I used to do something similar. Then I made my rsynced copies bootable with qemu-kvm. I already had a datacenter, so I rsynced it there. That provides several advantages.

> If you aren't here and there is a fire, you can always
> store it around a two layers of bricks, with a fire blanket between them.

You COULD, but you probably don't, and overheating would be a concern, as would delaminating of the platters in a fire. Theft is concern as well.

With my better version, I started syncing systems for a few friends. When I needed more capacity, I bought 16 bay SAS JBOB units for $350. It's grown into quite a nice, professional system, with real protection from fire, theft, etc. but my friends still just pay $12 / month to cover the costs.

I find that the cost of auxiliary equipment, servers, is far LESS for spindles. I just bought a 16 bay SAS jbod for $350. That's up to 64TB raw. A tape library would have cost $3,500.

Sure you CAN have a human switch tapes, just as you can have a human hotswap drives from any old server you want to use for backup storage. At least at the level of about 80 TBs, spindles are a lot less expensive as well as more convenient.

If you already have humans sitting around the datacenter who have nothing better to than switch tapes, and if you have hundreds of TBs, I suspect tapes make sense in that case.

Indeed, blatant slashvertisement. The video DID mention some key points. For those who didn't feel like watching the video or reading the transcript, aside from pure advertising, they did hit four points which I refer to as the golden rules of backup:

Backups must be:
Off site: fires, thefts happen, and they happen in datacenters too.
Automated: people will stop manually copying and swapping, probably at the worst possible time.
Rotated: Not just one backup overwritten daily. If you were hacked at 11:00 PM, that midnight backup doesn't help.
Tested: Of our customers who thought they had backups, over half didn't actually have working backups when we suggested they test them.

In the spirit of blatant advertising, Clonebox provides a very similar service, at a slightly better price, and the owner is a long time /.er

I think you read that sentence backwards. I said four threads on the CPU. A quad core processor can of course do at least four threads.

Also, four threads on the CPU means there are probably at least a dozen processes waiting on IO. Four threads active on the CPU, sixteen processes active on the system.

Versus one active process for System V since it runs them sequentially.
   

> their profitability depends almost entirely on how long they can keep
> the assets they have before they have to replace them.

Exactly. Their cost is largely a matter of how long they can continue to use the equipment they purchase and install. If users switch from viewing Facebook to watching Netflix all night, ISPs need much more capacity, which means replacing XGbps plant with 10XGbps equipment before it has worn out.

As you correctly pointed out, the XGbps equipment would continue to work just fine, delivering up Facebook for years. Infrastructure sized for Facebook pictures isn't sufficient for streamlining high definition video. As you said, replacing that equipment with faster equipment is a major cost.

What you said is true for say, a building. ISPs's networks are not "you purchase it once" items.
You say "yes it does scale somewhat but only in the short run", and that's right, infrastructure costs are only particularly important for equipment that is kept in service for less than 10 years - such as networking equipment.

I was prioritizing traffic in 1997, when I owned a hosting company. You don't need a standardized RFC giving an industry-wide standard method for doing something before you start doing it. In fact, RFCs frequently codify how people have already been doing things. The 1999 RFC shows that by that time , it had become common enough that the method needed to be standardized.

Customers who want high priority get it, spammers get deprioritized. It's been done forever and it hasn't been a catastrophe.

> Second, 1TB/mo is only around 3Mbps. The average broadband internet connection these days is going to be many times that, regardless of whether they're using 1GB/mo or 1TB/mo.

If 10,000 customers average 3 Mbps each, the ISP needs 30,000 Mbps of infrastructure for them. The instantaneous peak "up to" speed in the advertisements has nothing to do with it. If they use 1 GB, that's 1 GB the infrastructure has to carry. If they use 1 TB, the infrastructure has to carry 1 TB. Infrastructure for TBs costs a lot more than infrastructure for GBs. I'm certain of this because I've purchased both.

Yes, most of it will be optical, not copper . The same price difference applies. Most Slashdot readers aren't familiar with $10,000+ switches so I i
used analogous equipment that most nerds are familiar with. A Cisco router for 100 Gbps average usage costs less than one for 1,000 Gbps.

He said "the second it's allowed". It's ALWAYS been allowed, modulo Sherman and similar existing laws.
He's claiming that the moment it's not illegal ... Well, it's not illegal today, it's never been illegal, and his predictions haven't come true.

Given that the scare mongering is clearly bullshit, then it's time to ask "who is trying to sell us net neutrality using these transparent scare tactics, and what might their actual reasons be?" Clearly the stated reason is BS because we ALREADY live in a world with no net neutrality laws and tragedy has not befallen us.

>> Someone who uses 10GB a month should pay ten times as much as someone who uses 1GB a month
> your pricing structure is way off. There is a physical infrastructure that must be maintained regardless of whether you're using 1GB/mo or 1TB/mo.

This is cheap infrastructure to keep in place for 1 GB. There is expensive new infrastructure to buy for 1 TB.

24 port 100 Mbps switches cost about $15
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...

24 port 10GbE switches cost about $450 - $3200
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...

So in fact the infrastructure cost DOES scale with bandwidth. In fact, it's more extreme than that. Lower capacity infrastructure is already installed.
To higher usage per user, new infrastructure has to be installed.

> The only thing they designed it for in the beginning was simple http.

In the beginning, when the internet was designed, http wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. Http has only been around for half as long as the internet has.

> The SECOND they allow ...

The second it's allowed, eh? So since the 1980s when the internet was invented? There never has been a net "neutrality" protection law, and what you predict hasn't happened.

Companies looking for a new law have invented an imaginary problem and convinced people who don't think things through that it'll inevitably happen. ISPs didn't do that in 2013, it didn't happen in 2012, not in 2011 ... not in 1997.... Why would it suddenly happen in 2014? You've been played, my friend.

That's an interesting comment. Consider hashes as one important part of cryptography. SHA2 is a current standard used by some up-to-date software, while a lot of systems don't support it yet. It's too new to be used everywhere, having been officially standardized thirteen years ago.

Millions of web sites use .htpasswd files which default to DES (1977) and that's just one example out of many software packages that call crypt() to get a DES hash.

I've thought of cryptography as careful, methodical, slow compared to other technology related disciplines.

Thanks for looking that up. That is a very specific statement.

DMCA means EVERYTHING to YouTube. If they follow the DMCA procedure, they have safe harbor from both copyright holders and from people falsely accused of infringement. That protection is worth billions to YouTube. The procedure they have to follow to get that protection is:

Upon receipt of a complaint, temporarily remove the video and notify the person who posted it.

When the poster responds saying they don't believe it's infringing, put the video back up.

That second part is called "counter notice". You may have noticed in TFA it said YouTube may lock the account if he doesn't send them a counter notice. He simply needs to quit whining for ten minutes, long enough to type up a counter notice email.