Forgive me if I'm naive, but couldn't they lease out the satellites? You would think that the onboard computers would have some sort of software that could be modified to support generic data transmission. It just seems to be an awful waste of natural resources to burn these up. I'm not talking so much about investors' money but more about all the environmental damage caused by the mining of the materials used on these things. Please not that I'm not talking about "open sourcing" them, which is a pretty impractical idea if you think about it. I'm thinking more along the lines of leasing them to major long-haul telcom carriers, governments, etc.
In the last year or two, every Intel-based server that I've dealt with has been PCI-only. The ISA bus is dead (long live ISA!). More and more PC clone manufacturers are abandoning it in their new desktop systems.
Even better than a card-based solution would be a BIOS-based solution, IMHO. If Intel is serious about making motherboards for "servers", they better get with it and go with a serial console.
Back when I was in college at the University of New Mexico, I remember visiting Atipa when it was in a garage-like building behind a house in a scary part of town. We went there to pick up a PC (back before they were big into Linux...they were FreeBSD zealots at the time) and some cholos across the street were throwing up gang signs at us. It was classic. Somehow, my roommate (the guy buying the peecee) knew one of the Atipa guys from back in Texas and they we're supposed to be kind of crazy. We knock on the door, half expecting some guys with 9mm's to open it and shoot us on site. They invite us into the place and my jaw drops. It was the coolest office I'd ever seen. It was, as I said, a building that once held some sort of garage or warehouse. It was kind of dark inside but they had it lit up with torch lamps, which were pretty new and cool at the time. They had a rack with a fractional T1 or something like that and a couple of FreeBSD boxes. We got our pc and left and I remember thinking that it was the most "garage-ish" operation I'd ever seen.
And now they're getting funded. Times are changing!
I'm working on a really cool project right now at work. It's a Mason/mod_perl-based front-end to RRDtool. Since its development directly benefits my employer, they have no problem letting me work on it. Once I get this thing into a state that is worth distributing, it will most likely be open-sourced.
The easiest way to get your project funded is to get a job at a place lets you do "project" work and is also open source-friendly like my employer. Chances are, if your project is cool, there is some commercial potential for it.
If you want credit card numbers, go to the dumpster of any restaurant and start digging. Want good gold/platinum card numbers? Go to the good restaurants.
These stories are so damned stupid. People get all up in arms about giving their credit card numbers to online merchants yet they give them to complete strangers at restaurants, bars, and retail stores everyday. I trust amazon.com more than I trust most of the restaurant workers around here to my credit card number.
I understand your frustrations with abuse@home.com. I have a few comments:
1) The auto-responder at abuse@home.com says that a personal response is not garuanteed.
2) There are several reasons that @Home doesn't immediately terminate a customer for spamming. First off, they are a customer. They paid a lot of money to have their cable modem turned on. Secondly, in an @Home household, the spammer is usually not the one paying the bills. My manager handled abuse@home.com mail for a while before it got to be too much. After listening to hundreds of abuse calls, it's my guess that aboput 75% of @Home spammers are 13 year-old kids using the family computer. The demographics may be different for non-@Home subscribers but among the subscribers, most of them were kids. Typically, my manager would call their parents up and their parents would have no idea what the kid was using the computer for. After the spam complaint was explained to them, most of them promised to discipline the kid and that there would be no more spam. Usually, that phone call was all that it took. Of course, there was the occaisional professional spammer or the parents that just didn't give a damn. These subscribers quickly racked up spam complaints and would have their contracts cancelled for AUP violations.
Comparing @Home to AOL and UUNET is comparing oranges to tangerines. Yes, they are ISPs but you must consider the differences in the product. With an @Home account, you can get yourself in much more trouble than you can with an AOL account. The open news proxy server is a perfect example. No AOL user would put up a news proxy because, first of all, they have no bandwidth and no NAT machine. Secondly, they usually aren't clued enough to read news. When it comes to spam, it's no contest. An @Home customer can pump out an unbelievable amount of spam in a very short time compared to a lowly AOL dialup user. In short, the potential for abuse is much greater with an @Home customer.
I agree. Keep in mind, however, what a tremendous task it is to hire people when you are the size of @Home. I now work for a company about 1/5th the size of @Home and our fax machine spews resumes all day. I can't imagine what @Home gets. 95% of the resumes you get are completely worthless, too. It's a monumental task to hire several hundred employees when you are an @Home.
I used to work for @Home. One of my duties was reading mail sent to news@home.com and handling requests/complaints/whatnot. Anyone who proclaims that @Home is being *lazy* about fixing their problems is _just plain wrong_. @Home employees work their asses off to deal with the problems associated with being a large ISP. Unfortunately, there are just not enough @Home employees. When I worked there, every UNIX admin was spread thin. We all wore a million different "hats" and there never was enough time to deal with everything. @Home is a magnitude larger than it was when I was there and I'm pretty sure things have not improved.
As for the spam problem, the people at blame are the corporate types. This is a management issue, not a technical issue. This problem could be fixed by blocking inbound packets to customer IPs on port 119/TCP. Unfortunately, port blocking is more involved than just making changes to routers. Policies have to be re-written which, when you are @Home, necessitates lawyers, meetings, and the like. @Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say? Customers who crack government machines, e-mail spammers (who generate a larger backlash than usenet spam), smurfers, script kiddies, irc abuse, customer-to-customer abuse, people who host commercial sites on their cable modems, people who put porn sites on members.home.net (their homepage server), etc., etc. It's only to be expected that USENET complaints are near their bottom of their abuse priority list. If you could only see the volume of mail that abuse@corp.home.net generates, you'd understand.:-)
If you think about it, most high-quality dinnertable glasses and scientific glassware is one-sided, too. I could take a marker and trace a line all around this glass sitting here on my desk. It has a smooth lip so I wouldn't really say that it has one side or the other. Like the Klein bottle, this glass will hold water.
Leave it to Apple to come up with an amazing look and feel. I *love* those drop shadows. I'm suprised that we've yet to see that in any X11-based window manager...or have we?
Did I miss something? Why didn't Ramsey Electronics have their attorney(s) on-site while this was happening? If I found federal agents in my work place, the first thing I would do is to demand to speak to my attorney before saying *anything* else to the agents.
No slight to Taco and Hemos, I think they've both done a wonderful job, but I do believe that any serious geek who has experience in professional journalism could run this site. Rob and Jeff have great tastes in stories, no doubt. On the other hand, I've often complained, sometimes noisily, about the lack of objectivity on slashdot. Part of being a good journalist is posting the facts as they are and not inserting your personal opinions where they could be mistaken as news.
If Rob and/or Jeff decided to move on, I think we'd get along ok. Roblimo is new on the scene and seems to have been accepted pretty well. Cliff came along a while back and I think he adds a lot. I'm sure that there would be some uproar if Rob/Jeff left but we'd be back in the swing of things pretty quickly. What those guys did is create the forum and the atmosphere. We're a community now and we can be self-sustaining.
I didn't have any trouble getting hired into a mostly-mormon workplace, even though I'm not mormon. I think the reason that people think they favor mormons is that most of the workers in the state are mormon. When you have such a high percentage of mormons in the state, statistically, you will hire mostly mormons.
As far as working with the mormons, I had no problems whatsoever when I worked there (I work in LA now). I found them to be very accepting of me, even though I lived very differently than they did.
I love Utah. It's got everything a outdoorsy geek could need:
great tech jobs lots of bandwidth good local schools beautiful mountains great skiing/snowboarding friendly, "home town" feeling high quality, affordable housing very young population
Not a bash at all. I completely agree with you. The big guys (Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc) definitely failed to see the potential in the linux market and this gave VA a great headstart. However, I think they've seen the light now. Look at the Dell/RedHat deal as an example. There is no way they will deny that Linux is a worthy, if not superior, OS forever. Remember what Microsoft did to the browser market: denial, denial, skepticism, fear, turnabout, enthusiasm, domination. Like it or not, MS showed what a large, rich company company can do when they put their minds to it.
It's my opinion that the VA Linux stock is terribly overpriced. The fact is, VA Linux is in a very competative marketplace and their competitors (IBM, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc) are better poised to capture the Linux server market, should they decide to.
Let's look at what VA does:
1) They make Intel desktops and servers
2) They produce a value-added linux distribution that's tuned for their equipment, which generally consists of widely available PC hardware.
Now the problems with their business model:
1) Their Intel desktops and servers are hardly unique or exceptional. Having hands-on experience with VA Linux equipment as well as Dell, Compaq, IBM, and Gateway equipment, I can say that I think VA Linux has a long way to go before they catch those guys when it comes to the quality of their servers. Desktops may be a different story because their quality varies widely from producer to produce and even within product lines. On average though, I'm not impressed with the quality of VA Linux's server hardware.
Additionally, Dell and the other big boys buy their hardware in much larger volumes than VA does. VA cannot hope to compete with them on price any time soon. If you don't believe me, price out a two CPU rackmount server from VA and then price one of IBM's models out and see who comes in cheaper. A lot cheaper.
2) Their value-added distribution is not that "value added". Since their tweaks to the kernel are all open-sourced before they are sold, they are openly available to their competition. It would not be that hard for one of the bigger vendors to put together a server based on well-supported hardware and acheive the same performance that VA is getting out of their boxes. In fact, it has already been done.
I can see one of the big vendors getting into the Linux market "big time" within the next few months. Essentially, all they would need to do was hire off some of the kernel developers out there and financially back a major Linux software project like KDE and they would already be ahead of VA Linux. Remember, these large manufacturers are buying their components in much larger volumes than VA Linux and can blow VA out of the water on pricing.
In conclusion, I think VA Linux is a really great company, boldly breaking into a wonderful new market but they don't have the garaunteed market that stock traders seem to think they have.
Call your local Bar Association and get a referral. Most attorneys do not charge for introductory meetings. Meet with them and see what they'll do for you. If you like them, strike a deal.
UGGHH!!! I'm so sick of seeing VCs and Wall Street fawning over these companies that have absolutely WORTHLESS products. Has anyone here ever used Netscape Application Server? If you have, you know what a stinking turd it is. Want to scale your super-duper ".com" (and gawd, I'm so sick of that word) application using Netscape servers? Well, here's what you do: You buy several million dollars worth of high-end Sun hardware to run it and hire a flock of Java consultants to build your application for you. It will take them at least 6 months, probably a year, to develop the final product. When you're finally rolling, you'll have a bloated, unmanageable, Java-based three-tier app that barely functions, even when run on Sun's latest and greatest hardware. To support all this hardware, you'll need a room full of Solaris admins and systems support staff, and when its all said and done, your product is still as slow as a spilled bucket of tar on a North Dakota winter day. Trust me, I've worked for several companies that have gone this route and it ain't pretty.
The fact that this article touts that VCellar has hired someone who was formerly in charge of Kiva development scares me. I'll give them this, though--if you are foolish enough to go the three-tiered Java route, you'll need a company like Vcellar to help you run all the big iron you'll need to support your app.
The future of online computing, IMHO, is:
Perl Mason Apache FreeBSD mod_perl Oracle Dell hardware VA Linux hardware
Unfortunately, many of the above will probably never be as popular is the "Vcellar" type solutions, because large companies love to spend huge amounts of investors' money. It's the nature of the beast.
Before anyone starts getting resentful of the multibillionaires of the geek world, here's a few cliches to ponder:
1) Eventually, you will run out of things to buy. Ok, after you've bought five Lamborghini Diablos, the house on the hill, the yachts and the private planes, you WILL get tired of buying stuff. Those weeks of satisfaction that you got when you used to scrimp and save for something slowly dwindle away, until buying stuff is merely a way to spend time.
2) You can't take it with you. I think the Dave Matthews Band song puts it perfectly: "Look at me in my fancy car and my bank account / Oh, how I wish I could take it all down to my grave / God knows, I'd save and save"
3) Can't buy me love. So, you think all of your (non-rich) friends are going to come and hang out and party on the yacht and fly around the world with you for the rest of their lives? The ones that are truly your friends won't. They'll be too busy trying to achieve their goals in life.
4) You have to eat your own cooking. If you were happy as a poor person, you're going to be happy as a rich person. If you were miserable when you were poor, give yourself 6 months as a rich person and you'll be just as miserable as you were before.
You can listen to NPR live now but as I recall, you have to use the MS Windows Media Player. Personally, I think that RealPlayer is a pile of shit under any platform and that MS Media Player runs pretty nicely under NT. I have an NT box next to the IRIX and Linux boxes on my desk so it works out ok. Of course, live NPR is pretty popular so the server is often slow/overloaded/broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgive me if I'm naive, but couldn't they lease out the satellites? You would think that the onboard computers would have some sort of software that could be modified to support generic data transmission. It just seems to be an awful waste of natural resources to burn these up. I'm not talking so much about investors' money but more about all the environmental damage caused by the mining of the materials used on these things. Please not that I'm not talking about "open sourcing" them, which is a pretty impractical idea if you think about it. I'm thinking more along the lines of leasing them to major long-haul telcom carriers, governments, etc.
In the last year or two, every Intel-based server that I've dealt with has been PCI-only. The ISA bus is dead (long live ISA!). More and more PC clone manufacturers are abandoning it in their new desktop systems.
Even better than a card-based solution would be a BIOS-based solution, IMHO. If Intel is serious about making motherboards for "servers", they better get with it and go with a serial console.
This card looks cool but it's ISA. How about a PCI version?
Back when I was in college at the University of New Mexico, I remember visiting Atipa when it was in a garage-like building behind a house in a scary part of town. We went there to pick up a PC (back before they were big into Linux...they were FreeBSD zealots at the time) and some cholos across the street were throwing up gang signs at us. It was classic. Somehow, my roommate (the guy buying the peecee) knew one of the Atipa guys from back in Texas and they we're supposed to be kind of crazy. We knock on the door, half expecting some guys with 9mm's to open it and shoot us on site. They invite us into the place and my jaw drops. It was the coolest office I'd ever seen. It was, as I said, a building that once held some sort of garage or warehouse. It was kind of dark inside but they had it lit up with torch lamps, which were pretty new and cool at the time. They had a rack with a fractional T1 or something like that and a couple of FreeBSD boxes. We got our pc and left and I remember thinking that it was the most "garage-ish" operation I'd ever seen.
And now they're getting funded. Times are changing!
Chris
hahaha, slashdot killed my tag.
the tag was... FISHY
like it says
I'm working on a really cool project right now at work. It's a Mason/mod_perl-based front-end to RRDtool. Since its development directly benefits my employer, they have no problem letting me work on it. Once I get this thing into a state that is worth distributing, it will most likely be open-sourced.
The easiest way to get your project funded is to get a job at a place lets you do "project" work and is also open source-friendly like my employer. Chances are, if your project is cool, there is some commercial potential for it.
Good Luck!
Chris
If you want credit card numbers, go to the dumpster of any restaurant and start digging. Want good gold/platinum card numbers? Go to the good restaurants.
These stories are so damned stupid. People get all up in arms about giving their credit card numbers to online merchants yet they give them to complete strangers at restaurants, bars, and retail stores everyday. I trust amazon.com more than I trust most of the restaurant workers around here to my credit card number.
I understand your frustrations with abuse@home.com. I have a few comments:
1) The auto-responder at abuse@home.com says that a personal response is not garuanteed.
2) There are several reasons that @Home doesn't immediately terminate a customer for spamming. First off, they are a customer. They paid a lot of money to have their cable modem turned on. Secondly, in an @Home household, the spammer is usually not the one paying the bills. My manager handled abuse@home.com mail for a while before it got to be too much. After listening to hundreds of abuse calls, it's my guess that aboput 75% of @Home spammers are 13 year-old kids using the family computer. The demographics may be different for non-@Home subscribers but among the subscribers, most of them were kids. Typically, my manager would call their parents up and their parents would have no idea what the kid was using the computer for. After the spam complaint was explained to them, most of them promised to discipline the kid and that there would be no more spam. Usually, that phone call was all that it took. Of course, there was the occaisional professional spammer or the parents that just didn't give a damn. These subscribers quickly racked up spam complaints and would have their contracts cancelled for AUP violations.
Comparing @Home to AOL and UUNET is comparing oranges to tangerines. Yes, they are ISPs but you must consider the differences in the product. With an @Home account, you can get yourself in much more trouble than you can with an AOL account. The open news proxy server is a perfect example. No AOL user would put up a news proxy because, first of all, they have no bandwidth and no NAT machine. Secondly, they usually aren't clued enough to read news. When it comes to spam, it's no contest. An @Home customer can pump out an unbelievable amount of spam in a very short time compared to a lowly AOL dialup user. In short, the potential for abuse is much greater with an @Home customer.
Chris
I agree. Keep in mind, however, what a tremendous task it is to hire people when you are the size of @Home. I now work for a company about 1/5th the size of @Home and our fax machine spews resumes all day. I can't imagine what @Home gets. 95% of the resumes you get are completely worthless, too. It's a monumental task to hire several hundred employees when you are an @Home.
I used to work for @Home. One of my duties was reading mail sent to news@home.com and handling requests/complaints/whatnot. Anyone who proclaims that @Home is being *lazy* about fixing their problems is _just plain wrong_. @Home employees work their asses off to deal with the problems associated with being a large ISP. Unfortunately, there are just not enough @Home employees. When I worked there, every UNIX admin was spread thin. We all wore a million different "hats" and there never was enough time to deal with everything. @Home is a magnitude larger than it was when I was there and I'm pretty sure things have not improved.
:-)
As for the spam problem, the people at blame are the corporate types. This is a management issue, not a technical issue. This problem could be fixed by blocking inbound packets to customer IPs on port 119/TCP. Unfortunately, port blocking is more involved than just making changes to routers. Policies have to be re-written which, when you are @Home, necessitates lawyers, meetings, and the like. @Home has bigger fish to fry. Like what, you say? Customers who crack government machines, e-mail spammers (who generate a larger backlash than usenet spam), smurfers, script kiddies, irc abuse, customer-to-customer abuse, people who host commercial sites on their cable modems, people who put porn sites on members.home.net (their homepage server), etc., etc. It's only to be expected that USENET complaints are near their bottom of their abuse priority list. If you could only see the volume of mail that abuse@corp.home.net generates, you'd understand.
Chris
If you think about it, most high-quality dinnertable glasses and scientific glassware is one-sided, too. I could take a marker and trace a line all around this glass sitting here on my desk. It has a smooth lip so I wouldn't really say that it has one side or the other. Like the Klein bottle, this glass will hold water.
Leave it to Apple to come up with an amazing look and feel. I *love* those drop shadows. I'm suprised that we've yet to see that in any X11-based window manager...or have we?
Looking forward to the Windowmaker themes...
Glad to hear about this one. CCVS is seriously cool. I just hope they don't abandon (and stop selling) their FreeBSD port of the software!
Did I miss something? Why didn't Ramsey Electronics have their attorney(s) on-site while this was happening? If I found federal agents in my work place, the first thing I would do is to demand to speak to my attorney before saying *anything* else to the agents.
No slight to Taco and Hemos, I think they've both done a wonderful job, but I do believe that any serious geek who has experience in professional journalism could run this site. Rob and Jeff have great tastes in stories, no doubt. On the other hand, I've often complained, sometimes noisily, about the lack of objectivity on slashdot. Part of being a good journalist is posting the facts as they are and not inserting your personal opinions where they could be mistaken as news.
If Rob and/or Jeff decided to move on, I think we'd get along ok. Roblimo is new on the scene and seems to have been accepted pretty well. Cliff came along a while back and I think he adds a lot. I'm sure that there would be some uproar if Rob/Jeff left but we'd be back in the swing of things pretty quickly. What those guys did is create the forum and the atmosphere. We're a community now and we can be self-sustaining.
Chris
I didn't have any trouble getting hired into a mostly-mormon workplace, even though I'm not mormon. I think the reason that people think they favor mormons is that most of the workers in the state are mormon. When you have such a high percentage of mormons in the state, statistically, you will hire mostly mormons.
As far as working with the mormons, I had no problems whatsoever when I worked there (I work in LA now). I found them to be very accepting of me, even though I lived very differently than they did.
I love Utah. It's got everything a outdoorsy geek could need:
great tech jobs
lots of bandwidth
good local schools
beautiful mountains
great skiing/snowboarding
friendly, "home town" feeling
high quality, affordable housing
very young population
Not a bash at all. I completely agree with you. The big guys (Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc) definitely failed to see the potential in the linux market and this gave VA a great headstart. However, I think they've seen the light now. Look at the Dell/RedHat deal as an example. There is no way they will deny that Linux is a worthy, if not superior, OS forever. Remember what Microsoft did to the browser market: denial, denial, skepticism, fear, turnabout, enthusiasm, domination. Like it or not, MS showed what a large, rich company company can do when they put their minds to it.
It's my opinion that the VA Linux stock
is terribly overpriced. The fact is,
VA Linux is in a very competative marketplace
and their competitors (IBM, Dell, Compaq,
Gateway, etc) are better poised to capture
the Linux server market, should they decide
to.
Let's look at what VA does:
1) They make Intel desktops and servers
2) They produce a value-added linux distribution
that's tuned for their equipment, which generally
consists of widely available PC hardware.
Now the problems with their business model:
1) Their Intel desktops and servers are hardly
unique or exceptional. Having hands-on
experience with VA Linux equipment as well
as Dell, Compaq, IBM, and Gateway equipment,
I can say that I think VA Linux has a long
way to go before they catch those guys when
it comes to the quality of their servers.
Desktops may be a different story because their
quality varies widely from producer to produce
and even within product lines. On average
though, I'm not impressed with the quality of VA Linux's server hardware.
Additionally, Dell and the other big boys buy
their hardware in much larger volumes than VA
does. VA cannot hope to compete with them on price any time soon. If you don't believe me, price out a
two CPU rackmount server from VA and then price
one of IBM's models out and see who comes in cheaper.
A lot cheaper.
2) Their value-added distribution is not that "value
added". Since their tweaks to the kernel are all
open-sourced before they are sold, they are openly
available to their competition. It would not be
that hard for one of the bigger vendors to put
together a server based on well-supported hardware
and acheive the same performance that VA is getting
out of their boxes. In fact, it has already
been done.
I can see one of the big vendors getting into the Linux
market "big time" within the next few months. Essentially,
all they would need to do was hire off some of the kernel
developers out there and financially back a major Linux
software project like KDE and they would already be ahead
of VA Linux. Remember, these large manufacturers are
buying their components in much larger volumes than VA
Linux and can blow VA out of the water on pricing.
In conclusion, I think VA Linux is a really great
company, boldly breaking into a wonderful new market
but they don't have the garaunteed market that stock
traders seem to think they have.
You could get a wireless, solar-powered weather station for your roof. Then you could get some UNIX-based software and MRTG and put some graphs of your station online.
Call your local Bar Association and get a referral. Most attorneys do not charge for introductory meetings. Meet with them and see what they'll do for you. If you like them, strike a deal.
UGGHH!!! I'm so sick of seeing VCs and Wall Street fawning over these companies that have absolutely WORTHLESS products. Has anyone here ever used Netscape Application Server? If you have, you know what a stinking turd it is. Want to scale your super-duper ".com" (and gawd, I'm so sick of that word) application using Netscape servers? Well, here's what you do: You buy several million dollars worth of high-end Sun hardware to run it and hire a flock of Java consultants to build your application for you. It will take them at least 6 months, probably a year, to develop the final product. When you're finally rolling, you'll have a bloated, unmanageable, Java-based three-tier app that barely functions, even when run on Sun's latest and greatest hardware. To support all this hardware, you'll need a room full of Solaris admins and systems support staff, and when its all said and done, your product is still as slow as a spilled bucket of tar on a North Dakota winter day. Trust me, I've worked for several companies that have gone this route and it ain't pretty.
The fact that this article touts that VCellar has hired someone who was formerly in charge of Kiva development scares me. I'll give them this, though--if you are foolish enough to go the three-tiered Java route, you'll need a company like Vcellar to help you run all the big iron you'll need to support your app.
The future of online computing, IMHO, is:
Perl
Mason
Apache
FreeBSD
mod_perl
Oracle
Dell hardware
VA Linux hardware
Unfortunately, many of the above will probably never be as popular is the "Vcellar" type solutions, because large companies love to spend huge amounts of investors' money. It's the nature of the beast.
Before anyone starts getting resentful of the multibillionaires of the geek world, here's a few cliches to ponder:
1) Eventually, you will run out of things to buy.
Ok, after you've bought five Lamborghini Diablos, the house on the hill, the yachts and the private planes, you WILL get tired of buying stuff. Those weeks of satisfaction that you got when you used to scrimp and save for something slowly dwindle away, until buying stuff is merely a way to spend time.
2) You can't take it with you. I think the Dave Matthews Band song puts it perfectly: "Look at me in my fancy car and my bank account / Oh, how I wish I could take it all down to my grave / God knows, I'd save and save"
3) Can't buy me love. So, you think all of your (non-rich) friends are going to come and hang out and party on the yacht and fly around the world with you for the rest of their lives? The ones that are truly your friends won't. They'll be too busy trying to achieve their goals in life.
4) You have to eat your own cooking. If you were happy as a poor person, you're going to be happy as a rich person. If you were miserable when you were poor, give yourself 6 months as a rich person and you'll be just as miserable as you were before.
You can listen to NPR live now but as I recall, you have to use the MS Windows Media Player. Personally, I think that RealPlayer is a pile of shit under any platform and that MS Media Player runs pretty nicely under NT. I have an NT box next to the IRIX and Linux boxes on my desk so it works out ok. Of course, live NPR is pretty popular so the server is often slow/overloaded/broken.
Check it out at the NPR front page:
http://www.npr.org