Posts by Psymon

wow, I've seen some retarded comments on these pages before...

but MS _finally_ make their browser standards compliant, only to discover that around 2k of websites have insuficient browser checking and offer up _NON_standard code, and you blame MS?

Wow, wait there a minute, I'm just gonna ask the nurse to ratchet the belt on the back of your jacket up a notch.

As others have correctly pointed out, IE6 wasn't standards compliant because back then, there were very few, if any standards, and the entire landscape was in constant flux.

This is web development, we're talking about? You know, the industry that has to measure time on dog years because of the sheer pace of change? If you can't keep up, then get out.

If you haven't been able to correct your browser identification code by this late stage in the game (very nearly 7 web development years after IE8s release), you've failed. No ifs, not buts.

If we're gonna slag off the redmondian browser, pick something that is actually the browsers fault, like it's truly appalling javascript performance, which causes browser instability on sites with heavy usage.

On the other hand, the accelerator text highlighting facility is brilliant. The ease at which you can add your own custom searches makes it a genuinely useful and productive feature.

It's not going to take too long

XP is a bloody good OS these days, but that's only because it's been hammered into shape over the last eight years.

But this is also its downfall. in terms of the underlying tech, certainly the graphics and audio architecture, it really is getting a bit long in the tooth.

One thing that I can say is a massive step forward, is DirectX 11. It's a huge rewrite, with some pretty brutal slashing of nasty legacy rubbish. The most important addition though, is the GP-GPU functionality, which should be a shot in the arm for the PC games industry.

The entire industry has been pirched on the fence when it comes to incorporating realtime physics and other highly advanced features, because if you make it part of the gameplay, you essentially break the game for those who don't have a fancy PhysX card.

Of course, Nvidia and ATI had already developed their own implementations, but they were mutually incompatible, doubling the work for any coder.

This should level the playing fields and bring the PC back into play against the next-gen consoles.

@anon coward

Feed the trolls, tuppence a bag...

As opposed to the yanks, who during any conflict, only successfully manage to shoot civillians and each other?

Happens so often they had to apply political spin, rebranding 'friendly fire' as 'blue on blue'.

no wonder you were royally arse-whooped by a tiny island of bamboo chewing shoeless peasants.

get back to drooling on your burger, you cousin humping creationist lard bucket!

stereotypes, marvelous because they're seeded in truth!

@jlocke

The reason everyone runs their copies of windows in an admin account, I'm afraid to say, is down to the plethora of poorly designed software that still besieges the windows platform today.

It all snowballed when MS merged their corporate and home windows platforms, replacing the frankly disgusting 95/98/ME with the NT kernel in XP.

MS naively assumed that the 3rd party market would slowly come round, and start writing their software in adherance of the windows security model, but to this day Adobe, Mozilla, Apple and Google still routinely flout the model, forcing users to run as admins.

This is the reason they introduced the UAC in vista, to highlight how often even the biggest name mainstream products break these rules.

Until the rest of the software industry read a couple of technet articles start start writing their code correctly people will continue to blindly 'allow' on the UAC, because Mozilla et al have conditioned them to do so every time it tries to update itself.

It would make for some pretty cool toys

imagine intelligent lego bricks, or other component based toys using this tech.

slap a few blocks together in the shape of a dog and watch it walk, type thing.

@ Fraser

"It's not difficult only a very few badly written programs don't work."

I wish it were true. I've run a great number of large networks that have required very draconian lock-down policies, like schools, call centers, prisons etc. and you would be astounded at the swathe of badly written software that breaks because you've locked it out of a system file or setting it shouldn't have any business fiddling with in the first place.

FF, Opera, and Chrome all break golden rules of how software should operate within a windows environment. Funnily enough, the greatest proportion of offenders come from the FOSS stables.

It seems as if FOSS developers write software for the windows platform with some level of disdain. It's this disdain for following the CORRECT convensions that means FF breaks under roaming or mandatory profiles, (it will attempt to dump its temp cache on the sever at logout because it stores its temp files in the wrong folder).

Naturally, FF can't update itself in the locked down environment, because it tries to write back to its own program files folder. Which unibrowed developer still thinks this is acceptable behaviour?!? You install a windows service to perform updates to your software, and you use BITS to download the files so you don't flood my network with data packets.

Finally and most importantly, if you have developed any software that stores any form of configuration or preference setting OUTSIDE the registry, you need to be put out to pasture, shot, and then boiled down into glue. There is simply no excuse for this type of behaviour.

I'm sure you THINK you have a valid reason. You don't. Developing for the windows platform? software configuration is stored in the registry. No ifs, no buts. Ok? Ok. It's not the the 80s anymore!

It's because FF stores its proxy settings in a retarted location of the hard disk, that it can't be configured en mass. That's why, when you say to your friendly neibourhood sysadmin "Hey, me and my 2000 work collegues wanna use Firefox instead of IE" his appropriate responce should be to kick your teeth in, and then urinate on your still twitching corpse as a warning to others.

Don't get me wrong, I use and enjoy Firefox, and have done for years, but because of its amateurish design, it has no place in a profesional environment

wonderful!

It's truly delicious to see all sides squirming as it dawns on them that the copious lengths of rope they have been generously been laying out for themselves have suddenly begun to resemble a noose!

A tip of the hat for such wonderful knife twisting!

Aha!

I knew it!!!!!

We men are genetically superior to women at something - producing sperm!!!!

@christianity

any opportunity for a much deserved swipe at christianity should never be passed up.

If you don't like it, forgive me!

Very interesting

I'd agree that a hospital investing gigantic wads of cash (they don't actually specify the amount though) on a one-trick pony robot to perform a non-life saving procedure would be a waste of money, unless the sheer volume of operations of this nature would present a significant saving in time and/or money. I doubt any hospital would have that many un-snip jobs waiting in the pipeline.

This point of view does preclude the obvious though. If this robot can be programmed to reliably perform a vasectomy reversal in less time than a human, then surely it's purpose can be broadened to encompas similar procedures?

I'm sure there are lots of small tubes running around the human body that you or I would greatly appreciate reconnecting, should they ever become severed?

There will be a cost/benefit tipping point somewhere down the line. This is the kind of research that we need more of!

pint. Well, it's Friday

I no longer own a TV

...so I may be more aware of of commercials when I do occasionally see them round at friends houses, but I'm suprised that nobody has picked up on the miriad of buttocks that are flashed at us ALL DAY in shampoo ads?

Ban buttocks? Really?

Next we'll be seeing legislation damanding the return of skirting on furniture. We can't have tables and chairs flirtaciously flashing their legs!

The part that piqued my curiosity...

...is the extensible and variable drive capacities.

I might be a little behind the times, but this is surely a propritary extension to the RAID protocols? As far as I'm aware, all flavours of raid require same-size partitions?

Yes, to can put a larger drive into a standard RAID5, but it will only utilise the same capacity as the other existing drives.

standard RAID provides redundancy by putting staggered checksums on the other drives, so if one fails, the data on it can be recovered from said checksums off the other drives. there's a small but significant storage cost for this, but for the benefit of recovery we (as an industry) have always been happy with that.

For this to work though, the staggering and block sizes have to be standardised across all drives. If you have 4 1TB drives, and a 2TB drive, oboviously, the 2TB will require more checksums to rebuld the data in the event of failiure.

How does this work? Surely You'd have a significant drop in capacity on the 4 smaller drives? The staggering of checksums is also optimised for performance, would non-standard checksum sizes and positions throw this into disarray? (No pun intended)

Enquiring minds would like to know...

Well, OK it might not have flown

...but it was pretty, red and shiny!

A way to go

I've been working in desktop estate management for a while now, and amongst the many lessons that I have learnt, the one that stands out the most is beware of the proprietary.

Thick or thin client, big or small, these are the applications around which you need to exercise the most caution as they are the most likely to break as the desktop environment changes around them, and the least likely to adapt quickly to said changes.

Unfortunately, as you have rightly pointed out in this article, desktop envrionmental change is becoming faster, and more prolific. Thin client, or web-based software was supposed to be the answer to this, but from what we've seen, has fallen into exactly the same traps that have besieged the traditional software development cycle.

The evidence for this is can be witnessed in the browser usage statistics. The only reason IE6 still dominates the stats is because there are so many corporations whose hands have been tied by web based apps/intranets which have not, or possibly even cannot be updated to use modern browsers.

But this is the primary internet facing component of your operating system. From a security perspective, do you really want it to be stuck in a timewarp? Can you really afford to sit on critical security updates while you wait for your web app suppliers dev cycle to catch up?

We are currently holding off IE8 deployment because one of our primary web-app suppliers is soon switching from SAP to Oracle, and doesn't consider work on the current system to be 'economically viable'.

So, all the disadvantages of the traditional software cycle, with the added stone dragging your browser into the dark ages too?

The real irony is that traditional software has steadily become easier to manage. There are a miriad of solutions out there, allowing you to keep on top of your software suites, all the way from SCCM through to the lighter/cheaper solutions, and any mid to large environment will already have such solutions well established.

Even the the primary benefit originally touted, that of a single point of update has backfired in this new age of global enterprise. It's all very well being able to take one machine (or cluster of machines) offline to update them, but if that machine is serving clients around the world, one man's night, is another mans peak usage hours.

With fat client management software on the other hand, maintenance hours can be scheduled and staggered around the globe.

Finally, all these applications are built on a very immature and rapidly changing environment, with little sign of it stabalising in the near to mid fututre. The recent revelations pertaining to googles rather gun-ho attitutde over security in the HTML5 standard should give any web app developer pause for thought.

Web apps are already plagued with issues from cross-browser compatibility, 3rd party plugin dependencies, security restrictions, security certificate/dns routing, bandwidth, offline/disconnection, security of your data 'in the cloud'...

For these reasons, the web is not the idyllic solution portrayed by sales-speak evangelists, and really should be considered only as a solution if your exsisting product is suffering explicitly because its' client is of the lardy variety, not because your marketing department can break open a fresh box of buzz-words.

sounds about right

Apple will have used this 'upgrade' to hide the fact that they are fixing a fundamental flaw in their hardware.

UAC, the warning that your progamming sucks

3.11 and 95. Brings back a great many memories. Most of which involved a large amount of swearing. Back in those days, I did a huge amount of graphics and multimedia work, including a large portion of 3D raytracing, which meant there was only one serious platform, the Amiga.

My Amiga 4000 tower, with its 40Mhz Motorola 68060 wiped the floor with both the IBM compatibles and the Macs due to the ahead-of-their-time custom chipsets. I had a plethora of software for it, most of which was delivered full-fat, unrestricted and free on the monthly cover discs.

You can imagine then my seething bitterness and hatred when Commodore died, and I needed the raw cpu horsepower of the Pentiums if I was going to progress with my raytracing.

Windows 95 sucked Sweaty Dead Donkey Dick(tm) by comparrison. Printing was a risky enough business ("You didn't save before you hit 'Print'? You moron!") but being a seriously heavy duty user, I spent more time staring at blue screens than a BBC weatherman. Needless to say, my opinion of Wee Willy Gates and his Mickey Mouse OS was not exactly shining.

12 years later, and how things have changed. I'm a sysadmin now, primarily developing enterprise management solutions, and boy, was this career choice a real eye opener.

Cutting my teeth in schools that had experienced an explosive IT growth, remote application deployment is now the only viable method of keeping on top of things. For me, this meant a great deal of time re-packaging software into unattended MSI files, and it was here that I unearthed all the software industries dirty little secrets.

Has anyone yet noticed that an application designed for Vista works perfectly under XP, but not the other way round? Obviously excluding those that utuilise Vista specific features, but surely it should be the complete opposite?

The student machines had to be locked down tight as a drum. None of this woolly "freedom for the user" rubbish. The understaffed, underpaid technicians have enough on their plate with printer jams, password resets and broken keyboards without having to constantly clean systems of rogue apps designed to get around their content filtering software.

And here is the rub. Any linux fanboi will tell you then when you are USING a computer, you should only be logged on as a USER, but you can't do that under XP. This isn't a failing of the OS itself, but the software developers who still haven't come to terms with the concept of basic user rights.

The more I locked down the system, the more exceptions I discovered needed making. Not because it was hampering the user, but because the installed software was trying to do something it should have no right to do. I won't go into massive detail, but the most common mistake is assuming that it should have write access to its own program folder.

If you want to write a self update utility, that utility should be installed as a windows service with specific permissions to your programs folder ONLY. This is just one example of thousands that I could list where software developers go about things the WRONG way. Whenever you see that UAC message in Vista while not actually installing something, the developer has made a mistake.

These are not Vista specific issues. This is how it should have been done under XP in the first place. Unfortunately, it's been a vicious circle. Because of the poorly designed software ported from 95, users started running as admins, because everybody ran XP as admins, newcomers to software design assumed that was the way it was meant to be.

When you run XP under a restricted account (which by all rights you should be able to do without adverse effects) 99% of security issues suddenly vanish, with individual applications neatly sandboxed away from each other. Don't forget, the vast majority of modern malware targets 3rd party apps, not the actual windows platform these days.

This could be almost forgiven in small software houses, but Google, Mozilla and Adobe are some of the worst offenders. Adobe repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to their installers. Despite massive academic discounts, schools would only buy a handfull of photoshop copies, simply because there was no way to automate the install and registration until CS2, and even then you really need a software deployment system to do it properly. The schools simply couldn't afford the labour involved.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees the irony that the UAC was Microsofts attempt to bitch-slap the rest of the software industry into implementing correct security and usage methodologies which they should have done 8 years ago for XP.

After 8 years of hair pulling over badly designed software, I'm certainly hoping that the warm(er) reception to win7 will act as a wake-up call to software developers who haven't really moved on since their days in C and VB6.

@jimmy

While I'd agree with your position on locking down policies for a sub 1000 user organisation, That rule of thumb is completely flipped when you scale up to multi-site, and even globe spanning organisations where helping the temp receptioninst 200 miles away get her machine to run smoothly because she's installed yet another browser toolbar, simply isn't practical, and training for a role like the callcenter staff with such a high turnover is simply a black hole.

For such low level staff as this, turn-key reliability is key. For machines such as this, which make up the vast majority of nodes in large organisations, a profile for the job it is required to do must be created and replicated. Let us not forget that the biggest singular threat to security is the user (and therefore any executables they click) running with admin rights.

A highly competent admin can create a machine profile that allows the user to perform any and all duties involved in their job role, while at the same time locking it down so well that any support call regarding said machine can nearly always be attributed to catastrophic hardware or software failiure, for which automated response systems are in place.

But getting back to laptop specific issues, the two biggest challenges presented are data access, and automated resource configuration.

Data acccess is simple with a desktop within your firewall. It's on the server, and rightfully, that's where it should stay. Laptops force you to make compromises. One of the most logical solutions is external access. FTP is an all-out insecure disaster waiting to happen, and more often than not, too complex for a great many sales reps who, let's face it, were hired for their people, not IT skills.

VPN is a much more elegant and secure solution if done right, and is relatively transparent in use to the end user, but can (and often does) fail if whatever net connection has ports blocked, or worse still, if the user cannot gain access at all. 3G coverage is by no means all encompassing.

For the hard-core roamers, this leaves synchronisation, which is frankly, a pain in the arse. Completely side-stepping the blatantly obvious security implications, every IT bod who has had experience with Outlook will know that the most common failure point is the offline cache stored within its .pst files. Other forms of synchronisation are no different, especially when both offline and online versions of files are modified between syncs, I could go on (and on)...

The other challenge is resource configuration. Things like printers, proxy settings, and network drives that differ between site and domain. The user who has already been conditioned to expect such resources to 'just work' within the desktop environment, now expects them to dynamically adjust wherever they go. Woe betide if Word takes a full 40 seconds to load because it's timing out waiting for a disconnected network printer to respond.

The real kick in the teeth is that there is no ideal solution, even in a theoretical environment. Data access is an obvious AND/OR compromise, but dynamic resource configuration also eats away at CPU time the more frequent the checks (startup/logon is no longer adequate, thanks to suspend/hybernate and sometimes not even that between changing sites). Because of this, portable machines will always be a higher maintenance cost by several factors than their desk-chained counterparts.

legacy and procedure

I'd have to heartily agree with all of the above, and to cite precedence of absolute adherence to procedure leading to absolute failure to deliver on any front, simply phone up your major ISP with ANY request, from a simple billing change to a connection issue ever-so-slightly more complex than the cable not being plugged in.

I left a major multinational simply because the corporate environment of beurocracy and inflexability made my job a living nightmare.

On a more positive note, I am now working in a much smaller scientific institute, and the inter-departmental cooperation is wonderful. We have a number of products that we sell on to outside parties, which were all originally written in VB6 and C++.

It's truly suprising just how many software developers understand little to nothing about coding correctly within the windows environment, including the big names (Adobe, Google, and Mozilla to name but a few).

Raising a pint for our fabulous five, You know who you are!

The dev team were already keen to move into the .net development environment, but when we had a sit down, and I descibed some of the horrors of deploying legacy software in a networked environment (incorrect usage of profile folders, configuration files in the program folder, sometimes even in the windows folder, proprietary installer executables...) They were truly shocked at just how much the windows environment had changed without themselves noticing. We're still talking XP here, not 7.

I am pleased to say that our product line is now completely windows compliant (including 7), and some of the most sysadmin friendly software you will ever encounter, with full support of network deployment (using a distribution method of your choice msi/group policy, SMS/SCCM, or command line scripting) complete server/client managbility (can be from group policy OR our own management software if you don't have a windows DC).

But, most importantly, you can install a centralised update server ala wsus for patching (which uses and complies with BITS bandwidth throttling) or even incorporate our updates into your own wsus server.

As you can imagine, I'm bursting with pride for our lads. All of the design and architecture discussed over coffee and cakes without a single formal meeting, or having to go through 7 layers of senior management.

So, Adobe. Considering your software has opened up massive security holes in networks across the globe, where's YOUR centralised patching and reporting management server software? Come on, if a dev team of 5 programmers and 2 sysadmins can build this from scratch in 6 months, what's YOUR excuse?

They're certainly right about the feminine design

That thing couldn't look more feminine if it was ultra absorbant with an easy applicator.

Clever marketing though. If you want to sell something that's bound to have so little accelleration it should be banned from motorways and uinrestricted A roads then you are best off appealing to the market sector with the least knowlege of how a car actually works.

This is definately aimed at the "what car have you got? "A pink one" sector.

@alan Bourke

I don't normally respond to trolling, but this one missed the point by such a great distance it's almost commical.

No, VNC and RDP are not the same thing, but I wasn't talking about Remote Desktop, I was speaking of Remote Assistance. Using the the same underlying engine (which is vastly more efficient that VNC) Remote Assistance does not lock the clients workstation, leaving it open for both parties to interact with.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457004.aspx

We scrapped VNC 6 months ago because this works a lot better.

The security of which can be tightly controlled through active directory and group policy permissions.

When it comes to legacy software, as I stated before it is the primary sticking point when upgrading to a new system, but the whole point of my last comment was that the upgrading to a new system certainly in our case, offered massive improvements in system management and security, so by that measure of the stick, yes, it is indeed 'broken'.

It's no different to corporations that stick with IE6 because their intranet (or other web based systems) will only work in it. But as we all know, IE6 is slow, unstable, and appallingly insecure by modern browser standards. If those systems were built by an outside source over which you have no control, then yes, that is unfortunately a cross that you will have to bear

If, on the other hand they are all designed in-house, then it should be absolute top priority to migrate, if only to stop your users complaining.

Yes, old systems continue to 'function', but work? It's like the old frog-in-a-pot-on-the-stove analogy. These systems keep clunking away, but slowly and steadily the digital landscape around them changes.

More and more of our IT systems are becoming internet facing, while simultaniously IT is permeating into parts of our business that weren't even dreamt of back in the days of novell and DOS. Would you have believed if someone had told you 15 years ago that client computer BIOS control, the phones, your air conditioning, and even the window locks could all be managed on the same network?

And then, could you have even comprehended every nuance of the security requirements?

"Why the hell do I need a 128bit encryption security certificates embedded in my BIOS for? It's got a password!"

Another reason that we made the move to vista was that as a government body with sites worldwide, we are under mandatory preassure to encrypt any and all portable devices that may contain confidential personal data.

If there are any volunteers who would like to guide a non-english speaking office assistant through installing Becrypt on his bosses laptop at 4am, where were you 18 months ago?!?!

As is, Bitlocker meets all the requirements put forward to us, and can simply be enabled via group policy. It was a no-brainer, and any legacy software that stood in the way of this was either updated, replaced or scrapped.

I'm not pointing a gun at your head and telling you to "UPGRADE TO THE GLORY THAT IS WINDOWS 7 NOW!" But I will say this. When I first started here they were using an old version of Samba and required 3 duplicate user accounts for login, email and intranet. As such no-one could change their passwords or they'd lose sync. All new computers were installed and configured manually, and half the machines had static IP addresses due to the VB6 software that had been written 10 years ago.

I agree change for changes sake is no benefit, but c'mon?

It might have been a good idea...

if the patent system in the states wasn't totally, utterly and completely broken.

The american patent system allows patents so vague we've already seen half a dozen examples within these very pages of patents being approved that they cover the fundemental underpinnings of the internet as we know it. Which brings me on to the next point.

The American patent system has no concept of prior art. At best they will pay lip service to this condition, at worst they will pass patents blatantly based on unoriginal ideas.

Finally, the american patent system allows for the patenting of methadology. The backhanders paid to allow this insanity must have been monumental. So, not only can I patent something that has been done before, it can be a WAY of doing something that has been done before, and best of all it only has to be a vague conceptual notion of something that has been done before.

The British patent system although better, isn't by much, and if the lobby groups get their way then will be just as corrupt

Oh Dear

"Tellico had the same key. It was hard-coded in the source."

Rather shoddy coding practices on display there, me old mucker.

"Some other application could have used the same key, since it was pretty much public, though"

What?!?!

I can see this being the driving motive for private keys. Amazon are allowing these (non-profit generating) database queries out of good will, despite these apps clearly being in violation of the T&C (you're not going to purchase a book or album from Amazon, which you're software has just catalogued you as clearly already owning.)

If sloppy security practices are allowing other apps to spoof their identities, then I can easily understand that, at the very least, this would create a nightmare auditing the traffic load on your database.

At worst, I could see this potentially being used in some nefarious fraud technique. I suspect these freebie apps aren't the only ones using the services - I wouldn't be surprised if there are some people paying to use this service too, with some form of per click revenue generation.

And if there aren't, I'll wager Amazon may have plans to.

If you're an administrator, then you'll be wanting to keep close tabs the server load which you're shouldering out of sheer generosity, so it’s of no surprise that they’ve clamped down on security if these open source idiots have been handing out their security keys willy-nilly.

i'm waving in the reversing lorry...

...carrying the salt required to take this news with.

Considering the Prius when driven NORMALLY was less effecient than a Golf diesel, I can imagine the driving required would cause road rage for an entire funeral procession.

I'm genuinely salivating at the thought of the Top Gear review!

Not overly suprised

That this turns out to be a driver issue. I can't really see how a 'critical' bug of such magnitude would have suddenly appeared in Win7, because as we all know, Win7 is really Vista service pack 3 R2.

Right, now that we've had a level-headed thought on the matter, time to roll out the usual tidal wave of uninformed ignorance.

<rings bell>

BRING OUT YER TROLLS!

This model highlights why we always buy Tosh

solid, reliable, dependable hardware.

Yeah, it's not gonna win any speed awards, but chances are it won't give your sysadmin any nasty suprises like the truly awful Atheros wifi cards, that refuse to connect until AFTER the user has logged in, and only using their 3rd party software, or some bleeding edge nic that isnists on trying to use IPv6 on your IPv4 lan, or some power management feature that completely breaks when you downgrade to XP, or a screen so "slimline" the user will break it within a week.

Sony and Apple, go stand in the corner of shame!

Despite its looks this is a corporate lappy, and as such has been built with tried and trusted hardware. It'll make the user feel special without breaking the bank, or causing further hairloss for your over-stressed sysadmin.

hang on just a sec...

I can understand how the value of the pound dropping could exacerbate financial woes in general, but how would outsourcing be of benefit in such circumstances.

Excuse my GCSE level understanding of economics, but surely lowering of the GBP makes good and/or services MORE expensive when purchased from other countries?

Surely a dramatic crash in Sterling requires us to start exporting, not importing to improve our economic standing?

@Tony72

Sorry, But although in theory you're right, practical history of Mozilla development has proven that these cosmetic tweaks DO have an sizable impact on resources and performance.

FF 3+ has become a sluggish memory hog. Load times have become a disgrace, and FF is now actually one of the slowest of the browsers to fire up.

Speed and tabbed browsing were the reasons I switched to using FF. Now, FF is starting to look the least favourable when you use those criteria.

That's before you start sticking add-ons into it, before anyone nit-picks.

I'm assuming that all my bookmarks will be wiped YET AGAIN when FF autodownloads the latest major version iteration without asking.

IE retained favourites even on a network with roaming profiles

2 major revisions on, and Mozilla still haven't made their software windows compliant by using the registry correctly or documents&settings, which is why their software can't be properly managed on a network, and hence no corporate adoption.

Fix these major problems first, THEN start looking at more features