[ale] Mindspring and Earthlink merge

[Glenn Stone]

Alex from Mindspring writes:
> We have never offered shell accounts as a product. Netcom had their
> shell product which we kept but are not selling (no new customers).
> 
> IO ( http://www.io.com/ ) offers shell accounts.
> 
> But if you are running *nix at home, why use a shell account? ;)
> (yes, I realize they are nice to have, esp for debugging and porting).

'tis nice to see you're listening.  Far more than I can say for Media None. 

And double points for pointing out a solution for us, even though it doesn't
involve one of your services.  

Why the shell account from the ISP?  Well, one, up until recently, 
I haven't had the patience to set up fetchmail (and its requisite 
sendmail backend) in order to get mail on my computer at home.  
For two, I like keeping mail *on* the ISP so when I go to Timbuktu,
I can dial in and get it without having to download it somewhere
and thus leave it behind.  (This will become a moot point with DSL
and a 24x7 connection, but...)  Most ISP's don't run IMAP, and 
they also get upset if you pile up mail on the POP server.  If 
you have a shell account, your mail simply becomes part of your 
disk quota, and they don't get upset.  Three, sending and getting
mail is a lot faster when you don't have to upload/download everything
before getting to see it.  Four (and this assumes you're a command 
line weenie like me instead of a graphics nerd like some folks) 
when the machine you're downloading to is two copper segments from
an ATM backbone, downloads are a LOT faster :)  Five, the 
shell box everyone is sharing is usually a big honking machine,
and at four am, the latest version of Emacs builds in five minutes. :)
And lastly, if the shell box just *so happens* to be a bigger version
of what you're dialing into it with (quad Xeon running Mandrake 6.1 :) :)
you can build the latest Honking Huge Software Project on the bigga boxa, 
make yourself an RPM of it (you do know how to use RPM_BUILD_ROOT, don't
you? :) (no, I'm kidding on that one), suck down *just what you need* over
the wheezing 28.8-if-you're-lucky bitstraw, and play 'til your fingers
bleed without waiting five days for the download.  

Oh, one other reason for using the ISP shell account.  Let's say your MIS
manager won't reverse resolve your internal network addresses.  (Or your
ISP's dialup PPP ports.)  Leading bleeding edge software appears that fixes
the bug you've been pounding your head against for a week.  Closest mirror
is someplace like ftp.cc.gatech.edu, which REQUIRES reverse lookup before
even opening port "ftp".  Simple.  Telnet to shell account, which does
resolve, grab software, suck back to local box when done.  Takes a bit 
more time, but easier than not getting it at all....

My two bits'
Glenn