Whilst it’s a low-cost move (particularly as they can presumably make that offer based on me having clicked maybe 1 ad in 10 years), it’s an interesting way of building community… I wonder what the difference would be if they offered this as a carrot years ago.

We address backup from multiple dimensions:

1. Prevention
2. Technology
3. People
4. Risk Events
5. Recovery Times
6. Economics
7. Communication

1. Prevention
We use software RAID1 under Linux on commodity PC hardware. We also use different branded hard drives as this decreases the probability of simultaneous drive failure. We use hard-drive based backup (with monitoring to detect imminent drive failures) rather than tapes because of increased reliability. All our servers are under maintenance agreements and monitored (and yes, this is affordable for small businesses due to our process innovation). All of this means the likelihood of something happening to destroy your data in the first place is drastically reduced.

2. Technology
The technology used in your backup matters. Are you using tapes? They can have up to 70% failure rates when you attempt to recover from them! Are you backing up your whole system or just files? Do you know how long it will take to recreate your server from scratch with all the undocumented hacks your IT person has made? Are your backups actually working – are you doing test restores? How are you handling off-site backup? Does your backup software deal with open files (like your Outlook or Exchange databases)? Is all your data stored in one spot?

This makes backup much much easier. Are you using RAID5? On a hardware RAID device? You’ll be sold one of these if you ring up Dell and say you need backup, but do you realise that this scenario makes you MORE likely to lose data and incur considerable expense in attempting to recover it (as compared with RAID1, particularly software-baseder under Linux). Your Operating System matters too – Windows and its applications are a lot harder to back up and generally require more expensive hardware to run on too (which often means recovery time is slowed whilst waiting for replacement parts, or that you pay much more for fast warranty replacements).

3. People
People delete data. Deliberately or accidentally, it doesn’t matter. Design your backup system around this fact and you’ll be much happier. For example, some automated backup solutions simply mirror what’s on the fileserver. This includes mirroring any delete operations! Many companies only find out this was a limit to their system after the fact. Too late.

We automate solutions where possible, because leaving backup to busy overworked staff members is a sure way to guarantee it won’t get done, or won’t get done properly. Ask your IT person next time when the last time *they* backed up was. Chances are if they’re using a manual system it was months ago, and they supposedly care!

4. Risk Events
Consider the risk events you are exposed to. The most common are:

• accidental file deletion
• hard drive failure
• other system component failure
• virus/hacker attack
• disgruntled employees
• failure of your backups

The rarer, but still deadly events can include:

• fire/flood/theft
• dedicated hacker/industrial espionage
• … and all the other weird and wonderful events you can dream up!

You need a plan to address each and every event you can think of. You have a choice of:
accept – you accept the risk of it happening and lose data
mitigate – you put processes in place to reduce the likelihood or occurrence and/or reduce the
cost of recovery when it does happen (ideally do both)
offload – offload the risk to someone else, e.g. an insurance company. N.B. This is tricky with data

5. Recovery Times
This is often overlooked. Assume you have a perfect backup, how long does it take to recover? Windows servers in particular can take days to recover. Even with an image (snapshot) of the whole server and separate file-based backup, you’ll run into trouble if you don’t have near-identical hardware lying around to restore the image to. This is particularly a problem when your server is more than 12 months old and you can no longer buy replacement parts for it.

What about off-site backup? How long would it take you to download 100GB of data from your off-site backup or to drive and get it? The list of acceptable recovery times needs to be correlated with the list of risk events. For example, if your building burns down you might accept everything taking a week to get back up.

But if your hard drive fails, you want your recovery to be in a matter of hours. Ideally this type of failure would have been prevented with RAID1 and drive monitoring.

5. Economics
Often overlooked, this is considering what’s worth backing up, how, how often and how expensive and time-consuming the retrieval process is. It’s not possible to have 100% secure data (although sending it to the moon $10,000/hard disk at a time might be worth it to some!), so considering the economics of what data you have and its value to the organisation is important.

6. Communication
As Mal said above, the disaster prevention and recovery process (of which backup is a part) needs to be communicated and understood by business owners. All too often we see half-baked backup solutions that we know will fail under so many situations, but the business owner is blissfully unaware. In my opinion, this is worse than no backup at all as it provides a false sense of security.

• Great post on today’s generation that echoes my sentiments
• If you want to know about VCs’ role in the world
• Semantic Web (possibly Web 3.0) – watch this space
• The evil power of the “default”
• Recommendations vs Ads. Obvious, but they still don’t learn…
• Google as the next Microsoft, from the more-often-right-than-wrong department of Bob Cringely
• When will everybody realise Google only has one good product?
• VCs? Get with the program
• These people will rule small business in the 21st Century
• For the more down-to-earth of you who would prefer a “real job”, Marc’s posts on Career Planning are gold

There, this blog post is now more informative than the sum of all blog posts before it

By now some of you will have heard my talk about my latest project – A Global Obligation. Well the good news is it’s open for all (Web 2.0-compliant beta mode of course!) Please do your part for humanity and check it out. If you have any feedback or bugs, please let me know. Of course, don’t let that stop you from sharing the word once you’ve donated!

Click the image below to donate!

If you can’t see it, you can access it via this URL instead.

Yes, we’ve got referrals tracking working, so refer all your friends, add a banner to your blog and make the biggest dent in the Universe you can!

People who are already buying from iTunes would continue to. People who refused to buy from iTunes because of DRM might start. And people who bootleg would continue to bootleg. This situation would be better for the music industry, not worse.

Gruber’s argument here doesn’t go far enough, and it makes a big difference to the likelihood of getting the Big 4 to agree to a DRM-free world. Talk profit. Specifically, the net increase in additional users purchasing songs and increased volumes of songs being purchased by existing iTunes (etc.) users as a direct input to the profit function.

“People who are already buying from iTunes would continue to (do so)”. False.
You need to talk in marginal numbers, comprising:

• loss of sales (customers and customer downloads) due to greater ease of piracy
• increased sales due to easier use of legally-downloaded music (as opposed to fear/hatred/dark side of DRM)

I would argue that the iTMS has been the most successful because it is the easiest to use. It’s still a nightmare. Anyone who has dealt with reformatting iPods, moving computers, etc. would attest to the ‘too hard’ nature of such processes for average consumers. Even if you don’t agree on that, there’s at least a significant marginal increase in utility as a result of no DRM. We already have some evidence for a relationship (probably non-linear) between utility and willingness to purchase legal music, on-line or off-line. For many consumers, buying a CD, ripping it and then adding it to their personal audio device of choice is of greater utility than buying something off the iTMS.

There also exists a general insensitivity to price, within a non-free non-inconsequential band. If only 10% (a guess) of people are buying legal music, chances are they’re a less price-sensitive bunch than the entire market. So the chances are they could afford and would willingly pay more. They won’t, due to market forces (price of CDs in comparison, competition in a high-margin industry), but knowing that they would is important. Knowing that your customers are primarily purchasing based on something other than price is the key to unlocking this whole mystery.

allofmp3.com has already shown people are willing to pay for (probably) illegal music (OK, they claim the site is legal in Russia, but I’m sure you could get stung on some kind of parallel importing/failure to pay customs rules, let alone the risk of going through such proceedings) because it’s easy to use. They’re banking on price sensitivity, but they’re really baiting people because of their ease of use, lack of restrictions –> increased utility.

So as thousands have already said, Apple does have an interest in expanding the size of the market, given they have very little room to grow in gobbling up more of the pie. We do also need to consider fixed costs vs marginal costs. Sure, Apple is paying a hefty percentage to the record labels for each song, but there are significant fixed costs as well (e.g. iTMS staff salaries, marketing expenses, R&D amortisation, etc.). Given iTMS is hardly making any money (which is fine for Apple due to its status as an economic complement of iPods), Apple could be looking at it from a MES (minimum efficient scale) operations perspective and looking to drive further profitability from the iTMS. After all, if you own a business, you might as well try for a profit maximising result, even if you don’t have to.

Apple thus far has focussed on two things: becoming the power broker in the online music industry, and establishing the economic link between music sales and availability and iPod sales. Both of these serve as barriers to entry and protection against competition. Apple established the 2nd point long ago, but is only now in a position of sufficient clout that it can dictate terms to the record companies. The music execs have started to realise online sales are the way of the future. Their costs are lower and their profit higher. Their only concern is a flawed assumption that piracy kills the business model. They’ll soon wake up to this too. When they do, Apple is looking to be in a position to accept the supplicant grovelling to their new masters. And it will be a happy day for consumers.

I echo those pains! John and I are constantly complaing about it: particularly Dell. Apple is nice and easy to follow. You can even run Windows on their MacBooks now

My advice to people is thus:

1. If you’re buying a PC laptop, stick to the BUSINESS range models, as these almost always have far better industrial design and durability. e.g. Dell has two product lines: Latitude and Ispiron. The latter have heaps of features, but are hunks of junk. The former are pretty stable and reliable (although I’ve seen exceptions).

2. Either buy extended warranty, use a Gold credit card that gives you $warranty+12 OR buy the base model of something
e.g. Apple MacBook circa $1,500 will cost you ~$300 to make up 3 year’s warranty. Even given Apple’s high notebook resale values, the machine won’t be worth more than $400 in 3 years’ time. So warranty makes sense if you:
- can’t afford the risk of it failing in months 13-24
- buy warranty on everything else you buy
IMHO, if you NEVER buy extended warranties, you’re better off. It’s essentially self-insuring. But with the (e.g. ANZ Visa Gold) credit card bonus warranty, you can get the best of both worlds. ANZ Gold cards are $87 per year. NAB had a $0 first year special, ANZ probably have one too. Worth getting.

3. Factor on at least $300 per year in security software and PC technician costs per Windows computer. And that’s just to keep it working. (Obviously you can do this yourself)

4. Factor in another $300-$500 to get home wireless working reliably when not using Apple equipment. If you’re willing to put up with frustration and manual reconfiguration you can get around this, but these last two notes are for the uninitiated.

5. Buy a Mac
I used to be pro-Mac, then I was ambivalent (particularly when Macs were demonstrably slower), then impartial (”it depends…”) now I’m so totally pro mac that it’s not funny. Particularly with Boot Camp and Parallels. The hardware is better; the support costs (financial or otherwise) are significantly reduced; the ease of use is significantly enhanced.

6. Don’t touch Vista.
Nobody trusts Microsoft with an OS they’ve had 6 years to perfect. I’m recommending a 12-month wait on Vista (in which time we’ll see SP1, SP1a and the announcement of SP2 rush past). Then it will at least be acceptable to run.

Also note that the major reason for upgrading to Vista is to make your swanky new computer look swanky. Which means don’t buy the Home version, or you miss out on the swanky Aero interface. It’s no coincidence wanky is only one letter off…

End Rant.

This is curiously similar to the think for my old (2004) service, Webflicks:
http://webflicks.com.au/user/homeExistingUser.php

Hmmm… more than a superficial resemblance (look at the URLs, not the sites). Let’s delve closer:


+
-



> All Genres <
Action & Adventure
Animated
Anime
Art House
Australian
Children & Family
Comedy
Documentary
Drama
Erotic
Foreign
Horror
Music & Concert
Reality
Romance
Sci-fi & Fantasy
Sports
Suspense & Thriller
Television
Various
Western


This Webflicks list is slightly larger than the corresponding BigPond Movies one:

> All Genres <
Action & Adventure
Animated
Anime
Australian
Children & Family
Comedy
DVD Games
Documentary
Drama
Foreign
Horror
Music & Concert
Romance
Sci-fi & Fantasy
Short Films
Sports
Suspense & Thriller
Television
Various
Western


Look at the striking similarities between not only the categories, but the option values ascribed to them (there is no technical reason for these having the same absolute numbers – it’s just a ranking mechanism). Anyway, you get the idea. Identical site infrastructure.

So far, it remains to be determined whether Webflicks have merely licensed the infrastructure to BigPond (which came later) or whether BigPond is essentially a reseller of Webflicks’ service. At the very least, they have different member databases. Webflicks is based on your email address whereas bigpond is based on your username (although it also asks for your email address). It also appears (as the following images attest) that they have different user ratings databases as well. In fact, whilst the vast majority of their library appears identical, there are some differences (also below):

BigPond Movies search for “Teenage” (Looking for TMNT):

Webflicks search for “Teenage”:

Both returned 9 results, but with slightly different titles and ratings. Evidence of separate databases. The code for these results pages is largely similar as well. Heck, even the html output has not only the same elements, but the same names (e.g. Top Movie Title Matches)

I tried Googling for any evidence of an overt partnership between the two, but found nothing (comment to update this view). Now, from here one can assume:

• Covert partnership/Out-sourcing arrangement
• Violation of copyright and trade secrets (e.g. BigPond could have poached some of the WebFlicks developers
• Theft of publically-available HTML output only
• Mere coincidence

The last two are not likely. You just wouldn’t steal html structures and not the design. It would be much harder to code the site to produce syntactically identical html output than it would be to rewrite it, and you open yourself up to massive amounts of litigation in the process. Mere coincidence is just not probable. BigPond violating trade secrets? Hardly likely.

What we have on our hands here is a SCOOP my dear readers. BigPond movies is at best a fork of Webflicks and at worst a reseller/front.

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm

DRK