OpenSSL took the worst possible route. They had FOO_{standard library function} and BAR_{standard library function}, and also just used the unadorned library function. The FOO_ variant had some special behaviour, the BAR_ version was sometimes the standard library version and sometimes their own (depending on both the platform and the function - in some cases they always wrote their own even when there's an adequate - or even better - version shipped with the platform, in some cases they made a per-platform decision about it).

Almost right, except that you stick #define printf GOOD_printf at the end of the #ifdef block and then always use printf(), don't force everyone reading the code to work out that GOOD_printf() means printf().

The problem with this idea is that it assumes that it's easy to attribute costs to a particular programmer. The Heartbleed bug added a new feature (yay! Marketing checkbox!) and sat undiscovered for a couple of years. Do you think that the developer would have been fired immediately after introducing it in a closed-source environment?

The close button is easy to spot, because it is in the same place on every browser tab / window. If an annoying ad pops up, don't try to close the ad, close the page. Let the web site know the next time that they look at their analytics that they have a very high bounce rate and eventually they'll figure out that it's because they're pissing their (former) users off with their annoying ads.

I stick something in my user CSS so that links to the site get a warning added. I can then decide before I click whether it's worth adding following a specific link to the site. Usually, I don't. Unfortunately, most sites don't get statistics for how many people choose not to click on a link because they've been annoyed in the past.

If I associate your 'high end brand' with the projected battery life on my laptop suddenly dropping when I open a page with an advert for it, then I am not going to be predisposed towards that brand.

I'm pretty sure there's AdBlock for Firefox mobile. I tend not to block ads - I'd rather boycott sites that have annoying ads than give them the impression that their behaviour is acceptable - but I'm very happy with the self-destructing cookies plugin and Firefox for Android.

It's even more amusing if you're somewhere in the UK with a city name that was copied by the USA. I see quite a few of those that use GeoIP to find the place name and then match that to their database, telling me that there's a gorgeous girl several thousand miles away...

That's not quite true. For one thing, if your buffer cache is big enough that the entire source tree stays there then it has a noticeable impact on compile time. I tend to put the obj tree in tmpfs when doing a universe build (I don't actually want it, I just want to check everything builds most of the time), and that consumes 50GB. You might also be surprised at how much RAM the compile takes.

Hmm, is it something that you need to specifically enable? We're taking about an hour and a half with Quartus 13 on these machines. We do pay for the subscription version, although adding more design partitions is not a simple thing to do as our Verilog is generated from a higher-level HDL.

Can you define what you mean by 'a lot' of compiling? We have some machines where I regularly build LLVM and the FreeBSD base system. They're 32-core with 256GB of RAM, and on them most builds are nice and fast, although it still takes close to two hours to do a universe build (all kernel configs, userland for all supported architectures - the 'quick' sanity test that you haven't broken anything). They're similar specs to the 'beefy' machines in the FreeBSD cluster, which take around 24 hours to build a complete package set (all 24K ports for a single release / architecture).

I'm not sure what you got 6 years ago, but there are still things where the fastest you can buy it not as fast as you'd like. I'm really interested in better single-threaded performance, because some companies (*cough*Altera*cough*Xylinx*cough*) haven't yet worked out how to multithread their compilers and so it takes an hour and a half to do a synthesis run of our CPU.

As I said in my original post, the thing that killed it was their time to market. It was initially proposed as a device where you'd pay a slight premium, but get something with an open software stack and a nice form factor as a hacker toy. By the time it shipped, that premium had become 200-300% over comparable devices.

512MB made sense in 2008. It was the largest available Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM module you could buy. The OMAP series of SoCs are usually used in a stacked configuration, with the CPU, RAM, and Flash all vertically stacked. This reduces the complexity of the board a lot, because you don't need any traces to be run for RAM or Flash (only for external peripherals), but it also means that you're quite restricted in the memory chips you can use: they must be single-chip modules and must have a sufficiently low power and thermal envelope that they can sit happily on top of the SoC. 1GB PoP modules were released a few months after the Pandora team finished the design, but it was too late to replace it by then and they've never done a revision B.

I was really interested in the Pandora when it was announced, but eventually got a phone with similar specs for about £50, before most people got their Pandoras. I've now also got an Asus TransformerPad TF700, which is a very nice machine, but I'd really like something that could run FreeBSD out of the box. The Dragonbox Pyra specs look pretty good, but I note a lack of any physical dimensions on the web site (other than a 5" screen), which makes it a bit difficult to evaluate. I didn't realise hns was involved - hopefully this will go a bit better than the GTA handsets...

TI is notoriously bad at documenting their non-CPU cores. The c64x still needs a proprietary compiler (which supports only a weird dialect of C). Is there some commitment from them to open specs for the OMAP5 SoC? One of the nice things about the ChromeBook is that Google has the purchasing power to be able to demand this from their suppliers. I don't think the Pyra has the same influence, so may need to shop around a bit more...

Why do you think that contradicts his statement? Take a look at how much funding GCHQ receives from the NSA - it's a significant amount of their total budget and has led to some concerns that they act more in the interests of the US than UK.

The big problem with OpenPandora was their time to market. When they started (2008), the Cortex A8 was pretty new (released 2007, but not much silicon until 2008) and there were few devices you could get with one in, although a few evaluation boards were starting to appear. They promised something in a small mobile form factor running a completely open software stack, which sounded like a fun platform. By the time they actually shipped anything (2010), the Cortex A8 was starting to feel a bit dated and was available in cheap mobile phones running Android. By the time they shipped to more than a token number of people, the A8 was ancient and you could get a dual or quad-core A9 or similar for half the price.

Oh, and their UK operation effectively went bust after taking huge numbers of pre-orders. Both the UK and German companies had the pre-order money in their accounts for 2+ years earning interest before they shipped anything, but at least people who ordered things from the German company eventually got something, even if it was worth a fraction of what they paid for it, as a result of being two years - over an entire generation of the technology - old by the time they got it.