Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574377163804387216.html

<comment><USER2> I don't know, I have read some very good and critically acclaimed books from the so called modernist period and I never thought they were particularly boring or lacking of plot. That includes the Great Gatsby which has a pretty good plot, and some hemingway books.

Also my favorite authors like Nabakov, Heller, Vonnegut, PKD, Chandler, Hammet, etc. always had pretty interesting plots. They were not idiotic "made for tv plots" where every single conflict had to be neatly resolved by the end of the book, but they were interesting and absorbing. They were also very critically acclaimed.

I think really the problem is that there is a subjanre of novels that emerged that is intended exclusively to be read as assignments in college classes. These tend to be incredibly boring, so that literature professors so that lit profs can justify their existence and because most readers are essentially forced to read them. If those types of books are dead, good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place._

About damn time if you ask me. Maybe I can finally emerge from my genre fiction bunker. The world is confusing enough without novelists "vaguing it up" for the critics. Perhaps not all difficult novels have nothing to say (beyond "Look how _stylish_ I am"), but most do. That particular emperor's in his birthday suit.

<comment><USER4> It already has woken up, even in literary terms, if you know where to look, as Grossman says -- he cites Chabon, Donna Tart, and others. And although I love the way he expresses himself in this manifesto, he's hardly alone: Tom Wolfe wrote Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast in the 1980s, which has some not dissimilar themes, and B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto came out more recently; see more about it here: <http://jseliger.com/2007/11/12/a-readers- manifesto/> .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I loved this part:

> The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was > just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have > trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with > supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the > coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're > having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

I'm currently reading Arabian Nights. It's a really, really wonderful book. There's some great lessons in there and it's hilarious. When I read it in a cafe, sometimes I wind up laughing loudly out loud and people look over.

But the book was poorly translated for a long time. I'm reading Husain Haddawy's translation, and his introduction talks about translating a classic. Apparently some of the translators of the past thought the dirty, rough, common language of Arabian Nights wasn't fitting enough, so they took a lot of liberties to make the language more difficult to read so it would appeal to more educated people. Haddawy's version feels like a friend is a telling you a story: No fancy language. The sex and violence are crass. Things are described in simple ways.

And it's really, really good, and highly recommended. I like books I can learn from, where reading the writing isn't made an extra intellectual puzzle and challenge to get satisfaction from the book. A basic swashbuckling type story like Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa or The Three Muskateers by Dumas is really good. They're fun, readable, intelligent books that aren't difficult. And despite not being difficult, you still learn a lot of lessons from them. Good for relaxation time, for those of riding our minds pretty hard at work. I can understand how there's a pleasure in conquering a difficult book, but I personally prefer to get all the enjoyment and lessons out of a book with simple writing and interesting themes and characters.

<comment><USER6> Speaking of the Arabian Nights, coincidentally (or not), the WSJ also had this today, in its Masterpiece column, about that work: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020488630457430...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204886304574308744212027048.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good novels don't have to be hard to read, but they can be, and some of them should be. This either/or argument is pointless. Of course extremely difficult (and rewarding) novels like Infinite Jest and Ulysses will not be for everyone. But saying the opposite, that the mark of a great work of fiction is an easy to follow plot, is just ridiculous. Sometimes it's worth it to read something very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER8> Our preference for a story line is known as the narrative fallacy; it's perfectly okay for entertainment (and there is nothing wrong with entertainment), but importing it into other things is a recipe for error. The article doesn't talk about nonfiction though - the title was changed for HN from "Good Novels" to "Good Books".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, it's easier to copy&paste the <h1> than the actual <title>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fiction books have gotten sort of boring for me in the last few years. I used to read 20 or 30 fiction books a year, but lately, if I read 5 or 6, that's probably a lot.

On the other hand, I've been reading a lot more technical books.

I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore. I suppose I could read non-fiction as well, but the Internet has made me sort of wary of any non-fiction that's not peer reviewed. With a technical manual at least, the worst that can happen is that something's out of date or poorly worded.

<comment><USER10> When you say 'I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore' you're on to something.

From [http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all- been-w...](http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-written- before/)

The last script writer/novelist on Earth committed suicide. Every conceivable plot had already been conceived, written and published. Every story remade twice over, rebooted, adapted, re-imagined, reinterpreted, stolen, sequeled or turned into trilogies, double trilogies or franchises that kept going where they had gone before. Every cartoon and comic book hero had his/her own movie trilogy.

The chain of suicides, however, had not started until the advent of the Internet Plot Database. AJAX programmer and Star Trek fan Ziek Omeldoff in writing what appeared to him at the time as an innocuous little web application, did not know he was in fact heralding the end of literature, especially the genre of science fiction that he so loved.

The IPDB rivaled the famed Wackypidea in its community driven model and Goggle in its search capability. Every conceivable plot was indexed, cross referenced and searchable by idea, time, setting and a myriad of other simultaneous parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has always been pretty obvious to be. What has also been obvious is that writing well is a hard and rare skill which is quite distinct from other skills, skills like dancing, welding, math, physics, etc.

You can be a great physicist and a great writer, or mediocre writer, or terrible writer.

Some times you may have to put up with hard writing because the subject is very hard, and you're just not going to find an easier to read explanation.

Just about the only subjects that can't get away with that, are frivolity and pure entertainment, they HAVE to be written well.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _[Writers] ... are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware > literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre > fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance._

And _McSweeney's_ (quarterly concern and, less so, internet tendency)! Hit and miss, but they have such a cheerfully aggressive attitude about pollinating literary fiction with genre fiction with a complete disdain for works of literature-for-literature's-sake.

</comment><comment><USER13> No, that's why paperbacks exist I suppose ;)

s/Hard/Difficult/</comment>


Ruby on Rails Documentation (formatted for the iPhone) - <AUTHOR> http://pocketrails.com/ <comment><USER2> Thanks! This is nice. Can we get a nice icon for it though? :)</comment>


Is there any way to save Circuit City? I'm not optimistic, but I hope so - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/11/03/is-there-any-way-to-save-circuit-city-i-hope-so/

<comment><USER2> why would you hope to save circuit city? that store's about as much of a scam as compUSA.</comment>


Bulgaria played a vital role in introducing yogurt to the West - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180110-the-country-that-brought-yoghurt-to-the-world <comment><USER2> Bulgarian living in USA, here are my 2c - there is Bulgarian yogurt in USA - the one nearby store is the "White mountain" brand. It is a tad more sour than other yogurt but in unpleasant way at all, or maybe I'm biased to recognize it :).

I'm ashamed we Bulgarians haven't done better marketing of it as it is really good and superior than Greek. Everyone knows about Greek yogurt but nobody knows about Bulgarian * . I love Greek yogurt too, but the reason it's so thick is that it is strained.

Bulgarian yogurt derives its thickness and structure from the fermentation process, and good yogurt should not fall off if you turn the jar upside down.

* - at least in USA, in east Asia (Japan, Thailand in my experience) the most popular brand of yogurt is named "Bulgaria" and is in every 7/11 or supermarket.

EDIT: format of the asteriks

<comment><USER3> Oooh story time: in Korea, the most famous brand of yogurt is named "Bulgaris" and its TV ads depict gorgeous valleys with medieval monasteries, where people make yogurt the old-fashioned way, and live happily ever after. Thanks to these ads, Koreans think all Bulgarians drink yogurt every day and live up to a hundred years. Or something like that.

And then another yogurt company decided to market a new brand of yogurt... by naming it... (drum roll please...) "Bulgaria"!

Of course the first company sued the second company. And then the Bulgarian embassy weighed in, supporting the second company, because it turned out that the first company was using yogurt-making germs imported from Germany!

And then the court decided for the first company, essentially declaring that the nation of Bulgaria, sadly, does not own the name "Bulgaria" (or "Bulgaris", or Bulga-whatever) in Korean trademark system. (But don't quote me on that. IANAL.) The whole affair was very entertaining.

<comment><USER4> > Koreans think all Bulgarians drink yogurt every

I'm not sure about ethnic Bulgarians but ethnic Turks in Bulgaria consume yoğurt every day. There is always yoğurt in their kitchen.

<comment><USER5> Most Bulgarians _eat_ "кисело мляко" (sour milk) every day, some mix it with water + some salt to make "айрян", which is a drink :-) The so called "yogurt" has nothing to do with "кисело мялко". I am not saying that yogurt is bad, it's just some powder milk + emulgators + sweeteners, produced by companies like Danone, Nestle etc. We have hundreds of brands, but only a few produce the "real deal"...free market, you know :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For Canadians, I've found that Pinehedge Farms ([http://pinehedge.com/](http://pinehedge.com/)) make the closest yogurt I've found to Bulgarian yogurt. It's pricy and hard to find, but its thick, tastes right and even has that fatty layer on top that's a mark of using non- homogenized milk. First timers might be put off by it, but think of it as free clotted cream or light butter and use it!

Personally, I started making my own yogurt after getting an InstantPot and a packet of Bulgarian starter culture. It's very easy, tastes great and is cheaper than even the cheapest yogurt you can buy at the store. You can also control if it comes out fresh/sweet and the degree of sourness.

Another thing I've experimented with is making yogurt cheese. Regular fermentation requires 6-8hrs at 40C (depending on how sour you want it), but I started fermenting for 60hrs. At that stage, it's so sour, it's not edible, but once it's strained most of the acidity is gone and you're left with incredibly thick, flavourful yogurt. I use it instead of sour cream, for tzatziki, with jam, etc.

<comment><USER7> Do you mind telling me which yogurt culture you use and where you got it from? Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bulgarian living in USA here.

As other people have mentioned in the thread White Mountain yoghurt is the real deal (I have no connection to the company). Real Bulgarian yoghurt proudly made in Austin, Texas :)

Joking aside, their yoghurt is superb. I don't recall yoghurt like theirs even in Bulgaria. Unfortunately you can't order directly from them but you can find if it's available in a store near you from their website [http://www.whitemountainfoods.com](http://www.whitemountainfoods.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought that yogurt is widely used in all formal Ottoman lands. And it is called yoğurt because milk becomes sticky (yoğun), thus yoğurt in Turkish.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting that the first recorded uses in English (according to the OED) mention it as a Turkish foodstuff:

"1625 S. Purchas Pilgrimes II. ix. xv. §9. 1601 Neither doe they [sc. the Turks] eate much Milke, except it bee made sower, which they call Yoghurd."

(See also[1]) I suppose it's possible that Bulgaria got yogurt during Ottoman rule in the 14th century, and that the research in the early part of the 20th just happened to be there. But it seems more likely to me that any group that kept animals for milk would have fermented the milk to make it last longer, and that knowledge would have traveled all over Eurasia.

1: [https://www.bonappetit.com/test- kitchen/ingredients/article/...](https://www.bonappetit.com/test- kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-word-yogurt)

<comment><USER10> There may have been no real disambiguation by the original author from "Turks" as an epithet for Ottoman citizens and specifically ethnic Turks as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title is a bit misleading. It tells an interesting story about yogurt and Bulgaria, but yogurt has been around for literally thousands of years and it existed long before Bulgaria came to be even as a concept.

Most of the things mentioned (like traditional clay pots and the fermentation processes) are fairly common across the Balkans. Bulgaria certainly have their own local and interesting flavors but they didn't bring yoghurt to the world.

<comment><USER12> Alright, we replaced the title above with a more narrowly scoped sentence from the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you Bulgaria. Hopefully the real thing without thickeners will always be available. A lot of crap is being sold as yogurt by the usual multinational culprits.

I guess we can make it at home if need be.

</comment><comment><USER14> > or even Icelandic yoghurt

That remark will date. I don't think Iceland is famous for yoghourt, but it's somewhat trendy in the UK at the moment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyr)

I had some of the Arla kind, fat-free and with a layer of apple compote. It was sort of halfway between quark and yoghourt. It wasn't terribly pleasant - it has that grim chalkiness that fat-free Greek yoghourt has, only more solid. I can't see it becoming a permanent fixture in the dairy section.

<comment><USER15> I'm a huge fan of siggi's plain whole-milk skyr. creamier than similar greek yogurts I've tried.

<comment><USER16> "creamier" means almost always that this product has nothing to do with fermentation and work of microbial cultures, but was made thick by adding milk powder, gelatin and sugar substitutes. The opposite of healthy, not to mention the sh*ty taste.

<comment><USER17> Traditional skyr is made with rennet while plain yogurt is not. The rennet helps breakdown casein and form a thicker yogurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A piece of information which I missed in the article: 'yoghurt' was an almost completely unknown word in Bulgaria until as soon as 2-3 decades ago. We call the substance "кисело млѣко" (kiselo mlěko)[1] which literally means 'sour milk'. Nowadays there are some products that are commercially available and are denoted as 'yoghurt' (Bulg. "йогурт"), but the word still seems somewhat unnatural for most Bulgarians and may not be completely understood by some people (e.g. older, from the countryside, etc).

I am not a specialist, but the products that we in English call 'yoghurt', 'soured milk', 'buttermilk', 'kefir' are somewhat related and as far as I can understand from my cursory research now, the former two fall under the formerly shown term in Bulgarian, while the latter two are often referred to as "мътен" (măten), "мътеница"/"матеница" (mătenitsa/matenitsa), "бутаница" (butanitsa) and a few other regional names. Kefir is also often just called that way if it was imported, e.g. from Russia or somewhere in the Caucausus–as is usually done with other things (sometimes also with foreign-origin yoghurt). 'strained yogurt' is "цедено кисело мляко" (lit. the same), and there are also other milk products some of which I am not entirely sure how to explain since I don't know how exactly they are made, e.g. "катък" (katăk–something like a milk-based spread; essentially the same name as 'qatiq' in many Turkic-speaking regions, but AFAIK the same name can refer to relatively/quite different things from place to place), "таратор" ('tarator'–a cold soup, similar to 'ayran' with some specific added ingredients to it), "сух таратор" (lit. 'dry tarator', similar to Gr. tzatziki and Tur. cacık) and a number of others which people who are better aware of the Bulgarian culinary traditions would've probably mentioned here.

\---

Following is my completely wild guess, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find reliable sources to either prove or disprove it, so take from it whatever you want. Will be glad if somebody could chip in with more knowledge.

The Bulgarian term for yoghurt (as already said also not unknown in other South Slavic languages, but the single most–and virtually universally–used term in our language) seems closely related to the old Greek type of yoghurt «οξύγαλα», which literally means the same ('sour milk'). It was not uncommon for Bulgarians to translate terms from Greek during Medieval times, but they just took the Turkish word for all new things that came during Ottoman times, with the most prominent examples that remain nowadays all being foods (e.g. various plants or cooked dishes). Romanian features similar ways to refer to yogurt (although 'iaurt' seems more common nowadays), but I don't know how many of them are just calques, regional variants, or what the origin of each is in particular. What is more, Albanian also has its own–although seemingly unrelated–words for yogurt, buttermilk and various other milk products. This leads me to think that 'yoghurt' was one of the things that was known on the Balkans long before the Ottoman conquest and the Slavic speakers back then knew it–or something essentially similar–quite well (in stark contrast to another beloved milk product made out of yogurt: "айран", the name of which comes directly from the Turkish 'ayran').

P.S. As of now the Wikipedia article on the bacteria mentioned in the article[2] says the following: "Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus can be found naturally in the gastrointestinal tract of mammals living in Bulgaria, but one specific strain, Lactobacillus bulgaricus GLB44, is extracted from the leaves of the Galanthus nivalis (snowdrop flower) in Bulgaria as well. The bacterium is also grown artificially in many other countries." It is yet to be given a proper citation, but this is the anecdotal information I have heard on numerous occasions circulated in Bulgaria as the source for the naming as opposed to the country of origin of the person who discovered it. I don't know which version–if any–is correct, though.

P.P.S. There are also other milk products in Bulgaria with traditional names:

\---

[1] Official writing nowadays is "кисело мляко", but I have left the former spelling on purpose because this is etymologically more informative and makes a more visible connection to all Bulgarian dialects as well as to all modern South Slavic languages (also the ones from the western branch), where 'kiselo mlijeko' is also not unknown.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactobacillus_delbrueckii_subs...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactobacillus_delbrueckii_subsp._bulgaricus)

<comment><USER19> > кисело млѣко

I love that you used the old "yat" character that is missing from modern Bulgarian (since the reforms in 1940s if I recall correctly[0]). I see it on the coat of arms of the city of Sofia[1], though, and it makes me happy: Расте, но не старѣе (grows but doesn't age). Modern Bulgarian would be: Расте, но не старее.

[0] [https://poznavame-li-sofia.blogspot.bg/p/blog- page.html](https://poznavame-li-sofia.blogspot.bg/p/blog-page.html)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Sofia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Sofia)

<comment><USER20> Countless Bothans have fought and died over literal centuries to free Cyrillic from this godawful and pointless letter. You should both be ashamed of yourselves!

<comment><USER18> Yes, I plead guilty and am utterly ashamed of myself. My usage above was totally misleading when we consider the way people write nowadays. :)

In Bulgaria, the letter was first briefly removed in a reform between 1921 and 1923 and then removed by the new regime after the end of World War II. It was surrounded by controversy for a long time because in general there is one single way a word can be read in Standard Modern Bulgarian–save for the location of the stress–, which was not the case for this letter. In addition, prior to its official introduction after Bulgaria regained autonomy–and then independence–there were multiple ways to denote the sounds it used to stand for.

But for the sake of etymology I find it quite useful in a lot of places since it pops up in common but generally regular vowel changes across Slavic languages.

<comment><USER20> _in a reform between 1921 and 1923_

Wait, really? Was this some zany БЗНС/Стамболийски thing?

<comment><USER18> Yes, it was a БЗНС thing at first. There were three major reforms in the way Modern Standard Bulgarian is written:

0\. no official codification (before 1899; basically everybody wrote as they pleased and there were some differences between various authors); at some point there was a mostly standard way to write in Bulgarian, though, which was introduced and used by the precursor of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and various other institutions; [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дриновски_правопис](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дриновски_правопис)

1\. first official codification (1899–1921 and 1923–1945 with some minor changes); [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Иванчевски_правопис](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Иванчевски_правопис)

2\. shortly-lived attempt to modernise it (1921–1923); [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Омарчевски_правопис](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Омарчевски_правопис)

3\. last and so-far successful modernisation, since it wasn't succeeded by anything else yet (1945–nowadays). It was partly inspired from the previous attempt and partly by Lenin's reforms in Russian from 1918, and not from other Bulgarian or e.g. Serbian attempts, for whatever reason. [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Правописна_реформа_на_българск...](https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Правописна_реформа_на_българския_език_от_1945)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks, Bulgaria!

<comment><USER16> If you are in Germany (guessing by the nickname), there is very good and inexpensive yoghurt based on live Lact. Bulg. I buy about 10 tubs every week. It's not that sour like in Bulgaria, but very tasty anyway.

[http://www.hansano.de/unsere- produkte/produkt/joghurt/bulgar...](http://www.hansano.de/unsere- produkte/produkt/joghurt/bulgaria-joghurt/)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the tip. Although I grew up in Germany I've been living in the US for many years. When I first moved here in the 90s there wasn't much selection but since then yoghurt has become a massive food trend. We have everything from mass-produced to artisan specialty products. My fave is Fage greek right now, some of the smaller brands have real issues with quality control.

<comment><USER16> I don't know how it is in the US, but in Germany very few labels on the tub declare if there are any live cultures in the yogurt, and no one with the amount of that bacteria (like in BG). So one needs to develop a special taste to find out, if the yogurt was made thick by the work of bacteria or just by adding milk powder, gelatin etc.

<comment><USER22> gelatin may not be added to plain yoghurt in Germany iirc. It may be a declared ingredient of fruit-yoghurt mixtures though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How to get the attention of every Bulgarian in SV: The Thread

</comment><comment><USER24> Whoever you (they?) are I hope you RIP.

Yogurt is my life saver....

<comment><USER25> Hopefully I am not misunderstanding your comment, but for the record:

Bulgaria is a small country in Eastern Europe with a population of about 7M and bordering Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, and the Black Sea. Formed around 681. Lots of expansion, contraction, being enslaved, etc. including 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule. These days the poorest and most unhappy member of the EU according to research - but a member nonetheless! Lots of immigrants including in the Bay Area and especially Chicago.

Couple of fun facts: When the USSR was still a thing, Bulgaria was making personal computers, basically cloning Apple and IBM architectures.

Source: Bulgarian who moved to the Bay Area ~10 years ago.

<comment><USER26> time to go back my friend, Dido it's time to disrupt EE :)

<comment><USER25> Oh, I am back all the time :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Personally I enjoy yogurt that is more drinkable. Anyone here try Beijing yogurt before? Wondering what kind of products are similar here in the US. I've seen some comparisons to kefir but I haven't yet gotten to try it.

<comment><USER28> You can actually prepare soured milk yourself, from untreated fresh milk (or possibly even from pasteurised, but not from UHT or UV treated).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Lactobacillus bulgaris factor

</comment><comment><USER30> Where would we be without those ancient humans that decided to drink the juice of rotten fruits or eat chunky spoiled milk?

<comment><USER31> Onions! Hey, this thing will make your eyes water at 10 paces. _Let 's eat it._

Headcanon: the discovery that they are edible was the accidental result of a failed suicide attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Should anyone be interested in making yogurt with Bulgarian cultures, they are available on ebay:

US: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bulgarian-Starter-Kultur-fur- Tradit...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bulgarian-Starter-Kultur-fur- Traditionelen-Joghurt-naturliches-10-Kaps-20l/152096114152)

EU: [https://www.ebay.de/itm/Bulgarische-Joghurt-Starterkultur- na...](https://www.ebay.de/itm/Bulgarische-Joghurt-Starterkultur-naturliche- probiotische-30-Beutel-30L/202280610745)

I make Kefir myself with a culture that I once acquired on ebay. May try to make Bulgarian yogurt one day.

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought it was invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC. But, there is always an alternate story invented by some idiot.

<comment><USER5> There are hundreds of strains of Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus bacteria, that are used to make "sour milk" (or yogurt). I don't really care who invented what and when, I just enjoy the great variety of natural products, and I really hate the surrogates produced by the big brands like Danone and Nestle. At the end of the day, it is a matter of taste, but as a Bulgarian I prefer natural Bulgarian "кисело мялко" that could be found only in selected shops or in small villages around the country, because it is more sour, naturally thick, with >5% natural fat. There are similar products all over the Balkans and also in Iran, but they have different taste and texture, I guess depending on the different strains used for the fermentation and many other factors. I've traveled to more than 50 countries on 4 continents in the last 30 years, and I could say one thing - just don't consume the "branded" surrogates, that pretend to be "something", if you haven't tasted the real thing :-) I guess the same is true for every food - just last week I've purchased like 5 different brands of Dijon mustard in Dubai...OMG, none of them was even remotely close to what a Dijon mustard is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I brew kefir for well over 10 years. Healthier than yougurt.

<comment><USER35> Any evidence to support this?

<comment><USER9> There is evidence to support kefir's benefits[1], but that doesn't prove it's healthier than yogurt. The primary difference between the two by my standards is that kefir cultures are both bacteria and yeasts, and yogurt cultures are typically only bacteria. There are certainly some yeasts that have been shown to be good for the digestive tract[2], but there are certainly others that are not[3].

1: [https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/health-benefits- kefi...](https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/health-benefits-kefir)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_boulardii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_boulardii)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Okay. Thanks, we love it. It was a fantastic invention!

Now please bring the the thousands of bulgarian beggars distributed amongst almost all the Swedish grocery stores back home. Please.

<comment><USER12> Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewars is a bannable offense here, so please don't do that. Instead, if you'd read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. That means avoiding flamebait and flamewars.

Racial flamewars aren't ok either, including in dog-whistle format, which is how I read you at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16833066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16833066) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834408).</comment></comment>


Zhaoxin Unveiled Next-Generation x86 SoC Plans - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3138/zhaoxin-unveiled-next-generation-x86-soc-plans-32-core-servers-sub-7nm-client-designs/ <comment><USER2> For those who don't know, Zhaoxin is a continuation of the Via x86 line. Neat to see a third vendor still kicking.

<comment><USER3> Fourth vendor actually! Centaur just announced a new core for the server market and even AVX-512 support.

See this [https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its- new-...](https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3099/centaur-unveils-its-new-server- class-x86-core-cns-adds-avx-512/)

<comment><USER2> Awesome! And some tensor cores for inference, neat!

Honestly, wouldn't be surprised to see more vendors spring up out of nowhere soon. The base patents are about to expire on x86_64. Everyone keeps saying that Apple is going to release an ARM laptop, but IMO a homegrown x86_64 chip is way more likely.

<comment><USER4> Does Apple have any experience making x86_64 processors? Do they even have the license to do so?

<comment><USER2> If the parents are expired, they don't need a license. The base patents are expiring very very soon (ie. months).

<comment><USER5> Interesting proposition, something I haven't read anyone put forward before.

But Apple Scaling their current High Performance ARM design using HPC Node and higher Clock speed is likely much easier than doing a high performance x86 design.

Even Amazon decided to use ARM for their Server platform, to me I think ARM has won the game.

<comment><USER2> Apple's chip teams have worked on other ISAs before, and there's tons of ex Transmeta folk around the bay area of you need more x86 experience.

And Amazon AFAIK just cleaned up an existing ARM uarch sort of like Intrinsity's expertise. I don't think they have the experience needed to make their own high perf uarch, whether it be ARM or x86.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've used the previous generation of these for some machine control in very hostile environment (welding, plasmacutting), very reliable and cheap.

<comment><USER7> Which one exactly? Afaik all the CPUs on their roadmap never existed.

<comment><USER8> They exist. You can buy a Lenovo Kaitian-series dekstop in China with a Zhaoxin chip. They also have a bunch of laptops. You can't outside of china because that's their agreement with Via. You can still find them on Alibaba sometimes.

<comment><USER7> I meant the "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China" CPUs, those AFAIK dont exist.

Lenovo Kaitian M6100/A6100 were real, powered by renamed VIA NANO chips. Taiwanese designed VIA Nano E-C4650 got rebadged and magically became homegrown Chinese ZX-C4650 design etc. Good old Pentium 3 Mobile AGTL+ Socket 479 bus circa 2001 vintage. [https://wccftech.com/via-28nm-c4650-x86-quad- core-processor-...](https://wccftech.com/via-28nm-c4650-x86-quad-core- processor-benchmarks/)

Yes, the renamed original old school Centaur/VIA designs do exist, and perform at ~Intel Atom z8300 level. Good review by Chinese tech vlogger [https://www.bilibili.com/video/av61782186/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/av61782186/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've read about it many times but still can't figure it out completely.

Can a x86 license holder always use any of its new features? For example, you had a license in the 90s, can you automatically use 256, 512 width vector instructions?

Are none of those licenses untransferable in case of the company purchase or just AMD's?

Is the license policy from Intel a result from IBM's pressure back in the day? Did they demand multiple providers or just one alternative (AMD)?

<comment><USER10> AMDs initial x86 processors were indeed as an IBM mandated second source, but I think their 386 class (and definitely 486 class) processors were independently developed. I suspect Intel won't cancel existing licenses for anti-trust reasons, but also would price a new license for a lot more than in the 486 days.

<comment><USER7> AMD 386 had directly copied microcode, Intel sued and lost due to previous cross licensing agreements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With the trade war and "national security" posture the US is doing its very best to stimulate China to become self-sufficient.

<comment><USER12> Russia also producing their own CPUs recently. They are not very competitive in consumer space, but they are not ridiculously expensive either. It's awesome to see more competition.

<comment><USER13> Producing CPU (and chips in general) are rightfully seen by all of these countries as a national security imperative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No pricing, unfortunately.

<comment><USER15> This cpu may never be sold. It's an effort by the chinese government to be less dependent on american companies.

<comment><USER7> More like effort by VIA to circumvent x86 license expiry with added bonus of National IC Investment Fund grants [https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2019/11/22/chinas- lat...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2019/11/22/chinas-latest- development-fund-and-the-impact-on-american-companies/)</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Glacier - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ <comment><USER5> I'm a long time user of backblaze, and I'm a big fan of the product - it does a great job of always making sure my working documents are backed up, particularly when I'm traveling overseas, and my laptop is more vulnerable to theft or damage.

With that said - Backblaze is optimized for working documents - and the default "exclusion" list makes it clear they don't want to be backing up your "wab~,vmc,vhd,vo1,vo2,vsv,vud,vmdk,vmsn,vmsd,hdd,vdi,vmwarevm,nvram,vmx,vmem,iso,dmg,sparseimage,sys,cab,exe,msi,dll,dl_,wim,ost,o,log,m4v" files. They also don't want to backup your /applications, /library, /etc, and so on locations. They also make it clear that backing up a NAS is not the target case for their service.

I can live with that - because, honestly, it's $4/month, and my goal is to keep my working files backed up. System Image backups, I've been using Super Duper to a $50 external hard drive.

Glacier + a product like <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/> means I get the benefit of both worlds - Amazon will be fine with me dropping my entire 256 Gigabyte Drive onto Glacier (total cost - $2.56/month) and I get the benefit of off site backup.

The world is about to get a whole lot simpler (and inexpensive) for backups.

<comment><USER6> I'm looking into supporting Glacier in Arq. It sure is cheap -- $10/month for a terabyte.

<comment><USER7> I think the key here is not to just provide a toggle for using Glacier instead of S3, but to have the historical snapshots migrated to Glacier from S3 and deleted every 90+ days.

I will gladly pay more money for Arq again.

<comment><USER6> I think it would be more like choosing Glacier instead of S3 on a per-folder basis.

Arq is incremental backup. The data structure is similar to git's <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt>

Unless your files change a lot, keeping the latest backup version in S3 and previous versions in Glacier would mean that most of your backup data are still in S3 I think. Right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time.

Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade.

I don't mind not being able to access it for a few hours, I'm thinking disaster recovery of highly sentimental digital memories here.

If my flat burns down destroying my local copy, and my personal off-site backup (HDD at an old friends' house) is also destroyed... then nothing would be lost if Amazon have a copy.

In fact I very much doubt anyone I know that isn't a tech actually keeps all of their data backed-up even in that manner.

I find myself already wondering: My 12TB NAS, how much is used (4TB)... could I backup all of it remotely? It's crazy that this approaches being feasible. It's under 30GBP per month for Ireland storage for my all of the data on my NAS.

To be able to say, "All of my photos are safe for years and it's easy to append to the backup.". That would be something.

A service offering a simple consumer interface for this could really do well.

<comment><USER9> _sigh_ Dropbox should _not_ be used as a backup system. A system that synchronizes live should _never_ get that role, except if they can guarantee that old data is never overwritten, new is always appended. This is _not_ the case with dropbox - I've experienced multiple scary occurrences of old versions going to the nirvana with certain user actions. In certain cases the old data just appears to be gone, in other cases the web interface shows them but a restore results in an error message. Especially data move appears to be buggy. Dropbox _appears_ to be simple, but the backend processes are really not and there is too much going on for it to be a reliable backup system, especially if you also share some of your data to team mates.

edit: emphasis formatting, niceifying.

<comment> g-garron I use a combination of Dropbox and S3.

I have my MacBook and a Linux server linked to my Dropbox account. So changes in my documents are synced to my Linux.

My Linux run three cron-jobs. One daily, one weekly and another monthly. The command is.

s3cmd sync --delete-removed ~/Dropbox/documents/ s3://backup-daily/

There are buckets for weekly and monthly too.

Note: the command is not exactly like that, check the man page.

That way I have backed up all my documents very cheap.

<comment><USER5> One thing to be a little careful of - you are sending all of your data to S3, which is, of course, the backing store for Dropbox.

<comment><USER10> Dropbox stores their stuff in S3 a little different. It's not a 1:1 correspondence between user files and objects under Dropbox's S3 account. The fact that they use S3 as their backing store means very little. It certainly _sounds_ good to have S3 in back when you talk about scalability and durability, but 1) they could just as easily use something else, and 2) depending on their sharding strategy, a single lost object could impact multiple files at the user level.

<comment><USER5> Right - the point I was trying to make, is he was putting all his eggs in one basked. If anything catastrophic happened to S3, he might lose both his S3 _as well as_ his Dropbox backups.

If you are going to the effort of having dual-backup systems, may as well try and find something that can't be impacted by a single disaster.

<comment><USER10> Ah, right - definitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think one of the most interesting parts of this is how they plan to ensure that people do not use it for transient backup: [https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_de...](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_deleting_data_that_is_less_than_3_months_old)

 _Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, you would be charged a prorated early deletion fee of $0.03 per gigabyte deleted within three months._

<comment><USER12> So I guess that means it would still work well for a scheme like time machine uses, where incremental changes are added but deletions are simply made note of. At least I think that's how it works.

<comment><USER13> And yet they support a max of 100 vaults per account, so some roll behind recompaction of incrementals is still necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Storage experts: I'd love to know more about what might be backing this service.

What kind of system has Amazon most likely built that takes 3-4 hours to perform retrieval? What are some examples of similar systems, and where are they installed?

<comment><USER15> Typically they are tiered.

There'll be a near-line HDD array. This is for the recent content and content they profile as being common-access.

Then there'll be a robotic tape library. Any restore request will go in a queue annd when an arm-tapedrive becomes free they'll seek to the data and read it into the HDD array.

Waiting for a slot with the robot arm - tape drive is what will take 4 hours.

EMC(kinda), Fujitsu etc make these.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library>

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/emc_tape_sucks_no_mo...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/emc_tape_sucks_no_more/)

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't there also need to be a lot of logic to prevent fragmentation? You'd probably want data from one user near other data from that user, i.e. on the same tape.

<comment><USER17> I'd guess that they ignore that problem and have baked the time it takes to get data from several tapes into the 3-4 hour estimate.

If you think about it, writes are more common than reads on average, so it's more efficient to just write to whatever tape is online and deal with the fragmentation problem on the read end, as opposed to queueing writes until the 'correct' tape can be brought online just save some time reading. Also in backup situations like this, it's more important to get the backup done in a timely manner.

<comment><USER18> That's true, but they're obviously using a multi-tier solution, with about a 90 day buffer before things go to tape:

      In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.033 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days.

So it may just be feasible to organise writes so they end up together. But, yes, ultimately it is probably not worth it to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month._

What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics.

Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.

<comment><USER20> "Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years"

I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.

<comment><USER21> > _Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this_

I don't consider that obvious. I live in Berlin, the capital of what most would consider a stable country, but my apartment (which is even older) has been a part of 5 different countries in the last 100 years (German Empire, Weinmar Republic, Nazi Germany, East Germany and finally, the Federal Republic of Germany).

<comment><USER20> Sorry, what I meant by "stable" there is countries that have been relatively stable for a few hundred years and seem reasonably likely to continue that integrity for at least a century or so.

Of course, predicting future stability is complete guesswork!

<comment><USER22> US. UK. Sweden. It is really hard to come up with countries where the government has been stable "for a couple of centuries".

<comment><USER23> Thailand.

<comment><USER24> They have had a military coup within the last decade, not exactly a bastion of stability.

<comment><USER25> The Thai king is the longest-reigning current head of state, ascending the throne on 9 June 1946. Elizabeth II of England is 2nd, 6 February 1952.

The oldest _country_ (not government) is likely Vietnam (2897 BCE). Other contenders: Japan (660 BCE), China (221 BCE), Ethiopia (~800 BCE), or Iran (678 BCE).

Few of today's modern states pre-date the 19th Century, many antedate World War II or the great de-colonialisation of the 1960s including much of Africa and Oceana (some of the longest inhabited regions of Earth).

Among the more long-lived institutions are the Catholic Church (traditionally founded by Jesus ~30 AD, emerging as an institutional power in 2nd Century Rome). The oldest company I can find is Kongo Gumi, founded in 578, a Japanese construction firm. The record however is likely held by the Shishi Middle School founded in China between 143 and 141 BCE.

My own suggestion would be the Krell, though some might disqualify this based on a requirement for _human_ organization.

<comment><USER26> Isn't Egypt another contender for the oldest country?

<comment><USER25> That was my thought as well. However it spent a great deal of time under foreign rule: under the Greeks and Romans, the Turkish / Ottoman empire, and later under British occupation. And, I just discovered what boxer Muhammad Ali's referent was.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt_history>

<comment><USER26> So have Vietnam, China, and Iran.

<comment><USER25> Japan's older than China. But yes. As I mentioned in my post above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What I find fascinating with Amazon's infrastructure push is the the successful 'homonymization' of their brand name Amazon.

Amazon simultaneously stands for ecommerce and web infrastructure depending on the context. e.g "Hey I want to host my server".. "Why don't you try Amazon". "Do you know where I can get a fair priced laptop?" "Check Amazon".

Is there any other brand that has done this successfully?

Edit: I should have specified internet brand.

<comment><USER28> Virgin (200+ businesses operating or having operated, under the Virgin brand, ranging from infrastructures - trains, airlines - to records, banking, bridal saloons under the name Virgin Bride...).

Mitsubishi and Samsung springs to mind as two of the best known ones internationally where their brands are known in multiple markets internationally, though many of their businesses are less known outside Asia (e.g. Mitsubishi's bank is Japans largest). Any number of other Asian conglomerates.

ITT used to fall in that category back in the day: Fridges, PC's, hotels, insurance, schools,telecoms and lots more. I remember we at one point had both an ITT PC and fridge. The name was well known in many of its markets.

The large, sprawling, unfocused conglomerate have fallen a bit out of favor in Europe and the US. ITT was often criticized for their lack of focus even back in the 80's, and have since broken itself into more and more pieces and renamed and/or sold off many of them (e.g. the hotel group is now owned by Starwood).

<comment><USER29> Like you say, many of the big Asian companies are prime examples - <USER2> manufactures Motorcycles and Synthesizers, seems like a good combination!

<comment><USER30> Musical instruments (especially wind instruments) and motorcycles share a lot of similar design principles. Ever compared a saxophone to a WWII-vintage motorcycle engine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know a lot of people seem to have jumped on the _backup_ options of Glacier here and, whilst there is some potential for home users to make use of this product for back, that is not what Glacier is intended for.

Glacier is an _archive_ product. It's for data you don't really see yourself ever needing to access in the general course of business ever again.

If you're a company and you have lots of invoice/purchase transactional information that's 2+ years old that you never use for anything, but you still have to keep it for 5 - 10 years for compliance reasons, Glacier is the perfect product for you.

Even its pricing is designed to take into account that the average use case is to only access small portions of the total archive store at a reasonable price (5% prorated for free in the pricing page).

<comment><USER5> For many users, though - they will never use the restore capability. And for those who do, with Backblaze, they'll usually get a FedEx of a Hard Drive - <USER3> Recovery time is measured in about a day or so. I wouldn't downplay the consumer backup/restore angle so quickly - for many (most?) consumers, the ability to restore rapidly is balanced by their desire to have low monthly payments. I think we're going to see a lot of consumer backup applications built on top of Glacier in the next several months that will be competing with (the already excellent) backblaze and friends. (Note - Backblaze has excellent real-time restore, with date versioning, for those of us who use it as an online data recovery tool as well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is fantastic. I've long searched for a solution like that. This is really suitable for a remote backup that only needs to be accessed if something really bad happens (i.e. a fire breaking out, etc). I'm a lone entrepreneur, so I do have backup hard disks here, but being able to additionally save this data in the cloud is great.

I'm often creating pretty big media assets, so Dropbox doesn't necessarily offer enough space or is - for me - too expensive in the 500gb version (i.e. $50 a month).

Glacier would be $10 a month for 1 terabyte. Fantastic.

<comment><USER33> The only issue I see is that verifying archive integrity (you don't want to find out the archive was bad after you lost the local backup...) would be somewhat complicated, given their retrieval policies. Also, the billing for data-transfer out plus peak retrievals sounds so convoluted, I can't begin to work out what a regular test-restore procedure would cost me. Nevertheless, it's some exciting progress in remote storage!

<comment><USER34> They could provide salted hash verification: send some salt, get a list of files with SHA1(salt | filedata) via email some hours later (so they can do the verification as a low priority job).

The salt is used to prevent amazon from just keeping the hashes around to report that all is well.

To avoid abuse, restrict the number of free verification requests per month.

<comment><USER35> Or just build the verification into the storage system, and send a SNS message if data loss has occurred (just like what happens when a Reduced Redundancy object has been lost in S3).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure if cost is right. Each project I work on is approx. 50-60 TB in size (video). Recent one got backed up on 20 LTO 5 tapes times three. That's $600 for tapes per project. Each tape set went to a separate location - <USER4> secure ones for about $20/year and one at studio archive for immediate access, if needed. I find this method extremely reliable and it cost ~$700 initially to back all up and virtually non existent further fees. With Glacier it would cost $600 per month.

<comment><USER5> You have a pretty niche (but interesting!) use case. An LTO-5 Tape can store 1.5 Terabytes Raw [1] - Call it 2 Terabytes with a bit of compression (your Video probably doesn't losslessly compress at 2:1). 60 Terabytes requires 30 Tapes - around $15/month to store at Iron Mountain. [2] . The Glacier Charge for 60 Terabytes is $600/month vs $15/month for Tape Storage.

Also - upload/recovery times are problematic when you are talking 10s of terabytes. Right now, the equation is in favor of archiving tapes at that level (Even presuming you store multiple copies for redundancy/safety).

Glacier is for the people wanting to archive in the sub-ten terabyte range - they can avoid the hassle/cost of purchasing tape drives, tapes, software - and just have their online archive.

The needle will move - in 10 years Glacier might make sense for people wanting to store sub 100 Terabytes, and tapes will be for the multi-petabyte people.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open>

[2] [http://www.ironmountain.com/Solutions/~/media/9F17511FA1A741...](http://www.ironmountain.com/Solutions/~/media/9F17511FA1A74131A0ECF1C132C642E0.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Interestingly they penalise you for short-term storage:

 _Amazon Glacier is designed for use cases where data is retained for months, years, or decades. Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, you would be charged a prorated early deletion fee of $0.03 per gigabyte deleted within three months_

<comment><USER38> After reading tezza's explanation [1] of how they're probably using tape storage, this makes sense; Amazon wants the mechanical robot arm to spend the majority of its time writing to the tapes. If you're constantly tying it up with writes/deletes, you're taking time away from its primary mission: to archive your data. Charging you for early deletes discourages that practice.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411697>

<comment><USER39> They're not using tape storage. The ZDNet story confirms this: [http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud- storage-h...](http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage- hopes-enterprise-will-go-cold-on-tape-use-7000002926).

There are any number of reasons why deletes would be discouraged. One is packing: if your objects are "tarred" together in a compiled object, discouraging early deletes makes it more cost-effective to optimistically pack early.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I had a quick skim through the marketing stuff and the FAQs and didn't see anywhere that actually details what the backend of this is. I'd be curious if they're actually using tape, older machines, Backblaze pods, etc. I guess if it's the latter, the time to recover could be an artificial barrier to prevent people from getting cute.

<comment><USER41> It appears to use S3 as its basic backend. My guess is that S3 has been modified to have "zones" of data storage that can be allocated for Glacier. Once these zones have been filled with data (and of course that data is replicated to another region) the hard drives are spun down and essentially turned off.

This is why the cost of retrieval is so high: every time they need to pull data the drives need to be spun back up (including drives holding data for people other than you), accessed, pulled from, then spun back down and put to sleep. Doing this frequently will put more wear and tear on the components and cost Amazon money in power utilization.

As is Glacier should be extremely cheap for AWS to operate, regardless of the total amount of data stored with it. Beyond the initial cost of purchasing hard drives, installing, and configuring them the usual ongoing maintenance and power requirements go away.

<comment><USER10> Almost spot on. See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416065>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Beware that retrieval fee!

The retrieval fee for 3TB could be _as high as_ $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1].

It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour?

This last case seems most plausible to me [6] -- that the retrieval rate is based solely on the rate of your requests.

In that case, the math would work as follows:

After uploading 3TB (3 * 2^40 bytes) as a single archive, your retrieval allowance would be 153.6 GB/mo (3TB * 5%), or 5.12 GB/day (3TB * 5% / 30). Assuming this one retrieval was the only retrieval of the day, and as it's a single archive you can't break it into smaller pieces, your billable peak hourly retrieval would be 3072 GB - 5.12 GB = 3066.88 GB.

Thus your retrieval fee would be 3066.88 * 720 * .01 = $22081.535 (719x your monthly storage fee).

That would be a wake-up call for someone just doing some testing.

\--

[1] [http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...](http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_when_retrieving_large_amounts_of_data_from_Amazon_Glacier)

[2] After paying that fee, you might be reminded of S4: <http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/>

[3] How do you think this interacts with AWS Export? It seems that AWS Export would maximize your financial pain by making retrieval requests at an extraordinarily fast rate.

[(edit) 4] Once you make a retrieval request the data is only available for 24 hours. So even in the best case, that they charge you based on how long it takes you to download it (and you're careful to throttle accurately), the charge would be $920 ($0.2995/GB) -- that's the lower bound here. Which is better, of course, but I wouldn't rely on it until they clarify how they calculate. My calculations above represent an upper bound ("as high as"). Also note that they charge separately for bandwidth out of AWS ($368.52 in this case).

[(edit) 5] Answering an objection below, I looked at the docs and it doesn't appear that you can make a ranged retrieval request. It appears you have to grab an entire archive at once. You can make a ranged GET request, but that only helps if they charge based on the download rate and not based on the request rate.

[(edit) 6] I think charging this way is more plausible because they incur their cost during the retrieval regardless of whether or how fast you download the result during the 24 hour period it's available to you (retrieval is the dominant expense, not internal network bandwidth). As for the other alternative, charging based on how long it takes them to retrieve it would seem odd as you have no control over that.

<comment><USER10> Former S3 employee here. I was on my way out of the company just after the storage engineering work was completed, before they had finalized the API design and pricing structure, so my POV may be slightly out of date, but I will say this: they're out to replace tape. No more custom build-outs with temperature-controlled rooms of tapes and robots and costly tech support.

If you're not an Iron Mountain customer, this product probably isn't for you. It wasn't built to back up your family photos and music collection.

Regarding other questions about transfer rates - using something like AWS Import/Export will have a limited impact. While the link between your device and the service will be much fatter, the reason Glacier is so cheap is because of the custom hardware. They've optimized for low-power, low-speed, which will lead to increased cost savings due to both energy savings and increased drive life. I'm not sure how much detail I can go into, but I will say that they've contracted a major hardware manufacturer to create custom low-RPM (and therefore low-power) hard drives that can programmatically be spun down. These custom HDs are put in custom racks with custom logic boards all designed to be very low-power. The upper limit of how much I/O they can perform is surprisingly low - only so many drives can be spun up to full speed on a given rack. I'm not sure how they stripe their data, so the perceived throughput may be higher based on parallel retrievals across racks, but if they're using the same erasure coding strategy that S3 uses, and writing those fragments sequentially, it doesn't matter - you'll still have to wait for the last usable fragment to be read.

I think this will be a definite game-changer for enterprise customers. Hopefully the rest of us will benefit indirectly - as large S3 customers move archival data to Glacier, S3 costs could go down.

<comment><USER5> The math doesn't come close to replacing tape - basically once you go north of 100 terabytes (just two containers - at my prior company we had 140 containers in rotation with iron mountain) Glacier doesn't make financial or logistical sense. Far cheaper and faster to send your LTO-5 drives via driver.

<comment><USER10> It may not make sense today. Amazon is notorious for betting on the far future. They're also raising the bar on what archival data storage services could offer. When you ship your bits to Amazon, they're in 3+ DCs, and available programmatically.

Separate from the play for replacing tape, there's also the ecosystem strategy. When you run large portions of your business using Amazon's services, you tend to generate a lot of data that ends up needing to be purged, else your storage bill goes through the roof. S3's Lifecycle Policy feature is a hint at the direction they want you to go - keep your data, just put it somewhere cheaper.

This could also be the case where they think they're going after tape, but end up filling some other, unforeseen need. S3 itself was originally designed as an internal service for saving and retrieving software configuration files. They thought it would be a wonder if they managed to store more than a few GB of data. Now look at it. They're handling 500k+ requests per second, and you can, at your leisure, upload a 5 TB object, no prob.

But maybe you're right. The thing could fail. Too expensive. After all, 512k ought to be enough for anybody.

<comment><USER5> Thanks very much for the insight - what you are saying actually makes a lot of sense in the context of systems inside the AWS ecosystem. After all, they need to archive data as well. Also - my 140 container example w/Iron Mountain was Pre-versioning and always-online differential backups. We basically had a complex tower-of-hanoi that let us recover data from a week, a month, six months, and then every year (going back seven years) from all of our servers. (And, by Year seven, when we started rotating some of the old tapes back in - they were a generation older than any of our existing tape drives. :-)

Clearly, with on-line differential backups - you might be able to do things more intelligently.

I'm already looking forward to using Glacier, but, for the forseeable future, it looks like the "High End" archiving will be owned by Tape. And, just as Glacier will (eventually) make sense for >100 Terabyte Archives, I suspect Tape Density will increase, and then "High End" archiving will be measured in Petabytes.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is the best thing ever! I've been dreaming about such a service for a very long time -- posted about how I needed this here 6 months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3560952>

Rotating hard drives on the NAS in my attic is going to get a LOT simpler...

</comment><comment><USER44> that's certainly interesting. as there will be migration from s3 to glacier, it would be nice if tarsnap had an option to store only the (say) last week in s3 (with .3$/gb/month) and the rest in glacier (with, say, .03$/gb/month).

that would certainly be very nice. cperciva, what do you think?

<comment><USER45> I can't see any way for Tarsnap to use this right now. When you create a new archive, you're only uploading _new_ blocks of data; the server has no way of knowing which _old_ blocks of data are being re-used. As a result, storing any significant portion of a user's data in Amazon Glacier would mean that all archive extracts would need to go out to Glacier for data...

Also, with Tarsnap's average block size (~ 64 kB uncompressed, typically ~ 32 kB compressed) the 50 microdollar cost per Glacier RETRIEVAL request means that I'd need to bump the pricing for tarsnap downloads up to about $1.75 / GB just to cover the AWS costs.

I may find a use for Glacier at some point, but it's not something Tarsnap is going to be using in the near future.

<comment><USER46> While I have no idea how you would fit it in your current infrastructure, I certainly see a (BIG) use-case for: I have this 100 GB, store it somewhere safe (in glacier), I won't need it for the next year (unless my house burns down). I agree that is a bit different from ongoing daily backups with changes, but its also not THAT different from a customer perspective. That it doesn't fit with how you store blocks on the backend won't matter to a lot of customers.

<comment><USER45> Oh, I absolutely agree that Glacier has lots of great use cases. I wish Tarsnap was able to make good use of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here's to hoping that _duplicity_ and _git-annex_ could somehow make use of this service. I'm far more optimistic about _duplicity_ support though, as incremental archives seem to fit the glacier storage model much better. A _git-annex_ special remote [1] might turn out to be much more challenging, if at all possible.

[1] <http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/>

<comment><USER48> Once there's support for Glacier in boto (<https://github.com/boto/boto>) I would imagine a duplicity backend would be easy to implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> From the retrieval times they are giving, it seems plausible that they could be only booting the servers 5 or 6 times a day, to run the upload and retrieval jobs stored in a buffer system of sorts. Having the servers turned off for the majority of the time would same an immense amount of power, although I wonder about the wear on drives spinning up and down compared to being always on.

Any other theories on how this works on the backend while still being profitable?

<comment><USER50> Tape drives. Lots and lots of tape drives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This sounds really appealing as a NAS backup solution, but I'm a bit concerned about security and privacy. Let's say I want to backup and upload my CDs and movies, would Amazon be monitoring what I upload and assume I'm doing something illegal?

<comment><USER52> Just use GPG to encrypt your files before you upload them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Wow, order of magnitude cheaper than S3 (1 cent per month vs. 12-14 cents for S3). Data transfer priced the same.

Drawback is "jobs typically complete in 3.5 to 4.5 hours."

Seeing as how people tend to be pack rats, I can see this being huge.

</comment><comment><USER54> One recurrent issue with Amazon services is that they charge in US$ and currently do not accept euros. European banks charge an arm and a leg for micropayment conversions: last time I got a bill from AWS for 0.02$ it ended up costing me 20 euros or so. Pretty much kills the deal. One solution could be to pre-pay 100$ on an account and let them debit as needed.

<comment><USER55> That's really odd, I've never heard of fees that high - in the UK I can use my credit cards with Amazon and only pay a few pennies in transaction fees. Have a look at the CaxtonFX Dollar Traveller, you need to load it with $200 but then there's no transaction fees I think, except a slightly worse exchange rate..

<comment><USER54> Sure there are workarounds. But why should I have to jump through hoops when my account at Amazon is already entrusted with a European credit card and merrily charging euros for all other goods?

<comment><USER56> This sounds like it's an issue related with your bank trying to scrounge more money off you. I have a European debit card and I get charged the equivalent in EUR, nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> What does "99.999999999% durability" mean? Does it mean they allow themselves to lose one byte per terabyte on average?

<comment><USER58> I think it means there is a small chance enough hard drives might fail at the same time that there happen to be no backups of those drives.

They make so many backups so quickly that there is only a 0.00000000001% (I didn't count the zeros) chance of this occuring.

<comment><USER59> Which of course means that (if they're telling the truth) the probability of losing your data mostly comes from really big events: collapse of civilization, global thermonuclear war, Amazon being bought by some entity that just wants to melt its servers down for scrap, etc. (Whose probability is clearly a lot more than 10^-11 per year; the big bang was only on the order of 10^10 years ago.)

<comment><USER60> _per object_. So although the chance of losing any particular object is tiny, the chance of you losing _something_ is proportional† to the number of objects. Still extremely small.

†roughly proportional if you have << 1e11 objects

<comment><USER59> Yes. Though I bet the real lossage probabilities are dominated by failure events that take out a substantial fraction of all the objects there are, and that happen a lot more often than once per 10^11 years.

<comment><USER61> Agreed. More likely a catastrophic and significant loss for a small number of customers rather than a fraction of a percentage of loss for a large number.

Similar deal for hard drive bit error rates, where the quoted average BER may not necessarily accurately represent what can happen in the real world. For example, an unrecoverable read error loses 4096 bits (512 byte sectors) or 32768 bits (4k sectors) all at once, rather than individual bits randomly flipped over a long period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Interesting to see that in some cases it probably makes sense to just stop paying the bills, rather than pay the early deletion fee[1].

[1][https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_de...](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_deleting_data_that_is_less_than_3_months_old)

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm currently using an app called Arq that backs everything up to S3. If I had to guess, I'd say there's about 50-60 gigs or more on there. Last months bill was something like .60 cents. How does glacier compare or contrast to this setup (the app does something similar with the archive concept)?

<comment><USER64> Would love to know where you're getting that $0.60 number (I assume you meant 60 cents and not 0.60 cents). Even with the first-year free tier, it costs $7.00/mo ($6.00/mo on RRS) to store 60 GB of data on S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Crashplan is still cheaper for storage larger than 400GB.

Crashplan+ Unlimited is USD 2.92/month if you take the 4 year package. When I upload 300GB to Amazon and pay 0.01 * 300 = USD 3/month. Amazon would be even more expensive for larger amounts of data.

Is there some fine print I'm missing with Crashplan unlimited?

<comment><USER66> Also remember its free to recover your entire Crashplan archive (I have 500GB with them). If you wanted to recover 500GB with Glacier it would cost $200 @10MB/s (according to someones calculation further down) You have to pay for retrieval

<comment><USER65> Not totally true, you have to pay for retrieval for 1GB and upwards per month: <http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/#pricing> as well as 5cent per upload/retrieval request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I just started a project where I'm keeping a raspberry pi in my backpack and am archiving a constant stream of jpgs to the cloud. I've been looking at all the available cloud archival options over the last few days and have been horrified at the pricing models. This is a blessing!

<comment><USER68> Great idea, have you got any more details?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I am a bit confused with the pricing of retrieval.

Could some good soul tell me how much would cost to:

Store 150 GB as one big file for 5 years. To this I will add 10 GB (also as one file) every year. And lets say I will need to retrieve the whole archive (original file + additions) at the end of year 2 and 5.

How much will it cost?

</comment><comment><USER70> They should provide a "time capsule" option - pay X dollars, and after a set number of years, your data archive will be opened to the public for a given amount of time.

There'd be no better way to ensure that information would eventually be made public.

<comment><USER71> You can build it on top of Glacier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Great. Now if someone would simply create a badass client for this for Mac (like Backblaze or Mozy) … we'd be in business. :)

<comment><USER73> Arq's support is enough. <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

<comment><USER72> It already supports it?

<comment><USER7> Kinda: "In the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies."

<comment><USER74> URL? Can't find this on the website, blog or twitter account.

<comment><USER75> It's in the Glacier FAQ: [http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_should_I_choose_betw...](http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_should_I_choose_between_Amazon_Glacier_and_Amazon_S3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's particularly awesome, is that this likely represents an upper bound on cost. It will only go down as time goes on.

</comment><comment><USER76> Try this link

[http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/?utm_source=AWS&utm_medium...](http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/?utm_source=AWS&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=BA_glacier_launch)

</comment><comment><USER77> Looks like the perfect solution to backup all my photos. Considering 100 GB of photos, that's still just 100 * 0.01 * 12 = $12 a year! I'm sold on this!

</comment><comment><USER78> This looks like exactly what I need. I'm currently using S3 for backup and archiving by regularly running s3cmd to sync my data on my NAS.

And while not super-duper expensive, s3 provides much more than I really need, and hence a more limited (but cheaper) service would definitely be appreciated.

If there is anything with the easy of use like s3cmd to accompany this service I will be switching in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm with Atlantic.net cloud [AWS competitor, full disclosure]; the price point for storage is great but retrieval seems expensive -- perhaps retrieval is very rare its offset by the savings on the storage. I know you can mail in drives for storage, can you have them mail you drives for retrieval? (for Glacier specifically)

Also, prior comments made mention they were using some sort of robotic tape devices, but according to this blog:

[http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud- storage-h...](http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage- hopes-enterprise-will-go-cold-on-tape-use-7000002926/)

Its using "commodity hardware components". So, thats why I thought maybe they are loss-leadering on the storage and making up on the retrieval prices?

Its definately a interesting product and I love how there's a reason they called it Glacier. AMZN is a wild boar going after everyone!

<comment><USER10> I don't think they're loss-leadering on storage, but if they are, they don't think they will be for long. AWS (EC2 and S3 in particular) does very well when it comes to profit margins. I suspect they'd like to keep it that way, and that whatever they're charging gives them some slice of profit, however small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Since this is built on top of S3, I'd love to be able to store EBS Snapshots in this.

<comment><USER31> And then wait 4+ hours to restore them?

<comment><USER81> That'd make a ton of sense for forensic and compliance needs: lots of storage, limited access in special situations where a little delay is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> We've just added support for Amazon Glacier to <http://www.PlanForCloud.com> so you quickly forecast your costs and compare it with other options.

<comment><USER82> We just ran a quick cost forecast and it's interesting: If you start with 100GB then add 10GB/month, it would cost $102.60 after 3 years on AWS Glacier vs $1,282.50 on AWS S3!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is amazing! Just ~3 weeks ago I finally broke down and started using S3 to store my digital photos and other such crap.

Sure hope transferring 10 or 20 gigabytes of data from S3 to Glacier is easy.

</comment><comment><USER83> Anyone know what the TOS are for this? I couldn't find them on a scan of the announcement.

A lot of the consumer-level services refuse any liability for any data loss. Does Amazon do the same for this?

<comment><USER5> Presumably the standard S3 SLA will apply: <http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/>

Realistically, you'd want to have at least two diverse cloud backup systems - I doubt you'd be happy with Service Credits if your data went missing.

<comment><USER83> It always seem funny though that these companies say

"We will keep your data safe! *

* T&C's apply, if we lose it, you're on your own."

I shouldn't imagine Bank Vaults deal the same way with physical property. Can you get insurance for digital assets the same way you can for physical ones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Can anyone make sense of the retrieval fees? Seems like the most confusing thing ever. If I'm storing 4TB and one day I want to restore all 4TB, how much is it going to cost me?

<comment><USER31> 1 x retrieval request per archive (it's really designed to store a small number of large files/tars) plus $0.12/GB... therefore, 4TB = $480.

<comment><USER84> No, that's not right. That's only the data transfer rate.

If you check the FAQ, they bill you based on your peak hourly retrieval rate.

If I download 4TB at say...10MB/s, not only do I need to pay $480, but I also have to pay ~$257 as a retrieval fee?

Their wording is confusing, but ignoring the free retrieval amount (negligible difference on a 4TB transfer):

Fee = Peak hourly retrieval * number of hours in month * $0.01

[https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret...](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retrieve_for_free)

Admittedly ~$737 isn't the end of the world if your house has burned down and you need all your data back, but it's still important to know the details.

I think in that situation, it would be cheaper to use their bulk import/export, which would be roughly $300 for 4TB

<comment><USER85> This is so confusing. So apparently if you spend the entire month retrieving the data at 1.6MB/s it only costs $40 plus transfer fees? And more importantly, _how_ do you throttle your retrieval?

Edit: So I'm working through a scenario in my head and trying to figure out how charging based on the peak _hour_ isn't completely ridiculous.

I have 8GB stored to try out the system. This costs a whopping dollar per year. One day I decide to test out the restore feature. So I go tell Amazon to get my files and wait a few hours. When Amazon is ready, I hit download. I'm on a relatively fast cable connection so the download finishes in an hour. I look at the data transfer prices and expect to be charged one dollar.

But I didn't take into account this 'peak hour' method. I just used roughly 8GB/hour over the minimal free retrieval. This gets multiplied out times 24 hours and 30 days to cost 8 * 720 * $0.01 = $57. _Fifty-seven times my annual budget_ because I downloaded my data too quickly after waiting hours for Amazon to get ready.

<comment><USER86> If you're in a corporate environment, you'd likely have a network admin group that could throttle your connection to them. Or you'd be using a custom- designed front-end that would throttle it. Or if you're SOHO, you could set up QoS rules on your router to throttle it.

Realistically though, this service might not be for you if fast and cheap retrieval of your data is important. The importance here is cheap storage, not transfer. They could reasonably expect that you'd only retrieve this data once or twice, if ever, and cost won't be deterrent. Say, if your data center burns down and your company is moving to a new office.

<comment><USER85> Oh I totally understand that people are going to be willing to pay more after a disaster to get files back. But realistically, if there is a large enough volume of files to bother amazon then they're going to need day(s) to download. If they rate-limited by day then the price would only reach a couple years of storage. The hourly thing is only going to bite minor retrieval events, and it is going to bite them amazingly hard.

<comment><USER86> My department (information security) was actually just discussing this service this morning at our morning meeting. We've been looking into backup services for our security monitoring appliance beyond our datacenter and DR site. These backups would need to persist for a year according to PCI/SOX compliance, and if we needed to show data to an auditor, we wouldn't need the entire log. In fact, we'd likely not even need 5% of it. Most likely, we'd only need to pull a day (maybe two) from the logs.

I can imagine our media services group talking about the same thing, how to keep master files of their product pictures/videos where they'd only need to grab a file or two here or there (if at all).

Amazon seems to be pushing this as a file dump where retrieval of the files is exceedingly rare. They don't want you to use it as a hard drive, they want you to use it as a magnetic tape drive.

<comment><USER85> It's not that I want to use this as hot storage, it's that I would like to be able to test my backups once or twice a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I get a 404, and when I go to <http://aws.amazon.com/> I see nothing about glacier in the news feed.

<comment><AUTHOR> This link should work better: <http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/>

<comment><USER87> Hm, that link was 404 as well until just a moment ago. Must have taken time to propagate to the edge servers or whatever is going on there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Any easy to use Windows clients for Glacier (for backing up an OS and/or other files)?

If not, to any developers reading this: there's money in them thar Glacier.

</comment><comment><USER89> Amazon should complement this service with data contact centers which are connected to their data centers network. Then people could go to these centers in person and hand over their hard drives full of data for back up. It will be like bank lockers but only digital. At this low price people would want to upload terabytes of data which will be pain to upload/download.

<comment><USER90> You mean like <http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/> ?

<comment><USER89> Was not aware of this service. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I think this is more or less the formula for calculating monthly costs (corrections welcome):

0.01S+max(0,7.20*(R-0.0017S)/4)

S is number of GB stored

R is biggest retrieval in the month

4 is the average number of hours a retrieval

For an example with 10TB storage (replace 10000 to change): <http://fooplot.com/plot/4pu7u2gpox>

x is biggest retrieval in GB, y is $/month

<comment><USER91> Correction: See my other post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4416684>

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Would be nice if I could just type my Amazon login details into TimeMachine and magic off-site backups just happened.

</comment><comment><USER93> This looks awesome! We are currently developing a P2P-based backup solution (<http://degoo.com>) where we are using S3 as fall-back. This will allow us to be much cheaper and I am sure it will enable many other backup providers to lower their prices to.

<comment><USER94> The S3->Glacier lifecycle-feature must be a welcome thing for you I guess?

<comment><USER93> Definitely! Hopefully it can enable us to provide a good trade-off between cost and restore time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I hope they can get the access time down from 3-5 hours to about 1 hour - that's the difference for me between it being a viable alternative for storing backups of my client's web sites or not.

I might create a script that uploads everything to Glacier and just keeps a couple of the latest backups on S3 though.

<comment><USER96> Per Werner's blog post [1] "in the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies."

1\. [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/08/amazon- glacier.h...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/08/amazon-glacier.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Does anyone know if there is a CLI tool to interface with this yet? I see SDK's mentioned on the product homepage but I dont see any simple CLI tools for this yet to upload/download data and query etc.

<http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/>

</comment><comment><USER98> I'm curious about data security. It says it is encrypted with AES. But is it encrypted locally and the encrypted files are transferred? I.e. does Amazon ever see the encryption keys?

Or is the only way to encrypt it yourself, and then transfer it?

<comment><USER99> AFAIK the keys are managed by Amazon, just like S3. It's more for compliance reasons rather than real security. Encryption still has to be done yourself to protect the data.

<comment><USER100> It does protect you against situations where Amazon loses disks or tapes, or disposes of them improperly, or they are stolen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> It will be interesting to know if they will upgrade AWS Storage Gateway to use this kind of backend instead of S3 <http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/>

</comment><comment><USER102> It's a bit strange how S3 has a 'US Standard' region option, while Glacier has the usual set of regions (US East, US West, etc). I wonder if this means that unlike S3, Glacier isn't replicated across regions?

<comment><USER103> US Standard isn't replicated across regions.

<comment><USER102> Hm, you could be right, AWS says:

> The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in > Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

I guess this means that the data is automatically geographically sharded?

<comment><USER104> Keep in mind that even if your data is in one AWS region, it'll still be stored in multiple different datacenters some distance apart. Just not on the other side of the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> > Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of > 99.999999999% for an archive.

That's pretty impressive. I wonder how many bytes they lost to lose that .0000000001% of data.

</comment><comment><USER106> I just saw this and thought wow finally cheap mass storage. After reading the comments (and the Amazon Glacier web page) it's clear it's cheap archiving but not cheap retrieval.

</comment><comment><USER107> Any desktop apps out there that will let you add folders for backup to Glacier and have them be automatically synced up to the cloud as they change? That would be quite useful.

<comment><USER108> <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

I assume they will support Glacier soonish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Excellent! Is there any good open source client / backup application for this? I would start using it immediately. I'm currently using ridiculously expensive backup solution.

<comment><USER16> Duplciity supports S3, so I'd watch it for Glacier support: <http://duplicity.nongnu.org/>

<comment><USER110> I wonder if Glacier support in Duplicity will be possible without large changes. AFAIK, duplicity also reads some state from the remote end to determine what to backup (Although it also keeps a local cache of this?). To use glacier, the protocol would have to completely write-only.

<comment><USER111> I'd guess it would use a hybrid approach, with recent backups on S3 (which duplicity already does) being shifted to glacier after a period of time. The FAQ indicates that Amazon plans to make this easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> In case anyone is wondering it appears you can only upload from their APIs right now. I wonder if they intend to make it accessible through their web interface at any point?

</comment><comment><USER113> I wonder if homeowner's insurance would cover the retrieval fee if your computer/hard drives were protected assets on the policy.

</comment><comment><USER104> Wow, the cadence of releases from aws recently has been amazing. Can't wait to see what else they have in store.

</comment><comment><USER114> Now if Tim Kay just adds support for glacier and I can leave all the backup scripts as is...

</comment><comment><USER115> 11 9's. Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER116> Worst. name. ever.

<comment><USER117> How so? Doesn't it represent that your data is safe, as it is "frozen", and slow to retrieve like a glacier?

<comment><USER118> I like the name too. An accreting mountain of preserved data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> Wake up.</comment>


Maximizing Disk Utilization with Incremental Compaction - <AUTHOR> https://www.scylladb.com/2020/01/16/maximizing-disk-utilization-with-incremental-compaction/ <comment><AUTHOR> Incremental Compaction Strategy (ICS) is unique to Scylla Enterprise. It improves over the existing Size Tiered Compaction Strategy (STCS) common to Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise and Scylla by allowing far more granular compactions. This results in a very low overhead (space expansion) when running compactions. While the rule of thumb for STCS meant that you needed to leave have your disk space free, now users will be able to utilize 80% of their storage for data — which can save over a third in storage (and storage costs).</comment>


SolarCity modules last 35+ years – 40% longer than industry average - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2016/07/04/solarcity-increase-useful-lifetime-of-solar-power-installations/ <comment><USER2> In the last 13 years of having 28 panels on my roof I've lost one to some sort of flying rock. That said the panels (Sharp 185W) are currently producing 90% of the power they produced 13 years ago under similar conditions so that would support the original warranty that said they would be down to 80% by 25 years.</comment>


San Francisco street sells for $90K. Neighbors aren't happy - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/san-francisco-street-sells-for-90k-neighbors-arent-happy/2017/08/07/41be3292-7bc7-11e7-b2b1-aeba62854dfa_story.html?utm_term=.f8fe5da46fbf <comment><AUTHOR> > Another option [for making the investment pay off] is to charge residents to > park on their street — and rent out the 120 parking spaces that line the > grand circular road.

Ouch.</comment>