Don't take this as advice, because I don't know your mail setup. That said if you need a "farm" of computers to run your mail and your company has fewer than 100,000 employees, I think the benefit of moving off Exchange should be obvious: you wouldn't need the farm any more. Exchange's hardware requirements are 10-100x more demanding than an equally-functional setup using, for example, sendmail and dovecot. Even extremely large configuration can be run off a pair of Linux machines, and the second is only needed for redundancy. When provisioned with sufficient storage, your basic x86 Linux computer can handle huge mail loads. Think of the savings in terms of rack space, power, and cooling alone!
If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
Zimbra is obviously crap. How can I tell? The foremost feature of their software is its own implementation. Zimbra is open-source. Zimbra is browser-based. Zimbra uses JavaScript. Zimbra uses XML. Zimbra is asynchronous. Zimba runs in your browser.
Who fucking cares?
You can always tell a program is crap when its page on sourceforge starts with "FrobWiz is a multithreaded c++ blah blah blah." If they lead with the implementation details, the features must be unremarkable. That looks to be the situation here: it's like Outlook Express, on crack, and running in Mozilla. Whoop de doo.
Re:The Wisdom of Alpha Centauri
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sid Meier didn't design Alpha Centauri. That game was designed by Brian Reynolds, who also designed Rise of Nations. That's why they call it "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" instead of "Alpha Centauri: a game by Sid Meier". They are just slapping his name on there for some market recognition.
This also explains partly why Alpah Centauri was so much more fun and imaginative than Civ III.
Most distro installers are hopeless when faced with mixed IDE/SCSI systems. However in your case I suspect what happened was you installed GRUB on/dev/sda1 when you ought to have installed it on/dev/sda. It sounds like you don't have any other OS on your SCSI disk so it should be safe to do so. In fact, if you install GRUB there, you will be able to select Linux or Windows without touching your BIOS settings and without altering your Windows installation. If you were to remove the SCSI disk, your system would boot into Windows as usual.
Maybe you will have better luck when Ubuntu 5.10 is released:)
OK, I admit that I conflated two distinct causes in my argument: subsidy, and protectionism. In the USA we bizarely subsidize production of crops, then destroy them, and at the same time we apply quotas in imports of the same crop. We spend a half-billion dollars every year paying sugar cane growers to destroy their crops. We spend about one billion dollars in payouts to sugar growers and we also pay approximately 500% the world-wide price for cane sugar. Perhaps it reflects the unimaginable corruption of governments from Reagan to the present, but somehow we have managed to have expensive subsidies and expensive food.
It has to stop, the passengers get on/off, and then it has to start. I understand that you're optimistically looking at 2 minutes, but realistically looking at more like 3 minutes or so.
This is bull. Not even mainline train service has to stop for 3 minutes per station. BART dwell times are under a minute if the line is operating normally, and BART can have as many as 100k passengers in transit at once. Even Caltrain dwell times are not 3 minutes. I can't think of any service that spends so long in the station.
2) In the USA the government can, and has in the past demonstrated its willingness to, compell transit workers to not strike. In other words the feds can force even unionized transit workers to not strike.
3) 1 mile a long walk? 20 minutes, or 30 if you're really old and frail and there's a lot of hills. On a bicycle plan for 4-5 minutes per mile in traffic. You may think your car is independent but the number of things you rely on is incredible: paved roads, gasoline distribution, electrical service for the signals. On a bicycle you might want pavement but it's not required. On foot you're totally self-sufficient.
Normally I don't respond to AC, but this is the most wrong thing I've read on Slashdot in ages.
Since FDR's administration, the US Government has pursued a policy of low food costs, which has been sustained through ag subsidies that remove smaller producers by encouraging consolidation and scale.
Can you please explain to the audience how subsidies lower food prices? The opposite is true: subsidies prop up inefficient farming and raise prices for consumers. Domestic sugar subsidies have bilked the common American out of billions over the years in the biggest wealth transfer scheme of all time. The same is true to a lesser degree for many domestic crops which are protected from foreign competition by federal subsidy.
You might say that subsidies ensure a stable domestic food supply, which is a strategic necessity. I wouldn't argue against that, but I can hardly see how you expect us to believe that farm subsidies help the consumer at the expense of the farmer. Clearly the opposite is true.
Amazon undoubtedly has higher revenues than iTunes, but at Amazon the record companies actually have to pay to supply product. They have to manufacture the CDs and ship them to Amazon's distribution centers or those of their drop shippers, so their margins aren't quite as high. At iTunes all they do is give permission to Apple to sell the music, and Apple pays for everything: storage, bandwidth, operations, Apple even manufactures, sells, and supports the playback device and the computers and software that make the distribution channel work.
So at iTunes, the record companies have zero marginal cost, while at Amazon they probably pay $1/unit or something of that order.
I don't think there's anything wrong with varying prices and I don't defend the 99c price point. What I object to is the record companies trying to dictate the retail price. If they aren't careful, Apple will drop the 99% of music that is crap and control the price to their benefit on the remainder. As the retailer Apple ought to be able to dictate the retail price and negotiate with the manufacturer over their cost. But Apple has already given them a sweet deal by allowing them to dictate terms like songs not available, not available individually, albums costing above the $9.99 price, etc. So Apple is already being really nice outside of the traditional retailer/wholesaler relationship.
I think the record companies do not understand the power relationship involved here. They ought not to go poking the eyes of their largest online retail outlet.
With games there is at least a small cost for the goods. They come on a disc or a cartridge and in a case, with a manual, and so forth. At iTunes the cost of goods sold is *zero*. The record company's gross margin on an iTunes sale is 100%. It's an enviable business, to be sure, but not enough for these greedy fucks.
Oh no, you're right! It might take two minutes if I do it manually, so it's right out. Man you make a persuasive argument.
A 100-image-per-minute duplex scanner costs $1200 or more and has no other uses. A digital camera that could perform the work mentioned in the article might cost $400-600 and has plenty of uses besides.
By the way, I can easily do 100 images per minute with my digital camera scanning. You just set all the paper up in a stack on a music stand or other convenient place, fix the white balance, focus, and exposure on your camera (so you don't waste time on auto-focus and auto-exposure for each shot), and start snapping away. All you have to do is discard the top sheet after every frame, and it goes very quickly.
If you have a digital camera, try that instead. Many digital cameras, even middle-of-the-line ones like a Powershot S400 or similar, are perfectly good replacements for document scanners, and normally much, much faster.
A million used to be a lot of accounts, but now it really isn't. The real questions are: how many mails will be sent and received every day, how many during the peak minute of the day, and how much long-term storage is needed. At [name of company removed] which hosted zillions of email accounts, we found many unexpected problems with the storage, such as NetApp being unhappy with hundreds of billions of tiny files, Solaris NFS being unable to deal with filenames longer than 32-characters, and so forth. But handling the front-end tasks of SMTP, POP, and IMAP for 1m accounts wasn't so difficult.
If I were in your position I'd just call up HP and outsource the whole thing. If it was truly necessary to keep it in-house, I'd probably throw together three separate beefy machines: one to deal with the IMAP/POP clients, one to deal with the inbound queue, and one to deal with the outbound queue. Probably qmail or any other standard mailer would work fine. For the storage, you could use a small SAN with GFS.
Nah, that's not really true. There was an evacuation for a false alarm last year. The city was *empty*. Nobody was PISSED. It was fine. People would rather be safe than sorry.
Well, let's have a look at the situation. The head of FEMA Michael Brown, was fired from his last job after mismanagement in the high, exalted position of commissioner of the Arabian horse association. His only qualification for the role appears to be that his college roommate was a big Bush fundraiser. And of course, the guy at the top, GWB himself, is an AWOL coke-snorting drunk. There's basically nobody in the chain of command qualified to lead in this situation. Probably the highest ranking member who has demonstrated any competence is the Commandant of the Coast Guard.
This is what you get when you "drown the government in the bathtub".
I have nothing to add, except this: ICQ, quake, threewave, captured.com, blues news, sugarshack, redwood, the first big lan parties, the first cd burners, the start of mp3 trading. golden age, man. *sniff*
Not that I know of, because I've never read the book. Amazon's search indicates that the book doesn't mention Denver's airport.
But since you mentioned it, Kunstler is a hypocrite and jackass. He flies all over the country promoting his book in the least-efficient way possible. He came to speak at Google and stayed in San Francisco, took no public transportation to Google campus (which is served by Caltrain amongst others), then rode in a taxi from Mountain View to Berkeley, a trip that could easily be made by a Caltrain-to-BART transfer. It's pretty ridiculous. He is apparently uninterested in taking advantage of the kinds of technology he advocates. If he's so advanced, and if flying and driving are so stupid, why doesn't he just give his talk by remote video?
The entirety of the Denver Int'l Airport is a depressing capstone to an era whose time has already passed. DIA is 34000 acres (138 sq km) of blacktop in the wilderness, 22 miles from the commercial center of the city it supposedly serves. The baggage system is a charming anachronism from the days when people checked tons of baggage; most air travellers now avoid checking baggage whenever possible. The sprawling terminals are more suited to the aircraft than the passengers that have to traverse them. The whole scene is a kind of 20th-century technoabortion nightmare.
In 30 years what are the people of Denver going to have to show for this vast investment? When jet fuel is $5 per gallon, and United is a long-forgotten corporate failure, and all the 757s in the world are decaying under the Mojave sun, what good will that airport be? While the remaining wealthy are shuttled around in their private aircraft, Denver citizens are going to think that the airport seems like a rather long trip on a bicycle. They'll probably be wondering if that permanenty-ruined 34000 acres might have made nice farmland, and how many mainline railroads they could have had for the same price.
What DRM did they put in the iPod? You can copy songs off of and on to the iPod freely. You can output the full quality of all music (such as it is) to any device. You even get unprotected digital outputs from iTunes with the Airport Express or other digital device.
Where's the rights management again? We're talking about a system that would NOT SHOW CONTENT on unapproved devices. There are no parallels in iPod/iTunes.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were moving to a newer Exchange you already know the hidden costs: software for managing Active Directory quirks (from CA or whomever), special backup software that interfaces properly with exchange (possibly licensed per mailbox) and so forth. With the usual Linux setups you would backup mail the same way you backup anything else: with an LVM snapshot.
Who fucking cares?
You can always tell a program is crap when its page on sourceforge starts with "FrobWiz is a multithreaded c++ blah blah blah." If they lead with the implementation details, the features must be unremarkable. That looks to be the situation here: it's like Outlook Express, on crack, and running in Mozilla. Whoop de doo.
Sid Meier didn't design Alpha Centauri. That game was designed by Brian Reynolds, who also designed Rise of Nations. That's why they call it "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" instead of "Alpha Centauri: a game by Sid Meier". They are just slapping his name on there for some market recognition.
This also explains partly why Alpah Centauri was so much more fun and imaginative than Civ III.
Most distro installers are hopeless when faced with mixed IDE/SCSI systems. However in your case I suspect what happened was you installed GRUB on /dev/sda1 when you ought to have installed it on /dev/sda. It sounds like you don't have any other OS on your SCSI disk so it should be safe to do so. In fact, if you install GRUB there, you will be able to select Linux or Windows without touching your BIOS settings and without altering your Windows installation. If you were to remove the SCSI disk, your system would boot into Windows as usual.
:)
Maybe you will have better luck when Ubuntu 5.10 is released
OK, I admit that I conflated two distinct causes in my argument: subsidy, and protectionism. In the USA we bizarely subsidize production of crops, then destroy them, and at the same time we apply quotas in imports of the same crop. We spend a half-billion dollars every year paying sugar cane growers to destroy their crops. We spend about one billion dollars in payouts to sugar growers and we also pay approximately 500% the world-wide price for cane sugar. Perhaps it reflects the unimaginable corruption of governments from Reagan to the present, but somehow we have managed to have expensive subsidies and expensive food.
2) In the USA the government can, and has in the past demonstrated its willingness to, compell transit workers to not strike. In other words the feds can force even unionized transit workers to not strike.
3) 1 mile a long walk? 20 minutes, or 30 if you're really old and frail and there's a lot of hills. On a bicycle plan for 4-5 minutes per mile in traffic. You may think your car is independent but the number of things you rely on is incredible: paved roads, gasoline distribution, electrical service for the signals. On a bicycle you might want pavement but it's not required. On foot you're totally self-sufficient.
You might say that subsidies ensure a stable domestic food supply, which is a strategic necessity. I wouldn't argue against that, but I can hardly see how you expect us to believe that farm subsidies help the consumer at the expense of the farmer. Clearly the opposite is true.
Amazon undoubtedly has higher revenues than iTunes, but at Amazon the record companies actually have to pay to supply product. They have to manufacture the CDs and ship them to Amazon's distribution centers or those of their drop shippers, so their margins aren't quite as high. At iTunes all they do is give permission to Apple to sell the music, and Apple pays for everything: storage, bandwidth, operations, Apple even manufactures, sells, and supports the playback device and the computers and software that make the distribution channel work.
So at iTunes, the record companies have zero marginal cost, while at Amazon they probably pay $1/unit or something of that order.
I think the record companies do not understand the power relationship involved here. They ought not to go poking the eyes of their largest online retail outlet.
With games there is at least a small cost for the goods. They come on a disc or a cartridge and in a case, with a manual, and so forth. At iTunes the cost of goods sold is *zero*. The record company's gross margin on an iTunes sale is 100%. It's an enviable business, to be sure, but not enough for these greedy fucks.
This software seems unobjectionable. Any software designed to heighten awareness of what is happening on one's computer seems worthy of praise.
When I installed Bugzilla I issued this command: apt-get install bugzilla. Debconf asked me a few questions, and it worked fine.
Yes, you have to ensure the depth of field is at least 1".
A 100-image-per-minute duplex scanner costs $1200 or more and has no other uses. A digital camera that could perform the work mentioned in the article might cost $400-600 and has plenty of uses besides.
By the way, I can easily do 100 images per minute with my digital camera scanning. You just set all the paper up in a stack on a music stand or other convenient place, fix the white balance, focus, and exposure on your camera (so you don't waste time on auto-focus and auto-exposure for each shot), and start snapping away. All you have to do is discard the top sheet after every frame, and it goes very quickly.
If you have a digital camera, try that instead. Many digital cameras, even middle-of-the-line ones like a Powershot S400 or similar, are perfectly good replacements for document scanners, and normally much, much faster.
A million used to be a lot of accounts, but now it really isn't. The real questions are: how many mails will be sent and received every day, how many during the peak minute of the day, and how much long-term storage is needed. At [name of company removed] which hosted zillions of email accounts, we found many unexpected problems with the storage, such as NetApp being unhappy with hundreds of billions of tiny files, Solaris NFS being unable to deal with filenames longer than 32-characters, and so forth. But handling the front-end tasks of SMTP, POP, and IMAP for 1m accounts wasn't so difficult.
If I were in your position I'd just call up HP and outsource the whole thing. If it was truly necessary to keep it in-house, I'd probably throw together three separate beefy machines: one to deal with the IMAP/POP clients, one to deal with the inbound queue, and one to deal with the outbound queue. Probably qmail or any other standard mailer would work fine. For the storage, you could use a small SAN with GFS.
Nah, that's not really true. There was an evacuation for a false alarm last year. The city was *empty*. Nobody was PISSED. It was fine. People would rather be safe than sorry.
This is what you get when you "drown the government in the bathtub".
I have nothing to add, except this: ICQ, quake, threewave, captured.com, blues news, sugarshack, redwood, the first big lan parties, the first cd burners, the start of mp3 trading. golden age, man. *sniff*
But since you mentioned it, Kunstler is a hypocrite and jackass. He flies all over the country promoting his book in the least-efficient way possible. He came to speak at Google and stayed in San Francisco, took no public transportation to Google campus (which is served by Caltrain amongst others), then rode in a taxi from Mountain View to Berkeley, a trip that could easily be made by a Caltrain-to-BART transfer. It's pretty ridiculous. He is apparently uninterested in taking advantage of the kinds of technology he advocates. If he's so advanced, and if flying and driving are so stupid, why doesn't he just give his talk by remote video?
In 30 years what are the people of Denver going to have to show for this vast investment? When jet fuel is $5 per gallon, and United is a long-forgotten corporate failure, and all the 757s in the world are decaying under the Mojave sun, what good will that airport be? While the remaining wealthy are shuttled around in their private aircraft, Denver citizens are going to think that the airport seems like a rather long trip on a bicycle. They'll probably be wondering if that permanenty-ruined 34000 acres might have made nice farmland, and how many mainline railroads they could have had for the same price.
Supply and demand? The supply is unlimited. Therefore by your simplistic economic analysis the price will be zero. HTH.
JHymn. It uses your iTunes login to transcribe iTunes songs into unprotected AAC format.
What DRM did they put in the iPod? You can copy songs off of and on to the iPod freely. You can output the full quality of all music (such as it is) to any device. You even get unprotected digital outputs from iTunes with the Airport Express or other digital device. Where's the rights management again? We're talking about a system that would NOT SHOW CONTENT on unapproved devices. There are no parallels in iPod/iTunes.