Looking at Square's work with PlayStation games has always been a pleasure -- they really go out of their way to push graphics to the next level. I'm not surprised they turned to Silicon Graphics machines, which have always been solid performers in graphics development.
Anyone have any idea if they had to cut any corners on the movie? I heard that it was over budget and behind schedule somewhere, but those may have just been rumors.
Despite attempts to make it play out as something different, adult sites are just business. Same principles apply: develop a desireable product or service, then market it and sell. I don't want to get into the morality issues about working in the adult industry, because that's really a personal choice; but the people in the industry are businesspeople.
Certainly, one cannot look at this market and believe it to be a shortcut to riches. It's not. Plus, the market *is* saturated. I think the hardest part about this particular industry is the marketing. Look at the saturation in the search engines alone.
I'm of the opinion that this course could be titled "General Internet Business Principles", but that naturally that wouldn't get people fighting to get in the door.
Re:Does he get to sell customer mailing list?
on
Dot-com Liquidator
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· Score: 1
IANAL, but I'm betting that this depends on the privacy agreements the failed company made. If the company was good about privacy (many are not), they would probably be able to sell the list only once, and with restrictions on the buying company with regards to how they use it.
I've installed RH6 on a couple of Dell computers that were previously running Windows -- installation can be pretty brain dead, i.e. for a default install just click through a few menus and you're up and running in no time.
I think it's great that they're offering linux on their laptops -- those thin lattitudes would be nice. Unfortunately, I'd also like to see a laptop with a point stick, rather than that dicey touchpad that seems so popular of late. (I'm running RH6.1 on a Toshiba Satellite 2530CDS, although I'd prefer one of those IBM 600's. Oh for more point stick options! Any with Athlon?)
However, I think that support will be the key issue here. A lot of the configuration and setup that is second nature to *nix users is completely unintuitive to the average end user. People have to RTFM, which can be quite frustrating (especially those coming from the comfy windoze environment). I still believe that linux is a couple years away from mainstream use and that Dell is jumping on the linux hype right now. It may pay off in a year or two, but right now it's just not what the average end user wants (the *average* end user being the type of person who buys a pre-loaded Windows or Mac computer).
I agree that Dell's installs of linux leave a little to be desired. Partitions are a little funny, though they tend to get the hardware *mostly* right. Linux pros will rip apart and put back together the setup before they feel comfortable. Of course, that's because everybody's needs and desires for their computer vary.
The way we do it here is that we basically want to save the httpd logs forever. You never know when those logs will come in handy, particularly if you run any commerce sites -- it's nice to be able to track down IP subnets to add more empirical evidence. Plus, new statistical techniques may be developed down the road. I'm not as big a fan of archiving the messages log; however, those get backed up daily themselves with the rest of the servers.
We used to archive separate logs for access, error, and referer, but now Apache's combined logs have made life much easier. (Analog also is a nice bonus -- talk about quick stats!)
We typically download all the httpd logs for a quarter, burn them onto a CD-R, and store them. This on top of daily incremental backup with weekly full. That way, if we want to analyze the data later, we have the logs ready to go, rather than having to track them off a tape. (I myself have used old logs in this manner several times.)
I've heard that you can gzip the logs on the fly directly from Apache, but thought that might lead to unwanted cpu overhead due to its constant utilization on busy web sites; anyone got any anecdotal evidence on this one?
Well, while we're sharing hard drive stories, I figured I'd jump in.
On the office front, I've had a Maxtor IDE drive that began making funny noises after a while, though it never died. I had a Seagate IDE drive that ended up dying, due to "electrical failure", according to the hard drive recovery experts. Another Seagate drive died in a laptop, making bizarre grinding noises. And of course, we've probably all got a story of a Quantum drive going belly up.
Talking to other techs, I've heard mostly more bad reports about Quantum.
I got a Maxtor UDMA/66 17 GB drive (oddly, they were selling their 13GB drive for *exactly* the same price) for my home computer. While it works, my BIOS was apparently outdated, and the only way I could get the BIOS to recognize drives greater than 13 GB or so was to use Maxtor's MaxBlast utility. This actually caused me no end to headaches when I tried to install linux -- fdisk was quite unhappy trying to parse Maxtor's custom partition tables, and messed them all up.
Finally, my most recent drive was a 13GB IBM, and it has served me well (so far, knock on wood). With my Maxtor 17 gigger, that's a whopping 30 gigs of hard drive space. I can't imagine needing that much for my home computer.;)
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Looking at Square's work with PlayStation games has always been a pleasure -- they really go out of their way to push graphics to the next level. I'm not surprised they turned to Silicon Graphics machines, which have always been solid performers in graphics development.
Anyone have any idea if they had to cut any corners on the movie? I heard that it was over budget and behind schedule somewhere, but those may have just been rumors.
Despite attempts to make it play out as something different, adult sites are just business. Same principles apply: develop a desireable product or service, then market it and sell. I don't want to get into the morality issues about working in the adult industry, because that's really a personal choice; but the people in the industry are businesspeople.
Certainly, one cannot look at this market and believe it to be a shortcut to riches. It's not. Plus, the market *is* saturated. I think the hardest part about this particular industry is the marketing. Look at the saturation in the search engines alone.
I'm of the opinion that this course could be titled "General Internet Business Principles", but that naturally that wouldn't get people fighting to get in the door.
IANAL, but I'm betting that this depends on the privacy agreements the failed company made. If the company was good about privacy (many are not), they would probably be able to sell the list only once, and with restrictions on the buying company with regards to how they use it.
...from the workstation point of view, anyway.
.02 American dollars.
I've installed RH6 on a couple of Dell computers that were previously running Windows -- installation can be pretty brain dead, i.e. for a default install just click through a few menus and you're up and running in no time.
I think it's great that they're offering linux on their laptops -- those thin lattitudes would be nice. Unfortunately, I'd also like to see a laptop with a point stick, rather than that dicey touchpad that seems so popular of late. (I'm running RH6.1 on a Toshiba Satellite 2530CDS, although I'd prefer one of those IBM 600's. Oh for more point stick options! Any with Athlon?)
However, I think that support will be the key issue here. A lot of the configuration and setup that is second nature to *nix users is completely unintuitive to the average end user. People have to RTFM, which can be quite frustrating (especially those coming from the comfy windoze environment). I still believe that linux is a couple years away from mainstream use and that Dell is jumping on the linux hype right now. It may pay off in a year or two, but right now it's just not what the average end user wants (the *average* end user being the type of person who buys a pre-loaded Windows or Mac computer).
I agree that Dell's installs of linux leave a little to be desired. Partitions are a little funny, though they tend to get the hardware *mostly* right. Linux pros will rip apart and put back together the setup before they feel comfortable. Of course, that's because everybody's needs and desires for their computer vary.
Just my
The way we do it here is that we basically want to save the httpd logs forever. You never know when those logs will come in handy, particularly if you run any commerce sites -- it's nice to be able to track down IP subnets to add more empirical evidence. Plus, new statistical techniques may be developed down the road. I'm not as big a fan of archiving the messages log; however, those get backed up daily themselves with the rest of the servers.
We used to archive separate logs for access, error, and referer, but now Apache's combined logs have made life much easier. (Analog also is a nice bonus -- talk about quick stats!)
We typically download all the httpd logs for a quarter, burn them onto a CD-R, and store them. This on top of daily incremental backup with weekly full. That way, if we want to analyze the data later, we have the logs ready to go, rather than having to track them off a tape. (I myself have used old logs in this manner several times.)
I've heard that you can gzip the logs on the fly directly from Apache, but thought that might lead to unwanted cpu overhead due to its constant utilization on busy web sites; anyone got any anecdotal evidence on this one?
Well, while we're sharing hard drive stories, I figured I'd jump in.
;)
On the office front, I've had a Maxtor IDE drive that began making funny noises after a while, though it never died. I had a Seagate IDE drive that ended up dying, due to "electrical failure", according to the hard drive recovery experts. Another Seagate drive died in a laptop, making bizarre grinding noises. And of course, we've probably all got a story of a Quantum drive going belly up.
Talking to other techs, I've heard mostly more bad reports about Quantum.
I got a Maxtor UDMA/66 17 GB drive (oddly, they were selling their 13GB drive for *exactly* the same price) for my home computer. While it works, my BIOS was apparently outdated, and the only way I could get the BIOS to recognize drives greater than 13 GB or so was to use Maxtor's MaxBlast utility. This actually caused me no end to headaches when I tried to install linux -- fdisk was quite unhappy trying to parse Maxtor's custom partition tables, and messed them all up.
Finally, my most recent drive was a 13GB IBM, and it has served me well (so far, knock on wood). With my Maxtor 17 gigger, that's a whopping 30 gigs of hard drive space. I can't imagine needing that much for my home computer.
- Rodionpunk