A search engine doesn't actually guarantee any revenue for Mozilla. They get a cut of the Advertising revenue initiated by a Firefox search (or similar). Firefox needs users to generate the searches. A search engine would pay Mozilla in proportion to the amount of eyeballs it gives them.

Firefox would be foolish to change the default search to yahoo, as a large proportion would change it back to Google - but not all. They would effectively be dividing the profitability of their user base. The sort of people who use yahoo don't care what search engine they use but plenty of people insist of using Google and will change it back.

Google isn't simply giving money away to Firefox, they do derive some benefit from FF referrals, but how much? I suspect Google's past relationship with Firefox was largely a way for them to mitigate against challenges IE could pose if MS fiddled with it. They might have thought it necessary to be generous to Mozilla, as a long term strategy, but they have their own very popular browser now.

Has Yahoo offered Mozilla significantly better terms? Did Google simply decline to renew (or renew on good terms)? Is this all a negotiation tactic? Has Mozilla lost the plot? It'll all be clear soon.

I've done this myself as an experiment a few weeks ago. With the exception of FTB (the site has a jar file for it, so it'll likely work) everything you mentioned is available in ports. http://www.freshports.org/

There's also a binary packing system (pkg) but packages seem to randomly go missing there. A couple of weeks ago it was Xorg, until yesterday no Firefox. BTW can anyone explain the dynamics behind that?

The best way to get in is head first, install it on the least fancy PC you have. I'd strongly recommend FreeBSD and the handbook (This should be your first place of reference). http://www.freebsd.org/handboo... (take note of chapter 11). If you're a gentoo man you don't need PC-BSD.

Putting my view on *nix desktops aside (Are they worth the effort?), If there is a show stopper it'll probably be hardware support.

Why would Google want to crush Firefox? What motive does it have?

Firefox is an open-source browser that poses zero threat to any of Google's businesses. It can't be used in the same way IE was to limit competition. There will always be some people who aren't using Chrome. If they can't have everyone using Chrome, the next best thing is putting Google on as many browsers as possible. Chrome is all about making it easier for people to use their services, the browser itself is not that important.

A good chunk of Firefox user are people who've had it installed for them before Chrome existed and have just stuck with it. These are the kinds of people who would use the Firefox default search without noticing a change. Firefox still has ~20% market share, it might make a difference.

The Advertisements may be disabled in the preferences. They're trying to diversify their revenue which currently is mostly Google. Over the last few releases they've been highlighting the various privacy features and ideology Firefox has in a bid to differentiate themselves against Chrome, so it' a little Ironic to see this Ad compromise.

The Ads only occupy unused thumbnail tiles i believe..so it's not obtrusive. As long as us techies can turn it off, I'm happy. Everyone else will hardly notice, and it'll pay the Mozilla devs.

The US market is big enough that a lot of US businesses simply don't bother offering to ship anywhere else. The potential of having to deal with foreign customers/regulations is often not worth it, regardless of how simple the procedures are.

The former PM of Australian Kevin Rudd could also speak Mandarin. During one diplomatic spat, the Chinese embassy reminded him that:

"To speak Chinese is not to know China. Many examples can be found of people who speak Mandarin to a high level but who do not understand how China works. They may have learned their Chinese shut up in their study reading the Analects."

I think the Chinese regard this as an irreverent amusement more than anything meaningful

I have no interest in trading barbs with you. I don't care enough.

You're wrong to suggest i don't have technical skill. I've done a fair bit of C programming against the Linux API. It might not be the bash scripting that you get excited about, but it's something.

Perhaps you've inadvertently stumbled on an interesting point though, could it perhaps be that what worries you most is the erosion of your exclusive club of arcane knowledge? I'd suggest to you that arcana is not a necessary component of technology.

I'd like to note also, that you haven't addressed my underlying point that technical committees of multiple distros have adopted systemd.

I trust the Debian committee - as a collective - to make the best choice. The committee has a large group of people with diverse interests and the majority voted to adopt systemd. Debian isn't exactly known to be a flippant Distro.

I suspect the technical people behind Debian/Fedora/Arch/OpenSuSE and other Distributions (some of which make money on their products and services) are a lot smarter and thoughtful than a bunch of people with a website that has a purple background and orange links.

I've used systemd under Arch, and i could open up a systemd unit file and understand what every word in the file meant. I can't say the same thing about most SysV startup script.

I drive past the location they're going to build the data centers every day. It's mainly decrepit farms and grasslands. It's a common place for grass fires

How many people do these things usually employ?

Chrome is a good competitor to Firefox, it might be winning on various fronts at the moment but it's still a browser owned and controlled by a corporation with only profits in mind. Google made chrome to make it easier for them to track you and push their services on you.

Every time I've used Chrome, it's constantly nagged me to sign in to Google services, asks to change what mailto: does and in recent versions (on Windows) they've included a notification icon that ties in with Google Now. I feel Chrome gets a free pass on a lot of this stuff because it's considered fast. A lot of that perception is in UI responsiveness as the millisecond rendering differences are practically indistinguishable. Firefox should really consider moving away from XUL.

Firefox is a run by Mozilla (an NFP) who can only justify it's existence by making a good browser. Firefox needs to improve on a few fronts, but it's still a browser for the people. The only incentive they have is survival (which mean people using Firefox). The Mozilla Foundation has clearly become overly bureaucratic and focused on the survival of it's own bureaucracy to the detriment of their software. It needs a good shakedown. There are too many people looking for things to do - go to mozilla.org and check out the half-dead list of projects and 1000+ employees.

I'd like to see an RTC and a power switch/button on the next RPi.

I'm not sure the project goals of giving kids "hands-on, low-level interaction with computing devices" have been met. Linux is just too powerful/complex an OS to offer that to kids. You can use python modules to program the GPIO pins, but as soon as you do that you're getting into electronics and might as well use one of the Arduinos (which have a lot less abstraction).

It's a nice form factor at a nice price, and i have a few (doing various things) but they're not kid friendly any more than a PC is.

There needs to be a financial weight that relates to the employment prospects of a university's graduates.

If a faculty produces too many graduates that are unemployed years after graduating, the university should suffer a financial loss. Perhaps less student funding for a particular course or less government grants.This will incentivise them to make modifications to a program or cut intake.

Of course, this is a complicated area, but currently it makes no difference to a University if they produce masses of unemployed/unemployable people.

In a couple of years, you're going to be able to buy hardware with x4 the specs of what this phone has for less than $50.00 and it'll be able to run an older version of android decently. If you look at China it's starting to happen now although not yet in bulk supply.

"It's good enough for poor people" is very condensing. Just because they have no money, it doesn't mean they'll be happy to use an unusable phone. They're better off with a feature phone until hardware prices drop.

Considering windows 95 and 98 would return an version number of 9, there is no reason that Windows 9 couldn't have returned a totally different number, say 10.

I bet it they went with 10 only as a symbolic leap from 8/8.1.

Windows9x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

They wanted to avoid conflicts when an old program checks for the OS version .. ;)