We all know how much it sucks to have a hard drive fail – months or even years worth of data down the drain. And I bet you don’t do regular backups, do you?

I came across ReclaiME from a review site. It’s software (that unfortunately only works on Windows) that you can install on your computer to reliably recover data from hard drives or memory cards.  More specifically, it lets you:

• Recover images from a memory card
• Recover data from flash/USB drives
• Recover data from laptop, external, and SCSI/IDE drives
• Unformat non-system drives and partitions

I actually ReclaiME on one of my sister’s old camera memory cards, and it definitely doesn’t fall short of its claims.   It recovered over 40 images from the almost-empty card, most of which were intact, though a few were corrupted from the camera overwriting them.

While the software is excellent and works just like it promises, the only downside is that the price is a bit steep for the average user.  I’d imagine that software like this would be more tangible for service providers, businesses, or people that consider their data valuable enough to justify spending a pretty penny on data recovery software.  The price isn’t outrageous or anything, it’s just more than I’d pay for Windows-based recovery software (I prefer to use Linux), when there are other free/open-source alternatives out there:

http://lifehacker.com/5237503/five-best-free-data-recovery-tools

It takes a real ego to turn down $2 BILLION dollars. That’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder/CEO of Facebook, did when Yahoo and Viacom offered to buy him out. I was reading this in Fast Company this morning and I was couldn’t believe that two of the largest marketing firms in the world would want to buy a MySpace wannabe. I can’t really blame him for turning it down, though…since in a couple years his little business might be worth twice that much. According to Fast Company, the worth of Facebook is based these facts:

• It consists of over 47,000 college, high school, employee, and regional networks
• It handles over 600 million searches and mor than 30 billion page views a month
• It’s the 6th most-trafficked site in the U.S.
• It’s the biggest photo sharing site on the web, with 6 milling being added daily to it’s database of over 1 billion
• It grows at an average percent of 3% a week, which is a lot faster than my boobs grow.

Even though this kid could probably buy all the pocket protectors he wants, I’m still not sure of what he was deserving of a 7-page long article in FC. There’s nothing interesting enough about this kid to hold my attention for 7 pages, considering that in high school I ordered the cliffs notes for the Joy Luck Club, then ended up hiring some guy to write my paper because it was still too long.

You can read the online version of the article here.

Just when we all though the world couldn’t get any worse, it seems that Google, O-Reilly, and Wired Magazine got together to name David Hansson (the creator of Rails) the Hottest Hacker on Earth. It’s like they just decided to come up with a new award that no one’s ever heard of. What now? Is this kid going to get a scholarship to Harvard? Is he going to land a gig with a top technology firm? Hardly not. You’ll most likely find him sitting on his couch wearing a wifebeater and chucking mustard at the TV. He is kind of cute though, but I could never marry a guy who’s middle name sounds like a penis metaphor.