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cperciva

What is this, submit-everything-tarsnap-related week? I mean, not that I mind the extra traffic...

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Quick! Make a blog post about it so we can submit that too!

Or write about how you work your ass off delivering bagels at 6:00am.

We had the aviation week and the 2048 week this year. Maybe we’ll have the Tarsnap week (or the backup week).

Today is International Backup Awareness Day!

Everyday should be Backup Awareness Day.

It is

The only backup awareness days are the days you get audited ( by an auditor or by a disaster). Unfortunately, all other days are "backups cost a lot/are difficult to maintain/have never been tested" days.

Good question, especially when the linked post is wrong, or at least poorly written.

>Because in 1960, the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures decided that the SI prefix G- meant 10^9.

This is wrong. The switch from GB to GiB happened in 1998 and came from International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)[1], before that a GB was indeed 2^30. Then the old GB became the GiB and the new GB was standardized to use base 10.

[1]: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

both are correct. It's just some people decided that prefixes (G-, M-, etc) taken from a certain standard should mean differently in their area of expertise.

Sorry to split hair but until 1998 GiB didn't exist and GB were indeed 2³⁰ so it's wrong to say GB are now 10⁹ because of a decision of the BIPM from 1960.

GB are 10⁹ because in accordance with its mission the IEC made them so in 1998 which incidentally base its work on this 1960 decision. Without the IEC, we would still have GB referring to 2^3,. I can tell as I lived through this change as the annoying cs student who correct something the professor said, in front of the class and is right about it.

When you say "GB were indeed 2³⁰", do you mean it was officially defined to be that, or that it was common practice for people to call it that. G- was officially defined in 1960 to be 10^9.

In the case of my submission, I legitimately came across spiped while researching a problem I was working on today, and I thought others might find it useful.

I wasn't serious, just surprised to see spiped and this link submitted within a few hours of each other.

At time of writing there are three links to tarsnap.com on the front page: this one, scrypt, and spiped. I think that means that you win HN, sir. It's been a good run everyone, time to wind things down.

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