Fire, Flood, Theft, Hardware faulure (esp the RAID controller) RAID IS NOT BACKUP!
Copying it to newer media when hard drives are obsolted is an excellent suggestion but if your serious
about photos lasting 100 years removable media is needed (preferably two copys one kept offsite).
Unfortunatly there are no good domestic backup options, DVD degrate, HDD can fail (even when
powered down), tapes are way too expensive. The Iomega Rev drive looks interesting
but (click) is untested
Perhaps the best suggestion I've seen is effectivly doing a DVD RAID and make a parity disk here and here for details,
I only have one reservation about the suggestion in thoes posts. They propose burning the PAR2
files onto the same DVD I'd be inclined to burn it to a seperate disk but leave the outer sectors of
the data disk blank as the outer edge is often the first part to fail (as the plastic splits apart).
for extra peace of mind reburn (or at least test) the backups every couple of years.
Movies can be "highly intellectual and cultural". Music too. Even food. Computer games are simply nothing to brag about in front of your high profile friends.
Up to now games have been a pretty solo enterprise. One can go to a movie, read a book listen to music
and even go to a restaurant and come away with pretty much the same experence as everyone else, which provides a
basis for discussion and debate.
Games are more polymorphic, each session is different and games are played alone so that experence is limited to you...
Ah! I hear you say What about puzzle and network games? I think your right Puzzle games have the potential to become highbrow (in the 'I can do the Guardian Cryptic Crossword in 20 minutes' way) and perhaps timeless enough to develop a
large enough following to get respect. MMORPGs offer a unified experence which allow meaningful discussion between players
and a market large enough to make catering to 'elite' players who have gone beyond MMORPG drudgery
Are you saying that active entertainment on a TV won't sell?
I understand games consoles are quite popular
TV in the home is essentially radio with pictures. When's the last time you made a
point to listen to a radio program, and only listen to a radio program in your home?
I'd stop everything when I was younger to listen to Royal Canadian Air Farce or my
tapes of Eclectic Circus, but other than that.
Now you really have lost me are you now are you saying that people don't want
to record TV? Don't want to be able to pause a live TV program while they answer the telephone
or see what little Jimmy's crying about?
Computer's can't do that.
I suppose your right computers can't watch the TV for you but they can record it and
timeshift it
Even the most banal of websites requires more of your attention
than a TV show or radio, and then there's gaming, which is a 100% immersive, active experience.
anything that involves reading text of a screen 10 -15 feet away is going to suck... So browsing websites and email
is the least of a Media PC's functions
timeshifting TV and Radio
Acting as a Media Jukebox for organizing, storing and playing MP3, video, photos and DVD images
Play DVDs, CDs etc
Streaming sound and video from the web
Games console
Email would suck but video conferencing would be very nice
Surfing.. perhaps
IMHO the problem is that there just a bit too expensive and there not quite
as good as a set of dedicated devices..... Hmmm thats not it <Deletes next paragraph justifying that statement>.. in the public mindset (and to be honest I'd rather agree) PCs are horrible complex things that
are hard to use and crash all the time. Not like thoes nice consoles are nice and easy you just
plug them in and they work. You can play DVDs on them now, wouldn't it be nice if I could timeshift
TV and stream webradio and TV....
Besides, this being an odd-numbered Star Trek movie, it has every right to be a steaming heap of Ferengi dung and still keep the movies going strong.
The trouble with the odd number trek movies suck rule is that while true it does
not describe the full situation the odd movies suck compaired to the flanking even number
movies which allows the even numbers to also show a steady decline:-
I read awhile back (old wives tale maybe?) that being stabbed while wearing kevlar isn't always going to protect you as the knife does not have to penetrate the kevlar to penetrate the skin, especially cavity areas.
I recall that kevlar vests are not very good at resisting knives. Stab resistant vests are a different
design and use a very fine weave to prevent the knife penetrating (and are not very useful against
bullets) so remember ladies laminate!
How about the fact that at the end now the Cylons control everyone, but they don't just outright kill them and end the show?
Now not only the humans are stupid but either (a) the Cylons are also just as stupid or (b) their 'goal' was never to outright kill humanity (which just changes the premise of the whole show).
I watched the season 1 on DVD and about half way through came to the conclusion that the Cylons were completely
insane by any human standard. The only thing that does make sense is that there
trying to bring the Human Race to God (either by convertiion or vaporization). But the way there doing it is just bonkers.
Cases in point (SPOILERS!)
33 The Cylons jump in 33 minutes after the fleet jumps 236 times this is not a stratagy this is a
big sign saying ambush me!!
Water The Cylons have undetectable agents onboard and what do they do.... blow up the water supply
Any plot line involving Baltar/Number six
After comming to that conclusion the Cylons stopped being an enigma and became a Ohh how are they going to mess
with peoples heads this week I stayed interested but hold on hope of a satifactory conclusion to the series
You might be one of those who could make big money selling drugs. In that case, you could probably do just as well selling realestate and it's a lot safer.
Hmm I could make more money selling realestate, but I think I'll carry on
selling crack to toddlers, at least I get to keep my self respect
As we all know the net upshot of forcing users to change passwords every 90 day easy to remember
passwords and/or writing them down. In this case I think its an even worse policy. If an FBI password is
compremised the worst damage is going to happen within a day or two.
But even if I put all my DRM vigilantism aside, the capacity increase over reg'lar DVDs just doesn't cut it in my pocketbook. In fact, why even write to removable media when a RAID can store oddles more gigs per $?
Fire, flood, theft make a good start.
Then you get onto less likley hardware failure, a bad power supply could take down two
or more disks or perhaps your RAID card fails (but I'm sure you do
have an identical spare card sitting on a shelf). I'll also lump user error under this heading
One "Oops I've trashed the wrong directroy" makes your really apprecieate a good back up system
After hardware failure you get into the realms of
wild speculation, the Doomsday virus could turn up and start flashing BIOS's and wiping hard disks(1)
lighting could strike or some fool thinks an EMP bomb would be fun to set off.
(1) A well written virus could wait till it reproduced before killing its host
and/or trigger when its sure there is nothing out there to infect
If the data is valuable (family photo archive or large music collection)
I'd settle for nothing less than software mirroring HDD backed up by duplicate
DVD one sent offsite
Have there ever been any real 'here is a gallon of gas how far can you go' races?
It would add an interesting extra dimentions to the challange... routefinding would be
critical.
But Feynman would make a great programmer or architect.
Feynman could write the sort of code only a genius could write
groundbreaking, fast, compact, elegent... Thats wonderful......
I once went to a (perl) talk whos thesis was that debugging is harder than coding
so if you were clever when you were coding you are by definition not smart
enough to debug the code. Its even harder to debug someone elses code, you would
need someone much smarter then Feynman to maintain his code base. Feynman would
have a very hard time finding 'bread and butter' coding jobs he would have to be
project leader or nothing.
I've been stuck in that position. I have a PhD. When between Postdoc jobs
I'd had a hard time finding work, even getting shelfstacking work in a supermarket
I would have to lie about my qualification (I have some O levels, no no I don't have
A levels. a degree or a PhD it says Dr on my bank account because its my fist name.....)
I understand the reasons but it did not help me pay the bills:-(
A blog full of half-literate paeans to partying does suggest that you are overeducated and perhaps incompetent.
Smart people often break taboos: Richard Feynman loved strip clubs and Paul Erdös took amphetamines, to name but a couple.
I think your first statement had it right:-
Smart people break taboos, but they cover their tracks
Towering Geniuses can break taboos and they normally have enough reputation to survive any blowback.
Idiots break taboos, post it on MySpace and act suprised when employers don't want to hire a stoner
Most employers don't want to hire people who rock the boat they want warm bodies that
do the job their asked to do. Given the choice of Richard Feynman, a known stoner and a guy in a
smart suit and tie, they will go for the suit and tie almost every time. Feynman would be great to have
round the office playing the bongos and being insightful, but productivity would plumit
and he'd make a rotten DB admin.
2) There are multiple parties, and he is endorsed by all of them. This seems more likely.
This actually happens??? I was guessing it was some sort Rotten Brrough thing. I'm from the UK and the idea that two main patries back the same person is flat out
weard. The US is a big country surely there are enough politicians to go round. If there were a sortage you
could retrain some lawyers....
I recall that there are some states that are so firmly Democrat or Republican that noone bothers fighting
over them.. or even listening to them. It is that the otherside concededs and spends the campaign money
somewhere it 'matters'.
>>A few dollars and a PCR machine, and there's enough DNA to "taint" anything I want.
>>If I already have the DNA, I can frame someone with DNA "evidence" and the current
>>miseducated jury will proclaim the 100% match to be 100% proof.
>Not that simple. For various biochem reasons, it's difficult to PCR amplify more
>than ~10-20 kb (100-1500 kb is a typical rxn), which is tiny compared to the human
>genome size of 3X10^9 bp. Even if you knew which regions to amplify, a countermeasure
>against your attack would be to test for the existence of other random genomic fragments.
>Since you can't know those randomly-chosen regions, you can't know where to amplify,
>and therefore your attack can be detected.
Your quite right, PCR is not suitable for this application however over the last few
years a number of
Whole Genome Amplification protocols and kits have come out. The
QIAGEN REPLI-g kit claims an average product length is typically greater than 10 kb and a yield of 40ug from 0.1ng of template. (never tried it and have no connection with QIAGEN)
I'd never really thought about these kits in this context, its scary... you could amplifiy enough DNA to convict 10000 times over from a single fingerprint using a kit that costs $155. I cannot think of a forensic way to spot this... I think the only tipoff would be overegging
the pudding and using too high a concentration which would raise suspicion in a alert technicion
Whats the point is doing bespoke terrorism? Spending weeks hacking into
the power company and blacking out a city for a few days. Those weeks could be much better spent buying a few good quailty day zero exploits packing them up into nice infectious package and giving it a really nasty payload, say wipe the hard disk and flash the BIOS. Then you can attack every power company at the same time!
Ah I hear you cry really deadly virus never last long in the wild because
they kill their host.... Thats because biological virus can't count. Consider a computer virus that could count the number of hosts its infected and until it has filled its (random) quota, sits back and passes the time adding single bit errors to the text in Word, Excel and Access files.
Its a good thing all the good virus writers are gainfully enployed by the Spammers and Crime syndicates at least its in their interest to keep your PC running.
I find medetating on the Doomsday Virus does wonders for my backup
policy!
b) Warchalking - old hat. Perhaps before it was feasable to simply leave my PDA running as I walk around and report all the AP's it sees this might have been useful.
Warchalking is not so much old hat, as been dead for 4 years... and according to wikipedia
"The symbol is now widely used as a shorthand in logos and advertising" I don't think its possible to get more old and busted (at least without the aid of a truss).
Perhaps, if you're trying to make it look like you know what you're talking about when it comes to fossils, you should learn how to spell "fossil" correctly.
Then wouldn't it be useful for the biologists to define the context for the programmers? It shouldn't be impossible to do so (very hard, I will grant you).
It woudl be Very useful
However taking a programmer with no biological experence, I'd guess it would
take about a years full time study to properly define the context to him/her
and perhaps 3 months (full time) to give them a reasonable working knowledge.
Its easy enough to give the basics (DNA makes RNA makes Protein(1)) its that biology
is wall to wall special cases. Biological systems run the worst spagettee code you can imagine
written in a language thats barely documented(2), written by a developer who is willing to hack the executable, the source code, the compiler, the operating system and in extreme cases the
hardware to get a functional system.
Before this fossel was found there was only one missing link between fish and land animals. Now we have to find a link between fish and Tiktaalik roseae and another between Tiktaalik roseae and Land animals. Every Fossel found makes us more ignorant!
This is clearly why the creationists are right... by ignoring the facts they are clearly less ignorant about evolution than someone who has studied them and therefore must be closer to the truth
Slashdot Mirror
Just buy a network storage device with a RAID
Fire, Flood, Theft, Hardware faulure (esp the RAID controller) RAID IS NOT BACKUP!
Copying it to newer media when hard drives are obsolted is an excellent suggestion but if your serious about photos lasting 100 years removable media is needed (preferably two copys one kept offsite). Unfortunatly there are no good domestic backup options, DVD degrate, HDD can fail (even when powered down), tapes are way too expensive. The Iomega Rev drive looks interesting but (click) is untested
Perhaps the best suggestion I've seen is effectivly doing a DVD RAID and make a parity disk here and here for details, I only have one reservation about the suggestion in thoes posts. They propose burning the PAR2 files onto the same DVD I'd be inclined to burn it to a seperate disk but leave the outer sectors of the data disk blank as the outer edge is often the first part to fail (as the plastic splits apart). for extra peace of mind reburn (or at least test) the backups every couple of years.
Movies can be "highly intellectual and cultural". Music too. Even food. Computer games are simply nothing to brag about in front of your high profile friends.
Up to now games have been a pretty solo enterprise. One can go to a movie, read a book listen to music and even go to a restaurant and come away with pretty much the same experence as everyone else, which provides a basis for discussion and debate.
Games are more polymorphic, each session is different and games are played alone so that experence is limited to you...
Ah! I hear you say What about puzzle and network games? I think your right Puzzle games have the potential to become highbrow (in the 'I can do the Guardian Cryptic Crossword in 20 minutes' way) and perhaps timeless enough to develop a large enough following to get respect. MMORPGs offer a unified experence which allow meaningful discussion between players and a market large enough to make catering to 'elite' players who have gone beyond MMORPG drudgery
Computer = active entertainment.
TV = Passive.
Are you saying that active entertainment on a TV won't sell? I understand games consoles are quite popular
TV in the home is essentially radio with pictures. When's the last time you made a point to listen to a radio program, and only listen to a radio program in your home? I'd stop everything when I was younger to listen to Royal Canadian Air Farce or my tapes of Eclectic Circus, but other than that.
Now you really have lost me are you now are you saying that people don't want to record TV? Don't want to be able to pause a live TV program while they answer the telephone or see what little Jimmy's crying about?
Computer's can't do that.
I suppose your right computers can't watch the TV for you but they can record it and timeshift it
Even the most banal of websites requires more of your attention than a TV show or radio, and then there's gaming, which is a 100% immersive, active experience.
anything that involves reading text of a screen 10 -15 feet away is going to suck... So browsing websites and email is the least of a Media PC's functions
IMHO the problem is that there just a bit too expensive and there not quite as good as a set of dedicated devices..... Hmmm thats not it <Deletes next paragraph justifying that statement> .. in the public mindset (and to be honest I'd rather agree) PCs are horrible complex things that
are hard to use and crash all the time. Not like thoes nice consoles are nice and easy you just
plug them in and they work. You can play DVDs on them now, wouldn't it be nice if I could timeshift
TV and stream webradio and TV....
The trouble with the odd number trek movies suck rule is that while true it does not describe the full situation the odd movies suck compaired to the flanking even number movies which allows the even numbers to also show a steady decline :-
I recall that kevlar vests are not very good at resisting knives. Stab resistant vests are a different design and use a very fine weave to prevent the knife penetrating (and are not very useful against bullets) so remember ladies laminate!
Now not only the humans are stupid but either (a) the Cylons are also just as stupid or (b) their 'goal' was never to outright kill humanity (which just changes the premise of the whole show).
I watched the season 1 on DVD and about half way through came to the conclusion that the Cylons were completely insane by any human standard. The only thing that does make sense is that there trying to bring the Human Race to God (either by convertiion or vaporization). But the way there doing it is just bonkers.
Cases in point (SPOILERS!)
After comming to that conclusion the Cylons stopped being an enigma and became a Ohh how are they going to mess with peoples heads this week I stayed interested but hold on hope of a satifactory conclusion to the series
Vegetarians don't live longer it just seems longer
Hmm I could make more money selling realestate, but I think I'll carry on selling crack to toddlers, at least I get to keep my self respect
As we all know the net upshot of forcing users to change passwords every 90 day easy to remember passwords and/or writing them down. In this case I think its an even worse policy. If an FBI password is compremised the worst damage is going to happen within a day or two.
When I read the headline I was rather hoping someone had done a cool internet model in the style of MONIAC
For some reason that story puts me in mind of the current issue of The Order of the Stick
Fire, flood, theft make a good start.
Then you get onto less likley hardware failure, a bad power supply could take down two or more disks or perhaps your RAID card fails (but I'm sure you do have an identical spare card sitting on a shelf). I'll also lump user error under this heading One "Oops I've trashed the wrong directroy" makes your really apprecieate a good back up system
After hardware failure you get into the realms of wild speculation, the Doomsday virus could turn up and start flashing BIOS's and wiping hard disks(1) lighting could strike or some fool thinks an EMP bomb would be fun to set off.
(1) A well written virus could wait till it reproduced before killing its host and/or trigger when its sure there is nothing out there to infect
If the data is valuable (family photo archive or large music collection) I'd settle for nothing less than software mirroring HDD backed up by duplicate DVD one sent offsite
Have there ever been any real 'here is a gallon of gas how far can you go' races? It would add an interesting extra dimentions to the challange... routefinding would be critical.
Feynman could write the sort of code only a genius could write groundbreaking, fast, compact, elegent... Thats wonderful......
I once went to a (perl) talk whos thesis was that debugging is harder than coding so if you were clever when you were coding you are by definition not smart enough to debug the code. Its even harder to debug someone elses code, you would need someone much smarter then Feynman to maintain his code base. Feynman would have a very hard time finding 'bread and butter' coding jobs he would have to be project leader or nothing.
I've been stuck in that position. I have a PhD. When between Postdoc jobs I'd had a hard time finding work, even getting shelfstacking work in a supermarket I would have to lie about my qualification (I have some O levels, no no I don't have A levels. a degree or a PhD it says Dr on my bank account because its my fist name.....) I understand the reasons but it did not help me pay the bills :-(
Smart people often break taboos: Richard Feynman loved strip clubs and Paul Erdös took amphetamines, to name but a couple.
I think your first statement had it right:-
Most employers don't want to hire people who rock the boat they want warm bodies that do the job their asked to do. Given the choice of Richard Feynman, a known stoner and a guy in a smart suit and tie, they will go for the suit and tie almost every time. Feynman would be great to have round the office playing the bongos and being insightful, but productivity would plumit and he'd make a rotten DB admin.
This actually happens??? I was guessing it was some sort Rotten Brrough thing. I'm from the UK and the idea that two main patries back the same person is flat out weard. The US is a big country surely there are enough politicians to go round. If there were a sortage you could retrain some lawyers....
I recall that there are some states that are so firmly Democrat or Republican that noone bothers fighting over them .. or even listening to them. It is that the otherside concededs and spends the campaign money
somewhere it 'matters'.
Those last words make my blood run cold... how does he do it?
>>If I already have the DNA, I can frame someone with DNA "evidence" and the current
>>miseducated jury will proclaim the 100% match to be 100% proof.
>Not that simple. For various biochem reasons, it's difficult to PCR amplify more
>than ~10-20 kb (100-1500 kb is a typical rxn), which is tiny compared to the human
>genome size of 3X10^9 bp. Even if you knew which regions to amplify, a countermeasure
>against your attack would be to test for the existence of other random genomic fragments.
>Since you can't know those randomly-chosen regions, you can't know where to amplify,
>and therefore your attack can be detected.
Your quite right, PCR is not suitable for this application however over the last few years a number of Whole Genome Amplification protocols and kits have come out. The QIAGEN REPLI-g kit claims an average product length is typically greater than 10 kb and a yield of 40ug from 0.1ng of template. (never tried it and have no connection with QIAGEN)
I'd never really thought about these kits in this context, its scary... you could amplifiy enough DNA to convict 10000 times over from a single fingerprint using a kit that costs $155. I cannot think of a forensic way to spot this... I think the only tipoff would be overegging the pudding and using too high a concentration which would raise suspicion in a alert technicion
Whats the point is doing bespoke terrorism? Spending weeks hacking into the power company and blacking out a city for a few days. Those weeks could be much better spent buying a few good quailty day zero exploits packing them up into nice infectious package and giving it a really nasty payload, say wipe the hard disk and flash the BIOS. Then you can attack every power company at the same time!
Ah I hear you cry really deadly virus never last long in the wild because they kill their host.... Thats because biological virus can't count. Consider a computer virus that could count the number of hosts its infected and until it has filled its (random) quota, sits back and passes the time adding single bit errors to the text in Word, Excel and Access files.
Its a good thing all the good virus writers are gainfully enployed by the Spammers and Crime syndicates at least its in their interest to keep your PC running.
I find medetating on the Doomsday Virus does wonders for my backup policy!
I'm sure the chinese goverment would love to have a WiFi standard that they could easily eavesdrop on
Warchalking is not so much old hat, as been dead for 4 years... and according to wikipedia "The symbol is now widely used as a shorthand in logos and advertising" I don't think its possible to get more old and busted (at least without the aid of a truss).
Is it just me or is this just begging to have someone wander round flashing voting machines to do something useful like play pong?
Congrats!! your post it funnier than mine!
It woudl be Very useful
However taking a programmer with no biological experence, I'd guess it would take about a years full time study to properly define the context to him/her and perhaps 3 months (full time) to give them a reasonable working knowledge.
Its easy enough to give the basics (DNA makes RNA makes Protein(1)) its that biology is wall to wall special cases. Biological systems run the worst spagettee code you can imagine written in a language thats barely documented(2), written by a developer who is willing to hack the executable, the source code, the compiler, the operating system and in extreme cases the hardware to get a functional system.
(1) except RNA can 'make' DNA, RNA can act like a protein (enzyme)
(2) Using language only comprehensible if you know the subject already
Before this fossel was found there was only one missing link between fish and land animals. Now we have to find a link between fish and Tiktaalik roseae and another between Tiktaalik roseae and Land animals. Every Fossel found makes us more ignorant!
This is clearly why the creationists are right... by ignoring the facts they are clearly less ignorant about evolution than someone who has studied them and therefore must be closer to the truth