You can tell whether or not someone was actually there by whether or not they mention things like "Minix" in a list of viable operating systems.
I was part of a project at the time that needed real networking and a real Unix development environment. We spent four months working to find an alternative, then shelled out for a series of early Sparc pizza boxes. SS2 boxes maybe? As I recall, we got four at nearly $15k each that ate up a huge chunk of our budget.
Two years later, we had liquidated them and were doing all of the same stuff on Linux with cheap 486 boxes and commodity hardware, and using the GNU userland and toolchain. People here talk about GNU as predating Linux while forgetting that prior to Linux, the only place to run it was on your freaking Sparcstation (or equivalent—but certainly not under Minix), which already came with a vendor-supported userland. GNU starts to be interesting exactly when Linux becomes viable.
All in all, the change was bizarrely cool and amazing. We were like kids in a candy store—computing was suddenly so cheap as to almost be free, rather than the single most expensive non-labor cost in a project.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
there _was_ no free operating system for industry standard hardware, much less a Unix-like one, and the commercial offerings were all platform-specific.
If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:
- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account
- This meant either $tens of thousands for current workstation hardware or $thousands for last-cycle hardware if it was even available at all (university and government surplus lots were the primary suspects)
- Phone up the one or two providers that offered OSes for the system
- Shell out $many thousands for a license (and often $thousands more for media)
- In many cases, because non-current hardware was tied to non-current OSes no longer for sale, port the current tree yourself to the non-current hardware after spending the $thousands you spent for a license
In short, it was substantively impossible for—say—a small company, a startup, or a CS/CE student to get their hands on anything beyond a DOS box with Windows 3 on it. With money and time, they MIGHT get web BROWSING working on Windows 3—in unstable ways. Developing software was a nightmare on these DOS/Win3 boxes as well—compilers were expensive, proprietary, and often required runtimes that had to be licensed on a per-user basis (i.e. you spent $200 on the compiler that spoke a non-standard dialect, then if you wanted to sell what you created, you spent another $some amount per copy sold) and that had no hooks for anything network-ish, because there were no standards in the DOS ecosystem for that.
Linux changed everything. Suddenly, you could pick up commodity i386 hardware and actually do network stuff with it in Unix-y ways. Even in the early days when Linux was unstable, incomplete, and a bear to install/configure, it made things possible for small shops or independent developers/creators that had simply been prohibitive in every practical way just a year earlier.
As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.
Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.
Much more than the work by Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds invented the future that we live in.
Two Seagate 2TB, upon which we switched loyalties, then two WD Green 2TB.
The Seagates both hand spindle/motor problems of some kind—they didn't come back up one day after a shutdown for a hardware upgrade. The WD Green 2TB both developed data integrity issues while spinning and ultimately suffered SMART-reported failures and lost data (we had backups). One was still partially readable, the other couldn't be mounted at all.
Is there some kind of curse surrounding 2TB drives?
Anecdotal and small sample size caveats aside, I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years and 0 (of 8) SSDs over the same time period fail on me.
The oldest mechanical drive that failed was around 2 years old. The oldest SSD currently in service is over 4 years old.
More to the point, the SSDs are all in laptops, getting jostled, bumped around, used at odd angles, and subject to routine temperature fluctuations. The mechanical drives were all case-mounted, stationary, and with adequate cooling.
This isn't enough to base an industry report on, but certainly my experience doesn't bear out the common idea that SSDs are catastrophically unreliable in comparison to mechanical drives.
The "freedom brigade" these days has gone around the bend. What, I can't fly unmanned payloads into a building? I can't drop heavy solid objects from the air over pedestrians? BIG BROTHER! BIG BROTHER!
What's next? "You mean I can't bludgeon you to death with my garden shovel? This is all Obama's fault, the damned communist!"
on a Netgear R6300 and it has been very fast, great with signal quality, and the QoS features are working as expected.
Both the R6250 and R6300 have a dual-core 800MHz CPU, so they have the power to handle a decent QoS requirement without bogging down potential throughput too much. I'm satisfied, and it wasn't that expensive. If your situation isn't too terribly complex (many dozens of users and extensive QoS rules) then it might be a good choice.
The R7000 is even faster and supports external antennas, so I second that suggestion, but it's also twice the price of the 6250/3000, which can be found on sale from $100-$125 brand new if you're a good comparison shopper and/or patient.
In the PC gaming world, getting it to run at the highest settings *is* the game. It's like the "bouncing ball" graphics demos on 8-bit systems in the 1980s. The actual software isn't useful or meant to occupy the user's attention for long. The challenge is in *getting it to run* and the joy is in *seeing what my super-cool computer is capable of* in processing and graphics rendering terms.
Running on last year's card/settings? Sorry, you don't get the game.
This is why I stopped being a PC gamer in the late '90s. All I wanted was a better Tetris. What I got was a better bouncing ball demo.
There were a whole bunch of smartphones before the iPhone. Anyone remember them? I stumbled across my old Palm Centro the other day, which replaced a Treo 680. These devices were useful to some (I was one of them), but the cost/benefit calculation was finicky, and they didn't find widespread adoption.
Pop consensus was that smartphones were a niche market. Then, someone got one right (iPhone) and the whole industry took off. These days, people don't even realize they're using a "smartphone" (I can remember the early press using the term "supersmartphone") because it's just "my phone."
The same trajectory outlines the computing era in general—from 8-bit boxes that were fiddly and full of cables and user manuals and coding to the Windows era during the '90s—at first, it was a geek thing, and lots of people got in and then got out, deciding it wasn't useful. Then, suddenly, a few UX tweaks and it was ubiquitous and transparent and a market we couldn't imagine the world being without.
I suspect the same will happen with wearable tech.
front page of Slashdot. Of course this is price discrimination. Charge what the market will bear. Segment your users accordingly. Maximize revenue through each avenue, carefully ensuring that you match value offered to segments to pricing, etc.
This is not a story, this is marketing 101—it's what every marketing-driven organization (basically everyone in the modern economy) does, and the bigger they are, the better they do it.
It's not that any of this is wrong, it's just not newsworthy. We could write the same piece about any number of consumer goods companies, SAAS platforms, etc.
- The pay is 2-3x what I could get paid at established firms - The relationship-starting practices actually make sense (an interview amongst humans, often with C-levels, rather than with an HR-drone, and forms of testing that involve work on-product, rather than abstract and unrelated HR games). - They are thankful to have me and pleasant to work with (as opposed to confronting the HR bureaucracy and middle management) - I get better titles and better status/authority within the firm
I do good work, I produce value, and the startups that I work with see that and can measure it quantitatively. Established firms could if they wanted to, but that's the point: they don't want to. They want to pay you as little as they can get away with, and have you as silent and head-hung as they can get you to be.
I stopped working for stodgy HR- and middle-management-heavy firms years ago. It basically sucked, and was soul-sucking.
- Pays less - Is less secure - Is a shitty environment - Offers dwindling benefits - And little respect
You're cannon fodder, that's all.
At startups and companies with that "hot startup" attitude (there are a few established companies that do this), you're the core of the business, the brains of the operation, worthy of any perks or cash they can throw at you.
Who wants to work where they're completely undervalued when they can work where they're (if anything) overvalued?
Make the salary at least reasonable, the hiring practices sane, the benefits good, and the job security reliable, and you'll find that a lot of young people are willing to work at stodgy old firms, just like they used to.
Employees are just tired of being treated like shit. These days hot startup > freelance/consult > established firm when it comes to the deal you get as a worker.
I paid $600 at one point for a used full-height hard drive that was made out of a solid hunk of alloy for the first hard drive for my PC.
So?
Way to let the point fly over your head.
By the time we were mid-'90s, we could get backup solutions that were—yes—$1,000 to $3,000 for the mechanism and $15-$30 for each piece of media.
But they:
- Would cover the space of most consumer drives at the time within 1-4 cartridges - Would thus backup your entire consumer data library for $50-$150 per complete backup
This can't be done any longer. Not even close.
My point wasn't to get into a "history" pissing match. Sheesh, yes, also back in the day there were no such things as digital computers or hard drives or printing presses or even written script and everything had to be passed along as oral tradition, which meant that the cost of a backup was the cost of a human life.
As I said, this misses the point entirely. One might have hoped that in the process of getting here from the mid '90s we'd have gone forward rather than backward on the ability to make backups on removable storage media.
I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.
4mm and 8mm drives with multi-gigabyte capacities that compared favorably with hard drives of the time could be had for $hundreds to $a thousand or two, with media costs in the $10-$25 per tape range. At the time, there were also MO drives that had significant capacities in similar ranges, with slightly higher media costs.
Back then, the capacity of one removable cartridge/disk was much closer to the capacity of consumer market hard drives. You might have to go through 1-4 tapes or cartridges to back up all of your data, but that meant less than $100 for each additional complete backup set.
Now current consumer drive sizes are in the multi-terabyte range, while capacities of removable storage are such that you'll need 10-15 instances of media to back up your collection, and each media item is $50-$100. I have 18TB online right now. This means with a 300GB storage capacity, I'll need 30-45 instances of blank media for a single backup set. Back in the day, I had an Archive Python autoloader that used 4 DDS tapes and had a capacity of 96GB compressed, with a total online storage capacity of something like 40GB. In short, I had _excess_ capacity for less than $100 per backup set in a single operation.
At this level, it makes much more sense to just by a pile of multi-terabyte hard drives (4TB drives are currently less than $150 street price) and use them. Faster, cheaper, and without the up-front cost of the mechanism (backup drive) to pay for.
For consumers, dedicated backup technologies seem to have gone the way of the dodo.
I switched from iPhone to Android after using iMessage extensively and did not have this problem. So clearly it depends on some particular status/configuration of all the involved parties.
Does this depend on:
1) Moving the SIM from your old phone to your new phone 2) Leaving your old phone on and connected to WiFi so that iMessages still sees you as being on network
Or something like that?
I know that when I switched, it was a really quick thing—new Android phone arrived via USPS, pulled my old SIM, put it into new phone, turned off old phone, and away we went. I was in mid conversation with several people and never experienced a hiccup over the course of the day. Even talked about it over SMS—complained about the default keyboard on the new phone and all kinds of stuff.
Wasn't aware of this issue and didn't experience it. What gives?
that is, until the state got involved thanks to myself and one other person. Then, one day, the building was locked, the board was gone to Europe, and all dozen or so employees were standing outside the door baffled and unpaid, from what I understand. I got out sooner, by about two pay periods, and got mine back before it *all* went down.
I've had it with small companies. During the '00s I twice started with small companies only to hear "pay will be late" at the end of an early pay period, then "pay is just around the corner" by the end of the next pay period. In one case, the CEO simply never paid; I left before the third no-pay period was over, demanding that I be paid for my hours, to which he basically replied "so sue us!" I did—but only managed to recoup some of what I was owed. In the other case, they eventually paid but then promptly fired me for the noises I'd made about leaving due to two periods with no pay; that CEO had the gall to act infuriated and hurt at my lack of loyalty to the company.
So be sure that a small company with a low capital/revenue stream doesn't mean "You promise to do it for the love of the company if they can't afford to pay you."
Because logical slippage due to the vagaries of language is a decided risk.
Here you're mistaking the location of the dream. Dreams in *our* world, as *we* understand them have these properties. But again (and as I said in my other post) we're talking about another world that we have no reason to assume is not fundamentally different from this one (in fact we might, for many reasons that don't need belaboring here, and that are bound up with the very logic of the proposition in relation to what we understand about our world, have many reasons to assume the opposite—that it *is* fundamentally different from this one).
How does a "dream" behave in another reality in which *this* entire reality can *be* such a "dream?" Who knows. Nothing of what we understand about "dreams" as we know them in practical conception is remotely similar to what we mean when we talk about *our entire reality.*
How does a "computer simulation" behave in another reality in which *this* entire reality can *be* such a "computer simulation?" Who knows. Nothing of what we understand about "computer simulations" as we know them in practical conception is remotely similar to what we mean when we talk about *our entire reality.*
All we have to do to call the universe either a dream or a computer simulation is completely throw out any particular characteristics that are unique and empirically attributable to what we mean when we say "dream" or "computer simulation" as we are able to make use of these terms.
In other words, sure, this universe is a computer simulation or it's a dream...for certain values of "computer simulation" or "dream" that, if we were to accept them as valid, make the terms able to encapsulate *just about any phenomenon*.
This universe could also just be another reality's version of a "jumbo citrus fruit" or of an "Oscar awards ceremony," for the same reasons, and with the same level of practical or logical utility obtaining for these statements. For Slashdot purposes, I propose that we collaboratively write a paper on how this universe is just another encapsulating universe's version of a "Netcraft confirms it, Linux is dying!" press release.
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell whether or not someone was actually there by whether or not they mention things like "Minix" in a list of viable operating systems.
I was part of a project at the time that needed real networking and a real Unix development environment. We spent four months working to find an alternative, then shelled out for a series of early Sparc pizza boxes. SS2 boxes maybe? As I recall, we got four at nearly $15k each that ate up a huge chunk of our budget.
Two years later, we had liquidated them and were doing all of the same stuff on Linux with cheap 486 boxes and commodity hardware, and using the GNU userland and toolchain. People here talk about GNU as predating Linux while forgetting that prior to Linux, the only place to run it was on your freaking Sparcstation (or equivalent—but certainly not under Minix), which already came with a vendor-supported userland. GNU starts to be interesting exactly when Linux becomes viable.
All in all, the change was bizarrely cool and amazing. We were like kids in a candy store—computing was suddenly so cheap as to almost be free, rather than the single most expensive non-labor cost in a project.
than the desktop computing userlands you're thinking of. (With apologies to Shakespeare.)
just far less visibility.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
there _was_ no free operating system for industry standard hardware, much less a Unix-like one, and the commercial offerings were all platform-specific.
If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:
- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account
- This meant either $tens of thousands for current workstation hardware or $thousands for last-cycle hardware if it was even available at all (university and government surplus lots were the primary suspects)
- Phone up the one or two providers that offered OSes for the system
- Shell out $many thousands for a license (and often $thousands more for media)
- In many cases, because non-current hardware was tied to non-current OSes no longer for sale, port the current tree yourself to the non-current hardware after spending the $thousands you spent for a license
In short, it was substantively impossible for—say—a small company, a startup, or a CS/CE student to get their hands on anything beyond a DOS box with Windows 3 on it. With money and time, they MIGHT get web BROWSING working on Windows 3—in unstable ways. Developing software was a nightmare on these DOS/Win3 boxes as well—compilers were expensive, proprietary, and often required runtimes that had to be licensed on a per-user basis (i.e. you spent $200 on the compiler that spoke a non-standard dialect, then if you wanted to sell what you created, you spent another $some amount per copy sold) and that had no hooks for anything network-ish, because there were no standards in the DOS ecosystem for that.
Linux changed everything. Suddenly, you could pick up commodity i386 hardware and actually do network stuff with it in Unix-y ways. Even in the early days when Linux was unstable, incomplete, and a bear to install/configure, it made things possible for small shops or independent developers/creators that had simply been prohibitive in every practical way just a year earlier.
As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.
Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.
Much more than the work by Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds invented the future that we live in.
and there's workload and on hours and all of that stuff to consider, too. So of course it's not scientific by any stretch of the imagination.
But we've been very happy with our Intel SSDs and will continue to buy them.
Two Seagate 2TB, upon which we switched loyalties, then two WD Green 2TB.
The Seagates both hand spindle/motor problems of some kind—they didn't come back up one day after a shutdown for a hardware upgrade. The WD Green 2TB both developed data integrity issues while spinning and ultimately suffered SMART-reported failures and lost data (we had backups). One was still partially readable, the other couldn't be mounted at all.
Is there some kind of curse surrounding 2TB drives?
Anecdotal and small sample size caveats aside, I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years and 0 (of 8) SSDs over the same time period fail on me.
The oldest mechanical drive that failed was around 2 years old. The oldest SSD currently in service is over 4 years old.
More to the point, the SSDs are all in laptops, getting jostled, bumped around, used at odd angles, and subject to routine temperature fluctuations. The mechanical drives were all case-mounted, stationary, and with adequate cooling.
This isn't enough to base an industry report on, but certainly my experience doesn't bear out the common idea that SSDs are catastrophically unreliable in comparison to mechanical drives.
The "freedom brigade" these days has gone around the bend. What, I can't fly unmanned payloads into a building? I can't drop heavy solid objects from the air over pedestrians? BIG BROTHER! BIG BROTHER!
What's next? "You mean I can't bludgeon you to death with my garden shovel? This is all Obama's fault, the damned communist!"
problem of "other peoples' code" is an actual problem?
Because if so, I think you may be the script kiddy in a minimum-wage cubicle farm.
on a Netgear R6300 and it has been very fast, great with signal quality, and the QoS features are working as expected.
Both the R6250 and R6300 have a dual-core 800MHz CPU, so they have the power to handle a decent QoS requirement without bogging down potential throughput too much. I'm satisfied, and it wasn't that expensive. If your situation isn't too terribly complex (many dozens of users and extensive QoS rules) then it might be a good choice.
The R7000 is even faster and supports external antennas, so I second that suggestion, but it's also twice the price of the 6250/3000, which can be found on sale from $100-$125 brand new if you're a good comparison shopper and/or patient.
FPS" comment at the end is evidence of this).
In the PC gaming world, getting it to run at the highest settings *is* the game. It's like the "bouncing ball" graphics demos on 8-bit systems in the 1980s. The actual software isn't useful or meant to occupy the user's attention for long. The challenge is in *getting it to run* and the joy is in *seeing what my super-cool computer is capable of* in processing and graphics rendering terms.
Running on last year's card/settings? Sorry, you don't get the game.
This is why I stopped being a PC gamer in the late '90s. All I wanted was a better Tetris. What I got was a better bouncing ball demo.
There were a whole bunch of smartphones before the iPhone. Anyone remember them? I stumbled across my old Palm Centro the other day, which replaced a Treo 680. These devices were useful to some (I was one of them), but the cost/benefit calculation was finicky, and they didn't find widespread adoption.
Pop consensus was that smartphones were a niche market. Then, someone got one right (iPhone) and the whole industry took off. These days, people don't even realize they're using a "smartphone" (I can remember the early press using the term "supersmartphone") because it's just "my phone."
The same trajectory outlines the computing era in general—from 8-bit boxes that were fiddly and full of cables and user manuals and coding to the Windows era during the '90s—at first, it was a geek thing, and lots of people got in and then got out, deciding it wasn't useful. Then, suddenly, a few UX tweaks and it was ubiquitous and transparent and a market we couldn't imagine the world being without.
I suspect the same will happen with wearable tech.
that way myself. If you don't like it, I suggest that you not do it.
front page of Slashdot. Of course this is price discrimination. Charge what the market will bear. Segment your users accordingly. Maximize revenue through each avenue, carefully ensuring that you match value offered to segments to pricing, etc.
This is not a story, this is marketing 101—it's what every marketing-driven organization (basically everyone in the modern economy) does, and the bigger they are, the better they do it.
It's not that any of this is wrong, it's just not newsworthy. We could write the same piece about any number of consumer goods companies, SAAS platforms, etc.
I guess my response to this is: "Yes. And?"
Seems to me you're talking about SOCIALISM, or even worse, COMMUNISM.
I didn't sign no contract, and there ain't no such thing as society. That's a lie told by Karl Marx.
— All of America
Because:
- The pay is 2-3x what I could get paid at established firms
- The relationship-starting practices actually make sense (an interview amongst humans, often with C-levels, rather than with an HR-drone, and forms of testing that involve work on-product, rather than abstract and unrelated HR games).
- They are thankful to have me and pleasant to work with (as opposed to confronting the HR bureaucracy and middle management)
- I get better titles and better status/authority within the firm
I do good work, I produce value, and the startups that I work with see that and can measure it quantitatively. Established firms could if they wanted to, but that's the point: they don't want to. They want to pay you as little as they can get away with, and have you as silent and head-hung as they can get you to be.
I stopped working for stodgy HR- and middle-management-heavy firms years ago. It basically sucked, and was soul-sucking.
Companies want to talk about making yourself competitive in the labor market, then bitch and moan when those that will pay get all the hot talent?
Oh noez! Whatever will we do!?
I'd say that if someone gets paid $big_bucks at $hot_startup, they're entitled to it. If you want them, pony up.
company now:
- Pays less
- Is less secure
- Is a shitty environment
- Offers dwindling benefits
- And little respect
You're cannon fodder, that's all.
At startups and companies with that "hot startup" attitude (there are a few established companies that do this), you're the core of the business, the brains of the operation, worthy of any perks or cash they can throw at you.
Who wants to work where they're completely undervalued when they can work where they're (if anything) overvalued?
Make the salary at least reasonable, the hiring practices sane, the benefits good, and the job security reliable, and you'll find that a lot of young people are willing to work at stodgy old firms, just like they used to.
Employees are just tired of being treated like shit. These days hot startup > freelance/consult > established firm when it comes to the deal you get as a worker.
I paid $600 at one point for a used full-height hard drive that was made out of a solid hunk of alloy for the first hard drive for my PC.
So?
Way to let the point fly over your head.
By the time we were mid-'90s, we could get backup solutions that were—yes—$1,000 to $3,000 for the mechanism and $15-$30 for each piece of media.
But they:
- Would cover the space of most consumer drives at the time within 1-4 cartridges
- Would thus backup your entire consumer data library for $50-$150 per complete backup
This can't be done any longer. Not even close.
My point wasn't to get into a "history" pissing match. Sheesh, yes, also back in the day there were no such things as digital computers or hard drives or printing presses or even written script and everything had to be passed along as oral tradition, which meant that the cost of a backup was the cost of a human life.
As I said, this misses the point entirely. One might have hoped that in the process of getting here from the mid '90s we'd have gone forward rather than backward on the ability to make backups on removable storage media.
I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.
4mm and 8mm drives with multi-gigabyte capacities that compared favorably with hard drives of the time could be had for $hundreds to $a thousand or two, with media costs in the $10-$25 per tape range. At the time, there were also MO drives that had significant capacities in similar ranges, with slightly higher media costs.
Back then, the capacity of one removable cartridge/disk was much closer to the capacity of consumer market hard drives. You might have to go through 1-4 tapes or cartridges to back up all of your data, but that meant less than $100 for each additional complete backup set.
Now current consumer drive sizes are in the multi-terabyte range, while capacities of removable storage are such that you'll need 10-15 instances of media to back up your collection, and each media item is $50-$100. I have 18TB online right now. This means with a 300GB storage capacity, I'll need 30-45 instances of blank media for a single backup set. Back in the day, I had an Archive Python autoloader that used 4 DDS tapes and had a capacity of 96GB compressed, with a total online storage capacity of something like 40GB. In short, I had _excess_ capacity for less than $100 per backup set in a single operation.
At this level, it makes much more sense to just by a pile of multi-terabyte hard drives (4TB drives are currently less than $150 street price) and use them. Faster, cheaper, and without the up-front cost of the mechanism (backup drive) to pay for.
For consumers, dedicated backup technologies seem to have gone the way of the dodo.
I switched from iPhone to Android after using iMessage extensively and did not have this problem. So clearly it depends on some particular status/configuration of all the involved parties.
Does this depend on:
1) Moving the SIM from your old phone to your new phone
2) Leaving your old phone on and connected to WiFi so that iMessages still sees you as being on network
Or something like that?
I know that when I switched, it was a really quick thing—new Android phone arrived via USPS, pulled my old SIM, put it into new phone, turned off old phone, and away we went. I was in mid conversation with several people and never experienced a hiccup over the course of the day. Even talked about it over SMS—complained about the default keyboard on the new phone and all kinds of stuff.
Wasn't aware of this issue and didn't experience it. What gives?
post-industrialized nations, it's a pretty common thing to find that the failure to pay owed wages is considered a serious problem.
that is, until the state got involved thanks to myself and one other person. Then, one day, the building was locked, the board was gone to Europe, and all dozen or so employees were standing outside the door baffled and unpaid, from what I understand. I got out sooner, by about two pay periods, and got mine back before it *all* went down.
I've had it with small companies. During the '00s I twice started with small companies only to hear "pay will be late" at the end of an early pay period, then "pay is just around the corner" by the end of the next pay period. In one case, the CEO simply never paid; I left before the third no-pay period was over, demanding that I be paid for my hours, to which he basically replied "so sue us!" I did—but only managed to recoup some of what I was owed. In the other case, they eventually paid but then promptly fired me for the noises I'd made about leaving due to two periods with no pay; that CEO had the gall to act infuriated and hurt at my lack of loyalty to the company.
So be sure that a small company with a low capital/revenue stream doesn't mean "You promise to do it for the love of the company if they can't afford to pay you."
Because logical slippage due to the vagaries of language is a decided risk.
Here you're mistaking the location of the dream. Dreams in *our* world, as *we* understand them have these properties. But again (and as I said in my other post) we're talking about another world that we have no reason to assume is not fundamentally different from this one (in fact we might, for many reasons that don't need belaboring here, and that are bound up with the very logic of the proposition in relation to what we understand about our world, have many reasons to assume the opposite—that it *is* fundamentally different from this one).
How does a "dream" behave in another reality in which *this* entire reality can *be* such a "dream?" Who knows. Nothing of what we understand about "dreams" as we know them in practical conception is remotely similar to what we mean when we talk about *our entire reality.*
How does a "computer simulation" behave in another reality in which *this* entire reality can *be* such a "computer simulation?" Who knows. Nothing of what we understand about "computer simulations" as we know them in practical conception is remotely similar to what we mean when we talk about *our entire reality.*
All we have to do to call the universe either a dream or a computer simulation is completely throw out any particular characteristics that are unique and empirically attributable to what we mean when we say "dream" or "computer simulation" as we are able to make use of these terms.
In other words, sure, this universe is a computer simulation or it's a dream...for certain values of "computer simulation" or "dream" that, if we were to accept them as valid, make the terms able to encapsulate *just about any phenomenon*.
This universe could also just be another reality's version of a "jumbo citrus fruit" or of an "Oscar awards ceremony," for the same reasons, and with the same level of practical or logical utility obtaining for these statements. For Slashdot purposes, I propose that we collaboratively write a paper on how this universe is just another encapsulating universe's version of a "Netcraft confirms it, Linux is dying!" press release.