Presumably, Starfleet would stipend its officers a reasonable amount of local currency so they are less tempted to sell their knowledge or skills in local economies.
It seems that the limit to replication (but not transportation) is somewhere less than living or otherwise dynamic systems, so many things of that nature could work as tradables. In TNG: "Code of Honor", Enterprise was not able to replicate a particular vaccine. In TNG: "Starship mine", highly volatile "trilithium" warp core gunk couldn't be replicated by the terrorists. In various TNG and DS9 episodes, "Bio-mimetic gel" was illegal to produce, and obviously many plot points would have been spoiled if dilithium crystals and other engineering pieces could be replicated easily.
In TNG: "The Wounded", 'Brien beamed through the Phoenix's shields using a timing exploit analogous to what used to be possible with the old retail anti-shoplifting systems...
In TNG:"Deja Q", Geordi managed to *tech* a warp field around (part of) a moon to reduce the moon's gravitational constant for the purpose of changing its orbit. It worked, but not very well. It's unclear how this mode of generating a warp field field is related to warp travel, or if it's related to the DS9 bubble which was generated without warp engines.
Ascension happened more recently than 10,000 years before present, as established by the Atlantis episode where Weir time-travels to pre-Ascension Atlantis and chats up some Ancients to volunteer to become cryo'ed and rotate ZPMs every few thousand years.
In SG-1, it was shown on-screen that each stargate has a unique symbol on it for point of origin as the last symbol, with the first six symbols representing physical coordinates in the local galaxy. Atlantis established that a seventh symbol before the point of origin (and with enough energy) encoded information about connecting to coordinates in another galaxy.
Anyone who watched the "Daniel Jackson teaches stargating" videos would have clued in that the angstrom symbol for Earth's Egypt gate shouldn't appear on any other gate in the galaxy, and also that the gate on the nuclear planet didn't have any symbols they had not seen before.
Re:Troubleshooting skills.
on
Stargate Universe
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In Startrek physics, Ek would be close to 0 at warp since space-time moves rather than the ship. However, causing a warp field to transect a vessel rather than form around it would likely cause the wholesale destruction you seek.
Back to SG:U - The opening shots documented the ship turning parts of itself on to receive the people coming through the wormhole. Engineers who could design an intergalactic vessel would not design the CO2 scrubbers to be always on for tens of thousands of years (much less maintain atmospheric pressure), but to activate based on atmospheric composition or life-signs sensors. So, why don't the human engineers/scientists realize this and ask what else has been respiring on the ship? Also, why would such a vessel go into space without all internal hatches sealed?
Fear mongering? Where? Perhaps you're unfamiliar with relatively recent Earth history.
a) extrapolates from Iran's engineering capabilities known from Iran's own announcements as collaborated by external observation and analysis by Rand, Jane's, FAS, etc. and follows the common science/engineering advancement trajectory. Start reading around Iran's helicopter industry adventures in the 1970s.
b) missile test photos from last year show plausible progress; a delivery system that works for nuclear payloads will work for other easier payloads; detante worked out well enough that we can have this discussion.
c) USA, Russia and Germany all got to nuclear capabilities with almost no computers, inefficient power and instrumentation, and far less precise kit than we have today. South Africa, India and China also managed.
d) You are replying to a story about an ongoing series of political disagreements by the usual suspects about nuclear capabilities. "Covert" doesn't mean that your head has been in the sand since Gorby was in power.
e) What's the higher value target? Highly refined material manufactured by professionals intended for weapons use stored at hundreds of languishing sites around the world protected by bureaucratic accounting, or uncle Mahmoud's pile of prototype output where every gram is tracked by the site chief? Wikipedia has some starter links about IAEA's work around missing sources and unintended exposure.
I like the idea of a suck to excellence scale, but it doesn't get away from some of the definitional issues raised in the discussion around this story.
A universal 1-10 scale would inappropriately tempt us to conceive as quantified many concepts which are not rationally quantifiable or comparable. If Audacity receives an average rating of 7.375, while ksolitare receives an average rating of 8.350, what would that comparison tell us about the comparable characteristics or quality of either software? What meaningful difference in which aspect of quality would a difference in 0.1 or 0.047 denote, even among products of the same general class and function?
More painfully, as with grading English essays, what's the objective standard by which you assign a qualitative label to a numeric range of quantities? Pass/fail? Percentage? Four point scale? Nine point scale? Eleven point scale? Letter grades? Which letters can have +/- modifiers? Is "B+" comparable across institutions (or instructors!) which issue that label? is anything in the 0-100 range comparable across sites?
If each site publishes its own standard for how the universal number is obtained, not much ambiguity is saved by implementing the universal scale.
Would the financial consequences requirement shield reviews at fossfor.us from legal scrutiny? They only permit ratings of "Great" and "Just OK", but when their reviews are syndicated (on the front page of/., for example) it's not clear that "Bad" isn't an option available to reviewers, so/every/ rating must be positive by design.
Some obvious things: a) This story is not about "having data to build a nuclear bomb". Any accredited university engineering program has "the data to build a nuclear bomb", but it would be unwieldy to tactically deploy. The minor news is that Iran is close to the capability to produce a atomic bomb which is sufficiently compact to be mountable on a missile with decent range to threaten neighbors. b) The major news should be that Iran is receiving assistance with deployment systems which can be used with a much wider array of conventional, chemical, biological and other categories of payloads which are much easier to deploy (politically and militarily). I would be very glad if this were a continuation of the Cold War as we knew it, since that would mean that enough of the MAD thinking is in place by both sides that sufficiently tight controls are in place to prevent the nuclear option from ever being deliberately deployed. c) Remember that the first atomic bomb makers were working in and with what would be third-world technologies and systems were we to encounter them today. Why would it be remarkable to report that a country which does not follow our economic, social or value systems is capable of producing something now which was first demonstrated 60 years ago? d) This has been a pretty poor "covert battle" since the belligerents manage to sneak it into international headlines on an almost weekly basis without any combat engagements. Perhaps the important message is that the proxy wars which pre-dated the Cold War, and which lasted through it, remain an important feature of the real world which cannot be simplified into alarmist and misleading headlines? e) If we're worried about unauthorised use of nuclear material, the logical measures are to prevent everyone from having nuclear material (not possible due to the low barriers to entry), or to assist anyone who wants to work with nuclear material to do so in a secure way. There are vastly many more ways to proliferate nuclear materials from the hundreds of globally distributed nuclear stockpiles and waste bins of the former Cold War combatants than from a couple of tightly guarded and highly monitored bunkers on a mountain. The nuclear haves pretending that the nuclear have nots' nuclear ambitions represent a primary terrorist threat demonstrates a remarkably strong faith in current nuclear proliferation control systems (lost sources kill more people every year than all dirty bombs and terrorist-related nuclear incidents have in history), as well as an unassailable arrogance about LDCs.
The retractable phone cords from tradeshows would easily serve that purpose if cell phones were more amenable to attaching and powering external antennae.
I wouldn't call.rm obscure since it was the.divx of its day with RealPlayer installed on most Windows and Apple machines. Nor was GEM application specific, in that it was supported by apps on almost all the platforms (Amiga, DOS, Mac) which had usable pro-sumer publishing apps at the time. The point is that wide popularity now does nothing to ensure accessibility in the future.
I'm glad that (I think) you caught on to the sarcasm.
My visual artist friends tell me that in my North American city of 1 million people, the art market operates with substantial features of a monopoly. Because it relies so heavily on word of mouth advertising, and because the total number of substantial galleries can be counted on two hands, and because the professional art world is tightly network in a mostly closed manner, a small number of individuals routinely collude to define the market, its suppliers, prices, products, tastes, aesthetics, etc. Any supplier who tries to work outside the system is excluded from working within the system, while those who are offered a chance to work within the system must do so under generally unfair terms with exclusivity. Non-system galleries (which touch more people and move more pieces) than system galleries are forced to rural areas and are the only source of variety in the region.
My musician friends tell me that the regional and national markets work in a similar way, but thankfully we have a functional local aural arts market.
Also, I think we both mean substantially the same thing, positional/status goods, by warm fuzzies and look at me items.
The patent was filed in September 1993, by which time the popular shareware BBS software, door games and their extensions already used external (to the program) hardware (e.g. modem and hard disk characteristics) and software (host/controller versions and their registrations) information in the environment for licensing/serial number purposes. The elder FL/1911/DOD etc. could probably provide comprehensive lists of prior art...
For a company whose main line of income derives from setting the default search provider, complaining about someone else more easily gaining control over the users' defaults makes complete sense.
Because every browser sucks in its own ways, I would personally enjoy the ability to ditch Firefox's AwfulBar, use its rendering engine with the Chrome UI and Gears, and Safari's plugin system. That's unlikely to happen because no vendor wants to admit that part of their product is inferior.
If modularity meant that web developers would have to target what users use in the field as opposed to several different arbitrary theoretical standards (de facto or otherwise), we would instantly see a revolution shifting web UI design from meeting the needs of developers and software, to meeting the needs of users. The ability to design, think, and customize away from the lowest common denominator is part of why we hate that other alternative renderer (flash), right?
> What I'm saying is that just because something was originally created digitally doesn't make it "not art".
Sure it does. If I'm doing reasonably well in the business of marketing and distributing "art", the market for "art" is as broad or as narrow as I want to define it. If my infrastructure for marketing and distributing art was built for handling one kind of starting material (widgets in meatspace), and if access to the infrastructure is relatively scarce (galleries) because they require much capital investment, I have a significant disincentive to allow the definition of "art" to drift outside of my core competencies and intermediation.
On the consuming side, owners of "art" may get warm fuzzies from showing off their pieces because of the exclusivity alone. If exclusivity is not a part of the art, they might have to start to *think* about substantiative ways in which the art may be appreciated and valued.
(This reminds me of that other debate where those who wish to control the label pay more attention to the format than the substance of the content.)
Do you remember the GEM image file format from 20 years ago? Does your set-top box/optical disc player show.rm files from 10 years ago? Transcoding previously popular formats is already a problem.
That was HFS(+) in the mid to late 90s on OS 8/9 using some third party shell, necessary because Finder was pretty horrible at making lists of files in formats other than screenshots. That is no longer an issue on the Mac OS Extended filesystem, but the case-sensitive option of that format causes all sorts of issues with third-party software (like the Adobe stack) which are not routinely tested on it. If only they could address the "calculate folder sizes" extreme slowness through code rather than the UI.
It is, of sorts. The default behaviour, to seek out printers and configure the OS to use and share them makes sense for settings in which a USB printer is connected to a workstation and shared over the local network. It's less good when the subnet has multiple network printers on it, each speaking multiple protocols. Also, there are those helpful Windows laptops that show up with iTunes and mdnsresponder.
> This at least is totally fixed in 10.6 -- no more beachballs
I found the smb part of that issue fixed enough in 10.5. Now if they could only unbreak Safari's proxy/network settings detection and cache.
Among my experiences (mostly historic): -Some shims/extensions installed to compensate for hardware issues were unconditionally loaded, even on hardware that didn't need/couldn't boot with them. That made reusing disk images on slightly different hardware revisions... fun. -Wake on LAN should do... stuff. Consistently. -I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody... -What's that? The mounted ASIP resource disappeared for a few seconds and now everyone's trying to reconnect? At once? And their workstations are beachballed until the share comes back, even though they have no open resources on it? -Restoring resource forks from backup always works! -What do you mean by "the QuickTime update broke the AppleScript methods for a completely unrelated subsystem"? -I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody... -ls -lr on a folder with a few hundred files in subfolders... get coffee as much of the btree is traversed -I've connected to this resource before, so I'll make a new alias for it with a subtilely different name -What do you mean you've deleted stuff to the network trash and now it's locked? -I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody...
As we've seen recently, front line staff are frequently accountable for the number of blank forms filled, not the quality of what or who does the filling. At the retail level, signature fraud on a transaction is not the cashier's problem, it's their supervisor's. And then it's the problem of the merchant account provider. And then the clearing house, etc. There's not really much in there to protect the end user.
Cue usual discussion about defining the problem correctly, choose the right tool for the job, etc.
Specifically: "Would a Linux box with rsync work?" - It depends on the objective business requirements you've defined or been given. If those requirements include "has to be implemented on Foo operating system", then those requirements are not just for a backup solution.
"What is the sweet spot between value and longevity?" - Simple: Graph accumulated TCO/time based on quotes from internal and external service providers. Throw in some risk/mitigation. Find the plot which best meets your cost/time/business requirements.
"What solution would you use?" - Almost certainly not the solution you would use, because my needs are different. What is your backup strategy? What are your versioning requirements? What are your retention requirements? (How) do you validate data? Who should have access? What is an acceptable speed for access to archived data? What's an acceptable recovery scenario/timeline, etc.
If you do not already know the answers to those questions, or how to find reasonable answers, ask neighboring university TV stations until you find one which has implemented a backup solution with similar business requirements as your's, and copy and paste the appropriate bits. You'll likely get better answers from people who have solved your exact problem before if you search Google for the appropriate group/mailing list for your organization's level of operating complexity, and ask there instead of asking generalists on slashdot, and hoping that someone from your specialist demographic is also here.
Also be careful about hibernating the non-Windows OS if it accesses the NTFS partition on a multi-boot system. Booting Windows between sleeping and waking something else could cause... fun when its in memory view of the NTFS file system no longer matches the disk.
Several million buddhists and taoists and hindus etc could try to convince you otherwise, but all they could offer are the tools for you do do so on your own if you so choose.
Also, please be careful to distinguish between the applied and the philosophical dimensions of any discipline. The question of whether a compiler toolchain is technically proficient can and should be independently adjudicated from the belief that particular paradigms about software licensing benefits humanity, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, Starfleet would stipend its officers a reasonable amount of local currency so they are less tempted to sell their knowledge or skills in local economies.
It seems that the limit to replication (but not transportation) is somewhere less than living or otherwise dynamic systems, so many things of that nature could work as tradables. In TNG: "Code of Honor", Enterprise was not able to replicate a particular vaccine. In TNG: "Starship mine", highly volatile "trilithium" warp core gunk couldn't be replicated by the terrorists. In various TNG and DS9 episodes, "Bio-mimetic gel" was illegal to produce, and obviously many plot points would have been spoiled if dilithium crystals and other engineering pieces could be replicated easily.
In TNG: "The Wounded", 'Brien beamed through the Phoenix's shields using a timing exploit analogous to what used to be possible with the old retail anti-shoplifting systems...
In TNG:"Deja Q", Geordi managed to *tech* a warp field around (part of) a moon to reduce the moon's gravitational constant for the purpose of changing its orbit. It worked, but not very well. It's unclear how this mode of generating a warp field field is related to warp travel, or if it's related to the DS9 bubble which was generated without warp engines.
I didn't get the sense that this series was supposed to be in the future. SG1 and Atlantis both tracked with viewer time.
Ascension happened more recently than 10,000 years before present, as established by the Atlantis episode where Weir time-travels to pre-Ascension Atlantis and chats up some Ancients to volunteer to become cryo'ed and rotate ZPMs every few thousand years.
Someone needs to read/update the series bible?
In SG-1, it was shown on-screen that each stargate has a unique symbol on it for point of origin as the last symbol, with the first six symbols representing physical coordinates in the local galaxy. Atlantis established that a seventh symbol before the point of origin (and with enough energy) encoded information about connecting to coordinates in another galaxy.
Anyone who watched the "Daniel Jackson teaches stargating" videos would have clued in that the angstrom symbol for Earth's Egypt gate shouldn't appear on any other gate in the galaxy, and also that the gate on the nuclear planet didn't have any symbols they had not seen before.
In Startrek physics, Ek would be close to 0 at warp since space-time moves rather than the ship. However, causing a warp field to transect a vessel rather than form around it would likely cause the wholesale destruction you seek.
Back to SG:U - The opening shots documented the ship turning parts of itself on to receive the people coming through the wormhole. Engineers who could design an intergalactic vessel would not design the CO2 scrubbers to be always on for tens of thousands of years (much less maintain atmospheric pressure), but to activate based on atmospheric composition or life-signs sensors. So, why don't the human engineers/scientists realize this and ask what else has been respiring on the ship? Also, why would such a vessel go into space without all internal hatches sealed?
Are you seriously trolling this?
Fear mongering? Where? Perhaps you're unfamiliar with relatively recent Earth history.
a) extrapolates from Iran's engineering capabilities known from Iran's own announcements as collaborated by external observation and analysis by Rand, Jane's, FAS, etc. and follows the common science/engineering advancement trajectory. Start reading around Iran's helicopter industry adventures in the 1970s.
b) missile test photos from last year show plausible progress; a delivery system that works for nuclear payloads will work for other easier payloads; detante worked out well enough that we can have this discussion.
c) USA, Russia and Germany all got to nuclear capabilities with almost no computers, inefficient power and instrumentation, and far less precise kit than we have today. South Africa, India and China also managed.
d) You are replying to a story about an ongoing series of political disagreements by the usual suspects about nuclear capabilities. "Covert" doesn't mean that your head has been in the sand since Gorby was in power.
e) What's the higher value target? Highly refined material manufactured by professionals intended for weapons use stored at hundreds of languishing sites around the world protected by bureaucratic accounting, or uncle Mahmoud's pile of prototype output where every gram is tracked by the site chief? Wikipedia has some starter links about IAEA's work around missing sources and unintended exposure.
I like the idea of a suck to excellence scale, but it doesn't get away from some of the definitional issues raised in the discussion around this story.
A universal 1-10 scale would inappropriately tempt us to conceive as quantified many concepts which are not rationally quantifiable or comparable. If Audacity receives an average rating of 7.375, while ksolitare receives an average rating of 8.350, what would that comparison tell us about the comparable characteristics or quality of either software? What meaningful difference in which aspect of quality would a difference in 0.1 or 0.047 denote, even among products of the same general class and function?
More painfully, as with grading English essays, what's the objective standard by which you assign a qualitative label to a numeric range of quantities? Pass/fail? Percentage? Four point scale? Nine point scale? Eleven point scale? Letter grades? Which letters can have +/- modifiers? Is "B+" comparable across institutions (or instructors!) which issue that label? is anything in the 0-100 range comparable across sites?
If each site publishes its own standard for how the universal number is obtained, not much ambiguity is saved by implementing the universal scale.
Would the financial consequences requirement shield reviews at fossfor.us from legal scrutiny? They only permit ratings of "Great" and "Just OK", but when their reviews are syndicated (on the front page of /., for example) it's not clear that "Bad" isn't an option available to reviewers, so /every/ rating must be positive by design.
Some obvious things:
a) This story is not about "having data to build a nuclear bomb". Any accredited university engineering program has "the data to build a nuclear bomb", but it would be unwieldy to tactically deploy. The minor news is that Iran is close to the capability to produce a atomic bomb which is sufficiently compact to be mountable on a missile with decent range to threaten neighbors.
b) The major news should be that Iran is receiving assistance with deployment systems which can be used with a much wider array of conventional, chemical, biological and other categories of payloads which are much easier to deploy (politically and militarily). I would be very glad if this were a continuation of the Cold War as we knew it, since that would mean that enough of the MAD thinking is in place by both sides that sufficiently tight controls are in place to prevent the nuclear option from ever being deliberately deployed.
c) Remember that the first atomic bomb makers were working in and with what would be third-world technologies and systems were we to encounter them today. Why would it be remarkable to report that a country which does not follow our economic, social or value systems is capable of producing something now which was first demonstrated 60 years ago?
d) This has been a pretty poor "covert battle" since the belligerents manage to sneak it into international headlines on an almost weekly basis without any combat engagements. Perhaps the important message is that the proxy wars which pre-dated the Cold War, and which lasted through it, remain an important feature of the real world which cannot be simplified into alarmist and misleading headlines?
e) If we're worried about unauthorised use of nuclear material, the logical measures are to prevent everyone from having nuclear material (not possible due to the low barriers to entry), or to assist anyone who wants to work with nuclear material to do so in a secure way. There are vastly many more ways to proliferate nuclear materials from the hundreds of globally distributed nuclear stockpiles and waste bins of the former Cold War combatants than from a couple of tightly guarded and highly monitored bunkers on a mountain. The nuclear haves pretending that the nuclear have nots' nuclear ambitions represent a primary terrorist threat demonstrates a remarkably strong faith in current nuclear proliferation control systems (lost sources kill more people every year than all dirty bombs and terrorist-related nuclear incidents have in history), as well as an unassailable arrogance about LDCs.
The retractable phone cords from tradeshows would easily serve that purpose if cell phones were more amenable to attaching and powering external antennae.
I wouldn't call .rm obscure since it was the .divx of its day with RealPlayer installed on most Windows and Apple machines. Nor was GEM application specific, in that it was supported by apps on almost all the platforms (Amiga, DOS, Mac) which had usable pro-sumer publishing apps at the time. The point is that wide popularity now does nothing to ensure accessibility in the future.
I'm glad that (I think) you caught on to the sarcasm.
My visual artist friends tell me that in my North American city of 1 million people, the art market operates with substantial features of a monopoly. Because it relies so heavily on word of mouth advertising, and because the total number of substantial galleries can be counted on two hands, and because the professional art world is tightly network in a mostly closed manner, a small number of individuals routinely collude to define the market, its suppliers, prices, products, tastes, aesthetics, etc. Any supplier who tries to work outside the system is excluded from working within the system, while those who are offered a chance to work within the system must do so under generally unfair terms with exclusivity. Non-system galleries (which touch more people and move more pieces) than system galleries are forced to rural areas and are the only source of variety in the region.
My musician friends tell me that the regional and national markets work in a similar way, but thankfully we have a functional local aural arts market.
Also, I think we both mean substantially the same thing, positional/status goods, by warm fuzzies and look at me items.
The patent was filed in September 1993, by which time the popular shareware BBS software, door games and their extensions already used external (to the program) hardware (e.g. modem and hard disk characteristics) and software (host/controller versions and their registrations) information in the environment for licensing/serial number purposes. The elder FL/1911/DOD etc. could probably provide comprehensive lists of prior art...
For a company whose main line of income derives from setting the default search provider, complaining about someone else more easily gaining control over the users' defaults makes complete sense.
Because every browser sucks in its own ways, I would personally enjoy the ability to ditch Firefox's AwfulBar, use its rendering engine with the Chrome UI and Gears, and Safari's plugin system. That's unlikely to happen because no vendor wants to admit that part of their product is inferior.
If modularity meant that web developers would have to target what users use in the field as opposed to several different arbitrary theoretical standards (de facto or otherwise), we would instantly see a revolution shifting web UI design from meeting the needs of developers and software, to meeting the needs of users. The ability to design, think, and customize away from the lowest common denominator is part of why we hate that other alternative renderer (flash), right?
> What I'm saying is that just because something was originally created digitally doesn't make it "not art".
Sure it does. If I'm doing reasonably well in the business of marketing and distributing "art", the market for "art" is as broad or as narrow as I want to define it. If my infrastructure for marketing and distributing art was built for handling one kind of starting material (widgets in meatspace), and if access to the infrastructure is relatively scarce (galleries) because they require much capital investment, I have a significant disincentive to allow the definition of "art" to drift outside of my core competencies and intermediation.
On the consuming side, owners of "art" may get warm fuzzies from showing off their pieces because of the exclusivity alone. If exclusivity is not a part of the art, they might have to start to *think* about substantiative ways in which the art may be appreciated and valued.
(This reminds me of that other debate where those who wish to control the label pay more attention to the format than the substance of the content.)
Do you remember the GEM image file format from 20 years ago? Does your set-top box/optical disc player show .rm files from 10 years ago? Transcoding previously popular formats is already a problem.
That was HFS(+) in the mid to late 90s on OS 8/9 using some third party shell, necessary because Finder was pretty horrible at making lists of files in formats other than screenshots. That is no longer an issue on the Mac OS Extended filesystem, but the case-sensitive option of that format causes all sorts of issues with third-party software (like the Adobe stack) which are not routinely tested on it. If only they could address the "calculate folder sizes" extreme slowness through code rather than the UI.
> surely this is a configuration issue?
It is, of sorts. The default behaviour, to seek out printers and configure the OS to use and share them makes sense for settings in which a USB printer is connected to a workstation and shared over the local network. It's less good when the subnet has multiple network printers on it, each speaking multiple protocols. Also, there are those helpful Windows laptops that show up with iTunes and mdnsresponder.
> This at least is totally fixed in 10.6 -- no more beachballs
I found the smb part of that issue fixed enough in 10.5. Now if they could only unbreak Safari's proxy/network settings detection and cache.
Among my experiences (mostly historic): ... get coffee as much of the btree is traversed
-Some shims/extensions installed to compensate for hardware issues were unconditionally loaded, even on hardware that didn't need/couldn't boot with them. That made reusing disk images on slightly different hardware revisions... fun.
-Wake on LAN should do... stuff. Consistently.
-I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody...
-What's that? The mounted ASIP resource disappeared for a few seconds and now everyone's trying to reconnect? At once? And their workstations are beachballed until the share comes back, even though they have no open resources on it?
-Restoring resource forks from backup always works!
-What do you mean by "the QuickTime update broke the AppleScript methods for a completely unrelated subsystem"?
-I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody...
-ls -lr on a folder with a few hundred files in subfolders
-I've connected to this resource before, so I'll make a new alias for it with a subtilely different name
-What do you mean you've deleted stuff to the network trash and now it's locked?
-I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody...
As we've seen recently, front line staff are frequently accountable for the number of blank forms filled, not the quality of what or who does the filling. At the retail level, signature fraud on a transaction is not the cashier's problem, it's their supervisor's. And then it's the problem of the merchant account provider. And then the clearing house, etc. There's not really much in there to protect the end user.
Cue usual discussion about defining the problem correctly, choose the right tool for the job, etc.
Specifically:
"Would a Linux box with rsync work?" - It depends on the objective business requirements you've defined or been given. If those requirements include "has to be implemented on Foo operating system", then those requirements are not just for a backup solution.
"What is the sweet spot between value and longevity?" - Simple: Graph accumulated TCO/time based on quotes from internal and external service providers. Throw in some risk/mitigation. Find the plot which best meets your cost/time/business requirements.
"What solution would you use?" - Almost certainly not the solution you would use, because my needs are different. What is your backup strategy? What are your versioning requirements? What are your retention requirements? (How) do you validate data? Who should have access? What is an acceptable speed for access to archived data? What's an acceptable recovery scenario/timeline, etc.
If you do not already know the answers to those questions, or how to find reasonable answers, ask neighboring university TV stations until you find one which has implemented a backup solution with similar business requirements as your's, and copy and paste the appropriate bits. You'll likely get better answers from people who have solved your exact problem before if you search Google for the appropriate group/mailing list for your organization's level of operating complexity, and ask there instead of asking generalists on slashdot, and hoping that someone from your specialist demographic is also here.
Also be careful about hibernating the non-Windows OS if it accesses the NTFS partition on a multi-boot system. Booting Windows between sleeping and waking something else could cause... fun when its in memory view of the NTFS file system no longer matches the disk.
Several million buddhists and taoists and hindus etc could try to convince you otherwise, but all they could offer are the tools for you do do so on your own if you so choose.
Also, please be careful to distinguish between the applied and the philosophical dimensions of any discipline. The question of whether a compiler toolchain is technically proficient can and should be independently adjudicated from the belief that particular paradigms about software licensing benefits humanity, etc.