I love Firefox and Android, but unfortunately FF for Android is still huge and slow. I hope this improves over time, and it probably will, but I thought that maybe since the nightly builds they might have made some kind of breakthrough that warranted Beta status. Not so.
Good question, I don't know. I'll have to check out one of those devices, I can't (when first thinking about it) believe they would have managed to strip out all of the Google search stuff.
Exactly, you can take Android and do with it what you like. Google's requiring that if you want to sell a device and use all of their proprietary stuff (build stock Android -- it won't include Market, Gmail, etc...), you need to use *all* of their proprietary stuff. A fair tradeoff, I think.
When I was in grad school, we purchased a big lot of those Optiplexes at one point. Several years later, we had mysterious lockups and reboots. Opening the cases revealed pretty much all of the capacitors leaking.
They were out of warranty (fair) and Dell informed us there was no way to get replacement motherboards (proprietary, yay).
Of course, this also happened to me on an otherwise-nice ASUS motherboard. I'm glad solid-state capacitors were used on my current motherboard.
I understand what you're saying. DarwinPorts is great (and before that I used Fink). I used all the nixy stuff on OS X for a long time (since it came out, actually), but as Linux is (dare I say this here?) the dominant nixy platform at the moment, it's easier to do it on Linux. Stuff just compiles, without having to futz with all of the differences between Linux and Darwin. Furthermore, I'm preparing software for deployment on Linux systems, so why set up a virtual machine when I can just run the relevant environment?
Funny, I recently switched back to Ubuntu (and Android/google web apps) from Mac stuff for largely the same reasons. It felt like OS X started being neglected once the iPhone became a big money-maker. Depends on your specific needs, I suppose. I'm still doing nixy things all day, so stuff just works better on a full-blown Linux machine. I switched workstations not too long ago, but before that I was running Linux on a Mac pro that formerly ran Leopard.
Regardless, I don't see myself switching back to Windows any time soon.
Actually we knew the levees could break, and what would happen if they did. People just discounted the likelihood of such a hurricane hit, as they often do with bad things (i.e. not wearing seatbelts because you don't think you'll get in a car accident, etc). I still have pint glasses from the Bulldog in New Orleans with "Tourist Information" written on them. One of the bits of information is, "If the levees break, everyone will die. Nobody seems very concerned about this."
It's called Big Brother GPS, and it lets you specify your own server to which the POSTs are sent. Pretty neat, opens up opportunities for a ton of cool applications. If only I had time to write some of them. The developer provides a basic sample PHP script that will receive the output and post it in an embedded google map.
Thank you all for your replies, for allowing me to benefit from your collective experience. Both the straight-up answers to my question, and questions requesting further clarification were quite helpful.
Right, both you and parent. I think in the short term I'll keep the actual data around on a live filesystem, and then after it's clear the contract is all closed out, I'll just store the binaries, scripts, and intermediate files in a few different locations. Eventually we'll probably want to get an LTO drive and use Iron Mountain or some such. The likelihood of needing to refer to a whole dataset is very very slim for me, compared with having to go back and recover data from one or two simulations.
As I discovered after Hurricane Katrina, they also don't guarantee that the vault won't be flooded with water. Fortunately my (personal) box was above the water line. When I went to the warehouse where they'd relocated the boxes, I saw that those below the water line did not fare well.
Interesting about the Drobo -- I hadn't seen that they'd expanded their offering.
Regarding the LaCie Big-Disk-family-things, I will never buy them again. In my lab in grad school we had everyone using them for backups and extra storage. More than 50% of them failed. One of our collaborators was doing the same thing (totally different lab/university/state/windows instead of linux, etc) and also had a greater than 50% failure rate within 2 years of purchase (but out of warranty, of course). The problem was the controller boards, as the drives would work fine when removed from the enclosures (but couldn't be reassembled into a proper volume). LaCie would not replace the controller boards, either for free or money.
The exception is that I have a LaCie Biggest FW800, which has been pretty awesome, but it's a totally different product.
Plus I'd have to write a wrapper script for my scansnap if I wanted to restore the data. But wait, were the page estimates above done considering that paper has two sides?
Actually the more I think about this, the better it is. I can store some of the intermediary files and all of the scripts/binaries in much less space. While waiting for any follow-up or feedback from the client I'll need all of the files close at hand, but after a while I can probably pickle things like this.
I've considered this, and it may be the right long term option depending on the cost, but it takes about $5-6k of CPU time to generate the data. I guess if storage costs more than that it's a no-brainer, especially as CPUs get faster and cheaper.
This may be my best option. As you mention, a tape changer (the only place I've ever seen/dealt with LTO drives) is out, but a drive and tapes sound like a good option.
I already use S3 for some things. Unfortunately it would be about $500/month/customer's data on S3 right now, so that's out. I could buy a whole computer with hard drives every month for that.
I didn't consider just a drive and tapes -- it's been mentioned now by several commentors and it's a good idea. It's a tape *library* machine that would be impractical for cost and space considerations.
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I love Firefox and Android, but unfortunately FF for Android is still huge and slow. I hope this improves over time, and it probably will, but I thought that maybe since the nightly builds they might have made some kind of breakthrough that warranted Beta status. Not so.
Good question, I don't know. I'll have to check out one of those devices, I can't (when first thinking about it) believe they would have managed to strip out all of the Google search stuff.
Exactly, you can take Android and do with it what you like. Google's requiring that if you want to sell a device and use all of their proprietary stuff (build stock Android -- it won't include Market, Gmail, etc...), you need to use *all* of their proprietary stuff. A fair tradeoff, I think.
Or something like that.
skill
When I was in grad school, we purchased a big lot of those Optiplexes at one point. Several years later, we had mysterious lockups and reboots. Opening the cases revealed pretty much all of the capacitors leaking. They were out of warranty (fair) and Dell informed us there was no way to get replacement motherboards (proprietary, yay). Of course, this also happened to me on an otherwise-nice ASUS motherboard. I'm glad solid-state capacitors were used on my current motherboard.
I understand what you're saying. DarwinPorts is great (and before that I used Fink). I used all the nixy stuff on OS X for a long time (since it came out, actually), but as Linux is (dare I say this here?) the dominant nixy platform at the moment, it's easier to do it on Linux. Stuff just compiles, without having to futz with all of the differences between Linux and Darwin. Furthermore, I'm preparing software for deployment on Linux systems, so why set up a virtual machine when I can just run the relevant environment?
Funny, I recently switched back to Ubuntu (and Android/google web apps) from Mac stuff for largely the same reasons. It felt like OS X started being neglected once the iPhone became a big money-maker. Depends on your specific needs, I suppose. I'm still doing nixy things all day, so stuff just works better on a full-blown Linux machine. I switched workstations not too long ago, but before that I was running Linux on a Mac pro that formerly ran Leopard. Regardless, I don't see myself switching back to Windows any time soon.
Actually we knew the levees could break, and what would happen if they did. People just discounted the likelihood of such a hurricane hit, as they often do with bad things (i.e. not wearing seatbelts because you don't think you'll get in a car accident, etc). I still have pint glasses from the Bulldog in New Orleans with "Tourist Information" written on them. One of the bits of information is, "If the levees break, everyone will die. Nobody seems very concerned about this."
Fair enough! I'll stop backseat moderating. :)
Tip to moderators. This is a joke. Not sure why this is modded insightful.
It's called Big Brother GPS, and it lets you specify your own server to which the POSTs are sent. Pretty neat, opens up opportunities for a ton of cool applications. If only I had time to write some of them. The developer provides a basic sample PHP script that will receive the output and post it in an embedded google map.
Thank you all for your replies, for allowing me to benefit from your collective experience. Both the straight-up answers to my question, and questions requesting further clarification were quite helpful.
Right, both you and parent. I think in the short term I'll keep the actual data around on a live filesystem, and then after it's clear the contract is all closed out, I'll just store the binaries, scripts, and intermediate files in a few different locations. Eventually we'll probably want to get an LTO drive and use Iron Mountain or some such. The likelihood of needing to refer to a whole dataset is very very slim for me, compared with having to go back and recover data from one or two simulations.
As I discovered after Hurricane Katrina, they also don't guarantee that the vault won't be flooded with water. Fortunately my (personal) box was above the water line. When I went to the warehouse where they'd relocated the boxes, I saw that those below the water line did not fare well.
Interesting about the Drobo -- I hadn't seen that they'd expanded their offering. Regarding the LaCie Big-Disk-family-things, I will never buy them again. In my lab in grad school we had everyone using them for backups and extra storage. More than 50% of them failed. One of our collaborators was doing the same thing (totally different lab/university/state/windows instead of linux, etc) and also had a greater than 50% failure rate within 2 years of purchase (but out of warranty, of course). The problem was the controller boards, as the drives would work fine when removed from the enclosures (but couldn't be reassembled into a proper volume). LaCie would not replace the controller boards, either for free or money. The exception is that I have a LaCie Biggest FW800, which has been pretty awesome, but it's a totally different product.
Yeah 3TB is the compressed size. So Amazon is not really an economically sensible option at this point.
Plus I'd have to write a wrapper script for my scansnap if I wanted to restore the data. But wait, were the page estimates above done considering that paper has two sides?
That's a pretty impressive little custom system. Similar off-the-shelf systems run around $40k or more.
You have to retrieve it from /dev/urandom
Actually the more I think about this, the better it is. I can store some of the intermediary files and all of the scripts/binaries in much less space. While waiting for any follow-up or feedback from the client I'll need all of the files close at hand, but after a while I can probably pickle things like this.
I've considered this, and it may be the right long term option depending on the cost, but it takes about $5-6k of CPU time to generate the data. I guess if storage costs more than that it's a no-brainer, especially as CPUs get faster and cheaper.
This may be my best option. As you mention, a tape changer (the only place I've ever seen/dealt with LTO drives) is out, but a drive and tapes sound like a good option.
I already use S3 for some things. Unfortunately it would be about $500/month/customer's data on S3 right now, so that's out. I could buy a whole computer with hard drives every month for that.
I didn't consider just a drive and tapes -- it's been mentioned now by several commentors and it's a good idea. It's a tape *library* machine that would be impractical for cost and space considerations.