lots of files

I've heard those before. Usually they just mean that your tape deck is really worn out.

Matt Roberds

Damn... I thought it was that place where me and that chick went all capstan cave man!

Well, at least those were the memories the term provoked. :-)

This is a *camera*, not a phone! :>

Yes, hers has "in lens" stabilization. Note she's NOT a photographer. The camera was selected (many years ago) because it was small, reasonably priced, decent "resolution" (I think she shoots at 5MP) *and* had an electronic viewfinder (something that is becoming scarce on all but more expensive, larger body models).

But it still boils down to how many *dots* you can actually get out of the portion of the framed image that is of interest to you.

E.g., if she is photographing a patch of grass with water flowing over/through it from *across* the stream, she can take her sweet time setting up a shot, calling on optical zoom to maximize the "area of interest" in the viewfinder. Etc. The grass isn't going anywhere. And, the water flowing over it *now* is largely the same as the water flowing over it 30 seconds hence.

Similarly, she has some shots of Gila Monsters in which you can *feel* the texture of their skin (slow moving so you can get up *real* close!).

OTOH, when trying to frame a distant object with plenty of "room" around it (e.g., so when the hawk or hummingbird darts out of the CENTER of the photo, you still manage to capture it "in frame") you've got much less of the sensor (and lens) to play with. Given that the camera will also process that data (lossy compression), detail can vanish relatively quickly.

As "memory card" space is essentially free (unless you never intend to move the files off the card!), its silly to throw away "signal" at the point of capture and then fret later -- when you get home and review those shots on a *real* monitor (instead of a dinky little screen).

And, once you've taken the photo, there's little desire to sit at a computer and figure out just how aggressively you can down-sample it -- esp if you've no idea of which portions of the image you may ultimately want to reference (she uses these as source material for paintings)

Not for me. Music mostly annoys me. Ref: the Horatio Hornblower books by C S Forester. Horatio hated music; maybe Forester did, too.

"He [Horatio] suffers from chronic seasickness, especially at the start of his voyages. As a midshipman, he was once sick at the sheltered roadstead of Spithead. His embarrassment haunts him throughout his career. He is tone-deaf and finds music an incomprehensible irritant (in a scene in Hotspur he is unable to recognize the British national anthem)."

I guess it's a diagnosable "thing" now:

I used to think that I was missing the lobe of the brain that connects music to the emotions. Then I discovered polyphony, and realized that it was just that stuff from after about 1700 AD didn't do it for me. I'm a huge fan of earlier stuff, both sacred and secular. Machaut, Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Desprez, some Vivaldi, that crowd.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Or maybe it's addiction to music that should be diagnosed.

That would be the middle of the Baroque period (1600-1750). Prior to that, during the renaissance period, the human ear hadn't become accustomed to large leaps in pitch. That's because the main form of music was choral which is vocal and not instrumental. Getting a choir of local vocals together that can sing effectively over an octave is difficult. The accompanying instruments could easily do huge leaps in pitch, but were condemned to follow the lead of the choir.

A transition occurred somewhere in the Baroque period, where instruments became more important than choirs. Although Handel and Bach were contemporaries, their music is very different. Handel continues with an orchestrated version of the previous choir music, with all its limitations, while Bach uses huge leaps of pitch, typifying later trends in the Classical period. However, even Bach was stuck with the limitations of the choir, and had to use fugues and other overlapping mechanism to disguise that it wasn't the same singers making the drastic changes in pitch. Incidentally, a side effect was a large increase in the size of the choirs as not everyone was singing at the same time.

In general, we usually favor the music we grew up hearing. I father played and like mostly Classical music. Therefore, I now like and play classical music. I suspect sometime in your childhood, you were heavily exposed to Renaissance music, with small leaps in pitch, monotonic tunes, and minimal harmony, which you now favor.

Sorry, but I don't do polyphony very well: (3:38)

I usually have Pandora playing New Age music when working in the office. It helps me relax and remain calm when my natural urge is to strangle the customer and defenestrate his broken computer.

My favourite stuff is 16th C and earlier, especially Tallis.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"A larger trash can does not make for a cleaner office." - Me, in about 1977 when my office was blessed with 5 additional trash cans by my boss as a not very subtle hint to clean up my mess.

I keep the live stuff mostly in NAS (network attached storage) boxes and in various online cloud storage system. The biggest disk hog is my collection of CD and DVD images of OS distribution media and installation CD/DVD ISO files. I find it easier to create a CD or DVD from the saved ISO file, than to find the original CD/DVD.

Making backups of NAS storage is tricky and copying file by file takes too much time. Therefore, I suggest either a mirrored RAID array to deal with potential drive failures, or a duplicate NAS storage machine with some kind of mirroring software. The biggest problem so far has been theft, fire, and PG&E. Therefore, I recommend that the mirrored NAS boxes be located in different parts of the building.

Most of those are 1TB drives. There are now about twice as many in the office, and 5 more at home. They mostly hold image backups of customers machines as they arrive and as they leave repaired. Image backup speed is between 1GB/minute for USB 2.0 and a P4 machine, to

Of course not! Just another BIG THING taking up space, needlessly! :>

Yup. Or, mount the ISO and let it be accessed "in place" (obviously doesn't work for fresh installs)

I'm in the process of migrating all of my NAS's to use external drives (USB, FW, SCSI, etc.). This lets me control individual spindles (why spin up a drive if you aren't going to access its content?) as well as quickly/effortlessly move drives to other boxes (e.g., if a box dies

I mirror *across* devices, not *within*. So, updating a mirror means I need two boxes up and running. I'm currently using these little Atom SBC's (about 9W total) as they are plenty fast enough to just

I've been offered several SnapServer 410's (four hot swap SATA bays) which, if I can get some *other* (FOSS) software running I can move more of my SATA drives into "permanent" enclosures (still having the possibility of swapping out the drive sleds from each Snap NAS)

For imaging, I use bare (3.5") SATA drives in a "dock". Label maker lets me tag a pretty sticker on the drive so I know what it's for/from.

I've a shoebox full of drives in a desk drawer that allow me to restore any of the individual machines, here (of course, any changes since the image aren't covered in that process).

There are various tradeoffs between optical and electronic domain. One way is to use a small cell with a variable length zoom objective. A zoom object typically have quite a few lenses and a small aperture, hence requiring long exposure times.

The other alternative is to use a large cell like the 41 MPix sensor on Nokia PureView, so that a high quality, large, wide angle single fixed focal length lens and do the zooming in electronic domain by cropping the picture.

Of course there are tradeoffs and don't expect to enlarge a picture in the C.S.I style :-)

Ah, but there's an advantage to having wastebaskets. The interval between having to haul them out to the dumpster for emptying is much longer for large and numerous wastebaskets. Invariably, I manage to accidentally throw something important in the wastebaskets. Instead of having to dumpster dive to recovery the item, I have sufficient time and a smaller mess to sift through in the wastebasket.

That works most of the time. However, most of my ISO's are OS install CD's. It's not unusual for me to need an ancient Unix or Linux version, or some proprietarized mutation of Windoze overly enhanced by an OEM.

Because I can access them remotely. Often, I just need one file that's stored in the middle of an installation CD. I mount the ISO drive using one of several virtual drive programs, find the file, and extract it.

Another reason is drive life. My NAS boxes, that burn power 24x7 have disk lives of mover 10 years. I just decommissioned a homemade NAS box that's been up and running on the original Hitachi drive since about 2004. However, with portable USB drives, I've been getting 3-5 years. If I bounce it around in my car, subtract 1 year.

"The bigger the disk drive, the harder they crash". - Me, after having about 40 GB of important data trashed after I plugged my portable USB drive into a virus infested customer's machine.

I carry two 16GB USB 3.0 flash drives for utilities, one 32GB USB 3.0 drive for ISO images, and a 1TB drive which has the customers image backups on it. However, in the house and office, NAS is more convenient.

Correct.

Nice. I've built my own but with the price of NAS drives with gigabit ethernet on the decline, I just pay the price and be done with it. Generally, I prefer Buffalo Tech products.

I've noticed that companies with great products usually have miserable support, while companies with mediocre products have great support. There are a few that can do both, but not for extended periods. Too much entropy I guess.

Retch. The number one failure that I see are dead or dying hard disk drives. I buy new drives, do pre-emptive drive replacements, demand that customer do image backups, and have spares on hand. Putting image backups on old or pull-out drives is just asking for a problem. I do have plenty of old drives floating around the office, but those are for quick tests, donation machines, and paperweights.

Old photo. The current pile is about 3 times as large, plus about 200 drives that are ready for recycling in boxes on the floor. I'll replace that with an updated photo after I clear off the other debris from the table.

Yellow Post-It notes with additional scotch tape.

In between image backups, I use one of several "continuous backup" products. Favorites for Windoze are Acronis True Image Home and Memeo. When I do an image backup, the "continuous backup" files on the NAS box is cleared and I start over. The major problem with this scheme is that files that I erased on the drive, still appear on an image restore. I deal with that by having cron or Windoze scheduler do a dir /s or ls -r directory list of the drive along with the "continuous backup".

That's the root of your problem -- you should never throw things away! :>

Yup. Mount, burn, install, discard. Media is cheap enough to not bother trying to keep CD/DVD's lying around.

I power up box has the drive(s) of interest, pull down (or push up) what I need, then power things back down again. Only real exception is when I do periodic tests of the archives (comparing one to its backup, etc.). But, those things can happen overnight, etc. (takes a long time to move TB's of data even at Gb speeds!)

I don't like the small (~2") drives. They're slower and tend (IME) to not be as durable. I still treat drives with the "tenderness" that was

My worst experience came with a bug in a SCSI driver that tickled a "problem" in some 4G drives I had (back when 4G drives were $1K/ea). OS update caused the drive to get scrambled. (WTF???) No problem. Thinking the drive had *died*, I installed it's cold backup in its place -- and watched it suffer the same fate! (Yikes!!) Rolled the OS back to previous release and restored both drives from MO backups... Not an experience I ever want to repeat!

If you roll your own boxen (instead of COTS), you can build this sort of functionality into the boxes directly. E.g., as I effectively operate all as JBOD's, verifying two boxes have the same content requires pulling data from *each* onto a *third*, performing the compare, then moving on to the next file, etc.

With home-grown boxes, you can implement the comparison *on* the NAS box so you only pull *one* copy of the content over the wire. It also lets you store the "state" of your compares locally. So, you can resume them later (instead of having to leave both boxes "up" until the operation completes).

I picked up four more 4-drive, 1U boxes today to see if I can put some of these bare drives "on-line" (or, at least, "one power switch away").

(and I still have to finish copying files onto the box I built last night...)

I've been discarding all of my COTS NAS kit. Too hard to keep track of "how do I recover the files from *this* NAS if it dies". With the roll your own approach, I can ensure I have a consistent disk format from one box to the next: box dies? move disk and keep running.

I think it is more an issue of "greed". AS IF their products were somehow "worth" more than they really are. C'mon, guys... there's nothing magical about this *functionality*!

Using a dock doesn't force you to use old (or new!) drives. Rather, it allows you to get the modularity of "external USB drives" *without* having to keep a stack of enclosures, power supplies, etc. -- one for each "packaged" drive.

I email ls-alr.gz from each box to my "admin" account (on a server that runs 24/7/365 and provides my core network services -- DNS, font, tftp, etc.).

As I run four primary OS's, I can't rely on a COTS "product" to handle all of my needs.

I used to take images just during the building of the box (i.e., an image after the OS is installed; another after drivers have been added; another after "core utilities" and "essential configuration"; etc.).

But, I've since developed a "portable" imaging tool that lets me image drives without regard for the OS running on the drive. It compresses the "unused" portion of the medium so the images are only as large as the "need to be". Then, I update a restore partition on the disk so I can effectively roll the machine back to that "snapshot" in a matter of a few minutes.

This is a real win when I tweek something (or install something "new") that breaks the machine...

You're positing the existence of "enough disk space".

There ain't no such animal.

Sylvia.

Five years from now we will be saying "remember back when JL said 3 TB is all the memory anyone will ever need".

Just kidding John. :)

I can remember opting for a 256 Mb disk, because the more expensive

Sylvia,

I remember when the choice was 2Mb or 4Mb RAM and 80Mb or 120Mb disk

-Lasse

Five years from now, old fogies will be saying, "remember that Usenet thing?" ;-)

...But then, the Internet will answer "yes", because the internet never forgets...

Not sure if that was a joke or not.. it's pretty well true already, so...

Tim