1. Give 20 million to your political cronies for "R & D" on the new tax. 2. Generate publicity that creates a huge public furor over privacy issues. 3. Wait until even your fiscally conservative opponents are railing that you should just increase the fuel tax. 4. Make a big deal about "listening to the people", then cancel the unworkable plan, raise taxes and make everyone happy. 5. Profit!
I use SVN to backup my sister's important stuff to my home server. It was easy to teach them to commit changes and add new files to be versioned because I installed Tortoise SVN on their Windows computers. It has full versioning and can use an encrypted link if that's important.
Everything else just seemed like too much work to implement.
Can you prove that it is illegal to charge a different price for cash or credit? I'll bet you can't because it not codified in any law that I know of, certainly not at the Federal level. The CC companies don't like it and they wield a lot of economic power, but it's not illegal in any sense.
Some CC companies prohibit having a minimum amount for a CC charge like you see in some places, but again, it's not illegal, just a condition that the vendor agreement places on the business. They might lose their right to accept CC's, but they will not be arrested.
The reason that large chains don't give a discount for cash is that handling cash has it's own costs and the services provided by the CC companies makes up for the fees they charge. Mom and Pop businesses don't see the non-cash transaction savings, but they do see the CC fees.
Well let me tell you my story. A little over a year ago (a week before Christmas!!), my old company laid off 1/3 of the employees to try to save cash and boost the stock price (I doubt it did either, but the new CEO had to look "visionary", I guess). Anyway, they picked 1 person from each department plus the sales force to dump (yeah, it sounded stupid at the time too). I was the IT person sacrificed, and I am sure glad I was. The market was HOT and I was only out of work for 6 weeks (I had more than 5 months salary and benefits as part of the severance). Anyway, I got paid at 2 jobs for a 4 months and boosted my saving a lot. Plus, I got out of that miserable company (you can imagine the moral sucked). My boss left a few months back, but he got no severance like I did, so I was the lucky one.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure one reason that I was picked for the layoff was because I was the only one who documented anything at that company. I made a fabulous portal that everyone in the company used, but only I knew how to operate. I put all my docs in there. I do hope they can keep it running. (VBG)
I've now got a far, far better job and my old company's stock is trading at about 1/2 what it was after they laid off everyone. Karma's a bitch, huh. I feel bad for the people left behind, but documenting my work paid off for me, and opened the door wide at my new company, where my initiative to document our processes has gotten me a lot of recognition and I'm only too happy to keep putting all my knowledge in our company wiki. I'm not afraid of anyone letting me go, if they are that stupid (or desperate for cash) I don't want to be there anymore anyway.
Excel at what you do and if the company you are currently working for doesn't want you, lots of other will be lining up to hire you. Don't be afraid to share knowledge (verbally or in docs). It makes you look smart and you'll look great to management.
When I started working for my current company, I was not surprised by the complete lack of accessible documentation. I got support from management and set out to fix that. I found Trac and starting experimenting with the Wiki. Then I discovered that another operating group in the company was also using it, but just for the SVN web interface. That made the choice really easy and my group is now using both SVN and the Trac wiki and it's working great. Because of the tight integration, I can edit scripts and programs, check them into SVN, then make a link into a Wiki page in Trac to add the supporting docs and other links. It's really slick and has helped our group a lot. I can't tell you how many times someone asks "Does anyone know how to do X?" and the immediate answer is "It's in the wiki, search for X", or we just email the link to the wiki page.
Also, it is very useful to have a convenient way to version control your important files and SVN is fabulous for that. If you use Windows, there is a great tool to integrate SVN into the explorer (TortoiseSVN) that makes it easy for everyone to use version control.
I had to champion this and added most of the original content of the wiki myself to get it useful enough to get the other DBA's interested in it. We had a number of advantages -- an existing installation, small operating group of relatively new people, lot of trust in management, etc.
Even if they manage to shutdown the network aspect completely (not likely), another avenue will arise. Imagine is someone made a "file swapping device" that had a lot of storage and several interfaces. It could have a db of md5 hashes of all the files it knows about and whenever it connects with a similar device, it could swap the list of what it has. Then the devices could silently sync themselves with all the files that differ. After every "swap meet", you would have hundreds of new files to peruse and either keep or delete. The deleted ones would leave their hash in the db as a rejected file and you would never get that one downloaded again. Imagine this with a multi-terabyte drive, swapping music, movies, anything. Your only work is to delete the stuff you don't want to make room for more files. Backups would only need to be the db of hashes, because you could likely get almost all the files back from a few connections with your friends.
I think the UN is hoping that taking over control of the internet will make them look good, so you don't have to go back as far as you do to find something they did right. After all, it can't be that hard to control the internet, how could they possibly screw that up ?
(note for the humor impaired -- yes, I'm being sarcastic here)
Can't we just use the same defense of another infamous case whenever we are asked a question we don't want to answer?
Them: Tell us the encryption key!! Me: I don't recall what it was, I encrypted that partition a long time ago to test some new software, then forgot the key. There was nothing but a copy of my etc directory anyway. Them: We don't believe you!! Me: Well, it's the truth. Whether you believe it is immaterial, ask your legal counsel.
In essence, citizens have always surrendered their vote in exchange for what they value. It used to be for political/social/moral values, but in today's society the real "value" is (sadly) now an economic one, so their willingness to surrender their vote for an iPod is perfectly logical. It's the way this generation has been brought up, nothing more or less, and certainly not surprising.
In short, the only way you can get mainstream parties to listen to you isn't by helping them win, it's by making them lose, and doing so in a way that clearly demonstrates the direction you want them to take.
(sarcasm)Oh, that worked marvelously well in the last few elections now, didn't it.(sarcasm/)
The latest example is the Republicans, since they lost, you'd think they'd be all about finding out why and changing their behavior, but that's certainly not happening. The Democrats did the same thing back when they lost control of Congress, it took them many years to come back and it wasn't because they started listening to their constituents, it was because the Republicans got so full of themselves they started behaving even worse than the Dems did when they were in power.
Sadly, it seems to be a race for the bottom, with the American people losing in the end.
And yes, I am bitter and am trying to stop caring.
Trying to find a good hire is hard. There are a lot of applicants to sort through. How can you tell who's gonna work out who's not gonna fit in? Because there is no really effective way to determine the best person for the job, HR comes up with "surrogate" tests for what they'd really like to know. You can't expect an accurate answer if you ask "Are you honest and ethical at all times?". Who's gonna say no to that? So, you do a criminal background check (all the dishonest people must have already been caught at least once, right?). Really all that does is remove some high risk people from the pool of applicants, but it's nothing close to a guarantee for the company.
Managers can't figure out how to measure an existing employee's actual productivity (so they use something they can measure to represent productivity, like hours worked or lines of code), how can they possibly measure the productivity or effectiveness of a potential employee?
Your sister is being scrutinized in the only ways they can think to do it (legally). She might as well submit to this if she wants the job. If she doesn't really want the job, she could act like she does, but refuse the fingerprinting, leading to a standoff where the company might rethink it's policy if they think it's costing them in the hiring market. She should be prepared to loose the opportunity, however, because it's unlikely HR will budge for her in time to get an offer.
They'll never get someone who thinks outside of the box then.
Your error is believing that they want someone who can think "outside the box". That is not always a desired trait for management. In fact, I find very few job postings where there is an indicator that they want that, and when they say it, watch out, they may not mean it.
They know they need to do something to appease their "base". Since they don't have the votes to get anything passed unilaterally and they refuse to act bilaterally because their supporters will have their heads for "selling out" to those hated Republicans, they are grasping at whatever straws they can. The minority power of the Democrats last year finally made the Republicans suffer a breakdown as a party and costs them their majority. Now they are applying the same tactics they learned from the Democrats and the Democrats are doing the exact same things wrong. It's crazy that so few politicians are smart enough to avoid the mistakes to their adversaries and are condemned to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Do they force every elected official to get a lobotomy before they are sworn in?
I'm all for term limits for every elected official. There's something about DC that makes everyone lose touch with the people they were supposed to represent, and getting them out of that city is the only way to slap them back to reality. It's not that this is confined to one party, even the people who I vote for and like initially turn into money-raising, power-crazed idiots after a few years in DC.
The argument that an OS must be installed to make the computer useful can be easily refuted. Most PC's (I assume HP's, but can't confirm) will search for a boot server if their is no OS installed. This is handy for business use, but could also be exploited by home users if the cable/DSL routers had an OS they could download to a new OS-less PC. A router engineer could easily add a small Linux install like Puppy or DSL to their home router and then people could buy a bare PC (no HD required) and plug it in, it could boot the minimal Linux image from the router and become an "internet appliance". It'd be really cool to store all the changes and new files to a USB key so you could take it to another "appliance" and run it there as well.
Basically, you guys should get out more. It's a huge and interesting world out here, much more so than many imagine.
You're (on average) rich, you can afford to. My personal opinion is that there's few things more worthwhile to do with your money than experiencing the incredible variation that this world has to offer.
Well, that's all nice to talk about, but we are told by the media that the rest of the world hates us and wants to kill us, so traveling abroad seems to not be worth the risk. Why would I want to go someplace where the natives will look down on me in a condescending way or even resent me? It's just not worth the effort. I personally, have zero desire to travel abroad, mostly for the reasons I just stated.
The places that I might consider "friendly" enough to visit (Australia, Canada, the South Pacific Islands), probably wouldn't meet your ideal for diversifying my experiences anyway. No way would I ever visit the Middle East or Africa, and even much of Europe seems hostile to me. Maybe my perceptions are wrong, but I didn't come by them with a few news stories, year after year I hear of anti-American opinions and actions. It would take years of "good behavior" before I would change my opinion.
The Virtualization argument is pointless. How many home users do virtualization?
You're right. And furthermore, no one will ever need more than 64K of RAM!!
The better question to ask is "How many home users might do virtualization during the time that they use Vista?". I will go out on a limb and say I think quite a few will, even if it is violation of said EULA.
I used to "roll my own" with SpamAssassin and MimeDefang. Then I started using CanIt at work (I liked them initially because the author is the author of MimeDefang). They have a free version that works well for me at home now. We have been using it for about 4 years at works and it does a great job incorporating grey listing, SA, MimeDefang, ClamAV, etc. into an easy to install and maintain system with a nice web interface and a database backend. It can scale well when we need it to and the support is great (a MAJOR factor for my company).
Did I mention it is cheaper than the other commercial offering as well. OSS, great support, low cost!
Dennis
(I know this sounds like a commercial, but I am not affiliated with Roaring Penguin in any way other than being a very satisfied customer)
Not at all. Thank you for such an insightful insult.
My "customers" require a much higher level of service than yours do and I can provide it, even if you can't. Computing power is cheap compared to the serious business issues of good email getting discarded. I'm sure that you realize that a certain percentage of email blocked by the RBL is not Spam at all, but in your case you simply don't care about that. I do, so I use a more targeted, intelligent approach. Yes, it takes a lot more computing power and I deal with less total email in a month than you get in a day. Still, calling it stupid just shows a lot of ignorance of real world issues on your part. Your mistake is assuming that everyone's email situation is like your's, and it's not. I'm guessing that you work for an ISP like ComCast or AOL, where abusing customers is not only OK, it's a sport. In some places, a lost email is really a bad thing, I'm glad for you that you don't have to deal with that.
No offense, but that is truly an ugly hack. I *need* the ability to easily and reliably whitelist from a web app if I ever want any time off work. My co-workers are great, but not about to edit firewall rules to allow email through. IMO, firewalls should not be making email routing decisions, but "to each his own".
I will agree that once you have any system set up and working reasonably well, it gets hard to justify the effort and time to swap it out. There are enough projects demanding time and effort without adding things that have minimal payback. So if you're happy with what you're doing, there's no reason to "fix it" (not that my approval would mean anything anyway).
We process only about 100K messages per month, using a single small, old HP server. That is only about 5% of what you do. You would definately need a beefier setup that we have, but the load on that old box is pretty low. A new, dual Opteron server could likely handle a load like you have, but you'd probably want 2 for some redundancy anyway.
Using an RBL does help you reduce the load, but it comes at a cost. How easily can you create a white list of sites that you will accept email from even if they appear on an RBL? I deal with some companies that are not able to receive email from us. My co-workers get annoyed until I explain what their receiving servers are doing and then we push it back to the recipient and let them do battle with their ISP. If there is any "pushback" from the ISP tech, I just point out that we were able to send the email to them from a personal AOL account, but not from my company's email server. Who sends them more Spam?
BTW, the S/W that we use to filter email is from Roaring Penguin, the company that wrote and maintains MimeDefang. They have some terrific products that might be a upgrade for your systems, you should check them out.
We use CanIt by Roaring Penguin. It is very inexpensive (worth it for a no-hassle install, config, and support of sendmail alone). There is a free license for up to 10 users to let you try it out. It uses SpamAssasin, sendmail, grey listing, etc. and give it all a nice scalable database backend and web admin frontend. It comes with the Perl and PHP source if you really want to change anything.
It's really a great system from a company that is making a positive contribution to opensource projects. We have been using it for about 4 years with very few complaints. Most of the complaints have to do with good email not getting through because I've been a bit too draconian with the settings, but it's easy to whitelist any senders or domains that trigger the filters in error.
I'm surprised Spamhaus doesn't just "simulate" what life would be like without them
It's easy to explain why they don't do this. They know that only clueless email admins rely only on an RBL for Spam control. Only the "Spamhaus faithful" would get clobbered with the extra Spam and they would have to switch to a different method or lose their jobs. This would be a sure way to kill off your customer base by proving empiracally why a single point of failure in Spam detection is a bad idea.
I've seen as much bad behavior from the RBL maintainers as I have from the spammers, so I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter. The (very few) held emails are almost always legitimate. The only reason I even bother to hold them is to keep an eye on what's going on and kill the final few Spam emails. The system I use for my employer has an almost perfect rate of rejection. Most of our users get fewer than 10 Spam messages a year! I get a lot of questions from co-workers about how to deal with Spam in their personal accounts because we do such a great job of dealing with it in their work accounts.
I know the Spamhous fanboys will take offense at this post. My only comment is that you are free to use an RBL as your only Spam control if you wish, just as I am free to use what I consider to be better methods. Good luck to you if Spamhous ever goes dark for any reason -- you're gonna need it.
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1. Give 20 million to your political cronies for "R & D" on the new tax.
2. Generate publicity that creates a huge public furor over privacy issues.
3. Wait until even your fiscally conservative opponents are railing that you should just increase the fuel tax.
4. Make a big deal about "listening to the people", then cancel the unworkable plan, raise taxes and make everyone happy.
5. Profit!
I use SVN to backup my sister's important stuff to my home server. It was easy to teach them to commit changes and add new files to be versioned because I installed Tortoise SVN on their Windows computers. It has full versioning and can use an encrypted link if that's important.
Everything else just seemed like too much work to implement.
Can you prove that it is illegal to charge a different price for cash or credit? I'll bet you can't because it not codified in any law that I know of, certainly not at the Federal level. The CC companies don't like it and they wield a lot of economic power, but it's not illegal in any sense.
Some CC companies prohibit having a minimum amount for a CC charge like you see in some places, but again, it's not illegal, just a condition that the vendor agreement places on the business. They might lose their right to accept CC's, but they will not be arrested.
The reason that large chains don't give a discount for cash is that handling cash has it's own costs and the services provided by the CC companies makes up for the fees they charge. Mom and Pop businesses don't see the non-cash transaction savings, but they do see the CC fees.
Pansy. In my day we did CS 24/7 and liked it. You youngsters are too soft, you need that to toughen you up.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure one reason that I was picked for the layoff was because I was the only one who documented anything at that company. I made a fabulous portal that everyone in the company used, but only I knew how to operate. I put all my docs in there. I do hope they can keep it running. (VBG)
I've now got a far, far better job and my old company's stock is trading at about 1/2 what it was after they laid off everyone. Karma's a bitch, huh. I feel bad for the people left behind, but documenting my work paid off for me, and opened the door wide at my new company, where my initiative to document our processes has gotten me a lot of recognition and I'm only too happy to keep putting all my knowledge in our company wiki. I'm not afraid of anyone letting me go, if they are that stupid (or desperate for cash) I don't want to be there anymore anyway.
Excel at what you do and if the company you are currently working for doesn't want you, lots of other will be lining up to hire you. Don't be afraid to share knowledge (verbally or in docs). It makes you look smart and you'll look great to management.
When I started working for my current company, I was not surprised by the complete lack of accessible documentation. I got support from management and set out to fix that. I found Trac and starting experimenting with the Wiki. Then I discovered that another operating group in the company was also using it, but just for the SVN web interface. That made the choice really easy and my group is now using both SVN and the Trac wiki and it's working great. Because of the tight integration, I can edit scripts and programs, check them into SVN, then make a link into a Wiki page in Trac to add the supporting docs and other links. It's really slick and has helped our group a lot. I can't tell you how many times someone asks "Does anyone know how to do X?" and the immediate answer is "It's in the wiki, search for X", or we just email the link to the wiki page.
Also, it is very useful to have a convenient way to version control your important files and SVN is fabulous for that. If you use Windows, there is a great tool to integrate SVN into the explorer (TortoiseSVN) that makes it easy for everyone to use version control.
I had to champion this and added most of the original content of the wiki myself to get it useful enough to get the other DBA's interested in it. We had a number of advantages -- an existing installation, small operating group of relatively new people, lot of trust in management, etc.
Even if they manage to shutdown the network aspect completely (not likely), another avenue will arise. Imagine is someone made a "file swapping device" that had a lot of storage and several interfaces. It could have a db of md5 hashes of all the files it knows about and whenever it connects with a similar device, it could swap the list of what it has. Then the devices could silently sync themselves with all the files that differ. After every "swap meet", you would have hundreds of new files to peruse and either keep or delete. The deleted ones would leave their hash in the db as a rejected file and you would never get that one downloaded again. Imagine this with a multi-terabyte drive, swapping music, movies, anything. Your only work is to delete the stuff you don't want to make room for more files. Backups would only need to be the db of hashes, because you could likely get almost all the files back from a few connections with your friends.
(note for the humor impaired -- yes, I'm being sarcastic here)
Can't we just use the same defense of another infamous case whenever we are asked a question we don't want to answer?
Them: Tell us the encryption key!!
Me: I don't recall what it was, I encrypted that partition a long time ago to test some new software, then forgot the key. There was nothing but a copy of my etc directory anyway.
Them: We don't believe you!!
Me: Well, it's the truth. Whether you believe it is immaterial, ask your legal counsel.
In essence, citizens have always surrendered their vote in exchange for what they value. It used to be for political/social/moral values, but in today's society the real "value" is (sadly) now an economic one, so their willingness to surrender their vote for an iPod is perfectly logical. It's the way this generation has been brought up, nothing more or less, and certainly not surprising.
In short, the only way you can get mainstream parties to listen to you isn't by helping them win, it's by making them lose, and doing so in a way that clearly demonstrates the direction you want them to take.
(sarcasm)Oh, that worked marvelously well in the last few elections now, didn't it.(sarcasm/)The latest example is the Republicans, since they lost, you'd think they'd be all about finding out why and changing their behavior, but that's certainly not happening. The Democrats did the same thing back when they lost control of Congress, it took them many years to come back and it wasn't because they started listening to their constituents, it was because the Republicans got so full of themselves they started behaving even worse than the Dems did when they were in power.
Sadly, it seems to be a race for the bottom, with the American people losing in the end.
And yes, I am bitter and am trying to stop caring.
Trying to find a good hire is hard. There are a lot of applicants to sort through. How can you tell who's gonna work out who's not gonna fit in? Because there is no really effective way to determine the best person for the job, HR comes up with "surrogate" tests for what they'd really like to know. You can't expect an accurate answer if you ask "Are you honest and ethical at all times?". Who's gonna say no to that? So, you do a criminal background check (all the dishonest people must have already been caught at least once, right?). Really all that does is remove some high risk people from the pool of applicants, but it's nothing close to a guarantee for the company.
Managers can't figure out how to measure an existing employee's actual productivity (so they use something they can measure to represent productivity, like hours worked or lines of code), how can they possibly measure the productivity or effectiveness of a potential employee?
Your sister is being scrutinized in the only ways they can think to do it (legally). She might as well submit to this if she wants the job. If she doesn't really want the job, she could act like she does, but refuse the fingerprinting, leading to a standoff where the company might rethink it's policy if they think it's costing them in the hiring market. She should be prepared to loose the opportunity, however, because it's unlikely HR will budge for her in time to get an offer.
Your error is believing that they want someone who can think "outside the box". That is not always a desired trait for management. In fact, I find very few job postings where there is an indicator that they want that, and when they say it, watch out, they may not mean it.
They know they need to do something to appease their "base". Since they don't have the votes to get anything passed unilaterally and they refuse to act bilaterally because their supporters will have their heads for "selling out" to those hated Republicans, they are grasping at whatever straws they can. The minority power of the Democrats last year finally made the Republicans suffer a breakdown as a party and costs them their majority. Now they are applying the same tactics they learned from the Democrats and the Democrats are doing the exact same things wrong. It's crazy that so few politicians are smart enough to avoid the mistakes to their adversaries and are condemned to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Do they force every elected official to get a lobotomy before they are sworn in? I'm all for term limits for every elected official. There's something about DC that makes everyone lose touch with the people they were supposed to represent, and getting them out of that city is the only way to slap them back to reality. It's not that this is confined to one party, even the people who I vote for and like initially turn into money-raising, power-crazed idiots after a few years in DC.
You saw dead trees? When I went through there, we had to bring our own sticks and prop them in front of the windows!!
My company laid off 1/3 of their employees (including me) 11 days before Christmas.
Kind of like Ebenezer Scrooge, but without the repentance at the end.
The argument that an OS must be installed to make the computer useful can be easily refuted. Most PC's (I assume HP's, but can't confirm) will search for a boot server if their is no OS installed. This is handy for business use, but could also be exploited by home users if the cable/DSL routers had an OS they could download to a new OS-less PC. A router engineer could easily add a small Linux install like Puppy or DSL to their home router and then people could buy a bare PC (no HD required) and plug it in, it could boot the minimal Linux image from the router and become an "internet appliance". It'd be really cool to store all the changes and new files to a USB key so you could take it to another "appliance" and run it there as well.
Basically, you guys should get out more. It's a huge and interesting world out here, much more so than many imagine.
You're (on average) rich, you can afford to. My personal opinion is that there's few things more worthwhile to do with your money than experiencing the incredible variation that this world has to offer.
Well, that's all nice to talk about, but we are told by the media that the rest of the world hates us and wants to kill us, so traveling abroad seems to not be worth the risk. Why would I want to go someplace where the natives will look down on me in a condescending way or even resent me? It's just not worth the effort. I personally, have zero desire to travel abroad, mostly for the reasons I just stated.
The places that I might consider "friendly" enough to visit (Australia, Canada, the South Pacific Islands), probably wouldn't meet your ideal for diversifying my experiences anyway. No way would I ever visit the Middle East or Africa, and even much of Europe seems hostile to me. Maybe my perceptions are wrong, but I didn't come by them with a few news stories, year after year I hear of anti-American opinions and actions. It would take years of "good behavior" before I would change my opinion.
You're right. And furthermore, no one will ever need more than 64K of RAM!!
The better question to ask is "How many home users might do virtualization during the time that they use Vista?". I will go out on a limb and say I think quite a few will, even if it is violation of said EULA.
I used to "roll my own" with SpamAssassin and MimeDefang. Then I started using CanIt at work (I liked them initially because the author is the author of MimeDefang). They have a free version that works well for me at home now. We have been using it for about 4 years at works and it does a great job incorporating grey listing, SA, MimeDefang, ClamAV, etc. into an easy to install and maintain system with a nice web interface and a database backend. It can scale well when we need it to and the support is great (a MAJOR factor for my company).
Did I mention it is cheaper than the other commercial offering as well. OSS, great support, low cost!
Dennis(I know this sounds like a commercial, but I am not affiliated with Roaring Penguin in any way other than being a very satisfied customer)
Not at all. Thank you for such an insightful insult.
My "customers" require a much higher level of service than yours do and I can provide it, even if you can't. Computing power is cheap compared to the serious business issues of good email getting discarded. I'm sure that you realize that a certain percentage of email blocked by the RBL is not Spam at all, but in your case you simply don't care about that. I do, so I use a more targeted, intelligent approach. Yes, it takes a lot more computing power and I deal with less total email in a month than you get in a day. Still, calling it stupid just shows a lot of ignorance of real world issues on your part. Your mistake is assuming that everyone's email situation is like your's, and it's not. I'm guessing that you work for an ISP like ComCast or AOL, where abusing customers is not only OK, it's a sport. In some places, a lost email is really a bad thing, I'm glad for you that you don't have to deal with that.
I will agree that once you have any system set up and working reasonably well, it gets hard to justify the effort and time to swap it out. There are enough projects demanding time and effort without adding things that have minimal payback. So if you're happy with what you're doing, there's no reason to "fix it" (not that my approval would mean anything anyway).
We process only about 100K messages per month, using a single small, old HP server. That is only about 5% of what you do. You would definately need a beefier setup that we have, but the load on that old box is pretty low. A new, dual Opteron server could likely handle a load like you have, but you'd probably want 2 for some redundancy anyway.
Using an RBL does help you reduce the load, but it comes at a cost. How easily can you create a white list of sites that you will accept email from even if they appear on an RBL? I deal with some companies that are not able to receive email from us. My co-workers get annoyed until I explain what their receiving servers are doing and then we push it back to the recipient and let them do battle with their ISP. If there is any "pushback" from the ISP tech, I just point out that we were able to send the email to them from a personal AOL account, but not from my company's email server. Who sends them more Spam?
BTW, the S/W that we use to filter email is from Roaring Penguin, the company that wrote and maintains MimeDefang. They have some terrific products that might be a upgrade for your systems, you should check them out.
It's really a great system from a company that is making a positive contribution to opensource projects. We have been using it for about 4 years with very few complaints. Most of the complaints have to do with good email not getting through because I've been a bit too draconian with the settings, but it's easy to whitelist any senders or domains that trigger the filters in error.
It's easy to explain why they don't do this. They know that only clueless email admins rely only on an RBL for Spam control. Only the "Spamhaus faithful" would get clobbered with the extra Spam and they would have to switch to a different method or lose their jobs. This would be a sure way to kill off your customer base by proving empiracally why a single point of failure in Spam detection is a bad idea.
I've seen as much bad behavior from the RBL maintainers as I have from the spammers, so I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter. The (very few) held emails are almost always legitimate. The only reason I even bother to hold them is to keep an eye on what's going on and kill the final few Spam emails. The system I use for my employer has an almost perfect rate of rejection. Most of our users get fewer than 10 Spam messages a year! I get a lot of questions from co-workers about how to deal with Spam in their personal accounts because we do such a great job of dealing with it in their work accounts.
I know the Spamhous fanboys will take offense at this post. My only comment is that you are free to use an RBL as your only Spam control if you wish, just as I am free to use what I consider to be better methods. Good luck to you if Spamhous ever goes dark for any reason -- you're gonna need it.