I disagree.

We used to use LTO, and it was OK for a while, but we switched to using removable hard drives and rsync a long time ago and haven't regretted it one bit.

We're every bit as paranoid as the next guy (there *might* be some more paranoid, but not many).

We've pulled 10 year old hard drives off the shelf before and recovered things no problem. Our rotation won't ever require us to actually do that, but we have tested it a number of times and things worked great.

What we do though, is periodically update our archived copies to newer media when we update our removable drives.. Often times, this allows us to merge old archive media onto fewer drives saving us a lot of space in the long run. We do have multiple copies, including 3 sets that are permanently online in different locations, and a number of offline sets.. As our backups age, we reduce the number of copies we keep offline, but never go below 3 offline copies of any given data.

The real reason that this is fantastic though, isn't that it backs up so much faster (it does, because after a drive has rsync'd once, there usually aren't many changed files compared to the bulk of the rest of the data). The real reason that this is fantastic isn't because we save space and reduce our need to have old hardware with SCSI interfaces etc (it does though). The real reason this is fantastic isn't because when you take older/smaller drives out of the loop, you can actually repurpose them (you can though.. what are you going to do with a bunch of left-over too small LTO tapes).

The real reason that this is fantastic, is that in the event of a catastrophe, you can get things up and running very quickly. If you're really in a panic, you can boot off of the drive that is that backup disk because we add an OS to them when we prep the drives. You just need any old POS PC with SATA on it and a copy of the file used for decryption, and you can be up and running in minutes. Even for the lighter weight emergencies random access to your data is still quite priceless. You can go directly to the file you need, or even multiple versions of it, instead of waiting for tape media to scan.

In short, yes. LTO is dead whether it knows it yet or not.

Yeah... Given their cost, they're going to be completely impractical..

City kids that are bored will have a replacement for cow tipping.. They'll go dress to be unidentifiable on video, and then probably do one of the following:

EM van as stated above so they can have a souvenir
Lob it into a lake (maybe making a few holes in it first)
Attack it with a magnet strong enough to rearrange it's innards and then proclaim "Yeah Bitch! Magnets!" (check youtube if you don't recognize it)
Spray paint over all it's sensors, or hit them with something corrosive so they need to be replaced.
Land mine attach with some home made fireworks (manually triggered for safety of course).
How about a nice patch of quick trying foam adhesive so someone has to come chip it back out..
Oh oh.. massive balloon bundle attach.. How many do you need to lift 300 pounds? OK, good... double it..
Hack into it and either make it go rogue, or have it send back looped video and sensor readings so that it's effectively void.
Trebuchet testing?
Potato gun target?
Pool ball from a potato gun target?
How about just putting a picture on a stick attached to it's "head" to keep it from seeing anything.
Home made thermite test?

I'm out of decent ideas, but I'm sure the kids are much more creative than I am..

Do you know how the takedown of so many "darknet" sites was accomplished recently, or do you at least have some suspicions? The government seems to by lying about how they took down the original Silk Road site, and I'm wondering if you believe this is to: a) Hide a technical solution that they have at their disposal, or b) Hide the egregiously illegal/inadmissable things they did to accomplish this, or c) some of each.

I just hope the "in-valids" will still be able to find nice janitorial positions...

For anyone that hasn't seen Gattaca, you can catch a small clip here: http://www.wingclips.com/movie...

From yesterdays post:

Michael Geist reports that Netflix and Google are ready to challenge it in a case that could head to the Supreme Court of Canada.

There is a tiny bit of new news here. It's gone from speculation to being confirmed, but really, this is just a repost of the same thing.

If ever a language needed some help getting people to write *good* code instead of just being able to write code, PHP is it..

I've always wanted to have a fairly minimal setup.. We don't have a lot of space, and I don't want to waste a lot of energy, so I've always tried to have 1 always on server as my target. I've had two and three at times, but mostly just during upgrades, or while I was waiting to find the time to upgrade..
I have 1 quad core i7 with 32 gigs of ram, and 8 1.5 terrabyte hard drives running in RAID 6. The hardware has two network cards, which allows me to do just about everything I want with virtual machines running under KVM. Things are getting a little tight these days, so I'm looking to upgrade to 3 terrabyte drives for 18 terrabytes usable space, and I'd also like to move up to 64 gigs of ram, but I'm going to wait as long as I can so maybe the prices will come down a bit.
The server runs cool and is pretty quiet as I've chosen to go with a 4U case with the largest fans I could find. I've got a 24 port gigabit switch and an access point to round out my hardware.. Everything else is virtualized.

Hardware Summary:
4U server - 32 gigs ram, i7 9 terabytes usable RAID 6, and dual nics
1U 24port gigabit smart switch
2U rack mount UPS
generic 802.11 b/g/n access point

Virtualized:
Firewall/vpn server
File server
Plex server
4x part time windows XP for experiments and various utilities
3x part time windows 7
Vuze server

Benefits:
quiet
reliable
small footprint
relatively low power (about 150-175 watts most of the time, and during the winter it just reduces the amount the electric furnace runs)
low maintenance

Downside:
All your eggs in one basket - I have backups, but I'll be down in the event of hardware failure.
VM host is a little weaker than is optimal when I'm running a lot of guests

I don't think that bash really has it.. It seems like it does, but at least on most systems I've used, that's part of the program "test".

"Test" usually has a symlink to it under the name "[" which is actually what you're running when you type something like "if [ 5 -eq 7 ]"... Note.. the program "test" ignores any parameter of "]" making them completely optional most of the time..

It sure looks like syntax, but I think that "[" is just like any other character in bash.. "if" is just testing the return value from the program "["..

Doh.. and Halo should probably have been on the list..

Per someone else's comment.. I meant Mechwarrior 2.. They're right..

We do need this on Slashdot. I don't want the list that people from a gamer site would come up with. I'm sure it would be very different.

It is not news.

It *IS* stuff that matters.

That's s good list.. I'd like to add to it, and make it a little more eclectic..

Descent
Mechwarior
Portal / Portal 2
DIablo
Wizball (c64)
Impossible MIssion 2 (c64)
Raid over Moscow (c64)
The old Ultima series (like Ultima IV)
Quake
Quake 3 arena
Doom (it's classic, but it is hard to play these days after having gotten used to being able to look and move up and down)
Empire (c64 BBS - You probably can't just keep this one around to play, but it was fun when it was out there)
Legend of Zelda

Arcade:
Hard Drivin (I think that was it.. early car simulator with impossible tracks.. loops etc)
Tempest
Missile command
The original Tron game
Super Mario Bros
Donkey Kong

Board/card:
Cribbage is good
Uno is nice if you don't want to have to use your brain, or you need something very inclusive
Monopoly is a good staple to have around

Well, that's what comes to mind quickly.. I'm sure I've still missed quite a few classics..

I wonder how feasible it would be to modify tor, or maybe make a tor version 2 protocol so that the onion layers are determined packet by packet, instead of by the stream.

I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to the tor protocol, but it sounds like each stream is bounced off a series of relays.. If you could change that to each packet, or split the stream into a few other streams that took different routes (and let the stream get reassembled from packets from multiple streams at the destination), then it seems like you could make this sort of attack a lot harder..

I'm not sure about people trying to discover the location of the tor hidden service, but it seems like it would help protect the client -> server integrity quite a bit..

I haven't had a credit card in over 10 years, and my credit is fantastic. Of course, I've had a couple of car loans, and a home loan... all in good standing and/or paid off, but I never had a credit card when I got any of those loans either, so it certainly wasn't required for good credit.

The only thing I even ponder having a credit card for is for emergency purposes only. I'd consider something with no fees (unless used) for a rainy day backup, but instead of doing that, we've chosen to just have our own rainy day fund.

I am very thankful for the credit card companies though. I don't think that I could heat our home for free without their contribution to our junk mail pile. The rest of the junk mail on it's own just wouldn't be enough..