Has anyone recently tried to use IE to download firefox? Does IE adopt "security" policies to make it harder to download and install Firefox? I was experimenting with a fresh 2008 Server instance in EC2 the other day and needed to download some open-source packages to install. I found that IE was super paranoid about any download, especially from a mirror site, and would put up a security warning, make me click OK to whitelist the site, and then go back and try the download again. I went through all the settigns dialogs I could find trying to turn off this "feature" to no avail. Turns out if you download Firefox from the mozilla site it will redirect you to a different mirror each time - meaning you can do this dance repeatedly and never actually satisfy IE's bizarre "security". The workaround is to delve into one of the mirror sites and navigate to the download you need. I'm not a paranoid type but I find myself questioning whether this wasn't a deliberate "how can we make it a PITA to download Firefox" move by the IE crew.

...what Joel "straw man fallacies for fun and profit" Spolowsky says about it? Seriously, all this dude does is amplify his self-importance with grandiose soft(war)e stories while giving mediocre programmers pseudo-intellectual cover to do whatever the hell they want when they're not micro-managed. Ooh, yeah, that's making us all so much more practical and productive. Blog to the hand, JS.

In addition to price the major reason for me to use OO over MS is the seamless use accross OS's. I'm a developer who works on Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux and Vista. I keep a lot of documents under source control, things like specifications, spreadsheets with performance data, and diagrams which I'm now doing in OO draw. There's nothing that quite prepares you for being able to check out, edit, and check in the same spreadsheet on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and have it just work and render perfectly on all OS's. If you're a cross-platform shop in any way (for development, creative or anything) OO is a huge win in this regard.

Nothing against him as a person, but what's he been doing that's so brilliant in the past 2 decades that makes him an authority? He's like the Pete Best of Apple.