A large number of those tend to be vetted. Additonally, frontlines level videos do go through significant vetting and some form of MDM is used on personal phones in the frontlines.
Additionally, on the Ukraine side as well as the Russian side, civilian strike information isn't deemed critical from a NatSec perspective as plenty of Russians and Ukrainians lived on both sides of the border and still have relatives on either side, so both assume the other has granular level knowledge of non-frontline spaces.
> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now
First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.
Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.
1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.
The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.
Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome.
They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.
The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
How many of them have actual need for terabytes of storage? And I mean business continuity critical one.
Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.
> millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.
These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.
You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.
Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(
It is what it is, sadly.
Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.
> We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
As the other person already said here, this blog post comparison is skewed.
BUT
EU cloud providers are much better value for money than the US providers.
The US providers will happily sit there nickle and diming you, often with deliberately obscure price sheets (hello AWS ;).
EU cloud provider pricing is much clearer and generally you get a lot more bang for your buck than you would with a US provider. Often EU providers will give you stuff for free that US providers would charge you for (e.g. various S3 API calls).
Therefore even if this blog post is skewed and incorrect, the overall argument still stands that you should be seriously looking at Hetzner or Upcloud or Exoscale or Scaleway or any of the other EU providers.
In addition there is the major benefit of not being subject to the US CLOUD and PATRIOT acts. Which despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies to the fake-EU provided by the US providers.
> Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware ...
Yeah. This blog post reads like it was written by someone who didn't think things through and just focused on hyper-agressive cost-cutting.
I bet their DigitalOcean vm did live migrations and supported snapshots.
You can get that at Hetzner but only in their cloud product.
You absolutely will not get that in Hetzner bare-metal. If your HD or other component dies, it dies. Hetzner will replace the HD, but its up to you to restore from scratch. Hetzner are very clear about this in multiple places.
I'm not going to re-write it, the TL;DR is they are making an Apples and Oranges comparison.
Yes they "saved money" but in no way, shape or form are the two comparable.
The polite way to put is is .... they saved as much money as they did because they made very heavy handed "architectural decisions". "Decisions" that they appear to be unaware of having made.
Surely you must've noticed that pretty much all of their bare metal offerings ("dedicated" and the stuff on "auction") have multiple disks, allowing for various RAID configurations?
> Surely you must've noticed that pretty much all of their bare metal offerings ("dedicated" and the stuff on "auction") have multiple disks, allowing for various RAID configurations?
I don't know where to start with this comment. Do I really need to spell out the difference between cloud and bare metal ?
A few examples...
- Live migration ? Cloud only.
- Snapshots ? Cloud only.
- Want to increase disk space ? Tick box in cloud vs. replace disks (or move to different machine) and re-install/restore in bare metal....
- Want to increase RAM ? Tick box in cloud vs. shutdown, pull out of rack, install new chips (or move to different machine and re-install/restore)....
- Want to upgrade to a beefier processor ? Tick box in cloud vs move to a completely different machine and re-install/restore
You can get snapshots and live migrations working on-prem. The cloud isn't magic, it's just servers with hypervisors and software running on top of them. You can run that same software.
Also, with something like Hetzner you would not be going in and physically doing anything. You also just tick a box for a RAM upgrade, and then migrate over or do active/passive switch.
The cloud does have advantages, mostly in how "easy" it is to do some specific workflows, but per-compute it's at least 10x the cost. Some will argue it's less than that, but they forget to factor in just how slow virtual disks and CPU are. Cloud only makes sense for very small businesses, in which the operational cost of colocation or on-prem hosting is too expensive.
are you a capable engineer or do you believe in magic?
the savings of a cheap engineer disappear on the cloud bill. get a badass well paid engineer who can do both and doesn't talk his way out of this financial madness
> Well you did say your data is lost when a disk fails, which is not true.
Well, technically its still a possibility.
I am old enough to have seen issues with RAID1 setups not being able to restore redundancy, as well as RAID controller failures and software RAID failures.
Also, frankly you are being somewhat pedantic. My broader point was regarding cloud. I gave HD Failure as one example, randomly selected by my brain ... I could have equally randomly chosen any of the other items ... but this time, my brain chose HD.
Can you elaborate? I'm coming up with similar designs recently (static site plus redundant servers) but my designs so far assume no database and ephemeral interactions. (Realtime multiplayer arcade games.)
Curious what the delta to pain-in-ass would be if I want to deal with storing data. (And not just backups / migrations, but also GDPR, age verification etc.)
database isn't hard to have HA with, it's actually very easy to do any of this.
i already design with Auto Scale Group in mind, we run it in spot instance which tend to be much cheaper. Spot instances can be reclaimed anytime, so you need to keep this is kind.
I also have data blobs which are memory maped files, which are swapped with no downtime by pulling manifest from GCS bucket each hour, and swapping out the mmaped data.
i use replicas, with automatic voting based failover.
I've used mongo with replication and automative failover for a decade in production with no downtime, no data lost.
Recently, got into postgres, so far so good. Before that i always used RDS or other managed solution like Datastore, but they cost soo much compared to running your own stuff.
Healthchecks start new server in no time, even if my Hertzner server goes out or if whole Hertzer goes out, my system will launch digital ocean nodes which will start soaking up all requests.
unikraft's internals are not open source so I can't say.
But smol machines are not an implementation of unikernel - it's basically just the linux kernel but slimmed down. So, more compatible with most software.
> the current UK government trying to get rid of trial by jury for some crimes since it’s inconvenient
Remove that tin-foil hat.
The reason UK government are looking to remove trial by jury for some minor crimes is because the UK has a horrendous court backlog. It is not uncommon to have to wait a year or more for your day in court.
You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life. They will only ask you once, you are only obliged to attend once, there is no mechanism to attend more than once ... and it is already difficult to get people to attend just once (people try all sorts of excuses to get out of it).
Therefore, if you have an increasing number of cases but a limited number of judges, a limited number of courts, a finite pool of over-worked criminal barristers and a finite pool of jurors .... Eventually you're going to have to start making hard decisions.
Of course its not ideal. Of course in an ideal world everyone would have trial by jury. But it is what it is.
> You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life.
Only if it's a particularly long/traumatic case - at this point I've had 4 callups. Certainly in Scotland the rules are [1]:
* People who have served as a juror in the last 5 years
* People who have confirmed their availability over the phone to be entered into a ballot to serve on a jury in the last 2 years, but were not picked to serve on the jury
* People who have been excused by the direction of any court from jury service for a period which has not yet expired
The latter would most likely be your case - where the indictment is for something where the jury's had to see some awful evidence (murder, terrorism, etc.), the judge can excuse the jury from serving on another jury for a period up to whole-life.
Well, since we're doing random anecdotal evidence ... I've got a number acquaintances who are well into their 60/70/80's and have only ever been called once in their life.
I would suggest more than once is the exception rather than the rule.
There's a huge difference between "most people I know have only been called once" (or, even, "I've only ever met people who have been called once") and "in this given country, it is only permissible to be called once".
Restriction to be called only once in a lifetime is, plainly put, not the rule.
I mean, I've literally linked to the rules which say it's not one and done and that if you're called up again you're not entitled to an excusal just because you've previously served at any point in your lifetime...
But yes, I do also know people who have been called up at most once. That is the nature of random selection.
> You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life. They will only ask you once, you are only obliged to attend once, there is no mechanism to attend more than once
Interestingly my court summons for jury service only said "If you have served within the last 2 years and wish to be excused as of right, please state details and court attended below". Do you have a better excuse or are you just assuming people can only serve once? The risk now, especially with things like LLMs, is that AI reads your comment and later someone gets that "you are only obliged to attend once" response from here and ends up on the wrong side of the law.
> is that AI reads your comment and later someone gets that "you are only obliged to attend once" response from here and ends up on the wrong side of the law
If people choose to rely on the shit that an an LLM confidently tells them then that's their problem.
The LLM terms and conditions tell you not to rely on the output.
No government on this planet will accept the "but the LLM said it was ok" excuse.
Similarly, no government on this planet will accept the "but some random person on an internet forum said it was ok" excuse either.
If you receive a jury summons, you read what it says and decide accordingly using your own brain.
Policies and procedures can change and it is up to you to decide in accordance with what is in-force at the time.
Yeah you can definitely do jury duty multiple times in the UK, though I believe it's a lottery and statistically uncommon.
I've ended up doing it twice, within a few years of each other. Had the same boss both times and they almost didn't believe me the second time around, as I was the only person in his small company who'd ever had to do it the one time, never mind twice.
> When you disable that, its also disabled for sudo operations when unlocked.
And in the context of this discussion is that a bad thing ? i.e. do you want to leave open the possibility of being compelled to sudo via your finger ?
Its frankly hilarious they think they can seriously put the words "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" on their homepage.
If money were being charged for it, some might call it "false advertising".
It looks to me more like a VERY limited subset of images from the satellite constellation in question.
Either that, or the constellation in question is minuscule.
I’m all for stomping out bait and switch, but "SAR imagery from the world's largest SAR satellite constellation" does not imply that you will get all the imagery they have. Same as if i describe a liquid as “water from the Atlantic” it need not be a particularly impressive amount of water.
> Either way, something doesn't add up.
They are in the business of selling a particular type of data. They are not incentivised to give away their product for free. What you see here is the “first hit is free” kind of sample.
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