There are two options available to you - 1. Apple's caching server works perfectly (so long as your external IP doesn't change and everyone is on iOS 7 and Mountain Lion or Mavericks) - you download once (on demand rather than syncing the whole repo "WSUS" style) and distribute to many. This saves heaps of space without screwing with the end user, and it doesn't need to be managed via GP or anything like that. 2. SCCM on demand packages. Not an SCCM guy, but if you can replicate the caching server from Apple in SCCM, you're on the way.

Neither of these options gives a flying crap about HTTPS or Authentication.

If I put wheels on your metal office desk you can have a cool (temperature), fast (relative to otherwise stationary), usable (it's the top of a desk), and it will be bug (termite) free. That's all you get.

Working as an internet server is easy, sure, we've had Microsoft's IIS and Raspberry Pi's doing it. Working as a safe, stable, secure one is hard, and for that we have the BSD's.

Pretty sure whoever wrote "House" was looking at Theo and thinking "You know... that fucker could make a great TV show character". Of course it was probably followed by "but screw that IT crap" but whatever.

Which is surprising (assuming he is telling the truth) considering he includes Planet P, Zim, and Diz.

I've always, personally and with no basis in fact, felt that Verhoeven claiming that he didn't read the book is his cop-out for creating a movie that cops so much flak.

Of course the problem with this whole bullshit line is - what happens when the UPS' die.

So *if* they had power cycled and lost the device they were configuring there is a serious dereliction of duty there, or at least gross incompetency from the engineer who configured the devices. They would have known and could have started getting him back to reset passwords or w/e. Instead, there was a huge song and dance because, apparently, at no time was anyone with political power willing to turn to the nearest 6 year old and ask what they thought should be done.

Nice to see some staff around. Assuming you are correct, it is also safe to assume that a privacy advocate is using adblocking software, or has set the DoNotTrack header, and thus doesn't *want* their data protected, because they don't want people collecting their data at all and are making efforts to make this happen.

The problem, however, is that even with AdBlock, and DoNotTrack the end user runs into two issues which are almost insurmountable for the user experience.

1. The user can still be tracked by script, which is where NoScript comes in, unfortunately the lack of scripts makes a large number of websites unusable, and significantly degrades the user experience. More so when, like I suggested initially, most sites are hosting their script files with any third party.

Which leads me to 2. Even with script blocking enabled, there are still cookies to consider, and the same problems arise when attempting to access most websites.

So the average user can not concern themselves too much with privacy, not so much by choice, but because if they do they can't do all the things their friends are doing - youtube videos, the escapistmagazine (who need about 9 different hosts bypassed in NoScript to make their site *work* and are representative of a non-google entity), and the like all become effectively unusable by a group of people who are not highly technically minded.

I suggested originally that there are people who successfully browse the internet in a "private" fashion. Their selection of privacy usually means: Use a search engine that is inferior to google (because most of them are - and the term "google it" is being used even by clients of mine who use bing exclusively). Have a web browsing experience that is noticeably slower (Tor), or one that is noticeably "broken" (NoScript, No Cookies). AdBlock is about the only piece of software that sits, nicely, in the background relatively unobtrusively.

So, to sum up as it were, for the end user the business policy is excellent. They get a great web experience at the compromise of (a limited amount of?) their privacy, corporations have to use less bandwidth, web designers have to host less files, etc. etc. The privacy advocate gets an inferior experience because taking advantage of these features means their web traffic is monitored very closely in the name of better targeted ads.

Note: AdBlock means I don't get targeted ads (except in gmail), and google's work means I get web search results that are relevant to me. I love that it works like that, just pointing out the other side.

Sure, and I agree totally, unfortunately we can not convince others how to host their sites. I use jQuery on my sites, for example, and host the files myself. However, and especially with the advent of "cloud" computing, I have found this to be less and less the case. Google Analytics are another good example - people don't use AWStats (or similar) as much because Google does it all for them.

Great business model, terrible for privacy advocates.

It's not much of a choice - over 65% of the 10,000 most visited websites use jQuery (for example). If you want a semi-decent web experience, giving up on Google is particularly difficult. I don't imagine that it is impossible (queue hater geeks who get away with it), but it's not going to be easy.

Open Source - "where the source code is freely available". Different from "Free Open Source" - which includes definition of license.

One client in 4 years of greylisting has had that problem, for something like 40,000 unique senders per month. I like those numbers.

I do, regularly enough that when I'm attending one of the "tech only" training day the local apple guys know that I will be a source of useful information and will tell them what is shit and where, but that sort of thing doesn't make the news.

There's also the percentages problem - considering the size of the user base, it's not really surprising that people encounter problems with the product. The only piece of software I've seen work flawlessly in the last, what, 20 years would be Hobbit's netcat, and that doesn't handle IPv6.

Not defensive of either company here - Google wrote their own apps for iOS and Android and not for MS, ok, MS got given a list of requirements to comply with something that will be used in a not-insignificant market share, but there's this little gem which I almost missed the first read through:

Which I'm reading as "fuck it, too hard, let's just release what we've done and see what happens". Now they complain.

I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right! - P.T. Barnum



*Disclaimer* I may not be quoting directly/ correctly from memory :)

Funny, but bug 1 wasn't fixed by Ubuntu, and doesn't match the spirit of the discussion (e.g. a bug in software, not sales). There were no tools around to detect and determine the fault. IIRC at the time most techs couldn't reproduce but almost every consumer I ran into (and read about) could. Figures.

Except that's a crap line (which I have spouted in the past). Gnash is the perfect example - you have the opportunity to fix it, but the source code is such a pain in the ass to get around that nobody does it. Pick any large project with long standing bugs - why are they long standing? Because nobody wants to fix it - whether for lack of ability, lack of replication of the bug, or fear of the rip-off's license agreement (which is why there are, what, 5 gnash developers on the planet). Pick a large project with long standing bugs (memory leaks in firefox were a good example until too many people complained about it) and ask yourself why those bugs are long standing and well documented.