Search engines were a disaster in the late 90s and early 2000s when Google rose to prominence. They weren't very clever, indexed only a subset of the Internet (when it was tiny by today's standards), and were full of spam links because their algorithms were easily gamed. Look up PageRank. It was a big deal.

Not surprisingly the scientists that work on weather models care very much about their accuracy. The GFS model's peformance is constantly reviewed: http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/G...

HRRR means they just run WRF very frequently (http://ruc.noaa.gov/hrrr/). I think it's to help with short range forecasts specifically. As far as I know, they still use GFS primarily (http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/index.php?branch=GFS).

(Inktank community guy here)

There are a number of different options for backup/disaster recovery solutions with Ceph, depending on what piece(s) of the platform you are using. For instance, the object gateways (think S3) from multiple clusters can be plugged together for multi-site replication. The CephFS and block device portions both have snapshotting built in that can be replicated offsite.

In the medium-term we're looking at having a way to replicate your entire cluster over the wire at the RADOS level (underlying object store). Longer-term we'd love to be able to offer WAN-scale replication for a single cluster and the ability to snapshot a cluster (or portions/pools therein) easily.

I hope that helps. If you have more questions hit me up on #ceph at OFTC.net IRC.

I have been using Roboform for over 5 years. Currently I have 600 sites/passwords, all different, stored on my laptop & password-protected. The beauty of Roboform is that it will fill in passwords for Windows programs like SSH & SFTP & VNC as well as logging you in to sites automatically.

Off my laptop I store Roboform2Go in a Truecrypt volume on a thumb drive.

In the cloud I use SpiderOak to store the password-protected passwords.

I'd like to know any reasons why this is not safe? It is most convenient & runs on my Linux box too.

I do NOT use Roboform online sync, only locally.

Visipics is the only tool I have ever found that will reliably use image matching to dedupe; it is Windows only but I have used it on my own collections & it works very well indeed: http://www.visipics.info/

Now (v1.31) understands .raw as well as all other main image formats & can handle rotated images; brilliant little program!

It seems incredibly stupid to me not to just use the web. Why limit it to people who just have a device of a certain OS? Oh right, making money.

Or, hospitals don't have the billions of dollars of profit at their disposal that financial companies do. I think this is a sad reflection of our society's priorities, not on hospitals' planning efforts.

As one AC already pointed out, you should check out Ceph (full disclaimer: I work for Inktank now, the consulting services company that employs most of the core Ceph devs). Ceph is, at its heart a Distributed Object store, but we allow you to access in a number of different ways:

• * Native API
• * Via a RESTful interface that can handle native Amazon S3 and Swift API calls
• * As a thinly provisioned block device
• * Mount it as a POSIX-compliant file system via CephFS (although this is a bit rough for production environments just yet)

Josh Durgin has actually done some really interesting work in using the block device (RBD) to back Cinder which you can read a bit about here.

The cool part about Ceph is it was designed to be massively scalable (petabytes and beyond) and extremely fault tolerant / HA / etc. DreamHost actually just built out a huge production deployment of Ceph and OpenStack for their new DreamCompute / DreamObjects offering. If you have questions feel free to hit up the #Ceph irc channel at irc.oftc.net or poke me via email (my UN at inktank.com) and I'll see if I can't find the right person to help.

OpenStack really has some awesome potential, and we're excited about poking at it more with our semi-sharp Ceph-stick. Good luck.

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Agreed. I had a Windows Mobile phone way back in the day and I trashed it for only two shortcomings:

1. The scroll bar on the contact list would get messed up, so that you could not scroll to the top anymore, so your top 5 contacts were inaccessible.
2. The phone would appear to have signal and be working properly, but it actually had fallen off the network.

Rebooting fixed both these issues in standard fashion :-)

Please read this post as sung, thanks.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The preamble, at the very least, sets the tone of what the founders expected government to do.

There has been a quiet revolution in real-time public transport information in London (UK) also.

Transport for London has equipped all buses with real-time GPS and this info is available via web and SMS.

Apparently they are looking for third-party developers to use their APIs but I've not seen anything yet.

Here's how to find when the next bus is coming:
          http://countdown.tfl.gov.uk/#/

Since most ticketing is now electronic (the Oyster card system) there is also live info an nearly all the millions of passengers; at the Transport Museum they have some displays showing this off.