If Bill Gates had serious competition from Linus, then clearly both profit margins would have been lower than had either operated alone, as Bill did. Since the total amount of software purchased would be the same, the total amount of money acquired from customers would necessarily be less, not more.
Well, let's amend it.
Let's say Bill Gates is a serious monopolist in software, and Linus Torvalds is a serious monopolist in penguin sales. They have no competition with each other. But each are in charge of mega-conglomerates. Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Would you be less charitable in that world? More charitable? Or about the same...
One of the questions to ask seriously (and I'm not saying I know how the answer would come out, because I don't) is this: what would've happened if Bill Gates hadn't acquired all that money which he is now giving away? Where would it be? In the pockets of millions of ordinary folks, of course. And what would they have done with it?
This goes both ways, of course.
What if, in a parallel universe, there were two big time monopolists: Bill Gates, and this otherwise unknown guy called Linus Torvalds. They run separate software mega-conglomerates. Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Would you be less charitable in that world? More charitable? Or about the same...
What if, in a parallel universe, there were n big time monopolists, where n >= 0... (What-if scenarios are great!)
Personally I'm much more scared of avian flu than terrorists...
At least one Government minister shares the same sentiments as you... don't worry, I'm sure all the rest are still paranoid about terrorism and refugees... (Also, I read that article in the newspapers here in Canberra. I don't know about where you are but it's fairly well-reported here.)
You can email a text message to someone's phone, and for some carriers it is an automatic $0.10 or more a message received and the reciever can't not recieve it...
...and all over the world, spammers rub their hands in glee.
When problems do happen, the open source community is notorious for getting them fixed very quickly. If he were to provide us, the community, with more details about the problems he encountered...
Yes, the open source community is damn quick about providing assistance, support and advice... when the story is on the front page of Slashdot (and in a major broadsheet newspaper, you decide which is more significant).
I'd bet that there are dozens of stories like this that don't make the front page of Slashdot, and therefore don't get any sort of meaningful assistance.
That is to say, whilst we can help him in this situation, it doesn't actually fix the problem about Linux being less reliable than Windows for some tasks.
A few days ago, I was browsing the "Radio" directory of iTunes, the one where they list a whole bunch of streaming radio stations. Whilst they have a good selection of genres, they only have a half-dozen to a dozen distinct stations in each. Not a huge variety.
I thought, if Apple released an encoder, lots of broadcasters would sign up and the Radio directory would be a major drawcard of the software. Just like their Podcast directory. Millions of people have iTunes, so that's a huge audience. Apple could revolutionise Internet broadcasting.
But they don't want to.
Apple doesn't want you listening to streaming Internet radio, because every minute you're listening to it, you're not listening to music that you bought off their Music Store or ripped from your own sources, and if you don't buy from their Music Store, you're probably less interested in the iPod as well. Streaming radio is just a distraction. (Although they might see some merit, if they find a way to identify the currently-playing track so listeners can buy from the Music Store on impulse, Live365-style.)
Now swap "Internet radio" with "AM/FM radio" and "iTunes" with "iPod" and you can see their thinking. (Although you've already paid for your iPod and Music Store sales don't add up to much for them.)
Nobody is saying that computer documents (like web pages) have to be exactly like books. The Slashdot discussion you're reading right now is nothing like a book. It's not printed on anything like paper. It's not formatted into anything like a book page. The experience of reading it is nothing like reading the "Letters to the Editor" column of your local newspaper, although the length and content is (arguably) similar. Yet people read it.
Things don't have to be in the form of paper books to get read.
For the same reason, I say that e-books can be completely different from books, and we should celebrate these differences. Exactly like audiobooks. Different format for different people.
The good points of e-books have probably been said in this discussion, so I'll compress them down into this paragraph. Can carry lots of them. Can carry them anywhere, and read them in 5-minute bursts. Can search them. Can download and read them without having to go to a bookstore.
But the good points (and the bad points, of which there are more) mean that e-books shouldn't ever replace paper books. Rather, they should be in addition to it, for those times when you wouldn't otherwise read a paper book - and there are lots of those! Having half a dozen books on your PDA or phone, for instance, means you'll find a lot of reading opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have.
For this reason I say, play to the strengths of e-books. They don't need to be high-res, or huge, or use little battery, or simulate the paper experience exactly. If I want a paper imitation, I'll take paper. Make it so we can buy and download books on-the-fly from mobile devices. So we can find-as-you-type, or mark up pages with voice content. Give us text-to-speech. Give us a way to collaborate on books or read other opinions. You know, all the stuff you can't do with paper.
Actually, there are a number of xUnit implementations out there. JUnit is just one of many for many languages. NUnit is by no means a rip off of JUnit than JUnit is of pyUnit, or cppUnit, etc.
The original poster's point was, NUnit (and csUnit) both support unit tests marked up with.NET attributes (sorta kinda like Java annotations), and they've done it for quite some time now. Yet neither of these have made the front page of Slashdot.
The point was lost in the vitriol and flame but I think it still stands.
Talk to me in 10 years and tell me then if you think that thats stupid.
Back in the day, we thought that a 4MB card was OK, an 8MB card was more than sufficient and a 16MB card enough for all but the most massive monitors. Why? Because we used video cards as a framebuffer, and any excess memory was just a waste.
Then game developers started targeting the video card, and started putting texture maps on the video card. Whoa! Suddenly the baseline video card for games blew out... 128MB minimum today, will be a lot more in the future.
My point? That it took a completely new application of the video card to massively inflate what people should expect of it. And that what Microsoft is doing with Windows Vista could be the start of another completely new application that could again spur the development of huge new video cards.
(But then, we have new PCI Express cards with HyperMemory and TurboCache which use main system memory, since they have enough bandwidth to do so. So talk to me in 10 years and I could be saying that a 4MB card is OK, an 8MB card is more than sufficient and a 16MB card enough for all but the most massive monitors...)
Which does raise the question as to what the hell Microsoft are doing that means they require the same amount of graphics RAM as MacOS X needs for the system!
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't require a 256MB video card for Windows Vista. The requirement will probably be similar to Mac OS X: a video card that can display the resolution you want, at the colour depth you want. That's it.
The 256MB figure is for the new eye candy, and not just that, it's for the new eye candy to run at full speed and not start chugging or such. Mac OS X will also perform a lot smoother, the better video hardware you throw at it. Is 256MB excessive? Probably. But not a requirement.
I like to run multiple instances of applications. If I tell my OS I want another copy of something open, I don't want it to switch to the one that's already running.
Therein lies the second problem.
Most people want to just bring GAIM back to the front. So they do the most obvious thing - click on the GAIM icon. You want a new instance, so you click on the icon. Both they and you perform the same action with vastly different goals... that's a big problem.
So we need an interface that allows you to do both, but most importantly, makes the difference clear. The ambiguity is killing us (as you mentioned with Microsoft apps). I won't be drawn in to which function is "more important" or takes precedence, as I'm sure that if users understood what was going on, they'd find uses for both.
And yeah, as has been noted, the Mac OS X solution to the problem is to always bring the existing app to the front, and to never allow multiple instances (unless you go through Terminal.app, and there's little chance of most people doing that).
Besides promulgating the "all of Slashdot speaks with one voice" fallacy, you are confusing competition for goods and services with competition for jobs.
Put another way, competition is a good thing as long as it's somebody else doing the competing...
I browsed at +1 and couldn't really find anybody posting why NASA is doing it. It's obvious, really - so obvious that there's not really any reason for me to post it. But here we go...
The point of NASA doing this is not to send your name to aliens, and it's not to send your name to archaeologists 50,000 years in the future. They're doing it to make you feel like a part of you is on that probe, that a part of you is being launched into the depths of the solar system, exploring, etc. It's a discovery thing. It's also a marketing thing, and for what you get (a whole bunch of kids saying, cool), it's pretty cheap.
Since it's unlikely that it'll be picked up by aliens or archaeologists, it doesn't really matter what form the names take. Of course, the weight of the probe is finely tuned, so something light is preferable. Kids understand what a CD is, so that's a good choice.
NASA did a similar thing for the Deep Impact probe - collected names and included them on the impactor. Definitely no chance of that being picked up by aliens, but there's something cool about having your name on a big chunk of metal that will smash into a comet on the 4th of July (more marketing there).
It's a novella set in the near future where people have found that sleep really is useless and an evolutionary relic, and people without sleep seem to perform just fine. Not just fine - they're smarter (due to all that extra study time) and happier (due to the resulting changes to brain chemistry).
They find a gene that turn sleep off, and start disabling it in newborns - kicking off an entire race of smarter, happier humans who have no need to sleep. For some reason, the rest of us feel threatened by it...
Anyway, for anyone interested in this discussion, the novella is worth a read. (It also took the double of both Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1992 and 1991, for those who care.)
What exactly do you mean by "Cocoa based"? How would you be able to tell that it's Cocoa based if you see it? Does it need to be Cocoa based to be good? Apple's own Safari isn't written in Cocoa, in fact, it's written in a convoluted KDE-to-Mac wrapper. That Safari's user interface is so seamless is a testament to Apple engineers.
If you mean "written from the ground up in Objective-C against the Cocoa framework", the answer is no. If you mean "uses Cocoa widgets and form controls", the answer is no for the upcoming 1.5 release, but yes for after that. But as I said, if you can't tell that it's Cocoa, it's probably not important whether it is or not.
This keyboard makes all your commands discoverable. In the user interaction world, that's pretty hot.
Scenario: You hold down the Ctrl key. Instantly, your keyboard remaps itself, changing the key caps from "A" "S" "D" "F" etc. to "Ctrl-A", "Ctrl-S", "Ctrl-D", etc. It may sound silly but even that would make things a lot clearer to newbies - believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there who either never learn how to use key shortcuts, or learn a few by rote and never figure them out!
But then, your custom software comes in. Instead of "Ctrl-A" (for instance), it says "Ctrl-A: Select All". Instead of "Ctrl-S", it says "Ctrl-S: Save". If you let up on the Ctrl key, the other key caps revert. An easy way to see its effects.
Those same newbies who never learn how to use key shortcuts, they do things by clicking the File menu and choosing Save. Every time. Every goddamn time. To them, Ctrl-S is another cryptic, untrusted, black magic command. But if you change it to holding down Ctrl and pressing the "Save" key, that's much friendler. (It sucks how much some people are scared of computers. This is an utterly alien concept to Slashdotters. But it's true.)
A large body of work created by the US Government is under the public domain. I've never heard of people complaining about that, or travel guide publishers complaining about the CIA World Factbook being free (not a direct comparison, but you could probably find better ones), etc. etc.
And if you think about it, why not? Governments are there to serve the public, so if they do release work, I think releasing them to the public domain is a good move. But yeah, the debate here is on whether music is something that governments should get involved in, or leave to private hands - see rest of Slashdot discussion.
This isn't the first that the BBC has been accused of competing with commercial interests. One instance that sticks in my mind is this: for a long time, they couldn't release WAP services for mobile phone browsing. Why? Anti-competitive. So, for instance, they couldn't release a version of h2g2 (the online, community-built version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Although I presume that's been resolved, as they do offer a mobile version now.
Half the features on modern UIs don't increase productivity, and that includes OS X and other non-Microsoft products. People just like eye candy...
As long as these features don't decrease productivity, why not have them? After all, given two UIs with the same productivity, one with eye candy and one without, I'd take the eye candy...
Re:Gone....for the moment
on
PHRACK Final
·
· Score: 1
"Operation Sundevil", an attempt to crackdown on the Legion of Doom cracking and phreaking group, happened. Craig Neidorf (Knight Lightning), was indicted, subjected to search and seizures by the US Secret Service, brought to a jury trial and finally had all charges dropped by the prosecution...
For those with a few hours to spare and a desire to learn what happened back in 1990 with Operation Sundevil, Phrack, the feds, etc. etc. - read The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling, available at http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/hackcrck.html.
Slashdot Mirror
If Bill Gates had serious competition from Linus, then clearly both profit margins would have been lower than had either operated alone, as Bill did. Since the total amount of software purchased would be the same, the total amount of money acquired from customers would necessarily be less, not more.
Well, let's amend it.
Let's say Bill Gates is a serious monopolist in software, and Linus Torvalds is a serious monopolist in penguin sales. They have no competition with each other. But each are in charge of mega-conglomerates. Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Would you be less charitable in that world? More charitable? Or about the same...
One of the questions to ask seriously (and I'm not saying I know how the answer would come out, because I don't) is this: what would've happened if Bill Gates hadn't acquired all that money which he is now giving away? Where would it be? In the pockets of millions of ordinary folks, of course. And what would they have done with it?
This goes both ways, of course.
What if, in a parallel universe, there were two big time monopolists: Bill Gates, and this otherwise unknown guy called Linus Torvalds. They run separate software mega-conglomerates. Between them, they extract twice as much money from the general population as Bill Gates does in our universe.
Would you be less charitable in that world? More charitable? Or about the same...
What if, in a parallel universe, there were n big time monopolists, where n >= 0... (What-if scenarios are great!)
Why would you do that? You'd follow the money... see who's benefitting from the spam and file your claim against THEM in small-claims court.
Good luck trying to enforce that against somebody in Eastern Europe! (Or China. Or Nigeria, etc.)
I'd love to see some spammers do this.
Because for sure they'd hit some cellphones that are on the do-not-call list.
Good luck trying to enforce that against thousands of spam zombies across the Internet!
Personally I'm much more scared of avian flu than terrorists...
At least one Government minister shares the same sentiments as you... don't worry, I'm sure all the rest are still paranoid about terrorism and refugees... (Also, I read that article in the newspapers here in Canberra. I don't know about where you are but it's fairly well-reported here.)
You can email a text message to someone's phone, and for some carriers it is an automatic $0.10 or more a message received and the reciever can't not recieve it...
...and all over the world, spammers rub their hands in glee.
When problems do happen, the open source community is notorious for getting them fixed very quickly. If he were to provide us, the community, with more details about the problems he encountered...
Yes, the open source community is damn quick about providing assistance, support and advice... when the story is on the front page of Slashdot (and in a major broadsheet newspaper, you decide which is more significant).
I'd bet that there are dozens of stories like this that don't make the front page of Slashdot, and therefore don't get any sort of meaningful assistance.
That is to say, whilst we can help him in this situation, it doesn't actually fix the problem about Linux being less reliable than Windows for some tasks.
Apple doesn't want you listening to the radio.
A few days ago, I was browsing the "Radio" directory of iTunes, the one where they list a whole bunch of streaming radio stations. Whilst they have a good selection of genres, they only have a half-dozen to a dozen distinct stations in each. Not a huge variety.
I thought, if Apple released an encoder, lots of broadcasters would sign up and the Radio directory would be a major drawcard of the software. Just like their Podcast directory. Millions of people have iTunes, so that's a huge audience. Apple could revolutionise Internet broadcasting.
But they don't want to.
Apple doesn't want you listening to streaming Internet radio, because every minute you're listening to it, you're not listening to music that you bought off their Music Store or ripped from your own sources, and if you don't buy from their Music Store, you're probably less interested in the iPod as well. Streaming radio is just a distraction. (Although they might see some merit, if they find a way to identify the currently-playing track so listeners can buy from the Music Store on impulse, Live365-style.)
Now swap "Internet radio" with "AM/FM radio" and "iTunes" with "iPod" and you can see their thinking. (Although you've already paid for your iPod and Music Store sales don't add up to much for them.)
The funding of the space program continues to be less and less each year (adjusted for inflation).
Wikipedia link to the NASA Budget.
Why do e-books have to be exactly like books?
Nobody is saying that computer documents (like web pages) have to be exactly like books. The Slashdot discussion you're reading right now is nothing like a book. It's not printed on anything like paper. It's not formatted into anything like a book page. The experience of reading it is nothing like reading the "Letters to the Editor" column of your local newspaper, although the length and content is (arguably) similar. Yet people read it.
Things don't have to be in the form of paper books to get read.
For the same reason, I say that e-books can be completely different from books, and we should celebrate these differences. Exactly like audiobooks. Different format for different people.
The good points of e-books have probably been said in this discussion, so I'll compress them down into this paragraph. Can carry lots of them. Can carry them anywhere, and read them in 5-minute bursts. Can search them. Can download and read them without having to go to a bookstore.
But the good points (and the bad points, of which there are more) mean that e-books shouldn't ever replace paper books. Rather, they should be in addition to it, for those times when you wouldn't otherwise read a paper book - and there are lots of those! Having half a dozen books on your PDA or phone, for instance, means you'll find a lot of reading opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have.
For this reason I say, play to the strengths of e-books. They don't need to be high-res, or huge, or use little battery, or simulate the paper experience exactly. If I want a paper imitation, I'll take paper. Make it so we can buy and download books on-the-fly from mobile devices. So we can find-as-you-type, or mark up pages with voice content. Give us text-to-speech. Give us a way to collaborate on books or read other opinions. You know, all the stuff you can't do with paper.
Actually, there are a number of xUnit implementations out there. JUnit is just one of many for many languages. NUnit is by no means a rip off of JUnit than JUnit is of pyUnit, or cppUnit, etc.
.NET attributes (sorta kinda like Java annotations), and they've done it for quite some time now. Yet neither of these have made the front page of Slashdot.
The original poster's point was, NUnit (and csUnit) both support unit tests marked up with
The point was lost in the vitriol and flame but I think it still stands.
256mb of vram should be enough for anyone.
Talk to me in 10 years and tell me then if you think that thats stupid.
Back in the day, we thought that a 4MB card was OK, an 8MB card was more than sufficient and a 16MB card enough for all but the most massive monitors. Why? Because we used video cards as a framebuffer, and any excess memory was just a waste.
Then game developers started targeting the video card, and started putting texture maps on the video card. Whoa! Suddenly the baseline video card for games blew out... 128MB minimum today, will be a lot more in the future.
My point? That it took a completely new application of the video card to massively inflate what people should expect of it. And that what Microsoft is doing with Windows Vista could be the start of another completely new application that could again spur the development of huge new video cards.
(But then, we have new PCI Express cards with HyperMemory and TurboCache which use main system memory, since they have enough bandwidth to do so. So talk to me in 10 years and I could be saying that a 4MB card is OK, an 8MB card is more than sufficient and a 16MB card enough for all but the most massive monitors...)
Which does raise the question as to what the hell Microsoft are doing that means they require the same amount of graphics RAM as MacOS X needs for the system!
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't require a 256MB video card for Windows Vista. The requirement will probably be similar to Mac OS X: a video card that can display the resolution you want, at the colour depth you want. That's it.
The 256MB figure is for the new eye candy, and not just that, it's for the new eye candy to run at full speed and not start chugging or such. Mac OS X will also perform a lot smoother, the better video hardware you throw at it. Is 256MB excessive? Probably. But not a requirement.
I like to run multiple instances of applications. If I tell my OS I want another copy of something open, I don't want it to switch to the one that's already running.
Therein lies the second problem.
Most people want to just bring GAIM back to the front. So they do the most obvious thing - click on the GAIM icon. You want a new instance, so you click on the icon. Both they and you perform the same action with vastly different goals... that's a big problem.
So we need an interface that allows you to do both, but most importantly, makes the difference clear. The ambiguity is killing us (as you mentioned with Microsoft apps). I won't be drawn in to which function is "more important" or takes precedence, as I'm sure that if users understood what was going on, they'd find uses for both.
And yeah, as has been noted, the Mac OS X solution to the problem is to always bring the existing app to the front, and to never allow multiple instances (unless you go through Terminal.app, and there's little chance of most people doing that).
Besides promulgating the "all of Slashdot speaks with one voice" fallacy, you are confusing competition for goods and services with competition for jobs.
Put another way, competition is a good thing as long as it's somebody else doing the competing...
I browsed at +1 and couldn't really find anybody posting why NASA is doing it. It's obvious, really - so obvious that there's not really any reason for me to post it. But here we go...
The point of NASA doing this is not to send your name to aliens, and it's not to send your name to archaeologists 50,000 years in the future. They're doing it to make you feel like a part of you is on that probe, that a part of you is being launched into the depths of the solar system, exploring, etc. It's a discovery thing. It's also a marketing thing, and for what you get (a whole bunch of kids saying, cool), it's pretty cheap.
Since it's unlikely that it'll be picked up by aliens or archaeologists, it doesn't really matter what form the names take. Of course, the weight of the probe is finely tuned, so something light is preferable. Kids understand what a CD is, so that's a good choice.
NASA did a similar thing for the Deep Impact probe - collected names and included them on the impactor. Definitely no chance of that being picked up by aliens, but there's something cool about having your name on a big chunk of metal that will smash into a comet on the 4th of July (more marketing there).
Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress - I think that link is referral-free, but post better ones if you like.
It's a novella set in the near future where people have found that sleep really is useless and an evolutionary relic, and people without sleep seem to perform just fine. Not just fine - they're smarter (due to all that extra study time) and happier (due to the resulting changes to brain chemistry).
They find a gene that turn sleep off, and start disabling it in newborns - kicking off an entire race of smarter, happier humans who have no need to sleep. For some reason, the rest of us feel threatened by it...
Anyway, for anyone interested in this discussion, the novella is worth a read. (It also took the double of both Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1992 and 1991, for those who care.)
VS isn't exactly bug-free either...Googling visual studio bug results in 760,000 hits
Google search for visual studio bug - 840,000 results
Google search for eclipse bug - 1,480,000 results
Google search for emacs bug - 1,170,000 results
Google search for slashdot bug - 1,460,000 results
Google search for bright purple elephant bug - 131,000 results
Congratulations! You have given us a meaningless statistic.
Will the OSX version of Firefox be Cocoa based?
What exactly do you mean by "Cocoa based"? How would you be able to tell that it's Cocoa based if you see it? Does it need to be Cocoa based to be good? Apple's own Safari isn't written in Cocoa, in fact, it's written in a convoluted KDE-to-Mac wrapper. That Safari's user interface is so seamless is a testament to Apple engineers.
If you mean "written from the ground up in Objective-C against the Cocoa framework", the answer is no. If you mean "uses Cocoa widgets and form controls", the answer is no for the upcoming 1.5 release, but yes for after that. But as I said, if you can't tell that it's Cocoa, it's probably not important whether it is or not.
Or, run Camino or OmniWeb.
Let's face it, people... no computer is a real computer without a cigarette lighter in a drive bay.
P -BAY
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SIL-CIGCU
Don't set your case alight!
This keyboard makes all your commands discoverable. In the user interaction world, that's pretty hot.
Scenario: You hold down the Ctrl key. Instantly, your keyboard remaps itself, changing the key caps from "A" "S" "D" "F" etc. to "Ctrl-A", "Ctrl-S", "Ctrl-D", etc. It may sound silly but even that would make things a lot clearer to newbies - believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there who either never learn how to use key shortcuts, or learn a few by rote and never figure them out!
But then, your custom software comes in. Instead of "Ctrl-A" (for instance), it says "Ctrl-A: Select All". Instead of "Ctrl-S", it says "Ctrl-S: Save". If you let up on the Ctrl key, the other key caps revert. An easy way to see its effects.
Those same newbies who never learn how to use key shortcuts, they do things by clicking the File menu and choosing Save. Every time. Every goddamn time. To them, Ctrl-S is another cryptic, untrusted, black magic command. But if you change it to holding down Ctrl and pressing the "Save" key, that's much friendler. (It sucks how much some people are scared of computers. This is an utterly alien concept to Slashdotters. But it's true.)
A large body of work created by the US Government is under the public domain. I've never heard of people complaining about that, or travel guide publishers complaining about the CIA World Factbook being free (not a direct comparison, but you could probably find better ones), etc. etc.
And if you think about it, why not? Governments are there to serve the public, so if they do release work, I think releasing them to the public domain is a good move. But yeah, the debate here is on whether music is something that governments should get involved in, or leave to private hands - see rest of Slashdot discussion.
This isn't the first that the BBC has been accused of competing with commercial interests. One instance that sticks in my mind is this: for a long time, they couldn't release WAP services for mobile phone browsing. Why? Anti-competitive. So, for instance, they couldn't release a version of h2g2 (the online, community-built version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Although I presume that's been resolved, as they do offer a mobile version now.
Half the features on modern UIs don't increase productivity, and that includes OS X and other non-Microsoft products. People just like eye candy...
As long as these features don't decrease productivity, why not have them? After all, given two UIs with the same productivity, one with eye candy and one without, I'd take the eye candy...
"emerge phrack-all"
Or, for alternatives, http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=phrack
"Operation Sundevil", an attempt to crackdown on the Legion of Doom cracking and phreaking group, happened. Craig Neidorf (Knight Lightning), was indicted, subjected to search and seizures by the US Secret Service, brought to a jury trial and finally had all charges dropped by the prosecution...
l .
For those with a few hours to spare and a desire to learn what happened back in 1990 with Operation Sundevil, Phrack, the feds, etc. etc. - read The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling, available at http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/hackcrck.htm