Create the keys from a phrase you aren't likely to forget? And, if you get bashed over the head and can't remember the phrase, you are unlikely to need that backed up data anyway.

More to the point, why would the NSA give a shit about your 2013 tax filings?

Everyone keeps talking about this, but isn't it just an extension of "I stored my backup at my brother's house, which just burned to the ground" ? Also, it's not like Google / Amazon / Apple / Microsoft are going to disappear overnight - these are hundred billion dollar corporations backing those "cloud" storage systems.

Especially Amazon, now that they are have S3 replication between regions available. Upload it there, have it replicate to Oregon, the Bay Area, and Virginia at once.

The only thing that is sufficiently "fire proof" is a storage container that is not in a fire - If the fire is allowed to burn long and hot enough, it will transfer heat through the container and melt or scorch anything inside.

Off site is the only reasonable answer, even if it's just an encrypted SD card at someone else's house.

Exactly - cloud storage is available for free, or a pittance. Use an encrypted disk image to hold your stuff, using a strong password and a strong cipher. And then put that encrypted container on a couple different services just to make sure that DropBox / Amazon S3 / Google Drive / iCloud don't have a fire.

Problem solved.

Yeah, because companies hate it when the press continually talks about how their new product is so successful that they can't keep up with demand for weeks on end, and the notion of "it's so good that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to wait weeks for delivery" absolutely doesn't get other people to take another look at the product and / or get in line themselves.

See: Christmas launches of set-top gaming consoles.

You missed the post above you where someone claimed all of them were purchased by people planning to resell on eBay for higher prices by restricting availability.

Completely shocking that it was posted anonymously.

Lenovo absolutely buys Xeon, and by the truckload for their servers and P-series workstations like this one which you can put two Xeon E5-2699v3 CPUs into, which is the highest spec part Intel makes right now.

Don't forget that they now own IBM's xSeries server business, which uses practically nothing but Xeon.

That might be the first Merkur joke I've seen on Slashdot.

Did you really just ignore the part where I said that if you're building a super computer that is meant to simulate nuclear weapon detonation, you don't give a shit about the cost of the individual CPUs?

When the supercomputers in question are designed for Xeon already (they are) you don't up and switch to POWER or SPARC.

And I compared Intel's top performant part to AMD's top performant part based on that benchmark. If AMD has something that even gets close to a Xeon E5 V3 within the same power dissipation, enlighten me.

AMD provides value parts, because they can't stack up in ultimate performance anymore.

Exactly right - Intel's development fab is in Hillsboro, Oregon. They get the fab process working there, and then document the hell out of it and reproduce that billion+ dollar facility in their production fabs around the world - Costa Rica, Philippines, Malaysia, etc. Then they tear out the inside of the development fab and start over for the next generation. Periodically they need a bigger building footprint, so they build another dev fab next door and assign the previous dev fab to be a production fab at that node for products until they're done with it.

That would be what this campus does.

You're acting like China won't still be able to get their hands on a stack of Xeons any time they want to with Lenovo and Foxconn both sitting inside their borders. Plus, AMD can't deliver anything close to Xeon performance, much less at the same power rating. Nobody wants to dump 10MW into a computer room and then evacuate that heat if they can do the same job in 6MW with 2.5x the performance*.

Looking at this really should shed some light on where high-end computing sits right now - AMD isn't even in the top 50, and anyone building nuclear weapons number crunchers doesn't give a damn about price.

* Intel Xeon E5-2699V3 averages 24601 on CPUMark in 145 watts TDW, where AMD FX-9590 8-Core scores 10273 on the same benchmark, in 220 watts.

They wouldn't even bother with the clustering of Lenovo stuff - they'd just unsocket the CPU and put it into the supercomputer nodes, and then give back the CPU-less server to Lenovo by way of "RMA" or something else, hiding the fact that there is no CPU in it when they get it back. Then, Lenovo refurbishes it (sockets another CPU) and sells it again at a slight discount.

Like the US Department of Commerce would have any clue if that was happening or not.

Exactly.

"You aren't allowed to sell Xeon parts to but you are still allowed to ship millions of them to Lenovo. And if a couple pallets of CPUs fall off the back of the 747... well, whatyagonnado?"