So let me get this straight: If the modem is an HCF modem (i.e. has its own DSP) you aren't allowed to use it. In other words, the guy is putting up $20k for someone to write a universal HSP driver. Interesting notion.
I'm sure there's v.34 code available. v.90 may be a little trickier. The neat part about this is that you should (in theory) be able to use your soundcard and a part-68 interface for a modem if this is pulled off.
No, in any RDBMS, you just have the numbers in a table of phone numbers, and use a one-to-many relationship from the person to the numbers.
I've already replied to this arguement a number of times; I'm not trying to brush you off, but please refer to myother comments on the matter. Join tables aren't the solution to everything; at some point the system breaks down into nothing but tables with two columns and everything referring back to a name or some other common data bit. Hmm... come to think of it, that kinda sounds like a hierarchial system...
Let's say one of the telephoneNumber items is actually the front desk number in an office shared by a few dozen employees. Now let's say the number changes - you have to change that number in several dozen places.
True, but I would have tried to design the hierarchy to avoid that. To be more specific, refer to this.pdf (ps and an ugly jpeg also available). This is what I'm using for my directory format (I'm writing a perl Outlook.csv to.ldif convertor) -- Company-wide information goes under the company, and only the differences are put under the contact's BusinessContactInfo branch. There's only one place that needs changing there...
There's also the possibility of just using an LDIF modify command. I'm not really great at LDAP yet but I believe that it is possible to have the LDAP server walk the tree and modify the telephone number from (xxx) yyy-zzz to (aaa) bbb-ccc. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's nice to do; walking the tree isn't something I'd like to ask the server to do on a daily basis, hence my attempt at organization.
The "joiner" table you refer to is hardly a "kludge". It is an accurate representation of the association between items.
I referred to it as a kludge because to get the benefit of a hierarchial database in a relational one, everything must be done in joiner tables. i.e. you have a table of names. Then a table of names and telephone numbers. Now a table of names and addresses. Don't forget the table of names and spouses. Or the table of names and contact categories. And so on and so on and so on. There's no longer any structure, just a bazillion tables all linking each other. Normalization bliss, perhaps, but a pain in the ass to work with.
aside: If anyone is interested, the utility will soon be done. The actual convertor is done, but now I'm trying to get the second portion to actually fill the LDAP directory "smartly" to avoid the types of problems brought up by flacco. i.e. when it adds a contact, check to see if the company is already there and if so, if the BusinessContactInfo is idential to the company's info. If so, strip it out. if not, try to figure out how to best add it) -- if anyone's interested in helping me make the directory design better or maybe just wants a copy of the csv-to-ldif script, let me know. I'm new to all this but I want to get my company's umpteen-thousand contacts out of Outlook-Only land.
aside 2: Does anyone know how to get ghostscript to spit out nice png or jpeg files from postscript input? ps2pdf works great for.pdf, but I can't seem to figure out how to turn on the anti-aliasing for png/jpeg.
LDAP is an example of a really good and well developed implimentation of the hierarchial database idea. However, try keeping track of whay your customers bought from who with LDAP. So while LDAP (and other hierarchical dbs)do certain things better, don't try to run a CRM suite off one.
LDAP isn't designed to do that. It's funny that you picked a CRM application, because that's the type of thing I've been playing with.
Everyone that comes in contact with our company goes into an LDAP directory (benefits: works with almost every email client, replicates great along the boundaries we have, provides logical/protocol barrier between the contact data in the directory and the business data in the RDBMS) and then Postgres takes care of the actual relational (business) data. The ties between the RDBMS and the directory are done by DN; the directory format was carefully designed to avoid DN changes while still making the DN "make sense" when browsing the tree.
Our products, once manufactured, are assigned a serial number and entered into the directory as well, under a different node. We get the benefit of being able to track our product like we can our customers and the RDBMS takes care of all the stuff that changes on a frequent basis (trouble tickets for Customer Service, quotations, acknowledgements, shipping schedules, etc. The directory is only used to store the data that shouldn't change (or will only change very infrequently) during the lifetime of the entry. Looks good on paper; We'll see how well it works in reality.:-)
You've already given up the possibility of normalizing your phone numbers in the heirarchical model (my roomates home phone is the same as mine and it shows up in LDAP twice, once for me and once for him), so a simple many to one join to the telephone number table will allow you to list a home phone twice, once for each of us.
How have I given up the possibilty of normalization? It's normal for more than one person to have the same phone number! I would fully expect the number to be duplicated: If I'm searching for you, I find your number. I don't want to have to split the many-to-one reference later when you move! That makes absolutely no sense for 99% of directory applications!
Hell I'll even go and figure it out (for LDAP anyway): If your directory is primarily interested in telephone numbers, you would organize it such that the DN would have the telephone number in it. In that case, the number for you would have two person entries: one for your roommate and one for you. Most instances will have DNs without phone numbers in them though, because phone numbers tend to change.
Now, if the data you are modeling truely requires a many to many relationship (your model needs to handle the real world, you can't change the world to fit the limitations of your tools), you have no way of representing that information in a normalized fashion in a heirarchical model. The so called "kludge" of an x-ref table from the relational world is not even an option.
Exactly my point: There is no WonderTool; each tool has a specific purpose. I have a more in-depth comment elsewhere in this thread which goes into why RDBMSes aren't suited for this type of application.
I'm glad you said that; I dislike LDAP too, but it definately has its place, as do hierarchial databases. Please see my other comment in this thread for more information.
Taking out attributes with multiple values and putting them into a linked table is core to the functionality of relational databases.
I'm no newbie to RDBMSes; I Know that this is a core concept in the system. What I was referring to (and rather poorly, might I add) is that to get the same functionality of a hierarchial system you need to use these reference tables for everything lest you run across something which breaks your mold. This reduction to absurdity is eliminated in hierarchial designs.
I'm not a hierarchial guru; I have more experience and can relate (ha!) better to RDBMSes than I can hierarchial databases. But to say that a relational (table-based) database solves all your problems just because you can organize everything with relations is absurd. You lose the entire concept of a database entry or object by doing this. Instead of having a table consisting of contact information, you have a table for names, a table for spouses, a table for phone numbers, a table for fax numbers, a table for email addresses, a table for postal addresses... Lord help you if your documentation is ever lax or worse yet, you lose it (or the table views or the driving software) altogether! Each methodology has its place.
In a relational database you must either leave room for the most you think you will run into, use a "joiner" table (the real term escapes me at this moment) or similarly kludge together a solution. Hierarchial databases are a pain in the ass for many things, but storing multivalued data is not one of an RDBMS' strong points.
When you can code better than DJB then you can speak about his attitude.
I don't consider DJB a good programmer. Zero comments, bare bare bare documentation and one-space indents are not the traits of a good programmer. He writes software with security in mind, and that is a very good thing. I certainly wouldn't hire him based on what I've seen of his source, though.
Always accept mail to a certain domain (i.e. the local domain for staff/students)
Allow machines within our local network to relay mail to the outside world
Not allow external sites to relay mail to other outside sites
I don't understand what's difficult about that. I use tcpserver with qmail-smtpd -- I achieve exactly what you want, plus the ability to allow our people to use whatever ISP they want and to relay mail from their IP for 20 minutes after they've successfully checked for mail. I don't recall using a relayclients patch at all, but I do have several other patches applied to my qmail:
a tarpitting patch, which adds an exponential delay for each extra RECIP after the 5th;
DNS fixes for super-long domain names, and
A fix for broken Netscape clients which don't update their progress bar
I also use vpopmail which makes it trivial to run a zillion vhosted mail servers with separate mail policies, mailing lists and quotas and finally qmailadmin which takes care of 99% of the admin needs. What's left is just hand-editing the.qmail-xxx files to do silly things like have one email address go to two mailboxes and so on.
Some smartass somewhere has to mention that qmail and it's impossible-to-manage ezmlm program is a superior solution.
I don't seem to be having any trouble at all adminning small (150 user, 3GB/mo) and mid-size (800-user, ~25GB/mo) qmail installations. This is with Vpopmail too; the mid-size email system is for one domain; there are 36 others on that system too but they're all fairly small. Ezmlm isn't simple, no, but it's no pain in the ass to manage, either. I use QmailAdmin to do most of the dirty work. I set up the new domain, give the owner the postmaster password and point them to the qmailadmin setup. Piece of cake.
And while we're at it, djbdns rocks the house!
qmail is a very good MTA; I wouldn't trade it for anything else. That doesn't mean I think that djb is a god; I can't stand his daemontools, nor do I like djbdns. Go figure.
Don't care to go independent and contract or consult? Well, then I suppose you've got your 33%-40% tax bill coming to you, then! Your choice, though.
I'm not in IT; I work for a mid-size industrial power electronics and controls OEM. Funny, but CA4IT (and CA4SOHO for that matter) don't really apply. I'm far enough up into the 33-40% bracket that I can't max out my RSPs to get it down below, and my debt load is a little too high right now to be squirrelling money away into nooks and crannies (marriage: fun but not for the pocketbook!) -- what's your smug suggestion now?
We're not on crack here, nor are we "paying 1/3 of [our] salary in taxes" to provide subsidized internet access. We also don't wear toques in the summer or eat back bacon
Hmmm... You're obviously not "making enough" to be in the 33% tax bracket. And yes, the government is subsidizing net access. Some of us wear toques in the summer (as they do in the U.S., it appears to be a "cool" thing to do) and back bacon kicks ass.
Canada (and Sweden, Finland et-al) are more wired than the USA because we have longer winters (no, not all 12 months) and this means people spend more for internet access during the months you'd prefer not to go outside.
Interesting theory, but I thought it was due to the Chretien government wanting to do for information access what Mackenzie did for transportation. At least I think it was Mackenzie.
Remember the hole in BIND from the beginning of this year? Big as a truck? If I recall correctly it was a TSIG related buffer overflow that made it possible to run code at the same priviledge as BIND (often root)...
I never understood why BIND would run as root -- it will drop privs once it attches to port 53. Is this just another case of lazy admin?
I used to love my Linux laptop about 2 years ago, I felt so sophisticated. Tell you the truth I am running w2k on it now (A Sony Vaio), just wasn't worth the trouble. Then my box runs Linux (RH) and I do most of my java development on it, I am very happy with it.
I've been running Linux on my laptop for about a year now. Used to be Win98 but one day I just got sick of rebooting and reinstalling every 12-18 months. I'd been using Linux on all my servers and firewalls so I figured why not give it a try on the desktop?
I run Slackware 8.0 with XF4.1.0 with WindowMaker and KDE2.2.1 from CVS (I hack around on it a bit) -- the antialised fonts are great, the screen works perfectly, the video card, PCMCIA, sound and USB subsystems are all supported more or less flawlessly. I'm having issues with printing but I think I'm going to dump CUPS and try LPRng or something; I'm getting sick of fiddling with it.
I used to run Win4Lin daily to get the office aspects of my job done but now the only time I boot it is to run MPLAB, an IDE which drives the ICE I use in my embedded development. KOffice does 99% of my office needs and KMail/KNode work pretty damn good for POP3/IMAP and NNTP handlers. What Konqueror bungs up on Opera seems to take care of.
This laptop is about 3 or 4 years old now. It's a Hyperdata MediaGo 950AGP: Celeron 300, 256M RAM and a 10G drive. I get about 3 hours of battery life out of the thing, even watching DVDs (that was back in Windows when the ALI M3909 hardware MPEG2 decoder worked). If I'm doing heavy compiling then drop that time down about 40-50%. The notebook doesn't get overly warm in my lap and its sleep mode seems to be compatible with Linux for the most part. Hell, I take multiple-hour baths and surf the net/IRC with it (wireless card) -- I have one of those old wrought-iron claw-foot tubs which holds the heat forever and a 3/8" sheet of plywood goes across it to rest the notebook or any books and drinks I have. Yeah it's a little weird but it's a form of relaxation.:-)
So, at least for me, it hasn't been more hassle than its worth. Win98 was a hassle. Win2k won't work on this machine (the install freezes every time, Hyperdata support claims there is something not supported by Win2k). Linux has been a godsend for me. I've been offered notebook upgrades from work but I've really come to like this little one. I've even ordered plastic subassemblies a few times to repair cracks from overuse and misuse (I tend to pick it up by one corner and that strains one of the shell pieces).
aside: if anyone can find drivers or specs for the M3909 MPEG2 decoder I'd love to hear from you. I don't understand why they EOL a product and still refuse to give out data on it. A cel300 is a little weak for DVD/DivX decode so I'd at least like to try for half. Hell, this thing has an ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip in it; if ATI would release a Linux DVD player I'd be happy too!
Seems like we can't win. If we send food, it is an obvious propaganda effort. If we don't send food, then we don't have any compassion for the starving masses.
Instead of sitting back whining about people making an effort, what would you suggest?
The same thing I suggested back in September: If the U.S. is hell-bent on helping, SEND PEOPLE -- The food cannot ensure it gets to the intended recipients. The money and weapons can't ensure they get utilized as intended. If you're intent on helping, send aid but send troops to back them up.
Does this endanger lives? You bet your sweet ass it does. It might also provide a little bit of incentive to carefully pick your fights though. This "hands-off" foreign policy the U.S. has had for the past 50 years or so is as useless as tits on a bull.
Does your ISP support v.92? Last I heard, some ISPs weren't even going to support the new protocol because there wasn't a lot of demand for it and OEMs aren't putting the new modems in their machines.
As an ISP, we aren't supporting V.92 because it is detrimental to our user/line ratios. And as cut-rate as dialup is, people seem to be wanting price and availablility. Having to be booted off because a call comes in hardly comes in as a complaint, so we aren't supporting v.92.
I just finished hacking my I-Opener that I bought on ebay (for 50 dollars) and I think it would be pretty plausible.
My IOpener has a DSTN screen; if you're anywhere but dead center of it, it "sparkles". Hell even the corners sparkle when you're at dead-center. TFT doesn't have this problem and also has a very wide display angle.
I've heard that the newer iopeners have TFT screens, which makes me jealous as hell.:-(
Too bad the total multimedia support isn't there for it yet, or I'd like it even more.
I agree; Although this isn't a konq problem, kmid (the embeddable midi player) won't work with anything other than/dev/sequencer. That means I can't get my SoftOSS synth to work with it, although kmidi works just fine with SoftOSS. It's a real bitch because I'd like to get sound working with wholenote.com.
Flash is a bitch too; I've got the netscape plugin but half the sites STILL do the double-popup begging you to buy Flash. I know that Flash is working becuase other websites work perfectly fine with it. Good site: Steltor.com. Bad sites: sissyfight.com, macromedia.com, most others. I'm stumped. Hell even the Crossover plugin doesn't seem to help here.
I'd love to get a Voloview plugin working, but the Windows version requires IE5.5 and Crossover isn't that good yet.:-)
I pay $19.95 a month for the benefit of dial up (yeah, it could be less, but not by much)
The company I do tech work for offers it for $9.95/mo. Considering that's 50% off what you pay, it is "much".:-) Before you shout "yeah but how often is it up?" know that we haven't had need for scheduled downtime in over a year. The RADIUS servers are failover and the Ciscos are updated in blocks so the whole system isn't down. The only time we truly go down is when our upstream provider pulls a boner, and that's been rare.
Make sure you don't have "poll entire screen" checked. It's a pig.
My personal setup is TightVNC with everything BUT "poll entire screen" checked. It's pretty zippy, even over dialup, so long as you aren't redrawing the entire screen.
I tried this about a year ago and it sucked harder than an industrial Hoover. Install was bad and it just didn't work right. It appeared to be supported by a part-time high school student (From my phone calls and emails, the kid knew his stuff when you could get to him but the support level just wasn't "professional quality" at all.) Maybe they've gotten beyond this now, but the taste in my mouth is pretty sour.
I'm currently evaluating Steltor CorporateTime server. It uses a standard IMAP server and a standard LDAP server to provide mail and directory services (and shared folders if your IMAP server supports it) and its own calendaring server to do the shared calendars and scheduling.
So far, so good. It has a standalone Win/Linux/Mac calendar client and also an Outlook service (as well as Palm and EPOC connectors, IIRC). What it *did not* have was a convertor to convert all your Outlook contacts into an LDIF format, and I haven't been able to find one that either doesn't drop fields or break in other ways. I've created a Perl script to convert the CSV-exported contact data to LDIF, and I'm almost done, but it's not perfect yet.
CorporateTime seems to be very well supported and the price is about the same as Exchange Server. The fact that it uses standard protocols and the server will run on either Linux or NT is a big plus. I hope I can convince the people who write the cheques to go for it.
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Code must not rely on DSP, pure C required.
So let me get this straight: If the modem is an HCF modem (i.e. has its own DSP) you aren't allowed to use it. In other words, the guy is putting up $20k for someone to write a universal HSP driver. Interesting notion.
I'm sure there's v.34 code available. v.90 may be a little trickier. The neat part about this is that you should (in theory) be able to use your soundcard and a part-68 interface for a modem if this is pulled off.
No, in any RDBMS, you just have the numbers in a table of phone numbers, and use a one-to-many relationship from the person to the numbers.
I've already replied to this arguement a number of times; I'm not trying to brush you off, but please refer to my other comments on the matter. Join tables aren't the solution to everything; at some point the system breaks down into nothing but tables with two columns and everything referring back to a name or some other common data bit. Hmm... come to think of it, that kinda sounds like a hierarchial system...
Let's say one of the telephoneNumber items is actually the front desk number in an office shared by a few dozen employees. Now let's say the number changes - you have to change that number in several dozen places.
True, but I would have tried to design the hierarchy to avoid that. To be more specific, refer to this .pdf (ps and an ugly jpeg also available). This is what I'm using for my directory format (I'm writing a perl Outlook .csv to .ldif convertor) -- Company-wide information goes under the company, and only the differences are put under the contact's BusinessContactInfo branch. There's only one place that needs changing there...
There's also the possibility of just using an LDIF modify command. I'm not really great at LDAP yet but I believe that it is possible to have the LDAP server walk the tree and modify the telephone number from (xxx) yyy-zzz to (aaa) bbb-ccc. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's nice to do; walking the tree isn't something I'd like to ask the server to do on a daily basis, hence my attempt at organization.
The "joiner" table you refer to is hardly a "kludge". It is an accurate representation of the association between items.
I referred to it as a kludge because to get the benefit of a hierarchial database in a relational one, everything must be done in joiner tables. i.e. you have a table of names. Then a table of names and telephone numbers. Now a table of names and addresses. Don't forget the table of names and spouses. Or the table of names and contact categories. And so on and so on and so on. There's no longer any structure, just a bazillion tables all linking each other. Normalization bliss, perhaps, but a pain in the ass to work with.
aside: If anyone is interested, the utility will soon be done. The actual convertor is done, but now I'm trying to get the second portion to actually fill the LDAP directory "smartly" to avoid the types of problems brought up by flacco. i.e. when it adds a contact, check to see if the company is already there and if so, if the BusinessContactInfo is idential to the company's info. If so, strip it out. if not, try to figure out how to best add it) -- if anyone's interested in helping me make the directory design better or maybe just wants a copy of the csv-to-ldif script, let me know. I'm new to all this but I want to get my company's umpteen-thousand contacts out of Outlook-Only land.
aside 2: Does anyone know how to get ghostscript to spit out nice png or jpeg files from postscript input? ps2pdf works great for .pdf, but I can't seem to figure out how to turn on the anti-aliasing for png/jpeg.
Of course, if you want relational features, run relational database separately, OR run LDAP on top of your relational DB.
Know of any? I would love to have one open-protocol, open-format database backend but be able to run different front-ends on it. (SQL, LDAP, etc.)
LDAP is an example of a really good and well developed implimentation of the hierarchial database idea. However, try keeping track of whay your customers bought from who with LDAP. So while LDAP (and other hierarchical dbs)do certain things better, don't try to run a CRM suite off one.
LDAP isn't designed to do that. It's funny that you picked a CRM application, because that's the type of thing I've been playing with.
Everyone that comes in contact with our company goes into an LDAP directory (benefits: works with almost every email client, replicates great along the boundaries we have, provides logical/protocol barrier between the contact data in the directory and the business data in the RDBMS) and then Postgres takes care of the actual relational (business) data. The ties between the RDBMS and the directory are done by DN; the directory format was carefully designed to avoid DN changes while still making the DN "make sense" when browsing the tree.
Our products, once manufactured, are assigned a serial number and entered into the directory as well, under a different node. We get the benefit of being able to track our product like we can our customers and the RDBMS takes care of all the stuff that changes on a frequent basis (trouble tickets for Customer Service, quotations, acknowledgements, shipping schedules, etc. The directory is only used to store the data that shouldn't change (or will only change very infrequently) during the lifetime of the entry. Looks good on paper; We'll see how well it works in reality. :-)
You've already given up the possibility of normalizing your phone numbers in the heirarchical model (my roomates home phone is the same as mine and it shows up in LDAP twice, once for me and once for him), so a simple many to one join to the telephone number table will allow you to list a home phone twice, once for each of us.
How have I given up the possibilty of normalization? It's normal for more than one person to have the same phone number! I would fully expect the number to be duplicated: If I'm searching for you, I find your number. I don't want to have to split the many-to-one reference later when you move! That makes absolutely no sense for 99% of directory applications!
Hell I'll even go and figure it out (for LDAP anyway): If your directory is primarily interested in telephone numbers, you would organize it such that the DN would have the telephone number in it. In that case, the number for you would have two person entries: one for your roommate and one for you. Most instances will have DNs without phone numbers in them though, because phone numbers tend to change.
Now, if the data you are modeling truely requires a many to many relationship (your model needs to handle the real world, you can't change the world to fit the limitations of your tools), you have no way of representing that information in a normalized fashion in a heirarchical model. The so called "kludge" of an x-ref table from the relational world is not even an option.
Exactly my point: There is no WonderTool; each tool has a specific purpose. I have a more in-depth comment elsewhere in this thread which goes into why RDBMSes aren't suited for this type of application.
Disclaimer: I always hated LDAP.
I'm glad you said that; I dislike LDAP too, but it definately has its place, as do hierarchial databases. Please see my other comment in this thread for more information.
Taking out attributes with multiple values and putting them into a linked table is core to the functionality of relational databases.
I'm no newbie to RDBMSes; I Know that this is a core concept in the system. What I was referring to (and rather poorly, might I add) is that to get the same functionality of a hierarchial system you need to use these reference tables for everything lest you run across something which breaks your mold. This reduction to absurdity is eliminated in hierarchial designs.
I'm not a hierarchial guru; I have more experience and can relate (ha!) better to RDBMSes than I can hierarchial databases. But to say that a relational (table-based) database solves all your problems just because you can organize everything with relations is absurd. You lose the entire concept of a database entry or object by doing this. Instead of having a table consisting of contact information, you have a table for names, a table for spouses, a table for phone numbers, a table for fax numbers, a table for email addresses, a table for postal addresses... Lord help you if your documentation is ever lax or worse yet, you lose it (or the table views or the driving software) altogether! Each methodology has its place.
I agree with what you say, but what is it that doesn't allow you to do that in a relational database?
Multiple values for attributes immediately come to mind.
For instance: Bob Smith has 3 phone numbers. With a hierarchial database such as LDAP, you simply list them as
- telephoneNumber: (519) 555-1212
In a relational database you must either leave room for the most you think you will run into, use a "joiner" table (the real term escapes me at this moment) or similarly kludge together a solution. Hierarchial databases are a pain in the ass for many things, but storing multivalued data is not one of an RDBMS' strong points.telephoneNumber: (604) 555-1212
telephoneNumber: (905) 555-1212
When you can code better than DJB then you can speak about his attitude.
I don't consider DJB a good programmer. Zero comments, bare bare bare documentation and one-space indents are not the traits of a good programmer. He writes software with security in mind, and that is a very good thing. I certainly wouldn't hire him based on what I've seen of his source, though.
I don't understand what's difficult about that. I use tcpserver with qmail-smtpd -- I achieve exactly what you want, plus the ability to allow our people to use whatever ISP they want and to relay mail from their IP for 20 minutes after they've successfully checked for mail. I don't recall using a relayclients patch at all, but I do have several other patches applied to my qmail:
I also use vpopmail which makes it trivial to run a zillion vhosted mail servers with separate mail policies, mailing lists and quotas and finally qmailadmin which takes care of 99% of the admin needs. What's left is just hand-editing the .qmail-xxx files to do silly things like have one email address go to two mailboxes and so on.
Some smartass somewhere has to mention that qmail and it's impossible-to-manage ezmlm program is a superior solution.
I don't seem to be having any trouble at all adminning small (150 user, 3GB/mo) and mid-size (800-user, ~25GB/mo) qmail installations. This is with Vpopmail too; the mid-size email system is for one domain; there are 36 others on that system too but they're all fairly small. Ezmlm isn't simple, no, but it's no pain in the ass to manage, either. I use QmailAdmin to do most of the dirty work. I set up the new domain, give the owner the postmaster password and point them to the qmailadmin setup. Piece of cake.
And while we're at it, djbdns rocks the house!
qmail is a very good MTA; I wouldn't trade it for anything else. That doesn't mean I think that djb is a god; I can't stand his daemontools, nor do I like djbdns. Go figure.
Don't care to go independent and contract or consult? Well, then I suppose you've got your 33%-40% tax bill coming to you, then! Your choice, though.
I'm not in IT; I work for a mid-size industrial power electronics and controls OEM. Funny, but CA4IT (and CA4SOHO for that matter) don't really apply. I'm far enough up into the 33-40% bracket that I can't max out my RSPs to get it down below, and my debt load is a little too high right now to be squirrelling money away into nooks and crannies (marriage: fun but not for the pocketbook!) -- what's your smug suggestion now?
We're not on crack here, nor are we "paying 1/3 of [our] salary in taxes" to provide subsidized internet access. We also don't wear toques in the summer or eat back bacon
Hmmm... You're obviously not "making enough" to be in the 33% tax bracket. And yes, the government is subsidizing net access. Some of us wear toques in the summer (as they do in the U.S., it appears to be a "cool" thing to do) and back bacon kicks ass.
Canada (and Sweden, Finland et-al) are more wired than the USA because we have longer winters (no, not all 12 months) and this means people spend more for internet access during the months you'd prefer not to go outside.
Interesting theory, but I thought it was due to the Chretien government wanting to do for information access what Mackenzie did for transportation. At least I think it was Mackenzie.
For a Canadian, you sure don't sound like one.
Remember the hole in BIND from the beginning of this year? Big as a truck? If I recall correctly it was a TSIG related buffer overflow that made it possible to run code at the same priviledge as BIND (often root)...
I never understood why BIND would run as root -- it will drop privs once it attches to port 53. Is this just another case of lazy admin?
I used to love my Linux laptop about 2 years ago, I felt so sophisticated. Tell you the truth I am running w2k on it now (A Sony Vaio), just wasn't worth the trouble. Then my box runs Linux (RH) and I do most of my java development on it, I am very happy with it.
I've been running Linux on my laptop for about a year now. Used to be Win98 but one day I just got sick of rebooting and reinstalling every 12-18 months. I'd been using Linux on all my servers and firewalls so I figured why not give it a try on the desktop?
I run Slackware 8.0 with XF4.1.0 with WindowMaker and KDE2.2.1 from CVS (I hack around on it a bit) -- the antialised fonts are great, the screen works perfectly, the video card, PCMCIA, sound and USB subsystems are all supported more or less flawlessly. I'm having issues with printing but I think I'm going to dump CUPS and try LPRng or something; I'm getting sick of fiddling with it.
I used to run Win4Lin daily to get the office aspects of my job done but now the only time I boot it is to run MPLAB, an IDE which drives the ICE I use in my embedded development. KOffice does 99% of my office needs and KMail/KNode work pretty damn good for POP3/IMAP and NNTP handlers. What Konqueror bungs up on Opera seems to take care of.
This laptop is about 3 or 4 years old now. It's a Hyperdata MediaGo 950AGP: Celeron 300, 256M RAM and a 10G drive. I get about 3 hours of battery life out of the thing, even watching DVDs (that was back in Windows when the ALI M3909 hardware MPEG2 decoder worked). If I'm doing heavy compiling then drop that time down about 40-50%. The notebook doesn't get overly warm in my lap and its sleep mode seems to be compatible with Linux for the most part. Hell, I take multiple-hour baths and surf the net/IRC with it (wireless card) -- I have one of those old wrought-iron claw-foot tubs which holds the heat forever and a 3/8" sheet of plywood goes across it to rest the notebook or any books and drinks I have. Yeah it's a little weird but it's a form of relaxation. :-)
So, at least for me, it hasn't been more hassle than its worth. Win98 was a hassle. Win2k won't work on this machine (the install freezes every time, Hyperdata support claims there is something not supported by Win2k). Linux has been a godsend for me. I've been offered notebook upgrades from work but I've really come to like this little one. I've even ordered plastic subassemblies a few times to repair cracks from overuse and misuse (I tend to pick it up by one corner and that strains one of the shell pieces).
aside: if anyone can find drivers or specs for the M3909 MPEG2 decoder I'd love to hear from you. I don't understand why they EOL a product and still refuse to give out data on it. A cel300 is a little weak for DVD/DivX decode so I'd at least like to try for half. Hell, this thing has an ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip in it; if ATI would release a Linux DVD player I'd be happy too!
Seems like we can't win. If we send food, it is an obvious propaganda effort. If we don't send food, then we don't have any compassion for the starving masses.
Instead of sitting back whining about people making an effort, what would you suggest?
The same thing I suggested back in September: If the U.S. is hell-bent on helping, SEND PEOPLE -- The food cannot ensure it gets to the intended recipients. The money and weapons can't ensure they get utilized as intended. If you're intent on helping, send aid but send troops to back them up.
Does this endanger lives? You bet your sweet ass it does. It might also provide a little bit of incentive to carefully pick your fights though. This "hands-off" foreign policy the U.S. has had for the past 50 years or so is as useless as tits on a bull.
IMO bin laden claimed responisbiliry yesterday so perhaps that was a signal
Where, in your opinion did he do such a thing?
I used it for a week (firmware said ?Jan 2001) and it was an improvement from my haynes accura (real early 33.6).
Wow, haynes makes modems too? I was always fond of their undergarment products but I'm going to have to give their connectivity solutions a try too!
Does your ISP support v.92? Last I heard, some ISPs weren't even going to support the new protocol because there wasn't a lot of demand for it and OEMs aren't putting the new modems in their machines.
As an ISP, we aren't supporting V.92 because it is detrimental to our user/line ratios. And as cut-rate as dialup is, people seem to be wanting price and availablility. Having to be booted off because a call comes in hardly comes in as a complaint, so we aren't supporting v.92.
I just finished hacking my I-Opener that I bought on ebay (for 50 dollars) and I think it would be pretty plausible.
My IOpener has a DSTN screen; if you're anywhere but dead center of it, it "sparkles". Hell even the corners sparkle when you're at dead-center. TFT doesn't have this problem and also has a very wide display angle.
I've heard that the newer iopeners have TFT screens, which makes me jealous as hell. :-(
Too bad the total multimedia support isn't there for it yet, or I'd like it even more.
I agree; Although this isn't a konq problem, kmid (the embeddable midi player) won't work with anything other than /dev/sequencer. That means I can't get my SoftOSS synth to work with it, although kmidi works just fine with SoftOSS. It's a real bitch because I'd like to get sound working with wholenote.com.
Flash is a bitch too; I've got the netscape plugin but half the sites STILL do the double-popup begging you to buy Flash. I know that Flash is working becuase other websites work perfectly fine with it. Good site: Steltor.com. Bad sites: sissyfight.com, macromedia.com, most others. I'm stumped. Hell even the Crossover plugin doesn't seem to help here.
I'd love to get a Voloview plugin working, but the Windows version requires IE5.5 and Crossover isn't that good yet. :-)
I pay $19.95 a month for the benefit of dial up (yeah, it could be less, but not by much)
The company I do tech work for offers it for $9.95/mo. Considering that's 50% off what you pay, it is "much". :-) Before you shout "yeah but how often is it up?" know that we haven't had need for scheduled downtime in over a year. The RADIUS servers are failover and the Ciscos are updated in blocks so the whole system isn't down. The only time we truly go down is when our upstream provider pulls a boner, and that's been rare.
Make sure you don't have "poll entire screen" checked. It's a pig.
My personal setup is TightVNC with everything BUT "poll entire screen" checked. It's pretty zippy, even over dialup, so long as you aren't redrawing the entire screen.
Bynari Insight Server (seems like your best bet)
I tried this about a year ago and it sucked harder than an industrial Hoover. Install was bad and it just didn't work right. It appeared to be supported by a part-time high school student (From my phone calls and emails, the kid knew his stuff when you could get to him but the support level just wasn't "professional quality" at all.) Maybe they've gotten beyond this now, but the taste in my mouth is pretty sour.
I'm currently evaluating Steltor CorporateTime server. It uses a standard IMAP server and a standard LDAP server to provide mail and directory services (and shared folders if your IMAP server supports it) and its own calendaring server to do the shared calendars and scheduling.
So far, so good. It has a standalone Win/Linux/Mac calendar client and also an Outlook service (as well as Palm and EPOC connectors, IIRC). What it *did not* have was a convertor to convert all your Outlook contacts into an LDIF format, and I haven't been able to find one that either doesn't drop fields or break in other ways. I've created a Perl script to convert the CSV-exported contact data to LDIF, and I'm almost done, but it's not perfect yet.
CorporateTime seems to be very well supported and the price is about the same as Exchange Server. The fact that it uses standard protocols and the server will run on either Linux or NT is a big plus. I hope I can convince the people who write the cheques to go for it.