Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
on
Ask Robert Young
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· Score: 5
I'm a Linux enthusiast and contributor but I still don't see where it's "ready for the desktop" as I would understand that phrase.
Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could you in good conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?
vxWorks, the embedded OS that runs our great Arrowpoint Web Content Switch we have here at OSDN
If there's one endorsement you'd think companies wouldn't want, it's to be known as part of the system that serves Slashdot. It's baffling to me how that a systems company could be so oblivious to the performance of the flagship site in its web content division. Doesn't VA realize how bad it makes them look?
OK, but there's a tradeoff between asking hostile, loaded questions and getting informative answers. Personally, I would have preferred more neutral technical questions so I could have learned something from the answers. But it's unfair to ask questions like "Why is your security so poor?" and then complain that the answer was inadequate.
I agree that there were some decent questions here. (Although no one asked whether there really are MS astroturfers on Slashdot!) Half the questions in the Carnivore interview I referred to, though, were rude, pointless attacks with question marks at the end.
you could pollute the thread with 10,000 examples involving Al Gore/Ralph Nader/Harry Brown/Cowboy Neal and they'd be true
Hey, we read Cowboy Neal's interview -- you don't need to tell us.;-)
Does anyone in Redmond think the/. crowd will feel like they got real answers out of this?
Looking at your question, there wasn't much to say and he said it. There's a trade-off between security and ease of use. They erred on the side of convenience and some users got burned -- but those users didn't have to setuid their CD player software to get it to work. What were you expecting him to say? "We're idiots. Linux r00lz!"?
Like a lot of Slashdot interviews of "The Enemy", questions that are basically "You suck. Don't you suck? Admit you suck." got moderated ahead of ones that might produce interesting answers. And then when the answers fall short of, "Yes, we suck." everyone complains that it's just a lot of marketroid-speak.
The interview with the Carnivore reviewer was a great example -- 5 of the 10 questions essentially are "You're a liar. Why should I believe you when I say you're not a liar?"
In the discussion on this article, and in a lot of others, we get a string of posters asserting that Red Hat has crossed into profitability. We then get a series of responses (Zico, LoCoPuff) that they are still in the red. It seems like this should be a pretty straightforward question. Can we settle it once and for all?
As a strictly mutual fund investor, I lack the skills to reach a conclusion myself. I encourage partisans of both sides to present data and links that will end this dispute.
Exactly. When the submitter wrote: They could lay off 5,000 people, OR quit shelling out that much in MS licenses and pay salaries! he's correct, as long as all the workers need to do is read Slashdot, compile hello.c and play with widget themes. Of course, that is all that the noisier Linux zealots do with their boxes, which is why they're so convinced that saving a few dollars on software is necessarily cost effective.
Mexico City is supposedly taking the plunge and going over entirely to Linux. It'll be interesting to see how that works out. That's assuming it actually happens and it's not another bit of "one million Linux PC's in Mexican schools" posturing.
That's for desktops. Servers obviously are a different story.
I can't speak for your Lombard problems (although it sounds like other people aren't seeing them) but I think it's pretty clear that this is a bleeding-edge, take-your-chances release. Apple isn't preloading OS X, isn't advertising it in mass media and isn't pushing users to upgrade.
I received my OS X box and am still trying to decide on a safe place to try it out. Put it on the 8.6 box I'm using now at work? Not a chance, and I'd be responsible for any resulting problems if I did.
For one thing, like someone already said, in a weak market they can't demand the initial price that they were hoping for. So, in your example, they could only get $7/share.
Also, while the traditional point of an IPO was to raise money, that became a secondary result with dot-coms. Most of them only issued public stock for a small fraction of the company and most had no use for a large pool of capital anyway. The real point was to get a spectacular run-up on the post-IPO price to make the founders, insiders and friends rich and to create valuable stock to use to acquire other stupid companies.
That's why when, say, VA Linux went out at $~40 and went up to $320, it was viewed as a good thing. If they had cared about raising money, they would have sued their investment bankers for malpractice.
Does anyone read Salon anymore? I haven't heard it mentioned in months.
I vowed to stop reading it after the Henry Hyde business (which I thought was a journalistic disgrace) but I kept going back because it was too good to miss. In the last year or so, I don't think I've even looked at it except to follow a link from Slashdot like that stupid Andrew Leonard "hacker" story. It reads like one of those godawful free "alternative" newspapers: obsequious defenses of Bill Clinton that would embarass James Carville, columnists who say "fuck" a lot and endless, tedious blathering about sex.
Didn't they try to cut costs by getting rid of a lot of their writers? It shows.
GNUstep doesn't get the attention that some of the window managers' get, but I think the diversity of the desktop interface is one of the more fun aspects of open source.
Absolutely - and being a founder of Slashdot, it seems to me you're in a better than usual position to do something about it.
/.'s coverage of the Unix desktop has essentially dwindled to KDE vs. Gnome with occasional news about highly vaporous 3-D environments. WindowMaker is probably more popular than Evolution and a lot of the other stuff that gets hyped around here. E used to get covered in embarassingly obsessive detail about Rasterman's life but since parting company with Miguel and Gnome, it's become the David Lee Roth of Linux. Blackbox, icewm, UDE, some cool new thing I haven't heard of -- that would be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" to me.
A few years ago, it seemed like legislation was being passed to regulate the Inetrnet without the most basic knowledge of how it works. One got the impression that legislators thought the Net is like television and that it would be straightforward for US laws to control its content.
Today, people may argue with a lot of the laws being passed but it seems to me that at least lawmakers now understand what it is that they're trying to control - that it's not television and that it's not inside the United States. Is that perception correct? Do most members of the House and Senate at least have a rough idea of what the internet is? Do all of them at least have a high-ranking staffer who does?
The article talks about web sites dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator, lest they break some obscure decency law in some tiny village somewhere.
Far be it from me to try to impose any sort of logic on a Your Rights Online story, but the ability to deliver geographically specific content frees sites from having to meet any common denominator. It's providing the same content to everyone that creates the need to make that material acceptable everywhere.
Incidentally, the use of the term "dumbing down" to mean "recognizing the perspectives of people other than doctrinaire Slashbots" is a telling bit of snobbery. Also incidentally, if anything the article states that sites are not changing anything in response to laws in other jurisdictions.
Realistically, this isn't one of those things free software developers are likely to make. Like game development, it requires a team - in this case, accountants, lawyers, and more lawyers to make sure you don't get sued. And in contrast to game development, it's boring. No sophomore CS major is going to spend time researching the tax code of Indiana.
A couple of years ago I saw a command-line Perl tax form app on Freshmeat. I tried it and couldn't get it to work, even with help from the developer. I couldn't find it now.
Honestly, though, would you seriously trust your tax return to something from Freshmeat? I was happy that this year i could do my taxes in KSpread instead of Excel like I usually do.
(This also applies to PigleT's post above, making a similar point.)
But that's exactly what happened! They explained the situation to the police and the investigation ended there. All this ranting is about the facts that 1) the police needed to have it explained instead of realizing, "Gee, that's a quote from Johnny Mnemonic! I bet they messed up the script that processes the output of fortune!" on their own and 2) the police keep case records which have nothing to do with criminal records despite what Jamie and the boy's father are trying so hard to imply.
After wading through Jamie's hyperventilating, the story is this:
These kids put up a fuck_theirschool.org site.
Because of a coding error, their page had the sentence "I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs" on it without making it clear that it's a quote from fortune, not part of their text.
The police investigated.
A lot of dumb grown-ups, whom we're going to laugh at aren't as up on Unix and Perl as Jamie. What morons!
The records of the investigation are still in the police files. There don't seem to have been any charges filed, despite Jamie's insinuations.
I feel bad for these kids, but they just had some bad luck and things worked out the way they should have. Honestly, what is Jamie expecting? That the police will say, "Oh, a Perl error! We'll shred all the files and pretend this never happened?"
...hype and the same sort of exaggeration of the novelty of their work...
The John Gilmore article that finally opened after I finished writing the above has a perfect example: the RSS headline viewer. Oooohhh! First, this is something Microsoft had, what, four years ago? Something everyone hated? Second, if it turns out users do want such a thing, any other browser could add it in an evening.
I don't know about VA, but Red Hat is actually doing OK. They're on track to make a profit this year.
My understanding (it's nearly midnight and I don't feel like looking through EDGAR to back this up) is that according to their SEC filings, profits are nowhere in sight. The claims of profits are based on looser accounting standards that ignore certain expenses and which the SEC doesn't accept. Amazon does the same thing.
I may well misunderstand the situation so don't be shy about correcting me!
Anyway, Red Hat is mostly in the business of selling software other developers have made freely available. How much original code is on a Red Hat CD? They're hardly CheapBytes, but they're not the primary makers of the software they sell, the way Eazel is.
Well, I can say that I saw this coming. I just didn't expect it to be in 12 hours.
Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.
I think that's an excellent question for Netscape shareholders to ask. Eazel, on the other hand, was started as a pure "Eric Raymond says it will work!" play from the begining - everyone who invested in it knew full well what they were getting into.
What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?
It seems incredible, doesn't it? I think in the case of Eazel, investors were blinded by two things:
Linux went from nowhere to a strong server presence so quickly that all the people who had laughed it off - journalists, VC's, IT people - decided not to make the same mistake again. Instead they made the opposite mistake, believing every wildly exaggerated claim of market share and usability from the Linux zealots.
I think investors actually believed all the hype from the "Until now, Linux users were limited to a cryptic command-line interface" campaign that Red Hat and Gnome pushed so eagerly, and thought Nautilus would be much more of an advance over existing interfaces than was the case. Some of the KDE developers were saying after last summer's Linux World Expo that a marketing director from Eazel had come to their booth, seen a Konqueror beta and been stunned. He obviously had no idea that such a thing existed already, let alone that this was the 2.0 release coming out.
This overlaps with the first two but -- you get the impression that if these investors had bothered to actually install a Linux distro and use it full-time for a week themselves they would have placed their money a lot more wisely.
You know, I feel bad for VA. They're running what could have grown to a nice medium-size company, and I think the worst thing that happened to them was that huge run-up in their stock price. That put them in a position where they couldn't help but disappoint. Eazel, on the other hand, I've never really liked. Nautilus is OK, if slow (although I haven't tried 1.0 yet) but it's only a file browser. And one that's basically a knockoff of Explorer, with bits of Konqueror and the Mac Finder thrown in and a couple of their own useless innovations (embedded MP3 playing). they were relying entirely on hype and the same sort of exaggeration of the novelty of their work that turned me off to the Gnome leadership.
While Slashdot nowadays serves mostly as a platform for Michael's 2600'esque ideology and an arena for Windows-using Linux wannabes to denounce "Micro$hit," it is still the public face of Linux and the "Open Source Community." If I were a salesman for Sun or Microsoft and were trying to win over a customer who was eyeing a Linux solution, you can bet I'd encourage to try reading Slashdot between 5-7 pm EST.
Do they not realize what kind of PR gaffe it is for a systems builder's most popular site to be fucked for what seems like at least once every single day?
I agree - it's incomprehensible to me that a server manufacturer could let its flagship site perform so badly.
Hell, even if VA hadn't bought Andover, you'd think they'd realize the PR liability of having the preeminent Linux site unreachable for hours every day. You'd think they'd step in with hardware, network assistance, help with Slashcode -- something.
For those who can't be bothered to read the article, or the Slashdot writeup for that matter, this refers to the LinuxWorld online magazine, not the expo.
I enjoyed the first few months of LinuxWorld but honestly I can't say I'm surprised to see it go. Joe Barr is better suited to be a perpetual +1 Slashdot poster than a journalist, Nicholas Petreley sounds like a flack for Caldera and their message boards were generally deserted except for Mr. Barr picking flame wars with anyone who crossed his path.
I think the bottom line is that The Linux Revolution is over. Now it's just about people using it, improving it and making a living from it, without all the drooling hype.
And as for KMail, it is, IMHO, being evil. For years, *NIX has used the "highlight is copy, middle button is paste" philosophy. Ctrl-C is "kill"!! Why did the developer of KMail decide that they had to emulate Windows?
Before you flip out, try selecting some text in KMail, going to another application, hitting the middle mouse button and seeing what happens. I'd also suggest that:
You're missing the distinction between copy/paste and a clipboard.
Your definition of "evil" could use some fine-tuning.
Eazel Software Catalog. Hmm, looks like apt-get with a nice front end to me.... However a solution already existed in Linux space, Debian!
More to the point, this is going directly against Helix Code / Ximian's plans with Red Carpet. It's going to be interesting to see how this one comes out: Eazel's piles of money and its supercharged hype machine (As Seen In Newsweek!) versus Ximian's smaller (IIRC) piles of money and Miguel's status as the object of adoration of the North American Linux world. I'd bet on Ximian (ask Raster and Mandrake about trying to challenge Miguel for leadership of the Gnome world) but I'm skeptical that anyone is ever going to get Linux desktop users to ever pay for anything except hardware, and maybe distros.
Eazel Online Storage: been there, done that.
To me, it's obvious why free diskspace has little appeal. Commonly available bandwidth is simply too slow to make use of a reasonable amount of available storage. Let's say I'm offered 50 free megs. It's a trivial addition to my 12 gig hard drive and yet copying that data, even over a T1, would still take forever. If technology had progressed at a different rate and 35 meg hard drives were common on new computers today, it would be a different story.
Its interesting to me that the anti-authority script kiddies are going to eventually be the reason and the justification for the authorities monitoring everything we do online.
Nothing new there. I have locks on my doors, a bicycle in my living room and removable-face car stereo because of selfish, malicious idiots.
How many of the headaches that the rest of us have to live with come as a result of the antics of a bunch of jerks and lowlives? That's why I don't understand the inclination to glamorize or defend crackers as "black/white/whatever-hats" or "hacktivists" or to insist that their activities are harmless, if not beneficial.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob, if you had a non-technical friend or relative who currently uses Windows, Quicken, Office, IE and AOL, could you in good conscience tell him it would be in his best interest to use Linux instead? What exactly would be in it for him?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
If there's one endorsement you'd think companies wouldn't want, it's to be known as part of the system that serves Slashdot. It's baffling to me how that a systems company could be so oblivious to the performance of the flagship site in its web content division. Doesn't VA realize how bad it makes them look?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I agree that there were some decent questions here. (Although no one asked whether there really are MS astroturfers on Slashdot!) Half the questions in the Carnivore interview I referred to, though, were rude, pointless attacks with question marks at the end.
you could pollute the thread with 10,000 examples involving Al Gore/Ralph Nader/Harry Brown/Cowboy Neal and they'd be true
Hey, we read Cowboy Neal's interview -- you don't need to tell us. ;-)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Looking at your question, there wasn't much to say and he said it. There's a trade-off between security and ease of use. They erred on the side of convenience and some users got burned -- but those users didn't have to setuid their CD player software to get it to work. What were you expecting him to say? "We're idiots. Linux r00lz!"?
Like a lot of Slashdot interviews of "The Enemy", questions that are basically "You suck. Don't you suck? Admit you suck." got moderated ahead of ones that might produce interesting answers. And then when the answers fall short of, "Yes, we suck." everyone complains that it's just a lot of marketroid-speak.
The interview with the Carnivore reviewer was a great example -- 5 of the 10 questions essentially are "You're a liar. Why should I believe you when I say you're not a liar?"
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
As a strictly mutual fund investor, I lack the skills to reach a conclusion myself. I encourage partisans of both sides to present data and links that will end this dispute.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
They could lay off 5,000 people, OR quit shelling out that much in MS licenses and pay salaries!
he's correct, as long as all the workers need to do is read Slashdot, compile hello.c and play with widget themes. Of course, that is all that the noisier Linux zealots do with their boxes, which is why they're so convinced that saving a few dollars on software is necessarily cost effective.
Mexico City is supposedly taking the plunge and going over entirely to Linux. It'll be interesting to see how that works out. That's assuming it actually happens and it's not another bit of "one million Linux PC's in Mexican schools" posturing.
That's for desktops. Servers obviously are a different story.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I received my OS X box and am still trying to decide on a safe place to try it out. Put it on the 8.6 box I'm using now at work? Not a chance, and I'd be responsible for any resulting problems if I did.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Also, while the traditional point of an IPO was to raise money, that became a secondary result with dot-coms. Most of them only issued public stock for a small fraction of the company and most had no use for a large pool of capital anyway. The real point was to get a spectacular run-up on the post-IPO price to make the founders, insiders and friends rich and to create valuable stock to use to acquire other stupid companies.
That's why when, say, VA Linux went out at $~40 and went up to $320, it was viewed as a good thing. If they had cared about raising money, they would have sued their investment bankers for malpractice.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I vowed to stop reading it after the Henry Hyde business (which I thought was a journalistic disgrace) but I kept going back because it was too good to miss. In the last year or so, I don't think I've even looked at it except to follow a link from Slashdot like that stupid Andrew Leonard "hacker" story. It reads like one of those godawful free "alternative" newspapers: obsequious defenses of Bill Clinton that would embarass James Carville, columnists who say "fuck" a lot and endless, tedious blathering about sex.
Didn't they try to cut costs by getting rid of a lot of their writers? It shows.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Absolutely - and being a founder of Slashdot, it seems to me you're in a better than usual position to do something about it.
/.'s coverage of the Unix desktop has essentially dwindled to KDE vs. Gnome with occasional news about highly vaporous 3-D environments. WindowMaker is probably more popular than Evolution and a lot of the other stuff that gets hyped around here. E used to get covered in embarassingly obsessive detail about Rasterman's life but since parting company with Miguel and Gnome, it's become the David Lee Roth of Linux. Blackbox, icewm, UDE, some cool new thing I haven't heard of -- that would be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" to me.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Today, people may argue with a lot of the laws being passed but it seems to me that at least lawmakers now understand what it is that they're trying to control - that it's not television and that it's not inside the United States. Is that perception correct? Do most members of the House and Senate at least have a rough idea of what the internet is? Do all of them at least have a high-ranking staffer who does?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Far be it from me to try to impose any sort of logic on a Your Rights Online story, but the ability to deliver geographically specific content frees sites from having to meet any common denominator. It's providing the same content to everyone that creates the need to make that material acceptable everywhere.
Incidentally, the use of the term "dumbing down" to mean "recognizing the perspectives of people other than doctrinaire Slashbots" is a telling bit of snobbery. Also incidentally, if anything the article states that sites are not changing anything in response to laws in other jurisdictions.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
A couple of years ago I saw a command-line Perl tax form app on Freshmeat. I tried it and couldn't get it to work, even with help from the developer. I couldn't find it now.
Honestly, though, would you seriously trust your tax return to something from Freshmeat? I was happy that this year i could do my taxes in KSpread instead of Excel like I usually do.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Is it accessible to the public? Which Ars Digita office is it at? The web site has no pertinent information I could see.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
But that's exactly what happened! They explained the situation to the police and the investigation ended there. All this ranting is about the facts that 1) the police needed to have it explained instead of realizing, "Gee, that's a quote from Johnny Mnemonic! I bet they messed up the script that processes the output of fortune!" on their own and 2) the police keep case records which have nothing to do with criminal records despite what Jamie and the boy's father are trying so hard to imply.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
- These kids put up a fuck_theirschool.org site.
- Because of a coding error, their page had the sentence "I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs" on it without making it clear that it's a quote from fortune, not part of their text.
- The police investigated.
- A lot of dumb grown-ups, whom we're going to laugh at aren't as up on Unix and Perl as Jamie. What morons!
- The records of the investigation are still in the police files. There don't seem to have been any charges filed, despite Jamie's insinuations.
I feel bad for these kids, but they just had some bad luck and things worked out the way they should have. Honestly, what is Jamie expecting? That the police will say, "Oh, a Perl error! We'll shred all the files and pretend this never happened?"Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
The John Gilmore article that finally opened after I finished writing the above has a perfect example: the RSS headline viewer. Oooohhh! First, this is something Microsoft had, what, four years ago? Something everyone hated? Second, if it turns out users do want such a thing, any other browser could add it in an evening.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
My understanding (it's nearly midnight and I don't feel like looking through EDGAR to back this up) is that according to their SEC filings, profits are nowhere in sight. The claims of profits are based on looser accounting standards that ignore certain expenses and which the SEC doesn't accept. Amazon does the same thing.
I may well misunderstand the situation so don't be shy about correcting me!
Anyway, Red Hat is mostly in the business of selling software other developers have made freely available. How much original code is on a Red Hat CD? They're hardly CheapBytes, but they're not the primary makers of the software they sell, the way Eazel is.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Specifically I'd like to know how they justified their plans for IPOing or spending millions in VC money from peddling GPL software.
I think that's an excellent question for Netscape shareholders to ask. Eazel, on the other hand, was started as a pure "Eric Raymond says it will work!" play from the begining - everyone who invested in it knew full well what they were getting into.
What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies, please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?
It seems incredible, doesn't it? I think in the case of Eazel, investors were blinded by two things:
You know, I feel bad for VA. They're running what could have grown to a nice medium-size company, and I think the worst thing that happened to them was that huge run-up in their stock price. That put them in a position where they couldn't help but disappoint. Eazel, on the other hand, I've never really liked. Nautilus is OK, if slow (although I haven't tried 1.0 yet) but it's only a file browser. And one that's basically a knockoff of Explorer, with bits of Konqueror and the Mac Finder thrown in and a couple of their own useless innovations (embedded MP3 playing). they were relying entirely on hype and the same sort of exaggeration of the novelty of their work that turned me off to the Gnome leadership.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
While Slashdot nowadays serves mostly as a platform for Michael's 2600'esque ideology and an arena for Windows-using Linux wannabes to denounce "Micro$hit," it is still the public face of Linux and the "Open Source Community." If I were a salesman for Sun or Microsoft and were trying to win over a customer who was eyeing a Linux solution, you can bet I'd encourage to try reading Slashdot between 5-7 pm EST.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I agree - it's incomprehensible to me that a server manufacturer could let its flagship site perform so badly.
Hell, even if VA hadn't bought Andover, you'd think they'd realize the PR liability of having the preeminent Linux site unreachable for hours every day. You'd think they'd step in with hardware, network assistance, help with Slashcode -- something.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I enjoyed the first few months of LinuxWorld but honestly I can't say I'm surprised to see it go. Joe Barr is better suited to be a perpetual +1 Slashdot poster than a journalist, Nicholas Petreley sounds like a flack for Caldera and their message boards were generally deserted except for Mr. Barr picking flame wars with anyone who crossed his path.
I think the bottom line is that The Linux Revolution is over. Now it's just about people using it, improving it and making a living from it, without all the drooling hype.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Before you flip out, try selecting some text in KMail, going to another application, hitting the middle mouse button and seeing what happens. I'd also suggest that:
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
More to the point, this is going directly against Helix Code / Ximian's plans with Red Carpet. It's going to be interesting to see how this one comes out: Eazel's piles of money and its supercharged hype machine (As Seen In Newsweek!) versus Ximian's smaller (IIRC) piles of money and Miguel's status as the object of adoration of the North American Linux world. I'd bet on Ximian (ask Raster and Mandrake about trying to challenge Miguel for leadership of the Gnome world) but I'm skeptical that anyone is ever going to get Linux desktop users to ever pay for anything except hardware, and maybe distros.
Eazel Online Storage: been there, done that.
To me, it's obvious why free diskspace has little appeal. Commonly available bandwidth is simply too slow to make use of a reasonable amount of available storage. Let's say I'm offered 50 free megs. It's a trivial addition to my 12 gig hard drive and yet copying that data, even over a T1, would still take forever. If technology had progressed at a different rate and 35 meg hard drives were common on new computers today, it would be a different story.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Nothing new there. I have locks on my doors, a bicycle in my living room and removable-face car stereo because of selfish, malicious idiots.
How many of the headaches that the rest of us have to live with come as a result of the antics of a bunch of jerks and lowlives? That's why I don't understand the inclination to glamorize or defend crackers as "black/white/whatever-hats" or "hacktivists" or to insist that their activities are harmless, if not beneficial.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.