Yes, you can boot Mac OS 10.6.4 via eSATA
As my MacBook Pro enters the twilight of its long and storied career as my day-to-day working machine, I have begun to back it up obsessively. I have Time Machine back up to a 500GB La Cie drive attached by USB to an Airport Extreme base station, and I clone the laptop disk each night (well, early morning—the backup is scheduled for 4 am) using SuperDuper! to a G-Drive 500GB portable. The G-Drive is definitely stylish looking. Its FW 800 ports seem to have quit, though (or maybe the MacBook Pro’s?). I think there’s a loose connection somewhere. It derails the SuperDuper! cloning routine, and, even though the cables are pretty well-seated in the ports on the laptop and the drive, the drive disconnects itself at random. I was at the Apple Store today—shopping for a new MacBook Pro, I might add—and I saw the same thing happening to the G-Drives connected to the laptops on display. So beware the G-Drive.
In any case, I was at the lab, and feeling *really* obsessive, and I started cloning the laptop to the 1TB LaCie drive I have there. I have that drive connected to my MacBook Pro by eSATA (External SATA), using the expansion card slot. I didn’t even consider whether the machine would boot from the eSATA drive when I started. I probably shouldn’t have admitted that—who would listen to someone who just goes right ahead without even doing a cursory Google search? Caveat lector—but, well, the cloning came off without a hitch, as did booting from the eSATA drive. Also: it was FAST!
“Avalanche control” in scientific literature: A role for informatics
In “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research,” it is claimed that much of the scientific research literature published recently is “redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor” and that “research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs.” “Countless” is intended in a negative sense here. No argument is provided for the first claim, unless the claims about frequency of citation—generally very low, if at all, for any paper in the literature—are to be taken as an argument that recent literature is poor in quality. It does seem clear that the authors believe that there is too much literature, and it seems to me that their claims and arguments that there is too much literature might be just as strong if it weren’t paired with the argument that the literature is generally low in quality.
Taking a larger view, the problem is probably worse than the “Avalanche” authors suggest. A prominent case in point: the Biodiversity Heritage Library, whose holdings amount at present to 30,512,292 pages in 80,976 volumes, is growing daily, and more and more libraries are joining the project, including those in Europe and the Pacific rim. (Perhaps the “Avalanche” authors would find this reassuring. Back in the good old days, when men were real men (and women didn’t do science), only what was worth reading was published, and everyone read it.) Nonetheless, finding works relevant to a given topic is difficult and will become more so.
WHOI Top Stories- Sand, Sun, Waves ... and Bacteria?Every year bacteria close beaches nationwide. One student wants to know why.Elizabeth Halliday spent her summer at the beach, but she wasn't swimming or sunbathing. Instead, the MIT/WHOI Joint Program student traveled to Provincetown three times per week to collect samples of sand and water in order to study the source of bacteria that can lead to perio […]
- Sand, Sun, Waves ... and Bacteria?