... 'Your IT Support'? I think you may have read the wrong post. I was referring to Microsoft's activation team - they forward you to technical support when the Office activation system breaks on a PC. This happens often as can be noted on Microsoft's official forums.

We've had plenty of issues with their Office 2013 activation system at our office and when you call in, "oh, I'm sorry, you need to talk to technical support because this is an issue with your PC" What?!?

These PC's are fine, I just bought this program, activate it!!! So they pass you to another department that has you on hold for a minimum of one hour (not an exaggeration) which also gives you the ability to leave a message if you get tired of waiting. If you leave a message, they'll call you back in a week (also not an exaggeration). When you finally speak to these people they admit they're busy because of issues with Microsoft's activation system (not a fabrication, during two calls this was admitted).

I look forward to my monthly Compute! Magazine as I often spend the weekend punching in the code for the latest games on my Atari 800 XL. Mind you, there's often a few weeks involving in tracking down all the errors in the code or optimizing the code, which tides me over until next months magazine.

... then we can fill our staff with intelligent employees from India!

Our company experienced what we believe was its first age-related failure in October of 2012, an office PC with an Intel SSD drive in the value oriented line of 2008 (which was still high at the time). Basically the drive behaved as a mechanical drive would behave with an occasional bad sector and we were able to successfully image the data to a new one. Out of 200 Intel drives, that's pretty good. (We did have one failure in 2010 but that was an outright dead drive and we were able to RMA it). Not sure if this contributes anything to the conversation but I figured I'd throw this out there.

The Intel X25's in my PC, from 2009, are still humming along nicely and my last benchmark produced the same results in 2012 as they did in 2010. But I've gone so far as to set environment variables for user temp files to a mechanical drive, internet temp files to a RAM drive and system temp files to a RAM drive, offsetting the wear leveling.

If I had the mod points, I would mod every one of your points up as there's posts in this thread that are technically inaccurate to the point of 'outright wrong' and your posts are sensibly accurate. One of the domains we manage receives thousands of emails per hour and millions of emails per day and we fully support SPF on both sides, enforcing SPF outgoing (-all) and fully supporting SPF incoming. Even a softfail on incoming will increase our server's consideration of your spammyness. Since implementing SPF globally, we haven't had any complaints on either the recipient or sender's side while we've reduced the amount of people that receive spam in the name of our domain and reduced the amount of spam that we receive.

I believe even gmail affects spam ratings by interpreting softfails.

I'm guessing that the lack of education and complexity of creating a proper SPF record is adversely affecting its adoption rate.

I'm fully in agreement and I'm questioning whether some of the commenters here suggesting to use scoring over blocking, for senders that have enabled SPF, are actively involved in the administration of high volume email servers. If a company has created an SPF record, clearly they want people to block email that is not originating from their servers. This does not result in 'false positives' as its an SPF record with the DNS server - the address doesn't change.

I don't believe I've ever heard of an SPF false positive failure but the sender would be notified with a bounce back, at which point the issue could be corrected, so I don't think false positives should be a concern.

For the past year, one of our business domains has been a patsy for a continual bombardment of spam against the internet. Typically our catch-all account would receive at least 200 bounce back failures a day. Since then, we enabled SPF on our domain and it drastically increased the amount of bounce-backs considerably... which is good, as it means less people are seeing our domain in a malicious light as they're immediately denying the spam as it's caught by an SPF filter before it goes through other filters.

I encourage all mail server admins to enable SPF to hamper the ability of spammers to hit their targets.

Yea, I've heard the same from friends, that they can sleep after a cup of coffee and I found that bizarre. I suppose these differing experiences lends credence to the linked article. My experience with caffeine has remained the same for as long as I can remember, at least since my mid 20's. Too much coffee has a visible effect on me.

Since I've become an adult with habitual patterns, I've been able to tangibly gauge the effects of caffeine on my mind and I'm not entirely sure that young people, what with all the other natural chemicals raging through their body, are able to do the same.

I'm a person that's tangibly sensitive to the effects of caffeine. For me, a single morning cup of coffee can immediately waken me to the point where I'd be if I naturally allowed myself that one hour transition from waking to working. However, a second cup of coffee within a 5 hour period will cause my mind to race faster than I can effectively communicate and I have 'the jitters'. Also, a large cup of Starbucks will literally make it impossible for me to work as I can't focus on my screen or conversations. And if I have a coffee after 3:00 PM? I can forget about sleeping before 2:00 AM.

What works best for me, what allows me to reach an effective plateau, is one cup of coffee in the morning and a cup of green tea (or yerba) in the afternoon - I'm always sharp, on the ball and I'm less distracted by whatever causes ADHD.

Or Weyland Industries

"I've been a knitter for a long time (started on scarves back in the day) and enjoy pretty much any pattern..." etc., etc.

Hopefully I've conveyed my point.

If you're finding it difficult to find .conf files in /etc and properly constructing a sentence, then it's possible that Ubuntu Server is perfect for him or you. Especially you.

He may be referring to Apache HTTP Server 2.4.x, discussion concerning what he's referring to can be found on forums.freebsd.org - http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=34310

... of course, at the end of the day he can always compile from source or follow blog postings which provide a considerable amount of detail to complete this simple task. We've compiled from source many of our applications so we can customize the compiled experience to a finer degree. I may have made some ports contributions along the way as well.