On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Chuck Cole wrote:

> You will have ALL your punched card decks on hand and ready to use the
> moment that outage is fixed...
>
> Don't really disagree, just noting the analogy   :-)

*grins* Yes, I know I'm being a bit archaic, but the move from punchcards 
to magnetic storage to floppies to harddrives to solid-state devices IS 
pretty much lateral (albeit a VAST improvement). My point here is that 
whether I'm using punch cards or 8" floppies (yes kids, there were 8" 
floppies) or 3.5" floppies (yes kids, I skipped the 5.25"), or CDROMs, or 
a 2tb harddrive, or a 256MB sdd, or an array of 1GB thumbdrives... I CAN 
ACCESS MY DATA when there's a network outage. I can open a word processor 
and work on The Great American SciFi Novel. I can process the 21MB RAW 
images my camera takes. I can read email that's already in my inbox and 
compose replies (THEY will be ready when the outage is over).

If you use gmail and The Internet is down, you can't even look at your 
email. How crazy is that?


-Yaron

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