Invisible wrote:
> What, no solar power?

How much solar power do you think it gets from outside the solar system?

I'm not even sure there are solar panels on Voyager at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager.jpg

I don't see any. There's a big lump of something radioactive that keeps a 
thermojunction warm.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Invisible wrote:
>>> There is apparently something wrong with my brain. When I come home 
>>> from a dance class absolutely dripping with sweat and gasping for 
>>> breath, I find myself thinking "yeah, that was a really great 
>>> evening". It's like I *enjoy* hurting myself. o_O
>>
>> Indeed.
> 
> But, dude... that doesn't even MAKE SENSE! >_<

Yes it does. You're not hurting yourself. You're just exercising.

Think about what it would mean to your evolution if every time you ran away 
real hard or chased something so hard it made you sweat, you said "Wow, that 
sucks, I'm gonna try to avoid that in the future."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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> Think about what it would mean to your evolution if every time you ran 
> away real hard or chased something so hard it made you sweat, you said 
> "Wow, that sucks, I'm gonna try to avoid that in the future."

Damn. I think my brain just imploded due to the Liar Paradox. o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Heh. I too have written scripts to do backup. It seems like all you 
>> have to do is copy a bunch of files, but it's never quite that simple 
>> in reality. You have to deal with files that are locked, files getting 
>> moved around or deleted while you're trying to copy them, file 
>> security, alternate data streams, not upsetting programs working on 
>> those files just because you want to back them up, and so on.
> 
> Correct. And it's not that hard. Want my scripts to do it?

Right. Because there's a million and one gatchas to watch out for, and 
you've somehow covered them all with just a simple shell script.

>> If you want to be able to do stuff like back up or restore an 
>> individual Exchange mailbox, good luck doing that with scripting. 
> 
> Well, it would be file-level backups. I don't know how Exchange stores 
> its mailboxes.

In a giant database file. (It wouldn't surprise me if it's a JET 
database...)

> The tools are there to do this. They're not that hard to understand.

Sure. It's called professional backup software. And it costs lots of 
money. Because they can...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>>> The bank has no way to force you to pay the mortgage. At least around 
>>> here. They'll just take whatever's left.
>>
>> In other words, everything I own that has some kind of liquidity.
> 
> No. The house you mortgaged. Read your mortgage. It'll likely tell you 
> what you mortgaged.

Uhuh. And if the house doesn't even exist any more...?

>> Besides, don't they just throw you in jail indefinitely if you have no 
>> money? These are banks we're talking about here; they *always* get 
>> their money back.
> 
> Uh, I'm pretty sure that was gone by the Victorian era.

That's news to me.

>> 2. House prices appear to start at around £300,000 or so. The very 
>> best, most unobtainable jobs pay £30,000/year. That's a pretty friggin 
>> huge gap.
> 
> You need a better job.

Which part of "I know" are you not getting? ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible schrieb:

> There is apparently something wrong with my brain. When I come home from 
> a dance class absolutely dripping with sweat and gasping for breath, I 
> find myself thinking "yeah, that was a really great evening". It's like 
> I *enjoy* hurting myself. o_O

You're on endorphines, that's all.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> No. The house you mortgaged. Read your mortgage. It'll likely tell you 
>> what you mortgaged.
> 
> Uhuh. And if the house doesn't even exist any more...?

     \O/

Seriously, some places have "no-recourse mortgages", some don't. You'd have 
to read up on the laws where you bought the house. A no-recourse loan means 
they only get back the house, not anything else, and then you're out of debt.

Plus, the land is still of value.  Probably moreso than the house was.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Right. Because there's a million and one gatchas to watch out for, and 
> you've somehow covered them all with just a simple shell script.

It's really not all that hard. :-)  The tools are there.  If you don't want 
them, then fine, but it's based off of someone who wanted to back up several 
hundred desktop machines that had never been backed up onto a couple of 
central servers over the course of a couple of weeks, so, yeah, it handles a 
lot.

Look at robocopy, for example, and you'll see it'll mirror an entire 
directory tree including junctions and auditing properties and everything 
else, including network failures, it'll run and watch for some number of 
changes and redo the backup when it gets there, etc.

Then look at vshadow and see how it'll take a snapshot of a running drive 
and expose it under a different letter.

Of course it can fail. It's not going to fail silently without you knowing it.

> In a giant database file. (It wouldn't surprise me if it's a JET 
> database...)

That would be messy, but I'm guessing that vshadow tells exchange and/or jet 
to flush their changes so at least you get a consistent and correct file in 
the backup. (That's the sort of thing that I was saying UNIX doesn't make 
trivial, even tho you can copy open files.)

>> The tools are there to do this. They're not that hard to understand.
> 
> Sure. It's called professional backup software. And it costs lots of 
> money. Because they can..

If you're going disk-to-disk, it doesn't cost all that much.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Darren New wrote:

> Plus, the land is still of value.  Probably moreso than the house was.

Mmm, that's true...

Heh. The other day I saw a burned out house for sale, actually, IIRC 
they wanted £190,000 for it. And it's a gutted shell... (but, I presume, 
with planning permission).

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Right. Because there's a million and one gatchas to watch out for, and 
>> you've somehow covered them all with just a simple shell script.
> 
> It's really not all that hard. :-)  The tools are there.  If you don't 
> want them, then fine, but it's based off of someone who wanted to back 
> up several hundred desktop machines that had never been backed up onto a 
> couple of central servers over the course of a couple of weeks, so, 
> yeah, it handles a lot.
> 
> Look at robocopy, for example, and you'll see it'll mirror an entire 
> directory tree including junctions and auditing properties and 
> everything else, including network failures, it'll run and watch for 
> some number of changes and redo the backup when it gets there, etc.
> 
> Then look at vshadow and see how it'll take a snapshot of a running 
> drive and expose it under a different letter.
> 
> Of course it can fail. It's not going to fail silently without you 
> knowing it.

Oddly enough, I *have* looked at robocopy. I couldn't get it to work 
reliably enough.

I wrote a DOS script using xcopy to try to back up some PCs over the 
network. That wasn't reliable enough. So then I switched to using 
robocopy. That *still* wasn't reliable enough. So then I wrote a Tcl 
script to do it. Still had problems. Moved to Haskell. Mostly worked, 
but still occasional problems.

The backup scan ran as an AT job. Every now and then, there would be a 
network glitch or somebody would turn off the PC or something, and the 
script would hang with the network drive still mapped. Next day, the 
script bombs out because the drive is still mapped. Of course, it's 
mapped under the system account which runs AT jobs, you the only way to 
unmap it is to run an AT job to unmap it. That's once you kill the hung 
Tcl instance using Task Manager.

And don't even get me started on how absurdly difficult it is to write 
DOS scripts that handle failure properly...

The next stage of course would be to run a component on the remote 
machine to do the scan for modified files locally, and compress the data 
before sending it over the network... but I never got to that part 
because we have *real* backup software now. Backup software that works 
reliably.

>> In a giant database file. (It wouldn't surprise me if it's a JET 
>> database...)
> 
> That would be messy, but I'm guessing that vshadow tells exchange and/or 
> jet to flush their changes so at least you get a consistent and correct 
> file in the backup. (That's the sort of thing that I was saying UNIX 
> doesn't make trivial, even tho you can copy open files.)

Using the BackupExec agent for Exchange, backing up or restoring 
mailboxes or even individual emails is no harder than backing up a 
regular file. Try doing that with a DOS script...

(Then again, they charge you enough ****ing money for that thing!)

>>> The tools are there to do this. They're not that hard to understand.
>>
>> Sure. It's called professional backup software. And it costs lots of 
>> money. Because they can..
> 
> If you're going disk-to-disk, it doesn't cost all that much.

Possibly. I haven't investigated it much.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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