From Wikipedia:

The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[29] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite

In competitive sales situations, each company has performed competitive analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of their competition's product. When talking to a customer, the sales team is emphasizing the problems of the competitor's product and the strength of their own. The customer is beating up the salesman by asking questions about the weaknesses of their product that were fed to the customer by the competing salesperson.

"It took them six years to fix these three simple bugs."

"It wasn't until release 4.5 before they found a critical security vulnerability that has probably been exploited since release 1.0."

"They decided not to fix these important problems in the current release and customers are going to have to wait another year for this functionality to work properly."

Helping your competition perform competitive analysis is a really good way to help your company go out of business. The benefit of transparency will be hugely outweighed by the savagery that will be perpetrated against your sales team. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see the sales team quit if this transparency continues.

Because car analogies are so hated on Slashdot, here's one:

If a dealer handed you a piece of paper listing 100 things mechanically wrong with one car and then offered a second car that they said verbally had nothing wrong with it, would you really buy the car that is documented to be broken in 100 ways or would you trust the dealer's word on the other car?

When enough others decide to buy an app-able crockpot, you won't have any choice but too buy one as well.

Yes, for normal people, but we're nerds. We'll simply hack them, just like we jailbreak iPhones.

This story reminds me of something that happened in a bar a year or so ago. A fellow had a strange looking contraption that looked like it had something to do with a furnace. I asked him what it was, and he said it was an "obsolete" analog part that cost him twenty bucks new that he was installing in a friend's furnace to replace a burned up digital board that cost $200 used.

Look at cars, my last car had a digital circuit to control climate. If it had gone out, the replacement was $300. $300 for something that surely cost the automaker less than $5 to manufacture.

If I'm forced to buy an internet-connected toaster, you can bet its antennas will be the first parts to be removed.

A lot of reasons. I probably don't have a fixed IP address, I'd have to keep on top of security far more closely than with a PC, and I'd have to have at least two computers running 24/7/365 in case one went down, and I usually only have one or two running when I'm awake. The electricity alone would cost more than hosting.

It is a working system with everything you'd need to run a legitimate server.

I have wanted to run *BSD as our server OS for years, but the lack of native Oracle java support has held us back. Our app demands Oracle java and will not run on OpenJDK. Wish it would, because that's the only dang thing holding me off of *BSD these days.

I can fully expect some people will claim the lack of availability of native Oracle java support is a benefit of BSD. I would not argue against that sentiment, but my paycheck depends on other criteria.

My eyes were extremely bad, perhaps if I wasn't so nearsighted it would have been cheaper but I'd still rather have a single payer system.

From what I've read, about the only things they won't correct is retinal and vitreous defects. I know that they will correct astigmatism.

If you get a cataract, spend the extra money on a CrystaLens. Unlike 45 year old natural lenses and implants available before 2003, they will actually focus. Of course they're under patent so they're about a thousand dollars each more expensive than other implants. I'm sure I'll have a cataract in the other eye not too long from now, the last eye doctor I saw said "a couple of years" and it's been longer than that.

I think I'll wait until 2023 when the patent runs out and everybody makes them, the ones like my mom has will be obsolete. I only use that eye to look at tiny things, anyway.

Insurance paid for all but the extra thousand, it was the best thousand dollars I ever spent. The device inside my eye is my favorite device of all.

The whole "needles in the eyeball" are just a stepping stone to something truly amazing.

Indeed. I was severely nearsighted all my life, after the cataract surgery I no longer need corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses and I'm 62. My vision in that eye went from 20/400 to 20/16. Truly a miracle.

BTW, my retina surgeon said that my retinal detachment was a result of being so nearsighted; a nearsighted eyeball isn't perfectly round like a normally sighted person's eyes.

I'm fine with the chip; that protects me, the bank, and the retailer. I am NOT fine with the PIN. My signature can't be stolen; if someone steals my card, the signature on the sales slip proves it's not me. But if someone steals your PIN they have your every penny.

It happened to me with a debit card. I welcome the chip, but of they add a PIN I'll cancel all my cards and go back to cash and checks, even though they're nowhere as convenient.

I hadn't had any of the accounts I'd used, either, and wasn't sure which one it was. Still got the account back, give 'em a try.

I had cataract surgery on that eye two years before the retina came loose. I did know a couple of guys who had vitrectomies followed by cataract surgery, but the needles don't go through the lens, they go in through the whites (photos at wikipedia). I suspect that a vitrectomy involves steroids; steroid eyedrops for an eye infection caused my cataract.

It wasn't worth the effort, I just cut and pasted from the manuscript. It's bad enough posting journals, I take a bit more care with them.

I think you have Dr. Dre confused with Rick Rubin.

Dre does create the music you hear while a vocalist raps. He's known as a perfectionist in the industry and has refused to release material that was not up to his ideals even though contracts were signed, etc.

As for Bono and Apple working together to prevent piracy, I think U2's newest album is an example of the technology-- create an uninspired, unnecessary product that a major corporation gives away to consumers for free. Seems like the Fort Knox of piracy protection.

An oversimplification. The US, UK, and allies variously broke many cipher systems throughout WWII. Still the US benefitted from this.

What if the Germans were using, say, Windows, Android phones, SSL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Skype, instead of Enigma machines?