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The gentleman's name is Shawn Crosby. His wife, Colleen, is very hot looking. They make costumes as hobbies, winning several awards at conventions. Not to mention they are both huge Star Wars fans. Her website is here. It's already down under the load, but bookmark it for future reference.

They (and I) are also members of LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society). And I bet more than a few of them read Slashdot

Opera 7 has a "Nostalgia" mode which tries to imagine what a C64 Web browser might look like. Screenshot (6KB PNG) It looks a lot like the Contiki browser, funnily enough.

Heaven forbid companies actually make enough on their software to stay in business.

If software companies can't figure out a business model that doesn't involve stuffing banner ads down my throat every time I use their software then they can go out of business yesterday. This would save me the trouble of having to try to estimate the threat rating of every piece of "free" (as in beer) Windows software I enounter on the internet before downloading it. Maybe you enjoy shitting yourself but AFAIC, free beer is worthless when it's laced with laxative.

I think if you closely examined it you would be suprised to find out how much some of this "harmless" adware you're so eager to hair-split into legitimacy actually transmits back to the mothership. The ads may look like standard web banner ads but I've found cookies with my name (culled from the registry) and similar information that web sites can't obtain.

I don't care if it's spyware, adware, mangleware or assrapeware. It's not welcome on my computer and it will be removed, bypassed or otherwise nullified. Should all the companies in the world that make free Windows software go out of business as a result of me not being exposed to enough casino ads or get rich quick schemes that's even better because it will give people (including myself) that much more incentive to switch to a truly free operating system such as linux.

So you see, Mr. WanderingHermit: Any way you slice it I win.

I use gnutella and spyware-free grokster. I really want gnutella to succeed, but it just isn't up to snuff yet. It's tolerable for small files, but if I want to transfer anything more than a couple hundred megabytes, it just isn't as good. I despise the spyware that comes with the fast-track network, but they simply do have a superior network. (And I'm not a good enough programmer to contribute to the gnutella code)

I haven't fully checked it out, but I just installed it and it seems to work as promised. I'm due for a re-format anyway. (It's been over 8 months) ;)

If the previously installed software still works, great! If not, uninstall it.

Not that I believe any /.-er worth his or her salt would need step-by-step instructions, but go HERE for a tutorial on installing Grokster sans spyware. I'm told the same procedure works for KaZaA but I haven't tried it.

You know the answer. The only thing Morpheus "value added" to the standard fast track client was their revenue model of displaying advertisements. The main reason for using it, of course, was the "value not-added": spyware. The rest of the client was apparently untouched.

I've done some playing around with some Gnutella clients (including the relabeled Gnucleus that calls itself Morpheus) over the past couple of days. Beyond scalability, one other point in FastTrack's factor is that the protocol allows for a sizable amount of metadata to be sent along with the search results. That way, I can (for instance) tell if an MP3 is encoded at a reasonable bitrate or I can determine the resolution and (if applicable) codecs used by an MPEG or AVI file. This helps FT's usability immensely, and Gnutella would be wise to add something similar.

I also tried out Grokster, but uninstalled it when it quit working after I had let Ad-aware wipe out the spyware components. Grokster punts if it doesn't find a Cydoor DLL to run. This page tells you how to install Grokster sans spyware; in addition to cleaning with Ad-aware and one other program, it has you install a dummy Cydoor DLL.

Find out how here!!!

For the many people (myself included) who are now looking for a different FastTrack client check out this execellent page on how to install Grokster without spyware.