It's about a terabyte a *day* for "us". Aerospace engineering docs, things that have to be retained by law...
Our situation is uncommon. Media stuff is always an exception, and, jokes about the porn industry driving all storage and distribution technologies aside, media storage and backup considerations are always outliers in this arena.
I know a thing or two about this; I'm an avid photographer and I have a side career in music production.
Excuses. Exactly the thing we need to be better at, is having it not matter if things are openly published and documented.
Most of the things that the demoscene did back in the day were the result of abusing the hardware and doing things that were not at all documented anywhere. Yeah, the scale is bigger today, but it's still just an excuse to say you don't want to push the envelope because it's hard.
I concede your point, although your $10K estimate is a bit high. A robotic transport like that has multiple drives, and HP and Tandberg models allow you to jury-rig just one drive...
I also have to admit that at work I backup about a terabyte of data, nearly all of it essential to business continuity, per *day* and I send 4 tapes off to Iron Mountain each week, which is a separate job for archival purposes. This is so far removed from home use that I should not comment.
Yes. But can you document an in-service LTO-4 failure, or can't you?
I know one person who literally unspooled a cartridge and had it strewn in a hallway for people to walk on, put it back in the cartridge and didn't have any data loss. I know that doesn't prove anything, but, I also think an in-service failure of properly-handled LTO tape might be important news.
There are tons of comments here from people who have never set foot in a medical college, have never had a spouse or a child who has been a medical student, and for sure has never been a medical student him or herself.
You really have no idea what medical school is like. It's not like other professional schools, in too many ways to list, and it's completely unlike grad school. The experience is unique. Trust me, the students, especially the 2nd years, will appreciate any tool that helps them through some of the incredibly difficult hurdles they face during that part of the career.
I think most people would be amazed at how much material has to be learned in the first two years of medical school, and appalled at the depth of the testing.
And whenever you've got patient contact during those years, it's being evaluated, and there's never enough. You don't get to practice. You're *on* every time, even with the standardized ("fake") patients you treat. Basically you're being tested *every time*. And then, the minute school is out, you're probably working all summer in a clinical situation where you're doctoring. Yes, you're a second-year med student or whatever, but in whatever rural health clinic you're working in, you look like a doctor, you act like a doctor, and as far as the patients are concerned, you are one. You almost never "practice" for this. Your feet are in the fire from day one, and you have to function at a level that lots of intelligent and driven people really don't have the aptitude for. (This is a harsh reality that causes a frightening number of med students to either drop out or have total breakdowns and then drop out.)
I know I would never survive in the med school environment. Someone very close to me is thriving in it.
Anyway, the jabs against this idea seem to come from the fact that it's the Linden platform being used, and I started reading the comments because I knew there'd be funny remarks driven by an understanding of how stupid SL players can be and the stupid things they build and the attitudes some of them take, but a controlled sim with a purpose can be a really great tool for things like this.
Even if all there was in the sim, was an avatar where a standardized patient can describe different kinds of rashes, maybe with flash video to show details that are hard to put on avatar skin textures, it's useful. You can work in a pedi clinic for years and not see every kind of rash... And yes, that's pretty much the daily grind in a pedi clinic. Identifying one rash after the next after the next. Cures many of the notion that they want to be a pediatrician, early on...
>I'm currently a 4th year medical student and can tell you from personal experience that nothing... absolutely nothing... can replace face-to-face training >with real-life patients.
Of course not. Do you think that claim is on the table? Do you have anything against supplemental information?
I think a virtual training room could help with USMLE STEP or OSCE preparedness, don't you?
The "virtual patients" are not automata, they are merely a communication medium for the same standardized patients you get in your CBI's as an MS1/MS2.
As a 4th year student, have you already forgotten what that experience was like? MS2's are grateful for *any* resource. By the time you get used to the CBI routine, they take it away from you, just like the way they take away the cadavers pretty much as soon as you get used to them, whoops, that's the end of anatomy.
That said, I don't think the Linden world offers a good way to simulate fine-grained interaction with the world. It's essentially a text chat client augmented with flash video and voice chat. If you don't think flash video is an appropriate tool to supplement medical education, I won't argue, but you're at odds with the state of affairs in medical colleges today, where stuff like video and powerpoint presentations and podcasts are quite prevalent. There's nothing wrong with putting an interactive layer on top of that.
I don't know where you got the idea that anyone was trying to replace med school with Second Life...
As an MS4, you really don't have time to be thinking about stuff like this. Get to work, silly.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
#1 tends to be a megabyte or less.
#2 tends to be a few hundred megabytes of documents.
#3 tends to be terabytes.
My company has a PDF of every document that we've touched in the past decade (federal law requires this retention), and our entire business continuity backup fits easily on four LTO-4 tapes, plus a very less-than-full tape that we rotate for offsite storage weekly. We've explored every backup system out there and this is by far the most cost-effective for us.
I don't understand why the OP claims "tape is unreliable", as I have not heard of a single instance of in-service failure of an LTO-4. As for it being expensive, it is, but before we went to tape we were using Firewire800 external drives, much more expensive than tape cartridges, and not as reliable as some people have been led to believe.
USB and FW external drives almost never fail as long as they are powered on. They fail in storage, which seemed pretty weird to me, since they should be able to sit on a warehouse shelf indefinitely. My low-sample unscientific data from experience says otherwise.
Since everybody is going from LTO-2/3 to LTO-4, you should be able to get LTO-3 transports pretty cheaply.
But my first advice is to identify the data in categories #1 and #2, where you might realize that it's a good practice in any case, to store the important stuff with its own priority. This is the hard part. Identifying what's actually important. If you don't do this, no matter what backup system you end up using, you're going to be burying the important stuff in the noise, introducing risk.
The OP also mentioned Drobo. I have a Drobo and I love it, but I must warn you that it's pretty slow, even with really fast drives. Don't expect to be able to copy a terabyte to it in less than 40 or 50 hours, even with firewire 800. This is the problem that drove us to tape, which is much faster than any filesystem we can feed it from.
Tape isn't cheap but it is cost-effective. I love, absolutely adore, the HP 1/8 LTO-4 autoloader that I use at my office, and I'm thinking about getitng one for personal/home use. Nothing else gives the kind of throughput we get from that thing (both reading and writing) and as for reliability, I would like to hear from anyone who has ever had an LTO-4 tape fail in service.
"An African-American with a degree from Texas Southern University (which is barely better than a typical ghetto high school) will be promoted before an Asian-American or a European-American with a degree from Caltech."
They dropped your resume on the floor, and didn't even send you a card saying how much they regretted it, didn't they? And the only explanation for that is someone of a more fortunate race also applied. Bless your heart.
>At two meters below grade the soil is a constant 50F/10C or so.
Unless you introduce a heat source, and then it's extremely difficult to lose that heat since you're in such a well-insulated environment. Similar problems exist in cooling spacecraft. Sure it's "cold" in space, but if you have a local heat source that you want to shed, where do you send it and how?
Funny how he's not thinking about how this error could (and should) make him rich. No court would side with the company over the victim, and he could claim any damages he'd like -- he'd win, simply on the fact that the company gave him a $BIGNUM bill and didn't *immediately* acknowledge and correct the error.
The Torrent file is just a little bit of text information, but what about the actual transfer, where huge amounts of data are transferred with the endpoints just flapping in the breeze, waiting for some authority figure to take notice? This is the 21st century. Shouldn't some cryptographic scheme be in place making it impossible for things like governments and XXAA's to take any interest in what goes on in the torrent transfer?
>It can be EXTREMELY hard to get people to admit stuff.
In clinical situations it's often the opposite. You (the mental health professional) really don't care who did what to what orifice, but your patients are going to tell you anyway, in lurid detail. I don't know where you get the idea that it's hard to get patients to "admit stuff." They volunteer plenty, if they trust you.
Slashdot Mirror
A good encrypted filesystem is better than deleting: It's equivalent to overwriting the disc with random data.
>#2 may be a few hundred megabytes FOR YOU.
It's about a terabyte a *day* for "us". Aerospace engineering docs, things that have to be retained by law...
Our situation is uncommon. Media stuff is always an exception, and, jokes about the porn industry driving all storage and distribution technologies aside, media storage and backup considerations are always outliers in this arena.
I know a thing or two about this; I'm an avid photographer and I have a side career in music production.
Excuses. Exactly the thing we need to be better at, is having it not matter if things are openly published and documented.
Most of the things that the demoscene did back in the day were the result of abusing the hardware and doing things that were not at all documented anywhere. Yeah, the scale is bigger today, but it's still just an excuse to say you don't want to push the envelope because it's hard.
I concede your point, although your $10K estimate is a bit high. A robotic transport like that has multiple drives, and HP and Tandberg models allow you to jury-rig just one drive...
I also have to admit that at work I backup about a terabyte of data, nearly all of it essential to business continuity, per *day* and I send 4 tapes off to Iron Mountain each week, which is a separate job for archival purposes. This is so far removed from home use that I should not comment.
>The only way to access fancy features like shaders is through the driver's API.
The API gets there somehow other than magic.
>Dusty environments are a nightmare with tape.
Yes. But can you document an in-service LTO-4 failure, or can't you?
I know one person who literally unspooled a cartridge and had it strewn in a hallway for people to walk on,
put it back in the cartridge and didn't have any data loss. I know that doesn't prove anything, but, I also
think an in-service failure of properly-handled LTO tape might be important news.
>And I'd also like to hear from anyone who has an LTO-4 in THEIR HOUSE backing up their home system.
I'm working on it. I won't be getting an autoloader, but I don't think single drive transports are that bad.
Trouble is, I really want SAS.
There are tons of comments here from people who have never set foot in a medical college, have never had a spouse or a child who has been a medical student, and for sure has never been a medical student him or herself.
You really have no idea what medical school is like. It's not like other professional schools, in too many ways to list, and it's completely unlike grad school. The experience is unique. Trust me, the students, especially the 2nd years, will appreciate any tool that helps them through some of the incredibly difficult hurdles they face during that part of the career.
I think most people would be amazed at how much material has to be learned in the first two years of medical school, and appalled at the depth of the testing.
And whenever you've got patient contact during those years, it's being evaluated, and there's never enough. You don't get to practice. You're *on* every time, even with the standardized ("fake") patients you treat. Basically you're being tested *every time*. And then, the minute school is out, you're probably working all summer in a clinical situation where you're doctoring. Yes, you're a second-year med student or whatever, but in whatever rural health clinic you're working in, you look like a doctor, you act like a doctor, and as far as the patients are concerned, you are one. You almost never "practice" for this. Your feet are in the fire from day one, and you have to function at a level that lots of intelligent and driven people really don't have the aptitude for. (This is a harsh reality that causes a frightening number of med students to either drop out or have total breakdowns and then drop out.)
I know I would never survive in the med school environment. Someone very close to me is thriving in it.
Anyway, the jabs against this idea seem to come from the fact that it's the Linden platform being used, and I started reading the comments because I knew there'd be funny remarks driven by an understanding of how stupid SL players can be and the stupid things they build and the attitudes some of them take, but a controlled sim with a purpose can be a really great tool for things like this.
Even if all there was in the sim, was an avatar where a standardized patient can describe different kinds of rashes, maybe with flash video to show details that are hard to put on avatar skin textures, it's useful. You can work in a pedi clinic for years and not see every kind of rash... And yes, that's pretty much the daily grind in a pedi clinic. Identifying one rash after the next after the next. Cures many of the notion that they want to be a pediatrician, early on...
>I'm currently a 4th year medical student and can tell you from personal experience that nothing... absolutely nothing... can replace face-to-face training
>with real-life patients.
Of course not. Do you think that claim is on the table? Do you have anything against supplemental information?
I think a virtual training room could help with USMLE STEP or OSCE preparedness, don't you?
The "virtual patients" are not automata, they are merely a communication medium for the same standardized patients you get in your CBI's as an MS1/MS2.
As a 4th year student, have you already forgotten what that experience was like? MS2's are grateful for *any* resource. By the time you get used to the CBI routine, they take it away from you, just like the way they take away the cadavers pretty much as soon as you get used to them, whoops, that's the end of anatomy.
That said, I don't think the Linden world offers a good way to simulate fine-grained interaction with the world. It's essentially a text chat client augmented with flash video and voice chat. If you don't think flash video is an appropriate tool to supplement medical education, I won't argue, but you're at odds with the state of affairs in medical colleges today, where stuff like video and powerpoint presentations and podcasts are quite prevalent.
There's nothing wrong with putting an interactive layer on top of that.
I don't know where you got the idea that anyone was trying to replace med school with Second Life...
As an MS4, you really don't have time to be thinking about stuff like this. Get to work, silly.
There are three kinds of data:
1. If you lose this data you will go to jail.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
#1 tends to be a megabyte or less.
#2 tends to be a few hundred megabytes of documents.
#3 tends to be terabytes.
My company has a PDF of every document that we've touched in the past decade (federal law requires this retention), and our entire business continuity backup fits easily on four LTO-4 tapes, plus a very less-than-full tape that we rotate for offsite storage weekly. We've explored every backup system out there and this is by far the most cost-effective for us.
I don't understand why the OP claims "tape is unreliable", as I have not heard of a single instance of in-service failure of an LTO-4. As for it being expensive, it is, but before we went to tape we were using Firewire800 external drives, much more expensive than tape cartridges, and not as reliable as some people have been led to believe.
USB and FW external drives almost never fail as long as they are powered on. They fail in storage, which seemed pretty weird to me, since they should be able to sit on a warehouse shelf indefinitely. My low-sample unscientific data from experience says otherwise.
Since everybody is going from LTO-2/3 to LTO-4, you should be able to get LTO-3 transports pretty cheaply.
But my first advice is to identify the data in categories #1 and #2, where you might realize that it's a good practice in any case, to store the important stuff with its own priority. This is the hard part. Identifying what's actually important. If you don't do this, no matter what backup system you end up using, you're going to be burying the important stuff in the noise, introducing risk.
The OP also mentioned Drobo. I have a Drobo and I love it, but I must warn you that it's pretty slow, even with really fast drives. Don't expect to be able to copy a terabyte to it in less than 40 or 50 hours, even with firewire 800. This is the problem that drove us to tape, which is much faster than any filesystem we can feed it from.
Tape isn't cheap but it is cost-effective. I love, absolutely adore, the HP 1/8 LTO-4 autoloader that I use at my office, and I'm thinking about getitng one for personal/home use. Nothing else gives the kind of throughput we get from that thing (both reading and writing) and as for reliability, I would like to hear from anyone who has ever had an LTO-4 tape fail in service.
"An African-American with a degree from Texas Southern University (which is barely better than a typical ghetto high school) will be promoted before an Asian-American or a European-American with a degree from Caltech."
They dropped your resume on the floor, and didn't even send you a card saying how much they regretted it, didn't they? And the only explanation for that is someone of a more fortunate race also applied. Bless your heart.
>However, they don't want the refund, they want the product, which they already purchased.
You can probably use that argument obstinately enough to make yourself an accessory to Amazon's copyright infringement, if that's what you want.
"This assumes the appointed pro-bono counsel is competent and interested in the welfare of his/her client, which may or may not be the case."
It's a hard thing to prove, but if you can prove it, the attorney can be disbarred and/or fined (and even jailed) for contempt.
>Cuba and Internet Gambling come to mind.
Both of those are as fully eliminated as Belgian prostitution.
>While it does seem incredible today, those were very, very different times.
I know lots of photographers who have negative files from those same times.
Plenty of things from those "very, very different times" were meticulously preserved.
The single most important event in human history, though, not so.
>And if I find a way to get into your car that you parked on a public street and drive it away, tough tits for you.
What if I find a way to make use of the constant stream of cars that you put in my living room?
>and lest we forget: TANG!
Tang, the Mandarin word for "Sugar."
>At two meters below grade the soil is a constant 50F/10C or so.
Unless you introduce a heat source, and then it's extremely difficult to lose that heat since you're in such a well-insulated environment.
Similar problems exist in cooling spacecraft. Sure it's "cold" in space, but if you have a local heat source that you want to shed, where do you send it and how?
There are lots and lots of interesting things you can do with a humble 555.
I wouldn't have stayed on hold. I doubt I would even have called. I would be hoping these people are stupid enough to sue me.
Funny how he's not thinking about how this error could (and should) make him rich. No court would side with the company over the victim, and he could claim any damages he'd like -- he'd win, simply on the fact that the company gave him a $BIGNUM bill and didn't *immediately* acknowledge and correct the error.
And not worry about the *transport?*
The Torrent file is just a little bit of text information, but what about the actual transfer, where huge amounts of data are transferred with the endpoints just flapping in the breeze, waiting for some authority figure to take notice? This is the 21st century. Shouldn't some cryptographic scheme be in place making it impossible for things like governments and XXAA's to take any interest in what goes on in the torrent transfer?
>It can be EXTREMELY hard to get people to admit stuff.
In clinical situations it's often the opposite. You (the mental health professional) really don't care who did what to what orifice, but your patients are going to tell you anyway, in lurid detail. I don't know where you get the idea that it's hard to get patients to "admit stuff." They volunteer plenty, if they trust you.
>Tech types that think they are god and this means that they shouldn't have to be nice to anyone.
You should interact with doctors for a few years. You won't think tech nerds are socially inept or arrogant ever again.