Actually Microsoft has a free, rather nice tool that functions mostly like rsync called SyncToy. It's a native Windows application so you don't need a Windows-compiled rsync like many other tools do. It's GUI based to make is easy for the most unfamiliar of users but it is useful even to the advanced for periodic synchronization of data from Windows hosts to other drives or a network location. It has a built-in scheduler to allow it to function as as service.
(Note: This isn't an MS add. I recently discovered this tool by accident to backup my wife's laptop and was pleasantly surprised it "just works")
I think that this story is a horribly atrocious rendering about what happened at the panel. 99% of the time, the panel was focused on why SCO isn't a real, credible threat to Linux itself and also on the need for clear copyright inheritence for open source projects. There was also general discussion on the burden of proofs in various lawsuits.
There was also a BOF in the evening that was a very fun session later on that discussed the roles and needs of copyrights and patents.
Apache 2.0... has new features built into it, however, it is still relatively new. And some bugs are still lying around here and there. I reverted to 1.3 because of serious bugs in the PHP module (in version 2.0.1x,.14?.15?, can't remember exactly).
I was quite excited with 2.0.43 but ended up back at 1.3.27 because PHP 4.2.3 (haven't tried 4.3.0 yet) made Apache unstable, specifically when calling an 'apachectl restart' which made my pager go off due to the server segfaulting at 4am during logrotate. In my testing, it was PHP that caused this instability.
Also, with 2.0.43 I couldn't get it to build with anything but the OpenSSL package, which on my box was 0.9.6b (hole!) but I couldn't get it for the life of me to look at an alternate install of 0.9.6h.
Spews randomly blocked a consulting company's netblock I worked for part-time simply because that our block was next to a "known spammer's" block. When they politely asked to be removed and pointed out that according to their own evidence file that their netblock had nothing to with spam, they were met with very hostile responses and told to essentially ditch their teleco provider because they'd never unlist anyone. They admitted that they simply block IPs in a form of "collateral damage" because they feel like it to hurt legitimate businesses so they flee their network provider. Someone mentions C&W addresses, same thing if you're getting service from Qwest. Their website makes them come off as the noble crusaders against spam, but in reality what they do is just mean-spirited, unethical and just plain wrong.
See the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email to see just how the spews people treat those who politely ask for erroneous entried to be removed and PROVE they have nothing to do with spammers.
And spews doesn't? Spews randomly blocked a consulting company's netblock I worked for part-time simply because that our block was next to a "known spammer's" block. When they politely asked to be removed and pointed out that according to their own evidence file that their netblock had nothing to with spam, they were met with very hostile responses and told to essentially ditch their teleco provider because they'd never unlist anyone. They admitted that they simply block IPs in a form of "collateral damage" because they feel like it to hurt legitimate businesses so they flee their network provider. Look at antispews.org for more info on their flagrant abuses and why you shouldn't use spews.
... generally doesn't cause innocent third parties distress while attempting to achieve his goals.
Using spews is going to cause third-party distress.
DON'T /. THE NAMED.ROOT FILES!!!!
on
Root Zone Changed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Please don't/. the named.root files Don't click on it just because you're curious to see what they look like. People need to legitimately access those files to update their DNS servers and flooding the FTP with meaningless requests is highly counterproductive.
Also, Slashdot editors, why even let those links get posted? Every person with a browser is clicking on those to see what they look like and making them inaccessable to people who need them. People who need to see them or access them know where they're at already and people who are that curious should exercise a little personal initiative and go find out where to get them. It's irresponsible on the part of/. to let this happen. Slashdotting a news site is one thing, but Slashdotting internic is a very different can.
We've been using Tomcat in a production environment for 1 1/2 years and before that we were using Tomcat's predicessor JServ. It's been rock solid. 4.0 brought a lot of nice changes (like not overwriting the logs on startup!) and 4.1 is a refactoring release for performance. The one thing to keep in mind about Tomcat is that you have to write your own wrapper script/program to make Tomcat start up as a non-root user. If you're going to use it in conjunction with Apache, Apache2 will only work properly with the ajp13 connector. The webapp/warp connector doesn't seem to work properly yet.
If you're going to replace BEA though, consider looking at JBoss which is a true J2EE server unlike Tomcat which is just a servlet container. To replace a commercial product such as Weblogic, WebSphere or iPlanet, you want to look at JBoss for a complete J2EE/EJB solution.
In a shameless plug, I'm hosting a BOF at O'Reilly's OSCon 2002 in San Deigo that's geared towards the systems administrator and one of the main topics I hope to cover is security. The conference is pricey, but not as much as others I've been to. If you're coming to O'Reilly, swing by on Tuesday night.
I'm also a Time-Warner/Road-Runner customer. I was excited when Time-Warner sent me the inital propaganda telling me I was about to receive "choice". Then a few weeks later I got the oppotunity to have "choice" -- at $5 more per month than I was paying now. So instead of Time-Warner's "ISP" service for $45 / mo I could have Earthlink's "ISP" service for $50 / mo. Great choice! "We'll offer you choice, but you have to pay for it." What happened to choice driving prices DOWN!
What I want is _JUST_ and IP and bandwidth. I use my own hosted e-mail server, my own hosted website and my own DNS from where I work (it's faster than TW's even though it's 12 hops away). I'd go w/ DSL, but that presents its own problems since my teleco is Ameritech and they have about as bad a reputation as anyone. Good luck AT&T and Comcast users! Let us know how much you have to pay for "choice".
I have a room full of them! They're for historical purposes, but up until 4 months ago, one customer still sent us data pulls from their mainframe on them. I'm *STILL* in the process of archiving the remaining reel tapes onto Mammoth-2 cartridges.
It's also important to note that it's not just users of IE as their browser that are affected by this bug. Lots of Windows programs took a shortcut (Eudora being a prime example) and used MSHTML.DLL as the rendering engine for their application. Any application that displays HTML and uses MSHTML.DLL and has IE5.5 or IE6 should install this patch IMMEDIATELY.
I'd have to say that I have a pretty fun job. I'm the network administrator at a small but growing publishing company in Akron, OH. Fortunately when I graduated 2 years ago, I didn't succumb to the temptations of a.com. My company isn't quite as relaxed about things as a.com was, but we have gym facilities, a lake with tables and umbrellas, a softball team, our fair share of little toys in our cubes, lots of company outings that are actually fun, flextime, etc.. I mean, a job isn't supposed to be fun 24-7. There's stress and some not-so-fun things, but for the most part I really enjoy my job.
Sneer at the article all you want, but he has some excellent and valid points. Having just been through a 7 month design for a customer portal and e-commerce site for my company, I can tell you that this man is right. I actually argued for a Apache + PHP approach to our system. I'm QUITE glad that I lost the argument becuase we'd still be trying to scale that approach.
I attended JavaOne in June. Granted, it's a 17,000 attendee propaganda show but you'd be amazed at a lot of the software coming out of companies that are doing J2EE. Application platforms like Oracle 9iAS, iPlanet and IONA are amazingly powerful and robust. The J2EE implementation has 5 years of maturity behind it. Microsoft, while honestly having some interesting ideas, is at least 3 years of development effort behind Sun. It's a complete framework that handles everything from massive database connectivity to advanced XML parsing with technology such as XSL, DOM and SAX to guaranteed-delivery messaging systems for distributed applications.
Java is not free software or open source, but it's a lot better than.NET. I saw the Java Community Process in action at JavaOne and it's actually quite impressive. I went to many seminars where it turned out that Sun's own implementations for Java in the JCS were voted down in favor of externally derived ideas. One of the noted speakers was one of the major developers for Tomcat and the Apache-Jakarta project (Sorry, I forget the name now). Tomcat is a wonderful platform that is an early concept of how the Open Source community can rally around a not-quite-open source product.
Open Source would do well to embrace Java as much as possible. Eventually Java will turn into C, where there are many compilers and run-time environments available for all sorts of uses and needs. It's already happening comercially from a lot of companies who have a good idea and are running with it, such as KADA Systems for J2ME. Sun's primary interest in Java is a Microsoft-killer and if they have to relinquish more control to get that they will. Remember that at its core, Sun is a hardware and OS company, not a programming/application company like Microsoft.
I'm writing this from the convention floor of JavaOne running on a pretty nifty SunRay 150 workstation. It's amazing for one company that's "dominating" a technology at how many Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies use combinations of Unix/Solaris/Linux + a Java server for a significant portion of their company's systems. Of a survey of 104 Forutne 500 companies, 80% of those use a Java-based approach to web services using systems like iPlanet, Weblogic or Oracle9i. The OS itself is becoming increasingly irrelavant in today's technology. One application writting in NT is a quick drop-in into a Solaris machine running the same server. Let Microsoft try and dominate this area and it'll fail.
I've done extensive contracting work for "local" ISPs and I can tell you that they are in no way on their way out. Most people out there are happy with dial-up and aren't interested in the prohibitative prices of broadband. I recently completed some contracting work for an ISP in Western Pennsylvania and they went from 0 users to 1500+ users in about 3 months. There are four major keys to having a successful ISP:
1) You have to be financially committed to grow. When your dial-in lines are full during peak times consistently you need to add more. Nothing will cost you users faster than an ISP that rings busy for 20 minutes before a user can connect. A good rule of thumb is to have enough lines to support 25%-30% of your userbase being connected at any one time. Keep good logs of connect times and if you need more lines, buy them!
2) Provide good service. People will stick with the ISP that provides good service to user's problems, even if it's slightly more than the ISP down the road. Get a good ISP management tool that makes handling your radius/dual-up authentication, e-mail and other services easy and hire a couple of minimum wage people with half a brain to field "1st Level" calls -- high school students would be perfect in this area. That'll take care of 90% of your problems with users who most likely can't type their password or fiddled with their settings. Turnover in these jobs is high, so make sure you have a dummy-proof system that makes training a new hire easy. There are many freeware FAQ/Knowledge Base applications out there to automate this. The one application you DO NOT want to use is ISP Power no matter what their salesman says.
3) Have a solid person or persons behind the technology side of things. Either do it yourself if you have the knowledge, hire someone knowledgable or contract out the work (what I do part-time). Corporate IT is a lot different than ISP IT. Hire someone who knows routers, Radius, etc.. They need to be articulate becuase you'll have an uphill fight with the local teleco for both your frame connections and your Dial-In BRIs. Remeber that local Telecos push their own ISP service and you will not get good support from them if you're an ISP. You need to have someone prepared for a long drawn-out battle who can provide sound answers and be able to monitor and gather data on bandwidth and performance with which to bombard the teleco's tech support. The first words out of their mouth will be "Do you have your router configured properly" and will hammer this at you until you prove conclusively that it's not your router. You need to pick a platform and stay committed to it. Pick an e-mail server that is EASY to configure and maintain. MDaemon for NT/2000 and Qmail for Linux/Unix/BSD are good choices. Pick a hardware vendor you can have a good relationship with. 3Com is an excellent choice for ISP type hardware. Very few ISPs needs the power of Cisco equipment.
4) Take security seriously. Your 31337 Skriptors love to find ISPs with little thought to security or else security that has gone lax. Enforce a password policy, keep good logs and have monitoring systems up and running. Have a zero tolerance policy for spammers and other crackers. Invest in at least a minimal firewall setup for your servers. Spend the time to learn the Unix tools for firewalling or look at a good NT package such as BlackIce (again depending on chosen platform).
You can still be very successful with dial-up ISPs. Broadband will eventually either become cheaper allowing local ISPs to compete in that area or the government will eventually crack those markets open. It's just a matter of time.
One last thing, offer Front Page extension support! I can hear the booing from the/. community on this point but that is what people want, especially from their local ISP. They don't want to mess with FTP regardless of how good the directions are. They want to use their nice shiny pre-packaged Microsoft Web Publication Wizard.
I also, after the July 29, 2000 article on Password, tried to get Passport to remove my account. The response I got was "we're working on that functionality at this time". Guess they've dropped that project....
1) If your MAILBOX file gets trashed, you're out your entire e-mail directory. If one MAILDIR file gets messed up, you've only lost one e-mail.
2) If you get a messed up e-mail that you can't read in a mail program (and this DOES happen) you only have to delete the corresponding message in the/Maildir/ instead of messing around with the MAILBOX file.
I know that UofW claims Maildir take a performance hit, but I've not noticed one. There's all sorts of web resources on tweaking UofW to pump out e-mails faster. I'm currently using Qmail + IMAP-2000 (with the Maildir patch on Qmail's site) on a P100 w/ 32Mb of RAM and I've got it pumping out IMAP as fast as my work's commercial server does.
I don't know where you go/went to high school but I thought most of my high school teachers (I'm a college grad now) were actually pretty good. Sure there were some of the burned-out ones who'd been there too long, but for the most part they were all very knowledgable and personalable individuals.
My father is a primary school teacher and thus I've known an entire school of teachers from the time I was small and again, none of them are losers or morons.
As for the lack of competition, you obviously know nothing about that which you speak of. Getting a job in a school district is incredibly difficult because of such a low turn-over rate. Many new grads spend YEARS as per diem substitutes before they can move into the "year-long substitute" position for a teacher who's ill or on sabatical. Sure teachers don't make as much money as a tech worker or business executive, but they chose what to go into and knew the salary and job market when then entered it. They also have a three month vacation in which to do other things to make money. My parents raised three children on one teacher's salary. My father did different things in the summer to make additional money from computer lessons (back in the TI-99 and Atari days) to landscaping work.
Most teachers really love their job and it's the few students nowadays that really want to learn and recognize the value of their teachers that really make the teacher's jobs worthwhile.
My favorite high school teacher, among many that I liked, was Mr. Altmire. He was one of the english, rhetoric and writing teachers. He was also the debate team coach. He made class a lot of fun, but at the end after all the fun you really thought "wow, did I really get a lot out of that class."
It's not just the teachers that make your high school experience, it's also what you make out of it. It's up to YOU to decide to give it your all and to participate, etc.. and then you'll succeed. If you don't learn that in high school when the goings easier, you're in for a rude shock in college or the work force.
I got the full version early this morning from Netscape w/o any download lag at all. But I'm sure that's different now.
Things Different:
1) Load time is VERY fast.
2) Page rendering is on par with IE5.5
3) Most sites display correctly
Things the Same:
1) BIG FREAKING MEMORY LEAK!!I'm running Net6 on Windows 2000. Ever page I load increases Netscape's memory footprint by approximately 1.5 Mb. I let Yahoo's random page URL keep loading files and I ramped the memory usage up to about 85 Mb before I quit. Closing Netscape and reloading drop the footprint back to 4 Mb, which on first inspection is nice. However it quickly ramps up fast. Even entering data in this form box is increasing the ram count about 4K every 20 characters or so. Netscape 6 definitely should not have been released yet. This is sad and pathetic for the once innovative and powerful Netscape.
You have to provide verbal and/or written permission. When I was with Qwest not too long ago, I actually had to call a third-party number and verify my information and to speak on recorded record that I was allowing Qwest to change my long distance service. After awhile I got a better deal with Cable & Wireless through my company and switched but there I had to fax them a sheet that gave permission to change my long distance. You can call your AG's office, but I'd actually start with your state's public utilities commission since AT&T/MediaOne is providing your actual phone line.
The company I currently work for has been doing this almost EXACT thing for over 15 years. We're a medical publication company that uses SGML to format our books. Authors login from all over the world to our mainframe and use a variety of console-based and web-based tools to create, edit, manage and version-control publications. We have a lot of custom code binding commercial products together to do this. Also, I know we're not the only company in the same industry that does this sort of publishing this way, let alone other non-medical publishers. This is a horribly absurd patent. Obviously nothing in the way of verification of uniqueness of this request was done.
I think this is going to be the beginning of a trend where companies begin to specialize on what they're going to support. RedHat obviously wants to concentrate on x86 and its associated derivites. This leaves a market hole for someone to step in and support the existing Solaris installations as well as market to companies that may be looking at Solaris boxes and want to get Linux on them. It's a prime example of the marketplace at work. Plus I have a feeling that Sun is going to turn itself into a heavy-hitter in the Solaris/Linux market.
You're lucky. My college's bookstore wouldn't let you return a book period (unless you dropped the class in the first week and THEN you had to have a signed note from the registrar saying you did). ALL of my books were shrinkwrapped so I couln't thumb through it first to make sure it was worth buying. I got stuck with some really crappy books that are now making nice monitor stands. And then when the used book buyers came to campus, the wouldn't buy back any book that had a CD in it whether or not the little vinyl envelope was opened or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Microsoft has a free, rather nice tool that functions mostly like rsync called SyncToy. It's a native Windows application so you don't need a Windows-compiled rsync like many other tools do. It's GUI based to make is easy for the most unfamiliar of users but it is useful even to the advanced for periodic synchronization of data from Windows hosts to other drives or a network location. It has a built-in scheduler to allow it to function as as service.
(Note: This isn't an MS add. I recently discovered this tool by accident to backup my wife's laptop and was pleasantly surprised it "just works")
I think that this story is a horribly atrocious rendering about what happened at the panel. 99% of the time, the panel was focused on why SCO isn't a real, credible threat to Linux itself and also on the need for clear copyright inheritence for open source projects. There was also general discussion on the burden of proofs in various lawsuits.
There was also a BOF in the evening that was a very fun session later on that discussed the roles and needs of copyrights and patents.
I was quite excited with 2.0.43 but ended up back at 1.3.27 because PHP 4.2.3 (haven't tried 4.3.0 yet) made Apache unstable, specifically when calling an 'apachectl restart' which made my pager go off due to the server segfaulting at 4am during logrotate. In my testing, it was PHP that caused this instability.
Also, with 2.0.43 I couldn't get it to build with anything but the OpenSSL package, which on my box was 0.9.6b (hole!) but I couldn't get it for the life of me to look at an alternate install of 0.9.6h.
2.0.44 will perhaps fix these problems.
Spews randomly blocked a consulting company's netblock I worked for part-time simply because that our block was next to a "known spammer's" block. When they politely asked to be removed and pointed out that according to their own evidence file that their netblock had nothing to with spam, they were met with very hostile responses and told to essentially ditch their teleco provider because they'd never unlist anyone. They admitted that they simply block IPs in a form of "collateral damage" because they feel like it to hurt legitimate businesses so they flee their network provider. Someone mentions C&W addresses, same thing if you're getting service from Qwest. Their website makes them come off as the noble crusaders against spam, but in reality what they do is just mean-spirited, unethical and just plain wrong.
Don't use SPEWS!
See the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email to see just how the spews people treat those who politely ask for erroneous entried to be removed and PROVE they have nothing to do with spammers.
Using spews is going to cause third-party distress.
Please don't /. the named.root files Don't click on it just because you're curious to see what they look like. People need to legitimately access those files to update their DNS servers and flooding the FTP with meaningless requests is highly counterproductive.
/. to let this happen. Slashdotting a news site is one thing, but Slashdotting internic is a very different can.
Also, Slashdot editors, why even let those links get posted? Every person with a browser is clicking on those to see what they look like and making them inaccessable to people who need them. People who need to see them or access them know where they're at already and people who are that curious should exercise a little personal initiative and go find out where to get them. It's irresponsible on the part of
We've been using Tomcat in a production environment for 1 1/2 years and before that we were using Tomcat's predicessor JServ. It's been rock solid. 4.0 brought a lot of nice changes (like not overwriting the logs on startup!) and 4.1 is a refactoring release for performance. The one thing to keep in mind about Tomcat is that you have to write your own wrapper script/program to make Tomcat start up as a non-root user. If you're going to use it in conjunction with Apache, Apache2 will only work properly with the ajp13 connector. The webapp/warp connector doesn't seem to work properly yet.
If you're going to replace BEA though, consider looking at JBoss which is a true J2EE server unlike Tomcat which is just a servlet container. To replace a commercial product such as Weblogic, WebSphere or iPlanet, you want to look at JBoss for a complete J2EE/EJB solution.
In a shameless plug, I'm hosting a BOF at O'Reilly's OSCon 2002 in San Deigo that's geared towards the systems administrator and one of the main topics I hope to cover is security. The conference is pricey, but not as much as others I've been to. If you're coming to O'Reilly, swing by on Tuesday night.
You most likely won't want to install a SuSE RPM on a RedHat machine as SuSE's filesystem layout is significantly different from RedHat.
I'm also a Time-Warner/Road-Runner customer. I was excited when Time-Warner sent me the inital propaganda telling me I was about to receive "choice". Then a few weeks later I got the oppotunity to have "choice" -- at $5 more per month than I was paying now. So instead of Time-Warner's "ISP" service for $45 / mo I could have Earthlink's "ISP" service for $50 / mo. Great choice! "We'll offer you choice, but you have to pay for it." What happened to choice driving prices DOWN!
What I want is _JUST_ and IP and bandwidth. I use my own hosted e-mail server, my own hosted website and my own DNS from where I work (it's faster than TW's even though it's 12 hops away). I'd go w/ DSL, but that presents its own problems since my teleco is Ameritech and they have about as bad a reputation as anyone. Good luck AT&T and Comcast users! Let us know how much you have to pay for "choice".
I have a room full of them! They're for historical purposes, but up until 4 months ago, one customer still sent us data pulls from their mainframe on them. I'm *STILL* in the process of archiving the remaining reel tapes onto Mammoth-2 cartridges.
Yeah, I use this to adminitrate my Linux network that uses pam_ldap to authenticate users corporate-wide. It's a terrific tool.
It's also important to note that it's not just users of IE as their browser that are affected by this bug. Lots of Windows programs took a shortcut (Eudora being a prime example) and used MSHTML.DLL as the rendering engine for their application. Any application that displays HTML and uses MSHTML.DLL and has IE5.5 or IE6 should install this patch IMMEDIATELY.
I'd have to say that I have a pretty fun job. I'm the network administrator at a small but growing publishing company in Akron, OH. Fortunately when I graduated 2 years ago, I didn't succumb to the temptations of a .com. My company isn't quite as relaxed about things as a .com was, but we have gym facilities, a lake with tables and umbrellas, a softball team, our fair share of little toys in our cubes, lots of company outings that are actually fun, flextime, etc.. I mean, a job isn't supposed to be fun 24-7. There's stress and some not-so-fun things, but for the most part I really enjoy my job.
Sneer at the article all you want, but he has some excellent and valid points. Having just been through a 7 month design for a customer portal and e-commerce site for my company, I can tell you that this man is right. I actually argued for a Apache + PHP approach to our system. I'm QUITE glad that I lost the argument becuase we'd still be trying to scale that approach.
.NET. I saw the Java Community Process in action at JavaOne and it's actually quite impressive. I went to many seminars where it turned out that Sun's own implementations for Java in the JCS were voted down in favor of externally derived ideas. One of the noted speakers was one of the major developers for Tomcat and the Apache-Jakarta project (Sorry, I forget the name now). Tomcat is a wonderful platform that is an early concept of how the Open Source community can rally around a not-quite-open source product.
I attended JavaOne in June. Granted, it's a 17,000 attendee propaganda show but you'd be amazed at a lot of the software coming out of companies that are doing J2EE. Application platforms like Oracle 9iAS, iPlanet and IONA are amazingly powerful and robust. The J2EE implementation has 5 years of maturity behind it. Microsoft, while honestly having some interesting ideas, is at least 3 years of development effort behind Sun. It's a complete framework that handles everything from massive database connectivity to advanced XML parsing with technology such as XSL, DOM and SAX to guaranteed-delivery messaging systems for distributed applications.
Java is not free software or open source, but it's a lot better than
Open Source would do well to embrace Java as much as possible. Eventually Java will turn into C, where there are many compilers and run-time environments available for all sorts of uses and needs. It's already happening comercially from a lot of companies who have a good idea and are running with it, such as KADA Systems for J2ME. Sun's primary interest in Java is a Microsoft-killer and if they have to relinquish more control to get that they will. Remember that at its core, Sun is a hardware and OS company, not a programming/application company like Microsoft.
I'm writing this from the convention floor of JavaOne running on a pretty nifty SunRay 150 workstation. It's amazing for one company that's "dominating" a technology at how many Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies use combinations of Unix/Solaris/Linux + a Java server for a significant portion of their company's systems. Of a survey of 104 Forutne 500 companies, 80% of those use a Java-based approach to web services using systems like iPlanet, Weblogic or Oracle9i. The OS itself is becoming increasingly irrelavant in today's technology. One application writting in NT is a quick drop-in into a Solaris machine running the same server. Let Microsoft try and dominate this area and it'll fail.
I've done extensive contracting work for "local" ISPs and I can tell you that they are in no way on their way out. Most people out there are happy with dial-up and aren't interested in the prohibitative prices of broadband. I recently completed some contracting work for an ISP in Western Pennsylvania and they went from 0 users to 1500+ users in about 3 months. There are four major keys to having a successful ISP:
/. community on this point but that is what people want, especially from their local ISP. They don't want to mess with FTP regardless of how good the directions are. They want to use their nice shiny pre-packaged Microsoft Web Publication Wizard.
1) You have to be financially committed to grow. When your dial-in lines are full during peak times consistently you need to add more. Nothing will cost you users faster than an ISP that rings busy for 20 minutes before a user can connect. A good rule of thumb is to have enough lines to support 25%-30% of your userbase being connected at any one time. Keep good logs of connect times and if you need more lines, buy them!
2) Provide good service. People will stick with the ISP that provides good service to user's problems, even if it's slightly more than the ISP down the road. Get a good ISP management tool that makes handling your radius/dual-up authentication, e-mail and other services easy and hire a couple of minimum wage people with half a brain to field "1st Level" calls -- high school students would be perfect in this area. That'll take care of 90% of your problems with users who most likely can't type their password or fiddled with their settings. Turnover in these jobs is high, so make sure you have a dummy-proof system that makes training a new hire easy. There are many freeware FAQ/Knowledge Base applications out there to automate this. The one application you DO NOT want to use is ISP Power no matter what their salesman says.
3) Have a solid person or persons behind the technology side of things. Either do it yourself if you have the knowledge, hire someone knowledgable or contract out the work (what I do part-time). Corporate IT is a lot different than ISP IT. Hire someone who knows routers, Radius, etc.. They need to be articulate becuase you'll have an uphill fight with the local teleco for both your frame connections and your Dial-In BRIs. Remeber that local Telecos push their own ISP service and you will not get good support from them if you're an ISP. You need to have someone prepared for a long drawn-out battle who can provide sound answers and be able to monitor and gather data on bandwidth and performance with which to bombard the teleco's tech support. The first words out of their mouth will be "Do you have your router configured properly" and will hammer this at you until you prove conclusively that it's not your router. You need to pick a platform and stay committed to it. Pick an e-mail server that is EASY to configure and maintain. MDaemon for NT/2000 and Qmail for Linux/Unix/BSD are good choices. Pick a hardware vendor you can have a good relationship with. 3Com is an excellent choice for ISP type hardware. Very few ISPs needs the power of Cisco equipment.
4) Take security seriously. Your 31337 Skriptors love to find ISPs with little thought to security or else security that has gone lax. Enforce a password policy, keep good logs and have monitoring systems up and running. Have a zero tolerance policy for spammers and other crackers. Invest in at least a minimal firewall setup for your servers. Spend the time to learn the Unix tools for firewalling or look at a good NT package such as BlackIce (again depending on chosen platform).
You can still be very successful with dial-up ISPs. Broadband will eventually either become cheaper allowing local ISPs to compete in that area or the government will eventually crack those markets open. It's just a matter of time.
One last thing, offer Front Page extension support! I can hear the booing from the
I also, after the July 29, 2000 article on Password, tried to get Passport to remove my account. The response I got was "we're working on that functionality at this time". Guess they've dropped that project....
I can think of two advantages right off:
/Maildir/ instead of messing around with the MAILBOX file.
1) If your MAILBOX file gets trashed, you're out your entire e-mail directory. If one MAILDIR file gets messed up, you've only lost one e-mail.
2) If you get a messed up e-mail that you can't read in a mail program (and this DOES happen) you only have to delete the corresponding message in the
I know that UofW claims Maildir take a performance hit, but I've not noticed one. There's all sorts of web resources on tweaking UofW to pump out e-mails faster. I'm currently using Qmail + IMAP-2000 (with the Maildir patch on Qmail's site) on a P100 w/ 32Mb of RAM and I've got it pumping out IMAP as fast as my work's commercial server does.
I don't know where you go/went to high school but I thought most of my high school teachers (I'm a college grad now) were actually pretty good. Sure there were some of the burned-out ones who'd been there too long, but for the most part they were all very knowledgable and personalable individuals.
My father is a primary school teacher and thus I've known an entire school of teachers from the time I was small and again, none of them are losers or morons.
As for the lack of competition, you obviously know nothing about that which you speak of. Getting a job in a school district is incredibly difficult because of such a low turn-over rate. Many new grads spend YEARS as per diem substitutes before they can move into the "year-long substitute" position for a teacher who's ill or on sabatical. Sure teachers don't make as much money as a tech worker or business executive, but they chose what to go into and knew the salary and job market when then entered it. They also have a three month vacation in which to do other things to make money. My parents raised three children on one teacher's salary. My father did different things in the summer to make additional money from computer lessons (back in the TI-99 and Atari days) to landscaping work.
Most teachers really love their job and it's the few students nowadays that really want to learn and recognize the value of their teachers that really make the teacher's jobs worthwhile.
My favorite high school teacher, among many that I liked, was Mr. Altmire. He was one of the english, rhetoric and writing teachers. He was also the debate team coach. He made class a lot of fun, but at the end after all the fun you really thought "wow, did I really get a lot out of that class."
It's not just the teachers that make your high school experience, it's also what you make out of it. It's up to YOU to decide to give it your all and to participate, etc.. and then you'll succeed. If you don't learn that in high school when the goings easier, you're in for a rude shock in college or the work force.
I got the full version early this morning from Netscape w/o any download lag at all. But I'm sure that's different now.
Things Different:
1) Load time is VERY fast.
2) Page rendering is on par with IE5.5
3) Most sites display correctly
Things the Same:
1) BIG FREAKING MEMORY LEAK!!I'm running Net6 on Windows 2000. Ever page I load increases Netscape's memory footprint by approximately 1.5 Mb. I let Yahoo's random page URL keep loading files and I ramped the memory usage up to about 85 Mb before I quit. Closing Netscape and reloading drop the footprint back to 4 Mb, which on first inspection is nice. However it quickly ramps up fast. Even entering data in this form box is increasing the ram count about 4K every 20 characters or so. Netscape 6 definitely should not have been released yet. This is sad and pathetic for the once innovative and powerful Netscape.
You have to provide verbal and/or written permission. When I was with Qwest not too long ago, I actually had to call a third-party number and verify my information and to speak on recorded record that I was allowing Qwest to change my long distance service. After awhile I got a better deal with Cable & Wireless through my company and switched but there I had to fax them a sheet that gave permission to change my long distance. You can call your AG's office, but I'd actually start with your state's public utilities commission since AT&T/MediaOne is providing your actual phone line.
The company I currently work for has been doing this almost EXACT thing for over 15 years. We're a medical publication company that uses SGML to format our books. Authors login from all over the world to our mainframe and use a variety of console-based and web-based tools to create, edit, manage and version-control publications. We have a lot of custom code binding commercial products together to do this. Also, I know we're not the only company in the same industry that does this sort of publishing this way, let alone other non-medical publishers. This is a horribly absurd patent. Obviously nothing in the way of verification of uniqueness of this request was done.
I think this is going to be the beginning of a trend where companies begin to specialize on what they're going to support. RedHat obviously wants to concentrate on x86 and its associated derivites. This leaves a market hole for someone to step in and support the existing Solaris installations as well as market to companies that may be looking at Solaris boxes and want to get Linux on them. It's a prime example of the marketplace at work. Plus I have a feeling that Sun is going to turn itself into a heavy-hitter in the Solaris/Linux market.
You're lucky. My college's bookstore wouldn't let you return a book period (unless you dropped the class in the first week and THEN you had to have a signed note from the registrar saying you did). ALL of my books were shrinkwrapped so I couln't thumb through it first to make sure it was worth buying. I got stuck with some really crappy books that are now making nice monitor stands. And then when the used book buyers came to campus, the wouldn't buy back any book that had a CD in it whether or not the little vinyl envelope was opened or not.