with the cost of disks what they are, as discussed above, there is no such thing as not being able to afford a "proper" backup process in his case. It sucks to do it as the sysad, but it is doable on his budget. (actually, after one or two nights, if he really is a sysad, he'd have the entire process scripted and debugged, and would be sitting at home drinking a beer while the entire automated process ran at night, so the suckage would be in setting up the scripts)
External TB drives are around $150 bucks. Buy several. Make rotating copies. It's doable on your budget. (We're in the same boat, btw, and that was our solution for the dev machines)
However, the real issue is your employer has decided on the budget, and what you do with it is how well you're protected. Sometimes we don't get a Fibre NAS with remote backup, no matter how much we want it. Sometimes we have to get by with the old rsync, dd, or pure copy or even tar/zip with rotating media. (Anything less is suicide)
To be fair, depending upon which RAID you're using, you can lose 1, 2, or even up to n/2 disks in your arrays and still maintain your data. But that still won't protect you from del * or rm -rf.
I've had RAID 1, and 5 systems up and running in one form or another since 96. I also keep a backup done at least monthly.
I'm looking at moving to RAID 0 for my performance disk, and just a backup drive for storage. Disks these days are fine for file serving in the home. I'm not running a multi-thousand user file system after all.
What changed is that the "old" layout is now gone. It used to be an option, which was great for those of us that preferred the extremely compact look for our main page. Now what used to easily fit on a single screen takes up 3+ screens (stock quotes, weather, fares for example) and the "new" look is more a reminder of the Fisher-Price move with 2K->XP.
What gets me is since this should all be CSS anyways, why they felt the need to destroy their highly useful compact old layout for the new one. Perhaps it's time to apply GreaseMonkey to my.yahoo.com.
It was a decent market until MS screwed WinOS2_32 by requesting memory at the then 2GB limit for Office 95, which effectively removed OS/2 from business consideration as each process was limited to just a paltry 512MB at the time and O95 was not backwards compatible with any previous version of Office. You had to jump through at least 4 hoops to save a document in a previous format, every time. And you had to install a "translator" for O95 that you had to download by going through no less than 6 links on MS's website to get and was "undocumented".
But this is all old news. Let's just hope that Apple and Linux succeed in removing MS as a monopoly. I'd hate to live with the next iteration of Vista as my OS.
Posted from OSX/Ubuntu/CentOS/Fedora, depending on which machine I'm on.
That's overly simplistic. Any interesting application of reasonable complexity can create gains of 100+% in performance with appropriately implemented concurrent design.
That doesn't mean the performance gain is necessary, but it certainly is desired. Think of audio/video encoding, complex modeling, etc.
Try "Visa Debit Card" for kids as an example. I can see the advertising now:
Parents! Don't worry about your child being mugged. Now, with the new "Visa Kids Debit Card [TM]" you have no worries as they will carry no cash. And, their purchases will also be protected with the backing of Visa!
Yep, I can see it already. (And yes, I dislike Debit cards greatly)
A really positive move would be to ban all advertisements targeted at kids. It traps parents into a neverending spending cycle many can barely afford in the first place. Why should marketing experts be allowed direct their expertise in manipulation at the most vulnerable members of society.
Why allow those "vulnerable" members to watch any ad driven TV at all, or at least without running it through your nifty ad filtering MythTV setup or the like, or buying the DVD and ripping it to remove everything but the show?
Seems to work great for my kid, and saves me from at least a majority of the "I want that, can I have that?" series of questions that get the ever predictable "no" answer.
Some people need to seriously take another look at their parenting habits, and maybe remove the TV entirely from their house if this is a problem.
Sweatshops are the most demeaning, soul crushing places imaginable, and people only work there because their options are either that or death. This is no option at all. The existence of the sweatshop economy is the result of foreign investment interests deliberately influencing local politics and economics in such a way that a large pool of otherwise unemployed people is created who thus have no option *but* to work in a sweatshop.
And the other option? Working as a subsistence farmer on a barely arable plot of land with a single bad year of unreliable rain dooming you to starvation is better?
Did you ever stop to wonder why they chose to work in the sweatshop? And once that got started, there's an entire row of economic dominoes that fell in rapid succession that ensures sweatshops continue, because, like it or not, it is better than subsistence farming in many areas of the world and can sustain a larger population.
This doesn't mean sweatshops are "good". But they apparently are better than the alternative.
and that is exactly why people wind up ripping even HD movies. So they aren't forced to watch whatever crap advertising the studios want to force down your throat.
Ummm... not sure what you are talking about, but Office has, and always will be available for the Mac, and most versions other than Office 2007 are emulated in WINE-like projects (such as Cross-Over and such)
yes, it has been available in the Mac, but who wants to run it?
MS Office has sucked worse on each release since the O2K release, which made the single improvement of moving away from the horrible O97 MDI interface.
It's those days when I'm playing Warcraft through wine, listening to streaming radio through Amarok, have 20 windows open behind it, idling a LAMP server for my development projects, running a vent client, some form of news aggregater, pidgin & an e-mail client hooked up to several POP3/IMAP accounts that I am happy I erred on the side of a whole ton of swap space.
Never played Eve. Watched a friend play during work and went, yep, that's about the only way to play that game, let it do all the long term boring crap while you're working with occasional input from you every 15 m or so.
As for server transfers, so you're going to transfer to play with 1 new friend while leaving behind your other 25 or 40 "friends"?
Repetitive math problems are drills, and much like playing piano scales teaches basic techniques.
We already know the basic techniques for any MMO within about 10-20m, depending upon how long it takes to gain the initial abilities to start using all the "basic" versions. As you get higher, all that happens is group dynamics and can you get enough people together long enough and pay enough attention when you get to the point of opening that final door (portal, whatever) to prevent whole party death? The entire thing on a game play level is barely better than the original MUDs almost all MMOs are based on.
If the game is so heavily skewed by stats, perhaps the game itself is flawed?
A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.
The entire concept of realms as blizzard and most others have implemented is flawed at its core. It's the divide via partitioning mechanism to deal with scaling, the simplest solution to that problem and possibly the least conducive to player immersion. (Hi <new friend>, I play <MMO Game> too, want to join my group on <server A>? Darn, you're not on our server? Oh well, talk to you later.)
It depends - what's a "pirate"? It's either grossly overestimated, or, if you redefine "pirate" to the RIAA standards (criminalizing tons of previously accepted legal fair use) then it would be groslly underestimated, as everyone would be a criminal (a good sign that this is not a good definition)
Think about a guy who pirates all of the movies he watches (I know MANY MANY people like this).
So, does that include time-shifting or borrowing? I'm curious. I know only a few, and what's the difference between them and those that utilize a service like Netflix by your definition?
but he would buy *some*, and there's the rub.
You assertion is unfounded and unsubstantiated. Someone so against paying for stuff would probably buy them at flea markets and the like. Still no "loss", unless you've also removed Right of First Sale.
think about how much music you consume, video games, movies... spending $200 on all that stuff per year is pretty little.
What I "consume" (which is also a fallacy, as I don't consume anything, as that implies rendering it unusable in the future) is actually very very little. I could probably get by with $10/year, or less, especially if I engage in content swapping with friends or the market place in general. There is very little new content I "need" to see, as most of it sucks badly these days. Also, with broadcast sources, as bad as they are, I could get more than enough content that my actual consumption could conceivably go down to $0/year, unless you're going to outlaw broadcast content as well.
Your math is terrible. First, you assume that there are 1 million pirates, and that every "pirate" (Arrrr) would be a paying customer if they weren't "pirating" (what about those that borrow CDs and DVDs? Oh noes, the horror!!!)
With math matching yours for accuracy, I deduce a real loss of around $1 due to this "piracy".
Now, the real pirates, on the other hand, are those manufacturing illegal copies of the items in question and selling them to others, resulting in real lost sales, as someone paid X for the illegal product. Even here the assumption that they lost whatever their stated price is ludicrous, as they only lost whatever the illegal content's sale price, as there is no correlation whatsoever that the buyer would have paid more (with the assumption that the sold item sold for less than the asking price - not always the case - see sales of imported anime or HD DVDs....)
Slashdot Mirror
with the cost of disks what they are, as discussed above, there is no such thing as not being able to afford a "proper" backup process in his case. It sucks to do it as the sysad, but it is doable on his budget. (actually, after one or two nights, if he really is a sysad, he'd have the entire process scripted and debugged, and would be sitting at home drinking a beer while the entire automated process ran at night, so the suckage would be in setting up the scripts)
External TB drives are around $150 bucks. Buy several. Make rotating copies. It's doable on your budget. (We're in the same boat, btw, and that was our solution for the dev machines)
However, the real issue is your employer has decided on the budget, and what you do with it is how well you're protected. Sometimes we don't get a Fibre NAS with remote backup, no matter how much we want it. Sometimes we have to get by with the old rsync, dd, or pure copy or even tar/zip with rotating media. (Anything less is suicide)
To be fair, depending upon which RAID you're using, you can lose 1, 2, or even up to n/2 disks in your arrays and still maintain your data. But that still won't protect you from del * or rm -rf.
I've had RAID 1, and 5 systems up and running in one form or another since 96. I also keep a backup done at least monthly.
I'm looking at moving to RAID 0 for my performance disk, and just a backup drive for storage. Disks these days are fine for file serving in the home. I'm not running a multi-thousand user file system after all.
"Safe" production data ...with nightly replays/screenshots ...
Exactly. You make backups, no matter what. Anyone that relies on RAID for backups will get what they deserve, sooner than later.
RAID and SANs are for uptime (reliability) and/or performance. SANs with snapshots and RAID with backups are for data recovery.
Use bookmarks with keywords and enjoy FF goodness.
What changed is that the "old" layout is now gone. It used to be an option, which was great for those of us that preferred the extremely compact look for our main page. Now what used to easily fit on a single screen takes up 3+ screens (stock quotes, weather, fares for example) and the "new" look is more a reminder of the Fisher-Price move with 2K->XP.
What gets me is since this should all be CSS anyways, why they felt the need to destroy their highly useful compact old layout for the new one. Perhaps it's time to apply GreaseMonkey to my.yahoo.com.
USB is an inferior standard, no matter how widely adopted it is for trivial applications like keyboards and mice and 320X200 webcams.
It was a decent market until MS screwed WinOS2_32 by requesting memory at the then 2GB limit for Office 95, which effectively removed OS/2 from business consideration as each process was limited to just a paltry 512MB at the time and O95 was not backwards compatible with any previous version of Office. You had to jump through at least 4 hoops to save a document in a previous format, every time. And you had to install a "translator" for O95 that you had to download by going through no less than 6 links on MS's website to get and was "undocumented".
But this is all old news. Let's just hope that Apple and Linux succeed in removing MS as a monopoly. I'd hate to live with the next iteration of Vista as my OS.
Posted from OSX/Ubuntu/CentOS/Fedora, depending on which machine I'm on.
Sergey and Larry? Cuban? Jobs? The infamous Bill and Chair-Throwing Steve? Ellison?
Ok, I'll admit the last one is stretching things on the famous bit.
That's overly simplistic. Any interesting application of reasonable complexity can create gains of 100+% in performance with appropriately implemented concurrent design.
That doesn't mean the performance gain is necessary, but it certainly is desired. Think of audio/video encoding, complex modeling, etc.
Try "Visa Debit Card" for kids as an example. I can see the advertising now:
Yep, I can see it already. (And yes, I dislike Debit cards greatly)
A really positive move would be to ban all advertisements targeted at kids. It traps parents into a neverending spending cycle many can barely afford in the first place. Why should marketing experts be allowed direct their expertise in manipulation at the most vulnerable members of society.
Why allow those "vulnerable" members to watch any ad driven TV at all, or at least without running it through your nifty ad filtering MythTV setup or the like, or buying the DVD and ripping it to remove everything but the show?
Seems to work great for my kid, and saves me from at least a majority of the "I want that, can I have that?" series of questions that get the ever predictable "no" answer.
Some people need to seriously take another look at their parenting habits, and maybe remove the TV entirely from their house if this is a problem.
Sweatshops are the most demeaning, soul crushing places imaginable, and people only work there because their options are either that or death. This is no option at all. The existence of the sweatshop economy is the result of foreign investment interests deliberately influencing local politics and economics in such a way that a large pool of otherwise unemployed people is created who thus have no option *but* to work in a sweatshop.
And the other option? Working as a subsistence farmer on a barely arable plot of land with a single bad year of unreliable rain dooming you to starvation is better?
Did you ever stop to wonder why they chose to work in the sweatshop? And once that got started, there's an entire row of economic dominoes that fell in rapid succession that ensures sweatshops continue, because, like it or not, it is better than subsistence farming in many areas of the world and can sustain a larger population.
This doesn't mean sweatshops are "good". But they apparently are better than the alternative.
and that is exactly why people wind up ripping even HD movies. So they aren't forced to watch whatever crap advertising the studios want to force down your throat.
Ummm... not sure what you are talking about, but Office has, and always will be available for the Mac, and most versions other than Office 2007 are emulated in WINE-like projects (such as Cross-Over and such)
yes, it has been available in the Mac, but who wants to run it?
MS Office has sucked worse on each release since the O2K release, which made the single improvement of moving away from the horrible O97 MDI interface.
I'd most certainly list it as a bug.
Why does the game publisher think it has any rights at all regarding what I run on my PC?
It's those days when I'm playing Warcraft through wine, listening to streaming radio through Amarok, have 20 windows open behind it, idling a LAMP server for my development projects, running a vent client, some form of news aggregater, pidgin & an e-mail client hooked up to several POP3/IMAP accounts that I am happy I erred on the side of a whole ton of swap space.
It's those days I'm glad I bought 8GB of RAM.
Swap? Yick.
Never played Eve. Watched a friend play during work and went, yep, that's about the only way to play that game, let it do all the long term boring crap while you're working with occasional input from you every 15 m or so.
As for server transfers, so you're going to transfer to play with 1 new friend while leaving behind your other 25 or 40 "friends"?
BTW, you'll note I stated all MMOs are flawed.
Repetitive math problems are drills, and much like playing piano scales teaches basic techniques.
We already know the basic techniques for any MMO within about 10-20m, depending upon how long it takes to gain the initial abilities to start using all the "basic" versions. As you get higher, all that happens is group dynamics and can you get enough people together long enough and pay enough attention when you get to the point of opening that final door (portal, whatever) to prevent whole party death? The entire thing on a game play level is barely better than the original MUDs almost all MMOs are based on.
so you learned to pay attention. Perhaps some of us are capable of that already and the grind puts us to sleep?
Nicely written, and a completely different take on "helper" apps.
If the game is so heavily skewed by stats, perhaps the game itself is flawed?
A bad 70th level player is a bad 70th level player, regardless of whether they used a bot or mindlessly wandered through the same tasks themselves. Going through the same motions as the bot will not necessarily make them a better player.
The entire concept of realms as blizzard and most others have implemented is flawed at its core. It's the divide via partitioning mechanism to deal with scaling, the simplest solution to that problem and possibly the least conducive to player immersion. (Hi <new friend>, I play <MMO Game> too, want to join my group on <server A>? Darn, you're not on our server? Oh well, talk to you later.)
"1 million pirates" is a gross underestimation
It depends - what's a "pirate"? It's either grossly overestimated, or, if you redefine "pirate" to the RIAA standards (criminalizing tons of previously accepted legal fair use) then it would be groslly underestimated, as everyone would be a criminal (a good sign that this is not a good definition)
Think about a guy who pirates all of the movies he watches (I know MANY MANY people like this).
So, does that include time-shifting or borrowing? I'm curious. I know only a few, and what's the difference between them and those that utilize a service like Netflix by your definition?
but he would buy *some*, and there's the rub.
You assertion is unfounded and unsubstantiated. Someone so against paying for stuff would probably buy them at flea markets and the like. Still no "loss", unless you've also removed Right of First Sale.
think about how much music you consume, video games, movies... spending $200 on all that stuff per year is pretty little.
What I "consume" (which is also a fallacy, as I don't consume anything, as that implies rendering it unusable in the future) is actually very very little. I could probably get by with $10/year, or less, especially if I engage in content swapping with friends or the market place in general. There is very little new content I "need" to see, as most of it sucks badly these days. Also, with broadcast sources, as bad as they are, I could get more than enough content that my actual consumption could conceivably go down to $0/year, unless you're going to outlaw broadcast content as well.
Your math is terrible. First, you assume that there are 1 million pirates, and that every "pirate" (Arrrr) would be a paying customer if they weren't "pirating" (what about those that borrow CDs and DVDs? Oh noes, the horror!!!)
With math matching yours for accuracy, I deduce a real loss of around $1 due to this "piracy".
Now, the real pirates, on the other hand, are those manufacturing illegal copies of the items in question and selling them to others, resulting in real lost sales, as someone paid X for the illegal product. Even here the assumption that they lost whatever their stated price is ludicrous, as they only lost whatever the illegal content's sale price, as there is no correlation whatsoever that the buyer would have paid more (with the assumption that the sold item sold for less than the asking price - not always the case - see sales of imported anime or HD DVDs....)