The real FUD statement was when he talked about a financial house, basing an internal sytem on some GPL stuff, being faced with the issue of having to GPL their internal project.
Um... only if they want to sell it. Yes? Internal projects, by definition, is not software that gets distributed.
I'll admin that the GPL page is not exact on what constitutes distribution. Or does it?
Mozilla 1.4 was a memory hog... with either a memory leak, or just the tendancy to gobble up more and more the longer it was open. Since I usually only reboot my WinXP work machine about once every week or two this quickly became a PITA (and I have 512Mb).
The answer? Switched to Firebird 0.7. It uses a heck of a lot less memory then Mozilla 1.4 and is just as stable. (I usually have 3-5 browser windows open, with 5-10 tabs in each window.)
I saw Christmas decorations up a few weeks *prior* to Halloween.
(sigh) I remember when the earliest that you'd see Christmas decorations was the day after Thanksgiving, when all of the shops would spruce up overnight for Black Friday.
I live in the Northeast US, and most roads are barely wide enough for 2 lanes and have no shoulder at all. Or, if you're in town, the roads are just wide enough for 2 lanes and then they put parking down both sides of the street.
The Netherlands was probably the closest to biking Nirvana that I've seen yet. Bike lanes in town, and walking/biking paths through the country (usually an asphalt path on top of the dikes).
Despite common knowledge to the contrary, cycling properly on the road just isn't that dangerous relative to other ways of getting around.
I'd be willing to believe that if the idiot density per square mile wasn't a lot greater then it used to be. 20 years ago, a lot of families only had 1 car and the population in the US was lower. Hence, fewer cars on the road, which made it safer for kids to ride. Car ownership in Europe is distinctly different then the US. Also, bikes are more common in Europe, which means that drivers are more accustomed to looking out for bike riders.
You will run into an idiot sooner or later while riding your bike / moped / motorcycle. Or you'll make a mistake and dump yourself. And as the EMTs around here so nicely put it, someone who rides a 2-wheeled vehicle without a helmet is going for organ-donor status. Helmets are a heck of a lot more comfortable then they were a decade or two ago, they're not expensive and they do a good job at preventing head injuries.
Why would you not want to wear/use something that will protect you in the case of an accident? Would you rather your S/O visit you in the ICU or the morgue? A helmet/seat-belt is cheap insurance against the moment when your head cracks off the pavement.
I'll never forget the screech of a 9pin dot-matrix printer being forced to print graphics (especially where it made 3 interleaved passes over the same line).
Agreed, SD cards and Sony Memory Sticks are pretty close to being *too* small. Especially if you want to label them by hand.
8cm CDs are a nice size (and there are 8cm DVDs), the 3.5" disc was a nice size. I'd say a comfortable package would be something about 3-6cm wide and 6-8cm long (and under 0.3cm thick). That's just big enough to comfortably hand-write a label, but still small enough to easily carry half a dozen in a pocket. It's also big enough that you can find it if it falls under the car-seat.
One of the recordable DVD formats, together with an open-standard audio codec, will be the next logical progression for portables.
Hopefully in a 8cm sized disc... those hold a bit over a Gb, which is plenty for music (e.g. FLACC encoded) and some extras. Upside, the form factor would still be compatible with the majority of the DVD players, downside would be the fragility of the media (just like today's DVDs).
Or maybe we'll all make the move back to a format like MD or some other semi-enclosed format where the media is inside a shell. Something about the size of a 3.5" disc is good enough, but maybe only make it 10cm x 10cm.
If the GPL is invalidated, then regular old copyright law takes over. Which means that SCO is now on the hook for distributing copyrighted code without the permission of the authors. (And owners of copyright can be selective in who they choose to sue, without giving up rights to sue other infringers at a later date.)
The GPL doesn't take away anything from copyright law, it only adds a right that you didn't have under copyright law.
one last comment i want to make is that i don't understand how an open source voting software would be better than closed source. open source gives that many more people the code and ability to possibly mess with it. sure it gives that many more the ability to fix it as well, but closed source, if properly tested keeps people from being able to break in and mess with it unless they really try. i just see this as one use when closed source would be better. same goes for mission critical military, intelligence, and government applications.
Open source does not mean open-access.
For example, just because anyone can see the source to the linux kernal doesn't mean that anyone can add code to the kernal. Instead, it goes through a review (and some other processes?) prior to be admitted into the development tree.
Open-source merely ensures that anyone is able to inspect the code.
Clinton got caught lying about something that wasn't anyone's business. It's his personal life and you've gotta be some odd kind of sheep to hate his wife for it.
Except that I have, perhaps naive, the notion that presidents should be trustworthy. If you'll lie / cheat / steal a little thing - what's to stop you from lying / cheating / stealing when the stakes are higher (and the reward for immoral behavior is larger)?
The issue doesn't start with the fact that he lied trying to protect his family from a scandal. The issue is that he was cheating on his wife in the first place! (And then compounded the problem by refusing to come clean.)
Never saw that error... rename never caused us issues in VSS. Moving files is done via share / delete, which retains the history.
The problem with VSS is:
- Doesn't work well over a WAN, have to purchase a 3rd party product like SourceOffSite. (Which, while pretty darn good, isn't keystroke compatible with VSS... which is annoying).
- Storage system is horrid... hundreds of thousands of little files, with little to no anti-corruption measures (such as storing CRCs of the revision or cross-linking things).
- Poor security, sure you can setup project security so that your developers can't delete things within the graphical interface, but then they can turn around and delete the entire VSS directory tree. (VSS requires that your developers have R/W access to the storage system.)
OTOH, the GUI is pretty and easy to use... a lot better then dealing with command line CVS commands. Makes a semi-decent versioning file system for cases where you're working on a multiple projects with multiple co-workers who are geographically seperated (when combined with SourceOffSite). WebDAV and the new CVS-replacement project look interesting, but I have yet to figure out how to do a simple setup.
I've seen external USB 2.0 drives do anywhere from 1 megabyte/sec to as high as 3.5 megabytes/sec (2-2.5 would be average). Internal IDE drives (ATA/100) usually perform at a rate of 3-15 megabytes/second (6-9 Mb/sec would be average). SCSI drives are faster yet.
Those numbers are based on a sampling interval of 120 or 300 seconds (the number of bytes transfered during the past 300 seconds a.k.a. sustained transfer rate). I have a testing tool that creates 4Gb or 8Gb data sets on the drive and then does sequential/random reads. The data sets are large enough to overwhelm to disk cache or system cache, which gives me better sustained throughput numbers.
Off-hand, I'd question the power-supply. But I'd hope that you're running a large enough power-supply to handle the amount of drives and that you have it hooked to a line-filtering UPS. Does this only happen when the system is under heavy load?
Are the drives individual cooled? A slightly over-heated drive might respond too slowly for the controller.
Is it the same drive all the time? The same cable? Are you keeping a written log of what died and when so you can spot the pattern?
Hope they put a 500W power supply in that beast if they're thinking of putting (8) 7200rpm, power-sucking drives in it. (Okay, maybe a hefty 400W supply).
Anyone know if they included the cost of a Windows Server license in that $3k price? That alone should have jacked the price up to $3750 or so.
First off, unless you're working with 50Gb files, there's very little reason to put all of your data on a single server. With multiple servers you can spread the load around a little bit.
A cheap 200Gb storage server would be:
$750 1Ghz CPU / 512Mb RAM / MB / Case
$100 RAID1 card
$500 2x250Gb IDE drives
$150 misc parts
$300 external 250Gb USB 2.0 drive (backups)
====
$1800 or so, going with smaller drives would drop the price to $1500 for say a 120Gb system, but the base component costs are fixed. Going with a RAID5 card and 5 drives would give you a 1Tb system, with hot spare for $2750.
A decent sized tape drive (50Gb native) is going to set you back around $800-$1300, plus $50-$75 per tape. You might be better off buying (3) external USB drives and doing a 3-generation backup strategy (keeping 1 drive off-site).
They go on and on and on about how they researched MTBF numbers, then they shoot themselves in the foot by not using RAID1 or RAID5? Worse, they again, went with a single-drive for the system drive (where RAID1 would have been really cheap). So now we have 5 drives in the system, which cuts the MTBF by 5, with good odds that one of them is going to go belly up by the end of 6 months (taking a large amount of your data with it).
BTW, RAID5 controllers are more like $300-$400... not cheap as dirt, but if you're building a 1Tb server it's still inexpensive.
The article is garbage because they've failed to get the basics right (RAID + backup).
And then we all go back to the local / regional BBS system, except that it will be probably be done using IPSec over broadband. (US companies have too much invested in broadband to afford everyone switching back to dial-up to avoid censorship issues.)
Basically, if they try to grab control, the community will just route around the damage, or fragment into smaller segments. On the bright side, I never got spam when I was part of the BBS-scene (or CompuServe back in the early 1990s prior to the internet).
I disagreed with the wedding photographer bit... sounds like someone who's got a pet axe to grind.
The big problem is that he's complaining about professionals who spend a lot on equipment, have a limited amount of time per year to make money (the prime wedding season), and who live in a major metro area like Wash DC.
Folks, living in a major metro area like DC / NY is expensive. $70k annual salary is probably the minimum amount that you can pull in and live a modicum of a middle-class lifestyle. You remember the old adage, never get into a mortgage that is more then twice your annual salary? I doubt that someone making $70k/year is going to easily find a $140k-$160k home in a major metro area. Especially if they have a family and want a larger house. (I live in a secondary market, about 45 min away from a major metro area and housing is around $150k+ for a decent house in a decent location.)
Now, if he was talking some small-town market where the photographer is making twice the local average salary, he'd have a better case. $70k-$100k is pretty much the average salary for those metro areas.
Storage machines are a good first step in the backup strategy, but you're still going to want a tiered system.
Tier1 - tape drive. Expensive, but the media is tiny and easy to move around / store. Keep at least one tape per month off-site.
Tier2 - external USB drive, or storage server. Good for near-line backups and quick single-file restores.
Tier3 - multiple external USB drives (usually 3 or 4), with 1 or 2 drives kept off-site. Look for a foam carrying case (where you remove pre-cut "blocks" to make a hole big enough to hold the USB drive).
Tier4 - periodic snapshots of important projects to CD-R/DVD-R. Toss them in sleeves and store them with the files, or put them in a dark cool constant-temp/humidyt closet. Use software like QuickPar to create parity data on the CD/DVD to allow you to recover from bad blocks (figure on using 10-25% of your disc space for parity data). Hopefully, you'll never need to pull from these discs.
Basically, don't put all of your eggs in one basket and use a parity / error-checking program to verify your backup data.
Look into some sort of parity software to protect your files on the CD/DVD. They add extra files (usually 5-25% more space) that allow you to recover files that have been corrupted by the media degrading. I also create parity files for files on my hard drive (in my archive tree) because there are command line tools that will walk the directory tree and verify that all files are still clean. Take a look at QuickPar for a parity tool. For a DVD, I'd recommend setting the percentage to 10-15% (will eat up around 15-20% of the DVD with parity data).
Now for professional data, I'd recommend a few methods. First, hook up a 250Gb USB 2.0 drive and get software like rsync or SecondCopy 2000 to mirror files off to that drive daily. (SecondCopy has the ability to move deleted files to a seperate folder on the external drive, plus keep multiple revisions of changed files.) An advanced option is to get (3) drives, swap them weekly or bi-weekly, keeping the latest backup at an off-site location. Might want to get one of those custom foam carrying cases to put the USB drive in. I'd recommend getting the USB drives that have built-in power supplies (take standard computer cords) which gives you one less thing to lose or carry around. Peer II sells a nice, compact USB 2.0 enclosure (CA-405U2) that supports large format drives (if you get the latest models).
Consider a tape backup that holds 50Gb native. Tapes are nice because they're small/portable. Downside is that tapes are expensive and backup software on Windows machines is usually proprietary.
You'll still want to do the DVD-R method as well, which is a very good way to take snapshots of projects. Protect it with parity files, but don't depend on it as your only backup method.
Look for a tool called CDCheck CDCheck. Downside is that you have to manually manage the.CRC files. There's also a sourceforge projected calld CFV which is a command line tool.
Or, if you're burning a new CD, set aside 10-25% of the space for parity data using QuickPar. That way, even if a portion of the disk becomes unusable before you have time to copy it to a new disc, you have good odds of getting all of the data back off of the CD.
We don't use WEP on our wireless net at the office. Too often, the interaction between the card and the access-point doesn't work well if WEP is enabled (different vendors for the two products).
Instead, we've segregated all of the WAPs onto a dead-end network where the users have to VPN into our LAN through a border server. (Basically treating them as if they were outside the office and coming in from an external ISP.)
Works pretty well, other then having to remember to VPN into the network. The traffic ends up encrypted (inside of the VPN tunnel), so it's not possible to sniff passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
The real FUD statement was when he talked about a financial house, basing an internal sytem on some GPL stuff, being faced with the issue of having to GPL their internal project.
Um... only if they want to sell it. Yes? Internal projects, by definition, is not software that gets distributed.
I'll admin that the GPL page is not exact on what constitutes distribution. Or does it?
Mozilla 1.4 was a memory hog... with either a memory leak, or just the tendancy to gobble up more and more the longer it was open. Since I usually only reboot my WinXP work machine about once every week or two this quickly became a PITA (and I have 512Mb).
The answer? Switched to Firebird 0.7. It uses a heck of a lot less memory then Mozilla 1.4 and is just as stable. (I usually have 3-5 browser windows open, with 5-10 tabs in each window.)
Your town waited until *after* Halloween?
I saw Christmas decorations up a few weeks *prior* to Halloween.
(sigh) I remember when the earliest that you'd see Christmas decorations was the day after Thanksgiving, when all of the shops would spruce up overnight for Black Friday.
Definitely...
I live in the Northeast US, and most roads are barely wide enough for 2 lanes and have no shoulder at all. Or, if you're in town, the roads are just wide enough for 2 lanes and then they put parking down both sides of the street.
The Netherlands was probably the closest to biking Nirvana that I've seen yet. Bike lanes in town, and walking/biking paths through the country (usually an asphalt path on top of the dikes).
Despite common knowledge to the contrary, cycling properly on the road just isn't that dangerous relative to other ways of getting around.
I'd be willing to believe that if the idiot density per square mile wasn't a lot greater then it used to be. 20 years ago, a lot of families only had 1 car and the population in the US was lower. Hence, fewer cars on the road, which made it safer for kids to ride. Car ownership in Europe is distinctly different then the US. Also, bikes are more common in Europe, which means that drivers are more accustomed to looking out for bike riders.
You will run into an idiot sooner or later while riding your bike / moped / motorcycle. Or you'll make a mistake and dump yourself. And as the EMTs around here so nicely put it, someone who rides a 2-wheeled vehicle without a helmet is going for organ-donor status. Helmets are a heck of a lot more comfortable then they were a decade or two ago, they're not expensive and they do a good job at preventing head injuries.
Why would you not want to wear/use something that will protect you in the case of an accident? Would you rather your S/O visit you in the ICU or the morgue? A helmet/seat-belt is cheap insurance against the moment when your head cracks off the pavement.
/shudder
I'll never forget the screech of a 9pin dot-matrix printer being forced to print graphics (especially where it made 3 interleaved passes over the same line).
Agreed, SD cards and Sony Memory Sticks are pretty close to being *too* small. Especially if you want to label them by hand.
8cm CDs are a nice size (and there are 8cm DVDs), the 3.5" disc was a nice size. I'd say a comfortable package would be something about 3-6cm wide and 6-8cm long (and under 0.3cm thick). That's just big enough to comfortably hand-write a label, but still small enough to easily carry half a dozen in a pocket. It's also big enough that you can find it if it falls under the car-seat.
One of the recordable DVD formats, together with an open-standard audio codec, will be the next logical progression for portables.
Hopefully in a 8cm sized disc... those hold a bit over a Gb, which is plenty for music (e.g. FLACC encoded) and some extras. Upside, the form factor would still be compatible with the majority of the DVD players, downside would be the fragility of the media (just like today's DVDs).
Or maybe we'll all make the move back to a format like MD or some other semi-enclosed format where the media is inside a shell. Something about the size of a 3.5" disc is good enough, but maybe only make it 10cm x 10cm.
We've been over this before...
If the GPL is invalidated, then regular old copyright law takes over. Which means that SCO is now on the hook for distributing copyrighted code without the permission of the authors. (And owners of copyright can be selective in who they choose to sue, without giving up rights to sue other infringers at a later date.)
The GPL doesn't take away anything from copyright law, it only adds a right that you didn't have under copyright law.
one last comment i want to make is that i don't understand how an open source voting software would be better than closed source. open source gives that many more people the code and ability to possibly mess with it. sure it gives that many more the ability to fix it as well, but closed source, if properly tested keeps people from being able to break in and mess with it unless they really try. i just see this as one use when closed source would be better. same goes for mission critical military, intelligence, and government applications.
Open source does not mean open-access.
For example, just because anyone can see the source to the linux kernal doesn't mean that anyone can add code to the kernal. Instead, it goes through a review (and some other processes?) prior to be admitted into the development tree.
Open-source merely ensures that anyone is able to inspect the code.
Clinton got caught lying about something that wasn't anyone's business. It's his personal life and you've gotta be some odd kind of sheep to hate his wife for it.
Except that I have, perhaps naive, the notion that presidents should be trustworthy. If you'll lie / cheat / steal a little thing - what's to stop you from lying / cheating / stealing when the stakes are higher (and the reward for immoral behavior is larger)?
The issue doesn't start with the fact that he lied trying to protect his family from a scandal. The issue is that he was cheating on his wife in the first place! (And then compounded the problem by refusing to come clean.)
Never saw that error... rename never caused us issues in VSS. Moving files is done via share / delete, which retains the history.
The problem with VSS is:
- Doesn't work well over a WAN, have to purchase a 3rd party product like SourceOffSite. (Which, while pretty darn good, isn't keystroke compatible with VSS... which is annoying).
- Storage system is horrid... hundreds of thousands of little files, with little to no anti-corruption measures (such as storing CRCs of the revision or cross-linking things).
- Poor security, sure you can setup project security so that your developers can't delete things within the graphical interface, but then they can turn around and delete the entire VSS directory tree. (VSS requires that your developers have R/W access to the storage system.)
OTOH, the GUI is pretty and easy to use... a lot better then dealing with command line CVS commands. Makes a semi-decent versioning file system for cases where you're working on a multiple projects with multiple co-workers who are geographically seperated (when combined with SourceOffSite). WebDAV and the new CVS-replacement project look interesting, but I have yet to figure out how to do a simple setup.
I've seen external USB 2.0 drives do anywhere from 1 megabyte/sec to as high as 3.5 megabytes/sec (2-2.5 would be average). Internal IDE drives (ATA/100) usually perform at a rate of 3-15 megabytes/second (6-9 Mb/sec would be average). SCSI drives are faster yet.
Those numbers are based on a sampling interval of 120 or 300 seconds (the number of bytes transfered during the past 300 seconds a.k.a. sustained transfer rate). I have a testing tool that creates 4Gb or 8Gb data sets on the drive and then does sequential/random reads. The data sets are large enough to overwhelm to disk cache or system cache, which gives me better sustained throughput numbers.
What's the make/model of your motherboard? I've had a hard time finding Athlon-based ECC motherboards.
Off-hand, I'd question the power-supply. But I'd hope that you're running a large enough power-supply to handle the amount of drives and that you have it hooked to a line-filtering UPS. Does this only happen when the system is under heavy load?
Are the drives individual cooled? A slightly over-heated drive might respond too slowly for the controller.
Is it the same drive all the time? The same cable? Are you keeping a written log of what died and when so you can spot the pattern?
Hope they put a 500W power supply in that beast if they're thinking of putting (8) 7200rpm, power-sucking drives in it. (Okay, maybe a hefty 400W supply).
Anyone know if they included the cost of a Windows Server license in that $3k price? That alone should have jacked the price up to $3750 or so.
First off, unless you're working with 50Gb files, there's very little reason to put all of your data on a single server. With multiple servers you can spread the load around a little bit.
A cheap 200Gb storage server would be:
$750 1Ghz CPU / 512Mb RAM / MB / Case
$100 RAID1 card
$500 2x250Gb IDE drives
$150 misc parts
$300 external 250Gb USB 2.0 drive (backups)
====
$1800 or so, going with smaller drives would drop the price to $1500 for say a 120Gb system, but the base component costs are fixed. Going with a RAID5 card and 5 drives would give you a 1Tb system, with hot spare for $2750.
A decent sized tape drive (50Gb native) is going to set you back around $800-$1300, plus $50-$75 per tape. You might be better off buying (3) external USB drives and doing a 3-generation backup strategy (keeping 1 drive off-site).
Very lame and very stupid.
They go on and on and on about how they researched MTBF numbers, then they shoot themselves in the foot by not using RAID1 or RAID5? Worse, they again, went with a single-drive for the system drive (where RAID1 would have been really cheap). So now we have 5 drives in the system, which cuts the MTBF by 5, with good odds that one of them is going to go belly up by the end of 6 months (taking a large amount of your data with it).
BTW, RAID5 controllers are more like $300-$400... not cheap as dirt, but if you're building a 1Tb server it's still inexpensive.
The article is garbage because they've failed to get the basics right (RAID + backup).
At this point, I've ripped all of my CDs to MP3 (maybe ogg later)... I have an MP3 CD player in my car, 2 or 3 portable MP3 players.
So... unless I can rip new music CDs to mp3, I'll not be buying any new music (got lots already).
And then we all go back to the local / regional BBS system, except that it will be probably be done using IPSec over broadband. (US companies have too much invested in broadband to afford everyone switching back to dial-up to avoid censorship issues.)
Basically, if they try to grab control, the community will just route around the damage, or fragment into smaller segments. On the bright side, I never got spam when I was part of the BBS-scene (or CompuServe back in the early 1990s prior to the internet).
I disagreed with the wedding photographer bit... sounds like someone who's got a pet axe to grind.
The big problem is that he's complaining about professionals who spend a lot on equipment, have a limited amount of time per year to make money (the prime wedding season), and who live in a major metro area like Wash DC.
Folks, living in a major metro area like DC / NY is expensive. $70k annual salary is probably the minimum amount that you can pull in and live a modicum of a middle-class lifestyle. You remember the old adage, never get into a mortgage that is more then twice your annual salary? I doubt that someone making $70k/year is going to easily find a $140k-$160k home in a major metro area. Especially if they have a family and want a larger house. (I live in a secondary market, about 45 min away from a major metro area and housing is around $150k+ for a decent house in a decent location.)
Now, if he was talking some small-town market where the photographer is making twice the local average salary, he'd have a better case. $70k-$100k is pretty much the average salary for those metro areas.
Storage machines are a good first step in the backup strategy, but you're still going to want a tiered system.
Tier1 - tape drive. Expensive, but the media is tiny and easy to move around / store. Keep at least one tape per month off-site.
Tier2 - external USB drive, or storage server. Good for near-line backups and quick single-file restores.
Tier3 - multiple external USB drives (usually 3 or 4), with 1 or 2 drives kept off-site. Look for a foam carrying case (where you remove pre-cut "blocks" to make a hole big enough to hold the USB drive).
Tier4 - periodic snapshots of important projects to CD-R/DVD-R. Toss them in sleeves and store them with the files, or put them in a dark cool constant-temp/humidyt closet. Use software like QuickPar to create parity data on the CD/DVD to allow you to recover from bad blocks (figure on using 10-25% of your disc space for parity data). Hopefully, you'll never need to pull from these discs.
Basically, don't put all of your eggs in one basket and use a parity / error-checking program to verify your backup data.
Look into some sort of parity software to protect your files on the CD/DVD. They add extra files (usually 5-25% more space) that allow you to recover files that have been corrupted by the media degrading. I also create parity files for files on my hard drive (in my archive tree) because there are command line tools that will walk the directory tree and verify that all files are still clean. Take a look at QuickPar for a parity tool. For a DVD, I'd recommend setting the percentage to 10-15% (will eat up around 15-20% of the DVD with parity data).
Now for professional data, I'd recommend a few methods. First, hook up a 250Gb USB 2.0 drive and get software like rsync or SecondCopy 2000 to mirror files off to that drive daily. (SecondCopy has the ability to move deleted files to a seperate folder on the external drive, plus keep multiple revisions of changed files.) An advanced option is to get (3) drives, swap them weekly or bi-weekly, keeping the latest backup at an off-site location. Might want to get one of those custom foam carrying cases to put the USB drive in. I'd recommend getting the USB drives that have built-in power supplies (take standard computer cords) which gives you one less thing to lose or carry around. Peer II sells a nice, compact USB 2.0 enclosure (CA-405U2) that supports large format drives (if you get the latest models).
Consider a tape backup that holds 50Gb native. Tapes are nice because they're small/portable. Downside is that tapes are expensive and backup software on Windows machines is usually proprietary.
You'll still want to do the DVD-R method as well, which is a very good way to take snapshots of projects. Protect it with parity files, but don't depend on it as your only backup method.
Look for a tool called CDCheck CDCheck. Downside is that you have to manually manage the .CRC files. There's also a sourceforge projected calld CFV which is a command line tool.
Or, if you're burning a new CD, set aside 10-25% of the space for parity data using QuickPar. That way, even if a portion of the disk becomes unusable before you have time to copy it to a new disc, you have good odds of getting all of the data back off of the CD.
We don't use WEP on our wireless net at the office. Too often, the interaction between the card and the access-point doesn't work well if WEP is enabled (different vendors for the two products).
Instead, we've segregated all of the WAPs onto a dead-end network where the users have to VPN into our LAN through a border server. (Basically treating them as if they were outside the office and coming in from an external ISP.)
Works pretty well, other then having to remember to VPN into the network. The traffic ends up encrypted (inside of the VPN tunnel), so it's not possible to sniff passwords.