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Comment Re:NOT a robot (Score 1) 182

It has sensors to detect when it has bumped into something and automatically retreats. It senses when it is approaching a wall and prevents forward movement. When the parrot was removed it used its camera to locate the "docking station" and navigate its own way there.

Sure, it can be controlled, but it does its own thing too.

Comment Re:Wonderful Support... (Score 3, Interesting) 627

I'll echo this sentiment with my personal anecdote:

Working for a large Canadian telecom, preparing to launch a new service, I was reviewing the infrastructure at the behest of my manager after a sysadmin had moved into another role. I discovered, with no more than 2 weeks until this high profile service was to launch, that our clustered SQL instance would behave fine while sitting there or under minimal testing load, but as soon as you piled it on, the system would outright fall over.

Long story short, this led to a 36 hour phone call with Microsoft where I was escalated to SQL engineers and Windows engineers who in turn managed to pull strings at HP to get driver engineers on the phone leading to the discovery that the HBA drivers for our servers were crapping out under said load.

I'm a proponent of Linux, I use it where appropriate, I get support from RedHat on stuff that I need support on, and I generally loathe the generic issues that come along with running Windows. That said, when it comes to "Somebody is going to lose their job if I don't get this fixed" there are few organizations I'd rather have backing me up than Microsoft.

Comment Re:Someone needs to be flogged. (Score 4, Insightful) 295

While both of your points can be valid depending on the situation, I think it's stepping around the key point of the article. It doesn't really matter whether you choose a slightly less expensive Juniper system or if you home brew something, if at the end of the day you spec out a $15,000 server to host that router distribution, you're still paying *way* too much for routing services at a site that hosts less than 10 devices.

I've dealt with the exact same challenges that this Gianato says he was trying to avoid by simply buying the same model for everywhere. It's a ludicrous strategy, especially when choosing the 3945 as your standard. Using 1900 series Cisco gear would still be overkill for most of these sites, and would cost 10%.

Finally - it seems to me like the government is paying full list for their gear. Even small businesses get SOME discount from Cisco and their resellers, who the hell actually pays list? We're not even a big shop and our discount is at least 30-40% depending on what we're purchasing.

Pretty sad, really.

Comment Re:Unicast vs. Multicast (Score 5, Informative) 272

Multicast only works as a bandwidth savings device when you're streaming the same content at the same time to multiple devices. I'm not familiar with the Comcast Xfinity service, but to be able to glean any reasonable measure of savings you'd have to watch Xfinity like you do regular TV - shows scheduled at a certain time, not streamed on demand.

Comment Re:Here is something.. (Score 0) 400

What I find deeply disturbing is the number of people willing to pile on against the woman when TFA isn't even available. As pointed out in the link wbr1 provides, there was a court order for him to not abuse her, and he crossed the line. I don't want to be hyperbolic, but whenever there appears to be an article about a woman on /., the comments on said article indicate that /. has become some sort of tech hangout for MRAs. If I had mod points today I'd have blown them all down voting some of the hateful and/or sexist stuff in this thread.

There are many comments here which are no less disgusting than those in the recent situation involving Jennifer Hepler over on Reddit, and if you thought she got what she deserved you're only proving my point.

Google

Submission + - French court frowns on Google autocomplete, issues (arstechnica.com)

Lexx Greatrex writes: Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word "escroc," meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. "Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought," the article states. "A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie."
NASA

Submission + - NASA set for Mars spacecraft's big thruster blast (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: "NASA today said all systems were go for the Jan. 11 firing of its Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft's thrusters — a move that will more precisely set the ship's trajectory toward the Red Planet. NASA said the blast is actually a choreographed sequence of firings of eight thruster engines during a period of about 175 minutes beginning at 3 p.m. PST. The maneuver has been planned to use the spacecraft's inertial measurement unit to measure the spacecraft's orientation and acceleration"

Comment Last paragraph in the TFA is... confusing (Score 3, Insightful) 753

"First tests indicate that, for example, moving parts of the WebGL implementation to one side could save 300 KB. In a test run, the newer version of Visual Studio required less memory than the one that was previously used, and 64-bit Windows offers 4 GB of address space."

So, first of all, saving 300KB on WebGL seems like a pittance. Then, there's what appears to be the blatantly incorrect statement of 64-bit windows offering 4GB of address space - shouldn't that be way bigger, or am I stupid?

Power

Submission + - Iceland Announces First Carbon-Neutral Data Center (guardian.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Data centers consume a lot of energy, so companies ranging from Facebook to Google are exploring ways to lighten the load. Now the Icelandic city of Keflavik has announced plans to construct the world's first zero-carbon data center from a set of 37 prefabricated components. The project, commissioned by UK start-up Verne Global (a data hosting company), will comprise 5,400 sq ft and will be powered completely by geothermal and hydroelectric power.

Comment DansGuardian (Score 2) 384

DansGuardian with a proxy like squid should give you a basic websense-alike system - but even with all ports closed at the firewall except 80 and 443, bittorrent will likely still get through.

If you're truly worried about litigation, it seems like you could find a little money to deal with the issue. Take a look at Palo Alto Networks firewalls, especially the up and coming low-end model the PA-200.

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