Hello there.

Floating about posting this into Podrush from Livewriter Beta running inside a Windows7VM on my 2nd Gen Intel MacBook Pro.
First impressions are that this is actually usable, which is a great start. Vista was not I'm afraid, and if this is the Beta, bring it on. |This is the most stable beta I have ever used. Ever.

It boots from cold in about 45 seconds and resumes from hibernation in the VM in moments.

I am running it in unity mode which means I have a single documents folder on the mac which I can use and save into from the Win7 VM. This means that not having to run a parallel documents folder is a huge benefit. This is the most stable beta of any product never mind OS that I have ever tested. I am a fan.

What's not to love?

The failure rate for Lacie devices is quite extrordinary. I cannot believe that they can actually make money from a product that spends a large amount of it's time whirring around the RMA cycle or indeed whirring noisily in it's death throes. Working in the film and video sector one encounters an endless stream of poor users that have consigned their data to a Lacie, only for it to quite predictably and inevitably fail. Why?  It is the HEAT that is the killer.

If you guage the temperature that these un cooled enclosures reach in a cool room and they run hot! Now put one of them hooked up to a machine via its USB or firewire port around the back of a rack in the machine room and you will find the drive cooking at well over 40 degrees plus. Or in a typical office it will be simmering away under the desk, or on top of a machine until it dies or directories and data disappear.

below is a classic leaf out of a book of someone else's experience:

Extremely high faliure rate  (you can follow this link for the pages of user reviews)

User Rating

Product Experience
1

Strengths: great looking, excellent box design

Weaknesses: reliability, quality

Summary: I work for a design firm and we bought about 10 of these drives over the past year or two, nearly all of them have failed. I thought it could be due to mulitple users, heavy workload or general misuse. Well, unfortunately, the LaCie 250gig drive I bought for home use died as well. I used it solely for music, 3 to 4 time a week, well taken care of, sat on a shelf, adequate ventilation, very light use. This was the second time in three months that it died. The first time, I reformatted the drive and it worked. This time I wasn't so lucky, the drive just died. No disc utility could repair it. I was cautious of these drives from my experience at work so everything was backed up. But I will never buy another product from LaCie, we switched to another manufacturer at work and we have had no problems.

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Is this the only one? No there are hundreds, nay thousands of cases like this. This post may seem non scientific in pointing out how poor this product is, however you don't need to be a scientist to percieve a hugely disproportionate failure rate. As a solutions provider, support dude and integrator I see more than my fair share. You know what is good and what is not.

Be kind to yourself and your data. Don't buy Lacie!

LG announced the  LGBH200 Super Blu Player for watching both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs earlier this month. It'll cost $999 when it ships in October.

Apparently, the LGBH200 will have HDi support, 1080p output at 50/60Hz and 1080p upscaling of standard DVDs. It will be able to play audio CDs, and go online for bonus content. It can also access a full set of Blu-ray interactive features-where available.

This is however one of a slew of multi format players coming down the pike, there is one from Samsung at a similar price sporting both the Blu-ray and HD DVD  capability also.
This is a trend I think that will continue until one format finally wins out, (if it ever does)and given that increasingly these disk formats support greater functionality in their second and third generations of interactivity- ie the features that users can access when driving menus and controls- it seems nuts to bank on one format.

Would you ever want anything that cant play both?