I can tell you straight up as an engineer at MegaPath Networks that provisioning DSL is one of the hardest things on the planet to do. Especially as a nationwide ISP. You have all of the baby bells, each one doing things completely different (and wrong). DSL isn't like cable in the sense that you get repeaters on the line or any one of a million other things that the telcos use to provide phone services to places in the boonies.
DSL is a terribly complicated technology. In theory a telco or an ISP should be able to just hook up a line to your phone box and get you a nice fat 1.5 symetric connection for 20 bucks a month. However combined with all of the technical difficulties you also have anticompetitive behavior from the baby bells trying to under cut the competition "because they can!". Remember that with DSL you also must deal with third and fourth parties, sometimes even 5th parties. You have the telco (ILEC) then you have the CLEC (Northpoint, Covad, Rythmes, New Edge), then you have your ISP (MegaPath, Mindspring), and in some cases, quite a few actually ISP's will have resellers. Going through so many channels leaves a lot of room for error. God couldn't gaurantee an install with this going on. Cable service isn't plagued with this (yet!).
Now as a shameful plug for my company I must say we do the best job and are the highest rated company because we work extremely hard and have positioned ourselves in a way that lets us work with our CLECs rather than against them. This has proven very difficult to do, especially now that we have 3 CLECs. As an ISP you must be flexible and scalable. These two issues are the two main reasons why DSL providers are dropping like flies. You really need a balance between sales and engineering. Most ISP's around today were founded by engineers who really have no business sense let alone customer service skills. Yet as my old business teacher once told me "If you're not growing, you're dying". These companies must expand but in most cases expansion is in the wrong direction.
I'm all for competition, but in this market competition is whats killing the technology. Everyone is fighting over the market, under pricing their services, over selling and then folding leaving other ISP's such as MegaPath to clean up the mess. Go work at an ISP for a month and you will see endless droves of CEO's from other providers coming in to pimp their company off to the highest bidder because it's failing and they need to run for cover. No one wants to build something anymore. It's the IPO bandwagon, make something quick and cheap, sell it for 100 times it's worth and get fat on the beach in tahiti. Investors woke up back in April, they realized what was going on. DSL had become a buzzword used to suck in venture capitol. When the market crashed so did a lot of ISPs and rightfully so. It does make my companies job harder though. We have to fight off the bad reps of these other guys while maintianing a much higher level of customer service because thats whats expected.
I love the internet and I love my job. However I have a strong hatred for the over night millionaires that have done so much to destroy a great technology. How many millions need to be made before it's "enough"? When does it stop? Why can't we just run our business without constantly fighting off the vultures.
My company is more expensive than others, no doubt. We won't deny that, however we are very worth it. It's the difference between buying a pinto and buying a cadillac. One can't hold a candle to the other.
Enough of this rant, hope it helps someone make the right decision though.
Shouldn't that be an individuals choice? Why must these things be learned from a University, I can just as easily go to the public library and learn them for free, on my time, at my pace and according to my interests.
I skipped college and educated myself. People often claim that people like me who choose this route aren't "well rounded individuals". I'm afraid being well rounded has little to do with what University one attends. I have plenty of friends in schools such as UC Davis and UC Berkley who feel it's more about partying and drinking beer. I have yet to hire a sys admin or programmer with a degree who I felt had the ability and drive to self educate. Lets face it, working in this industry is a constant learning experience, going to school teaches more often than not what technology was a year ago or more, while jumping into the business will keep you on the cutting edge.
I'm 22 years old, a multi millionaire and a very well rounded person. I've been a musician for 13 years playing over a dozen instruments, I've studied philosophy as well as physics not because a professor MADE me but because I wanted to.
The problem with the Universities these days is they have to many required courses that have no purpose what so ever other than to make their wallets fat. 4 years and $150k later you have a little piece of paper saying you know "something". Americans have gotten lazy, all of the information you could ever dream of is on the internet, in your public library and in the minds of your colleagues and coworkers. The people forcing college down our throughts are the old school "boys club" folks who have something to gain from it, or feel guilt/stupid for doing it themselves when a much more lucritive route existed.
Granted their are things Universities are still good for, Doctors and Lawyers have much to gain from the experience, but UNIX geeks and programmers have ever so little.
Plain and simple, if you're a good guy you'll be a virgin for life. I've been with my share of women, I have a daughter who is almost three now, but if I had been a nice guy I would still be a virgin and single with no children.
True story here:
Me and some buddies went to a party freshman year (college), the whole night was pretty lame everyone was looking for something better to do. I noticed these two bi-chicks sitting at a table in the backyard. I simply approached and asked "Wanna fuck?" and both said yes, immediately.
Moral of the story here guys is chicks are just like us, they get horny and they like challenges as much as they like one night stands. Nice chicks don't get laid anymore than nice guys.
Amen to that brother. I can't count how many women treated me like shit when I was nice to them, however anytime I show no interest in a women or display any type of moody behavior (basically everything women say they hate) I get laid on a regular basis.
"These people have no idea what the standards are for Linux software. These warnings are unacceptable. This is the sort of stuff you would find in a Windows 9x disclaimer (if microsoft were forced to write one). There is no way I would load this on my Linux server. I must have guaranteed stability. That is why I run Linux." ----------------- Appearantly you have never used gnome, or Enlightenment, let alone anyone of the gnome applications such as Balsa. Linux software is in eternal Beta or Alpha. I havent seen stable Linux software in over a year. You also fail to realize this is a Demo not the full release. I seriously doubt you were this hard on Q3Test.
Red Hat is nice but man it can be a pain. For instance, sym linking everything is really a bad idea. RedHat sym links EVERYTHING, even the KERNEL! I use RedHat almost all the time, but I dont use it for development. S.u.S.E is looking very nice these days, I just might have to switch. BTW, http://www.wholelinux.com will set you up with whatever Linux distro you want, AND guarantee the install. Very cool site, ya gotta check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a production release of a "for sale" operating system. No where on RedHats site does it say RedHat 7 Beta
Many people will be installing this as their first Linux distro, is this to be their first experience to Linux?
hahahaha
Thats just to damn funny
WTF, it's been like that for three weeks and this issue has already been beaten to death on slashdot. Jesus give it a rest already
I can tell you straight up as an engineer at MegaPath Networks that provisioning DSL is one of the hardest things on the planet to do. Especially as a nationwide ISP. You have all of the baby bells, each one doing things completely different (and wrong). DSL isn't like cable in the sense that you get repeaters on the line or any one of a million other things that the telcos use to provide phone services to places in the boonies.
DSL is a terribly complicated technology. In theory a telco or an ISP should be able to just hook up a line to your phone box and get you a nice fat 1.5 symetric connection for 20 bucks a month. However combined with all of the technical difficulties you also have anticompetitive behavior from the baby bells trying to under cut the competition "because they can!". Remember that with DSL you also must deal with third and fourth parties, sometimes even 5th parties. You have the telco (ILEC) then you have the CLEC (Northpoint, Covad, Rythmes, New Edge), then you have your ISP (MegaPath, Mindspring), and in some cases, quite a few actually ISP's will have resellers. Going through so many channels leaves a lot of room for error. God couldn't gaurantee an install with this going on. Cable service isn't plagued with this (yet!).
Now as a shameful plug for my company I must say we do the best job and are the highest rated company because we work extremely hard and have positioned ourselves in a way that lets us work with our CLECs rather than against them. This has proven very difficult to do, especially now that we have 3 CLECs. As an ISP you must be flexible and scalable. These two issues are the two main reasons why DSL providers are dropping like flies. You really need a balance between sales and engineering. Most ISP's around today were founded by engineers who really have no business sense let alone customer service skills. Yet as my old business teacher once told me "If you're not growing, you're dying". These companies must expand but in most cases expansion is in the wrong direction.
I'm all for competition, but in this market competition is whats killing the technology. Everyone is fighting over the market, under pricing their services, over selling and then folding leaving other ISP's such as MegaPath to clean up the mess. Go work at an ISP for a month and you will see endless droves of CEO's from other providers coming in to pimp their company off to the highest bidder because it's failing and they need to run for cover. No one wants to build something anymore. It's the IPO bandwagon, make something quick and cheap, sell it for 100 times it's worth and get fat on the beach in tahiti. Investors woke up back in April, they realized what was going on. DSL had become a buzzword used to suck in venture capitol. When the market crashed so did a lot of ISPs and rightfully so. It does make my companies job harder though. We have to fight off the bad reps of these other guys while maintianing a much higher level of customer service because thats whats expected.
I love the internet and I love my job. However I have a strong hatred for the over night millionaires that have done so much to destroy a great technology. How many millions need to be made before it's "enough"? When does it stop? Why can't we just run our business without constantly fighting off the vultures.
My company is more expensive than others, no doubt. We won't deny that, however we are very worth it. It's the difference between buying a pinto and buying a cadillac. One can't hold a candle to the other.
Enough of this rant, hope it helps someone make the right decision though.
Shouldn't that be an individuals choice? Why must these things be learned from a University, I can just as easily go to the public library and learn them for free, on my time, at my pace and according to my interests.
I skipped college and educated myself. People often claim that people like me who choose this route aren't "well rounded individuals". I'm afraid being well rounded has little to do with what University one attends. I have plenty of friends in schools such as UC Davis and UC Berkley who feel it's more about partying and drinking beer. I have yet to hire a sys admin or programmer with a degree who I felt had the ability and drive to self educate. Lets face it, working in this industry is a constant learning experience, going to school teaches more often than not what technology was a year ago or more, while jumping into the business will keep you on the cutting edge.
I'm 22 years old, a multi millionaire and a very well rounded person. I've been a musician for 13 years playing over a dozen instruments, I've studied philosophy as well as physics not because a professor MADE me but because I wanted to.
The problem with the Universities these days is they have to many required courses that have no purpose what so ever other than to make their wallets fat. 4 years and $150k later you have a little piece of paper saying you know "something". Americans have gotten lazy, all of the information you could ever dream of is on the internet, in your public library and in the minds of your colleagues and coworkers. The people forcing college down our throughts are the old school "boys club" folks who have something to gain from it, or feel guilt/stupid for doing it themselves when a much more lucritive route existed.
Granted their are things Universities are still good for, Doctors and Lawyers have much to gain from the experience, but UNIX geeks and programmers have ever so little.
Plain and simple, if you're a good guy you'll be a virgin for life. I've been with my share of women, I have a daughter who is almost three now, but if I had been a nice guy I would still be a virgin and single with no children.
True story here:
Me and some buddies went to a party freshman year (college), the whole night was pretty lame everyone was looking for something better to do. I noticed these two bi-chicks sitting at a table in the backyard. I simply approached and asked "Wanna fuck?" and both said yes, immediately.
Moral of the story here guys is chicks are just like us, they get horny and they like challenges as much as they like one night stands. Nice chicks don't get laid anymore than nice guys.
Amen to that brother. I can't count how many women treated me like shit when I was nice to them, however anytime I show no interest in a women or display any type of moody behavior (basically everything women say they hate) I get laid on a regular basis.
"These people have no idea what the standards are for Linux software. These warnings are unacceptable. This is the sort of stuff you would find in a Windows 9x disclaimer (if microsoft were forced to write one). There is no way I would load this on my Linux server. I must have guaranteed stability. That is why I run Linux." ----------------- Appearantly you have never used gnome, or Enlightenment, let alone anyone of the gnome applications such as Balsa. Linux software is in eternal Beta or Alpha. I havent seen stable Linux software in over a year. You also fail to realize this is a Demo not the full release. I seriously doubt you were this hard on Q3Test.
Red Hat is nice but man it can be a pain. For instance, sym linking everything is really a bad idea. RedHat sym links EVERYTHING, even the KERNEL! I use RedHat almost all the time, but I dont use it for development. S.u.S.E is looking very nice these days, I just might have to switch. BTW, http://www.wholelinux.com will set you up with whatever Linux distro you want, AND guarantee the install. Very cool site, ya gotta check it out.