Reading some of the comments at Gizmodo ( http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/06/bbc-home-page-clock-to-be-pulled-after-one-complaint/ ) I begin to see the BBC's point. Apart from (possibly) being part of the template code and therefore requiring extensive site-wide testing, it might well probably break their (reportedly extensive) page caching.

Some there speculate that the old technique uses a client-side function call that is happily cached, while the new version either has to include client-side code that maintains and corrects for the local error offset (= extensive testing requirements due to multiple client platforms), or needs to include a server-generated time specifically customized for that client (= impossible to cache).

I have to wonder if this is deliberate -- or at least if it's a very low priority at M$ -- as they know this behaviour (occasionally changing a VM's MAC address) won't break any Windows systems -- only some Linux distros and network infrastructure.

That's like saying that it's okay to pollute the atmosphere with some poisonous gas (say, for example, chlorine gas) because we can always use technology to re-purify it.

I second this. I've migrated several business services (e.g. svn, flyspray, etc.) from physical boxes running various OSes (W2K8, Ubuntu) to CentOS virtual hosts on HyperV. Apart from one issue*, which is a stupidity using Minimal CentOS unrelated to Hyper-V, I have yet to see a single problem running CentOS on Hyper-V.

* CentOS Minimal requires manual network setup, which is fine, but there is no plug-and-play support. So whenever the VM is moved to a new Hyper-V server, the CentOS networking breaks (the solution is to manually assign a MAC address for the virtual NIC, rather than using the default "automatic" setting).

But even though the CBC gave good coverage to the leak story, Canada has been left out of this new group of governments agreeing to dig deeper into it. Baffling....

'nuff said

36 from Montreal -- and 20 of it is in the hop from ...newyork.savvis.net to ...chicago.savvis.net

Well, I used to do that. But then I bought a house with a huge park across the street, and that solved many of the issues. The dog's been hit twice by cars -- why it's still alive, I don't know -- and the parties in the park sometimes get out of hand...

http://spacing.ca/montreal/2007/09/10/joining-the-medieval-battle-on-mount-royal/

Or if it's Tuesday

Yes, not to mention decreasing pollution, and diminishing the ubiquitous delusion that it is a good idea for all the space around our houses to be paved in asphalt and filled with large metal boxes, some parked, some moving, but all getting in the way of what I want outside my front door. I, for one, would prefer a park.

Ok, I've managed to work out a truly marvelous 7-character conversion in APL, but the margin is too small to contain it.

Seems like a perfect candidate for a simple one-line APL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) ) function. This should be something like {/~{\}, but my keyboard doesn't have the required keys to enter any of the characters needed. Can anyone help?

Our family / family business has run, with increasing formality, email servers in various flavours since the mid-90's. These servers have processed messages including everything from lots (like really lots -- in the tens of thousands at least) of family pictures to (no doubt) lots of personal email of the many dozens of staff who have worked with us over the years. In general, the server settings have always been set to "retain everything", including full Exchange journalling, because there was no way to delete things without risking losing some important pictures someone sent to someone else.

I'm not too worried about the business activity traffic, because anything recent is well replicated in many other places -- primarily in various cached Outlook data files. But where family members threw away their old machines, the only copies of these important things are in the server journals we have archived. Is there some solution that can rationalize these millions of messages into some sort of structure?

In addition, I presume that this can only be done for individuals who actually want old items to be retrieved from the archives, as anyone else would be protected by privacy rights.