Installing Window Blinds and Start8 as a one-off doesn't seem terribly cumbersome, and then you have the UI that Microsoft should have given you in the first place (best ever response to this was taking my laptop in to Microsoft and having a MS person staring over my shoulder and eventually asking "what is that and where can I get it too").

Exactly (no mod points left, sorry). Auditing OpenSSL makes about as much sense as auditing Windows 95, we already know it's broken beyond repair, and any further effort expended on it is just throwing good money after bad. Focus on something that's worth going with, like LibreSSL, or something that was never OpenSSL to begin with.

Same here. I have an Atmos clock, which is entirely mechanical. You're supposed to get it serviced every 30 years (mine has just gone in for its second service, the first in the time I've owned it). The standard models are meant to run for about 400 years, the fancier ones like the du Millenaire are calibrated out to 3000 AD, although I'm not sure whether civilisation will still be around then if something goes wrong.

I'll bet the $10,000 Apple watch will be a piece of expensive inanimate jewellery long before my clock goes in for its third servicing.

Had an interesting discussion about this with some fellow geeks over steak recently, one of them proposed firing the bottom 80% of all your developers. Reason: Not only are they not contributing much that's useful, they are in fact a negative input on productivity since the other 20% who are useful have to go round cleaning up the mess they make.

I'm not sure if it's 80% (I'd say maybe 50%), but I know too many situations like this, where the clueless/incompetent are not only not doing anything useful but actively preventing the competent from getting their work done.

(The problem, which was pointed out at the time, is identifying who the incompetent 50% are. Many of them are where they are today because they know how to manipulate the system, rather than because they're any good at what they do).

The reason for using this alternative to the alternative is because any kind of blacklist-based security doesn't work. It rates #2 in the six dumbest ideas in computer security, with default-allow (which arguably is the problem that blacklists are trying to deal with) at #1. First there were CRLs, which don't work. They were replaced with OCSP, which doesn't work. Now we have cert blacklists, which are fairly recent so they haven't failed often enough for it to be obvious to everyone that they don't work, but give it time...

Once they fail, the browser vendors will come back with version 4 of the dumbest idea, then version 5, and then version 6, and they'll just keep on doing the wrong thing over and over and over until eventually it starts working, dammit!

Starting? What would it take for you to realise that the whole browser PKI mess is the steaming pile of dung that it actually is?

Already exists, Google "telecrapper 2000".

What dress?

FIPS 140 certification, which I assume is what you're referring to, is almost worthless in terms of determining how resistant to real-world attack a product really is. It would have done nothing to prevent the problem discussed here. Its main use is as a measure of how desperate a vendor is to get government contracts, which is also why no-one asks for it outside government procurement.

Applications are going to have to support both for years, possibly eternity. The whole HTTP 2.0 process was driven mostly by Google, who wanted HTTP changed to reduce the load on their servers (heaven knows what sort of uproar would have resulted if Microsoft had tried this sort of thing). Unfortunately the resulting design, while it may make Google's job easier, is incredibly difficult to implement for things like embedded devices. The HTTP 2.0 WG's response when this was pointed out, repeatedly, was "let them eat HTTP 1.1".

In other words there will be two HTTP's, 2.0 for Google and in general content providers and whatnot, and HTTP 1.1 for everything else.

Sadly, things look like they're heading in the opposite direction. The first thing I do with a new install of Chromefox is download a pile of extensions to turn it back into Firefox, but it seems like every new release requires even more extensions to undo the Chromefox braindamage. So at least for that browser, the developers are making changes that force you to download more extensions, not less.

Ah yes, but it's running VMWare running FreeBSD emulating Linux running Qemu running Windows XP running AppleWin running the dungeon generator written in Applesoft Basic for a 1MHz 6502 in 1979, and that's worthy of the front page of Slashspot.

(Oh year, "Apple II forever!").

It may have failed to make a dent on the smartphone market, but it's made a considerable dent (more like a smoking crater) in the desktop PC market. MS claims that they'll fix some of that in Windows 10 (Windows Phone, aka. 8, being so had that they skipped an entire version number to get away from it), but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach.

And that pretty much sums up the problem with this survey, it's not really "How good is your audio system" it's "How much money did you spend on your audio system". Based on actual measurements with test instruments (rather than golden-ears subjective wank), my $150 O2 beats $10,000 amps ($50,000, $100,000, the sky's the limit), which means to answer this survey I'd need an option to choose "super cheap, excellent performance". Since the survey equates cost with performance, there's no way to do this. Perhaps if I got a Tice clock and some Brilliant Pebbles and strapped them to my O2 I'd be able to say "super expensive, excellent performance"?