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Answerman - Pain in the Neck

On the subject of jury duty, I think the system we have here in Massachusetts works pretty well: one day or one trial. I've had days when I wasn't called and could leave around lunchtime. I've also sat on a jury, but our "one trial" took only a couple of hours, so it was essentially a one-day experience as well.

Of course, you could end up on a murder trial and be sequestered for days. Hasn't happened to me yet.

EyeOfPain wrote:

Huh, didn't think LTO was used for much outside backup applications.

That's why I said "video _archive_". These systems use the tapes as long term archive and have hard drive arrays for anything that needs to be accessed. So yeah, they are just being used as specialized backup, and presumably the underlying data are just video capture files.

So is there a reason we can't use Bitorrent for archiving? Have everyone who cares support part of the archive with it constantly bantering about online so there's no single point of failure to completely ruin everything?

Thinking about that, you could probably come up with some kind of peer-2-peer data archive protocol, which is optimized for redundancy instead of download speed. But it would have to be heavily encrypted and damn near impregnable before I think anyone would trust using something like that for backing up important data of any sort. Plus the copyright implications are gray area at best.

Asterisk-CGY wrote:

So is there a reason we can't use Bitorrent for archiving? Have everyone who cares support part of the archive with it constantly bantering about online so there's no single point of failure to completely ruin everything?

I kind of like that idea but you'd have to change the protocol I think.
Something more like winny/share/perfect dark would work, where each user puts aside a portion of their storage for caching files in the sharing cloud, even if they aren't actively downloading/uploading them specifically.

Thinking about that, you could probably come up with some kind of peer-2-peer data archive protocol, which is optimized for redundancy instead of download speed. But it would have to be heavily encrypted and damn near impregnable before I think anyone would trust using something like that for backing up important data of any sort. Plus the copyright implications are gray area at best.

But I could imagine a p2p protocol that allows you to upload files into the p2p network, and where ONLY YOU can download them back. In exchange you give a portion of your hard drive space to the cloud for other people to use... By setting a ratio of like, 4-5 times the space required per upload capacity, you can make sure there's enough redundancy.

Interesting idea, at least. Not gonna work for 10s of TB and above though, that's for sure.

For what it's worth, JVC tried to market D-VHS, which was an all-digital, HD-ready VHS format, to the general public back in 2005.[…] Blu-ray and HD-DVD came along two years later.