Wed Mar 23 18:56:48 UTC 2022
After wrestling with groff for so long I was looking forward to using jns' new
text justify [0]. But the compile ran into some CMAKE_ROOT error, causing me
significant amusement with the declaration that
>CMake has most likely not been installed correctly.
Not that I'm any great coding genius, but I'm surprised how many little
technical things seem bent or broken on SDF, which is supposedly run by geeks
for geeks. I'm sure it's somehow just as likely to be the result of my own
ignorance. At least I don't feel any great motivation to reactivate SDF Usenet
access since they changed things up again - I was only following the Apple ][
group, and I've never owned a single piece of Apple hardware. Regardless, it
was good to see at least one newsgroup still being actively useful and social
and spam-free, and I hope that's still the case.
So is storage (hard drive, or equivalent) the weakest link in current
computing? Sure feels like it to me. Reliability of long-term data seems like
the reason many would-be self-hosters end up outsourcing to one degree or
another. Not that a paid corporation is any less likely to be struck down by
the hand of fate, should God or Nature's God choose them to make an example
of. But thinking hard about the realistic odds and tradeoffs of any situation,
like "I live in the desert and off grid and need redundant solar panels so I
can always troll on my Raspberry Pi", means thinking about all kinds of stuff.
Exactly what data are you storing and why is it so important? Is it important
only to you, or potentially to others (security risks)? The better answers you
have to all of those questions, the more informed a position you're in to
decide whether to do something yourself or find someone else.
All that aside, it would be nice to see some small and portable storage
solution actually rated for decades or a human lifespan, like the M-Disc
standard for optical media. If the price of that longevity was slower speed to
some extent, that's a fair and acceptable tradeoff. Whatever happened to those
holographic cubes we were promised? Same trash heap of ideas as the flying
car? *Au revoir*, Mister Smith.
I like the speed of solid state, but their data recovery still looks downright
dismal. Most times if a hard drive goes wonky I have a reasonable chance of
recovering most of it. And when it comes to the truly important data, right
now I could fit mine on a single CD. I don't need a vast ephemeral cloud, even
if I'm the rainmaker in charge. Just a durable vault to which I can entrust my
most crucial bits.
Of course it's so much simpler to build a mobile trellis on casters. Which is
why I'm Amish at heart.
[0]
https://tildegit.org/jns/justify
