we say "shapah!"

Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud:

Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong.

By the People is an inspirational and education piece on the history of the US Government Printing Office and the radical ethic that said that the governments documents belonged to the citizens who footed the bill for their production. Today, with the Internet making it more possible than ever for all of us to inspect the workings of our governments and benefit from their creations, that ethic is more important (and more endangered) than ever.

I was reading Michael Dahn’s blog the other day and found this particularly worth re-posting here:

“We can only lose what we cling to!”
– Buddha

Many of us live by a set of beliefs accumulated over the course of our lifetime. We use these rules to navigate the possibilities of life. Some of them are positive rules that save us (e.g. “Don’t touch a hot stove”) but some of them are limiting (e.g. “I can’t do it. It’s too hard”). Sometimes we have to stop and ask ourselves if the limitations in our life are self-imposed or actual. I believe that many times the rules by which we find ourselves constrained are self-imposed.

When life appears to be unfair, when bad things happen to good people, this is when you have the opportunity to give up or to change the rules of the game. It’s these game changing moves that enable you to conquer your fears in new and creative ways. You can change the rules of the game in several ways, here are but a few:

1. Change your beliefs: I live by the mantra that “nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes longer.” Why is it that we limit ourselves by what we think is impossible? Why do we obey the rules of our belief when our opponent does not? Why is it that we enable others to walk over us? Only by changing your belief can you break down the barriers that you have constructed and consider the possibility of out-of-the-box innovation.
2. Change the rules: In life many of us abide by a path that we feel has been laid our for us or is predestined to occur. We get frustrated when we feel deviations from that path in the same way we feel the rumble strip on the edge of the road. These path barriers move us in a direction that we “feel” is the “right path.” We cling to our path because it has been a part of us for so many years. Only when you accept variance in your path are you free and open to new possibilities. By accepting change and alternative outcomes we free ourselves to new futures and alternative happiness.

When we stop clinging to self-imposed beliefs and prescriptive paths we free within ourselves the possibility of the impossible.

Here are a few new rules that you may want to consider.

1. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
2. Do Something
3. “To thine own self be true.” – Shakespeare
4. Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves.
5. Don’t live by anyone else’s rules, go make your own.

Over the years, I’ve had many different backup solutions in place in my home to back up the now >3TB of data I deem worthy of the trouble. I’ve used RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6. I’ve used complete solutions and DIY on all the major platforms, as well as Linux flavors like Debian, Yellow Dog and Slackware. I’ve automated these processes, backing up crucial data online, offline, near-line and off-site, and de-automated them whenever I’ve slacked off on my documentation and have forgotten what’s backing up to where and when. Through this experience, I have a decent idea of what works well and what doesn’t.

To bolster available storage to these various configurations over time, I’ve added both internal and external drives, using LaCie almost exclusively for the external side of things. I’ve purchased dozens of these drives over many years and, up until the last couple, have had good experiences with them.

Case in point: yesterday morning, I woke up to find that backups had failed overnight, making this the third set of their products (I always buy them in pairs) that have failed me in the last 2 years. Over the last two years, I’ve lost 6 total, in each case just days after the manufacturer warranties expired. I purchased these drives based on logic that by spending $300-$400 on each, I was getting an acceptable level of reliability for less than it would cost for an enterprise-class solution costing significantly more. Note, it’s not the hard drives that fail, rather the enclosures LaCie builds around them. I end up using the drives in other ways, as noted below.

Thus, I found myself slowly starting to wake up from more than a good night’s rest. I started to realize that I have all of my critical project data in only one location. I had to decide how to proceed in order to keep it safe. Unsatisfied with my past methodology, I set out for some solution evolution.

After spending the morning reading reviews, again comparing complete vs. DIY solutions, I purchased a DroboPro:

Here’s the front:

Internal pic:

Back:

Yes, you can see a USB 2 port, 2 Firewire 800 ports and indeed that’s a Gigabit Ethernet port for iSCSI : )

The DroboPro was $1,289.95
The new drives: 4 x $119.99 = $479.96
Total cost: $1,769.91

That may seem steep, and it is, however, compare this to the cost of 6 failed drives over two years @ $300 each. And my time and worry.

The logic is that spending $1800 on consumer-grade hardware, while thinking it a less-expensive route, is actually more costly as time spent installing, configuring, maintaining and replacing these *solutions* is far more pricey than spending more upfront on a solution that will stand the test of time and allow for more flexibility, security and reliability.

You can count on me sharing my thoughts here on the DroboPro after it’s been in place in my studio for a few months.

* thanks to Chris Connaker @ Computer Audiophile for the images

=
c

I read this today in the Business Insider:

A new survey from UBS has shown that the French continue to work the least amount of hours per year in the world. Once again, the French have blown away the competition.

People work an average of 1,902 hours per year in the surveyed cities but they work much longer in Asian and Middle Eastern cities. People in Lyon and Paris, by contrast, spend the least amount of time at work according to the global comparison: 1,582 and 1,594 hours per year respectively.

Upon seeing this data, some might criticize the French for being lazy, but that misses the point completely. The real message here is that the French are likely some of the most productive people in the entire world.

Think about it. Nationmaster ranks France as #18 in terms of GDP per capita, at $36,500 per person, yet France works much less than most developed nations. They achieve their high standard of living while working 16% less hours than the average world citizen, and almost 25% than their Asian peers as per UBS. Plus, if you visit France you’ll also realize that their actual standard of living is probably much higher than GDP numbers would indicate.

Thus, if one were to divide France’s GDP per capita by actual hours worked, you’d probably find that the French are achieving some of the highest returns on work-hours invested. Labor Alpha, if you will.

We can actually calculate this Labor Alpha using statistics from Nation Master.

France has $36,500 GDP/Capita and works 1,453 hours per year. This equates to a GDP/Capita/Hour of $25.10. Americans, on the other hand, have $44,150 GDP/Capita but work 1,792 hours per year. Thus Americans only achieve $24.60 of GDP/Capita/Hour.

This puts the French Labor Alpha at about $0.50 GDP/Capita/Hour over the US. It may sound small at first, but add that up across millions of people, and a few decades. Now you’ve built a lesson for the rest of the world to learn.

Winning is not about working hard. It’s about working smart… and less. As the French know well.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Here’s one of mine but you can click on it to make it bigger and easier to read:

=
c