But then, there's very little that you can do at all (which might piss off someone else) which doesn't carry some risk of being sued, even if the suit is without merit.

I should add that I'm not suggesting Mozilla shouldn't automatically update their users by default. Getting updates is the only way to keep secure and those who don't know how to find the option setting to turn this off are definitely in need of security by default. I just think with this system comes responsibility and Mozilla don't care enough about supporting the features & experiences their current users have got used to.

That's the good. The bad is extensions silently failing; interface being suddenly reorganised without any explanation.

The Mozilla view seems to be that Web Apps can already act in this capricious fashion, so desktop applications should too. This just seems to be taking what is bad and unempowering about web applications and bringing it to the desktop.

The latest interface idea is to reorganise the address bar to remove the site icon, get rid of the blue https signifier and replace it with a greyed out padlock (once more it's a coincidence how similar this ends up being to Chrome). I understand the reasoning for removing the site icon, but developers seem to think it's OK to jump from telling users that they should ignore any lock in that position, and look for the blue text, to a new UI which is the exact opposite. And they wish to push these changes silently to users; I can only assume they don't work with actual end users in the real world.

Every UI change has a cost to users in adapting to it, and a cost to those who support end users (businesses using the browser or supporting end users of browser based software), this needs to be balanced against the value of the new UI. At the very least the experience for users moving from the old to the new system needs to be considered. Users are much less excited by new stuff than developers, and they're much more put out be needless change. One of the effects of Mozilla's open development process is being able to see this disregard across their bugzilla/maillists/wikis.

I'm guessing it's the fact a random hacker looking to "add some security" to their project has heard of OpenSSL and already has it on their system.

Most developers are not security experts so will assess a library on awareness, features, reputation etc.; assessing security is not easy so the choice is almost certainly made on the other factors, and it's rational not to trust a library you've not heard of before for security. The other libraries have their own limitations/missing features or other warts which might push you towards OpenSSL.

Personally, I'd trust GnuTLS over OpenSSL, but then not all projects are happy using an LGPL library.

I'd be even more happy if someone made the effort to provide a TLS implementation which was proved correct. Code proofs are a lot of work, but SSL/TLS is so widely used that it ought to repay the effort.

Err, yes, apart from GnuTLS, Mozilla's NSS, Gutmann's cryptlib, yaSSL (there's enough to name one yet another ...), Polar SSL, and probably more -- and that's only counting C libraries available under an open source license.

Assuming you're the same AC who's been posting similar comments up this thread then you seem to have paid plenty enough attention to Raspberry Pi to know that's not true. The rational of RPi has been pretty clearly laid out:

1) The is not the same supply of students arriving to universities with home programming experience as there were in recent decades.

2) The vast majority of kids no longer have access to devices for them to program:
      2a) At home "the computer" is needed to do homework, and frequently for the family to access online services and retailers. It's too important to allow kids to potentially mess up programming. Kids may have access to a games console, but that's a sealed device.
      2b) At school computers are reserved for ITC lessons and can't be used for programming as it "might mess up powerpoint".

(whereas in the 80s the home computer was just a recreational device and while you could use it to play games it started up to a BASIC interpretor inviting kids to try programming it).

3) These things are related and by solving (2) you can affect (1).

4) A computer that is priced at less than the cost of a textbook and can plug into a TV as display will be accessible to kids and school classrooms in a way more expensive devices are not.

5) It's possible to design, build and distribute a functioning device for less than $25/35.

You could reasonably argue that one or more of these assumptions don't hold, or that what they propose will fail, either for technical or sociological reasons to solve the problem. But saying that they are trying to do something other than teach kids how to program is silly.

As to why many people beyond educational charity supporters are interested in R-Pi: I guess because it offers a lower price point than the competitor hobbyist ARM boards; a more powerful and familiar option than microcontroller boards such as Arduino; and an easier route into projects using an embedded computer due to the mainstream distribution support.

Personally, it inspired me to want one for the picture viewer/programmable information display panel I've been meaning to build for ages. An R-Pi which runs at less than a watt will be perfect. My previous plan was to use the guts from a defunct netbook; I'd never considered ordering something like a beagle bone -- not only more expensive but needing an expansion board for video out.

Given the enthusiasm I've seen (among some) teachers and children for the device, I'm persuaded that it does serve a need not covered elsewhere. Whether slashdot readers should/should not like it, is only relevant to the degree that slashdot readers become involved in creating the software ecosystem that will be needed for this to be a success.

Do you think? Seeing as this has now made the BBC news, complete with image showing the interxion logo, I'd say the pods have paid for themselves already :-)

Interxion have got their message about how seriously they take their customers uptime and how far they go to plan for eventualities out to readers of Data Center Knowledge (and now to Slashdot). I'd say money well spent, regardless of whether anyone will use the pods for more than publicity shots (or even if Interxion seriously expected them to).

That said, I'm not sure that Atlanta compares to London in terms of aging, and seriously creaking transport infrastructure. e.g. Atlanta has what is supposedly world's airport handling 90m travelers on its five runways; Heathrow handles 70m on just two runways both of which operate at over 98% capacity (plans to add a third were dropped when the current government was elected). The Victorian metro system is similarly overloaded having the distinction of being the oldest in the world while having to serve a population of almost 8 million.

It's not all that odd. Panasonic already do the same trick with some of their Lumix cameras. It makes a lot of sense as all lenses produce a circular image.

I can see your point, but that is the way the warranty tends to work. In other news, any software I've ever seen which actually comes with a warranty always covers only the cost of the software not the damage it failing might cost you.

We pay a small extra charge on the Dell kit we buy to be able to keep any failed HDD rather than return it if a drive is replaced under warranty. We have the old ones destroyed on site using one of these: http://www.edrsolutions.com/europe/solution.asp

Really, the cost of HDDs (even with post Thailand flood increases) is as nothing to the value of data on them.

On my home machines I don't bother. The bulk of MY storage for photographs, video, music, etc is hardly top secret and the relatively small proportion with my financial records etc are stored on an encrypted partition.

Stuff commercial sites don't care all that much about: analytics, ads. I think you've got that the wrong way round.

It is though stuff that isn't needed to get content in front of users before their C21 brains get bored and go elsewhere, which is why you can afford to load it last.

My personal hope is that after switching on IPv6 for google.com, Google then announce that as of a date a few months in the future sites which are available via v6 in addition to v4 would get a boost in search ranking. It would only take a small boost in Google juice to spur adoption and ensure that web hosting outfits provided IPv6 pretty quickly to avoid losing custom. Once the vast majority of the services are available on IPv6, v6 on the client becomes much easier.

I don't do much to manage them; it's more due to neglect than anything else.

They were in about eight browser windows spread across 2 displays and several virtual workspaces, on a work machine. It has ample RAM for development and running VMs so space wasn't an issue. The tabs were the usual mixture of issue tracker tickets, related wiki pages, google searches, relevant mail-list posts or blog pages, and things to read "when I have a spare minute". I just opened tabs far more often than I sorted through or closed them, and after a few months they'd collected.

Finding tabs wasn't particularly hard, thanks mostly to the fact that the so called "awsome bar" autocompletes on open tabs (in fact with the % shortcut it completes against just open tabs). Performance didn't seem particularly poor either. Maybe slightly less snappy, but not noticeably so.

I only realised how many tabs I had when an add-on started leaking memory in large amounts. While tracing down what was causing the leak, I was copying the info from about:memory and using the "copy tab URLs" extension to export lists of what was open. I was rather surprised, but very impressed with firefox, when I ran it through wc. Though I did then spent a whole afternoon reading/closing/bookmarking until I brought the count down to double figures.

I have seen some discussion by firefox devs on blurring the line between tabs and history. Once the (already planned functionality) to evict non-recently-used tabs from memory is in place, the distinction between tabs and history item becomes mostly a matter of UI anyway. I think that rather fits my disorganised browser usage.

I've been running recent firefoxen on 64 bit Ubuntu with over 340 open tabs. It used over 1.5Gb RAM, but that seemed reasonable in the circumstances. Chromium failed entirely with a fraction of the tabs.

On the other hand, I did find a firefox extension a couple of months ago which managed to leak over 1Gb/day (I'm afraid I can't which it was).

The tragedy is not that no-one is using OpenOffice, it's that millions of Windows and Mac users who downloaded it directly from the OOo website still are.

The Linux users are fine, their distros will either transition them to LibreOffice or provide security patches to OpenOffice, but the vast majority of OOo users were not slashdot readers who follow the twists and turns of OpenSource politics, they're people who don't know that Oracle bought Sun (nor care about such details); they just downloaded a free office suite. They are not getting any security updates, even as vulnerabilities are fixed in LibreOffice. They are not even getting any good information that they're being given a vulnerable, unsupported product. The OpenOffice website still has all the same download links, and the same security information, including a Security Bulletin with no mention of vulnerabilities beyond 2010.

I really think Apache and any ASF members should be ashamed. Whatever you think of having separate code-bases and a whole new incubator project, treating OOo users like this (especially when a maintained fork exists) is awful and detrimental to the standing of OSS in general.