Though don't tell LibreOffice you want "PDF A/1-a" format (i.e. embedded fonts) because if you do, it will generate a broken PDF that Acrobat Reader(!!) will not be able to open.

"There was an error processing a page. Invalid colorspace."

Maybe having fewer options makes it easier to test for this sort of thing. I bet Word's PDF exporter has been tested with Acrobat Reader...

It's depressing that people can be told, in the article, "I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution", and then reply "Hey, why not store your data in the cloud?" And so many replies along those lines, too! At one time this site was full of smart people who had passed their exams. Now it's full of people who don't even read the question. Like I said, depressing.

The rest of what you say, I don't even know why you are arguing with me. Obviously if you have only a small amount of data, the cloud is a good solution. $20/year is no big deal. The problem comes in when you have a lot of data and it would cost, say, $2400/year to store it on S3. You see the problem? How many fire safes and external drives can you buy for $2400? How many do you actually need in order to have a reasonable chance of keeping your data?

But I entirely agree that ludicrous RAID5 servers and piles of disks are a silly idea. I know so many stories about people keeping all their data on RAID5 and assuming it is safe. RAID-anything seems to increase the risk of catastrophe, probably because everything is in one basket. And that is the core of the solution: spread the risk. Different disks, made by different companies, stored in different locations. Bit like the cloud, really, except entirely under your control, and without a recurring cost.

I could agree with all of that, and indeed I think multiple external/removable HDDs are the most practical backup solution for ordinary people.

But I think it is better to do the backups from within the OS since the backup software can avoid copying unused parts of the filesystem, and is able to create differential/incremental backups, which is very fast and space-efficient. Disk cloning has the advantage that you can get up and running very quickly - but it is slow, it copies everything, and you can only store a single version of the filesystem.

Right. Other than buying new disks, there is no good solution.

The asker seems to be looking for some kind of "join all my small disks together" solution. And yes, he can do this. RAID-0 or LVM. But... don't do it! If even one of those disks fails all the data is effectively gone. The solution is cheap to implement but totally worthless. Sorry, your 250Gb SATA disk now belongs in a museum.

RAID-5/6 is, IMO, also a bad idea; there are too many instances where the controller has failed or multiple disks have failed.

The asker explicitly excludes cloud solutions. It's depressing that people have recommended various cloud solutions nonetheless. Apart from not being answers to the question, these solutions are totally awful for large quantities of data. Amazon S3 may be nearly free if you want to store a few gigabytes, but if you want to store a few terabytes you are going to pay through the nose, and all the other service providers are the same. 2Tb would cost $234 per month just for storage, transfer cost not included. For the price of two weeks of S3 storage you can buy a 2Tb external disk. For the price of upload, download and a month's storage, you can buy four or five such disks and have as much redundancy as any normal person could ever need.

It's a work machine so I'm stuck... it is Gnome 3, KDE 4, or Unity. The KDE 3.5 option disappeared years ago, and the most recent upgrade got rid of Gnome 2. Ah, progress.

However, the lack of an obvious way to change workspace is really the only problem I've hit with Gnome 3 in the last few months. That's not bad at all by Linux standards. It actually seems mature and well-built!

Thanks. But how do you change desktops? How do you move applications to a new desktop?

On Gnome 2 the bottom right corner of the screen lets me change to another desktop ("workspace", in Gnome-speak). And I can move an application to a different workspace by right-clicking on the title bar. But Gnome 3 doesn't seem to have these features. No doubt there is an easy answer...?

Multiple desktops are sometimes useful, but what I would really like on Windows is the ability to pin applications so they are "always on top". If anyone has any suggestions for that, I'd be very pleased to know about them.

Yeah, disappointing.

But then, without the disks, there is very little to say about how these machines were once configured and used within the data centres.

I hope that one day somebody from Blizzard will write a book about the development and deployment of the game, similar to Masters of Doom, in which this sort of information will be revealed. I, for one, would find it very interesting. Sure, as outsiders, we can take educated guesses about how you might build Warcraft, or a clone of it, but how much more interesting to know how it was (is) actually done! One day, perhaps it will not be so important to keep this secret.

You should read their terms again. They dont "need" to be deleted in 21 days. They simply guarantee to retain your file for 21 days without any downloads in the period. Depending on their resource availability they could retain files they believe would bring them revenue, for as long as they like and in any structure they like. And why shouldnt popularity-of-download be a goal?

Right, but this is totally inconsistent with the claim that "legal users of megaupload" have lost data. Because clearly MU was not a safe place to store data, as it might disappear if it wasn't sufficiently popular in the eyes of the MU admins. A totally arbitrary policy. No guarantees. There was no comeback if Kim Dotcom deleted your data - so why should there be any comeback if Carpathia Hosting deletes it? Honestly, you'd have to be very thick to store your only copy of anything on MU.

I also would have liked to read the paper mentioned by the GP. I hope the authors will resubmit it somewhere else. It is certainly topical, although it will probably remain unfashionable for many years to come.

No. See the indictment. Very interesting document. The real evidence against these guys is not on Megaupload at all. It is in the emails they sent to each other and to outsiders.

The Feds' case hangs on the allegation that these guys formed a criminal conspiracy, i.e. that they knew that they were breaking laws and that they conspired to hide this because of the vast profitability of their operation. The evidence is all email records, bank statements, and Kim Dotcom's fleet of luxury cars.