That would be a beautiful solution. Reading the responses to my post I've seen the following:
People that agreed: In one form or another. I'm not saying all Linux should be vanilla user-friendly, completely GUI crap. Some people understood what I was saying.
People that disagree: Fine with me if you disagree. Some of the people that disagreed made great points (that I still don't necessarily belive but good points all the same).
People that didn't read it: Or just didn't follow it. I'm not saying Linux is bad. I'm not saying that Linux should kowtow to the masses. I'm saying, if you want mass-market acceptability (which it would seem is desired) you HAVE to make it useable by the public that ISN'T an IT professional. These are the one's I'd like to address.
I realize that the creators of Linux "stuff" should be proud of themselves. I don't, however, feel that it's the developers that are the issue. It's those members of the Linux community that are simply users that are entirely too elitist that are the issue.
The same people that complain "Why can't we get ported to Linux?" or "Why isn't supported under Linux?" or "Why doesn't get off their dead asses and make Linux drivers for ?" are the people that don't like the concept of making Linux something that can be brought to the public.
I use Linux off and on, mostly to play with different releases, etc, and generally pay in full simply to expedite what I want to see happen. I want to see a product that I could recommend to a computer novice as easily as a fellow IT professional. Something where they don't *HAVE* to do everything from the CLI. Something where the GUI configuration utilities are easily followed by a non-technician. Something easier to utilize.
Companies will continue to not support Linux while it's still too difficult for the common person to use. They will still fail to support Linux while it's audience is a select few that wish to spend a great deal of their time learning more about the OS and computers in general.
won't be the ones reading. They'll be the ones skimming and then flaming.
What kills me about the Linux movement is this: It is composed apparently entirely of people that have never been USERS in their lives. They've never dealt with something that they just don't have the time or ambition to learn. They've never dealt with something that is unnecessarily difficult.
These people make statements like "Lets not dumb it down THAT far..." about porting AOL to Linux. Linux advocates seem to have forgotten that putting the software that people want on their PC isn't 'dumbing' anything down, it's called customer service. I like Linux. I wish it could gain the market share and market approval necessary to start getting the software development that we need for it to prosper.
Right now, Linux has no place on the desktop in my company. There are limited places where you could put Linux on the desktop and make it work. Why is this? Because the 'elite Linux gurus' want Linux to remain as-is. A club that only people with the computer and programming know-how can join. An exclusive club from which they can look down upon the [L]users that DARE to ask for user friendly software and configuration tools.
Next month and the following, as all of the geeks that have to fill out a tax form more complicated than the EZ, I want you to take a look at who you're paying to do your taxes. If you're doing them solo, take a look at the time wasted and the frustration involved in this seemingly simple task. Why is this? Because the IRS feels about the tax codes like you do about the code behind Linux. Job security through obscurity?
Well, it's a good thing I don't collect karma, because I am confident this is going down in "flames"...hell, you simply can't call Linux advocates elitist or snobbish and be expected to get away with it, eh?
Personally, I don't understand the draw for the fighting game genre, they seem to be, at best, a slight diversion, but I just don't get it. Now RPGs, that's some enjoyment. I'd still rather pull my own toenails than play any FF game aside from tactics. FF is to RPGs what Microsoft is to operating systems. Yeah it's the most well known one, and yeah it's the most prevalent, but it's a shining example of the worst possible way of doing things. -Jer
As someone that's been trial testing and beta-reviewing Win2k for quite some time now, I can tell you that the following is true:
Win2k is bloated. Was there any doubt?
Win2k is not significantly more stable running SOLO on a small home LAN with nothing special on it than WinNT, and we all know how stable that is.
Win2k is buggy (as evidenced by it's lack of stability). I found the '65k+ bugs' article to be amusing, and likely dead on.
Win2k beta 2 shipped with the standard shrink-wrapped license...one of the most ridiculous pieces of legal fiction since OJ Simpson said "I'm Innocent".
All in all, the coverage of Win2k here is far from balanced or unbiased, but it's also not too distant from the truth. Would you expect anything less? There is a distinct Anti-MS flavor to this site, just as there is an obvious Pro-MS flavor to many other sites. Most of us learn to seperate the wheat from the chaff and make informed decisions on our own.
NC 4.7 was about as buggy as I've ever seen. It crashes at the drop of a hat, and I find myself on the Netscape knowledgebase as often as not when using the browser. IE 5.0 wasn't nearly so bad off, there were some initial bugs, but it was basically more stable.
IE panders to the ISPs and companies that wish to release mildly customized versions to end-users. Netscape, for the most part, doesn't.
M$ found nice ways to integrate IE into EVERYTHING. I found it rather annoying when I installed Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise that it noticed that I didn't have an IE installation on my PC and went right ahead and installed it. More annoying, when I uninstalled IE, VB stopped working. (Anti-trust suit anyone?). This is the case with a LOT of things. If you are going to try to develop using the MMC, you won't be using Netscape or any non-IE browser for the task, even though you can run the MMC w/out IE.
The first and third points are probably the biggest issues facing Netscape. They have complete control over the former, and the latter might be being taken care of as we speak. At any rate, I look forward to Mozilla being made fit for human consumption soon.
It's still too expensive for me though. It was far cheaper to cleanly cat-5 cable each room in my house (except the bathroom, that just seemed wrong) with wall jack terminations and to buy a few *LONG* jumpers in the even I want to surf from the back or front deck. I'm pulling 10meg/s and having none of the problems with interference that I experienced with earlier generation wireless.
I'm glad that they seem to have gotten past all of those earlier issues though. When testing some wireless solutions, things like being in the kitchen when the microwave was on or even too much ambient noise in the room would interrupt my connection.
If they can just make the price a bit more comparable to wiring your house and buying standard NICs, it'll become the solution for me.
but with more money. Just a little bit of research show that @Stake and L0pht were both doing many of the same things, the only difference being that @Stake was turning a profit. I'm very pleased that this profit will now, in part, be used to help the L0pht fellows do what they do even better. As long as their still going to be getting plowed and whooping it up at the cons, that's all that matters!
Chinese news sources from releasing their 'private information' to non-Chinese news sites? I am not sure I understand what this is meant to accomplish exactly. Is there someone here that has a better grasp on the politics of this that could explain the ultimate goal of this seemingly futile gesture?
"By all means, play around with GUI configurators, but learn what they actually configure and where. Look at the config files. Learn to configure these things with vi and you'll go a long way towards a wider world."
I think it's important to note, however, that delving deeper into the OS itself is something that should be left up to the end user. If they simply want a stable, fast, strong OS, they should be able to get one without a CS degree. Yes, many of us are fine with using the config files, but those of us that do that would do it whether or NOT there was a GUI config tool.
We need the GUI tool for the people that are stuck in WinOS because, at least they can figure out how to make the often necessary mild config changes with an intuitive GUI interface. We don't need it for those that are 'in the know', we need it for those that don't even wish to be 'in the know', the AVERAGE user.
This is kinda what I keep saying about Linux as a whole. I love it, I enjoy using it. I'm also someone who enjoys playing with computer hardware and software, etc. Many computer users don't have so much fun doing these things however.
GUI tools to configure your Linux install would be a good start. Strong configuration docs would be great as well. If Linux could overcome a user's inherent belief that it's a 'geek OS' that they won't understand or be able to learn, it could make much greater headway into both the consumer and business desktop markets.
One comment I've seen a few times in this list is that a GUI would somehow be 'dangerous' by allowing security holes to be created in your OS. I fail to understand how a GUI would create more holes than a complete and utter lack of understanding of how to properly configure your daemons and drivers.
We need to listen to our mildly less computer literate friends when they describe why they wouldn't like to use Linux. They are the strong majority and will be the ones using the OS when/if it becomes mass market popular.
I had precisely the opposite experience. At one of the software development centers for the Army in VA, we used almost exclusively WD drives at the desktop, and had an excellent MTBF rate. Supporting nearly 1600 PCs, of which over 80% had WD drives, we might have swapped out a bad drive, on average, once or twice per year that were WD. To me, that is an excellent average. Having supported other equally large operations using other equipment (to include Maxtor and Seagate, among others), I've never had such an excellent rate, and have been rather faithful to WD whenever purchasing non-SCSI disks. Perhaps I am just unusually lucky (or you are unusually unlucky), or perhaps during the period in which I've been using WD they've been especially good. At any rate, they've still got my EIDE business.
It's the same the world over. People don't like Howard Stern's morning show, but rather than change the station, they try to get him removed from the air. If you don't like what happened on NYPD Blue last night, no problem, try to get it taken off the air rather than just stop watching.
These 'enlightened', 'freedom fighting' people here on/. are simply being hypocritical. It's a problem that plagues much of humanity. We all too often live by the 'do as I say, not as I do' philosophy. Rather than just not reading stuff by Katz, it's MUCH more fun to try to get him removed from/. completely. Of course, wait until an article is posted referencing some geek icon being forcibly removed from their media, be it television, radio, or internet, and watch the outcry on these very pages!
Unfortunately, whether or not we recognize the problem, it won't change. We're predestined to, as a whole, be hypocritical and judgemental.
but I'm still waiting for companies to sink more money into hardware support for the linux kernel and better, more intuitive GUI interfaces and installers. If the same level of money and support was poured into making linux a truly viable desktop solution for the computer novice, all of the distributions would be able to gain a stronger foothold in peoples homes and on user's desktops. I see this as a great place to lead off from, but lets ont let the desktop application go by the wayside. On an offtopic note, is there a distribution out there with a truly easy to use installer and a wide variety of 'built in' hardware support? I've been using RH almost exclusively, and, although I could get it running, I doubt I'd be able to say the same about even a mildly less technically able person, let alone a novice.
I wonder where the price will bottom out on these. I'd really like to pick up a pair of the enormously expensive 800x600 to hook up to my Dreamcast, but I'm guessing it will be quite a while before it comes down to a pricerange I'm willing to pay. Does anybody have a clue as to about what the current production costs are for this?
I must agree. More customers need to use the 'vote with your feet' concept. Sometimes, it causes some level of difficulty or annoyance on our part as a customer, but it's about the only feasible way to get the changes we want. When a company utilizes a business practice that I disapprove of, I simply don't utilize products from that company anymore. If we all did this, we'd soon find that companies would start performing the way WE want them to. Without customers, a company cannot thrive, vote with your feet.
Unfortunately, compatibility isn't the only bump in the road for widescale approval of linux at the end user desktop. From the standpoint of someone who has tried (generally unsuccessfully) to bring linux to the desktop at my company, the concerns were both compatibility with clients that use Windows programs, but with the end users being able to actually understand and use the OS. It won't help if there is a learning curve for users that would actually LOSE productivity getting acclimated to a new way of doing things. Now, if Corel Linux is easy enough to use, with a windowing interface that TRULY emulates Win95, it becomes a much more viable alternative. My $0.02
A few problems with your post: 1) Dreamcast is doing exceedingly well. It hit it's millionth sale before the first month was over. No console..ever..has done nearly so well. 2) PS2 isn't internet ready. They specifically said that it *WASN'T* going to be. They were waiting for high bandwidth solutions to become more commonplace. I'm not saying Sony is going to have much of a problem even if PS2 flops, I'm just saying that I don't think the PS2 is going to do as well as such a nice piece of technology should.
For what reason did Apple opt not to support one of the better selling computers in the world, the Apple ][? From the end user standpoint, it would seem that Apple distanced itself from a product that it should have been very proud of.
Okay, calling this a solution might be a stretch, but I certainly don't run 4 clients on my PC. I use ICQ. Anyone that wants to be able to IM me needs to run ICQ as well. This rarely becomes an issue, and when it does, most people seem open to at least running ICQ in conjunction with whatever they have, until they give up the other comletely and become ICQ users. I'm not saying to make ICQ the standard, but just decide what you want to use and stick with it. ICQ just seems the logical choice, seeing as I can run it on my Win boxes *AND* *nix boxes.
I not only have the black box, but even though I checked no boxes to exclude articles, I get no articles. Just a blank screen with the standard links on the left, and a black box on the right.
NO JENNI!!!! *sob*
Better yet, I can't get the default page to come up now either.
Here's a nice little real-world application of the "retaliation defense".
I am a sysadmin for a medium sized (300-500 million annually) multi-national corporation. Approximately 4 months ago, our firewall was DoS'ed and taken down. Fortunately, it illustrated an open port that I hadn't noticed. Even more fortunately, when I checked the logs, I found that the DoS attack came from a MUCH larger company.
Upon futher investigation, it was found that their sysadmin, in his infinite wisdom, felt the need to attack a spoofed address, hitting us.
In short, our lawyers had a field day earning our company MUCH money (read: millions) in a nice settlement, and the sysadmin found himself out a job, and more than likely looking at a bit of difficulty getting another job in the same niche.
So please, go right ahead, fuck around and retaliate people. I look forward to getting another sizeable raise for "earning" a large amount of extra income for my company.
Frankly, at this time, I don't think the label you use matters in the least. Hackers, HaxOrs, Crackers, etc...the public at large just does not seem to be prepared to differentiate.
The problem is that groups like LoU continue to perform/threaten to perform acts of complete stupidity, undermining efforts by more "legitimate" groups (l0pht, cDc, and the like).
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a beautiful solution. Reading the responses to my post I've seen the following:
People that agreed: In one form or another. I'm not saying all Linux should be vanilla user-friendly, completely GUI crap. Some people understood what I was saying.
People that disagree: Fine with me if you disagree. Some of the people that disagreed made great points (that I still don't necessarily belive but good points all the same).
People that didn't read it: Or just didn't follow it. I'm not saying Linux is bad. I'm not saying that Linux should kowtow to the masses. I'm saying, if you want mass-market acceptability (which it would seem is desired) you HAVE to make it useable by the public that ISN'T an IT professional. These are the one's I'd like to address.
I realize that the creators of Linux "stuff" should be proud of themselves. I don't, however, feel that it's the developers that are the issue. It's those members of the Linux community that are simply users that are entirely too elitist that are the issue.
The same people that complain "Why can't we get ported to Linux?" or "Why isn't supported under Linux?" or "Why doesn't get off their dead asses and make Linux drivers for ?" are the people that don't like the concept of making Linux something that can be brought to the public.
I use Linux off and on, mostly to play with different releases, etc, and generally pay in full simply to expedite what I want to see happen. I want to see a product that I could recommend to a computer novice as easily as a fellow IT professional. Something where they don't *HAVE* to do everything from the CLI. Something where the GUI configuration utilities are easily followed by a non-technician. Something easier to utilize.
Companies will continue to not support Linux while it's still too difficult for the common person to use. They will still fail to support Linux while it's audience is a select few that wish to spend a great deal of their time learning more about the OS and computers in general.
-Jer
won't be the ones reading. They'll be the ones skimming and then flaming.
What kills me about the Linux movement is this: It is composed apparently entirely of people that have never been USERS in their lives. They've never dealt with something that they just don't have the time or ambition to learn. They've never dealt with something that is unnecessarily difficult.
These people make statements like "Lets not dumb it down THAT far..." about porting AOL to Linux. Linux advocates seem to have forgotten that putting the software that people want on their PC isn't 'dumbing' anything down, it's called customer service. I like Linux. I wish it could gain the market share and market approval necessary to start getting the software development that we need for it to prosper.
Right now, Linux has no place on the desktop in my company. There are limited places where you could put Linux on the desktop and make it work. Why is this? Because the 'elite Linux gurus' want Linux to remain as-is. A club that only people with the computer and programming know-how can join. An exclusive club from which they can look down upon the [L]users that DARE to ask for user friendly software and configuration tools.
Next month and the following, as all of the geeks that have to fill out a tax form more complicated than the EZ, I want you to take a look at who you're paying to do your taxes. If you're doing them solo, take a look at the time wasted and the frustration involved in this seemingly simple task. Why is this? Because the IRS feels about the tax codes like you do about the code behind Linux. Job security through obscurity?
Well, it's a good thing I don't collect karma, because I am confident this is going down in "flames"...hell, you simply can't call Linux advocates elitist or snobbish and be expected to get away with it, eh?
-Jer
Personally, I don't understand the draw for the fighting game genre, they seem to be, at best, a slight diversion, but I just don't get it. Now RPGs, that's some enjoyment. I'd still rather pull my own toenails than play any FF game aside from tactics. FF is to RPGs what Microsoft is to operating systems. Yeah it's the most well known one, and yeah it's the most prevalent, but it's a shining example of the worst possible way of doing things.
-Jer
As someone that's been trial testing and beta-reviewing Win2k for quite some time now, I can tell you that the following is true:
Win2k is bloated. Was there any doubt?
Win2k is not significantly more stable running SOLO on a small home LAN with nothing special on it than WinNT, and we all know how stable that is.
Win2k is buggy (as evidenced by it's lack of stability). I found the '65k+ bugs' article to be amusing, and likely dead on.
Win2k beta 2 shipped with the standard shrink-wrapped license...one of the most ridiculous pieces of legal fiction since OJ Simpson said "I'm Innocent".
All in all, the coverage of Win2k here is far from balanced or unbiased, but it's also not too distant from the truth. Would you expect anything less? There is a distinct Anti-MS flavor to this site, just as there is an obvious Pro-MS flavor to many other sites. Most of us learn to seperate the wheat from the chaff and make informed decisions on our own.
-Jer
The reasons are three-fold:
NC 4.7 was about as buggy as I've ever seen. It crashes at the drop of a hat, and I find myself on the Netscape knowledgebase as often as not when using the browser. IE 5.0 wasn't nearly so bad off, there were some initial bugs, but it was basically more stable.
IE panders to the ISPs and companies that wish to release mildly customized versions to end-users. Netscape, for the most part, doesn't.
M$ found nice ways to integrate IE into EVERYTHING. I found it rather annoying when I installed Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise that it noticed that I didn't have an IE installation on my PC and went right ahead and installed it. More annoying, when I uninstalled IE, VB stopped working. (Anti-trust suit anyone?). This is the case with a LOT of things. If you are going to try to develop using the MMC, you won't be using Netscape or any non-IE browser for the task, even though you can run the MMC w/out IE.
The first and third points are probably the biggest issues facing Netscape. They have complete control over the former, and the latter might be being taken care of as we speak. At any rate, I look forward to Mozilla being made fit for human consumption soon.
-Jer
It's still too expensive for me though. It was far cheaper to cleanly cat-5 cable each room in my house (except the bathroom, that just seemed wrong) with wall jack terminations and to buy a few *LONG* jumpers in the even I want to surf from the back or front deck. I'm pulling 10meg/s and having none of the problems with interference that I experienced with earlier generation wireless.
I'm glad that they seem to have gotten past all of those earlier issues though. When testing some wireless solutions, things like being in the kitchen when the microwave was on or even too much ambient noise in the room would interrupt my connection.
If they can just make the price a bit more comparable to wiring your house and buying standard NICs, it'll become the solution for me.
but with more money. Just a little bit of research show that @Stake and L0pht were both doing many of the same things, the only difference being that @Stake was turning a profit. I'm very pleased that this profit will now, in part, be used to help the L0pht fellows do what they do even better. As long as their still going to be getting plowed and whooping it up at the cons, that's all that matters!
Chinese news sources from releasing their 'private information' to non-Chinese news sites? I am not sure I understand what this is meant to accomplish exactly. Is there someone here that has a better grasp on the politics of this that could explain the ultimate goal of this seemingly futile gesture?
I think it's important to note, however, that delving deeper into the OS itself is something that should be left up to the end user. If they simply want a stable, fast, strong OS, they should be able to get one without a CS degree. Yes, many of us are fine with using the config files, but those of us that do that would do it whether or NOT there was a GUI config tool.
We need the GUI tool for the people that are stuck in WinOS because, at least they can figure out how to make the often necessary mild config changes with an intuitive GUI interface. We don't need it for those that are 'in the know', we need it for those that don't even wish to be 'in the know', the AVERAGE user.
This is kinda what I keep saying about Linux as a whole. I love it, I enjoy using it. I'm also someone who enjoys playing with computer hardware and software, etc. Many computer users don't have so much fun doing these things however.
GUI tools to configure your Linux install would be a good start. Strong configuration docs would be great as well. If Linux could overcome a user's inherent belief that it's a 'geek OS' that they won't understand or be able to learn, it could make much greater headway into both the consumer and business desktop markets.
One comment I've seen a few times in this list is that a GUI would somehow be 'dangerous' by allowing security holes to be created in your OS. I fail to understand how a GUI would create more holes than a complete and utter lack of understanding of how to properly configure your daemons and drivers.
We need to listen to our mildly less computer literate friends when they describe why they wouldn't like to use Linux. They are the strong majority and will be the ones using the OS when/if it becomes mass market popular.
I had precisely the opposite experience.
At one of the software development centers for the Army in VA, we used almost exclusively WD drives at the desktop, and had an excellent MTBF rate. Supporting nearly 1600 PCs, of which over 80% had WD drives, we might have swapped out a bad drive, on average, once or twice per year that were WD. To me, that is an excellent average.
Having supported other equally large operations using other equipment (to include Maxtor and Seagate, among others), I've never had such an excellent rate, and have been rather faithful to WD whenever purchasing non-SCSI disks.
Perhaps I am just unusually lucky (or you are unusually unlucky), or perhaps during the period in which I've been using WD they've been especially good. At any rate, they've still got my EIDE business.
It's the same the world over. People don't like Howard Stern's morning show, but rather than change the station, they try to get him removed from the air. If you don't like what happened on NYPD Blue last night, no problem, try to get it taken off the air rather than just stop watching.
These 'enlightened', 'freedom fighting' people here on /. are simply being hypocritical. It's a problem that plagues much of humanity. We all too often live by the 'do as I say, not as I do' philosophy. Rather than just not reading stuff by Katz, it's MUCH more fun to try to get him removed from /. completely. Of course, wait until an article is posted referencing some geek icon being forcibly removed from their media, be it television, radio, or internet, and watch the outcry on these very pages!
Unfortunately, whether or not we recognize the problem, it won't change. We're predestined to, as a whole, be hypocritical and judgemental.
but I'm still waiting for companies to sink more money into hardware support for the linux kernel and better, more intuitive GUI interfaces and installers. If the same level of money and support was poured into making linux a truly viable desktop solution for the computer novice, all of the distributions would be able to gain a stronger foothold in peoples homes and on user's desktops. I see this as a great place to lead off from, but lets ont let the desktop application go by the wayside. On an offtopic note, is there a distribution out there with a truly easy to use installer and a wide variety of 'built in' hardware support? I've been using RH almost exclusively, and, although I could get it running, I doubt I'd be able to say the same about even a mildly less technically able person, let alone a novice.
I wonder where the price will bottom out on these. I'd really like to pick up a pair of the enormously expensive 800x600 to hook up to my Dreamcast, but I'm guessing it will be quite a while before it comes down to a pricerange I'm willing to pay. Does anybody have a clue as to about what the current production costs are for this?
I must agree. More customers need to use the 'vote with your feet' concept. Sometimes, it causes some level of difficulty or annoyance on our part as a customer, but it's about the only feasible way to get the changes we want. When a company utilizes a business practice that I disapprove of, I simply don't utilize products from that company anymore. If we all did this, we'd soon find that companies would start performing the way WE want them to. Without customers, a company cannot thrive, vote with your feet.
Unfortunately, compatibility isn't the only bump in the road for widescale approval of linux at the end user desktop. From the standpoint of someone who has tried (generally unsuccessfully) to bring linux to the desktop at my company, the concerns were both compatibility with clients that use Windows programs, but with the end users being able to actually understand and use the OS. It won't help if there is a learning curve for users that would actually LOSE productivity getting acclimated to a new way of doing things. Now, if Corel Linux is easy enough to use, with a windowing interface that TRULY emulates Win95, it becomes a much more viable alternative. My $0.02
Slashdot Man has frightened me, and I'm not even Rob. I need a stalker. -Sweaty Butcher (My Wu Name)
A few problems with your post: 1) Dreamcast is doing exceedingly well. It hit it's millionth sale before the first month was over. No console..ever..has done nearly so well. 2) PS2 isn't internet ready. They specifically said that it *WASN'T* going to be. They were waiting for high bandwidth solutions to become more commonplace. I'm not saying Sony is going to have much of a problem even if PS2 flops, I'm just saying that I don't think the PS2 is going to do as well as such a nice piece of technology should.
For what reason did Apple opt not to support one of the better selling computers in the world, the Apple ][? From the end user standpoint, it would seem that Apple distanced itself from a product that it should have been very proud of.
Okay, calling this a solution might be a stretch, but I certainly don't run 4 clients on my PC. I use ICQ. Anyone that wants to be able to IM me needs to run ICQ as well. This rarely becomes an issue, and when it does, most people seem open to at least running ICQ in conjunction with whatever they have, until they give up the other comletely and become ICQ users. I'm not saying to make ICQ the standard, but just decide what you want to use and stick with it. ICQ just seems the logical choice, seeing as I can run it on my Win boxes *AND* *nix boxes.
I not only have the black box, but even though I checked no boxes to exclude articles, I get no articles. Just a blank screen with the standard links on the left, and a black box on the right.
NO JENNI!!!! *sob*
Better yet, I can't get the default page to come up now either.
Here's a nice little real-world application of the "retaliation defense".
I am a sysadmin for a medium sized (300-500 million annually) multi-national corporation. Approximately 4 months ago, our firewall was DoS'ed and taken down. Fortunately, it illustrated an open port that I hadn't noticed. Even more fortunately, when I checked the logs, I found that the DoS attack came from a MUCH larger company.
Upon futher investigation, it was found that their sysadmin, in his infinite wisdom, felt the need to attack a spoofed address, hitting us.
In short, our lawyers had a field day earning our company MUCH money (read: millions) in a nice settlement, and the sysadmin found himself out a job, and more than likely looking at a bit of difficulty getting another job in the same niche.
So please, go right ahead, fuck around and retaliate people. I look forward to getting another sizeable raise for "earning" a large amount of extra income for my company.
-Pheonix
Frankly, at this time, I don't think the label you use matters in the least. Hackers, HaxOrs, Crackers, etc...the public at large just does not seem to be prepared to differentiate.
The problem is that groups like LoU continue to perform/threaten to perform acts of complete stupidity, undermining efforts by more "legitimate" groups (l0pht, cDc, and the like).
Just my half cent.