Excellent post. Great information. I have a question about SSDs, though. Google has published their information about hard drive and SSD survival in their data centers. It can be viewed here: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/servers-storage/googles-ss... So my question is how we mere mortals can deal with all the maintenance. It may well be that spinning hard drives are best for us.
I'm not sure spinning hard drives are more reliable outside of data centers - at least not for laptops because you are carrying them around (anecdotaly, I recently had en employee break a hard drive in a laptop after dropping it).
It probably doesn't really matter as much as your intuition might suggest anyway because each drive can and will fail. And they fail at similar rates (as opposed to an exponential difference of a factor of 10x or more). So you need to take similar precautions for each type of drive.
For personal use - I use exclusively SSDs because they are much faster. The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox.
For servers, all data that is important goes in a database cluster (Cassandra) with a replication factor of 3. Those drives are backed up daily offsite. For data that cannot be lost at all (even a days worth), I also copy each record to Amazon S3 every time it is changed. - I'm sure there are many other ways to tackle this problem.
"The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox." I don't think its healthy to consider cloud storage backup. For example I am pretty sure you could loose everything to Ransomware.
I know Dropbox sells Extended Version History [1] as an add-on, but it'll be awfully nice if Pro users had maybe 60 days of file history, versus 30 days for free. Just a thought.
You assume HDs will die. Keep 3 copies of all data, at least 1 far away, and diff regularly. If a HD lasts 2 years vs 10 in average, doesn't really change the best practice to keep your data.
Just to elaborate a bit, it's pretty easy to keep three copies of stuff you care about. First, you have the working copy, on the machine itself. A big backup disk is pretty straightforward. I use time machine, which isn't super reliable, but it's very very easy.
Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reinstalling anyway (probably) So, for the third copy i rely on 3rd parties. Different people have different needs, you might want to do something fancy in house.
It pretty much boils down to finding a service for your stuff. I have a couple of private github repos. Photos on iCloud and whatever Alphabet is calling Picasa these days. 20 gigs of music to Amazon or Alphabet (or both). Administrative stuff, like taxes, i just email to myself. It's probably smarter to keep that in dropbox or something along those lines.
The key point is, there are the things you make or capture that are irreplaceable, save those lots of places. There's a bunch of other crap on your computer to make it be useful. That stuff is trivial to reinstall. Well, ok, it might cost you a day or two to redownload and reconfigure emacs just so - but with a little planning you can put that config in git, so it's easy to restore or set up on a new machine.
It's almost better to think in terms of, if i had to upgrade tomorrow, what would i need to copy over? that's the stuff to be really fussy about.
> Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reinstalling anyway (probably)
I'd counter this with what I do with my laptop. The OS is considerably smaller than the data I actually care about (<20gb), it takes almost no time to backup and so it leaves me with a very quick ability to restore the system to a known good state in the event of some kind of failure. I don't do constant backups of it, but maybe once a month i'll update the backup I have of the OS.
Yeah, I was trying to point out you don't really need 3 copies of everything, and really 1 is enough for some stuff that's easy to replace. But the stuff that matters, you should have lots of copies of that. 2 backup disks is another way to go, just swap them, say, weekly. Photos from a once in a lifetime trip? make a bunch of copies, local and remote.
I thought the OP had a very reasonable suggestion. It would be very beneficial to me to have it as a profile setting. And if for me, then probably others, too. So only those who want it would change their behavior.
I still can't figure out how one login can give me -3 points. Very impressive. How many logins do you have? Must be a hassle keeping them straight, and you just burned three of them for one reply. Hardly seems sustainable.
1) I don't know whom you're addressing, but it's very unlikely someone used 3 different accounts to downvote you for something that isn't very political/controversial. For your reference, you can't downvote someone who replies to you, so it certainly wasn't me.
2) You can't "burn" downvotes. You have as many as you want, but can only downvote any eligible comment a single time. I can't remember what makes some comments ineligible, though.
3) You'll end up hating HN if you take downvotes personally. Downvoting is often a way to say "I disagree" without polluting the thread. Sometimes you hit a seam of (dis)approval, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. I hope a few downvotes won't stop you from participating, as there are a lot of brilliant people here who have interesting things to say.
My only surprise is that they are not writing Asian lives matter instead. This article lumps Asians in with "white" - it would be interesting to see how the Asian new-hires dominate.
Or maybe they can but they do not want to reveal their ability to do so just yet. We'll never know, until then assume they can break your crypto and use that knowledge to stay safe with your information.
I wonder if there is something somewhat related. It's not just A Phone, once they have the access method then virtually all other phones of that kind are open.
They are using a High profile case because it's easy to find an echo in their petition. They probably want to see many other phones, but this case goes deep in the mind of the people. From the start it seemed off to me that the suspect was cautious to destroy all the other information but leave the phone... there.
The phone might be just a normal one and have no clue at all.
Excellent post. Very interesting. I see how it works but am using Python 2.7 so based on your headline I suppose it won't work for me. This is the first real lead I've seen for integrating it easily. Pricing isn't terrible, if it goes production. Too bad there is no way to test it first for development. But we're lucky to have this at all.
Most of the stuff I found was for Python 2.7! I'll edit that into the post. My focus was for finding libraries that worked with new Python code, e.g. Python 3.5 code.
All of those libraries have Python 2.7 versions. Actually for all of them you pip install the same library; for pyttsx, `pip install pyttsx` and ignore jpercent's update.
I'm not sure what you mean about pricing and testing for development. Are you referring to Google's services? They offer 50 reqs/day for voice recognition on a free developer API key (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys). Google Translate can also be used by gTTS; it will rate limit or block you if you send too many reqs/min or per day without an appropriately registered API key, but you could play around with it for sure.
If voice recognition is important, it might be worth investigating Sphinx more and putting the time to tweak their English language model files. Synthesis is more difficult, though I think the Windows SAPI, OSX NSSS, and ESpeak on *nix are all "good enough." There are also a range of commercial libraries.
I too thought it was Python 3 only before I read it. Maybe a better title would be "Coding Jarvis in Python in 2016" and then explaining in the first paragraph that this is Python 2 and 3 compatible, with your personal focus on 3?
A federal judge’s order earlier this month that California public schools turn a trove of personal information on millions of children over to two nonprofits has parents worried and privacy rights advocates outraged.
The nonprofits, who advocate for special needs kids, say they need access to information on a state database to gauge compliance with federal law, but critics don’t believe Social Security numbers, home addresses and other sensitive records should be included. The ruling by Judge Kimberly Mueller of the Eastern District of California, grants access to data on all students enrolled in Golden State public schools at any time since 2008, a number estimated at 10 million.
The requests listed on the chart were filed in New York, Illinois, California, Massachusetts, and Ohio, in multiple different districts.
The device models ranged from an iPhone 3 to an iPhone 6 Plus, as well as an iPad 2 with Wifi capabilities — and one phone whose model hasn’t been identified yet.
They were running operating systems ranging from iOS4.2 to iOS9.1 — iOS8 being the level at which Apple says it cannot retrieve the data on the phone because it is encrypted, and only the user can unlock it.
Currently, 91 prisoners remain in the prison, down from a peak of nearly 800. Of those who remain, 35 are currently approved for release and transfer to a third-party country. Many have been awaiting transfer since 2009. The administration’s plan would release these men quickly while identifying more who may be eligible for clearance. It would also wind down the prison population to a smaller number of detainees who would likely never be approved for release. These “forever prisoners” would make up the population of the future prison facility somewhere in the United States.
