Slashdot Mirror

http://hackaday.com/2010/03/31...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/14...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18...

http://www.extremetech.com/com...

https://www.avforums.com/threa...

Most any WiFi firmware artificially limits the radio -> http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/proj...

http://www.ilounge.com/index.p...

Whoa, your car has hidden features? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Extra cores on your CPU? No way! http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...

Cripple phone features? Oh noes! https://www.techdirt.com/artic... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

More than one HAM radio have been found to be subject to software tweaking for improvements in scan speed and frequencies covered.-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Got a RAID card? Some of them can be crossflashed to gain features BTW. Or you can pay thousands to the manufacturer for some features (*cough*PERC*cough*) http://www.servethehome.com/ib...

Gains can be had by flashing custom firmware to your DVD\BD RW drives but I didn't feel like spending any time past a cursory search to find this. http://binflash.cdfreaks.com/ http://www.rpc1.org/viewtopic.... http://dvrflash.rpc1.org/

Firmware being used in external HDD has also been found to be crippled vs a standard drive, this didn't used to always be the case....

Here's one that's just an upgrade with features the manufacturer didn't include (see also ANY Jailbreaking post ever)

http://lifehacker.com/find-out...
http://lifehacker.com/5942229/...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/p...

Oh look, your camera now supports RAW? Thought that was only for pro cameras not P&S pocket models...

I could go on and on with examples but suffice it to say yeah it DOES happen and it happens fairly often. It happens most often with system that have a full OS, often Linux, where a firmware flash can give you all sorts of features (OpenWRT or Tomato anyone?) but it also happens in cameras, lab bench tools, TVs, stereos, and just about anything else that is driven by software. Want more turbo boost in your car? Software baby! Want that printer to register an empty toner cartridge sooner? No problem!

Tired now, think I've made my point?

Here you go.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f114/all-those-owners-dvp642-flashing-standby-light-176005/

we're at a point where computational power is considered to be sufficient or in excess for normal, non-power users

Saying that is like saying "Nobody will ever need more than 640 kB RAM". In 2 years software will require more power.

Falcon

"I haven't trusted any vendor on pricewatch to deliver a product remotely resembling what I ordered, at the same price as on the website, in anything less than 2-3 weeks... for over 5 years. Used to use pricewatch religiously, until I started hitting something like a 20% failure rate on receiving my products..."

Your lack of trust or your run of bad luck is not up to debate. Point is you can currently purchase 1 terabyte drives for 8.7 cents a gigabyte. And while newegg is selling DVD-Rs at 4 cents a gigabyte (100 DVD-Rs for $18 shipped) you have to figure it takes nearly 5 minutes for a modern 20x DVD-R drive to burn 4.3 gigabytes. Add another minute to swap DVD's and you can see it would take hours to burn just 100 gigabytes.... 100 gig / 4.3 gigabytes = 24 dvds x 6 minutes/dvd = 144 minutes.

Based on these results of a dozen USB2 external hard drives we'll assume a slow USB2 rate of 25 mB/sec, or 1.5 gB/min, taking 66 minutes to transfer 100 gigabytes.

So you have 144 minutes vs 66 minutes, and don't forget 100gb on DVDs means swapping discs every 5 minutes for over 2 hours. Sounds like a fun way to waste 2 hours to save $4.38 cents ($8.70 for 100gb on a 1tb drive vs $4.32 for 24 DVD-Rs).

DVDs may be sufficient for less than 10gB of data, but if you're using it for weekly backups a few external hard drives would be much easier.

Thanks, however it's not looking good for stateside folks for TY DL: http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/where-buy-ty-dvd9-dl-disc-255018/ I guess if money is no object: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=yuden+dl

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/

You need certain brands of optical drives, but with them and this program (and others), you can see the PI/PO or C1/C2 correction (I can't remember which is for CD and which is for DVD) rates on a per-sector basis on your disc. As the rates rise, the disc is going bad, becoming marginally readable and you can copy the disc before it becomes unreadable.

You can find out which drives to buy at http://cdfreaks.com/. The terminology on there for a drive that can do this is a "scanning drive".

I have no idea if you will find that your correction rates are rising over time.

The obsessed people at CDFreaks can help. Here's a link to their FAQ on CD-R media:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/media-faq-61943/

In other places in the cdfreaks forums, you'll find links to tools that can read the C1/C2 error rates. One of the simplest is "readcd", part of the "cdrecord" programs on Linux.

In the DVD world, Lite-On and Plextor both make proprietary programs to read the media-level error rates which only work with their own drives. Lite-On has a Linux version of theirs.

I don't believe everything I read, but Archival Blu-Ray Disk (BD-R) are supposed to have a lifespan of 200 yrs.

A spindle of 10 disks is about $250.00.

So, if properly handled/sealed etc..., I think that even if it lasted only 1/4 of the lifespan they advertise, you got yourself a solution right there! :)

The following is the link to cd-freaks for the article on Archival Gold disks.

Archival Gold Article on CD-Freaks.com

Cheers!

The nomic looks pretty cool, might be adding that one later. Don't know who posted it, kinda got lost :S From top to bottom: all in English except otherwise mentioned. I'm using google reader.
1. Swedish travel journals of friends from resdagboken.com
2. Job that fits my search criteria at monster.ie
3. The Vinyl Café at http://cbc.ca/podcasting
4. CDFreaks News http://www.cdfreaks.com/news
5. Friend's blog
6. Another friend, probably not updating anymore. Book in blog form about a helpdesk. In Swedish. http://contactcentret.blogspot.com/
7. http://www.idg.se/ Swedish Computernews.
8. Another friend's blog.
9. Another friend's, probably not updating anymore.
10. Detroit Red Wings news.
11. Slashdot.
12. The Goliath Expedition. This dude is walking around the Earth. http://blog.goliath.mail2web.com/ Stalled at the moment though due to Russian VISA issues.
13. http://musicvsmusic.blogspot.com/ Pop Rock Indie Blog. Usually a bit emo music but sometimes they get it right. Sparsely updated.
14. non-working RSS feed for a Cybernations Alliance.
15. Three Panel Soul http://www.threepanelsoul.com/ Comic
16. http://www.tjuvlyssnat.se/ Swedish overheardit version
17. http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/ Another comic.

- We were also told CD and DVD storage was long lived. While 30 years can be expected of a few of the highest grade disks http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/taiyo-yuden-faq-178622/ 3 years is what most of them manage. Theoretical limits typically don't make it past manufacturers.

- It may indeed last 50 years, but will the equipment it's to be connected to? I've got the first 100MB drive to hit the market. It has lots of stuff on it I want to retrieve. It's a good thing I've kept the 18 year old Apple IIgs it's inside of operating.

Better implemented on solid state holographic storage, but still possible on disk, is the reverse processing of image to beams. (There's a SciAm article from 1995 or so on holographic storage, particularly solid state, that covers this).

Store lots of images on the disk. Illuminate it with a hologram of a target image. Out of each image comes copies of the original reference beams, at a strength proportional to the similarity of the stored image to the target image. Nearly instantaneous, simultaneous retrieval with correlation score built into the signal strength. Lost is the different angles that'd be had in a solid state device, so scanning the disk for reading all the beams and finding those of interest might take a bit longer. The entire US government fingerprint files could fit on one disk and the whole thing searched in seconds, as is often seen on TV. Using it for movie storage makes marketing sense, especially with the initial price tag of $18,000 and disks being $180. But leaving it at that would be a damn shame.

the OP should have a mentioned that 20% market share, and Sony's goal of taking 50% market share with Blu-ray, is only IN JAPAN. It should be noted that the Japanese media market is much smaller; due to higher prices (DVDs cost $30-50, with only bargain titles hitting below $20). Capturing 50% by volume of the Japanese market is dramatically different then the US market, just by the sheer scale and volume difference, hence, titling this post "Sony Thinks Blu-ray Will Sell Like DVDs by Year End" is a disservice to Slashdot readers to the facts.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Blu-ray-sales-hit-record-in-Japan.html

In the US, Blu-ray consists of 8% of media sales calculated only from the top 20 sellers.

Source, Home Meida Magazine (warning: netbook link):
Chart on Page 3
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/hom040608/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation proposed this idea years ago. The record labels opposed it back then. It was a bad idea when it first came up and it's still a bad idea now (at least the EFF proposal was voluntary).

The Toshiba drive was the SD-H903A. Now there are some Toshiba laptops that are supposed to come with HD-DVD burners, but as far as being able to buy them out right...

http://www.cdfreaks.com/devices/HD-DVD/Toshiba/SD-H903A.html

Take a look at the above link. I'm not the only one.

• Blu-ray player sales dominate HD DVD, 3 to 1
• Latest Japanese data shows Blu-ray outsells HD-DVD 9:1
• Blu-ray outselling HD DVD 2 to 1 this year
• Blu-ray Winning Europe 4-to-1
• Sony claims Blu-ray had 95% Australian HD market in October
• Blu-ray Dominates HD- DVD in Holiday shopping
• Disc Sales: 'Pirates' Leads Blu-ray to Decisive Weekly Win Over HD DVD
• PS3 to Go Blu-ray Profile 1.1 With New Firmware Update
• Blu-Ray Wins a Battle in the High-Def War

He's talking about the distance from the surface of the disk to the recordable medium. See this: http://www.cdfreaks.com/reviews/Blu-ray-vs_-HD-DVD/Differences.html Should help explain things.... ;)

How about some official real documentation?

That's for starters. Then there's the insignificant issue of playing your own content back in its native resolution.

You can continue to look for ways that Vista betters XP in ways other than these - there's plenty of statements out there about it, some are even from blogs!

Don't be an apologist. Vista blows so hard I don't know a single person that prefers it over XP, and only know 1 that still runs it, but only because the process of putting XP on his Vista laptop runs into issues with the OEM not providing XP drivers. Not only that, but Linux and Macs are now being actively considered at my workplace, and I'm sure mine's not the only one considering what we're now reading in places like cio.com.

a) You have Direct X 10, for games. And, there are a ton of games for Windows.

b) You .NET, for business applications development

c) You have a pretty good web browser. Yeah, IE has its flaws, but it works pretty good for most people. That is, I can go to the baseball site, get the scores, and it works.

d) You have interfaces to a whole bunch of consumer appliances, from digital cameras and video players, and more.

e) Vista has a really cool sound model that I am eager to play with.

f) Unicode (UTF-16) is built in from the ground up.

NTFS stacks up well against Reiser and ExtN for most applications.

Remote Desktop and Terminal Services for Windows work really well...

Help Needed: Does anyone have any idea why someone would pay $150 million to try to make HD DVD more popular? There's obviously a lot of money in it for someone, but I can't imagine why.

Comparisons:

Blu-ray: "A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB..." with a raw data transfer rate of 53.95 Mbit/s. HD DVD: "HD DVD has a single-layer capacity of 15 GB and a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB; ..." with a raw data transfer rate of 36.55 Mbit/s. [My emphasis]

More comparisons: Blu-ray scratch resistance "has withstood direct abrasion by steel wool and marring with markers in tests" "HD DVD uses traditional material and has the same scratch and surface characteristics of a regular DVD."

"Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental company, decided in June 2007 in favor of expanding Blu-ray support exclusively to an additional 1450 stores. The decision came following a trial in 250 rental stores, in which both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs were available. In the trial it has been found that more than 70% of high definitions rentals were Blu-ray discs." [My emphasis]

"According to a market research company Nielsen VideoScan, as of week ended August 12, 2007, weekly sales of Blu-ray discs were ahead of HD DVD with 66% of the market. In 2007 sales, Blu-ray leads with 66% of the market. Since inception, market share was 61% for Blu-ray and 39% for HD DVD."

This comment on the CDFreaks.com differences page is interesting, I have no idea whether it is valid: "To make a (HD)-DVD disc you need two moulding machines and an extra process to glue the two 0.6mm substrates together, which means you loose valuable seconds. Also the HD-DVD disc tolerances for flatness & thickness are extremely tight (twice more critical than that of normal DVD). To make a Blu-ray disc you need only 1 moulding machine and you don't have to glue the two substrates, which means less production time. In fact a Blu-ray disc can be compared with an up-side-down CD disc... which is very simple to make. As for disc tolerances of Blu-ray, these are comparable with normal DVD, resulting in an much more controllable production process. This means better yields and that future high-speed discs are easier to make. All in all, you might be able to upgrade DVD lines to make HD-DVD's, but in time the mass-volume production process itself will be less expensive for Blu-ray."

From CDFreaks pros and cons: "Blu-ray requires a much lower rotation speed of the disc to reach the specified transfer rate of 36Mbps."

And "Hybrid Discs -- Here we can find an advantage for Blu-ray, resulting from the new structure of the disc. Since the recording layer for Blu-ray data is only 0.1 mm away from the surface of the disc there is enough space below to integrate a complete 8.5 GB DVD DL disc."

(I have no connection whatsoever with either format, of course. My only interest is that the format that becomes popular be the best format technically.)

Help Needed: Does anyone have any idea why someone would pay $150 million to try to make HD DVD more popular? There's obviously a lot of money in it for someone, but I can't imagine why.

Comparisons:

Blu-ray: "A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB..." with a raw data transfer rate of 53.95 Mbit/s. HD DVD: "HD DVD has a single-layer capacity of 15 GB and a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB; ..." with a raw data transfer rate of 36.55 Mbit/s. [My emphasis]

More comparisons: Blu-ray scratch resistance "has withstood direct abrasion by steel wool and marring with markers in tests" "HD DVD uses traditional material and has the same scratch and surface characteristics of a regular DVD."

"Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental company, decided in June 2007 in favor of expanding Blu-ray support exclusively to an additional 1450 stores. The decision came following a trial in 250 rental stores, in which both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs were available. In the trial it has been found that more than 70% of high definitions rentals were Blu-ray discs." [My emphasis]

"According to a market research company Nielsen VideoScan, as of week ended August 12, 2007, weekly sales of Blu-ray discs were ahead of HD DVD with 66% of the market. In 2007 sales, Blu-ray leads with 66% of the market. Since inception, market share was 61% for Blu-ray and 39% for HD DVD."

This comment on the CDFreaks.com differences page is interesting, I have no idea whether it is valid: "To make a (HD)-DVD disc you need two moulding machines and an extra process to glue the two 0.6mm substrates together, which means you loose valuable seconds. Also the HD-DVD disc tolerances for flatness & thickness are extremely tight (twice more critical than that of normal DVD). To make a Blu-ray disc you need only 1 moulding machine and you don't have to glue the two substrates, which means less production time. In fact a Blu-ray disc can be compared with an up-side-down CD disc... which is very simple to make. As for disc tolerances of Blu-ray, these are comparable with normal DVD, resulting in an much more controllable production process. This means better yields and that future high-speed discs are easier to make. All in all, you might be able to upgrade DVD lines to make HD-DVD's, but in time the mass-volume production process itself will be less expensive for Blu-ray."

From CDFreaks pros and cons: "Blu-ray requires a much lower rotation speed of the disc to reach the specified transfer rate of 36Mbps."

And "Hybrid Discs -- Here we can find an advantage for Blu-ray, resulting from the new structure of the disc. Since the recording layer for Blu-ray data is only 0.1 mm away from the surface of the disc there is enough space below to integrate a complete 8.5 GB DVD DL disc."

(I have no connection whatsoever with either format, of course. My only interest is that the format that becomes popular be the best format technically.)

Most DVRs are sealed and the storage is recycled. As long as you have your receiver in a different box, you can get a replaceable media DVR. Several manufacturers are making DivX compatible home DVD burners, Phillips being the cheapest right now. You can get 12+ hours of standard broadcast or 6 hours of HD material on a single DVD. You can rotate through a box of 10 DVD/RWs and get about the same storage you get with a satellite provider DVR unit, and you can permanently burn anything on regular DVDs (including multisession capability). I screwed up and got the read-only unit for $50. I could have gotten the burner for $150. I'm sorry I didn't, despite already owning a Dish Network receiver/DVR. As an added bonus with these units, you can load a single DVD with MP3s and get over 24 hours of continuous music. And it's worth noting that you can get format converters that will take pretty much any video format and convert it to any other, including DivX, so you can download eleventy seven gubbabytes of stuff and make it watchable on your home unit. For Winboxes DivX sells a passable converter, and eRightSoft gives away an absolutely jam packed converter (actually a front end for just about any OSS codec/format converter already available).

Any argument about DivX vs. another format is moot unless there's another format being built into home replaceable media recorders. And as for the false permanence of DVDs, if you follow the listing at http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=178622 you can get media that lasts 10 times longer than the commonly available 2 to 3 year lifetime disks.

I have a link that says differently
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/More-on-RIAA-admittin g-bootleg-CDs-more-a-threat-than-P2P.html

The RIAA does care when you share your music with 5 friends

It used a technical mechanism called SCCS which sounds very similar to this "managed copying."

What's to stop the DVD publishers from making this "managed copying" available for a while, then using technical means to renege on the terms a few years later?

Sorry i forgot to link the source site

The "Reviews" section of cdfreaks.com is my favorite source of thorough burner reviews.

Their most recent review (Feb 2007) of a Blu-ray burner (Philips SPD7000BD Blu-ray TripleWriter) shows that a single-layer Blu-ray disc (22.56GB) at 2x speed takes about 46:34. Dual-layer Blu-ray burning support hasn't been enabled yet. Another currently available Blu-Ray burner (Lite-On LH-2B1S Blu-Ray Disc Triple Writer) will supposedly support 4x single-layer burning speed with a future firmware update.

Their most recent review (Mar 2007) of a DVD burner (Pioneer DVR-112 DVD Burner) shows that single-layer DVD burning (4483MB) takes about 5:20-5:40 at 18x speed. Dual-layer DVD takes about 15:40 at 10x speed (if you can find DL media that support that speed).

The "Reviews" section of cdfreaks.com is my favorite source of thorough burner reviews.

Their most recent review (Feb 2007) of a Blu-ray burner (Philips SPD7000BD Blu-ray TripleWriter) shows that a single-layer Blu-ray disc (22.56GB) at 2x speed takes about 46:34. Dual-layer Blu-ray burning support hasn't been enabled yet. Another currently available Blu-Ray burner (Lite-On LH-2B1S Blu-Ray Disc Triple Writer) will supposedly support 4x single-layer burning speed with a future firmware update.

Their most recent review (Mar 2007) of a DVD burner (Pioneer DVR-112 DVD Burner) shows that single-layer DVD burning (4483MB) takes about 5:20-5:40 at 18x speed. Dual-layer DVD takes about 15:40 at 10x speed (if you can find DL media that support that speed).

The "Reviews" section of cdfreaks.com is my favorite source of thorough burner reviews.

Their most recent review (Feb 2007) of a Blu-ray burner (Philips SPD7000BD Blu-ray TripleWriter) shows that a single-layer Blu-ray disc (22.56GB) at 2x speed takes about 46:34. Dual-layer Blu-ray burning support hasn't been enabled yet. Another currently available Blu-Ray burner (Lite-On LH-2B1S Blu-Ray Disc Triple Writer) will supposedly support 4x single-layer burning speed with a future firmware update.

Their most recent review (Mar 2007) of a DVD burner (Pioneer DVR-112 DVD Burner) shows that single-layer DVD burning (4483MB) takes about 5:20-5:40 at 18x speed. Dual-layer DVD takes about 15:40 at 10x speed (if you can find DL media that support that speed).

The "Reviews" section of cdfreaks.com is my favorite source of thorough burner reviews.

Their most recent review (Feb 2007) of a Blu-ray burner (Philips SPD7000BD Blu-ray TripleWriter) shows that a single-layer Blu-ray disc (22.56GB) at 2x speed takes about 46:34. Dual-layer Blu-ray burning support hasn't been enabled yet. Another currently available Blu-Ray burner (Lite-On LH-2B1S Blu-Ray Disc Triple Writer) will supposedly support 4x single-layer burning speed with a future firmware update.

Their most recent review (Mar 2007) of a DVD burner (Pioneer DVR-112 DVD Burner) shows that single-layer DVD burning (4483MB) takes about 5:20-5:40 at 18x speed. Dual-layer DVD takes about 15:40 at 10x speed (if you can find DL media that support that speed).

You are asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is for tools that will tell you the disc is suffering from bitrot before it becomes unreadable.

These tools exist. I have run across them. Unfortunately, they only work on certain model drives that have the ability to report internal measurements.
Qpxtool supports about 45 drives from 8 manufacturers. Qpxtool measures recoverable and unrecoverable errors (PI/PIF), Jitter/Beta, FE/TE (Focus Error/Tracking Error).
http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/

pxlinux was similar, however they got threatening letters and/or lawsuits from the company that makes plextools (parent company of plextor).
PXscan/PXview runs under windows (pxlinux is a port of PXscan/PDview), had the same problem.
Qpxtool doesn't seem to have the same problem.

Nero appears to have some sort of disk quality test.
Windows software for testing before your record (FE/TE): http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=192488

Here is another program that might work on any drive but may not report there is a problem as early. It times how long the drive takes to read each sector.
If the drive has to reread a sector, that takes longer. Some drives reportedly either read full speed or fail (probably means they don't have any retries).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdck/

dvdisaster records additional recovery information. The author was apparently able to recover data from a disk after carrying it around in a backpack
with no sleave. It records one ECC block per 223 sectors and can tolerate up to 32 read errors per block. The error correction files can be stored
on separate media (it looks like one disk could store ECC information for a couple hundred disks).
http://dvdisaster.sourceforge.net/en/

I have also noticed (on some damaged discs from a friend) that the dd program stops when there is a read error but the sdd program has the option to retry.

Record your data to multiple disks (preferably different brands) using the exact same ISO image (burn the same image multiple times or copy your disk) and store them in different locations. This gives you a form of software raid. If someone hasn't already written it, it would not be hard at all to write a program that will
read a disk to an ISO image on the hard drive, retrying bad sectors and recording a list of sectors it was unable to read. Then try to read those missing sectors from a different disc. A more sophisticated version might ask the drive to return the data even in the event of a CRC error and do majority rules for each byte
of the sector across three or more source disks. For added protection, use different brand drives to record the disks.

Deterioration reportedly tends to start on the outside of the disk, so if you only record half a disks worth of data it may last longer. Or use dvdisaster.

Levels of deterioration:
- Detectable only by reading internal parameters from the drive
- Drive can read the sector after multiple tries (detectable from timing)
- Drive gives up but you may be able to issue multiple read commands and get the data
- Permanent failure. May still be able to get data if you have recorded redundant info using a tool like dvdisaster
- so many read errors, or damaged lead in, such that full recovery is impossible

As far as the original problem of protecting films, I would consider the following:
- Use archival quality single layer DVD+/-R media.
One example: http://www.verbatim.com/optical/archival/ (about $1.50 each)
- Use a drive

A quick primer: you can "error scan" DVD+/-R media with a drive that supports it. CDSpeed, a [free, IIRC] utility distributed by/with Nero, can easily save these scans. DVD enthusiasts often compare their scans... cdfreaks.com is a great discussion site.

Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=1733269&po stcount=294

Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].

The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33

A quick primer: you can "error scan" DVD+/-R media with a drive that supports it. CDSpeed, a [free, IIRC] utility distributed by/with Nero, can easily save these scans. DVD enthusiasts often compare their scans... cdfreaks.com is a great discussion site.

Some media have been observed to degrade fairly rapidly, others are quite stable. About a year ago, and again recently, I scanned a number of relatively old DVD-R discs [backups, uh, owned by a friend] burned from fall of 2002 on. You can see my post here:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showpost.php?p=1733269&po stcount=294

Funny thing is that most of the discs I used were of a brand widely lambasted as "cheap ____" and I was told that they wouldn't last six months. Curiously enough you can see that the cheaper "Princo" media has held up better than the "gold standard of the day" Riteks [although both are much better than some]. You can also see that one of older discs was scanned recently, and more than a year ago. It shows almost no degradation during that time [and what it does could easily be attributed to the aging scanning drive].

The CDFreaks forum has a lot more scans, including of older media. If you've got some discs and are worried about their aging stability, here's a good place to start:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=33

As we all know, the quality of blank DVD media varies by brand, manufacuring plant, etc. Note that some brands (e.g. Maxell) sell DVDs from different manufacturers (e.g. Mitsubishi Chemical, Taiyo Yuden). Therefore, some Maxell DVD models are very good (manufacured by a good factory) while other Maxells are very poor (cheaply manufactured).

The current "standard" for long-term storage seems to be DVDs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden, which is sold under various brands (including "Taiyo Yuden" brand). A hundred Taiyo Yuden DVD-R single-layer blanks cost about $33 (plus shipping) at Newegg.

Also, any archives should use parity data to recover from data that has gone bad. Hopefully, the "backup to DVD" software should include parity data creation. If not, use something like PAR2 files to ensure you can recover from minor data loss.

The CD Freaks Blank Media forum is a good place to read about how to identify and buy good quality blank DVDs. If you don't understand the concept of parity files, Slyck.com has a good explanation of PAR/PAR2.

The music industry runs considerable margins on successful acts, but the online distributors keep a small percentage of their sales. (source) 26% doesn't go very far when you're essentially bearing all of the costs. There are in theory displaced CD sales, but online music is supposed to capture sales where CDs are not preferred (on-demand availability, single tracks).

Better sue them for 1.6 trillion of lost income. Imagine how much money everyone must lose on youtube! ... But maybe the law doesn't apply to everyone (Already seen here in Sweden where The Pirate Bay was taken down for, uhm, I don't know =P)

Taiyo Yuden FAQ, for those who want guidance in finding these discs.

Sometimes you need media immediately. Some people like to pick up media at the store. If you're going to be buying it at the store, why not get the good stuff, especially if it's the same price?

Additionally, it's not a guessing game once you know what you're looking for. If it comes in the Taiyo Yuden "That's" packaging and says "Made in Japan", it's Taiyo Yuden (unless it's a cheap imitation, which is still identifiable and not very common). People over at the media section of the CD Freaks Forum have discussed this to death for years. I will save you from hours of mostly non-productive reading by telling you that the packaging is unique to Taiyo Yuden, that fakes are not hard to spot and will not normally say "Made in Japan", and that most of the people on the CD Freaks forum, who have entirely too much time on their hands and enjoy obsessively testing CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs with many official and hacked firmwares for dozens of recorders, agree that Taiyo Yuden is the best.

I hope Patrick gave credit were it's due?

A good burn is created by good media in a good drive. I like to visit http://www.cdfreaks.com/ before purchasing new burners. It's not I'm scared of losing $40 on a bad one. The reason I do it is the same one behind why I check the data twice once it's burned and make three copies; I'm a little paranoid despite the fact that I have CD's from 1994 that are still in perfect condition.

They do NOT have a history of aggressively suing patent infringers.

Really?
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Microsoft-introduces- FAT-file-system-royalty-fee-charges-for-each-hardw are-product-that-uses-FAT.html

In fact, they've started promising that they WILL NOT do this. And, they won't have any grounds to do so with this deal, unless there are some GPL programmers stealing code, which apparently rarely happens.

You're confused, patents have nothing to do with code. Patents are concerned with new inventions and devices. In the US, supposedly you can create an "invention" in code (somehow).

Your IT guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Burning discs at an ultra low speed will not necessarily make the quality of the burn better, and it may even make it worse.

Your post above is the is the best of show... I think the Fed issued DVD-R's should be holographically emblazoned with a unique site identification in plain English. Finding two discs with the exact same identification should NEVER happen... I don't see the significance of storing images of paper ballots, it seems like a big waste of time and effort. The main things I'd add is making the vote-accepting machine a Bittorrent seeder, serving to at least 3 other, reasonably balanced clients. It would seed a torrent of the ISO of the disc as it was being burnt. After the vote is verified to be written correctly to the disc, a 'vote accepted' signal is output, then real-time voting data is encrypted and served through Bittorrent. The disc is unencrypted, but I believe that the ISO stream must be encrypted to prevent the tampering of results, and for authenticity when decryption is successful. The computer that records the votes would have a hardware real random number generator. It generates a one time pad just before elections after being sealed up. Absolutely no one knows this code, and the burner stays shut until elections are over, period. The encryption key would be stored on disc with just the right number of offset bytes so that it XORs itself out in the encrypted ISO stream to a block of zeros. Then comes a smallish random file of random length, so that no assumptions can be made of the first few votes in order to derive the encryption key. Then comes the raw voting data. Between each vote record there would randomly be 0-3 or so bytes of random data to make the file structure less predictable to further increase the entropy of the ISO. Votes would be sector aligned, and the burner would have a big enough capacitor that completely burnt sectors are guaranteed. Sector level control is possible today. If rebooted after complete power loss, it would read the disc to continue to serve the election results so far, and continue to record, encrypt with the code read off the disc, and serve realtime election results. The point is that the state on the disc is never invalid, even if the DVD-R is damaged. One solution is to have a 2nd burner with a 2nd disc ready to go if there is a drive failure. The certified program for this DVD burning, Bittorent voting machine should be non-flashable ROM chips, soldered in with no way to surruptitiously remove it. This machine is not touched by the voters, and shouldn't need to be touched by anyone during the election. The attached machines that accept the vote from the voter, will also generate a real random number for verification, and a checksum, which gets sent to the server. It's important for the verification number to be not more than around 2 bytes, or 5 decimal digits, otherwise it may be personally identifiable. The only inputs to the server are Bittorrent requests from the internet, and votes from the serial ports. If the checksum is right and the vote is verified to be recorded on the DVD-R disk, then the machine sends back an 'accept' signal. Otherwise it sends a 'denied' signal. The attached machine would print a record that tells the offset into the ISO where their vote was recorded, and the 4-6 digit verification code. You keep that receipt. Another printout includes the above, and your actual vote. That copy goes into some form of paper ballot, it could be re-wound back into a scroll, as long as you got to see your vote on it. After the election is over, the encryption codes for every precinct are published and *anyone* can decrypt the voting results they may already have downloaded and add them up themselves. If everyone's download was corrupt, then there are the physical DVD-R evidence. The point at which the file becomes corrupt would likely indicate the time of failure. If every single measure fails somehow, then there's still a paper trail.

It's not that simple, mainly because the human eye's resolution isn't uniform. Basically, because of the fovea, in the center of our vision we have an area about 2 large (4 times the appearant diameter of the moon) offering us in the area a resolution of about 28" (seconds of arc), the resolution outside of this area being lower. Since it was projected on a 7 x 4 meter screen, each pixel is about 0.9 mm x 0.9 mm.

Which means that if I got my maths right, you would have to be 6.94 meters (almost 23 feet) away from the screen to have your maximum eye resolution to match the screens resolution. Farther than that the resolution of the screen would be too fine for it to be even needed.

I know this isn't a yes or no answer to your question, so to answer it we can say that if you're less than 6.94 meters away from the screen your eye resolution is still finer than the screen in some parts. Oh and someone tell me if I got my maths wrong.

This is old news...

See the announcement from 2003.

Once a /home folder is encrypted, any settings that a web browser is likely to dump onto disk will be beyond the reach of anyone who does not have your key/passphrase.

Except that does you no good, since if a warrant was issued for the computer, you would forced to provide the password or be held in jail for contempt. The law is pretty clear on this. And being held for contempt doesn't have time limits. Deleting after a subpoena is issued will also get you in trouble, and possibly the maximum penalty under law.

I would imagine that the same could be done if you continued to refuse to provide the key for your encrypted folder or partition. Your suggestions might make it difficult for someone to view your cached files, but it wouldn't prevent you from being locked up, and could result in a tougher sentence in the long run. Not the solution.

I hear a lot that the RIAA has the weakest evidence ever in these cases. Such as screen shots of dynamic IP addresses taken from Kazaa. How the hell do judges across this country uphold these cases with such lack of concrete evidence? I mean, give me five minutes in photoshop and I'll make you a "screenshot" of Kazaa with www.whitehouse.gov's IP address listed over and over on it. Can't an expert witness cause this evidence to be thrown out quickly?

To be fair, explorer has always been a joke.
It has had thumbnail rendering bugs since at least windows ME and MS has never corrected them except (IIRC) in some cases where it was a security flaw.
2000 and xp (ME too? I don't recall) uses 100% of system resources if you open a folder with a bad / strange format .avi file, even if thumbnails are off and you're viewing in details mode. The "solution" is to do a registry hack and kill a key.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=74137">
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=74137

There is so much work to be done in fixing the base interface, yet what gets worked on is transparent windows and stupid effects.

Allowing the user to enable/disable shell extensions, queueing up file transfers (which would resume after an explorer crash) and a "Yes, I really intend to copy all the fucking files in that folder even if they are attrib'ed system, hidden, read only or whatever the fuck else (and while you're at it, copy the permissions too without making me go to cmd to do it)" button in the file copy dialogue and ffs, a "save icon position on the desktop (and no, not just when I log out)" option are all be features that people want, yet they haven't been provided.
Heck, it would be nice to show how big a folder is without having to hold your mouse over it for an unspecified amount of time.

Here's how you convert from DVD to audio cd. http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=139536 Piece of cake if you're familiar with DvdDecrypter and Nero.

Curiously, they both were Spanish artists. I wish I could say it is mere coincidence...

http://uk.geocities.com/thetomcatslair/Entertainme nt/DRM/drm.html

Choice quotes:

First off, you need to download a few free programs: Windows Media Player (although I'm sure you've got this - it's bundled with every version of Windows since 98), the Nero Fast Burning Plugin (details from wmplugins.com and download from here), ...

This process does NOT work with Windows Media Player 10. See the FAQ Page for details.

Another possibility is that you bought the tracks from Napster. If so, Napster charge you extra to allow you to copy the song to a CD, and therefore, you can't remove the DRM using the method shown on my website.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=78454

* Backup music files from Napster/other companies that allow CD burning:

        * Download the songs from Napster
        * Burn the songs to a CD e.g. using Nero
        * Rip the CD to MP3 e.g using Easy CDDA Creator
        * Convert to any format you like e.g. using again Easy CDDA Creator

Now I am perhaps reading this wrong, but it sure sounds like you need a third party software called "Nero" to burn a CD. It is possible that the purpose of this software is to make a disk image to avoid using a real CD, however not ONCE have I seen anybody say "use WMP to burn a CD". Also it is pretty obvious that the WMA DRM allows a track to be marked as "can't make a CD from this".

Don't look at it in terms of "PS2 outsold the XBox and GC, therefore XBox 360 will outsell the PS3".

Look at it in terms of " PS2 is outselling the XBox 360, therefore PS3 will outsell the XBox 360 as well".

You can't possibly talk about the XBox 360 beating the next-gen consoles when it can't even beat the last- gen consoles. Analysts and bloggers may love the XBox 360, but consumers, well, don't, which is why we keep seeing constant predictions of success for the XBox 360 but no actual success.

Lite-On is supported by K-Probe, yes...but Nero CD/DVD-Speed supports lots of burners. What you're looking for is burn quality. This means a drive/medium combination that works well. Check CD Freaks for loads of test postings.

To give you one data point -- my own experience -- I go with NEC burners and Taiyo Yuden DVD+R media (which I get without problem from Rima). I get good results, whether scanned by the burning drive or a Lite-On I got before I knew better (which only gives mediocre burning results).