Yes, "RAID is not backup", in that you shouldn't simply RAID your primary drive and consider the backup problem solved, but backing up to a RAID array can be advantageous -- you do disk-to-disk backup (via any of a variety of methods), and monitor the health of the RAID array closely -- if any disk in the array goes south, replace it promptly and your backup stays consistent. And, if you keep a spare drive or two around, you can swap a drive out occasionally to take off-site (and let the array rebuild onto one of your spares).
Personally, I like the ReadyNAS Duo a lot more than the Drobo (hard to explain, I just trust their tech better, and the ReadyNAS is natively networked, rather than needing an afterthought add-on). Last I checked, Amazon will sell you an empty ReadyNAS Duo and a couple WD Green 1TB drives for ballpark $500. That said I haven't got a ReadyNAS yet (because money has so many uses these days); I'm using my second most favorite backup setup, a 500GB laptop drive in an external bus-powered FireWire enclosure. I'm using a MacAlly PHR-S250CC enclosure (which I'm very happy with), using a drive I already had, but for a complete setup, I'd probably go with one of Other World Computing's packages for about $150. This loses RAID (which I ultimately want very much to have, for reliability), and isn't networked (which would be good for backing up multiple machines, and ease of use), but the bus-powered drive is so damned easy to use that I actually do it every day (set the drive next to my laptop and plug one cable between them, Time Machine notices the drive and starts a backup, 5-10 minutes later it's done, and I unmount the drive, unplug the cable, and put it back on the shelf).
My primary machine is a Mac; I use Time Machine for daily backups, and use SuperDuper to clone my MBP's drive onto the same backup disk every few weeks (minus a number of large directories that I know Time Machine is getting anyway); this gives me a backup drive I can boot from (via SuperDuper), and a lot of incremental history stored in a very usable manner (via Time Machine). And a backup system that I actually use because it's painless.
Add a ReadyNAS, and I could have my laptop automatically backing (hourly) up any time it's on the home network.
As far as on-line backup goes, I haven't been convinced yet. It eats a lot of bandwidth, and it means that someone else (that I don't know personally) has a copy of all my data, with only their promise of encryption keeping them honest. Sure, there isn't much there for anyone else to get worked up about (a variety of legally purchased music and software, a bunch of old email and vacation photos), but if it's not out of my hands, then that's one less thing I have to worry about. I do love DropBox for moving non-confidential files around, but I wouldn't use it for backup.
I originally found Slashdot through a screenshot on the Enlightenment site that showed the front page for Chips & Dips... took a while to track down that it had recently moved to slashdot.org. I recall when they added uids (and kick myself every once in a while now for not registering sooner), but didn't see much point until some preferences were added, tied to the uid (I think it was that it would remember your score cutoff for browsing, if you browsed while logged in).
They used to post some pretty weird stories occasionally, back then. Anyone remember the lengthy writeup about how JWZ had died? Complete with fond rememberances from RMS and others? And then Taco saying, "No, no, it was a joke, see. Wasn't it funny?"
So, on the odd chance someone is missing the reference (which would be a shame)... the wax lion with a smooshed face (from a Mold-a-Rama machine), features in the first episode of Wonderfalls, a quirky gem of a show that Fox cancelled after four episodes. Worth tracking down and watching...
Apple could thrust one hell of a spear into the beast by releasing osx on standard intel now or very quickly [...] Yes of course drivers would be a big issue [...]
Bad drivers (for tons of random hardware) is one of the top five reasons why Windows sucks so hard. Well-written drivers for a limited pool of supported hardware is one of several reasons why Mac OS X works so well. Why on earth would it be a good idea for them to switch from a really successful development model to a terribly problematic one?
Look at it another way: the vast majority of normal people (not this audience of slashdot-reading computer jockeys) aren't going to run out and buy Vista (along with the requisite handfuls of upgrade parts for their PC), they'll "upgrade" to Vista (eventually) by buying a new machine comes with Vista preinstalled. So... why not just buy a Mac instead? The prices are actually fairly comparable to similarly equipped (for example) Dell machines, but the hardware is really nicely integrated, and just plain pretty. And the operating system kicks Microsoft's butt seventeen different ways:-)
Yeah, imagine what a horrible world it would be if everyone used the same format and we could interchange documents without any problems.
Uh, only if we're all using the same very latest version of Word on the same very latest version of Windows, on the same Microsoft-approved Intel-supplied hardware -- and then we get to play a big game of Simon Says -- "Microsoft says: okay everybody, time to upgrade, please enter your credit card number here."
I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that Microsoft has just as much right as anyone else to set standards.
The problem is that their "standards" follow the form of "here's our magic new standard format, it'll sorta do most of what you need, but only if you use it with our software. Don't bother trying to figure out the details of the format, because we'll change it at our whim, every so often, just to make sure that no one else's software will work with it. Even older versions of our own software won't work the the latest format, so everyone in your company will have to upgrade."
Microsoft doesn't have standards, they have proprietary formats. They don't want to promote and use open standards, they want to own the "standards". If they were willing/able to play well with others, they wouldn't be as hated as they are today.
I, too, found one of the biggest hurdles with Ruby to be the lack of quickly accessible man-page equivalents for the standard classes; I'm quite spoiled by Perl's perldoc(1), with its ability to quickly look up the syntax of some function or operator while in the midst of writing scripts.
Well, Dave Thomas (yes, one of the book authors) recently released a program called ri (the Ruby Interactive reference), which gives you quick command-line access to the documentation (same text as in the book) for any of the standard classes and methods! Makes Ruby much more programmer-friendly. You can find it here.
The interesting part is, last night the page also listed, "Security Update, April 2, 2001" (note the date!), with the description:
This update resolves the "Erroneous VeriSign-Issued Digital Certificates Pose Spoofing Hazard" security vulnerability, and is discussed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-017. Download now to prevent an unauthorized user from running code on your computer by digitally signing programs as "Microsoft Corporation."
Too bad the temporal rift only went a few days into the future and not further -- would've been nice to have downloaded, say SP3 for IE6...
For what it's worth, your differential mic for live music would've lost out to prior art -- you state that this was 15 years ago, which would be circa 1985; the Grateful Dead were using precisely such mic setups in concert in the mid 70's.
Lots of interesting background can be found in Robert L. Forward's Indisting uishable from Magic, which presents a wealth of ideas, facts, references, and scientific speculation on various launch systems (elevators included) as well as other bits of tech poised to move from SF to reality in the next century or so; each section is accompanied by a short work of SF, illustrating the concepts presented.
Highly recommended...
(Point of interest, I'm not trying to steer people to B&N or anywhere else, just borrowing their engine to list book details; tried Amazon first, and they were "temporarily closed" -- weird, huh?)
I'm sure they had huge problems with people "sending" money and then forgetting to hotsync.
Hmm, I agree, but for a different reason -- I expect they found various ways to prevent the various security problems, but there's still the question of making profits...
They've stated that they make their profit off the "float", the interest they earn on the money between the time that they charge your card and the time that they pay it out to the recipient, in the form of a check or some such.... Consider two different ways a scenario can play out:
I transfer you $50 at 11am, you check your mail at 7pm, find the transfer, and collect the money from them.
I beam you $50 at 11am, then I get around to hotsyncing at 6:30pm and you hotsync at 7pm and collect the money.
In the first case, they have the information necessary to charge my card right at 11am, and can collect the interest on the money for 8 hours. In the second case, although the interaction between the two parties has taken place at 11am, PayPal doesn't find out about it (and thus can't charge my card) until 6:30pm, so they only get to collect interest for 30 minutes.
Yes, interest on a few tens of dollars for a few minutes or hours doesn't sound like much, but multiply it by hundreds of thousands of transactions in process at any given time and it really adds up. And in the scenario above, they'd collect 16 times as much profit (interest for 30 minutes versus 8 hours)... you do the math. I think that's why the Palm version got canned.
The knife in question is what is termed as an "Art Knife" (though most art knives don't venture quite so far into the rare/exotic materials category), sort of a functional work of art. How functional? Well, a priceless bit of jewelery, you can theoretically wear, but a priceless knife, you can theoretically use to prepare lunch. You might well never do either, but in theory, the knife is more practical:-)
There is quite a community of people (me included) who are fascinated by knives, and who carry one or more around as a matter of course -- perhaps not a $2100 meteorite art knife, mind you, but I do know people who carry (and use) $500 custom-made pocket knives on a daily basis. (And, by the way, the vast majority of these people are sane, rational, level-headed types, who consider their knives to be tools, not weapons.)
For the two percent or so of the studio audience who are thinking, "hmm, this meteorite knife isn't for me, but the topic of knives is interesting", I would heartily recommend these sites for further information:
www.bladeforums.com This is the most popular "web-based BBS" site for discussion of all things sharp and shiny. Lively discussions with everyone from the merely curious to avid collectors, to amateur and professional knife makers, and the CEOs of some of the most highly regarded knife companies.
www.chaicutlery.com This online knife store is a one-man operation, a self-professed "collector turned dealer to support his habit" (and advocate for the sane use of sharp shiny things), who provides tons of good background information on the use, care, and rationale behind knives, without a hard sales pitch. My favorite place to point friends who become curious about knives.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, "RAID is not backup", in that you shouldn't simply RAID your primary drive and consider the backup problem solved, but backing up to a RAID array can be advantageous -- you do disk-to-disk backup (via any of a variety of methods), and monitor the health of the RAID array closely -- if any disk in the array goes south, replace it promptly and your backup stays consistent. And, if you keep a spare drive or two around, you can swap a drive out occasionally to take off-site (and let the array rebuild onto one of your spares).
Personally, I like the ReadyNAS Duo a lot more than the Drobo (hard to explain, I just trust their tech better, and the ReadyNAS is natively networked, rather than needing an afterthought add-on). Last I checked, Amazon will sell you an empty ReadyNAS Duo and a couple WD Green 1TB drives for ballpark $500. That said I haven't got a ReadyNAS yet (because money has so many uses these days); I'm using my second most favorite backup setup, a 500GB laptop drive in an external bus-powered FireWire enclosure. I'm using a MacAlly PHR-S250CC enclosure (which I'm very happy with), using a drive I already had, but for a complete setup, I'd probably go with one of Other World Computing's packages for about $150. This loses RAID (which I ultimately want very much to have, for reliability), and isn't networked (which would be good for backing up multiple machines, and ease of use), but the bus-powered drive is so damned easy to use that I actually do it every day (set the drive next to my laptop and plug one cable between them, Time Machine notices the drive and starts a backup, 5-10 minutes later it's done, and I unmount the drive, unplug the cable, and put it back on the shelf).
My primary machine is a Mac; I use Time Machine for daily backups, and use SuperDuper to clone my MBP's drive onto the same backup disk every few weeks (minus a number of large directories that I know Time Machine is getting anyway); this gives me a backup drive I can boot from (via SuperDuper), and a lot of incremental history stored in a very usable manner (via Time Machine). And a backup system that I actually use because it's painless.
Add a ReadyNAS, and I could have my laptop automatically backing (hourly) up any time it's on the home network.
As far as on-line backup goes, I haven't been convinced yet. It eats a lot of bandwidth, and it means that someone else (that I don't know personally) has a copy of all my data, with only their promise of encryption keeping them honest. Sure, there isn't much there for anyone else to get worked up about (a variety of legally purchased music and software, a bunch of old email and vacation photos), but if it's not out of my hands, then that's one less thing I have to worry about. I do love DropBox for moving non-confidential files around, but I wouldn't use it for backup.
I originally found Slashdot through a screenshot on the Enlightenment site that showed the front page for Chips & Dips... took a while to track down that it had recently moved to slashdot.org. I recall when they added uids (and kick myself every once in a while now for not registering sooner), but didn't see much point until some preferences were added, tied to the uid (I think it was that it would remember your score cutoff for browsing, if you browsed while logged in).
They used to post some pretty weird stories occasionally, back then. Anyone remember the lengthy writeup about how JWZ had died? Complete with fond rememberances from RMS and others? And then Taco saying, "No, no, it was a joke, see. Wasn't it funny?"
So, on the odd chance someone is missing the reference (which would be a shame)... the wax lion with a smooshed face (from a Mold-a-Rama machine), features in the first episode of Wonderfalls, a quirky gem of a show that Fox cancelled after four episodes. Worth tracking down and watching...
Bad drivers (for tons of random hardware) is one of the top five reasons why Windows sucks so hard. Well-written drivers for a limited pool of supported hardware is one of several reasons why Mac OS X works so well. Why on earth would it be a good idea for them to switch from a really successful development model to a terribly problematic one?
Look at it another way: the vast majority of normal people (not this audience of slashdot-reading computer jockeys) aren't going to run out and buy Vista (along with the requisite handfuls of upgrade parts for their PC), they'll "upgrade" to Vista (eventually) by buying a new machine comes with Vista preinstalled. So... why not just buy a Mac instead? The prices are actually fairly comparable to similarly equipped (for example) Dell machines, but the hardware is really nicely integrated, and just plain pretty. And the operating system kicks Microsoft's butt seventeen different ways :-)
it'll still be winter -- if we waited 'til spring and maybe it'd thaw out on its own.
Yeah, imagine what a horrible world it would be if everyone used the same format and we could interchange documents without any problems.
Uh, only if we're all using the same very latest version of Word on the same very latest version of Windows, on the same Microsoft-approved Intel-supplied hardware -- and then we get to play a big game of Simon Says -- "Microsoft says: okay everybody, time to upgrade, please enter your credit card number here."
I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that Microsoft has just as much right as anyone else to set standards.
The problem is that their "standards" follow the form of "here's our magic new standard format, it'll sorta do most of what you need, but only if you use it with our software. Don't bother trying to figure out the details of the format, because we'll change it at our whim, every so often, just to make sure that no one else's software will work with it. Even older versions of our own software won't work the the latest format, so everyone in your company will have to upgrade."
Microsoft doesn't have standards, they have proprietary formats. They don't want to promote and use open standards, they want to own the "standards". If they were willing/able to play well with others, they wouldn't be as hated as they are today.
Well, Dave Thomas (yes, one of the book authors) recently released a program called ri (the Ruby Interactive reference), which gives you quick command-line access to the documentation (same text as in the book) for any of the standard classes and methods! Makes Ruby much more programmer-friendly. You can find it here.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest, I'll go take my medication now.
-- Carl, who has met the guy who actually lived in the steam tunnels at CalTech...
The interesting part is, last night the page also listed, "Security Update, April 2, 2001" (note the date!), with the description:
Too bad the temporal rift only went a few days into the future and not further -- would've been nice to have downloaded, say SP3 for IE6...
For what it's worth, your differential mic for live music would've lost out to prior art -- you state that this was 15 years ago, which would be circa 1985; the Grateful Dead were using precisely such mic setups in concert in the mid 70's.
Highly recommended...
(Point of interest, I'm not trying to steer people to B&N or anywhere else, just borrowing their engine to list book details; tried Amazon first, and they were "temporarily closed" -- weird, huh?)
Hmm, I agree, but for a different reason -- I expect they found various ways to prevent the various security problems, but there's still the question of making profits...
They've stated that they make their profit off the "float", the interest they earn on the money between the time that they charge your card and the time that they pay it out to the recipient, in the form of a check or some such.... Consider two different ways a scenario can play out:
In the first case, they have the information necessary to charge my card right at 11am, and can collect the interest on the money for 8 hours. In the second case, although the interaction between the two parties has taken place at 11am, PayPal doesn't find out about it (and thus can't charge my card) until 6:30pm, so they only get to collect interest for 30 minutes.
Yes, interest on a few tens of dollars for a few minutes or hours doesn't sound like much, but multiply it by hundreds of thousands of transactions in process at any given time and it really adds up. And in the scenario above, they'd collect 16 times as much profit (interest for 30 minutes versus 8 hours)... you do the math. I think that's why the Palm version got canned.
The knife in question is what is termed as an "Art Knife" (though most art knives don't venture quite so far into the rare/exotic materials category), sort of a functional work of art. How functional? Well, a priceless bit of jewelery, you can theoretically wear, but a priceless knife, you can theoretically use to prepare lunch. You might well never do either, but in theory, the knife is more practical :-)
There is quite a community of people (me included) who are fascinated by knives, and who carry one or more around as a matter of course -- perhaps not a $2100 meteorite art knife, mind you, but I do know people who carry (and use) $500 custom-made pocket knives on a daily basis. (And, by the way, the vast majority of these people are sane, rational, level-headed types, who consider their knives to be tools, not weapons.)
For the two percent or so of the studio audience who are thinking, "hmm, this meteorite knife isn't for me, but the topic of knives is interesting", I would heartily recommend these sites for further information:
This is the most popular "web-based BBS" site for discussion of all things sharp and shiny. Lively discussions with everyone from the merely curious to avid collectors, to amateur and professional knife makers, and the CEOs of some of the most highly regarded knife companies.
This online knife store is a one-man operation, a self-professed "collector turned dealer to support his habit" (and advocate for the sane use of sharp shiny things), who provides tons of good background information on the use, care, and rationale behind knives, without a hard sales pitch. My favorite place to point friends who become curious about knives.
I can see it now: "Quayle 12%, Gore 15%, Bush 8%, and Jar Jar Sucks 65%"