You could probably re-write every piece of software Oracle has ever sold, in their entirety for $240 million (not including the Sun assets, Solaris has legitimate time and effort put into it).

If it's something you're accessing so infrequently that you're willing to put up with that access time, it's something you probably aren't accessing all that often. You get ~300 reads out of a tape before it goes bad. I'd imagine whatever it is they're using this for won't see that in a lifetime. Or if it will, by the time they've hit that limit, they'll be replacing the media anyways for the sake of technology refresh.

Unlikely. The time Blu-Ray saves in getting the the point on disk, it will lose in loading the media. Either way, access time will be measured in minutes, and do you really care if your data is returned in 3 minutes instead of 4? At that point I'd take the higher density, and known reliability all day long. Not to mention, I know I'll be able to buy tape and parts for another decade, the same can't be said of blu-ray.

That's patently false. The digital switch was a knife to the back of anyone using an antenna. I can tell you first hand at our cabin - we got about 20 channels. Since the digital switch, none of them work. When it was analog, you might get a little static every now and then, but at least you'd get SOMETHING. With digital, you either get it, or you don't. There's nothing in between. That means if you were remotely on the edge of the signal before, you're getting nothing now. And I can tell you at least where we're at, the broadcast signal strength they're using for digital is significantly lower than it was before.

Your reputation only matter when your customers have an alternative.

I work in a large IT organization. Our tech support deals with our customers. Exactly 0% of their training is geared towards selling the customer anything. And their bonuses are based 100% off customer satisfaction. Needless to say, our customers don't hate us - and we do more business with them because of it.

Out of curiosity, are they giving the code back, or is it all tied up in their own distro?

Which works great if you're writing all your own software, or are able to rely on nothing but open source. VERY few companies have that luxury, and FreeBSD/OpenBSD are a non-starter for anything you want vendor support on. RHEL and SLES on the other hand are almost universally supported by hardware and software vendors alike.

It's not a reasonable question, because it's not the topic at hand. If you want a virtual machine running linux, go get a virtual machine running linux. This is about backup services. Synology S3 integration isn't a VM on amazon with rsync, it's Synology making native S3 api calls.

No, crashplan isn't a vm running linux with rsync, it's a backup service. If you bothered to spend 30 seconds clicking on either link, you'd have seen that. Instead you started babbling about "serious backups" using rsync which is completely and utterly inferior to the crashplan or s3 option for 99%+ of Synology's target market.

I think you're lost. This thread is about integrated synology backups; not rsync, not virtual servers. Please move along.

S3? Yuck. Their pricing is horrendous. I'd suggest crashplan.

http://www.code42.com/crashplan/
http://forum.synology.com/wiki/index.php/CrashPlan_Headless_Client

Although the synology forums are currently getting destroyed (guessing from this article).

The problem is Synology advertises it as a replacement for your router/firewall as well. I always thought that was stupid. I mean, I get the draw of "only having one box", but I don't know why you'd ever directly expose your personal data to the internet that way.

Not really... Linux has basically 0 traction in the desktop market. There is OSX or Windows. OSX has basically 0 traction in the open systems server market, there is Windows or Linux. The various BSD distros have made noise every now and again from time to time, but they're an after thought, not a legitimate competitor (Solaris/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OSX/etc).

If they're smart, they'll take everything Blackberry had and then some. There's absolutely no reason they can't produce a better email experience interfacing with Exchange than any of their competitors have. There's STILL nothing that even comes close to the old Blackberry + BES + Exchange experience 10 years later, and that's sad.

100% this. Notice that Google announced Android Silver recently. All the sudden the head of that project gets fired, and Tizen mysteriously isn't shipping. The last time Samsung was "just about to ship", Google sold off Motorola and suddenly Samsung had delays.

It's absolutely Samsung's way of fighting back against Google pressure.