I've had the Slashdot RSS feed in prime position amongst my feeds for years now. I've been visiting /. on a nearly daily basis for a good 12 years. I have logged in solely to say that the beta layout has so utterly destroyed everything useful about Slashdot that if the powers that be do not revert back to the classic layout, I will permanently leave the site.

I know that many others feel this way. I have yet to see a single other person comment positively on the beta layout. I can only assume that this is an intentional ploy on the part of Dice to kill Slashdot; it's that bad. It's a shame because I have not found anywhere else on the Internet that provides the same mix of "topics I'm interested in" vs "insightful commentary". The beta layout removes all of that and more.

I can forgive the shoddy editorial standards, the late news, the duplicate stories and the trolls. But, to take away the usability of the site is something that will drive myself and others a long way from here, never to return. It's a shame. So, Dice, please listen to the users of this site, those who put eyes on adverts, and understand that this was a monumental mistake. Mistakes happen and risks are often worth taking, but in this case it clearly has not paid off; please revert the changes you've enforced before it is too late.

I'd assume there's a timestamp column or two for things like last login etc. That would reveal how used the application that uses the database is. Imperva sell WAFs though... and the hacker is focusing on the lack of a WAF? That seems a bit odd to me, but I could be reading too much into it. In any case, it's no bad thing to have a WAF as an extra layer of security, but you should still be immune to such attacks even without one. It should be a nice to have, not a silver bullet (which it never will be) against all attacks. Prepared statements and so on should be mandatory for anyone wishing to call themselves a developer.

Yes, we use it for one of our websites. It is Royal Bank of Scotland WorldPay - as would make sense, as opposed to Worldplay. KDawson strikes again - obviously it'd be too much to ask him to spend 10 seconds editing as his job title would suggest.

http://www.rbsworldpay.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBS_WorldPay

Seems generally more stable, I've been running the RC for a couple of days now. Not many immediately noticeable changes but lots of improved under the hood support. Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.

Anyway, the thing I'm really not sure of is the notifications system. Just about the only option with them seems to be to change their positioning via gconf-editor (and even that seems to be broken). I understand the philosophy behind them (see http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253) but they seem to be a little too unconfigurable, even for Gnome. Their black appearance would suit the KDE default theme, but it certainly doesn't fit in well with my much lighter Clearlooks theme in Gnome and there's no way to change that. One of the things I like about Gnome is the integrated look and feel of the entire system, whereas these stand out oddly. There is no way to dismiss them, so things get irritating when I want to use the search bar in Firefox and there's a notification covering it (these things could well be click transparent but it's still irritating). There is no way to configure what gets displayed as a notification either; I don't think I need each and every Pidgin message to be displayed as a notification for reasons of both privacy and distraction. To me, the notifications system seems a little too much like an answer looking for a problem. I may well disable them soon, after giving them a fair trial. The only sane way to do that seems to be to remove the notify-osd daemon. So much for ease of use!

That all said, it's my only major gripe with the upgrade, and that system was always going to be controversial. Hopefully it grows and improves. If not, I'm not forced to run it. Overall, this seems to be a steady incremental release that smoothes over a few rough patches and should hopefully do me well for another 6 months. Ubuntu is still the only distribution that I have not had very regular problems with on the desktop.

Assuming a bullet through the head is as reliable as you think it is (it is not), a large problem with this method of execution is the unnecessary stress it causes on the executioner. Firing squad executions are provided by a squad in no small part due to the inability to detect who was responsible for the lethal shot (there are other reasons). A point blank shooting causes a lot of psychological issues for most mentally stable people, and anyone working in the death row system should certainly be that.

It is my opinion that revenge and justice are two very separate ideas, and that state killing (if you accept such an idea; I don't) should be firmly restricted to the latter. Therefore, the quicker and more painless the execution the better, regardless of the crime.

You can get a PPL with a minimum of 45 (40 in the USA I believe) hours total time. Hell, you can get a fAPTL and jump in a 747 with 250 hours experience (not likely in the current economic climate but still legal).

So, just to nit pick, you have to be neither professional nor have thousands of logged hours; indeed you can be a professional with hundreds of logged hours. Most flight instructors start in the 250-500 hours category just to cheaply hours build.

Also, we already have enough light aircraft crashes as it is; the ones that usually don't make the national news (UK here). Relaxing the rules would be devastating in my opinion, and remember when a plane crashes, there's the whole mess on the ground too - will it crash into a field or a house?

What I've said holds true for FAA and JAA pilots pretty much the same. Anyway, if you're buying one of these bad boys for $200k, I doubt the extra ~$8-10k for a PPL is going to bother you, although perhaps the time spent learning and revising for the exams would.

Yeah, that is annoying, so may I suggest:

crisp@moar:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for crisp:
root@moar:/home/crisp#

Works for me!

Afraid I've got to interject here. I'm in the early stages of writing a dissertation, and OOo3 Writer just does not have the same feature set as even Word 2003 (which I'm using for it, under wine) for serious document composure.

I use Linux and have done for years, as my only OS, and I've used and support OOo and have done for years. I can't comment on the other portions of either office suite, because I've never put them to serious work. But, having spent a few hours really teaching myself Word 2003, then trying to see where the same functionality was in Writer, it became apparent that some of it just wasn't there.

It's a shame, but until OOo Writer gets (for example) something akin to Outline mode, it's just not able to match Word for advanced features. That said, OOo is very solid software, and will get there with regards to said features sooner or later I'm sure. Some may even say I'm using the wrong tool for the job.