Online dating is a bit tricky. Due to the male:female ratios involved, women tend to get deluged with emails so they respond by getting pickier and pickier. I'm not sure how wise that is, because it seems that what people think that they want and what they really want are not strongly correlated. Does the woman in your sample ad really want a mirror image of herself, but equipped with a penis? Or the one that was looking for her Prince Charming, don't you think he's likely to be a bit of a player?
I don't know how old you are, but women in their 30s are going to be disproportionately eager to start a family due to the end of her reproductive years approaching. So yes, if you're looking for a woman in her 30s who wants to have children, she's going to want to hop the next plane to Vegas, get married, and conceive a child before catching the return flight.
I've never actually done online dating (a little too old to have done that), but my instinct is to not like the odds. A better bet might be to do some networking (talk to your friends and see if they know anyone of your preferred sex who might also be looking to be set up) and joining a group for whatever you enjoy doing for fun. Seems like an easy, low-risk (what's the worst that happens? Even if you strike out, you still spent the day doing something you enjoy) way to meet someone with at least one common interest who isn't 200+ lbs.
I would never suggest to anyone to change who they are just to find a date. That would be losing all integrity, and that's not someone I would choose to date.
It's not changing who you are, it's changing how you present yourself. Writing like you're an illiterate buffoon is the online equivalent of not bathing or changing your clothes for a few weeks.
Well, before you introduce yourself to a potential romantic partner, I recommend that you take a shower, change your clothes, and/or run spell check. Whichever is appropriate to your surroundings. You'll enjoy much more success that way.
The reason for subsidies is simple -- it encourages farmers to plant enough to guarantee abundance under nearly any likely scenario, without leaving them trying to sell those same crops during a "good" year for less than they would have made by simply investing the season's crop capital in 6-month CDs and going on vacation somewhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly what the futures contracts are for? Where Farmer Joe contracts with Food Processor Frank to deliver T tons of COMMODITY on future date DD/DD/DDDD for $$$$.$$?
Why are mug shots posted here? For one thing, you have a right to see them.
That's the problem right there. You do not have any such right, at least in a sane society The fault lies with the dicks running the police who thought it would be a good idea..
Sure beats the alternative. If I get taken into state custody, I want my friends and family to be able to find out when, where I am, why, what's going on, etc. I do not want to just magically disappear.
Would you want to live in a society where people just get "disappeared"?
At a conference, or at work, I want to be treated like a professional. If you are busy thinking about whether I'm attractive or not, you're not thinking about what I'm saying.
It's not because your female, attractive or not. Most male geeks have terrible listening skills.
Herbert Hoover tried the Tea Party approach to an economic meltdown, and the result was 25% unemployment, breadlines and tent cities.
What, and the New Deal fixed it? Unemployment remained stubbornly high until we were dragged into WWII.
The government needs to act to stabilize the economy and allow "capitalism" (we don't, and shouldn't, have pure capitalism in this country) to work. It is not the government's place to try to Make Work.
"Created or Saved", an economic metric invented by Barack H. Obama. There is no way to measure how many jobs were "saved". It is a made-up number that is released with the intention to confuse people who don't have a background in Economics. It appears to have worked.
Yup. The government can borrow at lower rates than the rest of us, and use the money to provide us with a safety net so that we can take risks in spending more, helping to break the self-sustaining cycle of a recession.
You're seriously kidding, right? You think mispricing risk is the way out of the recession? mispricing risk is what got us into this recession. The hair of the dog that bit you is not a hangover cure and it's not an economic cure, either.
Just look at how poorly austerity plans have worked out when used.
They cause short-term pain, but yield long-term prosperity. Just like any correction.
Not until the recession is over, ideally, but yes. You need to raise money in the good times to pay for the bad times.
The recession is over. It ended 2 years ago. Still think the government is creating millions of jobs? Did FDR's New Deal create jobs, or did unemployment remain stubbornly high until we were sucked into WWII?
He's a creationist (i.e. prone to believing what he wants to believe) and on the payroll of people who have a pre-existing interest in casting doubt on global warming. So yeah, he's probably wrong.
Everybody has confirmation bias, including climatologists who forecast global warming. Also, how many studies could a climatologist publish which contradict global warming before that scientist stopped receiving grants for studies? I'm pretty sure a climatologist who didn't believe in global warming wouldn't get to be a climatologist for long.
Personally, I think it's more than likely that human activity is causing a warming of the planet, but it is probably much less severe and much less harmful than the hysteria that it's causing. I'd like to see people conserve more, and I try to do my part. We should work on cleaner technologies. But putting the world economy in a straitjacket like cap and trade would do? I think that is an overreaction and out of all proportion to the problem. Of course, that's probably my own confirmation bias showing through. We all have one.
I've never used VSS. Does it work outside of Windows? Anyway, VSS is abandonware. If memory serves, it doesn't even work with the latest version Visual Studio. You might want to get used to the idea of migrating to a new version control system.
Regarding CVS, you should not use that voluntarily. There are a number of reasons for this, but my main argument for its unsuitability is the lack of atomic commits. If one developer is committing while another is updating, the updating developer will see an inconsistent view of the repository (i.e. he'll see only part of what's being committed). This is clearly unacceptable. If that doesn't bother you, the fact that you can't move/rename files while preserving history will. Your first code refactoring will invalidate your project history.
OK, now to answer your question. No, git is not easier to use than other VCSs. It's unnecessarily difficult to learn, and that's a shame. Its branching and merging system supports some extremely productive workflows, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just a royal pain to learn.
I actually do use git, but it took me a long time to become comfortable with it. As far as I'm concerned, this is sad. It's just version control, for pete's sake. It shouldn't be so hard. And while the GUI tools are showing a lot of improvement, they are not there yet.
Most corporate projects would do best to select SVN for version control. It's extremely simple to learn (for those who don't already know it), and the GUI tools are excellent.
Most people who just want a place to stash their code and don't have a distributed team and don't really have branching and merging in their personal workflows, and I'm probably going to take a flaming for saying this, should also use SVN. I'm sorry, but git is just way to difficult to learn for your casual coder. It has something like 35 commands, and only about 10 of which are useful, but good luck finding them.
Re:PostgreSQL CVS-git conversion
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 1
Interesting.
I would argue to the old-school developers that there is absolutely, positively, 100% no reason to ever use CVS in 2011. There is absolutely no advantage that CVS has over modern VCS's.
I'm old-school for sure, and have done plenty of projects stored in CVS back in the day. That being said, I'll tell you that the only reason anyone still uses CVS is that it is a pain in the ass to convert years upon years of project history into another VCS.
CVS is fundamentally broken and should never be used. I can't imagine that anyone has voluntarily used CVS in the last 10 years or so.
Duplicity is handy if you're just wanting the same rsync experience, but with encryption.
If you need a nice Duplicity-like tool with a user friendly GUI, there's also Duplicati.
Too bad I don't have any mod points right now. Duplicati is awesome. You set it up, and it just runs on schedule. It doesn't overconsume resources, either.
Highly recommended for Windows if you only want to backup certain directories. (If you want to do a full system backup, you should just use Windows's backup tool).
Duplicity seems great too, and I'll definitely check it out if I ever run a Linux node outside of Amazon EC2.
Would anyone care to suggest a streaming movie alternative ( Linux friendly ) to Netflix that is comparable in selection and price?
Is there such a beast?
Short answer: No. Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
I've looked, and there just isn't. And that's even ignoring your Linux compatibility requirement.
Personally, I get most of my TV via OTA broadcast and Tivo. I've already got a reminder to myself to cancel Netflix streaming in early Sept before the rate increase. The netflix streaming is the best in the industry by far, but haven't you noticed that it is still extremely limited in selection? I hardly ever use it.
I'm also going to switch to the lowest DVD option (2 exchanges per month) because that's about how many movies I wind up watching per month, anyway. I guess Netflix is going to get a lot less money from me.
Gold and platinum... does anyone else see the problem here? (Hint: it won't be cheap)
Nope, only you see this as a problem, and that is because you are commenting on something that you don't know anything about.
Platinum-based drugs are the largest class of chemotherapy drugs, and yes, they are expensive. But so are the radiation treatments (radiologists, brain surgeons, physicists, and expensive equipment), hospital stays, oncologist consults, radiology studies (MRI, CT, PET), heroic surgeries, marrow stimulants, chemo symptom management, and probably about 100 other things I'm forgetting right now. And battles with cancer can last several years.
Treating cancer is extremely expensive. Nobody is going to bat an eyelash at a treatment that employs precious metals, especially if it works well and quickly.
It's a shame that Amazon uses terminology that some people find confusing. When AWS claims 99.999999999% durability, they are referring to a percentage of objects lost, not accessibility of those objects. The 99.99% availability refers to your ability to access those stored objects. I can see that you found this confusing based on sentences such as the following:
Not unless you your math somehow lets you get 99.9999999% reliability when you're down for a couple of days straight.
Not to belabor the point, but the 99.999999999% durability figure could not be measured in "days straight". An object can be either lost or not lost. I only bring this up so you understand why I assert that you did not, in the strictest sense, comprehend AWS's durability/availability claims.
Along those lines, the latest figures I can recall about S3 objects is that they are storing 500 billion objects. Assuming I didn't lose track of any zeroes, that would mean that AWS could lose 500 objects annually and still be able to make that claim. If you are aware that S3 has lost, or is on pace to lose, 500 objects this year, I'd appreciate a link. If not, I'm going to assume this is just your confusion talking, and does not relate to any real-world facts.
They've proven this year already they can not possibly maintain such a record, they will be unable to make such a claim for several years to come... unless they just ignore previous years performance... and if you do that, you're an idiot.
I'm not sure why you think that you've debunked AWS's claims by including prior years. If you'll bother read and comprehend their claim, it's "99.99% availability of objects over a given year", emphasis mine. It's certainly fair game for you to include prior years' downtimes when evaluating your own storage needs; however, they make no claim that their 99.99% includes all prior years. The sword, of course, cuts both ways. I don't think they had any downtime in 2010, but that doesn't give them the right to have 105 minutes of downtime this year.
So that brings us to you using prior years' performance in evaluating your storage needs. As I'm sure you know, past performance does not guarantee future results. S3 launched in early 2006, and the last major S3 outage I can think of was in the summer of '08 (I think it was 6 or 8 hours or something). You'd be right to say that if you average out 99.99% tolerances over a period of the 5 years that they've been around, they can't claim 99.99% uptime, year over year. Just based on that outage, alone.
Ignoring previous events is just fucking retarded so this 'given year' shit is just a 'we don't actually mean what we say, but if we twist the words JUST RIGHT, idiots will believe its REALLY safe regardless of actual evidence to the contrary being all over the news'
This yields an interesting question to ponder. Let's say you are evaluating S3 against Joe's Cloud Storage and Bait and Tackle Shop. Joe's launched on 1/1/2010 and has had zero down time. S3 launched in '06 and has had several hours' downtime. Both services claim 99.99% annual uptime. Whom do you trust more?
My servers are 100% reliable over any give period that they are online and functional. Isn't marketing bullshit fun?! And actually, my servers are more reliable than amazons, I've never in my life had a critical server/service down for an hour that wasn't planned well in advance. I admit, some of that is luck,
No, most of that is comparing apples with oranges and has nothing to do with luck. S3 does not have planned downtime. Ever. You need to include your planned downtime in your uptime metrics or kindly retract your 100% uptime claim.
if Amazon impresses you, you should not be making IT related decisions for anyone.
Well, S3 stores 500 billion objects and has had less than 1 day of downtime spread out over
Still, when you could build and maintain servers with 25 times the amount of data for the same cost as Amazon, I'm inclined to say that Amazon is overcharging.
Amazon is definitely not cheap, but I don't think 25x is an apples to apples comparison.
For one thing, Amazon provides you with "99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year". With Backblaze's NAS (which, by the way, is really frickin' amazing), your 1PB of data is one natural disaster away from becoming 0PB of data. So double the hardware/storage/cooling cost of your Backblaze solution, because if your data are important, you need a minimum of two of them in independent geographical regions.
Next, they don't factor in the admin cost. Obviously that isn't going to bring you to equal pricing, but you really have to add that in. Who is going to keep your NAS boxes running in multiple facilities?
Also, they say to install FreeNAS. Are you sure you got the configuration right to achieve the fault advertised tolerance? This type of problem is tricky, and getting it wrong could mean the loss of your important data. AWS is ready for you right now, and it isn't going to lose your data.
Lastly, AWS charges only for what you use. That's the elastic nature of the thing. So let's say you are doing a data intensive monthly processing that needs 1PB of capacity for 1 or 2 days out of the month, but for the rest of the month, you only need 100TB. All of a sudden the numbers look very different. You can't give your admin a 90% pay cut for 28 days out of the month, but your AWS bill will be only for what you use.
So AWS gives a ton of flexibility that is financially compelling for a lot of use cases. That being said, I completely agree with you that the use case of "permanent data storage that just keeps growing over time and is hopefully never read" isn't one where AWS can give you an attractive price. You'd be much, much better off with some other solution.
Apparently some countries use terms cognate to "college" to mean secondary education, or what U.S. residents call "high school". Where I went to high school, after the final bell, students had five minutes to board the school bus. If a student chooses to stay late to spend time in the library, how is such a student expected to get home?
Ride the activity bus.
How did you think all the kids who did after-school sports got home?
I'm not quite sure I'd call "spraying oneself with liquid nitrogen" easy, or even safe without training. One wrong move and you could crack a large portion of your skin (and muscle, and bone) off.
Well, nobody is spraying anybody with liquid nitrogen. I've had warts frozen off, and it generally involves a quick tap with a cotton swab that was dipped in liquid nitrogen.
There are inexpensive kits to do this at home (they don't use liquid nitrogen, though). I used one once, and it was effective and seemed pretty safe.
Out of curiosity, what does this mean? When I hear someone say they're a Commonwealth resident, I usually assume that means one of the former British Empire countries. But in the context of Bell Atlantic, I start thinking that maybe you mean one of the US states that calls themselves a commonwealth (e.g. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia); I've lived in a couple of those, though, and never heard that phrasing.
If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that GP intended to write "The Old Dominion" (i.e. The Commonwealth of Virginia), and his brain inadvertently mashed the two monikers together.
I'm inclined to let it slide because it's about 100 degrees there right now. Nobody's brain should be expected to work under such inhumane conditions.
Here's a hint, backups + refurbished hardware = disaster. If you care enough about your data to back it up, then it ought to mean enough to you to pay for quality media. It doesn't do you a damn bit of good to backup if the backup is on unreliable media.
OP wants to store the original copy and backup copy of data in the same physical location, and your only complaint is that the backup is on refurb hardware?
When you house catches fire and chars your laptop, you're not going to give a shit if your charred Time Capsule was refurb or not.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts.
Methinks you have confused cloud computing with grid computing.
SLAs are nice, but they only guarantee that you'll get uptime or a payout. Most of the time, the payout doesn't even come close to compensating the business for its losses. When the stuff hits the fan, you're still just a single account. Bigger accounts will still get the priority. SLAs are nice, in that they provide at least some incentive to the vendor to maintain uptime, but you should definitely assume that the uptime guarantee will be broken every once in a while, and you should plan for it.
This is why you need disaster recovery. SLAs can be broken. Vendors can go bankrupt. Life happens, and you need to plan for it with backup vendors.
A price increase does not have to be justified by value added at all.
Of course not, but to sharply increase prices without adding value risks alienating your customers.
I am a landlord, and I have mastered this art. Each year, I send out a letter that reads more or less as follows:
Dear Mr. Tenant,
Blah blah blah, our costs are constantly going up. Blah blah, your rent is also going up.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind you of our lease renewal bonus program. Upon renewing your lease, you may select one of the following FREE bonuses: 1. a ceiling fan in a room of your choice, 2. painting a room with your choice of one of our pre-approved colors, 3. a $50 gift card to the restaurant, gardening, or home improvement store of your choice, 4. I forget if there's anything else in the letter.
Thank you for letting us serve all of your housing needs for another year.
Sincerely,
Your Bastard Landlord who just raised your rent again this year
The amount of the raise is just enough to make people complain, but not enough to make people move. And typically, the bonus (notice how each bonus cost about $50?) is generally enough to get people to stomach a $25-50/mo rent increase. If they decide not to renew, they get another letter reminding of all the cleanup they need to do, how much it costs to move, how inconvenient it is to come up with a security deposit, and how many bastard landlords there are out there who don't fix anything.
So, anyway, yeah, I'm a huge believer in offering the customer a value-add in exchange for a price increase. It's just human nature to want to justify a negative event like a price increase, so give the damn customer his damn justification so he doesn't get pissed off and leave you out of spite. I make my $50 back in the first month, but I got the customer to stay for 12.
I'm truly shocked that Netflix was so naive as to think that this would end well for them. They're going to have to come up with some serious sweetener by Sept or they're going to get a lot of cancellations when the new, higher bills hit. As for me, I never had the urge to try any of their competitors, but I'm going to try out Amazon Prime streaming over the next few months. Maybe it will be good enough for me to cancel netflix? Maybe not.
But anyway, if they would have offered some sweetener right away, I probably wouldn't have bothered checking out the competition. After all, I'm human, and I'm affected by human nature, too.
That sounds like a rather spot on analogy. Sounds like precedent is against her. The argument that the passphrase, itself, is the incriminating self-testimony seems really weak, both because the passphrase is not being required, and because the passphrase is not, in the end, what will incriminate her.
IANAL, of course.
Actually, it's more like knowing the combination to a safe. Compelling a person to give chemical samples with a warrant is one thing (DNA, fingerprint, blood alcohol, etc.) Compelling a person to reveal the contents of his/her brain is quite another.
The 5th amendment is intended to protect the contents of the accused's brain, and protect the accused from being tortured in order to compel him to reveal his brain's contents.
Slashdot Mirror
Online dating is a bit tricky. Due to the male:female ratios involved, women tend to get deluged with emails so they respond by getting pickier and pickier. I'm not sure how wise that is, because it seems that what people think that they want and what they really want are not strongly correlated. Does the woman in your sample ad really want a mirror image of herself, but equipped with a penis? Or the one that was looking for her Prince Charming, don't you think he's likely to be a bit of a player?
I don't know how old you are, but women in their 30s are going to be disproportionately eager to start a family due to the end of her reproductive years approaching. So yes, if you're looking for a woman in her 30s who wants to have children, she's going to want to hop the next plane to Vegas, get married, and conceive a child before catching the return flight.
I've never actually done online dating (a little too old to have done that), but my instinct is to not like the odds. A better bet might be to do some networking (talk to your friends and see if they know anyone of your preferred sex who might also be looking to be set up) and joining a group for whatever you enjoy doing for fun. Seems like an easy, low-risk (what's the worst that happens? Even if you strike out, you still spent the day doing something you enjoy) way to meet someone with at least one common interest who isn't 200+ lbs.
I would never suggest to anyone to change who they are just to find a date. That would be losing all integrity, and that's not someone I would choose to date.
It's not changing who you are, it's changing how you present yourself. Writing like you're an illiterate buffoon is the online equivalent of not bathing or changing your clothes for a few weeks.
Well, before you introduce yourself to a potential romantic partner, I recommend that you take a shower, change your clothes, and/or run spell check. Whichever is appropriate to your surroundings. You'll enjoy much more success that way.
The reason for subsidies is simple -- it encourages farmers to plant enough to guarantee abundance under nearly any likely scenario, without leaving them trying to sell those same crops during a "good" year for less than they would have made by simply investing the season's crop capital in 6-month CDs and going on vacation somewhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly what the futures contracts are for? Where Farmer Joe contracts with Food Processor Frank to deliver T tons of COMMODITY on future date DD/DD/DDDD for $$$$.$$?
Why are mug shots posted here? For one thing, you have a right to see them.
That's the problem right there. You do not have any such right, at least in a sane society The fault lies with the dicks running the police who thought it would be a good idea..
Sure beats the alternative. If I get taken into state custody, I want my friends and family to be able to find out when, where I am, why, what's going on, etc. I do not want to just magically disappear.
Would you want to live in a society where people just get "disappeared"?
At a conference, or at work, I want to be treated like a professional. If you are busy thinking about whether I'm attractive or not, you're not thinking about what I'm saying.
It's not because your female, attractive or not. Most male geeks have terrible listening skills.
Herbert Hoover tried the Tea Party approach to an economic meltdown, and the result was 25% unemployment, breadlines and tent cities.
What, and the New Deal fixed it? Unemployment remained stubbornly high until we were dragged into WWII.
The government needs to act to stabilize the economy and allow "capitalism" (we don't, and shouldn't, have pure capitalism in this country) to work. It is not the government's place to try to Make Work.
It created millions of jobs, as intended.
"Created or Saved", an economic metric invented by Barack H. Obama. There is no way to measure how many jobs were "saved". It is a made-up number that is released with the intention to confuse people who don't have a background in Economics. It appears to have worked.
Yup. The government can borrow at lower rates than the rest of us, and use the money to provide us with a safety net so that we can take risks in spending more, helping to break the self-sustaining cycle of a recession.
You're seriously kidding, right? You think mispricing risk is the way out of the recession? mispricing risk is what got us into this recession. The hair of the dog that bit you is not a hangover cure and it's not an economic cure, either.
Just look at how poorly austerity plans have worked out when used.
They cause short-term pain, but yield long-term prosperity. Just like any correction.
Not until the recession is over, ideally, but yes. You need to raise money in the good times to pay for the bad times.
The recession is over. It ended 2 years ago. Still think the government is creating millions of jobs? Did FDR's New Deal create jobs, or did unemployment remain stubbornly high until we were sucked into WWII?
He's a creationist (i.e. prone to believing what he wants to believe) and on the payroll of people who have a pre-existing interest in casting doubt on global warming. So yeah, he's probably wrong.
Everybody has confirmation bias, including climatologists who forecast global warming. Also, how many studies could a climatologist publish which contradict global warming before that scientist stopped receiving grants for studies? I'm pretty sure a climatologist who didn't believe in global warming wouldn't get to be a climatologist for long.
Personally, I think it's more than likely that human activity is causing a warming of the planet, but it is probably much less severe and much less harmful than the hysteria that it's causing. I'd like to see people conserve more, and I try to do my part. We should work on cleaner technologies. But putting the world economy in a straitjacket like cap and trade would do? I think that is an overreaction and out of all proportion to the problem. Of course, that's probably my own confirmation bias showing through. We all have one.
I've never used VSS. Does it work outside of Windows? Anyway, VSS is abandonware. If memory serves, it doesn't even work with the latest version Visual Studio. You might want to get used to the idea of migrating to a new version control system.
Regarding CVS, you should not use that voluntarily. There are a number of reasons for this, but my main argument for its unsuitability is the lack of atomic commits. If one developer is committing while another is updating, the updating developer will see an inconsistent view of the repository (i.e. he'll see only part of what's being committed). This is clearly unacceptable. If that doesn't bother you, the fact that you can't move/rename files while preserving history will. Your first code refactoring will invalidate your project history.
OK, now to answer your question. No, git is not easier to use than other VCSs. It's unnecessarily difficult to learn, and that's a shame. Its branching and merging system supports some extremely productive workflows, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just a royal pain to learn.
I actually do use git, but it took me a long time to become comfortable with it. As far as I'm concerned, this is sad. It's just version control, for pete's sake. It shouldn't be so hard. And while the GUI tools are showing a lot of improvement, they are not there yet.
Most corporate projects would do best to select SVN for version control. It's extremely simple to learn (for those who don't already know it), and the GUI tools are excellent.
Most people who just want a place to stash their code and don't have a distributed team and don't really have branching and merging in their personal workflows, and I'm probably going to take a flaming for saying this, should also use SVN. I'm sorry, but git is just way to difficult to learn for your casual coder. It has something like 35 commands, and only about 10 of which are useful, but good luck finding them.
Interesting.
I would argue to the old-school developers that there is absolutely, positively, 100% no reason to ever use CVS in 2011. There is absolutely no advantage that CVS has over modern VCS's.
I'm old-school for sure, and have done plenty of projects stored in CVS back in the day. That being said, I'll tell you that the only reason anyone still uses CVS is that it is a pain in the ass to convert years upon years of project history into another VCS.
CVS is fundamentally broken and should never be used. I can't imagine that anyone has voluntarily used CVS in the last 10 years or so.
Duplicity is handy if you're just wanting the same rsync experience, but with encryption.
If you need a nice Duplicity-like tool with a user friendly GUI, there's also Duplicati.
Too bad I don't have any mod points right now. Duplicati is awesome. You set it up, and it just runs on schedule. It doesn't overconsume resources, either.
Highly recommended for Windows if you only want to backup certain directories. (If you want to do a full system backup, you should just use Windows's backup tool).
Duplicity seems great too, and I'll definitely check it out if I ever run a Linux node outside of Amazon EC2.
Would anyone care to suggest a streaming movie alternative ( Linux friendly ) to Netflix that is comparable in selection and price?
Is there such a beast?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
I've looked, and there just isn't. And that's even ignoring your Linux compatibility requirement.
Personally, I get most of my TV via OTA broadcast and Tivo. I've already got a reminder to myself to cancel Netflix streaming in early Sept before the rate increase. The netflix streaming is the best in the industry by far, but haven't you noticed that it is still extremely limited in selection? I hardly ever use it.
I'm also going to switch to the lowest DVD option (2 exchanges per month) because that's about how many movies I wind up watching per month, anyway. I guess Netflix is going to get a lot less money from me.
Gold and platinum... does anyone else see the problem here? (Hint: it won't be cheap)
Nope, only you see this as a problem, and that is because you are commenting on something that you don't know anything about.
Platinum-based drugs are the largest class of chemotherapy drugs, and yes, they are expensive. But so are the radiation treatments (radiologists, brain surgeons, physicists, and expensive equipment), hospital stays, oncologist consults, radiology studies (MRI, CT, PET), heroic surgeries, marrow stimulants, chemo symptom management, and probably about 100 other things I'm forgetting right now. And battles with cancer can last several years.
Treating cancer is extremely expensive. Nobody is going to bat an eyelash at a treatment that employs precious metals, especially if it works well and quickly.
This was my exact same thought. Now that virtual nodes behind load balancers are commonplace, any individual node's uptime is totally irrelevant.
Who upgrades a node in-place anymore? Add upgraded nodes to the cluster and remove the old nodes.
It's a shame that Amazon uses terminology that some people find confusing. When AWS claims 99.999999999% durability, they are referring to a percentage of objects lost, not accessibility of those objects. The 99.99% availability refers to your ability to access those stored objects. I can see that you found this confusing based on sentences such as the following:
Not unless you your math somehow lets you get 99.9999999% reliability when you're down for a couple of days straight.
Not to belabor the point, but the 99.999999999% durability figure could not be measured in "days straight". An object can be either lost or not lost. I only bring this up so you understand why I assert that you did not, in the strictest sense, comprehend AWS's durability/availability claims.
Along those lines, the latest figures I can recall about S3 objects is that they are storing 500 billion objects. Assuming I didn't lose track of any zeroes, that would mean that AWS could lose 500 objects annually and still be able to make that claim. If you are aware that S3 has lost, or is on pace to lose, 500 objects this year, I'd appreciate a link. If not, I'm going to assume this is just your confusion talking, and does not relate to any real-world facts.
They've proven this year already they can not possibly maintain such a record, they will be unable to make such a claim for several years to come ... unless they just ignore previous years performance ... and if you do that, you're an idiot.
I'm not sure why you think that you've debunked AWS's claims by including prior years. If you'll bother read and comprehend their claim, it's "99.99% availability of objects over a given year", emphasis mine. It's certainly fair game for you to include prior years' downtimes when evaluating your own storage needs; however, they make no claim that their 99.99% includes all prior years. The sword, of course, cuts both ways. I don't think they had any downtime in 2010, but that doesn't give them the right to have 105 minutes of downtime this year.
So that brings us to you using prior years' performance in evaluating your storage needs. As I'm sure you know, past performance does not guarantee future results. S3 launched in early 2006, and the last major S3 outage I can think of was in the summer of '08 (I think it was 6 or 8 hours or something). You'd be right to say that if you average out 99.99% tolerances over a period of the 5 years that they've been around, they can't claim 99.99% uptime, year over year. Just based on that outage, alone.
Ignoring previous events is just fucking retarded so this 'given year' shit is just a 'we don't actually mean what we say, but if we twist the words JUST RIGHT, idiots will believe its REALLY safe regardless of actual evidence to the contrary being all over the news'
This yields an interesting question to ponder. Let's say you are evaluating S3 against Joe's Cloud Storage and Bait and Tackle Shop. Joe's launched on 1/1/2010 and has had zero down time. S3 launched in '06 and has had several hours' downtime. Both services claim 99.99% annual uptime. Whom do you trust more?
My servers are 100% reliable over any give period that they are online and functional. Isn't marketing bullshit fun?! And actually, my servers are more reliable than amazons, I've never in my life had a critical server/service down for an hour that wasn't planned well in advance. I admit, some of that is luck,
No, most of that is comparing apples with oranges and has nothing to do with luck. S3 does not have planned downtime. Ever. You need to include your planned downtime in your uptime metrics or kindly retract your 100% uptime claim.
if Amazon impresses you, you should not be making IT related decisions for anyone.
Well, S3 stores 500 billion objects and has had less than 1 day of downtime spread out over
Still, when you could build and maintain servers with 25 times the amount of data for the same cost as Amazon, I'm inclined to say that Amazon is overcharging.
Amazon is definitely not cheap, but I don't think 25x is an apples to apples comparison.
For one thing, Amazon provides you with "99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year". With Backblaze's NAS (which, by the way, is really frickin' amazing), your 1PB of data is one natural disaster away from becoming 0PB of data. So double the hardware/storage/cooling cost of your Backblaze solution, because if your data are important, you need a minimum of two of them in independent geographical regions.
Next, they don't factor in the admin cost. Obviously that isn't going to bring you to equal pricing, but you really have to add that in. Who is going to keep your NAS boxes running in multiple facilities?
Also, they say to install FreeNAS. Are you sure you got the configuration right to achieve the fault advertised tolerance? This type of problem is tricky, and getting it wrong could mean the loss of your important data. AWS is ready for you right now, and it isn't going to lose your data.
Lastly, AWS charges only for what you use. That's the elastic nature of the thing. So let's say you are doing a data intensive monthly processing that needs 1PB of capacity for 1 or 2 days out of the month, but for the rest of the month, you only need 100TB. All of a sudden the numbers look very different. You can't give your admin a 90% pay cut for 28 days out of the month, but your AWS bill will be only for what you use.
So AWS gives a ton of flexibility that is financially compelling for a lot of use cases. That being said, I completely agree with you that the use case of "permanent data storage that just keeps growing over time and is hopefully never read" isn't one where AWS can give you an attractive price. You'd be much, much better off with some other solution.
Apparently some countries use terms cognate to "college" to mean secondary education, or what U.S. residents call "high school". Where I went to high school, after the final bell, students had five minutes to board the school bus. If a student chooses to stay late to spend time in the library, how is such a student expected to get home?
Ride the activity bus.
How did you think all the kids who did after-school sports got home?
I'm not quite sure I'd call "spraying oneself with liquid nitrogen" easy, or even safe without training. One wrong move and you could crack a large portion of your skin (and muscle, and bone) off.
Well, nobody is spraying anybody with liquid nitrogen. I've had warts frozen off, and it generally involves a quick tap with a cotton swab that was dipped in liquid nitrogen.
There are inexpensive kits to do this at home (they don't use liquid nitrogen, though). I used one once, and it was effective and seemed pretty safe.
Yep. I'm an 'ol Commonwealth resident
Out of curiosity, what does this mean? When I hear someone say they're a Commonwealth resident, I usually assume that means one of the former British Empire countries. But in the context of Bell Atlantic, I start thinking that maybe you mean one of the US states that calls themselves a commonwealth (e.g. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia); I've lived in a couple of those, though, and never heard that phrasing.
If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that GP intended to write "The Old Dominion" (i.e. The Commonwealth of Virginia), and his brain inadvertently mashed the two monikers together.
I'm inclined to let it slide because it's about 100 degrees there right now. Nobody's brain should be expected to work under such inhumane conditions.
What's the throughput rate on an NSLUG to a USB external drive? I feel like backups might be a little painful on such a device.
But more importantly, when your house catches fire and chars your computer, how are you going to get the data off your charred NSLUG?
Here's a hint, backups + refurbished hardware = disaster. If you care enough about your data to back it up, then it ought to mean enough to you to pay for quality media. It doesn't do you a damn bit of good to backup if the backup is on unreliable media.
OP wants to store the original copy and backup copy of data in the same physical location, and your only complaint is that the backup is on refurb hardware?
When you house catches fire and chars your laptop, you're not going to give a shit if your charred Time Capsule was refurb or not.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts.
Methinks you have confused cloud computing with grid computing.
Except when they do. Through an SLA.
SLAs are nice, but they only guarantee that you'll get uptime or a payout. Most of the time, the payout doesn't even come close to compensating the business for its losses. When the stuff hits the fan, you're still just a single account. Bigger accounts will still get the priority. SLAs are nice, in that they provide at least some incentive to the vendor to maintain uptime, but you should definitely assume that the uptime guarantee will be broken every once in a while, and you should plan for it.
This is why you need disaster recovery. SLAs can be broken. Vendors can go bankrupt. Life happens, and you need to plan for it with backup vendors.
A price increase does not have to be justified by value added at all.
Of course not, but to sharply increase prices without adding value risks alienating your customers.
I am a landlord, and I have mastered this art. Each year, I send out a letter that reads more or less as follows:
Dear Mr. Tenant,
Blah blah blah, our costs are constantly going up. Blah blah, your rent is also going up.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind you of our lease renewal bonus program. Upon renewing your lease, you may select one of the following FREE bonuses: 1. a ceiling fan in a room of your choice, 2. painting a room with your choice of one of our pre-approved colors, 3. a $50 gift card to the restaurant, gardening, or home improvement store of your choice, 4. I forget if there's anything else in the letter.
Thank you for letting us serve all of your housing needs for another year.
Sincerely,
Your Bastard Landlord who just raised your rent again this year
The amount of the raise is just enough to make people complain, but not enough to make people move. And typically, the bonus (notice how each bonus cost about $50?) is generally enough to get people to stomach a $25-50/mo rent increase. If they decide not to renew, they get another letter reminding of all the cleanup they need to do, how much it costs to move, how inconvenient it is to come up with a security deposit, and how many bastard landlords there are out there who don't fix anything.
So, anyway, yeah, I'm a huge believer in offering the customer a value-add in exchange for a price increase. It's just human nature to want to justify a negative event like a price increase, so give the damn customer his damn justification so he doesn't get pissed off and leave you out of spite. I make my $50 back in the first month, but I got the customer to stay for 12.
I'm truly shocked that Netflix was so naive as to think that this would end well for them. They're going to have to come up with some serious sweetener by Sept or they're going to get a lot of cancellations when the new, higher bills hit. As for me, I never had the urge to try any of their competitors, but I'm going to try out Amazon Prime streaming over the next few months. Maybe it will be good enough for me to cancel netflix? Maybe not.
But anyway, if they would have offered some sweetener right away, I probably wouldn't have bothered checking out the competition. After all, I'm human, and I'm affected by human nature, too.
That sounds like a rather spot on analogy. Sounds like precedent is against her. The argument that the passphrase, itself, is the incriminating self-testimony seems really weak, both because the passphrase is not being required, and because the passphrase is not, in the end, what will incriminate her.
IANAL, of course.
Actually, it's more like knowing the combination to a safe. Compelling a person to give chemical samples with a warrant is one thing (DNA, fingerprint, blood alcohol, etc.) Compelling a person to reveal the contents of his/her brain is quite another.
The 5th amendment is intended to protect the contents of the accused's brain, and protect the accused from being tortured in order to compel him to reveal his brain's contents.
In addition to what anyGould said, pleading the fifth will likely be used against you in court.
False.