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User: Doug+Neal

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  1. Re:Please change the name! on Not Just a Cleanup Any More: LibreSSL Project Announced · · Score: 1

    Same here although it never feels quite right. To me, it just looks French. In French the R would be silent, but 'leeb office' or 'leeb ssl' would sit even worse (and also sound a bit like 'lib' which could be very confusing)

  2. Re:Sentence doesn't make sense on Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd · · Score: 1

    Nouns can be verbed. Conversely, verbs can undergo nounings.

  3. Re:Offload to ADSL? on London Needs 70,000 Cells For 4G · · Score: 1

    Correct, BT has an extensive metro ethernet network in central London, as do half a dozen other companies.

  4. Re:erm 50 years away. on UK Joins Laser Nuclear Fusion Project · · Score: 1

    I suspect if there had been (and continued to be) cold war-era levels of political will and funding into nuclear R&D, then we would have had it in 20-30 years.

  5. Re:Who cares - Troll mod on Open Radeon 3D Driver Runs At 60~70% of Proprietary Driver Speed · · Score: 1

    Why aren't you going to be doing any gaming? Because there aren't many games that are made to run well on Linux. And why is that? Because the graphics stack sucks for 3D. It's a circular argument that has allowed the state of Linux graphics to continue to lag behind embarrassingly. I can't see how ATI being committed to improving their Linux drivers is anything other than a good thing?

  6. Re:Really? That's important ? on Linus Renames 2.6.40 Kernel To Linux 3.0, Announces Release Candidate · · Score: 1

    This wasn't one of those times...

  7. Re:X window on Ask Slashdot: Best Linux Distro For Computational Cluster? · · Score: 1

    NX is also an option.

  8. Re:phones also suck on RIM BlackBerry PlayBook: Unfinished, Unusable · · Score: 4, Informative

    BES Express is a free product. From an administrator's point of view it's somewhat limited in functionality compared to BES, but from the user's perspective the all the synchronisation and directory integration works as expected.

  9. Reassuring on Duke Nukem Forever Gets Delayed - Again · · Score: 1

    This is actually incredibly reassuring. Duke Nukem Forever being due out "soon" has been one of those things that has stayed constant since teenage years, while so much else about the world has changed! If it gets released, I'm not sure how I will deal with that. Truly it will be the end of an era. It will go from being a new game, to an old game, to being "retro", in the relative blink of an eye. But in my heart it will still be vapourware.

  10. Re:why on earth... on Keys Leaking Through the Air At RSA · · Score: 1

    Actually it's not common for exchanges to offer connectivity in via the internet except perhaps for low-traffic connections for integration testing and suchlike. The unpredictability of the internet makes it impossible for them to guarantee the service levels that are demanded. The constant stream of pricing updates can run into the gigabits per second depending on what you're subscribed to. If you're big enough to be trading directly on the exchange, the cost of the leased lines and/or colocation next to the exchange (latency is everything) is easy to swallow. Extranets like Radianz are also a very popular option. Brokerage is still alive and well and institutions that aren't doing high-frequency trading will often deal with with brokers.

  11. Re:why on earth... on Keys Leaking Through the Air At RSA · · Score: 2

    There is a middle ground between using the internet (where delivery is on a best effort basis and has no guarantees of anything) and laying your own submarine cables. Private international leased lines are readily available from a variety of vendors and are used extensively by financial institutions. They're available with various SLAs on contention, latency and uptime depending on how much you're willing to spend. Transatlantic routes are available surprisingly cheaply, as there is an abundance of bandwidth and a ton of carriers competing to sell it. It's usually provided over an MPLS core, which handles routing around damage, with a layer 2 (ethernet) or 3 (IP) handoff.

  12. Re:good job Republicans! on House Fails To Extend Patriot Act Spy Powers · · Score: 3, Funny

    Something about stopped clocks...

  13. Re:Er, usability? on TI Plans Minority Report UI Using ARM SoC + Projector · · Score: 1

    Dictation software has been around for about 15 years, so that's still an option for you. Here's why I'm not using it:

    • Ambiguities in speech, e.g. different words that are pronounced the same as each other
    • Code-writing that involves lots of symbols, numbers, precise spacing; or generally anything that's not free-form natural language.
    • The noise - I don't want to hear everyone around me talking to their computers all day
    • Similarly, I don't necessarily want everyone else around me to know what I'm typing
    • Noisy environments can render the whole thing unusable

    My feeling is that in due course there will be a UI revolution in text input that renders the keyboard as we know it obsolete, but speech recognition isn't it.

  14. Re:Lounge chair that eats cockroaches sometime soo on Designers Create Meat Eating Furniture · · Score: 1

    An astonishing number of things DO NOT CAUSE BEDBUGS

    Some studies have shown that bed bugs are the number one cause of bed bugs.

  15. Re:Finally! on Senators Bash ISP and Push Extensive Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Is that what I should tell my users when calls from their desk phones deteriorate or drop because their switch port is saturated by something unrelated? I don't think that would go down too well. QoS exists for a reason. Applying this to residential phone service, when that becomes packet switched (which it will eventually) doesn't need to violate net neutrality.

  16. Re:Finally! on Senators Bash ISP and Push Extensive Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Why not though? Shouldn't a packet-switched voice service (eventually) have the same quality and reliability guarantees as circuit-switched? It's a step backwards otherwise.

  17. Re:A little too white on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 1

    Agreed. Definitely many steps in the right direction. The relative proportions of the gaps and the fonts, and their alignments, sit awkwardly in some places. Reducing some of the gaps between elements would definitely be an improvement.

  18. Re:Start of a bad, racist joke? on Russian Simulated Mars Mission Close To 'Landing' · · Score: 2, Funny

    OK, here goes.

    Three Russians, a Chinese, a Frenchman and an Italian-Colombian walk into a bar. They order some drinks, and proceed to act in manners stereotypical of their respective countries of origin.
    The barman finds their antics highly amusing. They leave several hours later, fairly intoxicated but quite happy.

  19. MWe on Underwater Nuclear Power Plant Proposed In France · · Score: 2

    MWe, is that a French megawatt? Une megawatte?

  20. Re:Stop spreading FUD on Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ · · Score: 1

    Apology accepted and thanks for the offer, I may well take you up on it depending on how much time I get to spend on IPv6.

    It's a shame there hasn't been more written about this. There is not much in the middle ground between "blog posts about IPv4 running out" and "wading your way through every RFC". Probably why you hear the same issues so much.

  21. Re:Stop spreading FUD on Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ · · Score: 1

    That's pretty much the info I was looking for, but why the confrontational tone? I'm not "spreading FUD", I'm putting forward my concerns in the hope that someone can address them, and that's pretty clear from my wording.

  22. Re:IPv6 rollout on corporate networks on Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ · · Score: 1

    But the renumbering risk today affects only your outward facing infrastructure. If you're using globally scoped addresses throughout your network then that risk is far bigger, no? Unless, as you say, you use NAT.

    I know that there are some who don't see NAT as a bad thing. I'm not one of them. The biggest win with IPv6 is arguably the fact that you don't need to NAT again.

    Two addresses (ULA and global) per host as suggested by 'bbn' is an interesting idea though.

    OT: I also had that in my sig a while back... did you steal it from me? :P

  23. Re:IPv6 rollout on corporate networks on Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ · · Score: 1

    DHCPv6 is still desirable for almost every other device you care to name, because autoconfig doesn't say anything about DNS servers.

  24. IPv6 rollout on corporate networks on Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ · · Score: 1

    At my workplace we've been doing some limited trials of providing IPv6 connectivity to internal systems (we don't have much in the way of outward facing stuff).

    IMHO, and I would love to be corrected on this, but as far as I can see, there are some big problems to overcome with corporate deployments (not so much with home connections). Note that I am in no way advocating sticking with IPv4, this is just from my experiences so far:

    It starts with the fact that your internal IP addresses will be determined by what your ISP gives you. What if you change ISPs? This means renumbering everything. Changing ISPs didn't used to mean that. What's the solution - use address autoconfiguration everywhere? That's not going to scale up very well. Think about DNS. Dynamic DNS updates? Over potentially thousands of hosts? And keeping all that secure? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

    OK, so if you're running a network that big, you probably want to get some provider-independent address space, then you keep the same address scheme and advertise your addresses out to your ISP. That way your addresses always stay the same no matter which ISP you use and you also have the option to multi-home. All well and good, but acquiring PI addresses still requires you to become a member of your local RIR; it's quite a paperwork-intensive process. With IPv4 this is acceptable as it's mostly only large enterprises and ISPs that need PI space and the number of RIR members remains low. With IPv6, medium and small companies will also have an urgent requirement for PI space. The process needs to be simplified, packaged up, and probably most importantly, delegated; will the RIRs be able to cope as it stands? We will end up with huge waiting lists to get address space. The process needs to be more like registering a domain than getting PI IPv4 space.

    Now, of course, once so many more organisations are using PI addresses, what does this mean for the size of the global routing table? This is more of a problem for the ISPs and router vendors than the end users, but a problem nonetheless.

    Can anyone more experienced in IPv6 than me refute these points?

  25. Re:idea on Google Fiber Delays Broadband Award To 2011 · · Score: 1

    These UK ISPs have quite a lot of that list covered.

    Although the UK's situation, as far as broadband goes, is not perfect, the incumbent telco (BT) is at least forced by the regulator (Ofcom) to act as a wholesaler. Any ISP can provide service over BT's phone lines and backbones.