Speaking as a senior manager in financial services, I would: in my industry, the cost of a developer's time is small compared with the value of the systems and data that he works on. But I'd be very suspicious about an employee who told me that he'd be 10x less productive because his internet access was sandboxed.

i'd respectfully suggest that the kind of quant that refuses to play nicely with security policies is the kind of quant that I'd rather not employ. And as I'm the kind of guy who gets to decide who works in parts of a financial services company, I'd also respectfully suggest that the kind of quant who refuses to play nicely with that kind of policy will find his career and earnings opportunities somewhat constrained compared with the kind of quant who's prepared to fit in with company policy.

You don't need internet access that is in any way shared with your development work. Completely sandboxed internet access in a totally locked down thin client session might be OK, but you certainly don't need to be able to upload data to remote servers. If you think you do, you need to go and read up about segregation of duties.

But I don't expect you to agree. Your signature displays more about your attitude to the world than you perhaps realise.

I can't read the original article so I might be inferring something incorrect. But who on earth though it was a good idea to give internet access to someone with access to valuable source code? Whatever happened to role based access restrictions?

Vendors never actually mean what they say. Here are the real reasons:

Apple won't support a codec that's incompatible with its huge installed base of ipods and iphones. They don't care about royalty fees because most Safari users pay for an OS X licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.

Microsoft won't support a codec that makes the web more reliable for non-Windows users - especially Linux users. They don't care about royalty fees because all IE users pay for a WIndows licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.

Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.

Nobody actually cares about end users or developers. If you think they do, you're kidding yourself.

Most consumers (not nerds) care about convenience, price and quality - in that order. DVD scored massively over VHS on convenience, the price premium was small and the quality improvement was a bonus. So DVD was a massive success.

Blu-ray is less convenient than DVD. Most blu-ray users have only one blu-ray player but several DVD players. If the kids want to watch a blu-ray movie, the parents get relegated to the small screen in the kitchen; result: unhappiness and no more blu-ray sales.

The massive price premium is a second problem: why would I pay so much more for something that's less convenient?

And, in the UK, the quality uplift isn't so important. PAL DVDs are higher quality than North American ones, so Blu-ray offers less of an improvement. Also, we have smaller houses and smaller TV sets - almost all of my friends have bought LCD or plasma sets in the past few years, but very few have gone above 32" as that's the largest size that fits comfortably in the fireside alcove of a traditional UK propety.

I can't see blu-ray ever reaching a mass market. It'll be obsolete before it reaches critical mass.

Remind me never to ask you for advice! "You stupid idiot. Why didn't you know how to do it before you asked me!" As it happens, I couldn't find any instructions in the .dmg file. And it never occured to me to drag it to the Applications folder until I'd done a pile of googling - why would I want to do that?

I do use OS X, and there are two reasons that Linux is easier.

First, you don't have to find and download or, usually, purchase the application. Personally, I hate installing code from a random site when I have no way of knowing that the site owner is trustworthy or competent.

Second, OS X's approach is far from intuitive. When I first used OS X, it took me a LONG time to work out how to turn my downloaded Firefox disk image into a normall application that appeared in Finder and the dock but not the desktop. Call me stupid if you want, but I'm sure my Dad wouldn't have sussed it out either.

One problem with estimating Linux desktop market share is there's no one definition of market share. Is that worldwide share, English-speaking world share or USA share? Is it a share of operating system licence revenues, support revenues, the cost of hardware on which Linux is installed or is revenue irrelevant? If it's usage-based, do you count physical machines or virtual machines? Does it matter how much a machine is used; if so, do powered-up unattended desktops count? Or is web usage the best metric? If so, should you include non-PC web usage: phones, games consoles and the like?

There's no one answer because there's no one question. So, as with many statistics, you need to choose a proxy measure with some care and pay more attention to trends than to absolute numbers. Like the original article, I incline to the view that Net Applications' data presents a measure (hits to websites that are usually commercial and US based) that provides an unusually low estimate of Linux usage. However, Net Applications has provided consistently measured data for some years, so its analysis is extremely valuable. And the trend is clear - Linux is consistently growing in popularity and, in percentage terms, it's growing dramatically quickly.

It's obviously been a while since you used Linux. Pretty much any software can be installed with a few mouse clicks unless you're using a specialised distro - in which case you presumably know what you're doing.

I'll use ubuntu as an example. Nine times out of ten, you simply choose 'Add/remove programs' from the Applications menu, select your software and watch it install. If, perchance, the software isn't distributed by Canonical, you simply click on the .deb package in Firefox and it'll install automatically. Finally, some software - particularly browser plug ins and codecs - will install themselves automatically on demand

This is all very much easier than software installation under Windows or OSX.

Maybe so. But Oracle could easily release a new version under a much more onerous licence and withdraw support from the GPL'd code. MySQL isn't very attractive commercially unless it comes with support from a large vendor that Board members can read about in the financial press. That's why PostgreSQL is relatively unpopular in a commercial setting - it has more to do with the implied threat to the career development of senior staff than with the quality of the product.

MySQL is worth far more to Oracle than to any other company. To anyone else, MySQL is simply worth the present value of its future revenue stream but, to Oracle, it's also worth the impact that it has on its own database revenue streams.

The anti-MySQL ranters who keep posting on /. miss the point that for many, if not most, commercial projects, MySQL is good enough and has a very low total ownership cost. Oracle knows that too, and the mere existence of MySQL puts an effective price cap on Oracle for low-end projects. It's not the number of users who actually switch to MySQL that bothers Oracle; it's the number who threaten to and get a discount as a result.

Look out for some significant changes to MySQL licensing and pricing. It's my guess that databases just got a whole load more expensive.

Great product, shame about the marketing. That's why Canonical / Ubuntu is so important.

The PRS is guilty of long-standing idiocy. In one celebrated incident a few months back, they attempted to fine a garage owner £2,000 unless his customers turned off their car radios before driving onto his premises.

This thing is absolutely fine with me. I've never watched music videos on Youtube, but I don't for a moment imagine that the kids who did will be queuing up to stuff fistfuls of fivers in the PRS's pockets in some other way. Instead they'll turn to piracy or give up on music and play with Facebook.

In due course, big media will realise that their so-called guardians are actually their enemies and they'll fire them. But, by then, there might not be a music industry that's worthy of the name. It'll be a well-deserved outcome.

I'd expect tech readers to have a modicum of statistical sense, but the arguments presented in the summary display an embarrasing ignorance of established statistical techniques. The central limit theorem - one of the first things taught on any stats course - suggests that the sample size is more than adequate, and the researchers have made a serious attempt to take a representative sample across coutries, age groups and genders.

The flaws in the research are more subtle but aren't picked up in the summary. First, beware of any vendor-funded survey - you can guarantee that the although the underlying facts are probably accurate, the interpretation will spun to the point of incredulity. Also, there's probably good reason to believe that people who take part in email surveys aren't representative of the wider population.

But the real problem is that the survey muddles up devices and people: the research discovered that 99% of people can read see Flash animations, but that doesn't remotely mean that 99% of internet-connected devices have Flash. My phone is connected to the innternet, but it certainly can't read Flash files, for example, but I generally read emails on my PC not my phone

Having said that, the results smell about right. Almost all PCs have Flash because it's so easy to install these days - even on Linux./P