First off, Ubuntu seems to adopt new releases quicker that any other distribution, yet somehow manages to have excellent Q&A even on their unstable releases.
Ubuntu has the advantage of having a really rich guy running the show. Because of this, there are many paid Ubuntu developers to help with their QA. As a Gentoo developer, I spend only my free time working on Gentoo, which means I also maintain a normal job to put food on the table. If I were paid to work on Gentoo, I could spend more time improving the quality, too. Not having to spend 40+ hours a week doing something non-Gentoo would definitely improve my Gentoo productivity and allow me to spend more time doing QA checks on the tree.
There are some really smart guys over at Ubuntu. Getting paid to do it just makes it all the better. =]
Well, even though you made it sound almost impossible, all of those distributions except for one use RPM. It really is quite easy to build a RPM file that will work on all of those distributions. You then have to support two things, RPM and DPKG. A properly-written RPM spec file will work on any of those distributions. The hardest part is figuring out the dependencies and specifying them in the spec file, which not limiting anything to specific versions, other than where absolutely necessary.
Having worked with both RPM and ebuilds, I tend to prefer the Loki Setup method for distributing cross-distribution packages. It works on every distribution, and tends to be fairly easy to work with in general. While your package won't be tracked by the distribution's own package menagement, you're talking about creating a commercial software package. It should probably be installing into/opt/$packagename anyway and be fairly self-contained. This seems to work well for commercial software.
Maybe you misunderstood that I said that specific permissions be granted via policy, rather than blanket administration rights. Besides, I've been doing this for a long time now, and locked down machines tend to work better, have less problems, and users tend to be happier. The ones that get upset are the "Joe Admins" out there that think because they can admin their home box with their pirated copy of Windows XP, that they know anything about professional corporate environments. Remember that you don't own your work machine. It belongs to your work. It is their job to make sure that you can do your job on the machine and really nothing else.
I don't work in IT anymore, but at the last company where I worked, we kept a very tight ship. We got none of the new viruses or worms, when everyone I knew was running around panicking, I was going home on time and spending time with my girlfriend. Our users were also quite happy, as they rarely, if ever, had to call the help desk, and when they did, it was almost always a genuine problem that needed to be addressed, rather than an issue of viruses/spyware/malware. Taking the time to actually plan and design your network and policies can go a long way to prevention, without having to be draconian on the machines themselves. Unfortunately, this is missed in most companies.
Where I currently work, the IT department is completely inept. Problems don't get resolved for weeks and the network is generally a bunch of mayhem. Nothing is properly planned, everything is thrown together at the last minute. There's no design on the network, and nothing internal to stop any kind of malware, other than anti-virus software on each machine, which is only updated weekly. Laptops are given free reign on and off the network, and all laptop users are local administrators just so they can do things like change their network settings, which is all they really need to do that requires elevated priviledges.
You seem to think I advocate being controlling over what the users do with their machines on a fine-grained level. I have much better things to do than be big brother, so rather than watch over the users like a hawk, I'd rather design the network from the beginning to be easily maintainable and designed with security in mind from the beginning. This reduces the support calls, and in the end, makes my job easier and the users happier. Who cares if you have 100% control over your work machine if you can't use it because the latest virus or worm knocked it out. Most people just want a work machine to be reliable so that they can do their job without being inconvenienced with it breaking.
Don't let your laptop machines on the same network as your desktops. Keep them on their own little quarantined network. In fact, the more you can quarantine each machine from each other, the better off you're going to be if something does get onto one of these laptops. The simplest thing to remember is that you control the laptop and need to lock it down as much as humanly possibly, but at the same time, the laptop is the front-line soldier on the battlezone of the Internet, so proper quarantine procedures should always be followed. If you design your network to assume that any and all laptops that enter it could be infected with anything, it lends to a more secure environment.
Lock the sons of a bitches down hard. Don't allow the laptop user to install software. Don't allow them to run as an administrator account. Use policies to allow them to perform any administrative tasks that they might need, such as being able to change their IP address. Use a corporate-controlled firewall, preferably using a firewall that allows you to set a global policy and force it enabled. This is a host-based firewall, besides the actual corporate one to the Internet. Turn off all unecessary services. Enable anti-virus and don't allow users to disable it.
The real problem with laptops is that most IT departments treat them differently than they would a desktop. Don't. Don't give your laptop users administrative access, no matter how much they complain. It is your job to keep the machine in a usable state, no matter what they do to it, so don't allow them to do things that you know will break it.
FALSE: Why? because it still uses 2.4 kernel? Please! stability is the issue here. Purchase a RedHat Advanced server and you'll find it STILL uses 2.4. You cant please everyone all the time, but you can still produce a quality product with proven technology.
Funny...
[root@satellite02 mnt]# uname -r 2.6.9-11.ELsmp [root@satellite02 mnt]# cat/etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 1)
A portion of both groups discover eventually that the world is bigger than their little corner of it, but, like programmers using vi to edit CSS, they stick with their original chat and web clients even knowing that there are better alternatives.
And what the hell is wrong with using vi to edit CSS?
I mean, it's not like we're using emacs or anything.
While I do agree with you, this is Debian. Unfortunately, Debian has the reputation of being a bunch of elitist assholes and flaming kids. Not that Gentoo's reputation is any better, but at least people just think we're a bunch of ricers and not likely to flame the hell out of anyone who asks us a question. *grin*
I really hope these kinds of attitudes can change in the future and that some developers (in all camps) can grow the hell up and start acting like adults.
Where I work, we have a system similar to this. I noticed that nowhere do you list virus scanning and spam blocking. Of course, offering these services will *dramatically* increase the needs for infrastructure.
We use several sets of servers. The first servers are our MX servers. We have 5 of these and they process all incoming mail from the Internet at large. These servers are responsible for two things, delivery to local accounts, and processing incoming mail. They are all behind a Cisco CSS load balancer and have a limit set on their connections. There's a good reason for this, to be explained later. Besides the MX servers, we have 3 MQ servers. The MQ servers have no limits on their connections, as they are spill-over servers only, designed to queue up mail. This ensures that our spam and virus scanner servers do not become overloaded, even during a large spam attack, as the MQ servers must traverse their own, even more limited ingress on the load balancer. We also have SMTP servers, which are used by internal customers for sending mail. We have 3 of these. These servers also support SMTP AUTH over SSL/TLS for customers when they are off-network.
All of these servers are served by a load balanced set of SV servers, or our spam and virus scanning servers. These servers are running your usual concoction of mimedefang/spamassassin/clamav and are used by both the SMTP and MX servers. We currently have 12 of these to keep up with peak loads. All mail servers are running Sendmail, as its milter interface has performed much better in our tests than any other MTA. Of course, the exact configuration of the servers is a bit of a secret, but we have separated queues to keep emails from filling up the queues. Each of our 3 queues has 10 sub-directories, to keep the number of actual files in each directory down and to limit disk I/O on such large directories. Filesystem choice makes a big difference here, so you'll want to figure out your average email type and determine what filesystem to use based on this. The more RAM you have, the better.
For mailboxes checking, we have 3 sets of servers, our POP3 servers, of which we have 5, our 4 IMAP servers, and our 3 webmail servers. The webmail servers are running an IMAP proxy. Of course, all of these services are behind a load balancer. We even use the load balancers between services, such as webmail/IMAP. We use Courier IMAP, squirrelmail, and nupop for these, though all are heavily modified to support features which aren't necessarily needed outside our environment, such as automatic username munging based on originating IP. Backend storage is provided by NetApp Filers.
I run Gentoo (and Mac OS X) on my Dual G4, and I've not found any issues with stability or practicality on Linux. I haven't had any on OS X, either. Then again, I'm not a Mac snob. I've been running OS X for some time now, and while I'll say it is definitely better in some areas, it is *seriously* lacking in others, performance being the primary. While I use Mac OS X as a desktop, I tend to stay in Linux more often than not, because I like to actually get work done without having to spend countless hours trying to get simple tools that I use daily to work.
Zealots are on both sides. Try using fact instead of emotional responses, and maybe you won't be treated like a troll.
No, what Gentoo calls a "LiveCD" is a complete environment. We call our installation media an InstallCD, and not a LiveCD. It is our users that tend to not make the distinction.
Is a killer-app like HL3 enough to sway you to choose a system?
No. Otherwise, I would be running Windows so I could play all of the great and exciting games that come out and are never ported to my platform of choice. Maybe it is just me, but I think the idea of purchasing a piece of hardware, particularly a console, on the sole basis of a single game is insane. Wouldn't it make more sense to buy the system that is more likely to have the games that you want? Maybe even support a company that has always delivered the games that you want?
Sure. Unlike the PC, though, there are a LOT more games out there than just FPSs.
I'm not disagreeing with you, at all. The GP poster was talking about FPS games, so I stayed within the same genre. As for the games you mentioned, they are more designed towards cooperative playing. Try both running in 2 different directions in Contra. The easiest way to show that the spirit is cooperation (or attacking each other, in the case of Killer Instinct) is the fact that you share a single screen.
Playing in a room with people is quite a bit different than playing on the same screen where the other person can see where you are at all times. I like playing with a group of friends. I just don't think the FPS genre is really tailored for it.
Heh. You should try buying a second controller and inviting a friend over.;)
So we can share a split screen and see what the other is doing at all times? No thanks. What if I want to play with 4 friends? OOh... now my screen is split 4 ways, my field of vision is restricted, and now all of us can easily tell where each other is at all times. Doesn't that kinda take the fun out of a First Person Shooter?
Remember that not everyone is limited by some crappy 256K upstream from consumer-grade cable or DSL. It is very possible that someone has a fairly decent Internet connection. A full T-1 would be sufficient for doing most backups. Also remember that most of these places charge based on storage used, so you would only want to use them for the important stuff, not for your 559GB of pr0n. I would say the average small-to-medium business, the ones that would need this sort of solution, probably only have a few GB of data total that is important to them, and I'm sure they could limit that down to what is necessary even more.
Well, there is a very common fix for the problem of VoIP being dropped when bad things happen to your Internet.
Don't run your VoIP services over the same lines as your Internet.
I know that isn't the most popular thing to hear, but in the case of a business, not being able to answer when your customers call because your phones are down makes you look pretty incompetent, and if the customer isn't very loyal, you most likely just lost a sale to a competitor. Part of the problem with most VoIP installations is that people are using them over cheap, consumer broadband lines with absolutely no Service-Level Agreement with their ISP. Add in the lack of a Service-Level Agreement from the VoIP provider, and you have a poor-quality phone service, hinged on the reliability of two consumer services that are independent of each other and have no contractual obligation to perform any repairs within any reasonable amount of time.
I work for an ISP that offers VoIP services, however, we don't allow people to use software phones. Instead, the VoIP services we offer aren't much different from the traditional services. They still terminate into a piece of equipment at the customer site that is owned by us and the equipment converts the calls to SIP. Of course, we only cater to businesses, but we offer both voice and data to our customers at a reasonable rate.
The reason that we do not offer VoIP services to the customer's desk is we do not control their network. We have no way of ensuring proper QoS is in place or that their network is of sufficient quality for voice. I believe this to be the primary failure of companies like Vonage. They're out there putting out services on sub-standard lines and giving the entirety of VoIP a bad name with their lax reliability and quality.
We save our VoIP customers quite a bit of money, but we manage to do it without skimping on our quality. Maybe if Vonage could match the traditional telco, things would be different. Just as a point of reference, we also are a telco and offer "normal" lines, too. Our VoIP products have the same or better reliability than our "normal" voice products, and E911 isn't an issue.
Gentoo, for one, takes hardware donations. The donated hardware could become any number of things, from a new bittorrent server, to a developer's workstation. Another thing we offer is online developer machines, which gives remote access to the machines for developers in need. I am sure that Gentoo is not the only project out there with a similar way of handling donations. I know that FreeBSD has their own donations page. Pretty much any community-based project will gladly take your donation and put it to good use. In fact, it might be easier to find a project you would like to donate it to, rather than an individual. The project would probably do a better job of finding your machine a good home within its own structure than you probably would be able to without being intimately familiar with who does what and who needs what within the project.
I work for an ISP, so I'm betting that our mail needs are more intensive than the typical enterprise. We have over 20 servers just dedicated to running the virus and spam filtering. We are not a large ISP by any stretch, but I'm talking emails on the magnitude of millions of delivered emails per day. I'm not even going to guess on the number of spam/virus emails that get processed and filtered. The amount of resources saved by using a milter approach is significant. We originally were using Sendmail with a commerical milter for filtering. When we decided to not renew our license, we investigated other solutions, including qmail and postfix using various scanning methods. According to our findings, we would have had to have doubled our mail infrastructure to handle the extra load, plus delivery times suffered, as each time the message was moved from server to server, it was queued at the end of that server's mail queue.
There's nothing wrong with sendmail provided that you have a compitent administration team. Add the fact that Sendmail and BIND exploits have been becoming fewer and with greater interval between them, and you can see that Sendmail definitely is a viable solution for a mail system.
Your Fedora Core 4 has 0 clipboards. It's a subtlety, I know, but it is important for clarification.
Now, X has a clipboard.
So does Gnome.
I'm betting you're confusing these. In fact, it was Gnome (and KDE) that started the asinine idea that copying everything that Windows does is a good idea and decided to implement the "Windows" style clipboard, which is independent of the X one, using the standard Windows key combinations. Things like this tend to confuse users when they do not work exactly as they did in the original location. It is much easier to teach users that "You just select text to copy and use the middle button to paste" than it is to teach them that "Sometimes you use the mouse to select text to copy it, and middle mouse button to paste, but other times you have to right click and select copy, and right click and select paste, and even other times you have to use control-c to copy and control-v to paste after you've selected your text." What pisses me off is the programs that don't allow middle click to paste. Now this situation wouldn't be so bad if all three methods always worked in all of the gui applications, but this would mean it would need to be an X function. So instead of everybody writing their own clipboard scheme, it probably would have been better to have extended the default.
You also missed the entire set of people out there that use more traditional window managers, rather then the newer desktop environments. These people rely on the 20+ year old "Select to copy, middle click to paste" clipboard method, since there is no control-c, control-v version of the clipboard.
The average American likes Windows because it is relatively simple to install and to connect to the Internet.
Install? You're kidding, right? You do realize that the people you're talking about don't understand that there even is anything other than Windows, and I'd be willing to bet that most of them don't even know what Windows is. Most computer users use what was installed on their computers when they bought it. At a company, installs are done by IT. How exactly does the ease of installation have anything to do with usage?
It doesn't.
By the way, some hackers will likely provide the necessary software patch to enable x86 MacOS to run on any IBM PC clone. If the Apple x86 box garners 10% or more of the market, then most of the ISPs will gleefully provide support for UNIX connectivity. Perhaps, the title of this article should be "Simplicity & Connectivity & A Matter of Time for the UNIX Juggernaut called Apple".
Most major ISPs already provide support for Macs, and have for years. There are even many that are providing Linux support.
Ease of installation and connecting to the Internet really aren't as much of an issue as software availability. The simple fact that for most people, The Gimp is a "good enough" replacement for Photoshop doesn't matter when it isn't on the shelves of Best Buy. If they can't install and play Deer Hunter 4000 on their shiny new computer, it doesn't matter what OS it is running. To Joe Sizpack, his computer is either "broken" or "sucks", whether it runs Windows, Linux, MacOS, or any other OS is of no consequence.
As much as I prefer postfix to sendmail, nobody but sendmail has anything like a milter. They are simply invaluable in an enterprise environment. Forwarding emails between MTAs for processing is an order of magnitude more intensive on the servers in question.
We just use Nagios along with a temperature sensor and a custom-written Nagios plugin. It cost us about $200 in parts and about an hour's worth of labor to write the plugin.
Of course, there is always the esensor, which happens to go on sale tomorrow.
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Ubuntu has the advantage of having a really rich guy running the show. Because of this, there are many paid Ubuntu developers to help with their QA. As a Gentoo developer, I spend only my free time working on Gentoo, which means I also maintain a normal job to put food on the table. If I were paid to work on Gentoo, I could spend more time improving the quality, too. Not having to spend 40+ hours a week doing something non-Gentoo would definitely improve my Gentoo productivity and allow me to spend more time doing QA checks on the tree.
There are some really smart guys over at Ubuntu. Getting paid to do it just makes it all the better. =]
Well, even though you made it sound almost impossible, all of those distributions except for one use RPM. It really is quite easy to build a RPM file that will work on all of those distributions. You then have to support two things, RPM and DPKG. A properly-written RPM spec file will work on any of those distributions. The hardest part is figuring out the dependencies and specifying them in the spec file, which not limiting anything to specific versions, other than where absolutely necessary.
Having worked with both RPM and ebuilds, I tend to prefer the Loki Setup method for distributing cross-distribution packages. It works on every distribution, and tends to be fairly easy to work with in general. While your package won't be tracked by the distribution's own package menagement, you're talking about creating a commercial software package. It should probably be installing into /opt/$packagename anyway and be fairly self-contained. This seems to work well for commercial software.
Maybe you misunderstood that I said that specific permissions be granted via policy, rather than blanket administration rights. Besides, I've been doing this for a long time now, and locked down machines tend to work better, have less problems, and users tend to be happier. The ones that get upset are the "Joe Admins" out there that think because they can admin their home box with their pirated copy of Windows XP, that they know anything about professional corporate environments. Remember that you don't own your work machine. It belongs to your work. It is their job to make sure that you can do your job on the machine and really nothing else.
I don't work in IT anymore, but at the last company where I worked, we kept a very tight ship. We got none of the new viruses or worms, when everyone I knew was running around panicking, I was going home on time and spending time with my girlfriend. Our users were also quite happy, as they rarely, if ever, had to call the help desk, and when they did, it was almost always a genuine problem that needed to be addressed, rather than an issue of viruses/spyware/malware. Taking the time to actually plan and design your network and policies can go a long way to prevention, without having to be draconian on the machines themselves. Unfortunately, this is missed in most companies.
Where I currently work, the IT department is completely inept. Problems don't get resolved for weeks and the network is generally a bunch of mayhem. Nothing is properly planned, everything is thrown together at the last minute. There's no design on the network, and nothing internal to stop any kind of malware, other than anti-virus software on each machine, which is only updated weekly. Laptops are given free reign on and off the network, and all laptop users are local administrators just so they can do things like change their network settings, which is all they really need to do that requires elevated priviledges.
You seem to think I advocate being controlling over what the users do with their machines on a fine-grained level. I have much better things to do than be big brother, so rather than watch over the users like a hawk, I'd rather design the network from the beginning to be easily maintainable and designed with security in mind from the beginning. This reduces the support calls, and in the end, makes my job easier and the users happier. Who cares if you have 100% control over your work machine if you can't use it because the latest virus or worm knocked it out. Most people just want a work machine to be reliable so that they can do their job without being inconvenienced with it breaking.
I knew I forgot something above.
Don't let your laptop machines on the same network as your desktops. Keep them on their own little quarantined network. In fact, the more you can quarantine each machine from each other, the better off you're going to be if something does get onto one of these laptops. The simplest thing to remember is that you control the laptop and need to lock it down as much as humanly possibly, but at the same time, the laptop is the front-line soldier on the battlezone of the Internet, so proper quarantine procedures should always be followed. If you design your network to assume that any and all laptops that enter it could be infected with anything, it lends to a more secure environment.
Lock the sons of a bitches down hard. Don't allow the laptop user to install software. Don't allow them to run as an administrator account. Use policies to allow them to perform any administrative tasks that they might need, such as being able to change their IP address. Use a corporate-controlled firewall, preferably using a firewall that allows you to set a global policy and force it enabled. This is a host-based firewall, besides the actual corporate one to the Internet. Turn off all unecessary services. Enable anti-virus and don't allow users to disable it.
The real problem with laptops is that most IT departments treat them differently than they would a desktop. Don't. Don't give your laptop users administrative access, no matter how much they complain. It is your job to keep the machine in a usable state, no matter what they do to it, so don't allow them to do things that you know will break it.
Funny...
And what the hell is wrong with using vi to edit CSS?
I mean, it's not like we're using emacs or anything.
While I do agree with you, this is Debian. Unfortunately, Debian has the reputation of being a bunch of elitist assholes and flaming kids. Not that Gentoo's reputation is any better, but at least people just think we're a bunch of ricers and not likely to flame the hell out of anyone who asks us a question. *grin*
I really hope these kinds of attitudes can change in the future and that some developers (in all camps) can grow the hell up and start acting like adults.
Where I work, we have a system similar to this. I noticed that nowhere do you list virus scanning and spam blocking. Of course, offering these services will *dramatically* increase the needs for infrastructure.
We use several sets of servers. The first servers are our MX servers. We have 5 of these and they process all incoming mail from the Internet at large. These servers are responsible for two things, delivery to local accounts, and processing incoming mail. They are all behind a Cisco CSS load balancer and have a limit set on their connections. There's a good reason for this, to be explained later. Besides the MX servers, we have 3 MQ servers. The MQ servers have no limits on their connections, as they are spill-over servers only, designed to queue up mail. This ensures that our spam and virus scanner servers do not become overloaded, even during a large spam attack, as the MQ servers must traverse their own, even more limited ingress on the load balancer. We also have SMTP servers, which are used by internal customers for sending mail. We have 3 of these. These servers also support SMTP AUTH over SSL/TLS for customers when they are off-network.
All of these servers are served by a load balanced set of SV servers, or our spam and virus scanning servers. These servers are running your usual concoction of mimedefang/spamassassin/clamav and are used by both the SMTP and MX servers. We currently have 12 of these to keep up with peak loads. All mail servers are running Sendmail, as its milter interface has performed much better in our tests than any other MTA. Of course, the exact configuration of the servers is a bit of a secret, but we have separated queues to keep emails from filling up the queues. Each of our 3 queues has 10 sub-directories, to keep the number of actual files in each directory down and to limit disk I/O on such large directories. Filesystem choice makes a big difference here, so you'll want to figure out your average email type and determine what filesystem to use based on this. The more RAM you have, the better.
For mailboxes checking, we have 3 sets of servers, our POP3 servers, of which we have 5, our 4 IMAP servers, and our 3 webmail servers. The webmail servers are running an IMAP proxy. Of course, all of these services are behind a load balancer. We even use the load balancers between services, such as webmail/IMAP. We use Courier IMAP, squirrelmail, and nupop for these, though all are heavily modified to support features which aren't necessarily needed outside our environment, such as automatic username munging based on originating IP. Backend storage is provided by NetApp Filers.
This services about 500,000 email customers.
Funny.
I run Gentoo (and Mac OS X) on my Dual G4, and I've not found any issues with stability or practicality on Linux. I haven't had any on OS X, either. Then again, I'm not a Mac snob. I've been running OS X for some time now, and while I'll say it is definitely better in some areas, it is *seriously* lacking in others, performance being the primary. While I use Mac OS X as a desktop, I tend to stay in Linux more often than not, because I like to actually get work done without having to spend countless hours trying to get simple tools that I use daily to work.
Zealots are on both sides. Try using fact instead of emotional responses, and maybe you won't be treated like a troll.
No, what Gentoo calls a "LiveCD" is a complete environment. We call our installation media an InstallCD, and not a LiveCD. It is our users that tend to not make the distinction.
No. Otherwise, I would be running Windows so I could play all of the great and exciting games that come out and are never ported to my platform of choice. Maybe it is just me, but I think the idea of purchasing a piece of hardware, particularly a console, on the sole basis of a single game is insane. Wouldn't it make more sense to buy the system that is more likely to have the games that you want? Maybe even support a company that has always delivered the games that you want?
I'm not disagreeing with you, at all. The GP poster was talking about FPS games, so I stayed within the same genre. As for the games you mentioned, they are more designed towards cooperative playing. Try both running in 2 different directions in Contra. The easiest way to show that the spirit is cooperation (or attacking each other, in the case of Killer Instinct) is the fact that you share a single screen.
Playing in a room with people is quite a bit different than playing on the same screen where the other person can see where you are at all times. I like playing with a group of friends. I just don't think the FPS genre is really tailored for it.
So we can share a split screen and see what the other is doing at all times? No thanks. What if I want to play with 4 friends? OOh... now my screen is split 4 ways, my field of vision is restricted, and now all of us can easily tell where each other is at all times. Doesn't that kinda take the fun out of a First Person Shooter?
Remember that not everyone is limited by some crappy 256K upstream from consumer-grade cable or DSL. It is very possible that someone has a fairly decent Internet connection. A full T-1 would be sufficient for doing most backups. Also remember that most of these places charge based on storage used, so you would only want to use them for the important stuff, not for your 559GB of pr0n. I would say the average small-to-medium business, the ones that would need this sort of solution, probably only have a few GB of data total that is important to them, and I'm sure they could limit that down to what is necessary even more.
Well, there is a very common fix for the problem of VoIP being dropped when bad things happen to your Internet.
Don't run your VoIP services over the same lines as your Internet.
I know that isn't the most popular thing to hear, but in the case of a business, not being able to answer when your customers call because your phones are down makes you look pretty incompetent, and if the customer isn't very loyal, you most likely just lost a sale to a competitor. Part of the problem with most VoIP installations is that people are using them over cheap, consumer broadband lines with absolutely no Service-Level Agreement with their ISP. Add in the lack of a Service-Level Agreement from the VoIP provider, and you have a poor-quality phone service, hinged on the reliability of two consumer services that are independent of each other and have no contractual obligation to perform any repairs within any reasonable amount of time.
I work for an ISP that offers VoIP services, however, we don't allow people to use software phones. Instead, the VoIP services we offer aren't much different from the traditional services. They still terminate into a piece of equipment at the customer site that is owned by us and the equipment converts the calls to SIP. Of course, we only cater to businesses, but we offer both voice and data to our customers at a reasonable rate.
The reason that we do not offer VoIP services to the customer's desk is we do not control their network. We have no way of ensuring proper QoS is in place or that their network is of sufficient quality for voice. I believe this to be the primary failure of companies like Vonage. They're out there putting out services on sub-standard lines and giving the entirety of VoIP a bad name with their lax reliability and quality.
We save our VoIP customers quite a bit of money, but we manage to do it without skimping on our quality. Maybe if Vonage could match the traditional telco, things would be different. Just as a point of reference, we also are a telco and offer "normal" lines, too. Our VoIP products have the same or better reliability than our "normal" voice products, and E911 isn't an issue.
Gentoo, for one, takes hardware donations. The donated hardware could become any number of things, from a new bittorrent server, to a developer's workstation. Another thing we offer is online developer machines, which gives remote access to the machines for developers in need. I am sure that Gentoo is not the only project out there with a similar way of handling donations. I know that FreeBSD has their own donations page. Pretty much any community-based project will gladly take your donation and put it to good use. In fact, it might be easier to find a project you would like to donate it to, rather than an individual. The project would probably do a better job of finding your machine a good home within its own structure than you probably would be able to without being intimately familiar with who does what and who needs what within the project.
Not a thing, man. Carpets are yummy to munch on.
I work for an ISP, so I'm betting that our mail needs are more intensive than the typical enterprise. We have over 20 servers just dedicated to running the virus and spam filtering. We are not a large ISP by any stretch, but I'm talking emails on the magnitude of millions of delivered emails per day. I'm not even going to guess on the number of spam/virus emails that get processed and filtered. The amount of resources saved by using a milter approach is significant. We originally were using Sendmail with a commerical milter for filtering. When we decided to not renew our license, we investigated other solutions, including qmail and postfix using various scanning methods. According to our findings, we would have had to have doubled our mail infrastructure to handle the extra load, plus delivery times suffered, as each time the message was moved from server to server, it was queued at the end of that server's mail queue.
There's nothing wrong with sendmail provided that you have a compitent administration team. Add the fact that Sendmail and BIND exploits have been becoming fewer and with greater interval between them, and you can see that Sendmail definitely is a viable solution for a mail system.
Your Fedora Core 4 has 0 clipboards. It's a subtlety, I know, but it is important for clarification.
Now, X has a clipboard.
So does Gnome.
I'm betting you're confusing these. In fact, it was Gnome (and KDE) that started the asinine idea that copying everything that Windows does is a good idea and decided to implement the "Windows" style clipboard, which is independent of the X one, using the standard Windows key combinations. Things like this tend to confuse users when they do not work exactly as they did in the original location. It is much easier to teach users that "You just select text to copy and use the middle button to paste" than it is to teach them that "Sometimes you use the mouse to select text to copy it, and middle mouse button to paste, but other times you have to right click and select copy, and right click and select paste, and even other times you have to use control-c to copy and control-v to paste after you've selected your text." What pisses me off is the programs that don't allow middle click to paste. Now this situation wouldn't be so bad if all three methods always worked in all of the gui applications, but this would mean it would need to be an X function. So instead of everybody writing their own clipboard scheme, it probably would have been better to have extended the default.
You also missed the entire set of people out there that use more traditional window managers, rather then the newer desktop environments. These people rely on the 20+ year old "Select to copy, middle click to paste" clipboard method, since there is no control-c, control-v version of the clipboard.
Install? You're kidding, right? You do realize that the people you're talking about don't understand that there even is anything other than Windows, and I'd be willing to bet that most of them don't even know what Windows is. Most computer users use what was installed on their computers when they bought it. At a company, installs are done by IT. How exactly does the ease of installation have anything to do with usage?
It doesn't.
Most major ISPs already provide support for Macs, and have for years. There are even many that are providing Linux support.
Ease of installation and connecting to the Internet really aren't as much of an issue as software availability. The simple fact that for most people, The Gimp is a "good enough" replacement for Photoshop doesn't matter when it isn't on the shelves of Best Buy. If they can't install and play Deer Hunter 4000 on their shiny new computer, it doesn't matter what OS it is running. To Joe Sizpack, his computer is either "broken" or "sucks", whether it runs Windows, Linux, MacOS, or any other OS is of no consequence.
As much as I prefer postfix to sendmail, nobody but sendmail has anything like a milter. They are simply invaluable in an enterprise environment. Forwarding emails between MTAs for processing is an order of magnitude more intensive on the servers in question.
I would say you would want to be well outside the radius of an explosion and falling debris...
Seriously, I would think Cocoa Beach would probably be a decent place to view the launch from, unless you were wanting to get even closer.
...a simple database with an in-house PHP web front-end. *grin*
We just use Nagios along with a temperature sensor and a custom-written Nagios plugin. It cost us about $200 in parts and about an hour's worth of labor to write the plugin.
Of course, there is always the esensor, which happens to go on sale tomorrow.