I'd just like to point out that the USA does not always honour those treaties - the ANZUS treaty is technically in abeyance with New Zealand as the USA refuses to politely abide by New Zealand's non-nuclear laws. (The USA military machine is welcome but it may not be nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed).
Also a proportion of population, Nations like Oz and NZ make a greater contribution in terms of either peace-keeping or war-making manpower than the USA.
Debian was the first ever distro I installed - on a 486 DX2 66 with VL-bus graphics. I had to use DPKG for the first time and even compiled the X Window System on it!
This was my first task as a new hire at an ISP, "You see that box of old motherboards and parts? You have to build your own PC and put Debian on it." (Having only recently learned of this Linux thing.) The new people started on the lowest-end machines built by themselves from scratch out of leftover parts. As you worked there you got to get upgrades. A a tough baptism but worth it for the valuable experience gained.
25 years eh? Damn, I feel old, (and very nostalgic).
THANK-YOU to the Debian project and every maintainer and contributor over the last 25 years, you have helped change the world.
There is an ultimate economic problem inherent that could possibly lead to collapse of the current economic system:
In general, business seeks to drive all costs to zero.
Employment is a cost.
Thus, business will seek to drive employment as close to zero as possible.
Problem: Employees=Customers=Taxpayers=Voters=Us.
If there is a rapid decrease in employment, then in the entire consumer-economy (essentially built on short-term lending/consumer debt), there will be massive defaulting on credit (credit-cards, overdrafts, etc.) and shrinking consumer condidence/spending with damage done to business as a result. (So even if you are not directly displaced by AI, large numbers of those who are, may still result in you losing your job or a reduction in your real income over time). Further, the displaced will require either large amounts of training or education, to find new work - but AI may displace that work faster than humans can re-train. Rises in spending to support the unemployed - even as a short-term bridge, are problematic because of reduced levels of tax revenue due to the scale of job losses. This may lead to social unrest, however spending on policing and security will also face the same spending pressures due to reduced tax-take. Place more security in the hands of (cheaper) AI..? Deepen the job losses, rinse, repeat...
On a smaller scale, the mental disconnect between jobs, employees, customers and taxpayers already occurs in the false dicohtomy some businesses make when they go to government for a tax-break/subsidy/handout/corporate welfare, "If you don't, we'll just have to pass the cost on to the consumer.", (which is kind of the point of a proice in the first place). The implied threat being, the consumers are also voters who will punish politicians at the ballot-box for price-rises. Of course the money companies want from Government comes from those same consumers/employees/tax-payers/voters.
Ultimately (if we are to handle this wisely and humanely), Government may have to earn its income from the corporations alone and pay everyone a universal income. Possibly an outcome worthy of Gene Roddenberry's vision. Economically something of a win, in the end, for Marx.
Now, those of a more negatively-minded outlook may also look to the dystopian, mass-extermination memes - the fundamental problem for that is, again, missing the point that customers=people=employees=taxpayers, etc. Mass exterminations would eliminate far too many customers, i.e. the dystopian vision is simply bad for business. Not a lot of point in having a business if you don't have any customers. (A point Rand, with her "Industrialist as God" meme, totally missed the economic fundamental that no industrialist can be a god without customers.) Or, more succinctly, "No man (or his corporation) is an island."
They stop supporting me (Blackberry 10) so I stop supporting them. Not to mention they're not truly secure, vulnerable to the USA's increasingly lunatic and overreaching legislative, executive and judicial branches and value ad revenue over a paid subscription. Besides, it's become increasingly apparent that any centrally-controlled system, (creating a unique account on yet-another-walled-garden command-and-control server), is becoming obsolete in favour of distributed systems like Ricochet.im. WhatsApp is just going to become the dafault IM app for Facebook, so for those of us outside that particular cult, time to find another alternative.
Given that these sorts of events have consequences on a planetary scale and that little things like nation-states mean absolutely nothing if we lose the species, why the hell isn't this an international effort? Why does the USA have to do all the grunt-work? (I'm not a yank BTW). This really is something I could get behind the UN for actually doing something useful lately. (The UN has done SFA of use since eradicating smallpox).
The z30 is the best goddamn phone I've ever owned (and that's been: Motorola (last GSM brick model), Nokia, Motorola, Motorola (RAZR), HTC (Desire) and Samsung (Galaxy).
Basically I got sick of Android never feeling "finished", one annoying thing would get fixed but another introduced, or things that were useful got taken away. Constant bloody change for change's sake. (Don't get me started on grey text on a white background - WTF?)
Then there was feeling like I'd gone back to a Windows ME PC loaded with bloat/crapware and an apparent, "We'll do security last" attitude. I've never trusted Android enough to perform anything financial (like banking) with it. Particularly anything browser-based where the baked-in browsers only get updated with the firmware (i.e. never). Then there's the whole not being able to un-install the vendor or carrier's crapware to save space or bandwith use or to reduce attack surface. The utter lack of regular OS updates for ongoing, evolving security vulnerabilites, because you have to rely on the handset vendor and not Google.
I've used Apple kit and it's OK, (I'm not sure I like the new visual design ethos though) but the growing number of voices beginning to complain about the perceived drop in the quality of the software was off-putting, then there's the whole fashionista-cult-like nature and Jobs-worship amongst Appledom that's more than a little weird for a friggin' phone.
With the BlackBerry 10, I get around two bars signal in places where my HTC got none, the call quality is excellent. I could immediately un-install the bundled Facebook, Twitter and Box and installed (native) ownCloud and LinkedIn apps. I've easily found native apps or web-apps (excellent browser BTW), for everything I already use. Strong encryption, excellent security model and highly granular app-privilege controls, hell I can even un-install the clock app! Oh and the OS has a built-in traceroute and NSlookup app - that got me on geek-factor alone.
The desktop/tablet app "BlackBerry Blend" is like having my own personal cloud, without needing any third-party cloud provider - it just works and is really useful. Then new BBM app combines the best of (old) BBM, Skype, WhatsApp and Snapchat in one place.
My only worry is they might get bought by one of the big three and killed-off in favour of very inferior OS's or Chinese or Korean companies which means two things will probably happen, the security and privacy will go out the window and the elegant and business-like interface and design ethos will go all super-kawaii Hello-Kitty or Samsung/LG soulless conformity.
Yes, I'm evangelising, but what the hell, BlackBerry 10 is bloody awesome and the z30 phone hardware is a delight to use and the finish is excellent. More people need to sign their praises. That and we desperately need an alternative to the American big three (if you count MSFT).
How is this even news? Symform http://www.symform.com/ acheived this commercially ages ago and has even passed from start-up to aquisition (by Quantum http://www.quantum.com/last year. Even better, Symform has either quid-pro-quo or commercial options and doesn't appear to be some dodgy-looking coin-factoring operation.
Therein lies a big part of the problem, why should their be a "side". Science is about the finding of fact and facts don't care what side you're on. You might want to deny that a certain type of virus won't affect you because of your religious belief for example. Problem is, the virus doesn't care, don't have a "side" and will kill you just as well as everyone on the other "side".
People can deny all kinds of things as much as they like, but in the final measure, it doesn't matter squat, the climate will change, you will get lung cancer, HPV will infect you, whatever...
Cost is subject to volume it's also relative. Consider just how overbudget things like the UK's Trident nuclear weapon system is or the JSF for that matter.
It wasn't so long ago that an energy transmission cable was proposed from Iceland to the UK and Continental Europe so that all that geothermal energy could feed the mainland beast. Having flown over that part of the world a fiar bit, let me tell you Iceland is a one hell of lot further than Scotland's minor islands.
Speaking as an Enterprise vendor: 1. Nobody ewver pays list. 2. You aren't just paying for the device, there's a tonne of development going on. One dedupe appliance I worked with had over 120 engineers behind it that all have to be paid, plus every time you put something into the market, you find all kinds of weird-ass coner-cases that have to be diagnosed, debugged and fixed. You have global manufacturing, logistics and 24x7 support infrastructures to pay for. We also try and engineer-in more reliability, redundancy and durability than you can buy off-theshelf. LTO, for example, is *two to three orders of magnitude more reliable* than consumer hard disks.
As LTO can compress (for free) and encrypt (usually licensed) in hardware, I'd rather hope that your NetApp compression (and deduplication) is also free or are you paying for that? Even there you get better reduction ratios for less money if you purchased a dedupe appliance from Quantum, HP or EMC.
Tape is seldom the bottleneck if you have sized it correctly. If the tape is running slow (e.g. an LTO-6 drive running at 60MB/s) then it is the disk array that cannot supply it data fast enough. If the drive is running at 160MB/s then it's maxxing out (assuming you get no compression which today assumes 320MB/s). The vast majority of business arrays are optimised for IOPS and backup is a _sustained_sequential_ workload and once you empty their cache's most arrays just can't keep tape drive buffers stuffed, but few storage admin have the testicular fortitude to admit their big-$ array can't do sustained sequential workloads very well.
One more reason SSD's are such an improvement is they seldom have trouble keeping tape streaming and thus make tape work far better than disk ever could.
Finally, at the hundreds of TB, or in the peta-scale, disk is simply unsustainable at volume, between purchase, licensing, support contracts, power and cooling and generation migrations every 3 to 5 years.
Your home NAS is not the same problem organisations with very, *very* large datasets have to solve and thus very different cost-structures.
As LTO can compress (for free) and encrypt (usually licensed) in hardware, I'd rather hope that your NetApp compression (and deduplication) is also free or are you paying for that? Even there you get better reduction ratios for less money if you purchased a dedupe appliance from Quantum, HP or EMC.
Tape is seldom the bottleneck if you have sized it correctly. If the tape is running slow (e.g. an LTO-6 drive running at 60MB/s) then it is the disk array that cannot supply it data fast enough. If the drive is running at 160MB/s then it's maxxing out (assuming you get no compression). The vast majority of business arrays are optimised for IOPS and backup is a *sequential* workload and once you empty their cache's most arrays just can't keep tape drive buffers stuffed, but few storage admin have the testicular fortitude to admit their big-$ array can't do sustained sequential workloads very well.
One reason SSD's are so good is they never have trouble keeping tape streaming and thus make tape far more reliable than disk.
Finally, at the hundreds of TB, or in the peta-scale, disk is simply unsustainable at volume, between purchase, licensing, support contracts, power and cooling and generation migrations every 3 to 5 years.
Your home NAS and I daresay (what sounds like) your single NetApp NAS, are not the same problems organisations with very, very large datasets have to solve and thus very different cost-structures.
To get a drop-in replacement for an existing tape library so that you don't have to rebuild your entire backup workflow overnight.
If you look at most deduping PBBA's like Quantum's DXi range or HP's D2D, you can see they allow you to emulate a tape library as a *non-disruptive* drop-in replacement and they also let you creat SMb or NFS targets too so as new backup sets are created or as old tape sets expire out of rotation, new backup jobs can be created on the LAN instead.
Don't forget - what works _for_you_ may not work for the hundreds of thousands of other businesses worldwide.
I used to work at an LTO manufacturer and asked why we never drove the older generations down into the SMB space and it is simply this - the components are *really* expensive, the majority of the component cost of the drive is the R/W head, that alone probably accounts for 25% of the drive and you just can't push the price down much further, it costs what it costs.
Also, the HUGE majority of these things go into libraries with hundreds of drives, thousands of slots and robots that can move upwards of 90km per hour.
Several years ago when the overall tape market was declining, this was essentially due to the growth of LTO being masked as it cannibalised all the other tape formats (DAT, DLT, SAIT, et al), the overall number of LTO media shipments has continued to increase, that is, PB's shipped.
Two tape-centric factors are in play; capacities keep getting massively bigger but there are fewer customers that can actually use up all the available capacity. Spooks, arguably, but there are lot fewer intelligence agencies in the world than the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the bulk (around 80 percent) of the global economy. The Entertainment industries sure like LTO, its capaciousness and reliability has proven ideal for archiving the digital masters of their SD/HD/4k/IMAX/onwards and upwards formats. Though again, not that many when compared to the global economy.
The second factor is, everyone's known LTO-7 has been coming for a while and tape purchasing cycles always slow down around the introduction of a new capacity point. Organisations usually skip a generation (people who bought LTO-3, probably skipped four and upgraded to five) and once they do buy a new generation, usually buy a smaller library as they can now store double the capacity in a library half the size (and cost).
Like any tech, once the easy science and engineering is done, the market shakes out and the few reamining players begin to consolidate, usually down to one or two as tape has done, as disk is now doing and as SSD's will do in the next couple of years. Right now the only companies doing fundamental physics and materials research into tape are IBM and Fujifilm. Quantum no longer makes its own drives, HP will not make its own LTO-7, leaving everybody buying off IBM while the long-tail business windows down. IBM has played the same game here thay played with mainframes, they doubled-down and invested in new technology when everyone else was giving up in the face of Windows and PC's. The mainframe busines is still a $2bn per annum business and will remain a significant chunk o' change for many years to come. (Arguably, it's actually growing in some places...) That's a nice business model where all the costs have been sunk and what's left is maintenance margin. Well-played IBM. (As long as IBM's tape business can survive the sinking revenues of it's disk business which it's lumped in with).
Maybe to survive LTO will roll into a proper joint-venture, single manufacturer, where HP, IBM, Quantum and perhaps Oracle, throw in their IP to keep the drive technology best-of-breed and keep their share of that long-tail business. (Don't hold you breath though, too many ego's in that equation). Maybe it'll spin out into a niche business like OpenVMS has.
Given the problems the disk manufacturers appear to be having in shipping their new tech (SMD and HAMR) to the public in volume and the rise of SSD's, given that there is no significant amount of disk in (the massive global) archive, it's likely hard disks will die off well before tape does as it's far easier to swap out todays primary arrays for SSD's than it will be to migrate the mass of archives on tape.
Immigration? Seriously? Puh-lease, go cry to the Native Americans already. How about those "annexed" Hawaiians who then had their land filled up with "immigrants" from the USA until a large enough number of them had moved in to vote for statehood. You worried that's what South Americans might do to your little paradise too? Turnabout's a bitch. Suck it up.
Massive? Well, that's relative. Last time I checked the plan it was most certainly NOT the plan to have a collection of small daemons long-term, many more functions will be rolled into it over time.
"It's not like they would be able to fight it if USA was the same." - Actually it IS the same. Nokia was criticised in Iran's crackdown a while back and people called for aboycott of their products, for having sold cellular network equipment that's lets the government of Iran, track, intercept and listen to calls or data - technology that was put in place when that kit was sold many years ealier in the western world. I used to sell GSM tech over a decade ago in a western nation and even then government was wanting ways in. EVERY government in the world requires this. I've never owned a RIM phone, indeed I work for a competitor of theirs and EVERY manufacturer of cellular tech has to to this. We MUST comply with the law of each nation we do business in. Why is nobody picking on Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson, Apple, Google and a host of others?
This is pretty crap journalisim on Rory Cellan-Jones' part - better would be exposing how all the other manufacturers of networks, management systems and handsets all do this and how it's done every day right here in our own back-yard.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to point out that the USA does not always honour those treaties - the ANZUS treaty is technically in abeyance with New Zealand as the USA refuses to politely abide by New Zealand's non-nuclear laws. (The USA military machine is welcome but it may not be nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed). Also a proportion of population, Nations like Oz and NZ make a greater contribution in terms of either peace-keeping or war-making manpower than the USA.
Debian was the first ever distro I installed - on a 486 DX2 66 with VL-bus graphics. I had to use DPKG for the first time and even compiled the X Window System on it! This was my first task as a new hire at an ISP, "You see that box of old motherboards and parts? You have to build your own PC and put Debian on it." (Having only recently learned of this Linux thing.) The new people started on the lowest-end machines built by themselves from scratch out of leftover parts. As you worked there you got to get upgrades. A a tough baptism but worth it for the valuable experience gained.
25 years eh? Damn, I feel old, (and very nostalgic).
THANK-YOU to the Debian project and every maintainer and contributor over the last 25 years, you have helped change the world.
In general, business seeks to drive all costs to zero. Employment is a cost.
Thus, business will seek to drive employment as close to zero as possible. Problem: Employees=Customers=Taxpayers=Voters=Us.
If there is a rapid decrease in employment, then in the entire consumer-economy (essentially built on short-term lending/consumer debt), there will be massive defaulting on credit (credit-cards, overdrafts, etc.) and shrinking consumer condidence/spending with damage done to business as a result. (So even if you are not directly displaced by AI, large numbers of those who are, may still result in you losing your job or a reduction in your real income over time). Further, the displaced will require either large amounts of training or education, to find new work - but AI may displace that work faster than humans can re-train. Rises in spending to support the unemployed - even as a short-term bridge, are problematic because of reduced levels of tax revenue due to the scale of job losses. This may lead to social unrest, however spending on policing and security will also face the same spending pressures due to reduced tax-take. Place more security in the hands of (cheaper) AI..? Deepen the job losses, rinse, repeat...
On a smaller scale, the mental disconnect between jobs, employees, customers and taxpayers already occurs in the false dicohtomy some businesses make when they go to government for a tax-break/subsidy/handout/corporate welfare, "If you don't, we'll just have to pass the cost on to the consumer.", (which is kind of the point of a proice in the first place). The implied threat being, the consumers are also voters who will punish politicians at the ballot-box for price-rises. Of course the money companies want from Government comes from those same consumers/employees/tax-payers/voters.
Ultimately (if we are to handle this wisely and humanely), Government may have to earn its income from the corporations alone and pay everyone a universal income. Possibly an outcome worthy of Gene Roddenberry's vision. Economically something of a win, in the end, for Marx.
Now, those of a more negatively-minded outlook may also look to the dystopian, mass-extermination memes - the fundamental problem for that is, again, missing the point that customers=people=employees=taxpayers, etc. Mass exterminations would eliminate far too many customers, i.e. the dystopian vision is simply bad for business. Not a lot of point in having a business if you don't have any customers. (A point Rand, with her "Industrialist as God" meme, totally missed the economic fundamental that no industrialist can be a god without customers.) Or, more succinctly, "No man (or his corporation) is an island."
BASIC on a VZ200 with a Z80 processor and (according to the ad), a "whopping" 8kb of RAM. Ah, peek, poke, gosub and goto, sigh...
They stop supporting me (Blackberry 10) so I stop supporting them. Not to mention they're not truly secure, vulnerable to the USA's increasingly lunatic and overreaching legislative, executive and judicial branches and value ad revenue over a paid subscription. Besides, it's become increasingly apparent that any centrally-controlled system, (creating a unique account on yet-another-walled-garden command-and-control server), is becoming obsolete in favour of distributed systems like Ricochet.im. WhatsApp is just going to become the dafault IM app for Facebook, so for those of us outside that particular cult, time to find another alternative.
Given that these sorts of events have consequences on a planetary scale and that little things like nation-states mean absolutely nothing if we lose the species, why the hell isn't this an international effort? Why does the USA have to do all the grunt-work? (I'm not a yank BTW). This really is something I could get behind the UN for actually doing something useful lately. (The UN has done SFA of use since eradicating smallpox).
No, no, you're thinking of Britain, a vassal state of the USA since, oh, probably the Suez crisis, and a good little lapdog it's been ever since.
Yes, voluntarily.
The z30 is the best goddamn phone I've ever owned (and that's been: Motorola (last GSM brick model), Nokia, Motorola, Motorola (RAZR), HTC (Desire) and Samsung (Galaxy).
Basically I got sick of Android never feeling "finished", one annoying thing would get fixed but another introduced, or things that were useful got taken away. Constant bloody change for change's sake. (Don't get me started on grey text on a white background - WTF?)
Then there was feeling like I'd gone back to a Windows ME PC loaded with bloat/crapware and an apparent, "We'll do security last" attitude. I've never trusted Android enough to perform anything financial (like banking) with it. Particularly anything browser-based where the baked-in browsers only get updated with the firmware (i.e. never). Then there's the whole not being able to un-install the vendor or carrier's crapware to save space or bandwith use or to reduce attack surface. The utter lack of regular OS updates for ongoing, evolving security vulnerabilites, because you have to rely on the handset vendor and not Google.
I've used Apple kit and it's OK, (I'm not sure I like the new visual design ethos though) but the growing number of voices beginning to complain about the perceived drop in the quality of the software was off-putting, then there's the whole fashionista-cult-like nature and Jobs-worship amongst Appledom that's more than a little weird for a friggin' phone.
With the BlackBerry 10, I get around two bars signal in places where my HTC got none, the call quality is excellent. I could immediately un-install the bundled Facebook, Twitter and Box and installed (native) ownCloud and LinkedIn apps. I've easily found native apps or web-apps (excellent browser BTW), for everything I already use. Strong encryption, excellent security model and highly granular app-privilege controls, hell I can even un-install the clock app! Oh and the OS has a built-in traceroute and NSlookup app - that got me on geek-factor alone.
The desktop/tablet app "BlackBerry Blend" is like having my own personal cloud, without needing any third-party cloud provider - it just works and is really useful. Then new BBM app combines the best of (old) BBM, Skype, WhatsApp and Snapchat in one place.
My only worry is they might get bought by one of the big three and killed-off in favour of very inferior OS's or Chinese or Korean companies which means two things will probably happen, the security and privacy will go out the window and the elegant and business-like interface and design ethos will go all super-kawaii Hello-Kitty or Samsung/LG soulless conformity.
Yes, I'm evangelising, but what the hell, BlackBerry 10 is bloody awesome and the z30 phone hardware is a delight to use and the finish is excellent. More people need to sign their praises. That and we desperately need an alternative to the American big three (if you count MSFT).
A learned professor called Professor Learned! Ba-dum tish! :D
GNU or Gnome?
How is this even news? Symform http://www.symform.com/ acheived this commercially ages ago and has even passed from start-up to aquisition (by Quantum http://www.quantum.com/ last year. Even better, Symform has either quid-pro-quo or commercial options and doesn't appear to be some dodgy-looking coin-factoring operation.
Therein lies a big part of the problem, why should their be a "side". Science is about the finding of fact and facts don't care what side you're on. You might want to deny that a certain type of virus won't affect you because of your religious belief for example. Problem is, the virus doesn't care, don't have a "side" and will kill you just as well as everyone on the other "side". People can deny all kinds of things as much as they like, but in the final measure, it doesn't matter squat, the climate will change, you will get lung cancer, HPV will infect you, whatever...
Cost is subject to volume it's also relative. Consider just how overbudget things like the UK's Trident nuclear weapon system is or the JSF for that matter.
It wasn't so long ago that an energy transmission cable was proposed from Iceland to the UK and Continental Europe so that all that geothermal energy could feed the mainland beast. Having flown over that part of the world a fiar bit, let me tell you Iceland is a one hell of lot further than Scotland's minor islands.
Speaking as an Enterprise vendor: 1. Nobody ewver pays list. 2. You aren't just paying for the device, there's a tonne of development going on. One dedupe appliance I worked with had over 120 engineers behind it that all have to be paid, plus every time you put something into the market, you find all kinds of weird-ass coner-cases that have to be diagnosed, debugged and fixed. You have global manufacturing, logistics and 24x7 support infrastructures to pay for. We also try and engineer-in more reliability, redundancy and durability than you can buy off-theshelf. LTO, for example, is *two to three orders of magnitude more reliable* than consumer hard disks.
Fine, YOU ship an EMC VNX for $300 and then we can talk.
As LTO can compress (for free) and encrypt (usually licensed) in hardware, I'd rather hope that your NetApp compression (and deduplication) is also free or are you paying for that? Even there you get better reduction ratios for less money if you purchased a dedupe appliance from Quantum, HP or EMC.
Tape is seldom the bottleneck if you have sized it correctly. If the tape is running slow (e.g. an LTO-6 drive running at 60MB/s) then it is the disk array that cannot supply it data fast enough. If the drive is running at 160MB/s then it's maxxing out (assuming you get no compression which today assumes 320MB/s). The vast majority of business arrays are optimised for IOPS and backup is a _sustained_sequential_ workload and once you empty their cache's most arrays just can't keep tape drive buffers stuffed, but few storage admin have the testicular fortitude to admit their big-$ array can't do sustained sequential workloads very well.
One more reason SSD's are such an improvement is they seldom have trouble keeping tape streaming and thus make tape work far better than disk ever could.
Finally, at the hundreds of TB, or in the peta-scale, disk is simply unsustainable at volume, between purchase, licensing, support contracts, power and cooling and generation migrations every 3 to 5 years.
Your home NAS is not the same problem organisations with very, *very* large datasets have to solve and thus very different cost-structures.
As LTO can compress (for free) and encrypt (usually licensed) in hardware, I'd rather hope that your NetApp compression (and deduplication) is also free or are you paying for that? Even there you get better reduction ratios for less money if you purchased a dedupe appliance from Quantum, HP or EMC.
Tape is seldom the bottleneck if you have sized it correctly. If the tape is running slow (e.g. an LTO-6 drive running at 60MB/s) then it is the disk array that cannot supply it data fast enough. If the drive is running at 160MB/s then it's maxxing out (assuming you get no compression). The vast majority of business arrays are optimised for IOPS and backup is a *sequential* workload and once you empty their cache's most arrays just can't keep tape drive buffers stuffed, but few storage admin have the testicular fortitude to admit their big-$ array can't do sustained sequential workloads very well.
One reason SSD's are so good is they never have trouble keeping tape streaming and thus make tape far more reliable than disk.
Finally, at the hundreds of TB, or in the peta-scale, disk is simply unsustainable at volume, between purchase, licensing, support contracts, power and cooling and generation migrations every 3 to 5 years.
Your home NAS and I daresay (what sounds like) your single NetApp NAS, are not the same problems organisations with very, very large datasets have to solve and thus very different cost-structures.
To get a drop-in replacement for an existing tape library so that you don't have to rebuild your entire backup workflow overnight.
If you look at most deduping PBBA's like Quantum's DXi range or HP's D2D, you can see they allow you to emulate a tape library as a *non-disruptive* drop-in replacement and they also let you creat SMb or NFS targets too so as new backup sets are created or as old tape sets expire out of rotation, new backup jobs can be created on the LAN instead.
Don't forget - what works _for_you_ may not work for the hundreds of thousands of other businesses worldwide.
I used to work at an LTO manufacturer and asked why we never drove the older generations down into the SMB space and it is simply this - the components are *really* expensive, the majority of the component cost of the drive is the R/W head, that alone probably accounts for 25% of the drive and you just can't push the price down much further, it costs what it costs. Also, the HUGE majority of these things go into libraries with hundreds of drives, thousands of slots and robots that can move upwards of 90km per hour.
Several years ago when the overall tape market was declining, this was essentially due to the growth of LTO being masked as it cannibalised all the other tape formats (DAT, DLT, SAIT, et al), the overall number of LTO media shipments has continued to increase, that is, PB's shipped.
Two tape-centric factors are in play; capacities keep getting massively bigger but there are fewer customers that can actually use up all the available capacity. Spooks, arguably, but there are lot fewer intelligence agencies in the world than the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the bulk (around 80 percent) of the global economy. The Entertainment industries sure like LTO, its capaciousness and reliability has proven ideal for archiving the digital masters of their SD/HD/4k/IMAX/onwards and upwards formats. Though again, not that many when compared to the global economy.
The second factor is, everyone's known LTO-7 has been coming for a while and tape purchasing cycles always slow down around the introduction of a new capacity point. Organisations usually skip a generation (people who bought LTO-3, probably skipped four and upgraded to five) and once they do buy a new generation, usually buy a smaller library as they can now store double the capacity in a library half the size (and cost).
Like any tech, once the easy science and engineering is done, the market shakes out and the few reamining players begin to consolidate, usually down to one or two as tape has done, as disk is now doing and as SSD's will do in the next couple of years. Right now the only companies doing fundamental physics and materials research into tape are IBM and Fujifilm. Quantum no longer makes its own drives, HP will not make its own LTO-7, leaving everybody buying off IBM while the long-tail business windows down. IBM has played the same game here thay played with mainframes, they doubled-down and invested in new technology when everyone else was giving up in the face of Windows and PC's. The mainframe busines is still a $2bn per annum business and will remain a significant chunk o' change for many years to come. (Arguably, it's actually growing in some places...) That's a nice business model where all the costs have been sunk and what's left is maintenance margin. Well-played IBM. (As long as IBM's tape business can survive the sinking revenues of it's disk business which it's lumped in with).
Maybe to survive LTO will roll into a proper joint-venture, single manufacturer, where HP, IBM, Quantum and perhaps Oracle, throw in their IP to keep the drive technology best-of-breed and keep their share of that long-tail business. (Don't hold you breath though, too many ego's in that equation). Maybe it'll spin out into a niche business like OpenVMS has.
Given the problems the disk manufacturers appear to be having in shipping their new tech (SMD and HAMR) to the public in volume and the rise of SSD's, given that there is no significant amount of disk in (the massive global) archive, it's likely hard disks will die off well before tape does as it's far easier to swap out todays primary arrays for SSD's than it will be to migrate the mass of archives on tape.
Immigration? Seriously? Puh-lease, go cry to the Native Americans already. How about those "annexed" Hawaiians who then had their land filled up with "immigrants" from the USA until a large enough number of them had moved in to vote for statehood. You worried that's what South Americans might do to your little paradise too? Turnabout's a bitch. Suck it up.
Massive? Well, that's relative. Last time I checked the plan it was most certainly NOT the plan to have a collection of small daemons long-term, many more functions will be rolled into it over time.
Pilkington's "Activ" glass will self-clean in the rain. Though with credit to your comment, they recommend hosing it during prolonged dry spells.
This is pretty crap journalisim on Rory Cellan-Jones' part - better would be exposing how all the other manufacturers of networks, management systems and handsets all do this and how it's done every day right here in our own back-yard.
At least on land; a 1000mph car, the Bloodhound SSC FTW!