> (The less charitable way of viewing it is that Debian sat back and let others do the heavy lifting).

Maybe. But doing the heavy lifting isn't really what Debian does. Frankly, they don't have the money.

Thing is, much of this isn't particularly sophisticated.

Hell, even the most basic change control process forces you to think about how you're going to do the job, what the criteria are for successful completion and how you're going to back out if there's the remotest sign of anything going wrong. That's noddy stuff you learn in a 3 day intensive ITIL course with zero real-world experience; there is precisely zero excuse for a trading firm not doing all that and more besides.

It's not as simple as "badly-tested code" - it's actually "badly-designed deployment procedure and insufficient oversight".

TFA is light on details, but other articles have picked up the details and explained them a bit better: basically, Knight Capital were running their code on a cluster of 8 nodes.

They used a flag to signal a module to run. A particular module had been out of use for some years, so the flag to signal that module was re-used for a new module.

With me so far? OK, this is all very nice. Except when they updated their cluster, one of the nodes was missed. It still had the legacy module on there.

From this point on, their cluster was a disaster waiting to happen. Once the flag was triggered, all 8 nodes did exactly what they were supposed to do based on the code they were running - but because one of them was out of sync with the code it was meant to be running, it did something else entirely. Everything else cascaded from there.

It would have been relatively trivial to add some sort of oversight to the system so as to stop it fast if what it was doing versus what it was meant to be doing were two different things - but Knight didn't do this.

I find this particularly ironic as I want David Cameron investigated over the Snowden Files.

"When asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files - after first reminding us that they had backup copies in other parts of the world over which we have no jurisdiction. My national security advisor still insisted those files be destroyed, and now you all know why - it was so I could later use this action for my own political purposes."

FTF David Cameron.

Already happened, to great bemusement on the part of the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/21/nsa-nick-clegg-guardian-leaked-files

Doubt it.

I'm offering evens that this purchase has just one plan in mind: Asset-strip the company.

I'd agree that complacency killed the company - but I'd disagree that "ignoring the iPhone" was the issue.

I'd say that "ignoring Exchange ActiveSync" was the issue. A cursory glance at Exchange ActiveSync would have told anyone who cared to look that here is a feature that is aimed squarely at replacing BES/Blackberry with EAS/(insert non-blackberry phone here). With the added bonus that as it's integrated with Exchange, there's no need to buy, install and manage a third-party product.

Yeah, OK, EAS may not be as sophisticated in terms of setting up device policies as BES, but the number of organisations that care about all those fancy "Look, gran!" features could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

From that point, it was only ever a matter of time before a phone manufacturer built a phone that integrated with EAS and didn't suck. Did RIM look at this and take account of it? Did they hell.

Two words for you: Patent portfolio.

Bullshit.

VHS won for a simple reason: it was adopted by the porn industry.

Same's true for virtually all technology. Hell, one of the reasons people started to read was because of an Italian book describing sexual positions.

> To back up a program you copy it to a source then copy it back and run it. No install programs that install malware. Windows users are just used to bad things.

Not always true, unfortunately. Quite a few mac applications come with installers if they're doing anything even remotely clever with the underlying OS - Parallels does, as does gimp-print.

It's not unusual to find that bothering to write an uninstaller in the first place - never mind one that actually uninstalls everything - simply never happens. Fortunately this is seldom a big problem, but it can be an annoyance nonetheless and if you claim it doesn't happen you're either ignorant or disingenuous.

("Ignorant" isn't an insult, BTW, it simply means "you did not know" - and there's seldom shame in not knowing something. But it's frequently used as an insult by.... well, I guess ignorant people. People who did not know that it shouldn't be used as such.)

The trick with Ryanair is you don't give them an opportunity to have a problem.

Which means:

  - You make damn sure you check in online and have access to a reliable printer to print the boarding pass.
  - You never check in luggage. If necessary, you purchase a cabin-bag sized suitcase (there's lots on the market and they're made to fit carry on allowance size down to the centimetre).
  - You schedule your time so as to arrive at the airport well in advance (something you pretty much have to do with ever increasing security paranoia anyway).
  - You check before you board whether or not you're allowed a separate bag for duty free purchases (depends on the airport for some weird reason).
  - You never, under any circumstances, attempt to board the plane with anything that isn't in your bag or in a pocket. Newspaper under one arm? Nope.
  - You check ID requirements before you leave. Many airlines are imposing policies regarding what ID they require before they board you that have nothing to do with passport requirements at your destination.

We do. Like the GP said, Cheddar and Cider.

Strangely, it seems our best cheese - and for that matter cider - is made by people who have a proud tradition - stretching back many generations - of marrying their cousins.

And I don't mean for "waah waah antitrust" reasons, I mean because I honestly think we'd see a hell of a lot more innovation in more productive directions. A parent company might hold majority shareholdings in the subsidiaries, but daily operations (including pretty much all strategic thinking) should come from the individual companies Microsoft would be split into, not from the big hulking brute that is Microsoft today.

The idea being that

Off the top of my head, you'd wind up with:

  - Home Entertainment. Gets the XBox. Without the "mustn't play nicely with others" mentality coming from the top, they could license DAAP and integrate with Apple, maybe use the xbox as some sort of media centre that can stream to devices around the house.
  - Operating systems. Gets Windows - both client and server. Because it's now effectively a separate company, they can build stronger relationships with others - the concern that there's a conflict of interest somewhere mostly evaporates.
  - Enterprise Software. Gets SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, maybe IIS. Without the "must integrate everything 15 ways from Sunday and run only on Windows" push coming from HQ, there's scope to openly publish integration mechanisms.
  - Productivity Software: Gets Office, Visio etc. Opens the door for publishing an API that allows third party companies wanting to build a Sharepoint-alike and integrate just as seamlessly as Sharepoint does. (Or does Sharepoint just use WebDAV?)

We already have such an agreement, it's called Safe Harbor. The EU already has strong privacy laws; to store information with US companies they have to be Safe Harbor registered.

It's arguably pretty meaningless because it's self-certified - it has one purpose and one purpose only. To enable European companies to tick the box that says "We're keeping data safe".

Thing is, while we can all wring our hands and say "Ah, but PRISM changes everything" - it doesn't. It doesn't change a single damn thing until such time as regulators officially voice an opinion to that effect. Which frankly I can't see happening because those regulators are charged with upholding the law as written - and the law as written doesn't say anything about international spying programs having any impact on what's considered safe and what isn't.