Industry standards doesn't matter here. If you're tasked with keeping only 6 months of data, then you keep only 6 months. You certainly won't recover data over 6 months. Those 6 months of data better be recoverable. Once in a while, you might lose a day of backups here or there, but never a week's worth of data. If you lose that much data, you should fire your sysadmin and hire a new one who knows how to verify the backups.
If you're tasked with keeping data indefinitely, you keep data indefinitely. In that case, only purposeful destruction would cause you to lose that many months of conecutive data. The worse case scenario, if you were keeping all those tapes, is that a few tapes became unreadable. If someone lost a months worth of data in that case it just indicates that the backup admin was incompetent and didn't verify the backups properly.
Magnetic media is much more durable than you think. I have 25 year old 5.25" and 3.5" (Pre-Aohell flooding) floppy disks that I still use. They only fail if they're shoddily manufactured, like when AOL flooded the market with their cheap crap which drove the supercheap floppy disk market. The tapes used for backup aren't cheap consumer market crap. Sure, they wont last forever, but they're designed for longevity. Two years is not very long for tape storage. The main reason for "data failure" on tape is write failure caused by a configuration error. This is human error, not tape failure. This is why tape backup data always needs to be verified.
I've got tapes going back at least 8 years and they still work, since we keep the older tape drives around to read them. We rarely get requests to recover the data, but when we get the request, we recover the data with little to no trouble. Our main obstacle is finding the correct tape from vague descriptions of the data and time frame. Our servers are also in a dusty server room. So, either the White House sysadmins are absolutely and utterly incompetent, or they purposely wiped or destroyed the tapes.
Actually, cost is a barrier to linux adoption. You don't just plop a new OS on a school without planning to train all your teachers and hiring a brand new sysadmin who knows Linux/Unix to mantain and support the system.
In schools that run Windows, Linux will only save you money when Microsoft's OS isn't included on Dell's (or whatever hardware is cheapest) by default. Microsoft's OS is already "free" to the hardware purchaser. This has nothing to do with Windows being more seamless. It's entirely because it comes installed by default on the hardware. Major hardware vendors that do offer linux, don't offer much of a real discount. Small mom/pop/internet stores, that actually offer cheaper with linux installs, are not the prefered place to purchase hardware. They're small operations, so they don't carry the volume needed for timely volume purchases of a lab of 30-50 systems at a time.
Sure, you can run Open Office on Linux and there's all this open source software on Linux. Well, all the necessary Open Source software is available for Windows and Macs as well.
Macs are also mostly prevalent in many k-8 system where the teachers have been using Macs for years and have no real tech support/sysadmin to maintain them. It makes no sense for those teachers to switch, since, the school system would have to hire a Full Time tech to support and retrain all those teachers as well as pay for additional training. The Macs are currently Virus free and Trojan free because of its lower market penetration. That may change in the future as Macs take over more of the market, but for now Macs are much cheaper for k-8 schools to maintain and own than windows while still having the educational software the teachers need/want.
Adoping linux would require a tech support hire to manage, test and maintain all those educational software in Wine. Switching from Windows to Linux would be a wash for a school system. There is currently a whole world of educational applications written Windows and Macs, but not Linux, so there's no cost savings in software. Edubuntu is a nice effort, but it's currently worthless for anything above first grade. If anything, until viruses and trojans invade OSX, Macs are currently cheapest to run for non-technical users.
I'm one of the few Computer Engineering majors who work as a sysadmin. Of course, I started in Civil Engineering, and switched so it partly matches your experience. I ended up being sysadmin when the sole sysadmin in my startup quit. I was programming and knew hardware inside out. I ended up doing customer support, server installs and integration, sysadmin, and programming, until I trained some backup admins and I found another job elsewhere as only a sysadmin. Jack-of-all-trades at a startup is fun for only a very short while.
Most of my current sysadmin co-workers came from BioChem or something similar. A few were CS majors but never graduated. They found jobs as sysadmins part time, then full time and never bothered to complete their degree. One guy just has a semester's worth of classes left to go. Honestly, we have far too many sysadmins here. A good culling of 10%-20% might be good. I've already reduce my workload with a bunch of new scripts and made one subordinate unnecessary if I tell someone about it.
The best sysadmins tend to have gone to a real university. They don't necessarily have to finish school with a degree, but they do know how to do critical thinking and keep up with changes in both hardware and software. Most importantly, they've also learned to script and to plan for contingencies. Sysadmins who aren't from scientific or engineering backgrounds tend to take longer to learn to script and end up doing more tedium until they learn scripting shortcuts from those of us that have programmed before. Scripters/Programmers get more things done and still have more free time while not getting abused and overloaded with work. I get things done quickly and serve my "customers", which is what the rest of the company really are. I also don't take any ridiculous crap from people by laying down the law about what's acceptible and what's not. There's no room for abuse of any employee, even from a CEO.
I'm guessing the abused admins aren't quite as capable (e.g. most Non science/engineering/CS or most MCSE certificate only types with no real degrees) and/or aren't capable at standing up for themselves(e.g. nerds types in high school, outcast types, low self esteem, etc...). If I've done my job correctly, I don't get abused and never have been. I also don't take abuse from 1d10t users.
He sounds like an ass for bragging and that's why you looked down on him.
I've also seen too many CS degrees holders that are just utter failures as programmers. They were following the money trail and joined the CS major to chase the money during the boom. They learned how to take and pass tests but have no real skills or inclination to do CS work. The degree just indicates that you've pased the necessary tests and gets your foot in the door. A degree does not necessarily imply any skill. The crash culled a bunch of them, but there are still too many people joining CS with no computer knowledge prior to entering CS.
Why are you arguing back? I guess some people like you, LingNoi, just have tremendously poor dark vision. Your experience just isn't the same as everyone else. Just accept that you have poor night vision and some of us can see well enough in the dark.
I've walked around in the countryside in the dark. My current home is in a heavily wooded area with no streetlights. The only lights are from people's homes, if they happen to be awake and/or left their lights on. I've visited some people who live far away from electricity and plumbing and made my way, on a cliffside trail, 100 feet to the outhouse in the dark. None of their closest neighbors over 5 miles away had electricity or lights as well. I've hiked 5 hours in the dark, with the lights off, under rain clouds while out camping. I have been perfectly able to find my way around in the dark, see puddles of water, see trails, avoid obstacles, and lead a group of people in the dark. As I child, I lived on an island that loses power annually during typhoon season. (hurricane - for you mainlanders) Power outages occasionally last 3 months and I've made my way around in the dark.
For most people, if you give yourself some time to adjust, you can see well enough in the dark. If you've just stepped out of a lit abode for a few minutes, or on a moonless cloud covered night, you will see nothing. Give yourself at least 10-15 minutes and you will be able to see enough. After an hour, you see objects 50 feet away clearly enough. Using those million candlepower lights is a sure way to desensitize your retina and ruin your newly acquired dark vision. Low power single led button lights are sufficient when it's completely dark.
You only need high powered beams in cities that have too much light. Streetlights in cities used to be much brighter than car beams. These days car beams are much brighter than most street lights. A lot of people around me must have poor night vision since they like use their high beams all the time, which is illegal, in many states, when you're closer than 500 ft to the rear of the car in front of you and when there is a car approaching you. I don't use my high beams much since I see well enough and I don't need the trees lit up. I think some people must be afraid of the dark.
Why were the idiots not in bunkers when they were testing with live ammo? Hmm... I guess maybe they thought it was a different test.
In reality, it's not an anti-aircraft cannon, but an anti-personnel cannon, and a lousy one at that. It shot 250 Rounds and it only killed 9 while wounding 14? The single explosive round should have been able to do that much damage. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Slashdot Mirror
Industry standards doesn't matter here. If you're tasked with keeping only 6 months of data, then you keep only 6 months. You certainly won't recover data over 6 months. Those 6 months of data better be recoverable. Once in a while, you might lose a day of backups here or there, but never a week's worth of data. If you lose that much data, you should fire your sysadmin and hire a new one who knows how to verify the backups.
If you're tasked with keeping data indefinitely, you keep data indefinitely. In that case, only purposeful destruction would cause you to lose that many months of conecutive data. The worse case scenario, if you were keeping all those tapes, is that a few tapes became unreadable. If someone lost a months worth of data in that case it just indicates that the backup admin was incompetent and didn't verify the backups properly.
Magnetic media is much more durable than you think. I have 25 year old 5.25" and 3.5" (Pre-Aohell flooding) floppy disks that I still use. They only fail if they're shoddily manufactured, like when AOL flooded the market with their cheap crap which drove the supercheap floppy disk market. The tapes used for backup aren't cheap consumer market crap. Sure, they wont last forever, but they're designed for longevity. Two years is not very long for tape storage. The main reason for "data failure" on tape is write failure caused by a configuration error. This is human error, not tape failure. This is why tape backup data always needs to be verified.
I've got tapes going back at least 8 years and they still work, since we keep the older tape drives around to read them. We rarely get requests to recover the data, but when we get the request, we recover the data with little to no trouble. Our main obstacle is finding the correct tape from vague descriptions of the data and time frame. Our servers are also in a dusty server room. So, either the White House sysadmins are absolutely and utterly incompetent, or they purposely wiped or destroyed the tapes.
Actually, cost is a barrier to linux adoption. You don't just plop a new OS on a school without planning to train all your teachers and hiring a brand new sysadmin who knows Linux/Unix to mantain and support the system.
In schools that run Windows, Linux will only save you money when Microsoft's OS isn't included on Dell's (or whatever hardware is cheapest) by default. Microsoft's OS is already "free" to the hardware purchaser. This has nothing to do with Windows being more seamless. It's entirely because it comes installed by default on the hardware. Major hardware vendors that do offer linux, don't offer much of a real discount. Small mom/pop/internet stores, that actually offer cheaper with linux installs, are not the prefered place to purchase hardware. They're small operations, so they don't carry the volume needed for timely volume purchases of a lab of 30-50 systems at a time.
Sure, you can run Open Office on Linux and there's all this open source software on Linux. Well, all the necessary Open Source software is available for Windows and Macs as well.
Macs are also mostly prevalent in many k-8 system where the teachers have been using Macs for years and have no real tech support/sysadmin to maintain them. It makes no sense for those teachers to switch, since, the school system would have to hire a Full Time tech to support and retrain all those teachers as well as pay for additional training. The Macs are currently Virus free and Trojan free because of its lower market penetration. That may change in the future as Macs take over more of the market, but for now Macs are much cheaper for k-8 schools to maintain and own than windows while still having the educational software the teachers need/want.
Adoping linux would require a tech support hire to manage, test and maintain all those educational software in Wine. Switching from Windows to Linux would be a wash for a school system. There is currently a whole world of educational applications written Windows and Macs, but not Linux, so there's no cost savings in software. Edubuntu is a nice effort, but it's currently worthless for anything above first grade. If anything, until viruses and trojans invade OSX, Macs are currently cheapest to run for non-technical users.
I'm one of the few Computer Engineering majors who work as a sysadmin. Of course, I started in Civil Engineering, and switched so it partly matches your experience. I ended up being sysadmin when the sole sysadmin in my startup quit. I was programming and knew hardware inside out. I ended up doing customer support, server installs and integration, sysadmin, and programming, until I trained some backup admins and I found another job elsewhere as only a sysadmin. Jack-of-all-trades at a startup is fun for only a very short while.
Most of my current sysadmin co-workers came from BioChem or something similar. A few were CS majors but never graduated. They found jobs as sysadmins part time, then full time and never bothered to complete their degree. One guy just has a semester's worth of classes left to go. Honestly, we have far too many sysadmins here. A good culling of 10%-20% might be good. I've already reduce my workload with a bunch of new scripts and made one subordinate unnecessary if I tell someone about it.
The best sysadmins tend to have gone to a real university. They don't necessarily have to finish school with a degree, but they do know how to do critical thinking and keep up with changes in both hardware and software. Most importantly, they've also learned to script and to plan for contingencies. Sysadmins who aren't from scientific or engineering backgrounds tend to take longer to learn to script and end up doing more tedium until they learn scripting shortcuts from those of us that have programmed before. Scripters/Programmers get more things done and still have more free time while not getting abused and overloaded with work. I get things done quickly and serve my "customers", which is what the rest of the company really are. I also don't take any ridiculous crap from people by laying down the law about what's acceptible and what's not. There's no room for abuse of any employee, even from a CEO.
I'm guessing the abused admins aren't quite as capable (e.g. most Non science/engineering/CS or most MCSE certificate only types with no real degrees) and/or aren't capable at standing up for themselves(e.g. nerds types in high school, outcast types, low self esteem, etc...). If I've done my job correctly, I don't get abused and never have been. I also don't take abuse from 1d10t users.
He sounds like an ass for bragging and that's why you looked down on him.
I've also seen too many CS degrees holders that are just utter failures as programmers. They were following the money trail and joined the CS major to chase the money during the boom. They learned how to take and pass tests but have no real skills or inclination to do CS work. The degree just indicates that you've pased the necessary tests and gets your foot in the door. A degree does not necessarily imply any skill. The crash culled a bunch of them, but there are still too many people joining CS with no computer knowledge prior to entering CS.
Why are you arguing back? I guess some people like you, LingNoi, just have tremendously poor dark vision. Your experience just isn't the same as everyone else. Just accept that you have poor night vision and some of us can see well enough in the dark.
I've walked around in the countryside in the dark. My current home is in a heavily wooded area with no streetlights. The only lights are from people's homes, if they happen to be awake and/or left their lights on. I've visited some people who live far away from electricity and plumbing and made my way, on a cliffside trail, 100 feet to the outhouse in the dark. None of their closest neighbors over 5 miles away had electricity or lights as well. I've hiked 5 hours in the dark, with the lights off, under rain clouds while out camping. I have been perfectly able to find my way around in the dark, see puddles of water, see trails, avoid obstacles, and lead a group of people in the dark. As I child, I lived on an island that loses power annually during typhoon season. (hurricane - for you mainlanders) Power outages occasionally last 3 months and I've made my way around in the dark.
For most people, if you give yourself some time to adjust, you can see well enough in the dark. If you've just stepped out of a lit abode for a few minutes, or on a moonless cloud covered night, you will see nothing. Give yourself at least 10-15 minutes and you will be able to see enough. After an hour, you see objects 50 feet away clearly enough. Using those million candlepower lights is a sure way to desensitize your retina and ruin your newly acquired dark vision. Low power single led button lights are sufficient when it's completely dark.
You only need high powered beams in cities that have too much light. Streetlights in cities used to be much brighter than car beams. These days car beams are much brighter than most street lights. A lot of people around me must have poor night vision since they like use their high beams all the time, which is illegal, in many states, when you're closer than 500 ft to the rear of the car in front of you and when there is a car approaching you. I don't use my high beams much since I see well enough and I don't need the trees lit up. I think some people must be afraid of the dark.
Why were the idiots not in bunkers when they were testing with live ammo? Hmm... I guess maybe they thought it was a different test.
In reality, it's not an anti-aircraft cannon, but an anti-personnel cannon, and a lousy one at that. It shot 250 Rounds and it only killed 9 while wounding 14? The single explosive round should have been able to do that much damage. Oh well, back to the drawing board.