Asking/. a question is not a sign of a n00b or bad IT person. What better place than one of the biggest techie readerships on the Internet to ask questions. I find many Ask Slashdot threads to be very informative, filed away for 'future use'
The issue isn't whether or not the submitter is a "n00b" (although he clearly is). The issue is whether or not SLashdot is an approrpiate format for such poorly formulated questions. Questions that require clarification. Notice that we have not yet heard back from Mr. "onebadmutha" despite many requests for more information about his configuration and requirements. I seriously doubt his sincerity.
I guess it depends on how your 'remote workers' are accessing your network. Are they trying to mount your internal file server? Just POP'ing email? SSH to your servers? Are they doing it constantly? Remote users working on a fast internet connection doesn't automatically mean they demand lots of bandwidth. The majority of T1's I have seen have been largely underutilized on average even with remote users. And a company of any significant size (big enough to saturate a T1) would probably not run VoIP over that same line without some way of prioritizing voice traffic. I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
Anyway, The original poster specifically mentioned using DSL and splitting their users between DSL lines. Didn't sound like he was concerned about remote users... just getting faster internet for local users.
In what way is it a war? What are the stakes, exactly? The only ones with anything to lose are MS and Apple (and similar groups). Let THEM worry about wars and marketing and install bases and demographics. THe great thing about open source, for me at least, is the free exchange of code and ideas and the fact that nobody has to do anything they don't want to... and yet things get done because people enjoy it.
But what do I know. I'm just a mushheaded wanna-be hippy.
Like 0.1% of teh population. I've thought about it.
Out of date or out of reason, either way it reeks of "amateur." I mean, come on. The site is like 5 pages total. The least they can do is keep it up to date.
Heh, I just went to http://www.intouchtechnical.com/ (the domain of the submitter's email address). Looks like a pretty amateurish IT shop. Especially if they don't understand how to scale Internet access. And check out their computers section: http://www.intouchtechnical.com/comp.html Geez, $1200 for an AthonXP +2200 system.... with Win2k?? WTF?
I bet they have like 1 guy running Bittorrent all day using up all their bandwidth.
Such a line can easily be brought to it's knees by simply saturating the upstream. ADSL does not work well in business environments with many users. I'd take a full T1 over that 7M/768k DSL line for a business any day.
Slow down there, chief. Exactly what kind of company would be going from fractional T-1, to DSL, to... an OC-48? (I sssume you were exaggerating on the OC-48)
Couple questions:
1) How many employees are we talking about here? 2) What are they doing on the internet that is so demanding? 3) Are you running any web/streaming servers onsite? 4) Have you gone to any lengths to diagnose exactly what your bottleneck might be? 5) Are you sure you don't just have a couple of hogs downloading porn all day?
I know 200+ employee companies that get by with a single T-1 just fine. I'm a little suspicious of your bandwidth needs.
But if you really meed that much bandwidth for web browsing (I doubt you do), the next step would be a DS-3 circuit at about 45Mbit. But that can be pretty costly for the circuit alone. It would, however, allow you to scale because you'd probably be paying for the bandwidth used and not the full 45Mbit. If you are in a building with other companies who have similar needs, you may be able to split the cost of the circuit and share it.
Also, depending on your location, you may be able to setup a wireless (not WiFi) deal with someone. Something with real gear, of course. Not just a couple Linksys' with Pringle can antennaes.
Do we really need another KDE over nix variant? How about something gasp, new? Or at least barring something new, a unifed KDE or Gnome over *nix pre installed and configured on a desktop pc so the folks at home can use it? Isn't yet another variant just dispersing our energies? Yes freedom is supper cool, but letting M$ and Apple win due a lack of discpline or fresh ideas is not...
Good, idea. You get working on that. Meanwhile, other developers are going to do what they like to do. This isn't a war, ya know. Nobody is "letting MS and Apple win."
Maybe there's something I'm missing about this project but at the very least it wasn't immediatly obvious from looking at screenshots.
Indeed, it isn't particularly revolutionary. Just KDE running on yet another *nix variant.
The primary advantage of Linux is that it has a cooler name than BSD.
Seriously, when it comes right down to it, you end up running all the same software anyway (xfree86/Xorg, KDE, Firefox, etc), so it doesn't really much on the desktop. Depends on what type of package management you prefer. Like ports? Use BSD. Like RPMs? Use RedHat/CentOS/etc. Like apt-get et al? Try Debian or Ubuntu. Also, consider hardware support. You may not have much of a choice if one OS supports your hardware and the the other doesn't.
7 times more reliable? Seems awefully simplistic to me. Most people are going to want to put those drives in an array. With RAID 5 (to get the performance you talk about) you'd have 6 disks worth of space and could only afford 1 drive failure. How do you get 7 times more reliable out of that? It is no more reliable than 2 mirrored 750GB disks. Besides, what does your average user put 7 drives in?
Basically, I don't think that a cell phone virus would have nearly the impact of even a simple PC virus due to the fact that (as the article states) people just aren't that unprepared anymore. Maybe if we all were given wide open Windows !Smart Phones? Besides - I think my carrier would probably *charge* me to run a virus:D
So what does it matter if people are prepared for it? How has being prepared stopped Windows viruses and worms? And even if preparedness could stop viruses on the whole, it isn't like users can go out and install anti-virus software on their cell phone (last I checked, I could be wrong). I think we really are in times roughly equipvilent to 1988 in PC years. Currently, the easiest way to propagate a phone virus is via bluetooth. Which is kinda like floppies in 1988. Soon enough, phones will be connected peer to peer.
Yeah, like anyone is goign to try to ship nuclear bomb parts via Fed Ex (or whatever). Come on. How easy would it be to fly it in via private plane from Canada or Mexico like the tons of drugs that get into the US every day.
Not to mention that their dollar figures are somewhat misleading, as they didn't include the cost of the host PC...and AMD Opeteron 280 processors don't cost ANYWHERE NEAR $2,000. They also didn't show us how cheaper processors do.
They also didn't say how cheaper GPU's do.
You can buy a Tyan quad-CPU motherboard for about $1k, and the dual-core version of the 280 for $1k tops. So...that's $5-5.5K for a box with EIGHT processors that will do 6 million complex values in almost half the time as the $500 video card sitting in a workstation that most likely costs well over $1,500. So it's not really quite as simple as "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!"
Why does the workstation have to cost well over $1,500? Any PCIe system should do. YOu coudl build a system capable of holding such a GPU for well under $1,000 AND you could put muliple GPUs in it. Sure sounds pretty close to "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!" to me.
Also, did you know that you can buy a Sempron motherboard, 1GB of ram, and sempron processor for about $150 these days? For the same cost as that one GPU, you can buy 3 complete Sempron systems and have change left over for your networking gear.
But then you're hardly talking about "high performance" FFTs. You're just being a cheapass.
Spamtraps aren't the problem. Clueless users who sign up to something and then forget about it, or then decide they didn't want it after all... I'm sure there are more.
I doubt this is a serious problem. Most of these things that people might sign up for probably aren't true opt-in anyway ("send me mail" checked by default). Speaking as someone who admins mail servers and has to fight back spam on a daily basis, I can't say I really care if a few legitmate marketing companies get blocked. My users won't miss it.
Frankly, Spamcop is a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.
Speaking also as someone who has occasionally had to get servers (not just my own) off of Spamcop's blacklist, I can say that is easily worth it. The servers were listed for valid reasons. Spamcop is a valuable service.
And I don't give a damn whether Spamcop users receive mail from me or not. It's their loss, their problem, their idiot choice to use it. I sure as hell won't be bothering to jump through hoops to get my mailservers delisted if they ever get on there.
Lets just hope you don't have any other people using your servers. I'm sure they won't be so sympathetic.
Spamcop's design and processes are (from what I have experienced) just not sensible in the Real World.
I block tons of spam based on Spamcop and similar blackhole services. The more I can block based on blacklists, the less resoruces I need to dedicate to processing and scanning the garbage. When greater than 60% of all mail coming to your servers is spam and you get millions of messages a day (gross), you'll see the sense. A couple messages lost from lazy admins such as yourself is a small price to pay.
To be fair, I think he is talking about the confirmation emails triggering the block.
1. Competitor X signs up a spamtrap address to the "marketing" list 2. Spammer^H^H^H^H^H^HMarketer sends confirmation email to the spamtrap. 3. Marketer gets blocked because he is trying to confirming the subscription of a spamtrap address
Personally, I've never seen confirmation emails for marketting material. Mailing lists and forums, yes, but not marketing. So I am suspicious of the claim.
Your casual attitude toward "oh well, shouldn't have sent email to $secretspamtrap" without telling us *what* email or giving us details on how to avoid it in the future (like maybe adding your spamtrap domains to our lists that trigger "oh no, spammer" in our checks), you end up making RBLs more useless, and my job harder.
We WANT to make your job harder! Don't you get it?
You want to know how to avoid sending to spamtraps? Don't harvest emails from the web or buy lists from harvesters!
Oh come on, "email marketing" is a code word for "spamming" in the biz. OK, maybe, just maybe, your messages are "legit" and maybe you really do take people off your lists when they opt-out, but the reality is that savvy users shouldn't trust opt-outs. Too many spammers use it as a way of verifying good addresses to spam. It is much easier to simply report emails from unwanted "email marketers" as spam.
Nah, I don't buy it. I don't think it is reasonable for an ISP to store 2 years worth of full packet dumps of traffic. Just like the phone company can't reasonably record every phone call. Sure, they have records of the phone calls themselves, but that is a lot different than having them recorded. Same for an ISP. You can log connections easy enough. But I think dumping all the data to disk takes a lot more storage and CPU power than you think. And then you have to be able to index it and find what you want later!
I call bullshit. I'm not sure what "definition" you're using, but a given interface does not have to become more complex as functions get added. As a matter of face, added features can simplify a given interface.
I think you are confusing functions and features. Certainly features such as voice activated calling (when it works) make a phone easier to use. Functions, on the otherhand, quite often make it more complicated to use... especially if you want to make them easy to access along side other functions. Then you start to add new features to compensate for the extra complexity of the functions.. and the cycle goes on until you have an interface that is many times more difficult to use than it would be if all the phone did was make and recieve calls and store a few numbers.
I can't think of something specific atm, but I'm sure you can find an example or two in Cupertino somewhere.
If by Cupertino, you mean Apple, I would say they are a perfect example of sacrificing functions (but not necessarily features) for simplicity and ease of use. Microsoft, on the other hand, loves to try to load interfaces (and APIs) with all kinds of functions. See the difference?
What always annoyed me about the advances in mobile phone technology is that they never really improved reception. They add feature after feature. You can take and send photos. You can browse the internet, but you always manage to lose signal in the worst possible places. I used to live in a large metropolitan area and would regularly lose signal. I lived *inside* Chicago and I could barely get a signal in my own damn apartment. Is it because of the buildings? Maybe it'll never work right.
I say screw all the stupid features. Just give me a phone that just works everywhere. I couldn't care less if it can take pictures, browse the web, or download movie trailers.
And what do kids do when they go outside? Play, right? While I don't defend countless hours indoors playing video games, I wonder what makes you think that it effects productivity in the workplace. I also wonder why your first concern would be workplace productivity. Is that what we are raising kids for? To be effective in the workplace? Why isn't happiness your primary concern here? If people don't grow up happy, what is the point of being effective in the workplace? Seriously, my primary concern would be for the overall mental and emotional health of people with gaming addiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Asking /. a question is not a sign of a n00b or bad IT person. What better place than one of the biggest techie readerships on the Internet to ask questions. I find many Ask Slashdot threads to be very informative, filed away for 'future use'
The issue isn't whether or not the submitter is a "n00b" (although he clearly is). The issue is whether or not SLashdot is an approrpiate format for such poorly formulated questions. Questions that require clarification. Notice that we have not yet heard back from Mr. "onebadmutha" despite many requests for more information about his configuration and requirements. I seriously doubt his sincerity.
-matthew
I guess it depends on how your 'remote workers' are accessing your network. Are they trying to mount your internal file server? Just POP'ing email? SSH to your servers? Are they doing it constantly? Remote users working on a fast internet connection doesn't automatically mean they demand lots of bandwidth. The majority of T1's I have seen have been largely underutilized on average even with remote users. And a company of any significant size (big enough to saturate a T1) would probably not run VoIP over that same line without some way of prioritizing voice traffic. I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
Anyway, The original poster specifically mentioned using DSL and splitting their users between DSL lines. Didn't sound like he was concerned about remote users... just getting faster internet for local users.
-matthew
In what way is it a war? What are the stakes, exactly? The only ones with anything to lose are MS and Apple (and similar groups). Let THEM worry about wars and marketing and install bases and demographics. THe great thing about open source, for me at least, is the free exchange of code and ideas and the fact that nobody has to do anything they don't want to... and yet things get done because people enjoy it.
But what do I know. I'm just a mushheaded wanna-be hippy.
Like 0.1% of teh population. I've thought about it.
-matthew
Out of date or out of reason, either way it reeks of "amateur." I mean, come on. The site is like 5 pages total. The least they can do is keep it up to date.
-matthew
Heh, I just went to http://www.intouchtechnical.com/ (the domain of the submitter's email address). Looks like a pretty amateurish IT shop. Especially if they don't understand how to scale Internet access. And check out their computers section: http://www.intouchtechnical.com/comp.html Geez, $1200 for an AthonXP +2200 system.... with Win2k?? WTF?
I bet they have like 1 guy running Bittorrent all day using up all their bandwidth.
-matthew
Such a line can easily be brought to it's knees by simply saturating the upstream. ADSL does not work well in business environments with many users. I'd take a full T1 over that 7M/768k DSL line for a business any day.
-matthew
Slow down there, chief. Exactly what kind of company would be going from fractional T-1, to DSL, to... an OC-48? (I sssume you were exaggerating on the OC-48)
Couple questions:
1) How many employees are we talking about here?
2) What are they doing on the internet that is so demanding?
3) Are you running any web/streaming servers onsite?
4) Have you gone to any lengths to diagnose exactly what your bottleneck might be?
5) Are you sure you don't just have a couple of hogs downloading porn all day?
I know 200+ employee companies that get by with a single T-1 just fine. I'm a little suspicious of your bandwidth needs.
But if you really meed that much bandwidth for web browsing (I doubt you do), the next step would be a DS-3 circuit at about 45Mbit. But that can be pretty costly for the circuit alone. It would, however, allow you to scale because you'd probably be paying for the bandwidth used and not the full 45Mbit. If you are in a building with other companies who have similar needs, you may be able to split the cost of the circuit and share it.
Also, depending on your location, you may be able to setup a wireless (not WiFi) deal with someone. Something with real gear, of course. Not just a couple Linksys' with Pringle can antennaes.
-matthew
More like playing D&D and having sex.
Real men can combine the two.
Do we really need another KDE over nix variant? How about something gasp, new?
Or at least barring something new, a unifed KDE or Gnome over *nix pre installed and configured on a desktop pc so the folks at home can use it? Isn't yet another variant just dispersing our energies? Yes freedom is supper cool, but letting M$ and Apple win due a lack of discpline or fresh ideas is not...
Good, idea. You get working on that. Meanwhile, other developers are going to do what they like to do. This isn't a war, ya know. Nobody is "letting MS and Apple win."
Maybe there's something I'm missing about this project but at the very least it wasn't immediatly obvious from looking at screenshots.
Indeed, it isn't particularly revolutionary. Just KDE running on yet another *nix variant.
-matthew
$_ = "Linux";
s/Linux/Mescaline/;
Not only does Linux have a cooler name, but it is also much more clever about hiding its true nature.
-matthew
The primary advantage of Linux is that it has a cooler name than BSD.
Seriously, when it comes right down to it, you end up running all the same software anyway (xfree86/Xorg, KDE, Firefox, etc), so it doesn't really much on the desktop. Depends on what type of package management you prefer. Like ports? Use BSD. Like RPMs? Use RedHat/CentOS/etc. Like apt-get et al? Try Debian or Ubuntu. Also, consider hardware support. You may not have much of a choice if one OS supports your hardware and the the other doesn't.
-matthew
To open firefox or openoffice or netbeans takes very long.
;-)
Wait, you mean there are systems on which loading OpenOffice or Netbeans doesn't take a long time? Man, I need to get a new computer.
-matthew
7 times more reliable? Seems awefully simplistic to me. Most people are going to want to put those drives in an array. With RAID 5 (to get the performance you talk about) you'd have 6 disks worth of space and could only afford 1 drive failure. How do you get 7 times more reliable out of that? It is no more reliable than 2 mirrored 750GB disks. Besides, what does your average user put 7 drives in?
-matthew
Basically, I don't think that a cell phone virus would have nearly the impact of even a simple PC virus due to the fact that (as the article states) people just aren't that unprepared anymore. Maybe if we all were given wide open Windows !Smart Phones? Besides - I think my carrier would probably *charge* me to run a virus :D
So what does it matter if people are prepared for it? How has being prepared stopped Windows viruses and worms? And even if preparedness could stop viruses on the whole, it isn't like users can go out and install anti-virus software on their cell phone (last I checked, I could be wrong). I think we really are in times roughly equipvilent to 1988 in PC years. Currently, the easiest way to propagate a phone virus is via bluetooth. Which is kinda like floppies in 1988. Soon enough, phones will be connected peer to peer.
-matthew
Yeah, like anyone is goign to try to ship nuclear bomb parts via Fed Ex (or whatever). Come on. How easy would it be to fly it in via private plane from Canada or Mexico like the tons of drugs that get into the US every day.
-matthew
Not to mention that their dollar figures are somewhat misleading, as they didn't include the cost of the host PC...and AMD Opeteron 280 processors don't cost ANYWHERE NEAR $2,000. They also didn't show us how cheaper processors do.
They also didn't say how cheaper GPU's do.
You can buy a Tyan quad-CPU motherboard for about $1k, and the dual-core version of the 280 for $1k tops. So...that's $5-5.5K for a box with EIGHT processors that will do 6 million complex values in almost half the time as the $500 video card sitting in a workstation that most likely costs well over $1,500. So it's not really quite as simple as "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!"
Why does the workstation have to cost well over $1,500? Any PCIe system should do. YOu coudl build a system capable of holding such a GPU for well under $1,000 AND you could put muliple GPUs in it. Sure sounds pretty close to "OMG 4X PERFORMANCE, ONE QUARTER THE COST!!!" to me.
Also, did you know that you can buy a Sempron motherboard, 1GB of ram, and sempron processor for about $150 these days? For the same cost as that one GPU, you can buy 3 complete Sempron systems and have change left over for your networking gear.
But then you're hardly talking about "high performance" FFTs. You're just being a cheapass.
-matthew
Spamtraps aren't the problem. Clueless users who sign up to something and then forget about it, or then decide they didn't want it after all... I'm sure there are more.
I doubt this is a serious problem. Most of these things that people might sign up for probably aren't true opt-in anyway ("send me mail" checked by default). Speaking as someone who admins mail servers and has to fight back spam on a daily basis, I can't say I really care if a few legitmate marketing companies get blocked. My users won't miss it.
Frankly, Spamcop is a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.
Speaking also as someone who has occasionally had to get servers (not just my own) off of Spamcop's blacklist, I can say that is easily worth it. The servers were listed for valid reasons. Spamcop is a valuable service.
And I don't give a damn whether Spamcop users receive mail from me or not. It's their loss, their problem, their idiot choice to use it. I sure as hell won't be bothering to jump through hoops to get my mailservers delisted if they ever get on there.
Lets just hope you don't have any other people using your servers. I'm sure they won't be so sympathetic.
Spamcop's design and processes are (from what I have experienced) just not sensible in the Real World.
I block tons of spam based on Spamcop and similar blackhole services. The more I can block based on blacklists, the less resoruces I need to dedicate to processing and scanning the garbage. When greater than 60% of all mail coming to your servers is spam and you get millions of messages a day (gross), you'll see the sense. A couple messages lost from lazy admins such as yourself is a small price to pay.
-matthew
To be fair, I think he is talking about the confirmation emails triggering the block.
1. Competitor X signs up a spamtrap address to the "marketing" list
2. Spammer^H^H^H^H^H^HMarketer sends confirmation email to the spamtrap.
3. Marketer gets blocked because he is trying to confirming the subscription of a spamtrap address
Personally, I've never seen confirmation emails for marketting material. Mailing lists and forums, yes, but not marketing. So I am suspicious of the claim.
-matthew
Your casual attitude toward "oh well, shouldn't have sent email to $secretspamtrap" without telling us *what* email or giving us details on how to avoid it in the future (like maybe adding your spamtrap domains to our lists that trigger "oh no, spammer" in our checks), you end up making RBLs more useless, and my job harder.
We WANT to make your job harder! Don't you get it?
You want to know how to avoid sending to spamtraps? Don't harvest emails from the web or buy lists from harvesters!
-matthew
Oh come on, "email marketing" is a code word for "spamming" in the biz. OK, maybe, just maybe, your messages are "legit" and maybe you really do take people off your lists when they opt-out, but the reality is that savvy users shouldn't trust opt-outs. Too many spammers use it as a way of verifying good addresses to spam. It is much easier to simply report emails from unwanted "email marketers" as spam.
-matthew
In the US is not uncommon to lose signal even in places where the is coverage.
-matthew
Nah, I don't buy it. I don't think it is reasonable for an ISP to store 2 years worth of full packet dumps of traffic. Just like the phone company can't reasonably record every phone call. Sure, they have records of the phone calls themselves, but that is a lot different than having them recorded. Same for an ISP. You can log connections easy enough. But I think dumping all the data to disk takes a lot more storage and CPU power than you think. And then you have to be able to index it and find what you want later!
-matthew
I call bullshit. I'm not sure what "definition" you're using, but a given interface does not have to become more complex as functions get added. As a matter of face, added features can simplify a given interface.
I think you are confusing functions and features. Certainly features such as voice activated calling (when it works) make a phone easier to use. Functions, on the otherhand, quite often make it more complicated to use... especially if you want to make them easy to access along side other functions. Then you start to add new features to compensate for the extra complexity of the functions.. and the cycle goes on until you have an interface that is many times more difficult to use than it would be if all the phone did was make and recieve calls and store a few numbers.
I can't think of something specific atm, but I'm sure you can find an example or two in Cupertino somewhere.
If by Cupertino, you mean Apple, I would say they are a perfect example of sacrificing functions (but not necessarily features) for simplicity and ease of use. Microsoft, on the other hand, loves to try to load interfaces (and APIs) with all kinds of functions. See the difference?
-matthew
What always annoyed me about the advances in mobile phone technology is that they never really improved reception. They add feature after feature. You can take and send photos. You can browse the internet, but you always manage to lose signal in the worst possible places. I used to live in a large metropolitan area and would regularly lose signal. I lived *inside* Chicago and I could barely get a signal in my own damn apartment. Is it because of the buildings? Maybe it'll never work right.
I say screw all the stupid features. Just give me a phone that just works everywhere. I couldn't care less if it can take pictures, browse the web, or download movie trailers.
-matthew
And what do kids do when they go outside? Play, right? While I don't defend countless hours indoors playing video games, I wonder what makes you think that it effects productivity in the workplace. I also wonder why your first concern would be workplace productivity. Is that what we are raising kids for? To be effective in the workplace? Why isn't happiness your primary concern here? If people don't grow up happy, what is the point of being effective in the workplace? Seriously, my primary concern would be for the overall mental and emotional health of people with gaming addiction.
-matthew