First off make sure that you're not sharing IRQs between things like you nics, video card, sounds card, USB chipsets, etc. This is a major concern if you're buying motherboards with everything onboard since they almost always share IRQs among at least a few components.
Next look into RAID. Make absolutely certain that you are not utilizing onboard RAID and are instead using an addon card. I can guarantee you that any mobo you can afford with onboard RAID will in fact be software-based RAID ano not hardware RAID. You're looking at buying a real server board if you want true hardware-based onboard RAID. I just bought Tyan's Thunder K8WE. It's a $500 mobo. I found out too late that the onboard SATA RAID is Nvidia software RAID. I also got boned with the onboard Nvidia 10/100/1000 nics and the damned builtin firewall that can't be disabled but that's another story. Buy an addon SATA RAID controller. I recommend 3Ware (AMCC) but LSI, Adaptec and a few others are good as well. DO NOT BUY Highpoint or Promise controllers. Highpoint controllers are actually fancy IDE controllers with the RAID functions happening in the driver. Promise controllers are much the same way and simply just suck.
There are other things you can do but I can't stay and type any longer.
You have to write a up policy that upper management supports that clearly states that
1) E-mail is not a file transfer protocol.
2) Public folders (in the Microsoft Exchange sense) are not meant for use as a file server
Next you have to get management to purchase a couple things:
1) An on-demand e-mail archival solution. This product should integrate with your MUA (probably Outlook). The users should be able to locate and extract an archived email from the archival solution quickly and with minimal effort; otherwise the solution will not be utilized.
2) A better spam filter. I'd be willing to bet that a large part of your mail store is spam. There is no auditing requirement to archive non-business-related e-mail. Can the spam.
3) A web-based file-transfer/file-sharing solution. Since you're going to stop people from receiving large attachments via email (you are, aren't you?) you need to provide a method of transfer. One method is to use any of a hundred free or commercial trouble ticketing products like Request Tracker or even Bugzilla to create a secure way to transfer files between an external source and an internal employee by attaching files to an open and assigned ticket. There are numerous products out there that can satisfy this requirement, especially in these post-Sarbanes-Oxley/HIPAA/GLBA/etc times.
Next up is to clean up the PST nigthmare. I was recently involved as a consultant in the IT department of a company about your size. Dozens of their users had reached the 2GB PST limit numerous times. Their PSTs were rotated out and they simply started a new PST. The old PSTs were of course opened automatically within Outlook. These PSTs were stored on the company's main file server in the users' home directories. At some point we eventually realized that all incoming mail was delivered straight to PST instead of the users' mail spools in the information store. The day after this one of our Windows admins happened to notice that the text of the users' home directories were blue. That's right; they were compressed. Whoops! As a temporary solution for a failing mail server the previous admin staff decided to deliver mail straight to PSTs. This of course became the long-term practice. Soon they ran low on disk space. To solve this the temporarily enabled compression on the single large volume that this Windows server served to the LAN. This too became the long-term solution. Uncompressed I want to say that the data was around 800GB. Compressed it was 450GB or so. The admin staff didn't tell management what was going on and to the best of my knowledge management didn't ask or simply thought all was well. Our Windows admins are still trying to clean up this mess and these are the best Windows guys I've ever met.
Instigate policies that limit the amount of time received mail, sent items, deleted mail, drafts, etc are kept in the main inbox. A good archival solution should be able to mimick your policy in its config. Delete the deleted items daily. Dump the drafts every 2 weeks. Archive the sent items once a month. Archive the inbox every 3 months (quarterly, twice a year, whatever fits your needs).
Above all you have to get management's support and backing. Without that your pissing in the wind. Some squeaky-wheel middle management person with a Napolean-complex will put the brakes on the whole thing if you don't have upper-management's support. To get this support show them in dollars how much it would cost to restore the entire PST collection if you had a SAN failure (you do have a SAN, don't you?). Show them how much time you spend each week restoring mailboxes of enourmous size. Show management auditing requirements and how you don't meet them with your current setup. There's a lot you can do. Best of luck.
I'm actually sitting in and typing this message from a 48VDC-powered datacenter. It's in the basement under an ILEC CO. This ISP resides here in the basement and all network gear is DC-powered. The only gear in this room that is AC-powered besides my laptop is the cabinet of servers sitting next to me. Unfortunately it's rather hard to find big-name server brands that offer VDC power supplies anymore. One would think it would be relatively common. Unfortunately it's not. I favor VDC-powered data centers. This room, with about a dozen and a hald pieces of network gear is relatively cool. The output fans on all but two of these devices is actually quite cool. The less heat they put off, the less energy they're wasting, the more $$$ in our pockets at the end of the day. We're preparing to deploy a large co-lo facility in the near future. Imagine a dozen server cabinets that were powered but DC only. The cooling costs would be significantly less than with AC. The power costs would be significantly less than with AC. The electricial wiring costs would even be less with DC instead of AC. The only downside like I mentioned earlier is that it's harder to find big-name-brand servers that come with VDC PSUs. We only have a handful of brands to pick from that support a VMWare environment.
I've read the site owner's comments on the Google vs Bush administration battle and I've come to the conclusion that he's a fucknut. Please knock this 1st-poster's comment down to -1 since it contributes nothing to this topic.
Upper management will eventually state that no one uses Linux. When they say that give them a couple thousand examples of major entities that publicly use open-source software. For example:
Better yet, go through the Forbes 500 list and see just how many of those companies use Linux, Solaris, or any other *nix that is open-source or has had open-source underpinnings. Check the web servers, the MXs, etc. I see a couple that use Windows web servers but I'd be willing to bet that they have an open-source item somewhere that's publicly accessible.
What's next, getting a speeding ticket for having a car that's capable of violating the speed limit? Being sued for copyright infringement when renting a DVD for simply owning a DVD burner? I mean you could make a copy of said DVD. We'd better proactively defend ourselves against this threat....
I agree as long as you sell the only copy of the song and do not keep a copy for yourself. I do not see spending $15 to download 15 songs from iTunes Music Store as being any different than spending $15 to buy a physical CD. I have just as many rights to sell resell my only copy of the digital form as I do to sell my only copy of the physical copy. The RIAA has no room to bitch. It costs them many times less to produce a single AAC or MP3 than it does to produce hundreds of thousands of copies of the physical media, jewel case, and album art. No room to bitch at all.
Quit. Seriously. The answer is to quit. A bad boss makes for a horrible working environment. Horrible working environments are detrimental to your health. Your working environment will affect your mental health and that's not somethin you can leave at the office when you go home at not. Your home and love life will suffer just as much as your health. Take it from me; I've been there.
Just last week I was diagnosed with two partially-healed ulcers. A stomach problem over the holidays (read: bleeding) prompted me to go to the doctor. I'd been putting it off for 2 years after parting ways with a particularly nasty job that had an overabundance of office politics. My working life since then has been peaches and cream compared to what it was back then. I now have the best job I've ever had. Yet I still have two ulcers that have not yet healed themselves.
Bad bosses cause bad working environments. You do not want to be around either. Move up or move out. It's that simple. The job market is better than you think.
I just started using BT yesterday in fact. I downloaded Azureus and Burst. I've already encountered a few of the same problems that I experienced with eMule and KaZaA:
1) Many of the download files I've come across are WMVs that require a license (ie they seeded onto the P2P networks to generate revenue for the bastards that created them.
2)The other problems I've encountered is that the search mechanisms for BT that I've found have been exteremely limited. I've searched for a number of strings that on Kazaa or eMule would have turned up hundreds of hits. I found 0 hits on BT.
Am I not looking in the right places? Am I not using the right client, one that will let me pre-filter search results with files that contain DRM or at least by extension? Is there a way to filter out the bogus files as a group by reporting BS files for everyone's benefit?
Maybe I missed something here. When did we actually go to "war" against terrorism? I don't recall Congress making that declaration. Ohhhh, now I get it. You heard President Bush and friends say it often enough you actually started to believe it. We didn't declar war against Timothy McVeigh. We didn't declare war against Al Capone. We also didn't declare war against Pablo Escobar. We didn't declare war against Osama bin Laden. Junior may think we did but the fact of the matter is we didn't declare war on Osama bin Laden.
What a fucking idiot. Clinton had the opportunity to *assassinate* Osama Bin Laden not capture him. Assassinating an ass like Bin Laden would make us no better than the murderous thugs we're fighting. Lowering ourselves to their lack of standards robs us of one thing: our humanity.
I've always wanted to write a book about cousin Ben. There are already a few books out there already. Still I think it would be neat to write one myself. I've done enough research on the man over the years to jusitfy it. Everybody should have a famous relative. It makes research paper ideas so much easier to come up with.:-)
I can think of 2 major networking manufacturers that offer 4 hour replacement: Cisco and Enterasys. I've had to utilize that level of support dozens of times and have been satisfied each and every time. Come to think of it our Dell 4-hour contracts have also always been filled in that amount of time. Even on products I don't have Cisco SmartNETs on I've always had really turn around on. I just received a replacement Cisco 3845 chassis to replace a bad unit that is not covered under a SmartNET yet but is still within its 1-year warranty. That would normally give us a 10-day turn around. It was here in less than 24 hours. That's pretty damned quick.
One alternative to a speedy manufacturer service contract is a support contract with a local shop, like our's. That's one of the major benefits to contracting with our office. We have most everything a customer needs in-house. We give our customers a significantly lower MTTR than any manufacturer can dream of. Our service also gives our customers the ability to lower their overall support contract costs by eliminating the speedy support contracts on the lesser devices. For example standalone Cisco Catalyst chassis are covered by a lifetime warranty. Why pay for a SmartNET on each of them (or cheat and only get it on one) when you can simply rely on our stock and quick turn around to provide you with a loaner until you 10-day replacement switch comes in? It's a win win for the customer. We make a few bucks in billable hours which is still far less than what the customer would have to pay for a SmartNET. So in answer to the question of where do you get speedy replacement parts I would counter that with an alternative of a speedy support contract with a company that has a stock of replacement equipment at my disposal.
I've lost count of just have many different articles/stories/journals/accounts of individuals doing the old computer-in-oil project that have been linked to from Slashdot. I've easily read 3 dozen separate accounts, and very likely more. I don't recall a counter of bored people that give this a try though...
A full can of gasoline is harmless. A can that previously contained gasoline that is now empty is extremely dangerous. It's the exact opposite of what people think. Vo-Ag 101.
Everyone else that's implemented this and had time to think about what oil they should have used (while cleaning out rancid vegetable oil) usually switches to mineral oil. Like motor oil is doesn't turn rancid. I believe it costs much less though.
I believe it was mineral oil. Mineral spirits are quite flammable and IIRC are also conductive. This pops up on/. once or twice a year. I recall one story in particular. The author's reasoning for using mineral oil instead of vegetable or sunflower oil was that mineral doesn't turn rancid unlike its biological counterparts.
I have a a server behind me with 10 hard drives (not quite ones either) and more 80mm x 20mm and 120mm x 25mm fans than you can shake a stick at (I forget what the CPU fans are but they're loud and IIRC move air at 84cfm). Above that I have a Cabletron 2H252-25R (24-port 10/100) that is not quite. Sitting on that is a Cisco Pix 520 that is damned sure not quite. Did I mention the HP LaserJet 8550N next to my desk and the ceiling fan and floor fan I have to keep me cool in this room? The point is some people either a) don't give a rip about ambient noise or b) don't have a nice place to put the noisy equipment. I have a Cisco 5505 and a 5509 sitting on the floor behind me. Want to talk about loud? My home lab drives the mice out of my house!
Patents were supposed to protect the original inventor by grantly him/her a monopoly for a limited period of time. This gives the inventor time to produce his product, market it, sell it, and reap the rewards from his/her creation. At the end of the limited monopoly others are then allowed to build replicas. Companies like Rates Technology Inc build no products. The sell no patented devices. They simply make grand claims yet vague and never produce anything tangible. All the do is line their pockets off the hard work of those that really did invent the product and put time, effort, and money into making the idea a reality. Companies like this should be put down.
I heard almost the exact same story from a friend of mine a few months back. IIRC someone at a former consulting agency he worked for did it, or someone at one of the sites they supported, or something along those lines. I thought it was hilarious.
A number of my current coworkers came from previous yet common ventures. It started with a guy that worked a college in the area. The college outsourced the IT dept to a local company who then hired most of the existing IT staff to fill the same roles at the college. The original group of guys worked great together. I've met almost all of them now and they seem like a helluva group of guys. That consulting company started to get seriously fscked at about that same time. That consulting company drove the quality workers away in droves. In less than a year every single one of the original college employees left for greener pastures. At the end of that year that company lost the contract and we got it. They had a number of quality guys at the company including a couple who are now my coworkers. The original gang isn't back together but a couple of them are employed by us now. We managed to get a couple top notch guys away from that company which is a major plus. We managed to pick up 2 of the original college team too. It's a shame they don't all work for us but at least they're still around. This is a relatively small IT community.
Slashdot Mirror
Next look into RAID. Make absolutely certain that you are not utilizing onboard RAID and are instead using an addon card. I can guarantee you that any mobo you can afford with onboard RAID will in fact be software-based RAID ano not hardware RAID. You're looking at buying a real server board if you want true hardware-based onboard RAID. I just bought Tyan's Thunder K8WE. It's a $500 mobo. I found out too late that the onboard SATA RAID is Nvidia software RAID. I also got boned with the onboard Nvidia 10/100/1000 nics and the damned builtin firewall that can't be disabled but that's another story. Buy an addon SATA RAID controller. I recommend 3Ware (AMCC) but LSI, Adaptec and a few others are good as well. DO NOT BUY Highpoint or Promise controllers. Highpoint controllers are actually fancy IDE controllers with the RAID functions happening in the driver. Promise controllers are much the same way and simply just suck.
There are other things you can do but I can't stay and type any longer.
1) E-mail is not a file transfer protocol.
2) Public folders (in the Microsoft Exchange sense) are not meant for use as a file server
Next you have to get management to purchase a couple things:
1) An on-demand e-mail archival solution. This product should integrate with your MUA (probably Outlook). The users should be able to locate and extract an archived email from the archival solution quickly and with minimal effort; otherwise the solution will not be utilized.
2) A better spam filter. I'd be willing to bet that a large part of your mail store is spam. There is no auditing requirement to archive non-business-related e-mail. Can the spam.
3) A web-based file-transfer/file-sharing solution. Since you're going to stop people from receiving large attachments via email (you are, aren't you?) you need to provide a method of transfer. One method is to use any of a hundred free or commercial trouble ticketing products like Request Tracker or even Bugzilla to create a secure way to transfer files between an external source and an internal employee by attaching files to an open and assigned ticket. There are numerous products out there that can satisfy this requirement, especially in these post-Sarbanes-Oxley/HIPAA/GLBA/etc times.
Next up is to clean up the PST nigthmare. I was recently involved as a consultant in the IT department of a company about your size. Dozens of their users had reached the 2GB PST limit numerous times. Their PSTs were rotated out and they simply started a new PST. The old PSTs were of course opened automatically within Outlook. These PSTs were stored on the company's main file server in the users' home directories. At some point we eventually realized that all incoming mail was delivered straight to PST instead of the users' mail spools in the information store. The day after this one of our Windows admins happened to notice that the text of the users' home directories were blue. That's right; they were compressed. Whoops! As a temporary solution for a failing mail server the previous admin staff decided to deliver mail straight to PSTs. This of course became the long-term practice. Soon they ran low on disk space. To solve this the temporarily enabled compression on the single large volume that this Windows server served to the LAN. This too became the long-term solution. Uncompressed I want to say that the data was around 800GB. Compressed it was 450GB or so. The admin staff didn't tell management what was going on and to the best of my knowledge management didn't ask or simply thought all was well. Our Windows admins are still trying to clean up this mess and these are the best Windows guys I've ever met.
Instigate policies that limit the amount of time received mail, sent items, deleted mail, drafts, etc are kept in the main inbox. A good archival solution should be able to mimick your policy in its config. Delete the deleted items daily. Dump the drafts every 2 weeks. Archive the sent items once a month. Archive the inbox every 3 months (quarterly, twice a year, whatever fits your needs).
Above all you have to get management's support and backing. Without that your pissing in the wind. Some squeaky-wheel middle management person with a Napolean-complex will put the brakes on the whole thing if you don't have upper-management's support. To get this support show them in dollars how much it would cost to restore the entire PST collection if you had a SAN failure (you do have a SAN, don't you?). Show them how much time you spend each week restoring mailboxes of enourmous size. Show management auditing requirements and how you don't meet them with your current setup. There's a lot you can do. Best of luck.
I'm actually sitting in and typing this message from a 48VDC-powered datacenter. It's in the basement under an ILEC CO. This ISP resides here in the basement and all network gear is DC-powered. The only gear in this room that is AC-powered besides my laptop is the cabinet of servers sitting next to me. Unfortunately it's rather hard to find big-name server brands that offer VDC power supplies anymore. One would think it would be relatively common. Unfortunately it's not. I favor VDC-powered data centers. This room, with about a dozen and a hald pieces of network gear is relatively cool. The output fans on all but two of these devices is actually quite cool. The less heat they put off, the less energy they're wasting, the more $$$ in our pockets at the end of the day. We're preparing to deploy a large co-lo facility in the near future. Imagine a dozen server cabinets that were powered but DC only. The cooling costs would be significantly less than with AC. The power costs would be significantly less than with AC. The electricial wiring costs would even be less with DC instead of AC. The only downside like I mentioned earlier is that it's harder to find big-name-brand servers that come with VDC PSUs. We only have a handful of brands to pick from that support a VMWare environment.
This guy has a point.
I've read the site owner's comments on the Google vs Bush administration battle and I've come to the conclusion that he's a fucknut. Please knock this 1st-poster's comment down to -1 since it contributes nothing to this topic.
A lease is not the same thing as a license. A license is not the same thing as buying DVD.
The US Library of Congress. gov
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.loc
Googleg le.com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.gog
Forbesb es.com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.for
Wall Street Journal. com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.wsj
New York Stock Exchangee .com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.nys
Ford Motor Companyd .com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.for
Better yet, go through the Forbes 500 list and see just how many of those companies use Linux, Solaris, or any other *nix that is open-source or has had open-source underpinnings. Check the web servers, the MXs, etc. I see a couple that use Windows web servers but I'd be willing to bet that they have an open-source item somewhere that's publicly accessible.
3ware, LSI, Areca, Adaptec
What's next, getting a speeding ticket for having a car that's capable of violating the speed limit? Being sued for copyright infringement when renting a DVD for simply owning a DVD burner? I mean you could make a copy of said DVD. We'd better proactively defend ourselves against this threat....
I agree as long as you sell the only copy of the song and do not keep a copy for yourself. I do not see spending $15 to download 15 songs from iTunes Music Store as being any different than spending $15 to buy a physical CD. I have just as many rights to sell resell my only copy of the digital form as I do to sell my only copy of the physical copy. The RIAA has no room to bitch. It costs them many times less to produce a single AAC or MP3 than it does to produce hundreds of thousands of copies of the physical media, jewel case, and album art. No room to bitch at all.
I take it that you've never had a stressful job or ulcers. Get the first sometime and I assure that the second with quickly follow.
Just last week I was diagnosed with two partially-healed ulcers. A stomach problem over the holidays (read: bleeding) prompted me to go to the doctor. I'd been putting it off for 2 years after parting ways with a particularly nasty job that had an overabundance of office politics. My working life since then has been peaches and cream compared to what it was back then. I now have the best job I've ever had. Yet I still have two ulcers that have not yet healed themselves.
Bad bosses cause bad working environments. You do not want to be around either. Move up or move out. It's that simple. The job market is better than you think.
1) Many of the download files I've come across are WMVs that require a license (ie they seeded onto the P2P networks to generate revenue for the bastards that created them.
2)The other problems I've encountered is that the search mechanisms for BT that I've found have been exteremely limited. I've searched for a number of strings that on Kazaa or eMule would have turned up hundreds of hits. I found 0 hits on BT.
Am I not looking in the right places? Am I not using the right client, one that will let me pre-filter search results with files that contain DRM or at least by extension? Is there a way to filter out the bogus files as a group by reporting BS files for everyone's benefit?
Maybe I missed something here. When did we actually go to "war" against terrorism? I don't recall Congress making that declaration. Ohhhh, now I get it. You heard President Bush and friends say it often enough you actually started to believe it. We didn't declar war against Timothy McVeigh. We didn't declare war against Al Capone. We also didn't declare war against Pablo Escobar. We didn't declare war against Osama bin Laden. Junior may think we did but the fact of the matter is we didn't declare war on Osama bin Laden.
What a fucking idiot. Clinton had the opportunity to *assassinate* Osama Bin Laden not capture him. Assassinating an ass like Bin Laden would make us no better than the murderous thugs we're fighting. Lowering ourselves to their lack of standards robs us of one thing: our humanity.
I've always wanted to write a book about cousin Ben. There are already a few books out there already. Still I think it would be neat to write one myself. I've done enough research on the man over the years to jusitfy it. Everybody should have a famous relative. It makes research paper ideas so much easier to come up with. :-)
One alternative to a speedy manufacturer service contract is a support contract with a local shop, like our's. That's one of the major benefits to contracting with our office. We have most everything a customer needs in-house. We give our customers a significantly lower MTTR than any manufacturer can dream of. Our service also gives our customers the ability to lower their overall support contract costs by eliminating the speedy support contracts on the lesser devices. For example standalone Cisco Catalyst chassis are covered by a lifetime warranty. Why pay for a SmartNET on each of them (or cheat and only get it on one) when you can simply rely on our stock and quick turn around to provide you with a loaner until you 10-day replacement switch comes in? It's a win win for the customer. We make a few bucks in billable hours which is still far less than what the customer would have to pay for a SmartNET. So in answer to the question of where do you get speedy replacement parts I would counter that with an alternative of a speedy support contract with a company that has a stock of replacement equipment at my disposal.
I've lost count of just have many different articles/stories/journals/accounts of individuals doing the old computer-in-oil project that have been linked to from Slashdot. I've easily read 3 dozen separate accounts, and very likely more. I don't recall a counter of bored people that give this a try though...
A full can of gasoline is harmless. A can that previously contained gasoline that is now empty is extremely dangerous. It's the exact opposite of what people think. Vo-Ag 101.
Everyone else that's implemented this and had time to think about what oil they should have used (while cleaning out rancid vegetable oil) usually switches to mineral oil. Like motor oil is doesn't turn rancid. I believe it costs much less though.
I believe it was mineral oil. Mineral spirits are quite flammable and IIRC are also conductive. This pops up on /. once or twice a year. I recall one story in particular. The author's reasoning for using mineral oil instead of vegetable or sunflower oil was that mineral doesn't turn rancid unlike its biological counterparts.
I have a a server behind me with 10 hard drives (not quite ones either) and more 80mm x 20mm and 120mm x 25mm fans than you can shake a stick at (I forget what the CPU fans are but they're loud and IIRC move air at 84cfm). Above that I have a Cabletron 2H252-25R (24-port 10/100) that is not quite. Sitting on that is a Cisco Pix 520 that is damned sure not quite. Did I mention the HP LaserJet 8550N next to my desk and the ceiling fan and floor fan I have to keep me cool in this room? The point is some people either a) don't give a rip about ambient noise or b) don't have a nice place to put the noisy equipment. I have a Cisco 5505 and a 5509 sitting on the floor behind me. Want to talk about loud? My home lab drives the mice out of my house!
Patents were supposed to protect the original inventor by grantly him/her a monopoly for a limited period of time. This gives the inventor time to produce his product, market it, sell it, and reap the rewards from his/her creation. At the end of the limited monopoly others are then allowed to build replicas. Companies like Rates Technology Inc build no products. The sell no patented devices. They simply make grand claims yet vague and never produce anything tangible. All the do is line their pockets off the hard work of those that really did invent the product and put time, effort, and money into making the idea a reality. Companies like this should be put down.
I heard almost the exact same story from a friend of mine a few months back. IIRC someone at a former consulting agency he worked for did it, or someone at one of the sites they supported, or something along those lines. I thought it was hilarious.
A number of my current coworkers came from previous yet common ventures. It started with a guy that worked a college in the area. The college outsourced the IT dept to a local company who then hired most of the existing IT staff to fill the same roles at the college. The original group of guys worked great together. I've met almost all of them now and they seem like a helluva group of guys. That consulting company started to get seriously fscked at about that same time. That consulting company drove the quality workers away in droves. In less than a year every single one of the original college employees left for greener pastures. At the end of that year that company lost the contract and we got it. They had a number of quality guys at the company including a couple who are now my coworkers. The original gang isn't back together but a couple of them are employed by us now. We managed to get a couple top notch guys away from that company which is a major plus. We managed to pick up 2 of the original college team too. It's a shame they don't all work for us but at least they're still around. This is a relatively small IT community.