Well, it is available used for somewhat less, but 20TB isn't exactly your average home storage system either. I would ask him *why* he needed to keep all that data online, including backing it up. If the RAID itself contains a copy of his physical media library (or the bay), well, there's your backup already :)

He should balance the need to keep it all instantly available against the cost of doing so. The reason why there are no cheap solutions to backing up 20TB in a home scenario is that very few people do it. If it were me I'd just get a bunch of cheap drives and a hot-swap bay, and just create a script that catalogued the content of each drive. If it was irreplaceable content I created/shot myself I would invest in a tape solution, in that case it isn't *that* expensive. Crashplan works well for me to keep onsite/offsite backups of videos and pictures of my kids, but if I needed so much space that recovery time became a concern I would shell out for some disks or a tape library (it won't, however).

He could be something like a freelance video producer, in which case it might be a legitimate need, but then he would be insane to not already have a backup solution in place. Also, that would remove him from the home user category. For instance, rip-on-demand is likely the cheapest strategy storage-wise for using your library on your media center, and you probably won't end up with 20TB on a RAID :)

No, but the average customer stores far less, obviously it all works out because they're still in business :)

I wouldn't find it inappropriate if Crashplan contacted the poster storing 14TB above with a suggestion to get a business plan (if he doesn't already have one), but Crashplan obviously can handle it. I've read articles about people successfully recovering terabytes of data from Crashplan, but that guy had to use the HDD recovery option because it would have taken him weeks or months to download it all.

Also, this star (at about 2 197 000 000 times the volume of the sun, but only at most ~39 times the mass) must have an extremely low specific density. AFAICT even the average density is very close to what we would call a vacuum here on Earth at 7.87 × 10^-5 kg / m^3, and the mass is not evenly distributed, making it even more sparse for most of its volume.

This surprises me a little, did I make any mistakes?

The strangest name I've seen there is a desk lamp they used to have called "Mörker", which means "darkness" in Swedish.

For its intended purpose (ebook library management for use with your reading devices), calibre is simply the best software out there IMNSHO, paid or not. There are things for which it is not as good, but for my library of epub/kindle ebooks I haven't found anything that comes close. It might not be for you after all, but I'd advice you to give it another try, keeping the following in mind:

The "copying files" thing can be counterintuitive if you're used to micromanage files and folders yourself, but it can be viewed from another perspective: calibre doesn't manage files, it manages *books*. It keeps them in its internal database, of which the folder structure and data files is essentially just the bulk storage part. The files are a subset of all the information that makes up a book record, and the paths are not even used for metadata storage, although it reflects them. I keep a copy of my original files for backup purposes, but they are effectively obsoleted as soon as I clean up metadata and formatting in calibre. After that calibre is the absolutely best way to manage and access my books, and I'm happy to keep them in the calibre "db". After all, a file path is not a good place to store metadata. A db with proper fields, tags and so on is far better suited. Work with it, not against it :)

If you find that it doesn't suit you after some time, the export functionality is excellent. You also have all metadata stored in a well-structured SQLite db to extract and do with as you please.

The conversion error, BTW, is unfamiliar to me. If it simply omitted converting without throwing an error, that's a strange bug I haven't encountered or even heard of. If the results are not satisfactory: be aware that automatic document conversion between some formats, for instance from PDF to a flowing format, is *hard* to perfect, if not impossible. Most of my conversions are between flowing formats, and calibre does an admirable job with those. It even works around limitations in the different formats (by generating a html TOC for formats that don't support proper metadata TOCs, for instance).

It is extremely flexible and extensible. Incidentally the custom column system has a surprisingly powerful template language written by Charles Haley, one of the original authors of ex (which became vi) :)

calibre has a lot of "power user" features built in, a great plugin system with lots of available plugins, and it is very mature at this point. The relevant sub-forum at MobileRead is an excellent resource, any questions you might have are most likely already answered there.

We have a very similar taste in games, sir :)
I've greatly enjoyed most of the games on your list. I got Metro 2033 in a Humble Bundle a while ago, but never checked it out. I suppose it is similar to Last Light, which I see several posters mention here? Would you recommend it (2033 for starters, that is)?

Yes, you simply create a GUI interface using VB :)

A fellow Norwegian here. We'll probably always have nrk.no (the national broadcaster) as a free option :)

I generally agree with you, but many online papers now has only premium content behind paywalls. I don't know many who actually pays for them (most people I know can certainly afford it, they just choose not to), but it'd be interesting to see numbers. I also believe that Norwegian papers should collaborate on an all-you-can-eat scheme, however. I won't pay 200 NOK (about $32) monthly to read any one paper, but I would probably pay that amount (or even a bit more) to access all articles on all Norwegian papers. I believe I' not alone. They could divide that money based on usage.

Even better would be a micropayment solution (something like $1 pr. article), with a reasonably monthly cap, valid across all participating papers. That way you would get the long tail of readers who would pick only a few articles they really want to read, in addition to those who would blow through to the cap in a few days, effectively making the subscribers. Very few would shell out for a subscription just to read that one article, but more would probably enter a micropayment agreement based on usage. This could still be implemented as a collaboration between papers, I guess it would attract subscribers quickly.

The way it's looking right now more large papers will follow Aftenposten. I'm quite sure they're shooting themselves in the foot. People generally read several papers online, but few will be interested in spending something like 5% of their income on it.

Yeah, they come for the comments. Comment posting and -reading have many, many problems in the beta, some of them strongly degrading functionality.

Sure, whatever works for you. I inferred from your comment that you deferred decryption to some later date, and that would've been risky. Using calibre and just leave the books unorganised, but searchable, might have been the most efficient way to do it in bulk. I didn't intend to tell you how to do it, only to do it at all :)

Yeah, I read that too, and I'm not surprised. As many, many others are saying, breaking the reading habits of millions of customers (both those who remove DRM and those who don't) would have been a PR nightmare. I'm inclined to think that Adobe was just testing the water to see whether this was something they could pull of, I'm only surprised that they thought it would fly at all.

I believe you forgot the category "Power users who don't care about DRM as long as they can remove it". The crowd over at MobileRead may not be representative of the majority of customers, but amongst them it is common to deDRM everything as SOP. In the linked thread there are a lot of people who *do* care indeed :)

I remove DRM as well. I have never bought a book with DRM I can't remove, and I never will. I suspect that this new scheme will be broken soon, but if it isn't I will not buy another Adept-encrypted book.

I know that the "correct" thing to do would have been to boycott DRM-infested stuff completely, but that would limit my choice of books severely. I have absolutely no problem paying a fair price for a good product. In fact, the publishers who have abandoned DRM altogether (for instance Tor, O'Reilly) find that only their support requests and negative feedback decline, not their sales, so there must be many like me. Not that DRM will ever stop pirates from providing a superior product.

Ultimately I hope that the publishing industry will realise their insanity and drop DRM. The only ones they're hurting are their legitimate customers, the pirates will not even slow down because of any type of DRM.

Don't wait, do it now. Download calibre and some plugin tools, and deDRM is just a drag'n'drop operation. There is no need to use it to manage your books if you don't want to, you can just use it as a "storage shed" for your uncrippled books.

With apologies to Charles Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

I understand. I would check out if you could set up Quality of Service traffic shaping either on your computer or on your router. That way you can put a very low priority on torrent traffic so that it yields to other activity, and still have it run full blast when you're not doing anything else. I have had very good results with it on a WRT54GL when I had a couple of flatmates who were unable to configure their clients.

Really, you have a <24 Kbps connection?

You probably mean that you can't decide on a movie, prepare tea, and then watch it, but you can very likely download any movie in a few hours (I assume you're not on dial-up). I have the nominal bandwidth to get that movie in two minutes, in reality it would take something like 10-15 minutes because the torrent takes some time getting up to speed, and I prefer higher quality.

Still most episodes sit unwatched for days or weeks after downloading (I generally don't download movies). As of now I am lucky that I can very easily download something I want to see on short notice, but I rarely do. If I had to wait several hours for a single show I would just maintain a queue of already downloaded stuff like I do today.

The point is that any line faster than a dial-up would be ample to satisfy my viewing habits. A fast connection is nice, and I would miss it, but it's not strictly necessary to enjoy digital content (which apparently is what you experience as well, making my post superfluous. Oh well).