::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Wednesday 06 February 2002 16:28, you wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 03:29:05PM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> > On Wednesday 06 February 2002 15:20, you wrote:
> > > No, I try to avoid relational databases because they're slow and
> > > expensive.
> >
> > Which ones have you used? PostgreSQL and MySQL and fast and cheap :-)
>
> Those two are still slow, and they're more expensive to maintain than
> other solutions, if only because you have to spend money throwing hardware
> at them.

How about filesystems? You never mentioned them. Do your trust your data to 
ext2, msdos, and friends? Can you edit them with tools installed on every 
server, huh huh huh? :-)

> > What do you trust your data to instead, then?
>
> To my backups.  I work on the assumption that any piece of software
> is going to fail in interesting ways.  And I *certainly* don't trust
> software to detect that it has borked and to fix itself.  If it could
> do that, it wouldn't bork in the first place.

Those backups being text files of everything, then, right? So no executables, 
just sources, and all images in PNM, animations as lists of PNM files, and 
audio stored as plain lists of newline-seperated base 10 samples (with stereo 
sound stored as two space-seperated numbers per line)? Not using dump or tar 
or anything, huh? And *certainly* not anything like *data compression*? :-)

Otherwise you'll be depending on some software to read that tape!

But back to reality, although current software quality is often bad, it's 
quite easy to fix this problem if people would stop writing things in f**king 
C or C++ or Perl and that lot and put the effort in to use a 
bondage-and-discipline language like Eiffel :-(

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software