I would argue that legislation that provides consequences for banks recklessly gambling with people's savings accounts, handing out mortgages they know will result in foreclosure, and executives vying for short-term profit and bonuses over long-term stability of the global financial system would increase consumer confidence and cause these DDoS issues to be abated more quickly than the measures you suggest.
Actually, about a decade ago for studying that topic personally....but yes, the overarching point being that Anonymous/other DDoSers out there are upset at banks and the international financial system. Their being upset comes from deep frustration in that, these banks and institutions brought the world to a global financial panic, yet the people inside them, directors, managers etc -- all made tons of money. Meanwhile, homes are foreclosed upon and Joe Schmo is footing the bill.
In a positive peace, something would have been done about the bank's malfeasance and groups wouldn't feel so motivated to resort to vigilantism through DDoS to settle their grievances.
And laws stop honest people from doing something. Criminals, on the other hand, are criminals -- and conducting a DDoS attack cannot be stopped by policies and laws alone. There need to be both technical countermeasures, and political ones as well. In a "positive peace" the reasons for conflict are addressed and removed, while in a "negative peace" the only reason conflict is not happening, is well, the cost of the conflict to both sides.
These folks obsessed with a "negative peace" by making more laws should study history.
"What's your point"
You said "Just to be clear" and followed up with a straw man argument. That is a bit absurd, don't you think? How does a straw man argument help clarify anything?
You use a Socratic relativistic argument, about how evil has no definition and is a relative term, and then use an analogy about "slaughtering kittens" -- to prelude into another logical fallacy that you did employ (despite your checking) -- Reductio ad absurdum, demonstrated in your statement " Since slaughtering kittens is generally seen as evil I can only conclude that terminating Reader is the same as killing kittens. "
The context of the original Google "Don't be Evil" informal logo was based around the technical community. No one ever assumed Google would be faced with a situation where killing kittens would be economical, that's simply absurd. What they did assume is that Google would be faced with numerous situations where it had to choose profit or values, and that in those situations, values should be chosen. This is what drove Google's behavior in China -- threatening to leave the country altogether due to free speech restrictions -- and constantly fighting the Chinese government on censorship. Using scenarios like these as a critical lens for the "Don't be Evil" motto -- it's hard to see your remarks as having much bearing, as you are taking what human society considers evil (killing helpless animals for example) and trying to align that with the policy. However, that was never the intent of the phrase or how it was generally understood.
Logical fallacy in your argument here: (Semantic) Slippery Slope.
In the end, I have to appeal to you to "get real" about this as it seems like you are defending Google for the sake of defending Google. Regardless of the "appeal to authority" fallacy you claim to demonstrate, sometimes, it's just plain common sense. Forbes published an article about the "Don't be Evil" value vanishing slowly four days ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/26/is-larry-page-somehow-corrupting-googles-philosophy-dont-be-evil/?ss=game-changers/ .
So, that's an edited, mainstream magazine site (Forbes) describing this phenomenon as well. How many sources do you need to see before you start to notice a trend?
I can also assure you this is a matter of opinion, not scientific fact. No scientific method or experimentation can determine if something is or is not evil, because it's a relativistic determination. However, it seems as though the tide of opinion in the tech community is beginning to turn around and not look at Google as a darling defender of values and principles anymore. And with the loss of that esteem for Google, so goes the original intent of the "Don't be Evil" logo -- to (judiciously) put values before profit.
I like CloudFlare, but it seems like they exaggerated the scope of this incident in order to get publicity. It's a Startup -- so any exposure seems like good exposure, and they have a lot of operating expenses (bandwidth/hardware/etc), so getting on some VC's radar for a second investment round might be a priority.
I'm in the network of the founders on LinkedIn and she shared the NY Times article about the incident asking (not directed towards europeans) all her contacts if the internet was running slowly this weekend, and that's why. Although, no one I know had noticed such a thing -- and I host a few sites in London, and work with a remote team in the Middle East -- and they work on what we consider the weekend ( Sunday, they have a different weekend starting Friday).
IMHO, the question "was your internet running slowly?" was just a humblebrag to point to how they were featured in the NYT -- which is very telling in relation to the information in TFA here.
Just to be clear, that's a straw man argument, and straw man arguments are a logical fallacy. No one mentioned slaughtering kittens or forcing people to pay for a new OS -- that's stuff you dreamed up:)
That said, Google has done more than just kill Reader -- they've also stopped being such a bold defender of the open internet, and open source software. They are falling in line with general tech-corporate Americana. Just a couple days ago, a story on slashdot opened with the phrase "...a post-don't be evil google..."
While Reader didn't cost me anything, reader cost a lot of developers and site operators a whole lot of time and money in generating/distributing content with the reader API, and it will cost them much more money to re-do it without the reader API now that's been pulled out from under them.
It's clear what's going on here is that Google is once again trying to return to it's "Don't be Evil" roots -- even though its behavior is painting it less and less of the champion of the free internet, and more just-another-profit-centered-corporation. When you sue an open source software producer, you usually don't get much money or anything in return, so it's not a big deal monetarily. The gesture however gives them some PR points they've desperately been seeking lately, especially amongst the tech community they've alienated by cancelling Reader. Likely though, it's too little, too late.
If we're talking about a big, 100+ employee company, sure. What about a 20 person startup, with only enough funding for one IT person, or hiring an MSP? Or an MSP -- where if they had this late night person working, they'd have to be familiar with all the client environments and changes in order to help effectively. With MSPs with over 100+ clients, the person or group would never finish playing catch-up just to have enough background to handle everyone's issues (even with the best/most diligently updated documentation).
100% true -- MSP sales teams go out and say "We're 24/7 available." That means they wake you up late at night via some phone system, or they have someone overseas to answer calls, whose job it is to wake you up late at night for this 24/7 support.
Just like the night shift at a hospital -- the best doctors are available during the day. Patients get forgotten about by nurses at night sometimes (it's a big problem) -- the best nurses are also working during the day shift if they can. The best IT people work during the day -- so when escalation support is needed at night, they get woken up.
May not be unique to IT workers, but sure is common in that field.
You cannot find someone who knows how to turn on a Cisco router and type 'show run', and or, install/partition Linux, in the San Francisco Bay Area for $50k/year. More like $80k/year. $4k/month gets you a receptionist. Where is this data from geographically?
Not so much "foolish enough," but that's what the market is looking for. In Silicon Valley (where I am located), every single IT position I interviewed for or looked into had some mention of "availability for after hours" or "on-call rotation." It's really become part of the culture to have IT workers be always on, and if you're not willing to do that, your job will go to some 22-year old hotshot out of college who is willing to do anything to get in the door.
There are other doctors always available to take care of patients. Other firefighters are always on call to put out fires. These industries are highly systematized with workforce redundancy in mind -- and typically don't happen in the form of small businesses/startups.
What if you're at a small-medium business, and you're the ONLY IT person, or one of two or three IT people who know about some critical issue that needs fixing? And attempts at getting help/consultants have not gotten through management due to cost?
Unfortunately, other consulting companies will undercut you on that and not charge that fee so they get the business in the first place. The consulting company CEO chooses sales over quality of life for consultants -- his company might not even survive if he doesn't.
And small ones..with only the ability to hire consultants and/or a single, less experienced IT staff member. In the former case (consultants), the consultant gets all this work and they want it done efficiently at the lowest cost. When consultant does their best work, client complains about how long it takes and then consulting company manger yells at consultant, despite a job well done.
In the latter case (less experienced), you have a guy running around like a chicken without a head desperately trying to learn just-in-time to put out fires.
I'm an IT professional and more than once I've thought about quitting, especially when I was doing high-stress consulting. Clients treat you like meat, like "the help." They have no problem waking you up at 5AM with nonsense problems. If you don't answer and do it politely, they call your boss and then your job/livelihood is in jeopardy.
This isn't just a 9-5 thing where, when you leave the office, you're no longer on the hook -- it's always happening. Sometimes, you're at a bar at 10PM and you get an urgent call -- pick it up, and you in your tipsy state are now on the hook to resolve an important issue.
The fear of getting these calls has made me stay home sometimes when I could have been being social, and not travel away on vacation when I knew some action was going on I'd be needed for. It creates a lot of stress to be depended on so much, and now with telecommuting, you're expected to be responsive at all times wherever you are.
It's a lot of stress even in the best setup/most-redundant environments, and the job is not for everyone. And when projects come up that are difficult and highly user-facing, it's hard to avoid this type of a situation.
...probably got caught looking up the term "democracy" on the internet and all his family and friends sent off to gulag, so when network troubles happened after a month, they just let it go down.
Too bad Kim Jong Il isn't still around. Last I heard, he claimed to be an "internet expert," and he was rumored to be an expert in all things..
I'd recommend you proxy your web site through CloudFlare -- www.cloudflare.com -- by having them handle your DNS. You can read more about them at their web site -- I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They offer a free proxy service that acts as a web application firewall and will do a good job at blocking hack attempts.
From there, you should restrict your webserver's firewall to only allow traffic from CloudFlare's known IPs, so people cannot directly hit your webserver.
If Linux, install fail2ban on the SSH daemon + require SSH-key based access (no passwords!)
Finally, get a copy of the home version of Nessus from Tenable and use that to scan your server. It's interface is relatively easy to use, and if you hit your webserver IPs every couple months with this, in addition to using CloudFlare and hardening your SSH daemon, you should be in good shape and not have to worry about silly hacks.
The Principle of "Full Disclosure" -- Meaning, companies often don't fix vulnerabilities in a timely fashion until the risk is exposed by making the vulnerability public. This principle has been important in the history of and current landscape of information security, and many people think its effects have been a net benefit.
Harm -- how were these people exactly harmed by having their email addresses revealed? If someone posted my email and iPad MAC on a web site, would I be so upset I'd want him to go to jail for multiple years..family not have income, kids not see their father, over that?
Profit -- Really, these people did it for the reputation and points amongst the hacker community -- once a noble endeavor that drove the United State's technological evolution (how much did Wozniak do just to get points among his friends?) -- now something that can apparently be risky business.
It's easy to see, especially in the aftermath of the Swartz case, that four years in jail for this rather petty act seems like disproportionate punishment for a crime which I think would be worthy of no more than a couple months of a sentence.
Oh yes, to add to my other comment, here's a big one -- the VMWare VSphere client. Can I convert a 30-server VMWare infrastructure to something I can manage via Linux? Sure, SSH to ESXi functionality is useful, but they recommend turning SSH off, and it's much quicker to manage via the GUI.
I'd agree that it is not yet a walled garden, but it is obviously incipient and moving in that direction. The default settings to require software be signed/approved by Apple should be quite a hint that they want to move in that direction for Mac OS X.
On Windows, I'd miss being able to collaborate using MS Project and Visio (as others I work with have made this their choice), being able to test my workplace's Silverlight-driven web application using IE in addition to Firefox and Chrome. I still use Outlook for my email too -- I haven't found Zimbra Desktop, Thunderbird or other products sufficient for my email-power-user needs (they cost me time).
Most of my company's code can be managed through Eclipse (it's Java), but some code requires Visual Studio (Silverlight).
I could run parallels or Fusion on Mac -- but then I'd be running a virtual machine to do both at once. And despite strides towards making it seemless, there's always seemingly a bit of clunk involved. Then what happens if by, Mac OS X 11, Apple makes OS X more IOS-y and walled gardened off, making it less useful for power users? I'd be at a dead end and would need a new OS at that time.
Not at all true. There's been some serious issues with Windows, especially a lot of the MS12 KB's, that could allow someone on the same LAN as you to easily compromise/privilege escalate up to local system on your machine. When you work in the world of "compliant systems" where network security can't be an afterthought, this philosophy is dangerous.
poly, if you read my posting, you'd find that I professionally manage Linux systems to this day -- and I've setup complex architectures of 100+ Linux systems at multiple companies, up until last year. There are many companies that have referred to me as "The Linux guy." So no, I'm not the type that just "tried" Linux. I've made a career around it.
That said, I use RedHat-based distributions with the yum package manager normally. For Debian, there's of course apt-get and dpkg. And yes, I can groan about that -- in case you ever needed to use a version of something that isn't included in the repos.
For example, in the CentOS repos. You can go add epel and remi, but sometimes, other things on the system break when you install packages from these repos. Also, sometimes it just doesn't plain work --- mixed up dependencies, etc that need to be sorted out manually. And further to that -- there's even some open source software you might need/find useful that no one has made a package for your given flavor of Linux yet.
When it comes to Ubuntu and other Debian derived distributions, they usually keep the repos more up to date (often at the expense of stability and/or security). But still -- not everything always just works in package management, and often times I find myself downloading.pkgs or.tar.gz and compiling from source.
It strikes me as you're the type of person who has run Linux on the desktop and hasn't had to do much management of customized systems?
Brief background: I've been using Linux since Slackware '96, with kernel version 1.0.0. I prefer using Linux for servers, but often have used Windows in cases where it presents some advantage (like using Active Directory so I can govern Windows desktops, etc)., and most environments I've worked in have become mixed Linux/Windows environments. Still, I am known much moreso for my *nix talents and content to leave Windows to the armies of Windows sysadmins out there.
For a while now at work, I've been using Windows 7. Using KiTTY (or PuTTY) I can generally work well with unix systems, and the Windows system gives me an environment like a normal user, which helps in reproducing issues, etc. The downside is, well, it's still Windows and prone to quirky issues, e.g. problems caused by Windows update, wanting to reboot more often than I'd like..
At home, I use Mac OS X rather than Windows 7. I run a custom-built hackintosh pro system (built late last year, i7-ivy bridge type). Using Mac OS X, I can still interact with systems I need to (using CoRD for Windows Remote Desktop), and it runs all the other programs I need elegantly. It also doesn't need reboots very often and is quite a stable system.
However, I too have been looking for a solution now that Apple is moving in the iOS-y direction for OS X, in terms of a system that lets me keep the awesome BSD power of Mac OS without being confined to Apple's walled garden of App Store restrictions etc.
Linux doesn't work as a Desktop environment for me for a lot of reasons, despite the fact I love Linux. It requires too much overhead to install software (packages, dependencies, etc), often doesn't run software I need (and/or open source equivalents fail to install on my distro, etc etc), and the end-user experience in X windows is generally clunky and not nearly as elegant/streamlined as Mac or Windows. A lot of open source products that do work are second-best to the product you could use on a desktop -- e.g. Microsoft Word on Mac and Windows vs OpenOffice on Linux. It'll work most of the time, but sometimes, it'll be a problem. I'm not a one man team and I work with people using Windows and Mac -- so I have to accomodate. In order to work in Linux, I'd have to have a VM running Windows or Mac -- and that kind of defeats the purpose of Linux.
So, in short, I am searching for an operating system that has the nice interface and POSIX-compliant backend of Mac OS, the openness of Linux, and runs all the software Windows can. Will a solution ever exist?:)
Amen to this. IT professionals get enough cold calls, account managers doing "account reviews" (sales calls), and the like already. They often are people who like advertisement the least and believe they are smart enough to make their own decisions on vendors without being swayed.
That's why ads written like a PR News story posted on Slashdot are insulting to us -- it's obviously an ad, but it's not labelled so. They no longer label the author as associated with Dice Holdings, so it can be passed off as legit news. It also can't be blocked by ad blocking software or the "disable ads" button that appears as a thank you for positive contributions.
On top of that, they are using the moderation system to mod down complaints about this unscrupulous practice.
This is part of the growing trend of stripping content that users want in favor of content that pays the most money to the site's publisher, the same thing folks like Facebook are doing in activity feeds. Monetizing the site at the expense of the experience of the user. How long can this trend continue before users have had enough?
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue that legislation that provides consequences for banks recklessly gambling with people's savings accounts, handing out mortgages they know will result in foreclosure, and executives vying for short-term profit and bonuses over long-term stability of the global financial system would increase consumer confidence and cause these DDoS issues to be abated more quickly than the measures you suggest.
In a positive peace, something would have been done about the bank's malfeasance and groups wouldn't feel so motivated to resort to vigilantism through DDoS to settle their grievances.
These folks obsessed with a "negative peace" by making more laws should study history.
You use a Socratic relativistic argument, about how evil has no definition and is a relative term, and then use an analogy about "slaughtering kittens" -- to prelude into another logical fallacy that you did employ (despite your checking) -- Reductio ad absurdum, demonstrated in your statement " Since slaughtering kittens is generally seen as evil I can only conclude that terminating Reader is the same as killing kittens. "
The context of the original Google "Don't be Evil" informal logo was based around the technical community. No one ever assumed Google would be faced with a situation where killing kittens would be economical, that's simply absurd. What they did assume is that Google would be faced with numerous situations where it had to choose profit or values, and that in those situations, values should be chosen. This is what drove Google's behavior in China -- threatening to leave the country altogether due to free speech restrictions -- and constantly fighting the Chinese government on censorship. Using scenarios like these as a critical lens for the "Don't be Evil" motto -- it's hard to see your remarks as having much bearing, as you are taking what human society considers evil (killing helpless animals for example) and trying to align that with the policy. However, that was never the intent of the phrase or how it was generally understood.
Logical fallacy in your argument here: (Semantic) Slippery Slope.
In the end, I have to appeal to you to "get real" about this as it seems like you are defending Google for the sake of defending Google. Regardless of the "appeal to authority" fallacy you claim to demonstrate, sometimes, it's just plain common sense. Forbes published an article about the "Don't be Evil" value vanishing slowly four days ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/26/is-larry-page-somehow-corrupting-googles-philosophy-dont-be-evil/?ss=game-changers/ . So, that's an edited, mainstream magazine site (Forbes) describing this phenomenon as well. How many sources do you need to see before you start to notice a trend?
I can also assure you this is a matter of opinion, not scientific fact. No scientific method or experimentation can determine if something is or is not evil, because it's a relativistic determination. However, it seems as though the tide of opinion in the tech community is beginning to turn around and not look at Google as a darling defender of values and principles anymore. And with the loss of that esteem for Google, so goes the original intent of the "Don't be Evil" logo -- to (judiciously) put values before profit.
IMHO, the question "was your internet running slowly?" was just a humblebrag to point to how they were featured in the NYT -- which is very telling in relation to the information in TFA here.
That said, Google has done more than just kill Reader -- they've also stopped being such a bold defender of the open internet, and open source software. They are falling in line with general tech-corporate Americana. Just a couple days ago, a story on slashdot opened with the phrase "...a post-don't be evil google..."
While Reader didn't cost me anything, reader cost a lot of developers and site operators a whole lot of time and money in generating/distributing content with the reader API, and it will cost them much more money to re-do it without the reader API now that's been pulled out from under them.
It's clear what's going on here is that Google is once again trying to return to it's "Don't be Evil" roots -- even though its behavior is painting it less and less of the champion of the free internet, and more just-another-profit-centered-corporation. When you sue an open source software producer, you usually don't get much money or anything in return, so it's not a big deal monetarily. The gesture however gives them some PR points they've desperately been seeking lately, especially amongst the tech community they've alienated by cancelling Reader. Likely though, it's too little, too late.
If we're talking about a big, 100+ employee company, sure. What about a 20 person startup, with only enough funding for one IT person, or hiring an MSP? Or an MSP -- where if they had this late night person working, they'd have to be familiar with all the client environments and changes in order to help effectively. With MSPs with over 100+ clients, the person or group would never finish playing catch-up just to have enough background to handle everyone's issues (even with the best/most diligently updated documentation).
Just like the night shift at a hospital -- the best doctors are available during the day. Patients get forgotten about by nurses at night sometimes (it's a big problem) -- the best nurses are also working during the day shift if they can. The best IT people work during the day -- so when escalation support is needed at night, they get woken up.
May not be unique to IT workers, but sure is common in that field.
You cannot find someone who knows how to turn on a Cisco router and type 'show run', and or, install/partition Linux, in the San Francisco Bay Area for $50k/year. More like $80k/year. $4k/month gets you a receptionist. Where is this data from geographically?
Not so much "foolish enough," but that's what the market is looking for. In Silicon Valley (where I am located), every single IT position I interviewed for or looked into had some mention of "availability for after hours" or "on-call rotation." It's really become part of the culture to have IT workers be always on, and if you're not willing to do that, your job will go to some 22-year old hotshot out of college who is willing to do anything to get in the door.
There are other doctors always available to take care of patients. Other firefighters are always on call to put out fires. These industries are highly systematized with workforce redundancy in mind -- and typically don't happen in the form of small businesses/startups. What if you're at a small-medium business, and you're the ONLY IT person, or one of two or three IT people who know about some critical issue that needs fixing? And attempts at getting help /consultants have not gotten through management due to cost?
Unfortunately, other consulting companies will undercut you on that and not charge that fee so they get the business in the first place. The consulting company CEO chooses sales over quality of life for consultants -- his company might not even survive if he doesn't.
In the latter case (less experienced), you have a guy running around like a chicken without a head desperately trying to learn just-in-time to put out fires.
I'm an IT professional and more than once I've thought about quitting, especially when I was doing high-stress consulting. Clients treat you like meat, like "the help." They have no problem waking you up at 5AM with nonsense problems. If you don't answer and do it politely, they call your boss and then your job/livelihood is in jeopardy.
This isn't just a 9-5 thing where, when you leave the office, you're no longer on the hook -- it's always happening. Sometimes, you're at a bar at 10PM and you get an urgent call -- pick it up, and you in your tipsy state are now on the hook to resolve an important issue.
The fear of getting these calls has made me stay home sometimes when I could have been being social, and not travel away on vacation when I knew some action was going on I'd be needed for. It creates a lot of stress to be depended on so much, and now with telecommuting, you're expected to be responsive at all times wherever you are.
It's a lot of stress even in the best setup/most-redundant environments, and the job is not for everyone. And when projects come up that are difficult and highly user-facing, it's hard to avoid this type of a situation.
Too bad Kim Jong Il isn't still around. Last I heard, he claimed to be an "internet expert," and he was rumored to be an expert in all things..
I'd recommend you proxy your web site through CloudFlare -- www.cloudflare.com -- by having them handle your DNS. You can read more about them at their web site -- I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They offer a free proxy service that acts as a web application firewall and will do a good job at blocking hack attempts.
From there, you should restrict your webserver's firewall to only allow traffic from CloudFlare's known IPs, so people cannot directly hit your webserver.
If Linux, install fail2ban on the SSH daemon + require SSH-key based access (no passwords!)
Finally, get a copy of the home version of Nessus from Tenable and use that to scan your server. It's interface is relatively easy to use, and if you hit your webserver IPs every couple months with this, in addition to using CloudFlare and hardening your SSH daemon, you should be in good shape and not have to worry about silly hacks.
The Principle of "Full Disclosure" -- Meaning, companies often don't fix vulnerabilities in a timely fashion until the risk is exposed by making the vulnerability public. This principle has been important in the history of and current landscape of information security, and many people think its effects have been a net benefit.
Harm -- how were these people exactly harmed by having their email addresses revealed? If someone posted my email and iPad MAC on a web site, would I be so upset I'd want him to go to jail for multiple years..family not have income, kids not see their father, over that?
Profit -- Really, these people did it for the reputation and points amongst the hacker community -- once a noble endeavor that drove the United State's technological evolution (how much did Wozniak do just to get points among his friends?) -- now something that can apparently be risky business.
It's easy to see, especially in the aftermath of the Swartz case, that four years in jail for this rather petty act seems like disproportionate punishment for a crime which I think would be worthy of no more than a couple months of a sentence.
Oh yes, to add to my other comment, here's a big one -- the VMWare VSphere client. Can I convert a 30-server VMWare infrastructure to something I can manage via Linux? Sure, SSH to ESXi functionality is useful, but they recommend turning SSH off, and it's much quicker to manage via the GUI.
On Windows, I'd miss being able to collaborate using MS Project and Visio (as others I work with have made this their choice), being able to test my workplace's Silverlight-driven web application using IE in addition to Firefox and Chrome. I still use Outlook for my email too -- I haven't found Zimbra Desktop, Thunderbird or other products sufficient for my email-power-user needs (they cost me time).
Most of my company's code can be managed through Eclipse (it's Java), but some code requires Visual Studio (Silverlight).
I could run parallels or Fusion on Mac -- but then I'd be running a virtual machine to do both at once. And despite strides towards making it seemless, there's always seemingly a bit of clunk involved. Then what happens if by, Mac OS X 11, Apple makes OS X more IOS-y and walled gardened off, making it less useful for power users? I'd be at a dead end and would need a new OS at that time.
Not at all true. There's been some serious issues with Windows, especially a lot of the MS12 KB's, that could allow someone on the same LAN as you to easily compromise/privilege escalate up to local system on your machine. When you work in the world of "compliant systems" where network security can't be an afterthought, this philosophy is dangerous.
That said, I use RedHat-based distributions with the yum package manager normally. For Debian, there's of course apt-get and dpkg. And yes, I can groan about that -- in case you ever needed to use a version of something that isn't included in the repos.
For example, in the CentOS repos. You can go add epel and remi, but sometimes, other things on the system break when you install packages from these repos. Also, sometimes it just doesn't plain work --- mixed up dependencies, etc that need to be sorted out manually. And further to that -- there's even some open source software you might need/find useful that no one has made a package for your given flavor of Linux yet.
When it comes to Ubuntu and other Debian derived distributions, they usually keep the repos more up to date (often at the expense of stability and/or security). But still -- not everything always just works in package management, and often times I find myself downloading .pkgs or .tar.gz and compiling from source.
It strikes me as you're the type of person who has run Linux on the desktop and hasn't had to do much management of customized systems?
Brief background: I've been using Linux since Slackware '96, with kernel version 1.0.0. I prefer using Linux for servers, but often have used Windows in cases where it presents some advantage (like using Active Directory so I can govern Windows desktops, etc)., and most environments I've worked in have become mixed Linux/Windows environments. Still, I am known much moreso for my *nix talents and content to leave Windows to the armies of Windows sysadmins out there.
For a while now at work, I've been using Windows 7. Using KiTTY (or PuTTY) I can generally work well with unix systems, and the Windows system gives me an environment like a normal user, which helps in reproducing issues, etc. The downside is, well, it's still Windows and prone to quirky issues, e.g. problems caused by Windows update, wanting to reboot more often than I'd like..
At home, I use Mac OS X rather than Windows 7. I run a custom-built hackintosh pro system (built late last year, i7-ivy bridge type). Using Mac OS X, I can still interact with systems I need to (using CoRD for Windows Remote Desktop), and it runs all the other programs I need elegantly. It also doesn't need reboots very often and is quite a stable system.
However, I too have been looking for a solution now that Apple is moving in the iOS-y direction for OS X, in terms of a system that lets me keep the awesome BSD power of Mac OS without being confined to Apple's walled garden of App Store restrictions etc.
Linux doesn't work as a Desktop environment for me for a lot of reasons, despite the fact I love Linux. It requires too much overhead to install software (packages, dependencies, etc), often doesn't run software I need (and/or open source equivalents fail to install on my distro, etc etc), and the end-user experience in X windows is generally clunky and not nearly as elegant/streamlined as Mac or Windows. A lot of open source products that do work are second-best to the product you could use on a desktop -- e.g. Microsoft Word on Mac and Windows vs OpenOffice on Linux. It'll work most of the time, but sometimes, it'll be a problem. I'm not a one man team and I work with people using Windows and Mac -- so I have to accomodate. In order to work in Linux, I'd have to have a VM running Windows or Mac -- and that kind of defeats the purpose of Linux.
So, in short, I am searching for an operating system that has the nice interface and POSIX-compliant backend of Mac OS, the openness of Linux, and runs all the software Windows can. Will a solution ever exist? :)
That's why ads written like a PR News story posted on Slashdot are insulting to us -- it's obviously an ad, but it's not labelled so. They no longer label the author as associated with Dice Holdings, so it can be passed off as legit news. It also can't be blocked by ad blocking software or the "disable ads" button that appears as a thank you for positive contributions.
On top of that, they are using the moderation system to mod down complaints about this unscrupulous practice.
This is part of the growing trend of stripping content that users want in favor of content that pays the most money to the site's publisher, the same thing folks like Facebook are doing in activity feeds. Monetizing the site at the expense of the experience of the user. How long can this trend continue before users have had enough?
True, but, then when the cap dries out and eventually bursts open it'd probably be a major cause of drive failure and lack of longevity.