Quite. In fact, the first thing that I always do after installing Firefox is to set http://www.google.co.uk/ as my homepage, I then carry out all searches (unless for some reason I make a deliberate choice to carry out a search using a different search engine) from there.
FOSS needs good documentation at this point more than anything else. There are dozens of superb FOSS applications out there which are almost unusable by all but experienced, technically knowledgeable users due to impenetrable and/or overly sparse documentation. New users, particularly new users migrating from Microsoft Windows, have neither the time nor motivation to learn the somewhat arcane terminology of man pages, nor to view one application's man page, then spend a day or so going through the same process in respect of another application that the first application's man page references (and so on, often ad infinitum).
Quality documentation written for non-technical users to be able to follow and understand is essential if FOSS is to make further inroads into the Microsoft installed base. If you have technical authors, or ordinary users who are keen on and understand FOSS and have above average documentation authorship skills and a few hours to spare, I am sure that many FOSS projects would be delighted to hear from you.
3. Investments for heavy throttling will never pay back as people will find new interesting ways to bypass it or to switch to a different ISP!
Except that ever increasing consolidation in the ISP market is rapidly reducing consumer choice, and will continue to do so. In five years time, I doubt that a typical USA or UK resident will have more than two or three broadband ISPs from whom they can obtain service.
Guess which ISP is ranked as the world's worst by The Spamhaus Project, in terms of "the few networks who, out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem"?
Before rushing to praise Verizon, consider that Verizon are knowingly and unrepentently hosting more of the world's hardcore spam operations than any other network, anywhere in the world.
Linux on Sparc is the real untold story. The installation of Debian unstable on an unused Sun Ultra 5 has been a recent revelation, and given the prevalence of such hardware sitting unused in many locations, represents a low (or no, if one carries out an ftp install) way of recycling such hardware to make it truly useful. The Sun Ultra 5 recently rejuvenated in this way is running much faster than it ever did using Solaris 7 or 8, and also has none of the compilation/compatibility problems which beset Sun desktop users who don't have Sun's own (expensive) compiler. apt-get install - could life get any easier?
Slashdot Mirror
Quite. In fact, the first thing that I always do after installing Firefox is to set http://www.google.co.uk/ as my homepage, I then carry out all searches (unless for some reason I make a deliberate choice to carry out a search using a different search engine) from there.
FOSS needs good documentation at this point more than anything else. There are dozens of superb FOSS applications out there which are almost unusable by all but experienced, technically knowledgeable users due to impenetrable and/or overly sparse documentation. New users, particularly new users migrating from Microsoft Windows, have neither the time nor motivation to learn the somewhat arcane terminology of man pages, nor to view one application's man page, then spend a day or so going through the same process in respect of another application that the first application's man page references (and so on, often ad infinitum). Quality documentation written for non-technical users to be able to follow and understand is essential if FOSS is to make further inroads into the Microsoft installed base. If you have technical authors, or ordinary users who are keen on and understand FOSS and have above average documentation authorship skills and a few hours to spare, I am sure that many FOSS projects would be delighted to hear from you.
3. Investments for heavy throttling will never pay back as people will find new interesting ways to bypass it or to switch to a different ISP!
Except that ever increasing consolidation in the ISP market is rapidly reducing consumer choice, and will continue to do so. In five years time, I doubt that a typical USA or UK resident will have more than two or three broadband ISPs from whom they can obtain service.
Guess which ISP is ranked as the world's worst by The Spamhaus Project, in terms of "the few networks who, out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem"?
r izon.com
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/networks.lasso
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ve
Before rushing to praise Verizon, consider that Verizon are knowingly and unrepentently hosting more of the world's hardcore spam operations than any other network, anywhere in the world.
"Well that is all well and good, but AOL doesn't whitelist."
Yes, they do. Please see:
http://postmaster.aol.com/
And in particular:
http://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/
Linux on Sparc is the real untold story. The installation of Debian unstable on an unused Sun Ultra 5 has been a recent revelation, and given the prevalence of such hardware sitting unused in many locations, represents a low (or no, if one carries out an ftp install) way of recycling such hardware to make it truly useful. The Sun Ultra 5 recently rejuvenated in this way is running much faster than it ever did using Solaris 7 or 8, and also has none of the compilation/compatibility problems which beset Sun desktop users who don't have Sun's own (expensive) compiler. apt-get install - could life get any easier?