Yes, external hard drives are fairly cheap these days and are an easy way to do backups.
But people need to think about what they are doing backups for. Are they doing backups for Disaster Recovery? Or for Mistake Recovery?
Mistake Recovery is straightforward. "Oops, I just deleted my MP3 folder!"
For Disaster Recovery, which kind of Disaster are you preparing for? Are you trying to protect yourself from your hard drive failing? Or are you trying to protect yourself from your house burning down or being robbed?
From an enterprise perspective, this is where a multi-solution approach works best. You want disk images or the equivalent in separate online storage for hardware failures, offline media stored offsite for serious disasters (or spend a LOT of money for mirrored online storage in diverse locations with a buttload of bandwidth to cover replication), and online or nearline file backups for when the CEO deletes all his mail.
For home use? I don't really know what's practical. Something that easily provides solutions for all three scenarios and can be easily set up, maintained, followed religiously, and restored by John Q Public is the utopian ideal, but I don't know of any solution that truly meets that need yet. Maybe Time Machine will but the jury is out until it actually ships.
Online backups have a lot of potential for true Disaster Recovery, but the consumer-level options I've seen so far either don't offer enough disk space for broad system backups, or they're just too much money/month to pay for enough storage.
Even the world's greatest parents can raise a criminal. There comes a point in a person's life, no matter what their upbringing was, where they are responsible for their own actions, and the course of their life can take turns long after they are out on their own.
I've long wondered, if salmon can only reproduce in the river/spot they were hatched, how have they managed to exist at all for so long? Rivers change, dry up, new rivers get created, naturally over millions of years.
In other words, if salmon can only spawn where they were spawned, how did they even get to all the places they spawn currently? At some point, some salmon must have spawned in places they did not originally spawn from, no?
(This is not an argument attempt, I really don't know the answer to this and have wondered.)
What exactly is narcissistic or greedy about a person humbly accepting an honor accorded them by their peers? You don't even have to show up to politely say "Thank you, but I prefer not to be in the spotlight, please donate the award money to $CHARITY or $SCHOLARSHIP or $WHATEVER."
I wasn't indoctrinated by my American parents to be particularly narcissistic or greedy, but I was indoctrinated to be gracious when someone in good faith offers you a gift or award.
Not that I care about whether this particular guy wants an award or not, but the implication that all good-hearted folk would refuse to humbly accept awards or accolades is pretty goofy.
Indeed. How about all the children who are inexplicably attached to having Pluto be called a planet grow the fuck up and stop crying about this poor frozen Kuiper Belt Object? It's depressing to see presumably adult astronomers acting like young girls who have had their pony taken away.
Jesus, did people in the 1850s cry this much when Ceres was downgraded?
I certainly wouldn't claim necessarily that Americans work more than the Chinese on average, but they certainly work more than the majority of Europe and other industrialized countries. US workers, I believe, still rank near or at the bottom in amount of vacation time taken per year.
I *wish* I could work only as much as my European co-workers do.
Yes, VMWare definitely pushes solutions like this pretty heavily. I would recommend contacting VMWare and/or researching their offerings to see how they are architected. (You don't have to *use* VMWare, of course, you can just get an understanding of concepts/tools/practices and look at other vendors or open source solutions as well.)
I saw a presentation by a representative of one of Cook County's departments that was deploying some solutions like this. VMWare's Enterprise Desktop running on servers in the data center. And the employees at their desks didn't even have real computers, they just had dedicated Wyse terminals or other remote-access hardware that presented their virtual desktop to them automatically.
There's a lot of plusses and minusses to scenarios like this. What can work great for some companys might not for others, and even in those companies you'll almost certainly have to identify some people who for whatever reason really do need a local native desktop. But for your security guards and secretaries and accountants and whatnot, virtual desktops could be a good solution.
I just want to take this oppurtunity to say: I fucking LOVE when distros offer a pre-made vmware image. It makes quickly taking a look at a new distro or product so much faster and easier.
And yes, I fully support the offering of other virtual machine formats (xen, parallels, etc) as well.
Point is if you want me to try something, a pre-made ready-to-run virtual machine image is a *huge* incentive for my lazy and time-constrained ass.
Ask any judge if they would have a job if drugs were legal. Odds are, they will say no.
How many decades would it take for congress/state legislatures/etc to actually *lay off* sitting judges? I sincerely doubt there are any judges out there worried about downsizing in the wake of drug legalization.
Adding the Quadro FX 4500 to that example Dell I specced adds about $1,400 to the price, which still puts the Apple significantly cheaper than the Dell, I think.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong (as if I need to say that here) but I made a quick pass at Dell configuring a similar system:
Dell Precision 690 with 2 dual-core xeon 2.66Ghz, 1GB memory on 2 DIMMs, 128MB nVidia Quadro, 1 250GB 7200RPM SATA drive, 48x/32x CD-RW/DVD. The price I was quoted was $3,625.
I think the video card in the Dell is even a bit of a downgrade, but I'm not completely clear on the difference between the 256MB card in the Apple and the 128MB Quadro in the Dell.
Regardles, unless I really missed something, the Mac Pro is looking extremely competitive.
I live in the city of Chicago, and I mean actually in the city, not a suburbanite who lives in mortal terror there might be a mexican or black person nearby. Children all around my neighborhood (of various colors) play outside all the time. During the summer there are neighborhood block parties on some block almost every weekend.
I have a house with a yard, and space between me and my neighbors. And in and around the city, there are hundreds of world-class restaraunts, theaters (and I mean live theater, though there are also places like the Landmark, Music Box, and the Gene Siskel Film Center), symphonies, opera companys, museums, two zoos, and I'm less than an hour from two major airports that can take me to just about any part of the globe. I'm not much into sports, but we seem to have a decent smattering of options for sports fans as well.
I'm not entirely clear why I'm supposed to find this intolerable.
More importantly, since when do sysadmins get any damn say in what solutions their corporations choose? Sysadmins don't tell the CIO what to buy. The CIO buys and tells the sysadmins what they're going to support.
I don't have enough digits to count all the times those of us on the IT floor spent time and effort making technical recommendations as to what the best solution would be, which was then promptly overridden in favor of a solution that the CIO chose because he cut a deal with some other vendor. (We'll give you some of our software, in exchange for some of your software! Then it didn't cost us any money!!!)
Hasn't CD heard the saying "trust everyone but cut the cards"?
I prefer: "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel."
For my company, the best advice we could have had would have been "don't outsource R&D to India". We ran into trouble with at least one of the Indian employees trying to sell our source code to competitors.
Just throwing an office into a foreign country and then having someone fly out, hire local people, give them complete access to your network, then fly home, is apparently not the way to secure your IP.
Again, I'm not entirely being serious as much as rhetorical, but that particular ocean analogy doesn't entirely work because you can urinate in the ocean all you want, but that's not dangerous, it's just gross.
So, let's say 100 or 1,000 years ago, would anybody back then have believed that anything humans could do could affect the oceans? Or the weather? And yet there's some evidence (certainly still being argued) that we *have* had an effect on them. So, 1,000 years from now is it possible we might learn something that we don't currently know now?
My point wasn't DONUT TOUCH THE SUN IT IS DANGER so much as to wonder if there is anything so critical to our life that we would consider it off-limits because touching it would be too risky even when that risk is imperceptible.
If, for example, and I am entirely making this up for argument's sake, if there was a one in 100 trillion chance that dumping a certain element into the sun would affect it, or that bombarding some mystery particle in a lab might cause the formation of a black hole, or any other stupid sci-fi apocalypse scenario. *How much* risk would we be willing to take? Any?
As a more real world example, when Teller speculated during the Manhattan Project that a nuclear explosion might "ignite the atmosphere", other scientists eventually concluded that was actually impossible. But what if they couldn't conclude that? If they only concluded it was "extremely unlikely", would it still have been worth the risk? How extremely unlikely would it need to be before burning off the entire planet's atmosphere became an acceptable risk?
Again, mostly because of my IT background, the whole issue of risk management and how you quantify risks and judge them to be acceptable is somewhat interesting to me. Applying it on a planetary scale is mostly just an exercise.
I was of course being a little facetious (including reference to a similarly-themed Stargate episode), but I do think it's a fair question: How do we *know* that nothing we can do could ever have some effect on the sun's nuclear reactions?
I guess it's more of a rhetorical question. Is there any thing so critically important to the survival of all known life that we would decide to not take even infinitessimal risks with it?
Or from an IT perspective: what life-services do we currently rely on that is considered mission-critical, and thus can't be tampered with except without a rigorously-verified testing procedure and backout plan?
Aside from the risks and costs of such a venture, here's an even more important question? How do we know that dumping material into the sun might not somehow affect the sun in some way?
Granted, it seems crazy to imagine it might, but who knows? I don't know if we have a lot of experimental data on the subject. If dumping heavy radioactive elements into the sun *did* have some long-term effect, it seems we'd be about as screwed as we could possibly be.
We might try to pray to Thor to save us, but sometimes I think he's just repeating recorded messages back to us as it is.
Electronic tallying is useful because it can determine results fast. Very fast.
Why is that important? Seriously. What horrible things happen to our country even if it takes days or weeks to tally votes in an election for which none of the officeholders take office for several months anyway?
This obsessive-compulsive need for us to know the election results IMMEDIATELY NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW 24 HOUR NEWS COVERAGE OF HOUR THREE OF NOT KNOWING is somewhat disturbing.
This responsibility is only fair in light of the state-sanctioned monopoly granted to drinking establishments as a legal place to consume alcohol. Such a business could not even exist in a world without liquor licenses. With privilege comes responsibility.
I'm going to assume that I am misunderstanding you, because I don't see how it's possible you would suggest that "businesses where patrons consume alcohol" did not exist prior to the enforcement of liquor licenses. Don't you watch Deadwood???
I don't see how or why it's a federal issue to fund science. It's just another way for the feds to bully everybody. Let the states choose to fund or not fund it.
The Manhattan Project? The Moon Landing? Satellite technology? NORAD?
I don't know. I'm not sure which state would have stepped up to fund many of those.
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Yes, external hard drives are fairly cheap these days and are an easy way to do backups.
But people need to think about what they are doing backups for. Are they doing backups for Disaster Recovery? Or for Mistake Recovery?
Mistake Recovery is straightforward. "Oops, I just deleted my MP3 folder!"
For Disaster Recovery, which kind of Disaster are you preparing for? Are you trying to protect yourself from your hard drive failing? Or are you trying to protect yourself from your house burning down or being robbed?
From an enterprise perspective, this is where a multi-solution approach works best. You want disk images or the equivalent in separate online storage for hardware failures, offline media stored offsite for serious disasters (or spend a LOT of money for mirrored online storage in diverse locations with a buttload of bandwidth to cover replication), and online or nearline file backups for when the CEO deletes all his mail.
For home use? I don't really know what's practical. Something that easily provides solutions for all three scenarios and can be easily set up, maintained, followed religiously, and restored by John Q Public is the utopian ideal, but I don't know of any solution that truly meets that need yet. Maybe Time Machine will but the jury is out until it actually ships.
Online backups have a lot of potential for true Disaster Recovery, but the consumer-level options I've seen so far either don't offer enough disk space for broad system backups, or they're just too much money/month to pay for enough storage.
The suggestion is that we should punish with severe criminal penalties a small percentage of parents who didn't do anything wrong.
Sorry, but I'm firmly in the "It's better to let 10 guilty men go free than to punish one innocent" camp.
I'm also firmly in the "You are responsible for your own damn actions, nobody else is" camp.
Even the world's greatest parents can raise a criminal. There comes a point in a person's life, no matter what their upbringing was, where they are responsible for their own actions, and the course of their life can take turns long after they are out on their own.
I've long wondered, if salmon can only reproduce in the river/spot they were hatched, how have they managed to exist at all for so long? Rivers change, dry up, new rivers get created, naturally over millions of years.
In other words, if salmon can only spawn where they were spawned, how did they even get to all the places they spawn currently? At some point, some salmon must have spawned in places they did not originally spawn from, no?
(This is not an argument attempt, I really don't know the answer to this and have wondered.)
What exactly is narcissistic or greedy about a person humbly accepting an honor accorded them by their peers? You don't even have to show up to politely say "Thank you, but I prefer not to be in the spotlight, please donate the award money to $CHARITY or $SCHOLARSHIP or $WHATEVER."
I wasn't indoctrinated by my American parents to be particularly narcissistic or greedy, but I was indoctrinated to be gracious when someone in good faith offers you a gift or award.
Not that I care about whether this particular guy wants an award or not, but the implication that all good-hearted folk would refuse to humbly accept awards or accolades is pretty goofy.
Indeed. How about all the children who are inexplicably attached to having Pluto be called a planet grow the fuck up and stop crying about this poor frozen Kuiper Belt Object? It's depressing to see presumably adult astronomers acting like young girls who have had their pony taken away.
Jesus, did people in the 1850s cry this much when Ceres was downgraded?
I didn't think that section was *that* hard, though probably amongst the most difficult of the episode.
Anyway, I believe I saw in a steam update recently that they toned that encounter down a little.
I certainly wouldn't claim necessarily that Americans work more than the Chinese on average, but they certainly work more than the majority of Europe and other industrialized countries. US workers, I believe, still rank near or at the bottom in amount of vacation time taken per year.
I *wish* I could work only as much as my European co-workers do.
Yes, VMWare definitely pushes solutions like this pretty heavily. I would recommend contacting VMWare and/or researching their offerings to see how they are architected. (You don't have to *use* VMWare, of course, you can just get an understanding of concepts/tools/practices and look at other vendors or open source solutions as well.)
I saw a presentation by a representative of one of Cook County's departments that was deploying some solutions like this. VMWare's Enterprise Desktop running on servers in the data center. And the employees at their desks didn't even have real computers, they just had dedicated Wyse terminals or other remote-access hardware that presented their virtual desktop to them automatically.
There's a lot of plusses and minusses to scenarios like this. What can work great for some companys might not for others, and even in those companies you'll almost certainly have to identify some people who for whatever reason really do need a local native desktop. But for your security guards and secretaries and accountants and whatnot, virtual desktops could be a good solution.
I just want to take this oppurtunity to say: I fucking LOVE when distros offer a pre-made vmware image. It makes quickly taking a look at a new distro or product so much faster and easier.
And yes, I fully support the offering of other virtual machine formats (xen, parallels, etc) as well.
Point is if you want me to try something, a pre-made ready-to-run virtual machine image is a *huge* incentive for my lazy and time-constrained ass.
How many decades would it take for congress/state legislatures/etc to actually *lay off* sitting judges? I sincerely doubt there are any judges out there worried about downsizing in the wake of drug legalization.
Adding the Quadro FX 4500 to that example Dell I specced adds about $1,400 to the price, which still puts the Apple significantly cheaper than the Dell, I think.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong (as if I need to say that here) but I made a quick pass at Dell configuring a similar system:
Dell Precision 690 with 2 dual-core xeon 2.66Ghz, 1GB memory on 2 DIMMs, 128MB nVidia Quadro, 1 250GB 7200RPM SATA drive, 48x/32x CD-RW/DVD. The price I was quoted was $3,625.
I think the video card in the Dell is even a bit of a downgrade, but I'm not completely clear on the difference between the 256MB card in the Apple and the 128MB Quadro in the Dell.
Regardles, unless I really missed something, the Mac Pro is looking extremely competitive.
The Magog were an unstoppable swarm that devoured other civilizations in order to make more magog.
That doesn't sound at all familiar?
I live in the city of Chicago, and I mean actually in the city, not a suburbanite who lives in mortal terror there might be a mexican or black person nearby. Children all around my neighborhood (of various colors) play outside all the time. During the summer there are neighborhood block parties on some block almost every weekend.
I have a house with a yard, and space between me and my neighbors. And in and around the city, there are hundreds of world-class restaraunts, theaters (and I mean live theater, though there are also places like the Landmark, Music Box, and the Gene Siskel Film Center), symphonies, opera companys, museums, two zoos, and I'm less than an hour from two major airports that can take me to just about any part of the globe. I'm not much into sports, but we seem to have a decent smattering of options for sports fans as well.
I'm not entirely clear why I'm supposed to find this intolerable.
If I look up "Humorless" in the Wiktionary, does it say "See Wikipedia Community"?
Dear GOD IN HEAVEN there was a brief period of time when a page claimed there were TOO MANY ELEPHANTS in the world!
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!
More importantly, since when do sysadmins get any damn say in what solutions their corporations choose? Sysadmins don't tell the CIO what to buy. The CIO buys and tells the sysadmins what they're going to support.
I don't have enough digits to count all the times those of us on the IT floor spent time and effort making technical recommendations as to what the best solution would be, which was then promptly overridden in favor of a solution that the CIO chose because he cut a deal with some other vendor. (We'll give you some of our software, in exchange for some of your software! Then it didn't cost us any money!!!)
I prefer: "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel."
For my company, the best advice we could have had would have been "don't outsource R&D to India". We ran into trouble with at least one of the Indian employees trying to sell our source code to competitors.
Just throwing an office into a foreign country and then having someone fly out, hire local people, give them complete access to your network, then fly home, is apparently not the way to secure your IP.
Again, I'm not entirely being serious as much as rhetorical, but that particular ocean analogy doesn't entirely work because you can urinate in the ocean all you want, but that's not dangerous, it's just gross.
So, let's say 100 or 1,000 years ago, would anybody back then have believed that anything humans could do could affect the oceans? Or the weather? And yet there's some evidence (certainly still being argued) that we *have* had an effect on them. So, 1,000 years from now is it possible we might learn something that we don't currently know now?
My point wasn't DONUT TOUCH THE SUN IT IS DANGER so much as to wonder if there is anything so critical to our life that we would consider it off-limits because touching it would be too risky even when that risk is imperceptible.
If, for example, and I am entirely making this up for argument's sake, if there was a one in 100 trillion chance that dumping a certain element into the sun would affect it, or that bombarding some mystery particle in a lab might cause the formation of a black hole, or any other stupid sci-fi apocalypse scenario. *How much* risk would we be willing to take? Any?
As a more real world example, when Teller speculated during the Manhattan Project that a nuclear explosion might "ignite the atmosphere", other scientists eventually concluded that was actually impossible. But what if they couldn't conclude that? If they only concluded it was "extremely unlikely", would it still have been worth the risk? How extremely unlikely would it need to be before burning off the entire planet's atmosphere became an acceptable risk?
Again, mostly because of my IT background, the whole issue of risk management and how you quantify risks and judge them to be acceptable is somewhat interesting to me. Applying it on a planetary scale is mostly just an exercise.
I was of course being a little facetious (including reference to a similarly-themed Stargate episode), but I do think it's a fair question: How do we *know* that nothing we can do could ever have some effect on the sun's nuclear reactions?
I guess it's more of a rhetorical question. Is there any thing so critically important to the survival of all known life that we would decide to not take even infinitessimal risks with it?
Or from an IT perspective: what life-services do we currently rely on that is considered mission-critical, and thus can't be tampered with except without a rigorously-verified testing procedure and backout plan?
Aside from the risks and costs of such a venture, here's an even more important question? How do we know that dumping material into the sun might not somehow affect the sun in some way?
Granted, it seems crazy to imagine it might, but who knows? I don't know if we have a lot of experimental data on the subject. If dumping heavy radioactive elements into the sun *did* have some long-term effect, it seems we'd be about as screwed as we could possibly be.
We might try to pray to Thor to save us, but sometimes I think he's just repeating recorded messages back to us as it is.
Why is that important? Seriously. What horrible things happen to our country even if it takes days or weeks to tally votes in an election for which none of the officeholders take office for several months anyway?
This obsessive-compulsive need for us to know the election results IMMEDIATELY NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW 24 HOUR NEWS COVERAGE OF HOUR THREE OF NOT KNOWING is somewhat disturbing.
I'm going to assume that I am misunderstanding you, because I don't see how it's possible you would suggest that "businesses where patrons consume alcohol" did not exist prior to the enforcement of liquor licenses. Don't you watch Deadwood???
The previoud "dupe" was about the unconfirmed rumor. This article is about the officially-confirming press release from the ESA.
The Manhattan Project? The Moon Landing? Satellite technology? NORAD?
I don't know. I'm not sure which state would have stepped up to fund many of those.