If I'm attacked by someone, I'm not immediately inclined to curl up in the fetal position and await further abuse.
Similarly, if I'm being harassed by someone in a position of authority when I've done nothing wrong, I feel no particular compulsion to be agreeable and complacent.
And I'm sure that, to some extent, you agree with me. So please, kind sir, tell me: How should one respond?
Because a person in the Unites States has a right to buy things at the store without showing documentation.
Douchebag or not, if there is no law prohibiting an action, then that action is perfectly legal. One might even suggest that people in general should become the most glaring assholes the world has ever seen in the face of having their basic liberties trampled upon.
Rights cannot be granted, they can only be taken away.
That's only reasonably suspicious if a reasonable person would reasonably assume that all cashiers are crooked and a party to theft.
As a reasonable person, myself, I don't have any such suspicion. I think that most other reasonable folks would feel the same.
Furthermore (and this is straying pretty far from the context), even if the cashier is known to be stealing from the company, I don't believe that one's brief association with them as they pay for their goods is any reason to detain anyone.
I'm not aware of any company wherein a salesperson has greater influence on the price of an item on a per-sale basis, than the managers and owners of that company.
If you know differently, then please cite an example.
What people seem to not realize is that if managers were there to take over and make sales for everyone who didn't feel like they were "getting a reasonable deal" then they wouldn't get any work done and there would be no reason to have salespeople. Just a bunch of managers.
Agreed, to a point. I've only dealt with managers a few times, and it is far from a regular occurrence. But they're the first folks with their heads on the block when departmental numbers come up short, and so they deserve a chance to close a sale. The act of helping to close a sale does constitute productive work.
Remember the context, here. This is not about whether or not a $40 set of steak knives could be haggled down to $30 or some other minuscule waste of time, but whether a set of recovery disks ($cheap) can be haggled into the existing price of a new computer (>$500).
Regarding your reference to CID 20418209: Best Buy is not indicative of a proper haggling experience -- there is an expectation, in that particular environment, that the customer will be paying the marked price for the stated items.
But this is a very recent way to sell big-ticket items, which have historically always been negotiable to some extent.
Nevertheless, I've not ever complained to a manager about a salesperson's inability to satisfy my requests. Like I said, if the salesperson habitually allows profit to walk out the door in the form of an angry former customer, then they deserve reprimand. But it's not my place to point this out to management (I am, after all, a former customer by this point); my guess is that they'll see it themselves before too long and take care of it themselves.
I have haggled from both sides of the fence. At one point, I was involved in retail sales for rather high-end home and professional audio gear. In this industry, the standard de-facto markup is 100%, such that an item that costs $500 to get in the door will be unflinchingly priced at $1,000.
This, obviously, leaves considerable room for deal-making. But if the customer wanted something particularly expensive or odd, I certainly would have had to ask my boss about it before either giving it to him or showing him the door.
At another, much more down-to-earth retail sales job, I had no power to adjust a sale. Because of this, I referred all customer attempts at haggling to the nearest member of management. (Sometimes they'd negotiate, sometimes not.)
You see, the limits to what a salesperson may be empowered to do are always less than what a manager is able to do.
If I, as a consumer, have reached those limits and still do not feel that I'm getting a reasonable deal, then it certainly benefits both parties (myself and the merchant) to escalate the issue before abandoning the transaction. It gives the establishment one more opportunity to avoid losing a sale, and me one more opportunity to complete the transaction without additional investment in time on my part.
And that, sir, is haggling. Not complaining. Not trying to get anyone fired. Just negotiating a sale with a salesperson with a grey shirt (ala manager) instead of a blue one.
That, sir, is haggling. The point that a salesperson who is unable or unwilling to haggle over such a small item (whether by corporate or personal ignorance, or malice) deserves to be reprimanded if they habitually let a few hundred dollars of easy profit walk out the door in the form of an angry (and former) customer should be obvious and implicit. I mean, really: They've just turned a source of profit into a source of negative publicity, and should be dealt with accordingly.
As a customer, I've often left the store when the salesperson or their manager refuses to give me what I want for a price that I consider reasonable. And every single time I've done this, there's been a better-adjusted salesperson at another nearby retailer whom, eager to accommodate, wins a quick and painless sale.
If I can import an American-made Chevrolet from China cheaper than I can buy one from the local dealer, then I'd be a fool to do anything else as long as I'm going to be buying such a vehicle. (And, given the state of things, this might be possible soon.)
Likewise, with music. If I can buy licensed and legit American music cheaper by importing it from Russia than I can buy it from the local retailer (ala iTunes, eMusic), then I'd be foolish for doing anything else.
That the record industry or General Motors doesn't agree with my actions is really not any concern of mine.
$ traceroute www.allofmp3.com traceroute to allofmp3.com (87.242.93.250), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 ip-208-113-223-1 (208.113.223.1) 12.314 ms 4.906 ms 3.685 ms
2 core01 (66.33.192.2) 1.004 ms 0.986 ms 0.865 ms
3 146.82.32.57 (146.82.32.57) 1.009 ms ge-0-1-0.410.ar1.LAX3.gblx.net (64.215.183.49) 1.953 ms ge-0-1-0.405.ar1.LAX3.gblx.net (67.17.162.161) 0.952 ms
4 64.209.106.54 (64.209.106.54) 143.700 ms 143.797 ms 143.828 ms
5 ttc.ge2-8.br01.ams01.pccwbtn.net (63.218.65.22) 190.994 ms 191.044 ms 191.179 ms
6 ruscomnet-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.56.85) 191.647 ms 191.339 ms 190.912 ms
7 undef.ruscomnet.ru (80.249.128.2) 188.116 ms 188.058 ms 188.206 ms
8 87.242.93.244 (87.242.93.244) 188.109 ms 188.166 ms 188.323 ms
9 * * *
All the way from LA to allofmp3's firewall in 188 milliseconds, without showing a passport. I don't see any major hinderance to either economy or transportation here.
But then, I suck at history. So, tell me: Why might it be unfair to engage in commerce with our overseas friends under their laws, and them to engage in commerce with us under our laws?
It seems to me that there should be a fairly wide market for Dell conversion cables.
My wife has a Dell Dimension with a rather nice, easy-to-work-on case, but the 2GHz P4 it has is showing its age. A cable kit with a male header like a Dell motherboard connected to a bunch of.010 pin sockets, as supplied on every other ATX case in the world, would fix this problem forever. It'd then be trivial to mount any micro-ATX board, and have all of the LEDs, buttons, and jacks work.
Surely someone must make such a thing (and if they were just slightly less evil, it would be available directly from Dell).
Only works for some (generally cheap) modems. Most of the better manufacturers were paying Hayes royalties for a patented technique requiring a short period of total silence after +++ before they'd drop to command mode, and were unaffected by this trick.
Meanwhile, please understand that the more complacent and sugary-sweet you are when it comes to essential liberty, the less of it you'll have to enjoy.
With 50mW available, it'd be simple enough to put a luminescent display under some lightly-pigmented area of skin (under the arm, perhaps). No wrist watch required.
Please allow me to be the first to say that I, for one, welcome our electroluminescent overlords!
Here in the United States, everything is legal unless otherwise specified.
The DMCA, like most other laws, is not so much a list of permissible actions, but a list of restrictions on freedom.
The mere absense of legal verbiage forbidding an action is, in fact, a statement that such action is legal, by simple virtue of it not being made illegal.
But whatever the case: Making an iPhone talk to a non-AT&T network does not raise a copyright issue, so therefore copyright law does not apply, and no exception in the DMCA is required. It could have been a contract issue if Apple had made such a contract a condition of sale, but they do not.
So, as one's own property, one should do whatever one wishes with it in the absense of prior restraint.
In case you're still fucking brainwashed, I offer the following rhetorical question: Earlier today I used a 16" pry bar as a cold chisel to break up concrete. This is obviously not the tool's intended use, and I really should have used a cold chisel instead. Since the DMCA doesn't explicitly exclude gross repurposing of pry bars, does this make such usage illegal? (No, of course not.)
Rights cannot be granted, they can only be taken away.
I've had bad luck with every single VIA-based add-on USB controller card that I have attempted to use. Strange things, like only negotiating at USB 2.0 speeds -if- the machine is booted with the USB 2.0 device attached. Random hard lockups (not even a BSOD) under moderate (2.5" HDD speeds) data transfer in multiple, otherwise rock-solid Proliant machines under Win2k3.
In all cases, it seems that it's something that a driver update would fix. But also in all cases so far, no update has existed.
I've had much better results with randomly-selected NEC-based controllers, which so far have always just worked in every machine I've tried.
The birth certificate, at least in Ohio, is a public record. Anyone's birth certificate can be requested by anyone else. They just have to pay the duplication/certification fee(s), and show one form of positive ID. The requestor's name is recorded, the document is copied and officiously stamped, and the transaction is done.
All that possession of a valid duplicate birth certificate proves is that the named individual did in fact exist, and that someone at some point paid the county to produce a copy of it.
But then, perhaps that all it is intended to prove. This process does serve to reduce the number of completely fictitious Real ID cards being issued by making it somewhat more difficult to invent a new identity. That it does absolutely nothing to prevent the theft of someone else's identity may not be important in the case of this particular document.
It's not just the lone, cheap unmanaged switches that do this.
I once saw a well-designed, multi-building, redundant network of HP Procurve switches fail completely. In this case, it wasn't just a loose cable - someone decided to plug both the "LAN" and "PC" ports of an IP phone (with integrated ethernet switch) into separate ports on the wall.
It's easy to do on accident. It'd probably be just as easy to do on purpose, given root access to a system on the LAN and malicious intent.
That's exactly what -I- do, at least in function. To restore after a complete loss would entail both the backup server and the target machine being in the same spot at the same time, or at least the requisite hard drives. It will take either 35 or 70 miles of driving to do a bare-metal restore using my configuration, depending on which town I'm working in on the day the shit hits the fan.
I'd be foolish to do it any other way -- expecting the company's email to wait while I pedantically restore the whole machine over a 384kbps cable modem would probably mean my job.
The only real difference between what you're doing and what I'm doing is that I only have to drive moderate distances in the unlikely event of massive data loss (ie, multiple disk failure, targeted attack, or catastrophic filesystem bug), whereas you also have to drive moderate distances as part of a normal routine.
My backups are fresh. And again, I never, ever have to fuck with it.
And, granted, I do have an extra computer to maintain. But it's a nothing-special headless K6-2 box with a big SATA disk. No RAID, because it's redundant by its very existance. There's no compelling reason for it to be particularly stout; a small embedded MIPS-based machine with no moving parts would probably be a fine replacement if/when the hardware dies.
In the event that the backup server loses its mind and trashes its disk, it's easy to restore the system to a usable state -- the backup server itself is also backed up daily using the same rsync technique to the RAID array on the mail server.
Plus, for less-than-massive data loss, I can go back in time and restore selective stuff from an already-mounted, read-only NFS share, albeit slowly. (For the sake of brevity, I neglected to mention that the backup scripts use hard links to keep several days worth of complete data, plus weekly and monthly snapshots, available at all times. It's a hell of an undo button, and is a concept which should be somewhat familiar to anyone who has used a NetApps filer. Except it was much, much cheaper.)
Anything which can boot and run from an IDE disk can also run from a Compact Flash card, with the right adapter (Google for one). I've got things ranging from an old version of Slackware running on a flash-based 386 laptop, to a diskless Windows XP machine, which use this trick.
You see, CF cards inherently know how to act just like it is a regular IDE disk drive. The adapters are completely passive, and exist merely to supply power to the card and convert the small pin layout of a CF card to the much larger pin layout of a typical IDE cable.
So, if the mythological hypervisor actually exists and the hardware can run it, then it can boot from flash. The software doesn't know, or care, that it's operating from flash.
Most relatively recent motherboards also generally support booting from a bog-standard USB drive. This is often trickier, because whatever operating system/hypervisor/microkernel/whatever you're booting will probably eventually realize that there's USB ports in place and attempt to control them by itself. If it handles this changeover in an inconsiderate fashion, it will crash. But if the software was built with booting from USB as one of the design considerations, it generally will work fine -- Knoppix, for instance, is supposed to be fairly easy to run from a thumb drive on mostly random hardware.
Expect to see more of this sort of activity as programs and data remain relatively small and flash continues plummeting in price.
Who cares how long it takes to upload as long as it gets done before the drive crashes?
So what if it takes six weeks to upload a 100GB backup. Subsequent backups should[1] consist only of things that have changed, and should be rather fast indeed.
It doesn't even have to slow you down. Just use a router with good QoS support (for instance, anything which can run X-Wrt) and your online backup will only consume idle bandwidth... If it takes a few days to upload a few gigs of home movies, who really cares?
1: I keep automatic backups of our Gentoo mail server at work, using rsync to another Linux machine in another city and a nothing-special cable modem. It's in the realm of things that Just Fucking Works, and it's possible to restore the computer from bare metal in short order. But, rsync doesn't preserve NTFS permissions, so there seems to be no Windows-specific way of doing such a complete remote backup under Windows.
By your definition of "server," it seems we only have three such built-to-order machines here in use here at the shop. They're all Prolaint ML330s of various generations, custom ordered from Compaq or HP. The oldest one has SCSI RAID, the newest one has IDE RAID. All include at least one additional IDE port for the CD-ROM drive.
So I guess that some servers do use IDE, since these particular ones all seem to be serving just fine.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but those machines are ancient!"
So go on and head over to Dell, the vendor in question. Configure yourself a nice new $10,000 Poweredge 6800. Note the distinct inclusion of IDE CD-ROM drives, and thus the obvious inclusion of at least one IDE port.
The rest of your argument is, therefore, without merit. But even if it weren't: CF to IDE adapters are passive devices, need no testing beyond that which a cable would be subjected to, and play no factor in throughput or latency. Furthermore, flash devices can trivially be made as absolutely redundant as any other storage device in a PC.
Finally, ruggedness: This is only a PC. There is no redundant logic. If you go about jabbing screwdrivers into it, hitting it with a hammer, throwing salt water into it, or dropping it, it will fail. The adapter need only be as rugged as anything else inside of the box, which is not a very difficult standard to meet.
I have a CF card mounted on an expansion card bracket at the back of the case. A simple thing, really: PCB with a 4-pin power connector, CF slot, 40-pin IDE connector, and a couple of LEDs for status, all fastened to a bracket so that the card protrudes neatly through a slot at the back of the case.
It's definitely a "consumer" adapter -- I think I paid $8, total, to have it delivered to Ohio from Hong Kong. But like most mass-produced electronic items in this millennium, the soldering is quite good, and the connectors look to be of fine quality. I expect that it should prove to be a very durable implement.
I don't know what else I should expect of such an item, nor do I see any obvious manner in which to improve it.
Could you please be more elaborate on the topic of what a professional-grade CF-to-IDE adapter might consist of?
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If I'm attacked by someone, I'm not immediately inclined to curl up in the fetal position and await further abuse.
Similarly, if I'm being harassed by someone in a position of authority when I've done nothing wrong, I feel no particular compulsion to be agreeable and complacent.
And I'm sure that, to some extent, you agree with me. So please, kind sir, tell me: How should one respond?
Thank you.
Because a person in the Unites States has a right to buy things at the store without showing documentation.
Douchebag or not, if there is no law prohibiting an action, then that action is perfectly legal. One might even suggest that people in general should become the most glaring assholes the world has ever seen in the face of having their basic liberties trampled upon.
Rights cannot be granted, they can only be taken away.
That's only reasonably suspicious if a reasonable person would reasonably assume that all cashiers are crooked and a party to theft.
As a reasonable person, myself, I don't have any such suspicion. I think that most other reasonable folks would feel the same.
Furthermore (and this is straying pretty far from the context), even if the cashier is known to be stealing from the company, I don't believe that one's brief association with them as they pay for their goods is any reason to detain anyone.
Not always, not even in most cases.
I'm not aware of any company wherein a salesperson has greater influence on the price of an item on a per-sale basis, than the managers and owners of that company.
If you know differently, then please cite an example.
What people seem to not realize is that if managers were there to take over and make sales for everyone who didn't feel like they were "getting a reasonable deal" then they wouldn't get any work done and there would be no reason to have salespeople. Just a bunch of managers.
Agreed, to a point. I've only dealt with managers a few times, and it is far from a regular occurrence. But they're the first folks with their heads on the block when departmental numbers come up short, and so they deserve a chance to close a sale. The act of helping to close a sale does constitute productive work.
Remember the context, here. This is not about whether or not a $40 set of steak knives could be haggled down to $30 or some other minuscule waste of time, but whether a set of recovery disks ($cheap) can be haggled into the existing price of a new computer (>$500).
Are you done, yet?
Sir,
Regarding your reference to CID 20418209: Best Buy is not indicative of a proper haggling experience -- there is an expectation, in that particular environment, that the customer will be paying the marked price for the stated items.
But this is a very recent way to sell big-ticket items, which have historically always been negotiable to some extent.
Nevertheless, I've not ever complained to a manager about a salesperson's inability to satisfy my requests. Like I said, if the salesperson habitually allows profit to walk out the door in the form of an angry former customer, then they deserve reprimand. But it's not my place to point this out to management (I am, after all, a former customer by this point); my guess is that they'll see it themselves before too long and take care of it themselves.
I have haggled from both sides of the fence. At one point, I was involved in retail sales for rather high-end home and professional audio gear. In this industry, the standard de-facto markup is 100%, such that an item that costs $500 to get in the door will be unflinchingly priced at $1,000.
This, obviously, leaves considerable room for deal-making. But if the customer wanted something particularly expensive or odd, I certainly would have had to ask my boss about it before either giving it to him or showing him the door.
At another, much more down-to-earth retail sales job, I had no power to adjust a sale. Because of this, I referred all customer attempts at haggling to the nearest member of management. (Sometimes they'd negotiate, sometimes not.)
You see, the limits to what a salesperson may be empowered to do are always less than what a manager is able to do.
If I, as a consumer, have reached those limits and still do not feel that I'm getting a reasonable deal, then it certainly benefits both parties (myself and the merchant) to escalate the issue before abandoning the transaction. It gives the establishment one more opportunity to avoid losing a sale, and me one more opportunity to complete the transaction without additional investment in time on my part.
And that, sir, is haggling. Not complaining. Not trying to get anyone fired. Just negotiating a sale with a salesperson with a grey shirt (ala manager) instead of a blue one.
That, sir, is haggling. The point that a salesperson who is unable or unwilling to haggle over such a small item (whether by corporate or personal ignorance, or malice) deserves to be reprimanded if they habitually let a few hundred dollars of easy profit walk out the door in the form of an angry (and former) customer should be obvious and implicit. I mean, really: They've just turned a source of profit into a source of negative publicity, and should be dealt with accordingly.
As a customer, I've often left the store when the salesperson or their manager refuses to give me what I want for a price that I consider reasonable. And every single time I've done this, there's been a better-adjusted salesperson at another nearby retailer whom, eager to accommodate, wins a quick and painless sale.
If I can import an American-made Chevrolet from China cheaper than I can buy one from the local dealer, then I'd be a fool to do anything else as long as I'm going to be buying such a vehicle. (And, given the state of things, this might be possible soon.)
Likewise, with music. If I can buy licensed and legit American music cheaper by importing it from Russia than I can buy it from the local retailer (ala iTunes, eMusic), then I'd be foolish for doing anything else.
That the record industry or General Motors doesn't agree with my actions is really not any concern of mine.
Of course it's fair.
Look:
$ traceroute www.allofmp3.com
traceroute to allofmp3.com (87.242.93.250), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 ip-208-113-223-1 (208.113.223.1) 12.314 ms 4.906 ms 3.685 ms
2 core01 (66.33.192.2) 1.004 ms 0.986 ms 0.865 ms
3 146.82.32.57 (146.82.32.57) 1.009 ms ge-0-1-0.410.ar1.LAX3.gblx.net (64.215.183.49) 1.953 ms ge-0-1-0.405.ar1.LAX3.gblx.net (67.17.162.161) 0.952 ms
4 64.209.106.54 (64.209.106.54) 143.700 ms 143.797 ms 143.828 ms
5 ttc.ge2-8.br01.ams01.pccwbtn.net (63.218.65.22) 190.994 ms 191.044 ms 191.179 ms
6 ruscomnet-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.56.85) 191.647 ms 191.339 ms 190.912 ms
7 undef.ruscomnet.ru (80.249.128.2) 188.116 ms 188.058 ms 188.206 ms
8 87.242.93.244 (87.242.93.244) 188.109 ms 188.166 ms 188.323 ms
9 * * *
All the way from LA to allofmp3's firewall in 188 milliseconds, without showing a passport. I don't see any major hinderance to either economy or transportation here.
But then, I suck at history. So, tell me: Why might it be unfair to engage in commerce with our overseas friends under their laws, and them to engage in commerce with us under our laws?
It seems to me that there should be a fairly wide market for Dell conversion cables.
.010 pin sockets, as supplied on every other ATX case in the world, would fix this problem forever. It'd then be trivial to mount any micro-ATX board, and have all of the LEDs, buttons, and jacks work.
My wife has a Dell Dimension with a rather nice, easy-to-work-on case, but the 2GHz P4 it has is showing its age. A cable kit with a male header like a Dell motherboard connected to a bunch of
Surely someone must make such a thing (and if they were just slightly less evil, it would be available directly from Dell).
Only works for some (generally cheap) modems. Most of the better manufacturers were paying Hayes royalties for a patented technique requiring a short period of total silence after +++ before they'd drop to command mode, and were unaffected by this trick.
But it -was- fun...
I'll take that under advisement.
Meanwhile, please understand that the more complacent and sugary-sweet you are when it comes to essential liberty, the less of it you'll have to enjoy.
I'll tell you what advantages Vista has to offer over XP, when you tell me what advantages XP has over 2k.
If you want to compare upgrade cycles, then let us compare them.
You're mistaken; I see your position plainly.
But who gives a fuck if people agree with a law, or whether it is "right" or not, if the law doesn't even bloody apply to the topic at hand?
At least you admit to being brainwashed, fuckwad.
Cheers.
With 50mW available, it'd be simple enough to put a luminescent display under some lightly-pigmented area of skin (under the arm, perhaps). No wrist watch required.
Please allow me to be the first to say that I, for one, welcome our electroluminescent overlords!
Dear brainwashed fuckwad,
Here in the United States, everything is legal unless otherwise specified.
The DMCA, like most other laws, is not so much a list of permissible actions, but a list of restrictions on freedom.
The mere absense of legal verbiage forbidding an action is, in fact, a statement that such action is legal, by simple virtue of it not being made illegal.
But whatever the case: Making an iPhone talk to a non-AT&T network does not raise a copyright issue, so therefore copyright law does not apply, and no exception in the DMCA is required. It could have been a contract issue if Apple had made such a contract a condition of sale, but they do not.
So, as one's own property, one should do whatever one wishes with it in the absense of prior restraint.
In case you're still fucking brainwashed, I offer the following rhetorical question: Earlier today I used a 16" pry bar as a cold chisel to break up concrete. This is obviously not the tool's intended use, and I really should have used a cold chisel instead. Since the DMCA doesn't explicitly exclude gross repurposing of pry bars, does this make such usage illegal? (No, of course not.)
Rights cannot be granted, they can only be taken away.
Dear brainwashed,
In what way does modifying an iPhone constitute a copyright violation or an attempt at bypassing a content protection system for a copyrighted work?
Your friend,
Adolf
Meaningless off-topic anecdote regarding USB:
I've had bad luck with every single VIA-based add-on USB controller card that I have attempted to use. Strange things, like only negotiating at USB 2.0 speeds -if- the machine is booted with the USB 2.0 device attached. Random hard lockups (not even a BSOD) under moderate (2.5" HDD speeds) data transfer in multiple, otherwise rock-solid Proliant machines under Win2k3.
In all cases, it seems that it's something that a driver update would fix. But also in all cases so far, no update has existed.
I've had much better results with randomly-selected NEC-based controllers, which so far have always just worked in every machine I've tried.
The birth certificate, at least in Ohio, is a public record. Anyone's birth certificate can be requested by anyone else. They just have to pay the duplication/certification fee(s), and show one form of positive ID. The requestor's name is recorded, the document is copied and officiously stamped, and the transaction is done.
All that possession of a valid duplicate birth certificate proves is that the named individual did in fact exist, and that someone at some point paid the county to produce a copy of it.
But then, perhaps that all it is intended to prove. This process does serve to reduce the number of completely fictitious Real ID cards being issued by making it somewhat more difficult to invent a new identity. That it does absolutely nothing to prevent the theft of someone else's identity may not be important in the case of this particular document.
It's not just the lone, cheap unmanaged switches that do this.
I once saw a well-designed, multi-building, redundant network of HP Procurve switches fail completely. In this case, it wasn't just a loose cable - someone decided to plug both the "LAN" and "PC" ports of an IP phone (with integrated ethernet switch) into separate ports on the wall.
It's easy to do on accident. It'd probably be just as easy to do on purpose, given root access to a system on the LAN and malicious intent.
Right, right.
I hear you.
That's exactly what -I- do, at least in function. To restore after a complete loss would entail both the backup server and the target machine being in the same spot at the same time, or at least the requisite hard drives. It will take either 35 or 70 miles of driving to do a bare-metal restore using my configuration, depending on which town I'm working in on the day the shit hits the fan.
I'd be foolish to do it any other way -- expecting the company's email to wait while I pedantically restore the whole machine over a 384kbps cable modem would probably mean my job.
The only real difference between what you're doing and what I'm doing is that I only have to drive moderate distances in the unlikely event of massive data loss (ie, multiple disk failure, targeted attack, or catastrophic filesystem bug), whereas you also have to drive moderate distances as part of a normal routine.
My backups are fresh. And again, I never, ever have to fuck with it.
And, granted, I do have an extra computer to maintain. But it's a nothing-special headless K6-2 box with a big SATA disk. No RAID, because it's redundant by its very existance. There's no compelling reason for it to be particularly stout; a small embedded MIPS-based machine with no moving parts would probably be a fine replacement if/when the hardware dies.
In the event that the backup server loses its mind and trashes its disk, it's easy to restore the system to a usable state -- the backup server itself is also backed up daily using the same rsync technique to the RAID array on the mail server.
Plus, for less-than-massive data loss, I can go back in time and restore selective stuff from an already-mounted, read-only NFS share, albeit slowly. (For the sake of brevity, I neglected to mention that the backup scripts use hard links to keep several days worth of complete data, plus weekly and monthly snapshots, available at all times. It's a hell of an undo button, and is a concept which should be somewhat familiar to anyone who has used a NetApps filer. Except it was much, much cheaper.)
Yes. It's easy.
Anything which can boot and run from an IDE disk can also run from a Compact Flash card, with the right adapter (Google for one). I've got things ranging from an old version of Slackware running on a flash-based 386 laptop, to a diskless Windows XP machine, which use this trick.
You see, CF cards inherently know how to act just like it is a regular IDE disk drive. The adapters are completely passive, and exist merely to supply power to the card and convert the small pin layout of a CF card to the much larger pin layout of a typical IDE cable.
So, if the mythological hypervisor actually exists and the hardware can run it, then it can boot from flash. The software doesn't know, or care, that it's operating from flash.
Most relatively recent motherboards also generally support booting from a bog-standard USB drive. This is often trickier, because whatever operating system/hypervisor/microkernel/whatever you're booting will probably eventually realize that there's USB ports in place and attempt to control them by itself. If it handles this changeover in an inconsiderate fashion, it will crash. But if the software was built with booting from USB as one of the design considerations, it generally will work fine -- Knoppix, for instance, is supposed to be fairly easy to run from a thumb drive on mostly random hardware.
Expect to see more of this sort of activity as programs and data remain relatively small and flash continues plummeting in price.
Who cares how long it takes to upload as long as it gets done before the drive crashes?
So what if it takes six weeks to upload a 100GB backup. Subsequent backups should[1] consist only of things that have changed, and should be rather fast indeed.
It doesn't even have to slow you down. Just use a router with good QoS support (for instance, anything which can run X-Wrt) and your online backup will only consume idle bandwidth... If it takes a few days to upload a few gigs of home movies, who really cares?
1: I keep automatic backups of our Gentoo mail server at work, using rsync to another Linux machine in another city and a nothing-special cable modem. It's in the realm of things that Just Fucking Works, and it's possible to restore the computer from bare metal in short order. But, rsync doesn't preserve NTFS permissions, so there seems to be no Windows-specific way of doing such a complete remote backup under Windows.
I guess I'll play along.
By your definition of "server," it seems we only have three such built-to-order machines here in use here at the shop. They're all Prolaint ML330s of various generations, custom ordered from Compaq or HP. The oldest one has SCSI RAID, the newest one has IDE RAID. All include at least one additional IDE port for the CD-ROM drive.
So I guess that some servers do use IDE, since these particular ones all seem to be serving just fine.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but those machines are ancient!"
So go on and head over to Dell, the vendor in question. Configure yourself a nice new $10,000 Poweredge 6800. Note the distinct inclusion of IDE CD-ROM drives, and thus the obvious inclusion of at least one IDE port.
The rest of your argument is, therefore, without merit. But even if it weren't: CF to IDE adapters are passive devices, need no testing beyond that which a cable would be subjected to, and play no factor in throughput or latency. Furthermore, flash devices can trivially be made as absolutely redundant as any other storage device in a PC.
Finally, ruggedness: This is only a PC. There is no redundant logic. If you go about jabbing screwdrivers into it, hitting it with a hammer, throwing salt water into it, or dropping it, it will fail. The adapter need only be as rugged as anything else inside of the box, which is not a very difficult standard to meet.
Are you done yet?
I have a CF card mounted on an expansion card bracket at the back of the case. A simple thing, really: PCB with a 4-pin power connector, CF slot, 40-pin IDE connector, and a couple of LEDs for status, all fastened to a bracket so that the card protrudes neatly through a slot at the back of the case.
It's definitely a "consumer" adapter -- I think I paid $8, total, to have it delivered to Ohio from Hong Kong. But like most mass-produced electronic items in this millennium, the soldering is quite good, and the connectors look to be of fine quality. I expect that it should prove to be a very durable implement.
I don't know what else I should expect of such an item, nor do I see any obvious manner in which to improve it.
Could you please be more elaborate on the topic of what a professional-grade CF-to-IDE adapter might consist of?