That is a really scary sentence and one that I don't think you've thought through. The purpose of the government is to enforce the laws not to impose the 'will of the people' willy nilly.
And that is also a really scary sentence.
The purpose of a democratic system is, specifically, sovereignty of the people. Certainly, established laws should be followed -- but who writes those laws, and who are they written for? In a properly functioning democratic system, the answer to both is "The People".
That shifts like the wind and is often counter to what needs to be done, should be done and is right to do.
Which is better than what we have now, which is imposing the will of the corporate lobbyists, which is nearly always counter to what needs to be done, should be done, and is right to do.
Look, it's difficult to get a hard drive now less than 80 gigs. Even with an EEE PC, that's still a good 4-8 gigs. Oh noes, 300 megs -- that's enough to hold two Naruto episodes!
If that's what you're wanting, Gentoo isn't going to help you. LFS might, but it'd be kind of pointless -- you'll need much more space to download, compile, unpack, and assemble everything than it would take to simply install that Ubuntu-minimal.
I understand the point is to run a stripped-down system, but as Shikaku says, it's probably a lot of drivers -- in other words, a lot of code you won't necessarily need. The point of this exercise was to have something which would boot quickly and run quickly, not necessarily something that saves you a few megs of disk space.
Windows drivers tend to include far more crap than Linux drivers. Trivial example: Somehow, every printer manufacturer thinks they need their own special, branded, loaded-with-features control panel tab. On Linux, a printer driver is a PPD -- everything else is done in a printer-independent way....On second though, there's 112 megs just in kernel modules on my latest kernel, and it keeps three kernels worth of modules -- there's your 300+ megs right away.
IE6/7 are things you shouldn't need to run often -- last serious web development I did, the serious development was done on Firefox, on Linux/OSX, and tested on Windows/IE7 maybe once a week. When something broke in IE, it didn't take long to fix -- certainly less time than any effort to test in IE throughout the day.
Yes, we used virtualization, but the VMs didn't need to be kept running 24/7.
I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use.
I agree on Gimp. However, OpenOffice has generally been good enough for the few times I've had to use it.
But again, that seems odd -- as a web developer, I've used Google Docs, and haven't even touched that in several months. There just isn't a need for office apps.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list.... I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook.
Outlook is made by Microsoft, who is not particularly friendly towards open source. It's also deliberately incompatible in several ways (see "Halloween Documents"), hooks into all sorts of libraries and other apps... And hey, I don't see it as being high priority. Evolution and friends can be made to talk to Exchange, but there isn't an open source alternative for a WoW client.
WoW, by contrast, is a program which pretty much only needs network, sound, keyboard/mouse, and OpenGL. On top of which, Blizzard has actually worked to patch bugs relating to Wine -- Microsoft, if they could get away with it, would do just the opposite, wouldn't they?
I boot Windows when I want to play Steam games. I boot a VM when I want to test things in IE. That's about it.
joe bloggs who just wants to play his computer game will go "wtf - this just worked when i had windows".
I bought this laptop from Dell. To be fair, it came with Ubuntu, but I then reformatted it with a 64-bit Kubuntu.
There were exactly two things which had to be tweaked for this to work: First, I had to install the gnome-bluetooth package in order to get Bluetooth working. Second, I had to tweak an obscure commandline boot option to make the trackpad work.
I recently installed XP. I had to install around 20 separate drivers, most of which were not available for download from their respective manufacturers' websites. The video card -- nvidia -- was something which Just Worked on Linux, yet could not even be downloaded from nvidia.com for XP.
Fine, so I have to download it from Dell.com, which has drivers for Vista, or Vista. Fuck me.
Finally got on a chat with a Dell support person, who fed me direct URLs to all the drivers.
And I'm not even going to get into the whole AHCI thing, or the activation. Just getting a usable OS was easily a weekend, whereas a Linux livecd pretty much just worked.
I feel that this is the biggest hindrance to widespread adoption of linux.
You'd think so, but it's actually solved -- just buy a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled. Installing an OS is not a task for beginners, no matter what the OS. Running programs compiled for one OS on a completely different one is also not easy.
No, it turns out that no matter how easy it is to install, there are other, large problems, many of them not something the Linux community can solve by itself. For example: How do I stream Netflix movies on Linux? Whose fault is it that I can't?
Or, if you don't like compiling things for days, start with Ubuntu-minimal or Debian, and add packages you need. It will start barely bootable, and it's up to you to install the rest.
Plus it's not actually putting crap into my kernel.
I agree, LUK might be useful in the very rare situation where a Windows driver exists and a Linux driver does not, or a case where I'd rather use a Windows driver.
However, that's incredibly rare, and I would much rather run apps without any kind of kernel hook -- in fact, sandwiched inside an additional layer of emulation, which lets me do things like force them into a desktop window.
I'm not sure if GP is saying this, so I will: I'm not sure where you're getting that 4-second delay from. My Wine does not have it -- apps load as fast or faster than on Windows.
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
More often than "none at all", which is what the OP was asking for.
That's great advice of course:-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties:-(
So encrypt it. Then you have to store your crypto keys somewhere -- but crypto keys are relatively tiny, and if they're sufficiently secure, unchanging. You could, for instance, fill a DVD with copies of the same tarball, of that key, any script you wrote to retrieve the data, and a text file of instructions. Or use Paperdisk.
If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot...
Yes, store it on the NAS, and also on S3, so if the NAS blows up for whatever reason, you have that critical stuff. Remember, this is stuff on the level of "I am not willing to ever lose this."
And S3 has had downtime, but I don't remember it ever losing data. Downtime just means you try again later.
The main reason to not completely trust S3 -- to have your script periodically check it, and maybe to have a NAS of some sort anyway -- is because even if you assume Amazon is trustworthy, anyone who gets a hold of your keys can delete your data -- even you, in a moment of stupidity (think rm -rf/). But then, that's also a reason to not completely trust a NAS.
There's also a lot stuff I don't backup at all... like gigabytes of stuff I got from torrents... If anything happens to those I'll just d/l again what I want at that time.
Right -- my point is, when you ignore everything you can just re-download (but that it might be painful to have to find again), you're left with tiny amounts of data that S3 makes sense for.
password protect the file so only a client with the password can download it.
I don't know of a good way to do that with BitTorrent. Simpler to just encrypt the whole file, so anyone who downloads it is just helping seed, and can't read the file.
That's not unbreakable
With a large enough key, and properly applied crypto, it can be unbreakable until quantum computers become feasible.
As for DHT, I don't see where that's a problem -- trivial to simply disable it, or use a client which doesn't support it.
Casualty \Cas"u*al*ty\, n.; pl. Casualties. [F. casualit['e],
LL. casualitas.]Any injury of the body from accident; hence, death, or
other misfortune, occasioned by an accident; as, an
unhappy casualty.
[1913 Webster]
While it's often used in the context of war, which generally means large numbers of people completely dead, maybe this guy isn't?
when you mention SATA, the old timers will all get nostalgic and go on about tying onions to their belts (which was the fashion at the time). You'll then have to take the decidedly NOT affordable step of having someone build you a one-off SATA controller that can interface with a computer of that time.
This seems unlikely.
First of all, just look at what's happened with IDE -- came out in 1986, lasted until SATA appeared in 2003, at which point many computers still came with IDE instead of SATA, and it's certainly not difficult to find an IDE drive, or a brand new motherboard with IDE built-in.
So, it won't be easy, but you probably can find some old computer which has the correct interface. But how to get it from that old computer to a newer one? It seems incredibly doubtful to me that we'd have completely abandoned Ethernet, or USB...
In fact, that might be the better solution -- USB is ten years younger, but new versions of it keep coming out, and these new versions are always backwards compatible. It'd be slow, but you can plug a USB 1 drive into anything -- including a USB 3 port.
How many of your systems have a floppy interfaces to connect that T3000?
Two out of three. Before I sold the last one, three out of four.
Granted, I don't use a floppy. I kind of wish they'd put something more useful there instead. But people still do use floppy interfaces, and floppy drives. It's still (sometimes) more convenient to put disk drivers (RAID, etc) on a floppy for XP, rather than finding a trusted Windows machine to use nLite on.
Oddly enough, I'd be worse off if it was a SCSI tape system...
There's also the fact that when the first disk fails, someone has to notice, buy a new one, and replace it. This leaves a period during which, in a typical configuration, one more disk failure will obliterate all data. If you don't notice the disk failing, it could be a considerably long period.
So, the additional advantage to Amazon is that it truly is "set it and forget it" -- upload it once, no need to monitor it until you need it.
And yes, there's the possibility of your house burning down. Or getting struck by lightning. Or you spill Mountain Dew on the NAS. Or any of a large number of things.
I would say, prioritize your data. Most of the time, there's a small amount of data which cannot ever ever ever EVER be lost -- stuff like financial history, that book you're writing, etc. Even if you throw in, say,/etc on Linux, it's still a small enough amount of data that it would cost pennies to store on S3.
Put the rest of it -- your porn, whatever -- on that NAS. This is stuff that it would suck to lose, but it's not exactly irreplaceable -- or it is, but you're not willing to pay a premium to protect it.
Unless you are willing to write your own backup scripts, its going to be a headache.
Many of the scripts are written -- I kind of like Duplicity. But I agree, more needs to be done.
Querying S3 for a list of stored files is *very* slow, and you only get 1k results per query.
How slow is "very" slow?
And "only" 1k results -- sounds like you need to reread the API docs, specifically the "prefix" option. If your files are stored hierarchically, you could use a single query to return everything matching a prefix of some path -- when was the last time you had more than 1k files in a single directory?
And that isn't even that limit. From the API docs:
You can iterate through large collections of keys by making multiple, paginated, list requests. For example, an initial list request against the dictionary bucket might only retrieve information about the keys 'quack' through 'quartermaster.' But a subsequent request would retrieve 'quarters' through 'quince', and so on.
In other words: Your complaint is that, if I somehow needed to view more than a thousand items, it would take two HTTP requests. I consider that an acceptable performance hit.
This means you have to index what files you put in S3 in a local db.
*sigh*
Or, you could put them in a DB file -- maybe an sqlite database -- which you store at some preset S3 URL. Or you use Amazon's SimpleDB. No need for it to be local.
Or, as above, you use S3 properly, and you don't have that problem. This post is already too long, or I'd design one right now...
I have around 120 GB of family photos and purchased mp3s that I would like to store. To store 120 GB at.15 per gigabyte/month for 1 year would cost me: $216 (at $18 a month).
True -- and that's just storage. It would also cost you $144 to upload it all, plus a few pennies in requests. And another $244 to download it all.
Still, I absolutely would recommend it in small quantities, for things like financial data, or things which you've created yourself -- in other words, things which would be irreplaceable, and are relatively small. As far as I know, S3 has occasionally been inaccessible, but it's never actually lost data.
However, I would also challenge you to find something with as much redundancy as S3 for the same price. You mention a consumer-targeted app -- do you have one which doesn't require Windows, and also doesn't include vague clauses in their terms of service like "excessive amounts"? It would kind of suck to upload those 500 gigs to the backup equivalent of Comcast.
In particular, modern RSA, even considering future advances, would require fundamentally different technology (quantum computing) to make it feasible.
By "feasible" I mean that if quantum computing doesn't become practical, a 4096-bit RSA key will survive the heat-death of the universe.
Crypto is very, very rarely the weak point. It's almost always how that crypto is used.
And by the way, mods -- blanket statements like the parents' are easy to come up with, and easy to make sound intelligent, but there's no meat to them. It's kind of like the blanket statement of "The only secure computer is one that's not on the Internet." Easy to come up with, sounds reasonable, also entirely wrong.
Re:What you do when you buy a SLR McLaren Mercedes
on
BD+ Successfully Resealed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??
Insurance.
But how is that in any way relevant? The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car. The technology does exist to backup a DVD, and we are prevented from using it for no good reason.
A more relevant question: How do you feel about your brand-new Benz coming with exactly one key? Lose it, and you're SOL -- better buy a new car. Is that reasonable, when it costs them nothing to let you duplicate it?
So if current BR discs are so much more expensive, how much will a BR+ disc be?
You misunderstand. It's not BR+, it's BD+, and it's a more rigorous form of DRM. It has no immediately obvious impact on the price of the discs.
Of course, I am getting really fucking sick of paying money for these companies to pour into research on a technology which is fundamentally, logically impossible, and which if it worked, would be directly contrary to my interests.
I believe Slysoft was using the "oracle" model, which means there essentially has to be a single, central authority, and you do have to keep it proprietary, to make it harder for the MPAA to figure out how to block you.
So you're saying you refuse to buy the DRM'd Blu-Ray format from the MPAA, and boycotting them by buying the DRM'd DVD format from the MPAA?
If they succeed in cracking Blu-Ray, I'll be first in line, at least for rentals. Why not? The only sane alternative is to give up getting movies legitimately at all, and live off ThePirateBay.
the encryption key will be on the hard drive itself, encrypted with a symmetric cipher (and ideally you would have a reasonably strong passphrase committed to memory).
In which case, it's still a passphrase that must be remembered, and typed every boot -- which means there's an incentive for keeping it short and easy to remember.
On GNU/Linux "full disk encryption" requires a small unencrypted partition which contains the kernel and initrd, and initrd has the tools to decrypt the other partition and continue the full booting process.
It's actually trivial to just put/boot on a separate partition. What I used to do is keep/boot on a USB key, without a passphrase -- the assumption being that it was unlikely that both the laptop (in my backpack) and the key (in my pocket) would be stolen at the same time, and that the attacker would figure it out.
This is still better -- if the key is kept in hardware, and the OS never actually gets to see it, there's fewer ways to compromise it -- for instance, stealing it while on, cooling the RAM, swapping it into another machine, and reading the crypto keys straight out of RAM -- and it's also nice for this remote detonation method, which doesn't even require the laptop to be on.
Also, I don't think by "password protected" GP means such weak "encryption" as password protected archives. He probably means either GnuPG-encrypted material, or something that uses equally strong encryption.
Yes, I know -- all of which is moot when the attacker finds something in your temporary files or swap space.
I realize that crypto can be strong. But crypto isn't the weak link, it's either misapplied crypto, or software doing insecure things with the data once decrypted.
That's why I advocate full-disk encryption in the first place -- that way, it doesn't matter how poorly the software is written, as long as it's not actually leaking stuff over the network, the data is safe on disk.
Amazing this got to +5. I don't often say this, but mod parent down!
As is clearly shown here, the disruptive comes from persons who beleive they are so smart that they are not forced to be a teacher, and therefore qualified to tell the teacher what to do.
It's got nothing to do with "believing" they are smarter than the teacher, and everything to do with having actual evidence that the teacher in question is ignorant.
First, here is a fact. Teaching a job, just like those who sit in office doing nothing more than type code on keyboard.
It's not a particularly well-paid job, hence the saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I mean, how hard can it be type random gibberish in a keyboard? Anyone can do it, !.
Your post certainly seems to be trying to prove that point -- however, there aren't very many jobs where you can type "random gibberish". Programming is neither.
How many geeks know how to use every OS, every IDE. How many developers know how to write software without an IDE, or can code direct in assembly. Does that make the developers idiots.
I've used Windows, Linux, and OS X for development. I've only very rarely used an IDE, and I have occasionally played with assembly. It's not that hard.
But that's also not analogous -- I've forgotten everything I ever knew about assembly, but at least I know what it is. I don't know every operating system out there, but if you introduced me to a new one, I wouldn't immediately react with "OMG, this must be illegal!"
Many serious consider Free OS invalid. In is an opinion.
It's an unfounded opinion, with plenty of evidence to the contrary -- but in this case, it was not even an informed opinion.
In most schools, computers are not set up as a redundant array of disposable devices, and if a computer is broken, that generally means several students are denied an education for at least a little while.
Which has exactly what to do with a laptop the child brought in on his own?
And no, nothing so dramatic -- if a computer is broken, it means several students might have to (gasp!) use pencil and paper. They might even learn something about repairing a computer.
While teaching *nix is a lofty goal, i wonder if the organization would be there to fix the machines before the next class came in, or if they would just say, hey it is not my problem, and i don't care if some kids loses an education.
Which has nothing to do with it being unix. Or are you suggesting that Windows is somehow going to have fewer problems?
Even now, there is no acknowledgment of the damage that has been done to the students.
Way to read the article -- and what about the damage which is done to the students by only exposing them to one monopolistic monoculture?
After all, teachers don't go into your lame ass web development operation and tell you to use real tools.
Well, actually, this one kind of did -- in fact, she threatened to call the authorities on him for daring to use and distribute free software.
I realize I'm feeding the troll, but the troll is still modded +5, insightful. Mod parent down!
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That is a really scary sentence and one that I don't think you've thought through. The purpose of the government is to enforce the laws not to impose the 'will of the people' willy nilly.
And that is also a really scary sentence.
The purpose of a democratic system is, specifically, sovereignty of the people. Certainly, established laws should be followed -- but who writes those laws, and who are they written for? In a properly functioning democratic system, the answer to both is "The People".
That shifts like the wind and is often counter to what needs to be done, should be done and is right to do.
Which is better than what we have now, which is imposing the will of the corporate lobbyists, which is nearly always counter to what needs to be done, should be done, and is right to do.
Look, it's difficult to get a hard drive now less than 80 gigs. Even with an EEE PC, that's still a good 4-8 gigs. Oh noes, 300 megs -- that's enough to hold two Naruto episodes!
If that's what you're wanting, Gentoo isn't going to help you. LFS might, but it'd be kind of pointless -- you'll need much more space to download, compile, unpack, and assemble everything than it would take to simply install that Ubuntu-minimal.
I understand the point is to run a stripped-down system, but as Shikaku says, it's probably a lot of drivers -- in other words, a lot of code you won't necessarily need. The point of this exercise was to have something which would boot quickly and run quickly, not necessarily something that saves you a few megs of disk space.
Windows drivers tend to include far more crap than Linux drivers. Trivial example: Somehow, every printer manufacturer thinks they need their own special, branded, loaded-with-features control panel tab. On Linux, a printer driver is a PPD -- everything else is done in a printer-independent way. ...On second though, there's 112 megs just in kernel modules on my latest kernel, and it keeps three kernels worth of modules -- there's your 300+ megs right away.
What's with all animals plants and shit being the same with some irrelevant change here and there?
I believe that's actually covered in the same episode where they explained the humanoids.
IE6/7 are things you shouldn't need to run often -- last serious web development I did, the serious development was done on Firefox, on Linux/OSX, and tested on Windows/IE7 maybe once a week. When something broke in IE, it didn't take long to fix -- certainly less time than any effort to test in IE throughout the day.
Yes, we used virtualization, but the VMs didn't need to be kept running 24/7.
I don't need "A photo editor" and "An office suite", I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use.
I agree on Gimp. However, OpenOffice has generally been good enough for the few times I've had to use it.
But again, that seems odd -- as a web developer, I've used Google Docs, and haven't even touched that in several months. There just isn't a need for office apps.
Now one would think that these major apps would be high on the priority list.... I find it puzzling that Wine can run something like World of Warcraft, but not MS Outlook.
Outlook is made by Microsoft, who is not particularly friendly towards open source. It's also deliberately incompatible in several ways (see "Halloween Documents"), hooks into all sorts of libraries and other apps... And hey, I don't see it as being high priority. Evolution and friends can be made to talk to Exchange, but there isn't an open source alternative for a WoW client.
WoW, by contrast, is a program which pretty much only needs network, sound, keyboard/mouse, and OpenGL. On top of which, Blizzard has actually worked to patch bugs relating to Wine -- Microsoft, if they could get away with it, would do just the opposite, wouldn't they?
I boot Windows when I want to play Steam games. I boot a VM when I want to test things in IE. That's about it.
joe bloggs who just wants to play his computer game will go "wtf - this just worked when i had windows".
I bought this laptop from Dell. To be fair, it came with Ubuntu, but I then reformatted it with a 64-bit Kubuntu.
There were exactly two things which had to be tweaked for this to work: First, I had to install the gnome-bluetooth package in order to get Bluetooth working. Second, I had to tweak an obscure commandline boot option to make the trackpad work.
I recently installed XP. I had to install around 20 separate drivers, most of which were not available for download from their respective manufacturers' websites. The video card -- nvidia -- was something which Just Worked on Linux, yet could not even be downloaded from nvidia.com for XP.
Fine, so I have to download it from Dell.com, which has drivers for Vista, or Vista. Fuck me.
Finally got on a chat with a Dell support person, who fed me direct URLs to all the drivers.
And I'm not even going to get into the whole AHCI thing, or the activation. Just getting a usable OS was easily a weekend, whereas a Linux livecd pretty much just worked.
I feel that this is the biggest hindrance to widespread adoption of linux.
You'd think so, but it's actually solved -- just buy a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled. Installing an OS is not a task for beginners, no matter what the OS. Running programs compiled for one OS on a completely different one is also not easy.
No, it turns out that no matter how easy it is to install, there are other, large problems, many of them not something the Linux community can solve by itself. For example: How do I stream Netflix movies on Linux? Whose fault is it that I can't?
Or, if you don't like compiling things for days, start with Ubuntu-minimal or Debian, and add packages you need. It will start barely bootable, and it's up to you to install the rest.
Plus it's not actually putting crap into my kernel.
I agree, LUK might be useful in the very rare situation where a Windows driver exists and a Linux driver does not, or a case where I'd rather use a Windows driver.
However, that's incredibly rare, and I would much rather run apps without any kind of kernel hook -- in fact, sandwiched inside an additional layer of emulation, which lets me do things like force them into a desktop window.
I'm not sure if GP is saying this, so I will: I'm not sure where you're getting that 4-second delay from. My Wine does not have it -- apps load as fast or faster than on Windows.
Installers do not, in fact, take hours.
no standard way of doing OOP
Really? I was under the impression that not only was there a standard way, but it was lifted from Python.
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
More often than "none at all", which is what the OP was asking for.
That's great advice of course :-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties :-(
So encrypt it. Then you have to store your crypto keys somewhere -- but crypto keys are relatively tiny, and if they're sufficiently secure, unchanging. You could, for instance, fill a DVD with copies of the same tarball, of that key, any script you wrote to retrieve the data, and a text file of instructions. Or use Paperdisk.
If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot...
Yes, store it on the NAS, and also on S3, so if the NAS blows up for whatever reason, you have that critical stuff. Remember, this is stuff on the level of "I am not willing to ever lose this."
And S3 has had downtime, but I don't remember it ever losing data. Downtime just means you try again later.
The main reason to not completely trust S3 -- to have your script periodically check it, and maybe to have a NAS of some sort anyway -- is because even if you assume Amazon is trustworthy, anyone who gets a hold of your keys can delete your data -- even you, in a moment of stupidity (think rm -rf /). But then, that's also a reason to not completely trust a NAS.
There's also a lot stuff I don't backup at all... like gigabytes of stuff I got from torrents... If anything happens to those I'll just d/l again what I want at that time.
Right -- my point is, when you ignore everything you can just re-download (but that it might be painful to have to find again), you're left with tiny amounts of data that S3 makes sense for.
password protect the file so only a client with the password can download it.
I don't know of a good way to do that with BitTorrent. Simpler to just encrypt the whole file, so anyone who downloads it is just helping seed, and can't read the file.
That's not unbreakable
With a large enough key, and properly applied crypto, it can be unbreakable until quantum computers become feasible.
As for DHT, I don't see where that's a problem -- trivial to simply disable it, or use a client which doesn't support it.
Casualty \Cas"u*al*ty\, n.; pl. Casualties. [F. casualit['e],
LL. casualitas.]Any injury of the body from accident; hence, death, or
other misfortune, occasioned by an accident; as, an
unhappy casualty.
[1913 Webster]
While it's often used in the context of war, which generally means large numbers of people completely dead, maybe this guy isn't?
when you mention SATA, the old timers will all get nostalgic and go on about tying onions to their belts (which was the fashion at the time). You'll then have to take the decidedly NOT affordable step of having someone build you a one-off SATA controller that can interface with a computer of that time.
This seems unlikely.
First of all, just look at what's happened with IDE -- came out in 1986, lasted until SATA appeared in 2003, at which point many computers still came with IDE instead of SATA, and it's certainly not difficult to find an IDE drive, or a brand new motherboard with IDE built-in.
So, it won't be easy, but you probably can find some old computer which has the correct interface. But how to get it from that old computer to a newer one? It seems incredibly doubtful to me that we'd have completely abandoned Ethernet, or USB...
In fact, that might be the better solution -- USB is ten years younger, but new versions of it keep coming out, and these new versions are always backwards compatible. It'd be slow, but you can plug a USB 1 drive into anything -- including a USB 3 port.
How many of your systems have a floppy interfaces to connect that T3000?
Two out of three. Before I sold the last one, three out of four.
Granted, I don't use a floppy. I kind of wish they'd put something more useful there instead. But people still do use floppy interfaces, and floppy drives. It's still (sometimes) more convenient to put disk drivers (RAID, etc) on a floppy for XP, rather than finding a trusted Windows machine to use nLite on.
Oddly enough, I'd be worse off if it was a SCSI tape system...
There's also the fact that when the first disk fails, someone has to notice, buy a new one, and replace it. This leaves a period during which, in a typical configuration, one more disk failure will obliterate all data. If you don't notice the disk failing, it could be a considerably long period.
So, the additional advantage to Amazon is that it truly is "set it and forget it" -- upload it once, no need to monitor it until you need it.
And yes, there's the possibility of your house burning down. Or getting struck by lightning. Or you spill Mountain Dew on the NAS. Or any of a large number of things.
I would say, prioritize your data. Most of the time, there's a small amount of data which cannot ever ever ever EVER be lost -- stuff like financial history, that book you're writing, etc. Even if you throw in, say, /etc on Linux, it's still a small enough amount of data that it would cost pennies to store on S3.
Put the rest of it -- your porn, whatever -- on that NAS. This is stuff that it would suck to lose, but it's not exactly irreplaceable -- or it is, but you're not willing to pay a premium to protect it.
Unless you are willing to write your own backup scripts, its going to be a headache.
Many of the scripts are written -- I kind of like Duplicity. But I agree, more needs to be done.
Querying S3 for a list of stored files is *very* slow, and you only get 1k results per query.
How slow is "very" slow?
And "only" 1k results -- sounds like you need to reread the API docs, specifically the "prefix" option. If your files are stored hierarchically, you could use a single query to return everything matching a prefix of some path -- when was the last time you had more than 1k files in a single directory?
And that isn't even that limit. From the API docs:
You can iterate through large collections of keys by making multiple, paginated, list requests. For example, an initial list request against the dictionary bucket might only retrieve information about the keys 'quack' through 'quartermaster.' But a subsequent request would retrieve 'quarters' through 'quince', and so on.
In other words: Your complaint is that, if I somehow needed to view more than a thousand items, it would take two HTTP requests. I consider that an acceptable performance hit.
This means you have to index what files you put in S3 in a local db.
*sigh*
Or, you could put them in a DB file -- maybe an sqlite database -- which you store at some preset S3 URL. Or you use Amazon's SimpleDB. No need for it to be local.
Or, as above, you use S3 properly, and you don't have that problem. This post is already too long, or I'd design one right now...
I have around 120 GB of family photos and purchased mp3s that I would like to store. To store 120 GB at .15 per gigabyte/month for 1 year would cost me: $216 (at $18 a month).
True -- and that's just storage. It would also cost you $144 to upload it all, plus a few pennies in requests. And another $244 to download it all.
Still, I absolutely would recommend it in small quantities, for things like financial data, or things which you've created yourself -- in other words, things which would be irreplaceable, and are relatively small. As far as I know, S3 has occasionally been inaccessible, but it's never actually lost data.
However, I would also challenge you to find something with as much redundancy as S3 for the same price. You mention a consumer-targeted app -- do you have one which doesn't require Windows, and also doesn't include vague clauses in their terms of service like "excessive amounts"? It would kind of suck to upload those 500 gigs to the backup equivalent of Comcast.
It actually kind of does.
In particular, modern RSA, even considering future advances, would require fundamentally different technology (quantum computing) to make it feasible.
By "feasible" I mean that if quantum computing doesn't become practical, a 4096-bit RSA key will survive the heat-death of the universe.
Crypto is very, very rarely the weak point. It's almost always how that crypto is used.
And by the way, mods -- blanket statements like the parents' are easy to come up with, and easy to make sound intelligent, but there's no meat to them. It's kind of like the blanket statement of "The only secure computer is one that's not on the Internet." Easy to come up with, sounds reasonable, also entirely wrong.
How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??
Insurance.
But how is that in any way relevant? The technology doesn't yet exist to backup a car. The technology does exist to backup a DVD, and we are prevented from using it for no good reason.
A more relevant question: How do you feel about your brand-new Benz coming with exactly one key? Lose it, and you're SOL -- better buy a new car. Is that reasonable, when it costs them nothing to let you duplicate it?
So if current BR discs are so much more expensive, how much will a BR+ disc be?
You misunderstand. It's not BR+, it's BD+, and it's a more rigorous form of DRM. It has no immediately obvious impact on the price of the discs.
Of course, I am getting really fucking sick of paying money for these companies to pour into research on a technology which is fundamentally, logically impossible, and which if it worked, would be directly contrary to my interests.
I believe Slysoft was using the "oracle" model, which means there essentially has to be a single, central authority, and you do have to keep it proprietary, to make it harder for the MPAA to figure out how to block you.
So you're saying you refuse to buy the DRM'd Blu-Ray format from the MPAA, and boycotting them by buying the DRM'd DVD format from the MPAA?
If they succeed in cracking Blu-Ray, I'll be first in line, at least for rentals. Why not? The only sane alternative is to give up getting movies legitimately at all, and live off ThePirateBay.
(provided by Windows Services for Unix)
And therein lies the problem. How do I get that on a typical user's machine?
the encryption key will be on the hard drive itself, encrypted with a symmetric cipher (and ideally you would have a reasonably strong passphrase committed to memory).
In which case, it's still a passphrase that must be remembered, and typed every boot -- which means there's an incentive for keeping it short and easy to remember.
On GNU/Linux "full disk encryption" requires a small unencrypted partition which contains the kernel and initrd, and initrd has the tools to decrypt the other partition and continue the full booting process.
It's actually trivial to just put /boot on a separate partition. What I used to do is keep /boot on a USB key, without a passphrase -- the assumption being that it was unlikely that both the laptop (in my backpack) and the key (in my pocket) would be stolen at the same time, and that the attacker would figure it out.
This is still better -- if the key is kept in hardware, and the OS never actually gets to see it, there's fewer ways to compromise it -- for instance, stealing it while on, cooling the RAM, swapping it into another machine, and reading the crypto keys straight out of RAM -- and it's also nice for this remote detonation method, which doesn't even require the laptop to be on.
Also, I don't think by "password protected" GP means such weak "encryption" as password protected archives. He probably means either GnuPG-encrypted material, or something that uses equally strong encryption.
Yes, I know -- all of which is moot when the attacker finds something in your temporary files or swap space.
I realize that crypto can be strong. But crypto isn't the weak link, it's either misapplied crypto, or software doing insecure things with the data once decrypted.
That's why I advocate full-disk encryption in the first place -- that way, it doesn't matter how poorly the software is written, as long as it's not actually leaking stuff over the network, the data is safe on disk.
Amazing this got to +5. I don't often say this, but mod parent down!
As is clearly shown here, the disruptive comes from persons who beleive they are so smart that they are not forced to be a teacher, and therefore qualified to tell the teacher what to do.
It's got nothing to do with "believing" they are smarter than the teacher, and everything to do with having actual evidence that the teacher in question is ignorant.
First, here is a fact. Teaching a job, just like those who sit in office doing nothing more than type code on keyboard.
It's not a particularly well-paid job, hence the saying, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I mean, how hard can it be type random gibberish in a keyboard? Anyone can do it, !.
Your post certainly seems to be trying to prove that point -- however, there aren't very many jobs where you can type "random gibberish". Programming is neither.
How many geeks know how to use every OS, every IDE. How many developers know how to write software without an IDE, or can code direct in assembly. Does that make the developers idiots.
I've used Windows, Linux, and OS X for development. I've only very rarely used an IDE, and I have occasionally played with assembly. It's not that hard.
But that's also not analogous -- I've forgotten everything I ever knew about assembly, but at least I know what it is. I don't know every operating system out there, but if you introduced me to a new one, I wouldn't immediately react with "OMG, this must be illegal!"
Many serious consider Free OS invalid. In is an opinion.
It's an unfounded opinion, with plenty of evidence to the contrary -- but in this case, it was not even an informed opinion.
In most schools, computers are not set up as a redundant array of disposable devices, and if a computer is broken, that generally means several students are denied an education for at least a little while.
Which has exactly what to do with a laptop the child brought in on his own?
And no, nothing so dramatic -- if a computer is broken, it means several students might have to (gasp!) use pencil and paper. They might even learn something about repairing a computer.
While teaching *nix is a lofty goal, i wonder if the organization would be there to fix the machines before the next class came in, or if they would just say, hey it is not my problem, and i don't care if some kids loses an education.
Which has nothing to do with it being unix. Or are you suggesting that Windows is somehow going to have fewer problems?
Even now, there is no acknowledgment of the damage that has been done to the students.
Way to read the article -- and what about the damage which is done to the students by only exposing them to one monopolistic monoculture?
After all, teachers don't go into your lame ass web development operation and tell you to use real tools.
Well, actually, this one kind of did -- in fact, she threatened to call the authorities on him for daring to use and distribute free software.
I realize I'm feeding the troll, but the troll is still modded +5, insightful. Mod parent down!