coalescence

scp and "dpkg -i" are readily available, but it's really not that much work to setup a repository (aptly, reprepro, apt-ftparchive etc.)

I know I'd personally chose maintaining the system packages and where possible put extraneous language dependencies in packages too (fpm comes in handy as it can deal with a variety of packages, gem, npm etc). It makes life a lot simpler when it comes to administering a bunch of systems and trying to keep things consistent.

There are a couple of adages that may be valid.

"If it's too good to be true, it probably is"

and

"Cheap, Good, Fast - pick two"

That's true, although we should be fairly concerned about a company using very cheap hosting on VPS with no form of encryption storing anything sensitive. You may also be breaching PCI DSS (fwiw) doing that.

In reality though, more companies do this than should be allowed. I worked for an ISP in a previous life and even on the super cheap shared hosting there were companies that were making a decent turnover and then using the cheapest possible hosting for their email/site. The quantity of these companies was a significant number too.

Especially when they were kicking off on the phone due to inevitable maintenance/downtime. Trying to appease customers that turn over 10 million a year and pay £5 a month for hosting is a bit wtf. You pay for what you get... that's no different in hosting.

With #3 - ideally your systems should not allow you to break established procedure. Mitigate the risk by not giving the support staff tools to shoot yourself in the foot so easily. This could be achieved with peer verification or some other mechanism (lots of ways if you think it through).

Low end hosting doesn't generally have backups, because it's well, cheap. Extra overheads make the price increase, then you're not cheap and can't compete at that end.

Usually there are backup options included in the plan for upsell possibilities with these kinds of providers. Really, you should not expect a service that has 'cheap' in the name to offer any kind of backup.

I ordered (and fully paid for) my 2GB back in January and I'm still waiting for the order state to change (it's currently unfulfilled). If you look at the boards, I'm not alone. Apparently it'll arrive in May, so be aware if you order now, it may be some time.

Also, the images being stored in .rar format is a little crazy. I'm not sure why that's the case when there are a plethora of other compression formats more generally used for binary image compression.

That's the browser engine, for webapps, look here - http://arewewebyet.com/

We've had a dev kit at work for a while and it's the first headset that I've not wanted to take off. The ability to move around a scene and the wand make the interaction really intuitive and rewarding. As for the social implications of 'VR lockin', it'll be interesting to watch.

Indeed, you can create lists too that are private

FFmpeg supports Prores decode and encode? FFMBC for sure last time I checked

There are a few different profiles offered in the Ceph Erasure Coded Pool support, afaik they are based on research papers. Assume due diligence done to ensure they can be used openly (ianal etc).

http://ceph.com/docs/master/rados/operations/erasure-code-pr...

edit: Indeed, checked jerasure site and that's gone.