Firefox dnload manager sux

[Ric Moore]

On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 18:31 -0500, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
> Preaching: it would be worth your time, IMHO, to learn to use wget and 
> bittorrent from the command line. The payoff is considerable. And I'm saying 
> this as a recovering GUIholic.

Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. The above lines rankle just a
bit. I used to run an 8 line BBS that allowed telnet and shell access to
the local community running Linux. Way before that I started off with a
300 baud DC Hayes in 1980, got interviewed in Esquire for an unofficial
record of transmitting a "liberated" bit of software from Houston to
Honolulu... yoho, my 15 minutes of fame. Then used CP/M, and Irv Hoff's
IMP. Later, on my first XT, used Procomm and have plenty of experience
with x,y,z modem transfers on DOS, CP/M, CPM86, MP/M, etc. 

It is problamatic when today's web mavens decide to put their
interesting video bits behind all sorts of scripts. So, I've upped the
ante with a bunch of extensions, which festoon my desktop to detect the
actual video source files to grab it anyway. Sure, I tried wget but the
file could not be directly loaded by design. Ergo, why not just change
the dnload manager itself, if at all possible? 

If I wanted to rough it, I'd find that old IMSAI I had and bust my
fingers on the switches. Keyboards are for losers. Sorry, I've done my
time, and much prefer to just click on what works. That's what computers
are for, ya know. To reduce replicable tasks to something simple for the
user of it so they can do even more useful stuff. I wouldn't go back to
command line days if I had to be shot. But, if I have to, I know my way
around. A "well designed" GUI beats the living hell out of a lot of
typing any day of the week. I do not yearn to go back to loading tapes
onto my old Unisys 5000/90 except as an excuse to lure a nerd grrl to my
house to see the blinky lights and jerking tapes doing seeks. It did
useful work for that, while it might not have been the original guiding
principle of Unisys Corp to get Ric laid. So, given the choice between a
mouse-click or typing a 40 char command line... sometimes twice to
correct a typo, which would YOU chose? It's a no-brainer for me. Ric