The requirements to handle 1000 unique visitors/day will depend on what exactly you are serving. I ran a website that got well over 1000 uniques per day on a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz with 64 megs of RAM and a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. This was significantly overkill for the site. However, that was entirely static content. Oh, except it handled email, spam filtering, and a database for a POS system for a retail establishment with two stores.
If you are serving mostly dynamic content, you'll want more processing power and more RAM. Almost certainly, you'll be fine with a bottom end computer, but you probably want something manufactured in the last five years or so. This will obviously depend on what your dynamic content actually is, though; more complexity will require more processing power.
If you cannot afford any outages, you may want to look at redundant hardware, failover systems, etc. etc., but you first need to determine how much an outage will cost you. What if you have a 5 minute outage? An outage lasting an hour? Eight hours? A day? In any case, before you look at redundant hardware, you'll need a service level agreement from your ISP.
And of course, if you are looking at something to stream 1 gigabyte of traffic to each of these thousand uniques, that's a whole different matter. Now you may want to look at content delivery networks, and possibly multiple servers just to handle the outbound network traffic.
No matter what your requirements, though, you need to look at a good backup solution.
Regardless of whether or not the file system should be able to survive you pulling the plug, you may want to invest in a UPS. Even a low-end UPS should be fine, so long as it interfaces properly with Linux and gracefully shuts down your system as soon as it loses power.
As to file systems, I personally use XFS on my MythTV box. ext3 will grow and shrink but, last time I checked, had speed issues when it came to deleting large files. Also, when you do run a fsck, it's terribly terribly slow on larger file systems. ext4 has a number of significant improvements but is not yet stable.
Ubuntu 6.06, VMWare v5.5.x, Athlon 64-3500 and Athlon X2-4800 (at different times). I've used a wide variety of guest operating systems. Are you sure your CPU scales back when idle? You can find out for sure by doing cat/proc/cpuinfo while idle and looking at the cpu Mhz.
VMWare Workstation 5 had a problem when the host operating system changed the CPU frequency. This made the guest operating system clock go wacky and the guest itself almost unusable because letters I'd type would be repeated when the operating system thought I had held down a key for a second or two. The official workaround was to disable frequency scaling on the host operating system which is really not acceptable.
What are the alternatives? This is an honest question, I'm looking at picking up a sound card sometime soon. I would be using it for gaming in Windows so it would have to have good driver support in Windows XP and Vista. Hardware-accelerated would be nice but I _suppose_ not a requirement. I would also be using it in Linux (in fact, primarily in Linux), though not for gaming. Still, I'd need good drivers in Linux for watching DVDs, playing downloaded movies in Kaffeine, that sort of thing.
Ideally something better than my original Soundblaster Live.
You may want to look at the Quasar accounting and point-of-sale suite at http://www.linuxcanada.com/ The accounting suite itself is available under the GPL. The point-of-sale part is under a commercial license but includes the source code. Version 1.4.7 is currently available but 1.5 should be released shortly and contains many significant changes.
So, they are going forward to start a legitimate business based on the profits and contacts they've made in the ad-ware (some may say spy-ware) business? If they really wanted to turn over a new leaf, they'd dissolve the corporation and return all the money to the shareholders.
There's no excuse for buffer overflows and memory leaks in C++, not with TR1's smart pointers and not with the standard library's containers. That's not even considering garbage collectors which have been available in C++ for years.
Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. The Apple laptop with extended warranty, etc. etc., was a little over $3600 Canadian. A comparable Dell was closer to $3000 Canadian, a 20% price premium. It's somewhat confused, though, by the Dell warranty being clearly superior, the Dell laptop having a dual-layer burner, a better battery, and a much better video card, and the Apple hardware overall being higher quality. And of course, the Apple operating system is clearly superior.
I'm actually hoping to get a laptop closer to $2000 to $2100, though. For that, I can get a WXSGA display, 2 gigs of RAM, a 1.86 Ghz CPU, and a super-duper warranty if I go the Dell route. Or, for an extra $200, I can get an Apple laptop with a lower-resolution LCD, slower CPU, and a quarter of the RAM. Also, the Apple would cost an additional $400 for a substandard warranty (though I've heard Apple treats their extended warranty customers very well). Or alternatively, a 12" iMac with less RAM (1.5 GB), no DVD burner, a vastly slower CPU (1.33 Ghz), vastly smaller LCD and resolution, but at least with a decent hard drive and an extended warranty.
IF ONLY. But with price premiums in the 25 - 50% region, Apple's laptops are just out of my price range.
I like Qt from TrollTech for my Windows development. It has a far easier learning curve than, say, WinForms,.Net, MFC, or the like. And top-notch documentation.
Also, version 4.x is available for Windows under the GPL as well as a commercial license.
That's a really good idea. It depends, though, on how good a person is with money management. I have an ING Direct savings account and, for the first time in my life, RRSPs with them as well.
HOWEVER, if you are the sort of person who has problems saving money, the sort who spends money in their account when they know they shouldn't, overpaying your bills is a good trick to help yourself out. As is having a savings account in a separate bank, such as ING Direct. Similarly, moving money into your savings account right after your paycheque rather than at the end of the month.
Don't discount all of this. Most people live paycheque to paycheque. I used to. Any trick that can buy you another month or two before the money crisis is worth considering.
I wasn't working all that much overtime, essentially just ten hour days. What I did was to _aggressively_ cut back my spending so I could have a "quit my job" fund. This took a number of months, at least partly due to previous monetary issues (did contract work, didn't get paid...) But eventually, I had about three to four months of living expenses saved up, not counting accrued vacation time. That gave me enough to be comfortable but you may want more.
I saw a t.v. show that taught you how to cut back your spending. It mentioned things like not eating lunch at restaurants (brown-bag it), not going out to the movies, etc. If you need to be told this, you really don't know how to save. You may want to rent a movie from time to time and I don't advise cutting off your telephone line to save money. But forget going out for lunch. Avoid fast-food altogether. No movie theatres. Don't buy a new computer. Basically, cut your spending down to the absolute minimum you can and still keep from going crazy. I also started OVERPAYING my bills (heat, electricity, etc.) so that I was soon a month or so ahead. That helps when you finally do quit your job. You can be late on all your bills by at least a month before they complain.
In the end, I got a job interview due in large part to a mailing list I frequent. The job interview happened after working hours and everything came together. You may need to take a vacation day or even a sick day, though. I don't like taking sick days for anything other than legitimate illness but it sounds like you need a mental health day anyway.
Grrrr. I have three licenses for Windows XP for my two desktop machines, neither of which even run Windows XP as their primary operating system. So my copies of Windows are licensed and up-to-date.
It ticks me off that Microsoft won't help unregistered users of Windows. As a direct result of Microsoft not offering antispyware, etc. etc., I suffer the consequences. My computers are hit by spam. My computers are hit by viruses. But my computers are fully licensed!
Microsoft seems to be missing the point. By providing full updates, antivirus, and antispyware even to unregistered users, they would be directly benefitting registered, licensed customers.
Not only has Microsoft not stopped other companies sending out spam, they continue to send me spam themselves. I have an open issue with TrustE relating to the Small Business newsletter that Microsoft has been sending me for many months. Every attempt to unsubscribe is met with complete failure. Even complaining to TrustE back in November, and reiterating the complaint two or three more times, has so far only resulted in form letter responses from Microsoft that are completely unhelpful.
In the past, though not for this issue, I have sent unsubscribe requests to Microsoft by registered mail and THOSE were ignored as well.
How can me possibly expect Microsoft to solve the spam problem if they themselves resort to spamming users and refusing unsubscription requests?
When counts are released showing the number of Windows security holes vs. the number of holes in Linux, the counts generally include software that can be installed from the original CD. With Windows, this includes MSIE, Windows Media Player, etc. On Linux, this includes thousands of end-user applications, programs that Microsoft does not include with Windows. Do you think these comparisons are fair? Would you rather see comparisons to minimal installs of Linux?
Well, I have experience with prior bugs in console games, including most significantly a major bug in Knights of the Old Republic for the XBox. I had played about 30 hours into the game and then the bug hit. All my saves were too recent so there went thirty hours of game play.
From what I understand, they eventually patched the bug in newer releases of the game but offered NO patch even through XBox Live for existing owners of the game, nor was a workaround ever made available.
I rather enjoyed the game regardless of this problem. Nevertheless, the days of console games that just run are long since over.
At my university, you automatically fail a course if you don't write the final exam, even if the final is only worth 10%, and no matter how good your grade was going in. In fact, when I was a student, you'd get a 1 out of 9 (the grading scheme has since changed). In that case, it makes sense to walk in, write your name, hand it in, and leave.
I showed up five minutes late to a psychology final in university. Seven minutes later, I had completed the exam (I was the first person in the class of about four hundred to do so). The exam was multiple choice. So I handed it in. I didn't do wonderfully in the class but I certainly did well above average.
Another time, I was trying to get my friends to buy me alcohol before writing a programming final. I promised to drink all they'd buy me, then go write the exam. I picked my friends well, though, and nobody took me up on the offer. I ended up with the highest grade in the class and probably would have got an 8 instead of a 9 had I written the exam while drunk.
In one of my math classes, I totally forgot how to do matrix math. Gone, out of my head as soon as I sat down. Every question involved matrix math so I ended up having to solve every freakin' question long hand. Luckily, no points were given for HOW you answered the question, though you did have to show your work. I ended up getting one of the highest marks for the class, pulling my grade well above the possible fail I was half expecting.
One other time, I was half an hour in to the exam and all I had was my name on top of each of the answer pages. I couldn't get a single question. [sigh]
Microsoft has promised to fix the spam problem by 2006. That's only ten days away! That's great, my little email server is getting about a thousand spams a day so I'm really looking forward to what they roll out. I'm a little concerned, though, that Microsoft hasn't actually announced anything specific that would fix the problem yet, this close to 2006.
Lockups and crashes happen on console games, too. Heck, I played through 30 hours of Knights of the Old Republic on my XBox, only to have the game lock up and ALL of my save games were past the point of backtracking.
Had this been on a computer, there's a good chance (though not at all a certainty) that a software patch could have fixed the problem. With this XBox game, I was stuck. I had to start from scratch.
And let us not forget the XBox 360 lockups that plague some users.
I'm just not convinced consoles are significantly better. And all the games I want to play are on a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
The requirements to handle 1000 unique visitors/day will depend on what exactly you are serving. I ran a website that got well over 1000 uniques per day on a Pentium MMX 200 Mhz with 64 megs of RAM and a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. This was significantly overkill for the site. However, that was entirely static content. Oh, except it handled email, spam filtering, and a database for a POS system for a retail establishment with two stores.
If you are serving mostly dynamic content, you'll want more processing power and more RAM. Almost certainly, you'll be fine with a bottom end computer, but you probably want something manufactured in the last five years or so. This will obviously depend on what your dynamic content actually is, though; more complexity will require more processing power.
If you cannot afford any outages, you may want to look at redundant hardware, failover systems, etc. etc., but you first need to determine how much an outage will cost you. What if you have a 5 minute outage? An outage lasting an hour? Eight hours? A day? In any case, before you look at redundant hardware, you'll need a service level agreement from your ISP.
And of course, if you are looking at something to stream 1 gigabyte of traffic to each of these thousand uniques, that's a whole different matter. Now you may want to look at content delivery networks, and possibly multiple servers just to handle the outbound network traffic.
No matter what your requirements, though, you need to look at a good backup solution.
Regardless of whether or not the file system should be able to survive you pulling the plug, you may want to invest in a UPS. Even a low-end UPS should be fine, so long as it interfaces properly with Linux and gracefully shuts down your system as soon as it loses power.
As to file systems, I personally use XFS on my MythTV box. ext3 will grow and shrink but, last time I checked, had speed issues when it came to deleting large files. Also, when you do run a fsck, it's terribly terribly slow on larger file systems. ext4 has a number of significant improvements but is not yet stable.
Ubuntu 6.06, VMWare v5.5.x, Athlon 64-3500 and Athlon X2-4800 (at different times). I've used a wide variety of guest operating systems. Are you sure your CPU scales back when idle? You can find out for sure by doing cat /proc/cpuinfo while idle and looking at the cpu Mhz.
Note that this is a known bug in 5.5.x.
VMWare Workstation 5 had a problem when the host operating system changed the CPU frequency. This made the guest operating system clock go wacky and the guest itself almost unusable because letters I'd type would be repeated when the operating system thought I had held down a key for a second or two. The official workaround was to disable frequency scaling on the host operating system which is really not acceptable.
Can anyone tell me if they fixed this issue in 6?
Thanks, Chris. :) Good article. There's a comparison of two CMI8788 cards in April's MaximumPC that I'll check out as well.
How's life treating you these days, anyway?
What are the alternatives? This is an honest question, I'm looking at picking up a sound card sometime soon. I would be using it for gaming in Windows so it would have to have good driver support in Windows XP and Vista. Hardware-accelerated would be nice but I _suppose_ not a requirement. I would also be using it in Linux (in fact, primarily in Linux), though not for gaming. Still, I'd need good drivers in Linux for watching DVDs, playing downloaded movies in Kaffeine, that sort of thing.
Ideally something better than my original Soundblaster Live.
Disclaimer: I work for Linux Canada Inc.
You may want to look at the Quasar accounting and point-of-sale suite at http://www.linuxcanada.com/ The accounting suite itself is available under the GPL. The point-of-sale part is under a commercial license but includes the source code. Version 1.4.7 is currently available but 1.5 should be released shortly and contains many significant changes.
College students have to follow specific layout guidelines, something Word is astoundingly bad at.
So, they are going forward to start a legitimate business based on the profits and contacts they've made in the ad-ware (some may say spy-ware) business? If they really wanted to turn over a new leaf, they'd dissolve the corporation and return all the money to the shareholders.
It doesn't beg the question at all. That phrase means something else entirely.
There's no excuse for buffer overflows and memory leaks in C++, not with TR1's smart pointers and not with the standard library's containers. That's not even considering garbage collectors which have been available in C++ for years.
Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. The Apple laptop with extended warranty, etc. etc., was a little over $3600 Canadian. A comparable Dell was closer to $3000 Canadian, a 20% price premium. It's somewhat confused, though, by the Dell warranty being clearly superior, the Dell laptop having a dual-layer burner, a better battery, and a much better video card, and the Apple hardware overall being higher quality. And of course, the Apple operating system is clearly superior.
I'm actually hoping to get a laptop closer to $2000 to $2100, though. For that, I can get a WXSGA display, 2 gigs of RAM, a 1.86 Ghz CPU, and a super-duper warranty if I go the Dell route. Or, for an extra $200, I can get an Apple laptop with a lower-resolution LCD, slower CPU, and a quarter of the RAM. Also, the Apple would cost an additional $400 for a substandard warranty (though I've heard Apple treats their extended warranty customers very well). Or alternatively, a 12" iMac with less RAM (1.5 GB), no DVD burner, a vastly slower CPU (1.33 Ghz), vastly smaller LCD and resolution, but at least with a decent hard drive and an extended warranty.
IF ONLY. But with price premiums in the 25 - 50% region, Apple's laptops are just out of my price range.
I like Qt from TrollTech for my Windows development. It has a far easier learning curve than, say, WinForms, .Net, MFC, or the like. And top-notch documentation.
Also, version 4.x is available for Windows under the GPL as well as a commercial license.
That's a really good idea. It depends, though, on how good a person is with money management. I have an ING Direct savings account and, for the first time in my life, RRSPs with them as well.
HOWEVER, if you are the sort of person who has problems saving money, the sort who spends money in their account when they know they shouldn't, overpaying your bills is a good trick to help yourself out. As is having a savings account in a separate bank, such as ING Direct. Similarly, moving money into your savings account right after your paycheque rather than at the end of the month.
Don't discount all of this. Most people live paycheque to paycheque. I used to. Any trick that can buy you another month or two before the money crisis is worth considering.
I wasn't working all that much overtime, essentially just ten hour days. What I did was to _aggressively_ cut back my spending so I could have a "quit my job" fund. This took a number of months, at least partly due to previous monetary issues (did contract work, didn't get paid...) But eventually, I had about three to four months of living expenses saved up, not counting accrued vacation time. That gave me enough to be comfortable but you may want more.
I saw a t.v. show that taught you how to cut back your spending. It mentioned things like not eating lunch at restaurants (brown-bag it), not going out to the movies, etc. If you need to be told this, you really don't know how to save. You may want to rent a movie from time to time and I don't advise cutting off your telephone line to save money. But forget going out for lunch. Avoid fast-food altogether. No movie theatres. Don't buy a new computer. Basically, cut your spending down to the absolute minimum you can and still keep from going crazy. I also started OVERPAYING my bills (heat, electricity, etc.) so that I was soon a month or so ahead. That helps when you finally do quit your job. You can be late on all your bills by at least a month before they complain.
In the end, I got a job interview due in large part to a mailing list I frequent. The job interview happened after working hours and everything came together. You may need to take a vacation day or even a sick day, though. I don't like taking sick days for anything other than legitimate illness but it sounds like you need a mental health day anyway.
Grrrr. I have three licenses for Windows XP for my two desktop machines, neither of which even run Windows XP as their primary operating system. So my copies of Windows are licensed and up-to-date.
It ticks me off that Microsoft won't help unregistered users of Windows. As a direct result of Microsoft not offering antispyware, etc. etc., I suffer the consequences. My computers are hit by spam. My computers are hit by viruses. But my computers are fully licensed!
Microsoft seems to be missing the point. By providing full updates, antivirus, and antispyware even to unregistered users, they would be directly benefitting registered, licensed customers.
Not only has Microsoft not stopped other companies sending out spam, they continue to send me spam themselves. I have an open issue with TrustE relating to the Small Business newsletter that Microsoft has been sending me for many months. Every attempt to unsubscribe is met with complete failure. Even complaining to TrustE back in November, and reiterating the complaint two or three more times, has so far only resulted in form letter responses from Microsoft that are completely unhelpful.
In the past, though not for this issue, I have sent unsubscribe requests to Microsoft by registered mail and THOSE were ignored as well.
How can me possibly expect Microsoft to solve the spam problem if they themselves resort to spamming users and refusing unsubscription requests?
When counts are released showing the number of Windows security holes vs. the number of holes in Linux, the counts generally include software that can be installed from the original CD. With Windows, this includes MSIE, Windows Media Player, etc. On Linux, this includes thousands of end-user applications, programs that Microsoft does not include with Windows. Do you think these comparisons are fair? Would you rather see comparisons to minimal installs of Linux?
Well, I have experience with prior bugs in console games, including most significantly a major bug in Knights of the Old Republic for the XBox. I had played about 30 hours into the game and then the bug hit. All my saves were too recent so there went thirty hours of game play.
From what I understand, they eventually patched the bug in newer releases of the game but offered NO patch even through XBox Live for existing owners of the game, nor was a workaround ever made available.
I rather enjoyed the game regardless of this problem. Nevertheless, the days of console games that just run are long since over.
At my university, you automatically fail a course if you don't write the final exam, even if the final is only worth 10%, and no matter how good your grade was going in. In fact, when I was a student, you'd get a 1 out of 9 (the grading scheme has since changed). In that case, it makes sense to walk in, write your name, hand it in, and leave.
I showed up five minutes late to a psychology final in university. Seven minutes later, I had completed the exam (I was the first person in the class of about four hundred to do so). The exam was multiple choice. So I handed it in. I didn't do wonderfully in the class but I certainly did well above average.
Another time, I was trying to get my friends to buy me alcohol before writing a programming final. I promised to drink all they'd buy me, then go write the exam. I picked my friends well, though, and nobody took me up on the offer. I ended up with the highest grade in the class and probably would have got an 8 instead of a 9 had I written the exam while drunk.
In one of my math classes, I totally forgot how to do matrix math. Gone, out of my head as soon as I sat down. Every question involved matrix math so I ended up having to solve every freakin' question long hand. Luckily, no points were given for HOW you answered the question, though you did have to show your work. I ended up getting one of the highest marks for the class, pulling my grade well above the possible fail I was half expecting.
One other time, I was half an hour in to the exam and all I had was my name on top of each of the answer pages. I couldn't get a single question. [sigh]
I already do reverse DNS lookup. It does eliminate the majority of the spam. I'm left with about 1000 a day. Spamassassin gets almost all the rest.
But Microsoft said they'd eliminate the problem, so soon I won't have to do these steps.
Microsoft has promised to fix the spam problem by 2006. That's only ten days away! That's great, my little email server is getting about a thousand spams a day so I'm really looking forward to what they roll out. I'm a little concerned, though, that Microsoft hasn't actually announced anything specific that would fix the problem yet, this close to 2006.
Lockups and crashes happen on console games, too. Heck, I played through 30 hours of Knights of the Old Republic on my XBox, only to have the game lock up and ALL of my save games were past the point of backtracking.
Had this been on a computer, there's a good chance (though not at all a certainty) that a software patch could have fixed the problem. With this XBox game, I was stuck. I had to start from scratch.
And let us not forget the XBox 360 lockups that plague some users.
I'm just not convinced consoles are significantly better. And all the games I want to play are on a PC.
I don't get it. How could turning the whole show into a commercial be considered cutting down on commercials?