Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 02:05:56 -0400 From: "Brett G. Castleberry" <bcc9746@garnet.acns.fsu.edu> To: "Sue Blake" <sue@welearn.com.au>, "rick hamell" <hamellr@dsinw.com> Cc: <otter@tig.com.au>, <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Very basic questions... Message-ID: <004201be9aab$2bf7d560$af23c992@s1o3q0> References: <3.0.5.32.19990510111738.007b0150@pop.tig.com.au> <Pine.BSF.3.91.990509183540.9185M-100000@dsinw.com> <19990510124727.42190@welearn.com.au>
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No, I don't think we realize how it is outside the US. I don't pay anything
for internet access. As a graduate student at a state university I have
unlimited access, and if I were to quit school, my account with Tallahassee
Freenet gives me the same. I never thought I would be glad that our
government is the errand boy of Corporate America, but in this case, I am.
There is a spurious message going around here that the phone companies are
going to charge long distance rates for internet access. The chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission has actually posted an explicit denial
at the FCC site. For the corporations, this would amount to "restraint of
trade." Governments need to realize that phone lines are like public
highways. More wealth will be created by making them inexpensive to use
than by putting a meter on them.
FreeBSD. As a really new newbie, I was glad to find a site just for us.
But as a newbie, most of what I have to say is questions. Sometimes I want
to know about something and I think, "It's a question, so I ought to post it
to 'questions', but I 'll sound like an idiot there. And I can't post it to
'newbies' because they don't want questions."
Here at the Florida State University School of Information Studies, our
server runs on FreeBSD, but no one that I know of has it on his or her PC.
They run mostly Red Hat, with Slackware as runner-up. "FreeBSD is ugly,"
said one Red Hat user to me. But I have gathered that FreeBSD can be set up
with gnome or KDE too, if one wants. I want to learn command-line unix, so
I don't much care about nice GUIs at the moment. I find the dark screen
with glowing type to be very soothing. At this point I don't have much more
to add. I've got my FreeBSD 3.1 CD. I've got the book. I've got the
victim (a used 486 with an AMD 80mhz cpu, 20mb RAM, 850mb hd.) It's time to
"see the elephant." I'll let you all know how it goes.
Cheers,
Brett Castleberry
bcc9746@garnet.acns.fsu.edu
----- Original Message -----
From: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au>
To: rick hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com>
Cc: <otter@tig.com.au>; <freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG>
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 1999 10:47 PM
Subject: Re: Very basic questions...
> On Sun, May 09, 1999 at 06:48:20PM -0700, rick hamell wrote:
> >
> > You might want to be looking into another ISP then....:)
>
> Whoah! That's pretty much the way of things here in Australia. People
> in the USA can't imagine what it's like for the average Internet user
> in other countries. Most commonly we pay so-much a month, say $30-$50,
> and for that you get ten, twenty, or some other fixed number of hours
> per month. If you go over your time allocation, they impose really
> heavy hourly charges for excess time. A few of us have a different
> arrangement, where we don't pay for online time, just for each megabyte
> received by our system. Or you can get casual access at some places for
> around $10-$12 per hour. All local phone calls are charged in Australia
> too, while most of our continent's land mass would be a long distance
> call to the nearest ISP.
>
> So there's no way someone totally naive is going to waste time
> fossicking through the www.freebsd.org web site without some idea of
> what they're looking for and how to get there quickly, and the
> motivation to do so. A few pointers here would help a lot in this
> situation. Searching the mailing list archives is good if you know
> exactly what you're looking for and have good searching skills, but
> it's hell-on-a-stick if you're watching the clock. In these
> circumstances, asking on this list and/or the newsgroup for initial
> orientation is sensible. It demonstrates someone taking the initiative
> to solve a problem, one of the main determinants of future success with
> FreeBSD.
>
>
> BTW, I'm surprised that nobody has recommended our own Newbies page. It
> is supposed to serve exactly this function: to show totally lost
> newbies what newbie-relevant online resources they should access first.
> Since no newbie has ever complained or suggested a single change to the
> page, you must all be blissfully happy with it.
>
> The easiest way to get there is to go to www.freebsd.org (it works fine
> without images too) and look for the Newbies link under the
> Documentation subheading at the left. That left hand panel, and the
> newbies page, will lead you to just about everything you'd be looking
> for.
>
>
> But there's no substitute for one newbie giving another newbie some
> words of personal experience and encouragement. I'm not talking here
> about how-to, but about how-it-feels. A lot of us have come into this
> from a Microsoft background and once wondered if it could just possibly
> be within our ability to grasp some of this unix stuff one day. This
> leads to questions which do not have technical answers but people
> answers, and the right people to answer them are other newbies.
>
>
>
> --
>
> Regards,
> -*Sue*-
> (`
> ()
> '` <-- a +3 uncursed budgerigar named Einstein
>
>
>
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