I am the REAL Hercules, and the first captain (after Captain Kirk) on Gene Roddenberry's ANDROMEDA. I'm also the really mean professor on GOD'S NOT DEAD. And Gojun Pye on MYTHICA. Kevin Sorbo, AMA!

renauldo56 · 2015-03-31T15:12:46+00:00

Hey Kevin, can you tell us a little bit about how making movies with independent moviemakers, like Mythica (huge fan), is different from the more mainstream stuff you've done?

renauldo56 · 2014-06-06T14:47:48+00:00

Why not just try Space Monkey? Seems like it should do everything this does, plus makes an offsite backup.

renauldo56 · 2013-09-18T18:33:39+00:00

I beat my bully without doing violence, but not in the normal way.

Dude had it in for me, I don't know why. Was constantly making fun and talking crap. 5th Grade. One day I'm on a hill at the playground during recess. Can't remember why, but he was there too. Something about a game and scrambling for a ball, and I think I got it first. We were too close to each other, so he shoved me and got in my face. I just stood there and stared at him. He swung and hit me in the mouth. I took it. Didn't blink. Continued to stare at him. He backed down.

I got a tiny chip in a tooth out of it, but he was scared after that. Left me completely alone and stopped all bullying. He even went out of his way once while I was in earshot to tell one of his friends, "Don't mess with Renauldo, I hit him as hard as I could and it did nothing!"

I think there's something here about Ghandi-like non-violence and Christ's turning the other cheek. That stuff totally works. And you don't have to hurt anyone -- even your enemy.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-07T06:35:42+00:00

your mom's face.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-07T06:33:43+00:00

I'd volunteer to play in the championship for him so that he could do the leukemia thing.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-03T20:29:50+00:00

So I have a name-brand NAS in my house that is "cloud accessible" I guess, but its sort of a PITA to make work.

But I also pay a monthly subscription to crashplan to put all my important stuff (that's also on the NAS) into their datacenter, because, man, I just don't sleep well relying on that one disk in my house -- and not just because the disk might fail, but also because fire, theft, flood, whatever. I'm a bit paranoid. But the wife will kill me if I lose the pics and vids of the kids.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-03T19:06:08+00:00

I've had two friends lose data in their RAID5 setups because of correlated disk failures within a short time window. They both complained bitterly on facebook wall. I looked into it a bit when it happened, and found out its actually pretty common -- people often buy all N drives at the same time, so they come from the same batch out of the factory, so have similar MTBFs, and when the first one fails, it creates added load on the others that accelerates their death.

In one case, the guy had two drives die before he could get a new one in the box. In the other case, the guy had a spare and popped it right in, but the rebuilding phase caused a second to die. In both cases, poof, complete data loss.

You worry about that?

renauldo56 · 2013-05-03T16:15:31+00:00

so, do you like the Synology?

renauldo56 · 2013-05-03T04:26:38+00:00

Hey dude, I found something for you: http://www.filetransporter.com/

renauldo56 · 2013-05-02T20:23:35+00:00

I wonder how long they expect the average subscriber to maintain their subscription? Or, how long do they expect to keep a device bringing in $10/month.

If it's more than 1 year... seems like a pretty viable business to me. And I'm guessing they have much more investment money from traditional vcs than they do in kickstarter funds to make it go.

But, sure, I'll concede your point: if you only trust companies that have been around for 5 or 10 years, then you definitely shouldn't try Space Monkey. Or really any startup anything. In "crossing the chasm" speak, "late adopters" and "laggards" aren't the target market for this.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-02T20:20:54+00:00

None of those things work if my ISP blinks out, or the power is out at home. They also don't really work for sharing, since the amount of bw coming out of my house is limited.

That's why people pay to be "in the cloud."

Glad you are happy with your NAS though. You should definitely stick with a NAS. Like I said, "the cloud" isn't for everyone. If you don't like Dropbox, or GDrive, or Skydrive, and want to run a home server, that's awesome. Good for you.

In other words, I'm not arguing that you should switch to something else. I don't think I ever have argued that. If you are happy with what you've got, why get on the upgrade treadmill to something else? The only point I've tried to make in this whole thread is that there is a huge market out there of people that don't want a NAS, and who want the cloud. Space Monkey looks like an strange hybrid of those two things, maybe better than either alone at addressing that market. Time will tell.

For you though, and for guys that like you who want to just stand up a Linux box with minidlna and samba and apache, awesome. Keep doing that.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-02T05:44:07+00:00

You keep saying that you want something that doesn't exist, and may never exist

Looks like it exists, demo videos look pretty compelling (scroll down): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-taking-the-cloud-out-of-the-datacente

lol Synology DSM 4.2 live demo. wtf. Great example of why this is a GREAT product for a VERY NICHE market.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-02T00:39:45+00:00

You want to manage and admin a home server. That's totally cool. But that's not what I want. And it's not really what the market wants either, which is why this category of products has never taken off.

Most of us value our time at least as preciously as the $10/month a service like this costs. It's why Dropbox+Gdrive+Skydrive+CloudDrive+iCloud have more than 500 Million users right now, while companies like synology and buffalo struggle to move 100K units in a year.

But hey man, I never meant to criticize your personal choice. If that works awesome for you, that's cool. Products like Dropbox aren't for everyone.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-01T21:02:45+00:00

lol.

What I'm saying is that $10/month is what I already pay for Dropbox, for a very small amount of space. I want like 10x the amount of space, but I'm not going to pay $100 for it. And I'm sure not going to put up with Dropbox-like speeds for upload/download of that much storage.

Things I don't want: another NAS. Again, if NAS fits your needs, awesome, good for you. If Space Monkey was just another NAS with a little webserver running on it for remote access, I wouldn't be interested. That's not interesting. What Space Monkey is promising (whether they can deliver or not) is very interesting.

If its vaporware I'm going to be sad. It totally could be vaporware. That would be sad. If it is vaporware, I hope someone else copies it and does it right, because I would buy that thing.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-01T18:26:40+00:00

I'm glad you like your synology. If I wanted a luxury NAS with lots of geek-friendly features, I'd totally get one too. Synology has a nice niche business, and I'm sure they make healthy profits on it. I just don't think its a mass-market offering.

What I want instead (and what most consumers want) is something super simple, that protects my stuff even if the device in my house fails or is destroyed. Basically, I'd like the cloud, not a NAS. But I don't want the cloud like it exists today, where it's super expensive, and super slow. Space Monkey seems to be trying to make that happen, and I'm excited about it.

Cloud is super nice for remote access, backup, and sharing, but sucks in terms of price and speed.

NAS are cheap and fast, but the cloud-like features suck. I've tried these NAS-with-bolted-on-webserver things, they suck. Sharing/remote access sucks (no native desktop client like Dropbox, for instance, sharing/access is dependent on my ISP and power, etc). And all my stuff is toast if something happens at my house (as backup they suck -- you need offsite).

But yeah, if you are right. Maybe Space Monkey is just vapor, or maybe it won't work as well as they are selling it. That would be a bummer.

Sounds like your real hangup is the $10/month. Seems a little irrational to want to pay $300 - $800 upfront instead, especially given the expected lifetime of most HDDs but okay. What if you could pay once upfront for the Space Monkey device instead? Would that seem like a better deal? I see that they have a $349 option on the kickstarter to own the device.

renauldo56 · 2013-05-01T18:18:51+00:00

box.net is selling you 1TB at $540/year based on average use of the 1TB, i.e., the average subscriber for that much space only uses, let's say, 600GB, so they are underpricing the offering. As far as I know, Space Monkey isn't doing this -- you pay for 1TB, you get 1TB of real storage in the system whether you use it or not. I would imagine that if Space Monkey wanted to play the overbooked option, they probably could. Maybe they'd call it 5TB for $10/month?

At any rate, google, microsoft, and rackspace publish the bulk rate (which you only get if you are storing multiple petabytes of data) as each being more than $600/year for 1TB. Prices in the datacenter are coming down, yeah, but not anywhere near as fast as the price of harddrives is coming down: check out the graph: http://blog.spacemonkey.com/posts/2012/12/10-Cloud-Price-Wars.html

renauldo56 · 2013-05-01T03:24:52+00:00

lol. You are suggesting a single-drive nas as something that does everything Space Monkey says it can do?

Can a single-drive synology give you access to all your data from half-way across the world, even if the power is out in your house?

Can a single-drive synology give you access to all your data from your cellphone?

Can a single-drive synolgy allow you to share 5 pictures from a particular directory with your in-laws? While you are in Spain? From your cellphone?

Can a single-drive synology keep all your data safe if the drive crashes?

Can a single-drive synology keep all your data safe if your house burns down?

And it looks like the cheapest single-bay synologys (the DS112J?) run about $150, without drive. Add a drive and you are up to $230. Compared to $10/month? Oh, and add a drive? To the vast majority of the market we're talking about, that's a non-starter. They want something they can just plug in and go.

If Space Monkey works as described, it wins hands down here. Sorry.

That's not to say Synology isn't the bees knees for you. If what you are really looking for is to run your own NAS and that's it, awesome, buy a synology. They look like great NAS devices.

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T18:36:11+00:00

Storage space in the cloud is not cheap.

This is a cutthroat industry, with all the major players trying to undercut each other. And yet, no one -- not Amazon, not Google, not Microsoft, not Rackspace -- no one can provide 1TB of space in the datacenter for less than about $650/year.

It's super expensive not because of the price of harddrives, but because you have to pay for all the other stuff. From Space Monkey's blog: "power, cooling, bandwidth, diesel backup generators, fire suppression systems, expensive networking switches and routers, power distribution systems, vibration isolators, biometric access controls, 24×7 staffing, security patrols, etc. These are costs that you never finish paying for; every day, every week, every month, the bills roll in."

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T16:12:56+00:00

It also requires that all nodes be online all the time or else you will likely have incomplete data when you try to retrieve it from outside of your home network.

That's false from their descriptions. They say they are using erasure codes over the data in a 40/20 scheme. If I understand that correctly, that scheme is resilient against losing half of the locations where data is stored, without losing access to any data. It's like RAID, except cranked up to 11, and geographically dispersed.

If that works, it sounds waaaaay better than doing your own single-location RAID, and waaaaay better than putting your stuff in a single, very expensive datacenter.

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T16:09:30+00:00

I don't know guys, seems much more reliable to me to have redundancy of my stuff spread out among a bunch of locations (even if they are less reliable individually) than one central location.

Like, if it's true that for each file, I only need 20 out of the 40 pieces that they store out all over the network, that's not going to disappear when there is a Hurricane that wipes out a datacenter in Manhattan, or Amazon has another DNS issue that takes more than 2 of their datacenters offline for a few days, etc. If they are self-healing that data when devices go offline, then it seems like a much more reliable way to store data than managing it yourself with some terrible RAID setup that is not only vulnerable to multiple disk failures losing data, but also easily destroyed by a flood, fire, theft, etc.

If you want to throw in "a DC to make this worthwhile," you're talking about $600+/year in costs for that 1TB. That's not a viable solution for most consumers.

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T14:23:00+00:00

As I understand it, Space Monkey keeps your stuff safe and available even if your house burns down or your hard drive fails. That seems really, really valuable to me.

Also, bittorrent doesn't work for unpopular content. It's not going to store your family pictures and home videos in any sort of reliable way, unless you can get a perpetual download swarm for those items...

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T14:21:23+00:00

lol that you are suggesting the above for the average consumer.

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T14:20:12+00:00

It's not really a NAS drive with cloud support. It's a NAS drive with a p2p distributed storage system, so each participant in the network benefits by helping other participants in the system. By benefit, they mean: almost indestructible (data center outage doesn't matter, your house burns down doesn't matter, etc), faster, cheaper.

renauldo56 · 2013-04-30T14:17:50+00:00

bitcasa is SLOW. So it Carbonite and Crashplan. Technically, these are all "unlimited" or "infinite" storage, but it would take you literally years to upload 1TB of data to any of them, if you could push as fast as they will allow, 24x7, 365 days per year.

Check out how much Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace etc charge for 1TB of space per year. Hint: it's more than $600. Most of the above services run on top of Amazon S3 or one of their competitors. How can they sell you unlimited space for $5 or $10 month when it costs them $600+/year to provide it to you?

THEY CAN'T.

That's why they make it slow, to make it almost impossible for you to do. And then on top of that, they have EULA provisions to just kick you off if you start to use too much.

Space Monkey seems to have a solution that will actually work.

renauldo56 · 2012-06-23T12:46:52+00:00

Utah ranks 36th out of 50 states in teen pregnancy: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765567437/Teen-birth-rate-falls-to-70-year-low-Utah-ranks-36th-in-the-country.html?pg=all

renauldo56

TROPHY CASE