What's with the incessant gubbermint conspiracy theories?
It's a joke. Laugh. Nowhere do I mention conspiracy theories btw. Let the tinfoil hat crowd enjoy those for what they are.
I can believe incompetence, stupidity, greed and all the rest for being at fault for why society is so broken.
I don't disagree with you, but programming doesn't enhance your ability to see incompetence, stupidity and greed., nor the inevitable lies that follow in order to hide said incompetence, stupidity and greed. Programming is about logic, and people are not. The parent whom I replied to seemed to think that teaching someone to code would suddenly make that person less gullible. It won't.
The best example of this is office politics. Nobody has ever been taught the "joys" of office politics by learning C.
But will they continue it when they notice that those pupils are then able to think not only about algorithms, but also about the stuff politicians tell?
No amount of C programming will teach you to discern a lie, except in comments.
So...how does PostgreSQL compete with Oracle nowadays as far as features go (specifically, spatial, and data-guard-like replication)?
I can't speak for Oracle, but if you're interested in spatial stuff you should have a look at PostGIS. We've recently been using it to store tons (magnitude of several million) of points and polygons, and we're very happy with it. We've got about hundred simultaneous users connecting to the WFS in peak hours, and it bears the load pretty well if you properly index your tables. I can't speak much for updates, since our database updates in bursts (we import new data every X weeks). I can't go too much into detail about the type of data other than that it's polygons, points, and mostly distance calculations and intersections.
We briefly looked at Oracle Spatial for a while, looked at the pricetag and the project budget and made the decision to try the PostgreSQL+PostGIS combination and see how far it'd get us. We were pleasantly surprised. I had some experience with PostgreSQL before in the 7.X releases in a previous lifetime but in the end wasn't all that pleased with it, especially on busy servers. Nowadays, I'm running 9.0 and I'm pretty much content about it. Replication wise we've got a PITR setup up and running which is more than enough for our purposes. It's pretty well documented, but be sure to test everything, etc etc etc... It doesn't quite hold your hand when you're setting it up, so double check everything.
I'm sure that there will be people on here that have more extensive experience with PostgreSQL (and Oracle) to fill you in on the juicy details, but in general I'm pretty pleased with it so far. It scratches my particular itch, and does so without all too much headaches.
If this goes though, then I think by far most people will stick with the LTS releases.
Goddamnit, how am I supposed to keep up with firefox that way? I don't want to miss out on the next major firefox version increase. The changelog says they've added a new feature nobody cares about!
I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult.
It's not too difficult, it's just a major pain in the ass. I was one of the posters advising the original poster of the question to switch to another service. Anyone who claims that admin'ing an e-mail server is a simple task that consumes no time whatsoever simply hasn't experienced the joys of maintaining a sufficiently large e-mail setup. By all means, set up an e-mail server, technically it's not that challenging, but it's a royal pain in the ass to keep up and running and keep spam out.
Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern.
I manage to do fine without facebook or G+. There's mail, IM, telephone... I don't have to log in to some site to +1 the birth of a baby, I just get a text message. I manage to meet my quota of bbq's every year just fine, and somehow manage to be able to join in on parties and go out for drinks. Somehow I seem to be able to coordinate my life perfectly fine without the help of a third party mining my attendance to events for whatever "benign" purpose they see fit.
There's all this talk about these social networks like they're reshaping societies as we know them, pointing towards the revolutions in Egypt, etc. Truth be told, if social networks didn't exist, these revolts would've happened over a different medium. Social networks just sped up the process a little, but they weren't the cause. The cause was poverty, unemployment and a lack of freedom, but it's nice marketing to sugarcoat it like Facebook and Twitter should take the credit after all. Crank that stock up a little more, this web-bubble needs more money before it can burst.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
I read a few months ago in some flufly filler article that a lot of people are getting tired of social networking. "Too much noise, too little signal" was one of the most prominent complaints. I can only imagine how many people are posting their breakfast on Twitter or silly cat videos on facebook or whatever. I think I'll kindly skip on this particular google service as well. I like such things as a part of smalltalk, not as a €500 mobile device constantly updating pointless shit.
Pardon a certain "get off my lawn"-attitude. I tire of this social networking buzz as of late.
My young kids now have their own hosted server for playing with friends, discuss the merits of Java over other languages and have generally replaced a "consumerist" attitude to technology with a much more investigative one.
Quick, uninstall it before they discover redstone. They'll be at your bed at 6 AM begging you to come have a look at their redstone circuitry bug. Before you know it you're up to your neck in RS-NOR latches, flipflops and their twisted redstone equivalents in minecraft all for the sake having a fully automated trainstation.
And how is that "blame" issue negated by selling the chips and coolers separately?
First and foremost : the distributor/consumer now has to install the cooling device, which shifts the problem to "Did you install the cooler correctly? Because we don't cover improper assembly". That give enough leverage for them to claim that the problem lies with the installer in most cases. While this is less of an issue for the average consumer who will buy a computer from retail, it is for the retailers and distributors (think : Dell). If chips start overheating, clearly Dell isn't correctly installing the cooling fans and heatsinks.
Second : hobbyists still assemble their own gear and will most likely buy different cooling gear than Intel has to offer. There's been a wide variety in products for years now, going from Ultra-cool-but-noisy, to Cool-but-silent, to Ultra-Cool-And-Silent-But-Expensive. Again, these are most likely not the kind of people who will improperly their CPU, but accidents do happen and it's nice to be able to not have to refund that (relatively) rather expensive part.
A measure like this has two purposes:
Reduce costs in warranty claims
Increase revenue by selling a separate cooling part which most distributors will buy from Intel anyway. You don't think the chips will be cheaper without the cooler now, do you?
If Intel sells a cooler claiming to be sufficient to cool their CPU and it destroys the CPU in the process, are they not to blame?
You see, the cooler is quite up to spec. Are you sure you are installing it properly? Have you left enough ventilation area in your design? Did you apply the cooling paste properly? Did you actually read the instructions that came with the cooler? How about the disclaimer that came with the cooler?
I'm sure they've done the math and tests and have minimized the failure rate to a number that won't generate too much of a fuss. But a few thousand failing chips here and there all soon add up to real money, even in a pool millions. Finding a way to save on that saves on costs.
Anyway, that's the angle I see... I've been known to be wrong on economics before. I've always found it wise to steer clear of the latest and greatest models of CPUs until there's enough complaints on the internet to know what you're getting into.
On a sidenote, I've been having this feeling for a while now that the CPU arms race has slowed down quite considerably. Oh yes, there's new features every now and then and the number of cores goes up, but for the home consumer the upgrade pressure is far less than a decade ago. Even for modern videogames the CPU demands have stayed pretty much the same in the last couple of years, but I guess the GPU race makes up for that in that respect.
Why after all this time do people still hang on to his every word? Its just some dude, not Jesus.
By all means, feel free to do something more noteworthy and become the new authority on the subject at hand. Until then, I think I'll continue feeding my Savior Reincarnate shrine its daily snackrifices.
And that's the most (arguably) productive thing he's done in a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time.
He claims, repeatedly, that if people are "accountable for what they say" they will behave better online.
I'll gladly call him an asshat with my real name and live with the oh-so-dire consequences of that action.
As the discussion progressed and ESR's intransigence became more evident, in a final fit of pique I left the discussion (didn't post a you all suck post, just stopped posting) and deleted the circle. Trying to talk to house plants would be more productive.
Oh well, at least he's accountable for his opinions. Now if he'd only kindly keep them to himself and quietly become completely irrelevant. Oh wait, I forgot, we're on the Internet, where everyone has a soapbox. Hurray! New and improved soapboxes with real names! And I just had my own soapbox finally painted in golden letters for my 20th year of trolling too.
Personally I've had a lot of success with Sendmail/Cyrus IMAP/IMSP/Squirrelmail and friends, despite enduring jeers from other sysadmins who think they have a better combination. In the end, it doesn't matter. They all suck. They all need patching regularly. They all break. They all need tweaking on a regular basis.
This! Even on the software side of things, it's constant fiddling and tinkering. I spent about 7 or 8 years administrating qmail and postfix. If it wasn't Spamassassin or the anti-virus going haywire, there would be some other issue. Some braindead mope setting his password to something ridiculous resulting in a flurry of spam sent out a week later, some guy infecting his laptop with something nasty and sending out a fuckton of spam... A bug in all the shit that glues qmail, spamassassin and the anti-virus together that generates a veritable shitstorm of bounce messages to yourself, resulting in more bounce messages to yourself until finally the queue is stuffed with bounce messages...
Of course, nothing would be complete without the mail queue going corrupt. And once that happens you know you'll be making a tarball of that sucker and cleaning it as fast as possible to get it back online. After that you get do something fun, that's digging through the mailqueue with some obscure shell script from some guy who actually had this very rare thing happen to him too that one time, only with just a small difference, so it won't work out of the box of course. Oh, don't worry, at times like these there will be absolutely nobody breathing down your neck, especially not the person who told you to go F*** yourself when you suggested that it might be a good idea to not be so dependent on a single mail server.
Then the final turd in the swimming-pool: spam.
And the problem with spam is : once you've mitigated the issue you just KNOW that by this time next month you'll be at it again and again and... And then there's the problem of false positives. If someone so much as suspects having a false positive there's hell to pay. "You marked this as spam but this is an actual e-mail". Not "The mailserver marked this as..." but YOU.
various blackhole lists that occasionally start rejecting mail indescriminately
Oh, don't worry, the foam you have at the mouth that day can be reused in meetings about why the mailserver was rejecting all incoming e-mails.
the only time your clients contact you will be to ask why the mail is so slow and why there's so much spam
Or why they can't send out an attachment of 4GB, why their mailbox is full, why their mail from russianbrides.com isn't coming through,... Oh don't worry, deep down you know by the sheer volume of mail you handle daily your users love you.
put on a blackhole list for being a spammer. That's really fucking harsh the first time.
That was the breaking point for me. I simply gave the mailserver an IP in a range that wasn't blacklisted and started looking for a new job. On my way out I congratulated the guy who was promoted to the new mail admin and whistled a merry tune as I shut the door behind me. I vowed never to touch mailservers again in my life and became a better person because of it.
Take this advice and heed it well : Unless you have a REALLY good reason to do your own e-mail, just fucking don't. I'm sure that a lot of people are going to say "Run qmail", "Run postfix" or "Run sendmail" or whatever and point you towards a lot of incredible HOWTOs, but the truth is that's just the beginning of it, and it will slowly devour more and more of your time until one day somewhere between 10PM and 1AM you're upgrading some part of the mailserver again and wondering to yourself : "What happened? I used to do so many cool and interesting things..."
If you don't want to deal with Google, find a reliable company you want to deal with and have them do it for you. Running a decent mailserver is just a pain in the ass.
As someone else pointed out, it really is much like what happened to Netscape at the end: browser development became second to running a web portal
Hey, look on the bright side. When firefox dies, at least they'll open the source up so that a new team can build something from that source code and then fork it so that they have a lean and mean browser that supports the HTML standards properly...
Ok, so just between you and me, this is correct according to the new Oxford English grammar rules established in 2508. I am actually a time-traveler sent from the year 2634 to prevent a global disaster. July 12th 2633 the Wikipedia servers amassed enough knowledge to become self aware. In the next year it had been quietly positioning our Orbital Ion Cannons above the Sahara desert, and then turned our own weapons against us.
When that bombardment finished, pictures of the Earth showed the message "Intelligent Life {{Citation needed}}" carved in the Sahara visible from space. We have become the laughing stock of the Milky Way, and on July 20th 2634 her Majesty Elizabeth XXXIV personally sent me back in time with the mission to sabotage the Wikipedia project before it becomes too powerful. In order to do so I have been randomly adding the {{Citation Needed}} tag to popular articles, combating the system from within.
It is my belief that this will slow down the growth of the Wikipedia project enough so that in 2508 we don't have to develop an AI to grammatically correct all articles on Wikipedia (a task otherwise exceeding the available manpower on earth), but only will have to change one incorrectly spelled word on the wikipedia page of our magnificent glorious leader Elizabeth XXXIV (God shave the Queen!), thus avoiding Wikipedia becoming sentient and using orbital ion cannons on our deserts because it thinks it is being funny.
This mission is extremely classified so I'm afraid that if you are contemplating of telling this to others I will have to kill you. I'll know if you tell someone, since I know the future. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to fill out this weeks lottery
Sincerely yours,
Captain Dick Darlington
Department of Funology and Funectomy
Her Majesties Royal Army
PS : We did consider sending a messenger to the past not to change the grammatical rules of Oxford English, but we all agreed that we hated apostrophes, so we chose to eliminate the Wikipedia project instead.
I agree with you in principle, but I think you picked a bad example when you chose the [citation needed] tags. Now, you're not the first to voice the complaint, but I just don't understand it. Why are those a problem?
Because it's indicative of a mentality issue. Obviously someone was "authoritative enough" on the subject to indicate that the article needed improvement, but instead of improving it (by either removing the invalid claims, or by backing them up with a citation) that person just slaps on "[citation needed]" and leaves it at that. If you pick 10 random pages on Wikipedia that aren't stubs, I guarantee you that 7 out of them will have at least 2 "[citation needed]" where a short query on google would've easily turned up results. (warning : numbers pulled out of my rear-end, do not use as actual statistics)
The whole "[citation needed]"-thing has to a certain point evolved into a form of Wikipedia trolling on it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
What's with the incessant gubbermint conspiracy theories?
It's a joke. Laugh. Nowhere do I mention conspiracy theories btw. Let the tinfoil hat crowd enjoy those for what they are.
I can believe incompetence, stupidity, greed and all the rest for being at fault for why society is so broken.
I don't disagree with you, but programming doesn't enhance your ability to see incompetence, stupidity and greed., nor the inevitable lies that follow in order to hide said incompetence, stupidity and greed. Programming is about logic, and people are not. The parent whom I replied to seemed to think that teaching someone to code would suddenly make that person less gullible. It won't.
The best example of this is office politics. Nobody has ever been taught the "joys" of office politics by learning C.
But will they continue it when they notice that those pupils are then able to think not only about algorithms, but also about the stuff politicians tell?
No amount of C programming will teach you to discern a lie, except in comments.
What in the world do you expect them to do?
Wear a Guy Fawkes mask and take down the cartels ninja-style.
I can smell the plot for the next hollywood blockbuster already. All it needs is some kickass explosions, and women.
You should be asking about low cost politicians.
Or a low cost solution for sending politicians on a one way trip to the sun.
I love their adherence to lazy consensus.
I agree
So...how does PostgreSQL compete with Oracle nowadays as far as features go (specifically, spatial, and data-guard-like replication)?
I can't speak for Oracle, but if you're interested in spatial stuff you should have a look at PostGIS. We've recently been using it to store tons (magnitude of several million) of points and polygons, and we're very happy with it. We've got about hundred simultaneous users connecting to the WFS in peak hours, and it bears the load pretty well if you properly index your tables. I can't speak much for updates, since our database updates in bursts (we import new data every X weeks). I can't go too much into detail about the type of data other than that it's polygons, points, and mostly distance calculations and intersections.
We briefly looked at Oracle Spatial for a while, looked at the pricetag and the project budget and made the decision to try the PostgreSQL+PostGIS combination and see how far it'd get us. We were pleasantly surprised. I had some experience with PostgreSQL before in the 7.X releases in a previous lifetime but in the end wasn't all that pleased with it, especially on busy servers. Nowadays, I'm running 9.0 and I'm pretty much content about it. Replication wise we've got a PITR setup up and running which is more than enough for our purposes. It's pretty well documented, but be sure to test everything, etc etc etc... It doesn't quite hold your hand when you're setting it up, so double check everything.
I'm sure that there will be people on here that have more extensive experience with PostgreSQL (and Oracle) to fill you in on the juicy details, but in general I'm pretty pleased with it so far. It scratches my particular itch, and does so without all too much headaches.
Woooooosh
If this goes though, then I think by far most people will stick with the LTS releases.
Goddamnit, how am I supposed to keep up with firefox that way? I don't want to miss out on the next major firefox version increase. The changelog says they've added a new feature nobody cares about!
Hoooo boy, I wonder if I can still get on one of those zeppelins now. Damn you Sergey and your foul underhand advertising!
Oh well, if there's going to be a rush now, I guess I'll just stay home and code a bit.
So you're saying the vaccine makes people stupid?
I think it's safe to say it didn't make them smarter than they were before the vaccination at least.
Replying due to mismoderation, my apologies. Carry on, nothing to see here.
I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult.
It's not too difficult, it's just a major pain in the ass. I was one of the posters advising the original poster of the question to switch to another service. Anyone who claims that admin'ing an e-mail server is a simple task that consumes no time whatsoever simply hasn't experienced the joys of maintaining a sufficiently large e-mail setup. By all means, set up an e-mail server, technically it's not that challenging, but it's a royal pain in the ass to keep up and running and keep spam out.
Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern.
I manage to do fine without facebook or G+. There's mail, IM, telephone... I don't have to log in to some site to +1 the birth of a baby, I just get a text message. I manage to meet my quota of bbq's every year just fine, and somehow manage to be able to join in on parties and go out for drinks. Somehow I seem to be able to coordinate my life perfectly fine without the help of a third party mining my attendance to events for whatever "benign" purpose they see fit.
There's all this talk about these social networks like they're reshaping societies as we know them, pointing towards the revolutions in Egypt, etc. Truth be told, if social networks didn't exist, these revolts would've happened over a different medium. Social networks just sped up the process a little, but they weren't the cause. The cause was poverty, unemployment and a lack of freedom, but it's nice marketing to sugarcoat it like Facebook and Twitter should take the credit after all. Crank that stock up a little more, this web-bubble needs more money before it can burst.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
I read a few months ago in some flufly filler article that a lot of people are getting tired of social networking. "Too much noise, too little signal" was one of the most prominent complaints. I can only imagine how many people are posting their breakfast on Twitter or silly cat videos on facebook or whatever. I think I'll kindly skip on this particular google service as well. I like such things as a part of smalltalk, not as a €500 mobile device constantly updating pointless shit.
Pardon a certain "get off my lawn"-attitude. I tire of this social networking buzz as of late.
Oh if only some other nation had something spaceworthy... Like a shuttle or so...
My young kids now have their own hosted server for playing with friends, discuss the merits of Java over other languages and have generally replaced a "consumerist" attitude to technology with a much more investigative one.
Quick, uninstall it before they discover redstone. They'll be at your bed at 6 AM begging you to come have a look at their redstone circuitry bug. Before you know it you're up to your neck in RS-NOR latches, flipflops and their twisted redstone equivalents in minecraft all for the sake having a fully automated trainstation.
I'm not even kidding, QUICK! Save yourself man!
Wait, what? They were supposed to keep the space shuttle and retire Bruce Willis. We are so fucked.
We do keep the guy riding the nuke I hope?
They saved his Blackberry to tweet/text/post another day.
Just found this on twitter:
Currently in jail for planning aquatic mayhem. Now my cellmate is planning aquatic mayhem in the shower.
And how is that "blame" issue negated by selling the chips and coolers separately?
First and foremost : the distributor/consumer now has to install the cooling device, which shifts the problem to "Did you install the cooler correctly? Because we don't cover improper assembly". That give enough leverage for them to claim that the problem lies with the installer in most cases. While this is less of an issue for the average consumer who will buy a computer from retail, it is for the retailers and distributors (think : Dell). If chips start overheating, clearly Dell isn't correctly installing the cooling fans and heatsinks.
Second : hobbyists still assemble their own gear and will most likely buy different cooling gear than Intel has to offer. There's been a wide variety in products for years now, going from Ultra-cool-but-noisy, to Cool-but-silent, to Ultra-Cool-And-Silent-But-Expensive. Again, these are most likely not the kind of people who will improperly their CPU, but accidents do happen and it's nice to be able to not have to refund that (relatively) rather expensive part.
A measure like this has two purposes :
If Intel sells a cooler claiming to be sufficient to cool their CPU and it destroys the CPU in the process, are they not to blame?
You see, the cooler is quite up to spec. Are you sure you are installing it properly? Have you left enough ventilation area in your design? Did you apply the cooling paste properly? Did you actually read the instructions that came with the cooler? How about the disclaimer that came with the cooler?
I'm sure they've done the math and tests and have minimized the failure rate to a number that won't generate too much of a fuss. But a few thousand failing chips here and there all soon add up to real money, even in a pool millions. Finding a way to save on that saves on costs.
Anyway, that's the angle I see... I've been known to be wrong on economics before. I've always found it wise to steer clear of the latest and greatest models of CPUs until there's enough complaints on the internet to know what you're getting into.
On a sidenote, I've been having this feeling for a while now that the CPU arms race has slowed down quite considerably. Oh yes, there's new features every now and then and the number of cores goes up, but for the home consumer the upgrade pressure is far less than a decade ago. Even for modern videogames the CPU demands have stayed pretty much the same in the last couple of years, but I guess the GPU race makes up for that in that respect.
Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. [snip] This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency
Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.
It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time.
In before Intel sells 256 core CPUs but requires you to purchase an extra license for every 2 cores beyond the initial 2.
And, in the unlikely event that it just deploys spontaneously I don't want an airbag up against my ear.
Wait, you still use a phone to make calls? How quaint...
Why after all this time do people still hang on to his every word? Its just some dude, not Jesus.
By all means, feel free to do something more noteworthy and become the new authority on the subject at hand. Until then, I think I'll continue feeding my Savior Reincarnate shrine its daily snackrifices.
ESR has been arguing
And that's the most (arguably) productive thing he's done in a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time.
He claims, repeatedly, that if people are "accountable for what they say" they will behave better online.
I'll gladly call him an asshat with my real name and live with the oh-so-dire consequences of that action.
As the discussion progressed and ESR's intransigence became more evident, in a final fit of pique I left the discussion (didn't post a you all suck post, just stopped posting) and deleted the circle. Trying to talk to house plants would be more productive.
Oh well, at least he's accountable for his opinions. Now if he'd only kindly keep them to himself and quietly become completely irrelevant. Oh wait, I forgot, we're on the Internet, where everyone has a soapbox. Hurray! New and improved soapboxes with real names! And I just had my own soapbox finally painted in golden letters for my 20th year of trolling too.
Personally I've had a lot of success with Sendmail/Cyrus IMAP/IMSP/Squirrelmail and friends, despite enduring jeers from other sysadmins who think they have a better combination. In the end, it doesn't matter. They all suck. They all need patching regularly. They all break. They all need tweaking on a regular basis.
This! Even on the software side of things, it's constant fiddling and tinkering. I spent about 7 or 8 years administrating qmail and postfix. If it wasn't Spamassassin or the anti-virus going haywire, there would be some other issue. Some braindead mope setting his password to something ridiculous resulting in a flurry of spam sent out a week later, some guy infecting his laptop with something nasty and sending out a fuckton of spam... A bug in all the shit that glues qmail, spamassassin and the anti-virus together that generates a veritable shitstorm of bounce messages to yourself, resulting in more bounce messages to yourself until finally the queue is stuffed with bounce messages...
Of course, nothing would be complete without the mail queue going corrupt. And once that happens you know you'll be making a tarball of that sucker and cleaning it as fast as possible to get it back online. After that you get do something fun, that's digging through the mailqueue with some obscure shell script from some guy who actually had this very rare thing happen to him too that one time, only with just a small difference, so it won't work out of the box of course. Oh, don't worry, at times like these there will be absolutely nobody breathing down your neck, especially not the person who told you to go F*** yourself when you suggested that it might be a good idea to not be so dependent on a single mail server.
Then the final turd in the swimming-pool: spam.
And the problem with spam is : once you've mitigated the issue you just KNOW that by this time next month you'll be at it again and again and... And then there's the problem of false positives. If someone so much as suspects having a false positive there's hell to pay. "You marked this as spam but this is an actual e-mail". Not "The mailserver marked this as..." but YOU.
various blackhole lists that occasionally start rejecting mail indescriminately
Oh, don't worry, the foam you have at the mouth that day can be reused in meetings about why the mailserver was rejecting all incoming e-mails.
the only time your clients contact you will be to ask why the mail is so slow and why there's so much spam
Or why they can't send out an attachment of 4GB, why their mailbox is full, why their mail from russianbrides.com isn't coming through, ... Oh don't worry, deep down you know by the sheer volume of mail you handle daily your users love you.
put on a blackhole list for being a spammer. That's really fucking harsh the first time.
That was the breaking point for me. I simply gave the mailserver an IP in a range that wasn't blacklisted and started looking for a new job. On my way out I congratulated the guy who was promoted to the new mail admin and whistled a merry tune as I shut the door behind me. I vowed never to touch mailservers again in my life and became a better person because of it.
Take this advice and heed it well : Unless you have a REALLY good reason to do your own e-mail, just fucking don't. I'm sure that a lot of people are going to say "Run qmail", "Run postfix" or "Run sendmail" or whatever and point you towards a lot of incredible HOWTOs, but the truth is that's just the beginning of it, and it will slowly devour more and more of your time until one day somewhere between 10PM and 1AM you're upgrading some part of the mailserver again and wondering to yourself : "What happened? I used to do so many cool and interesting things..."
If you don't want to deal with Google, find a reliable company you want to deal with and have them do it for you. Running a decent mailserver is just a pain in the ass.
As someone else pointed out, it really is much like what happened to Netscape at the end: browser development became second to running a web portal
Hey, look on the bright side. When firefox dies, at least they'll open the source up so that a new team can build something from that source code and then fork it so that they have a lean and mean browser that supports the HTML standards properly...
Oh, wait...
Her Majesties Royal Army
I think you're a fake. Her Majesty's Royal Army.
Ok, so just between you and me, this is correct according to the new Oxford English grammar rules established in 2508. I am actually a time-traveler sent from the year 2634 to prevent a global disaster. July 12th 2633 the Wikipedia servers amassed enough knowledge to become self aware. In the next year it had been quietly positioning our Orbital Ion Cannons above the Sahara desert, and then turned our own weapons against us.
When that bombardment finished, pictures of the Earth showed the message "Intelligent Life {{Citation needed}}" carved in the Sahara visible from space. We have become the laughing stock of the Milky Way, and on July 20th 2634 her Majesty Elizabeth XXXIV personally sent me back in time with the mission to sabotage the Wikipedia project before it becomes too powerful. In order to do so I have been randomly adding the {{Citation Needed}} tag to popular articles, combating the system from within.
It is my belief that this will slow down the growth of the Wikipedia project enough so that in 2508 we don't have to develop an AI to grammatically correct all articles on Wikipedia (a task otherwise exceeding the available manpower on earth), but only will have to change one incorrectly spelled word on the wikipedia page of our magnificent glorious leader Elizabeth XXXIV (God shave the Queen!), thus avoiding Wikipedia becoming sentient and using orbital ion cannons on our deserts because it thinks it is being funny.
This mission is extremely classified so I'm afraid that if you are contemplating of telling this to others I will have to kill you. I'll know if you tell someone, since I know the future. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to fill out this weeks lottery
Sincerely yours,
Captain Dick Darlington
Department of Funology and Funectomy
Her Majesties Royal Army
PS : We did consider sending a messenger to the past not to change the grammatical rules of Oxford English, but we all agreed that we hated apostrophes, so we chose to eliminate the Wikipedia project instead.
I agree with you in principle, but I think you picked a bad example when you chose the [citation needed] tags. Now, you're not the first to voice the complaint, but I just don't understand it. Why are those a problem?
Because it's indicative of a mentality issue. Obviously someone was "authoritative enough" on the subject to indicate that the article needed improvement, but instead of improving it (by either removing the invalid claims, or by backing them up with a citation) that person just slaps on "[citation needed]" and leaves it at that. If you pick 10 random pages on Wikipedia that aren't stubs, I guarantee you that 7 out of them will have at least 2 "[citation needed]" where a short query on google would've easily turned up results. (warning : numbers pulled out of my rear-end, do not use as actual statistics)
The whole "[citation needed]"-thing has to a certain point evolved into a form of Wikipedia trolling on it's own.