Posted on 04/26/2013 10:05:30 PM PDT by grundle
That's the price Jingming Zhang, 28, a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., is offering for the data on his laptop, which was stolen on April 19.
Zhang was so distraught that he posted a flyer on the wall of the Wright-Rieman building, from where his computer was taken sometime between 10 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.
"If you stole my laptop and now you are reading this letter, I would like to say that you can keep the computer and I would like to pay you money for my data under D drive," he wrote. "The data is my FIVE-YEAR work."
Zhang's laptop had been in an unlocked room in Wright-Rieman, which houses laboratories.
Moral of the story: Lock your door. And always back up your data.
(Excerpt) Read more at gma.yahoo.com ...
Not to pick on the victim, as it's not his fault - but how could he not make any backups on something that he worked on for five years?
I guess he at least learned 1 thing!
He doesn’t need the data. He isn’t smart enough to get through a successful life anyway.
I’ve saw a multi-million dollar company go under, once, because they’d never bothered to swap the tape in their automated backup system. We’d built the system, for them, to run daily incrementals M-Th, and full backups on F. We’d even eject the tape, when we were done. All they had to do was to put in the next day’s tape (or the next of the set of four F tapes), when they came in in the morning.
When their disk packed up, it turned out that they’d been pushing the Tu tape back in, every day, and their most recent full backup was ten months old.
We made sure they got our bill, before they declared bankruptcy.
I know plenty of smart people who lack common sense..it appears he is one of them.
It sounds like he suspects somebody in the government stole it. The thief gets to keep the computer and make a 1000 bucks if the guy gets his folder back. The thief has to be somebody in the government. Probably a politician.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of hard drives going the speed limit.
Must be working on Global warming.
Now that he has put out his desperation in mentioning a/the grand instead of mentioning just a ‘good/nice/fair etc. reward’, (the crook might have been thinking 50 bucks would be fine before, if a buy back was offered to him, but not now!!) The person with that lap top can now decide a grand ain’t gonna get it! The price of poker just went up imo.
PhD huh? Sounds like he’s got some work to do. Like a lot of “docs”, he’s not as bright as he thinks. I’ve known quite a few and they, for the most part, were pretty useless. Not in my foxhole thank you very much.
>>Not to pick on the victim, as it’s not his fault
But it is. No different than leaving your keys in the ignition when shopping. This was just waiting to happen and what with Dropbox, Google Drive, and many other drag and drop places to back up data, there is no excuse for it.
Also, a word to the wise - one backup is not enough. If it is corrupted for some reason, and that does happen, you’re screwed. Rotate versions once a week over the period of a month - doesn’t take long.
That is so true!
No backup on his life’s work, and he asks the thief to give him contact info so he can reward him ...
What a maroon!
All you need is Sugar Sync. It automatically syncs up with what you are doing on your laptop as long as it is connected to the internet. And most college campus have wifi everywhere.
I helped set up a few relatives in college with it. They get the paying editions for about $50/year. They have free editions which keep 5Gb in “the cloud” for you or a student
There are other services like Sugar Sync.
Say the student is typing a paper into MS Word. Every time he presses save button (or control+S) he is saving what he has done thus far onto his hard drive AND onto “the cloud” with Sugar Sync
This student with stolen laptop could have survived with the free 5GB edition I am sure. The paper he worked on for years could not have been more than 10-100mb depending on how much graphics
FWIW
Was his master thesis titled “The Importance of Backing Up Information”?
Yes, this was how it was explained to me, as I remember on a particular occasion, after I was hired as a Ph.D. in 1979. I related a few years ago on this forum, when asked about my FR tag, how I was regaled with stories of Ph.D. new hires sitting all day and shooting rubber bands into the waste basket, and how I was given this appellation by a coworker in the spirit of gentle ( as I choose to believe ) ribbing. All in all, I made out OK. No complaints.
Hey doc. Not all PhD’s are useless I agree. But sometimes I have to wonder how some of them were able to put a thesis together. Our oldest daughter has just been accepted in to a PhD program at 46 so hopefully some of her life experience will guide her well. And, congrats on making it work for you. LOL!
His laptop that got stolen goes for good money on ebay. If this was his life’s work he should have backed it up on an external hard drive....less than $70 these days. Got one for a college student. He never used it but he did use Sugar Sync so if his laptop was stolen or hard drive crashed all his important work was backed up in “the cloud”
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