I have been trying to spec out a new machine lately, which is remindingme all over again how I hate hardware. This time around, the target ofmy particular hate is AMD CPUs, especially the new AM2 ones, where theperformance picture has become so complicated that you need a largechart to understand it.

Choosing CPUs used to be simple: within a given CPU family, the onlything that changed performance was the clock speed, so you could justbuy the fastest CPU your budget and desires afforded

It's not uncommon to have people harsh on Python and similar languagesas being 'scripting languages', not suitable for serious jobs becausethey're not fast enough or they use too much memory, or the like. I haveto beg to differ, because I have a great counter-example.

We use a SMTP frontend daemon to check connections before we bother tostart a real SMTP conversation. This program does our greylisting, ourDNS blocklist checking, connection count limiting, and a number of otherchecks

Henry Spencer recently wrote some very useful words of advice on backupson a local sysadmin mailing list. They struck me as the sort of thingsthat are useful enough to share more widely, so with Henry's permissionI'm putting his message here. (I thought about running just part of hisemail, but the more I read it, the more I wanted people to see all ofit, so I'm just going to put up the whole thing.)

So, in Henry Spencer's

One of my small peculiarities is that I'm an old-fashioned CRT person.By now this is an unfortunate affliction since it's pretty clear thatLCDs are the future, whether or not I really like them. (If the pricesfor good CRTs haven't already bottomed out and started climbing due todecreased production, it probably won't be long.)

Part of the reason I haven't warmed to LCDs is that they have scary andvisible failure modes, like stuck pixels, that