Oi... 6 years ago at most, the Canadian Securities Administrators (the rough equivalent of America's SEC), was using dial-up to submit filings. A lot of Canadian public companies are resources companies, and thus required to file technical reports (usually 10-20 MB PDF docs) over a 56K modem connection. Yeah. You do the math.

They eventually replaced it with an internet-based VPN (thank God) but the filing application itself is still largely a NT4.0-based program, with lots of Win95-esque interface elements. A year and a half after Win7 was released, they announced a Win7-compatible version... that could only run on the 32-bit OS. What's more, the program requires admin privs to run... for no particularly good reason.

A new group has finally taken over the project with the goal of eventually overhauling everything. Canadian sysadmins breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of leaving the 1990s.

Symmetric or asymmetric?

Sysadmin for an SMB here. We develop our own browser-based app in Flash/Flex that we use for a big part of our work. It's also computationally intensive, and I was often being asked how we could improve the performance of the application on the client-platform side. Sure, we have decent hardware, but we were developing for the standard Firefox build, and that meant 32-bit and the restrictions that go with it.

Eventually I convinced the development team that since they had moved the backend to 64-bit code, that the client runtime environment should be there too, and so we optimized the frontend for Chrome (which obviously, is 64-bit, with Flash built in). The speed increase wasn't phenomenal, but it WAS noticeable. Now I'm even more glad we made this change.

Yeah, I must admit to being a bit perturbed by the "definite" language used by that statement. Theories involving geophysical fission at the core of the Earth are intriguing, but they're just theories, and kind of on the fringes of the discipline. Saying "there exists" is scientifically kind of insulting.

I've never had any problem getting ISPs to set up PTR records for our static IP addresses on their networks. Checking for a PTR is definitely an essential part of my spam-fighting configuration.

Those interested in the particulars might also want to check out a recent Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi. Basically, the SEC feels that until an actual case is opened, it is not required to store files for "matters under investigation". Definitely worth a read.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817

Yeah, no doubt. For Intel to lecture about "open" technology is the pot calling the kettle black. They way they aggressively hold the x86 platform to their chest, a lawsuit always waiting to drop on AMD or NVidia if either company does something they don't like.

Open up the x86 platform to a few other chip makers, then we can talk about "open systems".

High-bandwidth users to throttle Verizon.

Hey now... I was in high school in the late 90s and our computer science class was centred around Turbo Pascal. I learned a lot writing Pascal programs, and for my final project my lab partner and I wrote a graphical RPG including an on-screen scrolling-text display we wrote from scratch. The year after I left, they switched to C++.

I know Javascript, BASIC, Pascal, a bit of Perl, but not any C. And while I feel that every CS student should come away knowing it, I'm also thankful to these other languages for teaching me the fundamentals of program logic.

Actually, a rail link between Asia and North America under the Bering Strait doesn't seem so inefficient anymore, does it?