Since a lot of the non-left-handed discussion revolves around passwords thought I'd share my method - I have to make a LOT of passwords for my job and keeping track of them is insane so for most things I use this -
take a keyword, say, the site name, the email address, or the login name you're using for a system. Take the numeric position of the first letter, add one on and that's where I start choosing 6 letters of a 'secret' 13 letter word I use. then add the square of the number of letters in the keyword at the end.
for example, if logging into ebay and the secret word was quellesuprise I'd start with the 6th character of the secret word, type 5 more letters of the word, then 16. so for ebay it's esupri16.
it works, but could be better. a) it not always obvious what the keyword should be and b) if someone say 4 or 5 of my passwords they could guess the system and crack many more.
It's a shame there's still no place to keep n show your stuff. No, bank doesn't count, I mean houses (or at least guild halls) - the one thing SWG got right that WOW has/facepalm'd is the lack of cool stuff that isn't clothing, or weapons.
in SWG i remember just abandoning quest lines when one of the things I picked up for a quest was so cool looking I had to have it in my house. Spending hours visiting friends, seeing what they were up to, and admiring their painfully detailed work the way I admire grand ASCII art (it took hours to move things just, exactly where they should be - design flaw but props to peeps who put up with it).
In SWG I had a hut, on an abandoned mountaintop, full of trophies and funny bits of my life in game, and I miss that.
Oh, and social crafting! how Blizzard missed making barbers a player craft (even if it was just secondary) is beyond me.
SWG sucked in major, buggy ways in terms of gameplay but in terms of a social space to interact and imagine in it was years ahead of WOW, years ago. Had better graphics too.
Otherwise I more or less agree with the post. Oh, and I'm not too happy about warlock nerfs, but that will just make my inevitable, crushing revenge on all the classes that instaglib me now all the more satisfying. Locks will rise again, be given something against melee (that lasts longer than 30 sec every 3 min), and that, my friends, will be a red day.
I haven't done any dungeons yet but the the better quests are really terrific. I wish I wasn't in a hurry to catch up to my friends (who are already at 80) and could spend more time with the storylines, I read about 1/3rd of the quests really closely and they're all solid at the least.
the end of the Fria (sp?) quest line in Un Goro v2.0 was amazing. the dk quests were superb. the soloability of quests is welcome, but yes, I think they were a little too easy, I found myself more worried about having 0 downtime then any actual fear for my life.
So I kind of agree and kind of disagree with the op
Is our current system one which reforms? I agree with the OP we should reintroduce corporal punishments & shamings IF we continue with our current system. If we did effective reform in the penal system then I'd feel otherwise. As it stands, people find future time a bit abstract, I'm not sure people really know what 10 years in jail is (either those threatened with it or those who assign the penalties (lawmakers, the body politic) but they have a more concrete idea about what getting your palm horribly burned is. Maybe punishments would be more fair (both less and more harsh depending on the crime, I think some crimes are horribly overpunished and others underpunished) if the punishment was something people more accurately understood.
been doing this for clients for years
on
Email-only Providers?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Here's what you need -
Set up your DNS with mydomain.com (you can use them as a registrar if you wish, I highly recommend them, but they offer free DNS even if you don't register the domain with them!) and use their mail forwarding service (mydomain is somewhat rare in offering this as part of their free DNS) instead of setting up a MX record.
Create a gmail account and set up an alias for the domain including reply-as.
Done! Totally free, pretty easy, and very reliable.
Sorry I don't have time to do a walk thru of each step I imagine others here can fill in the details...
to change file rights in XP pro don't forget to first turn off 'simple file sharing' (on by default) in windows explorer tools: folder options: view [tab]: near the bottom you'll see the option.
Any suggestions for effective ways American citizens can push against this legislation? Somehow I feel emailing my congresswoman doesn't really do much (and Pelosi probably opposes it anyway, I hope...).
Howabout non-us citizens (i.e. my French and Canadian friends) anything productive they can do?
Wrote GoDaddy here's the response in full - I don't know if it's reasonable or not.
Office of the President Response Dear xxx,
The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.
The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.
This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.
Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.
The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.
While the "censorship" allegations certainly make for an edgy "story," they simply had nothing to do with this situation.
Anyone have any details on how they're implementing this? I'd love to know what servers they're using, the details on the networking required for the feeds, the way they structure the observation room (one person can only effectively watch a certain number of feeds, I've heard 60ish from one vendor, i think it's higher but not much).
i think of in game houses as a place to show off your objects, art, taste and stuff, a place to socialize in and otherwise extension of the game world into more of a 'virtual reality' thing it's not the sims you should reference but Purple Crayon and Second Life - it's a game-within-the-game, and a richer environment all-around. I only had houses in SWG but I knew people that spent hours (and hours) tricking out their house with rare items, things-that-were-meant-to-be-something-else and other such things and they were really freaking cool - it would be like if you could customize your chars tatoos, hair and other stylistic stuff outside of your armor, you could imagine some people would dig that? houses are the same way, extending your RP, extending immersion and extending the range of things available to players.
as 1 just came down yesterday, finally canceled after 3 years in the game (70 lock main) but the last year was just a few hours a month.
reason 0) what new content. bliz has shown very little innovation (some... but very little) since launch, they just roll out more of the same over and over. when I saw the burning crusade I almost quit, until I got that sweet lvl 64 green dagger that kicked so much ass...
reason 1) not the best. for all it did better than SWG in too many ways it was not as good. Housing, objects, graphics, more interesting/social professions, sony completely, utterly fucked up star wars galaxies but it had elements that wow never came close 2. Knowing what wow could have been always left me a little sour...
reason 2) actually more important that reason 1 there just isn't enough time in the day to play n still get other things done that I want - in the end your wow character, gold, and epics are still bits on a server somewhere in the middle of nowhere and while budhists might say so are all the things of the world, I decided to prioritize the latter. It's really impossible to do both well, for me at least.
If there was some indication that security restrictions were helpful I'd feel a LOT better about them but like you and other posters have said they seem so random. How, for example, is your typical TSA securoon going to know if my LiIon batter is 6 or 9 cells? Why is 1 9 cell battery ok and 2 3 cell batteries not allowed?
All we need to do is go by the Israel standard. If they do it on el al isreal then we do it, the same way, same training 4 personnel, etc. Seriously, they've been stopping much more focused terrorists for way longer and they do things quite differently.
Last point - there are tons of things you can buy behind the security checkpoints - I've seen metal letter openers, long very sharp hat pins and other things that are way more dangerous than some of the things they've taken out of my bag.
I've been talking to some of the pols in SF, CA about this same issue, I think it's brilliant to allow public access to all security cameras, it was Foucault's Discipline and Punish that first got me on the idea (he talks a lot about observation and social control structures and says one way to balance the power of omnipresent observation is to allow everyone to participate in the viewing - I'll grab the quote later if I can).
Since we can't realistically fight the spread of cameras we should instead control how they're implemented. Why can't we stop the spread? Because even if public cameras are not put on every lamppost there is ALREADY widespread security cameras accessed by the 'authorities' all the time - I run security cameras for businesses in the SF area and the police come to us constantly asking for surveillance footage from our systems (both inside and outside the club) and we comply.
This trend towards private cameras the police can access will only continue, if we make it public, at least we have a measure of control and we should direct that control towards opening the system as much as possible.
I was recently looking into secure communications and revisited hushmail, discovered it was compromised (this story isn't new). I believe there is no good encryption solution available that doesn't involve both the sender and receiver running the same software.
Once you make that compromise the solutions multiply. For windows I really like truecrypt for file/disk encryption and firegpg with gnugp to do web based email encryption.
Exactly the point "if you're a real, live producer" 2257 is a pain but dealable. if you run a messageboard where someone posts a too too sexy pic of themselves with a racy story so you, the person who runs the board, now has to comply with 2257 record keeping for said user, this makes you censor or shut your board down...
There was widespread protest at the latest ammendments to 2257 (which just came out of review in Sept. and were going into law in Dec - written in 2006 by Gonzolas and the Bush whitehouse) as they were going to document-requirement-out-of-existence many adult themed but obviously non-porographic websites, the national lesbian bisexual gay transgenered taskforce was doing political organizing against it, among many other groups.
Effectively it said you are a porn producer if you run a website that has any graphic nudity (or "portrayals" of sexual activity) on it and you must therefore comply with section 2257 recordkeeping guidelines which are a huge, gigantic pain in the ass and go far, far beyond ensuring you're not using child actors in your smut.
Additionally if you are a producer (and w/ the new definition so very many people will be) you can be 'audited' at any time which is in effect a warrantless search and seizure.
I work with some people in the adult industry and I have this information from the source (i.e. not 2nd hand) that agents came into their production company on a 2257 record keeping inspection and seized EVERYTHING in the room the records were kept in. Computers. Other records. Everything.
Subsequently other production studios started actually building special rooms to contain just their 2257 paperwork and nothing else (it appears the understanding is the warrantless search only applies to the room where the records are kept). I was in meetings where they were trying to figure out if the room had to have a door or just an opening, a ceiling, and what cross-linked records (did I mention the requirements are a pain) might possibly be somewhere else... they even needed a new server just for the electronic records b/c elsewhere servers (with all their graphics and video) were seized b/c they had part of the 2257 records stored on them.
I know this sounds ridiculous but I'm certain this is was status quo - now this... quo... was going to be applied much, much more widely come December.
Bravo 6th circuit for putting breaks on this insanity.
Sorry I don't have time to include links but I'll follow up later w/ documentation if I can.
Not sure but they seem to build/maintain their site with the OSS Zope so while the text might be thier copywrite the formatting for the text was generated by Zope and I suspect there are some rules about how you can or can not copywrite that product?
I can't believe I'm even responding to this sillyness but we do need to keep the ill-informed slapped around I suppose.
Surviving falls for a HD is a Very Good Thing. But they claim the drive when spun-down (just using the flash) can survive a 6 foot fall or 900 Gs of deceleration. 900? I'm having a hard time understanding how 6 feet of free fall ends in 900g of force - does that mean, say, a 10 lb object dropped 6 ft will hit the floor with the equiv. of 9,000 lb of force? Anyone who paid attention in HS physics care to elaborate?
I have done some googling but gotten the greater part of nowhere
Just want to give props, very nice you made my morning. Now to convert this to a heads up display for my helmet and I'm 1 step closer to becoming the motorcycle hacker I always dreamed I could be. And 1 step closer to earning a darwin award...
Reliability - exactly the point, more than security. For example, no matter what I've done (settings, new routers, new wNICs, different PCs, etc.) the wireless @ my house just occasionally drops, as much as 2-3 times a day or as little as 3x a week... I almost always can fix it by 'repairing' the wireless nic but sometimes I have to just connect to another network for a while, then come back to mine.
Now I want to go wireless with our point of sale systems @ nightclubs which require constant, near perfect network transmissions (due to exceedingly bad information architecture and db design of the POS program). When wireless will be able to run with 99.99% uptime while running full encryption regardless of what other wireless devices may come and go in the area, that day is the day I tear all our network cabling out and dance a jig. I think that day is not today though.
Read thru the comments, much of it very good, here's some addendum 1) software RAID with windows is a bad idea. Linux, as everyone says, is more or less fine. 2) raid 5 w/ a controller - if you loose the controller, you loose the raid unless you can find an identical controller and have taken all the proper steps. 3) mirrored RAIDs can be recovered even if the controller fails, and have very, very good read speeds. Put your boot partition and important data on the mirror 4) one easy way to go is do a hardware mirror for your primary bootable partition (avoiding the problems of installing the OS to a software mirror) then put 2 additional (smaller, faster?) disks in a software RAID0 for your intensive read/write stuff and back them up on a daily basis 'cause some day you're guaranteed to have that fail catastrophically.
Part of my job is to send out advertising email to our confirmed, double opt-in, easy opt-out email list (see, i'm not evil) and I send plain text and html emails depending on their signup options.
Two comments. 1) I did cross browser testing on all the major web-based email providers and a couple clients and found CSS support is so bad it was unusable - WE NEVER COULD USE CSS IN HTML EMAILS! At least not in the real world. Maybe in a corporate environement where you know the client each user will use. I forget but I think AOL was the real kicker, possibly hotmail as well.
2) HTML email is a necessary evil, and at this point, I'd be happy if I could just ditch plain text alltogether. I'm advertising for nightclubs, plain text emails just don't appeal to people as much as pretty pictures. Yes, geeks are fine with text, but the rest of the non-geek world out there responds a hell of a lot better to pics.
Slashdot Mirror
Since a lot of the non-left-handed discussion revolves around passwords thought I'd share my method - I have to make a LOT of passwords for my job and keeping track of them is insane so for most things I use this -
take a keyword, say, the site name, the email address, or the login name you're using for a system. Take the numeric position of the first letter, add one on and that's where I start choosing 6 letters of a 'secret' 13 letter word I use. then add the square of the number of letters in the keyword at the end.
for example, if logging into ebay and the secret word was quellesuprise I'd start with the 6th character of the secret word, type 5 more letters of the word, then 16. so for ebay it's esupri16.
it works, but could be better. a) it not always obvious what the keyword should be and b) if someone say 4 or 5 of my passwords they could guess the system and crack many more.
It's a shame there's still no place to keep n show your stuff. No, bank doesn't count, I mean houses (or at least guild halls) - the one thing SWG got right that WOW has /facepalm'd is the lack of cool stuff that isn't clothing, or weapons.
in SWG i remember just abandoning quest lines when one of the things I picked up for a quest was so cool looking I had to have it in my house. Spending hours visiting friends, seeing what they were up to, and admiring their painfully detailed work the way I admire grand ASCII art (it took hours to move things just, exactly where they should be - design flaw but props to peeps who put up with it).
In SWG I had a hut, on an abandoned mountaintop, full of trophies and funny bits of my life in game, and I miss that.
Oh, and social crafting! how Blizzard missed making barbers a player craft (even if it was just secondary) is beyond me.
SWG sucked in major, buggy ways in terms of gameplay but in terms of a social space to interact and imagine in it was years ahead of WOW, years ago. Had better graphics too.
Otherwise I more or less agree with the post. Oh, and I'm not too happy about warlock nerfs, but that will just make my inevitable, crushing revenge on all the classes that instaglib me now all the more satisfying. Locks will rise again, be given something against melee (that lasts longer than 30 sec every 3 min), and that, my friends, will be a red day.
I haven't done any dungeons yet but the the better quests are really terrific. I wish I wasn't in a hurry to catch up to my friends (who are already at 80) and could spend more time with the storylines, I read about 1/3rd of the quests really closely and they're all solid at the least.
the end of the Fria (sp?) quest line in Un Goro v2.0 was amazing. the dk quests were superb. the soloability of quests is welcome, but yes, I think they were a little too easy, I found myself more worried about having 0 downtime then any actual fear for my life.
So I kind of agree and kind of disagree with the op
Is our current system one which reforms? I agree with the OP we should reintroduce corporal punishments & shamings IF we continue with our current system. If we did effective reform in the penal system then I'd feel otherwise. As it stands, people find future time a bit abstract, I'm not sure people really know what 10 years in jail is (either those threatened with it or those who assign the penalties (lawmakers, the body politic) but they have a more concrete idea about what getting your palm horribly burned is. Maybe punishments would be more fair (both less and more harsh depending on the crime, I think some crimes are horribly overpunished and others underpunished) if the punishment was something people more accurately understood.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/1344232
all ur dupes are belong to me
Here's what you need -
Set up your DNS with mydomain.com (you can use them as a registrar if you wish, I highly recommend them, but they offer free DNS even if you don't register the domain with them!) and use their mail forwarding service (mydomain is somewhat rare in offering this as part of their free DNS) instead of setting up a MX record.
Create a gmail account and set up an alias for the domain including reply-as.
Done! Totally free, pretty easy, and very reliable.
Sorry I don't have time to do a walk thru of each step I imagine others here can fill in the details...
to change file rights in XP pro don't forget to first turn off 'simple file sharing' (on by default) in windows explorer tools: folder options: view [tab]: near the bottom you'll see the option.
Any suggestions for effective ways American citizens can push against this legislation? Somehow I feel emailing my congresswoman doesn't really do much (and Pelosi probably opposes it anyway, I hope...).
Howabout non-us citizens (i.e. my French and Canadian friends) anything productive they can do?
Wrote GoDaddy here's the response in full - I don't know if it's reasonable or not.
Office of the President Response
Dear xxx,
The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.
The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.
This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.
Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.
The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.
While the "censorship" allegations certainly make for an edgy "story," they simply had nothing to do with this situation.
- Go Daddy
Office of the President
Anyone have any details on how they're implementing this? I'd love to know what servers they're using, the details on the networking required for the feeds, the way they structure the observation room (one person can only effectively watch a certain number of feeds, I've heard 60ish from one vendor, i think it's higher but not much).
D
i think of in game houses as a place to show off your objects, art, taste and stuff, a place to socialize in and otherwise extension of the game world into more of a 'virtual reality' thing it's not the sims you should reference but Purple Crayon and Second Life - it's a game-within-the-game, and a richer environment all-around. I only had houses in SWG but I knew people that spent hours (and hours) tricking out their house with rare items, things-that-were-meant-to-be-something-else and other such things and they were really freaking cool - it would be like if you could customize your chars tatoos, hair and other stylistic stuff outside of your armor, you could imagine some people would dig that? houses are the same way, extending your RP, extending immersion and extending the range of things available to players.
imho
as 1 just came down yesterday, finally canceled after 3 years in the game (70 lock main) but the
last year was just a few hours a month.
reason 0) what new content. bliz has shown very little innovation (some... but very little) since launch, they just roll out more of the same over and over. when I saw the burning crusade I almost quit, until I got that sweet lvl 64 green dagger that kicked so much ass...
reason 1) not the best. for all it did better than SWG in too many ways it was not as good. Housing, objects, graphics, more interesting/social professions, sony completely, utterly fucked up star wars galaxies but it had elements that wow never came close 2. Knowing what wow could have been always left me a little sour...
reason 2) actually more important that reason 1 there just isn't enough time in the day to play n still get other things done that I want - in the end your wow character, gold, and epics are still bits on a server somewhere in the middle of nowhere and while budhists might say so are all the things of the world, I decided to prioritize the latter. It's really impossible to do both well, for me at least.
If there was some indication that security restrictions were helpful I'd feel a LOT better about them but like you and other posters have said they seem so random. How, for example, is your typical TSA securoon going to know if my LiIon batter is 6 or 9 cells? Why is 1 9 cell battery ok and 2 3 cell batteries not allowed?
All we need to do is go by the Israel standard. If they do it on el al isreal then we do it, the same way, same training 4 personnel, etc. Seriously, they've been stopping much more focused terrorists for way longer and they do things quite differently.
Last point - there are tons of things you can buy behind the security checkpoints - I've seen metal letter openers, long very sharp hat pins and other things that are way more dangerous than some of the things they've taken out of my bag.
I've been talking to some of the pols in SF, CA about this same issue, I think it's brilliant to allow public access to all security cameras, it was Foucault's Discipline and Punish that first got me on the idea (he talks a lot about observation and social control structures and says one way to balance the power of omnipresent observation is to allow everyone to participate in the viewing - I'll grab the quote later if I can).
Since we can't realistically fight the spread of cameras we should instead control how they're implemented. Why can't we stop the spread? Because even if public cameras are not put on every lamppost there is ALREADY widespread security cameras accessed by the 'authorities' all the time - I run security cameras for businesses in the SF area and the police come to us constantly asking for surveillance footage from our systems (both inside and outside the club) and we comply.
This trend towards private cameras the police can access will only continue, if we make it public, at least we have a measure of control and we should direct that control towards opening the system as much as possible.
IMHO
truecrypt.
sigh
I was recently looking into secure communications and revisited hushmail, discovered it was compromised (this story isn't new). I believe there is no good encryption solution available that doesn't involve both the sender and receiver running the same software.
Once you make that compromise the solutions multiply. For windows I really like truecrypt for file/disk encryption and firegpg with gnugp to do web based email encryption.
Exactly the point "if you're a real, live producer" 2257 is a pain but dealable. if you run a messageboard where someone posts a too too sexy pic of themselves with a racy story so you, the person who runs the board, now has to comply with 2257 record keeping for said user, this makes you censor or shut your board down...
There was widespread protest at the latest ammendments to 2257 (which just came out of review in Sept. and were going into law in Dec - written in 2006 by Gonzolas and the Bush whitehouse) as they were going to document-requirement-out-of-existence many adult themed but obviously non-porographic websites, the national lesbian bisexual gay transgenered taskforce was doing political organizing against it, among many other groups.
... quo... was going to be applied much, much more widely come December.
Effectively it said you are a porn producer if you run a website that has any graphic nudity (or "portrayals" of sexual activity) on it and you must therefore comply with section 2257 recordkeeping guidelines which are a huge, gigantic pain in the ass and go far, far beyond ensuring you're not using child actors in your smut.
Additionally if you are a producer (and w/ the new definition so very many people will be) you can be 'audited' at any time which is in effect a warrantless search and seizure.
I work with some people in the adult industry and I have this information from the source (i.e. not 2nd hand) that agents came into their production company on a 2257 record keeping inspection and seized EVERYTHING in the room the records were kept in. Computers. Other records. Everything.
Subsequently other production studios started actually building special rooms to contain just their 2257 paperwork and nothing else (it appears the understanding is the warrantless search only applies to the room where the records are kept). I was in meetings where they were trying to figure out if the room had to have a door or just an opening, a ceiling, and what cross-linked records (did I mention the requirements are a pain) might possibly be somewhere else... they even needed a new server just for the electronic records b/c elsewhere servers (with all their graphics and video) were seized b/c they had part of the 2257 records stored on them.
I know this sounds ridiculous but I'm certain this is was status quo - now this
Bravo 6th circuit for putting breaks on this insanity.
Sorry I don't have time to include links but I'll follow up later w/ documentation if I can.
Not sure but they seem to build/maintain their site with the OSS Zope so while the text might be thier copywrite the formatting for the text was generated by Zope and I suspect there are some rules about how you can or can not copywrite that product?
I can't believe I'm even responding to this sillyness but we do need to keep the ill-informed slapped around I suppose.
Surviving falls for a HD is a Very Good Thing. But they claim the drive when spun-down (just using the flash) can survive a 6 foot fall or 900 Gs of deceleration. 900? I'm having a hard time understanding how 6 feet of free fall ends in 900g of force - does that mean, say, a 10 lb object dropped 6 ft will hit the floor with the equiv. of 9,000 lb of force? Anyone who paid attention in HS physics care to elaborate?
I have done some googling but gotten the greater part of nowhere
Just want to give props, very nice you made my morning. Now to convert this to a heads up display for my helmet and I'm 1 step closer to becoming the motorcycle hacker I always dreamed I could be. And 1 step closer to earning a darwin award...
Reliability - exactly the point, more than security. For example, no matter what I've done (settings, new routers, new wNICs, different PCs, etc.) the wireless @ my house just occasionally drops, as much as 2-3 times a day or as little as 3x a week... I almost always can fix it by 'repairing' the wireless nic but sometimes I have to just connect to another network for a while, then come back to mine.
Now I want to go wireless with our point of sale systems @ nightclubs which require constant, near perfect network transmissions (due to exceedingly bad information architecture and db design of the POS program). When wireless will be able to run with 99.99% uptime while running full encryption regardless of what other wireless devices may come and go in the area, that day is the day I tear all our network cabling out and dance a jig. I think that day is not today though.
RIP Kerio (2006) but I still use their final release wherever I need a software firewall. By far the best one I've ever seen.
Read thru the comments, much of it very good, here's some addendum
1) software RAID with windows is a bad idea. Linux, as everyone says, is more or less fine.
2) raid 5 w/ a controller - if you loose the controller, you loose the raid unless you can find an identical controller and have taken all the proper steps.
3) mirrored RAIDs can be recovered even if the controller fails, and have very, very good read speeds. Put your boot partition and important data on the mirror
4) one easy way to go is do a hardware mirror for your primary bootable partition (avoiding the problems of installing the OS to a software mirror) then put 2 additional (smaller, faster?) disks in a software RAID0 for your intensive read/write stuff and back them up on a daily basis 'cause some day you're guaranteed to have that fail catastrophically.
Part of my job is to send out advertising email to our confirmed, double opt-in, easy opt-out email list (see, i'm not evil) and I send plain text and html emails depending on their signup options.
Two comments. 1) I did cross browser testing on all the major web-based email providers and a couple clients and found CSS support is so bad it was unusable - WE NEVER COULD USE CSS IN HTML EMAILS! At least not in the real world. Maybe in a corporate environement where you know the client each user will use. I forget but I think AOL was the real kicker, possibly hotmail as well.
2) HTML email is a necessary evil, and at this point, I'd be happy if I could just ditch plain text alltogether. I'm advertising for nightclubs, plain text emails just don't appeal to people as much as pretty pictures. Yes, geeks are fine with text, but the rest of the non-geek world out there responds a hell of a lot better to pics.