My Dad just got a G5!

So I get this e-mail from my Dad late last night:

Chris,

After an absence of six months (at least) I'm back online. I kept following your advice and waited for the next (cool) operating system. I bought a G 5 with Panther 10.3.3. 80 gigs of memory, photoshop, illustrator, and a broadband link to the web. Jesus.....what a system. Anyway, WHAT's NEW ????!!!!

Love, Dad

He used to be on dial-up on an old G3 running an old version of Mac OS ... 8.x. His browser was netscape 4.x. He eventually got frustrated with his online experience and cancelled his dial-up account, *sigh*.

But now he's back with a vengeance on a G5 with a DSL connection! The first thing I did was to create an AIM account for him, and e-mailed him his screen name and password, along with instructions on how to set-up iChat. He lives in Paris, France. I live in Southern California. iChat AV sessions would be a boon. He apparently got it set-up, here's the reply i just got from him, most likely before he went to bed:

Mission accomplished......you're number one on my list of one......Talk to you in the morning.....

... heh ... Dad, a Man of few, impactful words.

So I'm hoping for some late night audio and, if I'm bold, even one-way video conferencing over iChat tonight (I carry the iSight around with the AlBook)

I've had my Mom on AIM for a while now, but she's still on "Jaguar", so she's only got the older version of iChat, so no AV goodness just yet. She could still buy iChat AV standalone, but it ain't worth the hassle quite yet. She's been on broadband for a while though.

Both my parents now use free.fr as their ISP. Most french ISPs i've seen offer far more competitive broadband packages than U.S. counterparts, especially when it comes to DSL upstream speeds. I think both my parents have 256K upstream, maybe 512K, for probably $10 less than what we pay here for the usual 1.5Mbps/128K. Free.fr started out as a free dial-up provider, keeping their costs low by offering compelling revenue-generating services leveraging cheap, commodity hardware and open-source, free software. They've created a faithful user base which they've been up-selling to their broadband offering.