Where I've worked, we ran our own mail servers and controlled the anti-spam software so if it was too restrictive we could tweak it. [...] we simply could not miss any messages from certain clients [...]. I hope you're aware that email is not suitable for reliable communications. There's so much that can go wrong before the email actually arrives at your mailserver that it's not even funny.
I would like to hear what your procedure was to handle clients that insist that they sent you a message when in fact their message got lost long before your boundary of control.
I run XP on my first gen Eee PC because I wanted Windows. It runs just as quick as the default Xandros and other Linux distros I put on it.
[...]
People bash on about XP being slow and crappy on these low power systems but in reality it isn't. That's all peachy dandy as long as your install is still fresh. Give it a few months and your precious XP will be crawling like a dog as it does on any other PC it's been running on for a period of time.
With Windows, you'll have to reinstall to regain your original performance. With Ubuntu, it won't degrade in the first place.
Wasn't life more simple before the days of ATA? No, it definitely wasn't! Simple in terms of available technology, yes. Simple in terms of easily getting hardware to work, no!
Have you ever tried getting a CD-ROM drive to work using a SB16 card's interface along with the crappy DOS drivers from Creative? Ever had fun trying to find an IRQ to use for a new ISA-card controller and finding that none was available? Or how about trying to have more than one harddisk in one computer, it was a nightmare with MFM (or RLL even).
Interestingly enough, the same was being said about ext3. Back then, everybody was wondering why anybody would want to use ext3, when ReiserFS provided journalling and a btree-based on-disk format.
My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild That's why you should use RAID6 or RAID10 for anything you store *really* important data on.
I'm not so sure about that. These 2.5" drives have a lot going for them, they need less power and thus produce less heat, not to mention that they're a lot smaller and take up less space.
I put eight 250GB drives in 2 of these babies http://www.snt.com.tw/product.php?mode=show&pid=82 and hooked them up with 2 Promise TX4-SATA300 controllers in a headless AMD BE2350 powered PC as a RAID6/LVM config using Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.
This way I get around 1.5TB of *fast* and *quiet* fully networked storage. If one drive fails I just pop in a new one and resync it, no sweat.
That's right, which is why I took the time to get all of those minor issues sorted out *before* I handed my wife the newly installed laptop.
All it really takes is to install the restricted extras in the repository and voilà, 99% of the things a typical user wants work.
Best of all, my wife seems to like Rhythmbox a lot better than the iTunes program she was using some time ago. She says it's actually easier to manage all her music files along with her iPod than ever before.
Anyway, she wouldn't have managed to get all of this working in Windows either, so I don't see why it should be expected to be otherwise in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
Maybe in the Windows ecosystem it is, and rightfully so. On the other hand, I never had a doubt in my mind when installing or upgrading to the latest release of Debian, it just works every time.
I've installed PCLinuxOS 2007 as a replacement for Windows XP on my wife's 6 year old laptop some 7 months ago. What shall I say, it's an absolute blessing! Boot times of 30 seconds instead of several minutes, no crashes and - best of all - everything just works, including the wireless PCMCIA card.
My wife couldn't be happier.
And you can rest your mind, PCLinuxOS 2007 doesn't put all users into root. If something requires administrative privileges, it will ask for the root password, which is where I come in, if it happens to my wife.
Anyway, in terms of ease-of-use, PCLOS is still much ahead of Ubuntu. I wouldn't run PCLOS on a server, but on desktop and mobile systems, it's top notch.
Call me an idiot, but I don't see how putting up a pre-made antenna on top of a building here and there can begin to compare to laying cables all over the planet, yet cell phone calls have always been ridiculously expensive compared to land lines. You're essentially getting your transmission medium for free - air - whereas copper, fiber, and an army of people to bury those cables must cost an insane amount of money. You seem to forget that the owners of those roofs may want to have some money for letting you put up an antenna. In addition, what do you think the carriers are using to feed those antennas? Right, it's copper or fiber coming in through the ground!
(take a look at Skype; skype isn't in any linux repositories, but it supplies 4-5 RPMs and a binary tarball) Wanna bet? Last time I checked, it definitely was in the standard PCLinuxOS 2007 repositories.
Finally, Vista is 400 [insert local currency here] if you buy the Ultimate version from a retail shop. If it came with your PC, it's considerably less. That's the problem, not the remedy.
IIRC, most of those drivers and TSRs could be loaded into high memory using the loadhigh (or lh) directive in config.sys and autoexec.bat. DOS even came with its own optimizer called memmaker to free up conventional memory.
Why not give PCLinuxOS 2007 a shot, instead? It's based on Mandriva, but much more polished and ironed out than the original.
You can get it from www.pclinuxos.org for free and it works like a charm. I just switched my wife from WXP over to it, which is something I never dreamt possible. No complaints, no nag, no malware, no viruses...
Amyway, I think that original Mandriva has become too commercial while they don't give you the impression that they really can deliver on support etc.
Even though FolderShare only works for Windows, it's the perfect tool if you're on that platform. The good thing about it is that it can handle more than 2 PCs syncing, so you can have up to a dozen PCs synced for a certain directory.
The only drawback is that the maximum number of files allowed per synced share is 10k. While this sounds like a lot, it really is not.
That's right, but at least for eMail stuck in an Outlook.pst file, you can install pfbackup.exe, which regularily copies the real thing into a backup copy. This offline copy can then easily be backed up by BackupPC.
The same goes for many other files that have running services locking them. Just pop in a pre- and post-backup script in BackupPC that handles stopping and starting said services or have the services (i. e. RDBMS) do a nightly dump to a file.
The beauty of BackupPC is that it will even only transmit the differences in those dumps when using rSync as a transport mechanism.
That, however, is nothing compared to what this guy did. Thanks for that link! It's been one of the first to actually do a proper scientific analysis on the matter.
There's even been coverage about his tunneling experiments occasionally in the nightly show "Space Night" broadcast on the German TV station "Bayern Alpha" http://www.br-online.de/wissen-bildung/spacenight/ .
Somehow this experiment keeps turning up now and then, causing wild speculation and discussions every time.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to hear what your procedure was to handle clients that insist that they sent you a message when in fact their message got lost long before your boundary of control.
[...]
People bash on about XP being slow and crappy on these low power systems but in reality it isn't. That's all peachy dandy as long as your install is still fresh. Give it a few months and your precious XP will be crawling like a dog as it does on any other PC it's been running on for a period of time.
With Windows, you'll have to reinstall to regain your original performance. With Ubuntu, it won't degrade in the first place.
Have you ever tried getting a CD-ROM drive to work using a SB16 card's interface along with the crappy DOS drivers from Creative? Ever had fun trying to find an IRQ to use for a new ISA-card controller and finding that none was available? Or how about trying to have more than one harddisk in one computer, it was a nightmare with MFM (or RLL even).
Thank god we have IDE/ATA!
Interestingly enough, the same was being said about ext3. Back then, everybody was wondering why anybody would want to use ext3, when ReiserFS provided journalling and a btree-based on-disk format.
The rest is history.
Right, but since last fall they're making you pass numerous assessment tests every 2 years to gain or retain your partner status.
It's also interesting to note that they refer to the registration process of getting a Windows Live-ID as being "profiled"...
No problem, it can be done.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=536838&cid=23234846
Just buy a well built PC (FSC are really nice) and put in a bunch of 2.5" disks in a RAID6 on an enterprise grade OS like Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.
I'm not so sure about that. These 2.5" drives have a lot going for them, they need less power and thus produce less heat, not to mention that they're a lot smaller and take up less space.
I put eight 250GB drives in 2 of these babies http://www.snt.com.tw/product.php?mode=show&pid=82 and hooked them up with 2 Promise TX4-SATA300 controllers in a headless AMD BE2350 powered PC as a RAID6/LVM config using Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.
This way I get around 1.5TB of *fast* and *quiet* fully networked storage. If one drive fails I just pop in a new one and resync it, no sweat.
That's right, which is why I took the time to get all of those minor issues sorted out *before* I handed my wife the newly installed laptop.
All it really takes is to install the restricted extras in the repository and voilà, 99% of the things a typical user wants work.
Best of all, my wife seems to like Rhythmbox a lot better than the iTunes program she was using some time ago. She says it's actually easier to manage all her music files along with her iPod than ever before.
Anyway, she wouldn't have managed to get all of this working in Windows either, so I don't see why it should be expected to be otherwise in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
That's still too complicated! Passwords have to be stored in mydomain.com/index.html for easy access!
Maybe in the Windows ecosystem it is, and rightfully so. On the other hand, I never had a doubt in my mind when installing or upgrading to the latest release of Debian, it just works every time.
No, I think he's only using the kernel.
I've installed PCLinuxOS 2007 as a replacement for Windows XP on my wife's 6 year old laptop some 7 months ago. What shall I say, it's an absolute blessing! Boot times of 30 seconds instead of several minutes, no crashes and - best of all - everything just works, including the wireless PCMCIA card.
My wife couldn't be happier.
And you can rest your mind, PCLinuxOS 2007 doesn't put all users into root. If something requires administrative privileges, it will ask for the root password, which is where I come in, if it happens to my wife.
Anyway, in terms of ease-of-use, PCLOS is still much ahead of Ubuntu. I wouldn't run PCLOS on a server, but on desktop and mobile systems, it's top notch.
You're essentially getting your transmission medium for free - air - whereas copper, fiber, and an army of people to bury those cables must cost an insane amount of money. You seem to forget that the owners of those roofs may want to have some money for letting you put up an antenna. In addition, what do you think the carriers are using to feed those antennas? Right, it's copper or fiber coming in through the ground!
IIRC, most of those drivers and TSRs could be loaded into high memory using the loadhigh (or lh) directive in config.sys and autoexec.bat. DOS even came with its own optimizer called memmaker to free up conventional memory.
Why not give PCLinuxOS 2007 a shot, instead? It's based on Mandriva, but much more polished and ironed out than the original.
You can get it from www.pclinuxos.org for free and it works like a charm. I just switched my wife from WXP over to it, which is something I never dreamt possible. No complaints, no nag, no malware, no viruses...
Amyway, I think that original Mandriva has become too commercial while they don't give you the impression that they really can deliver on support etc.
It probably can, but I wouldn't recommend it. Run BackupPC on Linux, which can back up Windows and Mac clients just fine using SMB/CIFS and/or rSync.
Even though FolderShare only works for Windows, it's the perfect tool if you're on that platform. The good thing about it is that it can handle more than 2 PCs syncing, so you can have up to a dozen PCs synced for a certain directory.
The only drawback is that the maximum number of files allowed per synced share is 10k. While this sounds like a lot, it really is not.
That's right, but at least for eMail stuck in an Outlook .pst file, you can install pfbackup.exe, which regularily copies the real thing into a backup copy. This offline copy can then easily be backed up by BackupPC.
The same goes for many other files that have running services locking them. Just pop in a pre- and post-backup script in BackupPC that handles stopping and starting said services or have the services (i. e. RDBMS) do a nightly dump to a file.
The beauty of BackupPC is that it will even only transmit the differences in those dumps when using rSync as a transport mechanism.
Where have you been the past 5 years? It's all thanks to something call DRM (Digital Restriction Management).
I'm not sure whether anybody is aware of it, but this really is old news. Ten(!) years ago, Dr. Nimtz published an experiment on how to tunnel data (specifically Mozart's symphony) at higher speeds than light. Read about it (in German) here http://www.wissenschaft.de/wissenschaft/hintergrun d/173235.html and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light
/ .
There's even been coverage about his tunneling experiments occasionally in the nightly show "Space Night" broadcast on the German TV station "Bayern Alpha" http://www.br-online.de/wissen-bildung/spacenight
Somehow this experiment keeps turning up now and then, causing wild speculation and discussions every time.