Dependency Hell is still alive and well. I've seen both apt (on redhat) and up2date fail due to dependancies. Think I'm joking? Think that's impossible? Think again. That screenshot is one of *many* failures on that particular system. I've only used apt a few times and it failed more than once, so to hell with it, I won't even bother. If I can't do it out-of-the-box, I don't do it.
In the last five years, Linux has gone from a very low percentage of easy successes to, let's be generous, 80%. (By easy I mean setup, next, next, agree, next, next, done, maybe reboot, works.) In that same time, Windows has gone from 90% to 99%.
Fun example: not to pick on anyone, but Freevo asked for it. Their page says "There are no external dependencies if you use the full binary release (~12 MB)! This means that you will not have to waste any time downloading other RPMs, libs etc to run Freevo." I tried it last week on a brand-new, fresh-off-the-CD RH 7.3 system. (because I had the install CDs handy; RH9 was at a friend's house.) Failed immediately due to dependencies: needed libpng or something. To be fair, it worked like a charm once I put RH9 on that box, but nothing nowhere says it requires thsi or that version of RH or kernel or anything.
1) I have a hard time seeing how sexy or cool someone is when I'm listening to them on the radio. I judge music solely on what I hear. I liked "crazy in love" the first time I heard it--I didn't know who the chick was or the rapper, and I hadn't yet seen her & her friends shaking their asses in the video (mmm...), I just liked it, partly because of the "Are you my woman?" sample. I also liked "Whodat" the first time I heard it, and it was just some random thing I had downloaded off of mp3.com in the early days. I just went to the Rap page, downloaded a dozen songs, and gave them a listen. 5 years later, it's still a favorite. Never heard from them before or since, never saw them, and can't even find any evidence that the group still exists or ever did.
2) I, and 99% of the rest of the populace, go to movies to be entertained, not to judge olympic-style the technical quality of the acting. If you have high standards, great, but don't look snobbishly down your nose at the rest of us. We're having a fine old time, thankyouverymuch. I *like* seeing women in skintight outfits blow shit up. (I liked the qatsi trilogy as well, btw.)
3) A question: Very few pop movies induce me to say "Wow, that was really impressive acting." I gather from your statement that you see many pop movies? (I don't think you would have said "very few" if you had only seen three and didn't like two.) Do you *ever* like them? If not, why do you keep going? After all, you can usually tell from previews and reviews if they're going to suit your tastes or not. Did you go to Charlie's Angels 2 with your expectations high and leave with them unmet?
They would've been better off putting Ahnold's jacket on a mannequin than the dippy-looking guy they have there. I'd love to have that, though, even if it has been 'soiled' as stated in the description.:-)
Um, right here? "LCDs have fixed resolution and they are simply too small for me to read icons and widget text..."
And you complain about *me* not reading? Glass houses, stones, etc etc...
There are some grammatical problems in his post (you don't "read" icons, but if he meant "icon's text" or "icons' text" then he's missing an appostrophe) but I think I can discern his intentions: since he specifically complains about "widget text" (you know what a widget is, right?) I can only assume he uses a GUI with "graphical toolbars," unless he has trouble seeing the "^X" next to "Exit" in Pine. I further assume that, in addition to reading, he has trouble identifying and accurately clicking on the buttons in a toolbar--I didn't see him say "I have a bad eye and trouble seeing small text, but I have *excellent* hand-eye coordination and can easily click on an 8x8pixel button." Given his stated bad vision and stated difficulty with text being to small, I think it's safe to say he has trouble with the pretty much everything Graphical in a Graphical user Interface.
ViewSonic has a 200 DPI 22.2" display, 3840x2400. (http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd _vp2290b.htm ) And Dell makes the Inspiron 8500 notebook with a 1920x1200 screen--that's 150 dpi, folks. That's the same number of pixels as the 23" Apple HD Cinema Display. The future is coming and it's going to be high-res flat panels. Might as well start planning now.
In other news (don't feel like starting a whole other post) LCDs look bad at their non-native resolution, and most divide into non-standard screens: 1280x1024/2 = 640x512--who supports that? Or 1024x768 goes to 512x384--that's the same res as a Mac Classic, not even VGA (640x480). We need to make out software smart enough to work in all these scenarios. I'd love to have one of those ViewSonics (they're $7500, btw) but a 640x480 pic on the Web will be the size of a business card. OTOH, I'd *pay* to spend some time working in Illustrator on one--assuming Adobe could grow the pallets to make them visible.
One more thing holding back micropayments: for anything that small--music, movie reviews, weather reports, stock quotes, cartoons--there is someone giving away the same thing (or nearly so) for free. Yahoo! gives away weather reports because they want traffic and name recognition. Ebert posts his movie reviews for free. I enjoy his reviews, but if he started charging for them, I'd stop reading. Everyone has their price. Penny Arcade, user Friendly, and Dilbert are loved by thousands, if not millions. How many PA fans would pay $.01 to read each day's strip? How many $.05? How many $.005? Everyone's going to get to their point where they say "Ah, skip it" and go somewhere else.
Stick with what we have now: instead of 1000 users paying $.10 every time they read a comic, just reach those 10 fans who will pay a buck. Like that BitPass site--I'm really gonna sign up with them so I can take my choice of 3 comics, 2 musicians, and some guy's PowerPoint slides? (OK, PDF, but whatever.) I'm sure someone else is saying something equally interesting somewhere else for free. If his viewpoint is truly valuable and unique (no offense Guy) then hook up with Gartner and sell it to CIOs for $1,000 a throw. Otherwise, I'll stick with CNet, Slashdot, whatever. Actually, yeah, let's take a look at what he has to offer:
The most important lessons that Guy has learned thru his long and checkered business career.--Those stories are everywhere for free, even moreso after.bomb.
Tactical tips to raising money in the most difficult of times.--I recommend a google search for 'VC blog'
Guy's fearless predictions about the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley.--Cringely, Metcalfe, ad infiditum.
How to Drive Your Competition Crazy:
A guerrilla manual to driving your competition up the wall.
--Google: "guerilla marketing"
Lies of VCs
--"vc lies"--Results 1 - 10 of about 60,500
Lies of Entrepreneurs--starting to see a pattern here?
Then and Now: Entrepreneurs $0.10
The differences for starting and running a business between then (1998 or so) and now (2003).
--Jeez... *Lots* of people have time to write stuff like this... especially since about mid-2000.
(getting redundant, so I'll skip a few.)
War for Talent:
Insights into the hiring and recruiting game.--I recommend JoelOnSoftware.com.
What is this guy (or anyone) saying that a million other people aren't saying for free? How do we know that this guy is *right*, and everone else isn't, and therefore worth--wait--ten cents?!? Wanna get your opinion out about business and make some money? Write a book like Iacocca. Otherwise, you'll learn the true meaning of "dime a dozen."
Payments of over a dollar have worked quite well on the web for a while, and payments of about $3 on up were working fine in several ways even before paypal. As you move the line lower and lower, the schemes become less and less successful. Below $.50 it becomes very hard, and below $.25 (which is getting to what I consider to be truly "micro") it becomes nearly impossible, not only because of the transaction cost as far as technology goes, but because of all the descision making that goes along with it. It's one thing to send someone $3 for a Pez dispenser on eBay, it's quite another to decide 30 times a day if you'll spend $.10 on an article that you don't even know (having not read it yet) is even worth your time to read.
So yes, there are some successes, but I don't think anyone should say micropayments work everywhere just because the iTunes Music Store is making it work at $.99 a throw. I'm just going by the definition of micropayments I first heard of in 1996-1997--payments from <$.01 to ~$.50. The kind of system Jakob Nielson talked about here in 1998, which he said would be here in 2000, which still isn't in place today, mid-2003. He talks about it costing $.10 in time to wait 10 seconds to download a page, but real life isn't that granular, nor is it worth the time to be. ("Simply waiting for a typical banner ad to download costs about 3 cents in lost employee time, so that could be a possible value of ad-free pages.") That is *exactly* where subscriptions work--"I'll pay $10/month to never have to look at (or wait for) an ad, ever."
Does your employer knock $.75 off your paycheck if you go to Taco Bell for lunch and spend an extra 5 minutes in the bathroom? Does he add $1 to your check if you eat lunch in the cafeteria and get back to your desk 10 minutes sooner than if you would have gone out to eat?
That's the biggest thing--as you get smaller and smaller, you're requiring people to spend proportionally more and more time thinking about transactions that are worth less and less. So yes, there's a big gray area in what is considered micro, so I'll qualify my response: online payments for less than $.25 will never become wildly popular, or even marginally accepted.
Plus, I'm reminded as I type this, there's not even a cent key on a keyboard. Maybe that's what's holding everything back?:-)
He doesn't make the distinction because payments of a dollar or more are not, by definition, micropayments. The term "micropayments" desccribes payments in the $.01 to $.10 range. And $.50 candy bars are successful because there is not a $.25 transaction fee imposed by the banking companies on each and every bar sold.
Micropayments require substantial data infrastructure. Think of the electricity in your house. It might cost, say, $.01 to have one light bulb on in your house for 10 minutes. So that's a micropayment, right? Wrong. Is there a database query and and individual transaction every 10 minutes as long as the light bulb is on? No. Information flows into one box that is checked once a month by a single company who both processes your bill and keeps the money. It is just not possible to get the associated per-transaction costs down low enough to make true micropayments work.
I remember seeing a TV with DVI input (maybe the gateway 42") and some fine print along the lines of it would accept DVI from a computer, but not from an HDTV box or satellite box or something (or maybe vice-versa--worked with boxes, not computers.) Is this that optional encryption people are talking about?
Well yeah, anything *can* happen, but you just shot down your own argument--right now, you *can't* have your cake and eat it too! As you yourself said, Linux doesn't have a nice GUI, MS isn't secure. Both of these things *could* be different (and someday, at least one will be), but right *now*, they *aren't*. The poster doesn't want a system in 3-5 years, he wants one today.
I know people use paypal for tip jars and stuff, but paypal is *not* micropayments! paypal is a system where anyone can use a credit card to send money to anyone else, with neither side having a merchant account. *that* is the problem paypal solves. paypal does *not* make it easier to pay $.01 or $.03 for a web page. (they are still driven by banks who charge a minimum of $.10 to $30 per transaction, AFAIK.) The reason we will never, ever, ever see true micropayment systems is because the human brain does not want them. Here's a bit from that article:
Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.
But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.
For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free.
And the answer is, they will *never* happen. read all about it here. In that article, Clay says so much, so perfectly, that I won't quote any of it--just go and read the whole thing. OK, I can't resist. One of his points is micropayments have too much "user overhead"--you have to make a descision for literally every penny you spend, and that alone makes it not worth it. As he says, the user is getting conflicting messages: "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Re:Why are they running Windows then?
on
Can .NET Really Scale?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, I've got to go with the poster who says "If you don't have time to take care of your box, get the fuck off the Internet." I run a Linux/Apache site and my logs are full of requests for "default.ida?XXXXXXX..." and other viruses that came out (and were fixed) *years* ago. With UNIX, you pay a bit more in the beginning and then you hardly need to touch the box. Anything that needs to be done, a competent admin can do with nothing more than SSH. As opposed to MS boxes that just sit around, get owned, and fuck up everything. Sorry, but you can not have security and ease of use and low cost and easy to use all at once. Security is *not* fire-and-forget. Security is ongoing *work*. Work: not fun and not easy. You can't have your cake and eat it too. learn your way around, or pay an admin. Otherwise, someday you'll get owned and you'll become one more idiot contributing requests for 'default.ida' and 'root.exe' to my Apache logs.
And I'm sick of this attitude that always seems to come from SB owners, like they are *owed* something and *exempt* from working just because they're a small business. What would we do if they said "I don't have the time or money to learn the rules of the road or how to care for an automobile, I just want to blast down the road at 130 mph, trailing a could of oily smoke, because I'm a SMALL BUSINESS OWNER and I'm in a hurry, dammit!" Would we allow that kind of behavior? HELL NO. I'm sorry, it costs time and money. ACCEPT IT.
How long will it take for laptops to get cheap enough that people are willing to take an old one, load it up with a multi-gig HD and wireless NIC, and leave it plugged in hiding under a coffeeshop counter? Kazaa/etc. aside, wait until Rendezvous/zeroconf takes off. The world will be a different place once certain electronics (computers, wireless digital cameras, listening devices) are cheap enough to be disposable and small enough to remin hidden for a while.
Linux on a 486 laptop is cheap enough already; the expensive part right now is the 802.11 card. What will it be like when you can get an X10 camera the size of a thimble with 802.11x or bluetooth built-in and a self-adhesive back, like those things you put under furniture?
Cameras and illicit servers--the world will soon be awash in them. All praise St. Moore, it's only a few years off.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be a fun couple of hours, and when you get turned down for credit, you'll get your report free.
"intrenat"?!? Idiot--it's "intarweb". :-)
No sense mentioning I'm already *paying* for my email account in the first place! Fucking idiot. (Not you, dnj, the parent.)
Not when I'm *paying* for my ISP and email, you fucking idiot!
I play them almost every day, worth every penny.
;-)
If you own it, can't you rig it to run for free?
Dependency Hell is still alive and well. I've seen both apt (on redhat) and up2date fail due to dependancies. Think I'm joking? Think that's impossible? Think again. That screenshot is one of *many* failures on that particular system. I've only used apt a few times and it failed more than once, so to hell with it, I won't even bother. If I can't do it out-of-the-box, I don't do it.
In the last five years, Linux has gone from a very low percentage of easy successes to, let's be generous, 80%. (By easy I mean setup, next, next, agree, next, next, done, maybe reboot, works.) In that same time, Windows has gone from 90% to 99%.
Fun example: not to pick on anyone, but Freevo asked for it. Their page says "There are no external dependencies if you use the full binary release (~12 MB)! This means that you will not have to waste any time downloading other RPMs, libs etc to run Freevo." I tried it last week on a brand-new, fresh-off-the-CD RH 7.3 system. (because I had the install CDs handy; RH9 was at a friend's house.) Failed immediately due to dependencies: needed libpng or something. To be fair, it worked like a charm once I put RH9 on that box, but nothing nowhere says it requires thsi or that version of RH or kernel or anything.
Huh? The prices are right underneath the purty pictures.
Bluetake BT400 GII - $70
Jabra BT200 v1 - $70
Nextlink Bluespoon Digital - $350
Nokia HDW-2 - $100
Sony Ericsson HBH-60 - $100
A few things:
1) I have a hard time seeing how sexy or cool someone is when I'm listening to them on the radio. I judge music solely on what I hear. I liked "crazy in love" the first time I heard it--I didn't know who the chick was or the rapper, and I hadn't yet seen her & her friends shaking their asses in the video (mmm...), I just liked it, partly because of the "Are you my woman?" sample. I also liked "Whodat" the first time I heard it, and it was just some random thing I had downloaded off of mp3.com in the early days. I just went to the Rap page, downloaded a dozen songs, and gave them a listen. 5 years later, it's still a favorite. Never heard from them before or since, never saw them, and can't even find any evidence that the group still exists or ever did.
2) I, and 99% of the rest of the populace, go to movies to be entertained, not to judge olympic-style the technical quality of the acting. If you have high standards, great, but don't look snobbishly down your nose at the rest of us. We're having a fine old time, thankyouverymuch. I *like* seeing women in skintight outfits blow shit up. (I liked the qatsi trilogy as well, btw.)
3) A question: Very few pop movies induce me to say "Wow, that was really impressive acting." I gather from your statement that you see many pop movies? (I don't think you would have said "very few" if you had only seen three and didn't like two.) Do you *ever* like them? If not, why do you keep going? After all, you can usually tell from previews and reviews if they're going to suit your tastes or not. Did you go to Charlie's Angels 2 with your expectations high and leave with them unmet?
So SBC, like Verizon, is concerned about the cost/hassle of complying with all the subpoenas it has been receiving.
:-)
No no no, you've got it all wrong--*surely* these giant corporations are doing this out of a deep desire to help their customers.
They would've been better off putting Ahnold's jacket on a mannequin than the dippy-looking guy they have there. I'd love to have that, though, even if it has been 'soiled' as stated in the description. :-)
And where does he mention icons?
Um, right here? "LCDs have fixed resolution and they are simply too small for me to read icons and widget text..."
And you complain about *me* not reading? Glass houses, stones, etc etc...
There are some grammatical problems in his post (you don't "read" icons, but if he meant "icon's text" or "icons' text" then he's missing an appostrophe) but I think I can discern his intentions: since he specifically complains about "widget text" (you know what a widget is, right?) I can only assume he uses a GUI with "graphical toolbars," unless he has trouble seeing the "^X" next to "Exit" in Pine. I further assume that, in addition to reading, he has trouble identifying and accurately clicking on the buttons in a toolbar--I didn't see him say "I have a bad eye and trouble seeing small text, but I have *excellent* hand-eye coordination and can easily click on an 8x8pixel button." Given his stated bad vision and stated difficulty with text being to small, I think it's safe to say he has trouble with the pretty much everything Graphical in a Graphical user Interface.
The poster's problem is specified in his post, idiot: "I have a very weak eye and I read text at 1024x768 on a 21" monitor, sitting 2 feet away."
ViewSonic has a 200 DPI 22.2" display, 3840x2400.d _vp2290b.htm )
(http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lc
And Dell makes the Inspiron 8500 notebook with a 1920x1200 screen--that's 150 dpi, folks. That's the same number of pixels as the 23" Apple HD Cinema Display. The future is coming and it's going to be high-res flat panels. Might as well start planning now.
In other news (don't feel like starting a whole other post) LCDs look bad at their non-native resolution, and most divide into non-standard screens: 1280x1024/2 = 640x512--who supports that? Or 1024x768 goes to 512x384--that's the same res as a Mac Classic, not even VGA (640x480). We need to make out software smart enough to work in all these scenarios. I'd love to have one of those ViewSonics (they're $7500, btw) but a 640x480 pic on the Web will be the size of a business card. OTOH, I'd *pay* to spend some time working in Illustrator on one--assuming Adobe could grow the pallets to make them visible.
No way dude, it totally got Sentinelled. Go Orlando, woo hoo!
One more thing holding back micropayments: for anything that small--music, movie reviews, weather reports, stock quotes, cartoons--there is someone giving away the same thing (or nearly so) for free. Yahoo! gives away weather reports because they want traffic and name recognition. Ebert posts his movie reviews for free. I enjoy his reviews, but if he started charging for them, I'd stop reading. Everyone has their price. Penny Arcade, user Friendly, and Dilbert are loved by thousands, if not millions. How many PA fans would pay $.01 to read each day's strip? How many $.05? How many $.005? Everyone's going to get to their point where they say "Ah, skip it" and go somewhere else.
.bomb.
Stick with what we have now: instead of 1000 users paying $.10 every time they read a comic, just reach those 10 fans who will pay a buck. Like that BitPass site--I'm really gonna sign up with them so I can take my choice of 3 comics, 2 musicians, and some guy's PowerPoint slides? (OK, PDF, but whatever.) I'm sure someone else is saying something equally interesting somewhere else for free. If his viewpoint is truly valuable and unique (no offense Guy) then hook up with Gartner and sell it to CIOs for $1,000 a throw. Otherwise, I'll stick with CNet, Slashdot, whatever. Actually, yeah, let's take a look at what he has to offer:
The most important lessons that Guy has learned thru his long and checkered business career.--Those stories are everywhere for free, even moreso after
Tactical tips to raising money in the most difficult of times.--I recommend a google search for 'VC blog'
Guy's fearless predictions about the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley.--Cringely, Metcalfe, ad infiditum.
How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: A guerrilla manual to driving your competition up the wall. --Google: "guerilla marketing"
Lies of VCs --"vc lies"--Results 1 - 10 of about 60,500
Lies of Entrepreneurs--starting to see a pattern here?
Then and Now: Entrepreneurs $0.10 The differences for starting and running a business between then (1998 or so) and now (2003). --Jeez... *Lots* of people have time to write stuff like this... especially since about mid-2000.
(getting redundant, so I'll skip a few.)
War for Talent: Insights into the hiring and recruiting game.--I recommend JoelOnSoftware.com.
What is this guy (or anyone) saying that a million other people aren't saying for free? How do we know that this guy is *right*, and everone else isn't, and therefore worth--wait--ten cents?!? Wanna get your opinion out about business and make some money? Write a book like Iacocca. Otherwise, you'll learn the true meaning of "dime a dozen."
Payments of over a dollar have worked quite well on the web for a while, and payments of about $3 on up were working fine in several ways even before paypal. As you move the line lower and lower, the schemes become less and less successful. Below $.50 it becomes very hard, and below $.25 (which is getting to what I consider to be truly "micro") it becomes nearly impossible, not only because of the transaction cost as far as technology goes, but because of all the descision making that goes along with it. It's one thing to send someone $3 for a Pez dispenser on eBay, it's quite another to decide 30 times a day if you'll spend $.10 on an article that you don't even know (having not read it yet) is even worth your time to read.
:-)
So yes, there are some successes, but I don't think anyone should say micropayments work everywhere just because the iTunes Music Store is making it work at $.99 a throw. I'm just going by the definition of micropayments I first heard of in 1996-1997--payments from <$.01 to ~$.50. The kind of system Jakob Nielson talked about here in 1998, which he said would be here in 2000, which still isn't in place today, mid-2003. He talks about it costing $.10 in time to wait 10 seconds to download a page, but real life isn't that granular, nor is it worth the time to be. ("Simply waiting for a typical banner ad to download costs about 3 cents in lost employee time, so that could be a possible value of ad-free pages.") That is *exactly* where subscriptions work--"I'll pay $10/month to never have to look at (or wait for) an ad, ever."
Does your employer knock $.75 off your paycheck if you go to Taco Bell for lunch and spend an extra 5 minutes in the bathroom? Does he add $1 to your check if you eat lunch in the cafeteria and get back to your desk 10 minutes sooner than if you would have gone out to eat? That's the biggest thing--as you get smaller and smaller, you're requiring people to spend proportionally more and more time thinking about transactions that are worth less and less. So yes, there's a big gray area in what is considered micro, so I'll qualify my response: online payments for less than $.25 will never become wildly popular, or even marginally accepted.
Plus, I'm reminded as I type this, there's not even a cent key on a keyboard. Maybe that's what's holding everything back?
He doesn't make the distinction because payments of a dollar or more are not, by definition, micropayments. The term "micropayments" desccribes payments in the $.01 to $.10 range. And $.50 candy bars are successful because there is not a $.25 transaction fee imposed by the banking companies on each and every bar sold.
Micropayments require substantial data infrastructure. Think of the electricity in your house. It might cost, say, $.01 to have one light bulb on in your house for 10 minutes. So that's a micropayment, right? Wrong. Is there a database query and and individual transaction every 10 minutes as long as the light bulb is on? No. Information flows into one box that is checked once a month by a single company who both processes your bill and keeps the money. It is just not possible to get the associated per-transaction costs down low enough to make true micropayments work.
I remember seeing a TV with DVI input (maybe the gateway 42") and some fine print along the lines of it would accept DVI from a computer, but not from an HDTV box or satellite box or something (or maybe vice-versa--worked with boxes, not computers.) Is this that optional encryption people are talking about?
Oops, that should've been $.30, not $30.
Well yeah, anything *can* happen, but you just shot down your own argument--right now, you *can't* have your cake and eat it too! As you yourself said, Linux doesn't have a nice GUI, MS isn't secure. Both of these things *could* be different (and someday, at least one will be), but right *now*, they *aren't*. The poster doesn't want a system in 3-5 years, he wants one today.
And the answer is, they will *never* happen. read all about it here. In that article, Clay says so much, so perfectly, that I won't quote any of it--just go and read the whole thing. OK, I can't resist. One of his points is micropayments have too much "user overhead"--you have to make a descision for literally every penny you spend, and that alone makes it not worth it. As he says, the user is getting conflicting messages: "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Sorry, I've got to go with the poster who says "If you don't have time to take care of your box, get the fuck off the Internet." I run a Linux/Apache site and my logs are full of requests for "default.ida?XXXXXXX..." and other viruses that came out (and were fixed) *years* ago. With UNIX, you pay a bit more in the beginning and then you hardly need to touch the box. Anything that needs to be done, a competent admin can do with nothing more than SSH. As opposed to MS boxes that just sit around, get owned, and fuck up everything. Sorry, but you can not have security and ease of use and low cost and easy to use all at once. Security is *not* fire-and-forget. Security is ongoing *work*. Work: not fun and not easy. You can't have your cake and eat it too. learn your way around, or pay an admin. Otherwise, someday you'll get owned and you'll become one more idiot contributing requests for 'default.ida' and 'root.exe' to my Apache logs.
And I'm sick of this attitude that always seems to come from SB owners, like they are *owed* something and *exempt* from working just because they're a small business. What would we do if they said "I don't have the time or money to learn the rules of the road or how to care for an automobile, I just want to blast down the road at 130 mph, trailing a could of oily smoke, because I'm a SMALL BUSINESS OWNER and I'm in a hurry, dammit!" Would we allow that kind of behavior? HELL NO. I'm sorry, it costs time and money. ACCEPT IT.
How long will it take for laptops to get cheap enough that people are willing to take an old one, load it up with a multi-gig HD and wireless NIC, and leave it plugged in hiding under a coffeeshop counter? Kazaa/etc. aside, wait until Rendezvous/zeroconf takes off. The world will be a different place once certain electronics (computers, wireless digital cameras, listening devices) are cheap enough to be disposable and small enough to remin hidden for a while.
:-)
Linux on a 486 laptop is cheap enough already; the expensive part right now is the 802.11 card. What will it be like when you can get an X10 camera the size of a thimble with 802.11x or bluetooth built-in and a self-adhesive back, like those things you put under furniture?
Cameras and illicit servers--the world will soon be awash in them. All praise St. Moore, it's only a few years off.
I don't have time to read all the responses so I'll just say this: the web is whatever we make it.