If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure--transportation and communications systems, water, and power. (...) Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive.

Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:

The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.

Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.

ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.

Any zookeeper who has ever worked primates would tell you that this is pretty typical.

My wife worked as a keeper at a prominent chimp and orangutan sanctuary for several years. She would come home with tales that would make your skin crawl of how smart the apes (both chimps and orangutans) are. It turns out that the OUs (you don't say "orangs", as it offends some of the more hard-core keepers) are the more cunning of the two -- she likened them to engineers.

Some examples:

• An orangutan who kept a bit of metal in between his bottom lip and teeth, using it to try to pick the locks at night when the keepers weren't around. After they finally caught him doing it, they went back and reviewed the tapes and saw that he'd been at it for weeks.
• An orangutan who threw her baby onto the hotwire (electrified fence) to use as an insulating glove to get herself over it.
• An orangutan who used a sweater in the same hotwire-insulating capacity. (OUs love sweaters, shirts, and dresses.)
• Chimpanzees that would hear people approaching, then position themselves just close enough to the walkway to be able to urinate and/or masturbate onto the guests (generally not the keepers).
• An orangutan who used a hard plastic toy to chip away at the concrete substrate (foundation) of his enclosure for days, until he finally managed to get to the bare rebar beneath.

Did you know that the apes you see in TV ads (such as CareerBuilder) and films (such as Dunston Checks In) are never more than 3 or 4 years old, but have a lifespan only a little shorter than humans? They're only "cute" when they are very young, and quickly become uncontrollable, no matter how well-trained they are -- precisely because they have that kind of intelligence. (Roughly that of a 4- to 6-year-old child.)

After that, they are retired and put in cages (rarely zoos) for the rest of their lives. The entertainers wash their hands of them, then your tax dollars are spent to maintain them for the next 40+ years. Depending on the facility, this can be as much as $20,000USD per ape per year.

So every time you see a "funny monkey video", think about how much of your paycheck is going to support that ape in a few years.

Why assume that the buyers are women? That sounds rather contrary to the higher proportions of men both in the tech industry and with technophile tendencies.

Let's be honest.

I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of men buying ebook erotica -- mentally justifying it as "research material".

If you're a socially-awkward male geek, is it really that far of a leap to want to be ahead of the curve when you finally get a woman to talk to you? Yeah, book-learnin' will only get you so far, but it's still better than nothing and a heckuva lot easier to hide than mags or DVDs.

Why would I ever use tape?

I know. As modern-day techies, the very concept of using magnetic tape to hold data is anathema to us. We remember the old TRS-80 or Commodore cassettes, or maybe even reel-to-reel, and it just seems so outmoded.

But here's the thing: tape really is pretty much the absolute best backup solution going right now.

• Tapes are comparable in cost/GB to hard drives. Within the same order of magnitude, anyway.
• No moving parts means you pretty much don't have to worry about them breaking.
• The "omgmagnets!" factor is pretty much a non-issue, as any magnet strong enough to corrupt a tape would probably do the same to a hard drive.
• Tape carousels, while on the expensive side, make it absolutely brainless to rotate through tapes every day. (Do hard drive carousel solutions even exist?)

Of course, I am making a big assumption here: that you're going to want to take your backups out of the server room. In that case, do you really want to send off hard drives every day? Tapes are built with this specific use-case in mind, while hard drives aren't -- I can't imagine what you'd be doing to the MBTF for a drive by sending it on a road trip once a week.

I could attach 8 2TB USB drives to a backup server and backup critical data to that.

In fact, if you watch the video here, you see that's effectively the solution they had, just Firewire instead of USB. This was precisely the point of my original post: people seem to think that this is at least theoretically viable, but it's really not. If you think it is, then I challenge you to try it -- go out and buy even just 4 cheap 2GB flash drives, plug them all in, time how long it takes to fill all 8GB, then extrapolate that to 800GB and beyond. Note that the limiting factor in the speed here will not, surprisingly, be the speed of the flash drives but will be that of the USB bus.

unless I misunderstand the mess the problem was database integrity and lack of old backups.

Nope, you misunderstood half of it -- the data integrity was a problem, yes, and they did have backups, but they never bothered to make sure that the backups worked. They were backing up garbage data, so the backups were just as useless as the original corrupt data.

Whether they had a stack of USB drives or a stack of tapes or a stack of Blu-ray discs wouldn't have mattered in the slightest, as they never checked to make sure they could restore in the event of a catastrophe.

Which brings me full circle: backups are very, very easy to do wrong. Most people think of them as an afterthought. Even once you really sit down and think the entire process all the way through, from backup to restore, they are still astoundingly difficult to do right. And, at least for now, none of the "right" answers are anywhere near cheap, while all of the wrong answers are quite cheap and obtainable.

Lessons such as "Regularly monitor and maintain backups like [any] business should?"

I love it when people say things like this. It shows me that they've never actually had to set up an enterprise backup strategy. I'm certainly not defending the Ma.gnolia guys, but I also can't stand it when people are on a shakier soapbox than they realize.

I'm sorry, but when you are used to the whiz-bang-pretty of Web2.0, the state of enterprise-level backups is horrifically archaic and dismal. And, btw, given the size of today's hard drives and databases, for pretty much all intents and purposes "Enterprise" == "More than one computer with more than just a few files on a drive".

Compare and contrast: a 1 TB hard drive will run you roughly $100. Do you know how much it then costs to backup that TB?

• LTO-4 tapes, 800GB each, $50-$150 each tape plus roughly $2500 for the drive. Figure 2 tapes/day * 10 days backups = 20 tapes * $100 = $2000 in tapes alone. Congrats, that 1 TB just cost you $4500 in enterprise backups ... not to mention the time involved each day in doing a backup. You might save yourself some time and money by doing incrementals ... but then you have to balance that risk with complexity of backups and difficulty in restores.

• NAS is trickier. The cheap NAS solutions, sub $1000 such as Buffalo and LaCie, aren't going to get you much more than a TB or two. And at that point, are you really any better off than the RAID solution? Maybe, maybe not. As you start to scale into IBM or Dell solutions, you are almost immediately beyond a $2500 price point before you even get to hard drives. Oh, and don't forget the cost of a gigabit switch so that it doesn't take you days to do a single backup.

• iSCSI? Seriously? Not an option for SOHO businesses.

Then there's backup software to contend with. It's not just as simple as "go buy a copy of BackupExec" -- there's different licensing for databases, and network backups, and whatever arcane rules they want today. I'm a PC guy so I can't talk much about Enterprise-level Mac backup solutions, but I can without a doubt say that Time Machine is not one of them.

It's even more dismal when it comes to Open Source solutions. Have you ever actually tried to setup Bacula? It may be the 600lb gorilla of OS backup solutions, but it's still a royal pain. And to the "just set up a cron job for rsync" guys, c'mon, really? Good luck with that.

So, please, let's dispense with the thought that backups are easy. Backups really suck. Hard. That's why so many people want to think of RAID as a backup solution -- because the step from one hard drive to two or three is easy, but the next step is much farther away than you think.

How have none of the fanboys mentioned yet that you can develop iPhone apps on Linux with Mono?

Mono now supports static compilation, which is one of the requirements to create a legitimate app that can be sold via iTunes. Search for "iphone" on Miguel de Icaza's blog (via Google) to see a number of posts on the subject.

You still have to pay all of the fees, but you aren't limited to Objective C and, in theory, you never have to sully your hands by touching a Mac keyboard.

(Preemptively -- also remember that Mono supports more than just C# and VB.NET. Again it's just theory, but you could write an iPhone app in IronPython, Boo, PHP, Pascal, etc. Anything that compiles down to CIL.)