And I've been getting increasingly nostalgic over WW1&2 shooters (Codename Eagle, BF1942, ET, the original CoD), over the current crop of modern warfare clones. This game might be right up my alley.

Don't have too much time to game these days, but if TF2 or PlanetSide 2 isn't hitting the spot, I might give the new Wolfenstein a try.

I'm not entirely sure what you're angling at VMware with that, but for AWS it makes more sense.

I was under the impression that OpenStack is a management and deployment framework - it will work on top of whatever supported hypervisors are in use (KVM, Xen, VMware, etc). One would assume you won't be exposed to the majority of OpenStack's APIs and direct management systems if you're using a third-party cloud provider.

Unless you're planning your own cloud system or are looking at a deployment on the scale where you would be closely looking at running up some of your own hardware with an IaaS partner for rapid scaling, I don't see any direct benefits to users. Especially for SMEs and non-IT-centric businesses, which are the primary targets for the "outsource everything to the cloud, it's worry free!" propaganda.

Reminds me of : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

I'd have to agree. VMware VI Client (the .NET one) is very well designed and thought out, but I'd add the HP 3PAR Management Console into the list of well-done management tools.

It's been a while since I used NetApp though. NetApp and 3PAR's management toolkits crap all over HP MSA/EVA or the various IBM SAN consoles for usability.

The same is true of comms here in Australia, where in order to obtain a carriers license, equipment must have certain features available for law enforcement purposes according to a set spec defined by the ACMA. There are also various data retention policies.

However, when the government makes drastic and expensive changes to infrastructure requirements for their own desires, there's an expectation that they foot the bill for changes to existing gear. After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.

Retrofitting configuration on to existing infrastructure can be very expensive compared to rolling out new kit, requiring changes from the management systems all the way to the network gear itself, testing/QA and so on. You're not just fiddling with ACLs or enabling netflows.

But even with that, they were reportedly pretty close to breaking the RAF, when they decided to change tactics and let them rebuild near the end of 1940.

Well lets see. If they try and message you after you've gotten your new droid/winphone/etc, they'll eventually get an error, if the previous conversation hasn't expired (expiry seems to take somewhere between an hour and a day, probably depending on network conditions). If it's expired and you're no longer on iMessage, or if they've had an error and try to send another message, it will go via SMS. Nothing default about it. Except in the case of an unexpired conversation, it's transparent.

If I want to remove a phone permanently from my iMessage account, I go into my iMessage settings, select the number and remove it. It's even easier if you own the device and it's part of your support profile, you can just do it through the Apple website. I own an iPad but my iPhone is employer-issue.

This iMessage stuff has been part of the iOS environment for literally years. This article is hyperventilating over nothing and is worthy only of a weary eye-roll.

Probably. But if you try installing a custom firmware, it will literally explode.

I can see a lot of carriers warming to this idea.

Australian labels are generally allied under the ARIA organisation, which has cordial relations with the RIAA. They're closely aligned in intent.

The other interesting thing is, Australian copyright law is much stricter about "fair dealing" (our version of the US' "Fair Use" clause), with exemptions only for very specific use cases. For instance, transcoding a CD to MP3 is not legal in AU. Nor would be using a jingle in a powerpoint for a highschool project, unless the jingle itself was the object of study. ARIA has said they will not sue for personal use such as this, which was taken as justification for not building in additional consumer protections and fair deal exclusions during the most recent revision of AU copyright law.

It's fortunate that this issue occurred and the case was tried in US jurisdiction.

Take for example the Australian model HECS scheme. Effectively, it's a government loan which is paid for like a tax.

Everything is paid for as it would be if you paid up front, by the government. When you leave university and begin to earn income, your annual tax bill is increased by a minimum amount (which you can increase if you want, or perform direct payments into HECS) which pays down the debt until it is gone. If you stop making income, you stop paying off the debt.

I can't recall the specifics, but I believe the latest changes peg the debt value to CPI, so it grows at the government-determined rate of inflation, well below market interest rates.

Overall, people pay for what they use, they can be capped if they're trying to become a professional student and debt load isn't as crippling as it sounds under the US system.

So?

Embedded systems using lightweight shells already take only a handful of seconds to boot up with their handrolled initscripts. And even more so than most desktops and servers, that embedded unit is probably going to be turned on for years at a time without reboots.

I've nothing against systemd itself, beside not being very familiar with its internals and being slightly annoyed at having to remember to type "systemctl" instead of "service", but it's silly to position its most-touted benefit as being "quicker boot times". A lot of the secondary benefits, well, we've already got things like OpenRC, rsyslogd and grep.

I may also be a little miffed at having ported a ton of old style init support glue (for a bunch of RH Kickstart configs) to the comparatively poorly documented Upstart, and now I have to change them again for 7's systemd :|.

After having a look over the doco for Godot, I'd say that CrystalSpace isn't as far behind as you'd think (especially if you include CEL). However, Godot seems to have more nice features if you're actually developing a game (nice UI, publishing integration).

CS suffers from being more of a programmer's playground than a practical game engine and having quite a steep learning curve, but I've been toying with it for more than a decade.

This hits closer to the mark - CS was started a long time ago, but it's ended up being well designed and modular. However, it's difficult to pick up new talent to implement new stuff with such a large existing codebase, leading to quite a bit of development inertia in certain areas.

Still, it works with modern OpenGL and console ports have been made.

I'm more interested in how Godot stacks up against a framework like Marmalade.

Well, I can't speak for the GP, but I don't keep any shortcuts on my desktop and pinned items are a bare minimum of common-use apps (Outlook, Firefox, PowerShell, etc). Having icons sprayed everywhere just feels extremely messy.

Admittedly, since getting a Mac at home, I have gotten into the habit of just hitting the windows key and searching for what I want (similar to Cmd-Space for Spotlight), which works better in Win8, but I still find the start screen incredibly annoying and inconsistent compared to the simplicity of a Start Menu that I've had for a decade.

Before that I had a Linux desktop and work machines running WindowMaker, which features a floating start menu :). My disdain for desktop icons and excessive pinning dates from that era.

Not sure what you mean by "trunk bandwidth", it could be either backhaul or transit.

Backhaul (from customer to ISP POP) needs to match closely or exceed end customer bandwidth. Most last mile wholesale providers will offer a 1:1 or low contention SLA, although some "manage" the bandwidth (they oversubscribe until someone complains). However, if an ISP can't get this, or they build it themselves, they need to make sure your backhaul interconnects are overbuilt enough to deal with expected growth in line with however long it would take to build additional capacity. This is the primary cost of end user connectivity. The local loop price is usually bundled in with backhaul for costing.

Transit is cheaper and much easier to manage, these are your interconnects to other networks. It needs to be overbuilt as well to exceed peak usage by enough margin to allow continual upgrades, but aggregate usage across an ISP is generally much lower than the sum of its customers. Transit physical interconnects are usually delivered directly into an ISP's POP (a location commonly shared with other network users and ISPs, like a regional datacentre) and benefit from economy of scale.

Discussing the cost of pure transit isn't too useful. Heavy users smash both backhaul and transit if they go nuts, and this usage can be much harder to predict and manage than 1000+ users calmly watching youtube or emailing kids for 5GB/mo. It is much easier at large scale, but for a small, non-profit rural co-op I imagine the handful of big users they have could get very expensive.

In the pricing model, there needs to be an element of discouragement (suddenly heavy users with deep pockets can still degrade network quality for everyone else) as well as recouping the cost of required upgrades and improvements to support the traffic. It is ridiculous for a non-profit to massively overcharge on the scale you're suggesting for no reason.

I'm not sure what Net Neutrality from the summary has to do with any of this either - this is usage-based billing over a flat pipe, not charging/throttling based on traffic type or destination. I may be a bit biased as I'm from somewhere where quota plans are the norm.

Getting a bit OT here, but I have not worked at a single company where the CEO/Managing Director/whatever did not work at least 2x the number of hours of practically everyone else.

For my current boss, stock market dabbling is leisure. Wining and dining whiners and strategic customers can be fun but it means he doesn't get spend time with the wife or golfing or just chilling in front of the TV. He's in at 5am checking projections and talking with vendors/big customers, regularily leaves at 4pm to go to business and networking seminars until late at night, or is just in the office until 6-7pm.

He's in his sixties, this is an established business that's been around for decades. Would you have the energy to build something like that from the ground up? I don't. He did. If he wants to relax a bit and drop the average back to a low 70-odd hours a week, good for him.