Although we haven't implemented it (we may still though), I was very impressed when we were using it in a testing environment. We set it up on a Fedora Core 4 system and it ran great. There is a community version for free so I recommend you give it a shot.
http://www.scalix.com/http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.htm l
I tried switching from Outlook to Thunderbird a while back and it was pretty bad. I'd say that Thunderbird needs to go for bugfixes first before the Calendar. Importing of all of my Outlook emails went pretty well initially. But then I tried to move my imported outlook stuff to a different folder... it moved the entire folder structure, but lost all of the email stored in any directories below the first one. So I started the import again... crashed. Rebooted just to start fresh. Started outlook import again... crashed. Deleted everything, uninstalled, reinstalled. Import worked this time. Moving bug above still happened though. Whats worse is that this bug ruined my confidence in Thunderbird. I found that whenever I couldn't locate an email I had to start wondering if Thunderbird just lost it:(
I also had a lot of trouble displaying, or manipulating folders with a ton of emails in them (~7000). Sometimes it would hang trying to display. Sometimes I could not shift-click to select multiple emails. Sometimes I couldn't drag and drop. Sometimes I couldn't even select an email (!).
I evetually started using it with my personal email accounts since they are low volume. Thunderbird works great for that since its free and has great built in spam filtering. As a replacement for Outlook at work though... unfortunately it has a ways to go.
I say perfect its primary function (email) first before anything else.
Oddpost.com had this webmail interface first. Then they were purchased by Yahoo. During that transition time they improved it quite a bit (stablity, cross-browser support, ui looks). Yahoo's Beta is the latest version of Oddpost. Oddpost users will later be transitioned to Yahoo (From what I gather). It suprises me that Oddpost remained so unnoticed for so long.
For anyone who is interested in having their own Oddpost/Yahoo web client. Scalix offers it for free in their community edition. I'm not sure if you can use the web client alone without the rest though. I'm actually going to be installing it Monday, so I'm talking out of my ass until then. The only hurdle is that it requires Tomcat 5.0 to work. If you're on Debian stable that might be a hassle.
Wow! You're absolutely right. I completely misinterpreted my bonnie++ results. I assumed the high CPU usage was related directly to the fact that it was software raid. My head hurts from slapping it now.
The md0_raid5 daemon takes something like 4-9% of the CPU during the write tests, 0% during reads, and 1-2% during the file create/delete tests.
Man this changes my whole view of software raid. I'd give you a +1 Informative if I had a spare point. How bout just a thank you instead?
My bonnie++ results are below if interested (mangled by slashdot): "bonnie++ -s 1024" Size 1G files 16
Never said they couldn't be mixed. You're probably referring to the last line about the PATA problems. See my other reply to Short Circuit.
Basically that part of my notes just reads confusing. The notes were meant for my reference. Didn't really write them for others to read. That last Con only applies to PATA configurations. I'm not saying that you cant mix them, nor am I saying that Soft-RAID only works with PATA. IF you use PATA, you must be aware of that Con.
Sorry that was just a confusing line. In my original post change "PATA Only" to "This Con only applies to PATA drives". Then it should make more sense.
I took some notes when I was setting up my home 4x250GB RAID 5 server. I found there to be three categories of RAID solutions. Might be helpful for you in deciding. Copied them below and added a few extra comments.
It really depends on what you are using the server for. I ended up going for the pure Software RAID option. Its for home and I'm a cheap. If you're not cheap or it is for a work server, I'd stick with the pure Hardware solutions. ________
Hardware RAID: The expensive Adaptec, 3ware, etc SCSI cards found in most servers.
Pro - Offloads XOR calculations from the CPU to internal processor. Pro - No manual intervention required in case of a raid failure. Con - Expensive. Con - Third Party and/or closed source drivers often required.
Semi-Hardware RAID: These are typically the SATA RAID controllers that are built into motherboards but includes cheapo add-on cards. Generally if less than 150 bucks, not full hardware RAID. I believe all of the RocketRAID cards fall in this section.
Pro - No manual intervention in case of a disk failure. Pro - Cheap. Con - Minimal or No CPU offloading. Con - Third Party and/or closed source drivers often required.
Software RAID: Use Linux and plain old SATA/PATA controllers to handle all of your RAID needs.
Pro - Very cheap. Pro - No worry about driver incompatiblity or closed source drivers. Con - No CPU offloading. You essentially trade CPU power for Disk speed/redundancy... and its a significant trade. Con - Manual intervetion required in case of disk failure. Con - PATA Only. Must be one drive per channel! NO SLAVES! Apparently data loss can occur on both drives in the chain if one goes bad. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.ht ml#ss4.1 Performance is also hurt in a Master/Slave combo.
We did some tests with lynx and links and found that links produced slightly nicer looking output.
Unfortunately both lynx and links had a maximum line length when dumping (width option). This created random line breaks in the middle paragraphs and what not.
You can increase the max size of the width by editing the links source and recompiling. Clip from an email I sent to my coworker about changing this limit:
"In case you want to play with links before I get there in in the morning.
LI character replacement: In parser.c under the html_li function. Line 858. Looks like there may be some sort of option to define an alternate replacement too
Size limit: In default.c under the option stuct. Line 1177
I set it to 65536 which should be the max size of an integer right? For some reason it lets me go over that though. wtf?"
I didn't test this much (nor do I know C++) so there may be more to change. So far the output looks very nice though.
You can click it and have the GMail compose window open up instead of something like Outlook Express that doesn't work with GMail. If you are not logged in to GMail it will bring you to the login screen and then redirect you to the Compose Page.
I'm using it right now on my Windows XP machine and it works perfectly. Supposedly works fine on Win9x/ME as well.
It's free, open-source, comes with an installer/uninstaller, and you can always switch back and forth between using it from your control panel. Under Internet Options > Programs Tab > Email. After you install G-Mailto, it will be in that list along with any other mail program you use.
Re:We built our own too. Plays SNES,NES,Genesis,MA
on
The Ultimate MAME Box
·
· Score: 1
Yeah sorry I'm getting to it. I've been more interested in getting the thing to work. I really do need to put up some documentation when I get a chance. We took all of those pictures just for that purpose.
We built our own too. Plays SNES,NES,Genesis,MAME
on
The Ultimate MAME Box
·
· Score: 1
We've nearly completed it and I have many pictures up if anyone is interested. I dont have any descriptions or instructions yet but I'm in the process.
If anyone is building their own and have questions or concerns, feel free to ask me. I had a blast just laying out how this entire thing was gonna work. I'd love to give some people a helping hand. My email is on my site... you can leave comments also if you have questions.
In all seriousness though... I wouldn't be suprised if it was just some mini-pc that can play normal PC games on the market (including all of the old ones... X-COM baby). How else could they have that many games without it being a hack of the same game over and over.
Instead of a mouse and keyboard they could just mod it to us a controller as the primary input. Then they could just set up a service where you could demo or buy the games online. Then all they'd have to do is set up button mapping for each game.
Of course my theory is just as possible as this game actually having 32k+ real games...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, this form is genius. Where did it come from? I've seen it a ton in comments. Any idea of the source?
Although we haven't implemented it (we may still though), I was very impressed when we were using it in a testing environment. We set it up on a Fedora Core 4 system and it ran great. There is a community version for free so I recommend you give it a shot. http://www.scalix.com/ http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.htm l
I tried switching from Outlook to Thunderbird a while back and it was pretty bad. I'd say that Thunderbird needs to go for bugfixes first before the Calendar. Importing of all of my Outlook emails went pretty well initially. But then I tried to move my imported outlook stuff to a different folder... it moved the entire folder structure, but lost all of the email stored in any directories below the first one. So I started the import again... crashed. Rebooted just to start fresh. Started outlook import again... crashed. Deleted everything, uninstalled, reinstalled. Import worked this time. Moving bug above still happened though. Whats worse is that this bug ruined my confidence in Thunderbird. I found that whenever I couldn't locate an email I had to start wondering if Thunderbird just lost it :(
I also had a lot of trouble displaying, or manipulating folders with a ton of emails in them (~7000). Sometimes it would hang trying to display. Sometimes I could not shift-click to select multiple emails. Sometimes I couldn't drag and drop. Sometimes I couldn't even select an email (!).
I evetually started using it with my personal email accounts since they are low volume. Thunderbird works great for that since its free and has great built in spam filtering. As a replacement for Outlook at work though... unfortunately it has a ways to go.
I say perfect its primary function (email) first before anything else.
Just an FYI for all of you intrested:
Oddpost.com had this webmail interface first. Then they were purchased by Yahoo. During that transition time they improved it quite a bit (stablity, cross-browser support, ui looks). Yahoo's Beta is the latest version of Oddpost. Oddpost users will later be transitioned to Yahoo (From what I gather). It suprises me that Oddpost remained so unnoticed for so long.
For anyone who is interested in having their own Oddpost/Yahoo web client. Scalix offers it for free in their community edition. I'm not sure if you can use the web client alone without the rest though. I'm actually going to be installing it Monday, so I'm talking out of my ass until then. The only hurdle is that it requires Tomcat 5.0 to work. If you're on Debian stable that might be a hassle.
The md0_raid5 daemon takes something like 4-9% of the CPU during the write tests, 0% during reads, and 1-2% during the file create/delete tests.
Man this changes my whole view of software raid. I'd give you a +1 Informative if I had a spare point. How bout just a thank you instead?
My bonnie++ results are below if interested (mangled by slashdot):
"bonnie++ -s 1024"
Size 1G
files 16CPU: 2.6GHz Celeron D
RAM: 512MB DDR400
Drives: 4x250GB 7200rpm 8mb PATA Maxtor
FS: Raid5 512k chunk, XFS
Those high %CPU marks from bonnie threw me off. Guess I need to update my notes a bit.
Never said they couldn't be mixed. You're probably referring to the last line about the PATA problems. See my other reply to Short Circuit. Basically that part of my notes just reads confusing. The notes were meant for my reference. Didn't really write them for others to read. That last Con only applies to PATA configurations. I'm not saying that you cant mix them, nor am I saying that Soft-RAID only works with PATA. IF you use PATA, you must be aware of that Con.
Although I have never set it up myself so it is possible I'm talking out of my ass.
t ml#ss5.9/
From what I read about the Persistent Super-Block and from what The Software-RAID HowTo says, you can boot from a software RAID setup.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.h
Sorry that was just a confusing line. In my original post change "PATA Only" to "This Con only applies to PATA drives". Then it should make more sense.
I took some notes when I was setting up my home 4x250GB RAID 5 server. I found there to be three categories of RAID solutions. Might be helpful for you in deciding. Copied them below and added a few extra comments.
t ml#ss4.1
It really depends on what you are using the server for. I ended up going for the pure Software RAID option. Its for home and I'm a cheap. If you're not cheap or it is for a work server, I'd stick with the pure Hardware solutions.
________
Hardware RAID:
The expensive Adaptec, 3ware, etc SCSI cards found in most servers.
Pro - Offloads XOR calculations from the CPU to internal processor.
Pro - No manual intervention required in case of a raid failure.
Con - Expensive.
Con - Third Party and/or closed source drivers often required.
Semi-Hardware RAID:
These are typically the SATA RAID controllers that are built into motherboards but includes cheapo add-on cards. Generally if less than 150 bucks, not full hardware RAID. I believe all of the RocketRAID cards fall in this section.
Pro - No manual intervention in case of a disk failure.
Pro - Cheap.
Con - Minimal or No CPU offloading.
Con - Third Party and/or closed source drivers often required.
Software RAID:
Use Linux and plain old SATA/PATA controllers to handle all of your RAID needs.
Pro - Very cheap.
Pro - No worry about driver incompatiblity or closed source drivers.
Con - No CPU offloading. You essentially trade CPU power for Disk speed/redundancy... and its a significant trade.
Con - Manual intervetion required in case of disk failure.
Con - PATA Only. Must be one drive per channel! NO SLAVES! Apparently data loss can occur on both drives in the chain if one goes bad. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.h
Performance is also hurt in a Master/Slave combo.
________
We did some tests with lynx and links and found that links produced slightly nicer looking output.
Unfortunately both lynx and links had a maximum line length when dumping (width option). This created random line breaks in the middle paragraphs and what not.
You can increase the max size of the width by editing the links source and recompiling. Clip from an email I sent to my coworker about changing this limit:
"In case you want to play with links before I get there in in the morning.
LI character replacement:
In parser.c under the html_li function. Line 858. Looks like there may be some sort of option to define an alternate replacement too
Size limit:
In default.c under the option stuct. Line 1177
I set it to 65536 which should be the max size of an integer right? For some reason it lets me go over that though. wtf?"
I didn't test this much (nor do I know C++) so there may be more to change. So far the output looks very nice though.
Dear Rueger,
Thank you.
-RabidSquirrel
For those of you who are interested. It's called G-Mailto.
It is really simple. It associates mailto: html links with GMail. So when you see a link like this on the web:
rabidsquirrel21@hotmail.com
You can click it and have the GMail compose window open up instead of something like Outlook Express that doesn't work with GMail. If you are not logged in to GMail it will bring you to the login screen and then redirect you to the Compose Page.
I'm using it right now on my Windows XP machine and it works perfectly. Supposedly works fine on Win9x/ME as well.
It's free, open-source, comes with an installer/uninstaller, and you can always switch back and forth between using it from your control panel. Under Internet Options > Programs Tab > Email. After you install G-Mailto, it will be in that list along with any other mail program you use.
Anyway, if you're interested, I put it up on my site:
http://www.rabidsquirrel.net/G-Mailto
Yeah sorry I'm getting to it. I've been more interested in getting the thing to work. I really do need to put up some documentation when I get a chance. We took all of those pictures just for that purpose.
We built it all from scratch. It was tons of fun.
The SquirrelCade (or Joygasm... we haven't decided yet)
We've nearly completed it and I have many pictures up if anyone is interested. I dont have any descriptions or instructions yet but I'm in the process.
If anyone is building their own and have questions or concerns, feel free to ask me. I had a blast just laying out how this entire thing was gonna work. I'd love to give some people a helping hand. My email is on my site... you can leave comments also if you have questions.
32k games is nothing...
In all seriousness though... I wouldn't be suprised if it was just some mini-pc that can play normal PC games on the market (including all of the old ones... X-COM baby). How else could they have that many games without it being a hack of the same game over and over.
Instead of a mouse and keyboard they could just mod it to us a controller as the primary input. Then they could just set up a service where you could demo or buy the games online. Then all they'd have to do is set up button mapping for each game.
Of course my theory is just as possible as this game actually having 32k+ real games...