I hear you. That's why I stopped going to the theatre.
If there's anything I'm proud of, it's the fact that I vote with my dollars. If a restaurant is crap, I don't eat there. If a corporation does something that upsets me, I don't complain, just don't buy from *that* company. I will instead direct all my dollars at the companies that do right by my book. I'm just one guy. My discretionary income by my lonesome won't sway any company, but imagine if millions of folks decide that they're sick of seeing the bland pabulum that's shat on the screen for consumption. These studio execs are so secure in their knowledge that people will buy whatever they produce so they produce crap. Why take a risk on an interesting idea when a guaranteed paycheck awaits?
Also.. who orders a motherboard before the case? That seems kind of backwards to me.
.
That would be me... My selection process is: 1) processor 2) motherboard (supported RAM, PCIx slots) 3) number USB2/3 4) video 5) power supply 6) case
At any one time I have four or five systems running compute-intensive operations.. Cases don't matter so much.. They're there really just to hold the pieces together and keep them cool.. My main concern for a case is that the baffles move air properly and that they are built to appropriate tolerances so my pieces fit.
"Frequent-ish" reboots can work in non-enterprise environments where you have downtime windows. In international organizations that run 24-7, this is rarely the case without lots of coordination. Now, if you design a system with high availability and redundancy, you can very well take down one node in a cluster for maintenance... Or if you virtualization you could migrate the VM to another host transparently. Alas, in many enterprises there are one-off systems that exist for a particular purpose and that have gone from a skunkworks project in a business unit to a semi-critical app.
So you end up with an app sitting on a non-redundant physical machine that cannot get a 1 hour maintenance window without extensive planning. And by this I mean alerting Madrid, London, Dubai, Cancun, Alaska, etc.. and trying to schedule hundreds of users to deal with the outage.
The argument is that if that system is so "mission critical" then it needs to have redundancy. Hah, welcome to corporate politics where unless a system is involved with revenue generation or payroll then that project essentially has no budget.
For this reason I love that Unix systems can go years without a reboot. I'm one of three admins that manage close to 400 OS instance... close to 50 applications. Dozens of databases... Dozens of physical machines. Rebooting just to see if the system comes back up is a pipe dream.
We're close to that already. With AJAX type apps, Java, Flash, etc., it's possible to run apps on different platforms and still look the same, use the same code, etc.. I've been running Chrome as my browser recently and have used the app store. Whether running on Win7 or RHEL6 or Ubuntu 10.10, it looks and feels the same.
At some point the responsibility shifts from Microsoft to VMWare. Where the responsibility for alerting customers lies is maybe not clear yet.
The update has broken a few things for me. Half my desktop gadgets are not functioning properly. There are some other glitches that I noticed with my AV software, though I'm still confirming on other PCs.
Without this forum your voice might as well be silenced. It's a perfect microcosm of the democratic process here. The readers vote on what they think is insightful or a troll or interesting. If an idea resonates with the people then it will be amplified by the teeming millions. Sure, if you can motivate people, incite people, then your voice is amplified. Others start listening. Others start perfecting the idea. Now some ideas are flawed, but the mere fact that it resonates with hundreds or thousands or millions means that it's a concern for those people.
Surely everyone is willing to do some actual *WORK*, right, instead of just lazily shooting your digital mouth off on a blackberry or iPad keyboard?
Right.. because we don't want it to be easy to participate in democracy...
It's precisely those folks sitting at home shooting off their mouths that makes democracy work. The ability for *anyone* to participate in the process is what makes the system great. Sure, there will be crackpots. There will be trolls. There will be people exploiting the system. But what I liked about the Internet (of old) was that everyone could be on common ground.
The other piece is free and open information. Rather than hiding laws in the locked filing cabinet in the basement, putting the information on the web means that everyone can peek at it. Anyone can dissect it. Some legislation may never be seen, but the mere fact that it *can* be seen is half the battle.
The most recent curses I uttered were at Microsoft for disabling the ability to change the background in Windows 7 Starter. It's just f*ing ludicrous that they took away that option.
There's a pervasive mentality in a lot of businesses that it's management versus engineers, or marketers versus engineers, etc.. Each group seems to think that they have a monopoly on intelligence. I've spoken with some managers who truly believe the real brains are the suits, and that the engineering groups are commodities that can be replaced. They believe that effective management is responsible for a great product, but that poor sales is the result of poor engineering. On the other hand, I've known more than a few engineers who blame all corporate ills and lack of sales on management. I know marketers who truly believe that they can sell anything; the type of product is meaningless as it's marketing that makes people buy the product. Thus, they are the reason the company does well. Of course, if a product fails they blame it on poor engineering or bad management.
Remember the dark days at Apple? Who was responsible? Ever try using the Apple offerings at the time? They were buggy, slow, overpriced and an ill-fit for businesses. Remember the clone/no-clone madness? The people spoke and decided that Apple wasn't for them.
Remember Sun back in the 90s? At first glance the technologies were engineering marvels... but technology cannot exist in a vacuum. Without high-speed and reliable networks, network based computing was bound to fail.
In short, everyone needs to do a good job. Engineers must design great products, and not necessarily direct the business. Marketers must listen to what the people want and not think of us as consumers instead of *people*. Managers must manage the engineers and marketers and set a clear vision for the company and not necessarily design products.
I don't know what the typical IT staff is for an NFL pro team, but I expect that they have some folks dedicated to electronic and computer equipment, etc.. Setting that stuff up in a constantly changing remote station can be hairy.
The problem may not be the physical control of the devices themselves, but all the different versions and retention policies. With a printout you can physically hand in a document and have it checked off as returned. Sure, people can photocopy or scan it, but that's a lot more difficult than just downloading a file. Stealing a physical playbook involves physical access. Stealing a playbook, getting it to the opponent, and verifying that the evidence is gone after it's used is even more difficult.
Add tablets and I would imagine that the users would put not only playbook information on it, but also emails and other documentation. Imagine if a pending trade is made public? And unlike paper, stealing a document now no longer means trying to get by some burly security guards.
Back in the day --- which, old as I am, wasn't all that long ago -- the role of the teacher was to explain concepts and teach. The homework, the rote exercises, the role of counselor, the teaching of discipline and social skills, was left to the parent. Add to this that kids have no voices in government, corporations see them as an access valve to parents' money and government sees them not as potential leaders but as a liability, it's no wonder that teachers end up underpaid, overworked, and asked to do much more than is appropriate.
Politically, there are a few obstacles:
There is a lot of pressure for the status quo. An easy tactic to maintain the status quo is to counter a request for change by saying that no problem actually exists. If someone says that the richest country in the world is not maintaining a lead or is trailing in education, someone counters that the statistics are skewed or the data is being misinterpreted or that there's nothing wrong with the status quo. Not taking any side, but we see the same with global warming and deficits and gun control and tax reform.
Education has no quick payoff. Investments in education will pay off in ten years or more. Politicians care about the next election cycle and not the long term benefit to the country. It's thus easier to push money to a new baseball stadium or to build a billion dollar fence or fight the evil file sharers than it is to fund meaningful education. Hell, it's easier to pull money from education than it is to maintain the status quo.
Children have little voice in Congress. They can't vote. They can't contribute to re-election funds. They usually can't/don't write letters to their representatives. They have little direct spending power.
If these issues are important to you, maybe the approach is to enlist the teenagers and the twenty-somethings who still remember their primary education to improve the situation. Maybe parents can also be convinced. I don't know if anyone else cares,
I have bookmarks for Google Docs, Talk, Voice and Calendar... I think of them as applications rather than webpages. And if you look at the amount of javascript, java and other code that runs locally, it's indeed an application.
I'm sick of this self-perpetuating bullshit that says geeks can't be athletic or interesting or cool (where "cool" means relatively unconcerned about what other people think about them) . Geeks are fascinating. They travel. They build things. They do interesting things with electricity and power motors. They make films, design cars, hike volcanoes, enter sporting events.
Being socially inept does not make one a geek. Certainly some geeks could give a rat's ass about how they appear to others, so they come off as anti-social, but that's often by choice. Boring chatter about the weather and the local sports team is fine, but boring is boring, and geeks often have better things to do.
Being non-athletic does not make one a geek. Yes, many geeks associate working out with some desperate attempt to impress others or the opposite sex (or the same sex if you swing that way) and just say no, but who can blame them?
I may or may not be a geek, who the hell knows or cares. But I do know that labels are a sad attempt to compartmentalize *people*.
Interesting comment.. I've been called a geek a long time, though I suspect I'm more of a dork than anything else.
Geeks to me are those who have passions and are not afraid to indulge them for fear of being considered weird. I know too many people who love a thing but don't want to appear fanatical so never really explore the thing. It's sort of sad, really.
We're all misfits, I think. I admire those who don't care about what others think when it comes to pursuing their passions.
I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort.
That's a fascinating idea, but I'm going to have to go with dual catapults on this one. No tracks needed, and the environmental impact is minimum (for the intervening geometry).
Just wait until the next issue when they realize that Comics Code was *NOT* dead, but instead placed in suspended animation when his arch nemesis switched the translator module causing a brain cascade failure... And in all that time, Comics Code was in an alternate reality, getting stronger, leveling up....
I'm in the same predicament. I shoot video and still images. Video will always be a beast to store, and I ended up buying external drives and storing them there. More recently I've been using laptop drives in externals (mostly Seagate 5400s in Rosewill cases). You can get pre-made externals, but the internal drives are not swappable.
Anyhoo, you asked about still photography...
I shoot in RAW generally, and have a couple Canons and miscellaneous Point and Shoots, plus cellphone snapshots... Every month is about 20G more of data. I shoot a couple times a month on the DSLR and fill up a 4G CF card. Many cameras support an small-RAW mode or similar compressed mode (it's still RAW, but smaller file size).
For the initial storage I have a fileserver with a single 1TB disk. After I load them into the PC, I immediately copy them to the staging area on the 1TB disk. I then prune the junk and crappy images of my thumb and shoe and other stuff that's definitely not worth keeping. This usually shaves off 1G of the 4G. Then I sync the folders. I use rsync with a --delete option under Linux, and Windows and MacOS have similar tools. This gives me two copies.
Next is tagging and making the contact sheet... Tagging can be as simple as a README in the folder or as complex as using an image archiving program. fSpot or similar can do the tagging and contact sheeting. This is important if you have lots of images.. Some of the pro software will even manage your EXIF and geotags.
Once this is done, I copy the really good images to a mirrored storage drive. I have 500G on this, but it's old. This storage grows maybe 5G or so each month.
Then I delete from my laptop.
What you do next depends on how attached you are to your pictures.
You can backup your images to an external drive. At 20G a month, you will fill a 320G drive in about a year. That's about $90. You may want two though, one for onsite, one for offsite that you rotate away.
You can also store in the mystic cloud. Google charges something like $20/20G/year. So that's about $100/year (a little cheaper than an external drive but a pain to sync).
There are other options, but this is what works for me.
Just last week in that vacant store front there used to be a chapter of the "Red Headed League". They organized events for the fiery headed, like myself. Shame that it has come to this.
In my world, managers hire sysadmins and contractors based on contract rates. The system engineers to not interview, but instead are presented candidates and told to fit them in.
In my world there is a hodge-podge of monitoring tools (depending on which manager was in charge when a "solution" was purchased) and disaster recovery is based on who shouts the loudest for the budget. In most cases project managers do not account for DR. When they hear that their costs will in some cases double, they suddenly don't consider their app to be business critical.. But when it comes to support, which comes from a different cost bucket, suddenly their application must have 15 minute SLAs
In my world there is one engineer/admin per 200 servers. We work on systems and often are the only ones familiar with that system. Documentation? 50 hour weeks and multiple deadlines (and problem resolution) leaves little time to document beyond an email saying, "OK, work is complete."
No management will ever replace sound technical solutions.
For years I've been watching people trim the fat away from steaks, chicken breast, lamb. I don't know why.. It's the gorgeous layers of fat, the marbling, the beautiful fat, the heavenly adipose, that succulent fat that makes the meat taste like *meat*. Otherwise might just as well eat protein wafers.
Not that I eat a lot of meat, but when I do, I want it to be worth it.
I bit the bullet recently and got myself a Droid2 Global and will concede that the smart phones are pretty amazing devices. I still have my laptops and netbooks, but am quite impressed with this device. The main problem is that the screens are so tiny and many websites still don't seem to detect and re-format appropriately. Syncing the devices is also more painful than it should be. DLNA sort of works. I can sort of sync my file server media. Streaming sites in the cloud sort of work....
I'm looking forward to the day when I can go into a restaurant, scan a barcode and pull down a menu and maybe even order. If I go to the theatre, it would be great if the posters had a link to the movie site.
Hey now... that works (I was the dumb anonymous user:D )...
Looking through the wiki now trying to figure out the other keys (doesn't match up on the Droid2). Pretty cool watching top, nmon, and smitty through that interface...
You can purchase an inexpensive atom based motherboard (or ARM or Geode based) with Bluetooth for under $140... Since no real processing is required, there may be even cheaper systems that can be built based on older commodity processors. There were some non-MMU versions of Linux that might work.. don't know much about recent developments, but that would be the way I'd go if I were to build it.
Yesterday I ordered a couple Android 2.2 phones. This is a big jump from my previous flip phone which provided endless fodder for my co-worker's comments. They called it the VCR, the tri-corder, "cinder block" (because "brick" didn't quite do it justice).
I want stuff to just work, but I also do a lot of customizations.
Anyhoo, the reason I went with Android instead of the iPhone came down to AT&T rates versus Verizon. I don't anticipate using all the features of either platform, but I do need VPN (Cisco AnyConnect or 100% compatible such as OpenConnect), SSH access, and some method of syncing a calendar and task list to a remote server. I also want my music catalog available for streaming, I carry a laptop and 3G wireless internet card with me whenever I'm on the road, but I'm starting to appreciate being able to check movie times and other stuff without powering up a laptop or netbook.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear you. That's why I stopped going to the theatre.
If there's anything I'm proud of, it's the fact that I vote with my dollars. If a restaurant is crap, I don't eat there. If a corporation does something that upsets me, I don't complain, just don't buy from *that* company. I will instead direct all my dollars at the companies that do right by my book. I'm just one guy. My discretionary income by my lonesome won't sway any company, but imagine if millions of folks decide that they're sick of seeing the bland pabulum that's shat on the screen for consumption. These studio execs are so secure in their knowledge that people will buy whatever they produce so they produce crap. Why take a risk on an interesting idea when a guaranteed paycheck awaits?
Heh.. :)
Actually, I really don't worry about storage. I boot them off the network and they get an iscsi disk as the root volume.
Also.. who orders a motherboard before the case? That seems kind of backwards to me.
.
That would be me... My selection process is:
1) processor
2) motherboard (supported RAM, PCIx slots)
3) number USB2/3
4) video
5) power supply
6) case
At any one time I have four or five systems running compute-intensive operations.. Cases don't matter so much.. They're there really just to hold the pieces together and keep them cool.. My main concern for a case is that the baffles move air properly and that they are built to appropriate tolerances so my pieces fit.
Interesting, but not true.
"Frequent-ish" reboots can work in non-enterprise environments where you have downtime windows. In international organizations that run 24-7, this is rarely the case without lots of coordination. Now, if you design a system with high availability and redundancy, you can very well take down one node in a cluster for maintenance... Or if you virtualization you could migrate the VM to another host transparently. Alas, in many enterprises there are one-off systems that exist for a particular purpose and that have gone from a skunkworks project in a business unit to a semi-critical app.
So you end up with an app sitting on a non-redundant physical machine that cannot get a 1 hour maintenance window without extensive planning. And by this I mean alerting Madrid, London, Dubai, Cancun, Alaska, etc.. and trying to schedule hundreds of users to deal with the outage.
The argument is that if that system is so "mission critical" then it needs to have redundancy. Hah, welcome to corporate politics where unless a system is involved with revenue generation or payroll then that project essentially has no budget.
For this reason I love that Unix systems can go years without a reboot. I'm one of three admins that manage close to 400 OS instance... close to 50 applications. Dozens of databases... Dozens of physical machines. Rebooting just to see if the system comes back up is a pipe dream.
We're close to that already. With AJAX type apps, Java, Flash, etc., it's possible to run apps on different platforms and still look the same, use the same code, etc..
I've been running Chrome as my browser recently and have used the app store. Whether running on Win7 or RHEL6 or Ubuntu 10.10, it looks and feels the same.
At some point the responsibility shifts from Microsoft to VMWare. Where the responsibility for alerting customers lies is maybe not clear yet.
The update has broken a few things for me. Half my desktop gadgets are not functioning properly. There are some other glitches that I noticed with my AV software, though I'm still confirming on other PCs.
No.
Your post proves it.
Without this forum your voice might as well be silenced. It's a perfect microcosm of the democratic process here. The readers vote on what they think is insightful or a troll or interesting. If an idea resonates with the people then it will be amplified by the teeming millions. Sure, if you can motivate people, incite people, then your voice is amplified. Others start listening. Others start perfecting the idea. Now some ideas are flawed, but the mere fact that it resonates with hundreds or thousands or millions means that it's a concern for those people.
Surely everyone is willing to do some actual *WORK*, right, instead of just lazily shooting your digital mouth off on a blackberry or iPad keyboard?
Right.. because we don't want it to be easy to participate in democracy...
It's precisely those folks sitting at home shooting off their mouths that makes democracy work. The ability for *anyone* to participate in the process is what makes the system great. Sure, there will be crackpots. There will be trolls. There will be people exploiting the system. But what I liked about the Internet (of old) was that everyone could be on common ground.
The other piece is free and open information. Rather than hiding laws in the locked filing cabinet in the basement, putting the information on the web means that everyone can peek at it. Anyone can dissect it. Some legislation may never be seen, but the mere fact that it *can* be seen is half the battle.
The most recent curses I uttered were at Microsoft for disabling the ability to change the background in Windows 7 Starter. It's just f*ing ludicrous that they took away that option.
There's a pervasive mentality in a lot of businesses that it's management versus engineers, or marketers versus engineers, etc.. Each group seems to think that they have a monopoly on intelligence. I've spoken with some managers who truly believe the real brains are the suits, and that the engineering groups are commodities that can be replaced. They believe that effective management is responsible for a great product, but that poor sales is the result of poor engineering. On the other hand, I've known more than a few engineers who blame all corporate ills and lack of sales on management. I know marketers who truly believe that they can sell anything; the type of product is meaningless as it's marketing that makes people buy the product. Thus, they are the reason the company does well. Of course, if a product fails they blame it on poor engineering or bad management.
Remember the dark days at Apple? Who was responsible? Ever try using the Apple offerings at the time? They were buggy, slow, overpriced and an ill-fit for businesses. Remember the clone/no-clone madness? The people spoke and decided that Apple wasn't for them.
Remember Sun back in the 90s? At first glance the technologies were engineering marvels... but technology cannot exist in a vacuum. Without high-speed and reliable networks, network based computing was bound to fail.
In short, everyone needs to do a good job. Engineers must design great products, and not necessarily direct the business. Marketers must listen to what the people want and not think of us as consumers instead of *people*. Managers must manage the engineers and marketers and set a clear vision for the company and not necessarily design products.
I don't know what the typical IT staff is for an NFL pro team, but I expect that they have some folks dedicated to electronic and computer equipment, etc.. Setting that stuff up in a constantly changing remote station can be hairy.
The problem may not be the physical control of the devices themselves, but all the different versions and retention policies. With a printout you can physically hand in a document and have it checked off as returned. Sure, people can photocopy or scan it, but that's a lot more difficult than just downloading a file. Stealing a physical playbook involves physical access. Stealing a playbook, getting it to the opponent, and verifying that the evidence is gone after it's used is even more difficult.
Add tablets and I would imagine that the users would put not only playbook information on it, but also emails and other documentation. Imagine if a pending trade is made public? And unlike paper, stealing a document now no longer means trying to get by some burly security guards.
Go Dolphins.
Back in the day --- which, old as I am, wasn't all that long ago -- the role of the teacher was to explain concepts and teach. The homework, the rote exercises, the role of counselor, the teaching of discipline and social skills, was left to the parent. Add to this that kids have no voices in government, corporations see them as an access valve to parents' money and government sees them not as potential leaders but as a liability, it's no wonder that teachers end up underpaid, overworked, and asked to do much more than is appropriate.
Politically, there are a few obstacles:
There is a lot of pressure for the status quo. An easy tactic to maintain the status quo is to counter a request for change by saying that no problem actually exists. If someone says that the richest country in the world is not maintaining a lead or is trailing in education, someone counters that the statistics are skewed or the data is being misinterpreted or that there's nothing wrong with the status quo. Not taking any side, but we see the same with global warming and deficits and gun control and tax reform.
Education has no quick payoff. Investments in education will pay off in ten years or more. Politicians care about the next election cycle and not the long term benefit to the country. It's thus easier to push money to a new baseball stadium or to build a billion dollar fence or fight the evil file sharers than it is to fund meaningful education. Hell, it's easier to pull money from education than it is to maintain the status quo.
Children have little voice in Congress. They can't vote. They can't contribute to re-election funds. They usually can't/don't write letters to their representatives. They have little direct spending power.
If these issues are important to you, maybe the approach is to enlist the teenagers and the twenty-somethings who still remember their primary education to improve the situation. Maybe parents can also be convinced. I don't know if anyone else cares,
I have bookmarks for Google Docs, Talk, Voice and Calendar... I think of them as applications rather than webpages. And if you look at the amount of javascript, java and other code that runs locally, it's indeed an application.
I'm sick of this self-perpetuating bullshit that says geeks can't be athletic or interesting or cool (where "cool" means relatively unconcerned about what other people think about them) . Geeks are fascinating. They travel. They build things. They do interesting things with electricity and power motors. They make films, design cars, hike volcanoes, enter sporting events.
Being socially inept does not make one a geek. Certainly some geeks could give a rat's ass about how they appear to others, so they come off as anti-social, but that's often by choice. Boring chatter about the weather and the local sports team is fine, but boring is boring, and geeks often have better things to do.
Being non-athletic does not make one a geek. Yes, many geeks associate working out with some desperate attempt to impress others or the opposite sex (or the same sex if you swing that way) and just say no, but who can blame them?
I may or may not be a geek, who the hell knows or cares. But I do know that labels are a sad attempt to compartmentalize *people*.
Interesting comment.. I've been called a geek a long time, though I suspect I'm more of a dork than anything else.
Geeks to me are those who have passions and are not afraid to indulge them for fear of being considered weird. I know too many people who love a thing but don't want to appear fanatical so never really explore the thing. It's sort of sad, really.
We're all misfits, I think. I admire those who don't care about what others think when it comes to pursuing their passions.
I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort.
That's a fascinating idea, but I'm going to have to go with dual catapults on this one. No tracks needed, and the environmental impact is minimum (for the intervening geometry).
Just wait until the next issue when they realize that Comics Code was *NOT* dead, but instead placed in suspended animation when his arch nemesis switched the translator module causing a brain cascade failure... And in all that time, Comics Code was in an alternate reality, getting stronger, leveling up....
Next issue.. Comics Code returns!
I'm in the same predicament. I shoot video and still images. Video will always be a beast to store, and I ended up buying external drives and storing them there. More recently I've been using laptop drives in externals (mostly Seagate 5400s in Rosewill cases). You can get pre-made externals, but the internal drives are not swappable.
Anyhoo, you asked about still photography...
I shoot in RAW generally, and have a couple Canons and miscellaneous Point and Shoots, plus cellphone snapshots... Every month is about 20G more of data. I shoot a couple times a month on the DSLR and fill up a 4G CF card. Many cameras support an small-RAW mode or similar compressed mode (it's still RAW, but smaller file size).
For the initial storage I have a fileserver with a single 1TB disk. After I load them into the PC, I immediately copy them to the staging area on the 1TB disk. I then prune the junk and crappy images of my thumb and shoe and other stuff that's definitely not worth keeping. This usually shaves off 1G of the 4G. Then I sync the folders. I use rsync with a --delete option under Linux, and Windows and MacOS have similar tools. This gives me two copies.
Next is tagging and making the contact sheet... Tagging can be as simple as a README in the folder or as complex as using an image archiving program. fSpot or similar can do the tagging and contact sheeting. This is important if you have lots of images.. Some of the pro software will even manage your EXIF and geotags.
Once this is done, I copy the really good images to a mirrored storage drive. I have 500G on this, but it's old. This storage grows maybe 5G or so each month.
Then I delete from my laptop.
What you do next depends on how attached you are to your pictures.
You can backup your images to an external drive. At 20G a month, you will fill a 320G drive in about a year. That's about $90. You may want two though, one for onsite, one for offsite that you rotate away.
You can also store in the mystic cloud. Google charges something like $20/20G/year. So that's about $100/year (a little cheaper than an external drive but a pain to sync).
There are other options, but this is what works for me.
Just last week in that vacant store front there used to be a chapter of the "Red Headed League". They organized events for the fiery headed, like myself. Shame that it has come to this.
I would like to be a SysAdmin in your world.
In my world, managers hire sysadmins and contractors based on contract rates. The system engineers to not interview, but instead are presented candidates and told to fit them in.
In my world there is a hodge-podge of monitoring tools (depending on which manager was in charge when a "solution" was purchased) and disaster recovery is based on who shouts the loudest for the budget. In most cases project managers do not account for DR. When they hear that their costs will in some cases double, they suddenly don't consider their app to be business critical.. But when it comes to support, which comes from a different cost bucket, suddenly their application must have 15 minute SLAs
In my world there is one engineer/admin per 200 servers. We work on systems and often are the only ones familiar with that system. Documentation? 50 hour weeks and multiple deadlines (and problem resolution) leaves little time to document beyond an email saying, "OK, work is complete."
No management will ever replace sound technical solutions.
It's the fat.
For years I've been watching people trim the fat away from steaks, chicken breast, lamb. I don't know why.. It's the gorgeous layers of fat, the marbling, the beautiful fat, the heavenly adipose, that succulent fat that makes the meat taste like *meat*. Otherwise might just as well eat protein wafers.
Not that I eat a lot of meat, but when I do, I want it to be worth it.
I bit the bullet recently and got myself a Droid2 Global and will concede that the smart phones are pretty amazing devices. I still have my laptops and netbooks, but am quite impressed with this device. The main problem is that the screens are so tiny and many websites still don't seem to detect and re-format appropriately. Syncing the devices is also more painful than it should be. DLNA sort of works. I can sort of sync my file server media. Streaming sites in the cloud sort of work....
I'm looking forward to the day when I can go into a restaurant, scan a barcode and pull down a menu and maybe even order. If I go to the theatre, it would be great if the posters had a link to the movie site.
Hey now... that works (I was the dumb anonymous user :D )...
Looking through the wiki now trying to figure out the other keys (doesn't match up on the Droid2). Pretty cool watching top, nmon, and smitty through that interface...
You can purchase an inexpensive atom based motherboard (or ARM or Geode based) with Bluetooth for under $140... Since no real processing is required, there may be even cheaper systems that can be built based on older commodity processors. There were some non-MMU versions of Linux that might work.. don't know much about recent developments, but that would be the way I'd go if I were to build it.
Can I have it both ways?
Yesterday I ordered a couple Android 2.2 phones. This is a big jump from my previous flip phone which provided endless fodder for my co-worker's comments. They called it the VCR, the tri-corder, "cinder block" (because "brick" didn't quite do it justice).
I want stuff to just work, but I also do a lot of customizations.
Anyhoo, the reason I went with Android instead of the iPhone came down to AT&T rates versus Verizon. I don't anticipate using all the features of either platform, but I do need VPN (Cisco AnyConnect or 100% compatible such as OpenConnect), SSH access, and some method of syncing a calendar and task list to a remote server. I also want my music catalog available for streaming, I carry a laptop and 3G wireless internet card with me whenever I'm on the road, but I'm starting to appreciate being able to check movie times and other stuff without powering up a laptop or netbook.