Yes. Splashtop Remote. I haven't used VNC in years, literally. Splashtop streams audio and video we'll enough to play games over, locally. Their account-based system nonsense is horrific, buy you can avoid it if you connect over a VPN.
I genuinely don't think I've ever seen anyone mistake the contraction for "we will" with "well". Neat!
You must never type with predictive algorithms. My smartphone swipe keyboard does that ALL THE TIME...not predictive enough I guess lol
You should be watching Jeri Ellsworth or Dave Jones if that's what you want.
He's building prototypes. Cheap, fast, and easy. That's the point. I suppose by your logic every web developer is a "tool" for using high-level languages instead of writing raw binary files? Our keyboards should just have two keys -- 1 and 0?
So somebody figured out how to reverse-engineer an iPod screen. Great. How long was that video? You can watch Heck build his X-Box laptop in about an hour. How long you think it would take to watch him reverse-engineer the protocols for every single component before wiring it together?
So...what, everyone who isn't an EE is a "poseur" to you?
Heck isn't an EE. He doesn't claim to be. Nobody else claims he is either. He's more of an artist than an EE. If you want to watch an EE go watch Dave Jones or Jonathan Oxer or Jeri Ellsworth or whoever.
On July 16, 2013, Governor Lincoln Chafee signed into law an amendment to the Rhode Island Fair Employment Practices Act. The amendment, at R.I.G.L. Â 28-5-7(7), makes it an unlawful employment practice "[f]or any employer to include on any application for employment . . . a question inquiring or to otherwise inquire either orally or in writing whether the applicant has ever been arrested, charged with or convicted of any crime,"
Assuming you're actually tried and convicted of a felony.
At a protest you probably won't be charged, and even if you are it probably won't be a felony. You really think a company is going to refuse to hire someone for stepping off the sidewalk?
There's a small part of the band that doesn't flex, and the batteries (and all the other electronics) are in there. That works fine, because the battery is much smaller than the device. It's basically like a wristwatch. Sure, the band bends, but the electronics don't.
For a smartphone the battery is usually around a quarter of the size of the entire device. So that trick doesn't work so well. But this phone is hardly an armband. It flexes slightly, it doesn't wrap, so you wouldn't need much flex in the batteries.
I'm with you there. It particularly seems odd considering that one of the primary adjectives used to describe a device of low quality is "flimsy".
Why is that odd? Flimsy means thin and poor quality. Can't find a single definition that uses 'flexible' or any of its synonymns. So I'm not sure how that's related...
To me, a 'flimsy house' is one that's gonna collapse with a gust of wind. I'd expect something built of corrugated aluminum. A 'flexible house' though is one designed to withstand earthquakes and would be damn near indestructible.
I actually can't think of a single time I've heard 'flexible' considered to be a bad thing. I mean yeah nobody is gonna buy a phone that bends like it's made of rubber, but that's not at all what this is.
The fly in the ointment so far has been that the most delicate component on a phone is the screen, which has to be on the outside, and has to be the full size of the device. So its impossible to house it inside a protective cage (well, some phone cases attempt to do that, with rather ugly results). But if the screen is flexible it's no longer the most delicate component.
I've never once seen a broken *screen* -- not on a smartphone at least. What I see constantly (more often than not it seems!) is broken *glass*. If this is flexible and still feels like glass, I'd buy it in a second. If it's just crap cheap plastic...then probably not.
Of course, if you replaced the glass on a normal smartphone with something more flexible but kept the rigid screen you probably would see more broken screens....
What about a flexible screen that can become rigid on-demand? Unroll your scroll e-reader, and when it opens fully it snaps open and holds its position...then you press a button and it rolls right back up. Could do that with some kind of pneumatic bladders or electromagnets. Or just simple mechanics -- build a frame as hinged rigid sections that open to only 180 degrees..so it won't bend when you tap on it, because it can only bend towards you. Add some magnets to the hinges if you don't want it flapping forward. Could theoretically do that one with flat screens, but a flexible one certainly makes it far easier. Wouldn't quite "roll" so much as "fold into a square/pentagon/rough approximation of a spiral" but it serves the same purpose.
What about an inflatable "Jumbotron"? Bouncy castles with LCD screens! Why? Because we can damnit!:)
I'd say the *majority* of smartphones I see have cracked glass. All it takes is one unfortunate drop. And not from great height. Happened to mine when it slid out of my pocket as I was sitting down...unfortunately above a hard tile floor.
Although I don't think I'd want a curved phone...just drop-proof "glass". I don't think there's any actual glass that's flexible, so this would probably be using a plastic screen...so I'd only buy it if it a good enough plastic too. No point in trading spiderweb cracks for scratches...and I don't want my fingers sticking to the screen when I try to swipe...but yeah, flex seems awesome. I had the same flip phone for eight years. I want a smartphone with that kind of longevity.
Besides if it's spending 80% of the time idle, then the program is waiting for the user not the other way around.
Bingo. When the software is waiting for something to do 80% of the time, and nothing else of any importance is running on that machine, optimization is pretty much irrelevant; at best it would save a tiny amount of power by slightly reducing CPU usage.
Yeah, and my work laptop backup software is idle 80% of the time...except for those 4 hours every Friday when the disk utilization pegs to 100% and it starts taking several minutes just to switch to a different folder in Outlook, with no other programs open...and if I need to use SQL Developer or Access or something, it's gonna have to wait for Monday!
Nobody cares how much time your program sits there waiting for someone to push the button. They care about how quickly it reacts once you push that button. Just because it's sitting idle for most of the time doesn't mean your customers wouldn't greatly appreciate some optimization.
So they did [complicated thing] that takes [a long time] and did it in a short time by not doing [complicated bit].
By that logic an upholsterer can make a car in a day, by leaving out the body, engine, transmission, suspension and electrics.
Well yeah, that's exactly the point. Tesla is the upholsterer trying to sell car seats; SAP is telling them 'buy our cars and rip the seats out' and Tesla said 'screw that, we'll just produce our own seats!'
Only a consultant would think that it's better to outsource than to hire competent talent and treat them well.
As a consultant myself -- that's very true in many ways:) Just graduated last year, got hired straight away by a big consulting firm. I'm sitting there in training as they're giving everyone their client placements, and some of the guys are going 'Hey, I applied to work for these guys -- and they turned me down!'. And generally we're getting paid a better salary, plus the profits to the consultancy. So the company is probably paying twice as much to hire the exact same people they could have hired directly if their HR weren't morons.
Of course...you don't have to worry about training if you get consultants, and you can be halfway though development for a new version, decide you don't want those features anymore, and scrap it without worrying about where the developers are gonna go -- which just happened to me, got moved to a new project a few months back because mine got dumped, and I'll be moving back in a couple weeks now when they start work on the next version. So yeah, if you look solely at it as dollars per coder hour -- ie, if your development needs remains fairly constant -- consultants rip you off massively. But if you really need that flexibility it's actually probably worth it.
TL;DR: Like the SAP crap, if you're buying stuff that doesn't actually fit your requirements, you're gonna get screwed.
I would doubt there are many employees at Tesla, especially in the technology side of the business, who are there solely because it is a paycheck and there's free coffee.
*FREE* coffee?!? Shit I need to find a new cube farm;)
On the other hand, the statistics about SAP rollouts would tend to indicate a very high degree of risk inherent in attempting to use that system.
The "other" hand? You're going to take something that's inherently complex and risky even when done professionally by a company with hundreds of developers... and then roll your own? And that's less of a risk in your world?
That's not *at all* what's being done though. They're not replacing ALL of SAP; they're replacing the small parts that are applicable to them.
If I tried to build a full replacement for the recently discontinued Google Homepage on my own, it would be a disaster. Too many widgets. But if I tried to build one just for myself, it'd probably go great, because all I'd want is a handful of fixed RSS feed. Throw together some PHP XML parsing and be done in a couple hours. And if there's a particular UI I want, I might be better off rolling my own rather than spending time deciding on and throwing Greasemonkey scripts at an existing similar service.
If they don't need much of what SAP does, then why the hell would they pay for it? At a certain point I'd put that in the category of 'no such system exists, build your own'. Things can also be useless because they do too much; not just because they do too little.
Don't get me wrong, pulling in a 2" or bigger conduit with a couple of copper cables and a multipair fiber is a great solution for both now and future-proofed installations, but it's expensive to start and probably not worth the hassle, even if it turns out that no real permitting is required to do it, especially when one can simply swap between a couple of hard disk drives or removable media or could run a private wireless bridge between locations.
Fuck it. Cat5 tied to a clothesline anchored to the roof. Cat5 is cheap enough to replace after every major storm, right?;)
The only real advantage in this setup is encrypted data-at-rest capabilities and restoring is as simple as downloading the whole container, or driving over and copying the container locally. Anything farther than local and you are right back to where you started, which is relying on services limited by Internet bandwidth.
Recently had my dad send me his laptop for some repairs. $40 to ship an entire, way over-packed laptop about 1000 miles, and it arrived in two days via UPS standard ground. If your backup strategy is to give the drive to a friend, there's no reason you couldn't ask them to drop it in the mail when you need to recover.
If you're recovering so often that the cost or hassle of mailing it is too much, then you have some bigger problems to look at. Keep a local backup for everything except 'my house no longer exists' type events...and if your house is ceasing to exist every month or every year, *what the hell*??? Seriously though, if you need to use your offsite backups, you're almost certainly gonna have thousands or more in repair bills so even if you've gotta have them overnight some massive 4-bay NAS, it's still gonna be a very minor cost in comparison.
In principle this sounds like a good idea, however before doing this you need to check (council and local government) if what you are doing is legal as there is nothing worse than having the police turn up at your door.
Unless you're trying to set up a giant antenna mast I can't think of any possible reason something like this would be illegal...so I'm curious if you have any specific laws in mind there.
As you said, it could definitely get sticky if you put anything questionable on their drive though, so it might be a good idea (for them; but not you in that case) to have some kind of formal documentation of this. Even just an email to them discussing the project would probably be enough for a court, it just has to fulfill "reasonable doubt" on their end. Keep the box secured though, lest you have to prove your innocence should they dump something on there without your knowledge (including by pulling the drive...so user passwords and disk encryption if you really want it to be safe)...
ok, when someone invents fast wifi we'll look at this again. personally i'll stick with 300mbps esata and walk across the street.
I hope you mean 3gbps esata; or 300MBps; if you're getting 300mbps on esata you've got some problems! 802.11n, which is pretty much the standard for the past couple years, can hit 300mbps. If you're willing to go really cutting-edge with 802.11ac you can (theoretically) break even SATA III speeds -- it's rated up to 6.77Gbps according to Wikipedia anyway...though it looks like you'd need a router with *eight* antennas on each end!
if its within wifi range should his house burns down, so will his backup box, and multi-terrabyte backup over wifi won't be fun.
Well, depends on where he lives. In a city? Definitely. Unless you stick it with a neighbor across the street, that would probably be enough.
Out in the suburbs with a half acre lot? You house going up probably won't take out the neighbor, but you're definitely still in range of wifi. Hell, spend a couple bucks or hours on a crappy cantenna and you could run it down the block.
And shit if you're close enough to your neighbors that a fire at your place would take out theirs, then you're probably parking on the street or a parking lot, meaning it'd probably be reasonably safe to just rotate backup drives between your home and your car...
Of course, if instead of a fire it's a tornado or flood or asteroid impact, then you're screwed....so it depends what your local risks are, and how severe the disaster has to get before you don't give a damn about your backups anymore.
Oddly enough I just caught an episode of The Linux Action Show last night that included a product that seems to have exactly what you'd want -- although it sure ain't cheap. Look for: DiskStation vs FreeNAS | LAS s29e03.
I'm at work so I can't get the details for you right now, but they did a brief review of a 4-bay NAS running Linux, which has some "app-store" style functionality...and it's a full linux system. There's an app that'll mirror the entire NAS to Amazon Glacier, although then you've got your network speed bottleneck (though having a one-button restore may help there) but there's no reason you couldn't set one of these up with your neighbor or wherever and access it via whatever network. It's very high speed, very low power, but it runs an Atom processor and a Linux distro so you could probably just toss your favorite PC backup solution on there. Could probably also grab that Glacier or a similar app, set it up to constantly *restore* nightly, and push the backups out from your machine...so you're only pushing incremental changes which shouldn't be bad, and the drive syncs those up to a local copy every night.
Current Li-ion tech needs to improve by an order of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per liter, and nearly two orders of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per kg. Ethanol has about 80% the energy density of gasoline by volume, and about 60% the energy density by weight, so it's already in the same ballpark.
There's more to it than just energy density though. A typical internal combustion engine only actually extracts around 20% of that energy; the rest is wasted. An electric car motor typically extracts over 80% of that energy.
So if batteries are currently are an order of magnitude less density, that means they provide about half as much energy to the axles. Still not as good, but doubling is a lot easier than an order of magnitude increase. Improve the battery tech a bit and cram a couple extra cells under the bumper or something. Plus electric motors have fewer parts, better low-end torque, and other advantages. Although there's also the charging time issue...
Er, if you could just get water from the tap for a cent or two a gallon no one would pay a dollar or more for a 20 ounce bottle of it.
Learn to read. Their argument was that if there's a drought and your tap dries up, stores may decide that the $1 bottle of water now costs $5. Supply and demand.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'massive security upgrade' could be that this one isn't run by a goddamn moron....
Where did you find RDP in a browser, without plugins, in 2009?
Yes. Splashtop Remote. I haven't used VNC in years, literally. Splashtop streams audio and video we'll enough to play games over, locally. Their account-based system nonsense is horrific, buy you can avoid it if you connect over a VPN.
I genuinely don't think I've ever seen anyone mistake the contraction for "we will" with "well". Neat!
You must never type with predictive algorithms. My smartphone swipe keyboard does that ALL THE TIME...not predictive enough I guess lol
You should be watching Jeri Ellsworth or Dave Jones if that's what you want.
He's building prototypes. Cheap, fast, and easy. That's the point. I suppose by your logic every web developer is a "tool" for using high-level languages instead of writing raw binary files? Our keyboards should just have two keys -- 1 and 0?
So somebody figured out how to reverse-engineer an iPod screen. Great. How long was that video? You can watch Heck build his X-Box laptop in about an hour. How long you think it would take to watch him reverse-engineer the protocols for every single component before wiring it together?
So...what, everyone who isn't an EE is a "poseur" to you?
Heck isn't an EE. He doesn't claim to be. Nobody else claims he is either. He's more of an artist than an EE. If you want to watch an EE go watch Dave Jones or Jonathan Oxer or Jeri Ellsworth or whoever.
In some states it's illegal for them to even ask.
On July 16, 2013, Governor Lincoln Chafee signed into law an amendment to the Rhode Island Fair Employment Practices Act. The amendment, at R.I.G.L. Â 28-5-7(7), makes it an unlawful employment practice "[f]or any employer to include on any application for employment . . . a question inquiring or to otherwise inquire either orally or in writing whether the applicant has ever been arrested, charged with or convicted of any crime,"
http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ri-enacts-ban-the-box-law-limiting-67297/
Assuming you're actually tried and convicted of a felony.
At a protest you probably won't be charged, and even if you are it probably won't be a felony. You really think a company is going to refuse to hire someone for stepping off the sidewalk?
There's a small part of the band that doesn't flex, and the batteries (and all the other electronics) are in there. That works fine, because the battery is much smaller than the device. It's basically like a wristwatch. Sure, the band bends, but the electronics don't.
For a smartphone the battery is usually around a quarter of the size of the entire device. So that trick doesn't work so well. But this phone is hardly an armband. It flexes slightly, it doesn't wrap, so you wouldn't need much flex in the batteries.
I'm with you there. It particularly seems odd considering that one of the primary adjectives used to describe a device of low quality is "flimsy".
Why is that odd? Flimsy means thin and poor quality. Can't find a single definition that uses 'flexible' or any of its synonymns. So I'm not sure how that's related...
To me, a 'flimsy house' is one that's gonna collapse with a gust of wind. I'd expect something built of corrugated aluminum. A 'flexible house' though is one designed to withstand earthquakes and would be damn near indestructible.
I actually can't think of a single time I've heard 'flexible' considered to be a bad thing. I mean yeah nobody is gonna buy a phone that bends like it's made of rubber, but that's not at all what this is.
The fly in the ointment so far has been that the most delicate component on a phone is the screen, which has to be on the outside, and has to be the full size of the device. So its impossible to house it inside a protective cage (well, some phone cases attempt to do that, with rather ugly results). But if the screen is flexible it's no longer the most delicate component.
I've never once seen a broken *screen* -- not on a smartphone at least. What I see constantly (more often than not it seems!) is broken *glass*. If this is flexible and still feels like glass, I'd buy it in a second. If it's just crap cheap plastic...then probably not.
Of course, if you replaced the glass on a normal smartphone with something more flexible but kept the rigid screen you probably would see more broken screens....
What about a flexible screen that can become rigid on-demand? Unroll your scroll e-reader, and when it opens fully it snaps open and holds its position...then you press a button and it rolls right back up. Could do that with some kind of pneumatic bladders or electromagnets. Or just simple mechanics -- build a frame as hinged rigid sections that open to only 180 degrees..so it won't bend when you tap on it, because it can only bend towards you. Add some magnets to the hinges if you don't want it flapping forward. Could theoretically do that one with flat screens, but a flexible one certainly makes it far easier. Wouldn't quite "roll" so much as "fold into a square/pentagon/rough approximation of a spiral" but it serves the same purpose.
What about an inflatable "Jumbotron"? Bouncy castles with LCD screens! Why? Because we can damnit! :)
Other than that, it's a marketing gimmick.
Two words: Impact resistance.
I'd say the *majority* of smartphones I see have cracked glass. All it takes is one unfortunate drop. And not from great height. Happened to mine when it slid out of my pocket as I was sitting down...unfortunately above a hard tile floor.
Although I don't think I'd want a curved phone...just drop-proof "glass". I don't think there's any actual glass that's flexible, so this would probably be using a plastic screen...so I'd only buy it if it a good enough plastic too. No point in trading spiderweb cracks for scratches...and I don't want my fingers sticking to the screen when I try to swipe...but yeah, flex seems awesome. I had the same flip phone for eight years. I want a smartphone with that kind of longevity.
Besides if it's spending 80% of the time idle, then the program is waiting for the user not the other way around.
Bingo. When the software is waiting for something to do 80% of the time, and nothing else of any importance is running on that machine, optimization is pretty much irrelevant; at best it would save a tiny amount of power by slightly reducing CPU usage.
Yeah, and my work laptop backup software is idle 80% of the time...except for those 4 hours every Friday when the disk utilization pegs to 100% and it starts taking several minutes just to switch to a different folder in Outlook, with no other programs open...and if I need to use SQL Developer or Access or something, it's gonna have to wait for Monday!
Nobody cares how much time your program sits there waiting for someone to push the button. They care about how quickly it reacts once you push that button. Just because it's sitting idle for most of the time doesn't mean your customers wouldn't greatly appreciate some optimization.
So they did [complicated thing] that takes [a long time] and did it in a short time by not doing [complicated bit].
By that logic an upholsterer can make a car in a day, by leaving out the body, engine, transmission, suspension and electrics.
Well yeah, that's exactly the point. Tesla is the upholsterer trying to sell car seats; SAP is telling them 'buy our cars and rip the seats out' and Tesla said 'screw that, we'll just produce our own seats!'
Only a consultant would think that it's better to outsource than to hire competent talent and treat them well.
As a consultant myself -- that's very true in many ways :) Just graduated last year, got hired straight away by a big consulting firm. I'm sitting there in training as they're giving everyone their client placements, and some of the guys are going 'Hey, I applied to work for these guys -- and they turned me down!'. And generally we're getting paid a better salary, plus the profits to the consultancy. So the company is probably paying twice as much to hire the exact same people they could have hired directly if their HR weren't morons.
Of course...you don't have to worry about training if you get consultants, and you can be halfway though development for a new version, decide you don't want those features anymore, and scrap it without worrying about where the developers are gonna go -- which just happened to me, got moved to a new project a few months back because mine got dumped, and I'll be moving back in a couple weeks now when they start work on the next version. So yeah, if you look solely at it as dollars per coder hour -- ie, if your development needs remains fairly constant -- consultants rip you off massively. But if you really need that flexibility it's actually probably worth it.
TL;DR: Like the SAP crap, if you're buying stuff that doesn't actually fit your requirements, you're gonna get screwed.
I would doubt there are many employees at Tesla, especially in the technology side of the business, who are there solely because it is a paycheck and there's free coffee.
*FREE* coffee?!? Shit I need to find a new cube farm ;)
On the other hand, the statistics about SAP rollouts would tend to indicate a very high degree of risk inherent in attempting to use that system.
The "other" hand? You're going to take something that's inherently complex and risky even when done professionally by a company with hundreds of developers... and then roll your own? And that's less of a risk in your world?
That's not *at all* what's being done though. They're not replacing ALL of SAP; they're replacing the small parts that are applicable to them.
If I tried to build a full replacement for the recently discontinued Google Homepage on my own, it would be a disaster. Too many widgets. But if I tried to build one just for myself, it'd probably go great, because all I'd want is a handful of fixed RSS feed. Throw together some PHP XML parsing and be done in a couple hours. And if there's a particular UI I want, I might be better off rolling my own rather than spending time deciding on and throwing Greasemonkey scripts at an existing similar service.
If they don't need much of what SAP does, then why the hell would they pay for it? At a certain point I'd put that in the category of 'no such system exists, build your own'. Things can also be useless because they do too much; not just because they do too little.
Don't get me wrong, pulling in a 2" or bigger conduit with a couple of copper cables and a multipair fiber is a great solution for both now and future-proofed installations, but it's expensive to start and probably not worth the hassle, even if it turns out that no real permitting is required to do it, especially when one can simply swap between a couple of hard disk drives or removable media or could run a private wireless bridge between locations.
Fuck it. Cat5 tied to a clothesline anchored to the roof. Cat5 is cheap enough to replace after every major storm, right? ;)
The only real advantage in this setup is encrypted data-at-rest capabilities and restoring is as simple as downloading the whole container, or driving over and copying the container locally. Anything farther than local and you are right back to where you started, which is relying on services limited by Internet bandwidth.
Recently had my dad send me his laptop for some repairs. $40 to ship an entire, way over-packed laptop about 1000 miles, and it arrived in two days via UPS standard ground. If your backup strategy is to give the drive to a friend, there's no reason you couldn't ask them to drop it in the mail when you need to recover.
If you're recovering so often that the cost or hassle of mailing it is too much, then you have some bigger problems to look at. Keep a local backup for everything except 'my house no longer exists' type events...and if your house is ceasing to exist every month or every year, *what the hell*??? Seriously though, if you need to use your offsite backups, you're almost certainly gonna have thousands or more in repair bills so even if you've gotta have them overnight some massive 4-bay NAS, it's still gonna be a very minor cost in comparison.
In principle this sounds like a good idea, however before doing this you need to check (council and local government) if what you are doing is legal as there is nothing worse than having the police turn up at your door.
Unless you're trying to set up a giant antenna mast I can't think of any possible reason something like this would be illegal...so I'm curious if you have any specific laws in mind there.
As you said, it could definitely get sticky if you put anything questionable on their drive though, so it might be a good idea (for them; but not you in that case) to have some kind of formal documentation of this. Even just an email to them discussing the project would probably be enough for a court, it just has to fulfill "reasonable doubt" on their end. Keep the box secured though, lest you have to prove your innocence should they dump something on there without your knowledge (including by pulling the drive...so user passwords and disk encryption if you really want it to be safe)...
ok, when someone invents fast wifi we'll look at this again. personally i'll stick with 300mbps esata and walk across the street.
I hope you mean 3gbps esata; or 300MBps; if you're getting 300mbps on esata you've got some problems! 802.11n, which is pretty much the standard for the past couple years, can hit 300mbps. If you're willing to go really cutting-edge with 802.11ac you can (theoretically) break even SATA III speeds -- it's rated up to 6.77Gbps according to Wikipedia anyway...though it looks like you'd need a router with *eight* antennas on each end!
if its within wifi range should his house burns down, so will his backup box, and multi-terrabyte backup over wifi won't be fun.
Well, depends on where he lives. In a city? Definitely. Unless you stick it with a neighbor across the street, that would probably be enough.
Out in the suburbs with a half acre lot? You house going up probably won't take out the neighbor, but you're definitely still in range of wifi. Hell, spend a couple bucks or hours on a crappy cantenna and you could run it down the block.
And shit if you're close enough to your neighbors that a fire at your place would take out theirs, then you're probably parking on the street or a parking lot, meaning it'd probably be reasonably safe to just rotate backup drives between your home and your car...
Of course, if instead of a fire it's a tornado or flood or asteroid impact, then you're screwed....so it depends what your local risks are, and how severe the disaster has to get before you don't give a damn about your backups anymore.
Oddly enough I just caught an episode of The Linux Action Show last night that included a product that seems to have exactly what you'd want -- although it sure ain't cheap. Look for: DiskStation vs FreeNAS | LAS s29e03.
I'm at work so I can't get the details for you right now, but they did a brief review of a 4-bay NAS running Linux, which has some "app-store" style functionality...and it's a full linux system. There's an app that'll mirror the entire NAS to Amazon Glacier, although then you've got your network speed bottleneck (though having a one-button restore may help there) but there's no reason you couldn't set one of these up with your neighbor or wherever and access it via whatever network. It's very high speed, very low power, but it runs an Atom processor and a Linux distro so you could probably just toss your favorite PC backup solution on there. Could probably also grab that Glacier or a similar app, set it up to constantly *restore* nightly, and push the backups out from your machine...so you're only pushing incremental changes which shouldn't be bad, and the drive syncs those up to a local copy every night.
Current Li-ion tech needs to improve by an order of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per liter, and nearly two orders of magnitude to match gasoline's energy density per kg. Ethanol has about 80% the energy density of gasoline by volume, and about 60% the energy density by weight, so it's already in the same ballpark.
There's more to it than just energy density though. A typical internal combustion engine only actually extracts around 20% of that energy; the rest is wasted. An electric car motor typically extracts over 80% of that energy.
So if batteries are currently are an order of magnitude less density, that means they provide about half as much energy to the axles. Still not as good, but doubling is a lot easier than an order of magnitude increase. Improve the battery tech a bit and cram a couple extra cells under the bumper or something. Plus electric motors have fewer parts, better low-end torque, and other advantages. Although there's also the charging time issue...
Er, if you could just get water from the tap for a cent or two a gallon no one would pay a dollar or more for a 20 ounce bottle of it.
Learn to read.
Their argument was that if there's a drought and your tap dries up, stores may decide that the $1 bottle of water now costs $5. Supply and demand.