luser001

Hmm, not sure why you conflate face-to-face and phone. I prefer to not talk over the phone, but have absolutely no problem talking face to face. Just thought I'd throw that out for the record. :)

Hmm, the additional qualification of "newly-hired" and "entry-level" are not present in the original, afaict on purpose. Your additions move the meaning pretty far from the original's. IMHO. YMMV.

Very good article. Thanks. The one sentence "we're not a profession" explains almost all the tech. workplace dysfunctions that I've seen.

Sorry, my comment above wasn't well thought out. Amazon's durability guarantee is on a per-object basis, not on a per-byte basis. I will post an article here after I research it thoroughly.

Sorry, I think I should retract that statement which I seem to have recalled mistakenly. The error rate seems to be quite a bit lower than that, so I will post an article here after I research it thoroughly.

Sorry, it's 10 bytes, not 100.

1 TB = 2^40 bytes

Amazon claims 99.999999999% durability. https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/

2^40 * (1 - 99.999999999/100) = 10.99 bytes

Transferring 1 MB/sec for 1 hour = 3.51 GB per hour

Assume you stored 1 TB (1024 GB) and need to retrieve all of it.

Free allowance per day = (1024 * 0.05)/30 = 1.70 GB/day

Free hourly transfer allowance = 1.70/24 = 0.07 GB/hour

Billable hourly transfer rate = 3.51 - 0.07 = 3.44 GB/hour

Retrieval fee = 3.44 * 720 * 0.01 = $24.76

Based on info here: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret...

I have an old Lacie Rugged 160 GB external drive that's 4.5 years old, and rarely used. It had a 1 year warranty. It's still working. I don't rely on it totally these days, though.

'scrubbing' is just a fancy way of saying that the files are read from media, checksums recomputed, and compared against stored checksums. If checksums are different and data was stored redundantly, then recovery is carried out, and correct data is written back to media.

I'm too lazy and don't really do it with my multiple DVD, CDs and HDD backup directories. But ideally, I should be doing it. My startup will make this sort of thing easy and automatic.

Very good points. I actually agree with you on most points. Which why I started my startup.

That calculator seems incorrect to me.

In particular the assumption that "Retrieval time is how long it takes Amazon to fulfull your request. Retrieval time has nothing to do with your download speed." seems to be the root cause.

Plugging in numbers from Amazon's worked example from https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret... gives different numbers than that web page.

My estimate for downloading 1 TB continuously for 1 MB/sec is a retrieval fee of approx $25 in addition to data transfer fees.

Amazon strongly implies that your data is stored triple redundantly. You'll have to buy more than one disk to get triple redundancy. Also, you'll need to "scrub" the data regularly to detect bit rot (100 bytes per TB are expected to go bad every year). And probably store the files with redundant coding to protect against this bit rot.

Plug: I am working on a startup (submitted to this YC round!) to solve this problem using user^Wcustomer-owned hardware for precisely the sort of reasons you describe. I am looking for co-founders. If anybody wants to talk, email is in my profile.

Plug #2: I wrote and submitted this article about Glacier yesterday but it sank fast: http://psranga.github.com/articles/possible-architecture-of-... Email me if you want to talk about going up against an 800 lb gorilla. :)

Ok, got it. This aspect isn't clear in your screenshots though. Good luck!

So I need to keep my computer at home turned on all the time?

That sounds expensive. I just submitted an article related to the topic of data center power consumption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744488

Would be nice to have links pushed to the "cloud" and have the home computer pull the info when it starts up.

Even better, you should find a way to somehow use Firefox Sync via javascript so that you don't have to maintain the server. [Ditto the same thing for Chrome Sync]

This may be a newbie question.

Article states: "... it should work fine in any metal box, right?"

But then says the case had some electronics which failed. Which means it wasn't just a metal case. Anyway TIL that server cases aren't just metal boxes.

And in case somebody wants to respond, how important is vibration dampening to ensure hard disk reliability? What's the best way to damp vibrations in a consumer tower desktop case?

Hmm, what evidence do you have that China wants a gold-backed yuan? AFAIK, yuan is at present a fiat currency.

1. Two commands instead of one. :)

2. Scripting an scp, rsync etc from the internal machine is easier now, since the ssh from the external to internal machine is handled transparently for you.

Note: I haven't kept up the specs etc.

That's the iPad 2. If it's comparable to the Surface, then your point is valid.

The cheapest iPad 3 with 3G costs $629.

And while YMMV, I don't require 3G on my tablet. I already have 3G on my phone, which is always in my pocket, and I can create a personal hotspot if reqd.

I don't think the $500 iPad has 3G?

AFAIK, most houses (not apartments) in the US have forced air circulation systems along with heating. Basically this means a fan will suck air out of the house and push air from outside, even with all windows closed.

So your advice is likely wrong for a lot of people. YMMV.

"I, a Baby Boomer, have a higher retirement age than my parents have ..."

It went up from 65 to 67 years. That isn't worth remarking upon, imho. Considering life expectancy, it probably went down as a percentage of expected lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_Stat...

I'll ignore your grossly inaccurate phrase "taxing someone to die".

your money is taxed once: when you receive it.

Until you receive it, it isn't your money, it's your parent's.

If a disk fails, it still needs to be replaced. RAID etc lets you avoid data loss until you replace the drive.

I've read that the "invoice price" is artificially inflated, because manufacturers give dealers hidden "incentives" and things like that to lower the real cost to the dealer. Any thoughts?

"The clients for my current occupation, teaching mathematics lessons through a local nonprofit organization, included first-generation immigrants from China, India, Russia, Romania, the Philippines, Korea, Ghana, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries I may be forgetting at the moment"

Just to be clear I'm understanding correctly: first-generation immigrant means born outside the USA and now living in the USA, right?

So you teach math to first-gen immigrants from Russia? Are these adults or children? If children, I guess there must be a couple of kids who went thru the Russian education system that are bad at math. :)

If anybody from Microsoft is reading this:

I will switch to Bing if you enable SSL search.

I tried it for a few weeks w/o SSL and I liked it. Until then I will not use it, nor recommend it to anybody else.

So, according to you, the problem of drivers regularly doing 50 mph in a 25 mph zone need not be resolved "immediately"?

When should it be resolved?

Not going to happen imho: how will a self-driving car change the fact that stopping distance increases with speed?

Consideration for (unexpected) pedestrians (children etc) and cyclists seems to the primary motivation for low speed limits on residential side streets. I think that makes sense.

I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.

Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets.

Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red light). Split revenue with the city.

Hmm, maybe I should run this by my city council. :)

I would definitely exclude administrators, janitors etc (because these jobs exist in companies that are "in STEM" such as a Microsoft).

I would include medical staff like nurses, doctors, pharmacists, psychiatrists, physiotherapists (not fitness trainers), licensed nutritionists, dentists, dentists' assistants etc.