You haven't checked out the firegpg page in awhile. Development has been discontinued and Gmail support has been removed.

If something goes horribly, horribly wrong, circuit breakers do blow. In quite a spectacular fashion I might add, and certainly not by design.

I just finished reading the Zombie Survival Guide and no where in there does he mention the use of gold bricks as a weapon, but I think you're on to something here. Just because the world has turned into a disease ridden hell hole full of the undead corpses of those you once loved doesn't mean you can't protect yourself in style. You, good sir, are a visionary.

The problem is that you can't always tell when something is failing. A couple of examples from my own personal experience on both the software and hardware side of things...

My bosses have been of the mind for years that you use something til it breaks then you replace it. I've insisted that we take a more proactive stance and regularly replace things, not only to make sure that we have workable hardware but also to make sure we're taking full advantage of all tax breaks available (different things depreciate differently, and after certain periods of accelerated depreciation it doesn't make sense to hold onto old hardware). Long story short, I initially lost that argument and our server died, leaving us out of business for a week. Did we still have things we could do? Sure, but since our business revolves around AutoCAD and producing working drawings on a schedule developed by the architects we work for, this put is in a position to not be able to produce anything that we could actually get paid for. 10 employees at an average of $1000 per day wasted time and our company was essentially out $50,000 of productive work because we didn't spend $3-4k on new servers when we should have. Now we have a firm IT equipment replacement policy in place as a result, but we had to learn the hard way that "use it til it breaks" is not the best way to go and, in the long run, just doesn't make economic sense.

My second anecdote involves AutoCAD again, but in this case we had updated to the latest version of AutoCAD, but we were still using tools, blocks and details developed with a version that was 5 years old because, well, they still worked, right? In the mean time, AutoCAD had developed a wide array of tools and features designed to vastly increase productivity that none of our tools took advantage of because a) no one had kept up on AutoCAD enough to learn all the tricks and b) because we didn't want to invest the time to develop new tools. When a summer intern came in and showed us how cumbersome our old tools were compared to how streamlined and convenient they could be we immediately began updating our libraries. Was it vanity on our part or a need to have the "hottest newness available?" No, it was because we wanted to catch up on all the features and time saving things we'd been missing out on. Is this going to be the same for every piece of software out there? Probably not, but just because you've been doing it the same way for years in no way means you have to continue doing it that way when it may be much more efficient to use the new hotness.

I do agree that updating for updating's sake is not always the best course of action, but sitting on your laurels doing things the same way you've always done them because that's the way they've always been done is also not a very good idea.

40 hours a week? We don't hire slacker programmers here. 80 hours a week minimum means they have 10 whole seconds per line. Plenty of time.

I voted for skepticism, but now I'm starting to question that decision.

I'm pretty sure they don't have a distribution center there, though, so no tax! Bonus!

I know at my company a lot of it is apathy. We have an unencrypted FTP site where clients can upload/download stuff at their leisure. It's not sensitive material, so no one really cares if something happens to it or if someone gets hold of what's up there. Probably not the best attitude, but if the higher ups don't concern themselves with it, I don't concern myself with it too much either. That being said, for internal stuff and for access to project files from offsite, I did set up an SSH account on a segregated virtual machine that we can gain access to via SFTP. I also gave out separate keys for each individual in our organization. If a key becomes compromised I can simply issue a new one to the key holder without having to inconvenience everyone else. Still probably not ideal (I'm not a security expert by any stretch of the imagination), but better than nothing.

I realize that AVI is indeed old, but old and obsolete are not the same thing. People still use AVI on a very regular basis, and as long as it gets used, it is, by definition, not obsolete. I suppose one way to make it obsolete, however, is to discontinue support for it so no one can encode something in an AVI container anymore, haha.

I stuck with the 0.9.3 version for quite awhile because of the lack of support for AVI in the latest release, but grudgingly I switched over a few weeks back. MKV is choppy and buggy on my Ubuntu install for some reason (I get video tearing all the time and I can't seek without the audio getting out of sync or disappearing entirely). VLC handles the files a little more gracefully than MPlayer or Xine, but it's still not ideal. I'm banking on support getting better though (or upgrading my hardware if it turns out that's the problem). I do, however, like the chapters and subtitles features that MKV brings to the table.

I can certainly understand to drop support for obsolete containers, but I think that calling AVI obsolete at this point is very premature.

Ahhh... good 'ole "cac.psu.edu" was always good for a proxy, haha. I think the ubiquitous wireless is a more recent than my stint at UP, although occasionally you could hop on a rogue AP and utilize someone else's bandwidth.

I graduated in '06, so it may be a more recent implementation. The page limit always irked me as well, but the ArchEng department didn't have a limit either so I'd go there to print. Hooray for fellow Penn Staters stickin' it to the man!

In college (I went to Penn State) they had a similar monitor that would update and show you if you were getting close to, or had already exceeded the limits for the month. After the first infraction in a semster, they'd cut you back to dialup speeds for about a week, then at the second infraction, for the rest of the semester, and after the third (assuming you could even get there at dialup speeds) you were cut off. My friends and I took this as a challenge, so we were always trying to get as close to the download limit without going over, even people who otherwise would not download much at all. I would anticipate this will only encourage similar behavior.

Do we really need to fight over it?

Supernova or Black hole