Anyone who's read online tech magazines for very long knows that by andlarge, the 'trade press' is pretty wretched. Bad articles abound; goodones are rare. (Periodically Slashdot will rise in righteous indignationover a particularly egregious example.)

Yet the field survives, and has no problem getting people to write morearticles for them. How? Follow the money.

Most of the free trade press exists to sell things: it sells readereyeballs to advertisers, and it sells exposure to its authors .

The Register recently republished a SecurityFocus article by ScottGranneman, called On blocking Chinese IP addresses ,discussing the implications of blocking essentially all of Chinafrom accessing a web host due to the number of spam attacks fromChinese networks.

In the course of the article, Mr Granneman asks:

Here's a good question. What needs to come first: the needs of the webservers my friends run, or the needs of a guy sitting in Shanghai thatwants to view the content of that web site?

In my opinion

IBM Developerworks recently carried an article comparing the LILO and GRUB Linux bootloaders that wound up concludingthere was nothing LILO did better than GRUB.

I beg to disagree, and strongly. LILO has two important features forserver operation:

First, a one-shot mode, where LILO tries booting a particular kernelonly once ; after that, it goes back to its normal default. This isa reassuring way of trying new kernels that you are not entirely surewill work. If you set the kernel up to reboot on panics