USB2.0 is considerably slower than an internal IDE drive. USB 2.0 is 480 megabit/s, and the final generation ATA 133 spec is 133 megabyte/s, which is around 1065 megabit/s, so over twice as fast. Ditto for things like latency. While the hard drives of the time physically couldn’t saturate a PATA connection, the difference in speed was still easily noticed.

At the time, if you wanted a fast external drive you used Firewire, which I actually did. I had several drives that were Firewire 800 but also included USB2.0 to connect to computers that lacked Firewire. I don’t recall if any of my motherboards that have Firewire built in can boot off of it but I kind of doubt it.

Later we had eSata for a brief period of time. I still miss it as it’s not as fast as USB3.0 which is the only option even today on many new external drives.

I remember seeing IDE drives all the way up to 1TB. Anything over 80GB was pretty uncommon though.

I had some 320GB IDE drives in my nForce2 chipset Socket A system, which thanks to the southbridge used on the motherboard, I had USB2.0 but no SATA support.

My personal experience with hard drives that have been sitting around for a long time and then pushed back into regular use is that they’ll work for a bit then suddenly just quit.

So I wouldn’t trust it for anything important, like being your only backup. As an additional backup (you can never have too many backups) it’ll be fine.

There was that one episode where Data single-handedly hijacked the Enterprise-D and took it on a joyride to go visit Dr. Noonien Soong and there was basically fuck-all the rest of the crew was able to do about it.

Turned out it was due to some sort of homing device in Data’s head that wasn’t supposed to work that way and it wasn’t going to happen again, etc. etc., but after that I would have been a bit cautious of allowing Data access to anything important.

The Flintstones also did a bit of a pivot too - they realized they were picking up more kids in their audience so they shifted from an adult sitcom to more of a family friendly show. The later episodes do have a bit of a different feel from the earlier ones.

Also, many of the later reruns on The Cartoon Network, etc. ditched the original laugh track (and good riddance), and that also gave the show less of a sitcom feel.

I have the Logitech F310 and I can also say it’s a good controller. Works flawlessly on Linux, and has never given me any trouble. Buttons always worked, no drift issues. Can’t really ask for more.

I realize it’s a fairly basic controller, but every time I’ve taken a look at maybe upgrading I’ve ended up concluding that just sticking with using the F310 is the best option.

That’s my main memory of Cracker Barrel. It was a place we’d sometimes stop and eat at when I was a kid during the family road trips. In that sense, I have some good memories associated with them, but I’m not particularly nostalgic for the brand and I’ve not been to one in years.

That’s what I assumed was being referenced, or is there some other joke I’m missing?

In any case, for those that haven’t seen that episode of TNG, don’t watch it. It’s terrible.

With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.

While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.

I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.

The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.

Next year should be 100% Linux for me. Steam is dropping support for Windows 7 at the end of this year, and I don’t have any other newer Windows PC to run Steam on.