Company B is obviously much more honest than Company A.

"your own Amazon EC3 instances" - isn't that an oxymoron?

I giggled at "RMS".

Whatever you chose should really be run over a VPN for external usage. Period.

I'd look at using ownCloud - and you can get commercial support if it is required. I used to work for a company which used Novell iFolder and that was pretty good - but looking into that a little more it seems like Novell has a new thing called Filr which seems to tick the boxes (especially from a Manager perspective).

Reflecting, I think you are correct - though I think there was a gas that was an additive to the environment. I myself never worked on the farms but I did grow up in a very heavy Apple growing area. "A few years" was a slight exaggeration but 12 months definitely isn't. I think you are right about different varieties degrading differently because I find Royal Galas to be the most boring and bland apple, but I can tolerate them when they are actually fresh.

I think some storage rooms are able to be heated to 70 degrees too, so that at the end of a cycle they can clean any fungus from a room (I assume that's the reason). I heard somebody accidentally slow-cooked their dog in one of these rooms.

If asked, I would have said that they were in my top 5 IT sites, but the fact is that I rarely actually went to them. I don't know why exactly I didn't go more. What makes a site be at the forefront of somebody's mind when they sit down with coffee in pursuit of their daily news? The best reason I can come up with is that the name wasn't quite as punchy as "slashdot.org" or "ars technica"...

We just pack the broccoli in styrofoam boxes with a bit of ice. Seems to work great. The stores just store the boxes in a cold room upon delivery. Rocket surgery, I know.

Also, if you think broccoli tastes bad then I suggest the problem is your cooking skills or your belief in anti-vegetable propaganda (probably fed to you as a child) and not the vegetable.

I wonder if Broccoli can be gassed like apples. Most people are unaware that the "fresh" apples they get in store are actually a few years old. The secret is keeping them in a store room filled with a gas to stop them from ripening further and going off.

I chuck an absolute tantrum whenever I am exposed to an inkjet printer. They are hands down the most stupid and irritating piece of technology known to mankind. I eastimate the success rate of an average inkjet printer to be in the 7 - 9% range.

And instead of welcoming it, people slag off on it.

It is a platform which is incredibly easy to adopt and make applications for, and it is not owned and steered by some company with a profit agenda and a mandate of openness. People still slag off on it sight unseen.

The organisation steering the project are not a bunch of scrubs and have some serious experience... And yet people slag off on it.

It is very well designed, and people still slag off on it despite having no idea of the design benefits. It understands that mobile internet is sketchy and takes counter-measures to offer an effective off-line mode and still people slag off on it. It doesn't rely on freakin Java, Objective-C, C# or the Eclipse/XCode/Visual Studio IDEs and they still slag off on it.

It has CalDAV support out of the box - and likely CardDAV soon enough. The interface is beautiful and functional. It is unlikely to have NSA backdoors... And yet people slag off on it.

It is aimed at being affordable rather than outrageously expensive like every other popular platform, and yet people slag off on it.

Although yes, most of the hardware it is coming out is underpowered with 256MB of RAM. It can run on higher powered hardware but that's not their focus at launch. I however will reserve judgement because I know my old Windows Phone 7 device with half the resources of my new Android device runs twice as fast. It won't be fast but it may not be terrible. Fucking wait a few months if you want your average $600+ powerhouse and STFU.

For once somebody decides to leverage low-income markets and instead of being positive about the opportunities and applauding the smart approach to bootstrapping a new OS, people whine about how bad Firefox apparently is even though they haven't used it in years and the true culprit of their problems were the piles of shoddy plugins and the crappy Windows XP system they were using.

As is apparent, people would rather talk out their ass rather than be constructive.

Wouldn't a small amount of these phones flood a wireless spectrum? It would not take many people in an area until the speed is chopped down significantly.

Or do they have poor range and expect femtocells everywhere? But why not just WiFi at that point?

Terminal tabs.

This is just the status quo, is it not?

You're not alone.

Though, I also like FirefoxOS on its own merit. It's a great idea and it has a great interface. I also refuse to spend over $250 on a phone so it's also great to have my budget catered for.

I really want a phone that gives me CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box with no app in-between (ala Android). I looked in the simulator and CalDAV is already there - just give it the URL, user name and password and Bob's your aunty. I would even help implement CardDAV support if I wasn't so busy with uni work. I haven't check out the email client yet.

On the subject of privacy: it's sad that people assume that if you want privacy you're a conspiracy nut or a criminal/terrorist.

So, why is Google winning?

Good hardware support allowing any manufacturer to have a stab? Well FirefoxOS bases off Android so it has all that hardware support down pat - and the rest of the OS is similarly open. App support? Well which has more apps - the web or Android? So Firefox has this down-pat (porting existing web apps is trivial).

FirefoxOS is also choosing not to take Android head-on in the first-world market but rather edging in via poorer countries. So it's not so much fighting Android off rather than pushing Android aside.

I for one welcome FirefoxOS because it already supports CalDAV out of the box, and I expect CardDAV is not so far off. It already has pretty much everything I ask of a smart phone (though no word on Pebble support yet).

Your experience was completely self-inflicted. Who knew pointing a loaded gun at your face and then pressing the trigger would result in injury? If you do a dirty hack (and you did, there's no uncertainty) then you deserve what you get. It's analogous to using some type of unofficial installer for software in Windows or OSX, and then being surprised when the installer screws with all the other software in your system while it is at it. Also just because a package/program *can* run in your OS - doesn't mean it is actually intended for your OS.

Packages without repositories is silly and in this regard Windows and OSX are the same. Repositories are set up explicitly for your OS - so programs and libraries will always be built and configured correctly. With repositories you do not need stupid updaters for each program (which, by the way you're entrusting your system to -- fucking retarded) and you do not need to worry about dependency location, management and updating. Also you can fairly safely assume programs in official or at least well managed repositories (like RPMFusion) are non-malicious due to initial inspection and continuous oversight - this is far better than Googling for random programs and then just *hoping* they're OK when you install them. The lesson is: stay within your package manager and trusted and maintained repositories. If you stray outside - expect to be burned. If some silly Ubuntu tutorial tells you to do something which disobeys this then don't proceed unless you're prepared to clean up the mess and manage the ongoing brokenness.

You mention half-baked uninstall - this is another thing that repositories and real package managers solve (simply making all packages "self contained" doesn't solve all problems) because you have a mechanism that is overseeing the installation and removal of packages and making sure that things go in and out cleanly and configuration being re-jigged - as opposed to things just being there one second and gone the next.