> One of the major problems with working for Samsung in, say, Austin is that the local managers have no say at all. All the decisions come from South Kore

100% BS, at least for my Samsung office. Some decisions, yes, like any other satellite company office where decisions come from "corporate" or "headquarters". Sure, major purchases get approved in Korea, but I get them approved significantly faster here than at my last job where I was in the same friggin' building as the folks doing the approving.

Again, there are MULTIPLE Samsung facilities in Austin. YMMV.

You have to realize that Samsung Electronics - which is only part of the Samsung group - has about 250,000 employees. As with any company this big, there's going to be a collection of good teams to work in and a (hopefully smaller) collection of not-so-good teams to work in. There are going to be communication breakdowns where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. No big company is immune to this. Find a good group with a good manager in any company and you'll be happy. Find a bad manager in an otherwise good company and you'll be miserable.

I work in the Samsung Austin R & D Center where we design CPUs for mobile devices. I love it here - an awesome work environment, awesome people, and excellent benefits because of Samsung's size, even though our building only has about 300 people in it. We have people here contributing to open source projects even though they're not part of the open source team that this article is referring to.

100 years of your data is absolutely meaningless if you can't read the media.

Do you have anything around that have the ability to read a tape that was written 20 years ago? 5 years ago?

Darn, I can't listen to my 8-tracks!

You're dating yourself. LTO-5 is 1.5TB native, 3TB compressed at $25 per tape. LTO-6 is 2.5TB native and 6.25TB compressed. Both of those compressed numbers are using the built-in compression in the drive.

A 10-pack of LTO-5 tapes is about $250.

You can easily encrypt the tapes and tape them offsite. You can keep a copy onsite and offsite. You're simply not doing that with disk.

Your speed is also off - an LTO-5 can write at 280MB/sec. The limiting factor is not the write time on the media but the read time from disk.

Restore times are typically limited by the write rate on the destination raidset, not the read rate from tape.

The dataset isn't that huge. Tape can write at speed at least as fast as disk - LTO-5 writes at up to 280MB/sec - far faster than you can read the source at which isn't likely to be fast disk. The seek for a single-file restore will be slower than disk but after the initial seek, the read will be as fast as from a typical archive disk (no, you're not archiving 20TB to SSD, nor are you storing the source data on SSD either)

However, the change rate for this application is likely to be low. That makes it very feasible to do random testing from the new backups where a minute to do the tape mount/seek is not a problem. You won't be writing more than a single tape in any single run (LTO-5 is ~1.5 TB of uncompressed data).

For $2K, you'll have the LTO-5 drive. Add $500 for 20 tapes and you can back up the entire set (once) plus a bunch of incrementals. I haven't done the math with LTO-6 which is faster and holds more data. If you want multiple generations, tape is a lot cheaper per TB than disk. The initial drive cost hurts but after that, the price is good at $15/TB or so.

That's a lousy answer. Tape *does* work. It can be slower than disk, but disk is not the *only* way to have a usable backup. Tape is not dead.

Tape works. Disk works. Offsite replication works. Do the math for how much data you have and how much bandwidth you have or can afford, and do the calculations on how much data you really have to back up. In many cases, recreating the data can be significantly cheaper than backup it up and restoring it. If you have your original CDs and DVDs, put them in an offsite location. If you have a disaster, you can have them re-ripped for a LOT cheaper than backing them up.

I've help run a multi-petabyte data center with backups to tape and they worked. Everything written to tape was restorable. I currently run a multi-petabyte data center and replicate everything to disk in an offsite location. It also works. Neither is cheap.

Figure out what part of the data is important to you and how long you can wait to get it back. If a fire burns down your house but you need the data back in minutes or hours, then tape is obviously not the answer but then neither is DVDs or any cloud provider.

There is NO single answer that's good for everybody. It's a cost/benefit/risk analysis that every first year comp sci student better become familiar with.

I talked to a really nice lady - Andrea - at the AT&T store in Cedar Park, TX. While I was there, she identified the owner and phoned the contact on the account. The contact turned out to be the mother of the kid who lost the phone and explained the situation. They were going to be picking the phone up from the store. Nice job AT&T!

BTW, on Samsung phones (or may be this is a 4.2+ feature) you can define an emergency contact that can be dialed while the phone is locked. Unfortunately the only contact that was defined was 911.

> Can you tell from the messages what the number is?

Nope. Because it's locked, I can only see in the status bar that it has new email and new text messages but not any of the contents. If I could see any email or IM, I could contact the sender and track the owner down. If I could see an email, I'd contact the recipient as well in case the owner is reading via another phone or web.

I'll take it to an AT&T store tonight if I don't get any great ideas during the day today. I don't want to hang on to it any longer than I need to because I'm sure the owner wants it back soon.

Whether it's Windows, Linux, VMS or ESXi doesn't really matter. The external differences boil down to syntax. If you find somebody who only knows the syntax, you're not going to be happy unless you're looking for a short term employee or contractor. You don't hire a Unix admin because he knows how to write a bash script - you find somebody who understands the importance of automation, the ability to document and test, and the ability to pick up new technologies. You know technology is changing so you need a person who can adapt. If you can troubleshoot the root cause of a system crash, it doesn't matter what OS you're working on and you'll pick up a different OS quickly. But hire an idiot that can't troubleshoot worth a darn and it doesn't matter if he's an RHCE, MCSE or VCP or holds all three.

If you find somebody that can't tell the difference between they're, there, or their or between its and it's, he's not on the learning curve you need him to be on. It means that in 20 or 30 years, he still doesn't care about quality and is too lazy to look things up. Those aren't good combinations.

Think really hard on that monitor size. A large display will add a lot to the price and make it heavy. If your sister really needs the larger display when it's sitting a desk at home the vast majority of the time, pick a laptop with a small display, add a docking station and buy an external monitor.

Actually the superzooms these days do have manual focus if you want to use it. I've been pretty happy with my Canon S5 IS and my wife just ordered me an SX40 for Christmas. I don't use the manual on my S5 often but it's nice when I do need it. Some objects just won't focus automatically.

But what if making money is "necessary for the Service"? The are implying that they have the right to license your work for profit so they can continue running Dropbox.

"voice plan: $20 a month" on an iPhone. Really? You are NOT getting a smartphone voice service for $20 per month. Unlimited voice minutes, which is what a landline gives you, is significantly higher. An individual phone line with unlimited minutes is $70 per month - that's $600 added to your cost for the first year alone.

It's not just that job search sites don't work well over dial up. You can't even keep up with security patches on your PC over dial up. I've got a relative that only has dial-up access and limited hours per month. Every time she turns on her PC, the patches start downloading and take over the phone connection. The only practical solution for dial-up users is to turn security patching off and that SUCKS. By the time you add up Window security patches, your Acrobat Reader security patches, and your antivirus patches, you'll easily consume hundreds of MB per month.