Comment Re:Prior Art: (Score 1) 342
More prior art: The television set. The program will not continue until the ads have played.
What Data Recovery Tools Do the Pros Use? 399
Life2Death writes "I've been working with computers for a long time, and every once and a while someone close to me has a drive go belly up on them. I know there are big, expensive recovery houses that specialize in mission-critical data recovery, like if your house blew up and you have millions of files you need or something, but for the local IT group, what do you guys use? Given that most people are on NTFS (Windows XP) by the numbers, what would you use? I found a ton of tools when I googled, and everyone and their brother suggests something else, so I want to know what software 'just works' on most recoveries of bad, but partially working hard drives. Free software always has a warm spot in my heart."
Comment Re:WWOOOSSSHHHH!!! KKRRCK-BOOOOMM!!!! (Score 1) 398
Indeed, Colbert is providing a valuable service, in that he will discourage organizations from making important decisions via public opinion polls in the future.
Colbert has simply shown how inherently vulnerable these votes are to manipulation. PZ Myers has been doing this sort of thing for years.
Public poll competitions are a thinly disguised publicity stunt. Frequently, they simply demean and trivialize the event they are promoting. In the case of NASA, this poll has been a farce from day one.
Comment Warranty no help in this situation (Score 2, Informative) 446
This happened to me, too. In September, I had a complete hard drive crash in my MacBook. It was still under warranty, so I took it to the store, and was offered the same deal (only w/o the $160 charge). The bulk of my data was backed up, but there were some things I was worried about losing and a few others I knew I'd lost. I wanted to keep the possibility of sending the drive to a recovery firm while still getting my computer back, but Apple makes no provision for that. They insist on keeping the dead drive.
It was worth it for me to just buy a new (and bigger) drive so I could keep the old one. I still haven't decided if the lost data is worth the effort of recovery, but at least I have that option now.
Submission + - Boris Yeltsin died today.
reporter writes: "Boris Yeltsin died today. He was the first president of post-Soviet Russia and fully dismantled the Communist system. The "Guardian Unlimited" of the United Kingdom just published a somewhat comical report highlighting elements of his unusual life. The best quote from the report is, "At the height of the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev [in 1991 August], the then foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, found Mr Yeltsin passed out on the carpet with an empty vodka bottle beside him, not phoning round world leaders.""
