OpenNMS offers excellent training and support. My company flew Tarus down to Autralia for a week where he implemented OpenNMS across our four sites in the first day, then spent four days with myself and a colleague training us on its features. The price, including business class flight from America (it's a lonnnng flight and we wanted him semi-conscious on arrival) was absolutely trivial when compared against just the licensing costs of a comparable proprietary product such as HP OpenView. Highly recommended.

Australia was first with mandatory helmet laws for cyclists. Now Australia's experience with that is cited as good reason not to introduce the same in other countries. So, it may be good for the rest of the world. Probably not.

I do believe usenet is about to "grow up" the way the web did. Except newsgroups are useless to businesses for anything except support forums, so how this is going to affect things in the future remains to be seen.

One of the biggest problems in business is the use of email. People get brought on board a project where all the communication has been done by email. If the project members used a collaborative medium such as Usenet to communicate, new parties to the project have full access to the history of what's gone before.