I've been looking at La Cie drives for the exact same purposes, but haven't committed yet. Anyone have one?
I've had a couple of LaCie's, perfectly happy with them.
Was the original place looking for a brand, or a place to purchase?
Our IT guy uses MacMall all the time. I have a LaCie that works great and has very solid construction. I saw a 500GB one on sale at Amazon recently for around $160.
I have a LaCie and, so far, no problems with it.
I had a LaCie one a while back. It was okay. There was some issue where it wouldn't simply overwrite old files with newer versions. Now I have a Seagate that supposedly has handy one-touch backup, but I haven't used it yet (don't tell Mr. B.).
5: You can even get the ones that look like lego bricks!
6: That seems like a file-system level issue, not hardware ....
This is sort of a pet peeve of mine, since there's widespread misunderstanding of how voting procedures work, and this misunderstanding affects the way people make judgments of responsibility. (E.g., grumbling about the do-nothing Congress, unable to do anything about immigration.)
No kidding! Just because the Republican senate intimidated the Democrats into never using their filibuster power doesn't mean the Democrats should do the same. I don't think. I mean, it'd be nice.
But yeah, the constant calls for Harry Reid's head I find a little ridiculous. Look at what he has to work with!
if you held to the illusion that people with doctoral degrees are smart and competent.
Guess it takes a union card instead. I'm about to head to our annual convention, which runs on very strict parliamentary procedure. At least once every year, someone figures out a smart parliamentary manuever to diffuse a contentious debate or try to swing something their way.
We've used Lacies at work and they've been fine, and I have a cheap Freecom external drive at home which, so far, has worked flawlessly in the year or so I've had it. I looked into external storage recently for a work project but it was overkill [many many TB] for most people's needs so there's not much point reporting it. There are loads of 1TB and 0.5TB cheap solutions out there.
which would surprise you if you held to the illusion that people with doctoral degrees are smart and competent
Nothing like a bit of time in acedemia to cure one of this.
What sucks about our meetings, SKraab, is that if I tried that I'd be shouted down by people appealing to TRADITION and how we don't do things like that. Was it by the rules? Yes, but it's still naughty, apparently.
Oh, the fun we had with Robert's Rules of Order back in high-school Model U.N.
8: I think it was the software (obvs), but if memory serves--which it may not--it was the software that came with the drive.
NewEgg has cheap prices and a reasonably easy to use website. If you have firewire 800 on your mac (rectangular plug with an aspect ratio of about 2:3 with a smaller rectangle inside it), you should probably get a firewire 800 drive because it's fast as hell. Otherwise, USB 2.0 or Firewire will be about the same in observed speeds. Something like this would be fine.
Speaking of which, my union convention that is, anyone have any groovy Toronto tips on restaurants & sightseeing?
re: 16
eSATA can be quicker, I believe. But a lot more fiddly [and not really Mac-centric].
15: well, I don't know what your particular set up at the time was, but generally I though with these things there is no additional software needed; you format the thing with a file system your system(s) support and away you go. Perhaps there are some odd win32 driver issues (still?) floating around, but I'm mostly windows ignorant these days....
Some file systems are much better than others, though.
17: A few quick ones, Sir Kraab: Blue Nile if you like ethiopian. 3-4 really good french style places. See the ROM (royal ontario museum) if you have a chance, they've just opened a big new section and I know nothing abou that, though. Kensington market is worth a wander through and stop for snack or lunch. How much time do you have, and what sorts of things are your favourites?
17: Go to Queen St. and buy me things. Thanks.
Ditto LaCie. Their Porsche line is nicely designed and solidly built -- you can find refurbs on their site for cheap.
Jesus - how quite is the Porsche line?
20: Souz, I will actually have not that much time, but M/tch M/lls will have plenty while I'm convening.
We're both history nerds (someone else told me about an exhibit on the history of typewriters, which sounds excellent) and willing to do the regular touristy things if they're worthwhile. Is it worth going up in the big tower thing?
Your other suggestions are right on target. Wandering and eating Ethiopian (or almost anything interesting and likely to have at least a few vegetarian dishes) sound like a good time.
I don't have any basis for comparison, but I'd say very.
I always regretted not making it to Jane and Finch.
Addendum to 26: By "plenty," I mean 3 days.
In political controversies deliberate confusion is routinely thrown in the differences between investigation, probable cause, indictment, trial, convicting and sentence, as well as the differences between criminal standard of evidence and proof andpolitical standards of evidence and proof (much weaker). So you'll ask that Rove (frex) be investigated, and you'll be accused of convicting him without trial.
The "no underlying crime" soundbite is of this kind. Fitzpatrick brought the perjury indictment because he though that Libby's perjury had impeded his investigation of the crime.
People do this all the time and no one ever calls them on it.
I have a G-Drive from the Apple store that works fine.
21: Go to Queen St. and buy me things.
Is this related to your advice to Becks to buy super-fancy underwear in Las Vegas?
26: I've never been up the CN tower ... I expect it's much like other touristy tall things to go up and look at a big city --- it's just the sort of thing you'd like, if that's the sort of thing you like, if you get my drift.
Oh, I screwed up `the blue nile' is one in Montreal I know. The one in Torotonto is `the Queen of Sheba'. I haven't been there for a few years, but in the past at least it was one of the best Ethiopian meals I've ever had. I can dig up some other restraunt suggestions if you'd like.
Besides the ROM (which really is a top rate museum, so sounds like you'd both enjoy it) there aren't a lot of `touristy' places I've been to there. The city has a lot of neat walkable neighborhoods, and I'm far more likely to go for that sort of thing. When are you going? If the weather is hot + sticky, you might like that less than at other times. Jane and Finch definitely isn't one of them (that part of town is both a bit rough and a bit of a mess), so I really don't know why M.V. regrets not going there.
It is apparant in the Constitution that the Founders felt a do nothing Congress is not a bug, it's a feature.
Church St. is the gay part of town, if you want to see that.
33: No, I think underwear is something you should accept only from people you're sleeping with.
The big tower thingie is worth going up in if you like that sort of thing. They've got a big thick glass panel in the floor that's totally freaky. Kensington Market is enjoyable if you like outdoor markets, especially at this time of year, and there's a little Taqueria tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac on the west side of it that's surprisingly good, given how shitty Mexican food in Ontario is. Sushi on Bloor is definitely worth a visit, if you like sushi. And Bloor St., too, has good shopping.
Toronto chinatown is pretty awesome, but I don't know what streets to tell you.
You can get an internal hard drive and an enclosure for a lot less money than you'd spend on an equivalent external hard drive. Very minor assembly required. Newegg is a good outlet for that kind of stuff.
33, 37: Buy your mom some ugly underwear, to make up for all the ugly stuff she bought for you when yu were in her power.
I wasn't talking to you, B. I was talking to PK.
Doesn't the phrase "socks for Christmas" mean anything to you?
38: There is better Chinese food in Richmond Hill (an affluent, largely Chinese populated suburb)
I would go for Jamaican or Portuguese. Bairrada Churrasqueira is supposed to be good. There's lots of Jamaican places.
Portuguese, if anything like in Portugal, will be hopeless for vegetarian options. Jamaican not hopeless, but not great.
42: As his long hair indicates, I tend to ask PK's opinion about his fashion choices.
"Mom, these underpants are really wonderful."
The blue-eyed look -- that lies!
His dad mostly buys his underwear. Nice try, though.
You don't need to be defensive. Many wonderful people are abusive parents.
I second the suggestion of the Royal Ontario Museum--it's very good. Well worth visiting.
My lovely wife is about to order a 1TB USB drive. Woot!
Good lord. I don't know if this happens to anybody else, but for several years I've been nursing this inexplicable resentment at how cheap storage has gotten. It's like, a Terabyte should be expensive, dammit!
Heh. Just over $300. And you're right, it doesn't even seem real.
It's the "you kids get off my lawn!" of gadget lust, I suppose.
54: I'm not feeling the resentment, only amazement. I can recall writing P.O.s for 10 megabytes for $thousands.
I remember choosing for budgetary reasons which of the following things I would get on my computer:
A) 256K of RAM instead of 128
B) DVD drive
C) CD-R writer
D) ZIP-250 drive
pick any two. That was only 7 years ago dammit!
You kiddies probably don't remember the Commodore 64.......
57: oh, absolutely. I remember crashing the Corvus (5MB networked hard drive shared among about 25 Apple ][s) we had at my school. I mean, sheesh, Toy Story took one Terabyte of storage, and it was a big damn deal at the time.
There's just something so accelerated about it. I'm no believer in singularity horsepucky, but geez. Exponential change is kind of weird.
58: pretty sure you mean MB, there, not K. If not, somebody was ripping you off something fierce.
61 is correct. About the MB, not the being ripped off, except that the ZIP drive did feel like a ripoff when USB drives appeared shortly thereafter.
Singularity: the rapture of the nerds.
Re: Toronto...
The ROM Crystal, designed by Donal Liebskind, is complete, but not open (except for the restaurant). I went last month when they opened it for a few days, but it is now closed so that they can put in the displays. It seems to me that there is a ridiculously long lag time to the opening of the entire thing...I think the last wing of the Crystal won't be open until winter/08.
College Street is fun at night, especially in the summer. Lots of people and patios.
Baldwin street is a little out of the way pedestrian street with great eats.
It might be worth your while to take the ferry to Toronto Island, which is a real gem. It gives you a great perspective on the city skyline, and is a nice quiet place.
The key to enjoying Toronto in the summer is getting to whatever street festival is going on that particular weekend. There's always something, so where you should go is predicated on when you are coming.
63: ain't that the truth. I'm really embarrassed for some of the people I've talked to about that nonsense.
"No, no, but things are changing way faster now!" "Yes, everybody notices that in their lifetimes." "But nooooooow it's speeeeecial!"
65: It wasn't all that long ago that I "knew" the end of disease (especially the infectious flavors), routine supersonic tourist travel, household robots, and self-driving cars were almost here. I'm settling for Haagen Dazs Mayan Chocolate.
Well, household robots are here in their way. You've also lived to see the end of commercial supersonic flight and self-parking cars, so that's something.
That's the thing that gets me most about Kurzweil. It's not just that he assumes that these technological advances will come right on the button, it's that he assumes that everything will work 100% correctly. How can a man with as much experience as he has with technology believe that?
59 - I had a Commodore 64. In fact, I've got a C-128 upstairs in my room right now.
59: Please. I wrote my MA thesis on one of those.
I had a Comodore 64, too. And that was my upgrade, bitches.
66: Jet packs! Where the hell are our jet packs?
Becks is 100 years old in computer years.
TLL, It isn't apparent that the Framers expected a do-nothing Congress. They're given freedom to establish their rules of operation.
I still want a flying car. I was promised a flying car. And not a personal helicopter.
I was quoted $18,000 on 512Mb of Mb of ram once, if that helps. Of course, that was in the latter half of the 90's and I laughed it out of the office.....
Please, TJ. Two deliberative bodies, that then have to agree with each other to pass a law? They knew from gridlock.
actually it might have been 256 Mb.
I want this flying car. It's one of the few things still capable of inspiring my jaded technolust.
pop culture agrees
Ha! That almost never happens.
The CN Tower in Toronto can be fun if only for the bizarre feeling of standing on glass so bloody high off the ground. I would say it's worth going up at least once, though not enough to wait if there's a long line.
Kensington Market, absolutely. Casa Loma, while a standard touristy thing, is nice and could be fun for history buffs. Toronto's museums are generally good - I am a fan of the Ontario Art Gallery.
Thanks for all the Toronto info. We head up there on Saturday and will report back on our findings, underwear shopping-related and otherwise.
82: Have fun! This has reminded me --- we should have another texas get together sometime.
If it's Toronto this weekend, there's the Fringe Festival that's worthwhile.
Now Magazine is the best resource for what's going on in TO.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/current/
Enjoy your stay.
And I don't have much to add on the sightseeing that hasn't been said, except: 1) I thought the CN Tower was worth it the day after a storm cleared the air, but probably wouldn't have gone up had it been as hazy/smoggy as the day before; 2) just walking around various neighborhoods is nice, but I couldn't tell you where I went specifically; 3) Casa Loma was certainly interesting, but there's another house-turned-museumish nearby on the same hill that's built more in the style of normal rich people's homes from roughly the same period which I thought I got more out of. But that might be the result of my particular historical interests; there were certainly far more people at Casa Loma. I can't remember what it was called, though.
How could I forget? Toronto also has a shoe museum, which--shockingly and to my everlasting regret--I haven't visited.
Other World Computing: (macsales.com) has the best by far in my experience. Enclosures, kits, bare drives, etc....
OK then. I had a computer made out of popsicle sticks with 2 centabytes of memory.
I hacked your computer with a grape.
Me and my brothers had a ZX81 that we bought with our saved-up pocket money. We did spring for the luxury of 16K of RAM.
Toronto: the Distillery District has a bunch of old converted warehouses with a fancy chocolates shop and Balzac's coffee. It was our 2nd favorite thing to do (after the CN tower's glass floor).
Thanks for all the Toronto advice, good people of Unfogged. And soubz is right, we should have a Texas meet-up again sometime soon. And/or, we'll also be sure to let you know the next time we're over Houston way.
ttaM, I just had a two-year-old Freecom drive go sour on me. It went quite elegantly, in the end refusing to read only half a dozen files of all that I was trying to get off; but also mysteriously, in that disk-checking programs wouldn't report errors. They wouldn't reformat it, either.
I think that hard drives really should las tlonge rthan two years.
re: 96
Ah, crap. That is a bit worrying. I just bought a dSLR (one of the new samsung/pentax k-mount jobs) and will be producing a lot more data. Reliable external storage is a must. Oh well, I see a 1TB Lacie or some kind of RAID setup in my future, then.
which Pentax? a K10? Should I be seriously envious? I do want the anti-shake, but not as much, I think, as I want a pancake lens for my existing body.
Freshman year in college, fall of 1993, there was a guy in my dorm from a very small town in Iowa who had used a Commodore 64 all through highschool. He said that he had always known that it was really old, but it was still something of a shock to see it included in an exhibit of historical computers in the basement of the Science Center.
re: 98
The Samsung GX10 (which is the K10 with slightly different firmware), yeah. Not arrived yet, should arrive at the weekend. I already have a load of K-mount lenses so either the Samsung or the K10 was the only logical choice.