Agreed that just backing up to another HD provides the best overall method for creating a complete backup of 100MB of disk storage.
However, I would suspect that most users don't change a huge percentage of their HD's content on a daily basis, unless you are routinely d/l'ing or ripping MP3s and MPGs on a daily basis (and I note that when I do generate that kind of traffic, it is usually because I am making a compilation CD, and while this does generate a few GB of "new" files on my HD that day, that data doesn't need to be backup up because I've got the original CDs anyway).
As a result, it seems to me that a reasonable solution is to create a "baseline" backup, say to a CD or DVD, at system install time, when there is (relatively) little on the disk, and then each day (or week, depending on needs), do an incremental backup of changed data only to another CD.
This approach is obviously quite inefficient if you have a complete HD failure, in that you have to recreate a new drive by starting with the first backup CD and then restore EACH ONE thereafter until the final CD restores the disk to it's last backed-up state, but for a more common problem of losing or corrupting an individual file, since that is more likely to happen with a recently modified than a remotely modified file, you are likely to be able to restore a last good version within only a few CD's of the most recent incremental backups.
This is, quite, frankly, an excellent comment. As I read the op-ed piece, I was struck by the tone of indignation on the part of the author.
It is always amazing to me how willing most people are to look the other way when other's rights are trampled, and yet how indignant they can become when the same trampling occurs to them.
Where has the judiciary been as free speech has been repeatedly trampled on over the past years? I certainly hope that none of these employees of the judiciary have been viewing DVD's on unapproved platforms, decoding Adobe files, or (heavens forbid!) reading anything at all on 2600!
First, a note of clarification: A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a way of tunnelling network traffic over another network protocol, in this case TCP/IP. Most of the commentary (some have written a similar clarification to my own above) have confused this protocol with internet connection sharing, NATing, or proxying.
In any case, a more general question concerns @Home's generally restrictive AUP. This is not the first time that @Home has saddled its users with restrictions to fairly common uses of a home network connection. Here in Connecticut, our CT @Home users group has had an active discussion regarding this restrictions.
In point of fact, our AUP has prohibited VPNS, NATing, and host of other activities for a long time. Other "disallowed" activities include running a server at home, for instance. While I can accept the validity of not allowing an "@Home" user (as opposed to an "@Work" user from running a commercial server, prohibiting me from running an FTP server at home so I can retrieve files I need while at work seems to me to be unreasonable.
Further, the last AUP I read (about a year ago) proported to make all content transmitted via the network connection the property of @Home (good thing I'm writing this at work!). Also, anything posted on the web site provided to each @Home subscriber would belong to @Home. So this means that if I write an email, @Home owns it...and if I write that Great American Novel and email the document to my publisher, actually @Home owns it because I emailed it...Say, I wonder if I send some illegal content the the police should actually arrest someone at @Home, because the simply act of transmitting it over my @Home connection makes it @Home's property...
As an argument for limiting actions such as running a web server, @Home has offered the negative impact that this has on network performance because the cable modem connection is shared by everyone on the same piece of coax. That's great, but I wonder a) how that makes it legitimate for @Home to claim to own the content of my transmissions, b) how my retrieving a 100K file once a day from work should be enough to kill their network, c) why they cannot just monitor the network for high-bandwidth abusers and deal with them directly without restricting users such as myself, or d) why they don't just install enough hardware to meet the demand they have created with their excessive and misleading advertising.
As everyone using @Home knows, they have already capped both upload and download transmission rates in most of their coverage areas. With a download cap of 128 or 256K, advertising speeds of up to 10MBs doesn't seem quite accurate, does it?
In the interest of fairness, I'll conclude that I am actually very happy with my @Home service. While the customer service phone line takes forever to get through, I have been fortunate to have had relatively rare service outages, and the ones that have happened have been brief (unlike others I know, but I've been very lucky). The service is "fast enough" for me (I'm not a gamer, so I don't know if I could "Quake" or not), although it is noticibly slower than the lightning fast speed it had when I first got it a few years ago). Overall, I'm actually quite happy with the service, but it would be better if I didn't have to worry that the cable police would be cutting off my service because I VPN'd in to work one night.
I think I would have been more impressed had there been some way to find out from the site who the editors are and what their academic / legal credentials are.
I wonder about a few things that have been said. For instance, while we may not like the way Microsoft goes about it, it seems to me that they do and _should_ have the right to restrict how their proprietary information is distributed. If they want to allow information to be d/l'd from their website under the condition that it not be further disseminated, why shouldn't they be able to do that? How is that different, conceptually, from the CopyLeft agreement, which requires that if you use CopyLeft'ed software and modify/extend it, you must return those modifications to the OpenSource community? How is the CopyLeft any better than Microsoft's saying, in essense, "you can d/l it from us if you want it, but you cannot pass it on? Anyone who wants it must also d/l it from us" ? While their email may be heavy handed, I don't see what that part of it is wrong.
Something else that I wonder. So far, it seems axiomatic to the political/legal powers that be, than a web site operator should be help responsible for content posted by users of the website, even when they are not actually owners or employees of the web site. If I submit, say, an ad or classified or something to The New York Times which winds up advocating or even providing instructions for an illegal act, is the Times legally liable for that, or is it protected? I don't know, but I would like to hear from someone who does.
It seems to me that in this regard, electronic communications are treated markedly different than non-electronic communications. For instance, my employer can read my email or monitor my web surfing activity "because they own the equipment and my time at work." Can they monitor a personal phone call, or video tape me in the bathroom, or open personal mail that arrives at work? No, even though they own the telephone, locker room/bathroom, and that cardboard slot where my mail is put. I wonder if the distinction is that mail and the telephone are so ingrained in our society and commonplace, while the internet and email is still, to so many, new, dangerous, and unfamiliar.
Seems to me that creating a large number of "cutesy" tld's is counter to the purpose of the TLDs - if the idea is to organize the domain name space, using a tree structure, then it makes aesthetic and pratical sense to me to limit the number of roots of the tree.
What all these extra tlds (.sucks,.imafrog, etc) are really trying to do is impose an additional "directory" type of structure onto the DNS system, which in some fashion search engines already do. Since the idea of the DNS system is to a) provide human recognizable and memorizable names instead of hard-to-remember IP addresses and b) provide a level of indirection so that machines can change physical location (and hence IP address) without breaking every link to them, then the best way to create an additional structure that would organize things is to have a separate database/access method, in which sites are characterized according to topic (or keywords), pointing to the DNS name which localizes the machine by indirecting to the IP address.
I'm all in favor of adding a few new tlds, I suppose, like.xxx (although it's hard to argue that you didn't think www.hardcorepornsite.com was going to get you to a porn site, and it may be hard from a legal standpoint to require all sex sites to move to the.xxx tld - who defines what's obscene? what about nude artwork?), it seems to me that the creation of new tlds should be done for specific purposes like segregating of porn sites, or for a new country or whatever, and nut just to let people have cute names.
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Sure would. I meant to say 100 GB. Oh well.
Agreed that just backing up to another HD provides the best overall method for creating a complete backup of 100MB of disk storage.
However, I would suspect that most users don't change a huge percentage of their HD's content on a daily basis, unless you are routinely d/l'ing or ripping MP3s and MPGs on a daily basis (and I note that when I do generate that kind of traffic, it is usually because I am making a compilation CD, and while this does generate a few GB of "new" files on my HD that day, that data doesn't need to be backup up because I've got the original CDs anyway).
As a result, it seems to me that a reasonable solution is to create a "baseline" backup, say to a CD or DVD, at system install time, when there is (relatively) little on the disk, and then each day (or week, depending on needs), do an incremental backup of changed data only to another CD.
This approach is obviously quite inefficient if you have a complete HD failure, in that you have to recreate a new drive by starting with the first backup CD and then restore EACH ONE thereafter until the final CD restores the disk to it's last backed-up state, but for a more common problem of losing or corrupting an individual file, since that is more likely to happen with a recently modified than a remotely modified file, you are likely to be able to restore a last good version within only a few CD's of the most recent incremental backups.
This is, quite, frankly, an excellent comment. As I read the op-ed piece, I was struck by the tone of indignation on the part of the author.
It is always amazing to me how willing most people are to look the other way when other's rights are trampled, and yet how indignant they can become when the same trampling occurs to them.
Where has the judiciary been as free speech has been repeatedly trampled on over the past years? I certainly hope that none of these employees of the judiciary have been viewing DVD's on unapproved platforms, decoding Adobe files, or (heavens forbid!) reading anything at all on 2600!
Many excellent responses on a complex area. Who's interest in starting an OS project to produce a solution for medical offices and/or hospitals?
In any case, a more general question concerns @Home's generally restrictive AUP. This is not the first time that @Home has saddled its users with restrictions to fairly common uses of a home network connection. Here in Connecticut, our CT @Home users group has had an active discussion regarding this restrictions. In point of fact, our AUP has prohibited VPNS, NATing, and host of other activities for a long time. Other "disallowed" activities include running a server at home, for instance. While I can accept the validity of not allowing an "@Home" user (as opposed to an "@Work" user from running a commercial server, prohibiting me from running an FTP server at home so I can retrieve files I need while at work seems to me to be unreasonable. Further, the last AUP I read (about a year ago) proported to make all content transmitted via the network connection the property of @Home (good thing I'm writing this at work!). Also, anything posted on the web site provided to each @Home subscriber would belong to @Home. So this means that if I write an email, @Home owns it...and if I write that Great American Novel and email the document to my publisher, actually @Home owns it because I emailed it...Say, I wonder if I send some illegal content the the police should actually arrest someone at @Home, because the simply act of transmitting it over my @Home connection makes it @Home's property...
As an argument for limiting actions such as running a web server, @Home has offered the negative impact that this has on network performance because the cable modem connection is shared by everyone on the same piece of coax. That's great, but I wonder a) how that makes it legitimate for @Home to claim to own the content of my transmissions, b) how my retrieving a 100K file once a day from work should be enough to kill their network, c) why they cannot just monitor the network for high-bandwidth abusers and deal with them directly without restricting users such as myself, or d) why they don't just install enough hardware to meet the demand they have created with their excessive and misleading advertising.
As everyone using @Home knows, they have already capped both upload and download transmission rates in most of their coverage areas. With a download cap of 128 or 256K, advertising speeds of up to 10MBs doesn't seem quite accurate, does it?
In the interest of fairness, I'll conclude that I am actually very happy with my @Home service. While the customer service phone line takes forever to get through, I have been fortunate to have had relatively rare service outages, and the ones that have happened have been brief (unlike others I know, but I've been very lucky). The service is "fast enough" for me (I'm not a gamer, so I don't know if I could "Quake" or not), although it is noticibly slower than the lightning fast speed it had when I first got it a few years ago). Overall, I'm actually quite happy with the service, but it would be better if I didn't have to worry that the cable police would be cutting off my service because I VPN'd in to work one night.
I think I would have been more impressed had there been some way to find out from the site who the editors are and what their academic / legal credentials are.
Something else that I wonder. So far, it seems axiomatic to the political/legal powers that be, than a web site operator should be help responsible for content posted by users of the website, even when they are not actually owners or employees of the web site. If I submit, say, an ad or classified or something to The New York Times which winds up advocating or even providing instructions for an illegal act, is the Times legally liable for that, or is it protected? I don't know, but I would like to hear from someone who does.
It seems to me that in this regard, electronic communications are treated markedly different than non-electronic communications. For instance, my employer can read my email or monitor my web surfing activity "because they own the equipment and my time at work." Can they monitor a personal phone call, or video tape me in the bathroom, or open personal mail that arrives at work? No, even though they own the telephone, locker room/bathroom, and that cardboard slot where my mail is put. I wonder if the distinction is that mail and the telephone are so ingrained in our society and commonplace, while the internet and email is still, to so many, new, dangerous, and unfamiliar.
What all these extra tlds (.sucks, .imafrog, etc) are really trying to do is impose an additional "directory" type of structure onto the DNS system, which in some fashion search engines already do. Since the idea of the DNS system is to a) provide human recognizable and memorizable names instead of hard-to-remember IP addresses and b) provide a level of indirection so that machines can change physical location (and hence IP address) without breaking every link to them, then the best way to create an additional structure that would organize things is to have a separate database/access method, in which sites are characterized according to topic (or keywords), pointing to the DNS name which localizes the machine by indirecting to the IP address.
I'm all in favor of adding a few new tlds, I suppose, like .xxx (although it's hard to argue that you didn't think www.hardcorepornsite.com was going to get you to a porn site, and it may be hard from a legal standpoint to require all sex sites to move to the .xxx tld - who defines what's obscene? what about nude artwork?), it seems to me that the creation of new tlds should be done for specific purposes like segregating of porn sites, or for a new country or whatever, and nut just to let people have cute names.