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?

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.

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.

Ok. I have mostly been working with Beaglebone and looked at this video to see what I might be missing with Edison. The shill in the video promotes Edison by saying it has all these things built in-- wifi and bluetooth.

From this video, it's clear the board is missing USB and any kind of normal power connector. Oh, and removable storage? And ethernet?

This device screams of a scheme to dump atom processors after the market disappeared for netbooks and intel was left with a few million chips on their hands. I'll stick with ARM and the larger ecosystem that has grown around the Beaglebone Black and Rpi, thank you.

Most commenters here and elsewhere assume these references to a competing product were accidental. I believe they were likely intentional. The $400m paid to the NFL did not include any money paid to the broadcast corporations. They're sitting there wondering why they should help the NFL promote something while at the same time having to pay the NFL similarly-sized piles of cash.

I think these carefully-executed comments were an intentional message to Microsoft that their promotional budget is better spent with them on commercials rather than trying to embed them in the content without paying the broadcasters.

Fully agreed. Additionally, if it's lucrative, that means the organization perceives it as a cost-center. At some point, management will finally tire of the burden of this inflated paycheck and under-performing technology and will dump it out along with you.

I find that the more reliably lucrative jobs are the ones that provide efficiency and cost-savings to organizations.

If this is your takeaway from that footage and you are proposing that watching this footage can have a valuable effect for viewers, it does not surprise me that you can't find a job using your journalism BA.

In your entire discussion of this topic, you ignore the relationship his suicide has to the larger community. You are caught up in the graphic sensationalism of the State Senator suddenly pulling out a gun and shooting himself. You treat the end of his life as if the meaning is journalists should pay attention at press conferences.

Yes, in j-school, they taught you to get the Five W's for your story. The first four are the least important... . The fifth is last for a reason- the 'WHY' is where you have the opportunity to fill your prose with meaningful content that can improve the human condition. If you focus on that dimension of your journalism, it will enable you to stand out of the crowd and get that job.

Nobody needs to see the beheading of a western journalist at the hands of lunatics. YouTube is right to remove the stage out from under these violent criminals.

Now is a 33 month prison sentence fair for gross stupidity? /shrug I've heard of worse . . .

I don't think people are recognizing that 33 months is a light sentence. The jury definitely shaved off a few months beneath what they would have handed down if he had been found guilty of pirating Fast 5. That movie was exponentially better than #6.

Keyloggers are certainly a popular way for collecting passwords on a malware-infected computer. Undoubtedly, some portion of this claimed collection would have been built off keylogging.

The extortionists describing this password trove are claiming it was built by using compromised client computers to launch SQL injection attacks against servers where the computer's owner had an account. Such a strategy would allow the attackers access to injection vulnerabilities that are inaccessible to an unauthenticated visitor. Additionally, and perhaps more concerning should be that this type of attack would succeed against corporate intranets via employee computers connected via VPN.

Using keyloggers alone might yield a few million passwords (depending on the size of the botnet), but to achieve a collection of a billion, the compromised machines would have to gather passwords not belonging to their owners.

Mr. Cameron-

I really enjoyed your visual special effects work on the landmark film, Escape from New York. I've been out of touch with your career since then, but noticed you were able to parlay your success working for John Carpenter into supporting an underwater diving hobby.

I'm wondering if you see any chance of technology improving soon that would enable humans to live underwater for extended periods. These underwater hotels are so darn expensive. I'd like to have a house in about 20' of sea water. When's that going to happen?

Compared with tools we had 10 years ago or more, UIs have indeed improved significantly.

No criticism of the OP here, but this got me thinking about one of my mortal enemies. The UI within SQL Server Management Studio. For the last decade of upgrades, I've really wondered how that development team leaves the office everyday thinking they are doing a good day's work. There are so many blatantly apparent rough edges to the UI for SSMS, I can't believe they think it's as good as they can make it.

In order to avoid tldr, I'll just give a single example. Look at the tabbing for each database connection window. The tabs are labelled "servername.database" but are limited to a small number of characters regardless of how many tabs are open. Here's an example where there are only two open tabs:

http://img.informer.com/screen...

The first reason the labelling is fundamentally broken is that the database name is chopped off in an unnecessary abbreviation. The tab could stretch out to display the whole thing! It's not scrunched in with a bunch of other tabs. There's plenty of room there.

The second reason this is broken is that the database name is the thing you actually need to see more than the server name. In the majority of use case scenarios, the user is connected to multiple databases on the same server. When switching tabs, you need to be able to locate the one for the database you're looking for within your current connections. Sure, there's that pulldown menu on the left, but that's a much further mouse drag than the tabs are from your focal point.

So, if you're ever looking for an example of a developer interface that doesn't get a proper update, look no further than SQL Server Management Studio. It's hardly changed in over a decade of releases.

Most inspired and insightful post I've read on Slashdot all year.

Thank you for teaching children.

Sounds like you missed an opportunity to capitalize on his genius. You could have been the Steve Jobs to his Steve Wozniak. No disrespect to yourself, because this is clearly one of those impossible-to-predict scenarios. I guess the lesson learned is to watch for these types of talents and make sure the work they have in front of them is sufficiently engaging on levels that will interest them.

I suppose this is one aspect of Google's 20% projects. People who are bored with their normal work may find satisfaction with their own pursuits and stay with the company to continue working on them.

While each of those are significant milestones in implementation achievements, I'm not aware of a single individual who can claim credit for enabling the completion of those projects.

To put those projects in proper scale to what the programmers on this IT World Hall of Fame have done, the above examples were all built with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. The needs of those systems were readily apparent by everyone involved. It was a matter of assigning an army of workers to put all the pieces together.

The accomplishments of these hall of fame programmers revolve around smart people identifying a vacuum of need that others hadn't recognized even existed. Then these people set about filling those needs by building essential tools themselves from scratch.