I'm using a laptop at work, and we are urged to make regular backups (using an in-house tool). Of course, those who know how to make backups do it with a better tool, and those who don't, well, I don't think they've even read the FAQ on that in-house thing.
Periodic backups are fine for stationary and/or always-on(-and-connected) machines, but not so much for laptops (which may or may not be connected to anything when the backup is due). Alternatively, users would have to remember to occasionally start the backups themselves. Yeah right, like that'll get done. So instead of messing about with periodic backups, I believe in going for a real-time backup strategy. That is, copy every file as soon as it's been saved. Things not being saved don't need to be backed up (again) anyway.
For that I'm using PowerQuest DataKeeper, which comes packaged with some other PQ products we have licensed. I'm sure you can get it standalone, too. Google. The neat thing is that you give it *two* backup destinations: one remote, one local. When the remote destination is unavailable, it buffers locally; when the remote destination again becomes available, it flushes its buffer and then backs up to the remote destination. It's zipping stuff as it goes, which would allow me to access files manually in an emergency. The only drawback is that it's kinda slow. I have a feeling it's trying to be polite and not hog my bandwidth, but when I'm logging out (and it's flushing the last files) I don't really want to wait for its politeness.
I know Tivoli has something called CDP for Files, but I've only tried it briefly. I believe there was some trouble with file masks (things to never copy), and in any case it requires Tivoli-ish file access (so no direct access).
I've also tried desperately to find an open source project that does the same thing, but no luck so far. I will look into doing something about that myself, "when I get some free time". If we still use personal computers by then, heh.
The Mac in 1984 also had a bunch of not entirely serious but very instructional programs to tell you how to orient, hold, and use the mouse. One of them was putting a movie theater sign back together after it fell apart, another was a neat little maze program.
These things continue to this day, though. With the TouchStream keyboard, you got a game where you had to balance a ball on a surface by moving your hand across the keyboard.
I couldn't count the number of times I've been handed a pile of "documentation" written by an barely literate ESL developer If you only knew what we (developers) get from the clients in the first place! Just last week a manager 3 levels up from me asked for a sizing (price tag) on a system that was barely even an idea yet. But you know, this is not all of the problem. Another part of the problem is something that you appear to share with developers:
there are times where I simply have to produce something in a quarter of the time it actually needs, and that invariably results in garbage. I know this is a problem everywhere. The reality is, too little of this kind of work is aiming for end-to-end quality, but rather short-sighted focus on quarter-end commitments.
[...]any given writer is going to have to face the likelihood that their conjectures get shown as flawed very quickly. Which is why Clarke's and Kubrick's 2001 and 2010 were rather carefully timed into the neither-too-near-nor-too-far future. To a future that's near enough for the general readership to feel it's attainable (space travel), but still far enough ahead (to at the time unvisited planets) to allow some freedom for the story to play out in.
By the time 2063 came out, a number of space-age milestones had indeed been achieved and they had the gall to be completely different than envisaged, so the story locations had to "shift" to accommodate them.
The 3001 book has an impressive afterword of all the fictional technology that played a part in the odyssey that had actually been invented since the writing of the first script.
Still, they're good books.
I actually think it's a ton of fun to read outright ancient sci-fi. Did you know that the author of Tarzan also wrote about a man who suddenly found himself on Mars? Great fun.
Where I live we've had our share of "be wary of lockpicks" type campaigns. I've had my eyes on the "RFID Digital Door Lock"* from ThinkGeek for some time, and thought that maybe this would be the thing (except I rent my home, so it's not really my door to drill holes in). At least, it ought to be difficult to pick; it would be just as easy as ever to just bust in the entire door.
Are there any slashdotters out there who have actually bought and tried this lock? Any good/bad reviews to be had?
I was going to post exactly this, the use of continuous paper.
But please, do make sure to select as small a typeface as technically possible.
This not only "saves trees", but also costs associated with handling and storing the logs after the fact. Paper piles quickly get both large and heavy! If you can save 15% by running 7pt instead of 10pt, it pays off in terms of square footage in the archive.
But to match the resolution of a human eye, you would need a 100 Megapixel floating point framebuffer Are you sure about this? You(r post) seem(s) bright and well-informed, but I believe human vision uses a powerful combination of high-def focus vision, lo-def peripheral vision, and a "memory buffer" to create the illusion of overall high-def vision. There was some research on that sort of buffered vision (I can't find the link now), and I'm pretty sure the actual "megapixel" value is closer to 17 than to 100. So basically you could start with the 17mp image to create your initial "sky", "shore", and "window" segments, then focus on each separately to refine their content. So instead of "parsing" the entire scene as one, you split them up and refine -- similar to where real-time raytracing is going (except the other way around, building an object model from a scene).
The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5,051 in your whole lifetime. To give you some perspective, you're 5 times more likely to drown, 23 times more likely to fall to your death, and 60 times more likely to die in a car accident. Then, what are the odds of falling out of the sky and into the ocean with your aircar? Would you die, or suffer an overflow error?
Yeah, I like to just "pick and go, too", except it sort of "slips".
Want to hear "Beatles"? We play Beatlis, followed by a track by Reatlis, then Roatlis, then Roatlix, which is nothing like the Beatles at all...
That's the diff with Pandora: as it picks tracks, you get to say "yeah, that's the genre I had in mind", or "nope, that's outside of what I want to hear", and your station will become ever more accurate to your taste. Want to hear "80s party rap"? No problem, just pick a track/artist (or more) and go (then approve/reject follow-on picks). With Last, you can choose the "80s" tag (including Wham), "party" (including Dylan, for some reason), or "rap" (including Eminem) -- which is not at all "80s party rap".
I miss Pandora. I hope that US Net Radio survives, and that Pandora soon makes a deal with the European music industry. Then I can finally use my Squeezebox for Pandora, too.
I used to *love* Pandora. But they sent me a very kind email saying "you're not really within the US, are you?", which I honoured. Since then, I am using Last.fm as a fallback.
But man, Last.fm sucks.
At Pandora, I had a couple of finely tuned stations that played *just* the sort of music I liked. At Last, the best one can do is to select a tag, and it will play whatever sounds vaguely similar in anyone's opinion... absolutely useless.
Interesting. Got more informatin on how the OS X scheduler does its thing? Yes, it is. But nope, I only know very little more, from reading the article.
Does Apple still publish those big "Inside Macintosh" books as they did way back when? If they do, I bet there's a gold mine in there (regardless of the colou^H^H^H^H^Hshade of your hat).
What 'saved' the Mac OS was its different use of timing triggers. "All" other OS'es use one common steadily ticking clock as a dealer of time slots. This allows the cheat to "skip to the start of the line (queue)" every time it's had its turn.
OTOH, the Mac uses a stack of alarms set to specific points in the future, and polled in order as they occur. So the difference on Mac OS is that there's no skipping the queue, it's rather "there is no queue, we'll call you when it's your turn".
I don't know the details of the OpenBSD scheduler, but it's very likely the same (clock tick) method as used by the rest of the susceptible OS'es.
FreeBSD for being the closest relative MacOS is not FreeBSD. It's got a Mach kernal. I know, but in broad terms (especially in peoples' minds) it's still seems to be "the closest" (just as "the best" Lotus Notes database need not be "a good" database;-p ).
and OpenBSD for its goal of trying "to be the #1 most secure operating system" This looks like an efficiency issue, not a security issue. And yet, hogging the CPU might be indistinguishable from a DDOS -- at least in the perspective of other users.
All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable How does this reflect on the BSDs? (FreeBSD for being the closest relative, and OpenBSD for its goal of trying "to be the #1 most secure operating system")
I mean, I'm all for travelling and seeing the world, but with all the changes we've read about the last couple of years, it's just not worth it. Or to put it rather more plainly: Fuck'em, I'm not that interested in seeing the Land of Opportunity anyway.
An option for Audiophiles? They HAVE the option, it's the SA-CD/DVD-A tracks, that's the audiophile version.
Why on earth would you release a high-end format, SA-CD/DVD-A with a "lossless" CD-quality format? Either you want convenience, so MP3, or you want quality, which means SA-CD/DVD-A. The point was, rather that let people rip, just include the 128 MP3s on there. I'm thinking that whatever original format the music comes in, you'd still want to have a consolidated media library so you don't have to juggle your physical discs.
In that perspective, a FLAC library take up perhaps half the disk space DVD-A would, and regardless of the size of your media library, or the price of online storage, a factor of two is a considerable difference. But I concede that that may be the only true benefit of high fidelity music compression.
But as insightful as your post is, why do you say
If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC and not a single lossless format among them?
I'd say FLAC+WMA would be the premier choice, the one being high-end for audiophiles, the other being playable on dang near any modern (car) stereo. (And yes I could have said MP3 instead of WMA, but Fraunhofer's licensing is even more bonkers than Microsoft's.)
Regarding the article, at www.mythic.tv they sell ready-made MythTV boxes so you don't need mad linux skills. The "Dragon" comes in a Silverstone case whose beauty, I suppose, is debatable (but it's not exactly ugly). But there are plenty of nice-looking HTPC cases out there, you can even find some that look not too far from a SlimDevices Transporter.
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I'm using a laptop at work, and we are urged to make regular backups (using an in-house tool). Of course, those who know how to make backups do it with a better tool, and those who don't, well, I don't think they've even read the FAQ on that in-house thing.
Periodic backups are fine for stationary and/or always-on(-and-connected) machines, but not so much for laptops (which may or may not be connected to anything when the backup is due). Alternatively, users would have to remember to occasionally start the backups themselves. Yeah right, like that'll get done.
So instead of messing about with periodic backups, I believe in going for a real-time backup strategy. That is, copy every file as soon as it's been saved. Things not being saved don't need to be backed up (again) anyway.
For that I'm using PowerQuest DataKeeper, which comes packaged with some other PQ products we have licensed. I'm sure you can get it standalone, too. Google.
The neat thing is that you give it *two* backup destinations: one remote, one local. When the remote destination is unavailable, it buffers locally; when the remote destination again becomes available, it flushes its buffer and then backs up to the remote destination. It's zipping stuff as it goes, which would allow me to access files manually in an emergency.
The only drawback is that it's kinda slow. I have a feeling it's trying to be polite and not hog my bandwidth, but when I'm logging out (and it's flushing the last files) I don't really want to wait for its politeness.
I know Tivoli has something called CDP for Files, but I've only tried it briefly. I believe there was some trouble with file masks (things to never copy), and in any case it requires Tivoli-ish file access (so no direct access).
I've also tried desperately to find an open source project that does the same thing, but no luck so far. I will look into doing something about that myself, "when I get some free time". If we still use personal computers by then, heh.
The Mac in 1984 also had a bunch of not entirely serious but very instructional programs to tell you how to orient, hold, and use the mouse. One of them was putting a movie theater sign back together after it fell apart, another was a neat little maze program.
These things continue to this day, though. With the TouchStream keyboard, you got a game where you had to balance a ball on a surface by moving your hand across the keyboard.
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ima
I don't know why I keep laughing at strips like this. But then, it's the kind of delirious knowing-that-I'm-doomed laugh.
By the time 2063 came out, a number of space-age milestones had indeed been achieved and they had the gall to be completely different than envisaged, so the story locations had to "shift" to accommodate them.
The 3001 book has an impressive afterword of all the fictional technology that played a part in the odyssey that had actually been invented since the writing of the first script.
Still, they're good books.
I actually think it's a ton of fun to read outright ancient sci-fi. Did you know that the author of Tarzan also wrote about a man who suddenly found himself on Mars? Great fun.
Um, 'cos Joel's got 'em all?
Sorry, couldn't resist...
That would be it, yes. :)
Where I live we've had our share of "be wary of lockpicks" type campaigns. I've had my eyes on the "RFID Digital Door Lock"* from ThinkGeek for some time, and thought that maybe this would be the thing (except I rent my home, so it's not really my door to drill holes in). At least, it ought to be difficult to pick; it would be just as easy as ever to just bust in the entire door.
Are there any slashdotters out there who have actually bought and tried this lock? Any good/bad reviews to be had?
* http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/77af/
Sure you can. There was an article not too long ago about a thesis-o-matic web page. (Can you get PP to generate a link to said article? No.)
I was going to post exactly this, the use of continuous paper.
But please, do make sure to select as small a typeface as technically possible.
This not only "saves trees", but also costs associated with handling and storing the logs after the fact. Paper piles quickly get both large and heavy! If you can save 15% by running 7pt instead of 10pt, it pays off in terms of square footage in the archive.
There was some research on that sort of buffered vision (I can't find the link now), and I'm pretty sure the actual "megapixel" value is closer to 17 than to 100.
So basically you could start with the 17mp image to create your initial "sky", "shore", and "window" segments, then focus on each separately to refine their content. So instead of "parsing" the entire scene as one, you split them up and refine -- similar to where real-time raytracing is going (except the other way around, building an object model from a scene).
Yeah, I like to just "pick and go, too", except it sort of "slips".
...
Want to hear "Beatles"? We play Beatlis, followed by a track by Reatlis, then Roatlis, then Roatlix, which is nothing like the Beatles at all
That's the diff with Pandora: as it picks tracks, you get to say "yeah, that's the genre I had in mind", or "nope, that's outside of what I want to hear", and your station will become ever more accurate to your taste.
Want to hear "80s party rap"? No problem, just pick a track/artist (or more) and go (then approve/reject follow-on picks). With Last, you can choose the "80s" tag (including Wham), "party" (including Dylan, for some reason), or "rap" (including Eminem) -- which is not at all "80s party rap".
I miss Pandora. I hope that US Net Radio survives, and that Pandora soon makes a deal with the European music industry. Then I can finally use my Squeezebox for Pandora, too.
I used to *love* Pandora. But they sent me a very kind email saying "you're not really within the US, are you?", which I honoured. Since then, I am using Last.fm as a fallback.
... absolutely useless.
But man, Last.fm sucks.
At Pandora, I had a couple of finely tuned stations that played *just* the sort of music I liked. At Last, the best one can do is to select a tag, and it will play whatever sounds vaguely similar in anyone's opinion
In Denmark, during the past two years, prices have risen from approx. 8 to 10 DKK/L.
Given that one DKK = 0.185 USD, and one gallon = 3.785 liter, this translates into a hair more than $7/G.
What's the current price in the US?
Does Apple still publish those big "Inside Macintosh" books as they did way back when? If they do, I bet there's a gold mine in there (regardless of the colou^H^H^H^H^Hshade of your hat).
Hey, I jsut learned a little bit more today. Thanks! :-)
(reply to self after RTFA)
What 'saved' the Mac OS was its different use of timing triggers. "All" other OS'es use one common steadily ticking clock as a dealer of time slots. This allows the cheat to "skip to the start of the line (queue)" every time it's had its turn.
OTOH, the Mac uses a stack of alarms set to specific points in the future, and polled in order as they occur. So the difference on Mac OS is that there's no skipping the queue, it's rather "there is no queue, we'll call you when it's your turn".
I don't know the details of the OpenBSD scheduler, but it's very likely the same (clock tick) method as used by the rest of the susceptible OS'es.
MacOS is not FreeBSD. It's got a Mach kernal. I know, but in broad terms (especially in peoples' minds) it's still seems to be "the closest" (just as "the best" Lotus Notes database need not be "a good" database
This looks like an efficiency issue, not a security issue. And yet, hogging the CPU might be indistinguishable from a DDOS -- at least in the perspective of other users.
Oh, trust me: I have, and I won't.
I mean, I'm all for travelling and seeing the world, but with all the changes we've read about the last couple of years, it's just not worth it. Or to put it rather more plainly: Fuck'em, I'm not that interested in seeing the Land of Opportunity anyway.
Hm.
Why on earth would you release a high-end format, SA-CD/DVD-A with a "lossless" CD-quality format? Either you want convenience, so MP3, or you want quality, which means SA-CD/DVD-A. The point was, rather that let people rip, just include the 128 MP3s on there. I'm thinking that whatever original format the music comes in, you'd still want to have a consolidated media library so you don't have to juggle your physical discs.
In that perspective, a FLAC library take up perhaps half the disk space DVD-A would, and regardless of the size of your media library, or the price of online storage, a factor of two is a considerable difference. But I concede that that may be the only true benefit of high fidelity music compression.
But as insightful as your post is, why do you say If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC and not a single lossless format among them?
I'd say FLAC+WMA would be the premier choice, the one being high-end for audiophiles, the other being playable on dang near any modern (car) stereo. (And yes I could have said MP3 instead of WMA, but Fraunhofer's licensing is even more bonkers than Microsoft's.)
Regarding the article, at www.mythic.tv they sell ready-made MythTV boxes so you don't need mad linux skills. The "Dragon" comes in a Silverstone case whose beauty, I suppose, is debatable (but it's not exactly ugly). But there are plenty of nice-looking HTPC cases out there, you can even find some that look not too far from a SlimDevices Transporter.
Just so you know...