Someone had suggested using Git and I was going to suggest the same. If you are only backing up documents then it should be easy enough to create repos on the USB HDD, Laptop and USB drive. You can then commit/merge changes between repos to keep in sync, perhaps use some shell scripts to ease administration.
Also, I use a product called Super Flexible File Synchronizer to sync a subfolder on my laptop's filesystem with a WebDAV server. It's got lots of features and supports Linux, Windows and Mac.
http://www.superflexible.com/
First of all I complete understand your point. It's annoying that applications are run in a sandbox and can't access other areas of the filesystem. But on the other hand I'm sure you recognize that there is a big security risk with applications being able to access any location (or even a shared one) in the filesystem. I'm sure Apple could come up with a secure way for different applications to have some shared space but I guess it's not a priority.
Have you tried Papers (http://itunes.apple.com/app/papers/id304655618?mt=8)? It's an iPad application for managing academic papers and other PDFs. It also has a desktop version for Mac OS X which it can sync with. It supports annotations as well as searching within your library. It even integrates with major sources like ACM, ADS, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTORE, and PubMed so you can download directly to the device. It imports all kinds of metadata for you.
I don't know if this will solve your problem but it certainly did for me (being able to carry around my library of papers and annotate them).
IMHO the big fight for Android is brand recognition/differentiation. When I look around my large extended family almost all of them are using iPods and iPhones. Even my elderly father knows about iPhone and iPod and has been asking me questions about these devices. Although I haven't, I'm pretty sure that if I asked one of my family members about Android they wouldn't know what I'm talking about. At best they might know it's made by Google. They certainly wouldn't know why Android is better.
Even when I speak to people who have Android devices, the usual reasons they give me for Android being better is that the device and app stores are not locked down. Neither of these reasons really make any difference to most people since it's usually very niche apps that get rejected from the app store. Try telling a kid he has a limited device while play Plant vs Zombies, or GTA China Town Wars.
I believe that until Android can become a household name it will struggle to dominate market. In fact I think that the recent surge of Android sales is really just filling the void of potential smartphone users who didn't want to go with Apple. Once this void fills up I think sales are going to slow down again.
So much for all us geeks who like to play around with the hardware and learn things. If everything back in the day was as closed as Steve Jobs wants it to be now, do you think we geeks could have learned so much ourself? Just to code some simple hello world application you would have needed to buy a "coding" license from Apple. Not really feasible for a 10 year old kid who is just starting to learn programming.
You must be looking at how Apple controls mobile devices and not desktops. A license is not required to develop Mac software (or even iOS software as long as you don't intend deploy it to the device). To look at how Jobs controls access to mobile devices and to extend that same logic to the desktop is a little naive. A desktop computer that wasn't open to creating new content or building software etc. would be pretty useless and nobody would use it. Unlike mobile devices which really are for communicating and content consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this isn't quite true. Introduced with iOS 6 is a new Auto Layout API to handle different screen sizes.
Someone had suggested using Git and I was going to suggest the same. If you are only backing up documents then it should be easy enough to create repos on the USB HDD, Laptop and USB drive. You can then commit/merge changes between repos to keep in sync, perhaps use some shell scripts to ease administration. Also, I use a product called Super Flexible File Synchronizer to sync a subfolder on my laptop's filesystem with a WebDAV server. It's got lots of features and supports Linux, Windows and Mac. http://www.superflexible.com/
First of all I complete understand your point. It's annoying that applications are run in a sandbox and can't access other areas of the filesystem. But on the other hand I'm sure you recognize that there is a big security risk with applications being able to access any location (or even a shared one) in the filesystem. I'm sure Apple could come up with a secure way for different applications to have some shared space but I guess it's not a priority. Have you tried Papers (http://itunes.apple.com/app/papers/id304655618?mt=8)? It's an iPad application for managing academic papers and other PDFs. It also has a desktop version for Mac OS X which it can sync with. It supports annotations as well as searching within your library. It even integrates with major sources like ACM, ADS, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, JSTORE, and PubMed so you can download directly to the device. It imports all kinds of metadata for you. I don't know if this will solve your problem but it certainly did for me (being able to carry around my library of papers and annotate them).
IMHO the big fight for Android is brand recognition/differentiation. When I look around my large extended family almost all of them are using iPods and iPhones. Even my elderly father knows about iPhone and iPod and has been asking me questions about these devices. Although I haven't, I'm pretty sure that if I asked one of my family members about Android they wouldn't know what I'm talking about. At best they might know it's made by Google. They certainly wouldn't know why Android is better. Even when I speak to people who have Android devices, the usual reasons they give me for Android being better is that the device and app stores are not locked down. Neither of these reasons really make any difference to most people since it's usually very niche apps that get rejected from the app store. Try telling a kid he has a limited device while play Plant vs Zombies, or GTA China Town Wars. I believe that until Android can become a household name it will struggle to dominate market. In fact I think that the recent surge of Android sales is really just filling the void of potential smartphone users who didn't want to go with Apple. Once this void fills up I think sales are going to slow down again.
So much for all us geeks who like to play around with the hardware and learn things. If everything back in the day was as closed as Steve Jobs wants it to be now, do you think we geeks could have learned so much ourself? Just to code some simple hello world application you would have needed to buy a "coding" license from Apple. Not really feasible for a 10 year old kid who is just starting to learn programming.
You must be looking at how Apple controls mobile devices and not desktops. A license is not required to develop Mac software (or even iOS software as long as you don't intend deploy it to the device). To look at how Jobs controls access to mobile devices and to extend that same logic to the desktop is a little naive. A desktop computer that wasn't open to creating new content or building software etc. would be pretty useless and nobody would use it. Unlike mobile devices which really are for communicating and content consumption.