Category: English

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Diligent Announces Record Throughput Speed

Diligent, you know… the place I work for, has announced a speed record which was achieved on a customer’s site. The throughput speed recorded there was 400 MB/second. Now it may not sound like a lot, but let me tell you why it’s impressive: Diligent’s product does not duplicate data that was already backed up. Generally, this kind of technology is called de-duplication. Diligent’s product is called ProtecTIER.

To do de-duplication the machine has to identify whether the information is already there or not. Doing this efficiently on huge amounts of data is very hard. Considering another fact – that ProtecTIER does this while the data is flowing and not in some background process like other de-duplication products – makes it even more impressive. We have a really good team here.

I guess you have to be a part of this to really appreciate both the amount of work that is put into ever-increasing throughput speeds and the way everyone here works towards this goal, always coming up with new ideas and improvements.

If you want to learn more about backup de-duplication technologies, you can read about it in this fresh Computer World article.

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Questions Couples Should Ask Before Marrying – by New York Times

The New York Times magazine published a list of questions couples should ask (or wish they had) before marrying. They included a list of 15 key questions from “relationship experts”. While the list is interesting and seems pretty much like what you’d expect, I was surprised to see number 7:

7) Will there be a television in the bedroom?

Is this really such a key question in a relationship?

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HP Is An Evil Company

Hewlett-Packard is simply an evil company. In Israel, their customer support has been so awful that Israeli customers united and contacted the global management about the quality lack of service. That alone says a lot – Israeli customers rarely unite. Online forums are full with disappointed customers, who could not get their devices fixed for one reason or another. It has come to the point where I simply recommend friends not to buy HP products because there will be no support for them.

Another thing is the well-known high cost of HP Inkjet printer cartridges. The European Parliament even forced HP to remove “smart chips” from their cartridges in order to get their prices lower (link to a 2002 news article). I haven’t bought an HP product in years… I wonder if that actually worked.

Why do I talk about this now? Because an HP former employee just revealed 14 Hewlett-Packard “Company Secrets”, all of them infuriating if you ever had problems with HP customer support. The one that left me with my jaws open wide was this one:

Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work.

Yes, you read it right. Your printer might stop working just because you printed a certain number of pages already. Later on, another 9 more “fun HP facts” like these were published.

There is only one simple conclusion – HP is an evil company. I recommend you to not buy their products and let them rot. (via Digg)

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I Got Ace Spayed

On Friday I took Ace to the vet. She was very quiet on the way there. She’s always quiet and sleepy in car rides… just like me, actually :) Anyway, she was pretty calm on the table when we got her out of her carrying box. The vet was supposed to give her a shot first and then use sleeping gas. Since Ace behaved so well, he decided not to use a restraining cage, being a very unpleasant experience to the cat.

When the vet touched Ace with the needle, the tiger inside of her woke up. She forced herself out of his lock and scratched him and me (I was standing close). Then she ran away to a corner, while creating a big mess on her way. I was scratched and proud. Luckily, some of the stuff in the shot did get into her system and she became dizzy enough after 10 minutes for us to grab hold of her. He still needed to use the restraining cage for the rest of the shot.

I took Ace home after the surgery. She was still wobbly and confused. Seeing her like this was really painful to me. She tried to climb onto her favorite places like the bed and the table, but failed to do so as it probably hurt too much and she didn’t get her strength back yet. So I helped her a few times but that too seemed painful to her. By evening time she started eating again and looked much better. On Saturday she was still recuperating but I could see that she regained her vitality and even tried to play a little (I didn’t cooperate – she must rest for a week).