We've deliberately kept our gen 3 iPad on its original iOS 5, despite all Apple's attempts to trick us into upgrading. As far as I can see from on-line feedback, iOS 6 was basically a Vista-scale train wreck with poor performance to match, while iOS 7 turns the device into looking like a kindergarten toy. Apple just seem very proud that the performance on "old" devices -- you know, the ones we were buying a whole two years ago -- doesn't suck quite as much in iOS 7 as it does with iOS 6.

For us, Apple have blown it at this point. Their entire iDevice set-up is consumer-hostile: create a walled garden app ecosystem, then try to use app developers to force device owners to upgrade their OS just so artificially nerfed updates of apps will work again, resulting in a device that doesn't perform as well as it did when purchased but can't be "downgraded" back to its original OS, and so causing completely unnecessary obsolescence in a very expensive device that would otherwise have lasted several more years. We quite like our iPad, but we have no interest in buying anything similar from Apple again in the current environment.

Art is in the eye of the beholder.

False. It's hilarious reading all these comments from people who think they know about something they are completely ignorant about.

The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.

So, you hold a PhD in art history? Or have you ever taken a single entry level art history class?

The first question was sarcasm. I did, in fact, take an art history class in college. Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".

A man once said "Be silent and thought a fool. Speak and remove all doubt."

This is why most of the apps I installed on my Android phone come from the F-Droid store. Everything in there was useful to at least one person, not just written in the hope that someone can be persuaded to buy it. Sadly, this does mean that it contains very few games...

It's a shame then that they chose a name that explicitly excludes large portions of the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem.

OpenSSL has nothing to do with Linux, other than that a number of vendors that bundle it with their products also bundle Linux. The FreeBSD or NetBSD Foundations would have made as much sense (i.e. none).

I switched from giffgaff when they put up their prices and engaged in misleading advertising ('look, we're cheaper than everyone else if you pick the really expensive plans that you have to dig around on their web sites to even find and ignore the ones that are the same price we were offering before we put prices up!'). I guess the difference is what you count as a plan. I regard their goody bags as an add-on, not a plan. On a pre-pay plan you don't get anything included - that's the point. Given that Giffgaff's cheapest goody bag (which expires after a month) costs what I spend on my phone in 3-4 months, I think it reinforces my point. You get unlimited texts only if you buy them in bulk. The 200 minutes and 250MB that the £7.50 goody bag gives you would cost me £8.50, so if I used that much it would be a good deal (although I'd then be paying 7p/minute more for calls above that, so I'd have to be making close to exactly 200 minutes of calls a month for it to make sense). I spend under £2/month on my phone currently though, so it's a pretty poor deal with that in mind.

If you start in London, you don't have to go that far. Cost of living drops by a factor of 3-4 when you get outside London and, as an added bonus, you aren't living in London. Oh, average life expectancy also increases by two years once you stop breathing London 'air' too.

They did release it DRM free if you bought it from them. If you bought it via another publisher then you got some extra crap and had to go back to them to get the DRM-free version. How about next time giving money directly to the company that sells DRM-free games, instead of to a company whose only contribution was to add some DRM crap and put it in a box?

You're assuming that everyone who wants to get an illegal copy needs to crack the DRM. That's not how it works. One person cracks it then releases it on file-sharing sites / networks and everyone copies it. It may prevent casual copying (e.g. I lend a friend the CD), but these days it's easier to give someone a link to a .torrent file than to lend them a CD anyway. More importantly, if someone doesn't know about things like BitTorrent then when they try to copy their game and find that they can't, they're going to ask their favourite search engine and discover that they can get games that they can copy for free. With something like GOG, you get all of the convenience of illegal downloads (actually more - the downloads are a lot faster and they always work), and I get to support the companies that are releasing the games in a way that I want.

The first or the second? I really enjoyed the first, but about the only improvement in the second was the graphics (and my laptop could only handle the lowest detail at a playable rate anyway). The combat was a lot better in the first one and the characters seemed more interesting.

It's a difficult balance in this kind of game between making it open (so the player feels in control of what's happening) and providing a story (because part of the reason for buying the game like this is to be told a story). The first one seemed to get the balance right, but the sequel felt too scripted to me - I was just running from one plot element to the next and then making the four token decisions. There were lots of side-quests in the first one that impacted the story later on and interactions with characters that told you interesting things.

I think the sequel also got off to a bad start, because it let you import your save game from the first one, but after being given a silver sword by a Goddess and a steel sword by a king and finding some legendary armour exploring a tomb, I discovered that the first person I killed had a better sword than me. More importantly, swords and armour made a significant difference in the second. One thing that always annoys me in fantasy games is when the equipment makes more of a difference in fights than the skill. In The Witcher, the difference between a crappy sword stolen from a low-paid henchman and the amazing sword forged for the kind was about 10-20%. Enough to give you a slight edge, but not enough to make a real difference unless a fight was very close. The difference between Geralt at the start and Geralt after he'd (re)learned a load of fighting skills was significant. In contrast, in The Witcher 2, you can get a really good sword and then be easily able to beat monsters that would kill you easily with a less-good sword, without learning any new skills.

The Witcher 1 and 2 were both DRM free. I grabbed both from GOG a while ago and they're just executables that run on any machine and don't have any need to phone home or similar.

Most of their Mac games use DOSBox or WINE, so it probably wasn't too much effort for them to get Linux support working for most of them. Even before they announced Mac support, I ran quite a few of their games with WINE and DOSBox on OS X (their older games use DOSBox on Windows too), but it's a lot less hassle to get their configs (although they tend to be quite pessimistic about visual quality, and you can improve some of the older adventure games a lot by changing the scaling mode to hq3x in the DOSBox config that they ship).

I'm very happy with GOG - there are typically 5-10 games on my shelf that I haven't got around to playing yet. I got The Witcher 1 and 2 as a bundle and enjoyed them both, although I enjoyed the first one a lot more. They're DRM-free and let you redownload games, often with significant updates (e.g. I bought Dungeon Keeper, and they later added the expansion pack. FTL is now FTL: Advanced Edition).

No, he's talking about mitigation, which is a well-known security practice. It's not about obscurity - you can have two or more open source implementations, but it's then harder for the same bug to be in both or all.

To give a concrete example, take a look at the DNS root zone servers operated by Verisign. They run a 50:50 mix of Linux and FreeBSD and increasingly a mix of BIND and Unbound. They use a userspace network stack on some and the system network stack on others. If someone wants to take out the root zone, they need to find exploits for each of these systems. A bug that lets you remotely crash a FreeBSD box likely won't affect Linux and vice versa. That gives them a little bit more time to find the fix (they also massively overprovision, so if someone does take out all of the Linux systems then the FreeBSD ones can still handle the load, and vice versa). If someone finds a bug in BIND then the Unbound servers will be fine.

If your web site were running a mixture of OpenSSL and something else, then it would be relatively easy to turn off the servers running OpenSSL as soon as the vulnerability is disclosed and only put them back online when they've been audited for compromises. Of course, it depends a bit on what your threat model is. If a single machine being compromised is a game-over problem, then you're better off with a monoculture (at your organisation, at least). If having all (or a large fraction) compromised is a problem, but individual compromises are fine, then it's better to have diversity.

If that's the take-home that you got from that video, I suggest you watch it again. You clearly missed the point.