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Environmental DVD Wrecks Apple Drives
FST777 writes "The British Mail on Sunday published its latest DVD giveaway on the EcoDisc, a thin and bendable DVD format that is supposed to be more environmentally-friendly than regular DVDs. Despite the clear warning against using them in Apple slot drives, some Mac users decided to give it a go. The result? A brisk trade for repair shops in the UK. 'The EcoDisc's manufacturer, ODS, insists the disc won't break drives. "We've produced over ten million of these discs — we've had less than a dozen phone calls," says managing director, Ray Wheeler. "There are ways to get the discs out." Wheeler says the problem stems from Apple's slot-loading drives. "It uses an ejection system that doesn't get approval from the DVD Forum." He claims the EcoDisc should work in other types of slot-loading drive, although admits that it hasn't been tested in the PlayStation 3.'"
"It uses an ejection system that doesn't get approval from the DVD Forum."
And these new discs do?
Simple Fixes for Simple People.
Who takes an unknown disc that they find in a newspaper and sticks it into their machine without so much as reading the cover? It says right on the thing, don't use it in a Mac. Then they want to complain?
Bunch of Flakes.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Circumcision is child abuse.
The environmentally friendly thing to do would be to have NO disc at all. Just point people at a download site and let them get the disk image from the tubes using zero plastics, chemicals, landfill, or other resources in the process.
I don't imagine anyone's going to trash their Mac for a few EcoDiscs, but still, it's a bit unsettling that the drives don't properly conform to standard.
My blog
Because the Internet doesn't use any electrical power?
I agree that it's probably more efficient to download data instead of burning it on DVD and distributing it that way, but by how much?
I don't know if you have noticed or not, but many CDs that are distributed today do not contain the "Compact Disk" logo. Back when DRM started, manufacturers started putting blank sectors and other stuff to try to thwart copying. Poeople started complaining about this as those disks no longer conformed to the "Compact Disk" Specification.
The companies that were producing these disks just dropped the logo, going under the assumtion that if is was the same size as a CD and had a shiny bottom, that people would put it in thier CD players, and people did just that.
To most people a CD is defined as "something that is about 5 inches across and has a shiny bottom. If I put it in my computer something happens."
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That being said, you could always get a MacBook Air. Nothing says "high technology" like a complete lack of an optical drive. ;-)
That being said, you could always get an iMac. Nothing says "high technology" like a complete lack of a floppy drive.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Yes, non-Macintoshes have them, I suppose. But what about what happens when you put a regular bad CD into the drive? On a Mac, you can always eject the disk by going to the Disk Manager (whatever that thing is called). Unless, of course, the CD is bad, then the disk manager won't necessarily load. No problem, just hold down one of those funky keys while selecting "restart." That will work, provided the disk isn't bad.
Well, you can always boot the machine into console and issue a direct "eject disk" command.
But then, of course, you'd say it was the user's fault for not knowing the disk was bad before inserting it.
This will be fun: Non-standard DVD player and an unusual DVD. Does the DVD adhere to appropriate standards, in which case, we can all gloat that the stylish and disposable Mac du jour falls victim to its own preciousness, or is this a matter of shared liability?
Does you mom know about that Sony rootkit? How about your sister? Just because everyone on /. knows about does not mean that it is common knowledge.
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Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this... Doctor: Don't do that.
Indeed. Remind me, what was the point of that?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The question is whether either the disc or the drives carried the DVD Logo? From what I have seen it's doubtful that the "EcoDisk" would qualify as it is less than half the thickness and weight of a real DVD, so it's interesting to see ODS trying to point fingers at Matshita for not following DVD Forum specifications.
That's a problem for elementary schools, not colleges.
Well, it's a problem for high schools too, but that's because it's school computers and HS students tend to be dicks when it comes to other people's property. That issue applies to both slot- and tray-loading drives, though.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I'll bet his post has a -1 by the end of the day.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'm fairly certain your parent post was pointing out how people bitched up a fit about the iMac not having that piece of junk back in 1998, not when the major PC builders finally dropped them from their standard configuration within the last 2 years.
Of course, back then the complaint was perfectly valid because Apple didn't replace it with anything.
Had the iMac shipped with a CDRW drive, they would have actually been "innovative", rather than "cheap".
They've specifically said they wouldn't support Apple's non compliant hardware, which Apple dishonestly marketed as compliant.
wow, you criticized apple fanboys with a side swipe at apple. And didn't click the no Karma, or Anonymous check box? a.) I didn't side-swipe Apple. I'm not sure why you're seeing that. The "He's telling the truth" bit is a reference to his ownership of an iPod, not to his critcism.
b.) This is basically a throw-away account. I've been lurking on Slashdot for far longer than my ID implies. One day there was a story about another company complaining about iTune's monopoly. Everybody poo-poo'd that complaint, so I mentioned that he had a point and why I thought so. (As opposed to saying something like "APPLE SUX!! EVERYBODY WHO LIKES APPLE SUCKS!") My comment was initially modded insightful. Unfortunately, that invited criticism. Instead of taking my point head-on, lots of people took jabs at my post. One guy shot up to a +5 for cooking up a hypothetical (and, if anybody spent more than 3 seconds pondering it, non-sensical) scenario about my motivations for making the comment. Silly stuff, but not really out of the norm for Slashdot. The silliness shot to an extreme when all of my recent posts started dropping. Before long, some 30 negative moderations had been made, actually causing me to get banned from Slashdot for a couple of months. (It was specific to an IP range, I could still post from home.) A couple of months later, I started posting again, and those new posts were automatically modded as troll.
So I created this account to avoid that BS attached by my old nick. Frankly, if this one gets toasted by ridiculously organized Apple fanboys too, I really don't care. I can create a new account. BFD. I'm not giving Steve Jobs verbal fellatio just to be cool with a group of people. I'm also not giving Apple any more credit than I'd give Microsoft. They're motivated by profit just like BillyG, so I'm not defending them just because I like my iPod.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Well then...seems that this 'evil right wing, middle class' paper outsells your liberal stuff. So..to you, the wingnut, makes it evil.
Compare this to fox news. It clobbers all other cable news shows...
"Folks, I'm no fan of reality...Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington owned slaves? If I want to say he didn't, that's my right! And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact. We should apply these principles to all information! All we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true, for instance, that Africa has more elephants today than it did ten years ago. Now, I don't know if that's actually true. But if it was true, boy, that would be a real blow to the environmentalists. As usual, the Bush administration is on the cutting edge of information management. While they've admitted that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, they've also insinuated he did have weapons of mass destruction--insinuations that have been repeated over and over again on cable news for the past 3 and a half years. And now, the result is, 18 months ago, only 36% of Americans believed it, but 50% of Americans believe it now! Man, that number's growing almost as fast as the population of African elephants!...What we're doing is bringing democracy to knowledge. Now, the "blame ignorance first" crowd is gonna say that something is either true or it isn't, and it doesn't matter how many people agree....If you go against what the majority of people perceive to be reality, you're the one who's crazy!...Together, we can create a reality we all agree on: the reality we just agreed on."
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Calling them DVD drives certainly does that, and really, not coming clean with the fact that they're *not* is enough.
I remove disks from drives here from time to time and I'd say you got VERY lucky, holding the machine upside down does provide an advantage, but it's so slight as to be amazing that it worked. The disk is too flexible and when the edges are lifted up, it does not release from the hub lock. Gravity can't be helping it very much...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The MacBook Pro uses a Matsushita UJ-857E DVD-RW drive. This is basically the UJ-85JE (Matsushita is Panasonic). This drive is used in a number of applications.
Floppy DVDs don't go in slot-loading drives. Apple is the highest-profile user of such drives. It's just doublespeak to claim that it's "Apple" slot-load drives that are affected. A quick search shows only 230 results for '"dvd forum" +ejection system'--the top results, of course, referring to this article, and the others referring to the emergency eject function (i.e. the paperclip hole). That is the "DVD Forum approved ejection system" and it is fundamentally incompatible with a slot drive--there's no tray to pull out manually even if it had such a trigger. Further, Matsushita is one of the four largest members of the DVD Forum.
Apple neither designed, engineered, nor manufactured the device, so while it's true Apple didn't build a device to comply with "standards", it's a tautology. There is no possible way for the statement to be UNtrue. The only way to have a "DVD Forum approved" ejection system is to have a tray drive.
Way to take the bait hook, line, and sinker, though.
Debatable. Remember, the thing sold like hotcakes, no matter how much we thought it was crap.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!