I run Linux, but a piece of ransomware was recently reported that used Java to allow itself to run on multiple platforms. As a result I've invested in an LTO drive since my current backup strategies are based around Dropbox and a monthly snapshot to external disks. Smart ransomware could start chewing up the data slowly and end up in the backups before it was detected.
LTO7 came out recently with a 15TB native capacity. This means that LTO5 drives can had relatively cheaply, which have a 1.5TB capacity per cart and the carts are about £15 each. My core data that needs to be backed up is about 1.6TB but is in two locations so I can use two tapes to cover it all.
The drive wasn't cheap, but some of the data is priceless. With a tape system I can take snapshots each month and keep a few tapes aside as long-term read-only backups, just in case.
This is a very good point;it's almost less what's there, than what's been left out.
As i understand the story so far, some southerm german paper gets this leak and enlists a *Washington DC* organisation (ICIJ) to ensure the relevant informatiion is appropriately publicised.
If I'm reading it right, this is the first tranche. The US might get its turn later.
and you believed it? The location is known and has been excavated.
btw, The Flood was in Gloucestershire, and Noah was a boat builder on the Severn. That is why the English are God's chosen people. You read it here first 'cos I just made it up.
As it happens, Comyns Beaumont wrote a series of books attempting to prove this in the 1940s. I think it was 'Britain: Key to world history'. I was tempted to buy a copy for shits and giggles, but the price on ebay is staggering.
Thinking about it, it probably helped that the project I was working on was written first in CE and then ported to desktop Windows. Going the other way would likely have been very painful.
I would say WinCE is unrelated to the WindowsNT architecture used on Windows XP/Vista/7, etc. It still seems to operate like the PDA operating system it's based on. I have experienced WinCE 6.0 on embedded applications. At first blush it "looks" like XP, only because it borrowed Luna theme, but applications are coded on a different API, and it's fundamentally different than normal Desktop versions of Windows.
I never used CE6, but CE5 and earlier were very much like Windows at the application level. There were a few differences in how the menus and other parts of the shell were set up but for the most part I was able to build a complex application that compiled on CE3-5, PocketPC and desktop Win32 that was about 95% shared code.
And the way I saw it, that was kind of the point - that people with experience of Win32 programming could easily make CE programs. Where it really got ugly was that prior to CE6 the kernel had a hard limit of 32MB per application. That required a lot of horrible workarounds (memory-mapping to a pagefile) to process large data sets.
USB replaced PS/2 and IEEE 1284 (Parallel ports), and SCSI-1 (see: Pre-USB scanners, CD Burners, HDDs), and PCMCIA (see WiFi, Flash, Floppies, Zip drives, etc.), and game ports, and TOSLINK, and MIDI ports, and PCI slots (to a significant extent), and ADB, and infrared ports, and...
It'll be a while yet before MIDI is replaced. TOSLINK as well. USB needs a computer to work - with MIDI you can link keyboards and instruments together point to point without having to run everything through a computer (which will add latency and only works when the software is running).
There are keyboards which support USB host mode, but they only ever use it for file I/O and firmware upgrades. You can't plug in a controller keyboard through it, it has to go via MIDI IN. Most of them do support MIDI over USB as well, but only for computer control (and sometimes for power) not for any kind of chaining. And I've never yet come across a synthesizer, or indeed any device at all other than a soundcard that supports audio over USB. The output is always 1/4" or TOSLINK if you're lucky.
Interesting that they struggled to find an Exabyte drive - those used to be the way you'd send audio to a CD pressing plant. I'd have thought there should be a bunch of them knocking around...
You see Blackberry has a unique position in the market, it being not just the manufacturer but also the network operator. Thus for most normal Blackberry users (non-corporate),
That's actually an interesting point. In years past, the Blackberry fanboys used to tout how secure BB devices were when used with a BB enterprise server. It appears now that this claim was never true.
Blackberries have to connect to a BES in order to work, IIRC. For a corporate user, that would be the company's own server. Joe Public would normally connect to a BES run by RIM and under their control, and thus amenable to government intercepts.
Did nobody just backup those tapes the moment CDs became widely available?
Recordable CDs didn't appear for nearly a decade after the CD was introduced, and when they did they were insanely expensive. What they usually did was record to a newer tape, or some newer format like DAT, DASH or ProDIGI. None of these strategies would really pan out properly, however.
A new analogue copy would work, but we now know that between 1975 and 1995 Ampex tapes still had the sticky shed problem, which is exactly what we're trying to solve. With DAT the machines are intricate and fragile, being essentially tiny video recorders and AFAIK they haven't been made for some time. They're harder to keep working than say, a Studer A80 or MCI which mostly use off-the-shelf electronics and still have quite a large supply of parts and decent OEM support.
DAT also recorded at 48KHz instead of 44.1 so an eventual transfer to CD would be lossy owing to sample rate conversion, or plays back at the wrong speed, but there were quite a few DAT machines made so you could still do the transfer. Assuming the thin, fragile videotape in the DAT cartridge hasn't deteriorated.
DASH... machines sometimes turn up on ebay but are probably just scrapped because no-one wants them. Being digital they won't have 'the tape sound' so even the retro nuts like me won't touch them. ProDigi machines are like hen's teeth.
So no, a 1980s format conversion could potentially have made things even worse. Indeed, one of the favourite formats for budget digital recording was... Betamax.
Freeze them all and wait until a 3d Printer can scan and reconstruct them at the atomic level...
My Quantegy tapes say to store between 4-32 degrees C (40-90 F). RMG and ATR don't seem to specify a temperature range, but I suspect cryogenic storage is going to do very bad things to the plastic. Also note that temperature does have effects on magnetism - e.g. the Curie point. Effects of low temperatures I don't know about offhand.
couldnt the tape be still framed one at a time in a modern scanning format to bring it back? (the video portion at least) im not sure how to pull the audio but being analog wouldnt there be a way to pull that as well?
The audio would be pretty easy to pull off - it's going to be a straight linear audio track so you could probably just stick it in a regular 24-track studio recorder. Pulling the video is the hard part because practically all 2" video machines use a segmented scanning technique with the head-wheel angled at 90 degrees to the tape. If these are helical scan, the tracks are going to be laid down at 15 degrees or something weird like that, and you'd need to build a custom video head for it. Maybe it's possible to take a C-format head and machine a suitable drum for it, I don't know.
Earlier I asked if it was an IVC recorder - however, reading it again he said that only 4 existed so I'm pretty sure they were recorded on an Ampex 8000, a 1961 helical scan machine that Ampex made prototypes of but never went into full production with or something. So yes, that's going to be a rare bird indeed.
Was there anything before BetaMax with Sony's fingerprints on it?
Umatic. That did pretty well - there's probably even people still using it. Betacam also. It's easy to forget now that up until about the mid 1990s, Sony was the shit - their equipment was in practically every TV studio or production house because it was top-notch. It's been said that merging with big content companies was really when things started to go downhill and the rot set in.
If I remember right, DAT didn't originally have the copy bits either. It was added because the studios pitched a fit over the idea of people being able to make a lossless CD-quality copy and did their level best to kill the format dead. Remember when the film industry sued over the fact that a Betamax machine could record their films, and tried to kill off the industry? They were going to do the same again, and it was part of the settlement over that which gave DAT and MD their copy protection garbage.
Ironically DAT was mostly used by recording studios to replace 1/4" mastering machines. Which seemed like a good idea at the time, even thought it wasn't - e.g. if you want a 24/96 master or 24/192 you'd have to go back to the 1/4" tape anyway because DAT topped out at 16/48, and that you're more likely be able to keep a 1/4" machine in working order than a DAT unit.
Oh, Sony also came up with DSD as an alternate way of archiving master tapes. As SACD that kind of flopped, but you can still get DSD mastering machines, e.g. from TASCAM.
just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
You may need to add a few widgets to do this, I think you can right-click to bring up the appropriate menu. It was a bit of a nuisance but in about 10 minutes or so I was able to get a reasonably good start menu and taskbar. It was disappointing that it didn't import the profile and layout from v4, though.
I could probably look up exactly how it was done, but right now I've switched to XFCE for the time being, because Plasma 5 crashes if you look at it funny. This on an nVidia card with the proprietary drivers so I think there's more to this than a bug in the Intel driver.
One important thing to note is that Plasma 5 drops support for the little systray icons, apparently they were powered by the XEmbed system which is considered deprecated. This means things like Dropbox and WINE applications which use the systray won't appear. There are workarounds for this (alternate libraries that implement a systray) and in the case of Dropbox it looks like they've recently added support for whatever new library or protocol replaces it.
How long is it able to retain the data and under what range of conditions? Currently this is one of the big problems with flash, where small-process TLC memory is so fragile that reading it damages the contents, much like core.
I don't think Command and Conquer, Warcraft 1&2, Star Control 2, Ultima 6-8, Wing Commander, and/or X-wing and Tie Fighter came out for SNES
Ultima 8 was AFAIK DOS-only. There was a SNES version of Ultima 7, but it was largely considered a joke. For one thing, Nintendo couldn't stomach the plot, which was about investigating a series of rather gruesome murders, which somehow mutated into 'kidnappings' in the SNES version. The original game was about 20MB all told, pushing the limits of what was technically feasible on the PC at the time (it used "unreal mode" which allowed the 16-bit game engine to access a 32-bit address space, but couldn't work under Windows or EMM386). As a result it was chopped down significantly, losing the ability to recruit party members or even select the player's sex.
AFAIK they never even attempted to port Serpent Isle, aka Ultima 7 part 2. Given the apocalyptic ending I can't say I'm surprised.
Although Doom without multi-player is kind of pointless.
Depends. If you've got a hundred odd add-on levels for it it's got a lot of staying power. 'Course the console versions didn't have that either.
That high pitched gibberish when you rewind a reel to reel tape recorder.
Interestingly, that sound went away before reel-to-reel did since the machines started muting the output during fast wind. A happy day for me was getting a machine with a jog shuttle so I could do that on demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My entire music collection at the time is still on reel to reel tapes, not sure how long they last but got some good stuff waiting. I had cassettes I could of used but wanted the best reproduction I could get.
Depends when the tape hails from, and in particular, what it's made of. Tape made between 1975 and 1994 used a synthetic replacement for whale oil that was later found to decay and causes the tape to shed goo all over the transport. This can be fixed if you need to recover the audio.
Tape made before that period should be good, from 1995 onwards they switched to a new formulation which seems to be holding up so far. Oh, note that Maxell tape continued to use whale oil so it isn't prone to this failure mode.
If the tape is shedding, it can be recovered by baking it using a food dehydrator. Look up "sticky shed syndrome" for more details.
I would guess not. (posted from a phone on a work break) I thought Texas was supposed to be a state that had balls. Guess not.
IIRC, digital projectors have to talk to an authentication server to decrypt the movie. If Paramount disable that, you're not going to be able to show it, balls or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the next best thing is probably burning data to Blu-Ray, and finalizing the media, so it cannot be written to after the backup is done.
That was my plan if the LTO plan fell through. However, even with BDXL it would take a lot of disks to back up the main data store.
Oops, LTO7 is 15TB compressed, it's about 6TB raw.
.
I run Linux, but a piece of ransomware was recently reported that used Java to allow itself to run on multiple platforms. As a result I've invested in an LTO drive since my current backup strategies are based around Dropbox and a monthly snapshot to external disks. Smart ransomware could start chewing up the data slowly and end up in the backups before it was detected.
LTO7 came out recently with a 15TB native capacity. This means that LTO5 drives can had relatively cheaply, which have a 1.5TB capacity per cart and the carts are about £15 each. My core data that needs to be backed up is about 1.6TB but is in two locations so I can use two tapes to cover it all.
The drive wasn't cheap, but some of the data is priceless. With a tape system I can take snapshots each month and keep a few tapes aside as long-term read-only backups, just in case.
This is a very good point;it's almost less what's there, than what's been left out.
As i understand the story so far, some southerm german paper gets this leak and enlists a *Washington DC* organisation (ICIJ) to ensure the relevant informatiion is appropriately publicised.
If I'm reading it right, this is the first tranche. The US might get its turn later.
and you believed it? The location is known and has been excavated.
btw, The Flood was in Gloucestershire, and Noah was a boat builder on the Severn. That is why the English are God's chosen people. You read it here first 'cos I just made it up.
As it happens, Comyns Beaumont wrote a series of books attempting to prove this in the 1940s. I think it was 'Britain: Key to world history'. I was tempted to buy a copy for shits and giggles, but the price on ebay is staggering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Among other things, Australia's technological achievements include WiFi, which you quite likely used to write your message.
Thinking about it, it probably helped that the project I was working on was written first in CE and then ported to desktop Windows. Going the other way would likely have been very painful.
I would say WinCE is unrelated to the WindowsNT architecture used on Windows XP/Vista/7, etc. It still seems to operate like the PDA operating system it's based on. I have experienced WinCE 6.0 on embedded applications. At first blush it "looks" like XP, only because it borrowed Luna theme, but applications are coded on a different API, and it's fundamentally different than normal Desktop versions of Windows.
I never used CE6, but CE5 and earlier were very much like Windows at the application level. There were a few differences in how the menus and other parts of the shell were set up but for the most part I was able to build a complex application that compiled on CE3-5, PocketPC and desktop Win32 that was about 95% shared code.
And the way I saw it, that was kind of the point - that people with experience of Win32 programming could easily make CE programs. Where it really got ugly was that prior to CE6 the kernel had a hard limit of 32MB per application. That required a lot of horrible workarounds (memory-mapping to a pagefile) to process large data sets.
USB replaced PS/2 and IEEE 1284 (Parallel ports), and SCSI-1 (see: Pre-USB scanners, CD Burners, HDDs), and PCMCIA (see WiFi, Flash, Floppies, Zip drives, etc.), and game ports, and TOSLINK, and MIDI ports, and PCI slots (to a significant extent), and ADB, and infrared ports, and...
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
It'll be a while yet before MIDI is replaced. TOSLINK as well. USB needs a computer to work - with MIDI you can link keyboards and instruments together point to point without having to run everything through a computer (which will add latency and only works when the software is running).
There are keyboards which support USB host mode, but they only ever use it for file I/O and firmware upgrades. You can't plug in a controller keyboard through it, it has to go via MIDI IN. Most of them do support MIDI over USB as well, but only for computer control (and sometimes for power) not for any kind of chaining. And I've never yet come across a synthesizer, or indeed any device at all other than a soundcard that supports audio over USB. The output is always 1/4" or TOSLINK if you're lucky.
Interesting that they struggled to find an Exabyte drive - those used to be the way you'd send audio to a CD pressing plant. I'd have thought there should be a bunch of them knocking around...
That's actually an interesting point. In years past, the Blackberry fanboys used to tout how secure BB devices were when used with a BB enterprise server. It appears now that this claim was never true.
Blackberries have to connect to a BES in order to work, IIRC. For a corporate user, that would be the company's own server. Joe Public would normally connect to a BES run by RIM and under their control, and thus amenable to government intercepts.
Did nobody just backup those tapes the moment CDs became widely available?
Recordable CDs didn't appear for nearly a decade after the CD was introduced, and when they did they were insanely expensive. What they usually did was record to a newer tape, or some newer format like DAT, DASH or ProDIGI. None of these strategies would really pan out properly, however.
A new analogue copy would work, but we now know that between 1975 and 1995 Ampex tapes still had the sticky shed problem, which is exactly what we're trying to solve. With DAT the machines are intricate and fragile, being essentially tiny video recorders and AFAIK they haven't been made for some time. They're harder to keep working than say, a Studer A80 or MCI which mostly use off-the-shelf electronics and still have quite a large supply of parts and decent OEM support.
DAT also recorded at 48KHz instead of 44.1 so an eventual transfer to CD would be lossy owing to sample rate conversion, or plays back at the wrong speed, but there were quite a few DAT machines made so you could still do the transfer. Assuming the thin, fragile videotape in the DAT cartridge hasn't deteriorated.
DASH... machines sometimes turn up on ebay but are probably just scrapped because no-one wants them. Being digital they won't have 'the tape sound' so even the retro nuts like me won't touch them. ProDigi machines are like hen's teeth.
So no, a 1980s format conversion could potentially have made things even worse. Indeed, one of the favourite formats for budget digital recording was... Betamax.
Freeze them all and wait until a 3d Printer can scan and reconstruct them at the atomic level...
My Quantegy tapes say to store between 4-32 degrees C (40-90 F). RMG and ATR don't seem to specify a temperature range, but I suspect cryogenic storage is going to do very bad things to the plastic. Also note that temperature does have effects on magnetism - e.g. the Curie point. Effects of low temperatures I don't know about offhand.
couldnt the tape be still framed one at a time in a modern scanning format to bring it back? (the video portion at least) im not sure how to pull the audio but being analog wouldnt there be a way to pull that as well?
The audio would be pretty easy to pull off - it's going to be a straight linear audio track so you could probably just stick it in a regular 24-track studio recorder. Pulling the video is the hard part because practically all 2" video machines use a segmented scanning technique with the head-wheel angled at 90 degrees to the tape. If these are helical scan, the tracks are going to be laid down at 15 degrees or something weird like that, and you'd need to build a custom video head for it. Maybe it's possible to take a C-format head and machine a suitable drum for it, I don't know.
Earlier I asked if it was an IVC recorder - however, reading it again he said that only 4 existed so I'm pretty sure they were recorded on an Ampex 8000, a 1961 helical scan machine that Ampex made prototypes of but never went into full production with or something. So yes, that's going to be a rare bird indeed.
Was it an IVC machine, out of interest?
We should get away from mass storage altogether and use this as replacement for RAM.
It doesn't have enough write endurance to do that. You could burn the stuff out with a FOR loop.
Was there anything before BetaMax with Sony's fingerprints on it?
Umatic. That did pretty well - there's probably even people still using it. Betacam also. It's easy to forget now that up until about the mid 1990s, Sony was the shit - their equipment was in practically every TV studio or production house because it was top-notch. It's been said that merging with big content companies was really when things started to go downhill and the rot set in.
If I remember right, DAT didn't originally have the copy bits either. It was added because the studios pitched a fit over the idea of people being able to make a lossless CD-quality copy and did their level best to kill the format dead. Remember when the film industry sued over the fact that a Betamax machine could record their films, and tried to kill off the industry? They were going to do the same again, and it was part of the settlement over that which gave DAT and MD their copy protection garbage.
Ironically DAT was mostly used by recording studios to replace 1/4" mastering machines. Which seemed like a good idea at the time, even thought it wasn't - e.g. if you want a 24/96 master or 24/192 you'd have to go back to the 1/4" tape anyway because DAT topped out at 16/48, and that you're more likely be able to keep a 1/4" machine in working order than a DAT unit.
Oh, Sony also came up with DSD as an alternate way of archiving master tapes. As SACD that kind of flopped, but you can still get DSD mastering machines, e.g. from TASCAM.
I think they meant game and application screenshots as images to compress, since that's going to be quite a big chunk of the use cases.
just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
You may need to add a few widgets to do this, I think you can right-click to bring up the appropriate menu. It was a bit of a nuisance but in about 10 minutes or so I was able to get a reasonably good start menu and taskbar. It was disappointing that it didn't import the profile and layout from v4, though.
I could probably look up exactly how it was done, but right now I've switched to XFCE for the time being, because Plasma 5 crashes if you look at it funny. This on an nVidia card with the proprietary drivers so I think there's more to this than a bug in the Intel driver.
One important thing to note is that Plasma 5 drops support for the little systray icons, apparently they were powered by the XEmbed system which is considered deprecated. This means things like Dropbox and WINE applications which use the systray won't appear. There are workarounds for this (alternate libraries that implement a systray) and in the case of Dropbox it looks like they've recently added support for whatever new library or protocol replaces it.
How long is it able to retain the data and under what range of conditions? Currently this is one of the big problems with flash, where small-process TLC memory is so fragile that reading it damages the contents, much like core.
I don't think Command and Conquer, Warcraft 1&2, Star Control 2, Ultima 6-8, Wing Commander, and/or X-wing and Tie Fighter came out for SNES
Ultima 8 was AFAIK DOS-only. There was a SNES version of Ultima 7, but it was largely considered a joke. For one thing, Nintendo couldn't stomach the plot, which was about investigating a series of rather gruesome murders, which somehow mutated into 'kidnappings' in the SNES version.
The original game was about 20MB all told, pushing the limits of what was technically feasible on the PC at the time (it used "unreal mode" which allowed the 16-bit game engine to access a 32-bit address space, but couldn't work under Windows or EMM386). As a result it was chopped down significantly, losing the ability to recruit party members or even select the player's sex.
AFAIK they never even attempted to port Serpent Isle, aka Ultima 7 part 2. Given the apocalyptic ending I can't say I'm surprised.
Although Doom without multi-player is kind of pointless.
Depends. If you've got a hundred odd add-on levels for it it's got a lot of staying power. 'Course the console versions didn't have that either.
The only reason to buy AMD these days is if you're on a budget, and you're OK with middling performance.
Or you want ECC memory...
That high pitched gibberish when you rewind a reel to reel tape recorder.
Interestingly, that sound went away before reel-to-reel did since the machines started muting the output during fast wind.
A happy day for me was getting a machine with a jog shuttle so I could do that on demand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My entire music collection at the time is still on reel to reel tapes, not sure how long they last but got some good stuff waiting. I had cassettes I could of used but wanted the best reproduction I could get.
Depends when the tape hails from, and in particular, what it's made of. Tape made between 1975 and 1994 used a synthetic replacement for whale oil that was later found to decay and causes the tape to shed goo all over the transport. This can be fixed if you need to recover the audio.
Tape made before that period should be good, from 1995 onwards they switched to a new formulation which seems to be holding up so far. Oh, note that Maxell tape continued to use whale oil so it isn't prone to this failure mode.
If the tape is shedding, it can be recovered by baking it using a food dehydrator. Look up "sticky shed syndrome" for more details.
I would guess not. (posted from a phone on a work break) I thought Texas was supposed to be a state that had balls. Guess not.
IIRC, digital projectors have to talk to an authentication server to decrypt the movie. If Paramount disable that, you're not going to be able to show it, balls or otherwise.