Here's my scheme:
- USB 3.0 External drive, as big as I need to back up all my/data/ (not the OS) from all my systems. I usually buy the 'sweet spot' of most GB/$ even if it's more than I need right now. Powered off except when used.
- Once a week I rsync it all over with a single script. Use cwrsync for Windows.
- If it runs out of room, then it's time to buy a bigger one and swap out the smallest drive in one of the current systems with the old backup drive. I wipe the old small drive and put it in a pile, just in case, but they rarely get used ever again.
- A small amount of really critical stuff I save off-site (rsync again) nightly with an automated script.
I haven't lost any significant data in 20 years doing it like this (though it wasn't as convenient or fast 20 years ago), even though I have had systems crater - it's easy to restore from a drive.
Backup to optical is so annoying I end up not doing it, and tape is clumsy and expensive (and for me has a very poor record of actually being able to restore anything) but if it's just a matter of turning on the external drive and running a script I can do it religiously.
This is true - we know AT&T forwards all your packets to the NSA, pissing itself with its eagerness to do so, and the other ISPs probably do so as well.
In theory you should encrypt everything strongly. But in practice, people overwhelmingly just don't do that.
So this is the Australian government, who we know wants to inspect every single packet sent in Australia (since they've said so), deciding they want to limit it to companies under their thumb instead of under China's thumb.
Huawei is an arm of the Chinese government. Officially and in practice. There are members of the Chinese Communist Party permanently assigned to it who monitor correctness and suggest policy (under pain of death). They will spy and steal tech if the Party thinks it's useful. That's just how they roll.
The only real question is whether anyone gives a damn what's going over Australia's National Broadband Network. If not, then Huawei may be cheaper.
Denton's sites are a big collection of troll-baiting link farms which occasionally do have something cool, but are usually just short little pieces designed to get as many comments (good or bad) as possible. The writers explicitly get paid for that.
It took years for PS3 to get good games. It was 10x harder to work with than the X360 or Wii.
Uncharted 3 is a thing of beauty (for a console) and Naughty Dog is squeezing amazing performance out (for a console), but they're the best devs Sony has and it took 5 years. Was a new proprietary architecture that works unlike anything else on the market worth the billions of losses and the ramp-up time? No. Xbox 360 has power parity (better in some areas, worse in others, but you can do about the same games on both) even though it's 'just' a little 3 core PC in a box.
What saved them was the Blu-ray drive (and the death of HD-DVD) and that Sony has better dev teams than MS. One SCE Santa Monica Division is worth more than all the Cell processors put together.
I never explicitly called out time as one of the crucial engineering constraints - thank you for doing so.
It's too important to gloss over because as far as I'm concerned it's the #2 constraint after basic physics. With enough time my team could do (almost) anything, and in addition to market timing concerns, engineering time is almost directly equivalent to money.
And of course understanding humans is very useful in negotiating with your clients, internal and external.
You've got three broad brush categories, though of course people are often some of each.
- Programmers code stuff. Whatever you tell them to. Sometimes you can give them a problem and they come up with a solution, but it doesn't keep the entire ecosystem in mind. Often don't understand what they're really doing. Drives me batty when they're called Software Engineers. - Hackers solve problems using whatever means necessary, however ugly it is. - Engineers are solving problems keeping all the tradeoffs in mind and considering that this is a/product/, even if only an internal product.
Here's an example: This week a customer asked me for a feature in some PC software that generates files for processing by the embedded system. I know the entire ecosystem, not just the PC part of it, so I was able to tell them it was doable, but would have these negative effects - I can get you something working in the short term with these negative side effects, but we can get rid of them in the long run if we do this and that. They thought it was more important just to have the feature in the short term to show off in the short term and would ask me to make the other changes later if the tradeoffs got onerous. Maybe they'll never need it. This was a good deal for them in terms of what was delivered for what they're paying for my time.
You mention testing, but that's not really engineering per se, just one of the tools in the belt. A good programmer would (and should) be able to employ testing where necessary. In this case I did only cursory testing because they needed it/right now/ and the demo files I provided worked and were sufficient to show off the feature. And of course I told them this. Now that there's some breathing room I'll add better testing, and more if they decide to move forward on it.
It's all about knowing your/entire/ system enough that you can weigh the risks and requirements properly. Sometimes we blow a risk assessment or the requirement is wrong or something else goes wrong (customers are often very bad at providing real requirements or information) but at least you started from an educated guess.
You're a hacker, that's a good start since you're focused on solving the problem, and that's crucial - programmers are often (though certainly not all) bad at that. You are almost certainly more creative than some engineers. But now you need to consider that the requirements and the environment may substantially change how you choose to solve the problem. That thing you did may work, but is it maintainable and sustainable, and will it survive foreseeable new requirements?
Another example: there's a place in one of our codebases where sometimes you're looking for a string in an array in user time (someone typed something). We don't bother to sort that. Who cares? It's 'instantaneous' for the user either way. Why waste the time and code and complexity sorting it? There's another case where we're constantly looking things up, on the order of 5x a millisecond, so that one is sorted. But not cached since 5x/msec isn't/that/ much of a hit in context
I went a bit long, but I hope this makes sense. It's all mindset. Engineering is learning everything you can that even indirectly effects your system and solving problems based on ALL the tradeoffs. Realistically you can't know them all, but you can try. Iteration helps, as does time and budget.
Till they stop acting like Schmidt-heads. Really, this grudging half-assed crap is hardly better than the Real Name Policy, it just makes it easier policy-wise for them to make exceptions for celebrities.
Hirai was the cause of most of your PS3 problems between the horrible architectural design which crippled it for years for no gain, the crazy quotes (which I would admittedly miss) and - well, he probably wasn't to blame for the PSN debacle, unless he's the guy who decided to boot OtherOS.
I work for a company that hires out engineering services. People come to us and say 'we need a product, please design it for us' or 'we need a specific solution'. Business is way up and we're turning away work for lack of time. I don't think there's an engineer there under age 40, and they're up to at least 70. We don't hire junior engineers.
People come to us because our work and cost estimates are correct, we know what we're doing, and deliver results - that's all from experience. When you're going by the hour, having people willing to burn hours banging their head against the wrong wall is not a good thing. We work hard, but there's very little insane overtime except when the client or a supplier screws up. You can do that when the estimates are good.
It's not that we don't learn new things - you can't go obsolete. I learn new things all the time for new projects, which is part of the allure of the job, but the old lessons are generally applicable. C# was extremely easy to pick up, for instance, or Android programming.
I guess my takeaway from this is that if you want to stay in IT and not burn out, be a solutions person, not a specific technology person - I realize that's counter to the usual IT emphasis on becoming a niche expert. You can certainly make good money that way, but how long will you enjoy it before getting bored? The people here still really enjoy what we're doing. Making new products and solving hard problems is FUN, especially when someone else is paying you for it.
I'm not pretending I know everything (there's a heck of a lot I don't know), so I do expect someone whose career is IT, when mine isn't, to know more about it than I do or I just can't respect you. It's that easy.
Having someone who knows less about networking, Windows, Linux, you name it, standing in the way of you getting something done just because they prefer to stick with what little they know is just infuriating. Either help, tell me where I'm wrong, or get out of my way. 'That's just not what we always do' doesn't cut it. Since you don't produce anything, your job is to assist, not to c#$@block people who are actually making products.
One of our IT guys is very good at what he does, helpful, and can suggest why I might want to do something a different way or why they'd prefer I not do that (which is fine). Sometimes he'll give me the go-ahead even though it's not official company policy. He knows what he's doing and I respect him, and will defer to his judgement.
The S95 is fast, light, and cheap (especially since the S100 just came out) and takes very good pictures. It also gives you as much manual control as you want to start with - you can do aperture priority, shutter priority, adjust ISO, manual focus. And it will do RAW mode. Or you can start with just putting it on fully automatic and working on your framing and composition first (which you should do).
If you really get into it you can put a custom ROM on it which will give you even more control like manually specifying shutter speed and aperture at the same time (manual mode).
After spending some time with this then maybe you'll want a DSLR, but I wouldn't start with one.
AT&T figures it should bring the full weight of bribes and lobbying to bear on one agency at a time... so they're starting with the DoJ. After they knock that off, then they can concentrate on the FCC.
They're still in a bad position here that they didn't expect to be in, so I guess Verizon and Sprint had some pretty good counter-bribes under the table. The merger's in serious trouble at this point. To the bribe-mobile!
I'm not going to blame myself - it's not MY system, which works great; tape is the IT department's system. And that's the problem. The whole tape 'ecosystem' seems to be too fragile for most IT departments to handle. If you get great IT guys I'm sure they can run a fine tape backup system, but usually they know even less about computers than the other employees.
Mirror to disk is much harder to screw up (though certainly possible!) and easier to verify. Both places I've been that had disk backups had no problem with restores - though that could be a reversal of cause and effect.
To put it another way, I'm sure tape is a great sharp knife in the hands of a craftsman, but most of the people using it don't seem to have thumbs.
I think my record for getting things restored off tape is about 10%. It mostly seems to be a placebo.
'Do we have backups of FOO?' 'Oh sure, we backup everything nightly.' 'Thanks, could you get me... FOO/BAR?' 'Sure. Justasec.'
Two hours later I get the call. 'Uh, we're having some issues here, it'll be a bit longer...' Two hours after that 'How badly did you need FOO/BAR?'
Either the automatic backup system was failing early on in the backup and had been for months and nobody had noticed the error condition, or it was backing up but for some reason wouldn't restore or they were doing incremental backups but someone forgot to change tapes overnight or whatever the long, long litany of excuses has been.
Which is why I always spin my own nightly work backups of all my machines to a 1 TB USB drive with rsync. Nightly and weekly. 100% success so far.
"You might also notice that _actual baby crying_ isn't nowhere as repelling."
You think so? When a baby goes all out screaming I'll take the chalkboard.
But leaving that aside I'm talking about taking an evolved pathway (the 3KHz crying baby zone) and superstimulating it. Like cocaine to your mesolimbic reward pathway.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my scheme: /data/ (not the OS) from all my systems. I usually buy the 'sweet spot' of most GB/$ even if it's more than I need right now. Powered off except when used.
- USB 3.0 External drive, as big as I need to back up all my
- Once a week I rsync it all over with a single script. Use cwrsync for Windows.
- If it runs out of room, then it's time to buy a bigger one and swap out the smallest drive in one of the current systems with the old backup drive. I wipe the old small drive and put it in a pile, just in case, but they rarely get used ever again.
- A small amount of really critical stuff I save off-site (rsync again) nightly with an automated script.
I haven't lost any significant data in 20 years doing it like this (though it wasn't as convenient or fast 20 years ago), even though I have had systems crater - it's easy to restore from a drive.
Backup to optical is so annoying I end up not doing it, and tape is clumsy and expensive (and for me has a very poor record of actually being able to restore anything) but if it's just a matter of turning on the external drive and running a script I can do it religiously.
Oh please. This is /doctrine/. Every company in China which employs more than three party members has a party office on site ( https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/which-way-for-china-part-two/ ). They don't make a secret of this - it's out in the open because you are officially still a communist country and companies are just... convenient and highly profitable: http://www.economist.com/node/21543575
So don't give me any weasel shit on this, when even your own government still champions it internally.
This is true - we know AT&T forwards all your packets to the NSA, pissing itself with its eagerness to do so, and the other ISPs probably do so as well.
In theory you should encrypt everything strongly. But in practice, people overwhelmingly just don't do that.
So this is the Australian government, who we know wants to inspect every single packet sent in Australia (since they've said so), deciding they want to limit it to companies under their thumb instead of under China's thumb.
Huawei is an arm of the Chinese government. Officially and in practice. There are members of the Chinese Communist Party permanently assigned to it who monitor correctness and suggest policy (under pain of death). They will spy and steal tech if the Party thinks it's useful. That's just how they roll.
The only real question is whether anyone gives a damn what's going over Australia's National Broadband Network. If not, then Huawei may be cheaper.
Denton's sites are a big collection of troll-baiting link farms which occasionally do have something cool, but are usually just short little pieces designed to get as many comments (good or bad) as possible. The writers explicitly get paid for that.
So yeah, he gets bad commenters.
It took years for PS3 to get good games. It was 10x harder to work with than the X360 or Wii.
Uncharted 3 is a thing of beauty (for a console) and Naughty Dog is squeezing amazing performance out (for a console), but they're the best devs Sony has and it took 5 years. Was a new proprietary architecture that works unlike anything else on the market worth the billions of losses and the ramp-up time? No. Xbox 360 has power parity (better in some areas, worse in others, but you can do about the same games on both) even though it's 'just' a little 3 core PC in a box.
What saved them was the Blu-ray drive (and the death of HD-DVD) and that Sony has better dev teams than MS. One SCE Santa Monica Division is worth more than all the Cell processors put together.
I never explicitly called out time as one of the crucial engineering constraints - thank you for doing so.
It's too important to gloss over because as far as I'm concerned it's the #2 constraint after basic physics. With enough time my team could do (almost) anything, and in addition to market timing concerns, engineering time is almost directly equivalent to money.
And of course understanding humans is very useful in negotiating with your clients, internal and external.
You've got three broad brush categories, though of course people are often some of each.
- Programmers code stuff. Whatever you tell them to. Sometimes you can give them a problem and they come up with a solution, but it doesn't keep the entire ecosystem in mind. Often don't understand what they're really doing. Drives me batty when they're called Software Engineers. /product/, even if only an internal product.
- Hackers solve problems using whatever means necessary, however ugly it is.
- Engineers are solving problems keeping all the tradeoffs in mind and considering that this is a
Here's an example: This week a customer asked me for a feature in some PC software that generates files for processing by the embedded system. I know the entire ecosystem, not just the PC part of it, so I was able to tell them it was doable, but would have these negative effects - I can get you something working in the short term with these negative side effects, but we can get rid of them in the long run if we do this and that. They thought it was more important just to have the feature in the short term to show off in the short term and would ask me to make the other changes later if the tradeoffs got onerous. Maybe they'll never need it. This was a good deal for them in terms of what was delivered for what they're paying for my time.
You mention testing, but that's not really engineering per se, just one of the tools in the belt. A good programmer would (and should) be able to employ testing where necessary. In this case I did only cursory testing because they needed it /right now/ and the demo files I provided worked and were sufficient to show off the feature. And of course I told them this. Now that there's some breathing room I'll add better testing, and more if they decide to move forward on it.
It's all about knowing your /entire/ system enough that you can weigh the risks and requirements properly. Sometimes we blow a risk assessment or the requirement is wrong or something else goes wrong (customers are often very bad at providing real requirements or information) but at least you started from an educated guess.
You're a hacker, that's a good start since you're focused on solving the problem, and that's crucial - programmers are often (though certainly not all) bad at that. You are almost certainly more creative than some engineers. But now you need to consider that the requirements and the environment may substantially change how you choose to solve the problem. That thing you did may work, but is it maintainable and sustainable, and will it survive foreseeable new requirements?
Another example: there's a place in one of our codebases where sometimes you're looking for a string in an array in user time (someone typed something). We don't bother to sort that. Who cares? It's 'instantaneous' for the user either way. Why waste the time and code and complexity sorting it? There's another case where we're constantly looking things up, on the order of 5x a millisecond, so that one is sorted. But not cached since 5x/msec isn't /that/ much of a hit in context
I went a bit long, but I hope this makes sense. It's all mindset. Engineering is learning everything you can that even indirectly effects your system and solving problems based on ALL the tradeoffs. Realistically you can't know them all, but you can try. Iteration helps, as does time and budget.
Till they stop acting like Schmidt-heads. Really, this grudging half-assed crap is hardly better than the Real Name Policy, it just makes it easier policy-wise for them to make exceptions for celebrities.
This guy is totally right. And there's the Virgin Mary.
... so they certainly could not have tricked our drone into landing even though we give zero consideration to any security but physical.
Hirai was the cause of most of your PS3 problems between the horrible architectural design which crippled it for years for no gain, the crazy quotes (which I would admittedly miss) and - well, he probably wasn't to blame for the PSN debacle, unless he's the guy who decided to boot OtherOS.
Anything? That gets? the tone? Down into? The lower? Registers? is certainly? Better? Than women? Who talk? Like this?
Can we bring back Kathleen Turner voice?
... you can count on him destroying this too.
Around here if you ask about a Head First book (some of them aren't bad) everyone looks at you blankly. Ask for the Hot Teen book and it's "Oh!"
I guess that's successful branding... of a sort?
But they're embarrassing as hell to be caught with on your desk. "It's about programming! It's a technical book! I swear!"
I work for a company that hires out engineering services. People come to us and say 'we need a product, please design it for us' or 'we need a specific solution'. Business is way up and we're turning away work for lack of time. I don't think there's an engineer there under age 40, and they're up to at least 70. We don't hire junior engineers.
People come to us because our work and cost estimates are correct, we know what we're doing, and deliver results - that's all from experience. When you're going by the hour, having people willing to burn hours banging their head against the wrong wall is not a good thing. We work hard, but there's very little insane overtime except when the client or a supplier screws up. You can do that when the estimates are good.
It's not that we don't learn new things - you can't go obsolete. I learn new things all the time for new projects, which is part of the allure of the job, but the old lessons are generally applicable. C# was extremely easy to pick up, for instance, or Android programming.
I guess my takeaway from this is that if you want to stay in IT and not burn out, be a solutions person, not a specific technology person - I realize that's counter to the usual IT emphasis on becoming a niche expert. You can certainly make good money that way, but how long will you enjoy it before getting bored? The people here still really enjoy what we're doing. Making new products and solving hard problems is FUN, especially when someone else is paying you for it.
I'm not pretending I know everything (there's a heck of a lot I don't know), so I do expect someone whose career is IT, when mine isn't, to know more about it than I do or I just can't respect you. It's that easy.
Having someone who knows less about networking, Windows, Linux, you name it, standing in the way of you getting something done just because they prefer to stick with what little they know is just infuriating. Either help, tell me where I'm wrong, or get out of my way. 'That's just not what we always do' doesn't cut it. Since you don't produce anything, your job is to assist, not to c#$@block people who are actually making products.
One of our IT guys is very good at what he does, helpful, and can suggest why I might want to do something a different way or why they'd prefer I not do that (which is fine). Sometimes he'll give me the go-ahead even though it's not official company policy. He knows what he's doing and I respect him, and will defer to his judgement.
So it's 'easy' - earn it.
The S95 is fast, light, and cheap (especially since the S100 just came out) and takes very good pictures. It also gives you as much manual control as you want to start with - you can do aperture priority, shutter priority, adjust ISO, manual focus. And it will do RAW mode. Or you can start with just putting it on fully automatic and working on your framing and composition first (which you should do).
If you really get into it you can put a custom ROM on it which will give you even more control like manually specifying shutter speed and aperture at the same time (manual mode).
After spending some time with this then maybe you'll want a DSLR, but I wouldn't start with one.
AT&T figures it should bring the full weight of bribes and lobbying to bear on one agency at a time... so they're starting with the DoJ. After they knock that off, then they can concentrate on the FCC.
They're still in a bad position here that they didn't expect to be in, so I guess Verizon and Sprint had some pretty good counter-bribes under the table. The merger's in serious trouble at this point. To the bribe-mobile!
I'm not going to blame myself - it's not MY system, which works great; tape is the IT department's system. And that's the problem. The whole tape 'ecosystem' seems to be too fragile for most IT departments to handle. If you get great IT guys I'm sure they can run a fine tape backup system, but usually they know even less about computers than the other employees.
Mirror to disk is much harder to screw up (though certainly possible!) and easier to verify. Both places I've been that had disk backups had no problem with restores - though that could be a reversal of cause and effect.
To put it another way, I'm sure tape is a great sharp knife in the hands of a craftsman, but most of the people using it don't seem to have thumbs.
I think my record for getting things restored off tape is about 10%. It mostly seems to be a placebo.
'Do we have backups of FOO?' 'Oh sure, we backup everything nightly.' 'Thanks, could you get me... FOO/BAR?' 'Sure. Justasec.'
Two hours later I get the call. 'Uh, we're having some issues here, it'll be a bit longer...' Two hours after that 'How badly did you need FOO/BAR?'
Either the automatic backup system was failing early on in the backup and had been for months and nobody had noticed the error condition, or it was backing up but for some reason wouldn't restore or they were doing incremental backups but someone forgot to change tapes overnight or whatever the long, long litany of excuses has been.
Which is why I always spin my own nightly work backups of all my machines to a 1 TB USB drive with rsync. Nightly and weekly. 100% success so far.
All you had to do for this game is make LEGO Minecraft.
You could have been pooping in cat litter made of ground diamonds and wiping your filthy bum with Jacksons.
But no, you made a LEGO MMO where you can't build freely. ...
If you can't see how stupid that is, well, that's why your MMO is dead.
Dump Unity off the image. Everyone wins.
That's why you're also flooded with hormones (fathers too!)
"You might also notice that _actual baby crying_ isn't nowhere as repelling."
You think so? When a baby goes all out screaming I'll take the chalkboard.
But leaving that aside I'm talking about taking an evolved pathway (the 3KHz crying baby zone) and superstimulating it. Like cocaine to your mesolimbic reward pathway.