Great Grand-Uncle Schimmelhorn's Toolbox

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sdwood said:
"If you aren't testing restores, you aren't backing anything up."
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The backups kept on a shelf in the site office, or just outside the server room door, might also be an issue... I liked the 'JCB in the computer room' incident I vaguelly recall ('JCB through the broadband cable' is far more common), then there was the basement computer room and the top-floor water tank rupturing...


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Most encountered are not this cute...

Yeah, there's a 'My 1st JCB' wiki... Collect them all! :)

Do you think U.N.I.O.N. should be offering a backup service beneath?

(Another story, but I suspect Blue counts as a JCB...)
 
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One reason I tend to have backups for anything I'm writing is... back in high school the file for a research paper I'd been working on for months got erased when an asshole student broke into the school and took a magnet to any and all floppy disks he could get his hands on. Which was all of that class's project files. Every essay, interview, and research paper which was going to be compiled into a book the class would publish. All of it, all because that student flunked out of the class due to skipping school for 2 weeks strait. And my last printout of it for the teacher to proof read was back towards the start of writing the research paper. It had grown in scope since then. And the essay was due in two days, with me only being able to work on it in class due to no computer at home, and the local library not having accessible media storage.
 
Daemion said:
That happened once and it was down the last few steps of the stairs. It was never going to seriously harm Taylor, just caused her to drop her stuff on the floor.
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Having been pushed down the "last few steps of the stairs", and a few times actually just falling - yeah, serious harm is quite possible. Death is actually quite possible.
 
Daemion said:
That happened once and it was down the last few steps of the stairs. It was never going to seriously harm Taylor, just caused her to drop her stuff on the floor. The bullying was never about crippling or killing Taylor, large parts of it were mental or more about destruction of property than harming the girl physically. If she had ended up bruised and bleeding in the nurse office every day, it would have drawn too much attention.

Sophia isn't bright but even she's not as brazen as attempting a murder in broad daylight, in front of witnesses.
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Most kids don't think falling on stairs can kill someone, because they fall while playing, and they weren't hurt.
Besides, i know of a case that a person tripped and fell on the floor, no stairs or any elevation, just a flat floor, and he died three days later, the fall caused a small clot in the brain.
Any hit to the head can be fatal, the vast majority isn't of course, but even a few steps can cause injuries, a meter of the ground and you can break something if you fall badly.
My cousin is tetraplegic becuse he jumped on a pool from the border, not even from somewhere high, and his head hit the water at the wrong angle, the whiplash compressed his vertebrae.
 
Tara Li said:
Having been pushed down the "last few steps of the stairs", and a few times actually just falling - yeah, serious harm is quite possible. Death is actually quite possible.
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lymbo said:
Most kids don't think falling on stairs can kill someone, because they fall while playing, and they weren't hurt.
Besides, i know of a case that a person tripped and fell on the floor, no stairs or any elevation, just a flat floor, and he died three days later, the fall caused a small clot in the brain.
Any hit to the head can be fatal, the vast majority isn't of course, but even a few steps can cause injuries, a meter of the ground and you can break something if you fall badly.
My cousin is tetraplegic becuse he jumped on a pool from the border, not even from somewhere high, and his head hit the water at the wrong angle, the whiplash compressed his vertebrae.
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Yes and you can drown on your own spit, too. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's probable. If you push someone down two steps then it's not your intent to harm or kill them. People trip and fall every day, 99.99% don't die. Humans aren't that fragile, you have to fall just right (or in this case wrong) to hurt yourself badly and even that is rarely deadly.

She wasn't pushed down onto the stairs, she wasn't even pushed down onto the floor. She was made to stumble and that's all there is.

In Taylor's case we clearly know the result: She dropped her books. That's it. Not a single bruise, no twisted ankle, no cuts, didn't even get her clothes dirty. Neither did she hit her head.

Article:
Six vicious emails, Sophia pushed me down the stairs when I was near the bottom, making me drop my books, tripped and shoved me no less than three times during gym, and threw my clothes at me while I was in the shower after gym class had ended, getting them wet.


The bullying was bad enough as it was in canon, there's no reason to exaggerate it for fanon purposes. The bullies never wanted Taylor to die or get seriously hurt, they wanted to make her suffer... and even that was more mental than physical. They were also at least smart enough to keep some plausible deniability and being seen by a dozen witnesses to beat Taylor up or pushing her down the stairs would have lead to trouble even for them.

They managed to keep this bullying campagain going for so long because they toed the line. They kept to the grey areas, the "she said/she said" and eroded any support Taylor might have had. No one really cared that the weird loner got her backpack stolen but if she had been badly hurt from being pushed by her bullies? That would have been different.

It's not like Emma and Sophia held actual power in Winslow. They manipulated some boys into doing their bidding but in the end they were still freshmen and had very little influence over the majority of the student population. They especially had no control over the gang-adjacent students.

They got away with their crap because it was perceived as unimportant. Not worth the trouble. If they picked on some outcasts, that's just how highschool works. For a bystander it wasn't a reason to oppose them. Until the locker all they did seemed to be small potatoes, because no one really knew the full extend of their bullying.

But this kind of protection would go away immediately if they nearly killed Taylor in front of witnesses. And don't bring up the locker here because they had plausible deniability and Taylor was okay physically, her hospital stay was because of her mental breakdown... and in the perception of the crowd not directly caused by whoever did the "prank".

Obviously you can modify all that for a Worm fic, making it AU, but in canon Taylor's life and physical wellbeing was never the target of the bullies and even the possible accidents didn't have a significant risk of being lethal. It would have been so easy for Sophia to arrange for accidents if she wanted Taylor hurt, like making her slip in the showers after gym. There were no witnesses or cameras, she would have gotten away with it easily. But she never even attempted anything like that.
 
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Daemion said:
The bullying was bad enough as it was in canon, there's no reason to exaggerate it for fanon purposes. The bullies never wanted Taylor to die or get seriously hurt, they wanted to make her suffer... and even that was more mental than physical. They were also at least smart enough to keep some plausible deniability and being seen by a dozen witnesses to beat Taylor up or pushing her down the stairs would have lead to trouble even for them.
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Bullying can wreck people's lives. Leave effects on them for decades. And, schools, at least in theory, are part of society's attempts to teach children to become effectively socialised adults. Cyber-bullying is current in the media, along with child suicides. For extra 'fun', the UK statistic that nearly a quarter of 5-7yr old's have their own (effectively unsupervised?) smartphone...

I've personal knowledge of how messed-up people can get in virtual worlds (like getting involved in Gorean settings, based on John Norman's Gor Novels). "You can always logout", "Just teleport away", and I particularly liked "Go off and read a good book" - people (and children are proto-people) get really invested in situations, relationships, use the amazing human talent of laser-focused attention to their disadvantage.

So. Lack of significant physical injury. As this story says, risk of psychological damage, developmental issues, possibly Triggering. Taylor going 'off piste' after having learned some of Little Anton's trick... That doesn't obviously have Manton Limits, and a brain scan would show she's not a parahuman...

An interesting question might be whether learning Little Anton's trick produces any changes that would show up on a brain scan...

(Please, don't start a bullying derail off this comment. I know there's the temptation, but...)
 
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mp3.1415player said:
I use a multistage backup process, for much this reason.

The lowest level is an rsync from my main work machine to a separate fileserver so 30 seconds after I save anything, it's replicated to a master copy on the server. That lets me get back something quickly should there be an immediate problem.

Then above that, the various systems all back up data from the live working directories to a separate backup drive on the machine in question every evening, using standard backup software doing incremental file addition. Those machines dump their new backups onto the main raid-5 backup server every night, and that is backed up onto tape on a longer schedule, two copies being produced, one of which is then stored out of the house. So the end result is that if I have a disk failure in a given machine I can replace it and restore from a backup resident on that machine, if the entire machine bites it I can restore off the fileserver onto a new one, and if the house gets nuked I can restore from the offsite backup. If that goes too, well, I'm likely gone along with it :)

It's not as comprehensive a disaster recovery method as a large company would probably have, but it works, it's been tested, and it wasn't all that expensive. I've got around 100TB of local storage, and backing that up to anything other than tape would be rather expensive and awkward. Surplus LTO-5 tape drives are cheap and readily available, as are tapes, and while it's several generations old it's got enough capacity to be more than useful for the sort of load I have. One issue I had initially is that the tape drive is much faster than 1Gbit ethernet, and you really want to saturate the tape interface to get it streaming flat out rather than having to constantly stop and rewind. So I had to update the ethernet between the computers being backed up and the server running the tape drive to 2.5Gbit so I could get it to sustain 240 megabytes a second or so and keep the tape buffer filled. I've fine tuned the backup scripts so they pretty much run continuously, which took a lot of experimentation.

The bottleneck at the moment is the raid-5 drive array, actually. It won't read more than about 200MB/s sustained, with peaks higher than that, because it's running mechanical hard drives absolutely flat out and the processor isn't super fast either. In the longer run I want to build a new one around SSDs but they're still too expensive so that'll have to do for now.

There's also some critical stuff stored on a cloud service, but it's mostly a limited amount of things that would be bad to lose if all else went to shit, and might need to be accessed from somewhere else on short notice. Current work data, and of course my writing.

That is backed up all over the fucking place :D

Yes, I am serious about backups. A USB stick and xcopy won't cut it ;)
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I have a funny idea of what THE FAMILY would use for long term data storage - imagine The Winslow, with an eldritch USB connection in the tail tip. Virtually indestructible and portable. Lizard grin comes as standard. Ha ha ha
 
TheShadowDeamon said:
I have a funny idea of what THE FAMILY would use for long term data storage - imagine The Winslow, with an eldritch USB connection in the tail tip. Virtually indestructible and portable. Lizard grin comes as standard. Ha ha ha
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I feel you should have considered linking an image, as a quick search gives loadsa English country house stuff...

Maybe not the usual one used...

Not the play, not the Toyman, probably this one...
 
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Daemion said:
Yes and you can drown on your own spit, too. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's probable. If you push someone down two steps then it's not your intent to harm or kill them. People trip and fall every day, 99.99% don't die. Humans aren't that fragile, you have to fall just right (or in this case wrong) to hurt yourself badly and even that is rarely deadly.

She wasn't pushed down onto the stairs, she wasn't even pushed down onto the floor. She was made to stumble and that's all there is.

In Taylor's case we clearly know the result: She dropped her books. That's it. Not a single bruise, no twisted ankle, no cuts, didn't even get her clothes dirty. Neither did she hit her head.

Article:
Six vicious emails, Sophia pushed me down the stairs when I was near the bottom, making me drop my books, tripped and shoved me no less than three times during gym, and threw my clothes at me while I was in the shower after gym class had ended, getting them wet.


The bullying was bad enough as it was in canon, there's no reason to exaggerate it for fanon purposes. The bullies never wanted Taylor to die or get seriously hurt, they wanted to make her suffer... and even that was more mental than physical. They were also at least smart enough to keep some plausible deniability and being seen by a dozen witnesses to beat Taylor up or pushing her down the stairs would have lead to trouble even for them.

They managed to keep this bullying campagain going for so long because they toed the line. They kept to the grey areas, the "she said/she said" and eroded any support Taylor might have had. No one really cared that the weird loner got her backpack stolen but if she had been badly hurt from being pushed by her bullies? That would have been different.

It's not like Emma and Sophia held actual power in Winslow. They manipulated some boys into doing their bidding but in the end they were still freshmen and had very little influence over the majority of the student population. They especially had no control over the gang-adjacent students.

They got away with their crap because it was perceived as unimportant. Not worth the trouble. If they picked on some outcasts, that's just how highschool works. For a bystander it wasn't a reason to oppose them. Until the locker all they did seemed to be small potatoes, because no one really knew the full extend of their bullying.

But this kind of protection would go away immediately if they nearly killed Taylor in front of witnesses. And don't bring up the locker here because they had plausible deniability and Taylor was okay physically, her hospital stay was because of her mental breakdown... and in the perception of the crowd not directly caused by whoever did the "prank".

Obviously you can modify all that for a Worm fic, making it AU, but in canon Taylor's life and physical wellbeing was never the target of the bullies and even the possible accidents didn't have a significant risk of being lethal. It would have been so easy for Sophia to arrange for accidents if she wanted Taylor hurt, like making her slip in the showers after gym. There were no witnesses or cameras, she would have gotten away with it easily. But she never even attempted anything like that.
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You are right.
But that wasn't my point.
I was replying to the comment that said she was NEVER going to get hurt being pushed, when that in fact could have happened.
And more relevant, sophia never considered that her actions could potentially seriously hurt taylor, nor that she might get in trouble for it, after all, she was a "predator" and taylor "prey", and prey is meant to be pushed down. So in this fic it presents a consistent picture of someone who believes themselves immune to consequences, and would plausibly forget to remove incriminating evidence from herself.
 
Neat. I responded to a post that claimed that Sophia repeatedly pushed Taylor down the stairs which could have killed her easily, when in fact it happened once and was at the bottom of the stairs, resulting in her dropping her books and nothing else.

Trying to construct crimes and lethal accidents from that one action is nonsense and I have no idea why people constantly blow the bullying out of proportion. It's sufficiently bad enough as it is, there's absolutely no need to add lethal danger to it.

Yes, the bullies never really considered all the consequences of their actions but that doesn't change the fact that until the locker nothing they did actually physically endangered Taylor. They shoved and tripped her a lot but it's not like they pushed her into traffic or anything like that. Most of the bullying was non-physical and aimed at humiliating her.

Sophia is also not *that* much into the whole predator and prey thing.

My initial comment had nothing to do with this fic, I was merely correcting an incorrect statement. Perhaps my word choice of "never" was pushing it too far into the opposite direction but the gist was that the bullies didn't attempt murder in broad daylight nor did they intend for Taylor to get seriously hurt, which would be the case if you push someone down the stair repeatedly.
 
Chargone said:
Regarding star trek inspiring tech, if I remember correctly, the automatic sliding door as used in shops and such Did explicitly come about due to the inventor thinking the bridge doors on the enterprise were cool/a good idea.
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Automatic doors predate Star Trek, but at the time most such doors operated with a pressure sensitive mat in front of the door (I think the motion detector based doors were just starting to come out). Which required maintenance and you could see the doors on set didn't have. At least one of the automatic door companies sent a letter asking how the doors on set worked since there was no visible trigger and they were so reliable.

The answer: a hardware store handle on the back of the door allowing someone on the opposite side of the wall to pull it over as the actors approached. And it wasn't actually reliable. They'd pull early or miss a cue resulting in the actors walking into the door. But those cuts simply wouldn't be put on air.
 
Ace Dreamer said:
I feel you should have considered linking an image, as a quick search gives loadsa English country house stuff...

Maybe not the usual one used...

Not the play, not the Toyman, probably this one...
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Sorry, Yes I did mean the Lizard. The big one shown there is a Ultra High-Capacity server farm. Here is the specs on a standard Winslow:
The Winslow has the appearance of a 66-cm plush alligator with a cheerful grin. However, there are claims that the Winslow is utterly indestructible and presumably immortal, and figures prominently one way or another into fully three-fourths of the galaxy's known religions.

Origin of The Winslow: Girl Genius
 
Well, technically, The Winslow originated earlier as one of the side plots in Foglio's Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire comic series in the late '90's. But Phil's snuck the little guy into a lot of different places over the years.

Edit: I forgot about it's short appearance in the Myth Adventures comic Phil drew in collaboration with Robert Asprin.
 
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Kinsfire said:
The Winslow predates Buck Godot by a good bit. Got a friend who knew him in Boston who commented that he liked to draw. The Girl Genius link that the wiki leads to that has a copyright of 2017 was originally printed somewhere back in the 80s as a filler. This Wayback Machine link gives better information.
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Of course The Winslow pre-dates Buck. Buck is merely an interesting mortal; The Winslow pre-dates this iteration of existence, and probably more. The Winslow is eternal!
 
Mr_Rose said:
Of course The Winslow pre-dates Buck. Buck is merely an interesting mortal; The Winslow pre-dates this iteration of existence, and probably more. The Winslow is eternal!
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Are you sure The Winslow isn't also the Ceiling Lizard? :)

((Taylor hauls The Winslow out of beneath. Grins at her. Gets thrown back. :) ))
 
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The Winslow has the potential for a decent Omake - Dragon and Armsmaster are visiting the BBFO office and get onto the topic of long term, secure data storage. Saurial offers to show them how The Family does it and takes them to a "suddenly there door" (because she just made it). Inside is a wide corridor with floor to ceiling shelves, filled with smiling Winslows (Taylor doing the multiple body trick) that all turn their heads to follow Them down the corridor. At the end is another door which contains "the equivalent of your stand alone server farms" and opens to reveal a Kaiju sized Winslow (piloted by Varga).
Follow up with the usual shell shocked reactions to finding out more "normal lizard stuff" and leaving rather quietly to try to recover their sanity. Taylor and Varga are laughing their asses off. Especially when an unsuspecting Lisa looks to see what all the fuss is about and her power blue screens… again.
 
EdBecerra said:
God almighty, I have to hire you to set up a backup system for my life.

Not my computer, my *life*.
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Hmm. Tricky. Sounds rather transhumanist... I'm not aware of our Fully Automated Author offering gradual or otherwise uploading services...

But, situation may be more nuanced. People sorta distribute themselves, anyways, in things like creating media, particularly writing. Boundaries of 'self' may extend outside their 'bone box' - think how much of themselves people put into things like their families, businesses, homes, their cars (or any other vehicles).

Personal AI (not the context-limited sort the big companies sell) might provide ways to 'distribute your mind'. For example, an AI and associated robot body could be trained in physical skills you regard valuable to keep around. An AI you can converse with, develop, explain concepts and associations to, based on things like your favourite (and most disliked) works of fact or fiction, described past experiences, photos, your writings, social media posts, videos. Encryption, used carefully, can keep private things the AI learns that you want kept private. Careful use of robotics can help (such as later life) mobility issues, while assisting with exercise. Worst case, calling for assistance.

Some might call the above 'cyborging your life'. But, in a way, isn't it using tools to extend your 'mental reach', similar to how humans have slowly developed tools to extend their physical one?

BTW, glad to see you here!

(Just to be clear, the above tech is not, best as I know, Apr 2024, available for sale, say from Amazon. But, hackers look to be developing it, and processing power plus storage capacity has become ridiculously cheap. I do recommend backup of your (encrypted) AI, including off-site, though! :) )

((Backing-up beneath would be good, but, there appear to be technical issues. :) ))
 
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