First, the TOC isn't duplicated AFAIK so a tiny scratch there makes the whole thing useless.
Second, parity files can be in the area that gets scratched as well - a scratch near the end of the data and beginning of parity files means you lose part of both.
Third, that a reader will be able to recover anything - usually the ones I have crap out on the whole file if there's one error, instead of getting a much as it can, so your strategy has to include some recovery tools as well. Which should be burned onto every disc you use the strategy on, so that in case the software gets pulled and DMCA notices or whatnot take down copies, it's still available.
TOC is the big weakness on CD/DVD (there are drives out there which can read a disk with a damaged TOC, but I don't know which ones). The only defense against that is duplicate disks, or spread parity across multiple disks so that you can restore an entire missing disk in the set.
There are two solutions for the "can't read the damaged file".
1) Use a recovery tool that is able to copy damaged files. Or include enough parity to replace entire files (not an option for cases where you are protecting a few, very large files, on a disk).
2) Assuming that you're using QuickPAR, rip the disk to an ISO file(ISO Buster, dd-rescue, etc). Copy the ISO file and rename that copy with a.PAR2 extension. Double-click the.PAR2 file, then drag-n-drop the ISO file onto the QuickPAR window. QuickPAR will manage to find all useable data and restore the individual files. (Sadly, QuickPAR doesn't support directories, so you'll want to always store things in a single directory.)
(Long time user of PAR2 on every disk that I've burned, including video DVDs.)
(shrugs) OTOH, I've owned a Sony eReader (PRS-505) for almost 2 years now and I absolutely love it for reading where there's very little navigation. Such as fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. It gets out of the way and lets me read.
The ability to change font sizes, to have a device that always weighs the same, can be held with one hand, doesn't flip closed when you set it down... It's fast enough, clear enough, and works well enough that I've read at least 2 books a month for the past 2 years on it. Maybe more.
Would I want to read reference type works on it? No, the tech is still not there to be responsive enough. And I'm not sure about a touch screen either. But it would be nice to be able to markup text and see the markup on the PC later, but that would require giving up DRM. (Although 99% of the books on my Sony are zero-DRM.)
I only have to charge it up about once a month, which means the battery should last for a long time. But really, it's the ability to change font sizes that is the biggest selling point for me. Some of my paperbacks are printed in 8 or 9 point fonts, which isn't so easy on the eyes. On the Sony, I can easily increase that to ~12 or ~18 point font sizes.
The big problem with Gentoo is lack of QA in portage. Which means that you will (a few times per year) run into situations where the latest version of a package in portage is junk.
I ran Gentoo for a number of years. Even ran our first Linux server on Gentoo prior to shifting to RHEL5/CentOS5. Ubuntu is a better run distro for the desktop. Less muss, less fuss, and a better focus on desktop issues.
Now, I like the source-only compile-everything-yourself concept behind Gentoo. It's good for really tiny footprint installs. But the focus is on hacking rather then usability.
40W chips are very interesting for business desktops where you don't need the latest / fastest CPU chip. Especially if they have 4+ cores and are inexpensive. The lowest power Phenom is 65W, the 905e.
(All of our new builds have been the energy efficient Athlon64 X2s for the past few years. It cuts down on heat inside the PC by a lot. Especially when compared to the 95W/125W AMD CPUs. Noise is also greatly reduced because the CPU fan, and other fans, can spin at a lower speed.)
It doesn't really "work" for Microsoft the other way around, ya know.
Mmm, we're one of the companies on the flip side. We really really like Linux on our servers, but (sadly) there's no good replacement for Active Directory. Which means we need to keep at least a handful of Windows servers around for authentication.
So we run Windows inside of a Xen HVM. If we can do that in a PV manner, all the better.
I'm not sure I'd lump most of her work in with the others. Maybe her high fantasy stuff, but not the more gritty sci-fi stuff like Faded Sun Trilogy or the Chanur Saga (or the Foreigner series).
It is something that EVE Online gets *almost* right.
The limitation that markets are only region wide means that there are a few dozen markets within hi-sec. Plus goods have to be physically moved, which means that goods can gain/lost value solely on distance.
Where EVE Online gets it wrong is the 0.01 ISK undercutting due to region-wide buy orders.
(Buy orders should change offered price based on distance from the buy order actual location. Even for region-wide buy orders. This would allow more competition and allow smaller buyers to compete against the big sellers because there would be more niches where the smaller buyers could offer a better buy price.)
Another good choice is EPG in full random mode with upper/lower case letters and numbers. We use it for our throwaway account or accounts where the password is stored (web forums, support sites, database connections) and the user doesn't have to type it in.
Most of those passwords are 16-32 characters in length, and pretty impervious to a brute-force attack.
For stuff that humans have to type in, large dictionaries of words combined with numbers, odd capitalization, misspellings, and symbols have to suffice.
For password storage, text files containing PGP/GPG encrypted ASCII text blocks are extremely useful. Dead simple to backup, the contents of the text files can be mailed or printed out. The trick then lies in keeping your secret keyring secure.
Something to serve as a base of operations when I'm traveling for pleasure and don't want to risk my expensive work laptop. A place to catch up on news, offload data from flash memory sticks, or to get a small spot of writing done.
So 10" feels like the sweet spot for me. My primary work notebook is a massive Thinkpad T61p 15" widescreen.
Right now there are mainly (3) pixel sizes in use on LCDs.
One allows you to put 1680x1050 in a 22" piece of glass, this is the 0.28mm sized pixel. The next size down does it in 19", about a 0.25-0.26mm pixel. The smallest allows you to pack those pixels into a 15.5" piece of glass (Thinkpad T61p).
As I get older, the 19" feels a bit small, but the 22" pixel size is almost exactly right. I can get by on the 15.5" laptop display, but I often have to use the zoom feature in the browser.
Most desktop monitor LCDs seem to use the larger pixel size. So look carefully and you should be able to pickout which size uses the larger or smaller pixels. A 1920x1200 screen in a 22" format is using the smaller pixel size, so you'll want to go up to 24" for 1920x1200 resolution.
Especially in a small business, your users will rebel if they can't install (or use) their software... which is quite reasonable given most people are still running Windows XP, and most XP software is not capable of being installed or sometimes even used without admin access... this is especially troublesome if that user happens to be the CEO/Owner.
Users typically rebel because prior IT help was unresponsive to their needs / wants in a timely manner.
We finally managed to lock down our machines back in '07 after we had 3 machines get infected within a 2 week period. That finally convinced everyone (users, the owner) that the ability to install software willy-nilly was too great of a risk.
Since then, we've had maybe once incident every few months. And because the user didn't have admin permissions, the malware was unable to infect the box (or was extremely easy to clean). Sometimes the malware fails to install, so a simple reboot fixes the issue. But we'll still run anti-malware scans on the boxes every month or two to make sure.
Most modern switches allow you to setup one port as a monitoring port. Which means that all packets get mirrored to that port so that a NIC in promiscuous mode will be able to inspect the packets.
The e-ink readers are not going to go away, they're definitely here to stay at this point. And if society collapses, I'll probably have more on my mind then worrying about my electronic books.
(I've had a PRS-505 for about 18 months. It still ranks up there as one of the most useful devices that I own and I read about 8-12 hours per week on it. And I'm one of those people who have multiple large bookshelves in their residence, filled with paper books.)
As others have posted, it supports either SD cards or the Sony memory stick duo cards. And you can have both inserted at the same time on the PRS-505 model.
However, what you'll find is that SD cards use up a lot more battery then the Memory Stick cards do. At least that holds true for the PRS-505.
So I went and bought a 512MB Memory Stick card off of eBay, tossed it in, and haven't worried about it since. For books that I want to not keep on the device, I'll use a SD card and insert the card when I need it.
(I'm not sure why SD cards don't do a good job on power consumption. Either the Sony memory card is better about power usage when idle, or the firmware doesn't interact as well with the SD cards. There's a long standing discussion over at MobileRead's forums on the issue.)
At 2-4 weeks between charges, recharging the Sony PRS-505 has never been a problem. I'm usually, after that period, looking to load up another book or two onto the device anyway, so I hook it up to the laptop's USB port overnight after loading the new books.
Plus, my PRS-505 sits in a leather case that protects it (when not in use), so there's really no exposed surface large enough to fit a solar cell.
Basically, the battery life on the ebook is good enough that it doesn't interfere with normal use. I usually let mine get down to about 25% battery before I make sure to hook it up after I finish reading for the evening. Then I'm good to go for another 2-4 weeks.
For leisure, cover-to-cover, reading it's absolutely top notch and easy to use. Light enough to carry around, lasts for weeks on a single charge, and I can change the size of the text. The Sony does a very good job of getting out of your way and letting you get down to focusing on the content of the book.
Do I wish that it was faster, or that I could search using a keypad? Sometimes. But I really don't like the Kindle's design choices in that regard. And faster page flipping will come with time, along with a higher resolution.
If the book is not available in electronic format, and it's something I'll read from cover to cover, I will often simply choose to not read it and will instead go to the next book on my list. That even holds true for books where I already own a paper copy.
Not mine... I was thinking "How will Sony screw over there own customers this time?" Looks cool, but what nasty DRM lurks underneath?
I was initially leery of Sony as well back when I bought my PRS-505 in Jan '08.
However, it will read books without DRM without any trouble. And there are 3rd party tools (Calibre) that will convert to the Sony book format. If you go to the MobileRead forums, you'll find hundreds of free books that members have formatted and converted into the Sony format.
Baen sells non-DRM books. Buy the book, download it in multiple formats.
So far, I think I might have bought *one* book from Sony's store. The rest have either been from older public domain works, or non-DRM stuff from Baen.
Things I want in a cell phone... small size, features, phone type stuff. Things I want in an ereader... modest size, long long battery life, legible in bright lights. While not exact opposites, I prefer the reader to be a separate device.
Back when the Sony PRS-505 came out and went below $300 (I paid about $275) I sprung for it. I've been extremely happy with a device that I only have to charge every 2-3 weeks, holds lots of books, and has a nice sized screen. My cell phone, OTOH, has to be charged nearly daily and is a lot less readable. (I probably read for 8-12 hours per week on the Sony.)
(The large screen on a book reader will matter more as you get older. The ability to bump the text size up is great for when I'm tired and my eyes have trouble focusing.)
One thing anti-spam software will often do is check the sending domain actually exists. Of course with this change, every domain suddenly exists and you have one less test available in scoring spam.
I'm assuming that you're talking about client-side tests. For mail server checks like that, it's a really good idea to have a local DNS server (on the same box, or at least on the same LAN) to handle DNS queries. Mostly for performance reasons (faster lookups, cached lookups), but also because a proper DNS server setup doesn't rely on the usually broken ISP DNS servers.
- No built-in ability to export to.CSV files. Seriously. This is 2009, other database applications have had the ability to send data straight to CSV for over 25 years.
- As you mentioned, MSAccess is simply so much more powerful when dealing with data from multiple sources.
- The ooBase file format is a compressed ZIP file. I suspect that it breaks horribly once you get over a few hundred MB worth of data together. (Something that MSAccess handles easily.) But since it's so difficult to get data in/out of it, I haven't bothered trying. It can't be used as a read/write ODBC data source.
- We're using an Access database as backend storage for our data collection project written in Java (that doesn't need a full blown database server). Because it's simply easier to check an MDB into our version control system then to deal with a lot of the other tools. We don't need the hassle of a server that we'd have to startup/shutdown (although SQLLite came close). Plus we can open up the MDB in MSAccess and get instant access to the data using a very well designed GUI (which you can't do in SQLLite). Or copy/paste data from other sources (like spreadsheets). Or make quick fixes to the data table layout.
So, it's better, but only if you're looking to do nothing more then track your grocery list.
For example I have an encrypted USB stick who's function is to hold my passwords, in particular the ones I don't use a lot.
A better and easier method for storing stuff like that is to use GPG/PGP.
Create a text file for the site / server name. Copy your authentication information (be verbose...) into the clipboard and encrypt with PGP/GPG. Paste the encrypted ASCII text block into the text file.
The big advantage here is that text files are dirt simple to backup (you could even email them) and your main security concern is to now keep your PGP/GPG keyring secure.
Now, I still store those text files on a USB key. But I don't need to rely on specific drivers or anything. And I have a program (Second Copy 7) that automatically backs up the contents of that USB key to my hard drive when it is inserted.
If you don't want to leak server/site names, you could always put everything in a single text file with a generic name.
I have already had two meetings over this and had my team start their proposals for alternate LTS distros and a migration plan. I am sure I am not the only one.
It's always smart to reexamine things every year or three when it comes to decisions like that. It's also smart to keep abreast of the other options out there.
I'm still sticking with my rule of thumb. If it's directly involved in revenue earning, go corporate (i.e. RedHat/Windows on HP / IBM / Dell / BigCorp hardware) and pay for fast reaction time support. If you can limp along without it for a few hours or even longer, go with the less expensive option (CentOS/Debian on whitebox hardware).
btrfs sounds great and all, but it's going to be a few years before it gets to the point where I think it'll be usable for production systems. It would have been nice if we could have had ZFS in the interim, but that just isn't going to happen.
Yah, sometimes you don't get the pony for Christmas.
(On the upside, I'm glad that there are new filesystems coming, such as ext4 and btrfs. A lot of the stuff that ZFS does, such as checksumming, could probably be handled by the LVM layer. 80-90% of our server's filesystems are already setting on top of LVM anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
First, the TOC isn't duplicated AFAIK so a tiny scratch there makes the whole thing useless.
.PAR2 extension. Double-click the .PAR2 file, then drag-n-drop the ISO file onto the QuickPAR window. QuickPAR will manage to find all useable data and restore the individual files. (Sadly, QuickPAR doesn't support directories, so you'll want to always store things in a single directory.)
Second, parity files can be in the area that gets scratched as well - a scratch near the end of the data and beginning of parity files means you lose part of both.
Third, that a reader will be able to recover anything - usually the ones I have crap out on the whole file if there's one error, instead of getting a much as it can, so your strategy has to include some recovery tools as well. Which should be burned onto every disc you use the strategy on, so that in case the software gets pulled and DMCA notices or whatnot take down copies, it's still available.
TOC is the big weakness on CD/DVD (there are drives out there which can read a disk with a damaged TOC, but I don't know which ones). The only defense against that is duplicate disks, or spread parity across multiple disks so that you can restore an entire missing disk in the set.
There are two solutions for the "can't read the damaged file".
1) Use a recovery tool that is able to copy damaged files. Or include enough parity to replace entire files (not an option for cases where you are protecting a few, very large files, on a disk).
2) Assuming that you're using QuickPAR, rip the disk to an ISO file(ISO Buster, dd-rescue, etc). Copy the ISO file and rename that copy with a
(Long time user of PAR2 on every disk that I've burned, including video DVDs.)
(shrugs) OTOH, I've owned a Sony eReader (PRS-505) for almost 2 years now and I absolutely love it for reading where there's very little navigation. Such as fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. It gets out of the way and lets me read.
The ability to change font sizes, to have a device that always weighs the same, can be held with one hand, doesn't flip closed when you set it down... It's fast enough, clear enough, and works well enough that I've read at least 2 books a month for the past 2 years on it. Maybe more.
Would I want to read reference type works on it? No, the tech is still not there to be responsive enough. And I'm not sure about a touch screen either. But it would be nice to be able to markup text and see the markup on the PC later, but that would require giving up DRM. (Although 99% of the books on my Sony are zero-DRM.)
I only have to charge it up about once a month, which means the battery should last for a long time. But really, it's the ability to change font sizes that is the biggest selling point for me. Some of my paperbacks are printed in 8 or 9 point fonts, which isn't so easy on the eyes. On the Sony, I can easily increase that to ~12 or ~18 point font sizes.
The big problem with Gentoo is lack of QA in portage. Which means that you will (a few times per year) run into situations where the latest version of a package in portage is junk.
I ran Gentoo for a number of years. Even ran our first Linux server on Gentoo prior to shifting to RHEL5/CentOS5. Ubuntu is a better run distro for the desktop. Less muss, less fuss, and a better focus on desktop issues.
Now, I like the source-only compile-everything-yourself concept behind Gentoo. It's good for really tiny footprint installs. But the focus is on hacking rather then usability.
40W chips are very interesting for business desktops where you don't need the latest / fastest CPU chip. Especially if they have 4+ cores and are inexpensive. The lowest power Phenom is 65W, the 905e.
(All of our new builds have been the energy efficient Athlon64 X2s for the past few years. It cuts down on heat inside the PC by a lot. Especially when compared to the 95W/125W AMD CPUs. Noise is also greatly reduced because the CPU fan, and other fans, can spin at a lower speed.)
It doesn't really "work" for Microsoft the other way around, ya know.
Mmm, we're one of the companies on the flip side. We really really like Linux on our servers, but (sadly) there's no good replacement for Active Directory. Which means we need to keep at least a handful of Windows servers around for authentication.
So we run Windows inside of a Xen HVM. If we can do that in a PV manner, all the better.
C. J. Cherryh
I'm not sure I'd lump most of her work in with the others. Maybe her high fantasy stuff, but not the more gritty sci-fi stuff like Faded Sun Trilogy or the Chanur Saga (or the Foreigner series).
Hoarding of money generally refers to people stashing coins/notes into non-bank institutions. Which removes it from circulation.
Money in a bank can be loaned out. Money in a mattress cannot.
(Not defending the original poster, but that's how I envision hoarding of money as being a bad thing.)
It is something that EVE Online gets *almost* right.
The limitation that markets are only region wide means that there are a few dozen markets within hi-sec. Plus goods have to be physically moved, which means that goods can gain/lost value solely on distance.
Where EVE Online gets it wrong is the 0.01 ISK undercutting due to region-wide buy orders.
(Buy orders should change offered price based on distance from the buy order actual location. Even for region-wide buy orders. This would allow more competition and allow smaller buyers to compete against the big sellers because there would be more niches where the smaller buyers could offer a better buy price.)
Another good choice is EPG in full random mode with upper/lower case letters and numbers. We use it for our throwaway account or accounts where the password is stored (web forums, support sites, database connections) and the user doesn't have to type it in.
Most of those passwords are 16-32 characters in length, and pretty impervious to a brute-force attack.
For stuff that humans have to type in, large dictionaries of words combined with numbers, odd capitalization, misspellings, and symbols have to suffice.
For password storage, text files containing PGP/GPG encrypted ASCII text blocks are extremely useful. Dead simple to backup, the contents of the text files can be mailed or printed out. The trick then lies in keeping your secret keyring secure.
The primary reason I want a netbook...
Size, cost, portability.
Something to serve as a base of operations when I'm traveling for pleasure and don't want to risk my expensive work laptop. A place to catch up on news, offload data from flash memory sticks, or to get a small spot of writing done.
So 10" feels like the sweet spot for me. My primary work notebook is a massive Thinkpad T61p 15" widescreen.
Right now there are mainly (3) pixel sizes in use on LCDs.
One allows you to put 1680x1050 in a 22" piece of glass, this is the 0.28mm sized pixel. The next size down does it in 19", about a 0.25-0.26mm pixel. The smallest allows you to pack those pixels into a 15.5" piece of glass (Thinkpad T61p).
As I get older, the 19" feels a bit small, but the 22" pixel size is almost exactly right. I can get by on the 15.5" laptop display, but I often have to use the zoom feature in the browser.
Most desktop monitor LCDs seem to use the larger pixel size. So look carefully and you should be able to pickout which size uses the larger or smaller pixels. A 1920x1200 screen in a 22" format is using the smaller pixel size, so you'll want to go up to 24" for 1920x1200 resolution.
Especially in a small business, your users will rebel if they can't install (or use) their software... which is quite reasonable given most people are still running Windows XP, and most XP software is not capable of being installed or sometimes even used without admin access... this is especially troublesome if that user happens to be the CEO/Owner.
Users typically rebel because prior IT help was unresponsive to their needs / wants in a timely manner.
We finally managed to lock down our machines back in '07 after we had 3 machines get infected within a 2 week period. That finally convinced everyone (users, the owner) that the ability to install software willy-nilly was too great of a risk.
Since then, we've had maybe once incident every few months. And because the user didn't have admin permissions, the malware was unable to infect the box (or was extremely easy to clean). Sometimes the malware fails to install, so a simple reboot fixes the issue. But we'll still run anti-malware scans on the boxes every month or two to make sure.
Most modern switches allow you to setup one port as a monitoring port. Which means that all packets get mirrored to that port so that a NIC in promiscuous mode will be able to inspect the packets.
(shrugs) You're not the target market.
The e-ink readers are not going to go away, they're definitely here to stay at this point. And if society collapses, I'll probably have more on my mind then worrying about my electronic books.
(I've had a PRS-505 for about 18 months. It still ranks up there as one of the most useful devices that I own and I read about 8-12 hours per week on it. And I'm one of those people who have multiple large bookshelves in their residence, filled with paper books.)
As others have posted, it supports either SD cards or the Sony memory stick duo cards. And you can have both inserted at the same time on the PRS-505 model.
However, what you'll find is that SD cards use up a lot more battery then the Memory Stick cards do. At least that holds true for the PRS-505.
So I went and bought a 512MB Memory Stick card off of eBay, tossed it in, and haven't worried about it since. For books that I want to not keep on the device, I'll use a SD card and insert the card when I need it.
(I'm not sure why SD cards don't do a good job on power consumption. Either the Sony memory card is better about power usage when idle, or the firmware doesn't interact as well with the SD cards. There's a long standing discussion over at MobileRead's forums on the issue.)
At 2-4 weeks between charges, recharging the Sony PRS-505 has never been a problem. I'm usually, after that period, looking to load up another book or two onto the device anyway, so I hook it up to the laptop's USB port overnight after loading the new books.
Plus, my PRS-505 sits in a leather case that protects it (when not in use), so there's really no exposed surface large enough to fit a solar cell.
Basically, the battery life on the ebook is good enough that it doesn't interfere with normal use. I usually let mine get down to about 25% battery before I make sure to hook it up after I finish reading for the evening. Then I'm good to go for another 2-4 weeks.
I've used a PRS-505 for about 18 months now.
For leisure, cover-to-cover, reading it's absolutely top notch and easy to use. Light enough to carry around, lasts for weeks on a single charge, and I can change the size of the text. The Sony does a very good job of getting out of your way and letting you get down to focusing on the content of the book.
Do I wish that it was faster, or that I could search using a keypad? Sometimes. But I really don't like the Kindle's design choices in that regard. And faster page flipping will come with time, along with a higher resolution.
If the book is not available in electronic format, and it's something I'll read from cover to cover, I will often simply choose to not read it and will instead go to the next book on my list. That even holds true for books where I already own a paper copy.
Not mine... I was thinking "How will Sony screw over there own customers this time?" Looks cool, but what nasty DRM lurks underneath?
I was initially leery of Sony as well back when I bought my PRS-505 in Jan '08.
However, it will read books without DRM without any trouble. And there are 3rd party tools (Calibre) that will convert to the Sony book format. If you go to the MobileRead forums, you'll find hundreds of free books that members have formatted and converted into the Sony format.
Baen sells non-DRM books. Buy the book, download it in multiple formats.
So far, I think I might have bought *one* book from Sony's store. The rest have either been from older public domain works, or non-DRM stuff from Baen.
Things I want in a cell phone... small size, features, phone type stuff. Things I want in an ereader... modest size, long long battery life, legible in bright lights. While not exact opposites, I prefer the reader to be a separate device.
Back when the Sony PRS-505 came out and went below $300 (I paid about $275) I sprung for it. I've been extremely happy with a device that I only have to charge every 2-3 weeks, holds lots of books, and has a nice sized screen. My cell phone, OTOH, has to be charged nearly daily and is a lot less readable. (I probably read for 8-12 hours per week on the Sony.)
(The large screen on a book reader will matter more as you get older. The ability to bump the text size up is great for when I'm tired and my eyes have trouble focusing.)
Ubuntu Netbook Remix
One thing anti-spam software will often do is check the sending domain actually exists. Of course with this change, every domain suddenly exists and you have one less test available in scoring spam.
I'm assuming that you're talking about client-side tests. For mail server checks like that, it's a really good idea to have a local DNS server (on the same box, or at least on the same LAN) to handle DNS queries. Mostly for performance reasons (faster lookups, cached lookups), but also because a proper DNS server setup doesn't rely on the usually broken ISP DNS servers.
My top complaints about ooBase.
.CSV files. Seriously. This is 2009, other database applications have had the ability to send data straight to CSV for over 25 years.
- No built-in ability to export to
- As you mentioned, MSAccess is simply so much more powerful when dealing with data from multiple sources.
- The ooBase file format is a compressed ZIP file. I suspect that it breaks horribly once you get over a few hundred MB worth of data together. (Something that MSAccess handles easily.) But since it's so difficult to get data in/out of it, I haven't bothered trying. It can't be used as a read/write ODBC data source.
- We're using an Access database as backend storage for our data collection project written in Java (that doesn't need a full blown database server). Because it's simply easier to check an MDB into our version control system then to deal with a lot of the other tools. We don't need the hassle of a server that we'd have to startup/shutdown (although SQLLite came close). Plus we can open up the MDB in MSAccess and get instant access to the data using a very well designed GUI (which you can't do in SQLLite). Or copy/paste data from other sources (like spreadsheets). Or make quick fixes to the data table layout.
So, it's better, but only if you're looking to do nothing more then track your grocery list.
For example I have an encrypted USB stick who's function is to hold my passwords, in particular the ones I don't use a lot.
A better and easier method for storing stuff like that is to use GPG/PGP.
Create a text file for the site / server name. Copy your authentication information (be verbose...) into the clipboard and encrypt with PGP/GPG. Paste the encrypted ASCII text block into the text file.
The big advantage here is that text files are dirt simple to backup (you could even email them) and your main security concern is to now keep your PGP/GPG keyring secure.
Now, I still store those text files on a USB key. But I don't need to rely on specific drivers or anything. And I have a program (Second Copy 7) that automatically backs up the contents of that USB key to my hard drive when it is inserted.
If you don't want to leak server/site names, you could always put everything in a single text file with a generic name.
I have already had two meetings over this and had my team start their proposals for alternate LTS distros and a migration plan. I am sure I am not the only one.
It's always smart to reexamine things every year or three when it comes to decisions like that. It's also smart to keep abreast of the other options out there.
I'm still sticking with my rule of thumb. If it's directly involved in revenue earning, go corporate (i.e. RedHat/Windows on HP / IBM / Dell / BigCorp hardware) and pay for fast reaction time support. If you can limp along without it for a few hours or even longer, go with the less expensive option (CentOS/Debian on whitebox hardware).
btrfs sounds great and all, but it's going to be a few years before it gets to the point where I think it'll be usable for production systems. It would have been nice if we could have had ZFS in the interim, but that just isn't going to happen.
Yah, sometimes you don't get the pony for Christmas.
(On the upside, I'm glad that there are new filesystems coming, such as ext4 and btrfs. A lot of the stuff that ZFS does, such as checksumming, could probably be handled by the LVM layer. 80-90% of our server's filesystems are already setting on top of LVM anyway.)