I should probably mention that I haven't burned any 4X discs yet. I haven't been been buying them, because my 2X drive (which I use most of the time) will only burn them at 1X. But any disc I've had that was advertised as 2X, I've burned at 2X.
Re:I dunno but...
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Good drive, good disks, good burn. Using the Pioneer 2X-RW in my G4 Power Mac, and a Pioneer 4X-RW in an external case, not buying mail-order low-ball-priced spindles, and always doing a disc-at-once burn in Toast, I have only had two DVD-R burns out of more than a hundred that didn't verify. (I always run a verify except sometimes when I'm giving the disc to someone else and don't have the time to verify.) One of those two was because the power went out during the burn.
Plus, unlike CD-Rs, the reflective layer is sandwiched in the middle of two polycarbonate discs, so the discs are much better protected from air and abrasion than CD-Rs are, which should improve long-term reliability
By the way, the original poster didn't even say whether he was burning +R, +RW, -R, or -RW, much less which model of drives were in his duplicator. How do you even know which version to be leery of buying?
But how much will they really have to emulate? VirtualPC gives that "approximately 400 MHz" performance when emulating an entire PC, OS and all.
If Microsoft comes up with a PowerPC version of the NT kernel for XBox2, then it will only have to emulate the game code, not the operating system, not DirectX, not the drivers, not the networking stack. That should provide enough of a performance improvement for a 2GHz G5, or maybe even a 1.5GHz G5, to run XBox-1 games at a good speed.
Once you say the magic words "central signing authority", you're putting dollar signs in someone's eyes. Verisign charges what, $900 for an SSL cert? And what does it get you? You're added to a stupid database. Browsers won't bitch about an invalid cert just so you can get https working. That's all. Because there's no way to get the security of https without the authentication.
Yep, the 4-port ioGear with OSD. The hardware was wonderful, the USB firmware sucked. I'm beginning to suspect a common OEM chipset source here. Does the Belkin use a tap ctrl, shift, alt, digit sequence to switch displays?
The ioGear also had a pair of "Device" USB ports which didn't go through any keyboard/mouse translation, but those were not switched from the front panel buttons. You could only switch them from a key sequence on the "console" keyboard! (Console keyboard meaning either the front USB port with device faking, or the PS/2 port. If I wanted to use a PS/2 keyboard, I wouldn't be looking for a USB KVM switch!) So I would still have needed a second keyboard, and have to use it every time I switched computers!
So if it weren't for the keyboard repeat problem (which I suspect to be a firmware problem), and being unable to switch the "Device" ports from the front panel buttons, I would have been happy reaching over to hit the switch buttons. (It's easier than tapping that keyboard sequence anyhow, plus there were four buttons, one for each computer.)
I also tried yet another cheapie-looking brand that I can't remember, but you can recognize it by the silver color, ports on all four sides, and oval motif on the top. The USB output port was electrically intermittent (probably cold solder joints), and it locked up my PowerMac during my initial feature testing! So I went back to using my years old Focus brand AT keyboard KVM switch with occassional flakiness, and brought up USB extension cords for manual reconnection. Since there are only two computers I'm using right now, I've gone ahead and hooked up a second keyboard and mouse.
I've also noticed that the USB device switchers you can buy conspiciously avoid showing or mentioning either a keyboard or mouse on their packaging.
the only problem is the audio control keys on an Apple keyboard do not seem to make it through.
I tried the ioGear USB KVM. Same problem. Apparently USB KVM switches "cheat" by pretending to be a generic USB keyboard and mouse. That's what they tell your computers, no matter what kind of keyboard or mouse you actually have installed. At least (IIRC) the Belkin unit is flash upgradeable, unlike the ioGear unit.
In my case, I was forced to get rid of the ioGear unit because it was repeating keydown events or something. I couldn't get through an entire line of "quick brown fox" without at least one, and sometimes two rrepeated charactters. Sometimes I'd even get a dddouble repeat.
Dammit, all I want is a USB KVM that behaves properly, and isn't designed with the assumption that all you have (or want) is a crappy $5 PS/2 keyboard and mouse.
They release a Quicktime player for Windows and not for Linux/FreeBSD/etc . Not even a closed source one. My guess is it shouldn't be complicated to port it anyway.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I suspect that it may be more trouble than you think. Why do I think this? Look at the VLC player. Mac version, unpack it and drag to Applications folder. Windows version, typical installer. Linux version, long list of "you need these libraries installed in your system first".
And then there's the issue of video hardware. Mac and XP both have good APIs to support using video accelleration and separate framebuffers for playing video. X Windows is still an artifact of the '80s, so you have to bolt on some extra APIs somewhere to do that. When you start talking about FreeBSD, then you've got the issue of binary executable formats too. Apple is not going to release Quicktime as a bunch of.c/.h files with a makefile just so you can maybe compile it under FreeBSD. Even if you already have the thirty other libraries it would need.
And then there's the issue of the Sorenson codec, for which I can remember there was finger pointing between Apple and Sorenson about why there's no Linux version. But you still need an API to compile the rest of Quicktime to anyhow.
Besides, can't you run Quicktime for Windows under Wine anyhow?
But if you have better things to do with your time than customize your window manager and desktop environment (and XFree86 modelines) all day, then maybe OS X is for you.
Linux is great for computer "gearheads". The equivalent of some guy 1983 whose only car was some beater that he constantly had jacked up to tweak the motor. On the other hand, if you have a regular 9-to-5 job, you can't afford to have your car not working every morning at 8 AM. One solution is to get another car. Another is to get rid of the beater for a reliable car, stop tinkering with it, and actually have some free time when you get back from work.
Some people like tinkering with their cars or computers all the time. I'd rather move on and tinker with something else instead.
On the other hand, waking up from sleep is fast. Usually under one second, or just about the time it takes you to get the thing open. In fact, this was the "killer feature" which caused me to Switch from 9.
Apparently Open Transport liked to hog the machine for eight seconds or so when you woke the computer from sleep. (It still does in Classic, but you can still use the OS X side while it's doing that.)
As I heard the story, Steve Jobs bitched about how long it took to wake a Powerbook from sleep. He did the math on how long it took times how often people woke up their Powerbooks times the number of Powerbooks produced. The result was that "entire lifetimes" were being wasted waiting for Powerbooks to wake up.
As for how long you can keep a Powerbook in sleep mode, it's usually on the order of a couple of days. If you have to go that long without having a power outlet handy, then shut it down, already!
I do that all the time on OS X. It's just that under the current "desktop", I get to see bits of all the other "desktops". And there's this handy bar full of these various desktops that I can switch between, one per app. It's called the "Dock".
So basically, it's all in how you think of it.
Plus, the new Expose feature should make finding those hidden windows a lot easier. In fact, I was surprised to see a hidden window in Mozilla show up. From the look of the title bar widgets, it may have been a prototype Find window, but it was definitely in Mozilla, and disappeared when I brought some other app to the front.
What I still cannot do (I used to be able to do it under Linux)
You forgot "get r00ted by the latest 'sploit"! One reason I'm getting rid of my last Linux box (a NAT/DNS/IMAP/etc. server) in favor of a Blue & White G3 running Panther is that I'm tired of "watching my back" looking out for the latest exploit. The kiddies don't want to bother with rooting OS X boxes because there aren't enough of them to bother with, and there aren't enough m4d t00lz to break into them either. And Apple is quick with the security updates. For the stuff that I compile myself, I have more time to fix them.
The 6809 CPU had an undocumented instruction to make it go into test mode. The instruction had TWO opcodes (14 and 15 hex). The test mode was basically "read all memory addresses sequentially, one per clock cycle, until reset". Lots of fun when your code derails. Especially in an unattended embedded controller. Doubly so on one where the watchdog circuitry would reset its timer on reads in addition to writes.
Did you hear what the solution was? Pioneer made a software update which, when you stuck a 4X disc into the drive, would write to the disk at 1X!
In Pioneer's case, it probably focused the lens right into the media. Crashola. There wasn't really anything Pioneer could do to prevent that except encourage the 4X standards committees to not make blank disks that way.
In this case (LG/Mandrake 9.2), it's probably an IDE command which LG implemented in a nonstandard way, such that an otherwise harmless CD writer command would cause the drive to kill itself, probably by erasing its flash ROM. You don't have to actually use the CD-ROM drive, just have it present while installing Mandrake. Which means that LG went out of their way to do something stupid.
What is it about masters theses which encourages people to either have no backup, or a single, weak backup (written repeatedly to the same disk, of course) which they don't even test for re-readability?
If he had written each backup to a different disk, he wouldn't have been out the whole thesis either! Blank CDs (the cheap ones, if you're just going to use them for temporary backups and not archival backups) are like ten cents each in quantity, and good ones are less than 50 cents each. Don't be cheap, write ten whole copies of the thing to a fresh CD-R every night.
No, the reason burned AIFF files take up more space than redbook audio is simply because redbook audio uses mode 1 (2352 byte blocks) and burned AIFF files (burned on a file system with a directory and everything, otherwise they wouldn't be AIFF files anymore, would they) are stored as mode 2 (2048 byte blocks).
So you can fit more music on a redbook audio CD than you can on an ISO full of AIFF files. (The maximum transfer rate is affected too, so you couldn't play that ISO full of AIFF files on a 1X CD-ROM drive.)
One problem... PSO comes with a printed key code in the game. This can only be used only once to sign up for network play. Sega did this intentionally to screw with the used market. And I wouldn't be surprised if you have to sign up for network play to use this exploit. (Not that they can't make it work with an unregistered PSO if they emulate enough of the server, including pretending to be Sega's servers. But that's a lot more work. And right now the site is slashdotted.)
...and not too many more comments before someone whined about it. When someone posts about Go in a chess story, why does this whining always happen and so quickly? we all know that go trolls are not comparatively as good as chess trolls. this is a chess troll. yawn.
I had a 4400 for a couple of months until I had an opportunity to buy a brand new close-out PTP 225 for half of its list price. I sold the 4400 to a friend and felt bad later when I realized that the 4400 was probably one of the worst models that Apple ever made, and the only one to use its specific type of RAM. I'm still using that PTP 225 to this day, running 10.2.x after considerable upgrades (CPU, video, RAM, Ethernet, IDE, Firewire, USB).
It expanded just fine for me, with a few exceptions. The IDE card wouldn't work properly in one of the "fast" (50MHz) PCI slots, but it worked fine in a "slow" (25MHz) slot. The Firewire would hang under 9.x if you tried to do anything serious like copying a few megabytes of files. I had to remove the Adaptec SCSI card (genuine PCC closeout stock, bought at a computer show a year later) because it wasn't supported under OS X, and abandon the internal "fast" SCSI bus, because it hung during boot under OS X.
For a long time I regretted not going for the better of the two PTP models I had the chance at. The better PTP 225 had 128MB RAM instead of 96MB, and an second 2GB drive w/RAID support, for only $300 more. But in the long run, it wouldn't have made any difference after all the upgrades I've done to it.
Okay, let's see. I happen to know from experience that the maximum effective bandwidth for 66MHz 32bit PCI is about 1.3-1.4Gbits or so, and that's if you optimize for BIG high-priority transfers, one-way, and have nothing else on that bus. Multiply by four (double the clock, double the bits) and you get about... 5.2-5.6Gbits or so? Fudge it down and you get maybe 4-5 gigabits maximum effective throughput without serious optimization.
Of course the reason to use 10 gigabit here isn't throughput, it's latency. The individual messages take roughly one-tenth the time from start of send to completion of receive than they would with a 1 gigabit link.
The person who receives the video doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the piracy, aside from getting rid of the original video.
Many of those "For Your Consideration" videos that aren't given to relatives and friends end up in thrift stores, where anybody can buy them (as long as someone else hasn't first). I found a VHS screener of a Babylon 5 episode at Goodwill a few years back, and a few months ago I passed up a stack of movie and TV awards-screener DVDs because everything (IMHO) sucked. I've also found a couple of pre-release screeners at used book stores.
Not to mention that you can get USB storage devices in a convienent cylindrical form factor. Handy for insertion into various bodily orifices! Watch out for those rogue booth babes!
Slashdot Mirror
I should probably mention that I haven't burned any 4X discs yet. I haven't been been buying them, because my 2X drive (which I use most of the time) will only burn them at 1X. But any disc I've had that was advertised as 2X, I've burned at 2X.
Plus, unlike CD-Rs, the reflective layer is sandwiched in the middle of two polycarbonate discs, so the discs are much better protected from air and abrasion than CD-Rs are, which should improve long-term reliability
By the way, the original poster didn't even say whether he was burning +R, +RW, -R, or -RW, much less which model of drives were in his duplicator. How do you even know which version to be leery of buying?
Maybe someone should grep the source for "uid[ \t]*=[ \t]*0[^0-9]" and inspect any matches, just in case?
Here's what I use instead of a Game Boy. Just try running Neverwinter Nights on your Lame Boy.
If Microsoft comes up with a PowerPC version of the NT kernel for XBox2, then it will only have to emulate the game code, not the operating system, not DirectX, not the drivers, not the networking stack. That should provide enough of a performance improvement for a 2GHz G5, or maybe even a 1.5GHz G5, to run XBox-1 games at a good speed.
Once you say the magic words "central signing authority", you're putting dollar signs in someone's eyes. Verisign charges what, $900 for an SSL cert? And what does it get you? You're added to a stupid database. Browsers won't bitch about an invalid cert just so you can get https working. That's all. Because there's no way to get the security of https without the authentication.
The ioGear also had a pair of "Device" USB ports which didn't go through any keyboard/mouse translation, but those were not switched from the front panel buttons. You could only switch them from a key sequence on the "console" keyboard! (Console keyboard meaning either the front USB port with device faking, or the PS/2 port. If I wanted to use a PS/2 keyboard, I wouldn't be looking for a USB KVM switch!) So I would still have needed a second keyboard, and have to use it every time I switched computers!
So if it weren't for the keyboard repeat problem (which I suspect to be a firmware problem), and being unable to switch the "Device" ports from the front panel buttons, I would have been happy reaching over to hit the switch buttons. (It's easier than tapping that keyboard sequence anyhow, plus there were four buttons, one for each computer.)
I also tried yet another cheapie-looking brand that I can't remember, but you can recognize it by the silver color, ports on all four sides, and oval motif on the top. The USB output port was electrically intermittent (probably cold solder joints), and it locked up my PowerMac during my initial feature testing! So I went back to using my years old Focus brand AT keyboard KVM switch with occassional flakiness, and brought up USB extension cords for manual reconnection. Since there are only two computers I'm using right now, I've gone ahead and hooked up a second keyboard and mouse.
I've also noticed that the USB device switchers you can buy conspiciously avoid showing or mentioning either a keyboard or mouse on their packaging.
I tried the ioGear USB KVM. Same problem. Apparently USB KVM switches "cheat" by pretending to be a generic USB keyboard and mouse. That's what they tell your computers, no matter what kind of keyboard or mouse you actually have installed. At least (IIRC) the Belkin unit is flash upgradeable, unlike the ioGear unit.
In my case, I was forced to get rid of the ioGear unit because it was repeating keydown events or something. I couldn't get through an entire line of "quick brown fox" without at least one, and sometimes two rrepeated charactters. Sometimes I'd even get a dddouble repeat.
Dammit, all I want is a USB KVM that behaves properly, and isn't designed with the assumption that all you have (or want) is a crappy $5 PS/2 keyboard and mouse.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I suspect that it may be more trouble than you think. Why do I think this? Look at the VLC player. Mac version, unpack it and drag to Applications folder. Windows version, typical installer. Linux version, long list of "you need these libraries installed in your system first".
And then there's the issue of video hardware. Mac and XP both have good APIs to support using video accelleration and separate framebuffers for playing video. X Windows is still an artifact of the '80s, so you have to bolt on some extra APIs somewhere to do that. When you start talking about FreeBSD, then you've got the issue of binary executable formats too. Apple is not going to release Quicktime as a bunch of .c/.h files with a makefile just so you can maybe compile it under FreeBSD. Even if you already have the thirty other libraries it would need.
And then there's the issue of the Sorenson codec, for which I can remember there was finger pointing between Apple and Sorenson about why there's no Linux version. But you still need an API to compile the rest of Quicktime to anyhow.
Besides, can't you run Quicktime for Windows under Wine anyhow?
Linux is great for computer "gearheads". The equivalent of some guy 1983 whose only car was some beater that he constantly had jacked up to tweak the motor. On the other hand, if you have a regular 9-to-5 job, you can't afford to have your car not working every morning at 8 AM. One solution is to get another car. Another is to get rid of the beater for a reliable car, stop tinkering with it, and actually have some free time when you get back from work.
Some people like tinkering with their cars or computers all the time. I'd rather move on and tinker with something else instead.
Apparently Open Transport liked to hog the machine for eight seconds or so when you woke the computer from sleep. (It still does in Classic, but you can still use the OS X side while it's doing that.)
As I heard the story, Steve Jobs bitched about how long it took to wake a Powerbook from sleep. He did the math on how long it took times how often people woke up their Powerbooks times the number of Powerbooks produced. The result was that "entire lifetimes" were being wasted waiting for Powerbooks to wake up.
As for how long you can keep a Powerbook in sleep mode, it's usually on the order of a couple of days. If you have to go that long without having a power outlet handy, then shut it down, already!
I do that all the time on OS X. It's just that under the current "desktop", I get to see bits of all the other "desktops". And there's this handy bar full of these various desktops that I can switch between, one per app. It's called the "Dock".
So basically, it's all in how you think of it.
Plus, the new Expose feature should make finding those hidden windows a lot easier. In fact, I was surprised to see a hidden window in Mozilla show up. From the look of the title bar widgets, it may have been a prototype Find window, but it was definitely in Mozilla, and disappeared when I brought some other app to the front.
You forgot "get r00ted by the latest 'sploit"! One reason I'm getting rid of my last Linux box (a NAT/DNS/IMAP/etc. server) in favor of a Blue & White G3 running Panther is that I'm tired of "watching my back" looking out for the latest exploit. The kiddies don't want to bother with rooting OS X boxes because there aren't enough of them to bother with, and there aren't enough m4d t00lz to break into them either. And Apple is quick with the security updates. For the stuff that I compile myself, I have more time to fix them.
The 6809 CPU had an undocumented instruction to make it go into test mode. The instruction had TWO opcodes (14 and 15 hex). The test mode was basically "read all memory addresses sequentially, one per clock cycle, until reset". Lots of fun when your code derails. Especially in an unattended embedded controller. Doubly so on one where the watchdog circuitry would reset its timer on reads in addition to writes.
In Pioneer's case, it probably focused the lens right into the media. Crashola. There wasn't really anything Pioneer could do to prevent that except encourage the 4X standards committees to not make blank disks that way.
In this case (LG/Mandrake 9.2), it's probably an IDE command which LG implemented in a nonstandard way, such that an otherwise harmless CD writer command would cause the drive to kill itself, probably by erasing its flash ROM. You don't have to actually use the CD-ROM drive, just have it present while installing Mandrake. Which means that LG went out of their way to do something stupid.
If he had written each backup to a different disk, he wouldn't have been out the whole thesis either! Blank CDs (the cheap ones, if you're just going to use them for temporary backups and not archival backups) are like ten cents each in quantity, and good ones are less than 50 cents each. Don't be cheap, write ten whole copies of the thing to a fresh CD-R every night.
If you're going to mention that, you could at least get its name (Therac-25) correct so people could google for what actually happened.
So you can fit more music on a redbook audio CD than you can on an ISO full of AIFF files. (The maximum transfer rate is affected too, so you couldn't play that ISO full of AIFF files on a 1X CD-ROM drive.)
One problem... PSO comes with a printed key code in the game. This can only be used only once to sign up for network play. Sega did this intentionally to screw with the used market. And I wouldn't be surprised if you have to sign up for network play to use this exploit. (Not that they can't make it work with an unregistered PSO if they emulate enough of the server, including pretending to be Sega's servers. But that's a lot more work. And right now the site is slashdotted.)
...and not too many more comments before someone whined about it. When someone posts about Go in a chess story, why does this whining always happen and so quickly? we all know that go trolls are not comparatively as good as chess trolls. this is a chess troll. yawn.
So what are you going to buy next week to confuse The Watchers? Buy a few barrels of fuel oil?
It expanded just fine for me, with a few exceptions. The IDE card wouldn't work properly in one of the "fast" (50MHz) PCI slots, but it worked fine in a "slow" (25MHz) slot. The Firewire would hang under 9.x if you tried to do anything serious like copying a few megabytes of files. I had to remove the Adaptec SCSI card (genuine PCC closeout stock, bought at a computer show a year later) because it wasn't supported under OS X, and abandon the internal "fast" SCSI bus, because it hung during boot under OS X.
For a long time I regretted not going for the better of the two PTP models I had the chance at. The better PTP 225 had 128MB RAM instead of 96MB, and an second 2GB drive w/RAID support, for only $300 more. But in the long run, it wouldn't have made any difference after all the upgrades I've done to it.
Of course the reason to use 10 gigabit here isn't throughput, it's latency. The individual messages take roughly one-tenth the time from start of send to completion of receive than they would with a 1 gigabit link.
Many of those "For Your Consideration" videos that aren't given to relatives and friends end up in thrift stores, where anybody can buy them (as long as someone else hasn't first). I found a VHS screener of a Babylon 5 episode at Goodwill a few years back, and a few months ago I passed up a stack of movie and TV awards-screener DVDs because everything (IMHO) sucked. I've also found a couple of pre-release screeners at used book stores.
Not to mention that you can get USB storage devices in a convienent cylindrical form factor. Handy for insertion into various bodily orifices! Watch out for those rogue booth babes!