Or is this just a stupid question? Every firewall product I have seen in the past 5 years (I have used NetScreen, Watchguard, Fortinet, Cisco PIX and Cisco ASA units) has IPSec VPN capability built in. IPSec is a standard and is supported in a wide variety of clients available on just about every operating system. Being a standard it is also compatible with other firewall/VPN vendors' implementations of IPSec. Assuming that your small/medium business has a firewall, just use what it has built in. License copies of their client software for your PCs, or use a free/OSS alternative. It's not rocket science.
My small business (300 users) has a Fortigate 400 used for our Internet connection (a pair of T1 circuits). We run Fortinet's VPN client for about a dozen remote workers. The same device also manages persistent VPNs with about a half-dozen business partner companies. Performance isn't an issue. Before we had the Fortigate we were using NetScreens (now Juniper Networks I believe), and we were still using the NetScreen IPSec clients for remote workers 2 years after we switched to the Fortigate firewall. IPSec is pretty much IPSec, and they all talk to each other.
The only thing that I would add to what has been said here is that if I were to buy a Cisco device I would go with an ASA instead of a PIX. You usually get more features for the same or less money with an ASA.
Maybe I'm too obsessive of a gamer, but when I was first dating the woman now my wife, I thought it was important that she was into gaming at least half as much as I was, just generally interested in my interests. My wife attends LAN parties I go to, we play WoW together, and she kicks my ass at Dr Mario when we play.
I'm not that obsessive of a gamer, and I didn't even think to bring it up with the woman I was dating (who is now my wife). This was an unfortunate mistake on my part. It wouldn't have been a deal breaker for me most likely, given the number of women in my age group who game is almost zero. But it probably would have headed off quite a few disagreements.
Especially at the 20 bucks a pop method that I keep hearing rumored Valve will use. Particularly when it will just amount to a few linear shooter levels.
I agree. As it stands now, most new games debut at $40, $50, or $60 for an entire game. But if you wait just 3-5 months you can usually pick it up for $20-$30. There are hardcore gamers who "must have the game" and will pay nearly any price to get it. They are the low hanging fruit. Once you have sold copies to all of them at $60 in the first week or two, you drop the price to $40 or $50 to pick up some more sales from people who think that $60 is outrageous. After those $40 sales are mostly done, you've really got to cut the price to milk the market. Eventually you hit $19.99, or even the dreaded Best Buy $11.99 price.
I submit that the casual gamer is willing to wait until the price hits $19.99 to buy the full version of the game. After all, they are probably still working their way through last years big hits that only recently hit $19.99. So if you price episodic content at $19.99 per episode, all they are seeing is you offerring 20% of the content for the same price. Who wants to pay for that?
Valve had a great idea to create Steam and circumvent the publishers. It allows them to cut some expense and keep a larger share of the profit. It also allowed them to offer several different products for the same game at different price points. IMHO this is good because it rewards the content creators rather than the content distributors. Sure, there are other issues with Steam (that we won't go into here). But it's also the perfect vehicle for episodic content. Before you had internet-based content delivery, you had to sell boxes of software at retail outlets. The expense of packaging and distributing those boxes made it unprofitable to create episodic content (aka, smaller pieces). All they have to do is figure out what is the correct price, but I submit that $19.99 isn't it.
That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.
From what I have read in other articles, there are rooms at other sites that also do this monitoring. So even though the single installation isn't fast enough to monitor in real-time, collectively it would certainly be powerful to monitor AT&T's part of it in real time.
The DI-624+ is not on the list and it is possible to manually change the NTP server which the router uses.
Great! So for all the bajillion users who have that particular model, all we have to do is track them down, explain what NTP is, explain what DLink is doing, convince them that it's a problem, and then try to teach them how to change the config on their router. That shouldn't be too hard.
Bill Gates isn't CEO of MSFT.
But he holds all the power...
Balmer IS the CEO, but when people talk about MSFT, it's BILL's company. He calls the shots. So you don't have to have the CEO title to steer the company.
That's because up until a couple of years ago Gates was the CEO. He is and always has been the driving force behind the company, and though he gave up the title of CEO to Ballmer, he still made sure that he is going to continue to be in control. He only gave up CEO work so that he could focus more on the technical stuff anyway (aka, Chief Visionary).
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
Interesting that they say "a dedicated graphics card". Nvidia's new integrated chipsets support DX9c and should be able to run the Aero Glass interface.
So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general/.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?
Wow! All those features and it still sucks balls. And I can say that as I used to be a Notes Admin, until I decided that I wanted something that just works, cleanly and intuitively.
When they really get their mail / calendar project going, Microsoft can kiss their Outlook customers goodbye.
Psst! This isn't about Notes versus Outlook. This is about Domino versus Exchange. The client is only a tiny piece of the puzzle, it's the server on the backend that's important. After all, Outlook is already included with every version of MS-Office. How are you going to kill sales of a product that is included for free as part of a suite of programs that everybody buys anyway? Duh!
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute).
I have. I had an implementation with approximately 50,000 users spread around the world at 20+ sites. And while it was expensive to license we didn't really have any performance problems. In my experience, many people run Exchange because it's easy to get installed and has GUI tools for the most common management tasks. People think that if they can install it and create accounts that they know how to manage Exchange. But generally speaking, most Exchange installations that I have seen do not follow Microsoft's recommendations, and so I am not suprised when they have problems.
I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding.
I'm not sure what IMAP server you would have been using, but I am confident that it doesn't support all of the features that Exchange supports, though it may support the more common functions (which may have been enough for your environment).
The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues).
Anti-spam doesn't have to be handled by a separate server running Postfix or whatever. Most large deployments will have a couple of Exchange servers set up as SMTP gateways that receive all incoming messages (for our 50,000 user implementation we had 4 of them spanning two sites). If you're running spam filtering at the gateways (and anyone sensible person would be) you can run any of a number of programs (I prefer XWall by Dataenter, because it is extrememly configurable and ridiculously cheap).
Regarding needing the 4 dual Xeon servers with 4GB of memory to manage your 5000 users, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Keep in mind that 5000 mailboxes at 100 MB each (the low end per your figures) results in approximtely 488 GB of mail databases, at the minimum. Considering the number of transactions that would need to be processed and the number of open connections, I'd say that sounds about right.
Even so, there are some steps for Exchange tuning that could help. For example, if you were running Win2K Server instead of Win2K Advanced Server, you can't boot the OS with the/3GB switch. This means that Exchange wouldn't be able to take advantage of all of the memory available, and can lead to performance issues due to memory fragmentation. Also, are you aware that Microsoft recommends that you limit mailbox store databases to no more than 35 GB? So on your four servers you would have needed 14-15 mailbox stores to stay under that limit. What happens when the store goes over 35 GB? It slows down further.
Still, with an implementation of that size it seems likely that the largest limiting factor for performance will be I/O operations. The best solution for that is always going to be more spindles, so if you don't have a really big array it's time to do what anyone hosting a large, I/O intensive database would do: look into purchasing a SAN (assuming that all of your data is in one place).
That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server.
Again, I don't know what IMAP product you were using, but I can guarantee you that it's feature set doesn't compare to Exchange. Exchange uses a completely different set of protocols, integrates with AD, etc. So you are really talking about an apples to oranges comparison. And at any rate, Exchange runs circles around Lotus Notes.
I'm guessing that Blizzard has some kind of exclusive deal for guides through a publisher and is finding that competing guides violate their copyright? Could that be the case? It still doesn't make much sense to me though.
Blizzard may be able to offer someone the exclusive rights to make an officially sanctioned game guide, but they can't prevent someone from making an unofficial guide. Writing a game guide is simply writing about the game. It is part analysis, part critique. Typically in an official guide they will have access to the game before it is released, and be legally allowed to use official trademarks, logos, etc. The unofficial guide usually comes after the fact and doesn't include official logos, etc.
I personally hope this guys wins it and smacks Blizzard around quite a bit. I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes, and Blizzard has plenty of cash if they have to pay up. Fighting Blizzard's DMCA takedown harrassment in court could end up being far more profitable than selling the game guides to begin with. And if he wins, he can start selling them as "the unofficial game guide filled with WoW secrets that Blizzard doesn't want you to see", or "the WoW secrets that Blizzard went to court to keep secret can now be yours for $xx.xx!"
If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW.
No doubt this is true. But it is also true that WoW is the 800 pound gorilla in the MMOG industry, with somewhere between 5 and 10 times the customer base of any other MMOG. So if SOE decided to take SWG in a direction that made it more WoW-like, then I suppose it's easy to see why.
Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?
I don't think that anyone claimed that it was. From the blurb on Slashdot, it's pretty clear that this is a user's list of tools and utilities, but that they are asking for a list of power user and sysadmin tools in the responses on Slashdot.
All of the E911 call centers that I have seen automatically pull the phone number and address when the call comes in. There's no need to trace anything (or manually initiate a trace).
You seem very negative about this, considering that the product hasn't even been released yet. Why is that?
No, the bottom line is that a big name, previous success, talent, money, and 'vision' (whatever the hell that is) isn't enough to create a compelling, fun product.
This is true, just look at John Romero. But keep in mind that Romero had a basic game concept and made a couple of games from it that were hits, and then tried to reinvent it. Garriott, on the other hand, was responsible for a very long string of extremely successful games with emphasis on gameplay. The closest thing to a bomb that he made was Ultima IX, and that was apparently only a turd because EA eventually said "Stop working on it, stop polishing it, and publish it." Garriott did, it was incredibly buggy, then Garriott left EA and EA ended up having to ship all registered owners new remastered versions of the game once they fixed the major bugs.
trust me i got married alittle over a year ago.. since then.. i have gamed about 60 hours total.. (i know because bf2 tells me how much i have played:)
Ditto. I've been married nine months, and I never get to play games anymore. Fortunately I had a chance to finsih Half-life 2, Doom 3, and KotOR before getting married. Since then, I haven't played much at all. I live for the times that she works on the weekends or goes out of town to see her family so that I can play some games. Otherwise I have to wait until she goes to bed at night (fortunately that's about 9-10 PM) and then sneak into my office, close the door, turn down the volume, and try to get in an hour or two before going to sleep. Assuming she doesn't play the "you should come to bed when I go to bed" card.
The stupid thing is that she worries that I'm surfing for porn or trying to hook up with freaky women online in the middle of the night, when all I'm really trying to do is save Middle Earth from Sauron.
Tie Fighter really did kick so much ass it's not even funny.
True. The games that came after that (X-wing vs Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance) were good too, but Lucasarts hasn't done anything in that vein for a long time. I really wish they would though. It would give me an excuse to dig out my old joystick. They have roughly 20 years between the end of Episodes III and IV that they could develop.
That's not what I wanted to hear. I was just thinking about KotOR this morning and how much I enjoyed it (on Xbox no less) and thinking about seeing if I could track down a disocunted copy of KotOR2.
I wouldn't say that these situations are "typical" necessarily, as there are probably just as many "instant millionaires" who manage their money properly and have a lot to show for it. But it's far more interesting to talk about the person who won the state lottery twice and squandered all of the money and now has to live in a trailer.
Of course, not everybody buys lottery tickets. I would suspect that a disproportionate percentage of lottery ticket buyers are people who don't have any money to begin with, and consequently don't have any money skills. If you (like many of these examples) are living hand to mouth to begin with, then the odds are that you will squander the money and continue to live hand to mouth. If you are a financially stable person who has savings, retirement funds, and some investments, then odds are you're going to come out way ahead if you win the lottery. But the problem isn't the money, it's the lack money skills.
At any rate, I'm not sure how you think this applies to online gambling. The majority of people who gamble online are either playing poker or placing sports bets. Odds are good that none of them will be winning instant millions.
Yep, cross cut shread everything that I throw away that even might have encriminating data. If you are more paranoid, you can keep a burn bag of the shreaded stuff.
Some people say that I am paranoid, but I think I'm not. Any junk mail that comes to my house with my actual name on it gets shredded in my big cross-cut shredder. If it is simply addressed to "resident" or "to our neighbors at" then I just pitch it. Once a month I empty the shredder bin into three separate trash bags - one from my office, one from the bathroom, and one from the kitchen. That way not all of the related bits are necessarily together, and the chances of them becoming extremely soiled are pretty good. Then it goes in the dumpster. I'm sure that someone somewhere can reconstruct my shredded bills if they really, really wanted to. But if they're identity thieves (as opposed to CIA agents doing recon on me) then they'll probably just move on to my neighbors dumpster instead.
Botting is not defined by "botting software." Its defined by Blizzard. In Eve-online, they don't have a 'bot' ban. They ban you if you are using macros. Maybe Blizzard should upgrade their terminology to make it clearer.
Not all games are that way. I used to play the very tedious Ultima Online, and the only way to train your skills without getting repetitive stress injury was to use macros. In fact, there was macro functionality built into the game. Macroing was fine, but unattended macroing was not. So if someone came up to your avatar while you were macroing and you ignored them (or weren't there to respond) then you would likely get suspended or banned.
For those of you who don't know what HIPPA is, imagine a very protective law about patient confidentiality that can result in serious jail time if it is violated.
Really? That sounds an awful lot like a law we have called HIPAA. Funny that the names would be so close. But I don't believe that HIPAA results in jail times, just large fines and penalties.
For reference, I've been building machines on a medium budget, getting middle to upper class hardware. I've got a gig of 3-3-3 PC3200 RAM, a nice SATA RAID0 array, a GeForce 6800, and an Athlon64 3200+ rig. I know that most components I have could be upgraded, but not intrinisically which ones are the most crucial to performance. I play all sorts of games, from RTS (AoE, Empire Earth, etc) games, to FPS (Quake 4, UT2004), to simulations (SimCity 4).
Is there a particular game that you are having trouble with, or are you just curious about where to spend the next pile of cash? That's a pretty decent system, and I would suspect much better than what I'm gaming on (A64 3000+, 1 GB memoy, single PATA drive and Radeon 9700 Pro), but I do just fine. My next big purchase will be a PCI-E mainboard and video card.
If your biggest concern is frame rates at higher resolutions or with high levels of eye candy, then the video card would be your best bet.
Since you're running RAID0, there's no point in changing the drives from a performance perspective unless you're willing to spend big money on RAID 5 or more disks in the stripe set (which isn't advised without going to 0+1). Since most games load mostly into memory there shouldn't be much disk thrashing.
Adding another gig of RAM might help with some games, but in general you are OK with 1 GB with most of today's games.
Going for a CPU upgrade would probably help some, but it's all about how much you want to spend.
I honestly think that you have a pretty well-balanced system. If you're just itching to upgrade, the biggest bang for the buck for you right now is probably going to be a video card. You can now buy 7900GT cards for $299 or less, and 7800GT for less than that.
That same $299 can get you an A64 3800+, or an A64 X2 3800+. For most games the extra 400 MHz of the non-X2 CPU would be a bigger boost. Either way it's not that big of a boost for you.
That would also be enough to buy you 4 1GB DDR400 modules. Going from 1 GB of RAM to 4 GB would probably be overkill in your situation.
Just to throw a number out there, if I were in your shoes and had a PCI-E mainboard and around $300 to spend, I would probably a 7800GT and another 1 GB of RAM.
You have to consider the labor marketplace. You're a seller of services. The company is a buyer. I agree, part of the annual increase stuff is to keep you interested enough not to look for another job, but that's the buyer's decision (the company), not an entitlement of the seller (the worker).
I still disagree. I believe that the worker is entitled to a fair wage. What is considered a fair wage one year is not necessarily a fair wage the next year. As I stated before, the job duties, prevailing market conditions, and experience level of the employee all affect what is fair and also change from year to year. That being the case, I believe that any employee is entitled to an annual review of their compensation, and in most cases an increase (ranging from cost-of-living only to a big fat raise) is in order.
Let's compare it to a contract. I don't know about how you run your business, but it has become pretty standard practice in the business world when contracting for multi-year services (or product supply) with a provider to build in an annual price increase for that provider. It is assumed as a cost of doing business that costs will go up, but with the contract they are at least limited.
Do you believe that the employees, who arguably are one of the most key components of the business, are not entitled to that treatment? I believe that they are. Some employers don't. But in most cases an employee is tied to an employer in ways that contracted providers aren't. They probably don't have multiple income streams from multiple employers to support them if they leave, or they may be tied to the company for other reasons (health benefits, etc) which makes leaving impracticable. And I believe that there are some cheap or unscrupulous employers who would try to take advantage of that situation by not paying a fair wage.
Of course, when I am considering a job offer from a new company one of the questions that I always ask is what their review and raise process is, the frequency, etc. If HR tells me that they do annual reviews for raises, then I'm positive that I'm entitled to them.
Let's pretend you make say $800,000 for the job you are doing right now. Further, let's pretend that I can hire someone in the market for $40,000 and expect that they will most likely be able to perform the same job, with the same credentials, at about the same performance level. Do you still think I should give you a raise just because the year changed from 2005 to 2006?
I think that example is obviously flawed, as nobody would ever hire someone for $800,000 if they could find someone to do it for $40,000. And in the real job market disparities that large don't exist. The $50k/$40k example is more reasonable, but I think that they still should be entitled to the review and raise. I think that you intentionally inflated the numbers to a ludicrous level so that people would think that someone who was getting paid 15-20 times the going rate shouldn't be entitled to a raise, and therefore someone who is getting paid in line with the going rate isn't either just because he makes more money than someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is this just a stupid question? Every firewall product I have seen in the past 5 years (I have used NetScreen, Watchguard, Fortinet, Cisco PIX and Cisco ASA units) has IPSec VPN capability built in. IPSec is a standard and is supported in a wide variety of clients available on just about every operating system. Being a standard it is also compatible with other firewall/VPN vendors' implementations of IPSec. Assuming that your small/medium business has a firewall, just use what it has built in. License copies of their client software for your PCs, or use a free/OSS alternative. It's not rocket science.
My small business (300 users) has a Fortigate 400 used for our Internet connection (a pair of T1 circuits). We run Fortinet's VPN client for about a dozen remote workers. The same device also manages persistent VPNs with about a half-dozen business partner companies. Performance isn't an issue. Before we had the Fortigate we were using NetScreens (now Juniper Networks I believe), and we were still using the NetScreen IPSec clients for remote workers 2 years after we switched to the Fortigate firewall. IPSec is pretty much IPSec, and they all talk to each other.
The only thing that I would add to what has been said here is that if I were to buy a Cisco device I would go with an ASA instead of a PIX. You usually get more features for the same or less money with an ASA.
Maybe I'm too obsessive of a gamer, but when I was first dating the woman now my wife, I thought it was important that she was into gaming at least half as much as I was, just generally interested in my interests. My wife attends LAN parties I go to, we play WoW together, and she kicks my ass at Dr Mario when we play.
I'm not that obsessive of a gamer, and I didn't even think to bring it up with the woman I was dating (who is now my wife). This was an unfortunate mistake on my part. It wouldn't have been a deal breaker for me most likely, given the number of women in my age group who game is almost zero. But it probably would have headed off quite a few disagreements.
Especially at the 20 bucks a pop method that I keep hearing rumored Valve will use. Particularly when it will just amount to a few linear shooter levels.
I agree. As it stands now, most new games debut at $40, $50, or $60 for an entire game. But if you wait just 3-5 months you can usually pick it up for $20-$30. There are hardcore gamers who "must have the game" and will pay nearly any price to get it. They are the low hanging fruit. Once you have sold copies to all of them at $60 in the first week or two, you drop the price to $40 or $50 to pick up some more sales from people who think that $60 is outrageous. After those $40 sales are mostly done, you've really got to cut the price to milk the market. Eventually you hit $19.99, or even the dreaded Best Buy $11.99 price.
I submit that the casual gamer is willing to wait until the price hits $19.99 to buy the full version of the game. After all, they are probably still working their way through last years big hits that only recently hit $19.99. So if you price episodic content at $19.99 per episode, all they are seeing is you offerring 20% of the content for the same price. Who wants to pay for that?
Valve had a great idea to create Steam and circumvent the publishers. It allows them to cut some expense and keep a larger share of the profit. It also allowed them to offer several different products for the same game at different price points. IMHO this is good because it rewards the content creators rather than the content distributors. Sure, there are other issues with Steam (that we won't go into here). But it's also the perfect vehicle for episodic content. Before you had internet-based content delivery, you had to sell boxes of software at retail outlets. The expense of packaging and distributing those boxes made it unprofitable to create episodic content (aka, smaller pieces). All they have to do is figure out what is the correct price, but I submit that $19.99 isn't it.
That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.
From what I have read in other articles, there are rooms at other sites that also do this monitoring. So even though the single installation isn't fast enough to monitor in real-time, collectively it would certainly be powerful to monitor AT&T's part of it in real time.
The DI-624+ is not on the list and it is possible to manually change the NTP server which the router uses.
Great! So for all the bajillion users who have that particular model, all we have to do is track them down, explain what NTP is, explain what DLink is doing, convince them that it's a problem, and then try to teach them how to change the config on their router. That shouldn't be too hard.
Bill Gates isn't CEO of MSFT. But he holds all the power... Balmer IS the CEO, but when people talk about MSFT, it's BILL's company. He calls the shots. So you don't have to have the CEO title to steer the company.
That's because up until a couple of years ago Gates was the CEO. He is and always has been the driving force behind the company, and though he gave up the title of CEO to Ballmer, he still made sure that he is going to continue to be in control. He only gave up CEO work so that he could focus more on the technical stuff anyway (aka, Chief Visionary).
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
Interesting that they say "a dedicated graphics card". Nvidia's new integrated chipsets support DX9c and should be able to run the Aero Glass interface.
So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general /.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?
Wow! All those features and it still sucks balls. And I can say that as I used to be a Notes Admin, until I decided that I wanted something that just works, cleanly and intuitively.
When they really get their mail / calendar project going, Microsoft can kiss their Outlook customers goodbye.
Psst! This isn't about Notes versus Outlook. This is about Domino versus Exchange. The client is only a tiny piece of the puzzle, it's the server on the backend that's important. After all, Outlook is already included with every version of MS-Office. How are you going to kill sales of a product that is included for free as part of a suite of programs that everybody buys anyway? Duh!
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute).
/3GB switch. This means that Exchange wouldn't be able to take advantage of all of the memory available, and can lead to performance issues due to memory fragmentation. Also, are you aware that Microsoft recommends that you limit mailbox store databases to no more than 35 GB? So on your four servers you would have needed 14-15 mailbox stores to stay under that limit. What happens when the store goes over 35 GB? It slows down further.
I have. I had an implementation with approximately 50,000 users spread around the world at 20+ sites. And while it was expensive to license we didn't really have any performance problems. In my experience, many people run Exchange because it's easy to get installed and has GUI tools for the most common management tasks. People think that if they can install it and create accounts that they know how to manage Exchange. But generally speaking, most Exchange installations that I have seen do not follow Microsoft's recommendations, and so I am not suprised when they have problems.
I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding.
I'm not sure what IMAP server you would have been using, but I am confident that it doesn't support all of the features that Exchange supports, though it may support the more common functions (which may have been enough for your environment).
The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues).
Anti-spam doesn't have to be handled by a separate server running Postfix or whatever. Most large deployments will have a couple of Exchange servers set up as SMTP gateways that receive all incoming messages (for our 50,000 user implementation we had 4 of them spanning two sites). If you're running spam filtering at the gateways (and anyone sensible person would be) you can run any of a number of programs (I prefer XWall by Dataenter, because it is extrememly configurable and ridiculously cheap).
Regarding needing the 4 dual Xeon servers with 4GB of memory to manage your 5000 users, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Keep in mind that 5000 mailboxes at 100 MB each (the low end per your figures) results in approximtely 488 GB of mail databases, at the minimum. Considering the number of transactions that would need to be processed and the number of open connections, I'd say that sounds about right.
Even so, there are some steps for Exchange tuning that could help. For example, if you were running Win2K Server instead of Win2K Advanced Server, you can't boot the OS with the
Still, with an implementation of that size it seems likely that the largest limiting factor for performance will be I/O operations. The best solution for that is always going to be more spindles, so if you don't have a really big array it's time to do what anyone hosting a large, I/O intensive database would do: look into purchasing a SAN (assuming that all of your data is in one place).
That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server.
Again, I don't know what IMAP product you were using, but I can guarantee you that it's feature set doesn't compare to Exchange. Exchange uses a completely different set of protocols, integrates with AD, etc. So you are really talking about an apples to oranges comparison. And at any rate, Exchange runs circles around Lotus Notes.
I'm guessing that Blizzard has some kind of exclusive deal for guides through a publisher and is finding that competing guides violate their copyright? Could that be the case? It still doesn't make much sense to me though.
Blizzard may be able to offer someone the exclusive rights to make an officially sanctioned game guide, but they can't prevent someone from making an unofficial guide. Writing a game guide is simply writing about the game. It is part analysis, part critique. Typically in an official guide they will have access to the game before it is released, and be legally allowed to use official trademarks, logos, etc. The unofficial guide usually comes after the fact and doesn't include official logos, etc.
I personally hope this guys wins it and smacks Blizzard around quite a bit. I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes, and Blizzard has plenty of cash if they have to pay up. Fighting Blizzard's DMCA takedown harrassment in court could end up being far more profitable than selling the game guides to begin with. And if he wins, he can start selling them as "the unofficial game guide filled with WoW secrets that Blizzard doesn't want you to see", or "the WoW secrets that Blizzard went to court to keep secret can now be yours for $xx.xx!"
If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW.
No doubt this is true. But it is also true that WoW is the 800 pound gorilla in the MMOG industry, with somewhere between 5 and 10 times the customer base of any other MMOG. So if SOE decided to take SWG in a direction that made it more WoW-like, then I suppose it's easy to see why.
Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?
I don't think that anyone claimed that it was. From the blurb on Slashdot, it's pretty clear that this is a user's list of tools and utilities, but that they are asking for a list of power user and sysadmin tools in the responses on Slashdot.
Being able to fly rigth down to a planet or through the second death star would be great.
IIRC, in X-Wing Alliance you do end up flying into the second death star. And it was great.
All of the E911 call centers that I have seen automatically pull the phone number and address when the call comes in. There's no need to trace anything (or manually initiate a trace).
You seem very negative about this, considering that the product hasn't even been released yet. Why is that?
No, the bottom line is that a big name, previous success, talent, money, and 'vision' (whatever the hell that is) isn't enough to create a compelling, fun product.
This is true, just look at John Romero. But keep in mind that Romero had a basic game concept and made a couple of games from it that were hits, and then tried to reinvent it. Garriott, on the other hand, was responsible for a very long string of extremely successful games with emphasis on gameplay. The closest thing to a bomb that he made was Ultima IX, and that was apparently only a turd because EA eventually said "Stop working on it, stop polishing it, and publish it." Garriott did, it was incredibly buggy, then Garriott left EA and EA ended up having to ship all registered owners new remastered versions of the game once they fixed the major bugs.
trust me i got married alittle over a year ago.. since then .. i have gamed about 60 hours total.. (i know because bf2 tells me how much i have played :)
Ditto. I've been married nine months, and I never get to play games anymore. Fortunately I had a chance to finsih Half-life 2, Doom 3, and KotOR before getting married. Since then, I haven't played much at all. I live for the times that she works on the weekends or goes out of town to see her family so that I can play some games. Otherwise I have to wait until she goes to bed at night (fortunately that's about 9-10 PM) and then sneak into my office, close the door, turn down the volume, and try to get in an hour or two before going to sleep. Assuming she doesn't play the "you should come to bed when I go to bed" card.
The stupid thing is that she worries that I'm surfing for porn or trying to hook up with freaky women online in the middle of the night, when all I'm really trying to do is save Middle Earth from Sauron.
Tie Fighter really did kick so much ass it's not even funny.
True. The games that came after that (X-wing vs Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance) were good too, but Lucasarts hasn't done anything in that vein for a long time. I really wish they would though. It would give me an excuse to dig out my old joystick. They have roughly 20 years between the end of Episodes III and IV that they could develop.
That's not what I wanted to hear. I was just thinking about KotOR this morning and how much I enjoyed it (on Xbox no less) and thinking about seeing if I could track down a disocunted copy of KotOR2.
I wouldn't say that these situations are "typical" necessarily, as there are probably just as many "instant millionaires" who manage their money properly and have a lot to show for it. But it's far more interesting to talk about the person who won the state lottery twice and squandered all of the money and now has to live in a trailer.
Of course, not everybody buys lottery tickets. I would suspect that a disproportionate percentage of lottery ticket buyers are people who don't have any money to begin with, and consequently don't have any money skills. If you (like many of these examples) are living hand to mouth to begin with, then the odds are that you will squander the money and continue to live hand to mouth. If you are a financially stable person who has savings, retirement funds, and some investments, then odds are you're going to come out way ahead if you win the lottery. But the problem isn't the money, it's the lack money skills.
At any rate, I'm not sure how you think this applies to online gambling. The majority of people who gamble online are either playing poker or placing sports bets. Odds are good that none of them will be winning instant millions.
Yep, cross cut shread everything that I throw away that even might have encriminating data. If you are more paranoid, you can keep a burn bag of the shreaded stuff.
Some people say that I am paranoid, but I think I'm not. Any junk mail that comes to my house with my actual name on it gets shredded in my big cross-cut shredder. If it is simply addressed to "resident" or "to our neighbors at" then I just pitch it. Once a month I empty the shredder bin into three separate trash bags - one from my office, one from the bathroom, and one from the kitchen. That way not all of the related bits are necessarily together, and the chances of them becoming extremely soiled are pretty good. Then it goes in the dumpster. I'm sure that someone somewhere can reconstruct my shredded bills if they really, really wanted to. But if they're identity thieves (as opposed to CIA agents doing recon on me) then they'll probably just move on to my neighbors dumpster instead.
Botting is not defined by "botting software." Its defined by Blizzard. In Eve-online, they don't have a 'bot' ban. They ban you if you are using macros. Maybe Blizzard should upgrade their terminology to make it clearer.
Not all games are that way. I used to play the very tedious Ultima Online, and the only way to train your skills without getting repetitive stress injury was to use macros. In fact, there was macro functionality built into the game. Macroing was fine, but unattended macroing was not. So if someone came up to your avatar while you were macroing and you ignored them (or weren't there to respond) then you would likely get suspended or banned.
For those of you who don't know what HIPPA is, imagine a very protective law about patient confidentiality that can result in serious jail time if it is violated.
Really? That sounds an awful lot like a law we have called HIPAA. Funny that the names would be so close. But I don't believe that HIPAA results in jail times, just large fines and penalties.
For reference, I've been building machines on a medium budget, getting middle to upper class hardware. I've got a gig of 3-3-3 PC3200 RAM, a nice SATA RAID0 array, a GeForce 6800, and an Athlon64 3200+ rig. I know that most components I have could be upgraded, but not intrinisically which ones are the most crucial to performance. I play all sorts of games, from RTS (AoE, Empire Earth, etc) games, to FPS (Quake 4, UT2004), to simulations (SimCity 4).
Is there a particular game that you are having trouble with, or are you just curious about where to spend the next pile of cash? That's a pretty decent system, and I would suspect much better than what I'm gaming on (A64 3000+, 1 GB memoy, single PATA drive and Radeon 9700 Pro), but I do just fine. My next big purchase will be a PCI-E mainboard and video card.
If your biggest concern is frame rates at higher resolutions or with high levels of eye candy, then the video card would be your best bet.
Since you're running RAID0, there's no point in changing the drives from a performance perspective unless you're willing to spend big money on RAID 5 or more disks in the stripe set (which isn't advised without going to 0+1). Since most games load mostly into memory there shouldn't be much disk thrashing.
Adding another gig of RAM might help with some games, but in general you are OK with 1 GB with most of today's games.
Going for a CPU upgrade would probably help some, but it's all about how much you want to spend.
I honestly think that you have a pretty well-balanced system. If you're just itching to upgrade, the biggest bang for the buck for you right now is probably going to be a video card. You can now buy 7900GT cards for $299 or less, and 7800GT for less than that.
That same $299 can get you an A64 3800+, or an A64 X2 3800+. For most games the extra 400 MHz of the non-X2 CPU would be a bigger boost. Either way it's not that big of a boost for you.
That would also be enough to buy you 4 1GB DDR400 modules. Going from 1 GB of RAM to 4 GB would probably be overkill in your situation.
Just to throw a number out there, if I were in your shoes and had a PCI-E mainboard and around $300 to spend, I would probably a 7800GT and another 1 GB of RAM.
You have to consider the labor marketplace. You're a seller of services. The company is a buyer. I agree, part of the annual increase stuff is to keep you interested enough not to look for another job, but that's the buyer's decision (the company), not an entitlement of the seller (the worker).
I still disagree. I believe that the worker is entitled to a fair wage. What is considered a fair wage one year is not necessarily a fair wage the next year. As I stated before, the job duties, prevailing market conditions, and experience level of the employee all affect what is fair and also change from year to year. That being the case, I believe that any employee is entitled to an annual review of their compensation, and in most cases an increase (ranging from cost-of-living only to a big fat raise) is in order.
Let's compare it to a contract. I don't know about how you run your business, but it has become pretty standard practice in the business world when contracting for multi-year services (or product supply) with a provider to build in an annual price increase for that provider. It is assumed as a cost of doing business that costs will go up, but with the contract they are at least limited.
Do you believe that the employees, who arguably are one of the most key components of the business, are not entitled to that treatment? I believe that they are. Some employers don't. But in most cases an employee is tied to an employer in ways that contracted providers aren't. They probably don't have multiple income streams from multiple employers to support them if they leave, or they may be tied to the company for other reasons (health benefits, etc) which makes leaving impracticable. And I believe that there are some cheap or unscrupulous employers who would try to take advantage of that situation by not paying a fair wage.
Of course, when I am considering a job offer from a new company one of the questions that I always ask is what their review and raise process is, the frequency, etc. If HR tells me that they do annual reviews for raises, then I'm positive that I'm entitled to them.
Let's pretend you make say $800,000 for the job you are doing right now. Further, let's pretend that I can hire someone in the market for $40,000 and expect that they will most likely be able to perform the same job, with the same credentials, at about the same performance level. Do you still think I should give you a raise just because the year changed from 2005 to 2006?
I think that example is obviously flawed, as nobody would ever hire someone for $800,000 if they could find someone to do it for $40,000. And in the real job market disparities that large don't exist. The $50k/$40k example is more reasonable, but I think that they still should be entitled to the review and raise. I think that you intentionally inflated the numbers to a ludicrous level so that people would think that someone who was getting paid 15-20 times the going rate shouldn't be entitled to a raise, and therefore someone who is getting paid in line with the going rate isn't either just because he makes more money than someone else.