what constitues a Good Programmer from a Bad Programmer, there are very few quantitative measures
Perhaps the problem is that often only a Good Programmer can recognise another Good Programmer. Because few companies have Good Programmers at their disposal, they rely on quantitative measures to evaluate programmers.
I have seen this many times: Companies often have a toxic culture and no one in their sane mind would ever want to work for them unless they were desparate for a salary. Unfortunately these companies prefer to hire desparate below-average developers rather than fix their culture and seek to create an environment that attracts top talent.
What companies ought to is to design a healthy corporate environment first and make sure it gets a good reputation. The right people can then be found and attracted easily.
So, if you are a manager and you can see that your corporate environment sucks, do not be tempted to hire desparate people just to fill some empty seats. Try to fix your culture as much as you can before seeking to hire, and focus on finding quality people.
I encourage you to read about disk partitioning and then try to install Windows yourself. You'll see that the Windows installer is light years behind many GNU/Linux installers. Most users from the mass market are unable to install Windows themselves, and some times even to configure it properly through the control panel, not to say be able to work with Windows through its command line interface, and would of course be powerless to navigate in its predecessor, MS-DOS, even if they had to do that in order to save their lives! However, I'll agree that most OS installers out there, and not only GNU/Linux's, could be significantly improved in terms of user interface. But the fact is that an OS installer isn't supposed to teach you the basics. If you can't acquire this knowledge yourself, then you need to find a computer technician, knowledgeable friend, or member of the open-source community to do that work for you. I'm sure there are many GNU/Linux fans near you that would be happy to come and help you install any distro for you, even for free. The good thing with GNU/Linux and other similar systems like BSDs is that it's supported by a helpful community whose members don't need to call each other friends in order to offer some help, and this is also a good way to make our communities grow and teach new members the values of volunteerism, copyleft, etc that made GNU/Linux possible. So, for every question about GNU/Linux you have, your best option is to contact your local LUG (Linux User Group), usually through their mailing list, or join a GNU/Linux IRC chat channel (eg on Freenode) while you are doing an installation.
Re:Technology is individualized and isolating
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid designers don't take care of couples, families, and friends when getting new products to the market. It's still hard to find, for example, dual headphones, laptops designed for simultaneous use by two people, or even books for couples/families/friends. Every technological widget is designed with a single user in mind, and interface designers never think of two people using the widget at the same time. Everything you use is designed to be used with one head and two hands, never with two heads and four hands. Couples, families, and friends end up having to divide headphones or seek special adapters, having a hard time using a laptop on the go with one of them holding it at an angle in order to allow the other person to type or look at the screen, and even being forced to read a book from a distance in order to allow the other person to have a look or read at the same time. Perhaps there is a market here that's overlooked.
When you pay for a movie or some music what you usually want is to get entertained. The mainstream big names in cinema and music, however, are not the only ones offering entertainment productions. There are millions of amateurs doing exactly the same, and now with the Internet it's easier to find them. You can get far better entertainment by preferring independent music groups and amateur movie productions, often licensed under a free licence. You can even create your own mashups and share legally with others. Now that the copyright lobby has become very unreasonable and aggressive in trying to maximise its profits, it's the right time to strike back by associating with other amateurs and becoming a producer yourself, too.
The copyright lobby that controls mass entertainment has become too unreasonable and aggressive in the last decade. I have chosen not to be their customer anymore. I do not buy movies, music, or other entertainment material which is associated with the big players in the mass entertainment industry. If I want to listen to some music, I get it from an independent music group, often licensed under a free licence. Music produced by the 'big names' in mass entertainment is not inherently better than the music your neighbour musician can produce. For movies, you will be surprised to see how good an amateur production can be. If you know about the practices of the mass entertainment industry and you agree they are unethical, while you continue being their customer, then you are also doing something unethical. By giving them your money, you effectively support them and give them the green light to put more people in prison for copyright-related offences. There are two things you ought to do in order to fight their unethical practices: Refuse to be their customer anymore, and collaborate with other like-minded people in producing amateur music and movies, preferably freely licensed. It is the age of collaboration, and we do not need any large corporations anymore to feed us mass entertainment. We can produce our own entertainment without them, just like we do with educational resources (Wikipedia) and software (GNU).
If the company runs on open-source tools, then you can use the same tools to run your own shop. However, the power of a company lies in its people and its culture, not its tools, and it's very difficult to copy a community and its culture.
Universities are businesses. Many of them are for-profit private corporations. But even the not-for-profit private universities seek to cover their expenses in the same way. They all sell a service, which is a mixture of certification, training, education, experience, and social prestige. Considering that engineering often pays more, it is not a surprise that universities charge more for a better service (better degree). The problem is that the value of studies in general has eroded a lot, but many universities seem to believe that they sell gold. Considering the money and time it takes to finish degrees, there are many times better ways to invest your money and time, for example in starting your own business and improving your knowledge part-time through a library rather than a university programme of study. Some universities have started to understand this situation, and offer more flexibility, but still the general situation is not very positive.
How much data do you need to share? For me and my work (freelance computer contractor) I just got a dedicated GNU/Linux server in a datacentre and placed anything non-critical there, after properly securing it of course. Thanks to 3G broadband and connections with all telcos operating here, I have Internet access whenever I am and at any time (except when it's raining! unfortunately 3G is too weather-dependent). I can also share parts of the data with my clients very easily as well (just an address and password, and the client can see a current report of where the project is going, access the bug lists, and even a Gantt chart), something which I have been told is very useful for them. The server I got is in the $200 range, but there are some cheap ones as well. There are some refurbished for $30 and some slow ones for $50, which depending on the value of your data I suppose could be used as personal Internet-based storage servers. Of course you could just leave a home PC open 24h connected to your DSL/cable and configure it as a server as well. Of course this works only if you don't have to share obscene amounts of data, which is why I asked how much data you have. For most kinds of data, you don't really need to carry them all with you, and what you need is just access to a subset of them.
Microsoft tries to embrace and extinguish a competing movement. The fact that we have attracted their attention means that we are doing well. They know they are going to die soon. Let them die trying to figure out how a bunch of hippie nerds overpowered the closed source trust.
White takes less energy than black on TFTs, so Google is already helping TFT owners save energy:) However, even if the CRT energy savings are significant, they would be nothing compared to the high medical costs of people with damaged eyesight from trying to discern little white letters on black background, and from back problems (for bending towards to be able to discern the white letters):) The est you can do to save energy is to replace all your CRTs with TFTs, which is what I've done as well. TFTs don't consume much power, my 24" TFT takes only 150W and if it was a CRT it would consume much more. However, I think the main offender in this regard are businesses that continue giving their employees old CRTs and allow office lights and PCs to be on when not needed. The average corporation is orders of magnitude more energy inefficient than the average consumer, so I think that environmental advice should be primarily targeted towards companies. Actually most energy inefficient office environments do have an environmental policy but never implement it. I switch off devices when I don't need them, but I see banks, offices, and other businesses leaving their lights, computers, and screens on even during the night. It makes one wonder whether they enjoy paying high electricity bills.
Newsflash: Brains developed over millions of years still outperform computers that have been in development only in the last few centuries. Verdict: Human ingenuity isn't advanced enough to outrun natural evolution (at least not yet), and we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation. Is this a surprise?
Organisations that handle lots of money tend to attract people who look for a job or opportunities for personal gain and have no interest in its original mission. Considering that the founding members will sometime retire or leave, how can a foundation ensure that its original culture and focus on its mission will pass on to all new members within generations? I always regarded this as a disadvantage of formal organisations. I am not saying this specifically for OpenBSD (which I highly respect), but I am just raising a point for discussion.
For me it makes much sense to work on a beach, as it clears my mind and helps me work faster. I'm more productive working outdoors rather than in my home office or other office environment. When I go to the beach, I usually don't go near beaches full of other people and I don't get into the water (just working while breathing clean air and watching crabs walking around me), and I have not had any hardware problems so far (I prefer rocky beaches so sand is not so much a problem, although sometimes the laptops get extremely hot and for this reason I put a small USB fan throwing air on them).
This would lead to further adoption of SATA. I really can't wait to see these bulky ribbon cables coming to extinction. I have no IDE drives personally, even the external ones are SATA. It would be good if the cable was more stable, but even with this issue the thin SATA cables are much better than the huge ribbon parallel beasts.
MS takes a look out in the market every few years to see what's hot, copies it by creating its own competing solution, and tries to achieve a critical mass of users by bundling it into Windows, which is what they did with MSIE and Media Player. Debian and other non-comercial GNU/Linux distributors don't compete with anyone, as most of the software they bundle is created by others. They just package it, fix some bugs, and ensure that the system can work harmoniously as a whole. MS could avoid legal trouble AND do something useful for Windows users by creating a disc set containing Windows, other MS software, plus third-party software such as Navigator or WinAmp. Considering that MS is a money-hungry company, it could ask for a fee from any third-party software maker wishing to include their newest creation in the Windows distribution as an optional component. It could also supply users with an installer to let them choose what to load onto their PCs. If anyone wishing to have their software in the Windows distro paid a fee, MS's profitability would be maintained even if users preferred non-MS apps from the distribution. MS could save on legal costs, help its reputation, and make some alliances in the software market in this and similar ways. Yet, what MS is doing is to compete like a wild dinosaur, trying to kill any new software player in the market, and it's not surprisingly that the industry has taken this to the courts. This is typical behaviour of 800-pound gorilla companies that attempt to use their weight (money) to throw new entrants out of the market instead of using their brain to think of mutually beneficial arrangements and make friends instead of enemies. Such companies usually don't last too long, as everyone with the only exception of their founders/bosses and important shareholders, hate them (most importantly the users, who were the source of their wealth in the first place).
Linux is way too complicated for the average PC user
Or, to say it in other words, the average PC user is just too dumb to use GNU/Linux. I'm not sure whether the GNU/Linux community would be the same if hordes of dumb users started using GNU/Linux. Would you really want to be associated with average Windows users? Perhaps it's a blessing for smart users to use an OS that no dumb user can touch.
That said, I don't mean that we shouldn't try to make GNU/Linux more popular. For me the correct approach would be hybrid: Making GNU/Linux a bit easier to use in some respects, and trying to elevate and educate the users at the same time.
For example, most Windows users have no understanding why they should type a password any time they sit on their PC. Rather than allowing them to run GNU/Linux without a password, we ought to educate them about security.
One of the many reasons Windows has failed on the desktop for me *as a user*, putting software freedom issues aside for the sake of emphasising this particular point, is its inability to compete with GNU/Linux in terms of software available just after you install the OS. To see this for yourself, get a Windows XP or Vista disc as distributed to end users and a Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch DVD set as found on the Debian servers. Make a desktop-oriented installation of each on two of your computers, and then try to list every piece of software present in each OS: Windows have calculator, notepad, a command-line ftp client, and not much else; but Debian has everything. Windows give me Paint, but Debian includes the powerful Gimp. As for productivity software, Windows includes WordPad and no spreadsheet, while Debian gives me OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnumeric and AbiWord. Carrying just a set of Debian DVDs around with you is enough to make any computer you come across generally operable and actually useful, while in order to do the same with Windows you need either other discs with the application software or an Internet connection to download it (if free). This is of course not the most important reason to choose GNU/Linux over Windows, but I think it's a reason that every end user would understand easily no matter their experience with PCs. The bundle of OS and applications on the same distribution is a big advantage of GNU/Linux, and a hindsight on Microsoft's part. Of course there are ways to make similar bundles with Windows, but most end users don't have access to such solutions.
It's the same in Greece and other European countries. Dial-up is prohibitively expensive compared to broadband for more than basic useage. Telcos didn't want broadband when it came here because it would lower their income from paying dial-up Internet users, and it did. Night useage of dial-up is cheaper, so when there was no broadband whoever wanted to be online 12-16+ hours a day had to stay awake in the night and sleep during the day. This is also why many Internet users got ISDN: It was faster so you could transmit more data with the same useage charge.
I once paid for on-line access to the full Britannica encyclopedia. I kept it for a while, and then cancelled my subscription. It didn't worth it for me. Perhaps other people would find it useful, but it's simply not for me. When I cancelled my subscription, I specifically told them that free sites like Wikipedia have put them out of competition, and it makes no sense to charge for access to their articles. Not only that, but I would say that for some articles (eg about computing) I would very much prefer Wikipedia or other sources even if the full Britannica was freely accessible, and I'm sorry to have to say this. I am not sure how Britannica makes money nowadays, but I'm afraid their business model is broken in our era. They have to adapt or die.
That said, Wikipedia is not perfect (and I do contribute and sometimes donate nowadays, although I was somewhat more critical in the past), but it's better than many of the alternatives. What could make Wikipedia work better would be a more volunteerist-cooperative ethic among its many members. Perhaps its lack thereof is a result of its publicity: It has become so big that people outside the Internet volunteerist culture have joined and use it for purposes other than creating a good education resource. There is also little coordination between the different language communities. However, the publicity of Wikipedia has made the world of wikis and Internet collaboration (in the open source way) more known to the masses, and this is a significant achievement. Wikipedia is now a good resource and I'd like it to remain as such or become better.
Can you make hundreds of thousands of attempts in a short amount of time?
I hear an inventor in the orient recently developed an apparatus named "for loop" which does exactly that. Too bad we can't copy it, since they just filed for a software patent.
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Why are you so sure? I am afraid our society is not as humane as it should be. Plenty of homeless people suffer and die unnoticed every day.
Perhaps the problem is that often only a Good Programmer can recognise another Good Programmer. Because few companies have Good Programmers at their disposal, they rely on quantitative measures to evaluate programmers.
I have seen this many times: Companies often have a toxic culture and no one in their sane mind would ever want to work for them unless they were desparate for a salary. Unfortunately these companies prefer to hire desparate below-average developers rather than fix their culture and seek to create an environment that attracts top talent.
What companies ought to is to design a healthy corporate environment first and make sure it gets a good reputation. The right people can then be found and attracted easily.
So, if you are a manager and you can see that your corporate environment sucks, do not be tempted to hire desparate people just to fill some empty seats. Try to fix your culture as much as you can before seeking to hire, and focus on finding quality people.
Would this system work with people who regularly use lots of alcohol-containing oral rinses?
I encourage you to read about disk partitioning and then try to install Windows yourself. You'll see that the Windows installer is light years behind many GNU/Linux installers. Most users from the mass market are unable to install Windows themselves, and some times even to configure it properly through the control panel, not to say be able to work with Windows through its command line interface, and would of course be powerless to navigate in its predecessor, MS-DOS, even if they had to do that in order to save their lives! However, I'll agree that most OS installers out there, and not only GNU/Linux's, could be significantly improved in terms of user interface. But the fact is that an OS installer isn't supposed to teach you the basics. If you can't acquire this knowledge yourself, then you need to find a computer technician, knowledgeable friend, or member of the open-source community to do that work for you. I'm sure there are many GNU/Linux fans near you that would be happy to come and help you install any distro for you, even for free. The good thing with GNU/Linux and other similar systems like BSDs is that it's supported by a helpful community whose members don't need to call each other friends in order to offer some help, and this is also a good way to make our communities grow and teach new members the values of volunteerism, copyleft, etc that made GNU/Linux possible. So, for every question about GNU/Linux you have, your best option is to contact your local LUG (Linux User Group), usually through their mailing list, or join a GNU/Linux IRC chat channel (eg on Freenode) while you are doing an installation.
I'm afraid designers don't take care of couples, families, and friends when getting new products to the market. It's still hard to find, for example, dual headphones, laptops designed for simultaneous use by two people, or even books for couples/families/friends. Every technological widget is designed with a single user in mind, and interface designers never think of two people using the widget at the same time. Everything you use is designed to be used with one head and two hands, never with two heads and four hands. Couples, families, and friends end up having to divide headphones or seek special adapters, having a hard time using a laptop on the go with one of them holding it at an angle in order to allow the other person to type or look at the screen, and even being forced to read a book from a distance in order to allow the other person to have a look or read at the same time. Perhaps there is a market here that's overlooked.
When you pay for a movie or some music what you usually want is to get entertained. The mainstream big names in cinema and music, however, are not the only ones offering entertainment productions. There are millions of amateurs doing exactly the same, and now with the Internet it's easier to find them. You can get far better entertainment by preferring independent music groups and amateur movie productions, often licensed under a free licence. You can even create your own mashups and share legally with others. Now that the copyright lobby has become very unreasonable and aggressive in trying to maximise its profits, it's the right time to strike back by associating with other amateurs and becoming a producer yourself, too.
The copyright lobby that controls mass entertainment has become too unreasonable and aggressive in the last decade. I have chosen not to be their customer anymore. I do not buy movies, music, or other entertainment material which is associated with the big players in the mass entertainment industry. If I want to listen to some music, I get it from an independent music group, often licensed under a free licence. Music produced by the 'big names' in mass entertainment is not inherently better than the music your neighbour musician can produce. For movies, you will be surprised to see how good an amateur production can be. If you know about the practices of the mass entertainment industry and you agree they are unethical, while you continue being their customer, then you are also doing something unethical. By giving them your money, you effectively support them and give them the green light to put more people in prison for copyright-related offences. There are two things you ought to do in order to fight their unethical practices: Refuse to be their customer anymore, and collaborate with other like-minded people in producing amateur music and movies, preferably freely licensed. It is the age of collaboration, and we do not need any large corporations anymore to feed us mass entertainment. We can produce our own entertainment without them, just like we do with educational resources (Wikipedia) and software (GNU).
If the company runs on open-source tools, then you can use the same tools to run your own shop. However, the power of a company lies in its people and its culture, not its tools, and it's very difficult to copy a community and its culture.
Universities are businesses. Many of them are for-profit private corporations. But even the not-for-profit private universities seek to cover their expenses in the same way. They all sell a service, which is a mixture of certification, training, education, experience, and social prestige. Considering that engineering often pays more, it is not a surprise that universities charge more for a better service (better degree). The problem is that the value of studies in general has eroded a lot, but many universities seem to believe that they sell gold. Considering the money and time it takes to finish degrees, there are many times better ways to invest your money and time, for example in starting your own business and improving your knowledge part-time through a library rather than a university programme of study. Some universities have started to understand this situation, and offer more flexibility, but still the general situation is not very positive.
How much data do you need to share? For me and my work (freelance computer contractor) I just got a dedicated GNU/Linux server in a datacentre and placed anything non-critical there, after properly securing it of course. Thanks to 3G broadband and connections with all telcos operating here, I have Internet access whenever I am and at any time (except when it's raining! unfortunately 3G is too weather-dependent). I can also share parts of the data with my clients very easily as well (just an address and password, and the client can see a current report of where the project is going, access the bug lists, and even a Gantt chart), something which I have been told is very useful for them. The server I got is in the $200 range, but there are some cheap ones as well. There are some refurbished for $30 and some slow ones for $50, which depending on the value of your data I suppose could be used as personal Internet-based storage servers. Of course you could just leave a home PC open 24h connected to your DSL/cable and configure it as a server as well. Of course this works only if you don't have to share obscene amounts of data, which is why I asked how much data you have. For most kinds of data, you don't really need to carry them all with you, and what you need is just access to a subset of them.
I hope they won't run Windows. If so, the Blue Screen of Death would get recognised as a medical condition and official cause of physical death.
Microsoft tries to embrace and extinguish a competing movement. The fact that we have attracted their attention means that we are doing well. They know they are going to die soon. Let them die trying to figure out how a bunch of hippie nerds overpowered the closed source trust.
Perhaps Mozilla Corporation should be renamed to Firefox Corporation if it wishes to focus solely on Firefox.
White takes less energy than black on TFTs, so Google is already helping TFT owners save energy :) However, even if the CRT energy savings are significant, they would be nothing compared to the high medical costs of people with damaged eyesight from trying to discern little white letters on black background, and from back problems (for bending towards to be able to discern the white letters) :) The est you can do to save energy is to replace all your CRTs with TFTs, which is what I've done as well. TFTs don't consume much power, my 24" TFT takes only 150W and if it was a CRT it would consume much more. However, I think the main offender in this regard are businesses that continue giving their employees old CRTs and allow office lights and PCs to be on when not needed. The average corporation is orders of magnitude more energy inefficient than the average consumer, so I think that environmental advice should be primarily targeted towards companies. Actually most energy inefficient office environments do have an environmental policy but never implement it. I switch off devices when I don't need them, but I see banks, offices, and other businesses leaving their lights, computers, and screens on even during the night. It makes one wonder whether they enjoy paying high electricity bills.
Newsflash: Brains developed over millions of years still outperform computers that have been in development only in the last few centuries. Verdict: Human ingenuity isn't advanced enough to outrun natural evolution (at least not yet), and we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation. Is this a surprise?
Organisations that handle lots of money tend to attract people who look for a job or opportunities for personal gain and have no interest in its original mission. Considering that the founding members will sometime retire or leave, how can a foundation ensure that its original culture and focus on its mission will pass on to all new members within generations? I always regarded this as a disadvantage of formal organisations. I am not saying this specifically for OpenBSD (which I highly respect), but I am just raising a point for discussion.
For me it makes much sense to work on a beach, as it clears my mind and helps me work faster. I'm more productive working outdoors rather than in my home office or other office environment. When I go to the beach, I usually don't go near beaches full of other people and I don't get into the water (just working while breathing clean air and watching crabs walking around me), and I have not had any hardware problems so far (I prefer rocky beaches so sand is not so much a problem, although sometimes the laptops get extremely hot and for this reason I put a small USB fan throwing air on them).
This would lead to further adoption of SATA. I really can't wait to see these bulky ribbon cables coming to extinction. I have no IDE drives personally, even the external ones are SATA. It would be good if the cable was more stable, but even with this issue the thin SATA cables are much better than the huge ribbon parallel beasts.
MS takes a look out in the market every few years to see what's hot, copies it by creating its own competing solution, and tries to achieve a critical mass of users by bundling it into Windows, which is what they did with MSIE and Media Player. Debian and other non-comercial GNU/Linux distributors don't compete with anyone, as most of the software they bundle is created by others. They just package it, fix some bugs, and ensure that the system can work harmoniously as a whole. MS could avoid legal trouble AND do something useful for Windows users by creating a disc set containing Windows, other MS software, plus third-party software such as Navigator or WinAmp. Considering that MS is a money-hungry company, it could ask for a fee from any third-party software maker wishing to include their newest creation in the Windows distribution as an optional component. It could also supply users with an installer to let them choose what to load onto their PCs. If anyone wishing to have their software in the Windows distro paid a fee, MS's profitability would be maintained even if users preferred non-MS apps from the distribution. MS could save on legal costs, help its reputation, and make some alliances in the software market in this and similar ways. Yet, what MS is doing is to compete like a wild dinosaur, trying to kill any new software player in the market, and it's not surprisingly that the industry has taken this to the courts. This is typical behaviour of 800-pound gorilla companies that attempt to use their weight (money) to throw new entrants out of the market instead of using their brain to think of mutually beneficial arrangements and make friends instead of enemies. Such companies usually don't last too long, as everyone with the only exception of their founders/bosses and important shareholders, hate them (most importantly the users, who were the source of their wealth in the first place).
Or, to say it in other words, the average PC user is just too dumb to use GNU/Linux. I'm not sure whether the GNU/Linux community would be the same if hordes of dumb users started using GNU/Linux. Would you really want to be associated with average Windows users? Perhaps it's a blessing for smart users to use an OS that no dumb user can touch.
That said, I don't mean that we shouldn't try to make GNU/Linux more popular. For me the correct approach would be hybrid: Making GNU/Linux a bit easier to use in some respects, and trying to elevate and educate the users at the same time.
For example, most Windows users have no understanding why they should type a password any time they sit on their PC. Rather than allowing them to run GNU/Linux without a password, we ought to educate them about security.
One of the many reasons Windows has failed on the desktop for me *as a user*, putting software freedom issues aside for the sake of emphasising this particular point, is its inability to compete with GNU/Linux in terms of software available just after you install the OS. To see this for yourself, get a Windows XP or Vista disc as distributed to end users and a Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch DVD set as found on the Debian servers. Make a desktop-oriented installation of each on two of your computers, and then try to list every piece of software present in each OS: Windows have calculator, notepad, a command-line ftp client, and not much else; but Debian has everything. Windows give me Paint, but Debian includes the powerful Gimp. As for productivity software, Windows includes WordPad and no spreadsheet, while Debian gives me OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnumeric and AbiWord. Carrying just a set of Debian DVDs around with you is enough to make any computer you come across generally operable and actually useful, while in order to do the same with Windows you need either other discs with the application software or an Internet connection to download it (if free). This is of course not the most important reason to choose GNU/Linux over Windows, but I think it's a reason that every end user would understand easily no matter their experience with PCs. The bundle of OS and applications on the same distribution is a big advantage of GNU/Linux, and a hindsight on Microsoft's part. Of course there are ways to make similar bundles with Windows, but most end users don't have access to such solutions.
It's the same in Greece and other European countries. Dial-up is prohibitively expensive compared to broadband for more than basic useage. Telcos didn't want broadband when it came here because it would lower their income from paying dial-up Internet users, and it did. Night useage of dial-up is cheaper, so when there was no broadband whoever wanted to be online 12-16+ hours a day had to stay awake in the night and sleep during the day. This is also why many Internet users got ISDN: It was faster so you could transmit more data with the same useage charge.
I once paid for on-line access to the full Britannica encyclopedia. I kept it for a while, and then cancelled my subscription. It didn't worth it for me. Perhaps other people would find it useful, but it's simply not for me. When I cancelled my subscription, I specifically told them that free sites like Wikipedia have put them out of competition, and it makes no sense to charge for access to their articles. Not only that, but I would say that for some articles (eg about computing) I would very much prefer Wikipedia or other sources even if the full Britannica was freely accessible, and I'm sorry to have to say this. I am not sure how Britannica makes money nowadays, but I'm afraid their business model is broken in our era. They have to adapt or die.
That said, Wikipedia is not perfect (and I do contribute and sometimes donate nowadays, although I was somewhat more critical in the past), but it's better than many of the alternatives. What could make Wikipedia work better would be a more volunteerist-cooperative ethic among its many members. Perhaps its lack thereof is a result of its publicity: It has become so big that people outside the Internet volunteerist culture have joined and use it for purposes other than creating a good education resource. There is also little coordination between the different language communities. However, the publicity of Wikipedia has made the world of wikis and Internet collaboration (in the open source way) more known to the masses, and this is a significant achievement. Wikipedia is now a good resource and I'd like it to remain as such or become better.
I hear an inventor in the orient recently developed an apparatus named "for loop" which does exactly that. Too bad we can't copy it, since they just filed for a software patent.