Great stuff. This news seems great and look forward to seeing where it goes, particularly around the open sourcing of some new tools.

We've just launched a new virtual server hosting service in .au which uses Ceph for the storage system (blatant plug: https://binarylane.com.au/ coming to the US soon!) We chose it after a lot of evaluation of various other systems and so far it seems to be performing really well.

The stuff on the roadmap you mentioned sounds awesome as well.

This is one of the reasons I have not bought into the Amazon ecosystem.

GP is right - Amazon have largely solved piracy for the majority of users by simply making it way easier. As an avid reader and someone that has been almost exclusively reading e-books since about 2005, I love the idea of the Amazon ecosystem.

But I can't bring myself to buy a book that I then don't own. I understand the revoking is, when considered as a percentage of books, tiny - but the point is /it can happen/. I don't want their DRM scheme to magically deactivate my book collection one day.

I know I can buy the books and strip the DRM - but then I'm back at the start and it's no longer easier to use the Amazon ecosystem. Users might as well just pirate it to - as usual - get a superior product.

I made the decision to not buy DRM'ed products ever a while ago. Unfortunately this greatly limits my ability to buy e-books - many publishers/retailers don't clearly distinguish between DRM-free and DRM on their sites, despite apparently supporting them both (I still haven't figured out how to reliably buy DRM-free Tor books; I don't know if I am stupid or what).

Actually after using FF29 for a few hours I am finding it really frustrating - I feel like I used to be able to easily glance at my other tabs to find the one I was looking for.

Now they all sort of gel together and are less 'distinct'. Maybe it's a weird "I'm not used to it yet" thing but I feel like having lots of tabs open is a little more confusing now than it was before.

Maybe they did some usability studies where they measured tab-finding-response-time and after a bit of use it got lower? Otherwise I can't figure out why this change exists.

The short answer:
- add-on bar has been removed
- ability to move tabs below ("browser.tabs.onTop") address bar is gone
- address bar cannot be moved when customising toolbars.

Classic Theme Restorer seems to fix most of these problems.

I love Firefox and have used it for years. I've put up with all the updates and changes and ridiculous behaviour since they started this rapid development cycle.

There's been some improvements. But every couple of releases my plugins break because they've removed some functionality or changed something. I can put up with that; software changes and needs maintenance.

This is the first upgrade I've done where my interface has been changed this significantly.

The Add-on bar is gone. Can't replace it without an extension. I have (well, had) tools in that I used daily.

Tabs now on top. Can't move them back to the bottom. Here's a two year old Bugzilla filled with people pleading that it remain an option.

There appears to be extensions to fix all this. But what's the fucking point any more? I'm sick of fighting to keep Firefox looking and working like Firefox if all they're going to do is take away the things that I actually use it for. It's just too much effort.

Mozilla, you used to be a leader. Now you're a follower. I know so few people that are still using Firefox - most people I talk to are surprised that I don't use Chrome - why are you going out of your way to alienate those of us that are left?

The customisation isn't flexible enough - I can't move some of the objects (like the address bar) or move tabs to the bottom where they used to be. My interface has been completely reworked with no way to restore it to what it was, as far as I can tell.

A 0-day for Adobe Flash was also patched today.

For some reason I had three different and separate updates I had to do to fix this:

1) Chrome automatically updated something and was running the latest version when I checked

2) The plugin that Firefox uses only seems to look for updates when I reboot. I found this guide to trigger the update manually, which basically then resulted in it just opening a browser window & making me download an update .exe.

3) Even after that, IE still reported running the older version. I ran Windows Update manually and discovered there was an separate patch in there for Flash for IE.

Pretty awesome.

Thanks for the reply.

I've actually been working on a deployment script for our service (we have a VPS hosting business in Australia), which gets most of it up and running in a single-click-deploy kind of way ( https://www.binarylane.com.au/... if you're interested).

It still needs some work (haven't set it up with Nginx, yet) but I had a few people interested in trying it and this meant they could have it up and running in a few minutes to tinker with.

I'll have a think about it - as a VPS provider I am really big on the idea of "private cloud" stuff and I'd really like to make things like this simple for users so they can easily deploy stuff without having to become Linux sysadmins.

No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "

Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on /your/ server.

It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.

But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO.

I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.

But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.

This.

We used to have a more DevOps approach when we were a startup (1999-2005ish?). After a while as our contracts got bigger and our client projects got more visibility, they wanted to move into a more change-request-managed style of development (this is despite the fact that we'd never (in my recollection) had any incidents as a result of our management process).

We created a strict separation of roles between Dev and Ops. Devs just wrote code, Ops pushed code to servers.

To this day, many years later, our Dev team still has poor visibility into our operational environment. Getting easy access to log files, looking at temporary files - really /basic/ operational stuff that Devs had done for years was denied to them and a "process" built around getting that stuff from Ops.

This process is slow and awkward. Arguably we could have done it better using tools but we'd bought into the process too much, it existed, so why bother changing it?

Similarly, from an Operations side, their workflow suffered because the devs would be off in a silo, then one day someone would pop up and say "OK I need a full staging and production environment for this project by tomorrow".

Again, not great project management on our part, but what was originally a natural flow of information between two teams who a) historically worked very closely and b) NEED to work very closely slowed to a trickle as the "DevOps" interface was basically shut down.

I have been pushing for a DevOps role for a few years, without success. For me DevOps is about lightening the burden of Dev and Ops teams by increasing the ability for information to flow between them quickly and easily.

In our company it's almost the opposite - we have only three operations staff but 12 developers. Just by virtue of the fact we have more developers they have a wide range of experience doing some operational tasks, just for their own projects.

I'll make sure to let the 7,518,856 other people I play Dota 2 with every month know (that number from just loading the game and looking at the unique monthly players figure).

That is, if I can get their attention while they're all trying to be the next team to win $1m in cash.

(Related aside: check out Valve's Free to Play documentary; it's a great watch for some insight into the lives of professional gamers.)

I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.

I always find it funny how often this is a (modded-up) defence to claims of corruption in Western society (generally the USA on Slashdot, but you'll see it almost everywhere else).

It doesn't mean that that you should stop striving to eliminate what corruption you do have. Or highlighting it at every opportunity and saying "that's wrong".

From the perspective of an outsider (Australian), the US increasingly looks like it's becoming an oligarchy where money is the only thing that matters. If this story were true it is a sad state of affairs.

So... Who cares if you have an accident that kills or maims someone else because you ignored the manufacturers instructions to modify something.... As long as someone else is around to pick up the bill?

Are you American or something?