If you intend to buy the HP MicroServer Gen8 as a home server there are a few caveats that I didn't find on the interwebs before I bought the device:

• Even though the main chassis fan is now fixed in AHCI mode with recent BIOS versions, there is still an annoying PSU fan that's tiny and high frequency. You cannot control it and the PSU seems to be custom-built.
• The BIOS does not support ACPI S3 (suspend-to-RAM) at all. Apparently it being a server BIOS they chose to not include the code paths in the BIOS needed to properly turn off devices and turn them back on. This means that it's not possible to simply suspend it and have it woken up when your media center boots.
• In contrast to the older AMD-based MicroServers the Gen8 comes with iLO, which will consume quite a few watts just for being present even if you don't use it. I read figures of about ten watts. It also cannot be turned off, as it does system management like fan control.
• The HDD cages are not vibration proof or decoupled.

It turns out that my recent woes with pbuilder were all due to libpam-tmpdir being installed (at least two old bug reports exist about this issue: #576425 and #725434). I rather like my private temporary directory that cannot be accessed by other (potential) users on the same system. Previously I used a hook to fix this up by ensuring that the directory actually exists in the chroot, but somehow that recently broke.

A rather crude but working solution seems to be "session required pam_env.so user_readenv=1" in /etc/pam.d/sudo and "TMPDIR=/tmp" in /root/.pam_environment. One could probably skip pam_tmpdir.so for root, but I did not want to start fighting with pam-auth-update as this is in /etc/pam.d/common-session*.

Axel just said that PDiffs are really useful for stable because it changes seldom. The truth is that there are no PDiffs for stable. I consider this a bug because you need to download a huge blob on every point release even though only few stanzas changed.

The real problem of PDiffs is the count that needs to be applied. We run "dinstall" much more often now than we used to and we cannot currently skip diffs in the middle when looking at a dak-maintained repository. It would be more useful if you could fetch a single diff from some revision to the current state and apply this instead of those (download, apply, hash check)+ cycles. 56 available index diffs are also not particularly helpful in this regard. They cover 14 days with four dinstalls each, but it takes a very long time to apply them, even on modern machines.

I know that there was ongoing work improving PDiffs that wanted to use git to generate the intermediate diffs. The current algorithm used in dak does not require old versions except one to be kept, but keeping everything is the far other end of the spectrum where you have a git repository that potentially gets huge unless you rewrite it. It should be possible to just implement a rolling ring buffer of Packages files to diff against, reprepro already generates the PDiffs in the right way, the Index format is flexible enough to support this. So someone would just need to make that bit of work in dak.

The process has been ongoing for more than a year but the Debian technical committee is about to select a candidate to recommend for its vacant seat. The Debian Project Leader will then (likely) appoint him (looks like it won t be a women). According to recent discussions on debian-ctte@lists.debian.org, it seems that either Keith Packard or Philipp Kern will join the committee. If you look at the current membership of the committee, you will see:

• Bdale Garbee: USA
• Russ Allbery: USA
• Don Armstrong: USA
• Andreas Barth: Germany
• Ian Jackson: United Kingdom
• Steve Langasek: USA
• Colin Watson: United Kingdom

That s very Anglo-Saxon centric (6 out of 7 members). While I trust the current members and while I know that they are open-minded people, it still bothers me to see this important body with so few diversity. Coming back to the choice at hand, Keith Packard is American and Philipp Kern is German. No new country in the mix. I can only hope that Philipp will be picked to bring some more balance in the body.

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I ve just been given a set of Hive Bluetooth speakers by MobileZap (see this link for all their Bluetooth speakers) [1]. The speakers charge by a micro-USB cable so I started charging them in my car immediately after collecting them. To connect them to a phone or other Bluetooth device you just press the Bluetooth button on top and get the phone to be visible and scanning for devices, they identify themselves as Hive , after that they just work. My first test of using them was playing Ingress and the quality of the sound was impressive, I had thought that the Ingress recommendation to use headphones was due to the risk of annoying other people or alerting other players, but the quality of the sound was impressive and the internal speakers of a phone can t do it justice. After getting home I did some tests listening to music. For watching music videos it didn t work so well as the sound was too far removed from the video, but the audio quality was very good. I listened to Vow by Garbage (a good benchmark for stereo sound) and even though the Hive speakers are only 16.5cm wide I could still notice the stereo effect when they were about 1.5m away from me. The audio quality didn t compare well with my Bose QC-15 headphones, but for affordable and portable speakers it was quite good and an obvious improvement over the speakers that are built in to any phone I ve used. According to the Bluetooth Wikipedia page the range of a class 2 device is 10m and the range of a class 3 device is 1m. When my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is talking to it I get a reliable range of about 5 meters and a mostly working range of 6 or 7 meters (sound randomly drops out and gets choppy). It could be that other phones would support a longer range due to having a higher transmission power (either class 1 or being closer to the limits of class 2) and a more sensitive receiver. But it doesn t seem likely that a 5m range is going to be a problem. Volume and Quality The speakers are rated at 5 Watt, when running at maximum volume (both through the phone volume setting and the volume control on the speakers) the sound is reasonably distortion free, as good as can be expected from playing an MP3 that s not compressed with the highest quality. Sound Meter [2] reports the sound volume as almost 85dB on a Galaxy S3 and as almost 100dB on a Galaxy Note 2, that would be somewhere between the volume of a busy street or alarm clock and the volume of a subway train or blow dryer which seems like a reasonable description, I find it very unpleasant to be within a meter of the speakers at maximum volume. With the typical amount of background noise in my house I can play music on the Hive speakers at one end of my house and hear it clearly at the other end. These speakers are more than capable of supplying the music for any party I d want to host or attend. I m not really into wild parties, but I think that anyone who has a one room party would be more than satisfied with the Hive speakers. Obviously the sound quality of portable speakers in a box that s 16.5cm wide and 6cm high isn t going to equal that of a full size set of speakers, but I think that hardly anyone who attends a party would expect better sound quality than the Hive speakers can provide. The aim of such speakers is to be portable, not really expensive, and to provide good sound quality within those constraints. I think that they meet such aims well. Over the years there have been many occasions when I have used a Thinkpad to provide the music for a party and found it to be quite loud enough. My current Thinkpad is a T420 which can produce 75dB according to my Galaxy S3 or 85dB according to my Galaxy Note 2. So it seems that I only really need about 10dB less than the maximum volume of the Hive speakers. Appearance The designers obviously made an effort on the appearance of the device. They have gone with the Hive concept and used hexagons everywhere. It really looks nice. Unfortunately when I took the photo there was some dust on it which didn t look bad to the eye but caught the camera flash. But with a matte black device there s always the problem of light colored dust. Even with a bit of dust it still looks great as a set of speakers, the dust just detracts from the appearance in photos. Line In One of the features I looked for was an audio line input so I could connect it directly to a non-Bluetooth device. I m assuming that this feature works as it s something that s difficult to stuff up when designing such a product, but I haven t got around to testing it. Once I started using the device I just found that I didn t have a real need for that feature. One thing that it might be useful for is PC desktop speakers that are powered by a USB port on the monitor. Currently I have a bearable (but not great) set of speakers for each PC and I don t need to change anything. But having the option of another set of speakers is very handy in case I suddenly need to make hardware changes. Other People s Reviews When I review a product I generally try and get opinions from random other people if possible. My mother and my mother-in-law were both impressed by the Hive speakers and expressed interest in owning a set. My mother-in-law was particularly interested as she uses her phone to listen to radio stations from outside Australia (I m going to get her onto Aldi for cheap 3G data ASAP so she can listen to Internet radio when travelling). Generally the impression that other people have of this device seems to be very positive. It seems that Bluetooth speakers aren t just a Geek toy. Conclusion While I m very impressed by this product, at this stage I m not sure whether I would pay for this one or something cheaper if I was paying for it. MobileZap offers a range of other products that look appealing at lower price points. It really depends on how much I use it. I ve just got a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer working and I ve found the Hive speakers very useful for the purpose of drowning out it s noise. If I keep doing that sort of thing then I ll get enough use out of the speakers to justify the price.

• [1] http://www.mobilezap.com.au/10059/stereo-speakers.htm
• [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kr.sira.sound

Did you notice that it was gone? It's back now. Phew. Apparently an upgrade to wheezy was scheduled for the passed week-end. This went badly with the RAID controller acting up after the upgrade. So the move to a new machine (or rather VM) was sped up. And because various policies changed, we needed to move to a dedicated database server with a new authentication scheme, get rid of the /org symlink, get rid of the buildd_* accounts, cope with a new PHP, cope with rlimits that broke a Python CGI (thanks, KiBi!), triggers that weren't tickled, and various other stuff. Thanks to DSA for handling the underlying infrastructure despite some communication issues during heavy fire fighting.

Some years ago when I first got a LG U990 Viewty (which in some ways is the best phone I ever owned) I went swimming and left my phone in my bag. My phone happened to rest on my car keys and had vibration mode enabled, after a couple of missed calls I had a nasty scratched area on the phone screen. Since then I ve been very wary about allowing metal objects to come in contact with a phone screen. Now I have a Samsung Galaxy S with some sort of motherboard damage (it won t even boot and I know it s not a software issue because it was initially intermittent). A phone that old isn t worth repairing (they sell on ebay for as little as $50) so it seemed worth testing how hard the screen is. The screen cover is Gorilla Glass which was the hardest glass available at the time the phone was new (apparently there are better versions of Gorilla Glass available now and my more recent phones should be tougher). My first test was with one of my favorite Japanese kitchen knives, it didn t scratch at all. Then I chose a knife sharpening stone as an obvious item that s harder than a knife, it scratched the screen easily. A quartz pebble also scratched the screen when I used some force, so presumably concrete and brick would also scratch it. Tests with all current Australian coins and my car keys showed that the screen is too hard to be scratched by them. I also tested hitting the phone screen with my keys, I hit it much harder than would happen if I was to run while having my phone and my keys in the same pocket and there was no damage. My conclusion is that any metal object you are likely to carry in your pocket is unlikely to cause any problem if knocked against the screen of a modern phone.

A few weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Android phone. As I predicted in my post about Phone and Tablet Sizes [1] the Note 2 with a 5.55 display is a bit too big for me to have an ideal single handed side grasp (I estimate that about 5.2 would be ideal). But I can stretch a bit and move it around in my hand to touch all parts of the screen with my thumb. Although when doing that I don t have a tight grip, with my previous phone the Samsung Galaxy S3 [2] I could properly wrap my hand around it to grip it tightly while using it with one hand. The Note 2 will be easier for me to drop or for a thief to snatch it from me. While the big screen makes the phone difficult to use with one hand it does allow viewing more data. The ConnectBot SSH client (Play Store link) [3] (F-Droid repository link) [4] works a lot better on a larger screen I ve also discovered that the volume control buttons can be used to change the font size in ConnectBot which is handy as the default is really tiny. Also Klaus Weidner s Hacker s Keyboard (Play Store link) [5] (F-Droid repository link) [6] works a lot better with a larger screen. When I tested the Hacker s keyboard on a smaller phone I found the 5 row layout too difficult to use, but on the Note 2 it works well. As an aside I wish I could quickly and easily toggle between 4 row mode (good for SMS) and 5 row mode (good for sysadmin work) in the Hackers Keyboard. For less serious use the large screen on the Note 2 is good for watching TV. I ve got a collection of mp4s of TV shows that I ve been meaning to watch, now I watch them in bed on my phone. Another advantage of the Note 2 is the battery life. When playing Ingress and doing all the usual email checks etc my Note 2 will last about as long as my wife s Galaxy S3 with it s power case. So without any extra batteries a Note 2 will probably last about twice as long as a Galaxy S3. The Note 2 has more RAM than the S3 I used to use (I had the S3 with 1G of RAM) and it also apparently has a faster CPU. The CPU speed hasn t been an issue for me but the extra RAM is a real benefit, it means that I can usually switch between Ingress and other programs without having to restart Ingress each time. As an aside I think that Google and LG should release a Nexus Ingress 4 phone or some other device that s optimised for Ingress, I m sure it would sell well. Some people make a big deal about the stylus that comes with the Note 2. It is a neat feature to have the device know when the stylus tip is hovering over the screen but it s not very useful for me. If I was going to create art work on a phone (as some people do) then it would interest me, but I m more interested in email and ssh for fine input and my fingers are generally good enough for those tasks. I have got thin fingers, so I think that people with thicker fingers could really benefit from the stylus. I recently bought a batch of stylus pens from Kogan which have a pen at one end and a rubber stylus tip at the other for fat fingered people I know who need to use an Android phone but can t afford a Note or Note 2. I also like the software build on it which is almost the same as that on the Galaxy S3. It seems that many people prefer the apparently stock features on the Nexus 4 but I like the way Samsung does things. Conclusion I m very happy with my new phone. The bigger screen allows me to see things more clearly, this is good for web browsing, reading email, and now that I can use the Hackers Keyboard I can type more effectively. The longer battery life is really good too, although I think that Samsung could have done better if the phone was 3mm thicker then it could have a much bigger battery and have a larger CCD for the camera. I don t think that the phone is really different, at least not for my use. Samsung has promoted it for artistic use and I ve seen evidence to support their claims. But for most people it ll just be a phone with a larger screen and a bigger battery. Some people criticise it for being too big, but it s still smaller than the handsets on most desk phones so it s not big by the standards of old fashioned phones. The increased size has not only allowed me to do the same things more effectively but also allowed me to do things I hadn t tried doing on a phone before such as watching TV. This isn t because of the phone being particularly special in any way, it s just that the change in size gives more possibilities for ways of using it. The Samsung Galaxy Mega is the largest smart phone. The 5.8 version of the Mega has a resolution of only 960*540 (less than the Note and Note 2 not good enough IMHO) and the 6.3 version has the same resolution as the Note 2 of 1280*720. I think that both Mega variants are too big for me, I need to be able to use a phone with one hand. So it seems that the Note 2 is probably the best phone for me right now.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/02/11/phone-tablet-sizes/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/21/galaxy-s3-power-case/
• [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.connectbot
• [4] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=connect&fdid=org.connectbot
• [5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard
• [6] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=hacker&fdid=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard

My wife has had a LG Nexus 4 for about 4 months now so it s time for me to review it and compare it to my Samsung Galaxy S3. A Sealed Case The first thing to note about the Nexus 4 is that it doesn t support changing a battery or using micro-SD storage. The advantage of these design choices is that it allows reduced weight and greater strength compared to what the phone might otherwise be. Such choices would also allow the phone to be slightly cheaper which is a massive advantage, it s worth noting that the Nexus 4 is significantly cheaper than any other device I can buy with comparable specs. My wife s phone has 8G of storage (not RAM thanks Robin) and cost $369 at the start of the year while the current price is $349 for the 8G version and $399 for the 16G version. Of course one down-side of this is that if you need 16G of storage then you need to spend an extra $50 on the 16G phone instead of buying a phone with 8G of storage and inserting a 16GB micro-SD card which costs $19 from OfficeWorks. Also there s no option of using a 32G SD card (which costs less than $50) or a 64G SD card. Battery etc The battery on the Nexus 4 isn t nearly big enough, when playing Ingress it lasts about half as long as my Galaxy S3, about 90 minutes to fully discharge. If it was possible to buy a bigger battery from a company like Mugan Power then the lack of battery capacity wouldn t be such a problem. But as it s impossible to buy a bigger battery (unless you are willing to do some soldering) the only option is an external battery. I was unable to find a Nexus 4 case which includes a battery (which is probably because the Nexus 4 is a lot less common than the Galaxy S3) so my wife had to buy an external battery. If you are serious about playing Ingress with a Nexus 4 then you will end up with a battery in your pocket and cable going to your phone from the battery, this is a real annoyance. While being a cheap fast phone with a clear screen makes it well suited to Ingress the issue of having a cable permanently attached is a real down-side. One significant feature of the Nexus 4 is that it supports wireless charging. I have no immediate plans to use that feature and the wireless charger isn t even on sale in Australia. But if the USB connector was to break then I could buy a wireless charger from the US and keep using the phone, while for every other phone I own a broken connector would render the phone entirely useless. Screen Brightness I have problems with my Galaxy S3 not being bright enough at midday when on auto brightness. I have problems with my wife s Nexus 4 being too bright in most situations other than use at midday. Sometimes at night it s painfully bright. The brightness of the display probably contributes to the excessive battery use. I don t know whether all Nexus 4 devices are like this or whether there is some variance. In any case it would be nice if the automatic screen brightness could be tuned so I could make it brighter on my phone and less bright on my wife s. According to AndroSensor my Galaxy S3 thinks that the ambient light in my computer room is 28 lux while my wife s Nexus 4 claims it s 4 lux. So I guess that part of the problem is the accuracy of the light sensors in the phones. On-Screen Buttons I am a big fan of hardware buttons. Hardware buttons work reliably when your fingers are damp and can be used by feel at night. My first Android phone the Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10 had three hardware buttons for settings, home, and back as well as buttons for power, changing volume, and taking a photo which I found very convenient. My Galaxy S3 has hardware buttons for power, home, and volume control. I think that Android phones should have more hardware buttons not less. Unfortunately it seems that Google and the phone manufacturers disagree with me and the trend is towards less buttons. Now the Nexus 4 only has hardware buttons for power, and volume control. One significant advantage of the Galaxy S3 over the Nexus 4 is that the S3 s settings and back buttons while not implemented in hardware are outside the usable screen area. So the 4.8 1280*720 display is all for application data while the buttons for home, settings, and back on the Nexus 4 take up space on the screen so only a subset of the 4.7 1280*768 is usable by applications. While according to specs the Nexus 4 has a screen almost as big as the Galaxy S3 and a slightly higher resolution in practice it has an obviously smaller screen with fewer usable pixels. Also one of the changes related to having the buttons on-screen means that the settings button is often in the top right corner which I find annoying. I didn t like that aspect of the GUI the first time I used a tablet running Android 3.0 and I still don t like it now. GPS My wife s Nexus 4 seems to be much less accurate than my Galaxy S3 for GPS. I don t know how much of this is due to phone design and how much is due to random factors in manufacturing. I presume that a large portion of it is due to random manufacturing issues because other people aren t complaining about it. Maybe she just got unlucky with an inaccurate phone. Shape and Appearance One feature that I really like in the Samsung Galaxy S is that it has a significant ridge surrounding the screen. If you place a Galaxy S face-down on a desk that makes it a lot less likely to get a scratch on the screen. The LG U990 Viewty also had a similar ridge. Of course the gel case I have bought for every Android phone has solved this problem, but it would really be nice to have a phone that I consider usable without needing to buy such a case. The Nexus 4 has a screen that curves at the edges which if anything makes the problem worse than merely lacking a ridge around the edge. On the up-side the Nexus 4 looks and feels nice before you use it. The back of the Nexus 4 sparkles, that s nice but when you buy a gel case (which doesn t seem to be optional with modern design trends) you don t get to see it. The Nexus 4 is a very attractive package, it s really a pity that they didn t design it to be usable without a gel case. Conclusion Kogan is currently selling the Galaxy S3 with 16G of storage for $429. When comparing that to the 16G version of the Nexus 4 at $399 that means there s a price of $30 to get a SD socket, the option of replacing a battery, one more hardware button, and more screen space. So when comparing the Google offers for the Nexus 4 with the Kogan offer on the Galaxy S3 or the Galaxy Note which also has 16G of storage and sells for $429 the Google offer doesn t seem appealing to me. The Nexus 4 is still a good phone and is working well for my wife, but she doesn t need as much storage as I do. Also when she got her phone the Galaxy S3 was much more expensive than it is now. Also Kogan offer the 16G version of the Nexus 4 for $389 which makes it more appealing when compared to the Galaxy S3. It s surprising that they can beat Google on price. Generally I recommend the Nexus 4 without hesitation to anyone who wants a very capable phone for less than $400 and doesn t need a lot of storage. If you need more storage then the Galaxy S3 is more appealing. Also if you need to use a phone a lot then a Galaxy S3 with a power case works well in situations where the Nexus 4 performs poorly.

Two days ago, I asked how I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer preinstalled with Windows 8. I found a solution, but am horrified with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI and Windows 8. I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI secure booting or fast boot. I suspect fast boot was the problem, causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings enough to tell. There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive! This is as far as I can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement. I am told (and found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the firmware setup once booted into Windows 8. But as I believe the terms of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license was never an alternative. I do not enter agreements I do not intend to follow. I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to work. But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops. Is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms? Or at least not without risking to loose the warranty? I've updated the Linux Laptop wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV, to ensure the next person do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the machine. Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching, Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.

Due to the data loss I blogged about, I had to reverse engineer the encryption used by git-annex for its encrypted special remotes. The file system on which the content lived has a bullet hole of 8 GB in it, which was helpfully discarded by pvmove. It's pretty unhappy about that fact, parts of the git repository are unusable and directories cannot be accessed anymore. git-annex cannot possibly run anymore.

However, I was still able to access the git-annex branch within said git repository (using porcelain). This branch contains a file called remote.log which contains the keys of the special remotes. There's one per remote, encrypted to a GPG key of your choice and all files within that remote are encrypted with the same symmetric key.

One small detail stopped me from getting the decryption right the first time, though. It seems that git-annex uses randomness generated by GPG and armored into base64. In my na vet I spotted the base64 and decoded it. Instead it's used verbatim: the first 256 bytes as HMAC key (which reduces randomness to 192 bytes) and the remaining bytes for the symmetric key used by GPG (which will do another key derivation for CAST5 with it). A bug about that just hit the git-annex wiki.

With that knowledge in mind I wrote a little tool that's able to generate encrypted content keys from the plain ones used in the symlinks. That helps you to locate the file in the encrypted remote. Fetch it and then use the tool to decrypt the file in question with the right key.

The lesson: Really backup the git repository used with git-annex and especially remote.log. I'm now missing most of the metadata but for some more important files it's luckily still present. Recovery of the file content does not depend on it if you can deduce the filename from the content. If you have many little files it might be a bit futile without it, though.

If you use LVM with Wheezy on a solid-state drive, you really want to install the latest lvm2 update (i.e. 2.02.95-6, which contains the changes of -5). Otherwise, if you set issue_discards=1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf, you will experience severe data loss when using pvmove. Happened to me twice, once I didn't care (chroot data being lost), the second time (today) I did. Not fun, especially when the backup of the data was scheduled for the same day.

One has to wonder why it takes three months for a bug that trashes data to reach testing. (Obviously I know the answer, but they're not particularly good reasons.) Other distributions, like Ubuntu, were much quicker to notice and incorporate that fix. And in the case of the named distribution not because they auto-synced it from unstable. If somebody notices such a grave bug, please yell at people to get the fix out there to our users. Thanks.

Am I the only one who's disappointed with the route Mozilla's taking and left wondering what the direction is? First they killed off the development of Thunderbird because, as we all know, people mainly use webmail these days. Then they presented us their view that the big Certificate Authorities are too big to fail, as CAs gravely violated our trust (c.f. Trustwave and their MitM authority). And "now" they're also blocking the introduction of new formats into their browser because they cannot be the one who innovates. Instead Microsoft and Apple obviously need to take the lead in introducing a format into their browsers because otherwise it wouldn't be useful. Even though it's safe to say that Chrome and Firefox make up for more than half of the desktop browser market share. It might be that Chrome's nibbling from Firefox's, still IE seems to be in decline and Safari is rather a further mention than something many people would care strongly about.

There were of course some valid reasons for not supporting WebP yet. But most of them got fixed in the meantime and all we hear is the referal to proprietary vendors who need to move first. If I'd want to depend on such vendors I'd go with proprietary operating systems. (Having to deal with hardware products of proprietary vendors at $dayjob is enough.) So what's up Mozilla? The solution is to ignore your users and tag bugs with patches wontfix?

The only real advantage of Firefox over Chromium these days is the vast amount of plugins and extensions (e.g. Pentadactyl, for which there is no real equivalent available). Another sad fact is that you need to pull Firefox from a 3rd party repository (even though packages are coming from the 2nd party) to get a current version onto your Debian system to work with the web. But then it's not Mozilla who's to blame here. Maybe we should've introduced one Iceweasel version that's allowed to have reverse-dependencies and one that cannot.

(This post might contain hyberboles, which should be considered as such.)