Stardock's primary business is Object Desktop and ilk; things which had some functionality and eye candy to Windows. These things will inevitably have less appeal as new versions of Windows are released which include similar functionality out of the box (or as people switch to other OSes which have more customization features).
Microsoft's primary business is a proprietary operating system which has been very successful largely as a result of questionable business practices which have turned a lot of people against them. The only direction their market share can go is down, and once other OSes reach a critical mass such that changing platform is no longer a daunting proposition for the majority of businesses they'll be in for a world of hurt.
Of the two, I think Microsoft is more likely to survive for a long time, but any business has a 100% chance of going under eventually. Either that or they'll be bought out, and the buying company might decide to change policies. For example, Valve promise that if they go under they'll release a patch to unlock all Steam games; but if they enter administration will they be granted the ability to unlock all their assets? While I believe Valve do fully intend to keep that promise if at all possible, the current management may not always be in a position to keep that promise.
Bankruptcy isn't the only reason for activation servers to go offline; remember PlaysForSure? All it takes is a corporate boss deciding the profits made from keeping their DRM servers alive is ought-weighed by the savings to be had from turning them off.
Then there's the possibility of technical problems making the services "temporarily" unavailable, or your licensing information getting lost and you having to try to prove to the company you really did buy the product and have a right to activate it, and so on.
It's funny how you dismiss the demise of SGI and 3DFX so easily. They were pretty big names back in the day; 3DFX essentially created the consumer-level 3D graphics acceleration. Here's some popular games that used the Glide API but there were plenty more. That list made me a little nostalgic. I wasn't into UNIX back then, but I do remember using SGI workstations at university in the late 90's.
Standard Operating Environment. i.e. a common image that is used by all the workstations, so if a PC dies it can be replaced with a freshly imaged one and the user won't notice the difference.
Not so good with Vista though, as the warning dialog appears in another desktop. Part of that secure desktop thingy for UAC prompts and the like. You get a program appear in the taskbar but unless you actually notice it and click on it you'll never know your PC is about to shut down.
Your basic point is correct though, but I think a lot of organisations prefer to buy stuff than have in-house staff capable of writing even simple scripts like this. Presumably it's for the same reason they'd rather pay some consulting company loads of money to build an SOE we could've done ourselves: if it's outsourced to a high-priced company, it must be better!
I didn't RTFA, but does the product they're suggesting produce pie charts? That's probably the answer.
Those last responses don't hold up to even a superficial analysis.
a: Get nothing out of it
It's already been established that the person in question (possibly you) "loved" the last.fm service and used it regularly, so claiming they "get nothing out of it" is obviously hogwash.
b: I can do it myself better
This isn't always the case, and in this particular example doesn't seem to be. The OP stated they'd found new bands via the last.fm service, so at the very least last.fm must have music s/he/you doesn't have. Further, last.fm has access to a large database of listening habits it can use to recommend things to you, which is something which I'm pretty sure even a mighty AC doesn't have. Also, are there any alternatives? implies knowledge that it is providing something they can't provide themself (or they can't provide themself, if you're the same AC).
I think the "tangible" argument seems reasonable, in a completely unrational kind of way (but we're humans, so we're supposed to be irrational). So, last.fm is a streaming service where you'd be paying for an "experience" rather than an actual product you can keep. What about paying for music or games or videos that you download, rather than coming in a box? Are these intangible as well, even though you can interact with it and keep it forever (I'm assuming no DRM so you can make backups and burn physical copies and so on)? Where does the line between "tangible" and "intangible" get drawn, for you?
Assuming you pay for your internet connection, what makes that tangible? It is, after all, just a service that will cease to be of any benefit to you if you stop paying the monthly fee. What about electricity bills?
I guess these fall under the "cannot do myself" reasoning; what I don't understand is why internet services are automatically excluded from this, despite it being quite obvious that there's a lot of things you can't reasonably do yourself that others can. Yes, you could build your own last.fm-like service and somehow get loads of people to use it, but I don't think it meets the "reasonably" criteria; as in, it'd be a fuckload of work. But somehow not having to do all of that work while still enjoying the benefits it'd bring isn't worth a few dollars a month?
I use pwgen for pretty much all my passwords. It has some nice options to restrict/expand the allowed set of characters, and should be a standard installable package on most distros.
Its main advantage is that it creates passwords with a mix of vowels and consonants so you get an almost word-like password. If creating a password I'll need to remember, I usually set it to create 10 or 20 and skim through for something that seems memorable to me. If creating passwords for services that I just need to enter somewhere, I'll create a 20+ character password including punctuation (-y) and make it completely random (-s), then just copy and paste.
I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is that the home user / small business routers are the ones being targeted by the botnet. Pretty sure our ASAs are safe from this botnet as well, but you know, it's not particularly relevant.
I think Sony are providing a content distribution network as well, which gives far higher availability and performance than just having a server somewhere does. There's also the cost of providing storage for that data (on all the servers in the CDN that end up mirroring the content), as well as a means for securely uploading it to the servers and making it appear in the store or however the PS3 works. I expect a good chunk of the cost is to cover the development and maintenance needs of the portal.
I can't access it but it seems to just be slow / timing out. A traceroute gets through to what I think is Sweden, and the behaviour is the same across my home ISP, my work ISP, and my server at a colo in the US.
Maybe Australians are the only ones caring enough to report the site is unreachable?
Right, so it's "in the early testing stages" (i.e. in testing) and not widely publicized in order to keep the number of users down (limited number of users), and when suddenly a lot of people started using it they weren't able to support it so shut off access.
I can sort of see where you're coming from but it seems a very fine distinction to be making with little or no reason to make it. Is there some kind of pedantry festival going on that I wasn't informed about?
How do you figure that? Google is a massive company with enormous wealth and the capacity to share some of that wealth with other companies who cooperate with them. If Google decides the next version of Android will have user behaviour snooping as a built-in feature, you really think the phone manufacturers are going to get together and fork their own version of Android and lose the marketing support of Google out of the goodness of their hearts?
Didn't Google recently shut down production of a phone because the screen didn't match the standards they require for Android phones? It must have cost that company a lot of money to get it to the stage where it was about to go to mass production, and then Google flies some guys out for a quick meeting and the product is pulled.
Just because it may be technically possible for a company to release an Android-based phone without Google's blessing, it doesn't mean it's feasible in a business sense.
Well IE still requests the file (it has to, otherwise it doesn't know what the filename or content-type is). Any naive script that flags the downloaded as having commenced when it first starts serving the data will treat an IE click-and-cancel the same as a Firefox click-and-cancel. Even scripts that wait until it's finished sending the data are likely to be allowed to complete by the web server, since aborting scripts in the middle of execution can be problematic. Most servers take the "safe" approach by default: let the script finish running and just throw its output away if the client disappears.
It looks like IE doesn't acknowledge receiving the data at the TCP/IP layer, and instead plays funny games with the TCP window size (setting it to 0) in order to stall the connection until the user decides what to do. It also seems to send 30+ duplicate ACKs for some reason. However all this is transparent to the web application; at best it'd just seem like a lossy TCP connection.
Interesting to see that IE7 still has the "unbelievable transfer speed" bug in that if you click on a link for a file download and take a while to decide where to put it, the initial transfer speed it shows is ridiculously high because it's already downloaded a few hundred kilobytes of the file before it starts the download speed timer.
The boss is a metaphor for the database engine which has to resolve the query. Of course it can't handle uncertainty. Also, exactly what a "null" means in a particular field in a particular table in a particular database is dependent upon that database's design, and what any people or applications who interact with it assume null means. It might be a flag that means "never ship anything to this customer because they're a douchebag".
But the question is perfectly sensible: "1 not in (2,3,NULL)" evaluates to false. Null isn't a placeholder, it's null.
Yes but the point is that "1 IN (2,3,NULL)" also evaluates to false. As you say null isn't a placeholder, and the analogies are an attempt to explain why and how if you ask the database engine "is 1 not contained in the set (2,3,null)" the answer is no, yet if you ask it is 1 contained in the set (2,3,null)", the answer is still no. One way to explain it is that null isn't a tangible thing or value, and cannot be meaningful compared with anything else.
But you're just changing the question to be one that you can answer, which isn't really a valid solution. At least, one expects a database server to handle statements in a consistent manner, and not to change the question to one which suits it better.
Suppose your boss asks you if a particular customer's address is 123 Fake St. You look up the customer information in the database and found their address is NULL. Your boss wants a yes or no answer. What do you say? Unless the parameters of the database state that a null record has particular meaning, you can't answer it either way. It's unlikely they live at 123 Fake St, but you can't say for certain they don't. Alternatively, it's likely they do if the boss got that address from somewhere else. But either way, you can't confirm it, and you can't deny it.
If we go back to the original question regarding why "select 1 from dual where 1 not in (2,3,NULL)" returns nothing, it's important to understand that the database server is trying to answer this for the general case, rather than for the specific case where a null record has some kind of rational meaning. All it can really do is say either "the question is nonsensical" or "the question is impossible to answer given the available data".
Suppose you're taking an exam and your copy of the questions has a photocopying error rendering some of the answers for a multiple choice question illegible. You can see option a) which is wrong, option b) which is also wrong, and then there's a black space where more options should be, and finally e) none of the above. What do you do? Assuming you actually care about the score you get for this exam, you're going to tell the instructor your test is unreadable; because there's a good chance that if you select the "right" option given what you can read, the automatic marking system will mark your answer as incorrect.
One thing I like about the N73 is the camera lens cover. Not only does it (attempt to) keep dust off the lens when it's not in use as a camera, but also sliding the cover open automatically activates camera mode. Easy to use AND functional at the same time.
Of course, it does take 5 seconds to actually *load* the camera... that's one of the things I don't like so much.
(I think it does still make it entirely too easy for the user to launch executable attachments though.)
Huh? The fact that Outlook doesn't let you access executable attachments (.exe,.bat,.lnk, etc.) without hacking the registry is one of the reasons I don't use it. It's a reasonable safety precaution but I find it a bit annoying.
To be certain I just sent myself an.exe, and both Outlook 2003 and 2007 won't let me either run it or save it. It just has a message saying it's "blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachment" and there is no mechanism to download it or run it whatsoever.
Outlook Express may be a different story, but Outlook has blocked these things for a long time. That's why most viruses send their payload in a zip file instead...
It's a resource hog, and I never use it. I haven't had any desire to use a graphical file manager since I discovered tab completion sometime in the nineties. This does mean my background is a plain color instead of a pretty picture, but since I generally have a lot of windows open I never *see* much of the background anyway. Instead of icons on the desktop, I keep launchers on the left-side panel, and in drawers.
An alternative to having a boring colour is to run your favourite xscreensaver on the root window. At the moment I'm using cwaves, which is similar to having a boring desktop but it's a bit more fun. Others I like as my background are 'strange', 'bouboules' and 'goop'. Just run the screensaver with -root as an argument to get it to draw on the root window.
I don't have nautilus handling the desktop either -- mine tends to end up cluttered in junk because the "Desktop" link in file dialogs is a convenient location to access for any scratch files. (For Gnome users who want to do this, you can use "gTweakUI - Nautilus" to easily disable it without having to know the gconf setting name.)
Diesel-electric submarines can be quieter than nuclear vessels, because when a submarine is running on batteries it can be completely silent. The only sounds will be from the crew, the screws turning, and the water moving over the hull. A nuclear submarine has to have water flowing through the reactor constantly -- you can't exactly shut these things down temporarily -- which makes noise even if the boat is sitting completely stationary.
Not directly related to your post, but probably worthwhile remembering that "diesel-electric" isn't necessarily a synonym for "obsolete". The downside is that batteries don't last anywhere near as long as a nuclear reactor does, so they have to surface or snorkel in order to recharge - and the diesels aren't exactly stealthy.
The chances of a high-speed submarine collision are very remote. Submarines generally don't operate at high speed, because a) it creates a lot of noise making them easier to detect and b) it deafens their own sensors. It's very unlikely a submarine would fail to notice another one that's operating at 20+ knots; even if it itself was moving at speed. So while the forces involved in such a scenario would indeed be phenomenal, a high speed collision is phenomenally unlikely. It would require either a severe equipment malfunction, or a reckless disregard for basic common sense as well as procedure on the part of both commanding officers.
Pretty sure they were pointing out that their statement "all moderators are total idiots" was a troll. They weren't claiming the post they were replying to was.
The problem is all the ISPs (except iPrimus) are absolutely tiny, so it is in fact impossible for customers to dump them "en masse" - there is no mass of customers to begin with. Even iPrimus is pretty small fry by ISP standards, really. The only large ISP that was interested in participating was iiNet, and they're not involved in this phase for some reason. Smells fishy to me; I suspect Michael Malone was intending to provide actual feedback about the filtering, and that's not what they're after.
Either that or they couldn't implement a filter that wouldn't bring a regular-sized ISP to its knees, so they had to find ISPs with less than a dozen active customers to trial it on.
I'm somewhat wondering how you manage to set up a fully redundant switched network without using spanning tree at all? I suppose they might've enabled it just for the switch interconnects and left it off for the access ports so they'd come up faster. Still if that was the case, they should've been aware of the risks and symptoms thereof.
I'm pretty sure that facts and intelligence are strictly prohibited where kdawson is involved.
Seriously, is there anything the lowly/. readership can do to get rid of kdawson? Just about every article posted by him/her/it is garbage. Surely the rest of the slashdot editors and employees are embarrassed by having this rot on their site?
I'm having to seriously contemplate abandoning the site altogether after this article. My mind just cannot grasp how a serious news site can post this kind of crap at all; much less how it can remain posted in the event that it was accidentally published. What. The. Fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
Stardock's primary business is Object Desktop and ilk; things which had some functionality and eye candy to Windows. These things will inevitably have less appeal as new versions of Windows are released which include similar functionality out of the box (or as people switch to other OSes which have more customization features).
Microsoft's primary business is a proprietary operating system which has been very successful largely as a result of questionable business practices which have turned a lot of people against them. The only direction their market share can go is down, and once other OSes reach a critical mass such that changing platform is no longer a daunting proposition for the majority of businesses they'll be in for a world of hurt.
Of the two, I think Microsoft is more likely to survive for a long time, but any business has a 100% chance of going under eventually. Either that or they'll be bought out, and the buying company might decide to change policies. For example, Valve promise that if they go under they'll release a patch to unlock all Steam games; but if they enter administration will they be granted the ability to unlock all their assets? While I believe Valve do fully intend to keep that promise if at all possible, the current management may not always be in a position to keep that promise.
Bankruptcy isn't the only reason for activation servers to go offline; remember PlaysForSure? All it takes is a corporate boss deciding the profits made from keeping their DRM servers alive is ought-weighed by the savings to be had from turning them off.
Then there's the possibility of technical problems making the services "temporarily" unavailable, or your licensing information getting lost and you having to try to prove to the company you really did buy the product and have a right to activate it, and so on.
It's funny how you dismiss the demise of SGI and 3DFX so easily. They were pretty big names back in the day; 3DFX essentially created the consumer-level 3D graphics acceleration. Here's some popular games that used the Glide API but there were plenty more. That list made me a little nostalgic. I wasn't into UNIX back then, but I do remember using SGI workstations at university in the late 90's.
Standard Operating Environment. i.e. a common image that is used by all the workstations, so if a PC dies it can be replaced with a freshly imaged one and the user won't notice the difference.
Not so good with Vista though, as the warning dialog appears in another desktop. Part of that secure desktop thingy for UAC prompts and the like. You get a program appear in the taskbar but unless you actually notice it and click on it you'll never know your PC is about to shut down.
Your basic point is correct though, but I think a lot of organisations prefer to buy stuff than have in-house staff capable of writing even simple scripts like this. Presumably it's for the same reason they'd rather pay some consulting company loads of money to build an SOE we could've done ourselves: if it's outsourced to a high-priced company, it must be better!
I didn't RTFA, but does the product they're suggesting produce pie charts? That's probably the answer.
If you think playing Quake on a modern system makes you feel older than playing Wolfenstein 3D, then you're not very old. ;)
Those last responses don't hold up to even a superficial analysis.
a: Get nothing out of it
It's already been established that the person in question (possibly you) "loved" the last.fm service and used it regularly, so claiming they "get nothing out of it" is obviously hogwash.
b: I can do it myself better
This isn't always the case, and in this particular example doesn't seem to be. The OP stated they'd found new bands via the last.fm service, so at the very least last.fm must have music s/he/you doesn't have. Further, last.fm has access to a large database of listening habits it can use to recommend things to you, which is something which I'm pretty sure even a mighty AC doesn't have. Also, are there any alternatives? implies knowledge that it is providing something they can't provide themself (or they can't provide themself, if you're the same AC).
I think the "tangible" argument seems reasonable, in a completely unrational kind of way (but we're humans, so we're supposed to be irrational). So, last.fm is a streaming service where you'd be paying for an "experience" rather than an actual product you can keep. What about paying for music or games or videos that you download, rather than coming in a box? Are these intangible as well, even though you can interact with it and keep it forever (I'm assuming no DRM so you can make backups and burn physical copies and so on)? Where does the line between "tangible" and "intangible" get drawn, for you?
Assuming you pay for your internet connection, what makes that tangible? It is, after all, just a service that will cease to be of any benefit to you if you stop paying the monthly fee. What about electricity bills?
I guess these fall under the "cannot do myself" reasoning; what I don't understand is why internet services are automatically excluded from this, despite it being quite obvious that there's a lot of things you can't reasonably do yourself that others can. Yes, you could build your own last.fm-like service and somehow get loads of people to use it, but I don't think it meets the "reasonably" criteria; as in, it'd be a fuckload of work. But somehow not having to do all of that work while still enjoying the benefits it'd bring isn't worth a few dollars a month?
I use pwgen for pretty much all my passwords. It has some nice options to restrict/expand the allowed set of characters, and should be a standard installable package on most distros.
Its main advantage is that it creates passwords with a mix of vowels and consonants so you get an almost word-like password. If creating a password I'll need to remember, I usually set it to create 10 or 20 and skim through for something that seems memorable to me. If creating passwords for services that I just need to enter somewhere, I'll create a 20+ character password including punctuation (-y) and make it completely random (-s), then just copy and paste.
I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is that the home user / small business routers are the ones being targeted by the botnet. Pretty sure our ASAs are safe from this botnet as well, but you know, it's not particularly relevant.
you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.
Not if you invent time travel first! Anyone know how many litres the TARDIS holds?
I think Sony are providing a content distribution network as well, which gives far higher availability and performance than just having a server somewhere does. There's also the cost of providing storage for that data (on all the servers in the CDN that end up mirroring the content), as well as a means for securely uploading it to the servers and making it appear in the store or however the PS3 works. I expect a good chunk of the cost is to cover the development and maintenance needs of the portal.
I can't access it but it seems to just be slow / timing out. A traceroute gets through to what I think is Sweden, and the behaviour is the same across my home ISP, my work ISP, and my server at a colo in the US.
Maybe Australians are the only ones caring enough to report the site is unreachable?
Right, so it's "in the early testing stages" (i.e. in testing) and not widely publicized in order to keep the number of users down (limited number of users), and when suddenly a lot of people started using it they weren't able to support it so shut off access.
I can sort of see where you're coming from but it seems a very fine distinction to be making with little or no reason to make it. Is there some kind of pedantry festival going on that I wasn't informed about?
How do you figure that? Google is a massive company with enormous wealth and the capacity to share some of that wealth with other companies who cooperate with them. If Google decides the next version of Android will have user behaviour snooping as a built-in feature, you really think the phone manufacturers are going to get together and fork their own version of Android and lose the marketing support of Google out of the goodness of their hearts?
Didn't Google recently shut down production of a phone because the screen didn't match the standards they require for Android phones? It must have cost that company a lot of money to get it to the stage where it was about to go to mass production, and then Google flies some guys out for a quick meeting and the product is pulled.
Just because it may be technically possible for a company to release an Android-based phone without Google's blessing, it doesn't mean it's feasible in a business sense.
Well IE still requests the file (it has to, otherwise it doesn't know what the filename or content-type is). Any naive script that flags the downloaded as having commenced when it first starts serving the data will treat an IE click-and-cancel the same as a Firefox click-and-cancel. Even scripts that wait until it's finished sending the data are likely to be allowed to complete by the web server, since aborting scripts in the middle of execution can be problematic. Most servers take the "safe" approach by default: let the script finish running and just throw its output away if the client disappears.
It looks like IE doesn't acknowledge receiving the data at the TCP/IP layer, and instead plays funny games with the TCP window size (setting it to 0) in order to stall the connection until the user decides what to do. It also seems to send 30+ duplicate ACKs for some reason. However all this is transparent to the web application; at best it'd just seem like a lossy TCP connection.
Interesting to see that IE7 still has the "unbelievable transfer speed" bug in that if you click on a link for a file download and take a while to decide where to put it, the initial transfer speed it shows is ridiculously high because it's already downloaded a few hundred kilobytes of the file before it starts the download speed timer.
The boss is a metaphor for the database engine which has to resolve the query. Of course it can't handle uncertainty. Also, exactly what a "null" means in a particular field in a particular table in a particular database is dependent upon that database's design, and what any people or applications who interact with it assume null means. It might be a flag that means "never ship anything to this customer because they're a douchebag".
But the question is perfectly sensible: "1 not in (2,3,NULL)" evaluates to false. Null isn't a placeholder, it's null.
Yes but the point is that "1 IN (2,3,NULL)" also evaluates to false. As you say null isn't a placeholder, and the analogies are an attempt to explain why and how if you ask the database engine "is 1 not contained in the set (2,3,null)" the answer is no, yet if you ask it is 1 contained in the set (2,3,null)", the answer is still no. One way to explain it is that null isn't a tangible thing or value, and cannot be meaningful compared with anything else.
But you're just changing the question to be one that you can answer, which isn't really a valid solution. At least, one expects a database server to handle statements in a consistent manner, and not to change the question to one which suits it better.
Suppose your boss asks you if a particular customer's address is 123 Fake St. You look up the customer information in the database and found their address is NULL. Your boss wants a yes or no answer. What do you say? Unless the parameters of the database state that a null record has particular meaning, you can't answer it either way. It's unlikely they live at 123 Fake St, but you can't say for certain they don't. Alternatively, it's likely they do if the boss got that address from somewhere else. But either way, you can't confirm it, and you can't deny it.
If we go back to the original question regarding why "select 1 from dual where 1 not in (2,3,NULL)" returns nothing, it's important to understand that the database server is trying to answer this for the general case, rather than for the specific case where a null record has some kind of rational meaning. All it can really do is say either "the question is nonsensical" or "the question is impossible to answer given the available data".
Suppose you're taking an exam and your copy of the questions has a photocopying error rendering some of the answers for a multiple choice question illegible. You can see option a) which is wrong, option b) which is also wrong, and then there's a black space where more options should be, and finally e) none of the above. What do you do? Assuming you actually care about the score you get for this exam, you're going to tell the instructor your test is unreadable; because there's a good chance that if you select the "right" option given what you can read, the automatic marking system will mark your answer as incorrect.
One thing I like about the N73 is the camera lens cover. Not only does it (attempt to) keep dust off the lens when it's not in use as a camera, but also sliding the cover open automatically activates camera mode. Easy to use AND functional at the same time.
Of course, it does take 5 seconds to actually *load* the camera... that's one of the things I don't like so much.
(I think it does still make it entirely too easy for the user to launch executable attachments though.)
Huh? The fact that Outlook doesn't let you access executable attachments (.exe, .bat, .lnk, etc.) without hacking the registry is one of the reasons I don't use it. It's a reasonable safety precaution but I find it a bit annoying.
To be certain I just sent myself an .exe, and both Outlook 2003 and 2007 won't let me either run it or save it. It just has a message saying it's "blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachment" and there is no mechanism to download it or run it whatsoever.
Outlook Express may be a different story, but Outlook has blocked these things for a long time. That's why most viruses send their payload in a zip file instead...
It's a resource hog, and I never use it. I haven't had any desire to use a graphical file manager since I discovered tab completion sometime in the nineties. This does mean my background is a plain color instead of a pretty picture, but since I generally have a lot of windows open I never *see* much of the background anyway. Instead of icons on the desktop, I keep launchers on the left-side panel, and in drawers.
An alternative to having a boring colour is to run your favourite xscreensaver on the root window. At the moment I'm using cwaves, which is similar to having a boring desktop but it's a bit more fun. Others I like as my background are 'strange', 'bouboules' and 'goop'. Just run the screensaver with -root as an argument to get it to draw on the root window.
I don't have nautilus handling the desktop either -- mine tends to end up cluttered in junk because the "Desktop" link in file dialogs is a convenient location to access for any scratch files. (For Gnome users who want to do this, you can use "gTweakUI - Nautilus" to easily disable it without having to know the gconf setting name.)
Diesel-electric submarines can be quieter than nuclear vessels, because when a submarine is running on batteries it can be completely silent. The only sounds will be from the crew, the screws turning, and the water moving over the hull. A nuclear submarine has to have water flowing through the reactor constantly -- you can't exactly shut these things down temporarily -- which makes noise even if the boat is sitting completely stationary.
Not directly related to your post, but probably worthwhile remembering that "diesel-electric" isn't necessarily a synonym for "obsolete". The downside is that batteries don't last anywhere near as long as a nuclear reactor does, so they have to surface or snorkel in order to recharge - and the diesels aren't exactly stealthy.
The chances of a high-speed submarine collision are very remote. Submarines generally don't operate at high speed, because a) it creates a lot of noise making them easier to detect and b) it deafens their own sensors. It's very unlikely a submarine would fail to notice another one that's operating at 20+ knots; even if it itself was moving at speed. So while the forces involved in such a scenario would indeed be phenomenal, a high speed collision is phenomenally unlikely. It would require either a severe equipment malfunction, or a reckless disregard for basic common sense as well as procedure on the part of both commanding officers.
Pretty sure they were pointing out that their statement "all moderators are total idiots" was a troll. They weren't claiming the post they were replying to was.
For attack subs yes, but not for ballistic missile submarines. That's not their purpose.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen, of course. Might've seemed like a fun thing to do at the time...
The problem is all the ISPs (except iPrimus) are absolutely tiny, so it is in fact impossible for customers to dump them "en masse" - there is no mass of customers to begin with. Even iPrimus is pretty small fry by ISP standards, really. The only large ISP that was interested in participating was iiNet, and they're not involved in this phase for some reason. Smells fishy to me; I suspect Michael Malone was intending to provide actual feedback about the filtering, and that's not what they're after.
Either that or they couldn't implement a filter that wouldn't bring a regular-sized ISP to its knees, so they had to find ISPs with less than a dozen active customers to trial it on.
I'm somewhat wondering how you manage to set up a fully redundant switched network without using spanning tree at all? I suppose they might've enabled it just for the switch interconnects and left it off for the access ports so they'd come up faster. Still if that was the case, they should've been aware of the risks and symptoms thereof.
I'm pretty sure that facts and intelligence are strictly prohibited where kdawson is involved.
Seriously, is there anything the lowly /. readership can do to get rid of kdawson? Just about every article posted by him/her/it is garbage. Surely the rest of the slashdot editors and employees are embarrassed by having this rot on their site?
I'm having to seriously contemplate abandoning the site altogether after this article. My mind just cannot grasp how a serious news site can post this kind of crap at all; much less how it can remain posted in the event that it was accidentally published. What. The. Fuck.