I have a similarly vast collection of non-adult content, yet that always passes without comment. They're just bits and bytes. I'm not assigning any particular value to one sort of content versus another.
Digital hoarding. Yes. It's a terrible disease barely kept in check by the constant threat of all the newspapers and empty cereal boxes that you apparently think occupy the remainder of volume in my home.
That was sarcasm.
No, I really don't have abnormally large collections of anything else. I have a half-dozen long boxes of comic books and perhaps a dozen full bookshelves. My home is actually quite tidy. I just have an odd hobby, which is far off-topic anyway. I note that no one has commented on the technical merits of my storage strategy.
As someone with considerably more than 8TB of porn (and a similarly vast quantity of non-porn content, handily digitized and indexed), until recently I used paired servers each holding 12TB of drives in RAID6 with 2 drives as hot spares (64 physical drives on four machines). I used rsync to maintain a second copy of all my data. I've decided that's insane, and I've moved to using a single 36TB FreeBSD server (running zfs for my storage pools) that has enough internal expansion to accommodate another 36TB without getting into external expanders. I've paired that with an LTO4 changer that I bought off Craigslist for around $1900. At the moment I have just enough tapes to have two complete copies of my data. I'd like to get another hundred tapes so I can comfortably manage grandfather-father-son backups and have some spares in reserve.
I really don't have any confidence in common RAID with large arrays of large drives, since the possibility of a hard error during a rebuild or resync is too high for comfort. Large data sets really need to be mirrored and if at all possible stored in some offline fashion. That's really the only path to reliable storage.
My home "test machine" is a Xeon E1220, which ironically is the least expensive (at retail) i7 system by around $80. I stuck 16GB of (admittedly expensive fully buffered) RAM in a Supermicro motherboard and added an IBM ServerRAID M1015 (8 port SAS card that supports 3TB drives, they sell on Ebay for $75 - $100). It all sits in a nice 3U chassis that I've had for years. Most of the hardware in the machine is devoted to running one little FreeBSD VM that supports ZFS for all the drives I have in that machine, but since the RAM/CPU needs of that machine are so small, relatively speaking, the same box is home to a couple full-time Windows Servers and a Centos VM and I'm still only using half the CPU and RAM resources available to that system.
The interesting thing about that setup is that it's really not as ridiculous as it sounds: $200 for the CPU, $150 for the motherboard, $200 worth of RAM.
The thing I use at work for my virtual machine needs uses a couple quad core Xeon 5000-series CPUs and has 8GB RAM. It's an Intel-branded server that I picked up off Craigslist for $250. I use it to run four Server 2003 guests and it's more than adequate for the use it has been given. It's probably a little too loud to leave running in a home (2U servers generally are), but I suspect someone with sufficient motivation could find a workaround for that.
Why keep anything important on a smartphone to begin with?
Yes, it's nice to access my e-mails from months or years ago, and it's handy to have pictures on the SD card, but if you're concerned about privacy, why not set the your phone up to have e-mails forwarded from an account with a password that isn't stored on the phone, and to delete messages shortly after they're read? That's how I manage mail on my phone and it works well enough for my purposes.
I suspect there are similar ways to offload calendar, contact and photos for anyone paranoid enough to need that. If someone snarfed all the data off my phone, they'd get at most 24 hours worth of e-mail and about 30GB of classical music. C'est la vie.
Drives break. Accidents happen. DVDs degrade. Consumer grade storage just isn't a good idea for anything long term. Pay for Mozy or Crashplan or some other commercial service. Your stuff can go on whatever ridiculous combination of disk arrays and tape backups they use for you and anyone else who is paying the $50 a year or whatever it is to keep your stuff available. This is by far the least hassle of any available option.
I dunno. I'm one of those Dwarf Fortress people too. It's one thing to die in Nethack because you fell on the dead cockatrice you were holding. It's another thing to play Dwarf Fortress and find out that one of your guys is running around missing an eyelid because of combat damage, or that you've gone an insane, inspired quadriplegic dwarf who keeps trying to sneak out of his bed to go work on whatever the hell it is that's inspiring him to create, so that his caretakers keep having to drag him back.
I've made the observation online many times before, but I consider the time that I Ascended a Wishless Tourist in Nethack a greater personal accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
My home media collection is around 20TB. For the longest time, I was dealing with redundancy by just maintaining a second, synchronized set of file servers. Each server has either a 16 port SAS controller or two 8 port controllers and a total of 16 storage drives in RAID6 including the hot spares. Each machine probably cost me $2500 to set up and I have four of them. And that's with getting the RAID cards and rack chassis from Ebay.
The truth is, the chance of having a non-recoverable error while doing a RAID rebuild is really, disgustingly high. Hopefully I wouldn't run into a scenario in which both servers in a synchronized pair had issues at the same time, but that wasn't giving me warm fuzzies the more I read about the reliability of RAID5/6 for large volumes.
So when it came time for me to upgrade my storage setup, I chose to go a different direction. I bought a lightly used LTO4 changer. Every tape holds 800GB and costs about $20. The tapes can be taken off site (shipped to my parents) and can grow to deal with whatever expansion of storage I make in the future. In the near term I will probably purchase a second LTO drive to store with my tapes, but I expect that I'll be in a much better place for dealing with my needs for at least the next several years.
It's not a solution for everyone, but it was the right move for me.
One of the very few people to put me on her Slashdot enemies list did so because I made a derogatory statement about the length of the HURD development process. In, as I recall, the year 2000 or 2001. It was a running joke at least five years before that.
Not really. There are 16x10 computer displays out there. They're marketed for professional use while the consumer garbage sticks with the cheaper and lower resolution panels. At sizes above 24", proper computer displays do offer even higher resolution, but since a 32" HDTV is $350 and a 32" computer monitor is more like $2000, it's pretty easy to see why one is a lot more common than the other.
In my experience, the average RMA turnaround time for the four drives I've so far sent back to OCZ is not quite six weeks. It's not just that they die, it's that they die and the after-sale customer service is atrocious.
My single experience with getting an Intel SSD replaced was a three day turnaround from the day the defective unit shipped out.
Just remember, people, that "unlimited" data plans in the US actually cap out at 5GB/month for almost everyone in almost every situation. The only truly un-metered data services I'm aware of are Sprint's plans for phones that offer 4G service or for circumstances where a user was grandfathered in on a contract that offered truly unlimited data service (e.g. Sprint SERO).
Pause is occasionally useful during PC repair since it'll freeze boot messages on the screen. CTRL-Break is functionally the same as CTRL-C in most places, just harder to type. Windows key-Pause brings up the System Properties applet on most versions of Windows.
I chose to switch to business class internet service after determining that my usage typically exceeds Comcast's monthly consumer bandwidth cap in a any normal five-day period. I was already paying for a faster connection, but they really wanted to penalize me for using it.
What's the point of a 25Mbps download speed if it means I just hit a cap that much faster?
At least for my ISP, business service is about $20/month more expensive, has no caps, restrictions on use, or throttling. If that's the cost to get the service I feel I need, I don't think that's unreasonable. Hopefully that will be an option for other heavy users going forward.
I thought it was totally sweet that Hulu worked under Skyfire on my phone. For the couple weeks that I could do that. I listened to two weeks worth of the Daily Show (also not on Hulu any more) during a long-ish car trip and it was fantastic.
I would expect to see device support, just like Netflix has added device support, for paying customers. We don't all have a PC in our living room to best leverage Netflix (I do and I'm sure a lot of other Slashdotters do too, but probably a lot more people have an Xbox or something).
Also, it kind of sucks that with a 70Mbit connection to the internet at home, hulu can't reliably deliver 480p streaming content to me. I expect that would need to change for paying subscribers, too.
I can get a desktop running Windows in under 15 mi
on
Speed-Assembling Servers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can go from a collection of parts to a desktop running Windows in under 15 minutes using a prepared disk image on a USB stick.
Servers are actually a bit easier to deal with than that, since the layout is more open. On a Tyan GT20 (a barebones server platform) there's probably about three minutes of work involved in sticking in the CPUs, RAM and hard drives. If I had a prepared disk image for one I could probably get one of those running in 10 - 15 minutes. The hardest part of the whole thing would be getting the machine into the rack.
I sent my geek girl a box of comic books, calligraphy and knitting supplies and a Supergirl camisole. Later in the week I'll gift her with Dragon Age Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum through Steam, since I know she wants those games.
She lives a thousand miles away so we don't get to see each other very often, but I know she'll at least be happy with her box of geek goodies.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a similarly vast collection of non-adult content, yet that always passes without comment. They're just bits and bytes. I'm not assigning any particular value to one sort of content versus another.
I don't think it would be that interesting to anyone else.
Digital hoarding. Yes. It's a terrible disease barely kept in check by the constant threat of all the newspapers and empty cereal boxes that you apparently think occupy the remainder of volume in my home.
That was sarcasm.
No, I really don't have abnormally large collections of anything else. I have a half-dozen long boxes of comic books and perhaps a dozen full bookshelves. My home is actually quite tidy. I just have an odd hobby, which is far off-topic anyway. I note that no one has commented on the technical merits of my storage strategy.
As someone with considerably more than 8TB of porn (and a similarly vast quantity of non-porn content, handily digitized and indexed), until recently I used paired servers each holding 12TB of drives in RAID6 with 2 drives as hot spares (64 physical drives on four machines). I used rsync to maintain a second copy of all my data. I've decided that's insane, and I've moved to using a single 36TB FreeBSD server (running zfs for my storage pools) that has enough internal expansion to accommodate another 36TB without getting into external expanders. I've paired that with an LTO4 changer that I bought off Craigslist for around $1900. At the moment I have just enough tapes to have two complete copies of my data. I'd like to get another hundred tapes so I can comfortably manage grandfather-father-son backups and have some spares in reserve.
I really don't have any confidence in common RAID with large arrays of large drives, since the possibility of a hard error during a rebuild or resync is too high for comfort. Large data sets really need to be mirrored and if at all possible stored in some offline fashion. That's really the only path to reliable storage.
My home "test machine" is a Xeon E1220, which ironically is the least expensive (at retail) i7 system by around $80. I stuck 16GB of (admittedly expensive fully buffered) RAM in a Supermicro motherboard and added an IBM ServerRAID M1015 (8 port SAS card that supports 3TB drives, they sell on Ebay for $75 - $100). It all sits in a nice 3U chassis that I've had for years. Most of the hardware in the machine is devoted to running one little FreeBSD VM that supports ZFS for all the drives I have in that machine, but since the RAM/CPU needs of that machine are so small, relatively speaking, the same box is home to a couple full-time Windows Servers and a Centos VM and I'm still only using half the CPU and RAM resources available to that system.
The interesting thing about that setup is that it's really not as ridiculous as it sounds: $200 for the CPU, $150 for the motherboard, $200 worth of RAM.
The thing I use at work for my virtual machine needs uses a couple quad core Xeon 5000-series CPUs and has 8GB RAM. It's an Intel-branded server that I picked up off Craigslist for $250. I use it to run four Server 2003 guests and it's more than adequate for the use it has been given. It's probably a little too loud to leave running in a home (2U servers generally are), but I suspect someone with sufficient motivation could find a workaround for that.
Why keep anything important on a smartphone to begin with?
Yes, it's nice to access my e-mails from months or years ago, and it's handy to have pictures on the SD card, but if you're concerned about privacy, why not set the your phone up to have e-mails forwarded from an account with a password that isn't stored on the phone, and to delete messages shortly after they're read? That's how I manage mail on my phone and it works well enough for my purposes.
I suspect there are similar ways to offload calendar, contact and photos for anyone paranoid enough to need that. If someone snarfed all the data off my phone, they'd get at most 24 hours worth of e-mail and about 30GB of classical music. C'est la vie.
Drives break. Accidents happen. DVDs degrade. Consumer grade storage just isn't a good idea for anything long term.
Pay for Mozy or Crashplan or some other commercial service. Your stuff can go on whatever ridiculous combination of disk arrays and tape backups they use for you and anyone else who is paying the $50 a year or whatever it is to keep your stuff available. This is by far the least hassle of any available option.
So at approximately 21TB of actual disk usage, I'd only be looking at three months of my rent for a year of online storage.
This is why I just bought an LTO changer.
You have a list of evil software companies that doesn't include Adobe or Symantec?
I dunno. I'm one of those Dwarf Fortress people too. It's one thing to die in Nethack because you fell on the dead cockatrice you were holding. It's another thing to play Dwarf Fortress and find out that one of your guys is running around missing an eyelid because of combat damage, or that you've gone an insane, inspired quadriplegic dwarf who keeps trying to sneak out of his bed to go work on whatever the hell it is that's inspiring him to create, so that his caretakers keep having to drag him back.
I've made the observation online many times before, but I consider the time that I Ascended a Wishless Tourist in Nethack a greater personal accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
My home media collection is around 20TB. For the longest time, I was dealing with redundancy by just maintaining a second, synchronized set of file servers. Each server has either a 16 port SAS controller or two 8 port controllers and a total of 16 storage drives in RAID6 including the hot spares. Each machine probably cost me $2500 to set up and I have four of them. And that's with getting the RAID cards and rack chassis from Ebay.
The truth is, the chance of having a non-recoverable error while doing a RAID rebuild is really, disgustingly high. Hopefully I wouldn't run into a scenario in which both servers in a synchronized pair had issues at the same time, but that wasn't giving me warm fuzzies the more I read about the reliability of RAID5/6 for large volumes.
So when it came time for me to upgrade my storage setup, I chose to go a different direction. I bought a lightly used LTO4 changer. Every tape holds 800GB and costs about $20. The tapes can be taken off site (shipped to my parents) and can grow to deal with whatever expansion of storage I make in the future. In the near term I will probably purchase a second LTO drive to store with my tapes, but I expect that I'll be in a much better place for dealing with my needs for at least the next several years.
It's not a solution for everyone, but it was the right move for me.
One of the very few people to put me on her Slashdot enemies list did so because I made a derogatory statement about the length of the HURD development process. In, as I recall, the year 2000 or 2001. It was a running joke at least five years before that.
Way to be timely and relevant, GNU.
Not really. There are 16x10 computer displays out there. They're marketed for professional use while the consumer garbage sticks with the cheaper and lower resolution panels. At sizes above 24", proper computer displays do offer even higher resolution, but since a 32" HDTV is $350 and a 32" computer monitor is more like $2000, it's pretty easy to see why one is a lot more common than the other.
In my experience, the average RMA turnaround time for the four drives I've so far sent back to OCZ is not quite six weeks. It's not just that they die, it's that they die and the after-sale customer service is atrocious.
My single experience with getting an Intel SSD replaced was a three day turnaround from the day the defective unit shipped out.
Just remember, people, that "unlimited" data plans in the US actually cap out at 5GB/month for almost everyone in almost every situation. The only truly un-metered data services I'm aware of are Sprint's plans for phones that offer 4G service or for circumstances where a user was grandfathered in on a contract that offered truly unlimited data service (e.g. Sprint SERO).
I'm utterly unconvinced that "talented" is an appellation I would apply anyone involved in the production of modern popular music.
See subject.
Pause is occasionally useful during PC repair since it'll freeze boot messages on the screen. CTRL-Break is functionally the same as CTRL-C in most places, just harder to type. Windows key-Pause brings up the System Properties applet on most versions of Windows.
I chose to switch to business class internet service after determining that my usage typically exceeds Comcast's monthly consumer bandwidth cap in a any normal five-day period. I was already paying for a faster connection, but they really wanted to penalize me for using it.
What's the point of a 25Mbps download speed if it means I just hit a cap that much faster?
At least for my ISP, business service is about $20/month more expensive, has no caps, restrictions on use, or throttling. If that's the cost to get the service I feel I need, I don't think that's unreasonable. Hopefully that will be an option for other heavy users going forward.
Get a Logitech Keyboard for PS/3, or one of these thingies
I thought it was totally sweet that Hulu worked under Skyfire on my phone. For the couple weeks that I could do that. I listened to two weeks worth of the Daily Show (also not on Hulu any more) during a long-ish car trip and it was fantastic.
I would expect to see device support, just like Netflix has added device support, for paying customers. We don't all have a PC in our living room to best leverage Netflix (I do and I'm sure a lot of other Slashdotters do too, but probably a lot more people have an Xbox or something).
Also, it kind of sucks that with a 70Mbit connection to the internet at home, hulu can't reliably deliver 480p streaming content to me. I expect that would need to change for paying subscribers, too.
I can go from a collection of parts to a desktop running Windows in under 15 minutes using a prepared disk image on a USB stick.
Servers are actually a bit easier to deal with than that, since the layout is more open. On a Tyan GT20 (a barebones server platform) there's probably about three minutes of work involved in sticking in the CPUs, RAM and hard drives. If I had a prepared disk image for one I could probably get one of those running in 10 - 15 minutes. The hardest part of the whole thing would be getting the machine into the rack.
I sent my geek girl a box of comic books, calligraphy and knitting supplies and a Supergirl camisole. Later in the week I'll gift her with Dragon Age Origins and Batman: Arkham Asylum through Steam, since I know she wants those games.
She lives a thousand miles away so we don't get to see each other very often, but I know she'll at least be happy with her box of geek goodies.
I would recommend a Thinkpad (not Lenovo generally, though), simply because everything else is worse in my experience.
Latitudes haven't been all that good in years, and Macbook Pros have god-awful thermal design.