dabiged

SATA was released in 2000. You can still buy new drives or motherboards with connectors. NTFS was released in 1993. You can still use it with off the shelf operating systems.

If I have an NTFS formatted SATA drive from 2002 I can plug it into a brand new machine and it will work out of the box (except it won't because it would have been dropped)

LTO6 was released in 2013 and is end of life. I cannot buy a new drive to read it. Storagetek T10000D was released in 2013. It is near impossible to find drives to read them. IBM TS1140 was released in 2014. Again all the tape hardware is EOL.

My point was: why is it that a media designed for long term storage, doesn't have long term support. If you want more uptake of tape, support the hardware for as long as you claim the tapes last.

All of what you have said is correct.

None of what you have said is going to happen at a bank, insurance company or media shop who need to comply with all the corporate legislation post-Enron.

I think a lot of people have also been burned by the continuous new rollout of tape formats.

People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise.

LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year.

Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.

If you are interested in a field or technique I highly recommend articles in the physics review journal. They publish around 4 articles every quarter and each is a 45-70 page deep dive on a subject.

Get a copy of Computer Networking: A Top-down Approach by Jim Kurose.

Read the first 500 pages until you get to the physical layer. Skim the back half of the book on funky protocols like Bluetooth, satellite and cell phones.

I had a lto4 (max capacity 800gb) last year that took over 5tb of data. The data was ASCII log files from a server that had been running for years. Lots of repetition (time stamps, everything ok messages, you have mail messages) and the drive compression ate it for breakfast.

I work in the tape restoration space. My biggest piece of advice is never NEVER encrypt your tapes. If you think restoring data from an unknown format tape is hard, trying to do it when the drive will not let you read the blocks off the tape without a long lost decryption key is impossible.

Are talking about open source only? Because there are loads of options available. Veritas has two products (netbackup and backupexec). There is also commvault, veeam, ibm spectrum protect and hp data protector. Admittedly only netbackup and commvault are what I would truly call enterprise, but your options are certainly not limited.

Related, I was going to say lack of growth in packet size.

I work with magnetic tape and have seen tape block sizes grow from ~512 bytes in the early 1990s, to 10s MB today, resulting in huge performance improvements. Network packet sizes haven't changed by anything near that amount in 30 years.

My first OSS project contributions went like this:

* Start using some software that I liked

* Read the documentation and notice poor grammar, punctuation, typos etc.

* submit PR for documentation (man pages, comment lines etc.)

* get PR merged and introduced to the dev team.

* submit more small PRs that are code based (expand existing classes, add minor features) etc.

* the maintainers will generally give feedback that your code doesn't fit into style guides, linters, case conventions etc. So patch it up and get it merged.

* Now you can pretty much do whatever. Test the code on Arm64. Add new OSes to their build pipeline.

My advice: Start small. Actually talk to the maintainers.

A lot of my favorite physics classes were Applied Physics. These were great as you used the building blocks from 1st/2nd year level to show complex phenomena in the universe. It is a shame this list has none of these.

Things like:

* Stellar Nucleosynthesis - S-process, R-process, stellar evolution

* Fluid mechanics - Navier Stokes equations

* Physical Oceanogrpahy - Ocean currents, tides, Pressure and Salinity effects

* Plasma Physics - MHD equations, Alfven waves

* Medical Physics - CAT, PET, MRI scanners. Radiation treatments.

* Planetary Science - Plate tectonics, Gas giant phenomena.

* Geophysics - EM, seismic, anisotropy

* Electron Microscopy - SEM, TEM, AFM etc.

It was extremely disappointing to finish a book which truly altered the way you saw the world, and not have a cohort of people to share it with.

From start to finish it probably took around 7-8 years. The booklist I had, started out pretty easy going (i.e. you were expected to read The Illiad in about 2 weeks), towards the fourth year it is frankly delusional how fast you are expected to read (War and Peace was assigned 1 week) and I have NO idea how the students in the course can do it. I was reading maybe 2 hrs a day whilst working fulltime.

Yes I read them in the order presented. The order kind of makes sense (sem 1 & 2: Ancient Greece, sem 3: Early christianity/rome, sem 4: renaissance, sem5/6: enlightenment, rise of democracy, sem 7/8: early modern period.) By the time you get to Shakespeare there are echoes of stories you have already read.

In terms of a strategy for retention, I kept a small book of quotes from the works and would add to them weekly (no idea where this is now).

I should say that the latter stages of the course has large sections that are for essay writing and projects. I skipped all this but added other books instead. These were mainly American literature (Twain, Fitzgerald, steinbeck), English literature (Bronte, Dickens, Orwell) and some older stuff (Suetonius, Xenophon).

Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books.

I found that reading so much ancient literature:

1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.

2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).

3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.

I think you are missing the context around nuclear anything in Australia.

We have no nuclear powerplants. We have no nuclear submarines. Large portions of the country are staunchly against mining uranium. Most people don't know We operate a single nuclear reactor that only produces medical isotopes. There is no nuance on anything nuclear here because it is almost completely absent from the country.

Teams on Linux.

AWS Pro level Cert.

Emailled.

Can anyone comment on the brands of tape you can purchase? Given it is an open format what sets the brands apart? Are there records of failure rates like backblaze has done with HDDs?

Currently for LTO8 tapes you can buy the following brands:

* Fujifilm

* Quantum

* IBM

* HPE

* Oracle

* Dell EMC

I used ChatGPT to generate a basic Azure ARM template for spinning up simple resources in Azure.

Worked flawlessly for simple infrastructure like VMs.

There is a Sydney team in the Australian cricket competition that is bright pink.

I played this game with physicist friends and the favorite word was 'shadow'. It was the only everyday object not composed of something in the standard model. It stumped everyone.

I am running Coreutils 8.3 on Linux mint 20.

It is also in Coreutils 8.22 in RHEL7.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

Edit: I just found this in the coreutils 9.0 changelog:

  dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
  For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
  102,400 blocks of data.  The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
  seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
  though they still work.

I am running Coreutils 8.3 on Linux mint 20.

It is also in Coreutils 8.22 in RHEL7.

Edit: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

Edit 2 : I just found this in the coreutils 9.0 changelog:

  dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
  For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
  102,400 blocks of data.  The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
  seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
  though they still work.

I only found out because I use dd 1000's of times each day and have had to prototype some really esoteric data pipelines using it. I have even compiled a few custom versions to do various tasks.

One other nuggets of wisdom which is very poorly documented in the man page: if you have a long running dd process (I often have 12+ hr dd processes reading 10+TB tapes) you can send a USR1 signal to check the progress. Very useful to check if your tape drive has had a hardware failure.

Information on both this and the byte counts are in my man page (GNU coreutils 8.30 on Linux Mint 20) around lines 130.

skip, seek and count default to counting the number of blocks. So if you want Megabytes 50-60 of a file you can do either a 1 byte block size:

> dd if=/tmp/file1 bs=1 skip=50000000 count=10000000

or you can use any block size you want and treat skip and count as byte counts, not block counts.

> dd if=/tmp/file1 bs=4M skip=50M count=10M iflag=skip_bytes,count_bytes

Option 1 will run at Kilobytes per second as it is transferring 1 byte at a time (my test gives me 933kB/s)

Option 2 will run a 100's MB per second as it is transferring 4MB at a time (my test gives me 202MB/s).

Edit: What I should have said at the top of the post was "If you want to extract data from a file whose size is not an integer block multiple". In the above example you could have used a Blocksize of 10MB for the same result. You cannot do this for an oddly size extraction (say 1234567bytes).

As mentioned elsewhere in this post this leads to dreadful performance. You are better off using iflag/oflag options seek_bytes, skip_bytes and count_bytes to treat these options as bytes and using a large block size.

dd does all you want without a new version.

dd allows you to specify your seek, skip and count values as bytes instead of blocks using the iflag/oflag options seek_bytes, skip_bytes and count_bytes.

So to read the first MB of data 100GB into a file you can:

> dd if=/tmp/file1 bs=2M skip=100G count=1M iflag=count_bytes,skip_bytes

This has become very popular in Australia with both of the big retailers, Coles and Woolworths.

I am sick of hearing about labor supply problems in the hydrocarbon industry as it is a problem entirely of their own making. I was in the Industry for 12 years and in that time the industry laid off something like 40% of the workforce twice.

Half of my ex colleagues had to drive Uber to make ends meet for years. I remember a reservoir engineer walking down the main street in the oil city I worked in with a board saying "qualified petroleum engineer will work cheap".

I spent 4 years (and $$$) doing a master's of petroleum engineering whilst working full time. None of the 40 odd students I went through the degree with got jobs due to an industry downturn and all left the industry. We happened to graduate during a low oil price period. Too bad. So sad. 4 year degree down the drain.

This affliction of no staff happens every boom, and the mass layoffs and industry exodus happens every bust. If the industry actually planned for this cyclical nature by avoiding overexpansion in good times and reducing mass layoffs in bad times this wouldn't be an issue.