I like Avast quite a bit. It's generally fast, problem-free, and stays the hell out of the way.
Or at least, it stays out of the way once you do a few things to it:
Tell it to turn off all sounds and notifications of normalcy. And to automatically accept all new program and definition updates. And to never to bother to ask to reboot the computer (it's a Windows desktop -- it'll be rebooted soon enough for othe reasons, anyway).
After that, it just sits quietly on the taskbar unless things go awry somehow.
And this, boys and girls, is why I always nuke the magstripe on my ID using a strong magnet. It's easy: Just take a small neodymium magnet (available at any hardware store or inside of any hard drive if you don't already have one), wipe it back and forth across the stripe a few times, turn it over, and do it again.
I started doing this the first time the clerk at a store swiped my ID through their register while I was buying beer and paying with cash. They (the corporation, not the clerk -- he's an alright guy) have no business recording who I am when I make a cash transaction with them.
I've used MediaMonkey under Vista to transfer music to my iPod Touch (though I haven't tried with the newest firmware).
It's still somewhat in the realm of "ugly hack," though: MediaMonkey uses parts of iTunes (which must also be installed) in order to accomplish this, but it worked fine in the boneheaded, practical sense of things in that it was transparent, easy, and I didn't have to suffer with seeing iTunes.
Could be coils, but they're expensive to troubleshoot (needs a trip to the dealer 45 miles from here), and expensive to replace, and there's six of them.
Can't be plug wires, because there aren't any -- just a short connector that sits between the coil and the plug, which are newish, and the plugs themselves have only a couple of thousand miles on them. (The rest of the ignition system is low-voltage.)
The battery is new.
The car is negative ground. The stereo is wired to the factory twisted-pair wires the factory amp, which are generally considered very noise-free wires even in otherwise-totally aftermarket installs. This is all the same arrangement it had from the factory, except the head says "JVC" on it instead of being a Blaupunkt OEM unit.
Could be the alternator, I guess. One of the AM radio noises does follow engine speed. One of these days, I'll swap alternators with the one in the parts car, which is a couple of years older and has 80,000 fewer miles on it, and see if it makes anything different.
But the other noise is a real bear. As long as the key is turned on, it has a constant, rapid ticking noise on AM. (I haven't tried wiring the stereo hot yet to see if the same thing happens with the key off, but it's at least not related to the heater blower.) It happens everywhere, and across the band, so it's not some sort of localized interference.
Automotive noise is always interesting, I tell you. I work with this stuff doing mobile communications in public safety, and it's always interesting. Fun stuff happens, sometimes, like when they key up the radio and the in-car laptop shits itself, though usually the client doesn't think its as funny as I do.
Physical security is still the key. If one doesn't have good physical security of the computer they're being paranoid about, the war is already lost.
I lock my laptop when I'm away from it even for a minute or two on a jobsite. And I lock the doors on my house. And I trust the people who live here and understand their level of expertise and potential deceit.
Ain't nobody going to fire up that Javascript function on my computer(s) without rebooting it first, in which case Firefox will have forgotten the master password.
Now: If you've got a remote exploit for that, I'm all ears.
Value of the work is variable, too, in my experience.
I have a good mechanic that I bring my difficult problems to. Recently, I had him finish a job for me that I'd gotten stuck on -- converting an automatic BMW 325i to a 5-speed manual.
It cost me a lot of money in labor to finish that job. But I was paying him (and up to two others) hourly to get it done, and that involved learning the tricks of doing so on that car, which takes time.
Next time I need transmission or driveshaft work done, or a clutch replaced, or a line bled out on that car, he'll know exactly the best and fastest procedure needed to accomplish that task, and it'll be far cheaper for me than it was the first time. After all, I've already paid him to learn it once and like I said, he's a good mechanic (ie, brilliantly intelligent, perhaps autistic) -- he'll remember it the next time.
And, sure -- there's folks that could've done it cheaper, or faster, but none around here that I'd trust, and none who would've done a more clean, careful job. Trust also adds value to work, and it took a good number of years in order for him to earn it.
Accordingly, I didn't haggle over the bill. He both earned that money honestly, even though it was a lot more than either of us expected, and also documented everything so well that it was obvious why it was more expensive.
I don't do PC work for folks that I work with, either. (Well, I do a bit of work on the side from time to time for my boss, but that's...different.)
Why? We sometimes spend months in the shop with little to do, and my previous coworker would sometimes let employees take their PC in to have it worked on during regular hours. This created an atmosphere wherein those other employees felt that they could always get their stuff fixed for free.
Which, actually, is OK -- my hourly rate at my day job isn't anywhere near what my rate as a private PC-fixer-person is, but then I don't get a solid 40 hours fixing PCs on the side in a week, either. And the boss didn't care, since he was well aware that we'd fuck around for days at a time when there wasn't anything to do.
So, cool. Except for when it's time to get out of the shop and work on an installation somewhere, which can take months. Then, folks still have the expectation of free PC repair, without understanding the concept that the company's best interest is served by me working on that $400,000 out-of-shop project instead of their piddly spyware issues.
I find that it's less tensive to avoid working on them at all, than to expect them to understand why I used to have time to do it and don't anymore (and that I'd be happy to work it at home, but that it won't be free).
Which still makes me slightly uncomfortable because I genuinely would like to help these people out, but it's still the lesser of the evils.
I do a little bit of PC repair. Everything I remove from a computer (even the screws) goes into a box dedicated to that machine, and stays there. (I use old, wooden cigar boxes with metal closures, but there's lots of relatively static-safe things which are applicable.)
When the computer is done, I package up whatever is left in the box in some form of appropriate bag, and make sure it all gets back to the customer along with their system.
It'd be nice, of course, to hang onto the occasional OEM power supply that gets replaced, or the hard drive that gets upgraded, but those aren't my parts to keep.
Unless, of course, the customer decides to give them to me. I even got an "I don't need that old thing anymore" on a laptop repair that an old client of mine didn't want to follow through on. There wasn't much wrong with it -- just a nice Latitude D620 with a fair bit of RAM, a dead battery, some real malware issues, and no Windows license.
The customer just weighed their options. They could've bought a new battery, a new OS, and paid me to recover their data and make Windows work again, or just buy a similar new or used computer that already works for a little more. They picked the latter, and decided they didn't need the "dead" laptop anymore.
'sides, it's the only legal way to conduct business anyway. To use a car analogy: When I take my car to the shop, there had better be a pile of old parts waiting for me to inspect or take with me.
If that's the case, why did they act like it never happened before.
It's how organizations tend to react to things which aren't widely known. Is it common? Very. Is it inevitable? Perhaps. Is it wrong? Probably.
It may be a small percentage, but would you really want your child to be the lucky winner?
No, of course not -- but I'll implore them to take those odds. I bought my twelve year old stepson a proper freestyle BMX bike for his birthday, and that's got a lot better chance of horribly disfiguring him than 1-in-11-million iPod fire does.
Relax. The world is dangerous, but it's safer than it used to be. As soon as we learned how not to be eaten by giant wild animals, we had to learn how not to drown after falling from a makeshift boat, and then we had to learn how not to get mangled in a threshing machine, and then we had to learn not to drown in a pile of corn, and then . . .
Meanwhile, I'm not going to cover my kids in padding before they go out and play, I'm not going to tie a GPS tracker around their neck, and I'm not going to take away anyone's iPod. I'll probably come up with some manner of car for them when they get old enough to drive one.
You raise your own kids how you want to. I prefer to raise adults.
And... since we're talking about low-frequency AC here, with two conductors (and a ground, but that's not important), and with each of these conductors having exactly equal and opposite current flowing through them:
The inductance cancels itself out.
Therefore, all you have is the usual resistive heating that happens in any wire with current flow, which isn't generally a problem for stuff folks are likely to find in their home office even with the cord all bunched up somehow.
Or induced noise from the ignition system. Or a bad body ground somewhere. Or... Or... Or...
There's very few safe absolute statements when it comes to automotive electronics and noise. I once replaced the spark plugs on my car, and suddenly could listen to AM radio again.
Meanwhile, my current car has an issue whereby I get lots of engine-speed-related noise on AM, AND other noise which happens even with the motor turned off. The former might be alternator or ignition noise (I suspect the alternator), while the latter problem I haven't been able to put my finger on yet.
Having your code be able to access only the CPU, RAM, the video framebuffer, and a sample playback buffer, and still do interesting things is more impressive.
Meh.
While you're at it, you might as well bar demo makers from using the Amiga's unique graphics and sound capabilities, too.
I contribute to Wikipedia once in awhile. Usually, I don't bother to log in (reverting obvious vandalism or whatever), but when I have something substantial to add, I try to make sure that I'm accountable for it. My edits generally seem to stick around just fine.
I've only contributed one image to Wikipedia. There wasn't any "bar" to jump over; all I did was tag and upload the picture, and put an appropriate link in the appropriate article.
It's been there for a little over two years.
Now, granted, the photo in question is of a work on public display in a public facility owned by the People, so I (altruistically) couldn't bear to claim any copyright on it and released it into the public domain. But, there wasn't any retribution for my contribution. I just put it there, and it stayed.
Technically, it's not a very good photo - the focus is soft, the lighting is horrible (dark subject, bright surroundings, glass case), and the camera shake during the long (freehand) exposure was unavoidable. But I did approach it professionally, trying to coax a decent exposure out of my little Kodak point-and-shoot of what I feel is an important subject. I shot that piece at least a dozen times to get something passable, and I'm quite pleased with the results of my effort, given what I had to content with.
I just checked the Wikipedia entry when I got back from the museum, out of curiosity, and uploaded an image that I felt was missing.
Did I do this wrong? Should I have prefaced my edits and uploads with telephone calls and prerequisites, while paying tribute to some unknown hegemony?
Why would you, as a developer, care what anyone else thinks?
Just create something useful and good that solves a problem that you care about, and polish it until you're happy with it. If someone else wants to contribute something (be it bugfixes, new features, GUI magic, translations, documentation, web site support, whatever), let them.
Isn't that how OSS is supposed to work? Because, I mean: If nobody ever uses $yourapp but you, what have you lost? And if everyone and their brother uses $yourapp, what have you gained?
Ah, yes. The ST-225, with the memorable and protracted groan from the stepper motor at startup and the green LED on the front.
I used one for years. Eventually, I put Stacker on the thing, with half of a 2 megabyte 8-bit EMS RAM expansion (with 72 buggery little individually-socketed DIP RAM chips on it) card dedicated to caching, and the other half used as a RAM disk for some frequently-loaded programs on the BBS. This was actually a net speed increase over using the drive uncompressed, and I got to shrink the disk usage of the message bases down to almost nothing.
And then, I lucked upon an ST-419, which was a beastly full-height 15-megabyte MFM monster. The thing took so long to initialize that I had to use a separate power supply for it, so I could power things on in the right sequence. And it didn't even fit in the case. (A BBS user once made me a nice sticker for the front of this machine that said "XT from Hell".)
I never had a lick of trouble with either of these drives.
Sometimes, I think thems were the days, and how much fun it was to be closer to the hardware. But then I remember that I don't have to think about UARTs and FOSSIL drivers anymore, and things seem better. I think I still have my old external SupraFAXModem v.32bis (bought for the low, low, factory-direct sysop-only price of $250) somewhere...but I don't know what it'd good for anymore.
Listen to the demo, and then come back and tell me that it's canned MIDI. It's got a bunch of analog synth goodness going on, which simply isn't a function of any stock MIDI synth library (which, as a rule, resemble simple sample-playback machines). And, sure, it loops - but then, so does almost everything else we call "music."
It's actually very similar to old PC demos in the DOS days. Back in the day, they had a set of hardware with a set of APIs (between MS-DOS and BIOS), and they got to use all of it -- stuff was generally not running on bare metal.
Nowadays, we have much more intense abstraction of hardware in modern operating systems. So what if they take advantage of it?
A decade ago (or longer), we had demos using GLIDE under MS-DOS on 3dfx Voodoo cards. Was this cheating? What about all of the ones which used the Yamaha hardware synths on Soundblaster cards, or the sample-playback and DSP functions of GUS and AWE cards? If using APIs is bad, should old DOS demos have restricted themselves from even using VESA SVGA video modes? Should they have used their own file IO routines instead of Microsoft's? If, way back when, MS-DOS included a generalized OpenGL library, should demo authors have been free to use it?
If a line must be drawn somewhere, then where?
Myself, I prefer to draw the line at whatever the stock operating system provides. And then, they get to use everything they've got available to them. If "everything" happens to include the whole of DirectX, then so be it.
But you ignore the human aspect of it all. I once had a nicely-packaged, limited edition 24kt gold Sony release of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, which I accidentally dropped a screwdriver on. Went right through the top layer of the disc.
I can't just buy it again -- it's unavailable outside of collectors circles. I've got other limited-edition works which can't just be bought new, too.
And then there's the aspect of young children handling media (or friends with young children who like to borrow discs).
A dozen years ago when that Floyd CD got destroyed, I couldn't pull this off due to costs, but nowadays, I rip everything, and just play the backup. Costs almost nothing, and keeps things secure.
It's not even very time-consuming -- blank goes into one $25 drive, source goes into another $25 drive, I sing a short incantation with the mouse, and usable media gets spit out sometime later. And on a quad-core machine, I don't see any performance hit at all while this is going on.
As long as we're presenting anecdotal evidence....
A decade or so ago, I used to burn my disks on a Plextor PX-820. Every single disk that I've tried, no matter what the manufacture, has read just fine on modern systems.
Please allow me to suggest that your currently-unreadable burns were bad to begin with. Please further allow me to suggest that a bad burner back in the day is still a bad burner today, and that any media you have from Way Back When is sure to reflect this fact.
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I like Avast quite a bit. It's generally fast, problem-free, and stays the hell out of the way.
Or at least, it stays out of the way once you do a few things to it:
Tell it to turn off all sounds and notifications of normalcy. And to automatically accept all new program and definition updates. And to never to bother to ask to reboot the computer (it's a Windows desktop -- it'll be rebooted soon enough for othe reasons, anyway).
After that, it just sits quietly on the taskbar unless things go awry somehow.
And this, boys and girls, is why I always nuke the magstripe on my ID using a strong magnet. It's easy: Just take a small neodymium magnet (available at any hardware store or inside of any hard drive if you don't already have one), wipe it back and forth across the stripe a few times, turn it over, and do it again.
I started doing this the first time the clerk at a store swiped my ID through their register while I was buying beer and paying with cash. They (the corporation, not the clerk -- he's an alright guy) have no business recording who I am when I make a cash transaction with them.
And this, boys and girls, is why fanboys and firmware don't mix.
Heh.
Naw, it happens with the engine off. :) It's quite the thing.
The coils all read open between all points. Apparently, this somewhat normal on this car, and they work by magic alone. (The car runs just fine.)
I hope we're all geeky enough here to know the definition of an "electric heater," and that basic electrical safety goes without saying.
I've used MediaMonkey under Vista to transfer music to my iPod Touch (though I haven't tried with the newest firmware).
It's still somewhat in the realm of "ugly hack," though: MediaMonkey uses parts of iTunes (which must also be installed) in order to accomplish this, but it worked fine in the boneheaded, practical sense of things in that it was transparent, easy, and I didn't have to suffer with seeing iTunes.
Could be coils, but they're expensive to troubleshoot (needs a trip to the dealer 45 miles from here), and expensive to replace, and there's six of them.
Can't be plug wires, because there aren't any -- just a short connector that sits between the coil and the plug, which are newish, and the plugs themselves have only a couple of thousand miles on them. (The rest of the ignition system is low-voltage.)
The battery is new.
The car is negative ground. The stereo is wired to the factory twisted-pair wires the factory amp, which are generally considered very noise-free wires even in otherwise-totally aftermarket installs. This is all the same arrangement it had from the factory, except the head says "JVC" on it instead of being a Blaupunkt OEM unit.
Could be the alternator, I guess. One of the AM radio noises does follow engine speed. One of these days, I'll swap alternators with the one in the parts car, which is a couple of years older and has 80,000 fewer miles on it, and see if it makes anything different.
But the other noise is a real bear. As long as the key is turned on, it has a constant, rapid ticking noise on AM. (I haven't tried wiring the stereo hot yet to see if the same thing happens with the key off, but it's at least not related to the heater blower.) It happens everywhere, and across the band, so it's not some sort of localized interference.
Automotive noise is always interesting, I tell you. I work with this stuff doing mobile communications in public safety, and it's always interesting. Fun stuff happens, sometimes, like when they key up the radio and the in-car laptop shits itself, though usually the client doesn't think its as funny as I do.
*boggle*
Clarkson does commercials?
Good advice, but...
Physical security is still the key. If one doesn't have good physical security of the computer they're being paranoid about, the war is already lost.
I lock my laptop when I'm away from it even for a minute or two on a jobsite. And I lock the doors on my house. And I trust the people who live here and understand their level of expertise and potential deceit.
Ain't nobody going to fire up that Javascript function on my computer(s) without rebooting it first, in which case Firefox will have forgotten the master password.
Now: If you've got a remote exploit for that, I'm all ears.
Value of the work is variable, too, in my experience.
I have a good mechanic that I bring my difficult problems to. Recently, I had him finish a job for me that I'd gotten stuck on -- converting an automatic BMW 325i to a 5-speed manual.
It cost me a lot of money in labor to finish that job. But I was paying him (and up to two others) hourly to get it done, and that involved learning the tricks of doing so on that car, which takes time.
Next time I need transmission or driveshaft work done, or a clutch replaced, or a line bled out on that car, he'll know exactly the best and fastest procedure needed to accomplish that task, and it'll be far cheaper for me than it was the first time. After all, I've already paid him to learn it once and like I said, he's a good mechanic (ie, brilliantly intelligent, perhaps autistic) -- he'll remember it the next time.
And, sure -- there's folks that could've done it cheaper, or faster, but none around here that I'd trust, and none who would've done a more clean, careful job. Trust also adds value to work, and it took a good number of years in order for him to earn it.
Accordingly, I didn't haggle over the bill. He both earned that money honestly, even though it was a lot more than either of us expected, and also documented everything so well that it was obvious why it was more expensive.
I don't do PC work for folks that I work with, either. (Well, I do a bit of work on the side from time to time for my boss, but that's...different.)
Why? We sometimes spend months in the shop with little to do, and my previous coworker would sometimes let employees take their PC in to have it worked on during regular hours. This created an atmosphere wherein those other employees felt that they could always get their stuff fixed for free.
Which, actually, is OK -- my hourly rate at my day job isn't anywhere near what my rate as a private PC-fixer-person is, but then I don't get a solid 40 hours fixing PCs on the side in a week, either. And the boss didn't care, since he was well aware that we'd fuck around for days at a time when there wasn't anything to do.
So, cool. Except for when it's time to get out of the shop and work on an installation somewhere, which can take months. Then, folks still have the expectation of free PC repair, without understanding the concept that the company's best interest is served by me working on that $400,000 out-of-shop project instead of their piddly spyware issues.
I find that it's less tensive to avoid working on them at all, than to expect them to understand why I used to have time to do it and don't anymore (and that I'd be happy to work it at home, but that it won't be free).
Which still makes me slightly uncomfortable because I genuinely would like to help these people out, but it's still the lesser of the evils.
I do a little bit of PC repair. Everything I remove from a computer (even the screws) goes into a box dedicated to that machine, and stays there. (I use old, wooden cigar boxes with metal closures, but there's lots of relatively static-safe things which are applicable.)
When the computer is done, I package up whatever is left in the box in some form of appropriate bag, and make sure it all gets back to the customer along with their system.
It'd be nice, of course, to hang onto the occasional OEM power supply that gets replaced, or the hard drive that gets upgraded, but those aren't my parts to keep.
Unless, of course, the customer decides to give them to me. I even got an "I don't need that old thing anymore" on a laptop repair that an old client of mine didn't want to follow through on. There wasn't much wrong with it -- just a nice Latitude D620 with a fair bit of RAM, a dead battery, some real malware issues, and no Windows license.
The customer just weighed their options. They could've bought a new battery, a new OS, and paid me to recover their data and make Windows work again, or just buy a similar new or used computer that already works for a little more. They picked the latter, and decided they didn't need the "dead" laptop anymore.
'sides, it's the only legal way to conduct business anyway. To use a car analogy: When I take my car to the shop, there had better be a pile of old parts waiting for me to inspect or take with me.
Back when such things were still useful and dear, I ripped the Molex connector off of a 2.5 gig Seagate drive.
It went like this: Wiggle, wiggle, tug, wiggle, tug, tug *ohfuck*
Being handy with an iron, it wasn't a big deal to solder an old Y cable onto the drive, but geez.
One word: Spin.
It's how organizations tend to react to things which aren't widely known. Is it common? Very. Is it inevitable? Perhaps. Is it wrong? Probably.
No, of course not -- but I'll implore them to take those odds. I bought my twelve year old stepson a proper freestyle BMX bike for his birthday, and that's got a lot better chance of horribly disfiguring him than 1-in-11-million iPod fire does.
Relax. The world is dangerous, but it's safer than it used to be. As soon as we learned how not to be eaten by giant wild animals, we had to learn how not to drown after falling from a makeshift boat, and then we had to learn how not to get mangled in a threshing machine, and then we had to learn not to drown in a pile of corn, and then . . .
Meanwhile, I'm not going to cover my kids in padding before they go out and play, I'm not going to tie a GPS tracker around their neck, and I'm not going to take away anyone's iPod. I'll probably come up with some manner of car for them when they get old enough to drive one.
You raise your own kids how you want to. I prefer to raise adults.
*shrug*
And... since we're talking about low-frequency AC here, with two conductors (and a ground, but that's not important), and with each of these conductors having exactly equal and opposite current flowing through them:
The inductance cancels itself out.
Therefore, all you have is the usual resistive heating that happens in any wire with current flow, which isn't generally a problem for stuff folks are likely to find in their home office even with the cord all bunched up somehow.
Or induced noise from the ignition system. Or a bad body ground somewhere. Or... Or... Or...
There's very few safe absolute statements when it comes to automotive electronics and noise. I once replaced the spark plugs on my car, and suddenly could listen to AM radio again.
Meanwhile, my current car has an issue whereby I get lots of engine-speed-related noise on AM, AND other noise which happens even with the motor turned off. The former might be alternator or ignition noise (I suspect the alternator), while the latter problem I haven't been able to put my finger on yet.
Ever heard a meteor shower? I sure have.
Meh.
While you're at it, you might as well bar demo makers from using the Amiga's unique graphics and sound capabilities, too.
[[citation needed]]
Pardon me if I seem lost and confused, but:
I contribute to Wikipedia once in awhile. Usually, I don't bother to log in (reverting obvious vandalism or whatever), but when I have something substantial to add, I try to make sure that I'm accountable for it. My edits generally seem to stick around just fine.
I've only contributed one image to Wikipedia. There wasn't any "bar" to jump over; all I did was tag and upload the picture, and put an appropriate link in the appropriate article.
It's been there for a little over two years.
Now, granted, the photo in question is of a work on public display in a public facility owned by the People, so I (altruistically) couldn't bear to claim any copyright on it and released it into the public domain. But, there wasn't any retribution for my contribution. I just put it there, and it stayed.
Technically, it's not a very good photo - the focus is soft, the lighting is horrible (dark subject, bright surroundings, glass case), and the camera shake during the long (freehand) exposure was unavoidable. But I did approach it professionally, trying to coax a decent exposure out of my little Kodak point-and-shoot of what I feel is an important subject. I shot that piece at least a dozen times to get something passable, and I'm quite pleased with the results of my effort, given what I had to content with.
I just checked the Wikipedia entry when I got back from the museum, out of curiosity, and uploaded an image that I felt was missing.
Did I do this wrong? Should I have prefaced my edits and uploads with telephone calls and prerequisites, while paying tribute to some unknown hegemony?
Why would you, as a developer, care what anyone else thinks?
Just create something useful and good that solves a problem that you care about, and polish it until you're happy with it. If someone else wants to contribute something (be it bugfixes, new features, GUI magic, translations, documentation, web site support, whatever), let them.
Isn't that how OSS is supposed to work? Because, I mean: If nobody ever uses $yourapp but you, what have you lost? And if everyone and their brother uses $yourapp, what have you gained?
Ah, yes. The ST-225, with the memorable and protracted groan from the stepper motor at startup and the green LED on the front.
I used one for years. Eventually, I put Stacker on the thing, with half of a 2 megabyte 8-bit EMS RAM expansion (with 72 buggery little individually-socketed DIP RAM chips on it) card dedicated to caching, and the other half used as a RAM disk for some frequently-loaded programs on the BBS. This was actually a net speed increase over using the drive uncompressed, and I got to shrink the disk usage of the message bases down to almost nothing.
And then, I lucked upon an ST-419, which was a beastly full-height 15-megabyte MFM monster. The thing took so long to initialize that I had to use a separate power supply for it, so I could power things on in the right sequence. And it didn't even fit in the case. (A BBS user once made me a nice sticker for the front of this machine that said "XT from Hell".)
I never had a lick of trouble with either of these drives.
Sometimes, I think thems were the days, and how much fun it was to be closer to the hardware. But then I remember that I don't have to think about UARTs and FOSSIL drivers anymore, and things seem better. I think I still have my old external SupraFAXModem v.32bis (bought for the low, low, factory-direct sysop-only price of $250) somewhere...but I don't know what it'd good for anymore.
Listen to the demo, and then come back and tell me that it's canned MIDI. It's got a bunch of analog synth goodness going on, which simply isn't a function of any stock MIDI synth library (which, as a rule, resemble simple sample-playback machines). And, sure, it loops - but then, so does almost everything else we call "music."
It's actually very similar to old PC demos in the DOS days. Back in the day, they had a set of hardware with a set of APIs (between MS-DOS and BIOS), and they got to use all of it -- stuff was generally not running on bare metal.
Nowadays, we have much more intense abstraction of hardware in modern operating systems. So what if they take advantage of it?
A decade ago (or longer), we had demos using GLIDE under MS-DOS on 3dfx Voodoo cards. Was this cheating? What about all of the ones which used the Yamaha hardware synths on Soundblaster cards, or the sample-playback and DSP functions of GUS and AWE cards? If using APIs is bad, should old DOS demos have restricted themselves from even using VESA SVGA video modes? Should they have used their own file IO routines instead of Microsoft's? If, way back when, MS-DOS included a generalized OpenGL library, should demo authors have been free to use it?
If a line must be drawn somewhere, then where?
Myself, I prefer to draw the line at whatever the stock operating system provides. And then, they get to use everything they've got available to them. If "everything" happens to include the whole of DirectX, then so be it.
But you ignore the human aspect of it all. I once had a nicely-packaged, limited edition 24kt gold Sony release of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, which I accidentally dropped a screwdriver on. Went right through the top layer of the disc.
I can't just buy it again -- it's unavailable outside of collectors circles. I've got other limited-edition works which can't just be bought new, too.
And then there's the aspect of young children handling media (or friends with young children who like to borrow discs).
A dozen years ago when that Floyd CD got destroyed, I couldn't pull this off due to costs, but nowadays, I rip everything, and just play the backup. Costs almost nothing, and keeps things secure.
It's not even very time-consuming -- blank goes into one $25 drive, source goes into another $25 drive, I sing a short incantation with the mouse, and usable media gets spit out sometime later. And on a quad-core machine, I don't see any performance hit at all while this is going on.
As long as we're presenting anecdotal evidence....
A decade or so ago, I used to burn my disks on a Plextor PX-820. Every single disk that I've tried, no matter what the manufacture, has read just fine on modern systems.
Please allow me to suggest that your currently-unreadable burns were bad to begin with. Please further allow me to suggest that a bad burner back in the day is still a bad burner today, and that any media you have from Way Back When is sure to reflect this fact.