Yanno, that word picture you painted really brings to mind a T-Shirt I saw at OSCON this year (Anil Dash from Six Apart wore it during his keynote)... http://www.threadless.com/product/235/Goatse The link is work-safe though still disturbing.
A fellow that I go swimming with is big into music and so has tried a variety of different devices for having music while doing laps - one of which is a bone-conduction headset. It works indifferently well for music - certain frequencies transfer better than others, but I could see that it might do better for phone communication. I'd think that a canalphone (shure or etymotic) would provide a more discreet and less bulky solution. Plus it won't pulverize your teeth or brain - though a canalphone might blow out your eardrum if you've got it up loud and get a burst of static or something.
Windows (XP at least) doesn't buffer writes to removable media by default. You can enable that feature by going into Disk Administrator, finding the firewire drive in the bottom-right quadrant, right-clicking on the grey label and picking properties. On the policy tab you can opt to have Windows buffer writes at the price of having to "eject" the disk before unplugging it.
Hardware neuroses, Windoze malware, PeeCees and "pro Macs". THAT explains it. You're one of those old-school Macintosh persecution-complex cultists. All becomes clear now. I do happen have a pair of white-box Windows machines for gaming, though the rest of my gear is low to mid-grade server-class x86 hardware running Linux or FreeBSD (Tyan and Supermicro stuff). I also happend to have some Mac hardware (although you'd probably sneer at my Powerbook for not being "pro" enough).
I spend approximately 10 to 15 seconds unplugging and replugging the USB drives on the days that I swap them. How long does it take you to burn a DVD? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? Amortized over a three or four week period (your claimed backup window), I still win on time "wasted". That's why I love the way the rsync method works - I don't have to DO anything, the snapshots happen automatically as long as the target drive is attached.
Since you use Apple hardware, using rsync for backups is even easier, provided you're running OSX, since Apple bundles it with the OS. Here is a good resource for setting it up if you ever decide to explore other, more reliable options for data security.
Alas though, judging from your tone, you don't seem willing to engage in rational discourse. C'est la vie.
I guess I'm glad you feel invulnerable with the backup scheme you've crafted (and make no mistake, it is a backup - despite that you choose to call it archiving), but really you're just playing roulette with your data.
Now, having offended you, let me agree with some of the things you say. =)
Your assertion about maintaining a complete system backup is pretty spot on. The data is what you want to keep safe and the applications are perfectly able to be reloaded from the source media (provided, of course, that it's still available - but that's a different topic). I somewhat disagree that configs are unimportant. Though backups aren't necessarily the place for those either, rather they ought to be kept in some sort of change-control mechanism (CVS or whatever) for the sake of repeatability. That way, you can do an install on a fresh box, check out the configuration and proceed to dealing with the important stuff - the data.
Back to disagreeing.
Your current scheme of burning off your work whenever you deliver something makes you vulnerable to significant data loss via accidentally fat-fingering an rm, or catching a virus, or suffering the random angst of an irritated diety (other assorted phenomenon) since you claim immunity to such catastrophe. Your major complaint about backups seems to center around the amount of effort required to do them (well, that and the bad experience you had after performing one). This is why I think you should take some time to look at using rsync to do snapshot-style backups. My backups go nightly and are almost completely automated - I just have to plug in a different external USB drive into the server each morning (though if I forget, it's no big deal). Between that and the hardware RAID, I've reduced my rework window to no more than 24 hours. As an added bonus, I don't have to worry with buying or storing a pile of CDs/DVDs or worring whether they'll still be readable when I need data off the bloody things.
Now to quibble about terms, or the reason I accused you of still doing backups.
Archiving says that you take the project data and move it off primary storage and onto your CD/DVD. Yet, when you were speaking of your MP3 collection, you said you burned a DVD when you had enough new material to fill a disk - implying that the data was not moved off, merely copied off. According to Webster, that'd be a backup. =P Thus you do some of both, probably.
In summary:
* Automated backups of your data so you don't have to actively worry about doing backups == good
* Depending on CDs and/or DVDs to keep your data safe == silly
* Calling a backup an archive == redefinition of terms
* Asserting that certain components haven't failed in the past and will therefore never fail in the future == past performance is no indication of future returns
> They had a full operating system, GUI, modem drivers, and web browser, that all fit nicely on a floppy. You can't do that without very well written code.
Not quite sure that follows. After all, you can do that* with DOS and I don't believe anyone would claim that it's well written code.
* Well, more or less. You can fit that wacky Caldera browser, Arachne, (beware the 'orrible MIDI music) and some rudimentary network tools (SSH, VNC and ping) on a floppy. Arguably that's not a "full operating system", but I do think my point size != quality still stands.
> You prompted some fatheaded masturbatory bloated colostomy bag of a D&D-player to crawl out of his parents' basement and use the word "methinks", but other than that, no harm done.
Hmm, took some cranky pills didn't you? I generally don't read or respond to ACs, but what the heck...
I don't D&D (closest I come is a bit of World of Warcraft on the weekends) and I don't live in my parents' basement. As far as "methinks" goes, I read enough that my speech patterns tend to be more archaic and/or formal. I get some teasing from my friends (yes, I actually have some) about it, but it's a harmless quirk.
Do I get to make some rude generalizations about inbred, backwoods, AOL-using, AC-posting, trailer-trash now? =P
Methinks the SSD in the title of that drive means something other than Solid State Disk. If you do a froogle search for the model number, none of the other resellers include that feature and they're all in the same neighborhood pricewise.
I've not ever had a slowdown that I can attribute to AVG. Prior to trying them I used F-Secure (ate CPU like candy to no appreciable benefit), McAfee (Random crashes on shutdown and the occasional munged update file that'll eat my data? Are we sure that NAI isn't in the virus WRITING business?!?!), and Norton (gods above, make the pop-up notifications and tray icons and wacky security alerts stop! Plus it also makes my system crawl). AVG just gets the job done and doesn't (well, other than at log in) get in my face. Certainly it doesn't bundle anti-spyware but why aren't you using MS Defender for that? And firewalls? D-Link has some nice hardware that'll augment the Windows boxed package nicely as well as giving you wireless and other toys. =P
> You missed the point entirely, although that was a nice attempt. The point was call a duck a duck. Don't say "deal with it because it's free". Don't say "if it sucks that's your fault for using an unofficial product."
But my point was that these aren't both ducks. They both exhibit duck-ish behavior in that they float on water and fly, but one is a mallard and the other is a canadian goose. =P
> So although well said, your point wasn't the least bit relevant, although I greatly appreciate you respoding with opinion as opposed to insults.
Er, I appreciate the cordiality but I'm not the only one missing points apparently...
> Oh and FYI: SuSE isos were available for free download since early 2004. That's not that bad, since Fedora's first release was in late 2003.
Having ISOs freely available isn't quite the same thing though - and THAT was my point. Sure, SUSE made ISOs available but that wasn't a community-driven project, it was their formerly commercial-only product that was tightly controlled by internal engineers. Versus RedHat's increasingly more hands-off approach to Fedora, which is what their community demands.
What I was attempting to point out was that Fedora's quality will continue to be... spotty. That's simply the nature of a community-driven distro. Early on Fedora had RedHat playing the part of the heavy and keeping people focused on all the necessary minutia. But they got yelled at because the process wasn't "open" enough. So they loosened up control and the inevitable result happened: broken releases.
Fedora has no strong center, no singular vision to guide it. Ubuntu has Shuttleworth and a nicely-defined hierarchy to look to for direction. Slackware has Patrick. Debian has similar community issues though they manifest themselves differently - they just never release distros anymore (and the last one they did push out was initially even more broken than FC5).
I guess what I'm saying is that, despite RedHat's involvement, thinking of Fedora like you used to think of RedHat 9 and earlier is incorrect. Fedora's new focus is on tracking the latest-and-greatest releases of stuff and not on achieving any great stability. If you want something that will predictably just work then you want one of the Enterprise-focused distros.
Time has moved on and this duck has evolved into a goose.
> Since I'm trolling, explain to me how this is ANY DIFFERENT from what Suse is doing? They give away OpenSUSE, as well as sell retail boxed sets.
And they just started doing so, what, six or seven months ago? The opensuse.org domain was registered July of '05 versus fedoraproject.org which was registered in September of '03, FWIW. My take is that it's an attempt to gain them visibility and to grow a community around their product (much like Fedora) so that their enterprise products wouldn't be marginalized. I've certainly taken a harder look at the SUSE stuff now that I can get a copy of it for free versus some rather obtuse LiveCD that wouldn't install to a hard drive. So, to answer your question - there is very little difference except that SUSE has only very recently gotten in the game and hasn't had as long to suffer at the hands of the community. Recall the old adage about too many cooks and the broth...
> Isn't what Fedora is doing with buggy releases the exact same thing that got Mandrake deemed as "crap" for years on end?
Perhaps, except Mandrake insisted that you PAY for their crap (or wait an additional period of time so that folks in the Mandrake Club would iron out many of the issues and then release a free version). Why anybody put up with that is beyond me.
> Instead of heated name calling, do clarify the differences.
I trust that clarifies the differences for you.
> That's because there aren't any, and you're just trying to divert attention from the issue by using the same old "troll" name calling tatic.
Actually, you were trolling. Had OpenSUSE existed for as long as Fedora, then you'd be correct in calling foul, but to compare a project with two and a half years of baggage to a six-month-old (and, arguably less popular so far) project smacks of revisionist history.
Actually, I think it's more than cachet - the interface really is better IMHO. I've got a 6gig iPod mini (bought it two days before the nano - grrr) and a 20gb iRiver. The iRiver sits on my desk idle for most of the year while I use the mini a lot. Why? Because I've got all my music ripped in iTunes on a Mac, it's much, much easier to sync with an iPod. Apple is very good about vendor lock. Plus, my iHP-20 takes ages to scroll to specific songs resulting in the little joystick thingy not centering properly anymore. It also takes 70 to 90 seconds from power-on to give me the little chirp indicating it's ready to accept input. Perhaps that's just the way it scans metadata or something, but various firmwares haven't ever corrected that. The only solution I've found is to not dump more than a gig or two of music onto it.:/
Beyond FM, which I never use, the biggest killer feature for the iRiver is its integrated mic. When I'm doing NaNoWriMo, I listen to music on my iPod and dictate into the iRiver (at least while its battery lasts). Never understood why Apple didn't go ahead and integrate a mic. My employer bought stacks of iPods for incoming students and they all had to go pick up those silly Belkin mic addons if they wanted to record lectures live. Dumb.
Not a data-center per se, but it generally does what I want it to.
My most interesting machine is an Opteron 142 with 2gig of ram and a smidge less than 5tb of disk. This machine's job is to export its disks over a dedicated dual gigabit link to the front-end server - the idea being that when I want more space, I can add another machine full of drives and just mount 'em up on the front-end. The front-end server is an Athlon 64 with 1gig of ram and mirrored 300gb disks. Local storage on the front-end is used for my regular data and apps while space from the file bucket is only used to hold DVDs. The front-end runs the usual collection of stuff: Samba, Slimserver, Apache (for DokuWiki and a couple of other webapps) and Nagios. I do nightly differential rsyncs of/home to an external USB drive (have a couple three in the rotation, not that I'm paranoid about my data or anything).
A Mac Mini does adequately well for my web-surfing, instant-messaging and VOIP stuff and I've got a pair of Athlon 64 gaming machines that I use to get my WoW fix (yes, I group with myself - how else does one play an MMO when they hate people?) A Fujitsu Lifebook 7010D and a Danger Hiptop are my mobile device choices for when I go on my periodic, real-life-imposed fetch quests. Beyond that, I've got a Mini-ITX firewall, a tri-band D-Link access point and a small pile of Netgear 5-port gigabit switches. My only printer, an HP 8000, has a JetDirect card so I need no printserver machine. I've also got a number of older machines that don't get much playtime anymore... (there's the old triumvirate of Shuttle cubes from when I used to drive my beastlord, cleric and mage around together in EQ, the Toshiba Libretto L5 which is now a glorified book reader mounted on my exercise bike, the other mini-itx machine from when I had delusions that I was going to do my own router distro, and so on.)
The part of my current setup that I find the most appealing is that it's not too noisy. The disk-array generates the most noise, but I was able to replace the screaming 80mm datacenter-class fans with some medium-speed PanaFlo parts and get it down to almost reasonable without sacrificing too much cooling. The gaming machines aren't overclocked at all and certainly aren't top of the line (A64 3200+ w/ Venice cores, GeForce 6600GTs, SeaSonic S12 power supplies, Thermalright XP-90 CPU coolers and dinky WD800JB hard drives) so they don't put out a lot of heat. You can hear their fans, but they're not obnoxious.
File bucket and front-end share a Best UPS Patriot Pro II and, according to a Kill-A-Watt meter, burn around 415 watts during file I/O benchmarking. With the Mac in TeamSpeak and the two gaming machines in WoW, I burn about 380 additional watts. The firewall, access-point and other network gear chew up another 50 or so watts. So, when I'm not at home to take advantage of stuff, I can turn most of the gear off and drop power consumption down to around 130 watts (50 for the router/networking stuff and 80 for just the front-end server). Prior to splitting the DVD storage off onto a separate box, I made it almost halfway through December without the heat kicking on. =P
Bah, this is getting too long. Time to shoot the programmer and ship the product.
Oh, wait... you mean Model Driven Architecture as opposed to Monochrome Display Adaptor. And here I though I could make a killing unloading all the old Hercules cards in my closet. Nuts.
Yup, 2.0GHz vs. AMD marketing machine's 4800+. Thanks for proving my point.
Since you've demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension I'll refer you to page 5 of your article. The AMD processors are clocked at 2 and 2.2 ghz. What's your point?
You AMD fanboys have the shortest memories every.
I bow before your command of the English language. Or is that typo the result of an Intel optimization? =P
Incidentally, I'm not an AMD fanboy - I have a mix of processors and each is used according to it's fitness for a given task. My current portable is a Fujitsu subnotebook with a Pentium M. Prior to that it was a Transmeta Crusoe (13+ hours of battery life for the win!). My gaming rigs tend to be AMD but that's because they're less expensive for my target performance points (several steps back from top-end). I have an elderly dual Pentium 3 machine serving up my music (stupid slimserver software eats CPU like it's going out of style) and a Opteron in my disk array box. Various firewalls and routers are VIA Epia or Natl. Semiconductor Geode based. *shrug* Heck, I'm posting this from a first-generation Mac Mini with a PowerPC. I don't have computers so much as I have appliances that perform specific tasks for me.
CPUs have achieved a level of performance that makes them all essentially interchangable. Performance deltas in benchmarks typically run less than 5% and bottlenecks can be traced to other system components (notably graphics cards) depending on what's being exercised. I applaud Intel for making the tough decision to jettison the classic Pentium 4 line in favor of what's now Core Solo and Core Duo. If I was in the market for a replacement laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to snap up one based on Intel's latest offerings (provided I could get one that had the graphics oomph to run Vista - mebbe that shiny new NVidia GoForce 5500).
The new Intel stuff is good - desktop wise it's within shooting distance of high-end AMD parts and it's a quantum leap for notebooks (a place where AMD has historically struggled anyway because of power/heat issues). However, if anything has kicked bloody it'd be the previous generation Pentium parts and therein lies my disagreement with you.
I'm curious, did you even read the article that you linked to? Here's a few samples since you seemed to miss them:
"Under Battlefield 2, we're able to see a small 3% performance advantage over the Pentium M. However, compared to the Athlon 64 X2, the Core Duo does not stand a chance."
"What performance at lower resolutions does tell us is that in this type of AI/physics load, the Athlon 64 X2 is a much better performer than the Core Duo, which does have some importance for performance in future games."
And in the summary:
"In the past, power users on the go had to sacrifice mobility for CPU power, but with the Core Duo, that is no longer the case. You will still most likely have to resort to something larger if you need better GPU performance, but at least your CPU needs will be covered. The one thing that Intel's Core Duo seems to be able to do very well is to truly bridge the gap between mobile and desktop performance, at least in thin and light packages.
But what about the bigger picture? What does our most recent look at the performance of Intel's Core Duo tell us about future Intel desktop performance? We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller."
Based on that, I don't see how you can conclude that:
Itty, bitty mobile processor Yonah, at 2GHz, with no 64-bit extensions, kicks the bloody shit out of AMDs top of the line offering on almost all the benchmarks.
The Core Duo is impressive, no doubt about it. Near desktop performance with laptop-like power consumption (at least once Microsoft fixes XP so USB devices don't cause Windows to remain out of standby) but it seems you've gone a few too many laps 'round the Intel hype hampster-wheel. As a matter of fact, in direct opposition to your assertion, in all but one of the benchmarks Yonah trailed AMD's offerings. The gap wasn't generally tremendous, but it certainly was there. Yessir, that'd be kicking the bloody shit. Yup. Oh yes.
> There are legitimate cases where some knob bought the domain name just because they wanted to feel better about themselves, and aren't really doing anything with it.
That the page currently has banner ads on it doesn't talk about the structure of the site and whether older content can still be linked to. A site I once worked on has done a similar sort of thing - the root page simply punts you to the owning entity's main page while all the old functionality remains underneath to satisfy the terms-of-service with their clients. Without knowing its history, I guess you'd lump them in the knob category since the root of the domain isn't "useful".
I also take issue with your statements regarding FTP. Absent a browser, you still need meaningful names for a repository - witness kernel.org. Using a bare, text-based FTP client I can visit the site and pull down useful content. If all the actual file repositories resided on some inscrutable domain, I'd not be able to find anything without having to make a mental mapping along the lines of: "lessee, kernels sit on baz.foo.bar while glibc resides over on the twiddle.my-bits.gently server" instead of kernel.org and ftp.gnu.org.
Honestly, in my opinion, the fellow who submitted the ask slashdot is your aforementioned corporate overlord and is trying to do something wrong. I can only speculate that you were once burned by a domain squatter or had your eye on a domain that got bought out from beneath you or something which would lead to the current level of vitriol.
I'm sort of doing what you're talking about with the exception of not using MythTV for playback yet since I've not found a DVI flatpanel that I like and can afford yet. *shrug*
I've got DVD Shrink installed on all my Windows machines so that when I get a new batch of discs in, I can rip them in parallel. I also strip off CSS and Macrovision at that time so that the resulting set of files on the media server is unencumbered. For playback, I use Media Player Classic (again in Windows) to display the shows although I've verified that vlc and mplayer will also play them. I used to be able to use Apple's DVD player software on a mini, but after upgrading to Tiger and getting the latest version of the DVD player software, it won't let me play off the fileserver anymore (damn the MPAA).
Be ready to shell out some serious bucks for storage space as not doing transcoding/trimming puts some serious hurt on a pile of drives. I've ripped just shy of 300 discs (297 to be exact) and have eaten 1.6 TB out of my 1.8 TB array.
My dream is to be able to just pop the disc into a machine and have it rip the contents, decrypt and drop Macrovision and then spit the disc back out but I've not figured out a nice way to do that yet. I also want to add more storage but I've maxed out the current case and cases with lots of drive bays are quite spendy.
> AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS.
Actually, that's no longer strictly true. Remember, AMD added 64-bit goodness to the existing x86 architecture (AMD64) and Intel was forced to do the same (EM64T) in order to remain competative.
Bit tardy for an April fools joke ...
on
Dell Might do AMD
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Dell's talked about this before and it's always seemed to me that they play the AMD card in order to force Intel to give 'em a sweeter deal. Sort of like when AOL threatens to use Netscape instead of IE as their default web browser. Just exerting leverage - they won't really ever do it (though I'd love to be proven wrong).
I have a bit of a nit to pick with your subject. =P
While I have to agree that data can be lost because of user error, I built a 2tb RAID 5 out of Maxtor 300gb SATA drives and have thus far had one in five of the drives fail. And, of course, two drives failed within a day of each other so I lost the whole shebang. RAID 5 is fine for stuff like movies and music but I'm sticking to RAID 0+1 for the really important stuff (along with good rsync backups of course).
So, "RAID5 is for High Availability but not Security" might be a better way of expressing your sentiment.
Ah, but that's the way the world works for the development of Game Console stuff. In order to test the game, you have to buy an unlocked console that will read standard CDRs.
I'd imagine that, in the end, that's where Microsoft would like to see the average PC end up. That way, they can raise the bar on pirates to the point that it's impossible for the average user to pirate software. It also has the "unfortunate" side-effect of locking down the complexity of what new developers can do. Sure, there's nothing stopping them from making a spiffy Excel macro, but what if they want to do something more complex? Oh, that requires the development platform - so sorry.
After all, how many folks have the ability to use a logic analyser to figure out how to bypass the DRM built into the X-Box? *sigh*
If my "needs" were a bit simpler, I'm sure it'd be a lot more smooth. It's just that I've gotten used to a few of the more esoteric things that RedHat (more accuratlely, RedHat + SGI) makes easily available. Volume management is something that I cannot live without anymore. It's also nice to have a filesystem that allows me to shrink/grow volumes (hence XFS).::shrug:: I guess having Veritas' filesystem and volume management tools at work has spoiled me.:)
I'm trying the beta3 installer at the moment. I first tried the nightly snapshot, but the kernel in that image wasn't configured to allow DHCP.::boggle::
As far as XFS and LVM goes, LVM has been standard since at least the mid 2.4s and XFS since the late 2.4s (2.4.24 was when it was included as far as I remember, tho I'd need to go back through Marcello's release announcements to be certain).
I've no real complaint about XFS since I'm used to using an unofficial installer (SGI's for RedHat), but LVM... that's pretty basic stuff there.
Slashdot Mirror
Yanno, that word picture you painted really brings to mind a T-Shirt I saw at OSCON this year (Anil Dash from Six Apart wore it during his keynote) ... http://www.threadless.com/product/235/Goatse The link is work-safe though still disturbing.
A fellow that I go swimming with is big into music and so has tried a variety of different devices for having music while doing laps - one of which is a bone-conduction headset. It works indifferently well for music - certain frequencies transfer better than others, but I could see that it might do better for phone communication. I'd think that a canalphone (shure or etymotic) would provide a more discreet and less bulky solution. Plus it won't pulverize your teeth or brain - though a canalphone might blow out your eardrum if you've got it up loud and get a burst of static or something.
Windows (XP at least) doesn't buffer writes to removable media by default. You can enable that feature by going into Disk Administrator, finding the firewire drive in the bottom-right quadrant, right-clicking on the grey label and picking properties. On the policy tab you can opt to have Windows buffer writes at the price of having to "eject" the disk before unplugging it.
Hardware neuroses, Windoze malware, PeeCees and "pro Macs". THAT explains it. You're one of those old-school Macintosh persecution-complex cultists. All becomes clear now. I do happen have a pair of white-box Windows machines for gaming, though the rest of my gear is low to mid-grade server-class x86 hardware running Linux or FreeBSD (Tyan and Supermicro stuff). I also happend to have some Mac hardware (although you'd probably sneer at my Powerbook for not being "pro" enough).
I spend approximately 10 to 15 seconds unplugging and replugging the USB drives on the days that I swap them. How long does it take you to burn a DVD? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? Amortized over a three or four week period (your claimed backup window), I still win on time "wasted". That's why I love the way the rsync method works - I don't have to DO anything, the snapshots happen automatically as long as the target drive is attached.
Since you use Apple hardware, using rsync for backups is even easier, provided you're running OSX, since Apple bundles it with the OS. Here is a good resource for setting it up if you ever decide to explore other, more reliable options for data security.
Alas though, judging from your tone, you don't seem willing to engage in rational discourse. C'est la vie.
I guess I'm glad you feel invulnerable with the backup scheme you've crafted (and make no mistake, it is a backup - despite that you choose to call it archiving), but really you're just playing roulette with your data.
Now, having offended you, let me agree with some of the things you say. =)
Your assertion about maintaining a complete system backup is pretty spot on. The data is what you want to keep safe and the applications are perfectly able to be reloaded from the source media (provided, of course, that it's still available - but that's a different topic). I somewhat disagree that configs are unimportant. Though backups aren't necessarily the place for those either, rather they ought to be kept in some sort of change-control mechanism (CVS or whatever) for the sake of repeatability. That way, you can do an install on a fresh box, check out the configuration and proceed to dealing with the important stuff - the data.
Back to disagreeing.
Your current scheme of burning off your work whenever you deliver something makes you vulnerable to significant data loss via accidentally fat-fingering an rm, or catching a virus, or suffering the random angst of an irritated diety (other assorted phenomenon) since you claim immunity to such catastrophe. Your major complaint about backups seems to center around the amount of effort required to do them (well, that and the bad experience you had after performing one). This is why I think you should take some time to look at using rsync to do snapshot-style backups. My backups go nightly and are almost completely automated - I just have to plug in a different external USB drive into the server each morning (though if I forget, it's no big deal). Between that and the hardware RAID, I've reduced my rework window to no more than 24 hours. As an added bonus, I don't have to worry with buying or storing a pile of CDs/DVDs or worring whether they'll still be readable when I need data off the bloody things.
Now to quibble about terms, or the reason I accused you of still doing backups.
Archiving says that you take the project data and move it off primary storage and onto your CD/DVD. Yet, when you were speaking of your MP3 collection, you said you burned a DVD when you had enough new material to fill a disk - implying that the data was not moved off, merely copied off. According to Webster, that'd be a backup. =P Thus you do some of both, probably.
In summary:
* Automated backups of your data so you don't have to actively worry about doing backups == good
* Depending on CDs and/or DVDs to keep your data safe == silly
* Calling a backup an archive == redefinition of terms
* Asserting that certain components haven't failed in the past and will therefore never fail in the future == past performance is no indication of future returns
> They had a full operating system, GUI, modem drivers, and web browser, that all fit nicely on a floppy. You can't do that without very well written code.
Not quite sure that follows. After all, you can do that* with DOS and I don't believe anyone would claim that it's well written code.
* Well, more or less. You can fit that wacky Caldera browser, Arachne, (beware the 'orrible MIDI music) and some rudimentary network tools (SSH, VNC and ping) on a floppy. Arguably that's not a "full operating system", but I do think my point size != quality still stands.
> You prompted some fatheaded masturbatory bloated colostomy bag of a D&D-player to crawl out of his parents' basement and use the word "methinks", but other than that, no harm done.
...
Hmm, took some cranky pills didn't you? I generally don't read or respond to ACs, but what the heck
I don't D&D (closest I come is a bit of World of Warcraft on the weekends) and I don't live in my parents' basement. As far as "methinks" goes, I read enough that my speech patterns tend to be more archaic and/or formal. I get some teasing from my friends (yes, I actually have some) about it, but it's a harmless quirk.
Do I get to make some rude generalizations about inbred, backwoods, AOL-using, AC-posting, trailer-trash now? =P
Methinks the SSD in the title of that drive means something other than Solid State Disk. If you do a froogle search for the model number, none of the other resellers include that feature and they're all in the same neighborhood pricewise.
I've not ever had a slowdown that I can attribute to AVG. Prior to trying them I used F-Secure (ate CPU like candy to no appreciable benefit), McAfee (Random crashes on shutdown and the occasional munged update file that'll eat my data? Are we sure that NAI isn't in the virus WRITING business?!?!), and Norton (gods above, make the pop-up notifications and tray icons and wacky security alerts stop! Plus it also makes my system crawl). AVG just gets the job done and doesn't (well, other than at log in) get in my face. Certainly it doesn't bundle anti-spyware but why aren't you using MS Defender for that? And firewalls? D-Link has some nice hardware that'll augment the Windows boxed package nicely as well as giving you wireless and other toys. =P
> You missed the point entirely, although that was a nice attempt. The point was call a duck a duck. Don't say "deal with it because it's free". Don't say "if it sucks that's your fault for using an unofficial product."
...
... spotty. That's simply the nature of a community-driven distro. Early on Fedora had RedHat playing the part of the heavy and keeping people focused on all the necessary minutia. But they got yelled at because the process wasn't "open" enough. So they loosened up control and the inevitable result happened: broken releases.
But my point was that these aren't both ducks. They both exhibit duck-ish behavior in that they float on water and fly, but one is a mallard and the other is a canadian goose. =P
> So although well said, your point wasn't the least bit relevant, although I greatly appreciate you respoding with opinion as opposed to insults.
Er, I appreciate the cordiality but I'm not the only one missing points apparently
> Oh and FYI: SuSE isos were available for free download since early 2004. That's not that bad, since Fedora's first release was in late 2003.
Having ISOs freely available isn't quite the same thing though - and THAT was my point. Sure, SUSE made ISOs available but that wasn't a community-driven project, it was their formerly commercial-only product that was tightly controlled by internal engineers. Versus RedHat's increasingly more hands-off approach to Fedora, which is what their community demands.
What I was attempting to point out was that Fedora's quality will continue to be
Fedora has no strong center, no singular vision to guide it. Ubuntu has Shuttleworth and a nicely-defined hierarchy to look to for direction. Slackware has Patrick. Debian has similar community issues though they manifest themselves differently - they just never release distros anymore (and the last one they did push out was initially even more broken than FC5).
I guess what I'm saying is that, despite RedHat's involvement, thinking of Fedora like you used to think of RedHat 9 and earlier is incorrect. Fedora's new focus is on tracking the latest-and-greatest releases of stuff and not on achieving any great stability. If you want something that will predictably just work then you want one of the Enterprise-focused distros.
Time has moved on and this duck has evolved into a goose.
> Since I'm trolling, explain to me how this is ANY DIFFERENT from what Suse is doing? They give away OpenSUSE, as well as sell retail boxed sets.
...
And they just started doing so, what, six or seven months ago? The opensuse.org domain was registered July of '05 versus fedoraproject.org which was registered in September of '03, FWIW. My take is that it's an attempt to gain them visibility and to grow a community around their product (much like Fedora) so that their enterprise products wouldn't be marginalized. I've certainly taken a harder look at the SUSE stuff now that I can get a copy of it for free versus some rather obtuse LiveCD that wouldn't install to a hard drive. So, to answer your question - there is very little difference except that SUSE has only very recently gotten in the game and hasn't had as long to suffer at the hands of the community. Recall the old adage about too many cooks and the broth
> Isn't what Fedora is doing with buggy releases the exact same thing that got Mandrake deemed as "crap" for years on end?
Perhaps, except Mandrake insisted that you PAY for their crap (or wait an additional period of time so that folks in the Mandrake Club would iron out many of the issues and then release a free version). Why anybody put up with that is beyond me.
> Instead of heated name calling, do clarify the differences.
I trust that clarifies the differences for you.
> That's because there aren't any, and you're just trying to divert attention from the issue by using the same old "troll" name calling tatic.
Actually, you were trolling. Had OpenSUSE existed for as long as Fedora, then you'd be correct in calling foul, but to compare a project with two and a half years of baggage to a six-month-old (and, arguably less popular so far) project smacks of revisionist history.
Actually, I think it's more than cachet - the interface really is better IMHO. I've got a 6gig iPod mini (bought it two days before the nano - grrr) and a 20gb iRiver. The iRiver sits on my desk idle for most of the year while I use the mini a lot. Why? Because I've got all my music ripped in iTunes on a Mac, it's much, much easier to sync with an iPod. Apple is very good about vendor lock. Plus, my iHP-20 takes ages to scroll to specific songs resulting in the little joystick thingy not centering properly anymore. It also takes 70 to 90 seconds from power-on to give me the little chirp indicating it's ready to accept input. Perhaps that's just the way it scans metadata or something, but various firmwares haven't ever corrected that. The only solution I've found is to not dump more than a gig or two of music onto it. :/
Beyond FM, which I never use, the biggest killer feature for the iRiver is its integrated mic. When I'm doing NaNoWriMo, I listen to music on my iPod and dictate into the iRiver (at least while its battery lasts). Never understood why Apple didn't go ahead and integrate a mic. My employer bought stacks of iPods for incoming students and they all had to go pick up those silly Belkin mic addons if they wanted to record lectures live. Dumb.
Not a data-center per se, but it generally does what I want it to.
/home to an external USB drive (have a couple three in the rotation, not that I'm paranoid about my data or anything).
... (there's the old triumvirate of Shuttle cubes from when I used to drive my beastlord, cleric and mage around together in EQ, the Toshiba Libretto L5 which is now a glorified book reader mounted on my exercise bike, the other mini-itx machine from when I had delusions that I was going to do my own router distro, and so on.)
My most interesting machine is an Opteron 142 with 2gig of ram and a smidge less than 5tb of disk. This machine's job is to export its disks over a dedicated dual gigabit link to the front-end server - the idea being that when I want more space, I can add another machine full of drives and just mount 'em up on the front-end. The front-end server is an Athlon 64 with 1gig of ram and mirrored 300gb disks. Local storage on the front-end is used for my regular data and apps while space from the file bucket is only used to hold DVDs. The front-end runs the usual collection of stuff: Samba, Slimserver, Apache (for DokuWiki and a couple of other webapps) and Nagios. I do nightly differential rsyncs of
A Mac Mini does adequately well for my web-surfing, instant-messaging and VOIP stuff and I've got a pair of Athlon 64 gaming machines that I use to get my WoW fix (yes, I group with myself - how else does one play an MMO when they hate people?) A Fujitsu Lifebook 7010D and a Danger Hiptop are my mobile device choices for when I go on my periodic, real-life-imposed fetch quests. Beyond that, I've got a Mini-ITX firewall, a tri-band D-Link access point and a small pile of Netgear 5-port gigabit switches. My only printer, an HP 8000, has a JetDirect card so I need no printserver machine. I've also got a number of older machines that don't get much playtime anymore
The part of my current setup that I find the most appealing is that it's not too noisy. The disk-array generates the most noise, but I was able to replace the screaming 80mm datacenter-class fans with some medium-speed PanaFlo parts and get it down to almost reasonable without sacrificing too much cooling. The gaming machines aren't overclocked at all and certainly aren't top of the line (A64 3200+ w/ Venice cores, GeForce 6600GTs, SeaSonic S12 power supplies, Thermalright XP-90 CPU coolers and dinky WD800JB hard drives) so they don't put out a lot of heat. You can hear their fans, but they're not obnoxious.
File bucket and front-end share a Best UPS Patriot Pro II and, according to a Kill-A-Watt meter, burn around 415 watts during file I/O benchmarking. With the Mac in TeamSpeak and the two gaming machines in WoW, I burn about 380 additional watts. The firewall, access-point and other network gear chew up another 50 or so watts. So, when I'm not at home to take advantage of stuff, I can turn most of the gear off and drop power consumption down to around 130 watts (50 for the router/networking stuff and 80 for just the front-end server). Prior to splitting the DVD storage off onto a separate box, I made it almost halfway through December without the heat kicking on. =P
Bah, this is getting too long. Time to shoot the programmer and ship the product.
Oh, wait ... you mean Model Driven Architecture as opposed to Monochrome Display Adaptor. And here I though I could make a killing unloading all the old Hercules cards in my closet. Nuts.
Yup, 2.0GHz vs. AMD marketing machine's 4800+. Thanks for proving my point.
Since you've demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension I'll refer you to page 5 of your article. The AMD processors are clocked at 2 and 2.2 ghz. What's your point?
You AMD fanboys have the shortest memories every.
I bow before your command of the English language. Or is that typo the result of an Intel optimization? =P
Incidentally, I'm not an AMD fanboy - I have a mix of processors and each is used according to it's fitness for a given task. My current portable is a Fujitsu subnotebook with a Pentium M. Prior to that it was a Transmeta Crusoe (13+ hours of battery life for the win!). My gaming rigs tend to be AMD but that's because they're less expensive for my target performance points (several steps back from top-end). I have an elderly dual Pentium 3 machine serving up my music (stupid slimserver software eats CPU like it's going out of style) and a Opteron in my disk array box. Various firewalls and routers are VIA Epia or Natl. Semiconductor Geode based. *shrug* Heck, I'm posting this from a first-generation Mac Mini with a PowerPC. I don't have computers so much as I have appliances that perform specific tasks for me.
CPUs have achieved a level of performance that makes them all essentially interchangable. Performance deltas in benchmarks typically run less than 5% and bottlenecks can be traced to other system components (notably graphics cards) depending on what's being exercised. I applaud Intel for making the tough decision to jettison the classic Pentium 4 line in favor of what's now Core Solo and Core Duo. If I was in the market for a replacement laptop, I wouldn't hesitate to snap up one based on Intel's latest offerings (provided I could get one that had the graphics oomph to run Vista - mebbe that shiny new NVidia GoForce 5500).
The new Intel stuff is good - desktop wise it's within shooting distance of high-end AMD parts and it's a quantum leap for notebooks (a place where AMD has historically struggled anyway because of power/heat issues). However, if anything has kicked bloody it'd be the previous generation Pentium parts and therein lies my disagreement with you.
I'm curious, did you even read the article that you linked to? Here's a few samples since you seemed to miss them:
"Under Battlefield 2, we're able to see a small 3% performance advantage over the Pentium M. However, compared to the Athlon 64 X2, the Core Duo does not stand a chance."
"What performance at lower resolutions does tell us is that in this type of AI/physics load, the Athlon 64 X2 is a much better performer than the Core Duo, which does have some importance for performance in future games."
And in the summary:
"In the past, power users on the go had to sacrifice mobility for CPU power, but with the Core Duo, that is no longer the case. You will still most likely have to resort to something larger if you need better GPU performance, but at least your CPU needs will be covered. The one thing that Intel's Core Duo seems to be able to do very well is to truly bridge the gap between mobile and desktop performance, at least in thin and light packages.
But what about the bigger picture? What does our most recent look at the performance of Intel's Core Duo tell us about future Intel desktop performance? We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller."
Based on that, I don't see how you can conclude that:
Itty, bitty mobile processor Yonah, at 2GHz, with no 64-bit extensions, kicks the bloody shit out of AMDs top of the line offering on almost all the benchmarks.
The Core Duo is impressive, no doubt about it. Near desktop performance with laptop-like power consumption (at least once Microsoft fixes XP so USB devices don't cause Windows to remain out of standby) but it seems you've gone a few too many laps 'round the Intel hype hampster-wheel. As a matter of fact, in direct opposition to your assertion, in all but one of the benchmarks Yonah trailed AMD's offerings. The gap wasn't generally tremendous, but it certainly was there. Yessir, that'd be kicking the bloody shit. Yup. Oh yes.
Yeah. I stopped reading when my parser threw an exception on this gem:
In the US, prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933 in the United States.
Perhaps this should've been filed under department-of-redundencies-dept.
That the page currently has banner ads on it doesn't talk about the structure of the site and whether older content can still be linked to. A site I once worked on has done a similar sort of thing - the root page simply punts you to the owning entity's main page while all the old functionality remains underneath to satisfy the terms-of-service with their clients. Without knowing its history, I guess you'd lump them in the knob category since the root of the domain isn't "useful".
I also take issue with your statements regarding FTP. Absent a browser, you still need meaningful names for a repository - witness kernel.org. Using a bare, text-based FTP client I can visit the site and pull down useful content. If all the actual file repositories resided on some inscrutable domain, I'd not be able to find anything without having to make a mental mapping along the lines of: "lessee, kernels sit on baz.foo.bar while glibc resides over on the twiddle.my-bits.gently server" instead of kernel.org and ftp.gnu.org.
Honestly, in my opinion, the fellow who submitted the ask slashdot is your aforementioned corporate overlord and is trying to do something wrong. I can only speculate that you were once burned by a domain squatter or had your eye on a domain that got bought out from beneath you or something which would lead to the current level of vitriol.
I'm sort of doing what you're talking about with the exception of not using MythTV for playback yet since I've not found a DVI flatpanel that I like and can afford yet. *shrug*
I've got DVD Shrink installed on all my Windows machines so that when I get a new batch of discs in, I can rip them in parallel. I also strip off CSS and Macrovision at that time so that the resulting set of files on the media server is unencumbered. For playback, I use Media Player Classic (again in Windows) to display the shows although I've verified that vlc and mplayer will also play them. I used to be able to use Apple's DVD player software on a mini, but after upgrading to Tiger and getting the latest version of the DVD player software, it won't let me play off the fileserver anymore (damn the MPAA).
Be ready to shell out some serious bucks for storage space as not doing transcoding/trimming puts some serious hurt on a pile of drives. I've ripped just shy of 300 discs (297 to be exact) and have eaten 1.6 TB out of my 1.8 TB array.
My dream is to be able to just pop the disc into a machine and have it rip the contents, decrypt and drop Macrovision and then spit the disc back out but I've not figured out a nice way to do that yet. I also want to add more storage but I've maxed out the current case and cases with lots of drive bays are quite spendy.
> AMD makes clone chips, Intel makes chips that fit into Microsofts OS.
Actually, that's no longer strictly true. Remember, AMD added 64-bit goodness to the existing x86 architecture (AMD64) and Intel was forced to do the same (EM64T) in order to remain competative.
Dell's talked about this before and it's always seemed to me that they play the AMD card in order to force Intel to give 'em a sweeter deal. Sort of like when AOL threatens to use Netscape instead of IE as their default web browser. Just exerting leverage - they won't really ever do it (though I'd love to be proven wrong).
I have a bit of a nit to pick with your subject. =P
While I have to agree that data can be lost because of user error, I built a 2tb RAID 5 out of Maxtor 300gb SATA drives and have thus far had one in five of the drives fail. And, of course, two drives failed within a day of each other so I lost the whole shebang. RAID 5 is fine for stuff like movies and music but I'm sticking to RAID 0+1 for the really important stuff (along with good rsync backups of course).
So, "RAID5 is for High Availability but not Security" might be a better way of expressing your sentiment.
Ah, but that's the way the world works for the development of Game Console stuff. In order to test the game, you have to buy an unlocked console that will read standard CDRs.
I'd imagine that, in the end, that's where Microsoft would like to see the average PC end up. That way, they can raise the bar on pirates to the point that it's impossible for the average user to pirate software. It also has the "unfortunate" side-effect of locking down the complexity of what new developers can do. Sure, there's nothing stopping them from making a spiffy Excel macro, but what if they want to do something more complex? Oh, that requires the development platform - so sorry.
After all, how many folks have the ability to use a logic analyser to figure out how to bypass the DRM built into the X-Box? *sigh*
If my "needs" were a bit simpler, I'm sure it'd be a lot more smooth. It's just that I've gotten used to a few of the more esoteric things that RedHat (more accuratlely, RedHat + SGI) makes easily available. Volume management is something that I cannot live without anymore. It's also nice to have a filesystem that allows me to shrink/grow volumes (hence XFS). ::shrug:: I guess having Veritas' filesystem and volume management tools at work has spoiled me. :)
I'm trying the beta3 installer at the moment. I first tried the nightly snapshot, but the kernel in that image wasn't configured to allow DHCP. ::boggle::
... that's pretty basic stuff there.
As far as XFS and LVM goes, LVM has been standard since at least the mid 2.4s and XFS since the late 2.4s (2.4.24 was when it was included as far as I remember, tho I'd need to go back through Marcello's release announcements to be certain).
I've no real complaint about XFS since I'm used to using an unofficial installer (SGI's for RedHat), but LVM