Damn FDIC. Oh well...

By the way, the phone number for Dice Holding's corporate headquarters is 212-725-6550. Be sure to give them a call and let them know what you think about their new design.

Time for a firefox extension "classic slashdot?"

No, it is that proper security is really hard to do, especially when you deal with third parties that need to access portions of the network that management also needs to access. It doesn't help when the third party has one company account, and a reasonably high turnover rate of employees.

I used to have a rolodex of access cards for different clients and sites. Many companies required a different card for each building. Then this magical internet came along and they merged all of the security systems into central corporate security. Like magic I only needed one card for each client, locked down to specific areas I needed access in different building. Then... they had a problem. I couldn't get into the building to help out. It wasn't the end of the world, but the project manager I was working for ended up giving me all access to keep it from happening again. It took two years for a corporate security audit to call me and ask why the hell I needed "ring zero access" or whatever they called it. Up until that I had cash vault access for whatever stupid reason.

The bigger and more distributed organizations get, and the deeper the tree is on the contractors they work with, the more it becomes impossible to manage security without paying a huge efficiency penalty.

Sorry to get so off-topic; aren't we supposed to be talking about how miserable the beta.slashdot.org site is? Completely unusable; are there any other competing websites that could resurrect the old slashcode?

Is Kuro5hin still around? ;)

It's a shame there is such a disconnect. /. Really was the start of Web 2.0. Looks like it will be the start of 3.0ooohpleezewhybother as well.

I'm sticking /. into the hosts file next week to resist temptation. Pretty clear management doesn't read slashdot though. The web designers must have gotten their feelings hurt and stopped as well...

At work with 10-Meg metropolitan fiber, no problem. At home, I pay 10% the price for a 15/5 plan; I would be kidding myself if I thought I could get the same level of service. The $ savings justifies it though, within reason.

I think Verizon's business FIOS plans are about double residential rates, which should give you less contention.

So, can we have a user's buyout of /. then? I'll pledge $20 for first year operating costs.

Too bad Taco's new site is even worse than Beta...

If you are throttling an hour a day it isn't QoS anymore, it is traffic shaping. If you throttle an hour a day to levels below 10% of rated bandwidth, are you delivering the bandwidth promised?

It is one thing for an ISP to react to using 100% bandwidth 100% of the time, but another altogether when you want peak capacity for 5% of the time, 50% for 15%, and 10% for the remaining 80% of the time. If you run two Netflix streams at a time at home with a 2 Mbit connection, you have unreasonable expectations of your ISP. Running two with a 10 Mbit connection doesn't seem as far off, as long as you aren't talking 24x7.

Yes it can be done. No, it isn't efficient. If you are only paying $0.0075/kWh in fuel (and ignoring disposal costs), you can afford some inefficiencies, but the relative advantage of nuclear goes away pretty quickly if your efficiency drops off dramatically.

Don't tell that to Toyota! They are investing heavily in Hydrogen fuel cells for SUV-class cars.

That is actually done to a very large extent now. Foundries running electric arc furnaces or induction furnaces only run in the off-peak period, currently at night. This artificially increases base loads.

The problem with trying to match generation with demand is that you still have a transmission/distribution problem. Distributed generation is the only way to really solve that, and again economics make it difficult to distribute power generation to the point where local demand is matched to local production in both capacity and timing.

People are trying to get closer to this-- automated demand response can help a little bit.

The California ISO is pretty open with information. They track daily anticipated demand, actual demand, and available capacity. Some actually predict that solar energy that is not time-shifted will become nearly worthless in five years.

Exactly what I was going to post; fundamentally variable production and nuclear don't mix well. Nuclear only works as a base load power source.

Presumably you could design a nuclear reactor and turbine system to be able to better modulate to match load. This wouldn't fix nuclear power's economics problems though, which are really what force it to be running all-out as many hours a year as they can.

They must use the same packing department as hp still.

What exactly do you suggest? We used to buy generic servers, but the warranty/support was terrible, so we switched to Dell. We used to run Linux firewalls, but the VPN options were incompatible with iPhones. (Yes, you can use the awful kludge of an essentially adware-laden OpenVPN client now.). So, we went with Cisco.

To be honest, I am most pissed with our multifunction printers now. Ricoh has become very difficult to self-repair and expensive to operate, Minolta worse... Haven't found a good current model yet that can print PDF vector graphics quickly and with good quality, while still being easy to replace the drum or rollers without a technician.

My paywall hate is the fact that the quality of the material presented does not correlate to the "cost" of registering. Out of habit, I go to SFGate often enough, but the quality is simply junk: there might be two news articles on the front page, and a bunch of human interest slide shows... for the people that can't read? I also read Seattle PI for a while, until they started doing goofy things with hijacking the browser. There are several others that come and go, but quite frankly I have no interests in another city's local interest or politics.

Google News used to be good, but they pretty much killed that.

Most of the newspapers have so little original news content that it is hard to call them a real source of information.

If I am going to pay for a news site, I want quality, quantity, and relevance. I want at least 20 articles a day that are interesting to me; I prefer no advertising and easy access. For that, I could probably part with the same amount I give Wikimedia each year, despite the fact it is likely to provide me with less value.