Let some small start-up test the water and prove a concept to be viable and then usurp their business model and bury them via patent abuse or just crush them financially. Amazon used to be a pretty decent company, now JB is just as greedy and unscrupulous as any other tech monopolist.
No, they're supporting a whistle-blower that happened to use them as a way to broadcast his information. To refuse to help him would imply that he did something wrong, which they may not see as the case..
If you lurk on the smoothwall email list for a while you'll see why Richard get a bit cranky. Threatening phone calls to his home with rude messages left with his children.. Having to exlain (for the 1,000th time) why a firewall should not be running {ftp|tftp|rsh|rexec}. Lusers asking the same old questions for the 50th time and getting all upset when the response to their badly phrased question is a quick "sod off!". I agree that Richard can be a very disagreeable fellow, but I can't fault the software or the behavior of the rest of the team from what I've seen.
I've been running smoothwall for several months and other than the nag screen and ads on the web interface, I have no issues with it - I even donated to the team before that whole subject got tense. I've found it easy to install, maintain and use. Several friends have also installed it and are quite happy with it.
This SUN whitepaper sounds familiar - I used to read the type of FUD from IBM when I worked for Amdahl supporting UTS (SYSV UNIX) on their multi-engine, multiple virtual image mainframes. We had a lot of similar issues: lack of apps, lack of technical staff that understood both worlds, etc. Most of the customers (RBOCS mostly) were writing their own apps or getting them from BellCore, the others were using them as massive DB servers or Office replacemnts for email and scheduling. In it's time, it was a good solution and despite all of IBM's FUD, the customers were generally happy with the platform.
I guess if you wait long enoough, everything comes around again in a slightly different guise 8-)
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It was already known that magnets applied to the head can make certain individuals sing bad folk-songs.
Let some small start-up test the water and prove a concept to be viable and then usurp their business model and bury them via patent abuse or just crush them financially. Amazon used to be a pretty decent company, now JB is just as greedy and unscrupulous as any other tech monopolist.
No, they're supporting a whistle-blower that happened to use them as a way to broadcast his information. To refuse to help him would imply that he did something wrong, which they may not see as the case..
If you lurk on the smoothwall email list for a while you'll see why Richard get a bit cranky. Threatening phone calls to his home with rude messages left with his children.. Having to exlain (for the 1,000th time) why a firewall should not be running {ftp|tftp|rsh|rexec}. Lusers asking the same old questions for the 50th time and getting all upset when the response to their badly phrased question is a quick "sod off!". I agree that Richard can be a very disagreeable fellow, but I can't fault the software or the behavior of the rest of the team from what I've seen.
I've been running smoothwall for several months and other than the nag screen and ads on the web interface, I have no issues with it - I even donated to the team before that whole subject got tense. I've found it easy to install, maintain and use. Several friends have also installed it and are quite happy with it.
This SUN whitepaper sounds familiar - I used to read the type of FUD from IBM when I worked for Amdahl supporting UTS (SYSV UNIX) on their multi-engine, multiple virtual image mainframes. We had a lot of similar issues: lack of apps, lack of technical staff that understood both worlds, etc. Most of the customers (RBOCS mostly) were writing their own apps or getting them from BellCore, the others were using them as massive DB servers or Office replacemnts for email and scheduling. In it's time, it was a good solution and despite all of IBM's FUD, the customers were generally happy with the platform.
I guess if you wait long enoough, everything comes around again in a slightly different guise 8-)