No. When you login, your session cookie should have an ID unique to that browser session. When you logout, it should cancel that ID at the server side, so even if the cookie persists it would be invalid. It seems like many websites are implementing this functionality by just deleting the session cookie when you logout. That's a problem.

Not if the "remember me" option has been clicked, that's the point.

I've been using computers of various kinds since the mid-80s, including Windows from 2.0 up to 8, Atari, Amiga, various Linux distros and most recently Mac OSX. I wouldn't dream of putting a Windows box into production without antivirus software. I've seen serious virus outbreaks on all of the platforms I've used, apart from Linux and OSX. I've never had active (continuous scanning / file protection) antivirus on Linux or OSX and I've never seen a virus infection. In all my years of supporting friends and family and various corporate systems, I've never had to clean off an infected OSX or Linux box. It's just never happened. So maybe I'm deluded or pretentious, but I'll install active antivirus on my Mac once I've seen a single example of a serious infection in the wild. Until then, I'll keep Clam on standby.

That's right, no-one uses a Mac to get actual work done. Well done.

So, essentially, you're tickboxing the installation of antivirus software. I'd install ClamXav and tick that box, if it was me. Macs aren't necessarily totally invulnerable, but I've never had active antivirus on my Mac, and I've taken it all over the world and used all sorts of dodgy free WiFi, and never had an issue. The only thing I do is a scan of removable media using Clam if I think it's come from someone who's unlikely to have protection on their Windows box. I put my 3G dongle on my parents' XP laptop (never previously connected to the Internet) and it was infected before I'd had time to download a free antivirus (I forgot that there's a huge difference between being behind a NAT router and plugging in a broadband dongle). Admittedly that was XP, Windows 7 is a lot better, but it is orders of magnitude more likely for unprotected Windows boxes to get infected compared to OSX - and far more likely for infections to spread across corporate networks from Windows boxes.

To each their own. Personally, I'd rather have good Linux kernel developers develop code for the Linux kernel.

Also, your implication that anyone who doesn't want to work in an unpleasant environment is mentally unstable is obvious hyperbole.

And again, your hyperbole is unfounded. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind.

Linux is a relatively large software project. There are plenty of other relatively large software projects, written by plenty of other smart people who also care about stability and quality.

In what way, exactly? Systems that include Linux surely have a collective value on that scale, but that value wouldn't disappear if someone made a small mistake in a kernel commit, or if Linus retired tomorrow.

You are giving me some perspective, by comparing a programme that develops one relatively large piece of software to a programme that puts humans in space? Physician, heal thyself!

Are you suggesting that he's just an ordinary poster on the list, with no special authority compared to kernel contributors and no special status as a leader that newcomers might look to?

I wonder how many n00bs never get that far, because they see how the leader of the community treats others and decide to go do something else instead. Maybe Linus does personally know the recipients of his infamous rants, but on a high-profile public forum not everyone watching might realise that.

If you walked into an office for a job interview, and the first thing you saw was some management type openly berating a subordinate, what tone would that set before you even started the discussion you were there for? Some conversations are best held privately, as much for the benefit of the community as for the participants themselves.

Then wish them well and send them on their way.

I find your implied association between smart people who get useful things done and rude people who can't act like adults unlikely. I know plenty of smart people, and the overwhelming majority of them would prefer to work with others in civilised fashion. Sure, when people are passionate about something then occasionally someone might cross the line, but then they apologise and everyone carries on.

I know plenty of blustery people as well, and a lot of them bluster to cover the fact that they aren't nearly as smart or valuable as they would like everyone else to believe. As with any bad apple, the best management decision for the project as a whole is usually to fire such people at the earliest opportunity rather than let them contaminate things any further or dig in any deeper.

Sometimes doing that will hurt in the short term, but no-one is irreplaceable. Once the bad ones are out of the way you can get on with bringing in other smart people to replace them. That can now include all the smart people you couldn't bring in before because they had no interest in working in a hostile environment and, being smart, they had plenty of other choices.

FWIW, I'm in the UK, in an area where the power supply is less than brilliant. We don't get many complete outages, but moderate surges and brown-outs seem to be happening all the time if the behaviour of a UPS is to be believed.

The working life of our electronic devices was surprisingly short across the board for the first few years after we moved here, with many formerly reliable devices all failing within a couple of years of the move, including (coincidentally or otherwise) multiple consumer-grade broadband routers. In contrast, in the years since installing a UPS for all the serious gear and at least basic surge protectors for everything else that plugs into a wall socket, we've seen almost no surprising failures of that kind.

Of course we don't know for sure whether it was really the dubious power supply that was responsible, and as other posters have mentioned there are several alternative explanations that would also make sense. But given how many things we saw fail within the window where the power supply was bad, and how few failed before and afterwards, the odds of the power supply being a factor seem quite high in our case.

To be fair, if you were debating with someone who writes applications that really do need the very top levels of performance, and you claimed that optimising trouble-spots would be sufficient to achieve that, then you were ignorant. For most software, being within a factor of 2 or 3 of hand-optimised low-level code is easily sufficient, and a bit of work with the profiler to identify the most serious flaws will go a long way. The rules change when you shift from that kind of performance standard to needing the very top levels, because then the emphasis on speed permeates everything.

Yes, that sounds unpleasantly familiar. It seems that these days a small business can't rely on any major vendor for a complete range of good quality, compatible gear. :-(

Maybe the likes of Cisco and HP are worth it if you have 24/7 IT teams running dedicated servers room full of equipment and measure the cost of downtime per second. For those guys, the high-end gear and management facilities and expensive support contracts might justify the cost.

For the rest of us, it feels like the best strategy now is to build heterogeneous IT systems and networks. Look for recommendations of individual devices, often from smaller and more specialised manufacturers, that do one job well. Anecdotally, I've found that in recent years these boxes tend to be pretty good at supporting the major standards, so if you buy best-in-class for each device you need then compatibility doesn't seem to be a major issue as much as maybe it used to be. And if anything does go wrong or you do need help with some awkward configuration, you have more than a snowball's chance in hell of speaking to someone who can help without coughing up most of this month's revenues for a support contract.

Agreed, given the repeated failures here, the power supply might be less than wonderful.

It's also worth remembering that "enterprise" equipment is often more about the management features (which no home user is ever likely to need) than the hardware itself. Sometimes the low-end business gear actually turns out to be worse than decent consumer kit. For example, we bought a bunch of Cisco's small business branded equipment for a small office once, paying a premium for it but expecting that the quality and support would be better than some disappointing consumer grade equipment it was replacing. In fact, the NAS turned out to be a rebadged device from another vendor that Cisco never really supported properly, the wireless access point turned out to have buggy firmware that would just drop connections, and so on. It's a mistake we'll never make again.

This may not be a popular opinion, but I'm a big fan of Apple Airport gear. They generally support the latest/fastest standards quite quickly, are easy to configure, have built-in PSUs rather than wall warts, and I've generally found their range to be better than average for consumer WiFi kit. Other than that latest models (which look ridiculous) they're generally neat and look OK in the living room. I've had one Airport Express die on me after 2 years of use, and that was already second hand when I bought it and spent its life behind a pile of hot hifi gear as an Airtunes sink.

The 'text mode DOS crap' is probably a proprietary pathology lab system, and it's likely not DOS at all but a unix running over telnet. Old but super fast and efficient, and not easy to upgrade without replacing expensive lab gear that interfaces with it well. You may also be seeing EMIS, or similar, a GP health informatics system that's again super-fast and reliable. There is an upgrade path to a Windows clients and more modern backend but most areas are following a phased rollout. As for path results - GPs can phone and get the results within 24-48hr, but it's not practical to do for every patient.

None of the NHS trusts I've worked for are using Windows 3.1 or CRT monitors, except for maybe esoteric lab equipment which isn't worth upgrading. I agree that NHS informatics is generally a mess, but the hardware isn't generally as bad as you're making out.