I like banshee. It resolves the track details and album art of CDs I rip, supports a wide range of formats, copes well with my large music directory and its file and directory name conventions, has working gapless playback (rhythmbox's never quite worked right whenever I tried), and integrates well with last.fm.

I didn't even know it was built on Mono until a couple of weeks ago. I haven't noticed any sluggishness, and I'm not running it on a terribly fast PC.

She might not want to upgrade, but she *needs* to upgrade, to fix security vulnerabilities.

That's the #1 problem here.

I was a long time Ubuntu user. When I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04, I found that Unity was unusable. Forget opinions about the redesigned, touch-friendly interface: it was broken. Menu items not appearing; rampant graphics corruption in the menu bar; window dragging taking several seconds to redraw the window; lots more. Does anyone have impressions of how buggy Unity is in this new release?

(Yes, proprietary nvidia driver. Playing nice with it is non-negotiable. Gnome 3 and KDE both do.)

As a power user and a developer, I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora after I discovered how awful Unity was in 11.04. I'm very happy with it. YMMV (I'm a Gnome 3 fan -- but if you don't like it, there's XFCE, LXDE, xmonad, etc etc).

...anyone sharing a public WiFi with you can be a man-in-the-middle...

What you described doesn't just "cost a lot". It's security cloud cuckoo-land...

Do they mean a PKI, with certificates?

If so, .secure will go down like a lead balloon.

See: Email encryption (S/MIME etc) -- do you know anyone who uses it? In the unlikely event that you do, can you say they're not a huge nerd? Hell, I work as a security specialist and I don't use it because it's too hard.

Also see: DNSSEC -- even the big network operators are having difficulty deploying it, let alone anyone else.

And the https system for web certificates, which only "works" because it's fundamentally insecure (every browser trusts a huge list of CAs, any one of which can sign a certificate for any site, which is all that's required to impersonate the site -- and that's before we get into mixed content and all the other problems). .secure will require usable, secure authentication over the Internet, and that's *hard*.

Passwords short enough to memorise are now short enough to crack in many cases. See recent article about hash reversal with GPUs.

Use a password safe. Just search -- there are lots around. I use KeePassX (small, cross-platform -- Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac, Android, no install required on Windows). It'll make strong passwords for you and save them in a tiny encrypted file you can copy to all your devices, with a couple of clicks. The only passwords you'll need to remember are your local login password and the password to the safe.

Life is better without having my web accounts chain-hacked or having to clutter my brain remembering a bazillion passwords...

Apple AirPort (all models) support IPv6 out-of-the-box. I'm running one myself. Works nicely.

As far as I could tell from some while of hunting around on the net, it's the *only* router that advertises such support, and might well be the only one that has it at all...

*facepalm*

Flashblock!

Err, Slashdot has always held a "ZOMG M$!!!" attitude. More so in 2001 than in 2011 in fact, I think...

That's a personal preference thing. I found many of Asimov's stories really dull. Have you read the early Foundation books, for example? They're just pedestrian chronologies. This-happened, and-then-this-happened, and-then-100-years-later-this-happened.

(He wrote some gems too. "Pebble in the Sky" is my favourite. And the Foundation books he wrote when he was older are much better, especially Prelude.)

Contrast with a good sci-fi TV series? There's a lot of plotting, and indeed philosophy, going on in Babylon 5 at its best, for example...

Gratuitous pedantry: There's no way any cloud-booted computer will use either PXE or TFTP. Those protocols are designed for trusted networks and are far too insecure to operate across the Internet.

They might have invented some secure protocol to do the same thing. However, I reckon it's probably integrated cloud storage support rather than cloud booting, as other posters suggested earlier. Cloud booting or display rendering in the cloud sounds too likely to give a bad user experience due to ISP issues.

I bet this test has just as much real world meaning as Mensa's IQ test though...

"86 percent do not check for a secure connection when accessing sensitive information when using unfamiliar computers"

Seriously, now. A website with "security" in the title really ought to at least try to present credible security analysis!

*facepalm*