Slashdot Mirror
The Institute for Backup Trauma
fief writes "John Cleese explains why tape based backup solutions will drive a manager insane in a viral marketing bit for Live Vault. (flash required) Produced by the Captains of Industry. Links provided via AdRants" Barely an ad, mostly just hilarious. Also contains Michael Dorn. Use as directed.
I saw this when it was mentioned on the LangaList a few weeks ago. Very funny, in my opinion, and it's good to see that this company doesn't take itself *too* seriously.
It's probably safe to say I'll remember them, so from a marketing point of view it would be a success.
If only they had hired Ron Jeremy
I mod this video -1 unfunny. Even though it is usually a pleasure to see Cleese, even he can't breath life into this clinker. The only positive thing I can say is that it had nice production values. I want my seven minutes back. That earlier story about electrically-assisted microbial fuel cells that can be used to produce hydrogen from organic material was a knee-slapper by comparison.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
If it's a credible institution, where's the machine that goes 'bing'?
Moderation +4
70% Funny
20% Overrated
10% Slashvertisment
I have an idea for his next sketch, and it involves a smoking server, that features a flash animation, and less than NASA-like bandwidth available to it...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It's gotta involve spam.... spam... spam, spam, spam
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I enjoyed the part where their backups failed because the guy who had them drove off of a cliff, we all know that is a problem with a tape backup.
Only in our American cars, which we know (from Hollywood) have a tendency to blow up without fail in a massive fireball as soon as they leave the road.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
But it'll never be as good as getting perpendicular
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
John Cleese explains why tape based backup solutions will drive a manager insane
In the next episode, he explains why Slashdotted marketing solutions will drive a network manager to suicide.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
I think the problem lays more with the server than with your connection. The speed at which you download is limited to the slowest component of the network; if the server has been /.ed, regardless of your connection speed, you will download slowly.
Mind you, you are probably right about the file being too big. If it weren't that big, the server might not have been overwhelmed.
No joke. His previous company was called Fred and Ted Entertainment, which made similar videos that can be found at http://www.fredandted.com
Their whole skit about "Ambulatory Mortosis" is one of their funniest.
http://www.fredandted.com/Mortosis/index.html
Congrats, Fred. You made Slashdot's front page. Now let's see if your servers can take the slashdotting...
Why's it streaming video *sigh*? I guess it's because of advertising and stuff but streaming video sucks! Can't stream properly when slashdottet, can't email to friends, can't save to harddisk. For all you (other) webmonkeys, here's a word of advice; make a non-streamable version so more people will enjoy this (perhaps) fine video.
Your sincerely
An unsatisfied 4 MB Internet user.
. . . is when I open a website in a new tab, and the site resizes my whole FireFox window.
All for a $@#% Flash site, too.
At least it doesn't use frames, I guess.
A direct link to the movie: http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/FLV/LVCleese_LG. flv
F0 07 C7 C8
What I like about this is its appeal to non-technical staff, especially clueless decisionmakers who feel secure in their data because someone sold them a backup system ("Don't worry, it's fully automatic!")
Yes, the video is an advertizement for a firm selling a product, but who else would be motivated to create something that is both educational and funny enough to let issues be discussed in a non-threatening way?
No-one, especially PHBs, wants to admit that all the money they spent on a backup system can easily be brought to naught, so you have to ease them into the concept. This might help.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
John Cleese to do this video? I know the answer, money, but this is definitley strange. When was the last time you saw a celebrity like this involved in promoting some obscure IT product?
Because I *am* the kind of person who annoys those around me by shouting out continuity errors in theaters, here's what was in the hidden frame of the Clockwork Orange-like training video:
Congratulations
You have found the hidden frame. If you have time to look for things
like this, you have way too much time on your hands. You are
probably the kind of person who watches movies just to look for
continuity issues, shouting out, "Hey, that guy in the background is
wearing a different pair of cufflinks than he did two seconds ago!"
- as if anyone else cares. You tend to dream up elaborate conspiracy
theories that involve movie stars, politicians, and the logos of certain
brands of cereal. You used to stuff grasshoppers into soda bottles
and bury them in the playground during recess just to see how long
they survived without oxygen. You should definitely seek professional
help of some kind even before you check in to the
Institute for Backup Trauma.
Brandishing Dangerous Logic
Although not commercial, here is what I do.
I live in Wisconsin and a friend of mine lives in Nevada. He has a broadband connection and so do I. My home server has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. His server also has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. I can use half the space for my data on both servers and he can use the other half. Every other day at 3am, my server rsyncs over ssh to his. The same occurs every other day when his rsyncs with my server.
We do a full tape backup every week on Saturday and incremental backups every day. I take the full backups to my safe deposit box at the bank.
I guess what I am saying is that if any of your friends or family have a broadband connection, ask if you can use it for backup. Offer them storage space for backup or money to house a Linux box you can use as offsite backup.
If your data is extremely important, make sure you encrypt it. One time my friend thought he dropped a tape in a parking lot. I was conserned for weeks until he found the tape under the seat of his car. I learned my lesson and now encrypt everything that is important to me.
Dear PowerMacG4:
I found the informational video on ambulatory mortosis to be quite traumatic as I realized the dramatized symptoms correspond to the symtpoms my wife has been having for last five years.
Of course, I am also relieved as this explains why it has been so difficult to bring her to orgasm. For a while, I was starting to question my manliness. I suppose once Prudential pays my life insurance claim, I'll go to Vegas with my new girlfriend to forget those 5 lost years.
Thanks, PowerMacG4. I owe you.
blog
Combining Kev Vance's comment about a direct link to the movie and nstrom's comment about using the Nyud.net mirror, I give you a high-bandwidth direct link:
L V/LVCleese_LG.flv
http://www.backuptrauma.com.nyud.net:8090/video/F
coding is life
I remember in the late 70's in England my Father coming back from some training course or other raving about the films they had been shown starring John Cleese, and he was always hyped on the fact that Cleese actually made people learn through laughter. I can't remember specifics but Dad worked for Thorne EMI who were in the Security business.
Thanks for the direct link, Kev. Their server seems to be extremely slow right now, so I'd suggest using the Coral Mirror of the file.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
I watched the video and even signed up for the FREE poster they offered, which they NEVER sent me!!!! I wonder if my working for a competitor had something to do with that?
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
I just realized that as I'm reading this thread, I'm sitting on two days worth of backup tapes.
No, sir, that was a series of clips from a much more famous movie. It's mostly famous within film geek circles, though, so I took it as something of an in-joke. You see the famous baby-carriage-falling-down-steps scene spoofed all over, like in The Untouchables and Brazil (directed by fellow Pythoner Terry Gilliam). And there's this one close-up of maggot-infested meat that reminds me of the high-resolution gross-out insets in old Ren & Stimpy cartoons. (There goes the rest of my hyphen allowance.)
BTW, the original was silent, and I don't think Beethoven's 9th was what Eisenstein had in mind!
Me. I am the competitor. lol. $ grep /backup /etc/fstab /dev/hdb1 /backup ext3 noatime 0 0 /dev/hdb2 /backup/archive ext3 noatime 0 0
$ grep /backup /etc/fstab /dev/hdb1 /backup ext3 noatime 0 0 /dev/hdb2 /backup/archive ext3 noatime 0 0
$ grep fri /etc/crontab
1 23 * * mon,tue,wed,thr,fri root /usr/sbin/backup_home
50 23 * * mon,tue,web,thr,fri root /usr/sbin/scrub_backups
30 23 * * fri root cp /backup/`date -I`.tar.bz /backup/archive
$ cat /usr/sbin/backup_home
#/bin/sh
DATE=`date -I`
BACKUP_DIR=/backup/ /bin/tar cvf $BACKUP_DIR$DATE.tar /home /bin/bzip2 $BACKUP_DIR$DATE.tar
exit 0
ewtrowbr@adfleet-svr Avails Reports $ cat /usr/sbin/scrub_backups
#!/bin/bash
REMFILE=`ls -t1 /backup/*.bz2 | sed -e '1,5d'`
for FILE in $REMFILE ;
do
rm -f /backup/$FILE;
done;
exit 0
I think he has a nice little side business doing this. Our president was a Brit and the company had british roots so it seemed to make sense to hire him when we went through a name change. The way its told is they cooked up the rough script and then had him come up from LA in the afternoon. He rolled in, meet everyone, and then sat down, looked at the script and told them its was (insert fav brit slang here). He asked if he could take it back to the hotel to work on it a bit. He then came back the next day with the new script and they shot it in an afternoon. Word has it he got 50 grand for that. Nice bit of change for the work if you can get it.
On the other hand, tape has NONE of these flaws. Even if your tape drive explodes in a fireball from a lightning strike, the tapes will be fine, and can be read in another drive.
And yet here's a company trying to encourage people to migrate away from tape backups? Yes, they have a good offering -- remote backups. But that can (and should) be done with tape (possibly to disk first, but with a second copy on tape or other offline media).
Sorry to make the only on-topic post in the entire story, but I just couldn't handle the FUD.
One of the scariest moments of my life was formatting my company's 150GB Netware server. It died early one Monday morning: power supply and two disks in the RAID just vaporized. The UPS, mysteriously, was fine. This was a 60-person architecture office; architecture's nearly all electronic these days, so that server *was* the company.
I put in new drives and restored from the previous Friday's tape. One guy had done some work on Saturday, which he lost, but everything else was perfect. Numerous times I've gone back to a tape from months previously (grandfather-father-son scheme) to get one or two files, and I've never had one failure. So personally, I'm a big believer in tapes.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
According to LiveVault's website and some Google research, LiveVault is in no way owned by CA (Computer Associates).
No offense, but where did you get that idea?
Here's a little tip I know.
:)
Now I'm on windows, but I use firefox so we should have a base to work with.
if you go to the address bar and type "about:cache" AFTER you've visted the site with the flash movie, it will show up in your cache index.
I've tried it, and not only did I find the SWF, but firefox also cached the link to the FLV file.
Typing in the FLV or trying to "save as" didn't work initially, so I created a simple html doc with 1 href to the link, and now I'm downloading the 26 meg FLV.
Ah look, it's done. Cheers
TIP: If you see "LVCleese_LG.flv" you're on the right track.