> 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

-- 
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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...

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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? ;-)

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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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Stefan Viljoen schrieb:

> Isn't this the way it is going? According to what I read on strategypage.com
> recently, F-16s, F-15s and F-18 are wearing out and are not being replaced.
> Additionally, much funding is being "saved" by decommissioning many
> (hundreds, apparently) of these aircraft early as well, in order to spend
> money maintaining the F-22 and F-35?

I'd guess that the number of F-35 to be bought will /not/ be as low as 
for the F-22. And it will not be anywhere as expensive.

>> (A) Besides being able to carry BVR AIM-120 AMRAAMs, the F-22 is
>> designed to bear much cheaper AIM-9 Sidewinders into battle.
> 
> Of which there'll be how many? As far as I know the AIM-9X is not in
> production anymore, and funding is being cut for buying it - again to be
> able to afford "enough" AIM-120's and to feed the budgetary monster that
> the F-22 has become.

Let's see... Wikipedia speaks of some 3.000 or 3.600 AIM-9X already in 
the arsenals (figures vary between language versions of the article), 
and some total of >10k to be purchased in total by American armed forces.

However, the F-22 currently doesn't even support the AIM-9X yet, and 
instead is supposed to use the AIM-9M, which I guess is available in 
stock at even larger numbers already. Not to speak of the other members 
of the AIM-9 family, which I'd suppose the F-22 could fire as well if 
needs be.

> That's damn impressive! No, I didn't know that. That could come in very
> useful in a low and slow situation. Though I wonder what the price is in
> fuel consumption? High-alpha maneuvers like that probably need a lot of
> thrust to be applied to keep from stalling?

Probably so, yes. But when was the last time the U.S. of A. bothered 
about fuel consumption in their armed forces?

> True, but that is a mark against the F-22 in my book. I was thinking when I
> said that of the situation where US ground forces are under attack from the
> air, and need to be protected against MiG strikes. So, the USAF sends the
> F-22. It -has- to go low and slow to get at the MiGs, assuming it is out of
> missiles. Sure, it can outclimb and outrun the MIGs, but it has no choice
> now - it has to tangle with them on their terms, low and slow, to protect
> US ground forces. Wouldn't that obviate its enormous speed and rate of
> climb? (Though the slow maneuver you pointed me to above would obviously
> help I readily agree.)
> 
> Also, that is if they have decommissioned all those F-16s and F-15s by that
> time, of course - which seems to be the way they are going.

... and purchase F-35 instead, which by the way seems to be a totally 
different beast, and shouldn't be mistaken for a smaller copy of the 
F-22 concept.

The F-22 is designed mainly as an air superiority fighter, the concept 
being to suppress any enemy air activity way before they can be a PITA 
to ground forces. Recent conflicts have shown that the US will not even 
think about sending in troops before this air superiority has in fact 
been achieved.

Also, a MiG may be an adversary to reckon with in a dogfight (I have no 
idea whether that is anywhere close to true), but with F-22s out of 
reach of their guns but close enough to make a run any moment, a MiG 
pilot probably couldn't really afford to attack grund targets. I guess 
he'd be eating 20mm Vulcan rounds any moment.


Plus, it's also a question of what you consider the primary threat: The 
world hasn't seen any all-out war between superpowers for >60 years, and 
with the presence of nuclear weapons such a war would be unthinkable 
anyway. Local conflicts have been commonplace however, and the USA seem 
to have made it a habit of entering such conflicts every 10 years or so 
ever since WW2. For such scenarios, the AA arsenals should be more than 
sufficient, and it may also be more efficient to have a small fleet of 
highly superior aircraft with a survivability of virtually 100% per 
mission, rather than a large fleet of lower-class planes with a 
survivability of only 90%. Not only for the sake of material costs, but 
even more so for the sake of morale at home.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> The backup scan ran as an AT job.

I'm assuming you mean it ran at the server to pull files, rather than at the 
client to push files. Might be better to switch that around.

> 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.

Why are you mapping a drive to a letter at all? Just use UNC names.

And robocopy can be told to stop copying after some number of failures. You 
can even tell it to resume copying halfway thru a large file if the copy 
failed in the middle.

> script bombs out because the drive is still mapped. 

Unmap it before trying to remap it, of course.

> mapped under the system account which runs AT jobs, 

Why? Tell AT to run it as a different user.

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

That's what robocopy is for.

> 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...

Well, sure. If you have a program that understands the file format, backing 
up part of the file works. No surprise there.

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

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