One of the first things i did in my current job, was from sendmail to qmail and Maildir format.
If you have to deal with a lot of annoying clients with email problems in a day, its a Great change.
My main reason is simply this: Joe user gets 20 emails in his inbox, and one of them has a large (5 meg).avi file. He doesn't want to download the.avi, but gets dangerously angry when you suggest wiping out his mailbox and starting fresh. With maildir format, you can simply erase the large one, and the others are still file. This also applies to people that want certain files removed due to virus protection programs flagging their messages before they download them.
There are a few other purposes, that are pretty useful... You can tell, at a glance, how many mails any given user has in their box at any given time, without going in to any files.
All in all, The maildir format has had amazing results for me.. simply being able to run a script that will erase any horribly large mails every few hours without wiping out entire mailboxes is an amazing power to have.
This is fantastic. I suppose it makes the previous article, on Msql, even Less important (not to take anything away from the minisql people).
The real highlights from the artice are these:
-Currently any new product which needs access to some data over network supports some protocols and possibily some way to access filesystems over the net. Data in MySQL table can be accessed in such systems even when MySQL is not ported to named platform.
-Backup and version control - ordinary filesystems can be backed up using any backup software. This data can be compared using diff and revision controled with cvs.
-Much shorter programming. People use database sometime for holding very simple data like current date or site name. This is single record, single column table which changes rarely.
Most people that have had to use mySql from time to time, can see instantly where one or all of these features come in to play instantly. I'm excited.
Argh,,, do you know anything about the way overclocking and the whole chip manufacturing process goes? Overclocking doens't break data, it Can lead to system instability, through heat buildup, but a heatsink and a nice fan will fix that. But geez.. it doens't bloody scramble your data. I hate computer wives tales.
As far as my employment. I'm system administrator... and the guy with the money (I hate the word boss) has seen my little seti farm, and told me "let me know when you catch any ETs"
So feh to the first part and feh to the second part.
I think the more interesting thing than the technology behind seti, is the sociology.
Thousands of people are using it, religiously. I've been running it since it came out, i've overclocked my computer father, upgraded my processor, and even went so far as to install it quietly on the server farm at work:)
I'm not sure if people are in to it because they Dig feeling like part of the worlds largest computation (information age mob mentality?) or simply because we're incredibly lonely and, more often than not, thourougly dissapointed in the human race.
The fact that you have seti at home clubs and organizations, people hold personal meetings to discuss how many work units they've burned in the last month (I guess thats the other factor... what better way to flex your hardcore box), Almost outweighs the fact that you can hear cell phones on saturn... besides, from what i hear, the long distance rates from there are deadly.
Did you ever play the unreal tournament demo for 3DFX cards only. They've already done this. They had voodoo ads up on the walls or on billboards. Very cool idea.. but its been done.
I mean, people putting a couple bucks in a pot and one person gets it all happens all the time. In card games, office pools, charity runs, etc. I mean, yeah, its new to Gaming, but Gaming Is New. There was even a pot going on about guessing when the linux 2.4 kernel would come out...i forget the link off hand.
Now yeah ok some of the things i mentioned are people betting on other things, where as in gaming its people betting on themselves... But i'm not sure anyone can Really act suprised... Teens and geeks in my city used to Play Mortal Kombat in arcades at 5 dollars a win, 5 years ago? Were we pioneers? or really just fulfilling the human need to bet?
Those all seem pretty bad, yeah. But have the people at Forbes ever tried tech support?
I would rather a week in Any of those jobs than a day in a " no Sir, We can't give you your money back because you accidentaly bought RealPlayer.(?)" or "No Ma'am i can't really stop your husband from visiting porno sites" or worse yet, getting emails saying "Help me! I can't send or receive email!" (I never really did figure that one out)
The point is, there are a Lot worse things one could be doing that regulating a chatroom or packing dog poo. Techs deal with stupidity and shit every day.
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One of the first things i did in my current job, was from sendmail to qmail and Maildir format. If you have to deal with a lot of annoying clients with email problems in a day, its a Great change.
.avi file. He doesn't want to download the .avi, but gets dangerously angry when you suggest wiping out his mailbox and starting fresh. With maildir format, you can simply erase the large one, and the others are still file. This also applies to people that want certain files removed due to virus protection programs flagging their messages before they download them.
My main reason is simply this: Joe user gets 20 emails in his inbox, and one of them has a large (5 meg)
There are a few other purposes, that are pretty useful... You can tell, at a glance, how many mails any given user has in their box at any given time, without going in to any files.
All in all, The maildir format has had amazing results for me.. simply being able to run a script that will erase any horribly large mails every few hours without wiping out entire mailboxes is an amazing power to have.
This is fantastic. I suppose it makes the previous article, on Msql, even Less important (not to take anything away from the minisql people).
The real highlights from the artice are these:
-Currently any new product which needs access to some data over network supports some protocols and possibily some way to access filesystems over the net. Data in MySQL table can be accessed in such systems even when MySQL is not ported to named platform.
-Backup and version control - ordinary filesystems can be backed up using any backup software. This data can be compared using diff and revision controled with cvs.
-Much shorter programming. People use database sometime for holding very simple data like current date or site name. This is single record, single column table which changes rarely.
Most people that have had to use mySql from time to time, can see instantly where one or all of these features come in to play instantly. I'm excited.
Argh,,, do you know anything about the way overclocking and the whole chip manufacturing process goes? Overclocking doens't break data, it Can lead to system instability, through heat buildup, but a heatsink and a nice fan will fix that. But geez.. it doens't bloody scramble your data. I hate computer wives tales.
As far as my employment. I'm system administrator... and the guy with the money (I hate the word boss) has seen my little seti farm, and told me "let me know when you catch any ETs"
So feh to the first part and feh to the second part.
I think the more interesting thing than the technology behind seti, is the sociology.
:)
Thousands of people are using it, religiously. I've been running it since it came out, i've overclocked my computer father, upgraded my processor, and even went so far as to install it quietly on the server farm at work
I'm not sure if people are in to it because they Dig feeling like part of the worlds largest computation (information age mob mentality?) or simply because we're incredibly lonely and, more often than not, thourougly dissapointed in the human race. The fact that you have seti at home clubs and organizations, people hold personal meetings to discuss how many work units they've burned in the last month (I guess thats the other factor... what better way to flex your hardcore box), Almost outweighs the fact that you can hear cell phones on saturn... besides, from what i hear, the long distance rates from there are deadly.
ahh yes but the difference is... Unreal Tourneys adfs were paid for
the old Apple ][ days they were there just to bring a level of realism, to mute the level of pixelism. heh.
Did you ever play the unreal tournament demo for 3DFX cards only. They've already done this. They had voodoo ads up on the walls or on billboards. Very cool idea.. but its been done.
actually, i'm a system administrator. But we All have to pay our dues at some point. And i did.
Maybe you compiled a kernel from the womb and your first word was a perl RegEx, but me, like most people, had to climb my way up.
I mean, people putting a couple bucks in a pot and one person gets it all happens all the time. In card games, office pools, charity runs, etc. I mean, yeah, its new to Gaming, but Gaming Is New. There was even a pot going on about guessing when the linux 2.4 kernel would come out...i forget the link off hand.
Now yeah ok some of the things i mentioned are people betting on other things, where as in gaming its people betting on themselves... But i'm not sure anyone can Really act suprised... Teens and geeks in my city used to Play Mortal Kombat in arcades at 5 dollars a win, 5 years ago? Were we pioneers? or really just fulfilling the human need to bet?
Those all seem pretty bad, yeah. But have the people at Forbes ever tried tech support?
I would rather a week in Any of those jobs than a day in a " no Sir, We can't give you your money back because you accidentaly bought RealPlayer.(?)" or "No Ma'am i can't really stop your husband from visiting porno sites" or worse yet, getting emails saying "Help me! I can't send or receive email!" (I never really did figure that one out)
The point is, there are a Lot worse things one could be doing that regulating a chatroom or packing dog poo. Techs deal with stupidity and shit every day.
wow this makes fred moody one of thw Worst People Ever, by my logic.