It strikes me that this is a lot like spam. It's extremely cost-effective because you don't have to pay for the medium and the clean-up costs are imposed on someone else. And like spam, it's not drowned out in noise only because most people have the consideration not to do it.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Another Bogus Benefit of Free software.
on
Eazel On The Ropes
·
· Score: 1
I enjoy a little ESR-bashing as much as the next guy, but I'd say one of the lessons of Eazel is that having worked for Steve Jobs in 1982 doesn't automatically make someone an brilliant interface designer. It's not obvious to me that these "incredibly talented designers with Macintosh on thei resumes" have any better ideas than do the 20 year old German CS majors working on Konqueror.
There was an interesting article in the Weekly Standard a few weeks ago. The basic idea is that the "keep them in school at all costs" mentality results in students being trapped there and miserable who otherwise could do something fulfilling with their lives.
Hmm, I'm not doing that justice. Here's a link. It's worth a look.
For the goat paranoid (capriphobic?), it's: http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_ 6_29_01/toby_feat_6_29_01.asp
They had apparently found a cast-iron method of printing their own money--blasting a single, relatively inexpensive set of binary bits onto millions of very cheap CDs, charging hundreds of dollars per disk to go with each PC, or thousands of dollars per license for each database server, and jealously wrapping the entire thing in a fierce set of intellectual property rights.
This is a nice illustration of what I find so unappealing about the "Free everything!" crowd. There is an utter contempt for the skill, talent, labor and risk that go into creating the goods they want to redistribute. In this case, it's the idea that creating software is simply "blasting bits" onto media. In other contexts, it's a similar attitude towards the creation of music, pharmaceuticals, inventions, brand names, literature... The only professions worthy of respect are sysadmin, Linux advocate or seller of T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. I'm no Libertarian but people like this make me want to beat them over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for.
Oracle has the same privilige games have on the desktop; they're cut total immunity from Open Source advocacy, probably because they're simply too important to the advocates to forgo. In fact, both Taco and Hemos seem to believe that as long as their their Windows partitions are only used for games, they don't really exist the rest of the time.
I just came across this and said, "I've got to this on Slashdot." It won't make a story submission so I'll just jam it in the Mandrake article and take the -1 (Offtopic)s. But here it's vaguely relevant!
Getting targeted by these scumbag shareholder class action attorneys is bad enough. But Red Hat is being chased by a firm called Bull and Lifshitz? Talk about adding insult to injury.
Perhaps the specification could include something that makes sense of incomprehensible comics like Zippy the Pinhead and its imitators.
I mean, Comics I Don't Understand is a useful resource but it assumes that the strip makes at least a particle of sense.
Although I suspect Scott Adams was right -- Zippy has one joke and it's on the reader.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Mozilla vs. Konq, development time...
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 1
It also supports CSS, ECMA, ssl and secure connections, java, and legacy plugins.. so it's a bit more trying than konq.
You're probably thinking of the old kfm browser. Konqueror supports SSL, Netscape plugins, ECMA (pretty much complete now), Java, CSS 1 (almost complete), CSS 2 (mostly done).... I use it for online banking on the Fidelity and Fleet Bank sites, both very JavaScript heavy, and it works perfectly. Better than Mozilla.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Mozilla vs. Konq, development time...
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 5
You can't really compare these two as projects, because they have completely different goals.
Right, but it's still a legitimate question to ask which is a more sensible way to go about it. The reality is that the Konqueror team has come up with a pretty solid browser for Unix and embedded Qt with a tiny fraction of the resources and experience of the Mozilla project. Meanwhile, after all the labor invested in XUL/JS and the performance penalty it enforces on the browser, what do they have? The Mac version is pretty much despised for its poor performance and Mac integration (especially compared to Mac IE, which kicks ass) and the Unix version is dog-slow.
If I were Steve Case, I'd be asking why they didn't just maintain Windows, Mac and Unix ports (keeping as much of the rendering engine cross-platform as possible) and make them each as good as possible. As it stands, they've pretty much conceded Windows and Mac market share to Microsoft, and now their monopoly on the Unix browser is crumbling.
(Yes, I know, if I'd just try the latest nightlies, I'll see that everything has changed.;-) )
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:How sure are they that they've found them all?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
There are software tools that can predict genes in raw sequence. (They recognize stretches of DNA that could potentially encode a reasonable-looking protein sequence, and also detect characteristic motifs that typically surround genes.) They're imperfect but they're probably good enough that the estimates of gene number are pretty accurate.
Still, there's a lot remaining to be figured out so I wouldn't discount any hypothesis just yet.
I was reading the Spectator a few weeks ago and read a terrific letter by Ron Unz (Californians may remember him as the maverick conservative who ran for governor or something against Pete Wilson, responding to a Tom Bethell article ridiculing the idea of evloution. The Spectator's online archives don't include letters so I can't quote it directly, but it was along the lines of:
I am a lifelong conservative. But I would be rather be governed by extreme leftists than by a conservative who doesn't believe in evolution, because any such person is either an unabashed ignoramus or deranged.
Yes, Tom, molecular biology is complicated. Nonetheless, we're going to keep figuring stuff out. And you'll get to reap the benefits, along with the "Animal research is a lie!" folks and the protesters who have tied the IMF and DNA into a single mindless ideology.
My qualification for holding forth on this, by the way, is that tonight's episode of Nova about the Human Genome Project prominently features my office and desk. (I, being less telegenic than my desk and considerably less important than my boss, was shooed away and told to stay lost until the crew went home.;-) )
I'm glad to see that Slashdot is acknowledging the existence of political perspectives besides the inane rantings of Jon Katz and Michael. This probably wasn't the best place to start, though.
KDE finally brought UNIX to the desktop. GNOME quickly followed.
With all due respect to KDE (to which I've made some minor contributions and which is now prgressing at a tremendous pace) and GNOME (pieces of which are superior to anything on any platform) -- try MacOS X and you'll realize how empty most of the recent boasting from the Linux world has been. It's just on a whole new level.
This all may seem off-topic, by the way, but I'm trying to give a sense of why some of us continue to have positive feelings towards Apple no matter how many butt-stupid, self-destructive things they do. They do things, both brilliant and idiotic, that no other company would dream of attempting.
As one of the Apple zealots, I have to say this is the sort of antic that creates the love/hate relationship we have with the company. Hopefully, this is another case of lawyers reacting on their own, that will calm down in a few days.
Meanwhile, I'll comment that Rob's statement:
[T]hey've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this.
makes the asumption that's central to the Slashdot mystique: that contributing to free software development and buying into Stallmanesque ideology are necessarily intertwined. The reality is that most of the individuals making significant contributions to free software, including Darwin, have little no to interest in the 2600 wannabe mentality that has come to dominate Slashdot and very few of the IP complainers will ever contribute to any project.
No, the real problem here is that Apple continues to alienate the early adopters, tweakers and hobbyists who are the core of the companies user base and who are the ones who kept it afloat.
I'll close by pointing out that it was my favorite tech company that finally _really_ brought Unix to the desktop, while Slashdot's pick turned out a slow, bloated Explorer knockoff, and fired half their workers the day they finished it...
I'm not sure which of 15 "You're talking about cracking, not hacking!" commments to reply to so I'll put this off by itself:
Notice how the article (you read the article, right?) uses the word hack, with only a single exception, to refer to what you guys insist may only be referred to as "cracking."
In Patrick's Roanhouse's words:With what he says is only slight exaggeration, he summed up his daily activities back then: "My mom thought I was playing Sesame Street Grover's ABC, but instead I was hacking into the Chinese government."
He says 2600 taught him the "hacker ethic," a value system that attempts to define what's acceptable and what's going over the top in the digital world. That is, probing systems to learn about their vulnerabilities is okay as long as no damage is done, but flooding sites such as Yahoo, Amazon and eBay with fake packets of data to block legitimate users out is just plain stupid, Patrick said.
The word "hack" is routinely used to describe what you guys insist is cracking, the crackers refer to themselves refer to it as hacking and it's perfectly clear what, say, this guy was talking about. Bitching at him for failure to use proper Jargon File-sanctioned terminiology is unhelpful.
While I'm commenting:
Anyone else think the real message here is that 2600 attracts more loudmouth posers than it does indviduals with real skills?
The quote:
Mike Godwin, former staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees: "There's no doubt in my mind that the clubs have done more good than harm, in that they've encouraged kids to develop their knowledge and computer skills."
underscores why I've never had much respect for the Wired/EFF/cyberrights axis. I just don't get how these people can drone on and on about privacy when they're clearly untroubled by, if not outright sympathetic to, *ackers breaking into systems where they're not allowed to be.
One, this story is about the Darwin OS, not the streaming server. Two, on what planet does MacOS not have any web servers?
Yeah, I know it's a troll. I'm just wondering what the idiots moderating you up are thinking. Anyway, when it comes to trolling, Michael has you beat with from the for-masochists-only dept.
No, I'm not seriously arguing that this represents a commitment to the MP3 format on the part of Microsoft. Obviously they're crippling the encoding to make WMA more attractive. (Although, it's striking that they're adding MP3 support at all.)
My point, and the point of the parent post that what we're talking about here is limited to the bundled audio software. It's not a systemwide attack on MP3, which is what the Slashdot writeup and the first link seem to suggest is the case.
Slashdot and a newly flush with cash Andover.net launch the Beanie Awards. After a mysterious process of nomination and voting, $100,000 is handed out for such awards as "Best Unix Eyecandy". (That would be E, before it went out of fashion.) Given the absence of any clear procedures, or even voting results, cynics suggest that Rob could have saved a lot of trouble and just written a check to Gnome.
Video available here. (See the 200 Beanie Awards links.) Watch to the end for the scene of Cowboy Neal hugging Chris Dibona.
Under Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second -- MP3 music "sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst who researches Internet audio issues for Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. (Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality.)
Actually, a less Slashdot-ish spin on this might be "Microsoft to add support for MP3 encoding to Windows XP". (Of course, then Taco could weigh in with an article on how that is uncompetitive bundling and the DOJ should step in to save LAME.)
I have to admit, I was expecting some nonsense about how AbiWord and Kspread are superior to MS Office that I could snidely dismiss. The answer was more interesting than I would have thought even if I don't really buy it.
The real answer to your question goes like this: No one (other than maybe some Slashdot reader) buys operating systems. People buy applications and then chose the operating system that best runs those applications.
True.
If you work as I do: on the net (Netscape) including all the net-based apps that I can run from my browser, reading email (exmh), and printing the occasional Word file (Applixware), you can do all these things on a Linux box every bit as easily and a great deal more reliably than on any of the 1980's legacy OSes.
I dunno about that - do people really do significant amounts of office work with net-based apps? Maybe they do. Everyone complains about web content they can't view without Windows IE but I never encounter any. Maybe I'm just a Luddite.
Of course, there's also the usual insinuation of "Windows crashes every five minutes." that is untrue (especially compared to doing heavyweight work in Netscape or Mozilla in Linux) but you can't really hold that against him.;-)
The part about "the future of the desktop" is a bit more plausible, although it doesn't address the question of "Why would my grandfather want to use Linux today?"
The sort of willfully ignorant, nonsensical, masturbatory blather that if I enjoyed, I'd be reading Kuro5hin (and compulsively talking about how I don't read Slashdot) instead of reading Slashdot.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time fishing off the Connecticut coast. There were always Soviet "trawlers" sitting outside the 12 mile limit looking out for submarines leaving the base at Groton. Supposedly there were Bear aircraft, too, although I never saw one.
No one was happy about it and we used to give them the finger but there was no question they were within their rights to be there.
The United States seems not to comprehend a tradition that places an enormous premium on honor, face, and responsibility.
Uhh, Jon, that's the entire freaking point. China is using hostages to cause the US to lose face in East Asia. The audience for this whole mess is government officials in Vietnam and Taiwan, not whiny Americans who can't understand why we don't just kiss and make up.
I'm no Bush fan but at least he and his crew seem to be getting what the crucial issue is here. I shudder to think what would have happened with Clinton in power. By the way, anyone with the slightest clue about aviation knows who hit whom.
I just filled out my form - have you? And I'd just like to reiterate my willingness to beta-test. Blizzard. I'm willing. So's CowboyNeal.
Uh-huh. Of course, Slashdot editors will continue to conclude any story involving a QuickTime file with a smug, "I just wish they would release it in a format I could actually view."
And you guys wonder why developers aren't falling over each other to release quality Linux games?
Unfortunately, the media is associating P2P with Napster and stealing.
I dunno - for all the the high-brow talk, is there another use for distributed file sharing? Gnutella and Freenet, as far as I can tell, consist of illegally shared MP3s and the same porn that's been passed around Hotline for years. (How many copies of gym.mpg do I need?) Besides being slow, buggy and unstable.
To my mind, if you have text documents you want to share, you put them on a web page. If you want to distribute demo MP3's for your band, a web page is definitely the way to go. If you're a political dissident, it seems to me that sharing from your computer is the last thing you do. You send the files to someone in a free country to make them available -- on a web page or FTP site.
Am I missing something? Of course, everyone here had all sorts of pious explanations for what they were using Napster for. Uh, yeah right.
If there are interesting, non-warez uses for P2P file sharing that are better than server-based methods, please enlighten me! I'm going to bed now, though, so flames and accusations of being a paid RIAA agent will go unnoticed (unless you're Freddy Krueger).
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:Would you ... CAN I ADD A BIT ?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 1
I think that's an excellent question in its own right:
How much usage of non-Red Hat systems (Windows, Mac, commercial Unix, *BSD, other Linux) is there at Red Hat?
Slashdot Mirror
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Hmm, I'm not doing that justice. Here's a link. It's worth a look.
For the goat paranoid (capriphobic?), it's:_ 6_29_01 /toby_feat_6_29_01.asp
http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
This is a nice illustration of what I find so unappealing about the "Free everything!" crowd. There is an utter contempt for the skill, talent, labor and risk that go into creating the goods they want to redistribute. In this case, it's the idea that creating software is simply "blasting bits" onto media. In other contexts, it's a similar attitude towards the creation of music, pharmaceuticals, inventions, brand names, literature... The only professions worthy of respect are sysadmin, Linux advocate or seller of T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. I'm no Libertarian but people like this make me want to beat them over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for.
Oracle has the same privilige games have on the desktop; they're cut total immunity from Open Source advocacy, probably because they're simply too important to the advocates to forgo. In fact, both Taco and Hemos seem to believe that as long as their their Windows partitions are only used for games, they don't really exist the rest of the time.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Bull & Lifshitz, LLP Announces Class Periods for Class Action Complaints - ARBA, KEI, RHAT, VNTR
Getting targeted by these scumbag shareholder class action attorneys is bad enough. But Red Hat is being chased by a firm called Bull and Lifshitz? Talk about adding insult to injury.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I mean, Comics I Don't Understand is a useful resource but it assumes that the strip makes at least a particle of sense.
Although I suspect Scott Adams was right -- Zippy has one joke and it's on the reader.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
You're probably thinking of the old kfm browser. Konqueror supports SSL, Netscape plugins, ECMA (pretty much complete now), Java, CSS 1 (almost complete), CSS 2 (mostly done).... I use it for online banking on the Fidelity and Fleet Bank sites, both very JavaScript heavy, and it works perfectly. Better than Mozilla.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Right, but it's still a legitimate question to ask which is a more sensible way to go about it. The reality is that the Konqueror team has come up with a pretty solid browser for Unix and embedded Qt with a tiny fraction of the resources and experience of the Mozilla project. Meanwhile, after all the labor invested in XUL/JS and the performance penalty it enforces on the browser, what do they have? The Mac version is pretty much despised for its poor performance and Mac integration (especially compared to Mac IE, which kicks ass) and the Unix version is dog-slow.
If I were Steve Case, I'd be asking why they didn't just maintain Windows, Mac and Unix ports (keeping as much of the rendering engine cross-platform as possible) and make them each as good as possible. As it stands, they've pretty much conceded Windows and Mac market share to Microsoft, and now their monopoly on the Unix browser is crumbling.
(Yes, I know, if I'd just try the latest nightlies, I'll see that everything has changed. ;-) )
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Still, there's a lot remaining to be figured out so I wouldn't discount any hypothesis just yet.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I am a lifelong conservative. But I would be rather be governed by extreme leftists than by a conservative who doesn't believe in evolution, because any such person is either an unabashed ignoramus or deranged.
Yes, Tom, molecular biology is complicated. Nonetheless, we're going to keep figuring stuff out. And you'll get to reap the benefits, along with the "Animal research is a lie!" folks and the protesters who have tied the IMF and DNA into a single mindless ideology.
My qualification for holding forth on this, by the way, is that tonight's episode of Nova about the Human Genome Project prominently features my office and desk. (I, being less telegenic than my desk and considerably less important than my boss, was shooed away and told to stay lost until the crew went home. ;-) )
I'm glad to see that Slashdot is acknowledging the existence of political perspectives besides the inane rantings of Jon Katz and Michael. This probably wasn't the best place to start, though.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
With all due respect to KDE (to which I've made some minor contributions and which is now prgressing at a tremendous pace) and GNOME (pieces of which are superior to anything on any platform) -- try MacOS X and you'll realize how empty most of the recent boasting from the Linux world has been. It's just on a whole new level.
This all may seem off-topic, by the way, but I'm trying to give a sense of why some of us continue to have positive feelings towards Apple no matter how many butt-stupid, self-destructive things they do. They do things, both brilliant and idiotic, that no other company would dream of attempting.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Meanwhile, I'll comment that Rob's statement:
[T]hey've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this.
makes the asumption that's central to the Slashdot mystique: that contributing to free software development and buying into Stallmanesque ideology are necessarily intertwined. The reality is that most of the individuals making significant contributions to free software, including Darwin, have little no to interest in the 2600 wannabe mentality that has come to dominate Slashdot and very few of the IP complainers will ever contribute to any project.
No, the real problem here is that Apple continues to alienate the early adopters, tweakers and hobbyists who are the core of the companies user base and who are the ones who kept it afloat.
I'll close by pointing out that it was my favorite tech company that finally _really_ brought Unix to the desktop, while Slashdot's pick turned out a slow, bloated Explorer knockoff, and fired half their workers the day they finished it...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
- Notice how the article (you read the article, right?) uses the word hack, with only a single exception, to refer to what you guys insist may only be referred to as "cracking."
- In Patrick's Roanhouse's words:With what he says is only slight exaggeration, he summed up his daily activities back then: "My mom thought I was playing Sesame Street Grover's ABC, but instead I was hacking into the Chinese government."
The word "hack" is routinely used to describe what you guys insist is cracking, the crackers refer to themselves refer to it as hacking and it's perfectly clear what, say, this guy was talking about. Bitching at him for failure to use proper Jargon File-sanctioned terminiology is unhelpful.He says 2600 taught him the "hacker ethic," a value system that attempts to define what's acceptable and what's going over the top in the digital world. That is, probing systems to learn about their vulnerabilities is okay as long as no damage is done, but flooding sites such as Yahoo, Amazon and eBay with fake packets of data to block legitimate users out is just plain stupid, Patrick said.
While I'm commenting:
Mike Godwin, former staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees: "There's no doubt in my mind that the clubs have done more good than harm, in that they've encouraged kids to develop their knowledge and computer skills."
underscores why I've never had much respect for the Wired/EFF/cyberrights axis. I just don't get how these people can drone on and on about privacy when they're clearly untroubled by, if not outright sympathetic to, *ackers breaking into systems where they're not allowed to be.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
One, this story is about the Darwin OS, not the streaming server. Two, on what planet does MacOS not have any web servers?
Yeah, I know it's a troll. I'm just wondering what the idiots moderating you up are thinking. Anyway, when it comes to trolling, Michael has you beat with from the for-masochists-only dept.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
My point, and the point of the parent post that what we're talking about here is limited to the bundled audio software. It's not a systemwide attack on MP3, which is what the Slashdot writeup and the first link seem to suggest is the case.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Video available here. (See the 200 Beanie Awards links.) Watch to the end for the scene of Cowboy Neal hugging Chris Dibona.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Under Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second -- MP3 music "sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst who researches Internet audio issues for Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. (Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality.)
Actually, a less Slashdot-ish spin on this might be "Microsoft to add support for MP3 encoding to Windows XP". (Of course, then Taco could weigh in with an article on how that is uncompetitive bundling and the DOJ should step in to save LAME.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
The real answer to your question goes like this: No one (other than maybe some Slashdot reader) buys operating systems. People buy applications and then chose the operating system that best runs those applications.
True.
If you work as I do: on the net (Netscape) including all the net-based apps that I can run from my browser, reading email (exmh), and printing the occasional Word file (Applixware), you can do all these things on a Linux box every bit as easily and a great deal more reliably than on any of the 1980's legacy OSes.
I dunno about that - do people really do significant amounts of office work with net-based apps? Maybe they do. Everyone complains about web content they can't view without Windows IE but I never encounter any. Maybe I'm just a Luddite.
Of course, there's also the usual insinuation of "Windows crashes every five minutes." that is untrue (especially compared to doing heavyweight work in Netscape or Mozilla in Linux) but you can't really hold that against him. ;-)
The part about "the future of the desktop" is a bit more plausible, although it doesn't address the question of "Why would my grandfather want to use Linux today?"
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
The sort of willfully ignorant, nonsensical, masturbatory blather that if I enjoyed, I'd be reading Kuro5hin (and compulsively talking about how I don't read Slashdot) instead of reading Slashdot.
Thanks, Michael. For a better read, here's BBSpot on Kuro5hin.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Or is it just more of that top-flight OSDN web hosting?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
No one was happy about it and we used to give them the finger but there was no question they were within their rights to be there.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Uhh, Jon, that's the entire freaking point. China is using hostages to cause the US to lose face in East Asia. The audience for this whole mess is government officials in Vietnam and Taiwan, not whiny Americans who can't understand why we don't just kiss and make up.
I'm no Bush fan but at least he and his crew seem to be getting what the crucial issue is here. I shudder to think what would have happened with Clinton in power. By the way, anyone with the slightest clue about aviation knows who hit whom.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Uh-huh. Of course, Slashdot editors will continue to conclude any story involving a QuickTime file with a smug, "I just wish they would release it in a format I could actually view."
And you guys wonder why developers aren't falling over each other to release quality Linux games?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I dunno - for all the the high-brow talk, is there another use for distributed file sharing? Gnutella and Freenet, as far as I can tell, consist of illegally shared MP3s and the same porn that's been passed around Hotline for years. (How many copies of gym.mpg do I need?) Besides being slow, buggy and unstable.
To my mind, if you have text documents you want to share, you put them on a web page. If you want to distribute demo MP3's for your band, a web page is definitely the way to go. If you're a political dissident, it seems to me that sharing from your computer is the last thing you do. You send the files to someone in a free country to make them available -- on a web page or FTP site.
Am I missing something? Of course, everyone here had all sorts of pious explanations for what they were using Napster for. Uh, yeah right.
If there are interesting, non-warez uses for P2P file sharing that are better than server-based methods, please enlighten me! I'm going to bed now, though, so flames and accusations of being a paid RIAA agent will go unnoticed (unless you're Freddy Krueger).
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
How much usage of non-Red Hat systems (Windows, Mac, commercial Unix, *BSD, other Linux) is there at Red Hat?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.