At almost a million dollars a pop, is it really saving money for ISPs to use these? How many would a major ISP need to shape all of their traffic?
Not only that but it seems like a dumb technical solution for P2P traffic shaping.
Most ISPs would be geographically distributed. I can't think of to many places where you would actually see this much traffic. You'd need, what, 10 OC-192's to see 80Gb/s? Maybe they add all the GigE ports together and cheat to advertise a big number, but still.
Second, this is the kind of device you want closest to your customers, not down the line where your traffic aggregates. If you want to stave upstream traffic, do it as soon as possible in the network.
Third, it's better in almost every aspect of IT to scale out, not up. Every node would be different. You could have business customers in one CDIR or another and different configurations for each. I'm sure this thing is configurable per port, but I'd think it would be easier and more cost effective to have smaller distributed individually configurable devices only where you need them.
No, I don't think this thing is best suited to do traffic shaping for the typical ISP. If you can do DPI on that much traffic, there's bigger, less benign applications I can think of.
Oh, I don't know. Trying to become a virtual astronaut might be a lot of fun.
Competing with other players online in a simulation of the sorts of intellectual and reflex / endurance challenges required to actually become an astronaut would definitely give the game some content. Learning about NASA's current and future technology and being in the know to share with your classmates and parents would be pretty cool.(I know I loved the stuff when growing up).
Being part of a community with like minded.. dare I say, science geeks, sharing common experience, sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
When you consider games like Starflight and Flight Simulator were some of the best selling games of all time, it starts to seem like not such a bad idea. And, I'm not at all opposed to sponsors like IBM, Lockheed Martin, Tang, or the Discovery Channel which I would not deem out of place.
There's a lot of possibilities. Despite the project being flushed, I think the potential is there for something really cool. In fact, the market just maybe is ripe for a bloody game where you don't shoot other people all the time. It's been done many, many times before with surprising results.
My 5 year old nephew wants to be an astronaut and loves dinosaurs. Who freaking doesn't?
His point is perfectly valid. I don't get nearly as excited about recent jumps in graphics technology because the difference in quailty is not as stunning as you'd once get.
The difference between CGA and my Amiga was immense. The difference between no antiscopic filtering and 16x antiscoping filtering is best left to those with 20/10 vision.
Once the pixels got indistinguishably small, and the hues varied to the limit of human perception, we were left only with increasing art quality, animation, lighting and other subtle things with smaller margins for improvement.
Not only that, but to use the current resolutions to their fullest potential takes many times the effort, art wise. Despite better tools, you have to fill in 40x as many pixels.
Thank you. No one ever wants to compromise in these fvcking arguments.
Both points are valid.
*nix is more secure by default (although with Vista, that difference is narrowing) AND Windows is the biggest target with the most clueless user base.
Of course some of you will know that Sun have had 8/16/32 cores for quite a while, and that Solars, *BSD, and probably even Linux support this stuff just fine.
The NT kernel has supported SMP for 10 years. So what?
It's all about the applications. Sure, there's some development tools in *nix for multicore. I doubt they are efficient and accessible though. Can y'all tell me how great GCC is with 16 cores and thread level parallelism? I'm sure some academic and or low level solutions exist everywhere. However, it's undoubtedly a PITA whatever platform you work with. Everyone could use better tools for the future. Especially for making desktop apps.
Now, hopefully I'm explaining this right. I'm sure a developer will set me straight if it's wrong.
DirectX works by talking right to the driver. Hence the name, DirectX. The hardware vendor is responsible for translating said DirectX function to operations in their hardware.
It's good in that there's less overhead and the drivers can be optimized per the vendor. It's bad in that some of the features may or may not be supported in hardware, and you are at the mercy of the vendor.
OpenGL, on the other hand, is a type of state machine, and kind of like a blob of functions and states you can use in a software VM, so there is an abstraction layer between the hardware and the API calls.
Basically, all OpenGL functions and state queries should be available, and the ones that are not supported by functions in hardware are run in software via the state machine.
Which one's better? I dunno. I personally prefer DirectX. Shame though, it's one OS only.
Does anyone actually use the tar program for its original purpose anymore?
Sure, I use it to write to our LTO3 tapes. Seriously, it's the best option, and very portable across the many Unix systems we might plug the drive into.
Speaking of tapes.... LTO4 tapes are an ancient type of technology, modernized to archive stunning (albeit non-random) read write speeds.
I came into college being pretty good at C++, VB, and having installed Linux a few times, but I didn't know a thing. Let me stand up for the typical CS degree.
Computer org was a fantastic class. So was Physics I and II. So were my software engineering classes. And, I'd say the same for numerical methods.
They all taught me something. Computer org inspired me to seek the root of a problem. It gave a view of how computers actually work, something I lacked before the class despite knowing how plow around an OS and assemble the latest PC. It taught me logic, and the difference between a megabit and a megabyte; skills that I've used in every tech job, weather it's development or Unix administration.
Physics I and II taught me the scientific method. This was my most important lesson. That it takes a long time, and lots of hard work to really KNOW something. That if you can't repeat something with relative certainty, it's meaningless.. it's not the real problem. That in order to solve hard things, you need patience, a variety of knowledge to draw from, and resolve. It taught me to RTFM also. It was the first class where I learned the real value of reference material.
Software engineering taught me to draw a damn flowchart and understand the problem and my planned solution before I start coding. 2nd most valuable lesson from college. So many self taught CS people, they stunningly still don't get this.
Numerical methods taught me that across all languages, the tools are largely the same. I learned how to translate a math problem into procedural code. I've seen people that can't devise the code to draw a window in the middle of the screen. It's not something we went over in the FORTRAN, but I'm sure I know how to instantly solve it thanks to the style of thinking instilled in me by that class.
The advantage is I don't have to buy a console to play games. I already have a PC.
Oh, and I don't see World of Warcraft or the Sims add on pack infinitum working on the PS3.
And I still can't download patches for my games, or install any of a thousand mods for HL2 on my Wii. And before this generation of consoles, the PC was the only place I could browse the web, download some silly game and install it without driving to target. I can go to gamedev.net or linuxgames.com and download thousands of unique non-commercial games, some of astounding quality. The PC is the easiest platform to access for the independant or outcast developer.
The PC will have it's spot (even if it's a smaller one) as the more flexible platform for as long as we have them. That is certain. And it will always offer console style retail box, blockbuster commercial gaming as well.
Put simply, as long as people have had general purpose computers, there have been games for them. Maybe the market will shrink, maybe the limelight will fall to the shiniest new consoles for a while every 5 years, but this fact is not going to change. It's a general purpose computer, not an "only for work and old people who don't play games" computer. That's the thing, people see consoles with the momentum, winning.. but it's not like they could ever end pc gaming andwin.
I doubt it. It's selling like bloody hotcakes. Newegg can't keep them on the shelves.
Why do you think we are starting to see similar devices?
I think the market was ripe for such a thing, particularly at these price points. I know I "had to have" mine, and for $379USD am loving every minute of it.
Now, Windows mobile could be a nice somewhat lean OS for the thing, and I'd find this REDFLY pretty good if it was a little sleeker and more refined then my eeePC. I would prefer the Linux though because I'm a big Linux geek and it offers very much flexibility.
There is know need/point in wasting money in some ego race to see who can touch mars first, but by exploring the universe we can expand our scientific knowledge.
Not to invalidate your point, but I think the GP has a better one. I don't care how smart you get. You've got to step out of mom's basement eventually!
Human spaceflight is risky, ponderous and expensive. But there is a very deep, very meaningful reason to push on. See, I've always held on to the frail hope that one day we will leave this rock. It's why I read science fiction. I mean, who does not? I can't imagine it another way. I find contemplating the inevitable extinction of the human race utterly depressing. It's our deepest instinct to survive, after all.
Square one is always going to be expensive. But it's certainly not a waste of money. The peripheral benefits are enormous. Advances in engineering, industry, science and enough to inspire so many. Can you imagine if a woman was the first to step on Mars? She'd inspire us all. I'd like to see that in my lifetime.
We got hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks back to Earth was via the manned missions. A lot of those samples were selected Harrison Schmitt a geologist, based on geological significance, once he got there. They were thereafter distributed to leading geologists around the world, many in the Soviet Union even. The samples have probably done more to advance our understanding of the Moon than any other thing. The last Apollo mission was the most scientifically significant. We were just getting started.
It did not crash the US federal budget. It caused no wars. It employed 400,000 people. It gave Boeing and Locked Martin something to build besides bombs. Apollo was almost invariably, a great thing. Without Vietnam, perhaps it would have continued on.
I don't have a problem racing to Mars. In fact, I think we should be there already. We've been sitting on our laurels since the 70's. The apatite for realizing the Arthur Clarke type human future in space will vanish in a few generations if we don't give those generations anything to look forward to.
I'm sick of the "modern" FPS. HL2, Bioshock, never finished em'. I liked Doom3 better, but I won't rave about it.
It just seems these days you have incredible graphics and the inevitable linear progression up to "the Boss."
Further, things really never get any more challenging. I never feel like I need to take my gameplaying skill and reflexes to the next level, as I have grown up doing with simpler games. I'm just shooing more zombies.
I don't get any sense of immersion. Maybe they throw in some token power and equipment variety, that's it. These games feel like a mediocre scifi movie where I get to click my mouse button.
I enjoyed Doom 3 because it was intense and challenging at points. And the big fat shiny story did not have "twists and turns" as to be some poorly conceived distraction. It was closer to the pure arcade sweat it out experience.
I want my games to be difficult and intense (Quake-3 Multilayer) or more interactive with true freedom and quality RPG elements (STALKER). Just don't give me something with state of the art graphics that pretends to be both.
I just hope ID can deliver with RAGE. I like the setting, and I think the FPS market is ripe for something that truly provides old school RPG freedom. Oblivion and STALKER came very close.
If you were talking about pixel detail, I might agree.
But It's all about the lighting and animation in a changing environment (starcraft was isometric with static lighting). It's hard to light and animate sprites convincingly, unless you have a lot of artists willing to draw a lot of frames.
Since I can't read, I completely mis-understood 50% of your post.
The point about the Soyuz and Shuttle being so different.. that still bugs me but that's a rebuttal to the overall discussion.
And you are using some opinion to back your point.
Now consider that the Soyuz is likely flown/managed by people whose attention to safety would give NASA managers heart attacks and just how much of a fuck up the shuttle is become evident.
You don't know anything about the history of the Russian space program, do you? Oh, and this, which killed 48 people. It's hard to find stuff on it though, because it was at the height of the cold war, and the USSR kept it secret.
Further, It's apples and oranges. The Soyuz and the shuttle are far far different. A Soyuz vehicle nearly fits in the shuttles cargo bay. Making just a big giant Soyuz won't necessarily be safer by default. I'm sure there's a bit more to it then that. Certainly we learned from the shuttle and it's far from perfect, but don't assume the Soyuz is a better design, because it's not designed for nearly the same purpose.
I believe that both sides take safety very seriously. What you said was an insult. We've all had enough fatalities.
After this camper gets shot in the head, I like to watch the angry guy who I fragged like 4 times shoot up my dead body in rage and stand statue while he types something obscene.
I then usually quip, "Not dead yet! Go back and shot me some more!"
I know how much a Cisco UBR10012 costs. I can imagine how many Comcast has purchased.
I do love working in the Cable industry though. It's by far the most interesting IT job I've ever had.
I wouldn't be agreeable to those. The applications that are used by the minority of internet users today are going to become mainstream tomorrow. Everybody is slamming bittorrent but missing the point that internet video is probably going to be the next killer app.
Since I admin a smallish ISP, I can tell you that it's already the next killer app. We've been monitoring network demographics with NTOP for quite some time.
This past year, we've seen a 10% increase in subscribers and a 60% increse in traffic. That increase is almost entirely http. P2P protocol usage, on the other hand, plateaued last year. It is becoming more and more insignificant.
You can watch 20 episodes of Lost commercial free in "HD" full screen at nbc.com. I watched the Sarah Conner Chronicles (brought to you by Cisco, the irony..) at home last night and monitored my bandwidth consumption, which saturated at around 3Mb. This isn't youtube, the picture is great. It's very impressive, and easy to do. It was a 10 second pluggin install on my Windows machine.
People are rapidly finding this. An informal survey of our CSRs reveals that they are getting increasing volumes of calls where the subject comes up.
Why or why does this keep getting repeated on Slashdot?!
TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network.
TCP/IP has nothing in it, specifically, to deal with outages and alternate routes. BGP is designed for this. Spanning Tree also. That's a layer 2 protocol usually only in LAN environments.
Welcome to IT.
Today, I had to:
1.) Figure out what "not in top of zone" meant in my BIND logs after tweaking a zone file.
2.) Get awk to not barf on an address book import script that happened to have 1 swiss character to deal with.
3.) Rebuild my RPM database cause Mandriva's update utility crashed on my workstation.
4.) Tirelessly search Cisco's website for an undocumented IOS command that I needed.
Mod ME up!
Slashdot Mirror
Most ISPs would be geographically distributed. I can't think of to many places where you would actually see this much traffic. You'd need, what, 10 OC-192's to see 80Gb/s? Maybe they add all the GigE ports together and cheat to advertise a big number, but still.
Second, this is the kind of device you want closest to your customers, not down the line where your traffic aggregates. If you want to stave upstream traffic, do it as soon as possible in the network.
Third, it's better in almost every aspect of IT to scale out, not up. Every node would be different. You could have business customers in one CDIR or another and different configurations for each. I'm sure this thing is configurable per port, but I'd think it would be easier and more cost effective to have smaller distributed individually configurable devices only where you need them.
No, I don't think this thing is best suited to do traffic shaping for the typical ISP. If you can do DPI on that much traffic, there's bigger, less benign applications I can think of.
Oh, I don't know. Trying to become a virtual astronaut might be a lot of fun.
Competing with other players online in a simulation of the sorts of intellectual and reflex / endurance challenges required to actually become an astronaut would definitely give the game some content. Learning about NASA's current and future technology and being in the know to share with your classmates and parents would be pretty cool.(I know I loved the stuff when growing up).
Being part of a community with like minded.. dare I say, science geeks, sharing common experience, sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
When you consider games like Starflight and Flight Simulator were some of the best selling games of all time, it starts to seem like not such a bad idea. And, I'm not at all opposed to sponsors like IBM, Lockheed Martin, Tang, or the Discovery Channel which I would not deem out of place.
There's a lot of possibilities. Despite the project being flushed, I think the potential is there for something really cool. In fact, the market just maybe is ripe for a bloody game where you don't shoot other people all the time. It's been done many, many times before with surprising results.
My 5 year old nephew wants to be an astronaut and loves dinosaurs. Who freaking doesn't?In 5 years administering ISP email servers, I can't recall ever seeing hotmail on an rbl. In fact, all the major mail domains are typically good.
Sure, I get millions of e-mail claiming to be from hotmail, but since they have a proper SPF record, it bounces off anyway.
But it's cool yo, hate on MS.
His point is perfectly valid. I don't get nearly as excited about recent jumps in graphics technology because the difference in quailty is not as stunning as you'd once get.
The difference between CGA and my Amiga was immense. The difference between no antiscopic filtering and 16x antiscoping filtering is best left to those with 20/10 vision.
Once the pixels got indistinguishably small, and the hues varied to the limit of human perception, we were left only with increasing art quality, animation, lighting and other subtle things with smaller margins for improvement.
Not only that, but to use the current resolutions to their fullest potential takes many times the effort, art wise. Despite better tools, you have to fill in 40x as many pixels.
Thank you. No one ever wants to compromise in these fvcking arguments. Both points are valid. *nix is more secure by default (although with Vista, that difference is narrowing) AND Windows is the biggest target with the most clueless user base.
I've always liked this better:
Introverts get energy from being alone.
Extroverts get energy from being with others.
The NT kernel has supported SMP for 10 years. So what?
It's all about the applications. Sure, there's some development tools in *nix for multicore. I doubt they are efficient and accessible though. Can y'all tell me how great GCC is with 16 cores and thread level parallelism? I'm sure some academic and or low level solutions exist everywhere. However, it's undoubtedly a PITA whatever platform you work with. Everyone could use better tools for the future. Especially for making desktop apps.
Now, hopefully I'm explaining this right. I'm sure a developer will set me straight if it's wrong.
DirectX works by talking right to the driver. Hence the name, DirectX. The hardware vendor is responsible for translating said DirectX function to operations in their hardware.
It's good in that there's less overhead and the drivers can be optimized per the vendor. It's bad in that some of the features may or may not be supported in hardware, and you are at the mercy of the vendor.
OpenGL, on the other hand, is a type of state machine, and kind of like a blob of functions and states you can use in a software VM, so there is an abstraction layer between the hardware and the API calls.
Basically, all OpenGL functions and state queries should be available, and the ones that are not supported by functions in hardware are run in software via the state machine.
Which one's better? I dunno. I personally prefer DirectX. Shame though, it's one OS only.
Sure, I use it to write to our LTO3 tapes. Seriously, it's the best option, and very portable across the many Unix systems we might plug the drive into.
Speaking of tapes.... LTO4 tapes are an ancient type of technology, modernized to archive stunning (albeit non-random) read write speeds.
I came into college being pretty good at C++, VB, and having installed Linux a few times, but I didn't know a thing. Let me stand up for the typical CS degree.
Computer org was a fantastic class. So was Physics I and II. So were my software engineering classes. And, I'd say the same for numerical methods.
They all taught me something. Computer org inspired me to seek the root of a problem. It gave a view of how computers actually work, something I lacked before the class despite knowing how plow around an OS and assemble the latest PC. It taught me logic, and the difference between a megabit and a megabyte; skills that I've used in every tech job, weather it's development or Unix administration.
Physics I and II taught me the scientific method. This was my most important lesson. That it takes a long time, and lots of hard work to really KNOW something. That if you can't repeat something with relative certainty, it's meaningless.. it's not the real problem. That in order to solve hard things, you need patience, a variety of knowledge to draw from, and resolve. It taught me to RTFM also. It was the first class where I learned the real value of reference material.
Software engineering taught me to draw a damn flowchart and understand the problem and my planned solution before I start coding. 2nd most valuable lesson from college. So many self taught CS people, they stunningly still don't get this.
Numerical methods taught me that across all languages, the tools are largely the same. I learned how to translate a math problem into procedural code. I've seen people that can't devise the code to draw a window in the middle of the screen. It's not something we went over in the FORTRAN, but I'm sure I know how to instantly solve it thanks to the style of thinking instilled in me by that class.
The advantage is I don't have to buy a console to play games. I already have a PC.
Oh, and I don't see World of Warcraft or the Sims add on pack infinitum working on the PS3.
And I still can't download patches for my games, or install any of a thousand mods for HL2 on my Wii. And before this generation of consoles, the PC was the only place I could browse the web, download some silly game and install it without driving to target. I can go to gamedev.net or linuxgames.com and download thousands of unique non-commercial games, some of astounding quality. The PC is the easiest platform to access for the independant or outcast developer.
The PC will have it's spot (even if it's a smaller one) as the more flexible platform for as long as we have them. That is certain. And it will always offer console style retail box, blockbuster commercial gaming as well.
Put simply, as long as people have had general purpose computers, there have been games for them. Maybe the market will shrink, maybe the limelight will fall to the shiniest new consoles for a while every 5 years, but this fact is not going to change. It's a general purpose computer, not an "only for work and old people who don't play games" computer. That's the thing, people see consoles with the momentum, winning.. but it's not like they could ever end pc gaming andwin.
I doubt it. It's selling like bloody hotcakes. Newegg can't keep them on the shelves.
Why do you think we are starting to see similar devices?
I think the market was ripe for such a thing, particularly at these price points. I know I "had to have" mine, and for $379USD am loving every minute of it.
Now, Windows mobile could be a nice somewhat lean OS for the thing, and I'd find this REDFLY pretty good if it was a little sleeker and more refined then my eeePC. I would prefer the Linux though because I'm a big Linux geek and it offers very much flexibility.
Human spaceflight is risky, ponderous and expensive. But there is a very deep, very meaningful reason to push on. See, I've always held on to the frail hope that one day we will leave this rock. It's why I read science fiction. I mean, who does not? I can't imagine it another way. I find contemplating the inevitable extinction of the human race utterly depressing. It's our deepest instinct to survive, after all.
Square one is always going to be expensive. But it's certainly not a waste of money. The peripheral benefits are enormous. Advances in engineering, industry, science and enough to inspire so many. Can you imagine if a woman was the first to step on Mars? She'd inspire us all. I'd like to see that in my lifetime.
We got hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks back to Earth was via the manned missions. A lot of those samples were selected Harrison Schmitt a geologist, based on geological significance, once he got there. They were thereafter distributed to leading geologists around the world, many in the Soviet Union even. The samples have probably done more to advance our understanding of the Moon than any other thing. The last Apollo mission was the most scientifically significant. We were just getting started.
It did not crash the US federal budget. It caused no wars. It employed 400,000 people. It gave Boeing and Locked Martin something to build besides bombs. Apollo was almost invariably, a great thing. Without Vietnam, perhaps it would have continued on.
I don't have a problem racing to Mars. In fact, I think we should be there already. We've been sitting on our laurels since the 70's. The apatite for realizing the Arthur Clarke type human future in space will vanish in a few generations if we don't give those generations anything to look forward to.
Of course! Read the rest of my post ;-)
STALKER is my favorite game in the past few years.
I'm sick of the "modern" FPS. HL2, Bioshock, never finished em'. I liked Doom3 better, but I won't rave about it.
It just seems these days you have incredible graphics and the inevitable linear progression up to "the Boss."
Further, things really never get any more challenging. I never feel like I need to take my gameplaying skill and reflexes to the next level, as I have grown up doing with simpler games. I'm just shooing more zombies.
I don't get any sense of immersion. Maybe they throw in some token power and equipment variety, that's it. These games feel like a mediocre scifi movie where I get to click my mouse button.
I enjoyed Doom 3 because it was intense and challenging at points. And the big fat shiny story did not have "twists and turns" as to be some poorly conceived distraction. It was closer to the pure arcade sweat it out experience.
I want my games to be difficult and intense (Quake-3 Multilayer) or more interactive with true freedom and quality RPG elements (STALKER). Just don't give me something with state of the art graphics that pretends to be both.
I just hope ID can deliver with RAGE. I like the setting, and I think the FPS market is ripe for something that truly provides old school RPG freedom. Oblivion and STALKER came very close.If you were talking about pixel detail, I might agree.
But It's all about the lighting and animation in a changing environment (starcraft was isometric with static lighting). It's hard to light and animate sprites convincingly, unless you have a lot of artists willing to draw a lot of frames.
Since I can't read, I completely mis-understood 50% of your post. The point about the Soyuz and Shuttle being so different.. that still bugs me but that's a rebuttal to the overall discussion.
You don't know anything about the history of the Russian space program, do you? Oh, and this, which killed 48 people. It's hard to find stuff on it though, because it was at the height of the cold war, and the USSR kept it secret.
Further, It's apples and oranges. The Soyuz and the shuttle are far far different. A Soyuz vehicle nearly fits in the shuttles cargo bay. Making just a big giant Soyuz won't necessarily be safer by default. I'm sure there's a bit more to it then that. Certainly we learned from the shuttle and it's far from perfect, but don't assume the Soyuz is a better design, because it's not designed for nearly the same purpose.
I believe that both sides take safety very seriously. What you said was an insult. We've all had enough fatalities.
Not me!
After this camper gets shot in the head, I like to watch the angry guy who I fragged like 4 times shoot up my dead body in rage and stand statue while he types something obscene.
I then usually quip, "Not dead yet! Go back and shot me some more!"
Impressive rant. You're correct, with the TCP/IP thing.
The mods did not think much of me anyway. Relax.
I know how much a Cisco UBR10012 costs. I can imagine how many Comcast has purchased. I do love working in the Cable industry though. It's by far the most interesting IT job I've ever had.
Since I admin a smallish ISP, I can tell you that it's already the next killer app. We've been monitoring network demographics with NTOP for quite some time.
This past year, we've seen a 10% increase in subscribers and a 60% increse in traffic. That increase is almost entirely http.
P2P protocol usage, on the other hand, plateaued last year. It is becoming more and more insignificant.
You can watch 20 episodes of Lost commercial free in "HD" full screen at nbc.com. I watched the Sarah Conner Chronicles (brought to you by Cisco, the irony..) at home last night and monitored my bandwidth consumption, which saturated at around 3Mb. This isn't youtube, the picture is great. It's very impressive, and easy to do. It was a 10 second pluggin install on my Windows machine.
People are rapidly finding this. An informal survey of our CSRs reveals that they are getting increasing volumes of calls where the subject comes up.
Never bet against the Internet, as they say.
TCP/IP has nothing in it, specifically, to deal with outages and alternate routes.
BGP is designed for this.
Spanning Tree also. That's a layer 2 protocol usually only in LAN environments.
Welcome to IT. Today, I had to: 1.) Figure out what "not in top of zone" meant in my BIND logs after tweaking a zone file. 2.) Get awk to not barf on an address book import script that happened to have 1 swiss character to deal with. 3.) Rebuild my RPM database cause Mandriva's update utility crashed on my workstation. 4.) Tirelessly search Cisco's website for an undocumented IOS command that I needed. Mod ME up!