Re: How do you catalog your books?

michael adams wrote:
"SD" <siddharthgdalal@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:e2amef$kc0$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Denton Taylor wrote:

I have a problem with that and here's the problem. I already went
through this cycle with spinfree/singlefile.

http://www.spinfree.com/store/

The problem being that an ambitious indivdual such as yourself has
this starry-eyed conviction that they'll be the next ebay or yahoo or
amazon. Then it doesn't work out or they get hit by a car and then
they fold up. And then the time and effort (and money) one has put
into working with the site is out the window.

I have no intention of being ebay or yahoo or amazon or anything big. I

don't

even intend to make a living out of the site. So far it is just a hobby

site. It

just about pays for its own costs and I'm happy with that. Even if it

doesn't

I'll still keep running the site because I like to do it!


You're totally dodging the issue concerning the reliability of on-line
storage provision. Your good intentions don't come into this. If you mess
up, whether you just doing it because you like it or not - you'll
be inconvencienng loads of other people who might have put a lot
of time effort into the data they put in your care.

Online storage is much more reliable than your own hard drive. I keep backups about once a week, my webhost keeps backups - every day as far as I can tell. If I screw up I can restore from those backups. That is one of the reasons, I am working on importing and exporting data so users can keep their own backups.

Also if things go well and the site does make more money than it costs to run it, I will keep geographically separated servers (may be some years away) but definitely more reliable than one's own computer, especially because servers are run by professionals and not the average non-techie.

I explained this to you before, but as I suspected might be the
case, you're totally impervious to reason.

I personally regard you as positive danger to anyone foolish enough to
fall victim to your nonsense. I intended to totally ignore you following
my last post, but it seems abundandantly clear that you have a hidden
agenda, and that your fantasies could prove positively harmful

Sure you may avoid using my service but since I posted here I have had over 10 new registered users. So some people do see value in what I am doing.


I just happened to come across this column last night while browsing
through some old Robert X Cringely columns. This is from
August 2002

I happen to regard Cringely's (not his real name) opinions on
most IT topics equal to those of most other people worth listening to.
Never mind UseNet fantasists such as your self.

And please don't expect any reply because I really have wasted enough time
on paying attention to your foolish nonsense.

I don't expect anything from you!

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020829.html


< selective quotes>

i, cringely

AUGUST 29, 2002

How IBM's Departure From the Disk Drive Business is Likely
to Change an Entire Industry

[...]

If I was writing this column two years ago, I might be covering the whole
area of Internet data storage, for that was at a time when you could get
free data storage on web sites - a business that has pretty much gone away.
And what's interesting is not that those businesses existed, but what
lessons they taught us through their departure. If you hand over your data
to some third party, what happens when they go out of business or change
their policies such that the erotic e-mail you were saving to savor in your
golden years is suddenly gone? Even mighty Microsoft has been whittling down
the storage for its Hotmail users. They recently eliminated long term
storage
of read mail for certain users, making the mistake of implementing the
change
- erasing the messages - before announcing that they were going to do so.

Can you trust a third party to reliably hold your data? I don't, and I don't
think you should, either. And this leads us, thankfully, to an area where I
think there is considerable room for growth - personal private and mobile
data storage. Why shouldn't we be able to take with us all the data we
really
value?I think the data we really value is a small subset of the data stored
in our PCs. I was amazed to learn, for example, that user data typically
comprises less than 10 percent of the data on most PC hard drives. The rest
is application and system code. Think about it. You have a dozen or more
applications and probably the installer for each on your system, yet how
many letters or reports have you actually done with that word processor,
and what are the total storage requirements for all those spreadsheets
for your failed Internet startups? It is a lot less than you think.

</quote>


michael adams

...



Everything has it's pros and cons. In your case you should immediately take backups of your PC and everything you store electronically on DVDs/Flash cards or some such and put them in your safe deposit box. Because a home user is definitely more likely to lose his/her own data than a web service provider.
.

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