ months slow in paying my invoices, knowing that there wasn't much I could do about it, finally I had had it and told the project manager that if I don't get a check this week, I'm out. The check came 2 days later. Par for the course.
Ah, so true... I took the M-B type test recently and came out INTP, and the descriptions out there fit perfectly - apparently the accuracy depends on how skewed your scores are toward each value. Mine are pretty skewed. But the geek stereotypes only go so far. I avoid caffein and run marathons (ok, just 1 so far, but..)
My favorite project at work was the design of a (large and complex) database system for a global MIS project... my manager allowed me to stare at the ceiling for a month doing essentially nothing else.. then I wrote it up and we hacked it out - first stage in 24/7 live-in-the-office-and-eat-catered-sushi-mode. There's no greater feeling (in the context of work, anyway) to have someone come over all excited saying "oh my god - we need this!" and to kick back, put my feet up on the desk and say, "way ahead of you - it's already in, been there since last year - just do this" - because the whole thing was so well thought out in advance. Rarely do we ever get the luxury of that much forethought.
'course, left to my own devices that's all I would do - stare at the ceiling and design, and nothing would get written. Someone please give me a staff...
I'm in exactly the same boat.. I've been using Unix heavily for about 13 years or so, including a bout of heavy sysadmin (sysV-flavor) around 10 years ago. I program in a Unix environment all day long; have done so for years. I'm not clueless.
As you say, the RH install went just fine. Then the tweaking began: X configuration, PPP, networking. The current project is getting my sound hardware to do the right thing (at the moment, to get it to do anything at all). Then I'll play with ip-masq and all that. I don't own any weird hardware - a Linux-friendly ether card, a real SoundBlaster, etc., but still, little worked properly post install.
I can see now that putting together what will ultimately be a small home office network is going to take me weeks of spare time in the evening. True, at the end I'll (hopefully) have a much deeper understanding of How it All Works than your typical Win-duhz user.. but I'll have earned it. The whole project would have taken me an hour so under Win98 or whatever. But I didn't want that. (the box is for Perl and database development, and I need what's comfortable, and for me, that's a lot of xterm windows running ksh.)
This isn't really a gripe. But I know my way around Unix. I can understand what the HOWTOs are saying. I prefer terse technical instructions to "dummies" and "idiots". I'm confident rebuilding a kernel. I like having this level of control and involvement. But there's just no way that someone outside the hobbyist community, who isn't interested in knowing all the details, and isn't being paid to care, is going to go through all this. They'd likely give up even before seeing the partition info in the install.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, without addressing your other points: You _do_ pay around 12.5% of your gross income to SS. 12.4% to be precise. You haven't fallen for that "employer pays half" line, have you?
David Brin. The Transparent Society.
True, especially in local contests like that one, and also primary votes, etc. Local elections are frequently decided by very small margins, since the turnout is small. I've done some election results reporting, and also seen lots of the details on an election where my father was a candidate. I have seen cases where the election hung, literally, on a single vote.
Amazon doesn't necessarily give you time to cancel though. At least once, Amazon shipped my order - or at least, the order got to the part of their process where they can't stop it from being shipped - between the time it took for me to place it, get an ack email from them, and for me to write a quick message back to them and get it read - that is, within 10 minutes or so. They can be pretty quick.
Recently I've been using Amazon to find music I want to buy, then hitting Cheap-CDs to make the purchase. Cheap-CDs usually beats Amazon by a buck per disc or so at least, and ships via US Mail, which I need - Amazon doesn't let you specify mail (they'll ship by mail if they want to, but you can't reliably tell them to use it). There are plenty of alternatives out there.
As I understand it, one of the guiding principles behind e-gold is the idea that things ought to be valued in gold itself - you shouldn't be thinking in terms of exchange with other currencies. The thinking is that fiat money - dollars, Euros, etc. - are manipulable by governments, aren't true stores of value, and other things. This thinking comes out of some of the more hard-core elements of the libertarian / anti-government movement. Lots of gold bug literature goes into this - lots of doom and gloom about what'll happen with the government inevitably mismanages the currency. (it's happened lots of times in history so maintaining some of one's assets in some sort of commodity hedge, like gold, isn't such a bad idea. I do.) So, anyway, the performance of gold vis-a-vis USD isn't supposed to be relevant, because you're using gold as your base currency, not as an investment vehicle.
:-) ?
I haven't checked the e-gold site in a while, but as I recall some of the "why?" literature there was along these lines. At any rate, many e-gold supporters come from this viewpoint.
My personal take on e-gold is it's a neat idea, but in the end at best all it'd do is introduce yet another currency, and as long as it's under the control of one firm (which charges absurd exchange fees - you could buy/sell any currency in the world for less spread than they charge, even for small amounts), it can't amount to anything. Maybe what we need is OpenGold
Yeahbut, no one who should have access has access either. I wasn't implying that the site isn't _secure_ - I have no idea whether or not it is, or how much so. But, if e-gold wants to be taken as seriously as a currency, it has to be as available as other currencies, meaning that if I need to do a transaction, it can be done. Dollars don't "go down". If I misplace my wallet, that's my fault... but people still trade cash. When e-gold 's servers go down, the entire e-gold economy goes with it. This isn't good, or acceptable for serious use.
Gold in this context is a currency, like any other, except that its value relative to other currencies isn't easily under the control of any one government - rather, it's manipulable by _many_ entities (note what happens when, for example, a large central bank announces it's going to be selling part of its gold reserves).
:-) - finding a comparable chart for USD inflation is left as an exercise for the reader - but note that USD inflation peaked during the periods between points 3 and 5 on the graph - coincident with a spectacular decline in the gold price. Gold was US$296 in 6/1982 (in 1982 dollars). It's slightly under that now I think. That's in 2000 dollars. What was that about inflation again?
It's not subject to inflation per se - but in a world of multiple, competing currencies, in which few things people are interested in buying are priced in gold, it's hardly a rock solid store of real-world value. Look at, say, this chart, best I could come up with in 10 seconds on Google
In an environment where gold (or some other designated commodity) were the standard currency that everyone used, e-gold might make sense. But as things stand now, where everything you want to buy is priced in dollars (or Euro or pounds or yen etc.), the friction of buying and selling e-gold and the metal storage costs make e-gold impractical.. and the stuff about gold being a valid inflation hedge and it not being subject to government manipulation is IMO hooey (see above).
I was talking about this with people at a conference I was at earlier this year... as I recall, I think what I said was e-gold would make more sense if the e-gold marketplace itself were open - so that the buying, selling, and storage or metal was handled by multiple competing companies, rather than the one gold firm that was behind e-gold. I can't check the site to see if the market has been opened up - I doubt it given the absurd spreads they were charging. With real competition spreads (the difference between buy and sell) might go down and using e-gold as an exchange medium behind real-world transactions would start to make sense. I still wouldn't use it unless there was a way to, say, earn interest on my idle cash, er, gold, and do other things I can normally and easily do with dollars. 'Till then, I think it's just for the gold bugs.
There is, or used to be, a great, and active, discussion section on e-gold over at Free-Market Net.
How "safe" can it be if I can't get at your site, right now, and access my money? Don't have that problem with cash in my wallet... and haven't so far with my online bank.
A lot of the logos-on-clothes thing is because you can't get intellectual property protection for a design or a "look" (look-and-feel perhaps?), but you can for brand names and logos. Major fashion marketers like DKNY and Tommy Hilfiger were getting killed by knockoff products, so they (skillfully IMO) made their brand and logos the status-conferring thing that people want to wear. Hilfiger couldn't do much about knockoff Tommy-ish clothes, but they can, and do, prosecute knockoff makers who infringe the Tommy logo and trademarks. Being a walking Tommy billboard says to the world, "I can afford to be fashionable", because knockoffs are, in theory, less common. Genius marketing IMO - attacks the knockoff problem _and_ has people walking around promoting your brand - and they pay you!
Repealing the Second Amendment and then passing laws that make bearing arms illegal would, in fact, make bearing arms illegal (by definition), entirely within the constitutional framework.
Of course this has nothing to do with one's right to bear arms, which exists whether or not the Constitution enumerates it, as you rightly point out. And if the Second Amendment (or any other in the BoR) were to be repealed, it would be an excellent idea to start exercising this right.
The "hacker culture" that the Net largely originated from had (and has) a strong libertarian undercurrent. Perhaps the influence of many of the net's founders and early adopters continues to be felt politically. Al Gore excepted, of course.
Claiming (or) building islands to start new countries has been done a bunch of times in the past - famous examples include the Republic of Minerva, which I think is detailed in the Loompanics book someone mentioned. I was looking at this stuff for fun recently - some entertaining links about independence and micronation movements include: Footnotes to History, this Micronations Page, and Homelands - many more exist (sites and pages, not successful micronations unfortunately); it's a popular libertarian topic.
Each of those Baby Bills would certainly be able to compete WITH EACH OTHER. However, Corel Office would still not be able to compete with any office suite that was written by the same company that wrote the closed-source OS
Corel, maybe not. But what's to stop Larry's Oracle (or some other big fish) from going out and buying a Baby Bill? The resultant company would probably turn toward focusing on high-end Windows servers (hehe) and database products. The other Bills might go separate ways toward different areas of the industry.
Not that I'd support any of these options (I'd leave MS alone, to wither in sclerosis as large companies eventually do), but there's lots of possible outcomes.
I thought most music acts still make most of _their_ money from live performances - as most of the money from record sales goes to the label, especially for newer acts. Not so anymore?
All of this well predates UUNET (founded by Rick Adams when seismo, a crushingly overloaded mail and news gateway, was about to go the way of ihnp4 [as in, shut down as having no justifiable business purpose]. Nice way to fall into a massive fortune!).
At the risk of self-plugging, I wrote up a bit about my experiences with our public-access Unix effort in NYC (Big Electric Cat) during the mid-80s, here. By the time our site was operating, public-access Unix wasn't all that uncommon anymore - Chinet, the Soup Kitchen, and others had been around for a bit, but I think we were among the earlier sites to make more of an effort to acclimate the general public (rather than hackers) to the net.
This thread has been a neat bit of history. Thanks to everyone..
"Books worldwide by web order" is a nice idea. It becomes a "sound business idea" when someone figures out how to earn profits doing it. Amazon hasn't, yet.
Even if it's not required by law, IMO Slashdot should take the spirit of equal access into consideration and try to run comparable interviews with the other candidates' organizations, IF the results of this interview turn out to be a political statement (rather than something technical, or social commentary, or whatever that doesn't specifically flog the Algore message).
The Bush campaign, we'll recall, clearly had a net strategy early on. McCain is raking the net for money as we speak. The other campaigns clearly have also given their Internet presence a lot of thought and should be heard from.
"... the dominant "orthodoxy" today is a secular liberalism with a hearty dose of new age/neopagan/neognostic spirituality. ... "
/rs (writing from that epicenter of the secular liberal media elite, New York City..)
This may be true in parts of the USA (say, the domains of the so-called "Urban Elites" - NYC, California, so on), but it's by no means the case nationwide - rather the opposite, I really think. Spend some time in the deep South - some form or another (and yes it varies very widely) of Christianity is what most people would say is the dominant force in their lives.
What I do think is the case, though, is that the Christian consensus you mention is largely gone from the so-called "elites" (you know, those people the Republicans are always railing against) - the people setting policy in government, the media, etc. I think this is where the perception that the USA is no longer Christian-dominated comes from, and I think it's also where a large part of the disquiet and distrust (vis-a-vis those elites) that Christian conservatives feel comes from.
(I'm a borderline atheist libertarian myself, but a day doesn't go by that my relatives from Florida don't dump some Xtian tripe on me. The spirit is alive and kickin' down there..)
Hmm.. now you've got me curious - I'll actually have to watch some TV tonight and see who's advertising on who. (needed an excuse..) I'm curious as to whether the cable networks advertising on broadcast channels are the same ones associated with the broadcast channel owners. Needs research :->
.. with the cable advertising analogy: The ownership structure of cable channels differs fundamentally from that of traditional broadcast (VHF 2-13 in the US mostly) channels in that many cable channels share common ownership. So, seeing an ad for, say, TBS while watching CNN isn't really a case of CNN's management accepting an ad from a competitor - it's all Time Warner. They may have some internal accounting thing where "money" moves, but it's not a competitive relationship from management's point of view.
I can't recall an instance of seeing, say, an ad for an ESPN program (Disney) during, say, a segment of CNN/SI (TimeWarner).
The ads that local cable operators can sell may subvert this a bit as they'd see anything that promotes more viewing as a plus - I don't know - in my area, TW owns the local cable operator too so I wouldn't see this behavior if it exists.
.. but, as far as the ads go, with most cable channels now (all the ones I get, anyway), you get the ads too. What you're paying for isn't freedom from ads - it's (supposedly) better, or at least more, content.
It's SOP in large companies to blow off paying bills 'till absolutely necessary - good for cash flow management. Pay slow, and try to collect as fast as possible.
It's also pretty standard for bills, statements, etc. to get routed to the wrong places, get set aside, and generally have all sorts of delaying things happen to them.
I used to do consulting work for a large bank.. they routinely were 2+ months slow in paying my invoices, knowing that there wasn't much I could do about it, finally I had had it and told the project manager that if I don't get a check this week, I'm out. The check came 2 days later. Par for the course.
Ah, so true... I took the M-B type test recently and came out INTP, and the descriptions out there fit perfectly - apparently the accuracy depends on how skewed your scores are toward each value. Mine are pretty skewed. But the geek stereotypes only go so far. I avoid caffein and run marathons (ok, just 1 so far, but..)
My favorite project at work was the design of a (large and complex) database system for a global MIS project... my manager allowed me to stare at the ceiling for a month doing essentially nothing else.. then I wrote it up and we hacked it out - first stage in 24/7 live-in-the-office-and-eat-catered-sushi-mode. There's no greater feeling (in the context of work, anyway) to have someone come over all excited saying "oh my god - we need this!" and to kick back, put my feet up on the desk and say, "way ahead of you - it's already in, been there since last year - just do this" - because the whole thing was so well thought out in advance. Rarely do we ever get the luxury of that much forethought.
'course, left to my own devices that's all I would do - stare at the ceiling and design, and nothing would get written. Someone please give me a staff...
I'm in exactly the same boat.. I've been using Unix heavily for about 13 years or so, including a bout of heavy sysadmin (sysV-flavor) around 10 years ago. I program in a Unix environment all day long; have done so for years. I'm not clueless.
As you say, the RH install went just fine. Then the tweaking began: X configuration, PPP, networking. The current project is getting my sound hardware to do the right thing (at the moment, to get it to do anything at all). Then I'll play with ip-masq and all that. I don't own any weird hardware - a Linux-friendly ether card, a real SoundBlaster, etc., but still, little worked properly post install.
I can see now that putting together what will ultimately be a small home office network is going to take me weeks of spare time in the evening. True, at the end I'll (hopefully) have a much deeper understanding of How it All Works than your typical Win-duhz user.. but I'll have earned it. The whole project would have taken me an hour so under Win98 or whatever. But I didn't want that. (the box is for Perl and database development, and I need what's comfortable, and for me, that's a lot of xterm windows running ksh.)
This isn't really a gripe. But I know my way around Unix. I can understand what the HOWTOs are saying. I prefer terse technical instructions to "dummies" and "idiots". I'm confident rebuilding a kernel. I like having this level of control and involvement. But there's just no way that someone outside the hobbyist community, who isn't interested in knowing all the details, and isn't being paid to care, is going to go through all this. They'd likely give up even before seeing the partition info in the install.