You've already mentioned that you tried the Crashplan approach. If having a computer turned on all the time is the only drawback that you see, then just buy a Raspberry Pi and use that to run Crashplan on. It will be cheaper than buying a NAS, and might even give you good portability because you can use a USB drive that can easily be used to recover data from in the future.

Since Crashplan allows you to generate your own keypair for encrypting backups, that should take care of the security aspect as well. Using Crashplan also lets you make multiple backup sets, define frequencies and retentions.

If you run out of storage, growing it will be as simple as adding a new hard disk to the logical volume. Of course, if you want to keep it simple, you could always just copy data to the new, larger disk and continue backing up too. You could even go fancy and do RAIDs on this, but then it might be overkill depending on your situation.

Overall, with this approach you use software that works well and have quite the minimal investment, i.e. RPi + USB hard disk. Using Crashplan for backups to destinations that are not on their servers is free.

Close, but not quite the the same. I understand that background radiation, solar flares, planets, moons, comets and asteroids have a negative impact upon radio communication. However, this is something that we do understand how to deal with in some respect, given our history of working successfully with radio. I am not trying to say it is easy, but the challenge there is within the scope of technology that is better understood.

Also, while all those factors you mentioned pose problems, the underwater acoustic channel is still more volatile. Imagine a temperature shift of one degree, i.e. from morning to evening, completely changing your delay factor. Not just that, but as a result now your ideal frequency and power combination that obtains you optimal bandwidth is also different. Underwater nodes are also notoriously hard to get power to (and yes, I understand that there is no power station sitting in space either, but you still do have access to energy gathered from solar radiation and etc.), which makes switching all of this really hard to do.

Now add the factor that the depth of your transmitter and receiver might be different, and this results in both of them having a different set of optimal (or near optimal) communication requirements. Both might even have different windows of opportunity to work in, making synchronization near impossible to achieve. This is not counting the problem of ambient noise that keeps changing based on surface winds, thermal effects and waves. Add to this multi-path echoes that are quite plenty and you start to get an idea of some of the many issues that this channel is faced with.

In the end, yes, both channels are similar in the fact that there are long delays and to some extent these might vary in space as well. But the very nature of the underwater acoustic channel is different from radio in space. There might be some things that can be learnt from NASA's space-tuned TCP/IP stack, but in general, TCP/IP is a bad idea in a channel that can hardly carry a few bits at a time. In the case of 6LoWPAN, which the authors of the paper in question look to for inspiration, they have still more bits than what you get underwater. Header compression and similar things can help, but in the end, fragmentation and reassembly is not the best approach. Hence my previous statement that maybe, TCP/IP is not the best idea for underwater acoustic channels.

TLDR: Yes, the two channels have some similarities, but they are not the same thing. Will there be things that can be learnt by each field from looking at solutions in either fields? Sure, but that doesn't cover it all.

Not quite. Acoustic networking is a necessity in water, as compared to eM in space. Acoustic networking is also notorious for being easily influenced by its ambient environment (temperature, pressure, acidity, salinity). Not to mention the long delays, which can easily vary over the course of a single day many times. Add to this the mix of those special ambient conditions that can lead to "black-holes" where sound from outside doesn't enter, and you've got a mix of an environment that is a pain to handle.

That said, I am not sure the authors' work on essentially porting 6LoWPAN to UWAN is the right way to go since it doesn't account for many things, but it is a step in the appropriate direction. Though, honestly, equipping underwater sensors or vehicles with IP networking might be a bit of an overkill.

Not to say that there aren't some things that I would like back from Leopard, but what you say is not correct. I can still assign applications to open on specific desktops. This is the only way I could imagine things working for some of my workflows.

Right click open app's icon -> Options -> Assign to; that should get you sorted with this.

This too works, except that up and down are gone. I have three desktops created that are always there by default. All you have to do is create empty desktops and leave them there.

That is how it always was. Red button closes window, Command-Q quits. In fact, the one thing that bugs me now at times is that if an app has no open window, it automatically quits it. This is inconsistent. But either way, what you say is not how it works.

Agreed, if it did this by default, this would be insane. But this is not what any of the applications do anymore. When quit and restarted the application starts brand new. You can enable the resume previous state options, but in 10.8 that is not default.

This might be personal preference, but I sort of like this. It makes it convenient in case of problems. My laptop had started randomly dying due to a very old battery and this feature saved me many times.

Again, iCloud is an option but not the default. Something seems amiss on your setup.

Exactly, you can now use the Application folder, drag it to the dock and have it show as a stack or folder to quickly browse through every application you have, or use launchpad. Honestly, choice is good. This is not complaint worthy.

At least you can disable it and even use an option-right-click to launch the application and ignore the security settings. Besides, having something like this is not bad as it ensure some degree of security, especially for "new" users.

Also, the default is not the mac app store only, but mac app store and identified developers. A year ago, this was irritating, but I just got a new Mac and I had to turn it off to install all but two applications. It is not as inconvenient anymore.

This is highly unlikely to happen. But if it does, then yes, that is the point when I would say that the platform is seriously broken.

Personally, some of my gripes are that the display preferences menubar item is now gone. However, I have this rectified by using SwitcherResX, which honestly gives me even more control than before. But this was a pain for some time.

The keypress repeat shows internationalized characters now, by default, which is like iOS. I find this convenient sometimes, and would rather have repeat back at other times. So I am still on the wall about this, but this can be easily switched from system preferences.

Removing the Save As feature in Lion was quite a pain, but that got fixed in Mountain Lion. Scroll bars not being ever present was irritating, but having the two finger touch gesture for this now makes it really convenient. The last thing I miss is the gesture for show desktop. The old one was more convenient than the new one.

In general, the move from Leopard/Snow Leopard to Lion was quite painful. But the move to Mountain Lion has fixed a lot of those issues and made things better. Do I miss some things form Snow Leopard? Sure. However, these are so few that I cannot even remember most anything that I would want back at this point.

The iOSification of OSX seems to be more of a hype than anything else. Yes, there are some things that came over from iOS. Some of them are convenient, and some not so. The ones that are not, are not forced, but are options that can be turned off.

With Forstall gone, I suspect the iOSification of OSX is also at an end. I do see the platforms evolving similar features from time to time, but to say that OSX will become iOS altogether is overstating the problem.

I got the Raspberry Pi while ago and this is the first time I am hearing of this issue. Of course, that is only because I haven't encountered it. So far I am using it extensively on my network without problems and it is even handling the load I throw at it quite gracefully.

It is a home VPN, DNS, Backup, File and Print server. On top of this, it is even the endpoint for my IPv6 tunnel and it runs a routing advertisement daemon to hand out v6 addresses on the network. So far it handles the v6 network load without any slowdown from my old machine that took care of this. I even threw in a USB stick to talk to 6LoWPAN devices I use at home and it works flawlessly with that too. So obviously both my USBs and the Ethernet are used up.

All this for a $35 computer that eats up a whole lot lesser energy than my old solution. Even if I had to solder a resistor to fix a problem that I haven't had, I am not sure what can beat this.

That I do completely agree with. My experience with grub-efi has been anything but efficient. But at least, once it is setup, it works well.

While I know that Linux enjoys a great market in some areas, I am pretty sure it is not a common desktop OS. Only Windows wins that accolade.

Sorry for the duplicate post, but I wasn't logged in to Slashdot apparently.

What you say has been true in the past, and to some extent is true even now. However, with the spread of smart phones (as much as 50% of adults in the US, as per recent reports) and Internet access becoming increasingly available in places like Trains and Airplanes as well, the argument that an email may go unnoticed between 1pm and 6pm, is quickly evaporating.

It is easy to imagine, in a highly and increasingly connected world, that telecommuting can work well. I already know quite a few software engineers who telecommute. Not only does this really keep them happy, but the added flexibility of managing their own time without having to worry about 2hr daily commutes makes them much more efficient employees as well.

Actually, there is a difference between what Microsoft did with IE on Windows and what Apple does with Safari on Mac OS X.

The problem with IE on Windows was that it was so tightly integrated into the OS that you could not uninstall it without some special hacks and tricks. IE was always there. In fact, the Windows Explorer was pretty much IE in many ways. This is why the antitrust case against them was strong and they lost. If the users had a way of uninstalling IE, everything would've been fine.

On the other hand, Apple does ship Safari with Mac OS X, but it couldn't be easier to uninstall. You just drag it to the trash, empty it and it is gone! The integration between Safari and the OS is nonexistent. Thereby giving the user the choice to at least get rid of it if they want to. There is no browser tight integration going on with Safari and Mac OS X.

Please don't spread FUD, or at least inform yourself before talking about it.

Yeah, I agree. The ignorance of companies in terms of cost reduction possibilities with modern telephony is just astounding to me personally. They always had a landline at home and office for him, but that too is damn expensive for him to make international calls, which he has to do for work and remain on them for hours on since they are conference calls. So, I recently installed an IP phone for him at home, just to trial and his bills have reduced by over 100%. Needless to say, bosses are so pleased that they are considering similar systems for all non-US based executives.

Either way, I sure hope you get to travel soon! It is, without a doubt, one of the best things in life.

For most people, that would be true. However, I'm actually a student and most of my bills are not borne by the University. This is why I care about abolishing my insane roaming charges. A higher investment once ensures that my mobility is not impacted and I have similar level of service wherever I travel. My monthly bill goes down as well because I can pick a cheap pre-paid provider since my voice calls are minimal. The problem here is not the overall cost, but the upfront cost, because that tends to be higher.

Let me elaborate. In Germany, where I live currently, a subsidized iPhone through T-Mobile costs €200 for students and comes with a €40/month 24 month contract. Overall cost is €1160. If I get the iPhone unlocked, I get it for €630. Now, my monthly cost with a prepaid provider like Fonic is never over €15 for a month. The worst case scenario here is that over a 2 year period the phone+service ends up costing me €990. However, it is always much lesser because out of 12 months, I spend about 4 months abroad. So, in actuality it is never more than €870. I thus save at least €270, which I get to keep as spending money when I travel. In the future, I will get my family/friends to buy one from the US for me and save another €100-150 on the cost of the iPhone.

Add to all of this the convenience that I can at any time change my carrier or move to another country without having to worry about paying a large sum to cancel a contract, and the "cost" reduces even more.

On the other hand, my father travels internationally a lot and his company picks up the tab. So he doesn't care about the cell phone bill. Even roaming is picked up by the company and so they don't care about phones being locked or unlocked. To them, the convenience of being able to always reach their employee at the same number is greater than cost involved for that "assurance".

As such, unlocked phones add freedom on most people's pockets. If you cannot afford an unlocked iPhone, you likely should not get a locked one either because you are then stretching your budget.

Of course, in the US where there are only 2 GSM providers (might become one in the future), unlocked phones don't really offer a visible advantage.

PS: Traveling that much even as a relatively poor grad student is quite possible. You just need to save, budget and stick to plans! ;-)

I sure hope that your comment comes with a deep dose of sarcasm because Apple has offered unlocked iPhones outside the US much before Google stepped into the phone scene with the Nexus. The US is pretty much one of the last to get officially unlocked iPhones purchasable from Apple.

D'oh! That's what happens when you don't sleep enough.