A scan of a single frame of a 35mm film, on a
high-end consumer film scanner will create a
file... let's see:
[SNIP]
so your output TIFF file is about 120Mb in size.
That is for a single 35mm film frame.
You've described yourself as a high end user.
That means you pay high-end prices for your backup needs, or try to kludge something for cheap.
Tapes are good backup solutions. Tapes and tape drives are are very expensive.
IDE hard drives are kludgy backup solutions, and have serious disadvantages compared to tapes.
HDs tend to be non-removeable, which makes it harder to have a decent rotation, complicates off-site backup, etc.
individual HDs are more fragile then individual tapes
RAID is not a substitute for backups.
HDs are not designed to sit on the shelf for a few years and then be read. It very well might work, but it very well might not. We can piss about it all night, but we'll never prove anything either way. I won't risk archiving to off-line IDE HDs, you can do whatever the hell you like.
The above facts may be annoying, but wishful thinking for cheap solutions doesn't make IDE HDs a quality backup solution.
If you want to backup to IDE, knock yourself out. (I do, as stated above.) But you should go in with your eyes open, and consider all the possible pitfalls - the better to plan around them.
Some people seem to think my attitude is too negative. When you're planning a backup scheme for your precious data, you should be paranoid. Really, really, paranoid. All hardware sucks, get used to it. Tech work is nothing more then trading off the strengths and weaknesses of individual components - don't blind yourself to the weak points of your favorite technologies, or Mister Murphy might pay you a nasty visit some day.
Good luck, BTW, to everyone in this discussion. May you never lose a byte.
>My personal experience leads me to believe that >hard drive volatility is exaggerated lately. >Old Western Digital drives that I had in my 386 >over 10 years ago had bad sectors every so often, >but since then, my high speed hard drives run fine. > I ain't advocating using a hard drive as a backup >medium just yet, but for personal use, I'm running >3 hard drives in a parallel RAID setup without >fear.
As someone else pointed out, RAID doesn't help if you overwrite or delete something by accident.
You are missing the point. What is your backup
method for backing up 220GB?
Tapes are designed for backups. If you seriously need to backup 200GB, then you are looking at DLT or better, and it ain't cheap.
Oh, you don't backup 220GB of personal data on a
regular basis?
Who the fuck has 220GB of personal data? Seriously, for the cost of backing up that much porn, you can just go down to the store and buy the legit DVDs. While you're at it, you can stop off at the record store and buy some albums so you can re-rip your MP3s.
Just because you have 220GBs of hard drives in your machines doesn't mean you need to back up every byte.
C:\WINDOWS>ver
Windows 98 [Version 4.10.2222]
C:\WINDOWS>du |sort |tail -1 353472k./
C:\games\Diablo II>du |sort |tail -1 1378784k./
C:\games\Diablo II>du save
1696k save/old/ 3328k save/
Pop quiz - if I wanted to back up this machine, do I
backup 1.5GB of Windows and Diablo binaries
backup 3 megs of Diablo II save files (would fit on 2 fucking floppies, FFS.) because I have my Win98SE and Diablo II+LOD CDs on the shelf.
My documents (resume, web pages, GNU Cash files, email etc.) live on a server, where they are in fact backed up nightly to a second hard drive.
Every couple of months I burn a CD of the latest backup tarfiles. Cheap CDRs are a half-assed long-term archival solution, but the price is right.
Some things (Mozilla installer, service packs) are so ephemeral that they aren't worth backing up, i.e. when you need them there will probably be a new version available anyway.
What about my MP3s and pr0n? When I've got enough new stuff I burn a CD full. Every year or so it's worth re-burning the MP3s so that I've got the same genre on a given CD. When you've got Sarah McLaughlin, Mozart, Dead Kennedies, Suicidal Tendencies, Reverand Horton Heat and Johnny Cash on the same CD, there isn't a person in the world who won't make fun of you.
So, you trust having no backup at all over having
a backup on an unreliable medium?
I did not recommend that no backup be performed. I said that I do not trust IDE drives for long-term archival use.
If you are determined to archive to IDE, fill your boots - it ain't my data.
Since IDE HD manufacturers recently decreased their warranty period, I'd be *really* reluctant to trust 'em 10 years from now.
Re:The market frowns on Sun's 'monopoly potential'
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
·
· Score: 2
>I'm looking at my keyboard -- or I was before I >started typing. > >It says IBM up at the top right. It make a >delicious clickety-clack when I type and across the >bottom I see Ctrl, Alt, Spacebar, Alt, Ctrl, Arrow >keys, 0,., Enter.
Yep, mine too. I bought this thing at a surplus store a couple of yeas ago for $5. IBM Model M keyboard, manufactured 1984. I sincerely hope to get 10 more years out of it.
The province of Alberta has a full-time Rat Patrol team who go around the provinces and kill rats. Alberta is rat free, and these guys drive around the borders with poison,.22s etc. to keep it that way.
>I think that's something that gets forgotten - >there's science fiction, and there's science >fantasy... And these aren't the same thing.
[SNIP]
>And then consider Star Wars... Gravity-on-demand. > Hyperdrive. Lightsabers. Moon-sized space >stations with planet-destroying super-weapons. >It's space fantasy - albeit wonderfully >entertaining... (And i haven't said a word about >sounds travelling in space)
I agree with your distinction, but I'd hesitate to use Star Wars as an example of anything good...
Gibson's Neuromancer is a classic, and he doesn't waste a paragraph trying to explain how his computers work. Gibson doesn't know how they work, he doesn't care, his setting includes computers with certain properties and abilities, *POOF*, it's magic. But Neuromancer was well written, Gibson kept everything internally consistent, and therefore somewhat believable.
Zelazny was another author who didn't like to get bogged down explaining his physics. But Lord Of Light didn't suffer from this, quite the contrary! It's a book about ideas, philosophies, characters, and the clash of ideas. Brilliant stuff, even if he doesn't explain how the Pavilion of Silence operates. There's all sorts of stuff in the book that Zelazy could describe in technical terms, but he'd rather use mystical language like "the bridge of the gods" or "the tall man of smoke who wears a wide hat".
Both Neuromancer and Lord Of Light won Hugos. It must have been on the strength of the "fiction", because there was precious little "science" in these books:)
>The real problem with spam is that it steals >bandwidth - blocking spam after it's already >sitting in your mailbox is like closing the barn >door after the horses have eaten your children - >the bandwidth has already been used, so you don't >gain anything
I disagree, this tool would spare me the time and annoyance of deleting the spam message by message.
(I don't dispute that spam is a terrible waste of bandwidth, but it's not the only problem.)
You have ever wanted to hold a seminar entitled "Suicide...Doing It Right!"
You believe that 90% of people are a poor excuse for protoplasm
I'm sure a lot of professions are the same. Can you imagine what kind of war stories cops tell each other? Hell, even traffic cops frequently deal with corpses etc.
I'm sure mortician/coroner humour is pretty bleak.
Why was "Clerks" funny? I loved it because anyone who deals with people all day realizes that people are DUMB. Some individuals might be smart, but in general, people are dumb. Human nature is dumb, often silly.
Bank tellers, store clerks, call center grunts, tech support guys... they all deal with people constantly, so they get to see some real gems of human behaviour.
In some jobs (cop/doctor/nurse) you get to deal with people at their very worst, and the dumbness/sillyness just shines right thru. My hat's off to them, I couldn't do it.
>But at the same time she is very calm and composed >on a surgery table even in an emergency. I have >seen her being at her best. But not once have I >seen her calling others stupid, even if that person >has no sense of medicine.
Oh I dunno:)
Medical people can see a lot of luserish behaviour in a typical day. It depends on where you work, geriatrics probably isn't so bad, but ER folks see every kind of stupidity you could imagine, and several you couldn't.
There are mailing lists etc. where EMTs and ER people trade stories about the outrageous stupidity of their patients, these lists have the same tone as tech people telling "CDROMs as cupholders" stories.
Ever notice that people who injure themselves because of drugs/alcohol receive a slightly different standard of care at hospitals? You've just used up all your sympathy points, dude!
>>Microsoft announced Tuesday that plans for.Net >>Server, aka "Longhorn" have been scraped and they >>will instead focus on the the release after that, >>code-named "Foghorn".
>Foghorn Langhorn? Now boy... you're doin' it all >wrong!
Ah say, them boys are about as sharp as a bag full o' wet mice.
Something like this would be a sweet car MP3 player, and I for one would never remember to take it inside on winter nights. In.ca that would be a problem for a device that doesn't like -20 degrees C.
The old discman in my truck sometimes doesn't like cold mornings, i.e. it skips a lot. The discman is OK after warming up for 5-10 minutes, but I don't know if I'd abuse a player with an internal HD like that:)
>Don't expect a clear signal on your car stereo >using Nueros. The Nueros unit has an FM >transmitter, not digital radio. So you're still >dealing with an analog signal and the sort of loss >associated with that.
I don't know about your car, but when I'm driving down the highway at 120 km/h, there's enough engine noise/road noise that I've never really felt the need to spend more $$$ on higher fidelity audio.
Can anyone really hear the difference in sound quality when they're actually driving the car?
My car didn't even have a tape deck when we bought it, so the cheapest way to get a CD player into it was/w an FM transmitter. It sounds OK, I'm sure the crappy factory speakers hurt the quality as much as the FM transmitter.
Fortunately, my truck has a tape deck, so I've got my old discman plugged in with a cassette adapter. Again, quality is "good enough" for me, and the price is right.
DESCRIPTION
inetd should be run at boot time by/etc/rc (see rc(8)). It then listens
for connections on certain internet sockets. When a connection is found
on one of its sockets, it decides what service the socket corresponds to,
and invokes a program to service the request. After the program is fin-
ished, it continues to listen on the socket (except in some cases which
will be described below). Essentially, inetd allows running one daemon
to invoke several others, reducing load on the system.
>I read the lyrics for the song and my reaction was >"huh?", perhaps the song makes exclusive reference >to OpenBSD so much that you would have to be >familiar with it to get it?
The current OpenBSD mascot is a blowfish, so there are a lot of fish references.
The (wicked cool) art for OpenBSD 3.2 has a James Bond theme.
OpenBSD art has a recurring theme of foiling "script kitties", so that explains all the cat references.
>I think a case mod topic might be overkill... I >mean does it really matter what the case looks >like? I only ever look at the monitor and >occassionally the keyboard (when I spill coffee on >it...).
Well if you don't like case mod stories, you should hope they break these stories off into their own topic! That way you could auto-ignore them via your preferences.
>It would be quite amusing for someone to make a 3d >version of nethack, yet have it use 3d text instead >of actual character graphics. Can you imagine, in >the flickering light of a dungeon, the sight of a >huge W jumping out from behind the shadows?
For extra irony, the Slashdot banner ad for this article is advertising the Radeon 9700.
>get a sales rep, ask for them to get you benchmarks >for SQL server on each of these boxes. They should >have numbers for you. If not, tell them that if >they can't get you these numbers, you are going to >have to try Dell, HP-Compaq, etc...
Alternatively, ask the IBM sales rep to let you borrow an evaluation unit for a week or two. Thrash on it, see if the config meets your needs.
Abuse the salescritters, that's what they're for.
The reason IBM servers are more expensive then buying a rackmount case and a bunch of parts is that IBM "adds value". Make 'em earn their extra $$$, and get some of that "added value" for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
You've described yourself as a high end user.
That means you pay high-end prices for your backup needs, or try to kludge something for cheap.
The above facts may be annoying, but wishful thinking for cheap solutions doesn't make IDE HDs a quality backup solution.
If you want to backup to IDE, knock yourself out. (I do, as stated above.) But you should go in with your eyes open, and consider all the possible pitfalls - the better to plan around them.
Some people seem to think my attitude is too negative. When you're planning a backup scheme for your precious data, you should be paranoid. Really, really, paranoid. All hardware sucks, get used to it. Tech work is nothing more then trading off the strengths and weaknesses of individual components - don't blind yourself to the weak points of your favorite technologies, or Mister Murphy might pay you a nasty visit some day.
Good luck, BTW, to everyone in this discussion. May you never lose a byte.
>My personal experience leads me to believe that
>hard drive volatility is exaggerated lately.
>Old Western Digital drives that I had in my 386
>over 10 years ago had bad sectors every so often,
>but since then, my high speed hard drives run fine.
> I ain't advocating using a hard drive as a backup
>medium just yet, but for personal use, I'm running
>3 hard drives in a parallel RAID setup without
>fear.
As someone else pointed out, RAID doesn't help if you overwrite or delete something by accident.
Tapes are designed for backups. If you seriously need to backup 200GB, then you are looking at DLT or better, and it ain't cheap.
Who the fuck has 220GB of personal data? Seriously, for the cost of backing up that much porn, you can just go down to the store and buy the legit DVDs. While you're at it, you can stop off at the record store and buy some albums so you can re-rip your MP3s.
Just because you have 220GBs of hard drives in your machines doesn't mean you need to back up every byte.
Pop quiz - if I wanted to back up this machine, do I
My documents (resume, web pages, GNU Cash files, email etc.) live on a server, where they are in fact backed up nightly to a second hard drive.
Every couple of months I burn a CD of the latest backup tarfiles. Cheap CDRs are a half-assed long-term archival solution, but the price is right.
Some things (Mozilla installer, service packs) are so ephemeral that they aren't worth backing up, i.e. when you need them there will probably be a new version available anyway.
What about my MP3s and pr0n? When I've got enough new stuff I burn a CD full. Every year or so it's worth re-burning the MP3s so that I've got the same genre on a given CD. When you've got Sarah McLaughlin, Mozart, Dead Kennedies, Suicidal Tendencies, Reverand Horton Heat and Johnny Cash on the same CD, there isn't a person in the world who won't make fun of you.
I did not recommend that no backup be performed. I said that I do not trust IDE drives for long-term archival use.
If you are determined to archive to IDE, fill your boots - it ain't my data.
Since IDE HD manufacturers recently decreased their warranty period, I'd be *really* reluctant to trust 'em 10 years from now.
>I'm looking at my keyboard -- or I was before I ., Enter.
>started typing.
>
>It says IBM up at the top right. It make a
>delicious clickety-clack when I type and across the
>bottom I see Ctrl, Alt, Spacebar, Alt, Ctrl, Arrow
>keys, 0,
Yep, mine too. I bought this thing at a surplus store a couple of yeas ago for $5. IBM Model M keyboard, manufactured 1984. I sincerely hope to get 10 more years out of it.
Maybe Canadians just have a thing against rats.
.22s etc. to keep it that way.
The province of Alberta has a full-time Rat Patrol team who go around the provinces and kill rats. Alberta is rat free, and these guys drive around the borders with poison,
Some days I think this would be the perfect job.
>I think that's something that gets forgotten -
:)
>there's science fiction, and there's science
>fantasy... And these aren't the same thing.
[SNIP]
>And then consider Star Wars... Gravity-on-demand.
> Hyperdrive. Lightsabers. Moon-sized space
>stations with planet-destroying super-weapons.
>It's space fantasy - albeit wonderfully
>entertaining... (And i haven't said a word about
>sounds travelling in space)
I agree with your distinction, but I'd hesitate to use Star Wars as an example of anything good...
Gibson's Neuromancer is a classic, and he doesn't waste a paragraph trying to explain how his computers work. Gibson doesn't know how they work, he doesn't care, his setting includes computers with certain properties and abilities, *POOF*, it's magic. But Neuromancer was well written, Gibson kept everything internally consistent, and therefore somewhat believable.
Zelazny was another author who didn't like to get bogged down explaining his physics. But Lord Of Light didn't suffer from this, quite the contrary! It's a book about ideas, philosophies, characters, and the clash of ideas. Brilliant stuff, even if he doesn't explain how the Pavilion of Silence operates. There's all sorts of stuff in the book that Zelazy could describe in technical terms, but he'd rather use mystical language like "the bridge of the gods" or "the tall man of smoke who wears a wide hat".
Both Neuromancer and Lord Of Light won Hugos. It must have been on the strength of the "fiction", because there was precious little "science" in these books
Are the editors trying to be funny or are they just that fucking lame?
>Because is there really that much difference
>between a company Intranet today and thier VM
>system a decade ago?
Yeah, the mainframe was a lot more reliable.
>Don't forget marketing; I've seen marketing trump
>legal.
ROTFL, does this outfit have an entry on fuckedcompany yet?
I should mention Argon Zark here.
The good news: Charley Parker is a kick-ass artist, they don't look like comics at all- visually stunning.
The bad news: New comics are downright rare, but he's been at it since 1995, so you can enjoy his accumulated work.
>May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead.
That's brilliant, do you know who said it first/where it came from?
>The real problem with spam is that it steals
>bandwidth - blocking spam after it's already
>sitting in your mailbox is like closing the barn
>door after the horses have eaten your children -
>the bandwidth has already been used, so you don't
>gain anything
I disagree, this tool would spare me the time and annoyance of deleting the spam message by message.
(I don't dispute that spam is a terrible waste of bandwidth, but it's not the only problem.)
I liked the you might be an ER nurse if list, i.e.
I'm sure a lot of professions are the same. Can you imagine what kind of war stories cops tell each other? Hell, even traffic cops frequently deal with corpses etc.
I'm sure mortician/coroner humour is pretty bleak.
Why was "Clerks" funny? I loved it because anyone who deals with people all day realizes that people are DUMB. Some individuals might be smart, but in general, people are dumb. Human nature is dumb, often silly.
Bank tellers, store clerks, call center grunts, tech support guys... they all deal with people constantly, so they get to see some real gems of human behaviour.
In some jobs (cop/doctor/nurse) you get to deal with people at their very worst, and the dumbness/sillyness just shines right thru. My hat's off to them, I couldn't do it.
>But at the same time she is very calm and composed
:)
>on a surgery table even in an emergency. I have
>seen her being at her best. But not once have I
>seen her calling others stupid, even if that person
>has no sense of medicine.
Oh I dunno
Medical people can see a lot of luserish behaviour in a typical day. It depends on where you work, geriatrics probably isn't so bad, but ER folks see every kind of stupidity you could imagine, and several you couldn't.
There are mailing lists etc. where EMTs and ER people trade stories about the outrageous stupidity of their patients, these lists have the same tone as tech people telling "CDROMs as cupholders" stories.
Ever notice that people who injure themselves because of drugs/alcohol receive a slightly different standard of care at hospitals? You've just used up all your sympathy points, dude!
>>Microsoft announced Tuesday that plans for .Net
... you're doin' it all
>>Server, aka "Longhorn" have been scraped and they
>>will instead focus on the the release after that,
>>code-named "Foghorn".
>Foghorn Langhorn? Now boy
>wrong!
Ah say, them boys are about as sharp as a bag full o' wet mice.
>Do you have to keep the player out in the open?
.ca that would be a problem for a device that doesn't like -20 degrees C.
:)
Something like this would be a sweet car MP3 player, and I for one would never remember to take it inside on winter nights. In
The old discman in my truck sometimes doesn't like cold mornings, i.e. it skips a lot. The discman is OK after warming up for 5-10 minutes, but I don't know if I'd abuse a player with an internal HD like that
>Don't expect a clear signal on your car stereo
/w an FM transmitter. It sounds OK, I'm sure the crappy factory speakers hurt the quality as much as the FM transmitter.
>using Nueros. The Nueros unit has an FM
>transmitter, not digital radio. So you're still
>dealing with an analog signal and the sort of loss
>associated with that.
I don't know about your car, but when I'm driving down the highway at 120 km/h, there's enough engine noise/road noise that I've never really felt the need to spend more $$$ on higher fidelity audio.
Can anyone really hear the difference in sound quality when they're actually driving the car?
My car didn't even have a tape deck when we bought it, so the cheapest way to get a CD player into it was
Fortunately, my truck has a tape deck, so I've got my old discman plugged in with a cassette adapter. Again, quality is "good enough" for me, and the price is right.
Read The Fine Manpage.
$ man inetd
>What other books would people recommend for someone
>interested in network security
Definitely start out with TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, W. Richard Stevens, ISBN 0-201-63346-9. I can't say enough good things about this book.
Internetworking With TCP/IP Volume 1, Douglas Comer, ISBN 0-13-01830-6 is another very good book, but Stevens' book is better.
>I read the lyrics for the song and my reaction was
>"huh?", perhaps the song makes exclusive reference
>to OpenBSD so much that you would have to be
>familiar with it to get it?
The current OpenBSD mascot is a blowfish, so there are a lot of fish references.
The (wicked cool) art for OpenBSD 3.2 has a James Bond theme.
OpenBSD art has a recurring theme of foiling "script kitties", so that explains all the cat references.
>That's nothing. Last weekend I went to the auto
>scrap yard and heisted some badges. Now my Linux
>box has a "Turbo Deisel" badge from a 70's Volvo.
Cool. Do you have a picture available somewhere?
>I think a case mod topic might be overkill... I
>mean does it really matter what the case looks
>like? I only ever look at the monitor and
>occassionally the keyboard (when I spill coffee on
>it...).
Well if you don't like case mod stories, you should hope they break these stories off into their own topic! That way you could auto-ignore them via your preferences.
>It would be quite amusing for someone to make a 3d
>version of nethack, yet have it use 3d text instead
>of actual character graphics. Can you imagine, in
>the flickering light of a dungeon, the sight of a >huge W jumping out from behind the shadows?
For extra irony, the Slashdot banner ad for this article is advertising the Radeon 9700.
>get a sales rep, ask for them to get you benchmarks
>for SQL server on each of these boxes. They should
>have numbers for you. If not, tell them that if
>they can't get you these numbers, you are going to
>have to try Dell, HP-Compaq, etc...
Alternatively, ask the IBM sales rep to let you borrow an evaluation unit for a week or two. Thrash on it, see if the config meets your needs.
Abuse the salescritters, that's what they're for.
The reason IBM servers are more expensive then buying a rackmount case and a bunch of parts is that IBM "adds value". Make 'em earn their extra $$$, and get some of that "added value" for yourself.