With all due respect Mr.Emperor, you are incorrect. One may find analysis of the judgment you reference here: http://www.ehlaw.ca/whatsnew/0...
The decision really has little to do with non-compete clauses in general. A non-compete is only the occasion for the suit not the thrust of the appeal. Rather it has more to do with what happens when a contract (in this case the non-compete) is vague.
In Canada a non-compete is valid as long as it is reasonable, specific, and limited in scope.
Much has been said about the numerous drawbacks of systemd. My question then is why are we seeing a near universal switch? It seems almost every distro is moving to systemd in fairly short order. Why do they do so? Surely dozens of distros each independently evaluating systemd and deciding to switch must be finding *something* compelling!
"... as someone who frequently drives with the lights on to warn fellow motorists..."
It is also not just speed traps. I take (and use) flashing headlights to mean 'there is something ahead requiring extra care and attention'. It could be a speed trap, it could be a deer on the highway, or it could be an accident scene.
"If there are gods and they are just, then they... will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by."
Okay, 3 questions though:
1) Who decides what is virtue and what is vice and by what standard?
2) What method do the gods (or God) use to determine if I am welcomed? Is it simply a numeric addition (good deeds outnumber bad ones)? Or perhaps it is a weighted scale ( 1 murder == 1,000,000 compliments). Are there any bad deeds that are unforgivable? Do my deeds from my entire life count or is only the last few years (or even days or moments) that count?
3) How can I know the answers to the above? Do I simply have to be the best I can? Is it reasonable to expect that if there is a God (or gods) that he (or she, or it, or they) would reveal himself? If not, would God be just? If so, how has he done so?
I posit therefore, that it is reasonable (necessary?) to investigate different, mostly conflicting, truth claims to determine which may actually be revelation of what God actually expects from us.
Have you considered using a password manager? KeyPass for example will do an auto type which I assume would bypass the cadence filter. Worth a try anyway.
You are giving this guy a hard time for making a decision on behalf of his young children while at the same time arguing that they don't have the ability to decide for themselves... weird.
Okay, who modded this troll up? . "There are no serious Libertarian candidates" Not true. Any sane definition of "serious candidate" would include the successful candidate(s). Ron Paul is a multi-term Congressman. I understand that Libertarian candidates have won numerous lesser offices. . "No serious, thoughtful person takes that ideology seriously" Now you are just being insulting. Replace that ideology with ANY ideology and it still is insulting. Libertarianism, Christianity, Flat Earth. Serious, thoughtful people have believed or believe a lot of weird stuff. That does not mean they are not intelligent or serious or thoughtful only wrong. Instead of insulting them (Yes even us Christians) next time assume that although they may be wrong they believe what they do for a reason. Try to understand them and have a discussion. If you are very lucky they might actually convince you that it is you who are wrong. . "... minds of people who choose to believe simple platitudes instead of paying attention to the vagaries and difficult-to-explain nuances of human nature." Ah, a troll AND a hypocrite! . Jeff Paetkau . <offtopic>Why is slashdot stripping out empty newlines?</offtopic>
Shortly after I Visa shut off service for Allofmp3.com I discovered you can still pay with Visa it is just a pain. You buy an XROST Prepaid iCard with your Visa and apply the card to your account. It isn't too bad. This is more of a barrier to new users who are just curious. Existing users who love the service can just put in a $50 payment every few months.
Mod parent -1 wrong. Padding is outside the width of the box according to the standards. However everyones favorite browser implements it inside the box. Consider the following CSS
"Seriously, where do people get their pictures for websites?"
I use istockphoto.com. $1-3 for an image suitable for web work.
Re:Right and left are false dichotomies
on
Netroots Politics
·
· Score: 1
"The Libertarian economy: Runaway to Ruin"
You can assert this all you want. However it simply is not true. Yes there are abuses in the marketplace of today. However, I assert that these are all related to government intervention.
"Libertarianism is like communism: both look great on paper."
Except that libertarianism works in reality as well.
"Libertarians never seem to understand that lifting all constraints from powerful organizations ultimately means the end of freedom and democracy. Why can't they see the end game of their simplistic thinking?"
This is the bit that takes the cake! Like the poor and weak there will always be the rich and powerfull people and organizations. The problem is these people and orgs may abuse others. The solution is certainly not to create an organization so rich and powerfull it can controll any other person or organization by an extremely wide margin. I could rag on the concept of the state all night but I have other things to do.
PS: The solution is not the state but the spreading of respect for propert rights.
"Libertarianism constitutes the ultimate in linear thought processes."
??? Umm okay. whatever.
"The central problem (and irony) with big-L Libertarianism..."
I think you mean small "l". Big 'L" would refer to members of some Libertarian Party. I don't think that was your intent.
"... who obviously will always exist and will always work to build their power at the expense of the masses."
Economics is not a zero sum game. You can build wealth and power in conjunction with others not in exploitation of others.
You cannot count on a more powerfull organization to protect you from exploitation as the most powerfull organization(s) will always be in a position to be most corrupt. Thus the ONLY way to prevent abuse is to spread the idea that it is wrong! That is your first, best, and only defense.
What almost all thinkers (many liberty minded included) ignore is that we are not fighting a war with the sword or coin but rather with the pen. This is a war of ideas. As long as the ideas of freedom are prevalent in society we will be free indeed! As soon as we allow those who would subjigate us to destroy these ideas and we allow ourselves to fall into ideological sloth we can hope for no better than tyranny.
Unfortunately, in much of the world this generation has lost the battle and we are seeing the results. However, there is always a new day. There is nothing quite like an idea whose time has come.
"Just one problem, though. To use a playground analogy, Apple is the kid on the playground who owns his ball and refuses to let you use his ball outside of a few games that Apple likes to play on the playground. Apple will let you loan (or license) his ball to play four square, but won't let you use the ball to attach to a tether to play tetherball. Sure, you can tie the ball to the tetherball, but Apple will get mad and call up the yard supervisors and have you sitting in detention, thanks to a law called the PTMPA (Playground Toys' Millenium Protection Act), created by the TMAA (Toy Manufacturers' Association of America). The PTMPA disallows balls made specifically for four square to be used for tetherball, basketballs to be used for bowling, and other combinations, and is punishable by a hefty fine."
Except Apple doesn't own the ball. Apple only picked it up from the store. The ball belongs to everyone. However, the school assumes that he owned the ball so when anyone tries to take the ball he gets detention.
Please explain how a government threatening a company to get it to perform some action constitutes a free market. By definition this is the exact opposite of a free market, it is a controlled market.
"... we were created in god's images. As the old saying goes, we hurt the ones we love. So, god must do the same..."
Your argument as I understand it including implied elements:
Christians claim, "God is good." We also claim, "Humans are like God." Humans are bad ---------- Therefore ---------- Christianity is ridiculous because both claims cannot be true.
However one of your premises is false and your argument fails. We were created in Gods image. That does not imply that we remained in that state. Infact it is a central tennet of Christianity that we did not remain in that state. That we are fallen, or bad.
As an aside, far from your intention of dismissing Christianity you have explicitly acknowledged one of its central premises. That is, humans are inherently bad.
Sorry Taco, I'm not buying it. I just can't believe that a site with 1/2 million readers doesn't get 24 quality submissions a day. Our problem isn't that these 2 yahoos get so many stories accepted. It is not that they link to some stupid website. Our problem is that the stories they submit aren't particularly interesting. They aren't particularly bad but there has to have been a dozen just as good submitted that day. Give some other user a chance.
PS: Thanks for posting this. This discussion does need to take place.
Okay, I understand the desire to look for the bright side, but the economics in the parent are just plain wrong.
If it takes $75B worth of resources, that is materials, production capacity, risk and labour, to switch to IPv6, that is $75B worth of resources that cannot be spent on other productive uses. It is not the case that suddenly $75B worth of income and infrastructure is going to appear out of thin air. No, resources must be diverted from other uses. This is what is know as opportunity cost.
This is the same issue that stupid newsmen were spouting off on after the New Orleans disaster. An entire city was wiped out yet they went on about how good it would be for the economy. WTF? An entire city worth of wealth was erased and this is somehow a good thing? Ya, some people will benefit, such as construction workers and sawmills. However, this is more than offset by the losses to just about everyone else. It will be offset to the tune of about 1 large city.
Think about it. If you could create wealth in this way you could simply bash your way to Billions with a baseball bat. Wealth comes from two sources. First, from taking existing wealth and converting it into more valuable wealth (production). Second, from re-arranging existing wealth from less valuable uses to more valuable uses (trade).
Now, it very well may be that the $75B investment is worth the cost. In fact, I believe this to be the case. I bet that over the years the investment will pay for itself many times over. However, the $75B it is going to cost is most certainly a cost and infact not a credit.
"BitTorrent and related technologies have broken the copyright system"
No Napster, FastTrack, and now BitTorrent have not broken the copyright system. The problems with the copyright system stem from its moral flaws and not from the fact that technology now exists that can subvert the system. In short the system was always broken Napster and its children mearly exposed it as existing in that state.
For example, imagine that there is a serious flaw in ssh or some other such secure protocal. In that case ssh is broken today. Just because everyone believes it is working correctly does not change the fact that right now it is broken. Now say tommorow a resercher finds and exposes this flaw. Now everyone realises the brokeness of ssh. The fact that it is not realised untill tommorow does not change the fact that it is broken today.
Creative works are, at the heart, nothing more than ideas. Using the barrel of a gun to forcibly control the distribution of ideas is, in my mind, one of the most revolting suggestions immaginable. This is true despite any bennefits claimed, never mind that I strongly dispute such claims. Furthermore, to suggest that a system should exist which can control how, and to whom, ideas may be distributed is to suggest that a system should exist that can control how people think. Peoples thoughts are made up of ideas. If you control the ideas that a person is exposed to you control how they see the world around them and how they behave in it. This is exactly the stuff George Orwell was warning us about in 1948. In the world of 1984, however, 'big brother' used language to control ideas. Today we use copyrights and Patents. The control that comes from a control of ideas is far more powerfull than any other weapon we allow to be used against us. It is not only our right to freely distribute ideas, but if we are to re-create, if we ever had one, a free society it is our duty to do so.
Their server is going down hard. Here is the text.
***
Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.
On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.
Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.
After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).
So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.
So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!
This is huge... I have always been a fan of the K Desktop Environment, as I've been a SuSE user since the early days. Gnome Has always felt klunky and thrown together compared to the new(er) versions of KDE. I'm disappointed someone is throwing down the line and choosing a single desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
With all due respect Mr.Emperor, you are incorrect. One may find analysis of the judgment you reference here:
http://www.ehlaw.ca/whatsnew/0...
The decision really has little to do with non-compete clauses in general. A non-compete is only the occasion for the suit not the thrust of the appeal. Rather it has more to do with what happens when a contract (in this case the non-compete) is vague.
In Canada a non-compete is valid as long as it is reasonable, specific, and limited in scope.
"Who really needs systemd?"
Much has been said about the numerous drawbacks of systemd. My question then is why are we seeing a near universal switch? It seems almost every distro is moving to systemd in fairly short order. Why do they do so? Surely dozens of distros each independently evaluating systemd and deciding to switch must be finding *something* compelling!
"... as someone who frequently drives with the lights on to warn fellow motorists ..."
It is also not just speed traps. I take (and use) flashing headlights to mean 'there is something ahead requiring extra care and attention'. It could be a speed trap, it could be a deer on the highway, or it could be an accident scene.
I don't think you got the joke.
****
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Server at xkcd.com Port 80
****
Oblig XKCD:
http://www.xkcd.com/
Go Canada!
"If there are gods and they are just, then they ... will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by."
Okay, 3 questions though:
1) Who decides what is virtue and what is vice and by what standard?
2) What method do the gods (or God) use to determine if I am welcomed? Is it simply a numeric addition (good deeds outnumber bad ones)? Or perhaps it is a weighted scale ( 1 murder == 1,000,000 compliments). Are there any bad deeds that are unforgivable? Do my deeds from my entire life count or is only the last few years (or even days or moments) that count?
3) How can I know the answers to the above? Do I simply have to be the best I can? Is it reasonable to expect that if there is a God (or gods) that he (or she, or it, or they) would reveal himself? If not, would God be just? If so, how has he done so?
I posit therefore, that it is reasonable (necessary?) to investigate different, mostly conflicting, truth claims to determine which may actually be revelation of what God actually expects from us.
Have you considered using a password manager? KeyPass for example will do an auto type which I assume would bypass the cadence filter. Worth a try anyway.
Okay, let me get this straight.
You are giving this guy a hard time for making a decision on behalf of his young children while at the same time arguing that they don't have the ability to decide for themselves ... weird.
Great post. The best part is the sig.
Okay, who modded this troll up?
.
"There are no serious Libertarian candidates"
Not true. Any sane definition of "serious candidate" would include the successful candidate(s). Ron Paul is a multi-term Congressman. I understand that Libertarian candidates have won numerous lesser offices.
.
"No serious, thoughtful person takes that ideology seriously"
Now you are just being insulting. Replace that ideology with ANY ideology and it still is insulting. Libertarianism, Christianity, Flat Earth. Serious, thoughtful people have believed or believe a lot of weird stuff. That does not mean they are not intelligent or serious or thoughtful only wrong. Instead of insulting them (Yes even us Christians) next time assume that although they may be wrong they believe what they do for a reason. Try to understand them and have a discussion. If you are very lucky they might actually convince you that it is you who are wrong.
.
"... minds of people who choose to believe simple platitudes instead of paying attention to the vagaries and difficult-to-explain nuances of human nature."
Ah, a troll AND a hypocrite!
.
Jeff Paetkau
.
<offtopic>Why is slashdot stripping out empty newlines?</offtopic>
Shortly after I Visa shut off service for Allofmp3.com I discovered you can still pay with Visa it is just a pain. You buy an XROST Prepaid iCard with your Visa and apply the card to your account. It isn't too bad. This is more of a barrier to new users who are just curious. Existing users who love the service can just put in a $50 payment every few months.
Mod parent -1 wrong. Padding is outside the width of the box according to the standards. However everyones favorite browser implements it inside the box. Consider the following CSS
#somebox
{
width : 10px;
padding : 10px;
border : 10px solid #000;
margin : 10px;
}
According to standard this box will take up 40px of space, be 30px to the edge of the border, and be 20px wide with 10px for content.
"Seriously, where do people get their pictures for websites?"
I use istockphoto.com. $1-3 for an image suitable for web work.
"The Libertarian economy: Runaway to Ruin"
..."
You can assert this all you want. However it simply is not true. Yes there are abuses in the marketplace of today. However, I assert that these are all related to government intervention.
"Libertarianism is like communism: both look great on paper."
Except that libertarianism works in reality as well.
"Libertarians never seem to understand that lifting all constraints from powerful organizations ultimately means the end of freedom and democracy. Why can't they see the end game of their simplistic thinking?"
This is the bit that takes the cake! Like the poor and weak there will always be the rich and powerfull people and organizations. The problem is these people and orgs may abuse others. The solution is certainly not to create an organization so rich and powerfull it can controll any other person or organization by an extremely wide margin. I could rag on the concept of the state all night but I have other things to do.
PS: The solution is not the state but the spreading of respect for propert rights.
"Libertarianism constitutes the ultimate in linear thought processes."
??? Umm okay. whatever.
"The central problem (and irony) with big-L Libertarianism
I think you mean small "l". Big 'L" would refer to members of some Libertarian Party. I don't think that was your intent.
"... who obviously will always exist and will always work to build their power at the expense of the masses."
Economics is not a zero sum game. You can build wealth and power in conjunction with others not in exploitation of others.
You cannot count on a more powerfull organization to protect you from exploitation as the most powerfull organization(s) will always be in a position to be most corrupt. Thus the ONLY way to prevent abuse is to spread the idea that it is wrong! That is your first, best, and only defense.
What almost all thinkers (many liberty minded included) ignore is that we are not fighting a war with the sword or coin but rather with the pen. This is a war of ideas. As long as the ideas of freedom are prevalent in society we will be free indeed! As soon as we allow those who would subjigate us to destroy these ideas and we allow ourselves to fall into ideological sloth we can hope for no better than tyranny.
Unfortunately, in much of the world this generation has lost the battle and we are seeing the results. However, there is always a new day. There is nothing quite like an idea whose time has come.
"Just one problem, though. To use a playground analogy, Apple is the kid on the playground who owns his ball and refuses to let you use his ball outside of a few games that Apple likes to play on the playground. Apple will let you loan (or license) his ball to play four square, but won't let you use the ball to attach to a tether to play tetherball. Sure, you can tie the ball to the tetherball, but Apple will get mad and call up the yard supervisors and have you sitting in detention, thanks to a law called the PTMPA (Playground Toys' Millenium Protection Act), created by the TMAA (Toy Manufacturers' Association of America). The PTMPA disallows balls made specifically for four square to be used for tetherball, basketballs to be used for bowling, and other combinations, and is punishable by a hefty fine."
Except Apple doesn't own the ball. Apple only picked it up from the store. The ball belongs to everyone. However, the school assumes that he owned the ball so when anyone tries to take the ball he gets detention.
[ Comment on parents sig. ]
Please explain how a government threatening a company to get it to perform some action constitutes a free market. By definition this is the exact opposite of a free market, it is a controlled market.
" ... we were created in god's images. As the old saying goes, we hurt the ones we love. So, god must do the same ..."
Your argument as I understand it including implied elements:
Christians claim, "God is good."
We also claim, "Humans are like God."
Humans are bad
----------
Therefore
----------
Christianity is ridiculous because both claims cannot be true.
However one of your premises is false and your argument fails. We were created in Gods image. That does not imply that we remained in that state. Infact it is a central tennet of Christianity that we did not remain in that state. That we are fallen, or bad.
As an aside, far from your intention of dismissing Christianity you have explicitly acknowledged one of its central premises. That is, humans are inherently bad.
Sorry Taco, I'm not buying it. I just can't believe that a site with 1/2 million readers doesn't get 24 quality submissions a day. Our problem isn't that these 2 yahoos get so many stories accepted. It is not that they link to some stupid website. Our problem is that the stories they submit aren't particularly interesting. They aren't particularly bad but there has to have been a dozen just as good submitted that day. Give some other user a chance.
PS: Thanks for posting this. This discussion does need to take place.
"Someone reported a problem with a mouse at Google Central and the recruiter got to work on hiring the python guy."
Isn't it apple that has a mouse problem?
Okay, I understand the desire to look for the bright side, but the economics in the parent are just plain wrong.
If it takes $75B worth of resources, that is materials, production capacity, risk and labour, to switch to IPv6, that is $75B worth of resources that cannot be spent on other productive uses. It is not the case that suddenly $75B worth of income and infrastructure is going to appear out of thin air. No, resources must be diverted from other uses. This is what is know as opportunity cost.
This is the same issue that stupid newsmen were spouting off on after the New Orleans disaster. An entire city was wiped out yet they went on about how good it would be for the economy. WTF? An entire city worth of wealth was erased and this is somehow a good thing? Ya, some people will benefit, such as construction workers and sawmills. However, this is more than offset by the losses to just about everyone else. It will be offset to the tune of about 1 large city.
Think about it. If you could create wealth in this way you could simply bash your way to Billions with a baseball bat. Wealth comes from two sources. First, from taking existing wealth and converting it into more valuable wealth (production). Second, from re-arranging existing wealth from less valuable uses to more valuable uses (trade).
Now, it very well may be that the $75B investment is worth the cost. In fact, I believe this to be the case. I bet that over the years the investment will pay for itself many times over. However, the $75B it is going to cost is most certainly a cost and infact not a credit.
"BitTorrent and related technologies have broken the copyright system"
No Napster, FastTrack, and now BitTorrent have not broken the copyright system. The problems with the copyright system stem from its moral flaws and not from the fact that technology now exists that can subvert the system. In short the system was always broken Napster and its children mearly exposed it as existing in that state.
For example, imagine that there is a serious flaw in ssh or some other such secure protocal. In that case ssh is broken today. Just because everyone believes it is working correctly does not change the fact that right now it is broken. Now say tommorow a resercher finds and exposes this flaw. Now everyone realises the brokeness of ssh. The fact that it is not realised untill tommorow does not change the fact that it is broken today.
Creative works are, at the heart, nothing more than ideas. Using the barrel of a gun to forcibly control the distribution of ideas is, in my mind, one of the most revolting suggestions immaginable. This is true despite any bennefits claimed, never mind that I strongly dispute such claims. Furthermore, to suggest that a system should exist which can control how, and to whom, ideas may be distributed is to suggest that a system should exist that can control how people think. Peoples thoughts are made up of ideas. If you control the ideas that a person is exposed to you control how they see the world around them and how they behave in it. This is exactly the stuff George Orwell was warning us about in 1948. In the world of 1984, however, 'big brother' used language to control ideas. Today we use copyrights and Patents. The control that comes from a control of ideas is far more powerfull than any other weapon we allow to be used against us. It is not only our right to freely distribute ideas, but if we are to re-create, if we ever had one, a free society it is our duty to do so.
On a side note I find it amusing in the scary kind of way how many good books I read extoling the wonders of the free market and denouncing the evils of state intervention yet they all start with page one "© 2005 Somebody, All rights reserved". Come on guys get your head in the game. Don't you realise actions speak louder than words. Or do you intend to send the message, "Do as I say, not as I do". Really, it is quite revolting.
Their server is going down hard. Here is the text.
***
Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.
On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.
Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.
After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).
So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.
So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!
This is huge...
I have always been a fan of the K Desktop Environment, as I've been a SuSE user since the early days.
Gnome Has always felt klunky and thrown together compared to the new(er) versions of KDE.
I'm disappointed someone is throwing down the line and choosing a single desktop.