China is really the perfect place for this type of research. Relatively isolated genetic population, huge population to sample from, totalitarian government to keep it all under control. If this is what they are making public, imagine what their military is working on.
It's not an industry anyway; it's publishing. Publishing has always been about finding stuff no one knows about and promoting it and making copies available everywhere. It's a SERVICE that consists of a few parts: production, manufacturing and distribution. We used to need the classic music publishing business because it was hard to record stuff, hard to manufacture discs to carry the sound information and it was hard to get it from place to place.
Now it's pretty easy to find and get any type of media with your internet connection. Therefore the opportunity cost is lower for the most expensive aspects of the classic music industry (manufacturing and distribution). And even production is pennies on the dollar compared to what it used to be. For a few grand you can get a home studio set up that has at least 1980's quality recording. Sure, there's an element of artistry to the production but whatever.
The internet is killing the media business by giving consumers more choice at a lower cost. The same thing the auto industry did to the railroads in the 20s and 30's. Guess what, books are dying also. And so is the physical movie business.
The bottom line is that what they do is not that great, unique or valuable any more, so they are dying out, to be replaced by the communal nature of the internet, where information (energy) is shared. There are ways to make money but copyright was never meant to protect a dying industry, it was meant to protect the individual innovator, the artist, from the big, rich, powerful businesses. And it still does today. A record label can't swipe a song you've copyrighted and sell it and not pay you. That's what copyright is for. Not preventing citizens from making copies of something. The biggest mistake ever made was extending copyright law to corporations as if they are individuals. Hell, any rights to corporations. And I'm not really against corporations, but the vast majority of these guys made their billions exploiting poor artists back in the 50's, 60's and 70's and turning music into almost a pharmaceutical rather than an art. They've created some gems, but they've also created some of the worst music ever heard. And because they were formed in order to exploit people and not improve the world, they are not socially valuable anymore either. We (citizens) just won't put up with exploiting people any more for money. You have to do something that benefits society and THEN MAYBE we give you some money.
Actually, more precise would be to state that big oil is in the business of moving energy from place to place, hopefully somewhere cheap and plentiful (Saudi Arabia) to somewhere expensive and rare (NYC). This is inherently exclusionary (evil) because energy from the sun (oil is just banked sun energy) should be free and owned by all equally. If it were, and we coupled it with the advances in robotics and automation over the next 20 years, all of us could be living a pretty damn good life and not have to work to stay alive. Unfortunately, the powers that be like to keep tight control of energy because if you control energy, you control the people who need it to live. That's not to point the finger at any American company or businessmen and say they have been keeping us down, scheming to subvert the constitution and instead become some sort of higher power over men. Rather, here in America we have seen what control of the energy can get us. But I think now we have the technology to make much better use of this oil than simply turning it into little green pieces of paper. We can build cars and houses more efficiently. We can definitely move ourselves and our goods more efficiently. And we can find new, renewable sources of energy that we will never run out of, and finally begin to live in balance with our world. It's going to take a lot of redesigning but we actually haven't been wasting energy with abandon that long.
I like this thing by How Stuff Work's Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation. Even without AI, robots are putting humans out of work at an alarming rate. The problem is that instead of creating new jobs, the government is building more jail cells;) If you look around, he also has a pretty good idea for a world where humans do what they want creatively while the robots give us all the necessities. It would be easy to pooh pooh it as "communism" but it's more creative capitalism. You see, if we didn't need food, shelter, medical care and we didn't need to work for it (as we are getting to very rapidly in the U.S., where the majority of people are not doing any real "work"), then we can all have pretty much a permanent vacation. So everyone would be on a fixed income that is equal to the GDP of the robot workers divided by the population. But you can choose to spend your fixed income on anything you want. You want to save it up and spend it all at once on a big house, sure. You want to save it up and lend it out to others? Sure! It's just capitalism without the whole struggle for survival. In this day and age we are getting very close to that. You can lose everything and you don't have to worry about starving, staying somewhere, etc. There is welfare, shelters, etc. With robots, all of that stuff can be made as luxurious as any McMansion you're working your ass off for now for only the cost of the energy. With solar power and a collective power grid that nobody owns (we share it), the sun's energy is turned into products that everyone gets to share equally. As long as the initial concentration is on necessities, everyone will have total freedom to live how they want, to accumulate wealth, to consume, while not having to work. It's either that or government prisions so I think we as a people need to get involved in making this something that benefits society rather than only the super rich. Money doesn't mean much anymore people, wake up, these robots are our opportunity to have a permanent vacation.
We just purchased LanREV which has been pretty good. We have a ton of Macs and this is the only one I could find that could do Macs and PCs (and they have a Linux client coming soon). It has a lot of stuff for handling special cases (such as Adobe software, etc) which makes it worth the money. With OpenNMS you're going to spend a lot of time hacking since there's a lot of different software installers out there, plus the client will have to be deployed manually or you have to write or find a deployer. With LanRev, it just scans the LAN and logs into the Macs via SSH and downloads itself; Windows it does the equivalent (C$ or whatever).
We were doing software inventory manually which was getting tedious. Our licenses move around a bit, you see. It also has a lot of automation, like moving licenses around, provisioning new computers, etc. It even has an internet server so your laptops can check in when out on the road. Not sure on the price, I think around $20-30/client install and $10/year which is not bad. If it had a linux server and client I would be set; their sales engineer said they would have Linux client by the end of the year (RHEL/CentOS and SUSE).. We add a license to the cost of each new box and no one even notices, except when accounting asks for an inventory and I just clickity-clickity-print.
Also, it exports inventory to a number of helpdesk packages (WebHelpDesk, for one) so you can keep that updated for your helpdesk people so they can track issues by device..
I like to implement open source, show them what it would've costed, and then ask the company to donate to the project so we can continue to get updates or support. Usually larger companies have some money sitting around so it's pretty easy to get 40-100 bucks to send to an individual for a good package. FYI, The last one we contributed to was jqGrid, because it's awesome.
I'd recommend a suite of stuff, not just NMS. It's good, but nagios can be made so compact and small. MTRG/rrdtool is the only solution for gathering stats. There's a ton of third party visualization stuff for all monitoring systems. When you're talking about monitoring system, you have to decide the facets you're looking to cover. Number one is a current status of systems, ie: a table of systems and their ping, load, whatever. Number two is automation. Can the system kick off escalating notifications when a host is down? Can the system kick off corrective actions, such as restarting httpd or power cycling a switch? Can it integrate with your asset management and help desk system? Number three is data. Can it provide long-term data for peak analysis? For visualization?
We're using nagios right now and it seems quite good for all these things. Yes, it's a little hard to set up, and takes some time to get right. But it has all the features necessary to monitor a network. Even better, it's easy to write plugins, scripts, and integrate with other existing systems.
What about network security monitoring? Traffic monitoring? And you need something like syslog-ng to collect your logs so you can take action when something goes down.
Incidentally, 960KW = about 909 btu's per second. 1 ton of refrigeration can move 3.333 btu per second meaning you would need 273 tons of cooling for the rack just to keep up.
Exactly, and you could use something with a high density like molten lead in titanium pipes to move the heat off the chips. And by chips I mean a single piece of silicon 19" wide and 24" deep. That's going to be the only way to do it with today's tech.. I mean, according to this, the PowerXCell 8i die size is 212mm^2 and they do about 100GFLOPS each. So to hit 1PFLOP, which is 1000000GFLOPS, you'd need 10000x212mm or 212000cm^2 or 2120m^2 of silicon. The aforementioned 19x24" chips would be 2207cm^2 each so you'd need about 100 chips. You could probably do 100 in a rack. Each of these chips would be dissipating 9.6KW for a total of 960KW/PETAFLOP.
Starting with that as a basic design, you could build on it to increase the FLOPS per mm. And it'll have to start using signals in the EHF to FIR range, which means new, faster switches are needed. Carbon nanotubes will probably be present on top of the silicon. The silicon will probably be a support structure for the optical processors, probably. You could probably get to their specs in 5-10 years with this plan.
Personally it's just more of the same from MySql in general. MySql AB didn't do much of anything with it since 5.0 came out. They wasted a lot of time on a complete rebuild, on adding more features no one cared about. The thing about MyQql 5.0 is that it's really not a very good database. MyISAM sucks (but it is small and fast..) and InnoDB is bloaty. So I think that really MariaDB is going to be the future. Of the codebase. That is the nice thing about MySql is that really it's a wrapper around the Storage Engines. But the problem is the wrapper sucks. No kerberos/LDAP authenication?! What?
I could see Oracle taking one of their open databases and adding a Mysql compatibility layer so basically you can run stuff designed for Mysql on Oracle. This is really their bread and butter already, they move legacy stuff off old UNIX and IBM databases into their DB. Look at all the gateways 9i had. MySql only implements a subset of what Oracle can do. And with no support for the more modern, more object orientated practices, along with trees, etc, I don't see MySql making it out of it's current place as a cheap small database for non-critical applications.
That's not to say you can't make it quite stable and fast but it's not that out of the box. And the fact that 5.1 shipped with a crashing bug really makes me doubt Sun's desire to continue the brand. Which brings me to the forks, which are really the only thing keeping a stable 5.1 version alive out there.
Postgres is really not a viable replacement because it's a database nerd's database. I like it, but the data analysts at work won't be able to deal with its quirks. It does do a lot, but not small and fast like MySql. It comes from a long line of great database researchers, all of whom are well known around the Valley. A lot of all the major players' databases in the valley are based on ideas from Ingres including Oracle.
Personally, I think SQLite3 (4) is going to be the database of choice for small web hosts very soon. Small, portable, fast enough. At that point MySql will no longer have a purpose unless they can move into the middle tier dominated by MS-SQL.
If this is true, it proves humans and Neanderthals were interacting at a high level. So it's almost certain that some interbreeding occurred as well and it's likely those genes are still out there. It's possible that if it was happening enough, even with incompatible genomes, this could happen.
Looks like Slashdot isn't above taking money from the BSA. In the bar above I see "Anti-Piracy Organization" - Rewards Offered up to $1 Million! It was a Google ad so I clicked on it, which hopefully costs them a few bucks.
With clever use of priorities and schedules, yes you can. I would like to see an hierarchial pool type that contains other pools of mixed media to simplfy that. I'm not sure if it can do that yet. v3.0.0 does a lot, I haven't fully explored it to the limits yet. I do know for a fact that you can run jobs to a disk-based pool and then set up a migration job that will move the files to tape. I do it with a set schedule but it would be nice to set an expiration on the disk stuff and instead of recycling the volume it migrates it to a lower priority pool, eventually making it to archive tapes.
Other posters have mentioned problems with the multiple daemons, but I think it's incredibly simple once you figure it out. You have a director that directs everything, and file and storage daemons. Storage daemons connect to storage resources like tape drives or disk. So in the migration scheme you could have two tape libraries, one which is your nearline backups and another which you run stuff to archive. Then you could do tape-to-tape migration also. Like my idea is to make incrementals every day (even if I do a full) and keep the incrementals permanently. So you can set it to save all incrementals to pool A which is tape library 1 and all full backups to pool B which is in tape library 2. You can really do anything, of course.
One thing that really surprised me was how much faster it operates than SCP or RSYNC. The encryption overhead is amazing on those (of course bacula supports SSL if you need it)
And for those who don't like to pay $10000 for backup software, there's Bacula. Couple that with an LTO-4 drive (~1000) and LTO-4 tapes (800GB uncompressed, ~60/piece) and you're set. Rsync.net is a decent, cheap online provider for those gaps when you haven't rotated tapes.
Bacula is pretty sweet because it lets you backup to disk volumes and then you can schedule a roll to tape. So you can just back everything up incrementally to a disk volume and then copy those backups to tape, and then run rsync on the disk volumes to have an offsite, online backup. When recovering, you ask to recover from whatever's available. If you keep enough disk storage around (and there's really no reason not to) you can recover to any date in the past. In the event of a disaster your tapes come into play.
Now with drives so cheap the temptation is to buy a external hard drive and use that. But tapes have a long history, guaranteed backwards compatibility (planned anyway, LTO drives have to R/W the previous generation and Read 2 generations back), last longer than moving drives, are simpler, lighter, more robust and more portable. Not that I wouldn't keep a external around to dump desktops but tape is the DR standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of Supercomputers, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of the new N900's?
China is really the perfect place for this type of research. Relatively isolated genetic population, huge population to sample from, totalitarian government to keep it all under control. If this is what they are making public, imagine what their military is working on.
It could be a payroll deduction, pre-tax, like an FSA. Ecofuel account.
It's not an industry anyway; it's publishing. Publishing has always been about finding stuff no one knows about and promoting it and making copies available everywhere. It's a SERVICE that consists of a few parts: production, manufacturing and distribution. We used to need the classic music publishing business because it was hard to record stuff, hard to manufacture discs to carry the sound information and it was hard to get it from place to place.
Now it's pretty easy to find and get any type of media with your internet connection. Therefore the opportunity cost is lower for the most expensive aspects of the classic music industry (manufacturing and distribution). And even production is pennies on the dollar compared to what it used to be. For a few grand you can get a home studio set up that has at least 1980's quality recording. Sure, there's an element of artistry to the production but whatever.
The internet is killing the media business by giving consumers more choice at a lower cost. The same thing the auto industry did to the railroads in the 20s and 30's. Guess what, books are dying also. And so is the physical movie business.
The bottom line is that what they do is not that great, unique or valuable any more, so they are dying out, to be replaced by the communal nature of the internet, where information (energy) is shared. There are ways to make money but copyright was never meant to protect a dying industry, it was meant to protect the individual innovator, the artist, from the big, rich, powerful businesses. And it still does today. A record label can't swipe a song you've copyrighted and sell it and not pay you. That's what copyright is for. Not preventing citizens from making copies of something. The biggest mistake ever made was extending copyright law to corporations as if they are individuals. Hell, any rights to corporations. And I'm not really against corporations, but the vast majority of these guys made their billions exploiting poor artists back in the 50's, 60's and 70's and turning music into almost a pharmaceutical rather than an art. They've created some gems, but they've also created some of the worst music ever heard. And because they were formed in order to exploit people and not improve the world, they are not socially valuable anymore either. We (citizens) just won't put up with exploiting people any more for money. You have to do something that benefits society and THEN MAYBE we give you some money.
Actually, more precise would be to state that big oil is in the business of moving energy from place to place, hopefully somewhere cheap and plentiful (Saudi Arabia) to somewhere expensive and rare (NYC). This is inherently exclusionary (evil) because energy from the sun (oil is just banked sun energy) should be free and owned by all equally. If it were, and we coupled it with the advances in robotics and automation over the next 20 years, all of us could be living a pretty damn good life and not have to work to stay alive. Unfortunately, the powers that be like to keep tight control of energy because if you control energy, you control the people who need it to live. That's not to point the finger at any American company or businessmen and say they have been keeping us down, scheming to subvert the constitution and instead become some sort of higher power over men. Rather, here in America we have seen what control of the energy can get us. But I think now we have the technology to make much better use of this oil than simply turning it into little green pieces of paper. We can build cars and houses more efficiently. We can definitely move ourselves and our goods more efficiently. And we can find new, renewable sources of energy that we will never run out of, and finally begin to live in balance with our world. It's going to take a lot of redesigning but we actually haven't been wasting energy with abandon that long.
I like this thing by How Stuff Work's Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation. Even without AI, robots are putting humans out of work at an alarming rate. The problem is that instead of creating new jobs, the government is building more jail cells ;) If you look around, he also has a pretty good idea for a world where humans do what they want creatively while the robots give us all the necessities. It would be easy to pooh pooh it as "communism" but it's more creative capitalism. You see, if we didn't need food, shelter, medical care and we didn't need to work for it (as we are getting to very rapidly in the U.S., where the majority of people are not doing any real "work"), then we can all have pretty much a permanent vacation. So everyone would be on a fixed income that is equal to the GDP of the robot workers divided by the population. But you can choose to spend your fixed income on anything you want. You want to save it up and spend it all at once on a big house, sure. You want to save it up and lend it out to others? Sure! It's just capitalism without the whole struggle for survival. In this day and age we are getting very close to that. You can lose everything and you don't have to worry about starving, staying somewhere, etc. There is welfare, shelters, etc. With robots, all of that stuff can be made as luxurious as any McMansion you're working your ass off for now for only the cost of the energy. With solar power and a collective power grid that nobody owns (we share it), the sun's energy is turned into products that everyone gets to share equally. As long as the initial concentration is on necessities, everyone will have total freedom to live how they want, to accumulate wealth, to consume, while not having to work. It's either that or government prisions so I think we as a people need to get involved in making this something that benefits society rather than only the super rich. Money doesn't mean much anymore people, wake up, these robots are our opportunity to have a permanent vacation.
We just purchased LanREV which has been pretty good. We have a ton of Macs and this is the only one I could find that could do Macs and PCs (and they have a Linux client coming soon). It has a lot of stuff for handling special cases (such as Adobe software, etc) which makes it worth the money. With OpenNMS you're going to spend a lot of time hacking since there's a lot of different software installers out there, plus the client will have to be deployed manually or you have to write or find a deployer. With LanRev, it just scans the LAN and logs into the Macs via SSH and downloads itself; Windows it does the equivalent (C$ or whatever).
We were doing software inventory manually which was getting tedious. Our licenses move around a bit, you see. It also has a lot of automation, like moving licenses around, provisioning new computers, etc. It even has an internet server so your laptops can check in when out on the road. Not sure on the price, I think around $20-30/client install and $10/year which is not bad. If it had a linux server and client I would be set; their sales engineer said they would have Linux client by the end of the year (RHEL/CentOS and SUSE).. We add a license to the cost of each new box and no one even notices, except when accounting asks for an inventory and I just clickity-clickity-print.
Also, it exports inventory to a number of helpdesk packages (WebHelpDesk, for one) so you can keep that updated for your helpdesk people so they can track issues by device..
I guess everyone should put all night party tags on their Facebook pages tomorrow night.
Oops, my bad
I like to implement open source, show them what it would've costed, and then ask the company to donate to the project so we can continue to get updates or support. Usually larger companies have some money sitting around so it's pretty easy to get 40-100 bucks to send to an individual for a good package. FYI, The last one we contributed to was jqGrid, because it's awesome.
I'd recommend a suite of stuff, not just NMS. It's good, but nagios can be made so compact and small. MTRG/rrdtool is the only solution for gathering stats. There's a ton of third party visualization stuff for all monitoring systems. When you're talking about monitoring system, you have to decide the facets you're looking to cover. Number one is a current status of systems, ie: a table of systems and their ping, load, whatever. Number two is automation. Can the system kick off escalating notifications when a host is down? Can the system kick off corrective actions, such as restarting httpd or power cycling a switch? Can it integrate with your asset management and help desk system? Number three is data. Can it provide long-term data for peak analysis? For visualization?
We're using nagios right now and it seems quite good for all these things. Yes, it's a little hard to set up, and takes some time to get right. But it has all the features necessary to monitor a network. Even better, it's easy to write plugins, scripts, and integrate with other existing systems.
What about network security monitoring? Traffic monitoring? And you need something like syslog-ng to collect your logs so you can take action when something goes down.
Also, I think Zabbix is pretty good also.
See the entry on Wikipedia.
Incidentally, 960KW = about 909 btu's per second. 1 ton of refrigeration can move 3.333 btu per second meaning you would need 273 tons of cooling for the rack just to keep up.
Exactly, and you could use something with a high density like molten lead in titanium pipes to move the heat off the chips. And by chips I mean a single piece of silicon 19" wide and 24" deep. That's going to be the only way to do it with today's tech.. I mean, according to this, the PowerXCell 8i die size is 212mm^2 and they do about 100GFLOPS each. So to hit 1PFLOP, which is 1000000GFLOPS, you'd need 10000x212mm or 212000cm^2 or 2120m^2 of silicon. The aforementioned 19x24" chips would be 2207cm^2 each so you'd need about 100 chips. You could probably do 100 in a rack. Each of these chips would be dissipating 9.6KW for a total of 960KW/PETAFLOP.
Starting with that as a basic design, you could build on it to increase the FLOPS per mm. And it'll have to start using signals in the EHF to FIR range, which means new, faster switches are needed. Carbon nanotubes will probably be present on top of the silicon. The silicon will probably be a support structure for the optical processors, probably. You could probably get to their specs in 5-10 years with this plan.
or for the windows users:
echo "127.0.0.1 slashdot.org" >> %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Sure, but Mysql doesn't have that. Here's a really old worklog for pluggable authentication. There's a blog on it also.
Personally it's just more of the same from MySql in general. MySql AB didn't do much of anything with it since 5.0 came out. They wasted a lot of time on a complete rebuild, on adding more features no one cared about. The thing about MyQql 5.0 is that it's really not a very good database. MyISAM sucks (but it is small and fast..) and InnoDB is bloaty. So I think that really MariaDB is going to be the future. Of the codebase. That is the nice thing about MySql is that really it's a wrapper around the Storage Engines. But the problem is the wrapper sucks. No kerberos/LDAP authenication?! What?
I could see Oracle taking one of their open databases and adding a Mysql compatibility layer so basically you can run stuff designed for Mysql on Oracle. This is really their bread and butter already, they move legacy stuff off old UNIX and IBM databases into their DB. Look at all the gateways 9i had. MySql only implements a subset of what Oracle can do. And with no support for the more modern, more object orientated practices, along with trees, etc, I don't see MySql making it out of it's current place as a cheap small database for non-critical applications.
That's not to say you can't make it quite stable and fast but it's not that out of the box. And the fact that 5.1 shipped with a crashing bug really makes me doubt Sun's desire to continue the brand. Which brings me to the forks, which are really the only thing keeping a stable 5.1 version alive out there.
Postgres is really not a viable replacement because it's a database nerd's database. I like it, but the data analysts at work won't be able to deal with its quirks. It does do a lot, but not small and fast like MySql. It comes from a long line of great database researchers, all of whom are well known around the Valley. A lot of all the major players' databases in the valley are based on ideas from Ingres including Oracle.
Personally, I think SQLite3 (4) is going to be the database of choice for small web hosts very soon. Small, portable, fast enough. At that point MySql will no longer have a purpose unless they can move into the middle tier dominated by MS-SQL.
Robots already fly around the world quite a bit. See Predator, UAV, etc.
It'll be much better when they invent the "Fastcum" glider. That will probably drop the trip down to 1 month instead of 6-9.
It's STRATEGERY! Mission Accomplished!
If this is true, it proves humans and Neanderthals were interacting at a high level. So it's almost certain that some interbreeding occurred as well and it's likely those genes are still out there. It's possible that if it was happening enough, even with incompatible genomes, this could happen.
Looks like Slashdot isn't above taking money from the BSA. In the bar above I see "Anti-Piracy Organization" - Rewards Offered up to $1 Million! It was a Google ad so I clicked on it, which hopefully costs them a few bucks.
With clever use of priorities and schedules, yes you can. I would like to see an hierarchial pool type that contains other pools of mixed media to simplfy that. I'm not sure if it can do that yet. v3.0.0 does a lot, I haven't fully explored it to the limits yet. I do know for a fact that you can run jobs to a disk-based pool and then set up a migration job that will move the files to tape. I do it with a set schedule but it would be nice to set an expiration on the disk stuff and instead of recycling the volume it migrates it to a lower priority pool, eventually making it to archive tapes.
Other posters have mentioned problems with the multiple daemons, but I think it's incredibly simple once you figure it out. You have a director that directs everything, and file and storage daemons. Storage daemons connect to storage resources like tape drives or disk. So in the migration scheme you could have two tape libraries, one which is your nearline backups and another which you run stuff to archive. Then you could do tape-to-tape migration also. Like my idea is to make incrementals every day (even if I do a full) and keep the incrementals permanently. So you can set it to save all incrementals to pool A which is tape library 1 and all full backups to pool B which is in tape library 2. You can really do anything, of course.
One thing that really surprised me was how much faster it operates than SCP or RSYNC. The encryption overhead is amazing on those (of course bacula supports SSL if you need it)
Where's the value-add? I mean, musicians tour to make money. Why don't you book some lectures for money? You get what you give, that's it.
And for those who don't like to pay $10000 for backup software, there's Bacula. Couple that with an LTO-4 drive (~1000) and LTO-4 tapes (800GB uncompressed, ~60/piece) and you're set. Rsync.net is a decent, cheap online provider for those gaps when you haven't rotated tapes.
Bacula is pretty sweet because it lets you backup to disk volumes and then you can schedule a roll to tape. So you can just back everything up incrementally to a disk volume and then copy those backups to tape, and then run rsync on the disk volumes to have an offsite, online backup. When recovering, you ask to recover from whatever's available. If you keep enough disk storage around (and there's really no reason not to) you can recover to any date in the past. In the event of a disaster your tapes come into play.
Now with drives so cheap the temptation is to buy a external hard drive and use that. But tapes have a long history, guaranteed backwards compatibility (planned anyway, LTO drives have to R/W the previous generation and Read 2 generations back), last longer than moving drives, are simpler, lighter, more robust and more portable. Not that I wouldn't keep a external around to dump desktops but tape is the DR standard.