Try the box that says "Thank you for contributing, your ads are disabled". It's non-money contribution in the form of posts that are rated highly as User-Generated-Content. That's one way. What the poster next to me is saying that for once instead of TV where we got ads shoved at us, these companies have to get *just a little smarter*.
That box works because Slashdot knows that the users that contribute help bring in more users, so they reward them by turning off ads. But just because a site provides some users the option to turn off ads to reward their contributions doesn't mean that the site can survive if all users blocked ads.
I have that box, but I chose not to click it. I like Slashdot and want to support them, but I don't want to give them my own money, so I let the advertisers pay them.
Either way, you're getting some benefit (i.e. viewing a website) without paying for it. How is that not stealing?
It's not stealing because the provider of that website provides that benefit to me without requesting payment. There is no contract, either explicit or implied, that requires me to watch ads in exchange for the benefit provided.
Of course there's an implied contract that you'll view the ads in return for the content. Why do you think they put the ads on the page in the first place? Surely you don't think the ads are there to make the site look better or be more useful? Where do you think ad supported sites make their revenue?
You're not that naive, don't play stupid just to justify the fact that you don't like ads and don't want to see them. I may not agree with honestmonkey and his opinions about viewing ads, but at least I respect him for sticking to and defending his ideals and not pretending that the website doesn't expect that you'll view ads in return for using the website.
and I don't have a problem with viewing the occasional ad to help them keep the content free.
Then don't block the ads.
How far does your morality go? Do you feel an obligation to click on the ads? To buy the advertised goods and services even if you don't like them? How far can a sane person go? Everyone draws the line somewhere. I drew mine before viewing the ads- by using an adblocker. Yours is different but I don't see how any line is "superior" to another line.
My morality goes as far as not purposely modifying the website in a way that presents the website owner from obtaining revenue. Sometimes I do see an ad that looks interesting and I click on it. Sometimes I even buy the product. But I don't do that because I feel obligated to, I do that because I happened to see an ad for a product or service I found interesting or useful.
For example, I wouldn't have discovered Splunk without seeing an ad for it and clicking through to look a the product, and though I haven't purchased the product yet, I'm running a trial version and if it works out I may purchase it. I'd heard the name mentioned from time to time, but one time I had a particular data analysis need and the ad promised that the product would fill that need. And the trial version of the product did exactly what I needed to in much less time that writing it myself.
I'm not the GP, but I'll weigh in. I value my privacy and have a slow computer. As a result, I use NoScript (why the fuck does my bank have third party advertising and tracking JavaScript on the wrong side of the secure online banking???), flashblock and FlashVideoReplacer, when I use firefox.
I have no particular objection to advertising, but I'm not going to disable flashblock (flash is posted frequently in some forums I visit) and I'm not going to let google analytics know everything about me etc.
Actually, much of the time I use dillo or links2 since I like the speed. These simply don't support flash, animated GIFs, IFrames or Javascript. Links2 actually has an adblocker, but I don't use it.
So basically, to sum up, I do a bunch of things to make my browsing experience more pleasant. I don't block explicitly, but it is actually quite rare for me to see ads. This is almost certainly because most advertisers are dedicated to making your browsing experience unpleasant.
I don't feel bad about it because I'm not even trying to block them. I think that what I'm doing is an entirely reasonable and sane way to surf the web.
That's a completely different issue -- you're blocking the ads because you have valid security or performance worries. I have no problem with that, a user should do what he wants to do to protect his computer. My problem is when someone says that they are blocking ads because they don't want to see them.
I use links occasionally as well (usually for testing) and I don't feel bad about not seeing ads because the advertiser decided not to present in a way that's visible on my browser.
1. users brought their bandwidth. you brought yours. the users are not required to pay for yours too. they are not required to ensure you make money either.
I'm not interested in a random stream of bytes, so I'm not sure why you're focused on bandwidth. I'm interested in the content. A news website paid for that news content, and I don't have a problem with viewing the occasional ad to help them keep the content free.
2. because when you put content up on a publicly accessible server, by default you've given permission for people to pull data from it.. Once that data enters their computers, you have no say in what happens.
Well, that's not exactly true - you can't scrape content from CNN and repost it at Epi-TR-CNN.com and treat it as your own content - the content owners right to their data doesn't end once it enters your computer.
But in any case, it's not (currently) so much a legal issue as a moral or ethical issue. Some people want to pay websites for the content they consume and others don't. You apparently are one of the ones that think it's ok to take the content and not abide by the implied contract that says that you'll view ads in return for viewing the content. As long those people remain in the minority, then ad supported content will continue to exist, but if ad blocking software became much more popular, then more sites would use paywalls... or worse, push for legislation to make ad blockers illegal.
The internet is not cable television no matter how hard marketing droids try to make it that way. It's a good thing, really.
Well no, it's not like cable TV, if it was then you'd be paying a lot more for internet access since your ISP would have to pay each of the websites you have access to. The Internet is more like over-the-air broadcast TV where they put the content out there for free with the expectation that you'll view the ads embedded in the content.
Oddly enough, you seem to be advocating for more of the cable-TV model where every internet user pays some fee for the content they want to view in exchange for viewing ad-free content (much like subscribing to HBO or other pay-TV networks)
Either way you are talking about someone's business model. A model I don't have to support. They HOPE I'll view the ad, they HOPE I'll click on it, or just glance at it or whatever. So what? I control what my browser displays. I control what gets downloaded to my computer. I control the size of the font, whether pictures are displayed, what color everything is in. I control all of it. And their BUSINESS MODEL is that they HOPE I'll see their shit. That is a piece of shit BUSINESS MODEL that I DON"T HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN. AT ALL. EVER. They don't like it, they are free to try something else to get my attention, or try someone else, or ban me from their website, or whatever they might think of to make money. But they can't force me to download their shit if I don't want to.
But you are participating in it -- Slashdot is one of those sites that has the annoying advertiser supported business model. I don't know their subscriber rates but I can't imagine it's very high. Are you a Slashdot subscriber? It only costs half a cent per page to subscribe and you don't need to see any ads, but you can still support the site. Do you?
Why the fuck do you care about someone else's business model? Isn't this Slashdot? Screw the buggy whip manufacturers, and the RIAA middle men and all that? I do not give a shit about advertisers. If they can't survive, and the website closes down, I AM FINE WITH THAT. I am stealing nothing. Fuck them if they can't take it.
I care because I like having just about every site on the internet provide content for "free". I don't see any other way for so many sites to provide such content without advertising. I certainly don't want to have to set up a page-view account and have my account balance dinged half a cent for every page view.
If you're so fine with the website shutting down because you don't care about how they make money, why do you visit them at all? If you know a website relies on a business model that you don't approve of and you really don't care if they shut down, why don't you just stop visiting that site?
Its more like reading a free newspaper but not reading the advertisements. Wait, what was the moral dilemma again?
Well, it's more someone gathering up a bunch of free newspapers, cutting out all of the ads, then handing out the newspapers to anyone that wants them.
No one is saying you need to read all of the ads, but the ads are there and your eyes may stray to one while you're reading the paper, and that's what the advertisers are paying for -- the chance that you'll find their ad interesting enough to read it and ultimately purchase what they are selling.
I was going to say I shouldn't have to point out how stupid your argument is, but considering how stupid it is I guess I must. Point it out. The stupidity, that is. What you suggest is stealing. What I am doing is merely averting my eyes. I don't have to look at the goddamn ads. Fuck 'em if they can't come up with some other way to make money. To belabor the point, what am I stealing by not looking at ads? Should the police come to my house and arrest me if I throw the ads from the newspaper away without reading them all first? Fuck that.
Sure, you can try to avert your eyes,and that's what most people do... but you're not suggesting averting your eyes, you're suggesting running software to block the ads so you don't even have to avert your eyes - there's no chance of you even glancing at an ad and having one catch your eye. Why run the software if you can so easily avert your eyes and pay no attention at all to the ad? Who knows, maybe your wife told you that the only thing she wants for her birthday is a blue widget and maybe some advertiser will have a big flashing ad with flying blue widgets and you might think "Oh hey, I should get this for my wife".
But by running ad blocking software you won't even have the fleeting chance of seeing the ad.
If you just ignore the ad but let it be displayed, the advertiser has already accounted for the fact that 99% of the people that the ad is displayed to are going to ignore it... but he knows that some small percentage of people will glance at it and an even smaller percentage will find it interesting enough to click on it -- or even if you don't click on it, maybe whatever he's advertising will stick with you subconciously. He accepts that low payoff which is why he pays very little for ad impressions.
But, when you run blocking software, depending on how your software works, then you're either taking money from the site you're visiting by viewing their page but not loading the ad so they lose out on payment from the advertiser. Or, if your software loads the ad in the background, you're taking money from the advertiser who paid the site you're visiting for the ad impression, but since you've hidden the ad, he's not getting what he paid for.
Either way, you're getting some benefit (i.e. viewing a website) without paying for it. How is that not stealing?
Yeah, I was going to say something similar, but also, don't even worry about it. The question is dumb. If I can block the ads, then there is no moral problem with it. If a site wants to figure out a way to force them on me I'll either accept it or move on. It's evolution in action. Sites with less obtrusive or blatant ads will be more likely to get my business. If sites don't want me to visit with Adblock turned on, I won't visit. They either figure some other way to make money off me or they die.
Couldn't that be applied to other merchants as well? There's a small produce market near me that has fresh fruit and vegetables displayed in open boxes outside along the sidewalk where anyone passing by can just grab an orange and walk away. There's (normally) not even anyone outside to monitor it and it's a pretty busy sidewalk with lots of foot traffic so I'd blend right in.
So if I can take an orange without getting caught, I should have no moral problem with it? If they didn't want me to take the oranges, all they have to do is lock them up or keep all of the produce inside where someone can monitor it.
Or is web content different because "information wants to be free" (even if someome is paying for it one way or another)?
Advertising is evil. No need to rationalize ad blocking. Kick the marketers to the curb and move on. If the site needs another source of revenue, they'll find it be it micropayments, subscriptions, etc. And if you really care about the content you can then pay to get it, and if not, nothing of value is lost.
So are you a slashdot subscriber? It's easy to subscribe and as a subscriber you'll see no ads. Do you put your money where your mouth is, or do you block ads and let other people view them and pay for the sites you use?
I fail to see what the big deal is about standard banner and text ads. The most annnoying ads are the ones that take over the browser window and you have to click to dismiss them, I rarely go back to sites that have those. I block all flash (not just ads) because flash is annoying, but I don't mind seeing regular ads. Ironically, there have been a number of occasions when I've glanced at an ad just as I've hit the "back" button and I saw something interesting in the ad, but there's no way to see it again. Gmail used to give you a way to scroll back and forth through the ad history (they don't seem to allow that now), but few sites give you that option. Once you leave the page, you have no way to return to the ad.
you'd never put anything valuable in a bank vault would you?
You know that governments gurarantee bank deposits everywhere, because when they didn't people simlpy didn't put their money at the banks, right?
So if I put my $100,000 coin collection (or the secret recipe for my famous fried chicken) in a bank vault (i.e. a safe deposit box), the government will insure it? I did not know that.
Statement #1 A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep.
Statement #2 It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite
How is #2 supposed to function at all when you state #1? Does not RAID store it's data and parity over a bunch of single disk drives? Isn't that the idea behind the "A" in RAID?
If RAID can not utilize disk drives for block storage because they are not someplace you want to store data you wish to keep, then where do you plan on storing all that parity data/duplicated data to detect and filter errors/copy in part or whole to take off site?
If you know what the "A" means in RAID, why don't you know what the "R" means? Redundant implies (well, outright says) that data is stored on redundant disks (nevermind that RAID-0 has no redundancy, since R * 0 = 0). When you write your data to a RAID array, the write operation is not complete until the RAID controller guarantees that the data has been written to multiple disks (or to NVRAM (sometimes mirrored across redundant controllers) where it will eventually make its way to multiple disks). Therefore, once the write is complete, the data exists on multiple disks, so there's no contradiction between statement #1 and #2.
Logically (as opposed to physically), at no point in time is my data ever written to a single disk. As soon as the write operation is complete, the data is guaranteed to be redundantly written to multiple disks. (the guarantee may depend on the RAID controller writing it out later, but it's still making a guarantee that the data will always have a backup copy on more than one disk). There are certainly RAID implementations that will lie and claim that the data is safe, even before the full RAID stripe has been completely (or at all) written, or while the data is still in non battery protected cache RAM, but if you're using such a controller, you're accepting the risk.
If you're going to nitpick over semantics, don't pick one letter of the acronym and pretend that the rest of the letters don't mean anything.
no i'm storing 2TB and sometimes more on an LTO tape. when i first noticed i couldn't believe but i asked around on some backup forums and people said that its true. LTO tapes will frequently store a lot more data than they are rated for.
i'm using an HP MSL 8096. except for a bunch of bad drives that were replaced under warranty i haven't had stuck tapes or any other problems. if i need to pull a tape out i look in Netbackup for the tape # and slot #. issue the command to unlock the magazines. pull them out. pull tape out. takes a few minutes total time.
i buy HP branded LTO-4 tapes for $30 each. maybe $32. they are so cheap and store so much i don't rotate that much. just on data that we don't need past 6 months. i buy 40 tapes per year. i even have a secret stash of backups with a lot more data than i send offsite. its cheaper buying LTO-4 tapes than calling the backup company to bring back a tape the next day. even if its only once a year.
and i remember calling PHB and asking for 300 DLT tapes which cost $25,000 back in the day
You don't seem to understand the distinction between compressed storage and native storage.
I fully believe that you're writing 2TB of data to your LTO-4 tape drive and it's storing that data on the tape. But it's still writing only 800GB of data to the tape, but the tape drive uses built-in compression software to compress the data while writing. It's completely transparent to you and the application writing to the drive (well, most backup software is aware of tape drive compression and can turn it off if it wants to). Netbackup (and other backup software) can optionally compress the data at the client before writing, but it's usually better to let the tape drive do it since client compression uses a lot of CPU on the client being backed up so unless you have network constraints it's better to let the drive do it.
Technically you will often get a bit over 800GB native capacity on a tape, especially on fresh tapes since there's a bit of excess capacity built-in to accommodate bad blocks on the tape (that are automatically rewritten by the drive when the read verification fails)... however, there's not so much excess capacity that you can write 2TB without compression. LTO-4 (and earlier) is rated at 2:1 compression, but apparently they use a new and better compression algorithm for LTO-5 since LTO-5 is rated at 2.5:1.
We usually get between 1 to 2TB per LTO-4 tape for general fileserver data, but when I backup a volume that contains mostly JPEG images (along with some XML descriptive files), I only get around 900GB/tape.
most of my 1000 some tapes are ancient DLT. i have about 40 LT-4 tapes in storage. even by itself that is like $800 per month if you figure 2TB on average.
the $2000 monthly charge includes shipping off site. guy comes once a month and i give him a tape. takes a few minutes. what labor cost? takes 5 minutes to take it out of the robot.
and the above doesn't include another 100TB archive i have as well at 10TB or so of tapes that i rotate for some other backups for archives.
i can see this working for smallish businesses
But you're not storing 2TB of data on single LTO-4 tape, you're storing 800GB of compressed data on a tape, so those 40 tapes are holding 3.2TB of data. You can apply the same (or better) compression to the data that the LTO drive does before you ship your data to Amazon, so you need to look at the native capacity of the tapes, not the compressed capacity. Let your backup software do the compression and Amazon will store the same amount of data that you can store natively on a tape.
If you have 500 DLT1 tapes (40GB native, or 2TB) stored offsite that you rarely access, you may save money by sending them to Glacier storage -- it would cost $20/month to store all of that data at Amazon. And you're going to have to copy that data to newer media at some point if you want to maintain access to it in the future, so you may as well do it now and let Amazon store it for you and you'll never need to do a media conversion again.
What tape library do you use? Ours has a stuck tape or other problem at least once or twice a month and sending someone to the server room to take care of it can take an hour or more depending on how many times they need to wait for a lengthy reset process after clearing the problem. We once had a label come off a cleaning tape, which jammed up the device for a day until the vendor made a service call to fix it. It takes us a lot more than 5 minutes to pull a magazine out of the drive, scan the tapes for documentation, load the tapes up into the off-site storage box, walk it to the mail room, then bring back the old rotated set of tapes and load back into the tape library.
Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
When I need to restore data RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I restore it from a snapshot on the storage array. Glacier storage would be for when my storage array has gone up in flames and since it'll take me a week(s) to buy a new array and find somewhere to keep it, waiting a few hours for a restore job to be available is ok with me, especially since it'll take 2 weeks to restore the data to my array over my 1gbit internet connection.
Centon DataStick Pro 64gb is about 35$ each. I bet if you buy 50 of them, they are cheaper. Get a good fire safe, and store one on site, one off site.
You forgot to include labor costds to pay someone to plug them into the backup server, swap them out, ship them offsite, and keep track of them.
But even if you exclude labor costs:
50 of those memory sticks cost $1750, if you split them between offsite and onsite, and have 2 copies of the data on each set, that's gives you 768GB of storage (50 / 2 / 2 * 64), which would cost about $8/month on Glacier, so you could store that data for more than 15 years for what it costs you to buy the memory sticks.
At the 50GB level, that is where this service becomes useful. For maximum security, I'd create a TrueCrypt volume, stuff all the stuff needing to go into the archive into it, gpg sign the volume, and upload the volume and its signature. That would mean 50 cents a month indefinitely, but at the minimum, if the upload is successful, Amazon would be storing the data on a SAN with at least RAID 5 or 6 on the backend.
Of course, with a Blu-Ray burner, I can spend a couple bucks and burn the data onto BD-R media to store indefinitely.
For business critical data, perhaps the best thing would be both burning a local copy to optical media, then uploading a TC container to AWS. This allows recovery in a lot more circumstances. This way, one doesn't need to sit there waiting for stuff to get readied, then download, but if there are no working local copies, the data is still accessible.
For 50GB you may as well use regular S3 storage... at 12 cents/GB, that's $6/month and you have instant access to your data, no need to wait 3 to 5 hours to do a restore from Glacier storage (and they say "most jobs" can be retrieved in that timeframe, they didn't say if 5 hours is the upper bound). If you save yourself an hour or two during the year when doing a critical file restore, then your saved labor costs should cover the additional cost of using S3.
my company pays for offsite storage of our tapes and i did some quick math
$2000 a month to store over 1000 tapes for us. I think the minimum bill is like $1500 if you only have a few tapes
$.01/GB is $10 to $20 per LTO-4 tape per month. i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data. i send out one tape per month for storage and keep a bunch more locally. so even on the cheap end that's $240 per month for the first year.
Compress your data before you send it to Amazon and you'll have a more fair comparison. An LTO-4 tape holds 800GB native, so your thousand tapes is 800TB of data, which would cost you $8000/month on Amazon Glacier.
If you store multiple copies of your data (to protect against tape failure) and could get by with only 200TB of Glacier space, then it might be cost effective, lower labor costs in loading tapes and shipping them offsite, and dropping maintenance on your tape library (or libraries) may also sway the decision.
The numbers change for LTO-5 (1.5TB native), but then you're looking at a large capital cost to swap out your tapes and upgrade your tape drives.
I'm in a little different situation - I have my data replicated to a colocated storage array with less than 100TB of data. Amazon Glacier storage would cost about the same as I pay in maintenance on the array (ignoring colocation fees). Glacier is not a drop-in replacement for the array, since the storage array also runs my DR VMware cluster, but it may be more cost effective to get rid of the colocated array cabinet and VMware cluster hardware and rent some VM's with a small amount of storage for the critical servers I need for disaster recovery, using Glacier to store the rest of my data.
In addition to smarter touchpad management, the capacitive sensors can be used for other functions. A concept video suggested that swiping one's fingers across the spacebar could be part of an auto-complete typing scheme. Auto-complete seems entirely unnecessary for a proper keyboard, unless you're a hopeless hunt-and-peck type, but the spacebar does seem ripe for thumb flicks or pinch gestures. I'd love to be able to move the cursor left and right by sliding my thumbs across the spacebar, for example. Switching between applications by waving one's hand left and right over the keyboard would be pretty cool, too.
Does anyone really think that would work well? I already disable the touchpad on my touchpoint (i.e. little red eraser tipped joystick) keyboard since stray touches on the touchpad cause phantom cursor movements, would a "smart" spacebar be useful?
But if you sent up an army of these plutonium powered craft, eventually one will have a plutonium fuel cell rupture after a launch failure and contaminate a large area.
One interesting way of dealing with nuclear waste: reprocess fuel a few times, extracting Pu-238 and friends (those pesky "have to keep waste sealed forever to prevent hyper-squirrels in the year 3,001,000 from being irradiated" elements) and launching an army of deep space probes. But then there's the waste stream from reprocessing...
Of course, the problem with that proposal is that spacecraft don't always end up where you want them, and sometimes crash back to earth and leave a widespread flaming pile of debris that can spread the plutonium over large areas.
Who's going to develop for their new platform after what happened the last time?
For that matter, who trusts HP for anything after their behavior "Hey, we're in the tablet market, buy WebOS, it's the wave of the future!" "Oh hey, we don't want to be in the tablet market, so we're selling our entire inventory for 80% off!" "Oh yeah, and the PC market sucks, we're spinning of the division, so no more HP PC's!" "Well maybe PC's aren't so bad after all, we decided to keep selling them! So keep buying them!" "Oh you know, we were wrong about tablets, now we we're going to sell them again and we really mean it this time!"
I won't buy HP servers because I really don't know where they are going and don't want to build an HP shop, then find out in 2 years that they decided that servers are not profitable.
"Apple alone is worth more than what 200+ countries in the world could produce in an entire year."
What's the betting that EVERY country in the third world hellhole that is AFRICA is in that 200+? Hilarious.
When do you think AFRICANS will be producing iPads and iPods? How about NEVER. How about some time after MONKEYS produce them?
I think the Africans will be next in line as cheap labor after the standard of living and incomes in China and India improve to their point where they are no longer cheap yet they will all want access to cheap imported goods. iPads aren't made in China because rural farmers are naturally good at assembling electronics, but because the $10/day they get paid for the work is much more than they'd earn on the farm and the work is much easier despite the long hours.
It will take years, perhaps decades, to get to the point where Africa becomes a major manufacturing hub, but I really believe that day will come.
I have drives sitting in archives (out of computers, on the shelf in sealed bags) since 1995. They were put there to hold original Autocad files for electrical systems of buildings.
Periodically we have to dredge these up and extract copies of some documents. None has ever given us a bit of trouble.
A drive out of a computer in a sealed environment is an amazing storage media. Virtually zero bit rot regardless of what the end-of-the-world doom sayers tell you about decaying magnetic fields. Spinning storage is at far greater risk than storage sitting in a disconnected machine or bare drive.
The biggest problem is remembering to keep at least one controller that is capable or running these older drive types. In fact, that is the only reason we ever copy drives to newer media; simply because mfm controllers and the machines that can accept them are becoming extinct.
I have drives that have been spinning for over 5 years without a disk error, and drives that have failed after a month, 6 months, a year, etc.
I don't trust my home mp3 collection to a single drive, nor would I trust data worth millions of dollars (or a criminal prosecution) to a single drive or even a single location. All of our important corporate data is replicated offsite (and is also saved to tape).
I've pulled 2 year old PC's out of storage (stored in a climate controlled datacenter) and had drives fail to spin up even though they all worked fine when they were stored. Keeping the drive powered off is no guarantee of data integrity, but if you keep the drive powered on and scrubbed you know that the data is secure. (with 2 backup copies of the data via RAID-6 or RAID-DP)
For powered off storage, I trust tapes a lot more than disk drives.
"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"
In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.
That sounds like an argument for storing the data on a properly backed up storage array instead of a risky single-drive solution. They've already spend hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars of dollars accumulating the data, and will likely spend hundreds of thousands more to take the case to trial - why risk hundreds of thousands of dollars to save $10,000?
"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"
Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.
Throwing away millions to save $10,000 seems just as unreasonable as throwing away millions to save $139 so there's undoubtedly more to the story.
"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"
Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.
I'd leave the company because then I'm no longer an IT professional, I'd be an IT "hacker" hired to cobble together solutions that may or may not work, but are guaranteed to cause headaches down the line. I've gone into startups that had homegrown networks built on such gear and while it works for a while, it inevitably causes problems and eventually as the company grows, they are forced to rearchitect the network properly - in a 20 person office, no one cares so much if you have to power cycle the switch (again), but when you grow to a sizable office and can't reach their budget and forecasting server when the Marketing guys share a large video file among themselves, suddenly it's costing real money to have dozens of people costing $100+/hour sitting on their butts for 30 minutes a day waiting for the network to come back.
I'm not going to use consumer grade $200 network switches to network a large corporate office environment (I might not use Cisco, but I'm not going to build it on cheap $200 switches), nor am I going to store data that's worth millions of dollars on a single (or two) 3TB hard drives. That's called being set up for failure, and I'll leave before I let myself become the fall-guy for an under funded solution that was "engineered" by my boss looking up prices on Newegg.
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Try the box that says "Thank you for contributing, your ads are disabled". It's non-money contribution in the form of posts that are rated highly as User-Generated-Content. That's one way. What the poster next to me is saying that for once instead of TV where we got ads shoved at us, these companies have to get *just a little smarter*.
That box works because Slashdot knows that the users that contribute help bring in more users, so they reward them by turning off ads. But just because a site provides some users the option to turn off ads to reward their contributions doesn't mean that the site can survive if all users blocked ads.
I have that box, but I chose not to click it. I like Slashdot and want to support them, but I don't want to give them my own money, so I let the advertisers pay them.
Either way, you're getting some benefit (i.e. viewing a website) without paying for it. How is that not stealing?
It's not stealing because the provider of that website provides that benefit to me without requesting payment. There is no contract, either explicit or implied, that requires me to watch ads in exchange for the benefit provided.
Of course there's an implied contract that you'll view the ads in return for the content. Why do you think they put the ads on the page in the first place? Surely you don't think the ads are there to make the site look better or be more useful? Where do you think ad supported sites make their revenue?
You're not that naive, don't play stupid just to justify the fact that you don't like ads and don't want to see them. I may not agree with honestmonkey and his opinions about viewing ads, but at least I respect him for sticking to and defending his ideals and not pretending that the website doesn't expect that you'll view ads in return for using the website.
and I don't have a problem with viewing the occasional ad to help them keep the content free.
Then don't block the ads.
How far does your morality go? Do you feel an obligation to click on the ads? To buy the advertised goods and services even if you don't like them? How far can a sane person go? Everyone draws the line somewhere. I drew mine before viewing the ads- by using an adblocker. Yours is different but I don't see how any line is "superior" to another line.
My morality goes as far as not purposely modifying the website in a way that presents the website owner from obtaining revenue. Sometimes I do see an ad that looks interesting and I click on it. Sometimes I even buy the product. But I don't do that because I feel obligated to, I do that because I happened to see an ad for a product or service I found interesting or useful.
For example, I wouldn't have discovered Splunk without seeing an ad for it and clicking through to look a the product, and though I haven't purchased the product yet, I'm running a trial version and if it works out I may purchase it. I'd heard the name mentioned from time to time, but one time I had a particular data analysis need and the ad promised that the product would fill that need. And the trial version of the product did exactly what I needed to in much less time that writing it myself.
I'm not the GP, but I'll weigh in. I value my privacy and have a slow computer. As a result, I use NoScript (why the fuck does my bank have third party advertising and tracking JavaScript on the wrong side of the secure online banking???), flashblock and FlashVideoReplacer, when I use firefox.
I have no particular objection to advertising, but I'm not going to disable flashblock (flash is posted frequently in some forums I visit) and I'm not going to let google analytics know everything about me etc.
Actually, much of the time I use dillo or links2 since I like the speed. These simply don't support flash, animated GIFs, IFrames or Javascript. Links2 actually has an adblocker, but I don't use it.
So basically, to sum up, I do a bunch of things to make my browsing experience more pleasant. I don't block explicitly, but it is actually quite rare for me to see ads. This is almost certainly because most advertisers are dedicated to making your browsing experience unpleasant.
I don't feel bad about it because I'm not even trying to block them. I think that what I'm doing is an entirely reasonable and sane way to surf the web.
That's a completely different issue -- you're blocking the ads because you have valid security or performance worries. I have no problem with that, a user should do what he wants to do to protect his computer. My problem is when someone says that they are blocking ads because they don't want to see them.
I use links occasionally as well (usually for testing) and I don't feel bad about not seeing ads because the advertiser decided not to present in a way that's visible on my browser.
1. users brought their bandwidth. you brought yours. the users are not required to pay for yours too. they are not required to ensure you make money either.
I'm not interested in a random stream of bytes, so I'm not sure why you're focused on bandwidth. I'm interested in the content. A news website paid for that news content, and I don't have a problem with viewing the occasional ad to help them keep the content free.
2. because when you put content up on a publicly accessible server, by default you've given permission for people to pull data from it.. Once that data enters their computers, you have no say in what happens.
Well, that's not exactly true - you can't scrape content from CNN and repost it at Epi-TR-CNN.com and treat it as your own content - the content owners right to their data doesn't end once it enters your computer.
But in any case, it's not (currently) so much a legal issue as a moral or ethical issue. Some people want to pay websites for the content they consume and others don't. You apparently are one of the ones that think it's ok to take the content and not abide by the implied contract that says that you'll view ads in return for viewing the content. As long those people remain in the minority, then ad supported content will continue to exist, but if ad blocking software became much more popular, then more sites would use paywalls... or worse, push for legislation to make ad blockers illegal.
The internet is not cable television no matter how hard marketing droids try to make it that way. It's a good thing, really.
Well no, it's not like cable TV, if it was then you'd be paying a lot more for internet access since your ISP would have to pay each of the websites you have access to. The Internet is more like over-the-air broadcast TV where they put the content out there for free with the expectation that you'll view the ads embedded in the content.
Oddly enough, you seem to be advocating for more of the cable-TV model where every internet user pays some fee for the content they want to view in exchange for viewing ad-free content (much like subscribing to HBO or other pay-TV networks)
Either way you are talking about someone's business model. A model I don't have to support. They HOPE I'll view the ad, they HOPE I'll click on it, or just glance at it or whatever. So what? I control what my browser displays. I control what gets downloaded to my computer. I control the size of the font, whether pictures are displayed, what color everything is in. I control all of it. And their BUSINESS MODEL is that they HOPE I'll see their shit. That is a piece of shit BUSINESS MODEL that I DON"T HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN. AT ALL. EVER. They don't like it, they are free to try something else to get my attention, or try someone else, or ban me from their website, or whatever they might think of to make money. But they can't force me to download their shit if I don't want to.
But you are participating in it -- Slashdot is one of those sites that has the annoying advertiser supported business model. I don't know their subscriber rates but I can't imagine it's very high. Are you a Slashdot subscriber? It only costs half a cent per page to subscribe and you don't need to see any ads, but you can still support the site. Do you?
Why the fuck do you care about someone else's business model? Isn't this Slashdot? Screw the buggy whip manufacturers, and the RIAA middle men and all that? I do not give a shit about advertisers. If they can't survive, and the website closes down, I AM FINE WITH THAT. I am stealing nothing. Fuck them if they can't take it.
I care because I like having just about every site on the internet provide content for "free". I don't see any other way for so many sites to provide such content without advertising. I certainly don't want to have to set up a page-view account and have my account balance dinged half a cent for every page view.
If you're so fine with the website shutting down because you don't care about how they make money, why do you visit them at all? If you know a website relies on a business model that you don't approve of and you really don't care if they shut down, why don't you just stop visiting that site?
Its more like reading a free newspaper but not reading the advertisements. Wait, what was the moral dilemma again?
Well, it's more someone gathering up a bunch of free newspapers, cutting out all of the ads, then handing out the newspapers to anyone that wants them.
No one is saying you need to read all of the ads, but the ads are there and your eyes may stray to one while you're reading the paper, and that's what the advertisers are paying for -- the chance that you'll find their ad interesting enough to read it and ultimately purchase what they are selling.
I was going to say I shouldn't have to point out how stupid your argument is, but considering how stupid it is I guess I must. Point it out. The stupidity, that is. What you suggest is stealing. What I am doing is merely averting my eyes. I don't have to look at the goddamn ads. Fuck 'em if they can't come up with some other way to make money. To belabor the point, what am I stealing by not looking at ads? Should the police come to my house and arrest me if I throw the ads from the newspaper away without reading them all first? Fuck that.
Sure, you can try to avert your eyes,and that's what most people do... but you're not suggesting averting your eyes, you're suggesting running software to block the ads so you don't even have to avert your eyes - there's no chance of you even glancing at an ad and having one catch your eye. Why run the software if you can so easily avert your eyes and pay no attention at all to the ad? Who knows, maybe your wife told you that the only thing she wants for her birthday is a blue widget and maybe some advertiser will have a big flashing ad with flying blue widgets and you might think "Oh hey, I should get this for my wife".
But by running ad blocking software you won't even have the fleeting chance of seeing the ad.
If you just ignore the ad but let it be displayed, the advertiser has already accounted for the fact that 99% of the people that the ad is displayed to are going to ignore it... but he knows that some small percentage of people will glance at it and an even smaller percentage will find it interesting enough to click on it -- or even if you don't click on it, maybe whatever he's advertising will stick with you subconciously. He accepts that low payoff which is why he pays very little for ad impressions.
But, when you run blocking software, depending on how your software works, then you're either taking money from the site you're visiting by viewing their page but not loading the ad so they lose out on payment from the advertiser. Or, if your software loads the ad in the background, you're taking money from the advertiser who paid the site you're visiting for the ad impression, but since you've hidden the ad, he's not getting what he paid for.
Either way, you're getting some benefit (i.e. viewing a website) without paying for it. How is that not stealing?
Yeah, I was going to say something similar, but also, don't even worry about it. The question is dumb. If I can block the ads, then there is no moral problem with it. If a site wants to figure out a way to force them on me I'll either accept it or move on. It's evolution in action. Sites with less obtrusive or blatant ads will be more likely to get my business. If sites don't want me to visit with Adblock turned on, I won't visit. They either figure some other way to make money off me or they die.
Couldn't that be applied to other merchants as well? There's a small produce market near me that has fresh fruit and vegetables displayed in open boxes outside along the sidewalk where anyone passing by can just grab an orange and walk away. There's (normally) not even anyone outside to monitor it and it's a pretty busy sidewalk with lots of foot traffic so I'd blend right in.
So if I can take an orange without getting caught, I should have no moral problem with it? If they didn't want me to take the oranges, all they have to do is lock them up or keep all of the produce inside where someone can monitor it.
Or is web content different because "information wants to be free" (even if someome is paying for it one way or another)?
Advertising is evil. No need to rationalize ad blocking. Kick the marketers to the curb and move on. If the site needs another source of revenue, they'll find it be it micropayments, subscriptions, etc. And if you really care about the content you can then pay to get it, and if not, nothing of value is lost.
So are you a slashdot subscriber? It's easy to subscribe and as a subscriber you'll see no ads. Do you put your money where your mouth is, or do you block ads and let other people view them and pay for the sites you use?
I fail to see what the big deal is about standard banner and text ads. The most annnoying ads are the ones that take over the browser window and you have to click to dismiss them, I rarely go back to sites that have those. I block all flash (not just ads) because flash is annoying, but I don't mind seeing regular ads. Ironically, there have been a number of occasions when I've glanced at an ad just as I've hit the "back" button and I saw something interesting in the ad, but there's no way to see it again. Gmail used to give you a way to scroll back and forth through the ad history (they don't seem to allow that now), but few sites give you that option. Once you leave the page, you have no way to return to the ad.
You know that governments gurarantee bank deposits everywhere, because when they didn't people simlpy didn't put their money at the banks, right?
So if I put my $100,000 coin collection (or the secret recipe for my famous fried chicken) in a bank vault (i.e. a safe deposit box), the government will insure it? I did not know that.
Statement #1
A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep.
Statement #2
It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite
How is #2 supposed to function at all when you state #1?
Does not RAID store it's data and parity over a bunch of single disk drives? Isn't that the idea behind the "A" in RAID?
If RAID can not utilize disk drives for block storage because they are not someplace you want to store data you wish to keep, then where do you plan on storing all that parity data/duplicated data to detect and filter errors/copy in part or whole to take off site?
If you know what the "A" means in RAID, why don't you know what the "R" means? Redundant implies (well, outright says) that data is stored on redundant disks (nevermind that RAID-0 has no redundancy, since R * 0 = 0). When you write your data to a RAID array, the write operation is not complete until the RAID controller guarantees that the data has been written to multiple disks (or to NVRAM (sometimes mirrored across redundant controllers) where it will eventually make its way to multiple disks). Therefore, once the write is complete, the data exists on multiple disks, so there's no contradiction between statement #1 and #2.
Logically (as opposed to physically), at no point in time is my data ever written to a single disk. As soon as the write operation is complete, the data is guaranteed to be redundantly written to multiple disks. (the guarantee may depend on the RAID controller writing it out later, but it's still making a guarantee that the data will always have a backup copy on more than one disk). There are certainly RAID implementations that will lie and claim that the data is safe, even before the full RAID stripe has been completely (or at all) written, or while the data is still in non battery protected cache RAM, but if you're using such a controller, you're accepting the risk.
If you're going to nitpick over semantics, don't pick one letter of the acronym and pretend that the rest of the letters don't mean anything.
no i'm storing 2TB and sometimes more on an LTO tape. when i first noticed i couldn't believe but i asked around on some backup forums and people said that its true. LTO tapes will frequently store a lot more data than they are rated for.
i'm using an HP MSL 8096. except for a bunch of bad drives that were replaced under warranty i haven't had stuck tapes or any other problems. if i need to pull a tape out i look in Netbackup for the tape # and slot #. issue the command to unlock the magazines. pull them out. pull tape out. takes a few minutes total time.
i buy HP branded LTO-4 tapes for $30 each. maybe $32. they are so cheap and store so much i don't rotate that much. just on data that we don't need past 6 months. i buy 40 tapes per year. i even have a secret stash of backups with a lot more data than i send offsite. its cheaper buying LTO-4 tapes than calling the backup company to bring back a tape the next day. even if its only once a year.
and i remember calling PHB and asking for 300 DLT tapes which cost $25,000 back in the day
You don't seem to understand the distinction between compressed storage and native storage.
I fully believe that you're writing 2TB of data to your LTO-4 tape drive and it's storing that data on the tape. But it's still writing only 800GB of data to the tape, but the tape drive uses built-in compression software to compress the data while writing. It's completely transparent to you and the application writing to the drive (well, most backup software is aware of tape drive compression and can turn it off if it wants to). Netbackup (and other backup software) can optionally compress the data at the client before writing, but it's usually better to let the tape drive do it since client compression uses a lot of CPU on the client being backed up so unless you have network constraints it's better to let the drive do it.
Technically you will often get a bit over 800GB native capacity on a tape, especially on fresh tapes since there's a bit of excess capacity built-in to accommodate bad blocks on the tape (that are automatically rewritten by the drive when the read verification fails)... however, there's not so much excess capacity that you can write 2TB without compression. LTO-4 (and earlier) is rated at 2:1 compression, but apparently they use a new and better compression algorithm for LTO-5 since LTO-5 is rated at 2.5:1.
We usually get between 1 to 2TB per LTO-4 tape for general fileserver data, but when I backup a volume that contains mostly JPEG images (along with some XML descriptive files), I only get around 900GB/tape.
nope
most of my 1000 some tapes are ancient DLT. i have about 40 LT-4 tapes in storage. even by itself that is like $800 per month if you figure 2TB on average.
the $2000 monthly charge includes shipping off site. guy comes once a month and i give him a tape. takes a few minutes. what labor cost? takes 5 minutes to take it out of the robot.
and the above doesn't include another 100TB archive i have as well at 10TB or so of tapes that i rotate for some other backups for archives.
i can see this working for smallish businesses
But you're not storing 2TB of data on single LTO-4 tape, you're storing 800GB of compressed data on a tape, so those 40 tapes are holding 3.2TB of data. You can apply the same (or better) compression to the data that the LTO drive does before you ship your data to Amazon, so you need to look at the native capacity of the tapes, not the compressed capacity. Let your backup software do the compression and Amazon will store the same amount of data that you can store natively on a tape.
If you have 500 DLT1 tapes (40GB native, or 2TB) stored offsite that you rarely access, you may save money by sending them to Glacier storage -- it would cost $20/month to store all of that data at Amazon. And you're going to have to copy that data to newer media at some point if you want to maintain access to it in the future, so you may as well do it now and let Amazon store it for you and you'll never need to do a media conversion again.
What tape library do you use? Ours has a stuck tape or other problem at least once or twice a month and sending someone to the server room to take care of it can take an hour or more depending on how many times they need to wait for a lengthy reset process after clearing the problem. We once had a label come off a cleaning tape, which jammed up the device for a day until the vendor made a service call to fix it. It takes us a lot more than 5 minutes to pull a magazine out of the drive, scan the tapes for documentation, load the tapes up into the off-site storage box, walk it to the mail room, then bring back the old rotated set of tapes and load back into the tape library.
Whenever I need to restore data from an archive backup, I need it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
Amazon is smoking crack.
When I need to restore data RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I restore it from a snapshot on the storage array. Glacier storage would be for when my storage array has gone up in flames and since it'll take me a week(s) to buy a new array and find somewhere to keep it, waiting a few hours for a restore job to be available is ok with me, especially since it'll take 2 weeks to restore the data to my array over my 1gbit internet connection.
Centon DataStick Pro 64gb is about 35$ each. I bet if you buy 50 of them, they are cheaper. Get a good fire safe, and store one on site, one off site.
You forgot to include labor costds to pay someone to plug them into the backup server, swap them out, ship them offsite, and keep track of them.
But even if you exclude labor costs:
50 of those memory sticks cost $1750, if you split them between offsite and onsite, and have 2 copies of the data on each set, that's gives you 768GB of storage (50 / 2 / 2 * 64), which would cost about $8/month on Glacier, so you could store that data for more than 15 years for what it costs you to buy the memory sticks.
At the 50GB level, that is where this service becomes useful. For maximum security, I'd create a TrueCrypt volume, stuff all the stuff needing to go into the archive into it, gpg sign the volume, and upload the volume and its signature. That would mean 50 cents a month indefinitely, but at the minimum, if the upload is successful, Amazon would be storing the data on a SAN with at least RAID 5 or 6 on the backend.
Of course, with a Blu-Ray burner, I can spend a couple bucks and burn the data onto BD-R media to store indefinitely.
For business critical data, perhaps the best thing would be both burning a local copy to optical media, then uploading a TC container to AWS. This allows recovery in a lot more circumstances. This way, one doesn't need to sit there waiting for stuff to get readied, then download, but if there are no working local copies, the data is still accessible.
For 50GB you may as well use regular S3 storage... at 12 cents/GB, that's $6/month and you have instant access to your data, no need to wait 3 to 5 hours to do a restore from Glacier storage (and they say "most jobs" can be retrieved in that timeframe, they didn't say if 5 hours is the upper bound). If you save yourself an hour or two during the year when doing a critical file restore, then your saved labor costs should cover the additional cost of using S3.
my company pays for offsite storage of our tapes and i did some quick math
$2000 a month to store over 1000 tapes for us. I think the minimum bill is like $1500 if you only have a few tapes
$.01/GB is $10 to $20 per LTO-4 tape per month. i know the specs are less but ive seen LTO-4 tapes hold close to 4GB of data.
i send out one tape per month for storage and keep a bunch more locally. so even on the cheap end that's $240 per month for the first year.
Compress your data before you send it to Amazon and you'll have a more fair comparison. An LTO-4 tape holds 800GB native, so your thousand tapes is 800TB of data, which would cost you $8000/month on Amazon Glacier.
If you store multiple copies of your data (to protect against tape failure) and could get by with only 200TB of Glacier space, then it might be cost effective, lower labor costs in loading tapes and shipping them offsite, and dropping maintenance on your tape library (or libraries) may also sway the decision.
The numbers change for LTO-5 (1.5TB native), but then you're looking at a large capital cost to swap out your tapes and upgrade your tape drives.
I'm in a little different situation - I have my data replicated to a colocated storage array with less than 100TB of data. Amazon Glacier storage would cost about the same as I pay in maintenance on the array (ignoring colocation fees). Glacier is not a drop-in replacement for the array, since the storage array also runs my DR VMware cluster, but it may be more cost effective to get rid of the colocated array cabinet and VMware cluster hardware and rent some VM's with a small amount of storage for the critical servers I need for disaster recovery, using Glacier to store the rest of my data.
The article mentions a touch sensitive space bar:
In addition to smarter touchpad management, the capacitive sensors can be used for other functions. A concept video suggested that swiping one's fingers across the spacebar could be part of an auto-complete typing scheme. Auto-complete seems entirely unnecessary for a proper keyboard, unless you're a hopeless hunt-and-peck type, but the spacebar does seem ripe for thumb flicks or pinch gestures. I'd love to be able to move the cursor left and right by sliding my thumbs across the spacebar, for example. Switching between applications by waving one's hand left and right over the keyboard would be pretty cool, too.
Does anyone really think that would work well? I already disable the touchpad on my touchpoint (i.e. little red eraser tipped joystick) keyboard since stray touches on the touchpad cause phantom cursor movements, would a "smart" spacebar be useful?
Can you name even one time where plutonium has been spread over large areas in such a fashion?
This is the closest I could find so far:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_96#Fate_of_the_plutonium_fuel
The fate of the plutonium is unknown.
But if you sent up an army of these plutonium powered craft, eventually one will have a plutonium fuel cell rupture after a launch failure and contaminate a large area.
One interesting way of dealing with nuclear waste: reprocess fuel a few times, extracting Pu-238 and friends (those pesky "have to keep waste sealed forever to prevent hyper-squirrels in the year 3,001,000 from being irradiated" elements) and launching an army of deep space probes. But then there's the waste stream from reprocessing...
Of course, the problem with that proposal is that spacecraft don't always end up where you want them, and sometimes crash back to earth and leave a widespread flaming pile of debris that can spread the plutonium over large areas.
Who's going to develop for their new platform after what happened the last time?
For that matter, who trusts HP for anything after their behavior "Hey, we're in the tablet market, buy WebOS, it's the wave of the future!" "Oh hey, we don't want to be in the tablet market, so we're selling our entire inventory for 80% off!" "Oh yeah, and the PC market sucks, we're spinning of the division, so no more HP PC's!" "Well maybe PC's aren't so bad after all, we decided to keep selling them! So keep buying them!" "Oh you know, we were wrong about tablets, now we we're going to sell them again and we really mean it this time!"
I won't buy HP servers because I really don't know where they are going and don't want to build an HP shop, then find out in 2 years that they decided that servers are not profitable.
"Apple alone is worth more than what 200+ countries in the world could produce in an entire year."
What's the betting that EVERY country in the third world hellhole that is AFRICA is in that 200+? Hilarious.
When do you think AFRICANS will be producing iPads and iPods? How about NEVER. How about some time after MONKEYS produce them?
I think the Africans will be next in line as cheap labor after the standard of living and incomes in China and India improve to their point where they are no longer cheap yet they will all want access to cheap imported goods. iPads aren't made in China because rural farmers are naturally good at assembling electronics, but because the $10/day they get paid for the work is much more than they'd earn on the farm and the work is much easier despite the long hours.
It will take years, perhaps decades, to get to the point where Africa becomes a major manufacturing hub, but I really believe that day will come.
I have drives sitting in archives (out of computers, on the shelf in sealed bags) since 1995.
They were put there to hold original Autocad files for electrical systems of buildings.
Periodically we have to dredge these up and extract copies of some documents. None has ever given us a bit of trouble.
A drive out of a computer in a sealed environment is an amazing storage media. Virtually zero bit rot regardless of what the end-of-the-world doom sayers tell you about decaying magnetic fields. Spinning storage is at far greater risk than storage sitting in a disconnected machine or bare drive.
The biggest problem is remembering to keep at least one controller that is capable or running these older drive types. In fact, that is the only reason we ever copy drives to newer media; simply because mfm controllers and the machines that can accept them are becoming extinct.
I have drives that have been spinning for over 5 years without a disk error, and drives that have failed after a month, 6 months, a year, etc.
I don't trust my home mp3 collection to a single drive, nor would I trust data worth millions of dollars (or a criminal prosecution) to a single drive or even a single location. All of our important corporate data is replicated offsite (and is also saved to tape).
I've pulled 2 year old PC's out of storage (stored in a climate controlled datacenter) and had drives fail to spin up even though they all worked fine when they were stored. Keeping the drive powered off is no guarantee of data integrity, but if you keep the drive powered on and scrubbed you know that the data is secure. (with 2 backup copies of the data via RAID-6 or RAID-DP)
For powered off storage, I trust tapes a lot more than disk drives.
"Well, no, it's still not a suitable alternative"
Yes, it is.
"because what happens after you've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs getting the case to trial when the disk drive crashes and you can't produce the evidence that you said you had?"
In any first world county (and USA allegedly is) the heaviest costs are always those of personnel. You *already* have spent the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours needed to collect the evidence. If you *now* just dismish the case, it becomes a *lost* sink cost. Now, the MTBF of a consummer market HDD against the difderential of all the already incurred costs versus the delta of adding those because of the trial is enormously possitive such as *even* a Newegg HDD makes sense.
That sounds like an argument for storing the data on a properly backed up storage array instead of a risky single-drive solution. They've already spend hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars of dollars accumulating the data, and will likely spend hundreds of thousands more to take the case to trial - why risk hundreds of thousands of dollars to save $10,000?
"IT is not about implementing unreasonable solutions"
Of course not. And throwing away millions in already spent costs becouse you think unprofessional to store the data in a single HDD -provided that's the only option, is absolutly unreasonable.
Throwing away millions to save $10,000 seems just as unreasonable as throwing away millions to save $139 so there's undoubtedly more to the story.
"My boss may ask me to replace our $4000 Cisco switches with $200 Netgear switches, and my job is to explain why that's not workable"
Apples to oranges. What if your boss offers you the alternative of Netgear switches or no switches at all? Because that's what we are talking here.
I'd leave the company because then I'm no longer an IT professional, I'd be an IT "hacker" hired to cobble together solutions that may or may not work, but are guaranteed to cause headaches down the line. I've gone into startups that had homegrown networks built on such gear and while it works for a while, it inevitably causes problems and eventually as the company grows, they are forced to rearchitect the network properly - in a 20 person office, no one cares so much if you have to power cycle the switch (again), but when you grow to a sizable office and can't reach their budget and forecasting server when the Marketing guys share a large video file among themselves, suddenly it's costing real money to have dozens of people costing $100+/hour sitting on their butts for 30 minutes a day waiting for the network to come back.
I'm not going to use consumer grade $200 network switches to network a large corporate office environment (I might not use Cisco, but I'm not going to build it on cheap $200 switches), nor am I going to store data that's worth millions of dollars on a single (or two) 3TB hard drives. That's called being set up for failure, and I'll leave before I let myself become the fall-guy for an under funded solution that was "engineered" by my boss looking up prices on Newegg.