As at least one other person has suggested, do this in Javascript. Processing power shouldn't be an issue - consider a "swarm" or "hive" screensaver running on a 386 with a tiny fraction of the power of a modern PC.
You have two separate areas to work on, three if you actually want it to look good (graphic design is its own thing): the physics/calculations, the animation, and making the animation not look like crap. For the animation/graphics, HTML5's Canvas may be your friend but I don't have the experience with it to say for sure.
For the physics side, you can either dig into some matrix algebra as someone mentioned (my time doing that is 20+ years old, can't help you much) or just code a routine to calculate the effect of a force (gravity of one of your objects) at a given point in space. Something like GetVectorInfluence(ObstacleMass, ObstaclePosition, PelletPosition) returning (acceleration, angle). At each stepping point you'll call that routine once for each obstacle, then sum the resulting vectors to determine where the point is going. You can start with one and shift to the other later if it turns out to be more efficient. Start out by doing that, working with an arbitrary space and recording the position of the moving item at each tick. Then graph out your results and see if you get the kind of lines you expect. I don't know if there's any reason to bother with excluding distant points from your calculations unless your total number of objects is huge - you may find that the math to include/exclude is more processor intensive than just doing the calculation and getting a near-zero result for distant objects.
I can't help much with the graphics, but it's basically doing a real-time chart instead of logging positions and rendering it later.
The graphic design may be as much headache as everything else, but as I tell people "As a graphic designer, I'm a great programmer." There is frequently little overlap in these skillsets.
In my case I gave PayPal ("these idiots") access to a secondary checking account set up specifically for that purpose, with no overdraft protection and no ability to draw funds from my other account(s). My credit union was perfectly happy to set that up.
I worry less about PayPal screwing me over than I do about someone hijacking my credentials somewhere even though I'm pretty cautious about them.
In my case, if my account is hacked (or PayPal decides to freeze it, etc.) then I'm without access to the US$4-5 that I leave in that secondary account. Since my CU has online banking and processes transfers immediately, if I'm going to be purchasing something I sign onto their site, move money, then go to PayPal. Conversely, on the rare occasions when I'm paid via PayPal rather than by check, I transfer the money down, then sign into the CU site and transfer it out of that "exposed" account.
Well, that's why it's worth making sure you're picking vendors with a visible, viable business model. It's much like the recent adage that "If you're not paying, you're not the customer - you're the product."
If a company is making assurances that it's cash-flow positive and sustainable and that investments would be for growth rather than funding operations, that's significant. It doesn't guarantee that the company will stay around, but it at least means there's a smaller chance that it's going to end up in a dead pool.
That's actually another thing to like about Dropbox (though I'm not sure how it would behave with a 1TB team account) - if Dropbox's servers were suddenly unavailable tomorrow, you'd still have all of your no-longer-syncing content on your systems in your Dropbox folders. There's no losing things because the only copy was "in the cloud" because if you nuke it from your drive that deletion syncs up to "the cloud."
I believe Stern Pinball is the only remaining one; they come out with a couple of different games each year. A couple of friends of mine have companies that sell and service machines (Chicagoland and California); I'm not sure how much is new ones vs. old but I've played a fair number of the newer machines and they're pretty nice (better in my opinion than the Pinball 2000 stuff that Williams was trying). The Simpsons Pinball Party and The Lord Of The Rings ones (both Stern) are pretty impressive still.
Dropbox has good clients for multiple systems, is simple to set up and use, requires basically no administration. It wins out over some of its competitors (SugarSync, I'm talking about you) because it actually has a solid Linux client along with the Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad and Blackberry (and browser-based access). I think their pricing for the individual accounts is high (or at least I think they'd do well with a $5/20GB plan rather than the current low-end of $10/50), but I can understand their current setting. The Dropbox for Teams page you link to has a 1TB 5-user account for $800/year ($160/user or under $15/user/month for 200GB per user), with all the tools available for a regular Dropbox account. That's not bad at all.
Sure, *I* and likely most readers here could set up remote access to storage if we wanted to, but is it worth it? I have a buddy who seems to have an allergy to paying for things when he can do them cheaper, but I feel that "you can do it yourself free!" falls apart because A) "free" is only free if my time has no value, in which case there are probably other things I'd rather be doing with my "free" time and/or B) I'm going to enjoy going through the setup and inevitable tweaking over time. I'm not rolling in dough, but I'm willing to pay people to do things that I could choose to do myself just as my customers are willing to pay me to do things that they could learn to do themselves (or hire an in-house IT person for).
I've built software in the past that had a price tag over $50k when installed and configured by field people, and I questioned it at first because I looked at what our software did and thought "our customers have IT departments and could build this for less than we're charging." That may be true, but they *weren't* doing it, and what we were doing had an ROI that generally was in single-digit MONTHS even with our price point. Paying for services is a lot like that - what do you need to invest to do it yourself, how much will it cost to buy it, what's the ROI, is it worth it.
The argument for using RAID6 (2 parity drives instead of 1) is that with the larger drives (1TB and up) if you have a hardware failure in one of your large drives (probably all from the same lot, possibly with sequential serial numbers and all with an effectively identical environmental history), your odds of having a second failure during a very long rebuild are not negligible. Your example of effectively 1% per hour on the rebuild should scare the crap out of many people - particularly if they've also been sloppy about backing up that 12+TB of data which is pretty likely.
Basically, if you have a pretty full RAID5, replace it with a RAID6 of significantly larger drives - get the extra redundancy, get some growth space, and take that RAID5 somewhere else - preferably preserved as a snapshot or used as a seed for offsite backup if you don't already have a good backup routine.
The Guardian article being referenced is probably Dan Gillmor's The great ebook price swindle. You can find a lot more about this by paying attention to the online writings of various authors, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch who write about the business of writing as well as being a (widely) published author.
Is it just me or has Vanity Fair been coming out pretty consistently with worthwhile stuff for the past few months or more? I'm starting to feel like I should be subscribing to support them.
Given what's being listed elsewhere on the front page regarding advertising based on your purchasing history I'd like to know who's going to be monitoring the privacy practices of the credit card companies.
What frosts me is that every flippin' clock radio out there that has external input ("Aux") for connecting an MP3 player or phone also has a nice big iPod dock either on the front or on the top. I don't want a useless-to-me chunk of exposed connectors on the most obvious part of my equipment, particularly when it means that they've made the display smaller and less visible so it's not blocked by the piece of Apple equipment that I would never purchase. I want a radio with decent speakers, a display that I can see from the shower on the other side of the room and either Aux input, Bluetooth or both so I can link my phone to it for music, podcasts, etc. and I'd rather not have to buy a Chumby to get it.
Learn something new every day - I was going to suggest "sudo bash", others have suggested "sudo -i" and "sudo su" which should also work. All will give you a root shell.
Seriously, you should be able to learn to handle the difference between small push buttons on a phone (at an angle that PC keyboards don't use) and keypad buttons on a keyboard. Also, why would you need to be doing enough on a phone keypad to make that an issue? If you're doing telemarketing calls or the like you shouldn't be using a plain phone, use software.
In general, this goes beyond a waste of time into the level of trolling.
While hearing aids (and many other medical items and drugs) are ludicrously overpriced, the article is too shallow to merit the front page of/. - it's around what I'd expect of a USA Today slow news day item if only they didn't have ads from hearing aid manufacturers.
As Limor at Lady Ada determined with the MintyBoost, the Apple devices do some funky things depending on the level of voltage on the data lines. Details at http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html with links to additional resources as well.
It may be an approved screenshot, but Samsung should be making the point that it *isn't* a screenshot of what most people see and use on their phone, where the iPhone picture is. That's a picture of the application listing rather than the home screen.
Maybe AT&T decided that they needed to get more people to buy Blackberries for Blackberry Messenger.
I can't help but feel that moves like this will accelerate the adoption of other messaging systems. AT&T may see a miniscule bottom-line improvement, but they don't even have the iPhone exclusivity to draw in the hipster crowd - now if you "need" an iPhone and use perhaps a few hundred messages a month you'll go to Verizon, and some people will just decide that the iPhone isn't worth the extra hundred dollars (or more) a year.
GroupMe, Beluga/Facebook, improved Twitter clients with DM, IM clients, Google Voice (if they ever come out with an API for SMS, though they lack MMS & some short-code ability), even a rumored porting of BBM to Android/iOS. Over time Android with C2DM should reduce the battery cost of non-SMS messaging clients, and you're left with only "feature-phone" users needing SMS because they don't have data plans. That's a losing bet for AT&T, because the feature-phone users are the ones most likely to be using prepaid phones instead of contracts.
I tried several readers that I had free access to (Adobe, ThinkFree Office included on the phone, Aldiko) and was not pleased with any of them. Little things like not recognizing that a table of contents actually had links to specific locations were deal-breakers.
I picked up ezPDF Reader from Amazon's AppStore as a free app (normally $2 in Market), but it pretty much just kicks ass. It recognizes links, allows you to display in either text-only or full page rendering, navigates well, and just generally wins. I've been using it with Digging Into WordPress which has quite a bit of very funky layout, and it's been working well. Highly recommended.
I think that if there's any likelihood of Bitcoin becoming significant, there's also going to be an increasing likelihood of someone dividing the problem space in such a way that it's addressable with appropriately-designed FPGAs and thereby killing that likelihood of significance. Right now it's unlikely to be worth anyone's time & money (unless it's being examined in classes), but if there are significant $ there someone's going to be pursuing them.
I've bought a couple of things through the Amazon Appstore, but most of what I've gotten as "Free Apps" are items that I would never have purchased otherwise, mostly games.
Of the other apps I've gotten (or considered), * I'm likely to purchase one (Pocket Casts) on the Android Market instead of keeping the Amazon version I have if an update due Thursday addresses the issues I've seen (it's not expensive), * I'm likely to purchase another (Enhanced Email) on the Android market for full price instead of 50% off because having prompt updates is important to me (plus I've had several times when I had to re-install apps from Amazon, not good for email/contact sync apps) * I probably won't purchase Flex T9 on the Market - I use it sometimes, and think it has great potential, but it also has some warts that annoy me related to numbers and special characters. * Plants vs Zombies I'm reasonably happy with aside from the fact that my Vibrant is apparently at the low end for its hardware needs. * ezPDF Reader pretty much rocks and if I didn't have it via Amazon I would absolutely be buying it through the Market (after using it, ThinkFree Office and another PDF reader) - I hadn't thought about it before, but I should probably get it through the Market anyway. * PicSay Pro is pretty sweet, and I may pick it up in the regular Market, but I don't actually end up using it much (perhaps 5-6 times total so far) even though it has some nice photo editing options,
Everything else I've gotten through Amazon I could either get as a free ad-supported version elsewhere, get on the Market for a few bucks, or would absolutely not miss, including games I picked up to try, then haven't bothered playing since.
I can't think of any other shock pics offhand, and I'm certainly not going to go looking for them just to try and come up with (more) disgusting or not-so-clever names.
Android is singled out over Apple devices because there's a workaround on iOS but not on Android. The workaround involves disabling a variety of things that many iPhone & iPad users may not want disabled, but it is available.
And I don't consider a single mention of an "Allshare workaround" that involves waiting for a particular app to connect, then crash to be a workaround.
I like that the PDF is laid out in such a way that it's still readable in full page view on my phone - that right there makes it much more likely that I'll use and refer to it.
Seriously, get CrashPlan, get additional internal or external drives for a couple of friends' or family members' (desktop) PCs and set everyone up with either CrashPlan (free, only every 24 hours) or CrashPlan+ ($2.50 monthly per PC with 10GB online storage, down to $1.50/month for 4 years or $5 monthly for unlimited online storage (down to $3/month for 4 years)). CrashPlan+ adds some nice features (better encryption, backup sets (e.g. mail, financial, docs go to many spots & online, photos go to fewer places), changes backed up every 15 minutes) but is by no means required.
Like any real backup solution you'll get to keep multiple versions if you make changes to files. You can also "seed" backups by creating them while you're at the friend's house because really, even over a local connection 200GB is going to take quite a while for the initial backup. CrashPlan has a lot of documentation of scenarios, there's a good chance one will match your situation and will cover issues you didn't even think of.
If you provide the drives and the setup, your friends will probably be just fine with doing this, particularly when you point out that they can back up to each others' PCs as well - everybody wins. Since you're providing everything, they should even be fine with you not making yourself available as a destination.
This addresses more of the possible things that cause you to lose data: * OS or program goes insane, stomps everything (also includes accidental deletions or malware such as the occasional encryptor offering to sell keys back to you) * Catastrophic hardware failure * Catastrophic hardware disappearance and frequently missed * Catastrophic home disappearance (fire, flood, tornado, etc.)
The biggest drawbacks that I know of are increased network traffic (upload for you, upload and download for your friends) and the need to leave your laptop on at least occasionally so it can actually run the backup. Either or both of these may be non-issues or deal-killers depending on your personal situation.
Slashdot Mirror
But I've used Google Latitude's history to look back when I did a bad job of tracking which clients I was at and for exactly how long.
As at least one other person has suggested, do this in Javascript. Processing power shouldn't be an issue - consider a "swarm" or "hive" screensaver running on a 386 with a tiny fraction of the power of a modern PC.
You have two separate areas to work on, three if you actually want it to look good (graphic design is its own thing): the physics/calculations, the animation, and making the animation not look like crap. For the animation/graphics, HTML5's Canvas may be your friend but I don't have the experience with it to say for sure.
For the physics side, you can either dig into some matrix algebra as someone mentioned (my time doing that is 20+ years old, can't help you much) or just code a routine to calculate the effect of a force (gravity of one of your objects) at a given point in space. Something like GetVectorInfluence(ObstacleMass, ObstaclePosition, PelletPosition) returning (acceleration, angle). At each stepping point you'll call that routine once for each obstacle, then sum the resulting vectors to determine where the point is going. You can start with one and shift to the other later if it turns out to be more efficient. Start out by doing that, working with an arbitrary space and recording the position of the moving item at each tick. Then graph out your results and see if you get the kind of lines you expect. I don't know if there's any reason to bother with excluding distant points from your calculations unless your total number of objects is huge - you may find that the math to include/exclude is more processor intensive than just doing the calculation and getting a near-zero result for distant objects.
I can't help much with the graphics, but it's basically doing a real-time chart instead of logging positions and rendering it later.
The graphic design may be as much headache as everything else, but as I tell people "As a graphic designer, I'm a great programmer." There is frequently little overlap in these skillsets.
In my case I gave PayPal ("these idiots") access to a secondary checking account set up specifically for that purpose, with no overdraft protection and no ability to draw funds from my other account(s). My credit union was perfectly happy to set that up.
I worry less about PayPal screwing me over than I do about someone hijacking my credentials somewhere even though I'm pretty cautious about them.
In my case, if my account is hacked (or PayPal decides to freeze it, etc.) then I'm without access to the US$4-5 that I leave in that secondary account. Since my CU has online banking and processes transfers immediately, if I'm going to be purchasing something I sign onto their site, move money, then go to PayPal. Conversely, on the rare occasions when I'm paid via PayPal rather than by check, I transfer the money down, then sign into the CU site and transfer it out of that "exposed" account.
Well, that's why it's worth making sure you're picking vendors with a visible, viable business model. It's much like the recent adage that "If you're not paying, you're not the customer - you're the product."
If a company is making assurances that it's cash-flow positive and sustainable and that investments would be for growth rather than funding operations, that's significant. It doesn't guarantee that the company will stay around, but it at least means there's a smaller chance that it's going to end up in a dead pool.
That's actually another thing to like about Dropbox (though I'm not sure how it would behave with a 1TB team account) - if Dropbox's servers were suddenly unavailable tomorrow, you'd still have all of your no-longer-syncing content on your systems in your Dropbox folders. There's no losing things because the only copy was "in the cloud" because if you nuke it from your drive that deletion syncs up to "the cloud."
I believe Stern Pinball is the only remaining one; they come out with a couple of different games each year. A couple of friends of mine have companies that sell and service machines (Chicagoland and California); I'm not sure how much is new ones vs. old but I've played a fair number of the newer machines and they're pretty nice (better in my opinion than the Pinball 2000 stuff that Williams was trying). The Simpsons Pinball Party and The Lord Of The Rings ones (both Stern) are pretty impressive still.
Dropbox has good clients for multiple systems, is simple to set up and use, requires basically no administration. It wins out over some of its competitors (SugarSync, I'm talking about you) because it actually has a solid Linux client along with the Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad and Blackberry (and browser-based access). I think their pricing for the individual accounts is high (or at least I think they'd do well with a $5/20GB plan rather than the current low-end of $10/50), but I can understand their current setting. The Dropbox for Teams page you link to has a 1TB 5-user account for $800/year ($160/user or under $15/user/month for 200GB per user), with all the tools available for a regular Dropbox account. That's not bad at all.
Sure, *I* and likely most readers here could set up remote access to storage if we wanted to, but is it worth it? I have a buddy who seems to have an allergy to paying for things when he can do them cheaper, but I feel that "you can do it yourself free!" falls apart because A) "free" is only free if my time has no value, in which case there are probably other things I'd rather be doing with my "free" time and/or B) I'm going to enjoy going through the setup and inevitable tweaking over time. I'm not rolling in dough, but I'm willing to pay people to do things that I could choose to do myself just as my customers are willing to pay me to do things that they could learn to do themselves (or hire an in-house IT person for).
I've built software in the past that had a price tag over $50k when installed and configured by field people, and I questioned it at first because I looked at what our software did and thought "our customers have IT departments and could build this for less than we're charging." That may be true, but they *weren't* doing it, and what we were doing had an ROI that generally was in single-digit MONTHS even with our price point. Paying for services is a lot like that - what do you need to invest to do it yourself, how much will it cost to buy it, what's the ROI, is it worth it.
The argument for using RAID6 (2 parity drives instead of 1) is that with the larger drives (1TB and up) if you have a hardware failure in one of your large drives (probably all from the same lot, possibly with sequential serial numbers and all with an effectively identical environmental history), your odds of having a second failure during a very long rebuild are not negligible. Your example of effectively 1% per hour on the rebuild should scare the crap out of many people - particularly if they've also been sloppy about backing up that 12+TB of data which is pretty likely.
Basically, if you have a pretty full RAID5, replace it with a RAID6 of significantly larger drives - get the extra redundancy, get some growth space, and take that RAID5 somewhere else - preferably preserved as a snapshot or used as a seed for offsite backup if you don't already have a good backup routine.
The Guardian article being referenced is probably Dan Gillmor's The great ebook price swindle. You can find a lot more about this by paying attention to the online writings of various authors, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch who write about the business of writing as well as being a (widely) published author.
Is it just me or has Vanity Fair been coming out pretty consistently with worthwhile stuff for the past few months or more? I'm starting to feel like I should be subscribing to support them.
Given what's being listed elsewhere on the front page regarding advertising based on your purchasing history I'd like to know who's going to be monitoring the privacy practices of the credit card companies.
What frosts me is that every flippin' clock radio out there that has external input ("Aux") for connecting an MP3 player or phone also has a nice big iPod dock either on the front or on the top. I don't want a useless-to-me chunk of exposed connectors on the most obvious part of my equipment, particularly when it means that they've made the display smaller and less visible so it's not blocked by the piece of Apple equipment that I would never purchase. I want a radio with decent speakers, a display that I can see from the shower on the other side of the room and either Aux input, Bluetooth or both so I can link my phone to it for music, podcasts, etc. and I'd rather not have to buy a Chumby to get it.
Learn something new every day - I was going to suggest "sudo bash", others have suggested "sudo -i" and "sudo su" which should also work. All will give you a root shell.
Seriously, you should be able to learn to handle the difference between small push buttons on a phone (at an angle that PC keyboards don't use) and keypad buttons on a keyboard. Also, why would you need to be doing enough on a phone keypad to make that an issue? If you're doing telemarketing calls or the like you shouldn't be using a plain phone, use software.
In general, this goes beyond a waste of time into the level of trolling.
While hearing aids (and many other medical items and drugs) are ludicrously overpriced, the article is too shallow to merit the front page of /. - it's around what I'd expect of a USA Today slow news day item if only they didn't have ads from hearing aid manufacturers.
As Limor at Lady Ada determined with the MintyBoost, the Apple devices do some funky things depending on the level of voltage on the data lines. Details at http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html with links to additional resources as well.
It may be an approved screenshot, but Samsung should be making the point that it *isn't* a screenshot of what most people see and use on their phone, where the iPhone picture is. That's a picture of the application listing rather than the home screen.
Maybe AT&T decided that they needed to get more people to buy Blackberries for Blackberry Messenger.
I can't help but feel that moves like this will accelerate the adoption of other messaging systems. AT&T may see a miniscule bottom-line improvement, but they don't even have the iPhone exclusivity to draw in the hipster crowd - now if you "need" an iPhone and use perhaps a few hundred messages a month you'll go to Verizon, and some people will just decide that the iPhone isn't worth the extra hundred dollars (or more) a year.
GroupMe, Beluga/Facebook, improved Twitter clients with DM, IM clients, Google Voice (if they ever come out with an API for SMS, though they lack MMS & some short-code ability), even a rumored porting of BBM to Android/iOS. Over time Android with C2DM should reduce the battery cost of non-SMS messaging clients, and you're left with only "feature-phone" users needing SMS because they don't have data plans. That's a losing bet for AT&T, because the feature-phone users are the ones most likely to be using prepaid phones instead of contracts.
I tried several readers that I had free access to (Adobe, ThinkFree Office included on the phone, Aldiko) and was not pleased with any of them. Little things like not recognizing that a table of contents actually had links to specific locations were deal-breakers.
I picked up ezPDF Reader from Amazon's AppStore as a free app (normally $2 in Market), but it pretty much just kicks ass. It recognizes links, allows you to display in either text-only or full page rendering, navigates well, and just generally wins. I've been using it with Digging Into WordPress which has quite a bit of very funky layout, and it's been working well. Highly recommended.
And it's currently slashdotted into oblivion because of the hordes of /. users who hate all of the current desktop options.
I think that if there's any likelihood of Bitcoin becoming significant, there's also going to be an increasing likelihood of someone dividing the problem space in such a way that it's addressable with appropriately-designed FPGAs and thereby killing that likelihood of significance. Right now it's unlikely to be worth anyone's time & money (unless it's being examined in classes), but if there are significant $ there someone's going to be pursuing them.
I've bought a couple of things through the Amazon Appstore, but most of what I've gotten as "Free Apps" are items that I would never have purchased otherwise, mostly games.
Of the other apps I've gotten (or considered),
* I'm likely to purchase one (Pocket Casts) on the Android Market instead of keeping the Amazon version I have if an update due Thursday addresses the issues I've seen (it's not expensive),
* I'm likely to purchase another (Enhanced Email) on the Android market for full price instead of 50% off because having prompt updates is important to me (plus I've had several times when I had to re-install apps from Amazon, not good for email/contact sync apps)
* I probably won't purchase Flex T9 on the Market - I use it sometimes, and think it has great potential, but it also has some warts that annoy me related to numbers and special characters.
* Plants vs Zombies I'm reasonably happy with aside from the fact that my Vibrant is apparently at the low end for its hardware needs.
* ezPDF Reader pretty much rocks and if I didn't have it via Amazon I would absolutely be buying it through the Market (after using it, ThinkFree Office and another PDF reader) - I hadn't thought about it before, but I should probably get it through the Market anyway.
* PicSay Pro is pretty sweet, and I may pick it up in the regular Market, but I don't actually end up using it much (perhaps 5-6 times total so far) even though it has some nice photo editing options,
Everything else I've gotten through Amazon I could either get as a free ad-supported version elsewhere, get on the Market for a few bucks, or would absolutely not miss, including games I picked up to try, then haven't bothered playing since.
"Gratuitous Goatse"
"Tasty Tubgirl"
I can't think of any other shock pics offhand, and I'm certainly not going to go looking for them just to try and come up with (more) disgusting or not-so-clever names.
Android is singled out over Apple devices because there's a workaround on iOS but not on Android. The workaround involves disabling a variety of things that many iPhone & iPad users may not want disabled, but it is available.
And I don't consider a single mention of an "Allshare workaround" that involves waiting for a particular app to connect, then crash to be a workaround.
I like that the PDF is laid out in such a way that it's still readable in full page view on my phone - that right there makes it much more likely that I'll use and refer to it.
Seriously, get CrashPlan, get additional internal or external drives for a couple of friends' or family members' (desktop) PCs and set everyone up with either CrashPlan (free, only every 24 hours) or CrashPlan+ ($2.50 monthly per PC with 10GB online storage, down to $1.50/month for 4 years or $5 monthly for unlimited online storage (down to $3/month for 4 years)). CrashPlan+ adds some nice features (better encryption, backup sets (e.g. mail, financial, docs go to many spots & online, photos go to fewer places), changes backed up every 15 minutes) but is by no means required.
Like any real backup solution you'll get to keep multiple versions if you make changes to files. You can also "seed" backups by creating them while you're at the friend's house because really, even over a local connection 200GB is going to take quite a while for the initial backup. CrashPlan has a lot of documentation of scenarios, there's a good chance one will match your situation and will cover issues you didn't even think of.
If you provide the drives and the setup, your friends will probably be just fine with doing this, particularly when you point out that they can back up to each others' PCs as well - everybody wins. Since you're providing everything, they should even be fine with you not making yourself available as a destination.
This addresses more of the possible things that cause you to lose data:
* OS or program goes insane, stomps everything (also includes accidental deletions or malware such as the occasional encryptor offering to sell keys back to you)
* Catastrophic hardware failure
* Catastrophic hardware disappearance
and frequently missed
* Catastrophic home disappearance (fire, flood, tornado, etc.)
The biggest drawbacks that I know of are increased network traffic (upload for you, upload and download for your friends) and the need to leave your laptop on at least occasionally so it can actually run the backup. Either or both of these may be non-issues or deal-killers depending on your personal situation.