My experience with SBC Yahoo Dial is awful. They overbilled by mom's account by over $1,000 in two months time. For some reason, they had her local number she was dialing (and had been using for over a year) as a “roaming” call. Hmmmmmmm. After 30 minutes on the phone, they finally said, “Oops!” and credited the account. So much for the value of outsourcing. – andy

Yahoo Dial, Full ISP Services. “SBC Prodigy Internet Services is being taken over by a new provider, SBC Yahoo Dial.” [WebmasterWorld] [dws.]

235,000 Software Engineers Can't Be Wrong, Right? [Slashdot]

OpenOffice beta for Mac OS X available: “The first Mac OS X version cut of the Open Source office suite, OpenOffice, has emerged blinking into the daylight. It's being officially announced at OSDCON today.

This new version, 1.0, is a new branch, with a “boatload” of Mac-specific patches, that adds up to a 147MB download. But it prints and saves, so there's been much progress since a very rough cut appeared early this year. From the screenshots the font rendering looks no worse than running Microsoft Office v.X pre-10.1.5 (which added support for font smoothing).

The project home page is here, and there's a roadmap here. This runs under the XFree86 X server, but a native Quartz version is one of the project's goals.” [NewsForge]

[GranneWeb] [dws.]

Patrick Hurley, my colleague here, just started up a Radio blog from his Mac, and noticed the pages loaded really slowly. This note from UserLand explains the problem — it's an IE and Mac thing. Worth reading if you're blogging from an older Mac. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]