I presume, then, that you are one of the scum sucking thieves who prey on confused retirees, the sick, and the undereducated who will sucker in to your scams.
There is nothing clever nor noble about ripping people off. Thieves have been around for millenia, they've always considered themselves "smart", and they've always had an excuse when facing prison, death, or the removal of their thieving hands (depending on the period.)
I've seen programmers littering the code with initialed comments like "FIX ME [NAME]" and running the highly complex "grep" and "find" utilities under *nix and Windows for a couple decades.
The fact that someone formatted it in a pretty dialog box is about as innovative as changing the color of your shoelaces.
The fact that anyone would apply for such a patent just demonstrates how sad and pathetic the American legal system has become as it self-destructs on a diet of lawyers and political kickbacks feeding on the very businesses that used to drive the economy. It's a shame, really. Probably no more than 10-15 years before the nation starts looking to India or Poland for handouts.
OTOH, maybe we should worry. Broke bullies with guns tend to become muggers, not beggars.
The problem with front-end client spam filtering is that it does nothing to reduce the backbone traffic volume nor the data volume the email server has to process.
Someone is selling the products. They are illegally using home PC resources via spamnets. I fail to understand why the spammers can't simply be charged with theft, fraud, and locked up accordingly.
Or just shot if they happen to be in a country that permits such penalties. The genepool needs some cleaning...
I've had spam show up at new accounts that were only registered, never used. I've even had spam arrive at an email account that was sent before I even created the account!
Then theare are the moron spammers who send out group addressed emails (the ones with 20-30 variants on spelling anything at all like your name.)
Anti-spam on the client is not the solution.
Sticking there severed heads on pikes outside ISPs would be far more effective and satisfying.
Or the traffic problem could be justifiably claimed as a result of poor engineering by Microsoft, and make Bill & co. responsible for the resulting expenses.
Or we could just make ISP's responsible for disconnecting any customer who has an infected machine connected. When the machine is cleaned, then they could reconnect, not before.
No, I don't care about people who can't afford to take care of their machine, buy hardware firewalls, virus scanners, etc. I don't care that people driving rust buckets can't afford better cars, either -- get the hazard off the public byways!
IIRC, the original AmigaDOS was written by a master's student in Britain for their thesis in something like 6-9 months.
Granted it was a leaner, cleaner system than current Linux, but the same is true of most software -- one person with vision, a lot of coffee, and a suicidal bent for long hours at a monitor can create what seems an impossible amount of code.
Average coder stats are heavily biased by the 9-5 support and maintenance programmers. Hard core developers often write code 3-4 times as fast, sometimes more.
The only thing that is "impossible" is for some companies to accept that the "product" model of software is dying. IBM, HP, et. al. can afford this change because they already have huge consulting and hardware divisions. Others have focused their business careers on "product" and are ill-prepared for the pricing model shift.
The timing of the attacks is obviously being paid for by someone.
Someone who has previously funded discredited research through the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.
Someone who previously invested large sums of money in SCO, leaving a debt to be called in the future.
Someone who is busy patenting common-sense user interactions using mice and GUI's.
Someone with the clout to buy a reprieve from justice, and treat the penalties as merely the cost of doing business, and likely calculated into the projected expense budgets.
I mean come on -- why settle for mere greed or glory-hounding when there is a perfectly good conspiracy theory out there.
Besides, the tack Brown has taken is entirely self-destructive. Glory hounds want attention, not to paint themselves as the village idiot, repeating blatant lies as if they're a defense against the criticisms levied by respected members of the IT community. If the man truly believes his "response" appears like a rational defense, he seriously neds help, and I hope he gets it soon.
Yes, I read the whole article. The use of buzz-phrases is interesting.
What happens when you Google those phrases? Has the reference to the report shown up in the search results yet? How long until it does, with all the news sites cross-referencing the trash information?
Fast forward a few weeks when the furor dies down and an "apology" is issued. Someone searches for those key phrases -- is this "reasoned argument" response still visible in the search results? Maybe long enough to influence a few people to accept it as fact because it achieved such a high Google ranking with all the cross-references?
Remember the people doing those searches likely don't have technical knowledge to realize the "research" is virtually non-existant. They've heard about this Linux thing, and SCO, and look -- here's a high-rated "Institution" report.
I think the combination of SCO and Brown's report are the most elegantly crafted FUD attack I've seen to date, and one of the most subtle. It even uses the OSS community's own outrage to boost it's ranking and visibility.
Now just imagine you could actually control a search engine and make sure only the "right" links show up in the results, with one or two mild detractions to appear balanced. How much Google stock would one need to buy to ensure that kind of control?
Sure it's all ranting conspiracy stuff, but it's amazing how such theories fit sometimes, isn't it?
Price is the biggest factor by far for most people I know when deciding to buy a CD or DVD. It doesn't matter how much you love a group when it costs more for an audio CD than a DVD.
DVD: Hundreds to thousands of support staff, actors, recording, sound, audio, video, foley, and F/X artists with budgets in the millions.
CD: A half dozen schleps in a room for a week or two to record an album with maybe a dozen people supporting the effort.
Yet both are $20-25? The RIAA thinks people are morons, but the only fools are the execs who think people are stupid enough to pay $20-25 for an item whose real cost coverage point is only $2-3, including promotions, advertising, roadies, groupies, and drugs.
Sure I prefer older music, especially blues. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying the occasional spark of talent from current styles. I even like some of it enough to buy it.
Real talent has no age, and plays multiple styles as their career progresses. I just have no more use for the bubblegum stars like Spears than I did for their equivalents when I was in high school. Every generation has it's useless, talentless candy fluff whose major "skill" is looking good enough in front of a camera to be built up into a teen idol for a few years.
Ok, when you start referring to managed media entertainment as "canon", you are perhaps taking it all a bit too seriously. It is not religion, it is not life, and in the long run, it does not matter.
If you lose the holier than thou attitude of searching for flaws and just relax to enjoy the mistakes and gaffs as being inside jokes, you'll find it's actually a pretty good series. What many point to as "flaws", I see as a rather tongue-in-cheek nose-thumbing to the ravening fanatics who seem to live for the sole purpose of tearing apart their "favourite" series universe.
Let's face it -- the core ST universe is clogged. They are literally running out of ideas, so all that's left is to have fun with the characters and situations. I think they've done that, without creating completely unbelievable characters.
As someone pointed out, Scott Bacula (?sp?) with time-travel plots is hardly a shock. The ST universe also has a very long history of creating dead-end plot lines and pulling an "oops, never happened, it was all a paradox due to another time travel episode." Enterprise is far from the first to ride that plot escape.
Has no one ever noticed that the most popular and highest rated episodes from all the ST series had a high comedic or action content? Most of them were either standalone or two-part eps, too. Most people don't want a boringly realistic universe, they want to forget about realism and rules and be entertained.
Granted, it's nice when that comes along with a long-running coherent plot like DS9 had after the first season or two, or as Babylon 5 developed. Such series grab my attention because they do tell a story worth paying attention to. It's the story that works, not the "coherency" of the series universe.
Story-wise, I think Enterprise has a promising long-run plot line, but it's unlikely to survive the lambasting by zealots who confuse fiction with life-critical religious importance. It'll probably be the first ST since the original series that doesn't get the 7-season run.
SuSE 9.0 Pro recognized and installed to a Seagate ATA/V 120GB S/ATA with no problem. The only real difference between my system and the reviewer's is that I have a slightly older intel workstation chipset P4 instead of the latest AMD chipsets.
SuSE 8.1 Pro installed fine on the same hardware, but without SATA support.
Sun is the problem here, not SuSE. It's a shame that SuSE's name is being denigrated for Sun's insistance on shipping an outdated kernel.
For that matter, I do not see the benefit of Sun's approach over a stock SuSE distro with Java, Open/Star Office, Mozilla, Evolution, etc. installed. In fact I fully expect that Novell will do some good integration of services with their existing products and SuSE Linux, likely providing a real version of what Sun is trying to package.
Oh wait, that's right -- you can install virtually all the JDS components from the existing SuSE releases without having to involve Sun in the first place.
So what exactly is truly "special" about Sun's flailing attempts at a broken distro? What are they accomplishing other than slapping a Sun logo on a box with a badly mis-configured and outdated SuSE release?
On the other hand, we have recent Microsoft cash coming in from the settlement, so I have to wonder if skuttering the JDS wasn't part of the settlement conditions...
Unless you happen to be dealing with critical business systems that require constant hand-holding for a myriad of problems.
Sure you can write a procedure to recover from the failure, but your job as a professional is to identify and fix the problem, not bandage it. If you have to settle for a bandaid solution, there should be an explanation why a proper fix isn't feasible (no source, too expensive, too low a business priority.)
Give people a modicum of respect -- a good lawyer might find the twists and turns of a complex contract as involving as a heavy-duty programming or debug session. Could you come up with such creative verbiage and double-talk?
What a bargain -- a whole $2 less than the discount bin DVD's that are being sold at a loss. I bet that's "shipping & handling" extra, too.
Having tried to obtain replacements for damaged media, I can guarantee you'll eventually run into everyone's favourite problem: out of stock. No longer in pressing/print. We can sell you the new extended edition for only double the price, but that's not a replacement so it's not free or discounted.
Officially "Canadian" bacon is backbacon, but the truth is you may get either served depending on where you are. Foreigners who ask for Canadian bacon don't know the difference between peameal and backbacon, so they get whichever pork-tenderloin bacon the restaurant usually serves.
Peameal bacon is rolled in corn meal and tends to be somewhat saltier. The corn meal rim gets crisped when the rim of fat fries, adding a texture component to the flavour.
Backbacon is usually less salty, sometimes more smokey, and has no corn meal.
Both are made using pork tenderloin, so they're very low fat, more like a mini ham steak than greasy side-pork bacon.
So dual boot a kernel that isn't crippled by a lack of open-source file systems being ported to it. Don't blame a file system for FreeBSD's lack of support, blame the BSD developers.
Then take a look at what the original poster is asking to do. You are off on a tear because your favourite solution has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
The block repliction you mention is handled by EMC and equivalent storage solutions from other vendors.
You know as well as I do that how far you go for disaster recovery depends on budget. The cheapest is offsite archiving, which loses some data and takes the longest to restore.
Next up is hot backup systems -- identically configured, they just need to have an image restored from the archives. Whether optical or tape depends on the size of the archives and the budget, but it's not a disk pack!
Hot failovers are what you're talking about -- a mirror image of the data center constantly fed by the primary systems, and ready to take over in minutes, not hours. Banks use such systems, Telcos don't (without the rest of the phone hardware, the computers aren't much good.)
SOHOs and small business rely heavily on optical media because it's much cheaper to implement than tape or advanced backup systems. Most businesses with less than 200 employees can quite comfortably do their daily deltas with a couple of gigs (often a few hundred megs at most), provided they're not backing up browser caches and such from desktop PCs.
Very few businesses with 200-500 employees deal with total corporate data volumes over a few hundred gig of application and database server data. If they use tape it's for operator convenience, or because a vendor recommended it, not because they actually need it.
File/document servers are another matter -- they often have hundreds of gigs of stale data, but you don't create images backups of all that data unless you have far more budget than most small businesses do.
Really, this whole thing is focused on flooding a system with enough garbage data to make it useless.
If this is a patentable "idea", then I've got a few dozen systems to fix over the years which prove prior art. They were quite happy to corrupt themselves when fed bad data.
In fact, they were much more advanced than this attack, because they would actually corrupt existing data when fed garbage!
Yes, I'm sure there is something special that means it's more than a garbage data flood, but that's just legalese to try and make it special. The basic approach has been around as long as humans have punched data errors.
So you don't buy a lot of disks. The point is that having a large collection does not mean you are a pirate -- I know several people with collections as large or larger than mine, and it's all originals.
There are legitimite needs for handling large volumes of media, and the people who own large, legal collections are also the ones most likely to spend the money on toys like robotics.
We're also the most likely to insist on duping a DVD to RW if someone wants to borrow it. Do you think we risk the originals when we mail movies back and forth? Or lend them to relatives with kids that are proven disk destroyers?
One fellow I know takes such care of his collection that even I am not allowed to borrow originals -- I get to watch dups.
The MPAA and RIAA can squack all they like -- they don't have a damaged media replacement policy anymore, so they've no right to complain if I take steps to protect my collection from damage.
You just don't get it -- RAID volumes are a fact of life for datacenters. It's not an "extra", it's not an "add on".
Hot swap RAID arrays allow the servers to keep running, even while they rebuild a failed drive. That is their purpose, and they serve it well.
Archive media is a different requirement entirely, and you seriously need to get over the mentality that RAID is the be-all end-all solution to your problems.
Lets say you offline the system and image those RAID arrays (bad idea in the first place -- backups are online/active. Not relevant to this particular case of duping CDs, but usually a requirement.)
You store them in your offsite facility, and your data center is destroyed. You are a small business, and have no hot backup system to drop the existing RAID drives into.
You order replacement hardware, but lo and behold the RAID controller you had is no longer supported or available. You get the updated version of the hardware, plug in your drives, and find you have a few hundred gigs of garbage.
You take those CD and DVD optical backups (or various tape media, if you have the volume need and budget), and suddenly there is no such problem. They read on multiple operating systems, multiple versions, and multiple vendors.
Even though data store vendors like EMC are using HDD cabinets to replace the online backup tapes, it is only a staging area. It does not and is not intended to meet long-term offsite archive requirements. It's intended to ensure that the backups take as little time as possible (much faster than tape), and that the most recent backups are readily available without having to have operators mount tapes (staff dollars.)
You cannot create a disaster recovery plan by falling in love with one particular technology. Your RAID arrays are not an archive, they are only one part of a storage solution.
People keep saying that I'm ignoring the requirement to archive his CD collection. It's you RAID bozos who aren't reading the requirements: to duplicate his disks. You're talking about a completely different problem, and blindly assuming it's what the original poster needs because it suits your needs.
I bought my first CD player about 17 years ago. I've bought a whopping average of 6 CD's per month over the years, including a huge number from fleamarket discounters and used retailers.
You'd be surprised how the collection builds up, even if you were only buying an album or two a week. Let's not forget this was pre dot-bomb, too. It only took about 15 minutes work to pay for a CD, so why not pick up one up on the way to work or over lunch if you got the urge?
Even today, a couple large lattes is a CD, especially when most of the music you like isn't new "artists" that disappear after one album and a forgettable contractual followup. Most albums I buy cost about 2/3 the price of new releases -- without being on sale.
The lattes are gone, but most of my disks have been listened to dozens of times, some probably a few hundred.
Obviously you've never caught the release-day sales at Future Shop and other stores, which get you that 6-month discount price if you pick up the movie in the first couple days after release.
Why in the world would I use an entire DVD or tape media to back up a project that compresses to a couple hundred megs of.tgz?
One volume, one version. Cheap, handy, easy to dup when it's time to deliver to the customer.
I'll really be fascinated to see how well your RAID5 does with a site disaster like a fire or a flood.
I'm also curious how you use the RAID5 to deploy a hot backup server.
The most baffling thing is how you manage to store your RAID5 in an offsite facility for emergencies while continuing to work.
You truly have one amazing RAID5.
No one smart still backs up data to optical media...
I bow to your superior understanding of data retention and disaster recovery. Clearly my years of work with banks, insurance, and telcos since the 1980's has taught me nothing. You've figured it all out, and those of us with disaster recovery plans that deal with physical site destruction are the fools.
I personally have over 1000 audio CDs, 800 DVDs, and another 1500 or so archive CDs (patch downloads, dev kits, work backups, etc.)
Having played CD monkey just reading a few of the audio CDs, I can't imagine trying to duplicate the whole set by hand.
What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.
I do know that you can expect to pay a few grand for such a setup. I know one fellow who set up a drive tower with 6 CD readers just to load his audio collection into MP3's for his player.
While most people consider a couple hundred disks a "collection", there are plenty of us media junkies who've actually own thousands of legal media.
I'm not suggesting piracy is directly equivalent to lost revenue -- I know very well that a large number of pirates are students and people on a tight budget. They will never buy the software, because they just don't have the money.
I also know too many people who are all too willing to pirate software because they don't like the price, though they can well afford it. One fellow in particular wanted to "borrow" some of my software, even though he owns 6 houses and flies overseas twice a year to see relatives.
As I'm far past student age, most pirates I've met over the past 5-6 years have been the latter category. I call them thieves because they have no legitimite reason for not paying for the software they use.
Those are the pirates who are lost revenue, whose theft has an actual dollar value.
As to student pirates...
I don't think students should have to be worrying about software and media costs -- they're supposed to be the future staff resources companies need. Any company which is charging legitimite schools more than the cost of duplicating software and printing manuals should be ashamed of their greed. Providing students with the tools they'll be using at work is an investment in knowledge that companies should be happy to sponsor.
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I presume, then, that you are one of the scum sucking thieves who prey on confused retirees, the sick, and the undereducated who will sucker in to your scams.
There is nothing clever nor noble about ripping people off. Thieves have been around for millenia, they've always considered themselves "smart", and they've always had an excuse when facing prison, death, or the removal of their thieving hands (depending on the period.)
I've seen programmers littering the code with initialed comments like "FIX ME [NAME]" and running the highly complex "grep" and "find" utilities under *nix and Windows for a couple decades.
The fact that someone formatted it in a pretty dialog box is about as innovative as changing the color of your shoelaces.
The fact that anyone would apply for such a patent just demonstrates how sad and pathetic the American legal system has become as it self-destructs on a diet of lawyers and political kickbacks feeding on the very businesses that used to drive the economy. It's a shame, really. Probably no more than 10-15 years before the nation starts looking to India or Poland for handouts.
OTOH, maybe we should worry. Broke bullies with guns tend to become muggers, not beggars.
The problem with front-end client spam filtering is that it does nothing to reduce the backbone traffic volume nor the data volume the email server has to process.
Someone is selling the products. They are illegally using home PC resources via spamnets. I fail to understand why the spammers can't simply be charged with theft, fraud, and locked up accordingly.
Or just shot if they happen to be in a country that permits such penalties. The genepool needs some cleaning...
I've had spam show up at new accounts that were only registered, never used. I've even had spam arrive at an email account that was sent before I even created the account!
Then theare are the moron spammers who send out group addressed emails (the ones with 20-30 variants on spelling anything at all like your name.)
Anti-spam on the client is not the solution.
Sticking there severed heads on pikes outside ISPs would be far more effective and satisfying.
Or the traffic problem could be justifiably claimed as a result of poor engineering by Microsoft, and make Bill & co. responsible for the resulting expenses.
Or we could just make ISP's responsible for disconnecting any customer who has an infected machine connected. When the machine is cleaned, then they could reconnect, not before.
No, I don't care about people who can't afford to take care of their machine, buy hardware firewalls, virus scanners, etc. I don't care that people driving rust buckets can't afford better cars, either -- get the hazard off the public byways!
IIRC, the original AmigaDOS was written by a master's student in Britain for their thesis in something like 6-9 months.
Granted it was a leaner, cleaner system than current Linux, but the same is true of most software -- one person with vision, a lot of coffee, and a suicidal bent for long hours at a monitor can create what seems an impossible amount of code.
Average coder stats are heavily biased by the 9-5 support and maintenance programmers. Hard core developers often write code 3-4 times as fast, sometimes more.
The only thing that is "impossible" is for some companies to accept that the "product" model of software is dying. IBM, HP, et. al. can afford this change because they already have huge consulting and hardware divisions. Others have focused their business careers on "product" and are ill-prepared for the pricing model shift.
The timing of the attacks is obviously being paid for by someone.
Someone who has previously funded discredited research through the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.
Someone who previously invested large sums of money in SCO, leaving a debt to be called in the future.
Someone who is busy patenting common-sense user interactions using mice and GUI's.
Someone with the clout to buy a reprieve from justice, and treat the penalties as merely the cost of doing business, and likely calculated into the projected expense budgets.
I mean come on -- why settle for mere greed or glory-hounding when there is a perfectly good conspiracy theory out there.
Besides, the tack Brown has taken is entirely self-destructive. Glory hounds want attention, not to paint themselves as the village idiot, repeating blatant lies as if they're a defense against the criticisms levied by respected members of the IT community. If the man truly believes his "response" appears like a rational defense, he seriously neds help, and I hope he gets it soon.
Yes, I read the whole article. The use of buzz-phrases is interesting.
What happens when you Google those phrases? Has the reference to the report shown up in the search results yet? How long until it does, with all the news sites cross-referencing the trash information?
Fast forward a few weeks when the furor dies down and an "apology" is issued. Someone searches for those key phrases -- is this "reasoned argument" response still visible in the search results? Maybe long enough to influence a few people to accept it as fact because it achieved such a high Google ranking with all the cross-references?
Remember the people doing those searches likely don't have technical knowledge to realize the "research" is virtually non-existant. They've heard about this Linux thing, and SCO, and look -- here's a high-rated "Institution" report.
I think the combination of SCO and Brown's report are the most elegantly crafted FUD attack I've seen to date, and one of the most subtle. It even uses the OSS community's own outrage to boost it's ranking and visibility.
Now just imagine you could actually control a search engine and make sure only the "right" links show up in the results, with one or two mild detractions to appear balanced. How much Google stock would one need to buy to ensure that kind of control?
Sure it's all ranting conspiracy stuff, but it's amazing how such theories fit sometimes, isn't it?
Price is the biggest factor by far for most people I know when deciding to buy a CD or DVD. It doesn't matter how much you love a group when it costs more for an audio CD than a DVD.
DVD: Hundreds to thousands of support staff, actors, recording, sound, audio, video, foley, and F/X artists with budgets in the millions.
CD: A half dozen schleps in a room for a week or two to record an album with maybe a dozen people supporting the effort.
Yet both are $20-25? The RIAA thinks people are morons, but the only fools are the execs who think people are stupid enough to pay $20-25 for an item whose real cost coverage point is only $2-3, including promotions, advertising, roadies, groupies, and drugs.
Sure I prefer older music, especially blues. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying the occasional spark of talent from current styles. I even like some of it enough to buy it.
Real talent has no age, and plays multiple styles as their career progresses. I just have no more use for the bubblegum stars like Spears than I did for their equivalents when I was in high school. Every generation has it's useless, talentless candy fluff whose major "skill" is looking good enough in front of a camera to be built up into a teen idol for a few years.
Ok, when you start referring to managed media entertainment as "canon", you are perhaps taking it all a bit too seriously. It is not religion, it is not life, and in the long run, it does not matter.
If you lose the holier than thou attitude of searching for flaws and just relax to enjoy the mistakes and gaffs as being inside jokes, you'll find it's actually a pretty good series. What many point to as "flaws", I see as a rather tongue-in-cheek nose-thumbing to the ravening fanatics who seem to live for the sole purpose of tearing apart their "favourite" series universe.
Let's face it -- the core ST universe is clogged. They are literally running out of ideas, so all that's left is to have fun with the characters and situations. I think they've done that, without creating completely unbelievable characters.
As someone pointed out, Scott Bacula (?sp?) with time-travel plots is hardly a shock. The ST universe also has a very long history of creating dead-end plot lines and pulling an "oops, never happened, it was all a paradox due to another time travel episode." Enterprise is far from the first to ride that plot escape.
Has no one ever noticed that the most popular and highest rated episodes from all the ST series had a high comedic or action content? Most of them were either standalone or two-part eps, too. Most people don't want a boringly realistic universe, they want to forget about realism and rules and be entertained.
Granted, it's nice when that comes along with a long-running coherent plot like DS9 had after the first season or two, or as Babylon 5 developed. Such series grab my attention because they do tell a story worth paying attention to. It's the story that works, not the "coherency" of the series universe.
Story-wise, I think Enterprise has a promising long-run plot line, but it's unlikely to survive the lambasting by zealots who confuse fiction with life-critical religious importance. It'll probably be the first ST since the original series that doesn't get the 7-season run.
Well, it looks like Enterprise is pre-announcing their "Jump the Shark" episode.
Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
SuSE 9.0 Pro recognized and installed to a Seagate ATA/V 120GB S/ATA with no problem. The only real difference between my system and the reviewer's is that I have a slightly older intel workstation chipset P4 instead of the latest AMD chipsets. SuSE 8.1 Pro installed fine on the same hardware, but without SATA support. Sun is the problem here, not SuSE. It's a shame that SuSE's name is being denigrated for Sun's insistance on shipping an outdated kernel. For that matter, I do not see the benefit of Sun's approach over a stock SuSE distro with Java, Open/Star Office, Mozilla, Evolution, etc. installed. In fact I fully expect that Novell will do some good integration of services with their existing products and SuSE Linux, likely providing a real version of what Sun is trying to package. Oh wait, that's right -- you can install virtually all the JDS components from the existing SuSE releases without having to involve Sun in the first place. So what exactly is truly "special" about Sun's flailing attempts at a broken distro? What are they accomplishing other than slapping a Sun logo on a box with a badly mis-configured and outdated SuSE release? On the other hand, we have recent Microsoft cash coming in from the settlement, so I have to wonder if skuttering the JDS wasn't part of the settlement conditions...
Unless you happen to be dealing with critical business systems that require constant hand-holding for a myriad of problems.
Sure you can write a procedure to recover from the failure, but your job as a professional is to identify and fix the problem, not bandage it. If you have to settle for a bandaid solution, there should be an explanation why a proper fix isn't feasible (no source, too expensive, too low a business priority.)
Give people a modicum of respect -- a good lawyer might find the twists and turns of a complex contract as involving as a heavy-duty programming or debug session. Could you come up with such creative verbiage and double-talk?
What a bargain -- a whole $2 less than the discount bin DVD's that are being sold at a loss. I bet that's "shipping & handling" extra, too.
Having tried to obtain replacements for damaged media, I can guarantee you'll eventually run into everyone's favourite problem: out of stock. No longer in pressing/print. We can sell you the new extended edition for only double the price, but that's not a replacement so it's not free or discounted.
Officially "Canadian" bacon is backbacon, but the truth is you may get either served depending on where you are. Foreigners who ask for Canadian bacon don't know the difference between peameal and backbacon, so they get whichever pork-tenderloin bacon the restaurant usually serves.
Peameal bacon is rolled in corn meal and tends to be somewhat saltier. The corn meal rim gets crisped when the rim of fat fries, adding a texture component to the flavour.
Backbacon is usually less salty, sometimes more smokey, and has no corn meal.
Both are made using pork tenderloin, so they're very low fat, more like a mini ham steak than greasy side-pork bacon.
Of course BSD is more than a kernel, even without all the GNU utilities and other OSS projects.
However, none of those components run the file system. The kernel does.
So dual boot a kernel that isn't crippled by a lack of open-source file systems being ported to it. Don't blame a file system for FreeBSD's lack of support, blame the BSD developers.
Read the posts again. All of them this time.
Then take a look at what the original poster is asking to do. You are off on a tear because your favourite solution has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
The block repliction you mention is handled by EMC and equivalent storage solutions from other vendors.
You know as well as I do that how far you go for disaster recovery depends on budget. The cheapest is offsite archiving, which loses some data and takes the longest to restore.
Next up is hot backup systems -- identically configured, they just need to have an image restored from the archives. Whether optical or tape depends on the size of the archives and the budget, but it's not a disk pack!
Hot failovers are what you're talking about -- a mirror image of the data center constantly fed by the primary systems, and ready to take over in minutes, not hours. Banks use such systems, Telcos don't (without the rest of the phone hardware, the computers aren't much good.)
SOHOs and small business rely heavily on optical media because it's much cheaper to implement than tape or advanced backup systems. Most businesses with less than 200 employees can quite comfortably do their daily deltas with a couple of gigs (often a few hundred megs at most), provided they're not backing up browser caches and such from desktop PCs.
Very few businesses with 200-500 employees deal with total corporate data volumes over a few hundred gig of application and database server data. If they use tape it's for operator convenience, or because a vendor recommended it, not because they actually need it.
File/document servers are another matter -- they often have hundreds of gigs of stale data, but you don't create images backups of all that data unless you have far more budget than most small businesses do.
Really, this whole thing is focused on flooding a system with enough garbage data to make it useless.
If this is a patentable "idea", then I've got a few dozen systems to fix over the years which prove prior art. They were quite happy to corrupt themselves when fed bad data.
In fact, they were much more advanced than this attack, because they would actually corrupt existing data when fed garbage!
Yes, I'm sure there is something special that means it's more than a garbage data flood, but that's just legalese to try and make it special. The basic approach has been around as long as humans have punched data errors.
So you don't buy a lot of disks. The point is that having a large collection does not mean you are a pirate -- I know several people with collections as large or larger than mine, and it's all originals.
There are legitimite needs for handling large volumes of media, and the people who own large, legal collections are also the ones most likely to spend the money on toys like robotics.
We're also the most likely to insist on duping a DVD to RW if someone wants to borrow it. Do you think we risk the originals when we mail movies back and forth? Or lend them to relatives with kids that are proven disk destroyers?
One fellow I know takes such care of his collection that even I am not allowed to borrow originals -- I get to watch dups.
The MPAA and RIAA can squack all they like -- they don't have a damaged media replacement policy anymore, so they've no right to complain if I take steps to protect my collection from damage.
You just don't get it -- RAID volumes are a fact of life for datacenters. It's not an "extra", it's not an "add on".
Hot swap RAID arrays allow the servers to keep running, even while they rebuild a failed drive. That is their purpose, and they serve it well.
Archive media is a different requirement entirely, and you seriously need to get over the mentality that RAID is the be-all end-all solution to your problems.
Lets say you offline the system and image those RAID arrays (bad idea in the first place -- backups are online/active. Not relevant to this particular case of duping CDs, but usually a requirement.)
You store them in your offsite facility, and your data center is destroyed. You are a small business, and have no hot backup system to drop the existing RAID drives into.
You order replacement hardware, but lo and behold the RAID controller you had is no longer supported or available. You get the updated version of the hardware, plug in your drives, and find you have a few hundred gigs of garbage.
You take those CD and DVD optical backups (or various tape media, if you have the volume need and budget), and suddenly there is no such problem. They read on multiple operating systems, multiple versions, and multiple vendors.
Even though data store vendors like EMC are using HDD cabinets to replace the online backup tapes, it is only a staging area. It does not and is not intended to meet long-term offsite archive requirements. It's intended to ensure that the backups take as little time as possible (much faster than tape), and that the most recent backups are readily available without having to have operators mount tapes (staff dollars.)
You cannot create a disaster recovery plan by falling in love with one particular technology. Your RAID arrays are not an archive, they are only one part of a storage solution.
People keep saying that I'm ignoring the requirement to archive his CD collection. It's you RAID bozos who aren't reading the requirements: to duplicate his disks. You're talking about a completely different problem, and blindly assuming it's what the original poster needs because it suits your needs.
Thank God you aren't a data center manager!
I bought my first CD player about 17 years ago. I've bought a whopping average of 6 CD's per month over the years, including a huge number from fleamarket discounters and used retailers.
You'd be surprised how the collection builds up, even if you were only buying an album or two a week. Let's not forget this was pre dot-bomb, too. It only took about 15 minutes work to pay for a CD, so why not pick up one up on the way to work or over lunch if you got the urge?
Even today, a couple large lattes is a CD, especially when most of the music you like isn't new "artists" that disappear after one album and a forgettable contractual followup. Most albums I buy cost about 2/3 the price of new releases -- without being on sale.
The lattes are gone, but most of my disks have been listened to dozens of times, some probably a few hundred.
Obviously you've never caught the release-day sales at Future Shop and other stores, which get you that 6-month discount price if you pick up the movie in the first couple days after release.
Why in the world would I use an entire DVD or tape media to back up a project that compresses to a couple hundred megs of .tgz?
One volume, one version. Cheap, handy, easy to dup when it's time to deliver to the customer.
I'll really be fascinated to see how well your RAID5 does with a site disaster like a fire or a flood.
I'm also curious how you use the RAID5 to deploy a hot backup server.
The most baffling thing is how you manage to store your RAID5 in an offsite facility for emergencies while continuing to work.
You truly have one amazing RAID5.
I bow to your superior understanding of data retention and disaster recovery. Clearly my years of work with banks, insurance, and telcos since the 1980's has taught me nothing. You've figured it all out, and those of us with disaster recovery plans that deal with physical site destruction are the fools.
Wanker. *spits*
I personally have over 1000 audio CDs, 800 DVDs, and another 1500 or so archive CDs (patch downloads, dev kits, work backups, etc.)
Having played CD monkey just reading a few of the audio CDs, I can't imagine trying to duplicate the whole set by hand.
What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.
I do know that you can expect to pay a few grand for such a setup. I know one fellow who set up a drive tower with 6 CD readers just to load his audio collection into MP3's for his player.
While most people consider a couple hundred disks a "collection", there are plenty of us media junkies who've actually own thousands of legal media.
I'm not suggesting piracy is directly equivalent to lost revenue -- I know very well that a large number of pirates are students and people on a tight budget. They will never buy the software, because they just don't have the money.
I also know too many people who are all too willing to pirate software because they don't like the price, though they can well afford it. One fellow in particular wanted to "borrow" some of my software, even though he owns 6 houses and flies overseas twice a year to see relatives.
As I'm far past student age, most pirates I've met over the past 5-6 years have been the latter category. I call them thieves because they have no legitimite reason for not paying for the software they use.
Those are the pirates who are lost revenue, whose theft has an actual dollar value.
As to student pirates...
I don't think students should have to be worrying about software and media costs -- they're supposed to be the future staff resources companies need. Any company which is charging legitimite schools more than the cost of duplicating software and printing manuals should be ashamed of their greed. Providing students with the tools they'll be using at work is an investment in knowledge that companies should be happy to sponsor.