"Have any of you ever had a CDR become unreadable for any reason other than scratching it? I sure haven't, and I've used CDRs on a regular basis for 5-6 years now."
You've never seen a case of CD-R eating fungus. Supposedly it is only an issue in tropical climates. I've seen it on a disc burned in the Caribbean.
"Removable hard drive bays should be standard on all PC's. Once you are used to these, the Hard Drive is just a Cartidge to plug into the PC. Data is easily backed up, and a Hard Drive in closet is safe."
Yeah but racks have poorer cooling than having the drive with a proper fan in front of it. I have a dying Maxtor 40G right now that was in a rack for many months in my machine. Now the SMART warnings are coming every day from it.
I might put a 5400 RPM drive in an enclosure for long periods, but NOT a 7200 or higher drive unless it was a specifically matched enclosure.
"Now the only thing I'm worried about are those cyanine-loving bacteria. If I can protect against those, then I can keep a CD healthy."
Supposedly these bacteria are only an issue in tropical climates. My family is from the caribbean and I have seen this one Princo disc burned by my uncle that was being eaten on the inside by this stuff. It was gross. Fortunately for me I now live in the great white frozen North that is Canada;-)
"The page you pointed to implies that the discs could last up to 200 years. I don't see anywhere that they guarantee it."
You have a short attention span. Try reading further down the page: "Accelerated ageing tests allow MAM-E to guarantee information storage for more than 200 years."
"Perhaps those unprotected CDs can be protected somehow? For example, if I covered the unprotected side with a thin layer of lacquer or some other coating, would it help the CD remain readable for a longer time?"
Some CD-R brands already have this built in. It seems that Taiyo Yuden has been making some improvements to their production process in this respect. For quite a while, I've been burning on 24X FujiFilm made by TY, but my stock of that recently ran low. So I bought some more spindles of TY/FujiFilm but rated at 48X. When I opened them, I noticed that the tops were a lot shinier than the 24X. Upon closer examination, I noticed that there was actually a hard layer on the top, probably designed to protect the data layer.
"That my CD archives are going to fail me is greatly distrubing. I've got more than pictures, but I've only been making CDs for two or three years. I was told and THOUGHT that the data would last longer than this. I had dreams that my digital coppies would outlast the sorry organic dyes of my shoebox photo collection. Hmph."
MAM-E Gold Ultra CD-Rs are guaranteed by the manufacturer to last for at least 200 years.
"Nero is the only mastering program I know of, which will verify cd-r contents after burning:-)"
Toast Titanium on the mac has a verification option as well. And here's something interesting: I must have burned and verified hundreds of CDs over a period of about 3 years and in all that time I have only had ONE error detected during verification. It as on a 12X Verbatim CD-Rw that I burned at 12X. (This was only the 2nd or 3rd burn for that disc.) I burned it again and it was fine though.
(Of course this was just one sample and it does not lower my opinion of Verbatim as a brand.)
"Do you feel content in the fact that you might not have been admitted to university if you had been white?"
My average was 10 points higher than the guaranteed admission cutoff. Ethnicity did not matter in my case, but if my average was say in the 'consideration' range, then it would have mattered.
Either way, it does not make me content at all. I am not an advocate of affirmative action. Sadly we still live in world that is racist, sexist and homophobic, often times without realising it so some perceive that this practice is necessary to 'correct' for those things which are VERY hard to unlearn. In the long run, the only solution I see is to actively unlearn hatred and fear of things that are different from ourselves.
Good point. There was actually a section on the OUAC university admission form where you had to specify if you are in any of the 'identified' groups for looking at human rights and diversity. These would be visible minorities, native americans, people with disabilities and women.
That was actually the first time I realised I was a visible minority. Yes, I'm not white but I was brought up in a very white (excuse me... pigmentally challenged;-) community with almost exclusively white friends. So in my head I am white. But being a visible minority probably boosted my chances of getting in (even though my averages were already well above the minimum for guaranteed acceptance.) I expect that if you are a female native american with a physical disability averages don't matter that much anymore.
Isn't that the way it is in North America as well? They rank the students based on high school averages, contest scores, extracurricular involvement and such and then pick the top n number of students? And then they adjust their entry cutoff thresholds to match the number of students they admitted?
I certainly know that in Canada anyway high schools are ranked, even if the universities strongly deny it. There's something called a 'drop factor' that describes the average drop in marks from senior high school to first year university. The higher the drop factor, the worse the school is ranked (as the students' marks dropped a lot going into university.) Back when I was doing university admissions some years ago, my high school chem teacher was boasting about how our school had an amazingly good drop factor for chemistry. (And after taking first year chem and seeing how practiaclly everyone else was confused on what I thought were basic 'review' things, I believe him.)
Please keep in mind that the Microsoft RPC patch and most virus signature updates designed to combat the MSBlaster worm worm will not protect against Sobig.F.
Just a few hours ago I cleaned sobig.F from one machine that was already patched in our 'MSBlaster Clean-sweep' and discovered this.
"While I applaud the M$ goal of making computers as easy to use as toasters, a ever widening gap is occuring thanks to pretty UIs that leaves those of us who know how things work under the hood in a separate world. I only hope that with Longhorn you can disable the absurd glossification and get it to run 10% faster."
While I applaud the Apple goal of making computers as easy to use as toasters, a ever widening gap is occuring thanks to pretty UIs that leaves those of us who know how things work under the hood in a separate world. I only hope that with Panther you can disable the absurd glossification and get it to run 10% faster.
(Well you can turn off the eye candy in Jaguar but I leave it on anyway;-)
"Indeed. My bank's ATMs have a cool touchscreen interface. Sometime ago, I was greeted by the usual window about "illegal operation", etc. The thing then rebooted, displaying what looked like a common PC BIOS, and booted Windows 2000."
I am surprised by this. Most North American ATMs (assuming you live in North America that is) use OS/2 as their OS. No kidding. (I have worked at a major bank so I was privy to some of this knowledge.)
"This means even to just watch divx movies and not do any actual enncoding, one has to install adware on their machine."
This is not correct. Just get the 3ivx codec which is currently $free (but not free as in speech) that plays DivX, XvID and 3ivx flavours of MPEG-4 encoded video and has no spyware. It's available on windows, mac, linux, beos and amiga. Get it - it includes both encoder and decoder, and on windows it installs an AAC (advanded audio coding) directshow filter so you can watch those MPEG-4 compliant videos with MPEG-4 compliant AAC audio streams in WMP. I never installed DivX on my machine but watch DivX video all the time thanks to this.
And I have seen comparisons showing that the post-filtering if 3ivx actually shows divx and xvid videos better than their own native codecs. YMMV.
(Note: Please don't quote the doom9.org comparison that said 3ivx encoding was terrible. This is only because the tester used terrible settings for the encoder since the 3ivx team did not respond to their request for good settings.)
Re:Commander Keen cutting edge?
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
"Talking of scrolling... I wish I could find my copy of Xenon II Megablast. I wonder if it will run at the correct speed on my more modern hardware."
If it runs too quickly all you have to do is pick up a copy of mo'slo. The freeware version will slow it down to any integer percentage of the real speed, adn the paid version can do float values as well (i.e. 0.1%).
Re:It's not necessarily the breakup that saddens m
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"It saddens me that Romero ever made Daikatana. Perhaps the greatest disaster ever witnessed by man could have been avoided."
Obviously you have never seen the movie "Gigli" .
Re:One of the things I find annoying...
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"I suppose "doom" is easier to say, but it doesn't give credit to the real first, the one that opened the floodgates."
The first, of course, would be Ultima Underworld from Looking Glass Studios which made it out the door just before wolf3d. That game still kicks some major booty even today.
""Cream of the cream" isn't often used, usually one uses the french: Creme de la creme
In english, it's usually the "cream of the crop" I believe?"
In english canada we use both. I'm not sure about the USA though as they don't have to learn French in school so they probably don't know what "La Creme de la creme" it means.
(fscking slashcode won't let the accents through... stupid... )
"Every time we mention SCO A fairy dies, and another pointy haired idiot buys some SCOX shares at an inflated price, using the psuedo-logic that if there's nothing there to refute, why do we keep refuting it?"
It's called natural selection. My logic is that the world has an infinite supply of a-holes and idiots so there's no point about having our feathers ruffled about just some fools that buy SCO stock. There will always be fools and I shed no tears for them.
"I don't get it. How is it going to sue linux users without showing them the code?"
I reckon they don't expect it to get to the point where they actually have to show the code in court. They probably expect to get a settlement before an actual court process takes place. This 'win' would boost the stock price up so the SO management can cash out.
" People in the US actually TEXT MESSAGE in the first place?"
Keep in mind that the article says that this is taking place inside the movie theaters. It would be unlikely that someone would make a voice call during a movie and live to tell about it.
I think that one good way of determining which movies are good are to see which ones appear on the file sharing networks. (I'm not saying you should download anything, I'm just saying you should see what's there and how popular it is.) I never saw Gigli on the popular bittorrent release sites. Not even once.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never seen a case of CD-R eating fungus. Supposedly it is only an issue in tropical climates. I've seen it on a disc burned in the Caribbean.
Yeah but racks have poorer cooling than having the drive with a proper fan in front of it. I have a dying Maxtor 40G right now that was in a rack for many months in my machine. Now the SMART warnings are coming every day from it.
I might put a 5400 RPM drive in an enclosure for long periods, but NOT a 7200 or higher drive unless it was a specifically matched enclosure.
Supposedly these bacteria are only an issue in tropical climates. My family is from the caribbean and I have seen this one Princo disc burned by my uncle that was being eaten on the inside by this stuff. It was gross. Fortunately for me I now live in the great white frozen North that is Canada ;-)
You have a short attention span. Try reading further down the page: "Accelerated ageing tests allow MAM-E to guarantee information storage for more than 200 years."
Some CD-R brands already have this built in. It seems that Taiyo Yuden has been making some improvements to their production process in this respect. For quite a while, I've been burning on 24X FujiFilm made by TY, but my stock of that recently ran low. So I bought some more spindles of TY/FujiFilm but rated at 48X. When I opened them, I noticed that the tops were a lot shinier than the 24X. Upon closer examination, I noticed that there was actually a hard layer on the top, probably designed to protect the data layer.
MAM-E Gold Ultra CD-Rs are guaranteed by the manufacturer to last for at least 200 years.
Toast Titanium on the mac has a verification option as well. And here's something interesting: I must have burned and verified hundreds of CDs over a period of about 3 years and in all that time I have only had ONE error detected during verification. It as on a 12X Verbatim CD-Rw that I burned at 12X. (This was only the 2nd or 3rd burn for that disc.) I burned it again and it was fine though.
(Of course this was just one sample and it does not lower my opinion of Verbatim as a brand.)
My average was 10 points higher than the guaranteed admission cutoff. Ethnicity did not matter in my case, but if my average was say in the 'consideration' range, then it would have mattered.
Either way, it does not make me content at all. I am not an advocate of affirmative action. Sadly we still live in world that is racist, sexist and homophobic, often times without realising it so some perceive that this practice is necessary to 'correct' for those things which are VERY hard to unlearn. In the long run, the only solution I see is to actively unlearn hatred and fear of things that are different from ourselves.
Good point. There was actually a section on the OUAC university admission form where you had to specify if you are in any of the 'identified' groups for looking at human rights and diversity. These would be visible minorities, native americans, people with disabilities and women.
That was actually the first time I realised I was a visible minority. Yes, I'm not white but I was brought up in a very white (excuse me ... pigmentally challenged ;-) community with almost exclusively white friends. So in my head I am white. But being a visible minority probably boosted my chances of getting in (even though my averages were already well above the minimum for guaranteed acceptance.) I expect that if you are a female native american with a physical disability averages don't matter that much anymore.
Isn't that the way it is in North America as well? They rank the students based on high school averages, contest scores, extracurricular involvement and such and then pick the top n number of students? And then they adjust their entry cutoff thresholds to match the number of students they admitted?
I certainly know that in Canada anyway high schools are ranked, even if the universities strongly deny it. There's something called a 'drop factor' that describes the average drop in marks from senior high school to first year university. The higher the drop factor, the worse the school is ranked (as the students' marks dropped a lot going into university.) Back when I was doing university admissions some years ago, my high school chem teacher was boasting about how our school had an amazingly good drop factor for chemistry. (And after taking first year chem and seeing how practiaclly everyone else was confused on what I thought were basic 'review' things, I believe him.)
;-)
Just a few hours ago I cleaned sobig.F from one machine that was already patched in our 'MSBlaster Clean-sweep' and discovered this.
While I applaud the Apple goal of making computers as easy to use as toasters, a ever widening gap is occuring thanks to pretty UIs that leaves those of us who know how things work under the hood in a separate world. I only hope that with Panther you can disable the absurd glossification and get it to run 10% faster.
(Well you can turn off the eye candy in Jaguar but I leave it on anyway ;-)
I am surprised by this. Most North American ATMs (assuming you live in North America that is) use OS/2 as their OS. No kidding. (I have worked at a major bank so I was privy to some of this knowledge.)
Lack of uality control is one of the pillars of slashdot.
This is not correct. Just get the 3ivx codec which is currently $free (but not free as in speech) that plays DivX, XvID and 3ivx flavours of MPEG-4 encoded video and has no spyware. It's available on windows, mac, linux, beos and amiga. Get it - it includes both encoder and decoder, and on windows it installs an AAC (advanded audio coding) directshow filter so you can watch those MPEG-4 compliant videos with MPEG-4 compliant AAC audio streams in WMP. I never installed DivX on my machine but watch DivX video all the time thanks to this.
And I have seen comparisons showing that the post-filtering if 3ivx actually shows divx and xvid videos better than their own native codecs. YMMV.
(Note: Please don't quote the doom9.org comparison that said 3ivx encoding was terrible. This is only because the tester used terrible settings for the encoder since the 3ivx team did not respond to their request for good settings.)
If it runs too quickly all you have to do is pick up a copy of mo'slo. The freeware version will slow it down to any integer percentage of the real speed, adn the paid version can do float values as well (i.e. 0.1%).
Obviously you have never seen the movie "Gigli" .
The first, of course, would be Ultima Underworld from Looking Glass Studios which made it out the door just before wolf3d. That game still kicks some major booty even today.
In english canada we use both. I'm not sure about the USA though as they don't have to learn French in school so they probably don't know what "La Creme de la creme" it means.
(fscking slashcode won't let the accents through ... stupid ... )
It's called natural selection. My logic is that the world has an infinite supply of a-holes and idiots so there's no point about having our feathers ruffled about just some fools that buy SCO stock. There will always be fools and I shed no tears for them.
I reckon they don't expect it to get to the point where they actually have to show the code in court. They probably expect to get a settlement before an actual court process takes place. This 'win' would boost the stock price up so the SO management can cash out.
Keep in mind that the article says that this is taking place inside the movie theaters. It would be unlikely that someone would make a voice call during a movie and live to tell about it.
Educated consumers is an oxymoron. When 'consumers' become educated, they are no longer ants in some marketer's vision of an economic model.
I think that one good way of determining which movies are good are to see which ones appear on the file sharing networks. (I'm not saying you should download anything, I'm just saying you should see what's there and how popular it is.) I never saw Gigli on the popular bittorrent release sites. Not even once.