Eudora has essentially had the same user interface for the last decade. Open source clients change weekly. Hell, Mozilla has come up with new names every month since last Fall.
Where I work now we mostly use IBM hardware with ServRAID controllers.
In the past I've worked with Compaq hardware, which I believed shipped with Symbios controllers. (Been awhile)
Sun storage was usually good, except that we tended to get alot of flaky gbics and cabling from them.
"Certified" hardware really is important, especially in larger environments, where wasted time is more expensive than buying the vendor's recommened hardware. A good example is when due to a supply shortage, we ordered a different vendor's NIC for a bunch of servers. No big deal, right?
Wrong. The NICs didn't play nice with switches in the field for some bizarre reason, and hundreds of hours of staff time was wasted fixing the problem.
In my experience, RAID hardware tends to be very picky and suffers from subtle and often bizarre hardware conflicts. In general, using a RAID solution that is packaged with the hardware is the best idea.
If you cannot afford good RAID hardware, stick to conventional JBOD configurations.
2. Configuration
Design your the configuration of your systems around consistency first, performance second.
You need to document your procedures for building servers, allocating storage, etc. Create scripts whenever possible.
If you are not confident that you could not talk a marginally qualified technician through a server rebuild over the phone, your docs aren't good enough. If you don't have the time to write docs, make the time or work late.
3. Backups
You need documented, tested backup AND restore procedures. All of your oncall staff need to be able to restore a server...
With 50 servers, disk controller or disk failures should not be a common event. We work with approximately 400 datacenter and 200 field servers (varying in age from 1-9 years), and replaced 3 controllers and 19 disks last year.
Look for electrical issues, you may have crappy electrical service.
I started planning an XUL project that never took off, but did spend some time perusing the Mozilla docs. They weren't awful..
What was missing, however, is the "critical mass" that toolkits like GTK or QT have. I think that a big part of this was a direct result of Mozilla's AOL affiliation. Politically, AOL had no intention of pushing any kind of programming toolkit on the world, while KDE has an active commercial development effort selling it and GNOME has support from all of the industry players.
That being said, I really hope that Mozilla's new found independence helps them collaborate with other open source projects.
Wouldn't it be great if someone made an XML-enabled toilet. That way humans, robots and animals alike would automatically be able to handle waste products with a single, consistent interface!
As far as I'm concerned, if you cannot pay for a car in three years, you don't need to own it.
I was talking to a buddy of mine who got laid off and ended up selling cars for a short time. He never ceased to be shocked by idiots with good credit making $30k/yr working retail buying $35k SUVs with 6 year loans!
By the time they finished buying accessories and ripoff extended warranties, these people could have bought a more reasonable car new with the same payment and a 4 year loan!
Look at used, off-lease Cadillacs or Lincolns that are "certified" (which gives them a 100k warranty). Right now you can find a 2001 or 2000 Caddy with 40k miles for like $16-20k.
They are friggin comfy cars and ride better than most trucks.
The mileage usually doesn't matter too much to me. I commute like 10 miles... the cost savings for commuting in a truck or big car versus a tin can on wheels is like $200. Big whoop.
When you factor in labor (UAW workers make 30-75/hr), plant overhead, and taxes (disability, real estate, social security, etc) you're looking at -2 - 2% margins with the bulk of profit coming from extended service contracts and financing.
Look at the profit margin for GM (1.6%) and compare it to a successful software company like Oracle (25%), and tell me that automaking is a high-margin business.
Automakers push leases to the dumb folks who "need" a new car, yet lack the cash. That's why you see middle class college students driving BMW's and 40k/year workers driving a Lexus or a Civic with $10k of aftermarket shit bolted on.
They make huge profit margins on these dolts, who often miss payments and end up paying 16%+ interest rates.
Depending on the region, however, leasing only represents about 30-40% of the new car market. Even then, customers are drawn into dealerships by the promise of low, low monthly payments.
Slashdot Mirror
Hiring French, German and Spanish speakers is a waste of time. Everybody knows that if you yell loud enough, those people will understand!
Tools exist to manage 100's of network devices.
In any case, whether you have 1 or 1000 routers, it is your responsibility to make them interact correctly with public networks.
AOL has a point of presence everywhere.
If you travel often, the toll charges you save pay for the premium service cost.
AOL was originally a Mac-only service.
The DOS version was called "PC Link" and had a hideous yellow interface.
Eudora has essentially had the same user interface for the last decade. Open source clients change weekly. Hell, Mozilla has come up with new names every month since last Fall.
It's easier to catch date errors in your application! Type-checking doesn't belong in a database anyway.
Your statements are highly misleading.
mySql lets you pick one:
1. Fast query performance
2. Row locking & transaction support
And when people talk about "minimal cross-platform compatibility" wrt MySql, they are talking about migrating from Oracle/Informix/DB2 to MySQL.
MySQL is cheap and delivers common functionality required by relatively simple database appliations. That's the only advantage.
Where I work now we mostly use IBM hardware with ServRAID controllers.
In the past I've worked with Compaq hardware, which I believed shipped with Symbios controllers. (Been awhile)
Sun storage was usually good, except that we tended to get alot of flaky gbics and cabling from them.
"Certified" hardware really is important, especially in larger environments, where wasted time is more expensive than buying the vendor's recommened hardware. A good example is when due to a supply shortage, we ordered a different vendor's NIC for a bunch of servers. No big deal, right?
Wrong. The NICs didn't play nice with switches in the field for some bizarre reason, and hundreds of hours of staff time was wasted fixing the problem.
The answer is SysAdmin 101 stuff.
..
1. Buy quality hardware.
IDE RAID for critical servers is a bad idea.
In my experience, RAID hardware tends to be very picky and suffers from subtle and often bizarre hardware conflicts. In general, using a RAID solution that is packaged with the hardware is the best idea.
If you cannot afford good RAID hardware, stick to conventional JBOD configurations.
2. Configuration
Design your the configuration of your systems around consistency first, performance second.
You need to document your procedures for building servers, allocating storage, etc. Create scripts whenever possible.
If you are not confident that you could not talk a marginally qualified technician through a server rebuild over the phone, your docs aren't good enough. If you don't have the time to write docs, make the time or work late.
3. Backups
You need documented, tested backup AND restore procedures. All of your oncall staff need to be able to restore a server.
With 50 servers, disk controller or disk failures should not be a common event. We work with approximately 400 datacenter and 200 field servers (varying in age from 1-9 years), and replaced 3 controllers and 19 disks last year.
Look for electrical issues, you may have crappy electrical service.
I started planning an XUL project that never took off, but did spend some time perusing the Mozilla docs. They weren't awful..
What was missing, however, is the "critical mass" that toolkits like GTK or QT have. I think that a big part of this was a direct result of Mozilla's AOL affiliation. Politically, AOL had no intention of pushing any kind of programming toolkit on the world, while KDE has an active commercial development effort selling it and GNOME has support from all of the industry players.
That being said, I really hope that Mozilla's new found independence helps them collaborate with other open source projects.
But what percentage of those 14,544 emails are critically important to you?
Who knows? One of those 0.66% of misclassified email might be the ONE email that matters most.
The problem is the XUL has been basically undocumented until now and very closely linked with Mozilla.
Mozilla rocks, but it took them until 2001 or so to produce a better browser than IE.
Just what the world needs, an XML terminal!
Wouldn't it be great if someone made an XML-enabled toilet. That way humans, robots and animals alike would automatically be able to handle waste products with a single, consistent interface!
Great idea!
I'll notify you of my progress as soon as I've finished chipping off pieces of this rock and turn it into something knows as a "wheel".
Begin Slashbot Argument:
The kernel is free. Unless Oracle opens up their code, we don't care about them.
GPL R001z!
End Slashdot Argument
As far as I'm concerned, if you cannot pay for a car in three years, you don't need to own it.
I was talking to a buddy of mine who got laid off and ended up selling cars for a short time. He never ceased to be shocked by idiots with good credit making $30k/yr working retail buying $35k SUVs with 6 year loans!
By the time they finished buying accessories and ripoff extended warranties, these people could have bought a more reasonable car new with the same payment and a 4 year loan!
Look at used, off-lease Cadillacs or Lincolns that are "certified" (which gives them a 100k warranty). Right now you can find a 2001 or 2000 Caddy with 40k miles for like $16-20k.
They are friggin comfy cars and ride better than most trucks.
The mileage usually doesn't matter too much to me. I commute like 10 miles... the cost savings for commuting in a truck or big car versus a tin can on wheels is like $200. Big whoop.
You call 15% gross margins "high margin"????
When you factor in labor (UAW workers make 30-75/hr), plant overhead, and taxes (disability, real estate, social security, etc) you're looking at -2 - 2% margins with the bulk of profit coming from extended service contracts and financing.
Look at the profit margin for GM (1.6%) and compare it to a successful software company like Oracle (25%), and tell me that automaking is a high-margin business.
Are you on crack?
I'm 6'5". I can suffer in a 50 mpg Toyota Echo or whatever and get out of the thing with a broken back. (And the Echo is roomy for an econobox)
Or I could sit in comfort in my Cadillac, which gets 28mpg. Or in a pickup that gets 20mpg.
Conspiracy theories sound great.
Automakers push leases to the dumb folks who "need" a new car, yet lack the cash. That's why you see middle class college students driving BMW's and 40k/year workers driving a Lexus or a Civic with $10k of aftermarket shit bolted on.
They make huge profit margins on these dolts, who often miss payments and end up paying 16%+ interest rates.
Depending on the region, however, leasing only represents about 30-40% of the new car market. Even then, customers are drawn into dealerships by the promise of low, low monthly payments.
I was socially engineering the secretary the other day and had a great time. I was too sleepy afterwards to hack any networks, though.
The problem is that copyright owners are scared shitless of the internet, and attach too high a value to their works in electronic form.
"Too high" is my opinion, and since these services continue to exist, the market must think otherwise.
I subscribe to O'Reilly's Safari, and find it a really helpful resource.
Being able to search through a bunch of books and see problems from multiple angles is a really cool thing.
Yes, it's all on Google... but I think that the quality of information in published books is often better and is very convenient to find.
Hobby expenses are also tax-deductible, up to 2% of your AGI.
WTF are you talking about?
Any bar owner knows that bartenders steal and drink on the job, its part of the overhead.