Your car could spy on you... and notify the police who could then issue the ticket for speeding, distracted driving, and all manner of things. It could even supply pictures/movies of you breaking the law.
I really think that roombas randomly move around rooms hoping to eventually get around all the furniture legs and other assorted obstacles. Eventually, with enough time, they can hope to reach every location. Limited time and insidiously placed chair legs mean they, for some reason miss portions of rooms. If the roomba engineers could focus on getting to ever part of a room (perhaps do something like "map" a room and put in a bigger dust bin) that would be an achievement.
I *know* where my wifi signal is low. Even if I didn't, would it be more useful to walk around with my phone and watch the bars or wait for the vac to hopefully do this for me (only to find it missed half the room).
- only in limited hotels - is no where you can actually see it - you have to hunt for it - goes no where useful like the airport/downtown/other end of the strip - you get lost going to or from the station - competes with several useless trams that visit 2 or 3 hotels of the same chain and are also frequently empty but confuse the situation - almost impossible to find as there's little incentive for hotels to show you the way to it
If they placed the monorail above the center of the strip and ran it from the airport to downtown and made easy access to the hotels, it would be packed. Right now walking the strip is interesting, but painfully slow as getting through intersections requires an escalator raid up over and down the other side. Half the time the escalator is broken. I'd gladly pay the price of a monorail to get to where-ever our group is going. The problem is the hotels and taxi lobbies torpedoed anything useful.
It's a matter of cost. When technology makes it possible to expand the last mile *and make it profitable* they will do so.
Businesses are not charities. The only reason they'll spend millions so they can charge you $70 a month is if they're legislated to do so (like they required the phone company to install phone lines in farm land).
A lot of former communist countries experienced years of lack of investment in their phone system when under communist rule - only the elite were able to get phones. After the fall, no one bothered running lines anywhere - everyone leapfrogged and moved to cell phones. I wonder if something similar will occur (such as wimax or 5g).
You're correct - older folks who don't want to be on the phone for an hour arranging a better deal. The biggest crowd though is the sports fans. Finding (reliable) alternatives is difficult. Cable companies are constantly working exclusive deals to extend this revenue stream. Even purchasing an MLB tv subscription (from the MLB) does not give me access all the regular season games - ridiculous. But the millions cable TV offered them obviously eclipsed the loss of money from fed up mlb.tv subscribers who quit the service.
BTW The $150 pass, also gives me access to NONE of the post season games. Sigh.
Actually, cable is rapidly becoming more and more designed for high-speed data (more accurately bi-directional high speed data).
Cable companies (MSOs - or Multi Systems Operators) have been upgrading their infrastructure (HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coaxial) for years now by replacing main trunks with fiber, re-allocating frequency ranges from TV to data, and developing new standards for equipment in the home (DOCSIS). While the original equipment was not really designed to support bi-directional data, the last decades improvements are all about making sure they cater to their current customers which more and more just want high-speed data. While I'm not a fan of cable companies, I think they see the direction things are headed in and are making sure they position themselves to survive the loss of TV subscribers.
Docsis 1.0 (1997) supported 10Mb/s. DOCSIS3 3.1 (2017) supports 10Gb/s transfer speeds. FTTH (Fiber to the home) is likely the next "big thing" (or possibly wi-max or its successor). Cable companies already have huge amounts of fiber on poles to to aggregate customers data. At this point, they're looking at ways of expanding that reach for the last mile.
What's the weight of a section of power line between two pylons? Hundreds of pounds? What's the weight of a typical "hobby" drone? <10 lbs? I suspect a stiff breeze exerts more force on high voltage lines.
Unless this thing is a a military drone or has titanium axes for rotors, I'm really failing to see how this thing could have caused *any* damage to a power line.
I suspect something else happened and this was a convenient scapegoat.
"He then went on to list a variety of exclusive shows coming up on the service, including new work from Ricky Gervais, Idris Elba and Adam Sandler." Translation: We're going to make some cheap reality tv shows with actors who have or are about to jump the shark because we've got nothing else.
I know that Netflix does have some original programming that are respectable. I don't watch any of them. In fact, I can't name any of them. I primarily go there for movies and binge watching tv shows like lost/walking dead/etc. I suspect many/most of us do to some degree. The problem is good shows are ridiculously expensive and short lived (how many times can you watch Gravity). The bean counters are looking at that and trying to eliminate that cost even though it may kill their base audience.
TV & cable channels have become a vast wasteland of "reality" programming because it's easy and cheap. Netflix is seeing that and thinking "Wow - ME TOO!"? Is this the same CEO that wanted to split the company and raise rates?
If Hulu transitions from primarily episodic tv to include movies and netflix transitions to "me too", I'll be transitioning my service too. My loyalty is pretty weak. I do, however, hope this is a move to negotiate better terms with the content mongers.
One would hope that the cpu time cost of this supercomputer has been calculated. I.E. How much people are willing to pay for CPU time on similar machines. Or even how much the facilities cost to house and run this computer (power, cooling, operators, building costs, etc). How about total costs amortized over the expected lifetime of the machine?
Of course, we don't know how the cost was calculated and it was probably a number arrived at after appropriate hand waving. And then someone transcribed some numbers when jotting it down, and this is the "amount worth" published.
2015 - intel/ms produce all goods in China - the computer sent to the US 2020 - intel/ms declare bankruptcy. Chinese companies produce all parts and software, computer sent to the US
The problem is not just the assembly cost, which is in fact marginal. The problem is the costs all down the supply chain. All the components inside, say, an Ipod are made in China. All the profits made producing and selling those items stay in China. I don't think you could even produce a computer in the US today. You'd have to get and ship all your parts from Asia. Hard drives, memory, displays, discrete components - all made overseas. The huge support base for producing all electronics have moved overseas. If a $200 Ipod costs Apple $150 in parts, $10 assembly/packaging/shipping and $40 profit, that's still $150 that flowed into Chinese economy - not the US economy.
Prototyping and design used to be done here. It's now easier to get the engineering talent overseas where engineers have access and contact with the people producing the actual parts they need to use in their own products. We've lost the production capability, we're about to lose knowledge about how to even create the devices we invented.
You're hiring a someone to be a computer scientist. Would you rather see them have a CS degree or a biology degree? Ivy League degree or Pretty Good European University? I think everyone is going to look at this differently. I know *I'd* rather see the CS degree. I wouldn't be overly impressed by Ivy League but I think a lot of others would be. I work in the the tech field along with people who have degrees in unusual areas (Dance?) but are technically top notch.
BTW, these days it seems a lot of resumes are searched for key words. If they're hiring a computer scientist - guess what keywords they're going to look for?
I've seen many people who seemed extremely critical leave. Once we had someone leave who convinced a couple of others to jump as well. Others fill in the gap (amazing how quickly some people learn when they *really* need to), new talent is hired. Take the new job, enjoy the 7.5 hours a week of more time, invest the money and meet your old pals at the pub.
I think that in addition to the virus detection code there's a *larger* amount of "valid paid-up subscription" nag code. The memory footprint of these things is truly stunning and kills machine's performance. Microsoft's Security Essentials used to be pretty lightweight but it's hitting middle age weight gain. At least it's not intrusive and doesn't nag you to pay up since it's free.
I agree that there are a lot of reasons why this is unlikely to more forward.
From a technical standpoint though, in Windows, you can make a plug-in that will prevent "print screen" from working on/"seeing" certain areas of the screen. Fire up Windows Media player. Start any movie, hit print screen and then see what you got by pasting it into something. You'll notice you'll get the media player window with a nice black box for the content. I also remember Windows being able to do that with IE when they first started their Terraserver project - the imagery was somehow copyrighted and you could look at it, but attempting to copy it or print it resulted in an image with the word copyright repeated over and over and no satellite image.
Of course this won't prevent anyone determined enough to reverse engineer the way the plugin works and then design a workaround. It would however prevent the casual user (probably about 99% of the facebook population) from simply using print-screen or copying the image and mailing it to a friend.
Has anyone ever been able to definitely prove the presence of a ghost? Houdini was rather well known for his attempts at contacting his mother through seances but was never able to find a clairvoyant who was real. Quite a few "ghost shows" are on TV where the "investigators" get all worked up about something quite ordinary ("Ooooh - look - only part of this chair is warm - someone was sitting here in the last hour!!! OMG get a thermal picture of it - this is too weird - I'm freaking out!!!!"). Yet these shows never find anything remotely mystifying.
So you're left with the task of proving/disproving the presence of something you and everyone else knows nothing about - much less how to test for the presence of it. Do they affect magnetic fields? Do they emit light? Do they make noise? Do they alter the temperature of the air around them? Are they affected by unlicensed nuclear accelerators? For ghosts, the answer would have to be "maybe". For humans, the answer for every question is "yes" (yes, we do emit very faint light). So if you do detect something, it's almost certain it's not a ghost, but rather a human.
They've pulled the beta off of their website. They received a letter from the lawyers representing the estate of Edison. The lawyers clients are claiming ownership of the ip rights to all pallotophone codecs and pallotophone encryption/decryption algorithms. Said counsel for Bubba Edison - Mr. G. R. White, "Mr. Edison is seeking to ride on his Great Grandfathers coat tails -we aim to help him since that's the right thing to do - and the fact that he's paying us lots of money". Mr. White was not immediately available for comment as he was participating in a feeding frenzy.
Linux has about a dozen different AV products, commercial as well as free. Wikipedia claims about 800 variants of Linux malware although it does not identify the percentage found in the wild.
Linux has it's roots from Unix which has been the genesis for such fun stuff as rootkits. Who can forget the Morris worm which brought down most Unix systems connected to the Internet in 1988. And now with the ability to install a malware hypervisor onto a machine, it doesn't even matter which OS you run -- no OS is safe.
I've always loved how at the end of a patent dispute, the company who's lost to the patent holder, agrees "to license the 'technology'. After the money is paid out, I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...
Company1 - "Yeah, hi, this is Bob at company X - we recently licensed your technology that allows people to use a mouse to interact with a computation unit in a way that allows the computation unit to perform a useful task. We'd like to get the relevant documentation?"
Company2 - "Um, docs. Huh - never thought of that - I mean it's never come up... Wow, I guess you could read the patent application - that's the only docs we got. BTW, would you like to purchase rights to allow the mouse to instruct the computation unit to perform a useless task? We got a special going on this week for that..."
Sort of. EIGRP is a routing protocol used within an organization (Interior Gateway Protocol or IGP). BGP is the routing protocol used between organizations (Exterior Gateway Protocol or EGP). So you may be running EIGRP (or OSPF, RIP2, etc) within your company but speaking BGP to the other companies your connected to. Also, while there are several IGPs, for all practical purposes, there's only one EGP (BGP). It functions similarly to other routing protocols, using metrics to detmine the best routes to other networks. If it advertises a better route to reach a network, everyone is going to start sending traffic destined for that network to them.
This concludes our lesson for TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).
It's my understanding that the high frequency traders need machines that are physically near to the market they're trading stocks on to minimize hops, lag, etc. and to chronologically beat everyone else who's trying to do the same. Everything is built to make transactions that can be executed almost immediately to take advantage of stocks going up or down before everyone else does thereby altering prices.
I'm going to guess that trying to play that game for servers overseas where lag can be measured in seconds won't work when your competition has servers located in the same building the market is in.
One thing you didn't mention in your post - how critical is the data? If you lost it what would happen: Nothing? Would you lose a few hours time recreating it? Would you go out of business? Would you get sued for breach of contract? Would Knees and Knuckles be paying your family a final visit? Knowing that would make a difference in how I would store the data.
As several posters have stated and you've noticed yourself - nothing beats a hard drive for cost/byte.
But then you need to determine what to do with that - do you keep it online at all times (power, space, cooling may become issues to consider).
How many copies of the data do you keep? Hard drives fail. Just because it's raid doesn't mean it's safe.
What's your bigger plan for dealing testing for failure of the backup media and determining when to retire them? Periodic testing has to be one of the most important parts of your plan. You build something test it once and later find out that your last 2 months of backups were worthless. Testing can help you avoid that.
Do you need to keep copies off-site? Having 2 copies in your data-center located in your basement is no good if it floods.
How much total storage do you need, need 6 months from now, 2 years, etc.? There's an interesting article from the online backup folks at backblaze.com. They put together 4U enclosures that store 67 Terabytes for about $8,000 USD. Complete instructions are on their site for how to do it (they don't sell them but use them for their business). However, it's not exactly portable. While not physically huge, it's gotta weigh a bit. Perhaps 2 at separate locations with a network connection between them to keep them mirrored?
There's a number of firms that offer various online backup solutions where your data is automatically uploaded to their datacenter automatically, however I suspect that you're going to exceed their usual offerings unless they have some "poweruser" or business option. For individuals, "$5/mo unlimited storage" seems to be the norm. However, their are 2 limiting factors to that "unlimited" - your/their available bandwidth. If it takes 2 months to push out your dataset - is that acceptable? Also, many firms delete your data 30 days after you delete it. So if you move those hds to your safety deposit box, does the backup co see them as deleted and then delete their copy? Comparing the cost of doing it yourself vs them may be attractive, esp if they have some appropriate business plan that's not much more then their individual plan.
Does the data need to be encrypted? If you loose those hds on the way to your offsite location will it be merely inconvenient or life altering when someone finds it and reads it?
Finally do you need to somehow need to index the data so you can find your backups?
Making backups is easy. Doing it right so you can actually get your data back takes a little more work.
Slashdot Mirror
Your car could spy on you... and notify the police who could then issue the ticket for speeding, distracted driving, and all manner of things. It could even supply pictures/movies of you breaking the law.
Dystopian Big Brother future.
Gosh, I hope instead of attending in person, he sends a humorous video which will calm the audience carrying torches and pitchforks...
I really think that roombas randomly move around rooms hoping to eventually get around all the furniture legs and other assorted obstacles. Eventually, with enough time, they can hope to reach every location. Limited time and insidiously placed chair legs mean they, for some reason miss portions of rooms. If the roomba engineers could focus on getting to ever part of a room (perhaps do something like "map" a room and put in a bigger dust bin) that would be an achievement.
I *know* where my wifi signal is low. Even if I didn't, would it be more useful to walk around with my phone and watch the bars or wait for the vac to hopefully do this for me (only to find it missed half the room).
Right now, it's :
- only in limited hotels
- is no where you can actually see it - you have to hunt for it
- goes no where useful like the airport/downtown/other end of the strip
- you get lost going to or from the station
- competes with several useless trams that visit 2 or 3 hotels of the same chain and are also frequently empty but confuse the situation
- almost impossible to find as there's little incentive for hotels to show you the way to it
If they placed the monorail above the center of the strip and ran it from the airport to downtown and made easy access to the hotels, it would be packed. Right now walking the strip is interesting, but painfully slow as getting through intersections requires an escalator raid up over and down the other side. Half the time the escalator is broken. I'd gladly pay the price of a monorail to get to where-ever our group is going. The problem is the hotels and taxi lobbies torpedoed anything useful.
It's a matter of cost. When technology makes it possible to expand the last mile *and make it profitable* they will do so.
Businesses are not charities. The only reason they'll spend millions so they can charge you $70 a month is if they're legislated to do so (like they required the phone company to install phone lines in farm land).
A lot of former communist countries experienced years of lack of investment in their phone system when under communist rule - only the elite were able to get phones. After the fall, no one bothered running lines anywhere - everyone leapfrogged and moved to cell phones. I wonder if something similar will occur (such as wimax or 5g).
I'm a cable never.
You're correct - older folks who don't want to be on the phone for an hour arranging a better deal. The biggest crowd though is the sports fans. Finding (reliable) alternatives is difficult. Cable companies are constantly working exclusive deals to extend this revenue stream. Even purchasing an MLB tv subscription (from the MLB) does not give me access all the regular season games - ridiculous. But the millions cable TV offered them obviously eclipsed the loss of money from fed up mlb.tv subscribers who quit the service.
BTW The $150 pass, also gives me access to NONE of the post season games. Sigh.
Actually, cable is rapidly becoming more and more designed for high-speed data (more accurately bi-directional high speed data).
Cable companies (MSOs - or Multi Systems Operators) have been upgrading their infrastructure (HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coaxial) for years now by replacing main trunks with fiber, re-allocating frequency ranges from TV to data, and developing new standards for equipment in the home (DOCSIS). While the original equipment was not really designed to support bi-directional data, the last decades improvements are all about making sure they cater to their current customers which more and more just want high-speed data. While I'm not a fan of cable companies, I think they see the direction things are headed in and are making sure they position themselves to survive the loss of TV subscribers.
Docsis 1.0 (1997) supported 10Mb/s. DOCSIS3 3.1 (2017) supports 10Gb/s transfer speeds. FTTH (Fiber to the home) is likely the next "big thing" (or possibly wi-max or its successor). Cable companies already have huge amounts of fiber on poles to to aggregate customers data. At this point, they're looking at ways of expanding that reach for the last mile.
What's the weight of a section of power line between two pylons? Hundreds of pounds? What's the weight of a typical "hobby" drone? <10 lbs? I suspect a stiff breeze exerts more force on high voltage lines.
Unless this thing is a a military drone or has titanium axes for rotors, I'm really failing to see how this thing could have caused *any* damage to a power line.
I suspect something else happened and this was a convenient scapegoat.
Choice quote:
"He then went on to list a variety of exclusive shows coming up on the service, including new work from Ricky Gervais, Idris Elba and Adam Sandler."
Translation: We're going to make some cheap reality tv shows with actors who have or are about to jump the shark because we've got nothing else.
I know that Netflix does have some original programming that are respectable. I don't watch any of them. In fact, I can't name any of them. I primarily go there for movies and binge watching tv shows like lost/walking dead/etc. I suspect many/most of us do to some degree. The problem is good shows are ridiculously expensive and short lived (how many times can you watch Gravity). The bean counters are looking at that and trying to eliminate that cost even though it may kill their base audience.
TV & cable channels have become a vast wasteland of "reality" programming because it's easy and cheap. Netflix is seeing that and thinking "Wow - ME TOO!"? Is this the same CEO that wanted to split the company and raise rates?
If Hulu transitions from primarily episodic tv to include movies and netflix transitions to "me too", I'll be transitioning my service too. My loyalty is pretty weak. I do, however, hope this is a move to negotiate better terms with the content mongers.
One would hope that the cpu time cost of this supercomputer has been calculated. I.E. How much people are willing to pay for CPU time on similar machines. Or even how much the facilities cost to house and run this computer (power, cooling, operators, building costs, etc). How about total costs amortized over the expected lifetime of the machine?
Of course, we don't know how the cost was calculated and it was probably a number arrived at after appropriate hand waving. And then someone transcribed some numbers when jotting it down, and this is the "amount worth" published.
They were the top vapor developers for *years*. They've got the talent do this correctly.
Paul
Sorry, I don't understand "Siri Set the rapture sven dead trees"
Would you like me to search the web for that?
2015 - intel/ms produce all goods in China - the computer sent to the US
2020 - intel/ms declare bankruptcy. Chinese companies produce all parts and software, computer sent to the US
The problem is not just the assembly cost, which is in fact marginal. The problem is the costs all down the supply chain. All the components inside, say, an Ipod are made in China. All the profits made producing and selling those items stay in China. I don't think you could even produce a computer in the US today. You'd have to get and ship all your parts from Asia. Hard drives, memory, displays, discrete components - all made overseas. The huge support base for producing all electronics have moved overseas. If a $200 Ipod costs Apple $150 in parts, $10 assembly/packaging/shipping and $40 profit, that's still $150 that flowed into Chinese economy - not the US economy.
Prototyping and design used to be done here. It's now easier to get the engineering talent overseas where engineers have access and contact with the people producing the actual parts they need to use in their own products. We've lost the production capability, we're about to lose knowledge about how to even create the devices we invented.
You're hiring a someone to be a computer scientist. Would you rather see them have a CS degree or a biology degree? Ivy League degree or Pretty Good European University? I think everyone is going to look at this differently. I know *I'd* rather see the CS degree. I wouldn't be overly impressed by Ivy League but I think a lot of others would be. I work in the the tech field along with people who have degrees in unusual areas (Dance?) but are technically top notch.
BTW, these days it seems a lot of resumes are searched for key words. If they're hiring a computer scientist - guess what keywords they're going to look for?
H2o. Need at least one uppercase, one lower case and one non-letter.
I've seen many people who seemed extremely critical leave. Once we had someone leave who convinced a couple of others to jump as well. Others fill in the gap (amazing how quickly some people learn when they *really* need to), new talent is hired. Take the new job, enjoy the 7.5 hours a week of more time, invest the money and meet your old pals at the pub.
I think that in addition to the virus detection code there's a *larger* amount of "valid paid-up subscription" nag code. The memory footprint of these things is truly stunning and kills machine's performance. Microsoft's Security Essentials used to be pretty lightweight but it's hitting middle age weight gain. At least it's not intrusive and doesn't nag you to pay up since it's free.
I agree that there are a lot of reasons why this is unlikely to more forward.
From a technical standpoint though, in Windows, you can make a plug-in that will prevent "print screen" from working on/"seeing" certain areas of the screen. Fire up Windows Media player. Start any movie, hit print screen and then see what you got by pasting it into something. You'll notice you'll get the media player window with a nice black box for the content. I also remember Windows being able to do that with IE when they first started their Terraserver project - the imagery was somehow copyrighted and you could look at it, but attempting to copy it or print it resulted in an image with the word copyright repeated over and over and no satellite image.
Of course this won't prevent anyone determined enough to reverse engineer the way the plugin works and then design a workaround. It would however prevent the casual user (probably about 99% of the facebook population) from simply using print-screen or copying the image and mailing it to a friend.
Has anyone ever been able to definitely prove the presence of a ghost? Houdini was rather well known for his attempts at contacting his mother through seances but was never able to find a clairvoyant who was real. Quite a few "ghost shows" are on TV where the "investigators" get all worked up about something quite ordinary ("Ooooh - look - only part of this chair is warm - someone was sitting here in the last hour!!! OMG get a thermal picture of it - this is too weird - I'm freaking out!!!!"). Yet these shows never find anything remotely mystifying.
So you're left with the task of proving/disproving the presence of something you and everyone else knows nothing about - much less how to test for the presence of it. Do they affect magnetic fields? Do they emit light? Do they make noise? Do they alter the temperature of the air around them? Are they affected by unlicensed nuclear accelerators? For ghosts, the answer would have to be "maybe". For humans, the answer for every question is "yes" (yes, we do emit very faint light). So if you do detect something, it's almost certain it's not a ghost, but rather a human.
They've pulled the beta off of their website. They received a letter from the lawyers representing the estate of Edison. The lawyers clients are claiming ownership of the ip rights to all pallotophone codecs and pallotophone encryption/decryption algorithms. Said counsel for Bubba Edison - Mr. G. R. White, "Mr. Edison is seeking to ride on his Great Grandfathers coat tails -we aim to help him since that's the right thing to do - and the fact that he's paying us lots of money". Mr. White was not immediately available for comment as he was participating in a feeding frenzy.
Mod parent up!
Linux has about a dozen different AV products, commercial as well as free. Wikipedia claims about 800 variants of Linux malware although it does not identify the percentage found in the wild.
Linux has it's roots from Unix which has been the genesis for such fun stuff as rootkits. Who can forget the Morris worm which brought down most Unix systems connected to the Internet in 1988. And now with the ability to install a malware hypervisor onto a machine, it doesn't even matter which OS you run -- no OS is safe.
I've always loved how at the end of a patent dispute, the company who's lost to the patent holder, agrees "to license the 'technology'. After the money is paid out, I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...
Company1 - "Yeah, hi, this is Bob at company X - we recently licensed your technology that allows people to use a mouse to interact with a computation unit in a way that allows the computation unit to perform a useful task. We'd like to get the relevant documentation?"
Company2 - "Um, docs. Huh - never thought of that - I mean it's never come up... Wow, I guess you could read the patent application - that's the only docs we got. BTW, would you like to purchase rights to allow the mouse to instruct the computation unit to perform a useless task? We got a special going on this week for that..."
Sort of. EIGRP is a routing protocol used within an organization (Interior Gateway Protocol or IGP). BGP is the routing protocol used between organizations (Exterior Gateway Protocol or EGP). So you may be running EIGRP (or OSPF, RIP2, etc) within your company but speaking BGP to the other companies your connected to. Also, while there are several IGPs, for all practical purposes, there's only one EGP (BGP). It functions similarly to other routing protocols, using metrics to detmine the best routes to other networks. If it advertises a better route to reach a network, everyone is going to start sending traffic destined for that network to them.
This concludes our lesson for TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).
It's my understanding that the high frequency traders need machines that are physically near to the market they're trading stocks on to minimize hops, lag, etc. and to chronologically beat everyone else who's trying to do the same. Everything is built to make transactions that can be executed almost immediately to take advantage of stocks going up or down before everyone else does thereby altering prices.
I'm going to guess that trying to play that game for servers overseas where lag can be measured in seconds won't work when your competition has servers located in the same building the market is in.
One thing you didn't mention in your post - how critical is the data? If you lost it what would happen: Nothing? Would you lose a few hours time recreating it? Would you go out of business? Would you get sued for breach of contract? Would Knees and Knuckles be paying your family a final visit? Knowing that would make a difference in how I would store the data.
As several posters have stated and you've noticed yourself - nothing beats a hard drive for cost/byte.
But then you need to determine what to do with that - do you keep it online at all times (power, space, cooling may become issues to consider).
How many copies of the data do you keep? Hard drives fail. Just because it's raid doesn't mean it's safe.
What's your bigger plan for dealing testing for failure of the backup media and determining when to retire them? Periodic testing has to be one of the most important parts of your plan. You build something test it once and later find out that your last 2 months of backups were worthless. Testing can help you avoid that.
Do you need to keep copies off-site? Having 2 copies in your data-center located in your basement is no good if it floods.
How much total storage do you need, need 6 months from now, 2 years, etc.? There's an interesting article from the online backup folks at backblaze.com. They put together 4U enclosures that store 67 Terabytes for about $8,000 USD. Complete instructions are on their site for how to do it (they don't sell them but use them for their business). However, it's not exactly portable. While not physically huge, it's gotta weigh a bit. Perhaps 2 at separate locations with a network connection between them to keep them mirrored?
There's a number of firms that offer various online backup solutions where your data is automatically uploaded to their datacenter automatically, however I suspect that you're going to exceed their usual offerings unless they have some "poweruser" or business option. For individuals, "$5/mo unlimited storage" seems to be the norm. However, their are 2 limiting factors to that "unlimited" - your/their available bandwidth. If it takes 2 months to push out your dataset - is that acceptable? Also, many firms delete your data 30 days after you delete it. So if you move those hds to your safety deposit box, does the backup co see them as deleted and then delete their copy? Comparing the cost of doing it yourself vs them may be attractive, esp if they have some appropriate business plan that's not much more then their individual plan.
Does the data need to be encrypted? If you loose those hds on the way to your offsite location will it be merely inconvenient or life altering when someone finds it and reads it?
Finally do you need to somehow need to index the data so you can find your backups?
Making backups is easy. Doing it right so you can actually get your data back takes a little more work.
Paul