Wait... nutmeg is poisonous if injected? I'm not saying you're wrong (I don't know), but can you substantiate this?
I love to Google, so I'll be happy to lend a hand.
"nutmeg poisoning, severe toxic symptoms produced by ingestion of powdered nutmeg, characterized by narcosis with periods of delirium and excitability."
"C. Nutmeg (Myristica spp.): Old World tropical hallucinogenic flowering plant, the source of nutmeg and mace. Probably pre-historical use. Taken orally or as a narcotic snuff. Extremely variable in effect, usually causes distortion of time and space perception."
Microsoft has been bundling applications and utilities with their OS ever since DOS Version 1, but rarely ever has been sued for that explicit reason. This should lead you to question your cause-and-effect scenario, that MS gets sued merely for offering free software. With a little more investigation and intellectual honesty, you would discover that the complaints are due to the conditions MS imposes when it provides its "free" software.
But, there is another point, too. MS has long offered backup software with its OS. Allowing that software to back up to another device does not add another piece of bundled software; it improves the functionality of the software already on the computer. Comparing this added functionality of an already existing piece of software to the browser MS bundled with its OS is like comparing apples and oranges.
Yes, but the component in question is the microdrive.
Have another look at the photograph of the drive in the original article. Here is a link to it: Seagate 5GB ST1 Drive
Notice that it is a Seagate drive. As I said, "Microdrive" is a trademarked name of IBM and Hitachi. Therefore, the Rio is not using a Microdrive, and the lead article is incorrect to have identified it as a Microdrive.
Seagate uses the same hard drive internals, but with different interfaces, for either CF Cards or ST1 (competing with Microdrive). Here is the Register article explaining things: Seagate unveils 'tiny to terabyte' hard drives
But, feel free to pay $250 for a Rio, so you can tear it apart and get the $150 hard drive out of it. The drive is an OEM product right now, so you might have trouble getting it any other way.
The interesting thing is, I was under the impression that both Creative and Apple have now protected their Microdrives so they're not readable in a camera.
It depends on the camera and the drive. Some combinations will work, and others won't.
A quick google search reveals that a professional camera shop/mail order company sells a 4 GByte microdrive for $370-$500, while the MP3 player is expected to retail for $250.
Actually, a quick Google search led me to Steve's DigiCams, in which Steve mentions that Seagate plans to start selling 5 GB CompactFlash II drives (just like the one pictured in the article) in the third quarter of 2004 at an expected price under $150. Also, "Microdrive" is the trademarked name of IBM's and Hiatachi's device.
An encyclopedia is supposed to tell one accurate facts, not to help the majority of readers validate their own false beliefs.
Unfortunately, there is no reference of all the accurate facts in the universe by which we may decide which new idea should or should not be added to an encyclopedia. It may surprise you to learn that not everything that is correct is immediately obvious as correct. When Copernicus was doing his work, there was still a lot of evidence that needed to be gathered to support his claims. A good encyclopedia of the time should have stated the facts as best they were known, and given some idea of how certainly the facts were known. As it happens, Copernicus was mostly at odds with a great scientific authority (with a 1000-year reputation), Aristotle. What did Copernicus have? An odd theory that needed time to be examined.
The first computer I bought was my Packard Bell 8088-compatible desktop. I had been doing the NRI correspondence course for Microcomputer Repair for a few years, and I was very glad finally to have my computer.
I put my computer together on the kitchen table, stood nervously looking at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned on the power. There was an immediate loud POP, and half of a capacitor made an arc that took it across the kitchen. A cloud of bright pink smoke rose up from the shattered capacitor as a small flame burned from the capacitor. I quickly turned off the power and blew out the fire. After I calmed down and looked over my setup carefully, I found that I had plugged the AT power supply cable one pin over on the AT power supply plug. I adjusted the cable and turned my computer on, again. To my surprise, my computer worked! It was a beautiful sight!
I still have that computer (in fact, she is on the table behind me right now, watching me type this). She still works when I turn her on, but I have to adjust the system date to less-than 2000. She is not Y2K compliant.
My Mom let me drive her car home after my college classes were done for the day, on the condition that I return to pick her up from choir practice at a certain time. I was exhausted, so I was glad for the chance to sleep for a few hours. I had to set my 16-pound Zenith laptop on the ground so I could grab the rest of my books, then I went inside and quickly found my way to bed.
I awoke in a panic, with just barely enough time to make it to pick up my Mom in time. I raced outside, jumped in the car, and tried to back out of the driveway. The car wouldn't move. I thought it was just a snowdrift, so I pressed harder on the gas. Still no good. So, I pulled forward a little and got up some speed in reverse. After a few more attempts, I finally managed to make it over this huge hill. I looked at the mass in the car's headlights. As my eyes adjusted, the horror of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Lying on the ground in front of me was my laptop's bag, with my laptop and several floppy disk cases full of floppy disks.
What I had done was so overwhelming that I did not even try to feel an emotion. I just picked up my laptop and carefully placed it in the back seat of the car.
When I had the chance, I checked out the results of the evening. The LCD screen was fractured down the middle and the case was split down the middle. As I balanced each half of my laptop on my lap, I turned on the power. To my surprise, she booted up. One thumb-sized piece of the screen revealed the DOS prompt.
I still have that laptop, though, of course, I have not used it very much since then. I was able to perform some important data transfer operations with it, though, relying entirely on memory of what the computer should be displaying in response to each of my inputs. Most of the 3.5-inch floppies came out OK, too, though a few were unusable due to their shutters being welded into the plastic. The floppy disk cases cracked a little, but I still use them, too.
As far as I know, coil guns do the same job rail guns do, but better. So why do they intend to use rail guns?
They don't. That's just a press release, meaning that it is some starry-eyed dreamer fantasizing. All the article really says (of any significance) is that the Navy plans to implement a new power generation/distribution system. Everything else mentioned in that article is just daydreaming of what the new power system might allow. And, for point-of-reference, I served in a Navy Engine Room as a Machinist Mate for 2 years and I have an A.A.S. degree in Laser Electro-Optic Technology.
BTW, I have seen a working coil gun, a small table-top model presented to my National Space Society group by a Sandia Labs rep a decade ago. It was capable of propelling a small, hollow, open-ended aluminum cylinder through a sheet of stryofoam. The Sandia rep also had video of their test model, a huge structure that launched a 50 pound projectile at Mach speeds (it was the first such unit to launch a projectile faster than the speed of sound).
- Claim that "evolution has created some of the most amazing machines and materials on earth."
- Claim that evolution is a fact.
- Pour millions of dollars in tax money into required classes that teach that evolution is a fact.
- Name a computerized method of selection and optimization with a name that implies or suggests that it is similar to biological evolution.
That's like saying people researching meteorology are "advocating" fluid dynamics.
A better analogy would be that it is like saying that Atlantis arouse from purely random and natural forces.
People in GA might be trying to *imitate* biological evolution, which sounds like a good idea, seeing how evolution has created some of the most amazing machines and materials on earth.
That's the theory, anyway. No one has actually seen it, of course. No one can reproduce it, either. The reputed evolution of life on Earth is an unrepeatable, largely-unobservable, theoretical progression. What's more, some things that people expect on the basis of the theory are wildly absurd, such as the idea that the Internet is about to become self-conscious, once it reaches the critical mass of network connections equal to those of the human brain. Such weird ideas severely discount the need for intelligent design to produce practical results. Even GA requires careful selection of parameters and testing procedures--that is GA would hardly work at all if there were not intelligent design applied to it. Yet, people who are disciples of biological evolution are happy to pretend that purely random forces and natural selection produce increasingly optimized results, better (or, at least, more efficiently) than could be produced by any other process.
This from the same guy who thinks that evolution isn't science...
At least I have the guts to sign my name to my comments, unlike you, Coward. You not only don't supply your name, you fail to supply a reason. Instead, you simply mock what you are too stupid to understand.
The parent makes it sound like they were attempting to create life, rather than a solution to a rather complex problem.
All right, then tell me why the article specifically distinguished between the robotic snakes that could return home after heavy damage, verses those that could not, entirely on the basis that the more robust snakes were designed through GA? The article does not see any other method that has produced such robust robotics.
The "Wired" article is just a breathless piece of evolution worship, lacking useful, critical or practical information. This is particularly apparent in the paragraph that states,
"Using this sort of programmed procreation, the Digital Biology Interest Group has made self-healing battlefield surveillance robots -- gadgets that look like robotic snakes that can figure out how to wiggle home even when severely damaged, unlike less-evolved robots that typically just give up when one of their critical components goes out of commission."
It is tempting to conclude from that paragraph that, somehow, the "life force" of real snakes was transferred to machines via the power of evolution, as if GA could make a machine live. Indeed, the paragraph makes it sound like no other design method could have arrived at that solution, that there is something almost magical about GA.
The really frustrating thing about this field is how slow moving it is and how little it is taken seriously.
It is difficult to take seriously a field that is advocated by people possessing more of an idealistic agenda than a pragmatic demonstration of benefits. AI in general suffers from this problem. In the case of GA, some people insist on using the technique as an argument advocating biological evolution, even though 1) it bears only a vague relationship to biological evolution and 2) is just another tool out of many tools, not the be-all-end-all that proponents want to present.
The other poster, anethema (99553), looks more experienced and knowledgeable about the process than I am, but since you asked me, I will also provide my answer.
I installed the hardware in the normal way. Then, I booted the Windows XP CD, as normal. There is a step here that I don't recall clearly, but I recall having to press the F6 key when prompted. Windows will ask for RAID drivers, which must be installed in the root directory of a floppy disk. Windows will load the RAID drivers, which enables it to see the SATA drives. Installation continues normally from that point.
The hardest part for me was copying all the files to the correct location on the floppy. I initially tried to copy the entire folder over from my motherboard manufacturer, but Windows would not look into any sub-directories. I only needed to install a few files on the floppy. One was the SATA/RAID driver, but there was another, too. I don't recall what it was, but Windows will name it if it doesn't find it.
I found the procedure on Usenet. It is a simple Google search. I would do it now, but I am too tired.
In the old days, at least, commercial CDs were made through a plating process. I am fairly certain this is still in use for "pressed" disks.
First, an original is made (out of wax, I think), then a negative image is created using a plating process. I don't remember how the original is created. The negative is good for thousands of pressed disks, in which it creates pits and lands in the reflective substrate. The substrate is sandwiched in the plastic media.
As you can see, the writing process is not the linear process of writing tracks that are used in home systems, so the writing speed isn't quite a measure of the same thing. They can create hundreds or even thousands of disks an hour.
1. & 2. Many ordinary computer systems today can easily keep up with a 16x DVD burner. The burner, itself, may not be able to keep up with the system or its own burn speed. *cough* 2 Meg bugger *cough*
3. We are talking about BenQ. I really doubt very much that this 16x BenQ drive will cost even as much as an 8x Plextor. In fact, what I think BenQ did was simply overclock an ordinary 8x drive. They did that before, with a 4x drive to make an 8x drive, and the crummy system specs make it look very much like they simply overclocked some cheap 8x drive. That's one reason their drive has a 2 Meg buffer.
BTW, I bought my 8x Maddog DVD burner for $80 (special sale price at CompUSA). I am very happy with it.
FYI, I am scanning my old family photographs from negatives, and one batch resulted in files that are 80 Meg per photo. I could only fit 50 of these on a DVD (out of the 67 I scanned). I have hundreds of photos. I've also started shooting video on miniDV, which already could swamp my 250-Gig hard drive, much less my puny 4.7-Gig DVDs.
Drive heads are relatively expensive, and the advantage gained decreases at an exponential rate. I would estimate that the optimum advantage in terms of speed would be gained with 3 drive heads. Additional drive heads would only provide a small increase in access speed.
I recall reading that a major contributor to optical media fatigue is crystalization of the plastic. The faster the disk spins, the more intense the laser beam must be, so the dye can be converted in a shorter time. This more intense laser beam also heats the plastic, which causes some structural change in the plastic. When the plastic cools, some of it crystalizes. Crystaline plastic is fragile. At the high stress of modern drive speeds (a CD spinning at 48x is spinning at 200 miles per hour on its outer edge), the disk tends to fracture.
Better chemistry could make the dye more sensitive and the plastic less prone to crystalization. This might allow higher spin rates.
I am perplexed by the numbers given for this so-called, "16x" DVD burner. Let's start with the rated speeds, and compare it to my 2-month old Maddog 8x Dominator 6-in-1 Dual DVD burner.
As you can see, the specs show that my 8x Maddog is almost as fast as the 16x BenQ!
Then, there is the statement in the review that says it only takes an average of about 6 minutes to burn a DVD at 16x (actually, average speed is only 11.32x). Compare this to the 8-to-9 minutes it takes to burn a DVD at 8x.
These results are underwhelming. I would expect more from a 16x DVD burner.
*Rumor on Usenet is that some DVD burners, such as the Pioneer A07 currently on the market, will be able to burn dual-layer DVDs with a simple firmware upgrade. Indeed, some of these models already *have* burned dual-layer in hacked versions. No word on where people got the dual-layer media.
I am typing this on a computer whose boot drive is a 120-Gig Western Digital SATA drive, with a boot OS of Windows XP. This same computer also has a 250-Gig Maxtor SATA drive and a 60-Gig WD parallel drive. My motherboard is a FIC AU13.
In what way do you imagine that Windows XP does not support SATA? The only limitation that I have found is that I had to use a floppy disk with the RAID drivers on it to install Windows to the SATA drive. However, I now boot directly from the SATA drive into Windows XP.
Some people actually know how to type, which means they use all the fingers on both hands to reach the necessary keys. More to the point, it means that holding down the shift key with one finger while trying to touch-type puts an odd strain on the hand and is poor typing posture. The shift key should only be used for at most 3 letters in sequence, and probably should be avoided for more than a single capital letter in a word.
Slashdot Mirror
I love to Google, so I'll be happy to lend a hand.
"nutmeg poisoning, severe toxic symptoms produced by ingestion of powdered nutmeg, characterized by narcosis with periods of delirium and excitability."
Dorland's Medical Dictionary
"Nutmeg is poisonous and should be used in moderation, a pinch or two is safe."
Encyclopedia of Spices
"Nutmeg is safe in very small amounts, but eating 1 to 6 tablespoons at on sitting can make you ill.
"Symptoms: Eating nutmeg causes headache, dizziness, nausea and aching muscles."
Everyday Poisons
"An hallucinogen and toxic."
Toxic Plants and Household Poisons
"888/ Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously."
Weird Science Fact File
"C. Nutmeg (Myristica spp.): Old World tropical hallucinogenic flowering plant, the source of nutmeg and mace. Probably pre-historical use. Taken orally or as a narcotic snuff. Extremely variable in effect, usually causes distortion of time and space perception."
Psychoactive Plants
Eh, close enough...
But, there is another point, too. MS has long offered backup software with its OS. Allowing that software to back up to another device does not add another piece of bundled software; it improves the functionality of the software already on the computer. Comparing this added functionality of an already existing piece of software to the browser MS bundled with its OS is like comparing apples and oranges.
Have another look at the photograph of the drive in the original article. Here is a link to it: Seagate 5GB ST1 Drive
Notice that it is a Seagate drive. As I said, "Microdrive" is a trademarked name of IBM and Hitachi. Therefore, the Rio is not using a Microdrive, and the lead article is incorrect to have identified it as a Microdrive.
Seagate uses the same hard drive internals, but with different interfaces, for either CF Cards or ST1 (competing with Microdrive). Here is the Register article explaining things: Seagate unveils 'tiny to terabyte' hard drives
But, feel free to pay $250 for a Rio, so you can tear it apart and get the $150 hard drive out of it. The drive is an OEM product right now, so you might have trouble getting it any other way.
It depends on the camera and the drive. Some combinations will work, and others won't.
Actually, a quick Google search led me to Steve's DigiCams, in which Steve mentions that Seagate plans to start selling 5 GB CompactFlash II drives (just like the one pictured in the article) in the third quarter of 2004 at an expected price under $150. Also, "Microdrive" is the trademarked name of IBM's and Hiatachi's device.
Unfortunately, there is no reference of all the accurate facts in the universe by which we may decide which new idea should or should not be added to an encyclopedia. It may surprise you to learn that not everything that is correct is immediately obvious as correct. When Copernicus was doing his work, there was still a lot of evidence that needed to be gathered to support his claims. A good encyclopedia of the time should have stated the facts as best they were known, and given some idea of how certainly the facts were known. As it happens, Copernicus was mostly at odds with a great scientific authority (with a 1000-year reputation), Aristotle. What did Copernicus have? An odd theory that needed time to be examined.
I put my computer together on the kitchen table, stood nervously looking at it for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and turned on the power. There was an immediate loud POP, and half of a capacitor made an arc that took it across the kitchen. A cloud of bright pink smoke rose up from the shattered capacitor as a small flame burned from the capacitor. I quickly turned off the power and blew out the fire. After I calmed down and looked over my setup carefully, I found that I had plugged the AT power supply cable one pin over on the AT power supply plug. I adjusted the cable and turned my computer on, again. To my surprise, my computer worked! It was a beautiful sight!
I still have that computer (in fact, she is on the table behind me right now, watching me type this). She still works when I turn her on, but I have to adjust the system date to less-than 2000. She is not Y2K compliant.
I awoke in a panic, with just barely enough time to make it to pick up my Mom in time. I raced outside, jumped in the car, and tried to back out of the driveway. The car wouldn't move. I thought it was just a snowdrift, so I pressed harder on the gas. Still no good. So, I pulled forward a little and got up some speed in reverse. After a few more attempts, I finally managed to make it over this huge hill. I looked at the mass in the car's headlights. As my eyes adjusted, the horror of what I had just done began to dawn on me. Lying on the ground in front of me was my laptop's bag, with my laptop and several floppy disk cases full of floppy disks.
What I had done was so overwhelming that I did not even try to feel an emotion. I just picked up my laptop and carefully placed it in the back seat of the car.
When I had the chance, I checked out the results of the evening. The LCD screen was fractured down the middle and the case was split down the middle. As I balanced each half of my laptop on my lap, I turned on the power. To my surprise, she booted up. One thumb-sized piece of the screen revealed the DOS prompt.
I still have that laptop, though, of course, I have not used it very much since then. I was able to perform some important data transfer operations with it, though, relying entirely on memory of what the computer should be displaying in response to each of my inputs. Most of the 3.5-inch floppies came out OK, too, though a few were unusable due to their shutters being welded into the plastic. The floppy disk cases cracked a little, but I still use them, too.
They don't. That's just a press release, meaning that it is some starry-eyed dreamer fantasizing. All the article really says (of any significance) is that the Navy plans to implement a new power generation/distribution system. Everything else mentioned in that article is just daydreaming of what the new power system might allow. And, for point-of-reference, I served in a Navy Engine Room as a Machinist Mate for 2 years and I have an A.A.S. degree in Laser Electro-Optic Technology.
BTW, I have seen a working coil gun, a small table-top model presented to my National Space Society group by a Sandia Labs rep a decade ago. It was capable of propelling a small, hollow, open-ended aluminum cylinder through a sheet of stryofoam. The Sandia rep also had video of their test model, a huge structure that launched a 50 pound projectile at Mach speeds (it was the first such unit to launch a projectile faster than the speed of sound).
- Claim that "evolution has created some of the most amazing machines and materials on earth."
- Claim that evolution is a fact.
- Pour millions of dollars in tax money into required classes that teach that evolution is a fact.
- Name a computerized method of selection and optimization with a name that implies or suggests that it is similar to biological evolution.
That's like saying people researching meteorology are "advocating" fluid dynamics.
A better analogy would be that it is like saying that Atlantis arouse from purely random and natural forces.
People in GA might be trying to *imitate* biological evolution, which sounds like a good idea, seeing how evolution has created some of the most amazing machines and materials on earth.
That's the theory, anyway. No one has actually seen it, of course. No one can reproduce it, either. The reputed evolution of life on Earth is an unrepeatable, largely-unobservable, theoretical progression. What's more, some things that people expect on the basis of the theory are wildly absurd, such as the idea that the Internet is about to become self-conscious, once it reaches the critical mass of network connections equal to those of the human brain. Such weird ideas severely discount the need for intelligent design to produce practical results. Even GA requires careful selection of parameters and testing procedures--that is GA would hardly work at all if there were not intelligent design applied to it. Yet, people who are disciples of biological evolution are happy to pretend that purely random forces and natural selection produce increasingly optimized results, better (or, at least, more efficiently) than could be produced by any other process.
At least I have the guts to sign my name to my comments, unlike you, Coward. You not only don't supply your name, you fail to supply a reason. Instead, you simply mock what you are too stupid to understand.
All right, then tell me why the article specifically distinguished between the robotic snakes that could return home after heavy damage, verses those that could not, entirely on the basis that the more robust snakes were designed through GA? The article does not see any other method that has produced such robust robotics.
"Using this sort of programmed procreation, the Digital Biology Interest Group has made self-healing battlefield surveillance robots -- gadgets that look like robotic snakes that can figure out how to wiggle home even when severely damaged, unlike less-evolved robots that typically just give up when one of their critical components goes out of commission."
It is tempting to conclude from that paragraph that, somehow, the "life force" of real snakes was transferred to machines via the power of evolution, as if GA could make a machine live. Indeed, the paragraph makes it sound like no other design method could have arrived at that solution, that there is something almost magical about GA.
It is difficult to take seriously a field that is advocated by people possessing more of an idealistic agenda than a pragmatic demonstration of benefits. AI in general suffers from this problem. In the case of GA, some people insist on using the technique as an argument advocating biological evolution, even though 1) it bears only a vague relationship to biological evolution and 2) is just another tool out of many tools, not the be-all-end-all that proponents want to present.
I can't believe that such a comment would apply to an "Electronic Arts" video game...
I installed the hardware in the normal way. Then, I booted the Windows XP CD, as normal. There is a step here that I don't recall clearly, but I recall having to press the F6 key when prompted. Windows will ask for RAID drivers, which must be installed in the root directory of a floppy disk. Windows will load the RAID drivers, which enables it to see the SATA drives. Installation continues normally from that point.
The hardest part for me was copying all the files to the correct location on the floppy. I initially tried to copy the entire folder over from my motherboard manufacturer, but Windows would not look into any sub-directories. I only needed to install a few files on the floppy. One was the SATA/RAID driver, but there was another, too. I don't recall what it was, but Windows will name it if it doesn't find it.
I found the procedure on Usenet. It is a simple Google search. I would do it now, but I am too tired.
First, an original is made (out of wax, I think), then a negative image is created using a plating process. I don't remember how the original is created. The negative is good for thousands of pressed disks, in which it creates pits and lands in the reflective substrate. The substrate is sandwiched in the plastic media.
As you can see, the writing process is not the linear process of writing tracks that are used in home systems, so the writing speed isn't quite a measure of the same thing. They can create hundreds or even thousands of disks an hour.
1. & 2. Many ordinary computer systems today can easily keep up with a 16x DVD burner. The burner, itself, may not be able to keep up with the system or its own burn speed. *cough* 2 Meg bugger *cough*
3. We are talking about BenQ. I really doubt very much that this 16x BenQ drive will cost even as much as an 8x Plextor. In fact, what I think BenQ did was simply overclock an ordinary 8x drive. They did that before, with a 4x drive to make an 8x drive, and the crummy system specs make it look very much like they simply overclocked some cheap 8x drive. That's one reason their drive has a 2 Meg buffer.
BTW, I bought my 8x Maddog DVD burner for $80 (special sale price at CompUSA). I am very happy with it.
FYI, I am scanning my old family photographs from negatives, and one batch resulted in files that are 80 Meg per photo. I could only fit 50 of these on a DVD (out of the 67 I scanned). I have hundreds of photos. I've also started shooting video on miniDV, which already could swamp my 250-Gig hard drive, much less my puny 4.7-Gig DVDs.
Drive heads are relatively expensive, and the advantage gained decreases at an exponential rate. I would estimate that the optimum advantage in terms of speed would be gained with 3 drive heads. Additional drive heads would only provide a small increase in access speed.
Better chemistry could make the dye more sensitive and the plastic less prone to crystalization. This might allow higher spin rates.
First, the BenQ:
Writing DVD+R discs: 16x
Writing DVD+RW discs: 4x
Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: 2.4x
Writing CD-R discs: 40x
Writing CD-RW discs: 24x
Reading DVD-Discs: 16x
Reading CD-Discs: 40x
Access time CD/DVD: 120ms
Buffer: 2Mb
Now, my Maddog:
Writing DVD+/-R discs: 8x
Writing DVD+/-RW discs: 4x
Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: Unk*
Writing CD-R discs: 32x
Writing CD-RW discs: 16x
Reading DVD-Discs: 12x
Reading CD-Discs: 40x
Access time CD/DVD: 110/130 ms
Buffer: 2Mb
As you can see, the specs show that my 8x Maddog is almost as fast as the 16x BenQ!
Then, there is the statement in the review that says it only takes an average of about 6 minutes to burn a DVD at 16x (actually, average speed is only 11.32x). Compare this to the 8-to-9 minutes it takes to burn a DVD at 8x.
These results are underwhelming. I would expect more from a 16x DVD burner.
*Rumor on Usenet is that some DVD burners, such as the Pioneer A07 currently on the market, will be able to burn dual-layer DVDs with a simple firmware upgrade. Indeed, some of these models already *have* burned dual-layer in hacked versions. No word on where people got the dual-layer media.
"To achieve 2.4x high-speed writing, Verbatim DVD+R utilises a patented Metal Azo dye as the recording layer."
Verbatim: Verbatim Announces 4.7GB DVD+R Discs
In what way do you imagine that Windows XP does not support SATA? The only limitation that I have found is that I had to use a floppy disk with the RAID drivers on it to install Windows to the SATA drive. However, I now boot directly from the SATA drive into Windows XP.