Third, public schools bear the brunt of your "problem children" as special ed is quite a large chunk (and burden) that private schools duck out on.
Of course, the problem with "special ed" funding is
a) it's used to skew performance results (Johnny's bringing down the school average? Label him "learning disabled" and he's not longer counted in the statistics)
and
b) grab more funding. Amazingly enough when you pay per "learning disabled" head you see a dramatic rise in who's labeled "learning disabled."
Neither of which actually does anything to help children learn (and may actually make problems worse).
Sixth, public schools provide books to students, for private schools this isn't usually true.
Then why are horror stories about public school teachers dipping into their own paycheck / public schools chronically low on books trotted out every voting season? As the Reason article pointed out California public school teachers dip into their pockets for between $200 and $500 a year for supplies. Obviously the public school system there is failing to provide all that it should.
California claims that approximately 61% of the school budget is spent on "classroom instruction", a catchall category that seems to include some items not directly related as well as other items that seem logically connected to classroom instruction. Even using this generous figure there is almost $110,000.00 per year, per classroom, per year left over after the cost of classroom instruction.
$110k a year per *classroom* after paying teachers' salaries and books. That seems like a lot of cash to be paying for transportation, capital building costs, etc.
So the bottom line is that even at 1,000 or 2,000 more per student is cheap considering all of the *EXTRA* items that a truly universal public education system must handle. All of these things ADD UP QUICKLY. It is you who are being dis-ingenuios by throwing up this sort of comparison to "private" alternatives.
Why is it disingenuous? Why must the entire public education debate simply be how much more money we throw at the system? Why not take a good hard look at the numbers? Every election cycle we hear the same people predict everything short of the apocalypse if we don't increase funding now. Bonds are passed, money is spent, but apparently teachers are still dirt poor, books are still scarce, and we're raising a bunch of morons (unless, of course, we pass this next bond.. trust us, it'll work this time). Shouldn't we be trying to figure out why there are so many highly paid administrators in the bureaucracy? Why we're buying shed full of computers who's educational usefulness is hazy at best? Why idiots in the Dept of Education blow millions building a new school on a toxic dump? I'm sorry, but most of the cries of highlighting the plight of teachers (and they do get the shaft) and then saying "Give us more money (but don't ask how we're spending it)" ring about as hollow as when Rosen says she's really busting everyone's balls because she's really looking out for the recording artists.
Ensuring that the 6.1 million pupils enrolled in California's public schools receive a high quality education and are provided the tools to meet California's world-class standards, education remains this Administration's highest priority. Despite the fiscal challenge facing California, the 2002-03 Budget fully funds statutory growth and cost-of-living adjustments for K-12 programs. As indicated in Figure K12-1, approximately $53.9 billion will be devoted to California's 988 school districts and 58 county offices of education, resulting in estimated total per-pupil expenditures from all sources of
$9,145 in fiscal year 2001-02 and $9,236 in fiscal year 2002-03.
Ooops.. off by about $130, but still a hell of a lot higher than the number you quoted.
As for the "Top Flight" that was a tad snarky, just as snarky as a matter of fact as your assertion that all but the top private schools are nothing but Christian madrases. You can get a damn good private education for half the price, and not just one where your kids' "faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics."
I live in CA, which should stand as a dire warning to the rest of the country: They limit their property taxes, their schools go underfunded...
Bullshit. There's a lot wrong with California public education, but underfunding isn't one of them. California public schools spent $9,267.00 per student for the education of its kindergarten through high school. That's a LOT of money per kid (you can send your kid to a top flight private school for about half), and most of it is pissed away by the bureaucracy. You don't cure a shopaholic by giving them more money, and you don't solve the education funding "problem" by giving them more money either.
Re:cable IS better
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As much as I hate to give them Kudos, I've had little to no trouble with Verizon DSL here on the east coast. Granted I don't use their PPPoE software (it was a little flakey) -- at one time I was using a linux box as a router, now I'm using a Linksys WAP router -- but the actual service with "Non Shit" PPPoE drivers is as steady as a rock. It maybe drops once a week (if that). Sure, its not as fast as my friends cable modem, but there are no restrictions on how I use it either. I have 5 machines hanging of the line, can run my web/imap server and VPN to work without violating any retarded TOS agreement. I've been damn happy with them.
Yes and No. I agree the movie studios are a huge problem here as well, but look at TW/AOL. They own a huge library of movies, they own a big chunck of cable, and they have a large technology company. Make a cable box that incorperates a PVR and an ethernet box, hook it up to your existing cable IP network, and start offering content. If they aren't dracionian about the service terms they'll have one hell of a business.
Allow me the same type of experience as renting from blockbusters (5 day rental, can watch as many times as I want in that time frame, have control over the the movie, e.g. FF, RW, pause) for the same $$$ and I'm sold. I now no longer have to trudge to BB to rent something / no late fees. Want to pimp your upcoming WBR/WEA releases? Allow users to download videos and sneak peaks of upcoming albums (and allow their subscribers to order items at a slight discount).
This is the type of service that can distinguish cable companies from sat. TV companies since sat. TV doesn't have the broadband infrastructure in place to replicate the service. Why movie studios are afraid of this boggles the mind. All I see is a huge paycheck for whoever can deliever this service at a reasonable price.
Man, cable companies really have their heads planted firmly up their ass. From the day that I got my TiVo I saw the potential of the PVR tailored for their market that would allow all kinds of value adding services. For instance, build a cable box where some of the storage capacity is used to store PPV moives. Instead of tying up cable channels with a limited set of monthly PPV moives you instead pipe down any movie they have in a catalogue down the TCP/IP data pipe and store it on the PVR. Thus, folks can stop, FF, RW pause a movie (just like a VCR/DVD), watch it multiple times over the course of a few days (or however long you allow them to view the movie) and allow subscribers to download any number of movies, not just the new releases. And it frees up cable channels to boot. If I ran a cable company I'd LOVE PVRs, and would be working with SonicBlue, TiVo, or Moto. design me a box and a back end post haste.
So was the second in a very B- movie way. I always end up watching it when I run across it on TBS. Haven't seen number 3, so I don't know if its crap or not.
Please. We sure do have a mountain of red tape here in the states, but NOTHING compares to the bureaucracy that the old Soviet Union created. Remember, the entire country was technically one huge bureaucracy. That and corruption will be the old soviet state's longest surviving legacies.
s that the reason that "republicans" are generally against efforts to improve voter participation, such as the motor-voter bill? no this was another election with low turn-out and a definite lack of interesting discussion. sad! but, numbers-wise the winning candidates generally won with small majorities
You're half right. Both parties are generally against efforts to improve their opponent's voter turnout. One of the interesting things about the Motor-Voter bill was in many cases it helped Republican candidates, at which point they changed their tune quite a bit (as did the Dems in those areas.. they were less gung ho about after).
The Dem's shit stinks just as bad as the Reps when it comes to manipulating the election system in their favor.
Reminds me of the old A-10 Warthog - damned ugly, but flew home once after getting half its wing shot off.
Ugly? Harumph! I think they're the prettiest military planes flying (but I'm biased, I lived on a base with them for 10 years). Now, the F117, that's an ugly plane.
Does IE still ask each and every time you get a new/modify an existing cookie? To me that was worse than having no control over cookies at all, since you ended up turning off the cookie controls (putting you back at square one) and you'd wasted an hour playing "whack a control."
Being pretty agnostic about browsers (in terms of whether or not it comes from MS), I must say I have moved all of my general browsing over to Pheonix on Win machines -- I still need to use IE to access internal websites for one of the companies I work for who shall remain nameless. The control over cookies and pop-up blocking (javascript) controls along with its lightness is quite nice. I haven't even installed the Flash plugin, so no worries about those adds either.
Well, you're sorta right, but it does matter. Lose a little on a console, it takes fewer games sold to recoup the loss / start making a profit. Lose a lot per console and you have to sell more games. You still want to make your box as cheaply as possible in order to a) undercut your competition or b) shrink the breakeven point. Losing shedloads of money with a respectable, but still hugely smaller (now there's a contradiction of terms) base than the PS2 doesn't bode well. They're going to have to push the cost of the box down a lot more to even hope to do better (games that are must haves would be good too). Notice how MS and nVIDEA are having a nice spat about the price of nVIDEA's chipsets? Notice how VIA wants to get into the action with the XBoxII (by offering the CPU / Video / Bridge chipset as a package)? MS are making a concerted effort to lower prices.
OT: But isn't it interesting how MS really isn't doing well in anything other than Windows and Office? The/. crowd seem to have this "gloom and doom / inevitablitiy of MS taking over every segment of the industry" attitude. Yes they have lots of money to throw around, yes they can afford to try three times before they get something remotely right, but lets face facts: they suck with their online experience (and its bleeding red ink), they suck at "Big Iron" (and its bleeding red ink), they suck at Phones (and their biggest cheerleader gave them the boot after thier flagship product was on the market for a whole two weeks), they're still mildly stinky at PDAs (although less stinky than they were), they're lackluster in the games market (where, for the first time in their history they're on the hook for the hardware, and bleeding red ink),.net looks insteresing but in the business sense is no different than what's going on now (buy.net server software, buy a client to run.net programs), and the *new, improved* greatest things since sliced bread: The Tablet PC and "networked stuff" (see the upcoming Comdex), are (IMHO) going to be middling at best, i.e. a huge let down from the hype. The tablet is nice but unneeded outside of niche industries, and the Windows based toaster is going to do about as well as it has already -- i.e. Not. MS still doesn't get the embedded space.
Don't get me wrong, they're still printing money with Windows and Office, and they will for the forseeable future. But MS have been pretty much losers at trying to break out from those two (incredibly large and profitable) niches. All things come to and end though (see Wang, IBM, et al) and one wonders just what's going to happen to those guys when the industry takes its next big shift.
I used to live on RAF Woodbridge in the UK back in the 80s (go Warriors!) and was there during the infamous Rendlesham forest UFO sighting (of Unsolved Mysteries and East at Left Gate fame). One of the better theories I've read about the whole thing was that the UFO story was a cover story for retrieving low flying spy satellite film canister, which, frankly, makes a hell of a lot more sense than the UFO nutters who are convinced we were doing all sorts of who knows what with ET.
I do remember a while ago an article (which I believe was on/.) about a B'wolf like system that had two or three ethernet Base 100 cards per box instead of Gigabit. IIRC the author claimed that this was actually faster that a gigabit network due to various things (overhead with Gigabit, some other stuff). I also recall that one of the interesting aspects of the system was the way he had all the topology of the boxen and switches. Apparently he had done some analysis to determine how everything should be wired for maximum thruput / minimum switch saturation.
Apple will not get into Tablets until its a proven game. Remember, Apple would be on the hook for both hardware and software costs, unlike MS who are making HW partners take on that risk. Remember, if the Tablet is a bust MS is only out its SW development costs. HP, et al would eat HW development costs along with inventory. Apple has to contend with both. I don't expect anything from Apple until the tablet concept has firmly taken hold in the consumer space.
In all fairness most software companies are like this. Promise the moon, deliver a moonpie. Claim that you indeed delivered what you promised, and since you've been saying different things at different times you can dig for some statement that backs up your claim.
I rarely ever see anyone look back when a product is released and compare it to the promises doled out during its announcement. Now that would make for some funny reading.
Even simpler (well, not really simple considering you'd be fighting vested interests) would be trim the damn budget by the 30-50% the GAO estimates is wasted / lost / stolen by the gov't every year. Gov't bookkeeping makes Enron's look honest. The solution wasn't giving Enron more money, and the solution isn't to give the gov't more money either. Let them learn to live on what they've got.
One of the benefits of MS's development methodology ("we're a software company") allows them to branch out in this direction a little more easier than Apple -- of whom a lot of people have been asking if something similar is in the works due to Ink, etc. Essentially MS has shunted off the hardware cost to the likes of HP and only have to worry about the software, and they've leveraged XP for most of the software as far as I can tell.
The downside of this strategy, though, is that if the hardware folks don't see a viable market MS is going to be left with software that doesn't have a platform to run on (see Sendo and the Windows Phone). Even by Gates admission he doesn't see tablets hitting the mainstream for 5 years which makes me wonder if / how long the likes of HP will push the platform. Tablets ain't cheap, and other than geek reasons I still don't see them taking off any time soon, even in the general business sector. Batteries are going to have to last all day, weight will have to drop and durability will have increase before they become really, really usefull.
... but it can be slower (not to mean its unusable) for certain things, mostly to do with graphics. Web browsing for instance. Some of the browsers are better and some are worse, but from my experience all are noticably slower than browsing with IE, Netscape, et al on Win or Linux.
Part of the reason may be that I'm running a Rage iBook and don't have the ability to take advantage of QuarkGL. And things are getting faster with each OS update.
Having said all that my iBook is my primary machine. I wouldn't trade it for the world (except for a faster one, or a TiBook)
I suspect that the *gotcha* is that while the "data" is free you start running thru your minutes while you're connected. Thus, if you're on for more than 300 minutes peak minutes you start getting charged $0.20 per minute, or whatever their rate is.
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Of course, the problem with "special ed" funding is
a) it's used to skew performance results (Johnny's bringing down the school average? Label him "learning disabled" and he's not longer counted in the statistics)
and
b) grab more funding. Amazingly enough when you pay per "learning disabled" head you see a dramatic rise in who's labeled "learning disabled."
Neither of which actually does anything to help children learn (and may actually make problems worse).
Sixth, public schools provide books to students, for private schools this isn't usually true.
Then why are horror stories about public school teachers dipping into their own paycheck / public schools chronically low on books trotted out every voting season? As the Reason article pointed out California public school teachers dip into their pockets for between $200 and $500 a year for supplies. Obviously the public school system there is failing to provide all that it should.
$110k a year per *classroom* after paying teachers' salaries and books. That seems like a lot of cash to be paying for transportation, capital building costs, etc.
So the bottom line is that even at 1,000 or 2,000 more per student is cheap considering all of the *EXTRA* items that a truly universal public education system must handle. All of these things ADD UP QUICKLY. It is you who are being dis-ingenuios by throwing up this sort of comparison to "private" alternatives.
Why is it disingenuous? Why must the entire public education debate simply be how much more money we throw at the system? Why not take a good hard look at the numbers? Every election cycle we hear the same people predict everything short of the apocalypse if we don't increase funding now. Bonds are passed, money is spent, but apparently teachers are still dirt poor, books are still scarce, and we're raising a bunch of morons (unless, of course, we pass this next bond.. trust us, it'll work this time). Shouldn't we be trying to figure out why there are so many highly paid administrators in the bureaucracy? Why we're buying shed full of computers who's educational usefulness is hazy at best? Why idiots in the Dept of Education blow millions building a new school on a toxic dump? I'm sorry, but most of the cries of highlighting the plight of teachers (and they do get the shaft) and then saying "Give us more money (but don't ask how we're spending it)" ring about as hollow as when Rosen says she's really busting everyone's balls because she's really looking out for the recording artists.
Ooops.. off by about $130, but still a hell of a lot higher than the number you quoted.
Hm. Well, all of your facts are wrong.
Well then take it up with the California Dept. of Finance since it's they numbers they're reporting.
As for the "Top Flight" that was a tad snarky, just as snarky as a matter of fact as your assertion that all but the top private schools are nothing but Christian madrases. You can get a damn good private education for half the price, and not just one where your kids' "faith won't be troubled by learning about biology or geology or physics."
I live in CA, which should stand as a dire warning to the rest of the country: They limit their property taxes, their schools go underfunded...
Bullshit. There's a lot wrong with California public education, but underfunding isn't one of them. California public schools spent $9,267.00 per student for the education of its kindergarten through high school. That's a LOT of money per kid (you can send your kid to a top flight private school for about half), and most of it is pissed away by the bureaucracy. You don't cure a shopaholic by giving them more money, and you don't solve the education funding "problem" by giving them more money either.
As much as I hate to give them Kudos, I've had little to no trouble with Verizon DSL here on the east coast. Granted I don't use their PPPoE software (it was a little flakey) -- at one time I was using a linux box as a router, now I'm using a Linksys WAP router -- but the actual service with "Non Shit" PPPoE drivers is as steady as a rock. It maybe drops once a week (if that). Sure, its not as fast as my friends cable modem, but there are no restrictions on how I use it either. I have 5 machines hanging of the line, can run my web/imap server and VPN to work without violating any retarded TOS agreement. I've been damn happy with them.
Yes and No. I agree the movie studios are a huge problem here as well, but look at TW/AOL. They own a huge library of movies, they own a big chunck of cable, and they have a large technology company. Make a cable box that incorperates a PVR and an ethernet box, hook it up to your existing cable IP network, and start offering content. If they aren't dracionian about the service terms they'll have one hell of a business.
Allow me the same type of experience as renting from blockbusters (5 day rental, can watch as many times as I want in that time frame, have control over the the movie, e.g. FF, RW, pause) for the same $$$ and I'm sold. I now no longer have to trudge to BB to rent something / no late fees. Want to pimp your upcoming WBR/WEA releases? Allow users to download videos and sneak peaks of upcoming albums (and allow their subscribers to order items at a slight discount).
This is the type of service that can distinguish cable companies from sat. TV companies since sat. TV doesn't have the broadband infrastructure in place to replicate the service. Why movie studios are afraid of this boggles the mind. All I see is a huge paycheck for whoever can deliever this service at a reasonable price.
Man, cable companies really have their heads planted firmly up their ass. From the day that I got my TiVo I saw the potential of the PVR tailored for their market that would allow all kinds of value adding services. For instance, build a cable box where some of the storage capacity is used to store PPV moives. Instead of tying up cable channels with a limited set of monthly PPV moives you instead pipe down any movie they have in a catalogue down the TCP/IP data pipe and store it on the PVR. Thus, folks can stop, FF, RW pause a movie (just like a VCR/DVD), watch it multiple times over the course of a few days (or however long you allow them to view the movie) and allow subscribers to download any number of movies, not just the new releases. And it frees up cable channels to boot. If I ran a cable company I'd LOVE PVRs, and would be working with SonicBlue, TiVo, or Moto. design me a box and a back end post haste.
So was the second in a very B- movie way. I always end up watching it when I run across it on TBS. Haven't seen number 3, so I don't know if its crap or not.
Please. We sure do have a mountain of red tape here in the states, but NOTHING compares to the bureaucracy that the old Soviet Union created. Remember, the entire country was technically one huge bureaucracy. That and corruption will be the old soviet state's longest surviving legacies.
No, the more games sold the more profitable the xBox division becomes. The hardware itself is (at last count) being sold at a loss.
s that the reason that "republicans" are generally against efforts to improve voter participation, such as the motor-voter bill? no this was another election with low turn-out and a definite lack of interesting discussion. sad! but, numbers-wise the winning candidates generally won with small majorities
You're half right. Both parties are generally against efforts to improve their opponent's voter turnout. One of the interesting things about the Motor-Voter bill was in many cases it helped Republican candidates, at which point they changed their tune quite a bit (as did the Dems in those areas.. they were less gung ho about after).
The Dem's shit stinks just as bad as the Reps when it comes to manipulating the election system in their favor.
They should move everything over to FreeBSD since they like it so much.
Amazing how their own internal whitepaper points out that a Unix based system is simple, easy to administer, secure, modular, and can be bloat free.
Reminds me of the old A-10 Warthog - damned ugly, but flew home once after getting half its wing shot off.
Ugly? Harumph! I think they're the prettiest military planes flying (but I'm biased, I lived on a base with them for 10 years). Now, the F117, that's an ugly plane.
Does IE still ask each and every time you get a new/modify an existing cookie? To me that was worse than having no control over cookies at all, since you ended up turning off the cookie controls (putting you back at square one) and you'd wasted an hour playing "whack a control."
Being pretty agnostic about browsers (in terms of whether or not it comes from MS), I must say I have moved all of my general browsing over to Pheonix on Win machines -- I still need to use IE to access internal websites for one of the companies I work for who shall remain nameless. The control over cookies and pop-up blocking (javascript) controls along with its lightness is quite nice. I haven't even installed the Flash plugin, so no worries about those adds either.
Well, you're sorta right, but it does matter. Lose a little on a console, it takes fewer games sold to recoup the loss / start making a profit. Lose a lot per console and you have to sell more games. You still want to make your box as cheaply as possible in order to a) undercut your competition or b) shrink the breakeven point. Losing shedloads of money with a respectable, but still hugely smaller (now there's a contradiction of terms) base than the PS2 doesn't bode well. They're going to have to push the cost of the box down a lot more to even hope to do better (games that are must haves would be good too). Notice how MS and nVIDEA are having a nice spat about the price of nVIDEA's chipsets? Notice how VIA wants to get into the action with the XBoxII (by offering the CPU / Video / Bridge chipset as a package)? MS are making a concerted effort to lower prices.
/. crowd seem to have this "gloom and doom / inevitablitiy of MS taking over every segment of the industry" attitude. Yes they have lots of money to throw around, yes they can afford to try three times before they get something remotely right, but lets face facts: they suck with their online experience (and its bleeding red ink), they suck at "Big Iron" (and its bleeding red ink), they suck at Phones (and their biggest cheerleader gave them the boot after thier flagship product was on the market for a whole two weeks), they're still mildly stinky at PDAs (although less stinky than they were), they're lackluster in the games market (where, for the first time in their history they're on the hook for the hardware, and bleeding red ink), .net looks insteresing but in the business sense is no different than what's going on now (buy .net server software, buy a client to run .net programs), and the *new, improved* greatest things since sliced bread: The Tablet PC and "networked stuff" (see the upcoming Comdex), are (IMHO) going to be middling at best, i.e. a huge let down from the hype. The tablet is nice but unneeded outside of niche industries, and the Windows based toaster is going to do about as well as it has already -- i.e. Not. MS still doesn't get the embedded space.
OT: But isn't it interesting how MS really isn't doing well in anything other than Windows and Office? The
Don't get me wrong, they're still printing money with Windows and Office, and they will for the forseeable future. But MS have been pretty much losers at trying to break out from those two (incredibly large and profitable) niches. All things come to and end though (see Wang, IBM, et al) and one wonders just what's going to happen to those guys when the industry takes its next big shift.
I used to live on RAF Woodbridge in the UK back in the 80s (go Warriors!) and was there during the infamous Rendlesham forest UFO sighting (of Unsolved Mysteries and East at Left Gate fame). One of the better theories I've read about the whole thing was that the UFO story was a cover story for retrieving low flying spy satellite film canister, which, frankly, makes a hell of a lot more sense than the UFO nutters who are convinced we were doing all sorts of who knows what with ET.
I do remember a while ago an article (which I believe was on /.) about a B'wolf like system that had two or three ethernet Base 100 cards per box instead of Gigabit. IIRC the author claimed that this was actually faster that a gigabit network due to various things (overhead with Gigabit, some other stuff). I also recall that one of the interesting aspects of the system was the way he had all the topology of the boxen and switches. Apparently he had done some analysis to determine how everything should be wired for maximum thruput / minimum switch saturation.
Said it before; say it again:
Apple will not get into Tablets until its a proven game. Remember, Apple would be on the hook for both hardware and software costs, unlike MS who are making HW partners take on that risk. Remember, if the Tablet is a bust MS is only out its SW development costs. HP, et al would eat HW development costs along with inventory. Apple has to contend with both. I don't expect anything from Apple until the tablet concept has firmly taken hold in the consumer space.
In all fairness most software companies are like this. Promise the moon, deliver a moonpie. Claim that you indeed delivered what you promised, and since you've been saying different things at different times you can dig for some statement that backs up your claim.
I rarely ever see anyone look back when a product is released and compare it to the promises doled out during its announcement. Now that would make for some funny reading.
Even simpler (well, not really simple considering you'd be fighting vested interests) would be trim the damn budget by the 30-50% the GAO estimates is wasted / lost / stolen by the gov't every year. Gov't bookkeeping makes Enron's look honest. The solution wasn't giving Enron more money, and the solution isn't to give the gov't more money either. Let them learn to live on what they've got.
God damn, I wish I had some modpoints. Short, sour and absolutely spot on. Too bad you're going to get nuked Karma wise.
One of the benefits of MS's development methodology ("we're a software company") allows them to branch out in this direction a little more easier than Apple -- of whom a lot of people have been asking if something similar is in the works due to Ink, etc. Essentially MS has shunted off the hardware cost to the likes of HP and only have to worry about the software, and they've leveraged XP for most of the software as far as I can tell.
The downside of this strategy, though, is that if the hardware folks don't see a viable market MS is going to be left with software that doesn't have a platform to run on (see Sendo and the Windows Phone). Even by Gates admission he doesn't see tablets hitting the mainstream for 5 years which makes me wonder if / how long the likes of HP will push the platform. Tablets ain't cheap, and other than geek reasons I still don't see them taking off any time soon, even in the general business sector. Batteries are going to have to last all day, weight will have to drop and durability will have increase before they become really, really usefull.
... but it can be slower (not to mean its unusable) for certain things, mostly to do with graphics. Web browsing for instance. Some of the browsers are better and some are worse, but from my experience all are noticably slower than browsing with IE, Netscape, et al on Win or Linux.
Part of the reason may be that I'm running a Rage iBook and don't have the ability to take advantage of QuarkGL. And things are getting faster with each OS update.
Having said all that my iBook is my primary machine. I wouldn't trade it for the world (except for a faster one, or a TiBook)
I think it comes with Spinal Tap's "Tonight, I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" as freebie.
I suspect that the *gotcha* is that while the "data" is free you start running thru your minutes while you're connected. Thus, if you're on for more than 300 minutes peak minutes you start getting charged $0.20 per minute, or whatever their rate is.