"You are asking to defend the rapist that claims "She was asking for it.""
Hmm.. I don't think thats quite the right analogy. There are three parties involved here, not two: the raped (victim of ILOVEYOU for example), the rapist (author of ILOVEYOU) and law enforcement officials (Microsoft).
If a policeman just stood by and watched the raper do his work, you would definitely fault the rapist, but you would most certainly also fault the policeman for just standing by, watching, and not doing anything to make the street safer for the woman who got raped.
Microsoft claims that they are interested in creating secure environments, and thats what they market and sell. When you buy a MS solution you are buying that. So I most certainly think MS should be hold responsible for not delivering as promised. We pay police to keep the streets safe.
Really, the company has obviously gone to great pains, and spent quite a lot of money (e.g. the part about "our attorneys carefully crafted" a generic service category). Why would somebody spend so much money, time and effort on something that is, as they claim, completely innocent?
If it's so innocent why is nobody allowed to know?
What's more likely, I think, that some company (or a group of companies) organized this to conduct research into viability of something. As an arbitrary example:), a company like Microsoft would probably find this data immensely useful for their.NET intentions - it would effectively tell them how viable.NET is at this point in time. By repeating the survey every year or two, they can determine when the best time would be to start shovelling.NET down everyone's throats.
This is just one example though. Telecommunications providers like MCI etc would probably also find data like this very useful, as it would tell them where good growth markets are and where to focus development and marketing. This sounds valid, but then keeping it secret would have no benefit.
"It gives no information about level of security (except "not blocking ping packets")"
I'm not sure it even gives you that information. What's the difference between pinging an existing host and getting nothing in return, and pinging an IP for which there is no host currently?
There may be other ways though. I'm not sure if it would work, but traceroute doesn't use ping packets (for example).. it sends UDP datagrams with increasing TTL to each host along the route to elicit ICMP time exceeded replies..
"Isn't it a bit more like someone knocking on your door?"
Well I guess then that this would be a case of somebody going round from door to door, and knocking to gather statistics on when people are home.
This is information that is generally useful *only* to a housebreaker (and maybe some Jehovah's Witnesses or something).. in other words. Either way you don't want those people to have information on when you're home.
Of course, I don't see how this analogy extends to computers any more:) Ping doesn't say anything about whether or not somebody is behind there computer anyway. Also you don't "hear" ping's like you hear door knocks (unless you're ultra paranoid and run software to analyze every bit of traffic on your computer.)
With Win2K at something like 40 to 50 million lines of code, I was wondering what system they use for source control there? They have to use something - yet the MS website for SourceSafe doesn't mention NT anywhere for examples of how useful SS is. I'm pretty sure that if they were using SS for NT, that they would say so very loudly, because if SS can handle a project that size it can handle anything.
Yet SS doesn't seem to scale very well to large projects, and the database isn't particularly stable and quite often has errors.
It would be quite interesting if they were using something Unix-based.. does anyone know?
"It's always interesting to see a dumbass try to figure out how expensive Microsoft products are when they clearly haven't spent five seconds looking into the issue"
It's always interesting to see people make dumbassed assumptions about others and posting immediately without realising how ignorant and arrogant it makes them look.
FYI the main reason I didn't quote any prices is because I don't live in the USA and all the prices I have are in Rands. Multiply all your prices by roughly 7 to get an idea - so yes, it's incredibly expensive. You can't really compare the prices just by multiplying or dividing everything by the exchange rate, different things scale differently. For example, if I take Rands to England I'll pay about R25 for a cup of coffee, whereas here in South Africa you'd pay no more than R5 for a cup of coffee. You'll pay over R3000 for Visual C++ here, or between R1500 to R2500 on average for an upgrade from a previous version. A single copy of SourceSafe is over R3000, Windows NT server is something probably about R3500 - R5000, etc etc blah blah.
It might sound cheaper for you guys, but your profits won't be 1/7x our profits for the same things. As I said, the exchange rate alone isn't enough to really compare things.
I do almost all the development software buying in our company. I know what prices are involved. It's easy to take cheap shots from where you're sitting without knowing what the hell you're talking about and without backing it up with any decent arguments about why I might be wrong.
(Hint -- nowhere in my post did I say that Microsoft got where they were by selling products to developers - the guy I responded to said that, stupid - I don't agree with him on that, but I wasn't discussing that now was I?)
"CVS works just fine run off a UNIX server with Windows clients"
I tried to convince everyone around here to use CVS+WinCVS, but was greeted with a fair amount of resistance. My boss has a general attitude that it's always a good idea to buy "the Microsoft solution". That's not necessarily a bad thing, but that can be debated for hours. Anyway, I was also greeted by skepticism from some of the other developers here.
Now, we're talking about very intelligent people and excellent developers - the problem is not any sort of pro-Microsoft attitude from their part (quite the opposite actually), but more, I would say, "fear of the unknown". I'm the only one in my company who has a clue with Unix/Linux.
I realise that a WinCVS/Linux combo shields them from all that, but my boss seems to think Unix/Linux systems require a lot of time for administration.
I'm rambling a bit. But the main reasons we chose SS is (a) the convenience of integration with Visual Studio (which, unfortunately, I believe is the main reason this product is so stagnant - what other company can provide that?), and (b) my boss's "always choose the MS solution" strategy.
Another problem is, as I said, I'm the only one in my company with any significant knowledge of Unix/Linux, which means that if I were to leave for whatever reason, everyone else would be pretty much stuck with the task of administering something they don't know how to. 9 times out of 10 people will (in my experience), in that situation, just throw out what they have and buy something that they understand or can learn easily.
VSS has a lot of bugs, is quirky, stagnant, has a somewhat dated interface, and a far-from-perfect database/network design (they essentially assumed when they built it that you would always be connected to the server for example) - but when you learn to work around the bugs, and you backup regularly and check the database for corruption regularly, then it does do it's job pretty well.
I guess your perception and my perception of "cheap" differ substantially. Or perhaps you simply work for a large company with a generous development budget.
But I work at a small company; and if generous capital isn't available, then MS software sucks you dry quickly. If you have, say, 5 VC++ programmers and 5 VB programmers (for example) the costs add up extremely quickly: 10 licenses for Visual SourceSafe, 5 licenses for VC++, 5 licenses for VB, a copy of Windows NT server (plus client licenses for all users, plus hardware to run it on) to run the SS database on, somebody to administer the server, 10 copies of Windows 2000 (unless you want to go nuts by developing on crashy Win98.)
When you're a big company, those expenses are probably a tiny percentage of the overall expense budget; but when you're a small company, you're talking a substantial percentage of your expenses.
Makes it kind of difficult to get off the ground. But I guess MS would rather target big companies because big companies have lots more money to spend. Very much like our local banks here - they only want business clients - they try as hard as possible to drive away individual personal clients, because its far less work for much more profit with business clients.
"I have a strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft, and I'm not shy about saying so"
When you compare MS to the old Unix-based "regimes", yes, MS is cheaper. But times have changed, and MS profit margins are very high - all it would take is a little competition from a few other companies with some development capital to create some decent products to compete head-on with the VisualStudio series to bring prices way down, quality up, and speed up innovation (Visual SourceSafe is an excellent example of a product that is completely stagnant for lack of competition.)
Have you considered that your "strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft" may be at least somewhat a dependency; a dependency which exists for a lack of alternatives? If this is the case then your argument amounts to not much more than the "we can't break up Microsoft because we're all so freaking dependent on their products" argument.
Sony and Philips, according to that, but there is no detailed information. A japanese company and a dutch company. Not exactly "secretly developed and used by the states for a decade", is it?
First off, I don't believe that the folks at NASA are actually stupid enough to run such critical systems "connected to the Internet", accessible to Joe Cracker. (I mean, thats asking for trouble, come on)
Secondly, I can't help but notice that the press currently has many extremely negative portrayals of hacking/cracking, sometimes going beyond the point of misinformation.
It seems that whenever the government wants to create new laws to invade the privacy of their citizens, they start throwing around the usual scary terms like "terrorists" and "paedophiles" - often with seemingly random news articles cropping up about some or other paedophile caught ensnaring kiddies on irc - normally it's enough to pacify the majority of sheeple. This looks similar to me.
When I see all the negative articles about destructive hacker/crackers, I wonder if it's just the usual media sensationalism, or if somehow these articles are merely preparing the public for the next set of sweeping laws that will destroy our rights in the name of protecting us from these evil crackers. (Consider the recent mess in the UK with the RIP bill wrt encryption etc)
<Conspiracy theory mode off>
Or perhaps I'm just being paranoid. But in general I think it's a good idea to take everything you see/hear/read (particularly from mainstream media) with a bucket of salt.
"Why is (sic) some people so god damn paranoid???"
Why are some people so god damn naive and trusting???
The media is biased, easily bought, and packed with propaganda and FUD, no matter what country you live in and no matter what socio-economic system you live under. You're daydreaming if you think otherwise.
"you can use the/etc/hosts method to block sites on pretty much any computer"
Sort of; the problem I encountered last time I tried this was that the clients (Win9X) were configured with the Linux masquerading box as the default gateway, but with the real dial-up DNS IP's for DNS, so/etc/hosts was completely bypassed by the clients (doh!). The Windows hosts file sucks because as far as I can tell it doesn't understand wildcards (for those servers with ads00.whatever through to adsXX.whatever..). Nonetheless I think I'd like to have a stab at setting up a caching nameserver on the Linux box, soon as I get some time, and to use the above hosts file on the clients anyway. That ought to kill most ads. (Thanks for the link BTW)
I'm kind of surprised that companies like doubleclick haven't started using actual IP addresses. I guess it'll happen eventually when enough people start learning how to block ads.
I downloaded a file somewhere recently (from a linked page form slashdot) called nasties.reg; it adds a reasonably extensive list of domains (e.g. "*.doubleclick.net") to the registry marked to not allow cookies from those domains.
You still get ads and images though, so they will still get your IP address etc, but they won't be able to tie that information to anything in the way of useful online profiling, without cookies. Of course, the list itself can no doubt also be used to map in/etc/hosts to localhost, but I believe more comprehensive lists can be obtained from elsewhere.
Can anyone remember where it might have come from, or where to get a sample/etc/hosts with an extensive list in?
"And Russia owned the most powerful propaganda machine in history for most of its existence. I don't know where you were the last 50 years"
Then I guess their powerful propaganda machine was never really focused on South Africa, because all we ever bloody hear about over here day in day out is how great America is, yet we never hear so much as a peep from Russia.
"Everyone knows who the first country to launch something into space was - Russia"
I would make that, launch "someone" into space..
But anyway.. I also thought that everyone knew that the first country was Russia - until recently I heard a competition on the radio where the question was "which country was the first to get someone in space", and most people who answered were quite sure it was the US of A.
I guess that demonstrates the power of propaganda in distorting the truth. The USA will make sure to remind everyone on the planet as often as possible that they were the first on the moon, but Russia modestly keeps quiet about their achievements.. the result? People end up thinking that only the USA could possibly have made such progress.
<slaps self on forehead> doh! Of course.. my mistake. I knew that of course (in fact I iterated that specific point in another post of mine that I posted on Saturday) but I still get confused sometimes:)
I visited www.stopnapster.com; they suggested three commercial sites trying to fill the market for the sale of online music. Since I agree that artists should be able to make money from the online sale of music, I visited all of them, and "randomly" picked a song that I decided I want to buy online ("Wonderful Life", by "Black", which is a fairly well-known song, and has featured on "greatest hits of the millenium" collections.)
Emusic's search feature told me flat out that they have no music by the artist.
I couldn't even find a search feature at LiquidAudio's web page, although one of their content provider's sites had one (www.virginjamcast.com) - 'cept they also had no songs by Black.
And at Kick.com, the only option available was to exchange personal information for their "music companion" software, which as far as I can tell wants to run my entire musical life, informing me of all the latest events, concerts, etc of my favorite artists, while pushing ad's in my face. For f*ck's sake, I just want to buy a single song, not invite kick.com to become an integral part of my daily life.
So much for the options. Back to Napster, I guess...
Sorry for the off-topic question, but I have searched far and wide and cannot seem to find a decent free Win32 X Server (no I don't mean the Win32 box runs as a server, I mean, you run the X server on your Win32 box and let client apps running on your Linux box connect to it.. anyway)
Currently I use VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/, a free cross-platform PC-anywhere type program), which works very well as a solution to my problem, but it isn't really an X server.
Slashdot Mirror
"You are asking to defend the rapist that claims "She was asking for it.""
Hmm .. I don't think thats quite the right analogy. There are three parties involved here, not two: the raped (victim of ILOVEYOU for example), the rapist (author of ILOVEYOU) and law enforcement officials (Microsoft).
If a policeman just stood by and watched the raper do his work, you would definitely fault the rapist, but you would most certainly also fault the policeman for just standing by, watching, and not doing anything to make the street safer for the woman who got raped.
Microsoft claims that they are interested in creating secure environments, and thats what they market and sell. When you buy a MS solution you are buying that. So I most certainly think MS should be hold responsible for not delivering as promised. We pay police to keep the streets safe.
chmod 000 `which rm`
"phenomena associated with annoying male adolescents"
As far as I can tell the phenomena lasts way waaay past adolescence .. :)
.. they have only innocent intentions?
Really, the company has obviously gone to great pains, and spent quite a lot of money (e.g. the part about "our attorneys carefully crafted" a generic service category). Why would somebody spend so much money, time and effort on something that is, as they claim, completely innocent?
If it's so innocent why is nobody allowed to know?
What's more likely, I think, that some company (or a group of companies) organized this to conduct research into viability of something. As an arbitrary example :), a company like Microsoft would probably find this data immensely useful for their .NET intentions - it would effectively tell them how viable .NET is at this point in time. By repeating the survey every year or two, they can determine when the best time would be to start shovelling .NET down everyone's throats.
This is just one example though. Telecommunications providers like MCI etc would probably also find data like this very useful, as it would tell them where good growth markets are and where to focus development and marketing. This sounds valid, but then keeping it secret would have no benefit.
"It gives no information about level of security (except "not blocking ping packets")"
I'm not sure it even gives you that information. What's the difference between pinging an existing host and getting nothing in return, and pinging an IP for which there is no host currently?
There may be other ways though. I'm not sure if it would work, but traceroute doesn't use ping packets (for example) .. it sends UDP datagrams with increasing TTL to each host along the route to elicit ICMP time exceeded replies ..
"Isn't it a bit more like someone knocking on your door?"
Well I guess then that this would be a case of somebody going round from door to door, and knocking to gather statistics on when people are home.
This is information that is generally useful *only* to a housebreaker (and maybe some Jehovah's Witnesses or something) .. in other words. Either way you don't want those people to have information on when you're home.
Of course, I don't see how this analogy extends to computers any more :) Ping doesn't say anything about whether or not somebody is behind there computer anyway. Also you don't "hear" ping's like you hear door knocks (unless you're ultra paranoid and run software to analyze every bit of traffic on your computer.)
With Win2K at something like 40 to 50 million lines of code, I was wondering what system they use for source control there? They have to use something - yet the MS website for SourceSafe doesn't mention NT anywhere for examples of how useful SS is. I'm pretty sure that if they were using SS for NT, that they would say so very loudly, because if SS can handle a project that size it can handle anything.
Yet SS doesn't seem to scale very well to large projects, and the database isn't particularly stable and quite often has errors.
It would be quite interesting if they were using something Unix-based .. does anyone know?
"It's always interesting to see a dumbass try to figure out how expensive Microsoft products are when they clearly haven't spent five seconds looking into the issue"
It's always interesting to see people make dumbassed assumptions about others and posting immediately without realising how ignorant and arrogant it makes them look.
FYI the main reason I didn't quote any prices is because I don't live in the USA and all the prices I have are in Rands. Multiply all your prices by roughly 7 to get an idea - so yes, it's incredibly expensive. You can't really compare the prices just by multiplying or dividing everything by the exchange rate, different things scale differently. For example, if I take Rands to England I'll pay about R25 for a cup of coffee, whereas here in South Africa you'd pay no more than R5 for a cup of coffee. You'll pay over R3000 for Visual C++ here, or between R1500 to R2500 on average for an upgrade from a previous version. A single copy of SourceSafe is over R3000, Windows NT server is something probably about R3500 - R5000, etc etc blah blah.
It might sound cheaper for you guys, but your profits won't be 1/7x our profits for the same things. As I said, the exchange rate alone isn't enough to really compare things.
I do almost all the development software buying in our company. I know what prices are involved. It's easy to take cheap shots from where you're sitting without knowing what the hell you're talking about and without backing it up with any decent arguments about why I might be wrong.
(Hint -- nowhere in my post did I say that Microsoft got where they were by selling products to developers - the guy I responded to said that, stupid - I don't agree with him on that, but I wasn't discussing that now was I?)
"CVS works just fine run off a UNIX server with Windows clients"
I tried to convince everyone around here to use CVS+WinCVS, but was greeted with a fair amount of resistance. My boss has a general attitude that it's always a good idea to buy "the Microsoft solution". That's not necessarily a bad thing, but that can be debated for hours. Anyway, I was also greeted by skepticism from some of the other developers here.
Now, we're talking about very intelligent people and excellent developers - the problem is not any sort of pro-Microsoft attitude from their part (quite the opposite actually), but more, I would say, "fear of the unknown". I'm the only one in my company who has a clue with Unix/Linux.
I realise that a WinCVS/Linux combo shields them from all that, but my boss seems to think Unix/Linux systems require a lot of time for administration.
I'm rambling a bit. But the main reasons we chose SS is (a) the convenience of integration with Visual Studio (which, unfortunately, I believe is the main reason this product is so stagnant - what other company can provide that?), and (b) my boss's "always choose the MS solution" strategy.
Another problem is, as I said, I'm the only one in my company with any significant knowledge of Unix/Linux, which means that if I were to leave for whatever reason, everyone else would be pretty much stuck with the task of administering something they don't know how to. 9 times out of 10 people will (in my experience), in that situation, just throw out what they have and buy something that they understand or can learn easily.
VSS has a lot of bugs, is quirky, stagnant, has a somewhat dated interface, and a far-from-perfect database/network design (they essentially assumed when they built it that you would always be connected to the server for example) - but when you learn to work around the bugs, and you backup regularly and check the database for corruption regularly, then it does do it's job pretty well.
I guess your perception and my perception of "cheap" differ substantially. Or perhaps you simply work for a large company with a generous development budget.
But I work at a small company; and if generous capital isn't available, then MS software sucks you dry quickly. If you have, say, 5 VC++ programmers and 5 VB programmers (for example) the costs add up extremely quickly: 10 licenses for Visual SourceSafe, 5 licenses for VC++, 5 licenses for VB, a copy of Windows NT server (plus client licenses for all users, plus hardware to run it on) to run the SS database on, somebody to administer the server, 10 copies of Windows 2000 (unless you want to go nuts by developing on crashy Win98.)
When you're a big company, those expenses are probably a tiny percentage of the overall expense budget; but when you're a small company, you're talking a substantial percentage of your expenses.
Makes it kind of difficult to get off the ground. But I guess MS would rather target big companies because big companies have lots more money to spend. Very much like our local banks here - they only want business clients - they try as hard as possible to drive away individual personal clients, because its far less work for much more profit with business clients.
"I have a strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft, and I'm not shy about saying so"
When you compare MS to the old Unix-based "regimes", yes, MS is cheaper. But times have changed, and MS profit margins are very high - all it would take is a little competition from a few other companies with some development capital to create some decent products to compete head-on with the VisualStudio series to bring prices way down, quality up, and speed up innovation (Visual SourceSafe is an excellent example of a product that is completely stagnant for lack of competition.)
Have you considered that your "strongly vested interest in the success of Microsoft" may be at least somewhat a dependency; a dependency which exists for a lack of alternatives? If this is the case then your argument amounts to not much more than the "we can't break up Microsoft because we're all so freaking dependent on their products" argument.
http://www.cd-info.com /CDIC/History/Pioneers/CDPioneers.html.
Sony and Philips, according to that, but there is no detailed information. A japanese company and a dutch company. Not exactly "secretly developed and used by the states for a decade", is it?
"new hardware has often been developed and used secretly by states"
I may have been misinformed, but as far as I know the CDROM was invented in the Netherlands by Philips electronics.
<Conspiracy theory mode on>
First off, I don't believe that the folks at NASA are actually stupid enough to run such critical systems "connected to the Internet", accessible to Joe Cracker. (I mean, thats asking for trouble, come on)
Secondly, I can't help but notice that the press currently has many extremely negative portrayals of hacking/cracking, sometimes going beyond the point of misinformation.
It seems that whenever the government wants to create new laws to invade the privacy of their citizens, they start throwing around the usual scary terms like "terrorists" and "paedophiles" - often with seemingly random news articles cropping up about some or other paedophile caught ensnaring kiddies on irc - normally it's enough to pacify the majority of sheeple. This looks similar to me.
When I see all the negative articles about destructive hacker/crackers, I wonder if it's just the usual media sensationalism, or if somehow these articles are merely preparing the public for the next set of sweeping laws that will destroy our rights in the name of protecting us from these evil crackers. (Consider the recent mess in the UK with the RIP bill wrt encryption etc)
<Conspiracy theory mode off>
Or perhaps I'm just being paranoid. But in general I think it's a good idea to take everything you see/hear/read (particularly from mainstream media) with a bucket of salt.
"Why is (sic) some people so god damn paranoid???"
Why are some people so god damn naive and trusting???
The media is biased, easily bought, and packed with propaganda and FUD, no matter what country you live in and no matter what socio-economic system you live under. You're daydreaming if you think otherwise.
"you can use the /etc/hosts method to block sites on pretty much any computer"
Sort of; the problem I encountered last time I tried this was that the clients (Win9X) were configured with the Linux masquerading box as the default gateway, but with the real dial-up DNS IP's for DNS, so /etc/hosts was completely bypassed by the clients (doh!). The Windows hosts file sucks because as far as I can tell it doesn't understand wildcards (for those servers with ads00.whatever through to adsXX.whatever ..). Nonetheless I think I'd like to have a stab at setting up a caching nameserver on the Linux box, soon as I get some time, and to use the above hosts file on the clients anyway. That ought to kill most ads. (Thanks for the link BTW)
I'm kind of surprised that companies like doubleclick haven't started using actual IP addresses. I guess it'll happen eventually when enough people start learning how to block ads.
"With 12 teraflops it would still take it 3 months to simulate the first 1/100th of a second of a nuclear bomb explosion"
Shit, perhaps they should hire someone to optimize their code a bit.
This may be a stupid question, but if Slashcode is Open Source, doesn't that mean you can just read the code to see what is done?
Applies to windows users mainly ..
I downloaded a file somewhere recently (from a linked page form slashdot) called nasties.reg; it adds a reasonably extensive list of domains (e.g. "*.doubleclick.net") to the registry marked to not allow cookies from those domains.
You still get ads and images though, so they will still get your IP address etc, but they won't be able to tie that information to anything in the way of useful online profiling, without cookies. Of course, the list itself can no doubt also be used to map in /etc/hosts to localhost, but I believe more comprehensive lists can be obtained from elsewhere.
Can anyone remember where it might have come from, or where to get a sample /etc/hosts with an extensive list in?
"And Russia owned the most powerful propaganda machine in history for most of its existence. I don't know where you were the last 50 years"
Then I guess their powerful propaganda machine was never really focused on South Africa, because all we ever bloody hear about over here day in day out is how great America is, yet we never hear so much as a peep from Russia.
Having become a nuclear power recently, next bloody thing you'll hear is that they'll have some ridiculous plan to detonate a nuke on the moon ..
On second thoughts, naah ... nobody could be stupid enough to consider that ..
"Everyone knows who the first country to launch something into space was - Russia"
I would make that, launch "someone" into space ..
But anyway .. I also thought that everyone knew that the first country was Russia - until recently I heard a competition on the radio where the question was "which country was the first to get someone in space", and most people who answered were quite sure it was the US of A.
I guess that demonstrates the power of propaganda in distorting the truth. The USA will make sure to remind everyone on the planet as often as possible that they were the first on the moon, but Russia modestly keeps quiet about their achievements .. the result? People end up thinking that only the USA could possibly have made such progress.
"new Pentium 4 processor is based on revolutionary technology"
What revolutionary technology are they referring to? I mean, marketing departments sometimes stretch the truth .. but outright lies?
<slaps self on forehead> doh! Of course .. my mistake. I knew that of course (in fact I iterated that specific point in another post of mine that I posted on Saturday) but I still get confused sometimes :)
I visited www.stopnapster.com; they suggested three commercial sites trying to fill the market for the sale of online music. Since I agree that artists should be able to make money from the online sale of music, I visited all of them, and "randomly" picked a song that I decided I want to buy online ("Wonderful Life", by "Black", which is a fairly well-known song, and has featured on "greatest hits of the millenium" collections.)
Emusic's search feature told me flat out that they have no music by the artist.
I couldn't even find a search feature at LiquidAudio's web page, although one of their content provider's sites had one (www.virginjamcast.com) - 'cept they also had no songs by Black.
And at Kick.com, the only option available was to exchange personal information for their "music companion" software, which as far as I can tell wants to run my entire musical life, informing me of all the latest events, concerts, etc of my favorite artists, while pushing ad's in my face. For f*ck's sake, I just want to buy a single song, not invite kick.com to become an integral part of my daily life.
So much for the options. Back to Napster, I guess ...
Sorry for the off-topic question, but I have searched far and wide and cannot seem to find a decent free Win32 X Server (no I don't mean the Win32 box runs as a server, I mean, you run the X server on your Win32 box and let client apps running on your Linux box connect to it .. anyway)
Currently I use VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/, a free cross-platform PC-anywhere type program), which works very well as a solution to my problem, but it isn't really an X server.