Slashdot Mirror
Combined DVD Burners Coming Soon
MonMotha writes "Sony recently announced plans to make a DVD burner capable of supporting both the - (DVD-R and DVD-RW) as well as the + (DVD+RW and DVD+R) standards for burnable DVD media. This move could spur the adoption of DVD burners, which have been poor sellers so far, partly due to the lack of a single standard for writable and rewritable media. The drive will not support the older DVD-RAM due to it's plastic casing."
According to news out this week, Sony has been quietly building CD-RW burners with anti-copying technology built in. Sony is also leading the push on drm legislation which will take away your fair use rights to backup that CD/DVD for protection from scratches, aging, and many other purposes, which are legal under fair use law.
It's up to you to decide whether you will support a company that is trying as hard as possible to prevent you from transfering music from your CD to your Rio or your car, or for backup purposes, etc.
It's up to you to decide whether Sony is acting in your best interest, or their own selfish interests by setting up a tollbooth on the digital highway that is becoming harder and harder to avoid.
How many of you knew that Sony was building anti-copying technology into their CD-RW burners that they are currently selling? I certainly didn't know, but since I refuse to purchase any Sony products due to their stance on "digital rights management", I am somewhat protected. By avoiding the companies that are pushing hard on drm, I am mitigating some of the damage they are doing to my ability to backup my property.
btw, have you unchecked the drm box in wmp before burning that CD? If not, you burned drm anti-copying abilities into your CDs.
See NYFairUse for more info.
I was discussing this very subject today. It's pertty much agreed that the biggest problem is the cost of the drive itself, followed by the cost of media.
My guess it that the price point for wide purchase of DVD Writers is $179...why $179? Well, this suggests that the $199 point would have already been reached...but most think "That's just $200"...no one want's to pay $200 for a drive....And $189 would have also been broken...but some won't buy there...and when you get to $179, you already have 3 choices under $200 and this suggest a good selection. And at the $179 price point, this suggests that there is likely to be a $169 drive in the near future...and you're no longer talking ~$200, but ~$150.
For some, media cost is a problem, but it's likely to go down as soon as ppl start buying burners.
The real problem is, lack of cheap drive manufacturers...you know, the Lite-Ons and the Pacific Digitals (Mostly repackaged Mitsumis).
or not, DeCSS is not required on platforms that can play DVD's "nativly"
you just rip it to a mpeg and re-encode it
(most of the time the machine that crashes is my circa 1996 Dell Laptop which doesn't support boot CD).
You know, I had this same problem. I was trying to install Linux on an ancient HP Omnibook laptop, and of course its floppy drive had long since bit the dust. Proprietary laptop floppy drives, if you haven't noticed, are very expensive, even on eBay, even for 5+ year old models.
At first I just boot-strapped my way up to Linux from dos, which worked until I managed to get the computer into an unbootable state. Then I bought those laptop-ide to normal-ide adaptors (whatever they're called) and plugged the old hard drive into my desktop when necessary.
But alas, at long last, I found Smart BootManager: a flexible bootloader that allows you to boot from floppy, cdrom, and hd, regardless of your BIOS. This thing is perfect for old PCs. Heck, it will even adjust the year on your bios, for those stupid Award bioses that turn anything from 2000 up into 1994 (i.e., my old 486).
I found out about this from Debian (yay Debian!) which includes it on their install cdrom.
There may be better solutions out there, but this works perfectly for me. Also, the site doesn't seem to have been updated since Feb 2001, so it's probably a dead project.
Anyway, you dd it to your MBR (or use the install program?), make sure your lilo/grub/whatever is installed to the boot block of your root partition (instead of the MBR), and you're set. Boot from a cdrom on a 486!
Hm, it suddenly strikes me that this is probably off topic...