Not hard... but not obvious. In everything else I've run, if you click the terminal icon in the panel 4 times, you get 4 terminals. Imagine one for vi to edit a program, another to compile the program, a 3rd to run it, and a 4th with another vi session for keeping notes.
I don't use OSX... I've never been a big fan of macs and I really don't like Apple's business philosophy, so I wouldn't have known or thought to try its way of doing things to get 2 terminal windows.
Every now and then, I download the latest version of the major distros and give them a spin. I have to admit, gnome 3 looks cool and I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't make it fit with my style of working on a computer. I'll try again with Fedora 18 or 19.
At this point, I've settled on kubuntu for my main laptop (usually docked - though it has annoyances too... like trying to put file progress indicators in the task bar rather than in separate windows I can monitor) and tried Mint 13 on my new acer netbook, and I'm particularly pleased with it. From my point of view, they seem to be doing things right.
The one thing I like on gnome 3 is pushing the mouse cursor up in the upper left and getting a choice of windows. But other than that, it makes things harder.
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
For vitual desktops, I personally prefer a fixed layout... email and web browser in upper left, work vitrual computer in lower left, etc. The ever-changing dynamic list doesn't work well for me.
The worst is that I can't get it to behave right with my laptop and external monitor. Laptops today come with shitty short screens, so when I work at home, I keep the lid closed and just use my external monitor. Gnome3 can't seem to grasp this and always assumes the laptop's monitor is the primary monitor, so I can't reach the widgets, menus, etc. Sure, I can muck with the display settings to fix it during a session, but I have to do it all over again if I reboot or need to open the lid for some reason.
For me, it just has an illogical way of doing things and completely breaks my work flow.
I've used a lot of linux variants over the years, but I don't really enjoy having to keep figuring out all the obscure ways to get it work right again... over and over.
In my mind, it's not so much a matter of inconvenience, but lost money. The whole reason you have a POS is because it helps you run your business more efficiently... faster, with lower costs, and probably fewer people. I mean it has to, right? Or there wouldn't be much point to having one in the first place.
So if the thing goes down, you're running less efficiently. That means you may have to hire on more people (or add more shifts), and/or your restaurant will run slower (irritating customers) and you have a greater chance for errors (free food you're giving away), and if some of those customers are first-timers, they may never come back (or worse, will tell others how bad your service was).
If your POS is down for one day, maybe that's survivable, but what if you really hose it and you're down for a week?
I'm not saying that's likely but it's a possibility and if the guy's smart, he'll consider the odds of failure the costs of that failure and put that against the savings and benefits he gets from doing it himself vs having an expert do it.
If it were me, and we're talking about mission-critical things to the business, I'm not sure I'd want to use my business as a place to experiment and learn now to do something like that.
If the guy were asking, "hey, I've done some plumbing work and I need to upgrade the gas lines in restaurant, any tips on how to do that?", I'm sure most people would say he needs to hire an expert because it's a risky thing to learn "on the job" and where failure seriously impacts the business.
It all has to be weighed to make a good decision. A lot of good businesses go down because they don't accurately gauge risk and one even takes them out. Just look at Lehman Bros. for an example of catastrophic failure, due in large part to mis-measuring/handling risk.
When running a business, you really have to draw lines between what you can/can't do, and what you want to/don't want to do. You also have to factor in what the cost will be if you mess it up while trying to learn.
If I were currently running a business, I would hire an accountant do handle my taxes. It's not that I couldn't figure it out, but it's something I don't care to figure out. I'd rather focus on what my business is. But then again, if I did it myself and screw it up, who badly could it hurt my business?
Here's a guy who knows some about running SQL Server and POS. But he has a business that's running 7 days a week that probably won't run if the SQL/POS is not operating. So what's the cost to the business if the POS doesn't work for a day or two because he hosed it up?
In this case, the risk is high of a failure (because he's in learning mode). He needs to balance the cost of failure with what he gains by learning to do it himself. If the cost x risk is too great, then yes, I advocate he hire someone to do it. If he can tolerate the cost x risk, then by all means, I encourage him to go for it.
If it were your business and you had a guy handling the mission-critical SQL/POS and you needed to add fail-over but your guy doesn't know how. Would you advocate him doing it on your production system? That's the situation this guy is in, except he's also the guy doing the SQL/POS work.
A key part of being successful in business is knowing what you can do well and what you're better of hiring an expert to do it for you. Good things to consider are whether the work is critical to operations and if it's part of your core business.
If you don't want to use a whole hard drive, you can also use something like Clonezilla to make a complete backup of the original drive onto an external or network drive.
Then you can also almost as easily restore it back to its original state if you have to send it back.
I don't know much about ocean species, but hopefully no Japanese Hornets hitched a ride as well. I'd hate to have them over here.
It is a large insect and adults can be more than 4 centimetres (1.6 in) long, with a wingspan greater than 6 centimetres (2.4 in).... Being stung is extremely painful and requires hospital treatment. On average 40 people die every year of anaphylactic shock after having been stung,[1] which makes the Japanese giant hornet the most lethal animal in Japan, as bears kill about ten people and venomous snakes kill five to ten people each year.
I really hope they've added back the ability to have file progress dialogs as an option to having them stacked up in the notifications area.
If I have multiple lengthly copy/move operations going on, I really prefer to have separate dialog windows to watch what's going on. It used to do that. And if I install Dolphin in Gnome, it still does it.
In fact, I'd just install something Gnome-based if I could just get it to figure out that when my laptop lid is closed, and my computer is plugged into my monitor, I don't want to use my laptop's monitor as an output; especially the default output.
Analytics is the new buzzword in corporate circles. Maybe she can get into a consulting company that provides analytics services - there's a lot of these popping up these days. A lot of this is just statistical analysis; it's just that the business types are just now starting to figure out that there's some value in using data to analyze decisions rather than just gut-feel.
It seems like everyone's now out there, "gotta get me some analytics".
It's widely recognised legally that awarding a patent IS giving a monopoly on the use of an idea
I was under the impression that a patent cannot be used for an idea, but the specific implementation of an idea. You could get a patent for inventing a hoverboard that is powered by anti-gravitons and I wouldn't be in violation of your patent if I invented one that is powered by the hearts of orphan children, even if they looked essentially the same and behaved the same. They're the same idea, a board that can hover in the air, but different implementations.
I'm sure it's not for an individual company. I suspect it will be written such that any company who's named after a jungle region that starts with an "A", ends, "N", has a "Z" in the middle and is 6 letters long, and is in the business of selling books and other things on the internet will be eligible for the tax break. In fact, I now wonder what business won't be eligible.
Carl Sagan mentioned this in one of his books. The same technology that could be used to detect asteroids then reach them and divert their orbits away from the Earth could also be used to divert them towards the Earth.
that helps peoples sums add up is dubious at best.
I think it's a bit more than just coming up with stuff willy nilly.
We have these theories that work great for a lot of observations. They break down a bit for some observations, but can be "fixed" by adding dark matter. This either means the theories are wrong somehow, or there is something out there that's not been accurately observed, or maybe both. The key is to come up with experiments that can falsify the proposition that there is dark matter and that it's the cause of the aberrations.
A nice analogy is the discovery of Neptune. The theories predicted the planets would move in such a way. However they didn't quite do that. But by assuming another planet (which had not been observed), they could get their sums to add up. The testable part of it was when they said, "look here, and you should find a planet that's causing these deviations", and behold, they did.
The thing is, the current theories, even if they're wrong with dark matter, they're "close" to whatever the real situation is because they work so well in most cases. That means the "correct' theory won't be too extremely different, or must at least reduce to the current theories for the special cases we have observed.
If there are competing but "good" theories out there, the key is to find out what differentiates them in their predictions, then to devise experiments to observe what happens in those cases. If you can't devise and carry out such experiments, then it's all mere speculation.
Revolving door and self interest. The only people truly qualified to regulate such an industry are experts from the industry. And if a regulator leaves a regulatory job, the only other jobs are back in the industry.
A regulator of an industry has no desire to see that industry eliminated. If that happens, they're out of a job because there will be nobody to regulate. Plus, if things go badly in the industry, they will suffer blame for failing to properly regulate and anticipate the problems.
These are solid reasons why a regulator of any industry would have an interest in minimizing the perception of problems within that industry.
Both VM and Straighttalk have unlimited plans for about $45... not much less than you're paying now. I can't speak to the coverage, but if you're good with what you have, there's not much point in switching just to save $5.
Kimberly Hester does not have clean hands. Posting an offensive picture of a co-worker with pants around ankles could be considered sexual harassment.
This still does not justify asking for access to her account or firing her for it. If they need information from any of her accounts (email, social media, or otherwise) they should be going through the courts to go through a process of discovery to get access to that material.
As it is now, if they were to gain access, any evidence would be immediately suspect because now there is no way to prove that they themselves did not put the offending information there.
So even if the administration felt justified in asking for her account information, actually getting it and using it to log into her account would be monumentally stupid.
You could get a lot cheaper monthly plan from Straight Talk or Virgin Mobile. They also have very basic cheap phones. Straight Talk has a 1000-minute/month plan for $30/month. I'm currently paying $35/month to VM which includes 300 minutes and unlimited data and text.
I had a non-smart-phone from Straight Talk. It did have a web-browser though, and that was how you could use "data".
However they now sell Android phones and I suspect any of the apps can access the data connection, just like it can with any carrier. You could always try it for a month. If you don't like it, take it back for a full refund. You'll only be out the $30 for the month of service.
You could also try Virgin Mobile. I'm currently using one of the androids and like it quite a bit. I ordered a newer model and tried it for a few days and didn't like it as much as my old one. I was able to return it for a full refund as well.
The risks of trying one of the prepaids is pretty low since you can easily return the phone if it doesn't work for you.
If you're sticking with harddisks instead of tape, you could also use partimage, which only copies the active areas of the disk. I've used it successfully for years (it's how I used to "refresh" my windows boxes... install everything, make an image, then 6 months later, restore, update, reimage, repeat). Partimage can even chunk the files so even if you were going to tape, you could still use it.
I've also used Clonezilla successfully a few times. It also only considers active areas of the disk, so you don't spend so much time filling the rest with 0's. Plus it's partition-aware so you could restore the image to a smaller (if it's larger still larger than your data) or larger drive without dd leaving you with a strange partition table that doesn't really match the drive.
However if you do like dd, one strategy I used to use in larger network was to have a linux machine running sshd, boot up the client machine on a linux disk and use something like: dd if=/dev/hda bs=8192|gzip -9|ssh -l work server "dd of=/images/imagename.gz to backup a machine and the reverse to restore it.
You could also do this with tar: (cd/; tar czf - * )|ssh -l work server "(cd backup_location;tar xvzf -)
I'm not exactly sure what is included in a full app that does de-dup, so this answer may not be what you're looking for.
I had a hard-drive crash and was behind on my backups. The last "full" backup was 3 months old, but I also had lots of of current data backed up on various USB drives. I was also able to recover about 80% of the crashed drive, though some of the files were corrupted.
I put all of this on a larger drive in different directories and ran a find with md5sum (and let it run all night). This let me figure out what I should keep and what was duplicated in another space. It's not very automated, but you just dump the results to text file and then sort/group however you want.
I now have a NAS where I have automatic daily backups happening. And when I can afford a couple more drives, I'll add a second drive to the NAS to provide RAID1 (mirror, right? for redundancy) and an external 3GB drive for periodic backups of the NAS. I'll then be keeping that out in my unattached shed in case of fire.
I really like the NAS. It's a QNAP, and with HD prices so high these days, the prices on the NAS came down a bit. It serves well as a backup location as well as media server.
Case in point: My friend got lost on the way to his brother's place because his GPS died. He's been living there for over a decade. My friend has driven there many, many times. But he relies on his GPS so much nowadays that he didn't even know how to get there without it!
Well... why don't you spend time educating your friend rather than cheering for laws to oppress the rest of us.
Remember the bad old days of typewriters and if you wanted to send someone a message you typed and it mailed it to them? And remember those bad old days when we didn't have cars and had to walk everywhere?
By comparing GPS to a map, you're making the same boneheaded comparison between mailing a type-written letter and using e-mail.
I'm guessing you see the benefit of using email and other forms of electronic communication rather than typing letters. So if you can see the difference there, I don't know why you can't see the difference between a map and a GPS navigation system. If you see merit in using one, I don't see how you can't see the merit in the other.
Or are you just one of those people who wants to use the government to control everyone else so they behave in a way you approve of?
I suspect Oppenheimer, et. al. wouldn't be making yet more and more breakthroughs in fundamental physics. I just watched a presentation about this. They pointed out that what the people were doing in the Manhattan Project was really more about engineering problems based on physics that was already known and not really that much new fundamental physics. That's not to say that the work of their lives wasn't brilliant, but that particular bit of work was probably not the pinnacle of their abilities.
I suspect that you're wrong about the quality of the scientists at CERN. Positions at places like are very competitive and aren't going to be filled by mediocre people.
Watch the Feynman lectures from the '50s and even then he talks about how the previous 50 years had been an incredibly remarkable time in physics and that the future of physics is not likely to be as interesting or have so many breakthroughs, but rather refinement and adjustment. The problem is that based on what can be observed in experiment, most of it has already been figured out. The only real hope for new astounding breakthroughs is that we'll start making observations that have never been seen before. Even in the 50s, Feynman was saying that if you can come up with something new that agrees with all known observations but describes something new beyond the existing theories, that will be something quite extraordinary.
And you say computers can't think, but I don't think that will be true for very much longer. And that will happen because there are brilliant people working in those fields.
I think there are plenty of brilliant people in the world and I disagree that somehow the human population is producing fewer geniuses. If anything, someone born with the ability to think in great ways has even more opportunities to become educated and have a chance to do something with it. What's lacking is a drive among the American population (to look at it from just my country) to push ourselves into the frontiers of discovery.
The state of science might not be deepening as much as the early/mid 20th century, but it sure is widening. And maybe that's just the nature of the thing. Can physics itself be a field with an infinite level of "deepness" where every fundamental law has "turtles all the way down"? Or is there a point where you actually arrive at a "theory of everything" where the rest is just refinement and reapplication?
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Not hard... but not obvious. In everything else I've run, if you click the terminal icon in the panel 4 times, you get 4 terminals. Imagine one for vi to edit a program, another to compile the program, a 3rd to run it, and a 4th with another vi session for keeping notes.
I don't use OSX... I've never been a big fan of macs and I really don't like Apple's business philosophy, so I wouldn't have known or thought to try its way of doing things to get 2 terminal windows.
Every now and then, I download the latest version of the major distros and give them a spin. I have to admit, gnome 3 looks cool and I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't make it fit with my style of working on a computer. I'll try again with Fedora 18 or 19.
At this point, I've settled on kubuntu for my main laptop (usually docked - though it has annoyances too... like trying to put file progress indicators in the task bar rather than in separate windows I can monitor) and tried Mint 13 on my new acer netbook, and I'm particularly pleased with it. From my point of view, they seem to be doing things right.
The one thing I like on gnome 3 is pushing the mouse cursor up in the upper left and getting a choice of windows. But other than that, it makes things harder.
I tried for a while to find a way to have a CPU and Network monitor like you could have it docked on a panel in gnome 2 but finally gave up.
I also often use more than one terminal window, but when you click on the terminal icon in the apps list, it just takes you back to the terminal you already have open.
For vitual desktops, I personally prefer a fixed layout... email and web browser in upper left, work vitrual computer in lower left, etc. The ever-changing dynamic list doesn't work well for me.
The worst is that I can't get it to behave right with my laptop and external monitor. Laptops today come with shitty short screens, so when I work at home, I keep the lid closed and just use my external monitor. Gnome3 can't seem to grasp this and always assumes the laptop's monitor is the primary monitor, so I can't reach the widgets, menus, etc. Sure, I can muck with the display settings to fix it during a session, but I have to do it all over again if I reboot or need to open the lid for some reason.
For me, it just has an illogical way of doing things and completely breaks my work flow.
I've used a lot of linux variants over the years, but I don't really enjoy having to keep figuring out all the obscure ways to get it work right again... over and over.
In my mind, it's not so much a matter of inconvenience, but lost money. The whole reason you have a POS is because it helps you run your business more efficiently... faster, with lower costs, and probably fewer people. I mean it has to, right? Or there wouldn't be much point to having one in the first place.
So if the thing goes down, you're running less efficiently. That means you may have to hire on more people (or add more shifts), and/or your restaurant will run slower (irritating customers) and you have a greater chance for errors (free food you're giving away), and if some of those customers are first-timers, they may never come back (or worse, will tell others how bad your service was).
If your POS is down for one day, maybe that's survivable, but what if you really hose it and you're down for a week?
I'm not saying that's likely but it's a possibility and if the guy's smart, he'll consider the odds of failure the costs of that failure and put that against the savings and benefits he gets from doing it himself vs having an expert do it.
If it were me, and we're talking about mission-critical things to the business, I'm not sure I'd want to use my business as a place to experiment and learn now to do something like that.
If the guy were asking, "hey, I've done some plumbing work and I need to upgrade the gas lines in restaurant, any tips on how to do that?", I'm sure most people would say he needs to hire an expert because it's a risky thing to learn "on the job" and where failure seriously impacts the business.
It all has to be weighed to make a good decision. A lot of good businesses go down because they don't accurately gauge risk and one even takes them out. Just look at Lehman Bros. for an example of catastrophic failure, due in large part to mis-measuring/handling risk.
When running a business, you really have to draw lines between what you can/can't do, and what you want to/don't want to do. You also have to factor in what the cost will be if you mess it up while trying to learn.
If I were currently running a business, I would hire an accountant do handle my taxes. It's not that I couldn't figure it out, but it's something I don't care to figure out. I'd rather focus on what my business is. But then again, if I did it myself and screw it up, who badly could it hurt my business?
Here's a guy who knows some about running SQL Server and POS. But he has a business that's running 7 days a week that probably won't run if the SQL/POS is not operating. So what's the cost to the business if the POS doesn't work for a day or two because he hosed it up?
In this case, the risk is high of a failure (because he's in learning mode). He needs to balance the cost of failure with what he gains by learning to do it himself. If the cost x risk is too great, then yes, I advocate he hire someone to do it. If he can tolerate the cost x risk, then by all means, I encourage him to go for it.
If it were your business and you had a guy handling the mission-critical SQL/POS and you needed to add fail-over but your guy doesn't know how. Would you advocate him doing it on your production system? That's the situation this guy is in, except he's also the guy doing the SQL/POS work.
A key part of being successful in business is knowing what you can do well and what you're better of hiring an expert to do it for you. Good things to consider are whether the work is critical to operations and if it's part of your core business.
If you don't want to use a whole hard drive, you can also use something like Clonezilla to make a complete backup of the original drive onto an external or network drive.
Then you can also almost as easily restore it back to its original state if you have to send it back.
I don't know much about ocean species, but hopefully no Japanese Hornets hitched a ride as well. I'd hate to have them over here.
It is a large insect and adults can be more than 4 centimetres (1.6 in) long, with a wingspan greater than 6 centimetres (2.4 in). ...
Being stung is extremely painful and requires hospital treatment. On average 40 people die every year of anaphylactic shock after having been stung,[1] which makes the Japanese giant hornet the most lethal animal in Japan, as bears kill about ten people and venomous snakes kill five to ten people each year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_giant_hornet
That solves half of it. It's not in notification bar any more. But there are no status bars/windows anywhere now.
I'll see what happens when I reboot.
I appreciate your effort.
I really hope they've added back the ability to have file progress dialogs as an option to having them stacked up in the notifications area.
If I have multiple lengthly copy/move operations going on, I really prefer to have separate dialog windows to watch what's going on. It used to do that. And if I install Dolphin in Gnome, it still does it.
In fact, I'd just install something Gnome-based if I could just get it to figure out that when my laptop lid is closed, and my computer is plugged into my monitor, I don't want to use my laptop's monitor as an output; especially the default output.
Analytics is the new buzzword in corporate circles. Maybe she can get into a consulting company that provides analytics services - there's a lot of these popping up these days. A lot of this is just statistical analysis; it's just that the business types are just now starting to figure out that there's some value in using data to analyze decisions rather than just gut-feel.
It seems like everyone's now out there, "gotta get me some analytics".
It's widely recognised legally that awarding a patent IS giving a monopoly on the use of an idea
I was under the impression that a patent cannot be used for an idea, but the specific implementation of an idea. You could get a patent for inventing a hoverboard that is powered by anti-gravitons and I wouldn't be in violation of your patent if I invented one that is powered by the hearts of orphan children, even if they looked essentially the same and behaved the same. They're the same idea, a board that can hover in the air, but different implementations.
I think it was some Dell laptops I saw last year that had changeable lids. I don't know if they still sell them.
I'm sure it's not for an individual company. I suspect it will be written such that any company who's named after a jungle region that starts with an "A", ends, "N", has a "Z" in the middle and is 6 letters long, and is in the business of selling books and other things on the internet will be eligible for the tax break. In fact, I now wonder what business won't be eligible.
Carl Sagan mentioned this in one of his books. The same technology that could be used to detect asteroids then reach them and divert their orbits away from the Earth could also be used to divert them towards the Earth.
that helps peoples sums add up is dubious at best.
I think it's a bit more than just coming up with stuff willy nilly.
We have these theories that work great for a lot of observations. They break down a bit for some observations, but can be "fixed" by adding dark matter. This either means the theories are wrong somehow, or there is something out there that's not been accurately observed, or maybe both. The key is to come up with experiments that can falsify the proposition that there is dark matter and that it's the cause of the aberrations.
A nice analogy is the discovery of Neptune. The theories predicted the planets would move in such a way. However they didn't quite do that. But by assuming another planet (which had not been observed), they could get their sums to add up. The testable part of it was when they said, "look here, and you should find a planet that's causing these deviations", and behold, they did.
The thing is, the current theories, even if they're wrong with dark matter, they're "close" to whatever the real situation is because they work so well in most cases. That means the "correct' theory won't be too extremely different, or must at least reduce to the current theories for the special cases we have observed.
If there are competing but "good" theories out there, the key is to find out what differentiates them in their predictions, then to devise experiments to observe what happens in those cases. If you can't devise and carry out such experiments, then it's all mere speculation.
Revolving door and self interest. The only people truly qualified to regulate such an industry are experts from the industry. And if a regulator leaves a regulatory job, the only other jobs are back in the industry.
A regulator of an industry has no desire to see that industry eliminated. If that happens, they're out of a job because there will be nobody to regulate. Plus, if things go badly in the industry, they will suffer blame for failing to properly regulate and anticipate the problems.
These are solid reasons why a regulator of any industry would have an interest in minimizing the perception of problems within that industry.
Both VM and Straighttalk have unlimited plans for about $45... not much less than you're paying now. I can't speak to the coverage, but if you're good with what you have, there's not much point in switching just to save $5.
Kimberly Hester does not have clean hands. Posting an offensive picture of a co-worker with pants around ankles could be considered sexual harassment.
This still does not justify asking for access to her account or firing her for it. If they need information from any of her accounts (email, social media, or otherwise) they should be going through the courts to go through a process of discovery to get access to that material.
As it is now, if they were to gain access, any evidence would be immediately suspect because now there is no way to prove that they themselves did not put the offending information there.
So even if the administration felt justified in asking for her account information, actually getting it and using it to log into her account would be monumentally stupid.
You could get a lot cheaper monthly plan from Straight Talk or Virgin Mobile. They also have very basic cheap phones. Straight Talk has a 1000-minute/month plan for $30/month. I'm currently paying $35/month to VM which includes 300 minutes and unlimited data and text.
I had a non-smart-phone from Straight Talk. It did have a web-browser though, and that was how you could use "data".
However they now sell Android phones and I suspect any of the apps can access the data connection, just like it can with any carrier. You could always try it for a month. If you don't like it, take it back for a full refund. You'll only be out the $30 for the month of service.
You could also try Virgin Mobile. I'm currently using one of the androids and like it quite a bit. I ordered a newer model and tried it for a few days and didn't like it as much as my old one. I was able to return it for a full refund as well.
The risks of trying one of the prepaids is pretty low since you can easily return the phone if it doesn't work for you.
Perhaps the same company will start marketing auto essay writing tools soon.
The only way to win an arms race is to be the vendor that sells to both sides.
If you're sticking with harddisks instead of tape, you could also use partimage, which only copies the active areas of the disk. I've used it successfully for years (it's how I used to "refresh" my windows boxes... install everything, make an image, then 6 months later, restore, update, reimage, repeat). Partimage can even chunk the files so even if you were going to tape, you could still use it.
I've also used Clonezilla successfully a few times. It also only considers active areas of the disk, so you don't spend so much time filling the rest with 0's. Plus it's partition-aware so you could restore the image to a smaller (if it's larger still larger than your data) or larger drive without dd leaving you with a strange partition table that doesn't really match the drive.
However if you do like dd, one strategy I used to use in larger network was to have a linux machine running sshd, boot up the client machine on a linux disk and use something like:
dd if=/dev/hda bs=8192|gzip -9|ssh -l work server "dd of=/images/imagename.gz
to backup a machine and the reverse to restore it.
You could also do this with tar: /; tar czf - * )|ssh -l work server "(cd backup_location;tar xvzf -)
(cd
if you can work with just the files.
I'm not exactly sure what is included in a full app that does de-dup, so this answer may not be what you're looking for.
I had a hard-drive crash and was behind on my backups. The last "full" backup was 3 months old, but I also had lots of of current data backed up on various USB drives. I was also able to recover about 80% of the crashed drive, though some of the files were corrupted.
I put all of this on a larger drive in different directories and ran a find with md5sum (and let it run all night). This let me figure out what I should keep and what was duplicated in another space. It's not very automated, but you just dump the results to text file and then sort/group however you want.
I now have a NAS where I have automatic daily backups happening. And when I can afford a couple more drives, I'll add a second drive to the NAS to provide RAID1 (mirror, right? for redundancy) and an external 3GB drive for periodic backups of the NAS. I'll then be keeping that out in my unattached shed in case of fire.
I really like the NAS. It's a QNAP, and with HD prices so high these days, the prices on the NAS came down a bit. It serves well as a backup location as well as media server.
Case in point: My friend got lost on the way to his brother's place because his GPS died. He's been living there for over a decade. My friend has driven there many, many times. But he relies on his GPS so much nowadays that he didn't even know how to get there without it!
Well... why don't you spend time educating your friend rather than cheering for laws to oppress the rest of us.
Remember the bad old days of typewriters and if you wanted to send someone a message you typed and it mailed it to them? And remember those bad old days when we didn't have cars and had to walk everywhere?
By comparing GPS to a map, you're making the same boneheaded comparison between mailing a type-written letter and using e-mail.
I'm guessing you see the benefit of using email and other forms of electronic communication rather than typing letters. So if you can see the difference there, I don't know why you can't see the difference between a map and a GPS navigation system. If you see merit in using one, I don't see how you can't see the merit in the other.
Or are you just one of those people who wants to use the government to control everyone else so they behave in a way you approve of?
I suspect Oppenheimer, et. al. wouldn't be making yet more and more breakthroughs in fundamental physics. I just watched a presentation about this. They pointed out that what the people were doing in the Manhattan Project was really more about engineering problems based on physics that was already known and not really that much new fundamental physics. That's not to say that the work of their lives wasn't brilliant, but that particular bit of work was probably not the pinnacle of their abilities.
I suspect that you're wrong about the quality of the scientists at CERN. Positions at places like are very competitive and aren't going to be filled by mediocre people.
Watch the Feynman lectures from the '50s and even then he talks about how the previous 50 years had been an incredibly remarkable time in physics and that the future of physics is not likely to be as interesting or have so many breakthroughs, but rather refinement and adjustment. The problem is that based on what can be observed in experiment, most of it has already been figured out. The only real hope for new astounding breakthroughs is that we'll start making observations that have never been seen before. Even in the 50s, Feynman was saying that if you can come up with something new that agrees with all known observations but describes something new beyond the existing theories, that will be something quite extraordinary.
And you say computers can't think, but I don't think that will be true for very much longer. And that will happen because there are brilliant people working in those fields.
I think there are plenty of brilliant people in the world and I disagree that somehow the human population is producing fewer geniuses. If anything, someone born with the ability to think in great ways has even more opportunities to become educated and have a chance to do something with it. What's lacking is a drive among the American population (to look at it from just my country) to push ourselves into the frontiers of discovery.
The state of science might not be deepening as much as the early/mid 20th century, but it sure is widening. And maybe that's just the nature of the thing. Can physics itself be a field with an infinite level of "deepness" where every fundamental law has "turtles all the way down"? Or is there a point where you actually arrive at a "theory of everything" where the rest is just refinement and reapplication?