The information war. Strip down for the long-haul. My first attempt to get ppp running in 1995 took me two weeks and something like 85 hours. In April of this year, I replaced my RedHat 4.2 installations with Red Hat 5.2 at home. Because I now knew the procedure, it took a total of perhaps three minutes.
Modems are a pox on the community.
Thanks to USRobotics needing to cut costs to remain competitive, we now have to put up with winmodems. At this point, Linux PCI support is less than perfect. It's getting better, but there are still only something like five PCI modems that work in Linux. Thanks to Rob Clark, we at least can find out if a specific modem will work.