I wrote quite a long script -- it's almost 400 lines of Zsh. There may well be better solutions now, but I started this in 2003 or so. I should probably put what I've got on Github or somewhere.
I'm not paranoid about backing up every day -- the backups are done (by cron) whenever I turn my desktop PC on, which is usually every 1-3 days, but obviously less if I'm away. The script ends by sending an email to me. If it's successful, GMail labels the message and it skips the inbox. If the backup isn't successful, GMail puts the notification in my inbox.
There's also a third computer, in my mum's house (different building to the garage). This is normally switched off, but the BIOS is set to boot it up once a month. It provides an off-line backup.
All the backups maintain some history, using rsync's hard links feature. The most recent five backups are kept (usually the last five days), then one backup a week (for the last year). Other than photographs, I don't have much personal data, so there isn't much churn.
It's relatively tame -- one of the first "naughty words" I learned at school, I was probably about 6 years old. It belongs with words like crap, cock, dick, fanny (another UK/US confusion...), arse. The sexual words are all worse, including bastard.
The project manager on my project would giggle every time it was mentioned in a meeting when we were moving to it, about a year ago. I suggested he pronounced it "jit" instead, which was OK until we started using the "EGit" plugin for eclipse -- "eejit" is used in Ireland, it roughly means idiot (or git). My manager is Irish.
Software called "ass" would probably be the best opposite case. Pronounced "ass" (rather than "arse") it means the hybrid animal, and generally wouldn't raise eyebrows.
Note that Linus was fully aware of the British meaning of Git when he names his software.
(I've used it for some basic web testing, but the testing was more about verifying the flow of the process than checking lots of nifty AJAX, so I don't know how good Selenium is at the latter.)
That's exactly what I've done. I set up some scripts to rsync data from my computer to a server in my mum's garage, and also the reverse.
That way, we both have important data (mostly photos) backed up off-site in different cities, and the photos are available to browse through a web interface.
but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
A friend went with an encrypted backup program, and set up more-or-less the same thing with another friend.
It is reasonable only for the most extreme examples, and this case could qualify. (There is so little information on what actually happened that I can't give a definite opinion. If the joke was only posted on Woods' own Facebook page then I strongly condemn the judge's decision earlier today, and I question why Woods pleaded guilty in court. I'm going to assume that's not the case, and that the message was put on a page 'owned' by April's parents.])
You wish to blindly protect free speech, but is this speech worth protecting? It wasn't political, and it's possible it was only written to cause offence. Is that what you want to protect?
In America, there are groups like the Westboro Baptist Church that protest and cause great, directed offence to specific individuals at funerals. Do you think that's right? Most British people don't. (Offending in general is fine, it's when it's personally directed to specific individuals that it can be a problem.)
I'm not sure where I am on whether or not that should be a crime, but I would like to point out that April's parents probably had their guts turn inside out upon hearing that remark.
Do we know if he heard it?
The article doesn't say where the joke was posted. If it was on April's parent's Facebook page then a charge seems reasonable. If it's somewhere else, then it's clearly not reasonable.
Where I work now, when I do one hour overtime, my manager comes to me and asks when I want to take that hour back and go home early or come in late.
That sucks. In California compensatory time off for overtime has to be at a factor of 1.5, i.e. 90 minutes off for each hour of overtime.
He may well be approximating the situation.
I work "flexitime". There are "core hours", when I should be in the office (10-12, 14-15:30), the intention is that meetings are scheduled at these times. There are "main hours", 7-19. I can work whatever hours I like, so long as I'm here during the core hours and not outside the main hours, and the total hours is 37½ per week (and I don't get into debt or credit by more than 8 hours at the end of the month, debt/credit carries over to the next month).
Working a 9 hour day is two hours extra, but doesn't count as overtime if it was 8-18 (hour for lunch). It's expected that I'll work a 5 hour day (or two 6 hour days) to make up for it. Most people use this to go home early on a Friday, or to help with childcare.
Working outside the main hours (including the weekend) is "overtime", and I would be compensated with 1.5x the time in return (or 2x in some cases). The only time this has happened to any of my team is when I went to a meeting in a different country, which fell on a public holiday here. I took Thursday and Friday off, in return for working on the holiday Monday.
At least where I work, travel gets added on too. The first time I travelled for work (and this is my first "real" job) I was quite pleased to have a free trip to Berlin: I left on Thursday evening, took Friday as holiday, worked on Monday and Tuesday and then came back to London. On Wednesday, my manager had rejected my official request to take Friday as leave -- that was my travel time (two two hour flights, plus waiting time, came to near enough 7h12m, i.e. a working day).
I'm not that old, but all three places I've worked in the UK did this. (My university during a summer, a large electronics multinational, a scientific non-profit.)
My manager tends to leave at about 16:30 on Fridays, saying, "go home everyone! Why are you still here?". She's also had to remind one of my colleagues that he's obliged to use all his holiday days (he was only 20, and a bit keen).
I think you need some political pressure to clean up those power plants then (also, I doubt there's the spare capacity anyway, so it should be in place before new plants are built).
I'm not sure whether it's from the EU or just the UK, but this seems to say 6 of the more polluting power plants in the UK will be / have closed by the end of 2015. The linked PDF shows the worst, producing 3.9GW, is permitted (under older rules) to produce 87ktpa (kilo-tonnes per annum?) of NOx. I've nothing to compare that number with.
This report has some graphs and figures for pollution more generally. Of the 1105kt NOx released in 2010, 336kt was from power generation and 370kt from road transport. Page 13 shows there's been a massive reduction in road transport NOx since 2000.
Secondary reason was European airports banning them, but that has since been reversed. UK doesn't let you opt for pat-downs, not sure about the rest of Europe.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm about to cite the Daily Mail), but it looks like they're no longer in use in the EU -- the Manchester use was a temporary extension, an exception to the general ban last year.
According to this the Manchester machines will be replaced by the end of October.
It should be an advantage anywhere larger than a village. I can smell traffic fumes walking along any moderately busy road. Whatever it is I'd rather it was somewhere where a) fewer people were exposed to it b) it could be dealt with more easily
(I currently live next to a railway where all the trains are electric. At a rough guess, something like half a million people go past my window every day, and with no harmful air pollution. Wouldn't it be nice if I could say the same about the road, for the people on the other side of the building?)
Sure, at high speeds. But there's a difference between being hit by a car at 80 km/h and being hit at 20 km/h. The second one shouldn't kill you, but could without a helmet.
In which case, pedestrians should also wear helmets.
A bicycle, however, is entitled to use all of the assigned carriageway, just like a horse, motorbike, car, truck, tractor, tank, whatever.
Indeed? The whole thing?
Yes. Obviously most don't almost all of the time, but it's appropriate to sometimes. It's part of the standard way to turn right (remembering we drive on the left), but is also useful if the road is too narrow to allow someone to overtake me -- it stops people from trying.
It really ought to be one car, because the penalty for a stop on a bicycle is minimal if you know how to operate it, but anyway.
Erm, no, it isn't.
There aren't similar rules in the UK, people are generally polite anyway. Narrower roads, but in the countryside and in cities, mean people are very used to letting others go first.
Stupid drivers not driving safely is a problem in and of itself. But when a bicyclist gets hurt regardless of vehicular interaction, well, I bet the bicyclist is going to regret not wearing a helmet if his or her head is hit against something hard.
I bet we'd have more people willing to skydive if they didn't have to lug around backpacks carrying heavy parachutes.
And I bet we'd have less people willing to walk around outside, or drive cars, if wearing a helmet was mandatory for those two activities -- yet in both cases it would definitely reduce head injuries.
The whole point of the article is that the overall effect of mandating cycling helmets is negative -- worse health overall. In a few cases the outcome is better, often it makes no difference, yet it discourages people from a pretty safe activity which has other health benefits.
Banning walking and cycling completely would eliminate pedestrian and cyclist injuries, but would increase car occupant injuries, heart disease, and pollution-related illnesses.
I cycle to work -- only about half an hour each way -- and I'm noticeable fitter than most people I know that don't get at least that much exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed! They've got a lot to deal with!
Strongbow's fine for kids, it's got fruit in it...
"Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999 999 999% for an archive."
So if I have a 1 000 000 000 000 byte = 1TB archive, after a year I should expect one byte of to be corrupted?
I wrote quite a long script -- it's almost 400 lines of Zsh. There may well be better solutions now, but I started this in 2003 or so. I should probably put what I've got on Github or somewhere.
I'm not paranoid about backing up every day -- the backups are done (by cron) whenever I turn my desktop PC on, which is usually every 1-3 days, but obviously less if I'm away. The script ends by sending an email to me. If it's successful, GMail labels the message and it skips the inbox. If the backup isn't successful, GMail puts the notification in my inbox.
There's also a third computer, in my mum's house (different building to the garage). This is normally switched off, but the BIOS is set to boot it up once a month. It provides an off-line backup.
All the backups maintain some history, using rsync's hard links feature. The most recent five backups are kept (usually the last five days), then one backup a week (for the last year). Other than photographs, I don't have much personal data, so there isn't much churn.
It's relatively tame -- one of the first "naughty words" I learned at school, I was probably about 6 years old. It belongs with words like crap, cock, dick, fanny (another UK/US confusion...), arse. The sexual words are all worse, including bastard.
The project manager on my project would giggle every time it was mentioned in a meeting when we were moving to it, about a year ago. I suggested he pronounced it "jit" instead, which was OK until we started using the "EGit" plugin for eclipse -- "eejit" is used in Ireland, it roughly means idiot (or git). My manager is Irish.
Software called "ass" would probably be the best opposite case. Pronounced "ass" (rather than "arse") it means the hybrid animal, and generally wouldn't raise eyebrows.
Note that Linus was fully aware of the British meaning of Git when he names his software.
Try Selenium for that: http://seleniumhq.org/ -- it works on a few browsers.
(I've used it for some basic web testing, but the testing was more about verifying the flow of the process than checking lots of nifty AJAX, so I don't know how good Selenium is at the latter.)
http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html#introducing-the-selenium-webdriver-api-by-example
I would say at your parent's house
That's exactly what I've done. I set up some scripts to rsync data from my computer to a server in my mum's garage, and also the reverse.
That way, we both have important data (mostly photos) backed up off-site in different cities, and the photos are available to browse through a web interface.
but this being slashdot that's probably not offsite.
A friend went with an encrypted backup program, and set up more-or-less the same thing with another friend.
A good article that gives a better description is here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 but the problem was more that creative had patented something "on a portable media player" not that they patented "a media player".
Interesting article, thanks, I think I'll submit it to /.
It is reasonable only for the most extreme examples, and this case could qualify. (There is so little information on what actually happened that I can't give a definite opinion. If the joke was only posted on Woods' own Facebook page then I strongly condemn the judge's decision earlier today, and I question why Woods pleaded guilty in court. I'm going to assume that's not the case, and that the message was put on a page 'owned' by April's parents.])
You wish to blindly protect free speech, but is this speech worth protecting? It wasn't political, and it's possible it was only written to cause offence. Is that what you want to protect?
In America, there are groups like the Westboro Baptist Church that protest and cause great, directed offence to specific individuals at funerals. Do you think that's right? Most British people don't. (Offending in general is fine, it's when it's personally directed to specific individuals that it can be a problem.)
See also: http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/what-are-human-rights/the-human-rights-act/freedom-of-expression/
Does anyone have a reliable reference for that?
The man has now been jailed after pleading guilty: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/08/april-jones-teenager-jailed-facebook
I'm not sure where I am on whether or not that should be a crime, but I would like to point out that April's parents probably had their guts turn inside out upon hearing that remark.
Do we know if he heard it?
The article doesn't say where the joke was posted. If it was on April's parent's Facebook page then a charge seems reasonable. If it's somewhere else, then it's clearly not reasonable.
It's broadly the same in the whole EU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive
(In the UK you can sign away some of the rights in a contract, but I'm not sure how common it is to do so.)
Where I work now, when I do one hour overtime, my manager comes to me and asks when I want to take that hour back and go home early or come in late.
That sucks. In California compensatory time off for overtime has to be at a factor of 1.5, i.e. 90 minutes off for each hour of overtime.
He may well be approximating the situation.
I work "flexitime". There are "core hours", when I should be in the office (10-12, 14-15:30), the intention is that meetings are scheduled at these times. There are "main hours", 7-19. I can work whatever hours I like, so long as I'm here during the core hours and not outside the main hours, and the total hours is 37½ per week (and I don't get into debt or credit by more than 8 hours at the end of the month, debt/credit carries over to the next month).
Working a 9 hour day is two hours extra, but doesn't count as overtime if it was 8-18 (hour for lunch). It's expected that I'll work a 5 hour day (or two 6 hour days) to make up for it. Most people use this to go home early on a Friday, or to help with childcare.
Working outside the main hours (including the weekend) is "overtime", and I would be compensated with 1.5x the time in return (or 2x in some cases). The only time this has happened to any of my team is when I went to a meeting in a different country, which fell on a public holiday here. I took Thursday and Friday off, in return for working on the holiday Monday.
What about 1 shift crews that have to maintain 3 shift servers and police departments? Off hours is a necessity and out budget doesn't cover overtime.
So don't work off-hours, and your budget should be increased following the next problem.
At least where I work, travel gets added on too. The first time I travelled for work (and this is my first "real" job) I was quite pleased to have a free trip to Berlin: I left on Thursday evening, took Friday as holiday, worked on Monday and Tuesday and then came back to London. On Wednesday, my manager had rejected my official request to take Friday as leave -- that was my travel time (two two hour flights, plus waiting time, came to near enough 7h12m, i.e. a working day).
I'm not that old, but all three places I've worked in the UK did this. (My university during a summer, a large electronics multinational, a scientific non-profit.)
My manager tends to leave at about 16:30 on Fridays, saying, "go home everyone! Why are you still here?". She's also had to remind one of my colleagues that he's obliged to use all his holiday days (he was only 20, and a bit keen).
My alphabet spaghetti only had A-Z. Perl uses the *other* half of ASCII.
First, this is first such geek driven museum I know.
Here you are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_museums . You can find my workplace, in a sub-sub category, and I work with staff from many other institutions, and most are very "geek" driven.
Picking one out, Bletchley Park has been mentioned on /. before, and has some support from Google among others.
Sounds like Luxembourg, which isn't exactly an average EU country...
I think you need some political pressure to clean up those power plants then (also, I doubt there's the spare capacity anyway, so it should be in place before new plants are built).
I'm not sure whether it's from the EU or just the UK, but this seems to say 6 of the more polluting power plants in the UK will be / have closed by the end of 2015. The linked PDF shows the worst, producing 3.9GW, is permitted (under older rules) to produce 87ktpa (kilo-tonnes per annum?) of NOx. I've nothing to compare that number with.
This report has some graphs and figures for pollution more generally. Of the 1105kt NOx released in 2010, 336kt was from power generation and 370kt from road transport. Page 13 shows there's been a massive reduction in road transport NOx since 2000.
Secondary reason was European airports banning them, but that has since been reversed. UK doesn't let you opt for pat-downs, not sure about the rest of Europe.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm about to cite the Daily Mail), but it looks like they're no longer in use in the EU -- the Manchester use was a temporary extension, an exception to the general ban last year.
According to this the Manchester machines will be replaced by the end of October.
What do you base that on? Humanity may have overpopulated Calcutta, or Sao Paulo.
We haven't overpopulated Wyoming.
If we all lived like the average Calcuttan or Sao Pauloan we'd be fine.
It's trying to live like the average Wyominger that's the problem.
It should be an advantage anywhere larger than a village. I can smell traffic fumes walking along any moderately busy road. Whatever it is I'd rather it was somewhere where
a) fewer people were exposed to it
b) it could be dealt with more easily
(I currently live next to a railway where all the trains are electric. At a rough guess, something like half a million people go past my window every day, and with no harmful air pollution. Wouldn't it be nice if I could say the same about the road, for the people on the other side of the building?)
Sure, at high speeds. But there's a difference between being hit by a car at 80 km/h and being hit at 20 km/h. The second one shouldn't kill you, but could without a helmet.
In which case, pedestrians should also wear helmets.
A bicycle, however, is entitled to use all of the assigned carriageway, just like a horse, motorbike, car, truck, tractor, tank, whatever.
Indeed? The whole thing?
Yes. Obviously most don't almost all of the time, but it's appropriate to sometimes. It's part of the standard way to turn right (remembering we drive on the left), but is also useful if the road is too narrow to allow someone to overtake me -- it stops people from trying.
It really ought to be one car, because the penalty for a stop on a bicycle is minimal if you know how to operate it, but anyway.
Erm, no, it isn't.
There aren't similar rules in the UK, people are generally polite anyway. Narrower roads, but in the countryside and in cities, mean people are very used to letting others go first.
Stupid drivers not driving safely is a problem in and of itself. But when a bicyclist gets hurt regardless of vehicular interaction, well, I bet the bicyclist is going to regret not wearing a helmet if his or her head is hit against something hard.
I bet we'd have more people willing to skydive if they didn't have to lug around backpacks carrying heavy parachutes.
And I bet we'd have less people willing to walk around outside, or drive cars, if wearing a helmet was mandatory for those two activities -- yet in both cases it would definitely reduce head injuries.
The whole point of the article is that the overall effect of mandating cycling helmets is negative -- worse health overall. In a few cases the outcome is better, often it makes no difference, yet it discourages people from a pretty safe activity which has other health benefits.
Banning walking and cycling completely would eliminate pedestrian and cyclist injuries, but would increase car occupant injuries, heart disease, and pollution-related illnesses.
I cycle to work -- only about half an hour each way -- and I'm noticeable fitter than most people I know that don't get at least that much exercise.