crisco - Slashdot User

Submission + - Setting Up a Distributed Email Server

Submitted by on Friday December 29, 2006 @10:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: My boss has recently asked me to find out about creating a distributed email distribution system to distribute marketing materials globally. We intend to send about 300 million emails every day. Obviously, we're going to need a lot of bandwidth. But my worry is that our IP addresses are going to get black listed by SPAMHaus and the like very quickly.

The current proposal includes using a dozen servers powered by AMD processors, with one of them acting as an "email pool" from which the others request a new batch of addresses. They will all be running Debian GNU/Linux. The tricky part is the networking — ideally we'd want to use something like Tor. As it stands, the plan is to use multiple T3's, but again, we're worried about our static IPs getting black listed.

Have any of you set up a distributed email distribution system before? How much hardware did you throw at the problem? How did you circumvent blacklisting? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Submission + - NASA Needs Fake Moon Dust

Submitted by

crisco

on Friday December 29, 2006 @04:39AM

crisco writes: "NASA's renewed interest in lunar exploration and "in situ resource utilization," or ISRU, is driving the need for tons of carefully faked lunar dust and sand for testing purposes:

"We don't have enough real moondust to go around," says Larry Taylor, director of Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. To run all the tests, "we need to make a well-qualified lunar simulant." And not just a few bags will do. "We need tons of it, mainly for working on technologies for diggers and wheels and machinery on the surface," adds David S. McKay, chief scientist for astrobiology at the Johnson Space Center (JSC).

"

Journal Journal: Telcos, Customers, Voters: Taking sides on IPTV and FTTN. 1

Journal by Kadin2048 on Friday December 29, 2006 @02:25AM

ArsTechnica recently posted an interesting article discussing the experiences of several Chicago suburbs experiencing the first waves of telco-delivered next-gen broadband (FTTN) deployments.

Submission + - Lost Gmail emails and the Future of Web Apps

Submitted by

brajesh

on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:53AM

brajesh writes: "Recently some people lost all their Gmail emails and contacts. The problem seems to be contained and fixed, but this incident shows how far are we in terms of moving all communication online on services like Gmail for your domain(beta). Will it ever be possible to do away with desktop solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird?"

Submission + - iPod Generation Indifferent to Space Exploration

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:51AM

An anonymous reader writes: CNN tells us that today's young adults are no longer excited at the possibility of space exploration: "The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars." As a result, NASA's budget will include a greater amount of public relations spending. We'll have to wait for Netcraft to confirm that NASA is dying.

Submission + - Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Virtual Currency Market

Submitted by

miller60

on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:39AM

miller60 writes: "Telecommunications outages from Tuesday's earthquake in near Taiwan have disrupted the market for virtual currency from MMORPGs, with market leader IGE and other major online sellers reporting inventory and delivery problems. The market for the real money trading of game assets is highly dependent upon suppliers operating "gold farms" in China and other Asian countries. With Internet access from Asia limited, these suppliers are apparently having trouble logging into games to make deliveries of gold and accounts. Online markets for the sale of game assets have grown in recent years, despite heated debates about the practice among gamers."

Submission + - The NSFW HTML Attribute

Submitted by

phaln

on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:36AM

phaln writes: "Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded 'nofollow' attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel="nsfw")."

Submission + - Vaccine for flu to be tested on humans

Submitted by Adam9 on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:08AM

Adam9 writes: British scientists are on the verge of producing a revolutionary flu vaccine that works against all major types of the disease. Described as the 'holy grail' of flu vaccines, it would protect against all strains of influenza A — the virus behind both bird flu and the nastiest outbreaks of winter flu. Just a couple of injections could give long-lasting immunity — unlike the current vaccine which has to be given every year.

Journal Journal: [programming] Is Hibernate Worth It? 7

Journal by dthable on Friday December 29, 2006 @12:07AM

I've got into a little debate/argument with a former boss over how to code up a new Java web application. I suggested looking into Hibernate (which I know very little about) to ease up on the developers. He thought we should take control of writing the SQL because there might be too much overhead. Does Hibernate, or any relational mapping library, cause enough slow downs to resort to writing SQL? Is Hibernate really going to make my database and application that much easier to maintain?

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