...are the PRS claiming ownership of children that were conceived during a playback of Barry White's greatest hits? Would they like a cut of the combined wages of a man and his wife who met at a concert? How long until certain sea-mammals are hunted down and killed due to flagrant public performances of the legendary Whale Song Anthems 7?
I have no idea how much coke it must have taken for these people to get such an overblown sense of their own importance, but I'm hoping they carry on. Behaviour like this reminds me of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corp.
Feel your pain on the forward slash issue - in my instance though, it only appears to windows admins when discussing file paths; they're quite happy to say h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash, but tell them to pushd to slash var slash log slash named and they'll go "do you mean forward slash var?" - utterly mind boggling convention doublethink:)
Flare? Never heard of that one. I'd be tempted to believe your tutor is actually a PhD psychology prof with an axe to grind against techies who's trying to prove his thesis that geek types are too gullible to be trusted. That's the only reason I can come up with for inventing needless jargon in this instance at any rate;)
So why not have a "London" and a "London, Ontario"? I thought it was pretty common in english to assign the minor version a secondary title to differentiate it... not to assign every other possible version a secondary title as well. Do americans really say they're going to "Paris, France" for their honeymoon, or do they just assume people will know that no-one would want to go to Texas for a romantic holiday?
It took MS alot of time to resurrect Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Holbein and Rembrandt so they could finally contribute to making the Windows 7 Table Centrepiece a truly worthy work of art fit for the launch parties. Man does that thing look sweet! I hear it took Da Vinci three years just to produce the hand-polymerised arbor-cellulose used for it's sculpted form.
Coming from a company that made heavy use of sharepoint (2003 and 2007 - to be fair 2007 is aeons ahead of 2003 but inherited out projects' terrible design) I can heartily say that the index tool sucks, and the relevance engine is piss poor; no one could ever, ever find anything on the company intranet, and one of the helldesk's most idiotic tasks was keeping a bookmark of all the important sub-sites and documents on the intranet... and all because devs fell for the idiocy of the "don't bother organising it... it'll all be instantly SEARCHABLE... with LASERS!!!!!!!" spiel.
It took a google mini box to make our sharepoint cluster anywhere near usuable. Helldesk calls dropped 15% the week the box went online.
Most people in London are, at best, an hour away from home - on a good day (i.e. not at rush hour, wind in the right direction, sacrificed chicken) I can go door-to-door in 40 minutes, on a bad day (i.e. most of them) the commute takes between 1 and 2 hours. It's not unusual to work until after 7.
People takes changes of clothes with them to work; offices provide showers (in fact, most people I know have spent the night in the office after a night on the sauce). Your destination is probably within a half-hours walk, so you down tools, go for a few drinks and then go to the cinema - infinitely more enjoyable than sweating yourself to death on the tube (spend as little as ten minutes on the city branch of the Northern line to get a feel for what hell is like) only to backtrack as soon as you've got changed at the other end. I don't know anyone in the UK who'd even consider of wasting valuable drinking time by going home, unless it was to bring back some cheap booze into the cinema;)
If you want the lawyers to go for it, throw in an emotional distress claim when the staff demand your laptop and refuse a refund for them making you look stupid in front of your date.
You only have a very narrow field of vision with which you can pick out fine detail; your eye gives you the illusion of hi-res video by jumping about all over the picture very quickly, the jumps usually being based on what the rest of you retina is seeing - movement being a prime candidate for further investigation of course, plus very simple for the eye to process.
Light sensitivity is very easy - actually analysing it in detail is very computationally intensive.
I live and work in London, in the City. At least 50% of the commuters, myself included, use laptops, carry laptop bags and definitely don't take them home before going out (pub: 5 minutes walk away*, home: 90min rush-hour commute away) or, in fact, let them leave our shoulders until we get home. No-one is going to go the the cinema if they ban people from bringing laptops in because they're disgustingly common. No-one I work with is going to let the cinema "look after" laptops for people - my company has some government contracts and, thanks to some idiotic data leaks from some governmental contractors we have company clauses telling us under no circumstances should we let the laptops out of our sight (yes, we have FDE on all laptops as well).
To be honest though, it's a bit of a moot point. None of my circle of friends see going to the cinema as a social event as it's generally cheaper to buy the DVD, a load of booze and fags and a pile of food that it is to see same film at the flicks - think the last film I went to see in the west end cost me ~$25 (a lush theatre, admittedly), but even the shithole odeons cost about $15. Incidentally, Odeon have been doing their best to monopolise UK cinema, and are frequently cunts about it - carpets are often unclean, there's no booze for sale, they'll attempt to confiscate it if you try and bring in your own food (illegal, but most people aren't aware of their rights) to the extent that most places are cinematic no-go areas, with only Picture House and The Prince Charles showing remotely decent films at a reasonable price in comfort and style. Yadda rant yadda:)
* Actually, it's unusual for a pub to be more than 2mins walk away, but hopefully you'll forgive the rounding error
I fully expect humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence will quickly escalate into warfare the likes we've never even dreamed of. Some of the first things they'll receive from us will be the patchy recordings of The Beatles blurted our all over the radio, which they'll have copied and distributed to their scientist caste (the ones with the silly aerials on their heads) for analysis.
As soon as the RIAAKU (Recording Industry Association of All the Known Universe) finds out that their intellectual property has been rebroadcast by the aliens own radio transmitters to a potential audience of billions of trillions (there are alot of stars in the galaxy), the alien race will be sued into oblivion. If they don't die from being forced to forfeit the right to gravity on their planet (due to it being an aiding agent to piracy) they'll be killed by fallout when Britney, aka Space Smallpox, makes its way to their homeworld.
Agreed, I'm a mythtv man myself, and I gave up on the ATI stuff for decent high-end video playback ages ago. Just sad to face the prospect of no good IGP's for my myth boxes.
...that nVidia are at least giong to make a stab at providing graphics-enabled southbridges or something... as for things like HTPC's an Intel CPU + nVidia integrated graphics is brilliant. If I'm in the market that's looking for integrated graphics (in the case of HTPC's, power usage and space considerations) then the GPU is more important than the CPU... and I find myself being pushed to AMD for the whole platform.
Intel is really shooting themselves in the foot with all the bus licensing stuff IMHO. By scaring off nVidia IGP's, they're left with their own mediocre offerings which, in my experience, are vastly inferior even in graphics tasks that don't involve 3D.
If nVidia can supply us with miniscule IGP's-on-a-PCIe-stick-for-a-tenner then great, but their recent developments seem to be pushing themselves into niche applications (bigger and bigger GPU dies primarily) and I'm worried an Intel platform will make me choose between Intel IGP or a power-guzzling graphics card. Heck, pretty much every machine I've built for others in the last five years has come with an ATI or nVidia IGP because I don't know anyone that games.
Disclaimer: I have every type of GPU in my house; I use nVidia IGP's for all my HTPC's since they're the only ones that are consistently good for HD content under both windows and Linux. Intel IGP's suck for video (my X3100 can't keep up with SD x264 scaled over a 1900x1200 screen without tearing and lag) but are fine for my laptops (low power usage preferred), and a mix of ATI and nVidia grpahics cards on the machines that need 3D. I was annoyed enough when nVidia IGP's stopped appearing for AMD boards, but not having them at all will be a serious pain in the arse.
Admittedly, this was only a concept car, but they genuinely thought it'd be possible. Similarly, the batteries in their current state aren't suitable - long life yes, large current no; you'd probably need a battery of a thousand or so cells to equal your average Li-ion mobile. Promising concept for the medium term though.
Despite the colossal way we've advanced in computers over the last ten years, I really really think 16EB really should be enough for anyone until at least 2050...! Surely it'd be more beneficial to tack on additional instructions (e.g. AltiVec-style SIMD ops) to current architectures rather than design a whole new one that we don't remotely have the capability to explore...?
Noooooo! I want to be able to say I have a 23488102 bit OS if that's the size of my bzImage! And once I have 1TB of porn I can call it a 8.79609302*10^12 bit operating system!
Seriously - it's one thing for some IT marketing types not to know that a 128bit OS would need a 128bit processor (which would be a Big Thing, especially if HP were getting back into the market of CPU design and manufacture), but for the submitter and eds to not point it out makes it look a little daft.
Modded funy but, oh god, if you're trying to do anything with one of these servers it's a NIGHTMARE!
We have a bunch of IBM x3650's at work which take an utter aeon to boot. Memory checking (before you get to POST) takes between 2 and three minutes, depending on how much memory there is in the machine. POST takes about five seconds. Then we have to wait for the onboard NICs to do their "do you want to configure my boot ROM?" thing (despite the fact it's disabled in BIOS). Then it takes three minutes (!) for the onboard ServeRAID to initialise - and if we're talking about one of the boxes with an external SAS array, we usually have to wait another minute for the LSI RAID cards to initialise. But the MOST frustrating thing is waiting for POST - you get three minutes of a black screen, and then a five second window (minus, say, a second for the monitor to wake itself up) to press the correct F key to go into the BIOS or boot from USB or whatever... and if you miss that window, you get to do the vulcan nerve pinch and spend ANOTHER three minutes staring at a blank monitor.
People may joke about servers never needing to be rebooted, but they do. And when you're standing in front of the machine trying to do some maintenance (we've had some awful, awful problems with RAID firmwares which have necessitated multiple firmware flashes, and thus reboots), shit like having to wait ten minutes before the OS even begins to load is the sort of bullshit than can turn a "problem no-one noticed" into a major incident. When some intern knocks out the power cables, I don't want the server standing around with the IS dept's balls in a vice because "boot time isn't important", it should be just as big a priority to get server boot times down to a bare minimum as it is to get small boot times on the tiniest, most superficially trendy netnotnitnutnatbooktop.
Rant!
Anyway, fast boots are always good, as long as reliability isn't sacrificed whilst doing so - I'm slavering at the idea of something like EFI replacing the appallingly stone-aged PC BIOS. I'm lucky enough to have LinuxBIOS/coreboot on one of my (ancient) motherboards at home and it's awesome to go from power on to booting within a few seconds.
Sure myself, as when I lived in student digs we'd have endless precessions of TV license people telling us that just because we had a TV we needed a license (not true - any device capable of receiving and displaying TV signals needs a license); we only had consoles and a DVD player hooked up to the thing and the guy admitted we were in the clear. It doesn't stop the license bods getting heavy and issuing warrants to raid your house when Eastenders is on and they're expecting you to be watching it (they do this with people who don't even own TV's), but that's simply because the license gathering arm are stereotypically a bunch of jackbooted yahoos. Alot of them will tell you all sorts of bullshit to trick people into paying up even when they don't legally need to - it literally pays to know your rights.
N.B. now I'm not a penniless student, I have absolutely no qualms about paying the license fee. BBC4 alone is worth it.
P.S. IIRC, Ireland is the country with the license you have to pay if you have any device that could "potentially" receive/display TV signals.
rsync makes it pretty easy to implement a bargain-basement backup system if you're willing to do a bit of hacking around with scripts and soft/hard links. Make your backups into e.g./backups/2009/09/17/* and update the symlink for/backups/latest to point to that dir; when the next backup comes along, use the --link-dest=/backups/2009/09/17/ to hardlink all files that have stayed the same, but copy over the newer versions into your/backups/latest. This way you get a) the absolute minimum space taken up without resorting to snapshots and b) and easy way of looking at and restoring individual files or the whole tree from a given date/time. For bonus points set up a vacuum script that automagically deletes the oldest backups whenever your backup partition gets to 90% full or whatever. Run your set of scripts every hour or so (but don't forget to include lock files/semaphores so you don't end up running nine instances of the script simultaneously).
As far as syncing large amounts of data, firstly use rsync 3 if you can - it's a hojillion times faster with large numbers of files and much easier on your memory. If you're going over the internet, tunnel through SSH using inline compression (if your data is easily compressible that is) - heck, tunnel through SSH on your private network, rsync makes it ridiculously easy. Using this technique I managed to keep a mirror of a 2TB file server over a 2Mbps SDSL link no more than an hour or two out of date.
That's how I remember it working anyway - don't have a box I can try it out on here, but in all honesty rsync and a bit of bash/python/whatever is capable of reproducing all sorts of "enterprisey" backup features for zero cost and almost zero effort (and, I'll almost certainly say, zero approval from your boss). IMHO it's one of the killer apps of UNIX.
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Rsync Overlord Corp, just a satisfied customer;)
I've had a bunch of similar questions regarding explorer (explorer usage in vista was nigh unbearable for me), much like the GP - and believe me, I've not found a single review that covers precise behaviour in explorer, simply because pretty much everyone leaves it at default settings. If I gave a crap about it yet (I'm a "wait until SP1" kinda guy) I'd have found some tin or a VM and installed it, as it is I'm just waiting for what the geeks and guys at annoyances.org have to say about it.
Slashdot Mirror
...are the PRS claiming ownership of children that were conceived during a playback of Barry White's greatest hits? Would they like a cut of the combined wages of a man and his wife who met at a concert? How long until certain sea-mammals are hunted down and killed due to flagrant public performances of the legendary Whale Song Anthems 7?
I have no idea how much coke it must have taken for these people to get such an overblown sense of their own importance, but I'm hoping they carry on. Behaviour like this reminds me of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corp.
Feel your pain on the forward slash issue - in my instance though, it only appears to windows admins when discussing file paths; they're quite happy to say h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash, but tell them to pushd to slash var slash log slash named and they'll go "do you mean forward slash var?" - utterly mind boggling convention doublethink :)
Flare? Never heard of that one. I'd be tempted to believe your tutor is actually a PhD psychology prof with an axe to grind against techies who's trying to prove his thesis that geek types are too gullible to be trusted. That's the only reason I can come up with for inventing needless jargon in this instance at any rate ;)
So why not have a "London" and a "London, Ontario"? I thought it was pretty common in english to assign the minor version a secondary title to differentiate it... not to assign every other possible version a secondary title as well. Do americans really say they're going to "Paris, France" for their honeymoon, or do they just assume people will know that no-one would want to go to Texas for a romantic holiday?
How many other Greenwich's are there at 0 longitude?
It took MS alot of time to resurrect Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Holbein and Rembrandt so they could finally contribute to making the Windows 7 Table Centrepiece a truly worthy work of art fit for the launch parties. Man does that thing look sweet! I hear it took Da Vinci three years just to produce the hand-polymerised arbor-cellulose used for it's sculpted form.
Coming from a company that made heavy use of sharepoint (2003 and 2007 - to be fair 2007 is aeons ahead of 2003 but inherited out projects' terrible design) I can heartily say that the index tool sucks, and the relevance engine is piss poor; no one could ever, ever find anything on the company intranet, and one of the helldesk's most idiotic tasks was keeping a bookmark of all the important sub-sites and documents on the intranet... and all because devs fell for the idiocy of the "don't bother organising it... it'll all be instantly SEARCHABLE... with LASERS!!!!!!!" spiel.
It took a google mini box to make our sharepoint cluster anywhere near usuable. Helldesk calls dropped 15% the week the box went online.
Most people in London are, at best, an hour away from home - on a good day (i.e. not at rush hour, wind in the right direction, sacrificed chicken) I can go door-to-door in 40 minutes, on a bad day (i.e. most of them) the commute takes between 1 and 2 hours. It's not unusual to work until after 7.
People takes changes of clothes with them to work; offices provide showers (in fact, most people I know have spent the night in the office after a night on the sauce). Your destination is probably within a half-hours walk, so you down tools, go for a few drinks and then go to the cinema - infinitely more enjoyable than sweating yourself to death on the tube (spend as little as ten minutes on the city branch of the Northern line to get a feel for what hell is like) only to backtrack as soon as you've got changed at the other end. I don't know anyone in the UK who'd even consider of wasting valuable drinking time by going home, unless it was to bring back some cheap booze into the cinema ;)
If you want the lawyers to go for it, throw in an emotional distress claim when the staff demand your laptop and refuse a refund for them making you look stupid in front of your date.
You only have a very narrow field of vision with which you can pick out fine detail; your eye gives you the illusion of hi-res video by jumping about all over the picture very quickly, the jumps usually being based on what the rest of you retina is seeing - movement being a prime candidate for further investigation of course, plus very simple for the eye to process.
Light sensitivity is very easy - actually analysing it in detail is very computationally intensive.
I live and work in London, in the City. At least 50% of the commuters, myself included, use laptops, carry laptop bags and definitely don't take them home before going out (pub: 5 minutes walk away*, home: 90min rush-hour commute away) or, in fact, let them leave our shoulders until we get home. No-one is going to go the the cinema if they ban people from bringing laptops in because they're disgustingly common. No-one I work with is going to let the cinema "look after" laptops for people - my company has some government contracts and, thanks to some idiotic data leaks from some governmental contractors we have company clauses telling us under no circumstances should we let the laptops out of our sight (yes, we have FDE on all laptops as well).
To be honest though, it's a bit of a moot point. None of my circle of friends see going to the cinema as a social event as it's generally cheaper to buy the DVD, a load of booze and fags and a pile of food that it is to see same film at the flicks - think the last film I went to see in the west end cost me ~$25 (a lush theatre, admittedly), but even the shithole odeons cost about $15. Incidentally, Odeon have been doing their best to monopolise UK cinema, and are frequently cunts about it - carpets are often unclean, there's no booze for sale, they'll attempt to confiscate it if you try and bring in your own food (illegal, but most people aren't aware of their rights) to the extent that most places are cinematic no-go areas, with only Picture House and The Prince Charles showing remotely decent films at a reasonable price in comfort and style. Yadda rant yadda :)
* Actually, it's unusual for a pub to be more than 2mins walk away, but hopefully you'll forgive the rounding error
I fully expect humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence will quickly escalate into warfare the likes we've never even dreamed of. Some of the first things they'll receive from us will be the patchy recordings of The Beatles blurted our all over the radio, which they'll have copied and distributed to their scientist caste (the ones with the silly aerials on their heads) for analysis.
As soon as the RIAAKU (Recording Industry Association of All the Known Universe) finds out that their intellectual property has been rebroadcast by the aliens own radio transmitters to a potential audience of billions of trillions (there are alot of stars in the galaxy), the alien race will be sued into oblivion. If they don't die from being forced to forfeit the right to gravity on their planet (due to it being an aiding agent to piracy) they'll be killed by fallout when Britney, aka Space Smallpox, makes its way to their homeworld.
Agreed, I'm a mythtv man myself, and I gave up on the ATI stuff for decent high-end video playback ages ago. Just sad to face the prospect of no good IGP's for my myth boxes.
Damnit, should have used preview. That should have read "as they've put all current R&D on hold".
That's a different fabrication that was rebutted a couple of days ago. The exiting of the chipset market appears to be real, as they've put .
...that nVidia are at least giong to make a stab at providing graphics-enabled southbridges or something... as for things like HTPC's an Intel CPU + nVidia integrated graphics is brilliant. If I'm in the market that's looking for integrated graphics (in the case of HTPC's, power usage and space considerations) then the GPU is more important than the CPU... and I find myself being pushed to AMD for the whole platform.
Intel is really shooting themselves in the foot with all the bus licensing stuff IMHO. By scaring off nVidia IGP's, they're left with their own mediocre offerings which, in my experience, are vastly inferior even in graphics tasks that don't involve 3D.
If nVidia can supply us with miniscule IGP's-on-a-PCIe-stick-for-a-tenner then great, but their recent developments seem to be pushing themselves into niche applications (bigger and bigger GPU dies primarily) and I'm worried an Intel platform will make me choose between Intel IGP or a power-guzzling graphics card. Heck, pretty much every machine I've built for others in the last five years has come with an ATI or nVidia IGP because I don't know anyone that games.
Disclaimer: I have every type of GPU in my house; I use nVidia IGP's for all my HTPC's since they're the only ones that are consistently good for HD content under both windows and Linux. Intel IGP's suck for video (my X3100 can't keep up with SD x264 scaled over a 1900x1200 screen without tearing and lag) but are fine for my laptops (low power usage preferred), and a mix of ATI and nVidia grpahics cards on the machines that need 3D. I was annoyed enough when nVidia IGP's stopped appearing for AMD boards, but not having them at all will be a serious pain in the arse.
Been there, done that.
Admittedly, this was only a concept car, but they genuinely thought it'd be possible. Similarly, the batteries in their current state aren't suitable - long life yes, large current no; you'd probably need a battery of a thousand or so cells to equal your average Li-ion mobile. Promising concept for the medium term though.
Despite the colossal way we've advanced in computers over the last ten years, I really really think 16EB really should be enough for anyone until at least 2050...! Surely it'd be more beneficial to tack on additional instructions (e.g. AltiVec-style SIMD ops) to current architectures rather than design a whole new one that we don't remotely have the capability to explore...?
Noooooo! I want to be able to say I have a 23488102 bit OS if that's the size of my bzImage! And once I have 1TB of porn I can call it a 8.79609302*10^12 bit operating system!
Seriously - it's one thing for some IT marketing types not to know that a 128bit OS would need a 128bit processor (which would be a Big Thing, especially if HP were getting back into the market of CPU design and manufacture), but for the submitter and eds to not point it out makes it look a little daft.
Modded funy but, oh god, if you're trying to do anything with one of these servers it's a NIGHTMARE!
We have a bunch of IBM x3650's at work which take an utter aeon to boot. Memory checking (before you get to POST) takes between 2 and three minutes, depending on how much memory there is in the machine. POST takes about five seconds. Then we have to wait for the onboard NICs to do their "do you want to configure my boot ROM?" thing (despite the fact it's disabled in BIOS). Then it takes three minutes (!) for the onboard ServeRAID to initialise - and if we're talking about one of the boxes with an external SAS array, we usually have to wait another minute for the LSI RAID cards to initialise. But the MOST frustrating thing is waiting for POST - you get three minutes of a black screen, and then a five second window (minus, say, a second for the monitor to wake itself up) to press the correct F key to go into the BIOS or boot from USB or whatever... and if you miss that window, you get to do the vulcan nerve pinch and spend ANOTHER three minutes staring at a blank monitor.
People may joke about servers never needing to be rebooted, but they do. And when you're standing in front of the machine trying to do some maintenance (we've had some awful, awful problems with RAID firmwares which have necessitated multiple firmware flashes, and thus reboots), shit like having to wait ten minutes before the OS even begins to load is the sort of bullshit than can turn a "problem no-one noticed" into a major incident. When some intern knocks out the power cables, I don't want the server standing around with the IS dept's balls in a vice because "boot time isn't important", it should be just as big a priority to get server boot times down to a bare minimum as it is to get small boot times on the tiniest, most superficially trendy netnotnitnutnatbooktop.
Rant!
Anyway, fast boots are always good, as long as reliability isn't sacrificed whilst doing so - I'm slavering at the idea of something like EFI replacing the appallingly stone-aged PC BIOS. I'm lucky enough to have LinuxBIOS/coreboot on one of my (ancient) motherboards at home and it's awesome to go from power on to booting within a few seconds.
And when the border agent finds the iPod... what then?
"I will remove your iPod from its tiny nano-sheath and push it up your cock. Then I'll plug some speakers up your arse and put it on to shuffle with my fucking fist. Then, every time I hear something that I don't like - which will be every time that something comes on - I will skip to the next track by crushing your balls."
That'd never happen of course - actors in security theatre are well known to be kind, courteous, good humoured and completely without avarice.
Sure myself, as when I lived in student digs we'd have endless precessions of TV license people telling us that just because we had a TV we needed a license (not true - any device capable of receiving and displaying TV signals needs a license); we only had consoles and a DVD player hooked up to the thing and the guy admitted we were in the clear. It doesn't stop the license bods getting heavy and issuing warrants to raid your house when Eastenders is on and they're expecting you to be watching it (they do this with people who don't even own TV's), but that's simply because the license gathering arm are stereotypically a bunch of jackbooted yahoos. Alot of them will tell you all sorts of bullshit to trick people into paying up even when they don't legally need to - it literally pays to know your rights.
N.B. now I'm not a penniless student, I have absolutely no qualms about paying the license fee. BBC4 alone is worth it.
P.S. IIRC, Ireland is the country with the license you have to pay if you have any device that could "potentially" receive/display TV signals.
rsync makes it pretty easy to implement a bargain-basement backup system if you're willing to do a bit of hacking around with scripts and soft/hard links. Make your backups into e.g. /backups/2009/09/17/* and update the symlink for /backups/latest to point to that dir; when the next backup comes along, use the --link-dest=/backups/2009/09/17/ to hardlink all files that have stayed the same, but copy over the newer versions into your /backups/latest. This way you get a) the absolute minimum space taken up without resorting to snapshots and b) and easy way of looking at and restoring individual files or the whole tree from a given date/time. For bonus points set up a vacuum script that automagically deletes the oldest backups whenever your backup partition gets to 90% full or whatever. Run your set of scripts every hour or so (but don't forget to include lock files/semaphores so you don't end up running nine instances of the script simultaneously).
As far as syncing large amounts of data, firstly use rsync 3 if you can - it's a hojillion times faster with large numbers of files and much easier on your memory. If you're going over the internet, tunnel through SSH using inline compression (if your data is easily compressible that is) - heck, tunnel through SSH on your private network, rsync makes it ridiculously easy. Using this technique I managed to keep a mirror of a 2TB file server over a 2Mbps SDSL link no more than an hour or two out of date.
That's how I remember it working anyway - don't have a box I can try it out on here, but in all honesty rsync and a bit of bash/python/whatever is capable of reproducing all sorts of "enterprisey" backup features for zero cost and almost zero effort (and, I'll almost certainly say, zero approval from your boss). IMHO it's one of the killer apps of UNIX.
Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Rsync Overlord Corp, just a satisfied customer ;)
As the wonderful Daily Mash points out;
"Nevertheless it is better to carry the heady stench of the Gaul than expose yourself to the sort of tiny risks that generate gigantic headlines."
I happen think giving George Lucas access to the star wars prequels was a poor design choice :)
I've had a bunch of similar questions regarding explorer (explorer usage in vista was nigh unbearable for me), much like the GP - and believe me, I've not found a single review that covers precise behaviour in explorer, simply because pretty much everyone leaves it at default settings. If I gave a crap about it yet (I'm a "wait until SP1" kinda guy) I'd have found some tin or a VM and installed it, as it is I'm just waiting for what the geeks and guys at annoyances.org have to say about it.