I think the place for a treatise on the English class system isn't slashdot. But bear in mind that the poor may be, in financial terms, relatively rich. In the US, your definitions of `working class' and `middle class' are purely based on income. Here, however, it's based on education and aspiration. Someone who got a degree at 21 but decided to scrape a living as an artist, funded by the odd thing the sell plus a generous mother, is middle class. A plumber who makes the equivalent of $200K is working class. Large TVs predict that you are working class or that your parents are. Small TVs predict that you are middle class, which pretty much mandates that your parents are. I was being flippant when I said large TV == no job; what I meant was large TV == job rather than career. I have no idea how people in dead-end jobs that pay very little afford large TVs and cigarettes (another indicator of poverty) but I know that if I were skint I'd spend the money on other things.
My parents, retired secondary school and university teachers, don't have a television, and never have. I doubt any friend of theirs has a TV larger than 20", and they are the golden generation of final-salary pensions.
The answer to your last question is ``not as much as the tabloids think, but a great deal more than the wildest fantasy of the most left-bent end of the Dems''.
Wow...I'm a bit amazed at how many people are posting here about such SMALL tvs??? I mean, the only place I see small tv's are usually ones that are 4th or 5th tv's in the house, in the kitchen, bathroom or dining room maybe...
I only have one TV in the house. We try to spend the rest of the time talking to each other.
People with all the small screens....where are you from? Are you still college students or just recently graduated? Just curious.
It's called `England'. I know several people with high six-figure incomes who have a 14" portable somewhere in the house, and that's it. Broadly, the larger the television, the less likely you are to have a job. You can spot the poor areas: that's where the satellite dishes are. We recently bought a cheap 26" LCD, and people come into our house and are surprised that we have a TV that size (and it was only because the offer from Dell didn't have anything smaller). ``42" TV'' is now shorthand for stupid and fat. I _could_ buy a large TV (although I'm not sure where I'd put it: books, you know), but I also could buy a Hummer and a leather sofa.
Surely passwords are the wrong answer. I carry the contents of.ssh from my office machine on a tiny USB thingie from pqi. Very handy when I was at my father in law's last month. I also have Windows binaries of ssh on it. Mount the USB disk, use the id_dsa file from it as my key, job done. Yes, a keystroke logger will get my passphrase, but won't get the key. A very targeted attack would be needed. If I were worried about that, I'd tie our SSH listener into our SecureID infrastructure, but that seems a bit keen.
People that slashdot readers know aren't a good model of the population at large. I'd be prepared to bet that of my wife's friends, less than 10% of them know there is a format war at all. The main decision they're involved in is ``keep the VCR vs Buy a DVD recorder vs Buy a hard-disk recorder'' for timeshifting. In my guise a technology consultant to a large pool of social acquaintances, not one person has mentioned HD. And over lunch in a technology company where I work, the general view is ``maybe at some point, but who cares?''. Note this is England, where a TV over 26" is the mark of he working classes.
I don't think the death of HD-DVD (even if it happened) would be a victory for Blu-Ray. All those pissed-off HD-DVD customers, the general ``HD video is a good way to get ripped off'' buzz, in a tightening economy, spells trouble. DCC was `beaten' by MiniDisc, but in the end it was a pyhric victory.
Retail end users don't upgrade operating systems, ever. This may not be 100% true, but it's certainly 95% true. When consumers buy a new PC in order eradicate spyware, what makes you think OS upgrades are on the agenda (even if they actually work with the hardware present, which is a whole other story). Businesses might, but OEM pricing of licensing is so low relative to Select/Enterprise that usually it makes no economic sense. So I believe a seat sold with XP is a seat lost to Vista for 2-4 years.
day, someone posts a "Company X are in violation of the GPL!" to Slashdot -- and all hell breaks loose. Your lawers tell you that "Yes, we have to open source all our products, because they have all been contaminated by the GPL, becase we touched the linux kernel source (which is GPL)!".
If your lawyer tells you to distribute source on the strength of Slashdot, you've got bigger problems. Like having sketchy lawyers.
If you're worried, do what we did and buy the Blackduck product.
ian
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
The kinds of documents you're talking about - where formatting doesn't matter - memos and letters to mum - are called email.
I'm guessing you have youth on your side. The set of people of say, 90 who use email is not as universal as you might like to think. I write to my great-uncle in residential care: he's 80-something, and reads large print with difficulty. Email: he's never heard of it, never mind used it. My parents, in their seventies, are heavy users of email: many of their contemporaries are not.
That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems. Japanese internal documents in particular are just glyphs on a page. Documents that go to customers, perhaps. Which is about 1% of the documents produced.
The core of religious belief is that God created the heavens and the Earth.
Really? Really? Or is that just the American Protestants speaking? By religion to you mean religion in the large, or do you mean what's happening in the revival tent by the mall?
Creation consumes about four pages in the Old and New Testaments. Although Genesis is canonical to Judaism as well creationism doesn't split Jews apart, and the only reason it's become an issue (in Europe at least) in Islam is that any sense of persecution the Christians can muster is attractive to the Muslims as well. There is no schism between `believers' in Evolution and others in Shinto, or Hinduism, or Buhdism, in any of the other major world religions.
There isn't really in Christianity: it's just that America dominates Anglophone discourse, and the tension between fancy intellectuals from the coasts who think they're no much smarter than the rest of us but aren't really on the one hand and stupid farmers from the flyover states on the other hand (to parody their mutual images) happens to have gone to Evolution this century. Last century the flyover states wanted the right to lynch niggers if they wanted to vote, next century who knows? This century, you justify the fact that your farm's gone bust, your son is dead in Iraq and your daughter can't read by telling yourself that them damn New Yorkers are going to go to hell by believing in evilution. Go girl: who needs a job and healthcare anyway?
Prediction: belief in creationism is 90% amongst Americans who live more than 100 miles from both the Atlantic and the Pacific, earn under $60K and have no post-18 education. Everyone else who pretends to believe in it just wants their votes or their money.
since TeX hasn't yet managed to take over the world (yet), I suppose that there must be quite a few that tried it and didn't decide to use it
Most of them don't get that far. WYSIAYG is deeply embedded in the psyche of any computer who's not used an ASR33, and the reasons why editing with a text editor and then doing formatting out of the markup works well is just something they won't even try. The view I've had from people who have been impressed at how quickly I can generate a decent PDF but not prepared to jump in is that I need to use two tools (emacs/vi/whatever + pdflatex) while they need just one (Word, usually) and emacs/vi is as much work to learn as Word. Plus they find reading the raw LaTeX source in order to read it too difficult: my eyes automatically Do THe Right Thing when confronted with {\tt this sort\/} of {\it stuff\/}, because I've had over twenty years' practice, but others' don't.
Lyx doesn't get them, because the gaps show too badly and it's fairly obviously a cute interface to `complex' underpinnings.
I have to submit an annual return to our parent company showing the current status of our firewalling. I have a perl script that generates LaTeX tables directly from Cisco FW Feature Set config files. People look impressed. But then they get back to hacking tables by hand.
ian
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
In the real world you'll get asked to make precise changes to the way your document looks
In your real world, perhaps. In the world of memos and letters and five-page reports, where most documents would twenty years ago have been handwritten or at most whacked out on a Selectric, the layout matters to the audience not one whit. The author may believe it does, of course, and piss away hours on formatting: but the reader will read the words. I have never, ever heard of someone returning a letter from their mother commenting that the leading is a bit small...
Some of us, however, are concerned more with quality, and we have lots of money, so it would be stupid to discount our opinions.
Up to a point, but it's not worth selling one box with a thousand dollar profit margin if that stops you from selling ten thousand boxes with a hundred dollar profit margin. And, for example, SACD vs DVD-A is a prime example of this: the energy and market confusion caused not merely a failure in its own right, but has knocked on into other markets. In many cases, your most loyal and affluent customers are the last people you should listen to: otherwise NAIM and Linn would have long surpassed Apple as the key audio vendor.
Isn't picture quality the most important feature of a TV/video player?
No, unless you spend all day watching test cards. The most important thing about TV is content, and MASH at sub-VHS quality is still better than 90% of other programmes. Or did Sgt Bilko suddenly stop being funny the day colour TV arrived?
I suppose audio quality is way overblown for stereo systems
It is. Otherwise iPods would have failed: convenience and `good enough' win every time.
and lens quality is way overblown for phothographic equipment?
Indeed, every time someone buys a digital compact camera, lines per inch resolving power and flatness of field are their first priorities, and price, usability and convenience come way later.
One reason not to offer HD downloads is head-end bandwidth, of course.
"Build and they will come" is a nice thought. but the roadside carnage of technologies that have been built and have not come is testament to its weakness as a business plan.
Richer Sounds, the canonical UK discount box shifters, have the Toshiba HDE1, whatever that might be, for £170 (say $300: UK prices include 17.5% VAT). Given the cost of a display which can show any difference between upscaled DVD and HD-DVD, this strikes me as a price at which there's no barrier to entry. And still they aren't selling.
There isn't the slightest evidence that in the mainstream market there is any consumer pull of HD. For practical purposes Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are market failures: they're not selling media in any quantity, it's not being rented in any quantity, the players have passed straight from exotic high-price to discount box-shifting. A download service that offered roughly DVD quality would work well: aside from anything else, a lot of ISPs impose download caps which make the larger downloads less attractive. Most people are not anally retentive collectors who can't see a sequence of bits without having to copy it; most people watch films for plot, action and character rather than analysing motion artefacts; most people would see a timebomb'd download service for what it is, an alternative to Netflix, and use it (or not) accordingly.
I got some West Wing DVDs for Christmas, and as my home machine is now a 2.4GHz iMac rather than a G4 Mac Mini it's not quite so painful to temporarily shift them to my AppleTV with Handbrake. With 2.5Mbps average two-pass H.264 the quality is perfectly fine (ie at least as good as my cheap DVD player) on a 26" 1280x768 LCD TV driven via HDMI at 720p. I'd be quite happy to pay Netflix money for that quality.
And yet strangely a lot of people spend money with Netflix, Amazon Rental, etc, etc. I believe there is a video store near to me, but the Amazon rental service is priced so low I don't care and works fine. It also has a rather wide range: I'm guess the set of video stores with a copy of Nuit et Bruilard to hand is small.
Something that perpetually fascinates me, which presumably relates to the autism of geeks, is that automatic assumption that all media has to be owned and collected: terabytes of ripped DVD material, etc. I assume these are the people who can never actually see a concert, because they spend the whole time photographing and recording it. I own a handful of films of DVD, although I go to the cinema (the ultimate rental, in a sense) once a week. I rent occasional films, that I missed at the cinema, or want to see for some other reason, and after watching them once, from end to end, I'm quite happy not to have them around any more. What do these people with hundreds and thousands of films _do_ with them? I'm increasingly puzzled at what I myself should be with the thousands of CDs I've acquired over the past twenty years: how many of them do I listen to? How many of them, indeed, have I listened to more than once?
But please, go ahead yank that cable out of the box hosting the NFS share which you are storing your database on an tell me how it goes.
Yup, standard test scenario. The database stops, and when the cable goes back in, starts up again. We tried it with the cable out for a few hours once, too. Most people who have trouble with NFS mount filesystems `soft' without thinking about it.
But please, go ahead yank that cable out of the disk array hosting the FC disk which you are storing your database on an tell me how it goes. Last time we tried that the database server panic()d. The NFS scenario survived the loss of both network paths; the FC configuration didn't survive the loss of both FC paths. NFS is a lot more tolerant of failure than locally attached disk.
Oh please. ``a, because a PST being written and read over a network is slower, and if the connection goes down, the file may be corrupted... just like working with any other file over a network.'' That might be the gospel according to Redmond, but for those of us outside the horrific networking decisions Microsoft have made, terabyte-class Oracle databases work just fine over NFS. Remote access via GigE to dedicated filers is faster than local spindles unless those spindles are in exotic raid arrays, and why would a `network' be any more likely to induce corruption than, oh, a fibre channel network?
It doesn't matter if the replication is within a chassis, within a closely coupled cluster or between boxes linked only by GigE: the point is that only a fool would take a write and place it into a single device, be that device RAM, SSD or rotating media. I currently use the classic ``two sets of electronics fronting one RAID array'' assemblage (Pillar) with replication taking place within a few hours to another box (a pile of second-user DotHill disk, a Sun, the magic of ZFS) twenty miles away. Except there I can do the replication faster than periodic (Oracle archive logs, Cyrus replication) I do. Hourly, daily and weekly snapshots at each end, periodic tape for long-term audit and I'm relative relaxed.
But you're right: this is all up for grabs in the coming months. Distributed filesystems are one thing, although the need for diffuse bandwidth covering the clients and all the nodes in the cluster could be a constraint for a lot of people. Companies like Acopia that use switches to virtualise NFS into mirrored milesystems are another (although as getting application vendors to accept NFS rather than SAN is a major hassle, virtualised NFS may cause them to tear up your support contract). Applications that are distribution aware are a third --- I hear from my Oracle administrators that Oracle.next has its own, userland NFS client so that it can play database-aware tunes on write sequencing taking advantage of NFS's ``a confirmed write is durable'' semantics, and it's an obvious move to just write your logs out to your remote filesystem as well as your local one.
I'd be interested to hear of people who are running Oracle into things like Lustre. It should work, and work well, but I suspect it will take a brave man to sign it off into production.
There are also valuable business applications for the same technology. If 64GB flash were "relatively affordable" and noticeably faster and more effective than a good RAID array, then these flash drives could be an important component of an enterprise storage system.
We're going to see how effective this is over the coming months: NAS and SAN products are clearly going to start sprouting SSDs either instead of the primary cache or as a mid tier between the RAM and the disk. I'm not expecting miracles: RAM is very, very cheap and the cost mostly comes from the infrastructure around it.
To take an example, my NAS storage has 12GB of mirrored RAM (you're still going to need to mirror the SSD unless you're insane) backed by enough battery to hold it up through a power failure until I can get enough power to stage it to disk. It's also using dedicated space within the RAID groups to use a an (essentially) linear-write intent log. An SSD might help a bit: perhaps 64GB of SSD is cheaper than 64GB of RAM and a battery. But at the moment for quite a heavy workload --- 2TB of Cyrus, 2TB of Clearcase, 6TB of Oracle, ~1000 home directories --- I never get to the position of writes not being staged via the RAM. Sure, I can imagine pathological workloads where I would need more staging, but right now 12GB is fine. So 64GB of SSD would add nothing to the proceedings except perhaps a small amount more read cache, and if the world were demanding more read cache (and it tends to exhibit diminishing returns) the answer would be to partition the RAM between battery-backed and mirrored write cache and unprotected read cache.
ian
Increasingly, the edit decision list isn't given to a negative cutter; the final assembly is sent directly to a digital output device which generates film. I don't know if projection prints are individually struck like this or duplicated optically: I suspect it depends on the volume. The first film to do this starting from live-action shooting was O Brother Where Art Thou in 2000. It's obviously universal for projects shot on DV and then distributed on film, where there aren't negatives as such.
This whole discussion will be dead within ten years, because anyone who has watched digital projection will be increasing dissatisfied with optical prints anyway. The only optical print I've ever seen that comes close to modern digital projectors is the dye sublimation print of Apocalypse Now done a few years ago. I used to go to the Stanford Cinema in Palo Alto and see clean prints of B&W classics: seeing the BFI's digital restoration of The Dam Busters a few months ago knocked those into a cocked hat.
Conversely, being in a position and interest to have registered for Slashdot back in the day indicates that at least you have seen some water pass under the bridge. I was told about Slashdot while chatting to Eric Raymond, back when The Cathedral and the Bazaar was new and controversial, and Miquel woss-name, back when Gnome vs KDE was a battle people cared about. Views acquired by umpteen years of industry watching might not be right, but they are at least a perspective.
ian
A friend of mine who works at a local Dell tech support office has confirmed my pattern, saying that over 75% of Vista related issues are on laptops.
Which is madness from microsoft's perspective, as the market for computer sales is tilting more and more towards laptops. My contrast, Apple are pushing the books hard, and the iMac sits in the background just in case you want one.
MAID == Massive Array of Idle Disks. It's a class of products which are essentially cheap, high-density SATA arrays with an emphasis on spin-down when disks aren't in use. The idea is that you get as much capacity as a jukebox full of LTO-3, with a similar standby current, plus you don't have the problem that tape has to be running at the right speed. In my experience, incremental backups always have to go via disk staging anyway, because scanning for changed files takes the transfer rate into the tape drive below the critical level at which the tape can no longer keeps itself busy with the tape moving continuously.
Alongside MAID there are on- and off- line de-duplication products, which look for shared blocks of data and replace them with pointers. In principle one could back up baseline twice and reduce that, offline, to a baseline and a block-wise incremental. Absent that, I'm having success taking snapshots and then using rsync-type ``changes only'' transfers: that means you can transfer a large file, make a small change, and then only have the subsequent transfer consume the change's worth of disk.
You'll also be aware of the various rows here in England as the government displays its new networking technology: CDs and a courier.
Most of us with medium-sized data farms (I herd about 50TB) are getting out of removable media as fast as we can. I've got 20TB of disk at the far end end of 30 miles of GigE, which with compression (all hail ZFS!) provides me enough space to keep copies of all the critical data, plus a few weeks of daily snapshots. My RPO is ``that day's work'' and my RTO is essentially zero: I can serve the data up over NFS from the replicas as easily as from the live systems. Obviously, some of it's better than ``that day'': the Oracle archive logs go straight over, and the Cyrus mail server will replicate live as soon as I can find the time to get it working. But we're only using tape now for monthly audit copies, and those can therefore safely stay in the machine room: the data replicates offsite, and then comes back into the tape silo monthly. A machine room fire costs us the audit copies: if I feel keen I'll start cloning those and sending them offsite. If I can scare up the budget and offsite space for a MAID then I can get out of tape entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the place for a treatise on the English class system isn't slashdot. But bear in mind that the poor may be, in financial terms, relatively rich. In the US, your definitions of `working class' and `middle class' are purely based on income. Here, however, it's based on education and aspiration. Someone who got a degree at 21 but decided to scrape a living as an artist, funded by the odd thing the sell plus a generous mother, is middle class. A plumber who makes the equivalent of $200K is working class. Large TVs predict that you are working class or that your parents are. Small TVs predict that you are middle class, which pretty much mandates that your parents are. I was being flippant when I said large TV == no job; what I meant was large TV == job rather than career. I have no idea how people in dead-end jobs that pay very little afford large TVs and cigarettes (another indicator of poverty) but I know that if I were skint I'd spend the money on other things. My parents, retired secondary school and university teachers, don't have a television, and never have. I doubt any friend of theirs has a TV larger than 20", and they are the golden generation of final-salary pensions. The answer to your last question is ``not as much as the tabloids think, but a great deal more than the wildest fantasy of the most left-bent end of the Dems''.
Surely passwords are the wrong answer. I carry the contents of .ssh from my office machine on a tiny USB thingie from pqi. Very handy when I was at my father in law's last month. I also have Windows binaries of ssh on it. Mount the USB disk, use the id_dsa file from it as my key, job done. Yes, a keystroke logger will get my passphrase, but won't get the key. A very targeted attack would be needed. If I were worried about that, I'd tie our SSH listener into our SecureID infrastructure, but that seems a bit keen.
People that slashdot readers know aren't a good model of the population at large. I'd be prepared to bet that of my wife's friends, less than 10% of them know there is a format war at all. The main decision they're involved in is ``keep the VCR vs Buy a DVD recorder vs Buy a hard-disk recorder'' for timeshifting. In my guise a technology consultant to a large pool of social acquaintances, not one person has mentioned HD. And over lunch in a technology company where I work, the general view is ``maybe at some point, but who cares?''. Note this is England, where a TV over 26" is the mark of he working classes.
I don't think the death of HD-DVD (even if it happened) would be a victory for Blu-Ray. All those pissed-off HD-DVD customers, the general ``HD video is a good way to get ripped off'' buzz, in a tightening economy, spells trouble. DCC was `beaten' by MiniDisc, but in the end it was a pyhric victory.
ian
If you're worried, do what we did and buy the Blackduck product.
ian
That aside, I have never heard of an internal document in my company (one of the world's largest IT and manufacturing concerns) being bounced for formatting problems. Japanese internal documents in particular are just glyphs on a page. Documents that go to customers, perhaps. Which is about 1% of the documents produced.
There isn't really in Christianity: it's just that America dominates Anglophone discourse, and the tension between fancy intellectuals from the coasts who think they're no much smarter than the rest of us but aren't really on the one hand and stupid farmers from the flyover states on the other hand (to parody their mutual images) happens to have gone to Evolution this century. Last century the flyover states wanted the right to lynch niggers if they wanted to vote, next century who knows? This century, you justify the fact that your farm's gone bust, your son is dead in Iraq and your daughter can't read by telling yourself that them damn New Yorkers are going to go to hell by believing in evilution. Go girl: who needs a job and healthcare anyway?
Prediction: belief in creationism is 90% amongst Americans who live more than 100 miles from both the Atlantic and the Pacific, earn under $60K and have no post-18 education. Everyone else who pretends to believe in it just wants their votes or their money.
Lyx doesn't get them, because the gaps show too badly and it's fairly obviously a cute interface to `complex' underpinnings.
I have to submit an annual return to our parent company showing the current status of our firewalling. I have a perl script that generates LaTeX tables directly from Cisco FW Feature Set config files. People look impressed. But then they get back to hacking tables by hand.
ian
ian
One reason not to offer HD downloads is head-end bandwidth, of course. "Build and they will come" is a nice thought. but the roadside carnage of technologies that have been built and have not come is testament to its weakness as a business plan. Richer Sounds, the canonical UK discount box shifters, have the Toshiba HDE1, whatever that might be, for £170 (say $300: UK prices include 17.5% VAT). Given the cost of a display which can show any difference between upscaled DVD and HD-DVD, this strikes me as a price at which there's no barrier to entry. And still they aren't selling.
There isn't the slightest evidence that in the mainstream market there is any consumer pull of HD. For practical purposes Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are market failures: they're not selling media in any quantity, it's not being rented in any quantity, the players have passed straight from exotic high-price to discount box-shifting. A download service that offered roughly DVD quality would work well: aside from anything else, a lot of ISPs impose download caps which make the larger downloads less attractive. Most people are not anally retentive collectors who can't see a sequence of bits without having to copy it; most people watch films for plot, action and character rather than analysing motion artefacts; most people would see a timebomb'd download service for what it is, an alternative to Netflix, and use it (or not) accordingly. I got some West Wing DVDs for Christmas, and as my home machine is now a 2.4GHz iMac rather than a G4 Mac Mini it's not quite so painful to temporarily shift them to my AppleTV with Handbrake. With 2.5Mbps average two-pass H.264 the quality is perfectly fine (ie at least as good as my cheap DVD player) on a 26" 1280x768 LCD TV driven via HDMI at 720p. I'd be quite happy to pay Netflix money for that quality.
Something that perpetually fascinates me, which presumably relates to the autism of geeks, is that automatic assumption that all media has to be owned and collected: terabytes of ripped DVD material, etc. I assume these are the people who can never actually see a concert, because they spend the whole time photographing and recording it. I own a handful of films of DVD, although I go to the cinema (the ultimate rental, in a sense) once a week. I rent occasional films, that I missed at the cinema, or want to see for some other reason, and after watching them once, from end to end, I'm quite happy not to have them around any more. What do these people with hundreds and thousands of films _do_ with them? I'm increasingly puzzled at what I myself should be with the thousands of CDs I've acquired over the past twenty years: how many of them do I listen to? How many of them, indeed, have I listened to more than once?
But please, go ahead yank that cable out of the disk array hosting the FC disk which you are storing your database on an tell me how it goes. Last time we tried that the database server panic()d. The NFS scenario survived the loss of both network paths; the FC configuration didn't survive the loss of both FC paths. NFS is a lot more tolerant of failure than locally attached disk.
Oh please. ``a, because a PST being written and read over a network is slower, and if the connection goes down, the file may be corrupted... just like working with any other file over a network.'' That might be the gospel according to Redmond, but for those of us outside the horrific networking decisions Microsoft have made, terabyte-class Oracle databases work just fine over NFS. Remote access via GigE to dedicated filers is faster than local spindles unless those spindles are in exotic raid arrays, and why would a `network' be any more likely to induce corruption than, oh, a fibre channel network?
But you're right: this is all up for grabs in the coming months. Distributed filesystems are one thing, although the need for diffuse bandwidth covering the clients and all the nodes in the cluster could be a constraint for a lot of people. Companies like Acopia that use switches to virtualise NFS into mirrored milesystems are another (although as getting application vendors to accept NFS rather than SAN is a major hassle, virtualised NFS may cause them to tear up your support contract). Applications that are distribution aware are a third --- I hear from my Oracle administrators that Oracle.next has its own, userland NFS client so that it can play database-aware tunes on write sequencing taking advantage of NFS's ``a confirmed write is durable'' semantics, and it's an obvious move to just write your logs out to your remote filesystem as well as your local one.
I'd be interested to hear of people who are running Oracle into things like Lustre. It should work, and work well, but I suspect it will take a brave man to sign it off into production.
ian
Increasingly, the edit decision list isn't given to a negative cutter; the final assembly is sent directly to a digital output device which generates film. I don't know if projection prints are individually struck like this or duplicated optically: I suspect it depends on the volume. The first film to do this starting from live-action shooting was O Brother Where Art Thou in 2000. It's obviously universal for projects shot on DV and then distributed on film, where there aren't negatives as such. This whole discussion will be dead within ten years, because anyone who has watched digital projection will be increasing dissatisfied with optical prints anyway. The only optical print I've ever seen that comes close to modern digital projectors is the dye sublimation print of Apocalypse Now done a few years ago. I used to go to the Stanford Cinema in Palo Alto and see clean prints of B&W classics: seeing the BFI's digital restoration of The Dam Busters a few months ago knocked those into a cocked hat.
Conversely, being in a position and interest to have registered for Slashdot back in the day indicates that at least you have seen some water pass under the bridge. I was told about Slashdot while chatting to Eric Raymond, back when The Cathedral and the Bazaar was new and controversial, and Miquel woss-name, back when Gnome vs KDE was a battle people cared about. Views acquired by umpteen years of industry watching might not be right, but they are at least a perspective. ian
Alongside MAID there are on- and off- line de-duplication products, which look for shared blocks of data and replace them with pointers. In principle one could back up baseline twice and reduce that, offline, to a baseline and a block-wise incremental. Absent that, I'm having success taking snapshots and then using rsync-type ``changes only'' transfers: that means you can transfer a large file, make a small change, and then only have the subsequent transfer consume the change's worth of disk.
ian
You'll also be aware of the various rows here in England as the government displays its new networking technology: CDs and a courier. Most of us with medium-sized data farms (I herd about 50TB) are getting out of removable media as fast as we can. I've got 20TB of disk at the far end end of 30 miles of GigE, which with compression (all hail ZFS!) provides me enough space to keep copies of all the critical data, plus a few weeks of daily snapshots. My RPO is ``that day's work'' and my RTO is essentially zero: I can serve the data up over NFS from the replicas as easily as from the live systems. Obviously, some of it's better than ``that day'': the Oracle archive logs go straight over, and the Cyrus mail server will replicate live as soon as I can find the time to get it working. But we're only using tape now for monthly audit copies, and those can therefore safely stay in the machine room: the data replicates offsite, and then comes back into the tape silo monthly. A machine room fire costs us the audit copies: if I feel keen I'll start cloning those and sending them offsite. If I can scare up the budget and offsite space for a MAID then I can get out of tape entirely.