Marketing demographic information most liklely. It doesn't say how accurate or what the source of that portion of the data is.
Like many companies, my company has various different methods that we obtain leads. We automatically run every lead through a service to obtain demographic information about the email address that can tell us household size, residence value, own or rent, income, education level, field of employment, interests, age, etc. All those go towards scoring the lead as it relates to our target market.
While a data breach is a data breach, if it's somewhat public information or otherwise readily available from any number of other sources it's not like the damage from having income information is catastrophic.
In this case, it was one less step the miscreants have to go through to grade each record set for sale on the black market. No doubt they are going to (or already have) sort by income descending, break them into nice 100 ID chunks, and sell them to the highest bidder.
PII should be classified based on sensitivity. At a certain level, that PII must be encrypted during transit. At the highest level, it must be encrypted during transit and at rest. SSN falls in the highest sensitivity level. SOP for years. This doesn't guarantee you won't get hacked, but it reduces / minimizes the impact if you are hacked.
PII - Personally Identifiable Information SSN - Social Security Number SOP - Standard Operating Procedure
Out of curiosity since you are familiar with the subject, where is the acceptable place to keep the encryption key? During a compromise it doesn't do much good when it's on or near the same server as the DB with the data. Two servers, with two distinct access control credentials?
My Nexus 7 2012 has been unusably slow since upgrading to 5.0 and 5.0.2 isn't much better. The web browser is useless. Granted, I have a lot of apps loaded, but it was far better with Kit Kat compared to Lollipop. It looks like the biggest culprit is Google Mail since I have several accounts with a LOT of email.
It's annoying but doing a full reset (via the bootloader menus) helped my 2012 N7 to run great again with 5.0. I realized how few apps I actually needed to make good use of it, too. Battery life is still subpar, but it's almost 3 years old at this point so I don't expect it to be fresh as a daisy.
If you had clicked the "show more" button you would have gotten to:
enormity inôrmd/ noun noun: enormity; plural noun: enormities 1. the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong. "a thorough search disclosed the full enormity of the crime" (in neutral use) the large size or scale of something. "I began to get a sense of the enormity of the task" synonyms: immensity, hugeness; More
But then, TFS has so many grammatical and other errors in it that this point is moot.
Yes which is precisely why we are discussing.. oh wait... you're using the American version of 'moot' as opposed to the 'Oxford English' definition of 'moot'.
Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles
Wikipedia is not "Wiki." Wikipedia is a wiki. There are many wikis in the world, and they are not all Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the publication, and wiki is the medium. "All of Wiki's articles" is like saying "All of Newspaper's articles."
Maybe I can get away with this offtopic pedantic comment since this whole article is about a guy spending years trying to fix small errors.:)
To be completely pedantic, you don't actually know that he confined his search to just Wikipedia. The article revolves around Wikipedia but he might be crusading across the entire internet, for all you know. Many other Wiki systems allow user contributions just like Wikipedia.
How many of those edits were accepted fixes, and how many were epic edit war battles fought tooth and nail over 100 reverts with the Wikirati elite editor brigade?
No one's freedom is impeded by the prohibition for governments to compete with private interests. What we are talking about is not a bunch of people getting together to run cables. No — the talk is of coercing — at gun point (as all taxes are collected) — all of the town's residents (whether they want it or not) to pay for some Common Good[TM]. And that shall not be allowed to stand — not in a country, that calls itself free.
You are completely right that governments (big or small) shouldn't be in the business of indiscriminately creating arms that provide services at or near the level of existing commercial interests. However, if the US isn't a good example of freedom at work when we have bulk taxation for education, all manner of safety services, roads, waste removal, parks, etc after citizens all agreed that it was indeed a common good, then I want no part of what you do think a good example of freedom is. You might be interested in relocating to Freedom-rich Libya. Now with fewer taxes, and you can't even tell the government is there at all!
Oh I see, government itself is the enemy of freedom!
Since the government hires the people to... monitor cellphone calls, use radars to search people's homes, put people in prison, etc,... I'd say you already know the answer.
If there were no government and no taxes we would all be perfectly free!
Artificial dichotomy. Too much water, you die. Too little water you die. Just the right amount of water -- you die from something else. Too much government, you lose freedoms. Too little government, you have the ultimate freedom to protect your own freedom. Just the right amount of government -- they don't take away freedoms arbitrarily and don't let others do so, either.
Government that competes using taxpayer dollars with existing corporations just because some people don't like the customer service they're getting is the wrong level of government. If there are so many people wanting another provider, another company would show up and eat the existing one's lunch. That doesn't happen. Hmmmm.
Maybe if you use the word freedom a few dozen more times it will all work itself out? You have arrived at the point where your awareness of the situation ends. "Another company" can't show up since many municipalities have incumbent agreements that specifically *forbid* anyone from competing with the cable or phone company that first installed infrastructure. Who thought of those laws? It wasn't the will of the people, not by a last mile, but I will give you one guess as to who did. There is such a terrifying patchwork of local laws surrounding utility construction and availability that no company large enough to pull it off would ever want that kind of risk (until Google showed up, but at their current buildout rate they are still about 1400 years from offering service to a substantial portion of the US).
Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).
Muni broadband runs into funding problems from conservative officials who dont want to throw taxpayer money at the problem (I'm not taking sides, thats just how it is) and private broadband runs into pole attachment problems where incumbent exclusivity agreements exist with a muni. Same set of officials, but a completely different direction to pull them in. Google is making it look pretty easy, but then again they are throwing billions of dollars at it.
A market where utilities have government-mandated monopolies is not free.
Google is demonstrating that there isn't a mandated communications monopoly per se, but just an extremely high barrier to entry and some incumbent legislation that moves out of the way as soon as enough people are teased with hyperfast internet hookups.
Mid 90's was when modem technology still hadn't caught up to the phone line standards that were deployed far and wide across the US. Sure, you could get a nice solid 14400 or 28800 (if you were living high on the hog) and have lightning-fast IRC sessions. A few years later, you will be connecting at 31200 and bitching that you can't get a 56k handshake in your neck of the woods (as distance to the local CO and quality of lines really started to matter) and a few years after that you would have been bitching that no cable or telephone company wanted to bother spending $1M+ rolling out to a tiny town to try to grab a few hundred customers paying $40/mo for 1Mbit broadband. Meanwhile, those who did live in urban/suburban areas were being "treated" to broadband from the phone company and the cable company, neither of which was really prepared to deal with thousands of customers with 3Mbit+ connections all trying to pirate music. So, service "upgrades" were nonexistent as all the providers played catchup with customer demand for about 10 years.
And then, as if by some dark magic, wireless operators started rolling out handsets that could best all but the fastest wired connections (50Mbit+ coverage for 90% of the US pop). What a strange land we live in.
Yes and you could call those trojan horses "keyloggers".
Some rather enterprising (yes its a pun) security experts use a "read-only" usb ports policy as a way to have a quasi-airgapped system, where you can still bring in software updates on a usb flash drive but can't exfiltrate any data via the same. This would totally side-step that measure, making it novel in some situations.
Missing from the summary: THEY HAVE SOFTWARE INSTALLED ON THE VICTIM LAPTOP that modules the CPU usage.
You don't need any fancy equipment, any AM radio will do.
Given how successful Stuxnet was at infecting across the airgap (by way of poor USB policies) it is rather plausible that you could rely on a trojan horse (in the most literal sense of the term) to get inside and start broadcasting sensitive information out, be they keystrokes or fragments of files or whatever.
I think that the question is, what medium will still be around and functional decades from now?
And I think the best predicable answer is Compact Disc, mainly due to the ubiquity of music CDs, which while not as popular as they once were, are still extremely common and will probably continue to be common. 12cm optical readers may eventually stop reading video formats like DVD, or Blu-ray, or other shorter-lived formats once new formats replace them, but there really hasn't been another digital music format with a physical component to it with the longevity and widespread popularity that CD has enjoyed.
When a huge heavy cakebox of 50 CDRs can hold just 30 GB, I just hope whatever it is that you're storing doesn't take up much room and isn't going to grow.
OK hotshot, how sure are you that the medium those *wonderful* answers are stored on hasn't deteriorated, resulting in us looking back on bad advice?!
Assume it will, or that it already has. Which, has more or less been in all those answers which came before.
Buy 4 HDs... back everything to all four, keep two at home, and keep backing up to them, put the other two in another physical location. Periodically rotate one of them.
If you have at least two backups of very recent vintage, and two of an slightly older vintage... you're constantly making new backups.
Over time, assume even the ones you're still using.
In other words: Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
Which is precisely what the GP said.
Don't assume you've made a static backup which will suffer from neither bitrot nor obsolescence. Plan accordingly.
This is literally a decades old strategy. The more important the data, the more discrete copies you keep, and the more regularly you do it.
What makes this Ask Slashdot different (it doesn't, but here goes) is that the submitter is asking for the best long term media for a personal archive, which implies storage untouched, for long periods. In other words, if I die tomorrow, how can I be sure my great grandkids will get to see my vacation photos in 2077 after my worthless kids and their worthless kids shove all my shit in their basement to deal with "next spring"?
It seems to me that the correct question is either: A) what backup service can you pour money into today with the hopes that it will outlive you and keep your data safe? or B) how do I convince my worthless kids to rotate my archives off of SATA3 disks in 10 years when the last compatible PCs are getting recycled?
Tape media may still be a good bet, and probably better than magnetic HDDs. Tapes are small, store lots of data, and are pretty resilient.
I wonder how long they require/expect the data to last for? Years? Decades? Generations?
The complexity of making a tape drive work has to be at best, 2x that of an off the shelf hard drive given the number of moving parts. And, unless you spring for the really really expensive version a tape cartridge wont come anywhere close to the density of a 2TB 2.5" HDD.
That being said, the only real obstacle to longevity of any medium is maintaining a good backup regiment. How hard would it be to, once every 2 years, purchase a new reasonably-priced USBx flash drive, copy the backup from the last flash drive (assuming your storage needs are modest, currently in the 100GB range) and put the new one in the safe? 24 months is definitely within the safe time range of even the cheapest flash media.
This morbid interest in "time capsule" media that will survive untouched for 50 years so your grandkids can come along and see your vacation photos from spring break after you die from a heart attack at age 30 is really bizarre. If no one has come for your data in 10 years or so, guess what: it wasn't worth anything.
I have DVDs that I've burned as a teenager kept in a nice, high-quality soft "archival" binder for the last 18 years. Nearly all of them, of varying quality/expense, are unreadable due to degradation.
OTOH, I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine and are just as old. I'd expect sealed HDDs to be as good as it gets - tape is nice, but maintaining a supported/working tape drive was always difficult (used to have one). But, unlike every other type of storage, harddrives are actually capable of warning you of an impending failure. (I've been *saved* by S.M.A.R.T. at least twice, over the years.) Add some rudimentary RAID, and you're probably good. The only way I can think of to go further is to use two/three, and cycle them between your PC(often/all the time), a nearby firesafe(When you are heading in that direction), and a safety-deposit box (seasonally?).
It's hard to ignore spinning disks if your archival requirements are in the midrange (2-4TB) where optical media would take up far more room. Just keep an extra drive around for spare parts in case you lose a motor or something.
Here's an even better solution: Since this exact same question has been asked on Slashdot multiple times, and the topic has been beaten to death, just look in the archives and see what everyone recommended last time. Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
The submitter is leaving out most important information: How much data? Storing terabytes is different than storing gigabytes (which will fit on a thumb drive). How long? The submitter says "backups" not "archives", which implies that long shelf life is not a priority, but many people use the terms interchangeably.
OK hotshot, how sure are you that the medium those *wonderful* answers are stored on hasn't deteriorated, resulting in us looking back on bad advice?!
Would any wireless company enter into an agreement like this?
As a consumer I'd love to see google kill one of those fuckers off but why would they put themselves in that position?
MVNO agreements are very lucrative for the operators, and every US operator does them already. They capitalize on an existing resource (And de-prioritize the traffic accordingly) and don't have any overhead of managing payments or tech support. It's exactly like "store brand" foods at the grocery. Price-sensitive consumers flock to MVNOs and the carriers make just as much profit per person (because they still control the actual resource) while expanding their user count and not devaluing their original product by very much.
Enterprise versions usually work differently anyway. For example the enterprise edition of XP doesn't require any sort of activation - install and go, change hardware to your hearts content, it just works (well, aside from driver issues). Like all operating systems used to do. Presumably 7 and 8 work the same way - if you've got a single customer buying and managing thousands of licenses you don't want to make them dick around with activating them individually. I suspect 10 will be basically the same, except for the automatically scheduled license audit if you fail to pay for your subscription on time.
To say that it "just works", ignoring the complexity of running a KMS (and juggling VLKs), is a bit disingenuous. 7, 8, and presumably 10 do indeed *all* need activation of some sort regardless of flavor.
That's not what it means. It means you have the choice to upgrade to 10 for free within 1 year. If you wait more than a year after release you have to pay. Anyone who got a free upgrade will continue to have a full 100% working and updated OS after the 1 year.
This is exactly how they did things with 8. I don't know why the article author is pulling BS out of his ass.
The Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 "free upgrade" had dubious generosity, since the user-visible part revolved around sidelining the much-maligned desktop replacement "start screen" in favor of something that slightly resembled the one in Windows 7. It was more of a "half upgrade half downgrade" that almost every user desperately wanted.
The Ars Technica post was a little more useful and less FUD-ridden, although I won't hold my breath til I see it directly in Microsoft product marketing materials:
Update 2: A blog post from Terry Myerson clears up what "Windows as a service" means, though the duration of "the supported lifetime of the device" is still foggy. "This is more than a one-time upgrade," writes Myerson. "Once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device—at no additional charge
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and subsequently become more productive.
I can certainly see where putting a person of color, or a woman, in a group of racist, misogynist bigots would disrupt their happy groupthink and break up their productivity. Regardless of whether that productivity started out a little lower than an equivalent group of non bigots.
The question that interests me is: if you are employing "a group of racist, misogynist bigots"... whatthefuck? Clan members aren't a protected class. Fire their asses.
Slashdot Mirror
Marketing demographic information most liklely. It doesn't say how accurate or what the source of that portion of the data is.
Like many companies, my company has various different methods that we obtain leads. We automatically run every lead through a service to obtain demographic information about the email address that can tell us household size, residence value, own or rent, income, education level, field of employment, interests, age, etc. All those go towards scoring the lead as it relates to our target market.
While a data breach is a data breach, if it's somewhat public information or otherwise readily available from any number of other sources it's not like the damage from having income information is catastrophic.
In this case, it was one less step the miscreants have to go through to grade each record set for sale on the black market. No doubt they are going to (or already have) sort by income descending, break them into nice 100 ID chunks, and sell them to the highest bidder.
PII should be classified based on sensitivity. At a certain level, that PII must be encrypted during transit. At the highest level, it must be encrypted during transit and at rest. SSN falls in the highest sensitivity level. SOP for years. This doesn't guarantee you won't get hacked, but it reduces / minimizes the impact if you are hacked.
PII - Personally Identifiable Information
SSN - Social Security Number
SOP - Standard Operating Procedure
Out of curiosity since you are familiar with the subject, where is the acceptable place to keep the encryption key? During a compromise it doesn't do much good when it's on or near the same server as the DB with the data. Two servers, with two distinct access control credentials?
My Nexus 7 2012 has been unusably slow since upgrading to 5.0 and 5.0.2 isn't much better. The web browser is useless. Granted, I have a lot of apps loaded, but it was far better with Kit Kat compared to Lollipop. It looks like the biggest culprit is Google Mail since I have several accounts with a LOT of email.
It's annoying but doing a full reset (via the bootloader menus) helped my 2012 N7 to run great again with 5.0. I realized how few apps I actually needed to make good use of it, too. Battery life is still subpar, but it's almost 3 years old at this point so I don't expect it to be fresh as a daisy.
If you had clicked the "show more" button you would have gotten to:
enormity
inôrmd/
noun
noun: enormity; plural noun: enormities
1.
the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong.
"a thorough search disclosed the full enormity of the crime"
(in neutral use) the large size or scale of something.
"I began to get a sense of the enormity of the task"
synonyms: immensity, hugeness; More
But then, TFS has so many grammatical and other errors in it that this point is moot.
Yes which is precisely why we are discussing.. oh wait ... you're using the American version of 'moot' as opposed to the 'Oxford English' definition of 'moot'.
[slow clap]
That's it for this thread.
Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles
Wikipedia is not "Wiki." Wikipedia is a wiki. There are many wikis in the world, and they are not all Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the publication, and wiki is the medium. "All of Wiki's articles" is like saying "All of Newspaper's articles."
Maybe I can get away with this offtopic pedantic comment since this whole article is about a guy spending years trying to fix small errors. :)
To be completely pedantic, you don't actually know that he confined his search to just Wikipedia. The article revolves around Wikipedia but he might be crusading across the entire internet, for all you know. Many other Wiki systems allow user contributions just like Wikipedia.
How many of those edits were accepted fixes, and how many were epic edit war battles fought tooth and nail over 100 reverts with the Wikirati elite editor brigade?
Yes, just like the rest of us.
No one's freedom is impeded by the prohibition for governments to compete with private interests. What we are talking about is not a bunch of people getting together to run cables. No — the talk is of coercing — at gun point (as all taxes are collected) — all of the town's residents (whether they want it or not) to pay for some Common Good[TM]. And that shall not be allowed to stand — not in a country, that calls itself free.
You are completely right that governments (big or small) shouldn't be in the business of indiscriminately creating arms that provide services at or near the level of existing commercial interests. However, if the US isn't a good example of freedom at work when we have bulk taxation for education, all manner of safety services, roads, waste removal, parks, etc after citizens all agreed that it was indeed a common good, then I want no part of what you do think a good example of freedom is. You might be interested in relocating to Freedom-rich Libya. Now with fewer taxes, and you can't even tell the government is there at all!
Oh I see, government itself is the enemy of freedom!
Since the government hires the people to ... monitor cellphone calls, use radars to search people's homes, put people in prison, etc, ... I'd say you already know the answer.
If there were no government and no taxes we would all be perfectly free!
Artificial dichotomy. Too much water, you die. Too little water you die. Just the right amount of water -- you die from something else. Too much government, you lose freedoms. Too little government, you have the ultimate freedom to protect your own freedom. Just the right amount of government -- they don't take away freedoms arbitrarily and don't let others do so, either.
Government that competes using taxpayer dollars with existing corporations just because some people don't like the customer service they're getting is the wrong level of government. If there are so many people wanting another provider, another company would show up and eat the existing one's lunch. That doesn't happen. Hmmmm.
Maybe if you use the word freedom a few dozen more times it will all work itself out? You have arrived at the point where your awareness of the situation ends. "Another company" can't show up since many municipalities have incumbent agreements that specifically *forbid* anyone from competing with the cable or phone company that first installed infrastructure. Who thought of those laws? It wasn't the will of the people, not by a last mile, but I will give you one guess as to who did. There is such a terrifying patchwork of local laws surrounding utility construction and availability that no company large enough to pull it off would ever want that kind of risk (until Google showed up, but at their current buildout rate they are still about 1400 years from offering service to a substantial portion of the US).
Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).
Muni broadband runs into funding problems from conservative officials who dont want to throw taxpayer money at the problem (I'm not taking sides, thats just how it is) and private broadband runs into pole attachment problems where incumbent exclusivity agreements exist with a muni. Same set of officials, but a completely different direction to pull them in. Google is making it look pretty easy, but then again they are throwing billions of dollars at it.
What you said is 100% dead on.
The sarcasm came from the fact that we (in the USA) traded in our freedom, and instead of broadband all we got was this lousy t-shirt.
A market where utilities have government-mandated monopolies is not free.
Google is demonstrating that there isn't a mandated communications monopoly per se, but just an extremely high barrier to entry and some incumbent legislation that moves out of the way as soon as enough people are teased with hyperfast internet hookups.
Mid 90's was when modem technology still hadn't caught up to the phone line standards that were deployed far and wide across the US. Sure, you could get a nice solid 14400 or 28800 (if you were living high on the hog) and have lightning-fast IRC sessions. A few years later, you will be connecting at 31200 and bitching that you can't get a 56k handshake in your neck of the woods (as distance to the local CO and quality of lines really started to matter) and a few years after that you would have been bitching that no cable or telephone company wanted to bother spending $1M+ rolling out to a tiny town to try to grab a few hundred customers paying $40/mo for 1Mbit broadband. Meanwhile, those who did live in urban/suburban areas were being "treated" to broadband from the phone company and the cable company, neither of which was really prepared to deal with thousands of customers with 3Mbit+ connections all trying to pirate music. So, service "upgrades" were nonexistent as all the providers played catchup with customer demand for about 10 years.
And then, as if by some dark magic, wireless operators started rolling out handsets that could best all but the fastest wired connections (50Mbit+ coverage for 90% of the US pop). What a strange land we live in.
Yes and you could call those trojan horses "keyloggers".
Some rather enterprising (yes its a pun) security experts use a "read-only" usb ports policy as a way to have a quasi-airgapped system, where you can still bring in software updates on a usb flash drive but can't exfiltrate any data via the same. This would totally side-step that measure, making it novel in some situations.
Missing from the summary: THEY HAVE SOFTWARE INSTALLED ON THE VICTIM LAPTOP that modules the CPU usage.
You don't need any fancy equipment, any AM radio will do.
Given how successful Stuxnet was at infecting across the airgap (by way of poor USB policies) it is rather plausible that you could rely on a trojan horse (in the most literal sense of the term) to get inside and start broadcasting sensitive information out, be they keystrokes or fragments of files or whatever.
I don't think that's the question at all.
I think that the question is, what medium will still be around and functional decades from now?
And I think the best predicable answer is Compact Disc, mainly due to the ubiquity of music CDs, which while not as popular as they once were, are still extremely common and will probably continue to be common. 12cm optical readers may eventually stop reading video formats like DVD, or Blu-ray, or other shorter-lived formats once new formats replace them, but there really hasn't been another digital music format with a physical component to it with the longevity and widespread popularity that CD has enjoyed.
When a huge heavy cakebox of 50 CDRs can hold just 30 GB, I just hope whatever it is that you're storing doesn't take up much room and isn't going to grow.
Assume it will, or that it already has. Which, has more or less been in all those answers which came before.
Buy 4 HDs ... back everything to all four, keep two at home, and keep backing up to them, put the other two in another physical location. Periodically rotate one of them.
If you have at least two backups of very recent vintage, and two of an slightly older vintage ... you're constantly making new backups.
Over time, assume even the ones you're still using.
In other words: Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
Which is precisely what the GP said.
Don't assume you've made a static backup which will suffer from neither bitrot nor obsolescence. Plan accordingly.
This is literally a decades old strategy. The more important the data, the more discrete copies you keep, and the more regularly you do it.
What makes this Ask Slashdot different (it doesn't, but here goes) is that the submitter is asking for the best long term media for a personal archive, which implies storage untouched, for long periods. In other words, if I die tomorrow, how can I be sure my great grandkids will get to see my vacation photos in 2077 after my worthless kids and their worthless kids shove all my shit in their basement to deal with "next spring"?
It seems to me that the correct question is either: A) what backup service can you pour money into today with the hopes that it will outlive you and keep your data safe? or B) how do I convince my worthless kids to rotate my archives off of SATA3 disks in 10 years when the last compatible PCs are getting recycled?
Tape media may still be a good bet, and probably better than magnetic HDDs. Tapes are small, store lots of data, and are pretty resilient.
I wonder how long they require/expect the data to last for? Years? Decades? Generations?
The complexity of making a tape drive work has to be at best, 2x that of an off the shelf hard drive given the number of moving parts. And, unless you spring for the really really expensive version a tape cartridge wont come anywhere close to the density of a 2TB 2.5" HDD.
That being said, the only real obstacle to longevity of any medium is maintaining a good backup regiment. How hard would it be to, once every 2 years, purchase a new reasonably-priced USBx flash drive, copy the backup from the last flash drive (assuming your storage needs are modest, currently in the 100GB range) and put the new one in the safe? 24 months is definitely within the safe time range of even the cheapest flash media.
This morbid interest in "time capsule" media that will survive untouched for 50 years so your grandkids can come along and see your vacation photos from spring break after you die from a heart attack at age 30 is really bizarre. If no one has come for your data in 10 years or so, guess what: it wasn't worth anything.
I have DVDs that I've burned as a teenager kept in a nice, high-quality soft "archival" binder for the last 18 years. Nearly all of them, of varying quality/expense, are unreadable due to degradation.
OTOH, I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine and are just as old. I'd expect sealed HDDs to be as good as it gets - tape is nice, but maintaining a supported/working tape drive was always difficult (used to have one). But, unlike every other type of storage, harddrives are actually capable of warning you of an impending failure. (I've been *saved* by S.M.A.R.T. at least twice, over the years.) Add some rudimentary RAID, and you're probably good. The only way I can think of to go further is to use two/three, and cycle them between your PC(often/all the time), a nearby firesafe(When you are heading in that direction), and a safety-deposit box (seasonally?).
It's hard to ignore spinning disks if your archival requirements are in the midrange (2-4TB) where optical media would take up far more room. Just keep an extra drive around for spare parts in case you lose a motor or something.
... have always worked for me.
Here's an even better solution: Since this exact same question has been asked on Slashdot multiple times, and the topic has been beaten to death, just look in the archives and see what everyone recommended last time. Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
The submitter is leaving out most important information: How much data? Storing terabytes is different than storing gigabytes (which will fit on a thumb drive). How long? The submitter says "backups" not "archives", which implies that long shelf life is not a priority, but many people use the terms interchangeably.
OK hotshot, how sure are you that the medium those *wonderful* answers are stored on hasn't deteriorated, resulting in us looking back on bad advice?!
Would any wireless company enter into an agreement like this?
As a consumer I'd love to see google kill one of those fuckers off but why would they put themselves in that position?
MVNO agreements are very lucrative for the operators, and every US operator does them already. They capitalize on an existing resource (And de-prioritize the traffic accordingly) and don't have any overhead of managing payments or tech support. It's exactly like "store brand" foods at the grocery. Price-sensitive consumers flock to MVNOs and the carriers make just as much profit per person (because they still control the actual resource) while expanding their user count and not devaluing their original product by very much.
Enterprise versions usually work differently anyway. For example the enterprise edition of XP doesn't require any sort of activation - install and go, change hardware to your hearts content, it just works (well, aside from driver issues). Like all operating systems used to do. Presumably 7 and 8 work the same way - if you've got a single customer buying and managing thousands of licenses you don't want to make them dick around with activating them individually. I suspect 10 will be basically the same, except for the automatically scheduled license audit if you fail to pay for your subscription on time.
To say that it "just works", ignoring the complexity of running a KMS (and juggling VLKs), is a bit disingenuous. 7, 8, and presumably 10 do indeed *all* need activation of some sort regardless of flavor.
That's not what it means. It means you have the choice to upgrade to 10 for free within 1 year. If you wait more than a year after release you have to pay. Anyone who got a free upgrade will continue to have a full 100% working and updated OS after the 1 year.
This is exactly how they did things with 8. I don't know why the article author is pulling BS out of his ass.
The Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 "free upgrade" had dubious generosity, since the user-visible part revolved around sidelining the much-maligned desktop replacement "start screen" in favor of something that slightly resembled the one in Windows 7. It was more of a "half upgrade half downgrade" that almost every user desperately wanted.
The Ars Technica post was a little more useful and less FUD-ridden, although I won't hold my breath til I see it directly in Microsoft product marketing materials:
Update 2: A blog post from Terry Myerson clears up what "Windows as a service" means, though the duration of "the supported lifetime of the device" is still foggy. "This is more than a one-time upgrade," writes Myerson. "Once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device—at no additional charge
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and subsequently become more productive.
I can certainly see where putting a person of color, or a woman, in a group of racist, misogynist bigots would disrupt their happy groupthink and break up their productivity. Regardless of whether that productivity started out a little lower than an equivalent group of non bigots.
The question that interests me is: if you are employing "a group of racist, misogynist bigots"... whatthefuck? Clan members aren't a protected class. Fire their asses.