"even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination"
And yet, the author does just the opposite of what he claimed he would do... I agree with the pre-heart-attack author. Can he ever be sure he isn't insane? Can I ever be sure I am not insane?
"Being a philosopher and not a poseur, I put the matter to an empirical test."
A truly awful test that could only ever gather anecdotal evidence. You earn a "D-" in science.
Maybe I missed it, but did his vision lead him to Roman Catholicism? Greek Orthodox? Anglicanism? Russian Orthodox? Episcopalian? Lutheran? Mormonism? Jehova's Witnesses?
The display is color. In the lowest brightness setting, it reverts to black
and white and remains mostly visible in sunlight (it's visible in sunlight at
all brightness settings, but the colors don't come out well so there's little
point in wasting battery and not turning the brightness all the way down).
You're right about the keyboard and general lack of resources. I purchased
one for myself and am finding it very difficult but possible to touch type, but
I do enjoy the placement of the Control key (to the left of the A; there is no
caps-lock). I had to do quite a bit of work to get everything set up with
"normal" window manager, xterm with readable fonts, browser, etc (note that the
default sugar interface includes all of these, just in a different form than
any Linux distro); I'm planning on using it as a conveniently portable
development (often via ssh) workstation. (I've heard similar complaints about
the Asus EeePC keyboard, but that is not exactly built for children so
presumably its keyboard is slightly larger.)
I've seen many Give-One-Get-One participants say they purchased it as a gift
for their own child or niece. This is the obvious market for the OLPC in its
current form were it to be sold in retail stores. The question is, does it
make a good laptop for children in wealthy areas who probably already have
access to a computer and Internet? It certainly includes a lot of neat
software, but is somewhat sluggish. I don't know any young chilren, and I've
no idea if the laptop makes a good gift or not.
Well, this may or may not be useful, but the notes from Tufte's presentation say "Web site design, computer interfaces, information kiosks: Visual Explanations, pages 146-150, then every entry in the index under 'interface'; Envisioning Information, chapters 2 and 3, then every entry in the index under 'interface'."
I have all four Tufte books and I have read a few of the other interface
books suggested by others. Books like Raskin's The Humane Interface
and Norman's The Design of Everyday Things tend to focus on "widgets"
for lack of a better term, specifically the minimization of modes, steps, and
things that must be kept in the head to perform a given action, and the design
of natural mappings of controls to what is being controlled (favorite example:
stovetop burners are arranged in a square; majority of burner controls are
linearly placed with some sort of picture indicating which burner is affected;
vastly simpler is a square layout of the controls matching that of the burners;
my grandmother almost started a fire due to this confusion). These are
essential of course, but Tufte's books bring another much needed perspective:
an interface is primarily a presentation of information, and the presentaion
should be guided by library science and information design principles.
More to your question, I agree with the other poster to start with
Display, though I've read the most from that one and simply skimmed
the others. Display seems to focus mostly on plots of scientific
data. The next two have things like the weather animation depicted on the
cover of Visual Explanations and neat train schedules from around the
world which may or may not be more relevant depending on what you're doing. I
attended Tufte's travelling lecture, and I believe I still have his list of
sections, pulled from the first three books, most relevant to interface
design; I may be able to dig it out later in the day.
Re:Ruby could be the answer as well
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
I'm not familiar with SciPy or IPython, but Ruby has Ruby/GSL, a wrapper around the GNU Scientific Library. It defines Vector and Matrix classes and many math and stats functions that work on them. There's also Numerical Ruby NArray that defines structures similar to Vector and Matrix and basic math operators. I've used both of these a little, but not for anything large. For example, I just used Ruby/GSL to calculate a Receiver Operating Characteristic curve for a spamfilter, but GSL has no ROC stats function so I wrote my own in Ruby. The function itself has no advantage over Ruby's built-in Arrays, but I left to door open massage my data using GSL before calculating the ROC curve.
Do you have any data on the exact date or extent to which greylisting became ineffective? I'm currently researching spamblocking techniques for myself, but my personal spam data suggests that greylisting was fairly effective as late as May of 2007. I disabled greylisting at that time for various reasons; it would be dissapointing to find that greylisting is no longer effective. (Data includes spam from two-three personal addresses on a server that accepts most anything. Yes, I use client-side filters.)
Isn't there a heat gain, as some solar radiation that would have been reflected back into space is captured and eventually converted to waste heat here on earth?
So let's do 14 years tax-free. After that you must register in the case of copyright, and declare a value in the case of copyright or patent, and start paying property taxes.
Yet Nike, or all advertisers in agregate, have convinced you that various
shoe technologies are necessary. Sure you might not pay the premium for Nike,
but you're still buying into the "shoe needed for sport" mindset which is
nine-tenths of Nike's job. I'm guilty of the same thing in many areas of life,
e.g. "car needed for getting around", "must keep up with the Joneses", and
probably many others I'm not even aware of. But I do run barefoot.
My post office has a sign that says something like "Valid signature required
on all credit cards; 'Check ID' no good". My credit card is not signed on the
back, and they, along with every other store, accepted it without checking.
For one-to-one communication, I often prefer no-quoting. Mail clients
generally don't do this, but they could display the entire conversation in a
thread rather than treating everything as a discrete document (does GMail
display threads like this?). Usenet clients should also do something similar,
but none I've seen do so, other than Google News. Google News also does some
auto trimming of quotes to make this more sane (if I remember correctly); it's
a shame this isn't common in news readers (or maybe it is; I've only used a
couple).
Steel sword coated with diamond? Isn't this how samurai swords are essentially made, with a softer steel on the inside and hard martensite on the outside for a sharp edge but flexible sword?
I think the biggie is vastly higher resolution. Typical screens are what, 72-100 ppi? It's simply tiring to keep scrolling about. Letter size paper or a larger newspaper fits more information and lets the reader scan about without much effort.
Also, something about being able to easily add color seems to make everyone want to do it. Those thick, darkly colored bars of slashdot headings sharply contrast with the black-on-white text and in many cases activate the negative space between the bars.
And yet, you control but a single, insignificant vote. What have you got to
lose? We can't even count accurately enough for a single vote to be
significant should a large election come down to it.
I like Tufte's thoughts on moderating, particularly his point about avoiding "the chronic internet disease of 'All Opinions, All the Time.'" Different websites have different goals of course, but there is nothing inherently wrong with refusing to allow anyone to publish any opinion on your website. Tufte's own forum is much lower traffic than Slashdot, but it has the interesting property of discussions that are years long, and the majority of posts are on-topic and very useful. Slashdot discussions more than a day or two old are all but dead. One thing I see often enough that it bugs me is a post like, "So and so behaves in ways X, Y, and Z" and a followup post correcting it, "No, it's most like X, Y, and W"; further posts support the correction or provide links to further info, but as a reader I'm still stuck reading the whole conversation when I'm more interested in the correct information that could have fit into a single paragraph. Discussion sites tend to shy away from editing and consolidating correct information, preferring to leave everything as individual posts. It would be a lot of work to implement, and perhaps even impossible, but I get the impression that the reason nobody tries is not due to the difficulty but because individual posts are treated as sacred; any editing is "censorship". At the very least, one should not be afraid to delete the GNAA trolls and the like at -1...
Admittedly, editing of comments may be a waste of effort on Slashdot. But many tech blogs will post an article and some points will be corrected in the reader comments. The blog publisher will update the article yet leave the comments as is, creating a confusing page of comments that refer to an article that is no longer there. Is there any reason, other than it's too much work, to not delete the comments that no longer make sense and credit in the article those who made corrections?
Perhaps, though it always was about the "Linux community", however one defines that. OpenSSH is certainly important to the Linux community. Wikipedia, not directly. I would support a name change for the fund; aside from Wikipedia, all the currently supported projects could be considered a part of the Linux community. In the end it's up to donors to understand to what they are donating; I'm not familiar with the terms of use of the Linux trademark, but maybe the LinuxFund's donations to the Linux Mark Institute keeps them off their back;-)
The LinuxFund was never strictly about Linux, but Free an Open Source Software projects. I'm not sure I'd call Wikipedia a software project, but it is open source and does maintain the Mediawiki software.
I always liked the old LinuxFund's mission of giving many small grants to many small projects. Are there any other similar organizations that do that sort of thing? Google Summer of Code comes to mind, but that is limited to college students. There's always the Paypal links on project homepages or Sourceforge, but I wish there was something more visible.
LinuxFund's current "give a constant source of funding to some projects" is nice too, and donating to the LinuxFund will hopefully remain a convenient way to donate to a number of individual projects.
I am currently a LinuxFund card holder, and was disappointed when Bank of America bought out MBNA. I'll be switching to the card my credit union offers very soon.
I'm familiar with books by Tufte and Norman and have attended Tufte's
presentation on presenting information. I think Tufte's writings on PowerPoint
may fail to emphasize the main problems, but it seems to me that Tufte and
Norman are largely in agreement. Norman states,
Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing
could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest
for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that
this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in
comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with
a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a
talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time
they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic."
But Tufte never advocates placing such, high resolution material in a
slide. Slides are a low resolution medium; high resolution material belongs in
a handout that the audience can review at their leisure during or after the
talk.
Norman goes on to criticize Tufte's assesment of the Columbia disaster
PowerPoint slides. "Yes, [the slide] is almost incomprehensible. But in my
opinion, the slide should have had less information on itTufte wants more
information. He demonstrates this by showing how many words are on a page of a
textbook. 'So what?' I say. We read textbooks very differently than we listen
to talks.
Tufte doesn't want more information in the low resolution, temporally
spaced slides. He wants more information in a technical report with
enough text and high resolution graphics to properly explain the situation and
enough time to absorb it and make a proper decision. Tufte's point was not
that the slides could be improved but that a presentation is no way to make
life and death decisions. I don't know what else went on, but it sounds like
that was it; the decision was made based on that presentation alone. I've read
much of Tufte, and this is my conclusion of his meaning. It sounds like the
material Norman read did not make this clear, for which you can fault Tufte;
it's easy to miss the points among the specific PowerPoint jabs.
"bullets on my slides are extremely brief, usually no more than 4-5 words"
Jane said, Here is a ball.
See this blue ball, Sally.
Do you want this ball?
Sally said, I want my ball.
My ball is yellow.
It is a big, pretty ball.
(from The Cognitave Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte.
I hope you aren't basing this on the dreaded "seven plus or minus two" rule of human memory. This is an oft misused fact because it leaves out the detail that the seven things are unrelated things. A presentation will presumably have many inter-related elements, allowing humans to keep much larger sets of data in memory.
I'm not saying you do this, but the stereotypical business presentation has points such as "increase market share", "synergize this" and other ambiguous statements. As Edward Tufte notes, it is better to specify what exactly will increase sales and use more concrete statements in general.
The main problem with PowerPoint, and all slide-exclusive presentations including those made with Keynote or transparency sheets, is the temporal separation of information and the low resolution of the display. Showing slide after slide while hiding previous slides hampers the ability of the audience to make comparisons and recall previous points. Simply printing out the slides as a handout is no substitute because each individual slide is designed for the low resolution of a projector and may have but a few key points and not much meat anyway.
Better perhaps would be to design a paper handout with paragraphs and high resolution plots (not chart candy) so the audience can peruse the data at their leisure while the speaker walks them through the information and highlights the key points. The audience is free to read ahead a bit, or spend more time on a particular graphic if necessary. The projector can be used for pointing to certain areas of a graph or showing other supplemental material.
Sure, it may be more work. But you should see slides that convinced NASA to land the Columbia. These suffer from additional problems, but are certainly worth a look. Perhaps these have "too much text", but it's more a problem with the organization of that text than the amount of it. Complex ideas cannot always be described in five words. And the fact that old slides are whisked away to reveal new slides certainly didn't help.
There are quite a few ISPs that provide Internet services in combination with DSL service from the local phone company. I recently switched grudgingly from Speakeasy, which uses lines from Covad, to Qwest with third party ISP. I did this to save money, but now have no regrets upon hearing this news. Shopping around for an ISP other than Qwest MSN, XMission looked like a good one, but they stopped offering service in my area (they are Utah based I believe) so I can't speak firsthand. Other than that, the Qwest website listed dozens of local ISPs, very few of which were price competitive with Qwest's own Internet service, but many offered other features such as static IPs. I assume most locations have a handful of ISPs that provide service atop the telco's lines.
Slashdot Mirror
"even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination"
And yet, the author does just the opposite of what he claimed he would do... I agree with the pre-heart-attack author. Can he ever be sure he isn't insane? Can I ever be sure I am not insane?
"Being a philosopher and not a poseur, I put the matter to an empirical test."
A truly awful test that could only ever gather anecdotal evidence. You earn a "D-" in science.
Maybe I missed it, but did his vision lead him to Roman Catholicism? Greek Orthodox? Anglicanism? Russian Orthodox? Episcopalian? Lutheran? Mormonism? Jehova's Witnesses?
The display is color. In the lowest brightness setting, it reverts to black and white and remains mostly visible in sunlight (it's visible in sunlight at all brightness settings, but the colors don't come out well so there's little point in wasting battery and not turning the brightness all the way down).
You're right about the keyboard and general lack of resources. I purchased one for myself and am finding it very difficult but possible to touch type, but I do enjoy the placement of the Control key (to the left of the A; there is no caps-lock). I had to do quite a bit of work to get everything set up with "normal" window manager, xterm with readable fonts, browser, etc (note that the default sugar interface includes all of these, just in a different form than any Linux distro); I'm planning on using it as a conveniently portable development (often via ssh) workstation. (I've heard similar complaints about the Asus EeePC keyboard, but that is not exactly built for children so presumably its keyboard is slightly larger.)
I've seen many Give-One-Get-One participants say they purchased it as a gift for their own child or niece. This is the obvious market for the OLPC in its current form were it to be sold in retail stores. The question is, does it make a good laptop for children in wealthy areas who probably already have access to a computer and Internet? It certainly includes a lot of neat software, but is somewhat sluggish. I don't know any young chilren, and I've no idea if the laptop makes a good gift or not.
Well, this may or may not be useful, but the notes from Tufte's presentation say "Web site design, computer interfaces, information kiosks: Visual Explanations, pages 146-150, then every entry in the index under 'interface'; Envisioning Information, chapters 2 and 3, then every entry in the index under 'interface'."
I have all four Tufte books and I have read a few of the other interface books suggested by others. Books like Raskin's The Humane Interface and Norman's The Design of Everyday Things tend to focus on "widgets" for lack of a better term, specifically the minimization of modes, steps, and things that must be kept in the head to perform a given action, and the design of natural mappings of controls to what is being controlled (favorite example: stovetop burners are arranged in a square; majority of burner controls are linearly placed with some sort of picture indicating which burner is affected; vastly simpler is a square layout of the controls matching that of the burners; my grandmother almost started a fire due to this confusion). These are essential of course, but Tufte's books bring another much needed perspective: an interface is primarily a presentation of information, and the presentaion should be guided by library science and information design principles.
More to your question, I agree with the other poster to start with Display, though I've read the most from that one and simply skimmed the others. Display seems to focus mostly on plots of scientific data. The next two have things like the weather animation depicted on the cover of Visual Explanations and neat train schedules from around the world which may or may not be more relevant depending on what you're doing. I attended Tufte's travelling lecture, and I believe I still have his list of sections, pulled from the first three books, most relevant to interface design; I may be able to dig it out later in the day.
Tufte's message board is a wealth of information on dozens of related topics. Apparently Tufte published an out of print booklet, Visual Design of the User Interface, much of which became a part of Envisioning Information.
I'm not familiar with SciPy or IPython, but Ruby has Ruby/GSL, a wrapper around the GNU Scientific Library. It defines Vector and Matrix classes and many math and stats functions that work on them. There's also Numerical Ruby NArray that defines structures similar to Vector and Matrix and basic math operators. I've used both of these a little, but not for anything large. For example, I just used Ruby/GSL to calculate a Receiver Operating Characteristic curve for a spamfilter, but GSL has no ROC stats function so I wrote my own in Ruby. The function itself has no advantage over Ruby's built-in Arrays, but I left to door open massage my data using GSL before calculating the ROC curve.
See also the SciRuby wiki.
Do you have any data on the exact date or extent to which greylisting became ineffective? I'm currently researching spamblocking techniques for myself, but my personal spam data suggests that greylisting was fairly effective as late as May of 2007. I disabled greylisting at that time for various reasons; it would be dissapointing to find that greylisting is no longer effective. (Data includes spam from two-three personal addresses on a server that accepts most anything. Yes, I use client-side filters.)
Isn't there a heat gain, as some solar radiation that would have been reflected back into space is captured and eventually converted to waste heat here on earth?
So let's do 14 years tax-free. After that you must register in the case of copyright, and declare a value in the case of copyright or patent, and start paying property taxes.
Is there a compelling reason that the default behavior is not 80% of your available memory?
Yet Nike, or all advertisers in agregate, have convinced you that various shoe technologies are necessary. Sure you might not pay the premium for Nike, but you're still buying into the "shoe needed for sport" mindset which is nine-tenths of Nike's job. I'm guilty of the same thing in many areas of life, e.g. "car needed for getting around", "must keep up with the Joneses", and probably many others I'm not even aware of. But I do run barefoot.
My post office has a sign that says something like "Valid signature required on all credit cards; 'Check ID' no good". My credit card is not signed on the back, and they, along with every other store, accepted it without checking.
For one-to-one communication, I often prefer no-quoting. Mail clients generally don't do this, but they could display the entire conversation in a thread rather than treating everything as a discrete document (does GMail display threads like this?). Usenet clients should also do something similar, but none I've seen do so, other than Google News. Google News also does some auto trimming of quotes to make this more sane (if I remember correctly); it's a shame this isn't common in news readers (or maybe it is; I've only used a couple).
... will it blend?
Steel sword coated with diamond? Isn't this how samurai swords are essentially made, with a softer steel on the inside and hard martensite on the outside for a sharp edge but flexible sword?
I think the biggie is vastly higher resolution. Typical screens are what, 72-100 ppi? It's simply tiring to keep scrolling about. Letter size paper or a larger newspaper fits more information and lets the reader scan about without much effort.
Also, something about being able to easily add color seems to make everyone want to do it. Those thick, darkly colored bars of slashdot headings sharply contrast with the black-on-white text and in many cases activate the negative space between the bars.
And yet, you control but a single, insignificant vote. What have you got to lose? We can't even count accurately enough for a single vote to be significant should a large election come down to it.
I like Tufte's thoughts on moderating, particularly his point about avoiding "the chronic internet disease of 'All Opinions, All the Time.'" Different websites have different goals of course, but there is nothing inherently wrong with refusing to allow anyone to publish any opinion on your website. Tufte's own forum is much lower traffic than Slashdot, but it has the interesting property of discussions that are years long, and the majority of posts are on-topic and very useful. Slashdot discussions more than a day or two old are all but dead. One thing I see often enough that it bugs me is a post like, "So and so behaves in ways X, Y, and Z" and a followup post correcting it, "No, it's most like X, Y, and W"; further posts support the correction or provide links to further info, but as a reader I'm still stuck reading the whole conversation when I'm more interested in the correct information that could have fit into a single paragraph. Discussion sites tend to shy away from editing and consolidating correct information, preferring to leave everything as individual posts. It would be a lot of work to implement, and perhaps even impossible, but I get the impression that the reason nobody tries is not due to the difficulty but because individual posts are treated as sacred; any editing is "censorship". At the very least, one should not be afraid to delete the GNAA trolls and the like at -1...
Admittedly, editing of comments may be a waste of effort on Slashdot. But many tech blogs will post an article and some points will be corrected in the reader comments. The blog publisher will update the article yet leave the comments as is, creating a confusing page of comments that refer to an article that is no longer there. Is there any reason, other than it's too much work, to not delete the comments that no longer make sense and credit in the article those who made corrections?
Perhaps, though it always was about the "Linux community", however one defines that. OpenSSH is certainly important to the Linux community. Wikipedia, not directly. I would support a name change for the fund; aside from Wikipedia, all the currently supported projects could be considered a part of the Linux community. In the end it's up to donors to understand to what they are donating; I'm not familiar with the terms of use of the Linux trademark, but maybe the LinuxFund's donations to the Linux Mark Institute keeps them off their back ;-)
The LinuxFund was never strictly about Linux, but Free an Open Source Software projects. I'm not sure I'd call Wikipedia a software project, but it is open source and does maintain the Mediawiki software.
The LinuxFund does not fund Linux; it funds various Linux-related Free and Open Source software projects as mentioned in the summary...
I always liked the old LinuxFund's mission of giving many small grants to many small projects. Are there any other similar organizations that do that sort of thing? Google Summer of Code comes to mind, but that is limited to college students. There's always the Paypal links on project homepages or Sourceforge, but I wish there was something more visible.
LinuxFund's current "give a constant source of funding to some projects" is nice too, and donating to the LinuxFund will hopefully remain a convenient way to donate to a number of individual projects.
I am currently a LinuxFund card holder, and was disappointed when Bank of America bought out MBNA. I'll be switching to the card my credit union offers very soon.
I'm familiar with books by Tufte and Norman and have attended Tufte's presentation on presenting information. I think Tufte's writings on PowerPoint may fail to emphasize the main problems, but it seems to me that Tufte and Norman are largely in agreement. Norman states,
But Tufte never advocates placing such, high resolution material in a slide. Slides are a low resolution medium; high resolution material belongs in a handout that the audience can review at their leisure during or after the talk.
Norman goes on to criticize Tufte's assesment of the Columbia disaster PowerPoint slides. "Yes, [the slide] is almost incomprehensible. But in my opinion, the slide should have had less information on itTufte wants more information. He demonstrates this by showing how many words are on a page of a textbook. 'So what?' I say. We read textbooks very differently than we listen to talks.
Tufte doesn't want more information in the low resolution, temporally spaced slides. He wants more information in a technical report with enough text and high resolution graphics to properly explain the situation and enough time to absorb it and make a proper decision. Tufte's point was not that the slides could be improved but that a presentation is no way to make life and death decisions. I don't know what else went on, but it sounds like that was it; the decision was made based on that presentation alone. I've read much of Tufte, and this is my conclusion of his meaning. It sounds like the material Norman read did not make this clear, for which you can fault Tufte; it's easy to miss the points among the specific PowerPoint jabs.
"bullets on my slides are extremely brief, usually no more than 4-5 words"
Jane said, Here is a ball.
See this blue ball, Sally.
Do you want this ball?
Sally said, I want my ball.
My ball is yellow.
It is a big, pretty ball.
(from The Cognitave Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte.
I hope you aren't basing this on the dreaded "seven plus or minus two" rule of human memory. This is an oft misused fact because it leaves out the detail that the seven things are unrelated things. A presentation will presumably have many inter-related elements, allowing humans to keep much larger sets of data in memory.
I'm not saying you do this, but the stereotypical business presentation has points such as "increase market share", "synergize this" and other ambiguous statements. As Edward Tufte notes, it is better to specify what exactly will increase sales and use more concrete statements in general.
The main problem with PowerPoint, and all slide-exclusive presentations including those made with Keynote or transparency sheets, is the temporal separation of information and the low resolution of the display. Showing slide after slide while hiding previous slides hampers the ability of the audience to make comparisons and recall previous points. Simply printing out the slides as a handout is no substitute because each individual slide is designed for the low resolution of a projector and may have but a few key points and not much meat anyway.
Better perhaps would be to design a paper handout with paragraphs and high resolution plots (not chart candy) so the audience can peruse the data at their leisure while the speaker walks them through the information and highlights the key points. The audience is free to read ahead a bit, or spend more time on a particular graphic if necessary. The projector can be used for pointing to certain areas of a graph or showing other supplemental material.
Sure, it may be more work. But you should see slides that convinced NASA to land the Columbia. These suffer from additional problems, but are certainly worth a look. Perhaps these have "too much text", but it's more a problem with the organization of that text than the amount of it. Complex ideas cannot always be described in five words. And the fact that old slides are whisked away to reveal new slides certainly didn't help.
There are quite a few ISPs that provide Internet services in combination with DSL service from the local phone company. I recently switched grudgingly from Speakeasy, which uses lines from Covad, to Qwest with third party ISP. I did this to save money, but now have no regrets upon hearing this news. Shopping around for an ISP other than Qwest MSN, XMission looked like a good one, but they stopped offering service in my area (they are Utah based I believe) so I can't speak firsthand. Other than that, the Qwest website listed dozens of local ISPs, very few of which were price competitive with Qwest's own Internet service, but many offered other features such as static IPs. I assume most locations have a handful of ISPs that provide service atop the telco's lines.
Do laws of physics and thermodynamics apply "outside" or "before" the universe? Does "before" have any meaning "outside" our universe?