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ZDNet Discontinues AppWatch
Adam J. Richter writes: "Citing "today's economic climate", ZDNet has discontinued AppWatch.com, a software release tracking site similar to freshmeat.net, but covering only free software (usually GPL compatible) and having an automated update detector, making it very current with low noise. AppWatch was originally an independent site created by developer John D. Rowell. Before anyone flames ZDNet, consider that it may be that even a 100% share of ad revenues would not have been sufficient to retain John and his staff in comparison to other opportunities. John and an assistant were originally working on AppWatch for free, and ZDNet did a good thing by arranging so that they could get paid for it, probably saving the site at the time. Both parties were doing something positive, and the fact that they had to stop does not mean that they have done something negative. I, for one, hope to see AppWatch.com continued in one form or another."
When I was about 25 years old, I was invited to spend a couple
of weeks at the farm of a friend of the family. Work was becoming a
drag at that time, and it looked like a good way to get away from
the grind for a while. I had been living in an apartment attached to
my parents place at that time, and had no opportunities to get involved
in my favorite pasttime except with the occasional neighborhood dog.
The trip looked like a good opportunity to try out some farm species.
I arrived at the Nebraska farm at the end of June. I had never met
the people before, but my folks had known them for many years. They had
two kids: Clare was 19, and a little homely looking, and John was 20.
He was handsome and trim. Both were in college in Nebraska and staying
at home during the semester break. They eyed me with some suspicion
when I pulled up in the drive, got out and introduced myself to the family.
They took me on a tour of the place, which was over two hundred acres,
and I soon found out what a gold mine this place was to be for an animal
loving person such as myself. They had a male and several females of many
animals: goats, sheep, horses... the works. I had to curb my enthusiasm
and wait for the golden opportunity.
For the first week, I helped out on the farm with the normal
chores. The two kids kept an eye on me for a while, but soon accepted me
as a fixture around the place, and we became good friends. I was going to
bed horny every night,and I found that jerking off was not doing the job...
I needed an animal!
After the first week, I had the complete run of the place and was
trusted by the family. Then during that week, while I was working in the
barn, the father appeared and told me he was taking the family into
Hastings for the day, and for me to hold down the fort. They would not
be back before dark. I told them they could rely on me, and inwardly
thought, now is the time. My two weeks was getting close to being over,
and I was going to have to return home soon. A little later I heard
their car drive away from the farm. I went out and checked around and
sure enough I was alone.
I couldn't decide what animal to try first. I finally settled on
the goats. I had never tried one before, but they looked very sexy and
every day I would see the nannies with their tails straight up walking
around. I went out to the goat area and selected two nice does. One was
a solid gray, and the other a white one with big dark spots. They were
in excellent condition and very clean and most important of all, they
were in heat. I could tell from the swollen, dripping cunts. I took
them in the barn. I found some milking stands in the barn, and I put
the spotted one on stand so she would be high enough for me to reach
and tied the other one next to her. Then I went back for the billy.
The billy goat was a beautiful solid black Nubian. He was about five
years old and had done a lot of breeding. He was well muscled and had a
pair of large nuts. A really handsome beast! I led him to the door of the
barn and he came to attention when he saw the two nannies. I stood there
for a moment and let him call to the nannies, who answered him with quiet
bleats. Once he settled down a little, I went to my knees and started
petting him, then running my hand down his back legs to his balls. As
soon as I touched them, my own cock started to stir.
Since I was alone, I took off my pants and shorts, leaving only my T-shirt
on, then went back to play with those hot nuts. I reached under him with
my other hand and started stroking his sheath. It didn't take him long
to erect, probably because of the nearby nannies. I wanted to suck him
off, but decided to save that for later. For today, I had planned for
the two of us to fuck the nannies side by side. I led him up to the gray
goat and let him sniff her. She immediately squatted and sent a stream of
hot piss right on his nose. I had an enormous boner by then, so we just
let nature take her course.
The billy mounted up and I helped him get in her. I watched closely,
fascinated by the sight of the billy's cock pistoning in and out of the
doe's swollen cunt. After a minute, I stood up and sunk my cock into the
spotted goat on the stand. Because of the stand, I was directly in line
with her cunt. I put my arm over the billy's back and we started fucking
in unison. The billy beat me to an orgasm, and just as he came he lost
his footing and his cock came out squirting. He pumped three or four
squirts all over the goat's genitals, then dismounted and walked away.
I looked down and studied the gray goat's pussy. It was soaking wet with
her juices and piss, and the goat's thick bestial sperm was all over her
asshole and pussy, with some dripping from inside. That was more than I
could take.
I pulled out of the spotted goat and sat on the barn floor behind
the gray goat, and glued my mouth to her slimy cunt. I tounged vigorously
for a couple of minutes, savoring the taste of the billy's sperm and the
other juices. I then realized that I needed to come myself. I had to
squat to reach her, but I was not to be denied sloppy seconds from a
billy goat! I was so excited by this new experience that it didn't
take me long to come. I grabbed her hips and screamed as my cock pumped
my load deep inside her. After that I was exhausted, and totally drained.
The only thing I could do was slip off her and settle to the barn floor
behind her. That's when I heard a sound at the door.
I looked over and saw the family's two kids standing in the
doorway. John had his cock out of his pants and was slowly playing with it.
I was shocked and couldn't do anything but stare at them.
Clare was first to say something. "That was beautiful," she said.
"I just knew you were a seasoned animal lover when I met you."
"How long have you been there?" I asked, thinking that a long kept
secret had just been discovered.
"Since you started," John said.
"I thought you went into town."
"We decided to stay here at the last minute."
"Are you going to tell what you saw?"
"Shit, no!" John responded, "We were hoping you we into animals, so
we could all have some fun together this summer." They were both shucking
their clothes. "I really enjoyed watching you eat out that goat. Have you ever
eaten out a mare in heat? They're really great!"
"Enough talk," Clare said, "Let's have some fun." She grasped John's
cock and stroked it a couple of times. "You're leaking,"she observed,
"You better get plugged into one of those beasts before you shoot all
over the floor. And you," she looked at me, "if you are going to have
sex with animals, you should be naked like they are. Take off the T-shirt.
I'll go see if the billy has any strength left."
I was still shocked and just sat where I was and watched. Clare went
to where the billy was standing. He had found some hay and was quietly
munching. Clare sat on the floor behind him and started playing with his
balls. Her other hand was stroking her pussy. John stepped up to the
spotted goat, and with one stroke sunk his cock in to the balls. He
grunted his approval of her. "Damn, she's nice," he said to no one in
particular. Then he pulled his cock back slowly and just teased her
cunt with the head before sinking it back in and then repeating the
process. The goat was standing with legs spread and not moving an inch,
loving every stroke. I was only inches away and could tell that John
was obviously showing off for me. I was starting to get hard again
watching this. John then reached down, stuck two fingers in the gray
goat's cunt, and scooped out some of the mixture. Then while staring
me right in the eye, he slowly licked his fingers clean.
"You better get your tongue up her cunt before all that wonderful
juice goes to waste," he said. "You should always clean up your animal
after a fuck." I was feeling more comfortable now and I no longer feared
exposure, but I had never had animal sex in front of anyone before, so I
was still reluctant, even though I had a full fledged boner. "Come on,
buddy, eat her out," John teased, "I'll hold her tail for you."
I looked over to see what Clare was doing. She was still stroking
the billy's balls, but now had put her head under his tail and was noisily
licking his asshole. I looked back at John and he smiled and shrugged.
"What can I say, she's my sister." I decided then, what the hell.
They had already seen me doing everything with the animals. Being
watched on purpose was another new experience, one that I did not want
to miss.
I smiled back, took off my T-shirt, and moved to the waiting goat.
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
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t| `. | | : t
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g \ \
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a \ . C ) _ ((> | / a
t
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e | ( C__)\__/
x | \ | \\__// (/ | x
* | \ \) `---- --' | *
g | \ \ / / | g
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t | / / | | \ |t
s | / / \/\/ | |s
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x | | | | | |x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
There are dozens of these sites. VersionTracker.Com is one of my favorites, since it covers all of the major operating systems and lets you formulate your own queries.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
More please!
that michael would never do something like that.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted
Nice story, where do you get these from?
Dear Provider,
Thanks for submitting your product or service to be listed in the Webware.com directory. However, Webware.com will cease publication on August 31, 2001, so we are unable to list your product at this time.
If you have a downloadable version of your product, please submit it to Download.com.
The Webware.com team
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
What do you need in AppWatch that Freshmeat didn't provide? Being that AppWatch, specializing in listing free software, is providing a subset of what Freshmeat lists, couldn't Freshmeat just provide a filter for searches based on licensing that would just give you the same functionality? They already keep track of license types, and this type of filterng is available in the advanced version of the simple search they now have on their home page when you register.
Freshmeat always seems timely and deals in all the apps I use, even some really minor ones that I don't think I'd ever use. Always used them, so here's hoping they don't suffer the same demise. I see a long painful road of this ahead of us and the few willing to starve a little for their cause are going to make it to the end.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
dd if=./foo.bar of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
doesn't work!
The site is www.distrowatch.com. Not nearly as comprehensive as (now defunct) Appwatch, but growing and will hopefully be useful for people who used to frequent Appwatch. I relied on Appwatch for a lot of information, but now that I am on my own, I will do my best to keep www.distrowatch.com up to date. Feedback is welcome.
When a project is discontinued, there's only one right thing to do: Release the source. This way others can pick up where you left. Maybe others have the time and the energy to take over what you couldn't afford to continue. The problem with commercial investments in spare time projects is that source code immediately becomes valuable and is less likely to be disclosed.
If we can't do anything about the death of AppWatch, we can consider petitioning versiontracker.com for a Linux section. They already have Mac, Mac OS X, and Windows.... Linux would be a natural evolution....
AppWatch is like Google for finding free software; the search results are usually very accurate to what is intended.
Freshmeat is more like AltaVista, there's a ton of stuff, but the search results are not pertinent.
I hope AppWatch can continue operating without ZD or they will me missed.
ayottesoftware.com
Free Software works by personnal contribution, the more people that contribute, the more software and services are available FOR FREE and FOR EVERYONE (including those who are investing time and/or money).
We can continue with the fact that the more software and services are available, the more people will adopt free software solutions as they are most likely to find what they are looking for.
And to complete the cycle, the more people have adopted free software, the more people will contribute. Some may contribute because they feel in debt toward the Free Software community, other would program anyway and, as they are in the free software environment, they contribute in free software (think of great sharewares/freewares that existed like pkzip, rar, winamp,...). And other may be just caught by the game, beginning by adding a feature they needed and contributing it back to end by being a major contributor on the project.
So, enterprises who are investing in free software are investing in tools that they may be already using (Apache for example) or that they will find later and for which they won't have to pay license fees (and thus, they'll have to spend less money on software... They don't win money, they just allow a way to not spend it to be possible.
We already have freshmeat? Did appwatch not cover GNU software maybe?? I guess that's why it's dead now... Thank god freshmeat is still around!
Linux Rulez!!!!!!!!!!!
yessir buddy, let's all be gooed corepirate "friends", while we eXPerience corepirate fud0cide. only trouble with that, is that j. public (who cares about him?) will remain immersed in PayPer LieSense fudlicking (therebuy sponsoring even more fud0cide). you guys built a beautiful 'net, now you're going to let some corepirate schmucks fence IT off? can't be helped? or is IT, nobody (save a few) really gives a fud? what's going to happen when VA/./*/*/*/*/$, goes under? Couldn't happen here, unless somebody kneads money, write? SHEESH!@#$%. YUK. have you seen these guise?
...who were on Slashdot just a few months ago, if you recall, and who appear to be trying to solve more or less the same problem as these people - they presumably have the framework available to collect enough data to solve this (I'd say they already have solved this, but of course they haven't because there is so little software actually listed in their system so far)...
After reading the notice regarding the discontinuation of AppWatch, I clicked on the link for their "Linux Update" site... only to see a big banner ad by Verio imploring me to "harness the power of Windows 2000 web hosting". Yup, that's good targeted advertising there, ZD...
I've played with this idea but don't have the time to implement it properly. The basic premise is that people releasing free software usually have some web/ftp space that they control. It then becomes trivial for them to publish a file that lists their projects, the current version(s), and the URLs to the actual files.
Then, a user who's interested in my stuff would only need to add my update URL to their client, and it would poll my web server periodically to see if anything has been updated. A savvy client would poll ALL of them once in awhile to see if any of their local programs have changed.
Imagine being able to check on the latest versions of things like sendmail, squid, procmail, wu-ftpd, openssh, openssl, and so forth, all done on YOUR machine. Now that would be interesting.
Maybe this already exists. If so, point me at it and I'll start publishing my version information that way.
By the way, snobby users of distributions that are package-laden: some of us build from source EVERY TIME. Sure, we use packages, but they're OUR packages, custom built for our dozens of machines. Thank you, drive through.
I've never even heard of this site/service, and I'm on ZDNet constantly. More stupidity...they apparently don't market it or they ruined it to the point where it's not worth mentioning. Maybe they need to look within to find out why it's not doing well.
John and an assistant were originally working on AppWatch for free,
So now they go back to their roots, without getting paid. Or what?
Wow, do I feel silly. This is the first time I've heard of it. (And I was on the net before the age of webbrowsers.) Ah well, can't miss what never existed to me.
But wouldn't these "gems" have a better chance of existing if someone would take the trouble to promote them???
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
It only makes sense. Watch them FBI agents cry for more money once free software is delivered in an encyprted enviornment, LOL..
I was just getting ready to post about it. I love VT. It's been my default page now since at least '97. It's a great site. I haven't used the Windows side of it since I am a Mac guy (does the nick give it away) so I can't comment on it much. If it's as complete as the Mac site, it's well worth a look. Freshmeat.net will always be my *nix site but VT is my Mac site.
Warning: shameless plug, but very helpful.
We're working on it: http://sf.net/projects/trovesendtwo/ And we could use some help if you're JAPH...
All this needless effort can be avoided. On the author/maintainer side a client app should be able to update these product directories, check for diffs in listings, and save the author/maintainers a lot of work and track the history of the product changes. If a directory itself disappears the data is NOT lost. Just upload it all to the next one. And the next one. And the next one. The directory people can now go about promoting their site (and your products).
The problem with sites like this one are the amount of work created for everyone, code authors/project maintainers & the directory people. And thus they die or burnout. And now all the work is lost?? The site is now just a press release. It's a shame.
One side benefit, to the people you are trying to reach with your products, is that you can disseminate your product info to as many directories/sites with no more effort than updating once and letting the client-app do all the work of updating those sites you choose to list your product at.
...and try contacting them and asking them to cover Linux as well.
/.).
VT is a great site, it should be at the top of any support tech's bookmark list, the first web site you check in the morning with your Coke (or coffee), and the site you re-check most often through the day (well, maybe behind
I'll happily look at a few banner ads in exchange for a quickly-found, direct download link to that crucial update from some company that I need for their product. It's a lot easier than digging down through that company's often-poorly-designed web site to find that same update.
~Philly
For me Appwatch repaced my regular Freshmeat viewings.
To say that Appwatch provided a _subset_ of Freshmeat's listings is like saying that a needle is a subset of a haystack.
Freshmeat reports too much junk...every half-baked, one-off-releases, "Hello, World!" script written in Eiffel gets listed there. Too much crap to sort thru.
Appwatch reported actively worked on projects, and the most important GNU tools that form the basis of Linux and other OSes. (i.e. GCC, binutils, glibc, the fetish utils, e2fsprogs, libtool/automake/autoconf, sed, gawk, bison, flex, bash, m4, perl, python, various X terms, nasm, gtk, etc.) And you knew when the releases came within hours.
Gee, I hope they can continue -- the deja->google
transfer chopped off my right arm, Appwatch going would surely take the left.
I like FileFlash for Windows applications. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I just heard some sad news on TV, apparently Slashdot website creator, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after having his penis sliced off. Authorities say the accident involved Rob's penis, his computer, and an illegal computer device imported from China that was designed to stimulate the penis during cyber-sex. The authorities aren't releasing many details yet as to how it happened, but they suspect that the device malfunctioned which caused his penis to be sliced off. However, there is speculation among the Slashdot community that the Open Source Operating System "Linux" is to blame, for its faulty structure and lack of professional development. There is no word of whether there was any foul-play involved from hackers amongst the Linux community.
BTW, I remember when we announced the launch of AppWatch on several sites and the only to reject it was... Slashdot. We talked with Hemos by e-mail and his excuse was that there were ~100 submissions like ours by day. But now I can thank you for ignoring our announcement. You know the story.
How to contact me - http://www.pervalidus.net/contact.html
>other opportunities. John and an assistant were originally working on
>AppWatch for free, and ZDNet did a good thing by arranging so that
>they could get paid for it, probably saving the site at the time. Both
>parties were doing something positive, and the fact that they had to
>stop does not mean that they have done something negative. I, for one,
>hope to see AppWatch.com continued in one form or another."
ZDNet basically thought they could gain credibility within the Linux,BSD
and Unix world by using AppWatch as sort of a gateway to their lame
feature articles and such. Pretty much didn't work. Can anyone recall
their idiotic "security challenges" without laughing for instance?
Do you know anyone within the Linux,BSD or Unix community who still
doesn't view ZDNet as basically being a huge joke when it come to dealing
with the issues of the non-Microsoft world?