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Further, it works really well with "Assistant" / Home. "Play that song that goes ... " "Go back 10 seconds" "Pause" "Resume" "Listen to song X on all speakers" "Play Journey song from the Tron Soundtrack" all work well... but... they've got no damned API, so that sucks.

That seems like a suspiciously large bump. I could imagine a scenario where the numbers are right, though. Is Chrome OS counted as Linux? School is starting up again in many areas...

Firefox does have their own, documented and seemingly stable remote debugging protocol. I haven't used it recently, but there is the Valence project (https://github.com/mozilla/valence) which provides adapters for their debugging tools for other protocols, namely Chrome's remote debugger. In the past, I have used this to debug Chrome with firefox's devtools. Maybe it works for your needs?

Of course, but bug upvotes don't hurt that cause, either. I have a few reasons that I work on open source projects. First, to fix a bug or add a feature that affects me directly. Second, to learn something new. If I'm just doing the latter, I'd prefer to tackle a bug with more interest/votes, to help others out while I'm at it and increase the odds of finding a willing reviewer.

Upvote the bug! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372998

I doubt it'll happen anytime too soon, but Mozilla should see the community interest.

In general, they do well, but there are a few categories which they don't seem to "get". They do a good job of trying to remove a lot of barriers to objectivity, even when useful reviews require subjective knowledge. They also try hard to find equivalent, reproducible tests so that they can use them on multiple products, even if they're not exact equivalents. This means, for instance, that they might end up testing ice-braking tires by measuring the stop distance in an indoor ice rink where they can control the conditions... that makes it easy to measure the tires against other tires, but it's not real-world. They also purchase their products, rather than accepting them from the companies, which helps increase the odds that they're getting the same things off the shelf you do. Again, they seem to be clueless about a few categories, though, such as certain electronics. Just look at the ratings for the Google Home and Amazon Alexa--very poor--because they get lumped in with wireless speakers where sound quality is the utmost importance.

I guess I've been burned enough by drastic application/feature reworks, policy changes, and product shutdowns that I'm extremely wary of any new product that doesn't offer a publicly documented programmatic option for getting data in and out (and preferably basic interaction). Maybe my experience is unusual, but I can't believe it that more people aren't clamoring for APIs or at least data export options from their services before wasting time getting tied to them.

Read/Write API or it didn't happen. There was a time a few years ago when I thought companies were moving in the direction of ensuring their products could be extended through APIs first and foremost and launching those APIs a the time of product launches, but either I dreamed it or that time seems passed.

Is there some kind of organization out there whose mission is (at least partly) to pressure companies into providing data import/export and full access API's to prevent lock-in, data loss and such?

There's a good alternative to this on Android, namely apps like Tinfoil for Facebook, which are simply convenience webkit wrappers around the Facebook WebView

> You can pay someone else to isolate and secure your XP installation as well (for the minimum amount of stuff you need in there). Put it in a VM, behind a firewall, secure it, prevent unknown services from running in it, etc.

Of course, you can also pay someone to do the same for a free software OS. You might even have more options for safely isolating it. I suspect the main point is that you have options, e.g. you don't simply have to isolate it (that may not work depending on how you use the software), you could also maintain / fork it.

In theory, with enough money, I'm sure you could also pay MS to maintain it for you or (as I've seen done once or twice in the business world) simply buy out the company and have them support it, but it seems like the cash barrier required to getting those things done could be lower than self-supporting the software in many circumstances.

We're eagerly awaiting an alternative to LastPass after the recent sale. 1Password is the best on OS X, but really lags everywhere else (Win, Android), but the total lack of support on Linux (for writing) is a non-starter. It'd be great to see something, even a simple CLI app to provide basic password read/write without a GUI. The threads in AgileBits' forums referencing this topic are really depressing. Is there another way to express a "vote" for basic Linux support?

Thanks for the write-ups that you did. It's so much more tempting to contribute to a project when there are active public summaries of work being done. Sometimes, I admit, I don't even bother submitting my pull requests on projects with 50 unmerged PRs and no activity. When I see evidence of a progress and organization like those blog posts, it makes me want to contribute even if I don't necessarily have a personal itch to scratch.

I'd love to see more posts soon, if you or someone else ever gets the time*!

Eventual security, perhaps, but that's a loooong stretch-goal. The fact of the matter is, even Servo, which is written-from-scratch and lacks all the UI goodies, is only a fraction Rust. It'll be a long time before supported libraries could be rewritten and rust, and I reckon a rewrite of all these things is likely to cause more new human-error security flaws than it will eliminate pointer/memory related security issues. In the (very) long run, though, I agree.

Actually, the naming/anthropomorphized nature of the sun and the noon--among many other abstract concepts--is still a topic of rich debate. While the English disambiguates this, the original text may not. Many things that are translated in the bible as abstract concepts actually make more sense when translated as the name of a god (with the same name in an ancient Semitic landside add the concept). Check out Robert Wright's Evolution of God for better examples

xmms2 seems like it fits the required bill the best, though the project is pretty stagnant and there's never been a real release. It does seem to get all the big issues right.

HipChat's fatal flaw, IMHO, is publicly-accessible file downloads, even in private conversation, with no ostensible lifespan (that I've seen). While the URL for shared files might be extremely hard to guess, I can never feel comfortable not being able to predict what files someone might openly share.

Enlightenment (v. 17, both with and without the tiling module enabled). http://enlightenment.org

One here.