I have two huge HP-UX boxen and twenty-some jetdirect-equipped HP printers. The measure of control I have over these printers, and the ability to configure them as I please, is LAUGHABLE. For example, printer names have to be all upper-case and can't contain punctuation. I have all the latest HP printing software, incidentally, and it's best described as difficult, counter-intuitive and tedious to use. I used to think/etc/printcap was evil, now I long for its (relatively) fast & easy configuration. Using samba, LPD, and the Windows drivers gives me much better control than using HP's flagship products. And, the PC users can comprehend the printer names! I use samba's automagic printer driver download, but I have to do a lot of hand-editing because the files that HP is shipping to define the driver requirements of the entire HP5 lineup are corrupt (that's the.INF files). I always wondered why I couldn't properly use an HP5 unless I had both HP4 and HP5 drivers installed; now I know. And of course, there was at least one verion of JetAdmin for Win95/98 that raped your entire printing subsystem and could not be uninstalled... I had to reformat several hard drives in the IS department because people loaded that tarbaby. So, in short, having HP work on linux printing is like having Dr. Mengele check out your skin condition. I predict that HP will produce lots of barely useable crap that will get incorporated into every major distribution due to consumer demand. Here at my shop, I will never buy another HP printer. I haven't seen an HP printer since the ThinkJet that wasn't just a lamer version of a QMS printer anyway.
Gee, thanks, nothing like taking a swipe a people who happen to live near, or look like, or maybe even share race/religion/color/gender with the person you're pissed at. This is what gives vigilante justice a bad name, is trigger-happy vigilantes. Go rent video of The Oxbow Incident before you reply. FYI, the majority of corporations incorporated in the USA (including most multi-nat zaibatsus) are incorporated in Delaware. That's because we have a functional chancery court here, unlike the corrupt and politically beholden chanceries of most US states. Being located in or incorporated in Delaware does not mean you are good or evil, it merely means you did something intelligent once. Why don't you pick on oxygen-breathers; after all, the people who you are mad at all breathe oxygen, and you wouldn't want anyone to escape your "justice". --Charlie
...a cowardly weasel wrote: [snip] > # anything with law in its name, except law schools, LAWrence > # keep deLAWare, that's where DVD CCA is incorporated > # Exception for anything in Poland because lots of towns contain law > RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !lawrence > RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !\.edu$ > RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !\.pl$ > RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST}.*law.* > RewriteRule.* Index.HTM [snip]
Bury your money in a pickle jar and wait for civilisation to collapse. Then trade it for valuable supplies - after all, those bills will make great toilet paper. Seriously, why would you ask us on slashdot this question? Asking hacker geeks for financial advice is like asking pill bugs for flying lessons! --Charlie
You're talking about a government that can legally imprison you for mentioning a banned subject (such as the IRA) in your own home. Granted, they don't usually do that. (The USA's Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't usually trick the FBI into murdering people without cause, either, but that isn't helping Vickie Weaver any.) Nonetheless Britons have no legal right to freedom of speech, which is a lot more oppressive than controlling your (probably excessive) vehicle speed. --Charlie
Your comments are based on the illusions you have been conditioned to accept... for example, the most efficient possible keyboard has TEN KEYS. That's right, TEN KEYS. And all but ten characters are chorded, obviously, providing more possible unique characters than your old Sun piece of crap. If you never, ever have to move your hands, your keypads can be positioned for optimum ergonomics, your key-throw can be adjusted down to nearly nothing, and your typing speed can exceed any other keyboard type. But, you need to free your mind from concepts like "penalty zones", "chords are bad/difficult", "key size matters" etc.
If you study assiduously you may achieve, but if you meet the Buddha you must kill her.
1) The last-minute refit of the Lunar Lander to provide gold-foil rad shielding and those big goofy looking feet (the latter in response to ACClarke's "Fall of Moondust"). 2) CIDR. Prevented total Internet meltdown at almost the last possible second, although it could not be thoroughly tested before deployment because the Internet cannot really be simulated (it's too big, obviously). 3) The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon. I mean, they really didn't design it the way it ended up working - "hints" anyone? BIND arrived barely in time as the old "daily NIC download" system was collapsing under its own weight. 4) Porsche's trailing arm torsion bar suspension. A unique solution to an old problem - Porsche actually made fundamental advances in automotive design, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering simultaneously. All high-performance cars and most tanks use the trailing arm today. 5) Telsa's universal brushless AC motor. Revolutionized the fledgling electrical industry and earned the undying hatred of Edison. 6) The Subroc missile - a modern sub-fired rocket that fires out of the same tubes as a WW2-style Mk48 torpedo. 7) Ethernet. Obviously. 8) The Vauban star fort. Look it up. 9) LPD/LPR printing. A hideous gnarly hack that has become the basis of many a networked print system. Thank god for Red Hat's printtool. 10) Christmas. Kill a tree for Jesus, hang a pickle on it, anything but attend that pagan Saturnalia feast where people might get naked. --Charlie
Good lord, yes. The M16 is a derivative and not particularly outstanding work, despite what others here claim. But John M. Browning's work has stood the test of time far longer and is the basis for all later designs (well, probably not the luger, we'll say MOST later designs anyway). Browning's concepts and designs were inspired, groundbreaking, and truly "elegant". --Charlie
Well, yeah. In _Steal_this_Book_ Hoffman describes the time he plugged his phone wires into the 120 VAC electrical outlet - it seems that Ma Bell never thought they needed protection from that particular hack.... easily verifiable, documentable. Now the telcos have breakers everywhere instead of fuses. --Charlie
Don't be an idiot. Lightning hurts A LOT! (According to John Cahill of Harvard, Bob Peck of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and others who have been hit and survived. Not all survive.) If you think tesla coil output doesn't sting, I suggest you go grab hold of your car's ignition coil out lead while somebody cranks the ignition. This will probably change your mind. I'm an admirer of Tesla, and I believe in the Madison Square Garden submarine and Stanford White's tower, but even I admit that the picture of Tesla sitting in the big coil is at best misleading and at worst an outright double exposed fake. If truly massive amounts of energy pass through your body it will _hurt_you_ unless the frequency is quite precisely tuned. The tuning necessary changes as the density and composition of the media passing the energy changes - and you are not composed of a single uniform substance, so you will get hurt if you broadcast enough energy through your body to power a TV. Geez, how do you think microwave ovens work?
I've read a transcript of his speech to the Royal Society, and examined a number of his patent papers. Anybody else bothered? I thought not. Tesla was a nut, much like Edison but less of an evil bastard... in case you don't know, Edison was probably behind the electric chair (he figured he could discredit AC with this gruesomely inefficient engine of torture, but it turns out people like to torment those they execute so it didn't work) and in his later life he traveled around the country electrocuting people's dogs and holding seances (scout's honor, look it up!). Tesla was obsessive at least, probably manic-depressive as well, and one of his obssessions was high frequency. High voltage was just a consequence of that obsession, I think. He was a bona-fide genius as well as a fruitcake, and his insight into the great forces of the universe is amply demonstrated by his many technological feats (or hoaxes, if you prefer) that can not be duplicated today. Read Tad Wise's biography Tesla to get the lunatic-fringe view of Tesla's work. Wise swallows the death ray, Tunguska, etc. whole which you may not (I have my doubts) but he does paint a memorable picture of a great immigrant American headcase.
Check out an overview of the treaty at European Parliament. Informed (if somewhat alarmist) commentary can also be found at the Federation of American Scientists. Basically, the treaty limits the signatories and their sucessors (the former SSRs) to a pair of anti-missile defense batteries apiece. When the US signed we were already planning to decomission Talos anyway, and funding had dried up for further ABM systems, so the US Gummint figured they'd gotten something for nothing. Later, Ronald "Ronnie Raygun" Reagan decided to play fast and loose with the terms of the treaty in order to develop the so-called "Star Wars" programs. The strapped chicken fiasco discredited Reagan's plans, but the KEW systems are still eminently viable and would probably be in production today if Bush hadn't reneged on paying the companies who sank millions into developing the old "flying crowbars" concept. Hey, you asked. Kind of a sore spot with me since I was peripherally involved in KEW 2.x. --Charlie
In real terms (i.e. how many loaves of bread you can buy) your confederate money is more valuable than it was when issued. Collectors will give you legal tender for confederate scrip, which has a great deal of nostalgia value for southerners, numismaticists, and neo-nazi pinheads. Like all paper money, your confederate dollars have only the value your creditors believe they have. Old-fashioined, "real" money is formed of rare or otherwise valuable materials - the US dollar is no more firmly backed than your confederate cash. --Charlie
So, you took simple, easy to type SHORT names that were references to the pre-christian celtic epic The Battle of the Trees and switched to longer-to-type meaningless names because you got tired of things making sense? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.... Hey, why don't you name one antidisestablishmentarianism - after all, it's the same number of mouse clicks to select it on your Microsoft box, and those whiny WAN and LAN administrators need some more carpal tunnel punishment! --Charlie
Um, hate to be the guy to point this out, since the article & posts make so many good points, but the "tree" names Oak, Ash, Thorn, etc. that are so "unimaginative" and "don't relate to function" are probably the results of an earlier admininstrator who has read one of the many translations of the great epic The Battle of the Trees (or Cad Goddeau). This work is fundamental to understanding pre-christian Celtic cultures, and was the major topic of Robert Graves' magnum opus The White Goddess . Written as a long poem with debatable religious connotations, the Cad lists attributes and deeds of the various trees, and encrypts the ogham alphabet. A much more global, understandable, and useful convention than "Xmen", whatever they are. And if you're into offending the politically correct, it's also a way to suggest the scandalous idea that white folks might have an ethnic heritage. --Charlie
Of course, us systems folks actually have to TYPE the names on occasion - rodent interfaces being too slow and limited for really creative work - so Lovecraftian names are a bit long (cf Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Nigurath, The.Goat.with.a.Thousand.Young, Yog-sothoth, Yuggoth, etc.) with the exception of Great.Cthulu, which is hard for users to spell correctly, since most of them don't read and are too feeble-minded to grasp phonics.
The radfems used to say "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" (this is called IRONY, in case you haven't heard of it). Ya see, fish'n'bikes are only vaguely related due to the quote itself, dig?...just like linux being OSS is only incidentally related to its' success. UNIX is essentially cryptic and antique - for most purposes no different from MVS, if you've heard of that. (A more charitable person might say that they are both mature and capable.) BUT, linux, and other linux-derived opsystems, is FREE and it WORKS. So the point is I can make money to feed the babies without any danger of going to jail for stealing intellectual props. My net is connected to 28 non-profit hospitals - ALL of them use linux for basic networking tasks. OSS is only relevant because that is the venue that allowed Linus to create linux - it's not something that any of these hospitals choose their OS for. On the other claw, the biz linux usrs like me are now quite hot on OSS. So you could say linux legitimized OSS, when the BSDs and GNUsofts alone could not. And of course I never considered the BSDs before linux (those insufferable unix bigots cheese off most people in the biz world) but now I might use them here 'n there... probably not, though, since I can use linux instead, and linux is not an intolerant religion like BSD.
ROTFL - MSN.COM actually recommends poking two major holes in NT security, keeping an extra machine running another operating system for the stuff NT can't handle, and warns you not to install Microsoft's service packs! I love it! And incidentally, as someone who has installed OS/2, NT, and many flavors of linux, I can say that OS/2 3x on CD (not disk) and pretty much all CD-bootable versions of Red Hat are no more difficult to install than NT. --Charlie
Care to comment on the story (popular in the DC area) of your yakking over the catwalk rail in the Cape Canaveral Vehicle Asembly Building? Is it a base canard? An exaggeration? Maybe something some other guy named ESR did? Or, are you the first non-astronaut to send blown chunks into orbit?
C'mon, Rob, don't moderate my question out... Infantile minds want to know!
On the windows hosts use Pegasus Email v3.12a (32-bit) which has full IMAP support. The Email can stay on the linux box, so that cron jobs can be used to prune old crap that oozers never delete and so that the oozers can play musical chairs as they wish. Sendmail/IMAP/Pegasus/Samba is THE state-of-the-art Microsoft integration method. You can pay many $1000s and will still not get close to the performance (I run 400+ oozers off of a Pentium 166 RH5.2 server).
Slashdot Mirror
I have two huge HP-UX boxen and twenty-some jetdirect-equipped HP printers. The measure of control I have over these printers, and the ability to configure them as I please, is LAUGHABLE. For example, printer names have to be all upper-case and can't contain punctuation. I have all the latest HP printing software, incidentally, and it's best described as difficult, counter-intuitive and tedious to use. I used to think /etc/printcap was evil, now I long for its (relatively) fast & easy configuration. .INF files). I always wondered why I couldn't properly use an HP5 unless I had both HP4 and HP5 drivers installed; now I know.
Using samba, LPD, and the Windows drivers gives me much better control than using HP's flagship products. And, the PC users can comprehend the printer names! I use samba's automagic printer driver download, but I have to do a lot of hand-editing because the files that HP is shipping to define the driver requirements of the entire HP5 lineup are corrupt (that's the
And of course, there was at least one verion of JetAdmin for Win95/98 that raped your entire printing subsystem and could not be uninstalled... I had to reformat several hard drives in the IS department because people loaded that tarbaby.
So, in short, having HP work on linux printing is like having Dr. Mengele check out your skin condition. I predict that HP will produce lots of barely useable crap that will get incorporated into every major distribution due to consumer demand.
Here at my shop, I will never buy another HP printer. I haven't seen an HP printer since the ThinkJet that wasn't just a lamer version of a QMS printer anyway.
Gee, thanks, nothing like taking a swipe a people who happen to live near, or look like, or maybe even share race/religion/color/gender with the person you're pissed at.
.*law.* .* Index.HTM
This is what gives vigilante justice a bad name, is trigger-happy vigilantes. Go rent video of The Oxbow Incident before you reply. FYI, the majority of corporations incorporated in the USA (including most multi-nat zaibatsus) are incorporated in Delaware. That's because we have a functional chancery court here, unlike the corrupt and politically beholden chanceries of most US states. Being located in or incorporated in Delaware does not mean you are good or evil, it merely means you did something intelligent once.
Why don't you pick on oxygen-breathers; after all, the people who you are mad at all breathe oxygen, and you wouldn't want anyone to escape your "justice".
--Charlie
...a cowardly weasel wrote:
[snip]
> # anything with law in its name, except law schools, LAWrence
> # keep deLAWare, that's where DVD CCA is incorporated
> # Exception for anything in Poland because lots of towns contain law
> RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !lawrence
> RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !\.edu$
> RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !\.pl$
> RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST}
> RewriteRule
[snip]
Bury your money in a pickle jar and wait for civilisation to collapse. Then trade it for valuable supplies - after all, those bills will make great toilet paper.
Seriously, why would you ask us on slashdot this question? Asking hacker geeks for financial advice is like asking pill bugs for flying lessons!
--Charlie
You're talking about a government that can legally imprison you for mentioning a banned subject (such as the IRA) in your own home.
Granted, they don't usually do that. (The USA's Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't usually trick the FBI into murdering people without cause, either, but that isn't helping Vickie Weaver any.) Nonetheless Britons have no legal right to freedom of speech, which is a lot more oppressive than controlling your (probably excessive) vehicle speed.
--Charlie
Your comments are based on the illusions you have been conditioned to accept... for example, the most efficient possible keyboard has TEN KEYS. That's right, TEN KEYS. And all but ten characters are chorded, obviously, providing more possible unique characters than your old Sun piece of crap. If you never, ever have to move your hands, your keypads can be positioned for optimum ergonomics, your key-throw can be adjusted down to nearly nothing, and your typing speed can exceed any other keyboard type.
But, you need to free your mind from concepts like "penalty zones", "chords are bad/difficult", "key size matters" etc.
If you study assiduously you may achieve, but if you meet the Buddha you must kill her.
KWATZ!
1) The last-minute refit of the Lunar Lander to provide gold-foil rad shielding and those big goofy looking feet (the latter in response to ACClarke's "Fall of Moondust").
2) CIDR. Prevented total Internet meltdown at almost the last possible second, although it could not be thoroughly tested before deployment because the Internet cannot really be simulated (it's too big, obviously).
3) The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon. I mean, they really didn't design it the way it ended up working - "hints" anyone? BIND arrived barely in time as the old "daily NIC download" system was collapsing under its own weight.
4) Porsche's trailing arm torsion bar suspension. A unique solution to an old problem - Porsche actually made fundamental advances in automotive design, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering simultaneously. All high-performance cars and most tanks use the trailing arm today.
5) Telsa's universal brushless AC motor. Revolutionized the fledgling electrical industry and earned the undying hatred of Edison.
6) The Subroc missile - a modern sub-fired rocket that fires out of the same tubes as a WW2-style Mk48 torpedo.
7) Ethernet. Obviously.
8) The Vauban star fort. Look it up.
9) LPD/LPR printing. A hideous gnarly hack that has become the basis of many a networked print system. Thank god for Red Hat's printtool.
10) Christmas. Kill a tree for Jesus, hang a pickle on it, anything but attend that pagan Saturnalia feast where people might get naked.
--Charlie
Good lord, yes. The M16 is a derivative and not particularly outstanding work, despite what others here claim. But John M. Browning's work has stood the test of time far longer and is the basis for all later designs (well, probably not the luger, we'll say MOST later designs anyway). Browning's concepts and designs were inspired, groundbreaking, and truly "elegant".
--Charlie
Well, yeah. In _Steal_this_Book_ Hoffman describes the time he plugged his phone wires into the 120 VAC electrical outlet - it seems that Ma Bell never thought they needed protection from that particular hack.... easily verifiable, documentable. Now the telcos have breakers everywhere instead of fuses.
--Charlie
Don't be an idiot. Lightning hurts A LOT! (According to John Cahill of Harvard, Bob Peck of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and others who have been hit and survived. Not all survive.)
If you think tesla coil output doesn't sting, I suggest you go grab hold of your car's ignition coil out lead while somebody cranks the ignition. This will probably change your mind. I'm an admirer of Tesla, and I believe in the Madison Square Garden submarine and Stanford White's tower, but even I admit that the picture of Tesla sitting in the big coil is at best misleading and at worst an outright double exposed fake.
If truly massive amounts of energy pass through your body it will _hurt_you_ unless the frequency is quite precisely tuned. The tuning necessary changes as the density and composition of the media passing the energy changes - and you are not composed of a single uniform substance, so you will get hurt if you broadcast enough energy through your body to power a TV. Geez, how do you think microwave ovens work?
I've read a transcript of his speech to the Royal Society, and examined a number of his patent papers. Anybody else bothered? I thought not. Tesla was a nut, much like Edison but less of an evil bastard... in case you don't know, Edison was probably behind the electric chair (he figured he could discredit AC with this gruesomely inefficient engine of torture, but it turns out people like to torment those they execute so it didn't work) and in his later life he traveled around the country electrocuting people's dogs and holding seances (scout's honor, look it up!). Tesla was obsessive at least, probably manic-depressive as well, and one of his obssessions was high frequency. High voltage was just a consequence of that obsession, I think. He was a bona-fide genius as well as a fruitcake, and his insight into the great forces of the universe is amply demonstrated by his many technological feats (or hoaxes, if you prefer) that can not be duplicated today.
Read Tad Wise's biography Tesla to get the lunatic-fringe view of Tesla's work. Wise swallows the death ray, Tunguska, etc. whole which you may not (I have my doubts) but he does paint a memorable picture of a great immigrant American headcase.
Check out an overview of the treaty at European Parliament. Informed (if somewhat alarmist) commentary can also be found at the Federation of American Scientists.
Basically, the treaty limits the signatories and their sucessors (the former SSRs) to a pair of anti-missile defense batteries apiece. When the US signed we were already planning to decomission Talos anyway, and funding had dried up for further ABM systems, so the US Gummint figured they'd gotten something for nothing. Later, Ronald "Ronnie Raygun" Reagan decided to play fast and loose with the terms of the treaty in order to develop the so-called "Star Wars" programs. The strapped chicken fiasco discredited Reagan's plans, but the KEW systems are still eminently viable and would probably be in production today if Bush hadn't reneged on paying the companies who sank millions into developing the old "flying crowbars" concept.
Hey, you asked. Kind of a sore spot with me since I was peripherally involved in KEW 2.x.
--Charlie
In real terms (i.e. how many loaves of bread you can buy) your confederate money is more valuable than it was when issued. Collectors will give you legal tender for confederate scrip, which has a great deal of nostalgia value for southerners, numismaticists, and neo-nazi pinheads.
Like all paper money, your confederate dollars have only the value your creditors believe they have. Old-fashioined, "real" money is formed of rare or otherwise valuable materials - the US dollar is no more firmly backed than your confederate cash.
--Charlie
Yeah, sorry, I know it's a bit off-topic.
--C
So, you took simple, easy to type SHORT names that were references to the pre-christian celtic epic The Battle of the Trees and switched to longer-to-type meaningless names because you got tired of things making sense? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.... Hey, why don't you name one antidisestablishmentarianism - after all, it's the same number of mouse clicks to select it on your Microsoft box, and those whiny WAN and LAN administrators need some more carpal tunnel punishment!
--Charlie
Um, hate to be the guy to point this out, since the article & posts make so many good points, but the "tree" names Oak, Ash, Thorn, etc. that are so "unimaginative" and "don't relate to function" are probably the results of an earlier admininstrator who has read one of the many translations of the great epic The Battle of the Trees (or Cad Goddeau). This work is fundamental to understanding pre-christian Celtic cultures, and was the major topic of Robert Graves' magnum opus The White Goddess . Written as a long poem with debatable religious connotations, the Cad lists attributes and deeds of the various trees, and encrypts the ogham alphabet.
A much more global, understandable, and useful convention than "Xmen", whatever they are. And if you're into offending the politically correct, it's also a way to suggest the scandalous idea that white folks might have an ethnic heritage.
--Charlie
Of course, us systems folks actually have to TYPE the names on occasion - rodent interfaces being too slow and limited for really creative work - so Lovecraftian names are a bit long (cf Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Nigurath, The.Goat.with.a.Thousand.Young, Yog-sothoth, Yuggoth, etc.) with the exception of Great.Cthulu, which is hard for users to spell correctly, since most of them don't read and are too feeble-minded to grasp phonics.
The Hurd should be ready by the time linux explodes from feature bloat. The Hurd is better suited to resist fb.
The radfems used to say "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" (this is called IRONY, in case you haven't heard of it). Ya see, fish'n'bikes are only vaguely related due to the quote itself, dig? ...just like linux being OSS is only incidentally related to its' success.
UNIX is essentially cryptic and antique - for most purposes no different from MVS, if you've heard of that. (A more charitable person might say that they are both mature and capable.) BUT, linux, and other linux-derived opsystems, is FREE and it WORKS. So the point is I can make money to feed the babies without any danger of going to jail for stealing intellectual props. My net is connected to 28 non-profit hospitals - ALL of them use linux for basic networking tasks. OSS is only relevant because that is the venue that allowed Linus to create linux - it's not something that any of these hospitals choose their OS for.
On the other claw, the biz linux usrs like me are now quite hot on OSS. So you could say linux legitimized OSS, when the BSDs and GNUsofts alone could not. And of course I never considered the BSDs before linux (those insufferable unix bigots cheese off most people in the biz world) but now I might use them here 'n there... probably not, though, since I can use linux instead, and linux is not an intolerant religion like BSD.
ROTFL - MSN.COM actually recommends poking two major holes in NT security, keeping an extra machine running another operating system for the stuff NT can't handle, and warns you not to install Microsoft's service packs! I love it! And incidentally, as someone who has installed OS/2, NT, and many flavors of linux, I can say that OS/2 3x on CD (not disk) and pretty much all CD-bootable versions of Red Hat are no more difficult to install than NT.
--Charlie
Care to comment on the story (popular in the DC area) of your yakking over the catwalk rail in the Cape Canaveral Vehicle Asembly Building?
Is it a base canard? An exaggeration? Maybe something some other guy named ESR did?
Or, are you the first non-astronaut to send blown chunks into orbit?
C'mon, Rob, don't moderate my question out... Infantile minds want to know!
On the windows hosts use Pegasus Email v3.12a (32-bit) which has full IMAP support. The Email can stay on the linux box, so that cron jobs can be used to prune old crap that oozers never delete and so that the oozers can play musical chairs as they wish.
Sendmail/IMAP/Pegasus/Samba is THE state-of-the-art Microsoft integration method. You can pay many $1000s and will still not get close to the performance (I run 400+ oozers off of a Pentium 166 RH5.2 server).