Sounds like you need to go into photoshop (gimp, whatever) and draw a bunch of tiny random yellow dots on a page and print it out 200 times.
And then put that paper back into the input tray. Rotated 180 degrees. Not only will it have some nonsensical dots on it, the real pattern will also be there. And when you print the page again, the real pattern will be superimposed again over the two existing ones!
" and not only does the spyware stay away, but the net admins won't read your gmail;)"
If you go to https://gmail.google.com/ in IE or FF, your entire gmail session will be SSL encrypted (256 bit AES). This applies for the login and the session.
This does not work for http://gmail.google.com/ or https://www.gmail.com/ . (In this case it switches to https for the login and back to http for the session.)
"Plextor is about as good as it gets. Currently I've got the PX-712A and I couldn't be more pleased. There is one newer model, the PX-716 that supports dual layer discs. It is as we say "teh hotness". Also, their newer drives have serial ata versions, which few others can claim."
A common misconception - Plextor used to be the absolute best. Honestly they have been falling from the throne since they released the PX-708A (which is the predecessor to the PX-712A (which is the predecessor to the PX-716A.))
The 708A had pretty good quality burns, but they still did not qualify as excellent. But lots of people reported problems with this drive and CD media in general. It had a tendency to somehow get 'stuck' on DVD-only mode and not read any CD media, pressed or burned. My own 708A only read CD (pressed and burned) at 4X and actually left scuffs on them. I spoke to many people on forums about this and it was widely reported, some people going through two and three RMAs. I returned it to costco and got another one which fortunately worked well. I paid CDN$300 for my 708A right when it came out and I still feel ripped of my money.
The PX-712A, while an excellent drive in theory that got very good reviews, still only had 'pretty good' burning quality, which IMO is not good enough for the most expensive drive in its class at the time. There were also a lot of burn quality problems, again with people going through two and three RMAs.
As to the PX-716A, it is simply not good enough to be worth its exorbitant price. Again the burn quality for CDR and DVDR is very good but not supreme. This is confirmed by PI/PO and C1/C2 scans in comparison to other drives of half the cost.
Every burner I have owned for the last 5 years was a Plextor, but I think it will stop here. The competition delivers better burn quality for much less money. Plextor's products are not rock solid anymore and I won't pay their price.
If you want the best CD-R burning on a drive today, get yourself an old Plextor Premium (back fomr the days when Plextor *was* the King of Quality) or get a very economical NEC-ND3500A which currenty owns the title for the lowest error rates on CDR and DVDR burns.
"Make sure you are using Taiyo Yuden blanks for burning CDs. Usually, media quality causes the most problems. I compared TY to Verbatim with kprobe -- BIG difference. Verbatim has an average of 8 errors per sector, while Taiyo Yuden had 0.2. Look for CD-Rs made in Japan -- they are Taiyo Yuden (often, they are sold as "music" CD-Rs)."
You are exercising a common misconception here. Taiyo Yuden is a company the manufacturers CD-Rs. Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs are made by Taiyo Yuden.
This is not true with Verbatim. While Verbatim is owned by Mitsubishi Chemicals Company and some Verbatim media is made by MCC, much of it is also made by CMC Magnetics (boo! hiss!). Chances are, you're comparing a POS disc from CMC to a premium disc from Taiyo Yuden. If you did acquire a true MCC disc, it would be very good, almost as good as the T-Y. (The real MMC ones are Made in Singapore. The CMC and many other types too are Made in Taiwan.)
So it is not fair to compare Verbatim to Taiyo Yuden as there is no way to know who *really* made the Verbatim disc unless you give us the media code.
" thanks for the tip... I assume TY is also a great brand to buy for CD-R media?"
TY is arguably the best for CDR, DVD+R and DVD-R. Some will argue that others are slightly better and they could be right. Go read lots of things in the CDFreaks Media forums for more info.
"so, there is no one brand that uses the right chemicals all the time and uses the real discs all the time?"
That would be Pioneer. Have fun importing their discs that are sold only in Japan.:P
My advice for purchasing DVDR media is the following:
1) Made in Japan = Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh or Pioneer = Excellent media, regardless of the name brand. Usually at retail it's sold as Fuji or Maxell.
2) Made in Singapore = Genuine Mitsubishi Chemicals = Very good media, usually sold as Verbatim
3) Made in Taiwan = RiTEK, Princo, Prodisc, CMC or ??? = No guarantees on anything. Could be good or bad. This is very common at retail.
If you are in the US, you can buy by manufacturer at www.accaproducts.com, which is a very popular supplier. I am not affiliated with them and have never bought from them as I am in Canada. I will not tell you who my Canadian supplier is right now because they finally got a new batch of TY inkjet printable 8X +R and -R in, so I want to order before they are slashdotted.;-)
"Um... he's saying that DVD-R stores 5.5MB/more/ than DVD+R. Which is news to me, but far from unreasonable."
Yeah, I didn't state that clearly enough. DVD-R stores about 5.5 MB *more* than a +R. I was certain it was a lie/hoax when someone first told me, but it is the truth.
For reference, a DVD-R stores 4,707,319,808 bytes and a DVD+R stores 4,700,372,992 bytes. This is in actual usable user space. Try googling for these numbers, you will see. (OK, I did the math, it's more like 6.6 MB difference as opposed to 5.5 MB. I almost remembered it correctly.)
"Personally, I have never had problems reading either format, but I have clients who have had problems giving DVD+R masters to duplication houses, where DVD-R masters are fine."
Also, Mac OS 10.2 chokes on DVD+R quite deliberately, though my iBook running Jaguar reads +Rw just fine. (This is with a region patched Toshiba SD-R2212 DVDROM/CD-Rw.) Though they added + support in 10.3.
"But, practically, any modern DVD player (for PC or set-top) that was meant to playback recorded discs will play back both formats. Every modern burner will burn both formats.
The +/- thing is only an issue to folks burning discs for their modded XBoxes or PS2s, the way I see it (PS2s tend to prefer -, or XBox prefers +)."
Agreed. And agreed.
"For most all real life purposes, I can just buy whatever pack of discs are cheapest, make sure they have the letters "DVDR" in that order, and not worry about the technical differences."
No, you can't. The vast majority of DVD media out there is trash. It takes a sharp identify the REAL Taiyo Yuden discs as opposed to the 8 or so brands that are fakes with copied TY media codes so they DVDInfoPro or Nero CD Speed ID's them as TY. The crap media will burn fine, but then a few months later your data will be gone. It also take a sharp identify the TRUE Mitsubishi Chemicals discs from the RiTEK/CMC ones, even though they will be on the same shelf in the same pile for the same price in the same Verbatim packaging.
But as to +/- issues, I will burn my home movies to +R with bitsetting to get around players that block one or the other format.
"Except that Columbia TriStar (now Sony), MGM (IIRC, now owned by Sony) and Fox have all announced that they are commiting to Blu-Ray for their movies. IIRC, no major company has commited to putting movies on HD-DVD, although Warner is expected to because they sit on the DVD forum."
I am indeed aware of this, and that's why what I proposed is an unlikely outcome to the current situation. I was thinking more in the theoretical as opposed to the practical realm.
+R media has better multisession support. With many sessions, it uses only 2 MB overhead on the disc (per session) for whatever data they use to link sessions. In contract, -R media uses much more data in the border zones. (It varies per session, but 3 sessions will have up to 132 MB of overhead.)
Most people don't know that a -R disc holds slightly more data than a +R. It's about 5.5 MB. I was astonished when I found out. Go look up the specs and you will see that this is true. This is not too relevant unless you are trying to back up a DVD that has so much data in 1 layer that it goes into this 5.5 MB limit.
"With all that storage George Lucas will still find a way to re-re-re-release the bastardized Star Wars movies one-per BluRay disc and people will still buy them. "More Ewoks! More pouty Anaki! More lifelike JarJar! All in THX certified Dolby Megadigital 24+3 Digital Sound!""
He's already preparing for and HD release. When he set up for the current DVD set, it was all produced in HD for subsequent release.
Sorry, but the current DVD release of Star Wars (original trilogy) will definitely NOT be the last one. I don't suppot the way Lucas rapes the market like this, so I did not buy it.
*I just felt a disturbance in the force, as if a million fans just cried our in agony, and then were silenced.*
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
"However, there's something far more important here: elimination of middle-men. Through Steam, Valve can sell games directly without a publisher. Game development houses tend to get a patheticlly small percentage of the total revenue from their game. Publishers suck it all up. Getting rid of publishers is a Good Thing, and something I've been waiting for the Internet to do for a while."
True. While the failure of Steam in this one instance does not mean that the whole concept is flawed (and doesn't mean that it's right either,) I think that what's also needed is an official downloadable activation/decryption patch from Valve sometime after Christmas. This way they help prevent piracy and mitigate fears about how to play if the company goes under.
Though hopefully this will open some eyes with respect to the dangers of online activation in general, and make the public more wary of such releases.
(Disclaimer: I am quite aware that steam is technically H2O (gaseous) and air is actually a mixture of gasses. Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous value of the preceding comment.)
"You people need to get a life. The Networks generate their revenue off of sponsorship (read: commercials). Commercials are how the networks pay for all these shows you're watching! What don't you understand?"
Exactly... A lot of the stupidities of television can be easily be explained once you realise that the product is YOU, the viewer, and you are being sold to the advertisers, who are the real customers.
These shows that play on TV are just 'unfortunate necessities' of doing business.
Again I am reminded why I almost never watch TV and instead just play my DVDs with no commercials.
" Congratulations! You win the award for Best Use of Obvious Information for Karma!"
1. It may be obvious to you, but there are probably a lot of people out there who do not know who Shawn Fanning is or that he created Napster. Why do you take this superior, exclusionary attitude? This is the kind of attitude that causes Linux-zealots make Linux look really bad. This is absolutely not 'obvious' information unless you closely followed the Napster/Music Industry wars a few years back and actually remember the names.
2. I already hit 50 karma back in 2001. This gets me no additional karma.
3. Why are you posting an off-topic rant at +2?
Congratulations! You win the award for best misuse of your high karma +1 posting bonus!
"The new guy in Legal just requested Firefox.
Management have OKed it, I just installed it."
Good for him. Good for you. It's nice to see that corporate acceptance is speaking.
And last night my non-techie gf actually *initiated* a conversation about an article in her local newspaper that featured FireFox, which impressed me very much!
"
Off topic, but I've gotta' say it. Firefox used to require a proxyserver password, and we have to change every 30 days. Now it uses the login credentials like IE. The last barrier to corporate deployment here."
Improved NTLM support has made my life easier as well.
"Netscape of lore is dead. It might steal marketshare from IE because of the familiar name, but somehow I doubt users will get excited about it the way they did for the original Netscape."
This is exactly why this 'new' Netscape is important. You need a familiar name to sell to your PHB.
"Again, if you send your kid to a private school of your liking you don't have to deal with this crap - and you'll get them a better education while you're at it. This will mean an easier time getting accepted at a better college, will lead to a more fulfilling career, a better quality of life, so on and so forth."
I actually liked high school, but if I had to bring up a kid today with this kind of stuff going on, I would seriously consider homeschooling.
Slashdot Mirror
And then put that paper back into the input tray. Rotated 180 degrees. Not only will it have some nonsensical dots on it, the real pattern will also be there. And when you print the page again, the real pattern will be superimposed again over the two existing ones!
If you go to https://gmail.google.com/ in IE or FF, your entire gmail session will be SSL encrypted (256 bit AES). This applies for the login and the session.
This does not work for http://gmail.google.com/ or https://www.gmail.com/ . (In this case it switches to https for the login and back to http for the session.)
Dialup.
A common misconception - Plextor used to be the absolute best. Honestly they have been falling from the throne since they released the PX-708A (which is the predecessor to the PX-712A (which is the predecessor to the PX-716A.))
The 708A had pretty good quality burns, but they still did not qualify as excellent. But lots of people reported problems with this drive and CD media in general. It had a tendency to somehow get 'stuck' on DVD-only mode and not read any CD media, pressed or burned. My own 708A only read CD (pressed and burned) at 4X and actually left scuffs on them. I spoke to many people on forums about this and it was widely reported, some people going through two and three RMAs. I returned it to costco and got another one which fortunately worked well. I paid CDN$300 for my 708A right when it came out and I still feel ripped of my money.
The PX-712A, while an excellent drive in theory that got very good reviews, still only had 'pretty good' burning quality, which IMO is not good enough for the most expensive drive in its class at the time. There were also a lot of burn quality problems, again with people going through two and three RMAs.
As to the PX-716A, it is simply not good enough to be worth its exorbitant price. Again the burn quality for CDR and DVDR is very good but not supreme. This is confirmed by PI/PO and C1/C2 scans in comparison to other drives of half the cost.
Every burner I have owned for the last 5 years was a Plextor, but I think it will stop here. The competition delivers better burn quality for much less money. Plextor's products are not rock solid anymore and I won't pay their price.
If you want the best CD-R burning on a drive today, get yourself an old Plextor Premium (back fomr the days when Plextor *was* the King of Quality) or get a very economical NEC-ND3500A which currenty owns the title for the lowest error rates on CDR and DVDR burns.
You are exercising a common misconception here. Taiyo Yuden is a company the manufacturers CD-Rs. Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs are made by Taiyo Yuden.
This is not true with Verbatim. While Verbatim is owned by Mitsubishi Chemicals Company and some Verbatim media is made by MCC, much of it is also made by CMC Magnetics (boo! hiss!). Chances are, you're comparing a POS disc from CMC to a premium disc from Taiyo Yuden. If you did acquire a true MCC disc, it would be very good, almost as good as the T-Y. (The real MMC ones are Made in Singapore. The CMC and many other types too are Made in Taiwan.)
So it is not fair to compare Verbatim to Taiyo Yuden as there is no way to know who *really* made the Verbatim disc unless you give us the media code.
TY is arguably the best for CDR, DVD+R and DVD-R. Some will argue that others are slightly better and they could be right. Go read lots of things in the CDFreaks Media forums for more info.
Write a patch and submit it. They may accept it.
Making people realise that paper audit trails are necessary is a lot more important than having your choice of Kerry or Bush for the next 4 years.
That would be Pioneer. Have fun importing their discs that are sold only in Japan. :P
My advice for purchasing DVDR media is the following:
1) Made in Japan = Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh or Pioneer = Excellent media, regardless of the name brand. Usually at retail it's sold as Fuji or Maxell.
2) Made in Singapore = Genuine Mitsubishi Chemicals = Very good media, usually sold as Verbatim
3) Made in Taiwan = RiTEK, Princo, Prodisc, CMC or ??? = No guarantees on anything. Could be good or bad. This is very common at retail.
If you are in the US, you can buy by manufacturer at www.accaproducts.com, which is a very popular supplier. I am not affiliated with them and have never bought from them as I am in Canada. I will not tell you who my Canadian supplier is right now because they finally got a new batch of TY inkjet printable 8X +R and -R in, so I want to order before they are slashdotted. ;-)
See Also: Brands and disc types that are fake Taiyo Yuden.
Technically I'm both, so you receive no hard feelings from me. ;)
Yeah, I didn't state that clearly enough. DVD-R stores about 5.5 MB *more* than a +R. I was certain it was a lie/hoax when someone first told me, but it is the truth.
For reference, a DVD-R stores 4,707,319,808 bytes and a DVD+R stores 4,700,372,992 bytes. This is in actual usable user space. Try googling for these numbers, you will see. (OK, I did the math, it's more like 6.6 MB difference as opposed to 5.5 MB. I almost remembered it correctly.)
Also, Mac OS 10.2 chokes on DVD+R quite deliberately, though my iBook running Jaguar reads +Rw just fine. (This is with a region patched Toshiba SD-R2212 DVDROM/CD-Rw.) Though they added + support in 10.3.
Agreed. And agreed.
"For most all real life purposes, I can just buy whatever pack of discs are cheapest, make sure they have the letters "DVDR" in that order, and not worry about the technical differences."
No, you can't. The vast majority of DVD media out there is trash. It takes a sharp identify the REAL Taiyo Yuden discs as opposed to the 8 or so brands that are fakes with copied TY media codes so they DVDInfoPro or Nero CD Speed ID's them as TY. The crap media will burn fine, but then a few months later your data will be gone. It also take a sharp identify the TRUE Mitsubishi Chemicals discs from the RiTEK/CMC ones, even though they will be on the same shelf in the same pile for the same price in the same Verbatim packaging.
But as to +/- issues, I will burn my home movies to +R with bitsetting to get around players that block one or the other format.
I am indeed aware of this, and that's why what I proposed is an unlikely outcome to the current situation. I was thinking more in the theoretical as opposed to the practical realm.
Technically there are some differences ...
+R media has better multisession support. With many sessions, it uses only 2 MB overhead on the disc (per session) for whatever data they use to link sessions. In contract, -R media uses much more data in the border zones. (It varies per session, but 3 sessions will have up to 132 MB of overhead.)
Most people don't know that a -R disc holds slightly more data than a +R. It's about 5.5 MB. I was astonished when I found out. Go look up the specs and you will see that this is true. This is not too relevant unless you are trying to back up a DVD that has so much data in 1 layer that it goes into this 5.5 MB limit.
Optical Issues: There are weaknesses in the design of the optical properties. The explanation is long and I really don't understand everything.
He's already preparing for and HD release. When he set up for the current DVD set, it was all produced in HD for subsequent release.
Sorry, but the current DVD release of Star Wars (original trilogy) will definitely NOT be the last one. I don't suppot the way Lucas rapes the market like this, so I did not buy it.
*I just felt a disturbance in the force, as if a million fans just cried our in agony, and then were silenced.*
I wonder if anyone at the movie studios has realised that if they now put the home movie market onto HD-DVD after much of the PC industry has backed Blu-Ray, few people will have the equipment to make pirate copies? It sounds like a rather ingenious, non-permanent, anti-piracy scheme.
True. While the failure of Steam in this one instance does not mean that the whole concept is flawed (and doesn't mean that it's right either,) I think that what's also needed is an official downloadable activation/decryption patch from Valve sometime after Christmas. This way they help prevent piracy and mitigate fears about how to play if the company goes under.
Though hopefully this will open some eyes with respect to the dangers of online activation in general, and make the public more wary of such releases.
(Disclaimer: I am quite aware that steam is technically H2O (gaseous) and air is actually a mixture of gasses. Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous value of the preceding comment.)
Exactly ... A lot of the stupidities of television can be easily be explained once you realise that the product is YOU, the viewer, and you are being sold to the advertisers, who are the real customers.
These shows that play on TV are just 'unfortunate necessities' of doing business.
Again I am reminded why I almost never watch TV and instead just play my DVDs with no commercials.
1. It may be obvious to you, but there are probably a lot of people out there who do not know who Shawn Fanning is or that he created Napster. Why do you take this superior, exclusionary attitude? This is the kind of attitude that causes Linux-zealots make Linux look really bad. This is absolutely not 'obvious' information unless you closely followed the Napster/Music Industry wars a few years back and actually remember the names.
2. I already hit 50 karma back in 2001. This gets me no additional karma.
3. Why are you posting an off-topic rant at +2?
Congratulations! You win the award for best misuse of your high karma +1 posting bonus!
He is the guy who created napster.
Good for him. Good for you. It's nice to see that corporate acceptance is speaking.
And last night my non-techie gf actually *initiated* a conversation about an article in her local newspaper that featured FireFox, which impressed me very much!
" Off topic, but I've gotta' say it. Firefox used to require a proxyserver password, and we have to change every 30 days. Now it uses the login credentials like IE. The last barrier to corporate deployment here."
Improved NTLM support has made my life easier as well.
This is exactly why this 'new' Netscape is important. You need a familiar name to sell to your PHB.
I actually liked high school, but if I had to bring up a kid today with this kind of stuff going on, I would seriously consider homeschooling.