Magtape is the only viable medium for things which are actually "backups" as that term is understood in the professional IT arena. Every other possible medium for backups has faults which cripple it for one or more of the requirements which backups are required to fulfill -- primarily that's length of storage, but there are lot of other fun failure modes.
Sure, spinning magnetic storage, optical media, and flash drives each have some advantages for specific purposes.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
And if you think that's an overly strict requirement, a) you're probably wrong, and b) I can come up with lots more that you won't.
My commercial backup guidelines are these:
You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable.
Only one backup can be on optical media; only one can be on spinning magnetic media, whether it's powered or not (this includes the cloud, and local external HDD backups, whether powered 24/7, alternating, or pulled and shelved).
Flash media is right out, as are SSDs.
I can pull 20 year old DC3000 tapes off my shelf and read them -- as long as I have a SCSI interface for the computer in question.
this is going to be as stupid as Mozilla's plan to rev a new major release of Firefox every 6 weeks.
It's easy to look at this and say "what a great idea"... but the people who do that are, nearly unanimously in my experience, people who are only responsible for 1 or 2 PC.
When you're responsible for 100 or 500 or 20,000, you come back to me and tell me how many more IT people that's going to require you to hir... oh, wait.
> It's easy to blame Microsoft for this, but isn't this really an issue that is intrinsic to all installed applications?
No one read John Carmack's "don't let the client control anything" screed several years back, about how gaming systems cannot let the client code *know* or *control* things, because then it could be replaced with something that would cheat on the user's behalf, by looking around corners for bad guys and such?
This is the same exact thing, as far as I can see...
I've run Zimbra for 3 years now, back to 5.0.9, which I installed for my then employer. The architectural people there have taken, right along, an attitude that I can characterize only as "RFCs? Who cares about those?"
It doesn't handle fixed-pitch well; its editor won't re-wrap (though they might have finally fixed that in 7), it doesn't uknow from RFC 2369 -- in fact, it handles mailing lists poorly in general; notably, you can't change the Reply-To in any way when replying, if you generally want HTML off (as I do), the only way to turn it on is to dive into the Preferences and switch it, then reload; same turning off...
Check for bugs filed on their bugzilla by jra@baylink.com if you want a full list of the ignominy. But in general, I would say: evaluate it pretty thoroughly to see if you can deal with its crap before deploying.
It's *very* pretty. I just don't know if it's worth the trouble.
in all their "Mafia protection racket" analogies, they didn't use the phrase "You gotta really nice lookin' business here", which nearly always precedes "It'd be a shame if something happened to it".
"I think the Internet contains things which are a negative influence on my life, and I haven't the self-control *not to do those things and go those places*."
Or things even worse. You can do this, but you're going to need pretty hefty realtime dust collection; I suppose it's possible that a Rainbow water-curtain vac might be enough, but I'm not sure.
I'll bet someone else will be sure.:-)
And I'm not sure if you can finish off the cut edge of a board to a point where it won't unravel -- or at least, how you would do so.
People *do* do this: I have a favorite notebook whose covers are circuit boards. But it's non-trivial.
I was there, for the STS-132 Tweetup, and it is absolutely incredible.
Nearly 2700 press were badged for this launch; the record was 2707 for STS-1, and they might find they've beaten it when all is said and done.
Shame the press paid no attention to the 100 or so in the middle; perhaps the public would have raised more fuss with its legislators about NASA's miserable budget.
This is possibly the stupidest idea in history. Their stated goal: taking complexity out of time handling code -- *cannot happen*: it will *still* have to account for all the years we did this.
about when it said that the 3.0 Linux kernel release was "merely Linus' preference"; it wasn't. While the code didn't rev, the *kernel release practice did*, and it justified the new version number, even to me--and I'm the one who codified traditional version numbering practice in the Wikipedia article of the same name. It's stuck for 2 years now, so I assume I interpreted it properly.:-)
That said, Ars is wrong here, and so's Mozilla: I *was* IT guy, and had 500 seats to deal with, and they'd be pissing me right off if I was still in that position. I can think of no better way to chase medium to enterprise businesses away than to say "we don't give a fuck about you and your problems"... and that market is probably 30-40% of their marketshare.
Owel; someone will tell them "Oh yeah? Well, fork you!", and the problem will go away.
Because allowing the Skype PtP client on to office computers makes them insecure, and probably uncontrollably violates the Congress firewalls in the process.
Ok, this one wins the prize for smart-ass comeback.
Damn, but I'd forgotten how much fun it was to troll Slashdot.
In fact, my real problem was that a) the new release was so mangled by AP that it was impossible to see what they were *really* trying to do, and b) 2 weeks notice is a bit short.
And, FWIW, I've paid attention to the power grid for considerably longer than 5 minutes. Just not at that level of detail.
Those of us who know and care -- and I don't mean me, I mean people like Dr Rebecca Mercuri, whose postgrad work has been right on this point -- have been trying to get that to happen since, oh, at least 1996 or so.
and doesn't understand what happens when you're even a bunch of *degrees* out of sync, much less a few decihertz. We don't have *near* enough HVDC intertie to make this not matter, and I can't imaging how they think this is gonna work -- nothing at all on NERC's website to say what's *really* gonna happen, either.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I buy this argument; it seems to me to be based on too narrow a view of the universe of different use cases.
I certainly haven't seen *all* of them myself, but in general, I've seen enough to be skeptical of "tape can't do it arguments.
And LTO-10 is 48TB/cart. Uncompressed, I assume.
LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB.
Already announced.
And wouldn't it be interesting to know if that study was based on cartridge count or capacity?
Of *course* the cart count is going down, not *everyone's* data storage needs expand without bounds, and newer larger sizes imply some catch-up.
Magtape is the only viable medium for things which are actually "backups" as that term is understood in the professional IT arena. Every other possible medium for backups has faults which cripple it for one or more of the requirements which backups are required to fulfill -- primarily that's length of storage, but there are lot of other fun failure modes.
Sure, spinning magnetic storage, optical media, and flash drives each have some advantages for specific purposes.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
And if you think that's an overly strict requirement, a) you're probably wrong, and b) I can come up with lots more that you won't.
My commercial backup guidelines are these:
You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable.
Only one backup can be on optical media; only one can be on spinning magnetic media, whether it's powered or not (this includes the cloud, and local external HDD backups, whether powered 24/7, alternating, or pulled and shelved).
Flash media is right out, as are SSDs.
I can pull 20 year old DC3000 tapes off my shelf and read them -- as long as I have a SCSI interface for the computer in question.
GNU tar is great that way.
...every other 911 derivative for the last 50 years.
The original 911 would just swing that engine right around in front if you'd let it.
When did they become mid-engine?
(Oh: I see: *the 980* was mid.)
this is going to be as stupid as Mozilla's plan to rev a new major release of Firefox every 6 weeks.
It's easy to look at this and say "what a great idea"... but the people who do that are, nearly unanimously in my experience, people who are only responsible for 1 or 2 PC.
When you're responsible for 100 or 500 or 20,000, you come back to me and tell me how many more IT people that's going to require you to hir... oh, wait.
No; this is a *great* idea!!!
> It's easy to blame Microsoft for this, but isn't this really an issue that is intrinsic to all installed applications?
No one read John Carmack's "don't let the client control anything" screed several years back, about how gaming systems cannot let the client code *know* or *control* things, because then it could be replaced with something that would cheat on the user's behalf, by looking around corners for bad guys and such?
This is the same exact thing, as far as I can see...
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/quake-cheats.html
Wasn't there any actual *coverage of the case* somewhere on the web that could have been linked to, Ray?
Nobody tell David Hasselhoff, ok?
I've run Zimbra for 3 years now, back to 5.0.9, which I installed for my then employer. The architectural people there have taken, right along, an attitude that I can characterize only as "RFCs? Who cares about those?"
It doesn't handle fixed-pitch well; its editor won't re-wrap (though they might have finally fixed that in 7), it doesn't uknow from RFC 2369 -- in fact, it handles mailing lists poorly in general; notably, you can't change the Reply-To in any way when replying, if you generally want HTML off (as I do), the only way to turn it on is to dive into the Preferences and switch it, then reload; same turning off...
Check for bugs filed on their bugzilla by jra@baylink.com if you want a full list of the ignominy. But in general, I would say: evaluate it pretty thoroughly to see if you can deal with its crap before deploying.
It's *very* pretty. I just don't know if it's worth the trouble.
"Yes".
Pay attention, editors.
in all their "Mafia protection racket" analogies, they didn't use the phrase "You gotta really nice lookin' business here", which nearly always precedes "It'd be a shame if something happened to it".
Nice piece, though, over all.
I don't have a problem with a developer deciding to use names like this for a package, if they want to stick their neck out.
The point here, is apparently that *the developer* wasn't sticking their neck out; someone else did it *for them*. *That*, I have a problem with.
So, y'all people shooting at the name itself? That's a strawman; please look at what's actually offensive here.
"I think the Internet contains things which are a negative influence on my life, and I haven't the self-control *not to do those things and go those places*."
There; FTFY.
Or things even worse. You can do this, but you're going to need pretty hefty realtime dust collection; I suppose it's possible that a Rainbow water-curtain vac might be enough, but I'm not sure.
I'll bet someone else will be sure. :-)
And I'm not sure if you can finish off the cut edge of a board to a point where it won't unravel -- or at least, how you would do so.
People *do* do this: I have a favorite notebook whose covers are circuit boards. But it's non-trivial.
I was there, for the STS-132 Tweetup, and it is absolutely incredible.
Nearly 2700 press were badged for this launch; the record was 2707 for STS-1, and they might find they've beaten it when all is said and done.
Shame the press paid no attention to the 100 or so in the middle; perhaps the public would have raised more fuss with its legislators about NASA's miserable budget.
It'll be awfully hard to fix...
and TFA is apparently only available to Sigma Xi members. Great work there, Slashdot editor.
This has been *progressing*?
This is possibly the stupidest idea in history. Their stated goal: taking complexity out of time handling code -- *cannot happen*: it will *still* have to account for all the years we did this.
And it will break *lots* of stuff.
about when it said that the 3.0 Linux kernel release was "merely Linus' preference"; it wasn't. While the code didn't rev, the *kernel release practice did*, and it justified the new version number, even to me--and I'm the one who codified traditional version numbering practice in the Wikipedia article of the same name. It's stuck for 2 years now, so I assume I interpreted it properly. :-)
That said, Ars is wrong here, and so's Mozilla: I *was* IT guy, and had 500 seats to deal with, and they'd be pissing me right off if I was still in that position. I can think of no better way to chase medium to enterprise businesses away than to say "we don't give a fuck about you and your problems"... and that market is probably 30-40% of their marketshare.
Owel; someone will tell them "Oh yeah? Well, fork you!", and the problem will go away.
Because allowing the Skype PtP client on to office computers makes them insecure, and probably uncontrollably violates the Congress firewalls in the process.
Morons.
And the *best* part of trolling slashdot is watching *nobody* get the right answer.
I didn't have it either, of course, but that's not important right now. Courtesy of a gent on NANOG with better google-fu than me:
http://www.nerc.com/page.php?cid=6|386
and
http://www.nerc.com/files/NERC_TEC_Field_Trial_Webinar_061411.pdf
Ok, this one wins the prize for smart-ass comeback.
Damn, but I'd forgotten how much fun it was to troll Slashdot.
In fact, my real problem was that a) the new release was so mangled by AP that it was impossible to see what they were *really* trying to do, and b) 2 weeks notice is a bit short.
And, FWIW, I've paid attention to the power grid for considerably longer than 5 minutes. Just not at that level of detail.
Those of us who know and care -- and I don't mean me, I mean people like Dr Rebecca Mercuri, whose postgrad work has been right on this point -- have been trying to get that to happen since, oh, at least 1996 or so.
You can see the (total lack of) results, right?
Clearly, whomever thought this was a Pretty Neat Idea hasn't read this:
http://yarchive.net/car/rv/generator_synchronization.html
and doesn't understand what happens when you're even a bunch of *degrees* out of sync, much less a few decihertz. We don't have *near* enough HVDC intertie to make this not matter, and I can't imaging how they think this is gonna work -- nothing at all on NERC's website to say what's *really* gonna happen, either.
Love all the warning, too.