This'll probably get modded -1, Pathetic, but so far I've been completely unable to get a working Mozilla binary to build under Windows. Builds and runs fine under Linux. I've uninstalled and reinstalled all the required tools a bunch of times, checked and rechecked my environment against the build docs, etc. Here's a web page with more details. If some kind soul could tell me what I'm doing wrong, you'd have my undying admiration!
(Yes, I've tried posting to the Mozilla newsgroups, but this is exactly the kind of request that gets ignored by everyone there.)
Re:Um, you've never lived in New York, have you?
on
Step 2, Groceries
·
· Score: 2
Nice to see sanctimony hasn't gone out of style.
You might try shopping for a family rather than just for yourself. Might increase the amount of food you have to buy on foot in 15 minutes on your way home.
Me, I'd consider a service like this even living by myself -- I value my time enough that the nearly 2 hours a week I'd spend getting food your way is a bigger price to pay than a $10 delivery charge for a week's worth of groceries.
Which is what I don't understand: both Replay and TiVo offer the one-time fee option. I bought my TiVos a couple years ago, signed up for lifetime service, and haven't paid a dime to TiVo since activating my most recent one. Which seems like it's exactly what you're asking for.
Is it just that the one-time fee is too high? That, I could understand; this isn't the world's cheapest toy and they do need to bring the price down before they'll get true mass-market acceptance.
FYI, you can hack a TiVo to be accessible from the net, but at present it's definitely a job for the technically inclined. (I've done it to both of my TiVos and it works great.) The network-enabled ReplayTV models are probably worth a look if remote access is high on your wish list.
This baffles me. You were about to buy one, you saw they had a new pricing option you weren't aware of and weren't interested in, and that caused the pricing option you were aware of and interested in to suddenly be unacceptable? What am I not seeing here?
SonicBlue's boxes have no monthly fee. TiVo's machines are available with a lifetime service plan as well (you choose monthly or lifetime). So if it's just the monthly fee that's holding you back, have at it!
The slippery slope will lead to profiling agencies, much like credit reporting agencies, who sell your profile to employers, landlords, lawyers, law enforcement, and anyone else who wants to make a decision about you.
It will lead to that?
I agree it might lead to that, though even then I'd remain skeptical of the negative impact; the implicit assumption is that any of those people will give a damn what I'm doing on the web. Some might, but then some landlords and employers already care about things they have no business caring about, so this is hardly a new threat. There are already laws on the books saying they can't refuse to hire me or rent me a room based on irrelevant information.
More fundamentally, though, are you saying we should forbid people from exchanging information that could have harmful uses? To me that's the slippery slope; that way lies draconian DRM technology and the laws to back it up ("you might pirate our movies") not to mention simple censorship.
If people are free to exchange information at will -- which is something I believe in -- there are consequences that cut both ways, and to me, at least, it's next to impossible to retain the good consequences while eliminating the bad ones.
But we do agree, at least, that P3P isn't all it's cracked up to be. I think for a lot of site maintainers it's no more than "that thing I had to go read up on to get IE6 users to stop complaining that my site was forgetting their login names between visits."
Well, actually, I felt the same way before I had that particular job (or I wouldn't have taken it; this was during the boom when tech jobs were growing on trees.) Maybe there's a causal relationship but it goes the other way.
And it's not that I don't care about privacy. I close the bathroom door same as anyone else. I just don't have an expectation of perfect privacy in certain contexts, and Web surfing is one of them.
"Information wants to be free" is a double-edged sword -- every one of us is an information source as well as a consumer.
David Brin's "The Transparent Society" has a good treatment of the issues, and I agree with most of what he has to say. Unless we put a stop to the development of information technology, the trend will be toward easier and more frequent gathering and wide dispersal of information, be it music, your surfing habits, the campaign donors of your favorite congressman, or next week's weather forecast. With the arguable exception of cryptography, just about every segment of the computer industry is devoted to increasing information flow. I believe that's a trend that ultimately results in far more good than harm. Which isn't to say there's no harm, but I don't think it's ever been possible to pick and choose the side effects of technological advancement.
No, they just don't care. I'm a geek who understands the tracking that goes on (I've written Web tracking software in the past) and for the most part, I don't care. If Joe's Bait & Tackle Shop can make an extra buck with the knowledge that I visit the Psychology Today website, more power to 'em. I see that as a slippery slope leading nowhere. I don't see it as worth my energy to object to data collection just for the sake of objecting to data collection, if no harm can come to me as a result.
I suppose I see the Internet as being inherently non-anonymous (a sufficiently interested party could be tapping my cable modem, either by court order or surreptitiously) because I do understand the technology, so the fact that it's not anonymous isn't an issue I feel it's really fruitful to worry about. I'd far rather get worked up about things I have a nonzero probability of actually changing, or at least that do me harm. Mind you, my definition of "harm" includes things like sending me spam, but I see little evidence that web site information sharing will ever be responsible for more than a fraction of a percent of the mountains of spam that already hit my filters.
In the instances when I really do want to resist observation by a third party, e.g. working from home which means I'm dealing with my company's trade secrets, I take care to encrypt everything I send. Even then, though, a sufficiently interested corporate spy or government agent could break into my house and install keyboard-monitoring software without my knowledge, or could be watching my monitor using a spy cam from the neighbor's roof. At some point you either have to go completely off the deep end with privacy paranoia or conclude that as an individual there's a point beyond which it's impossible to keep secrets from the world. From there it's a matter of figuring out where you think it's reasonable for that point to be, and it's on that score that well-informed people can disagree.
Sun's Scott McNealy summed it up pretty well, I think ("You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.") Obviously I'm in the minority here on Slashdot, but I think he's pretty much right.
Burn your books while you're at it -- you could be out doing something rather than sitting on your ass reading about it.
And if your friend starts to tell you about his day at work... what are you doing standing there idle while he yammers? Life is too short to waste time listening to other people go on about their banal, petty little lives.
People who want to waste time winding down rather than accomplishing something useful every second of their lives are all losers who deserve to be ridiculed and belittled.
No problem, just sit one of
these
down at the controls of one of
these
and you're all set. It'll even clear away the floor if you want the room really clean.
Define "better" -- I think most games running on my (mid-range) graphics accelerator at 1280x1024 look much better than their console equivalents. Crisp and detailed, not fuzzy and full of annoying interlace artifacts (yes, I know some DreamCast games can run at 480p.)
For me, high resolution rendering is the main attraction of a new accelerator. Getting a decent frame rate at 1900x1440 (on my good 21" monitor) is really immersive. No console will match that any time soon.
But that doesn't stop me from buying PS2 games if they look like fun...
Bayesian filtering is really impressive, especially if you filter on word pairs rather than just words. I've been using SpamProbe
for the last couple weeks and it does a fantastic job. But it's a server-side thing at the moment (I run it using procmail) so no help for folks who get their mail from their ISP's POP or IMAP server using Mozilla or another client.
exercise is miserable. It is painful. It is hard, horrible work.
Running isn't the only form of exercise. I'm 5'9" and used to weigh close to 200 pounds. Now I weigh around 160. Four years ago I decided enough was enough and made some changes, some big and some small:
Diet soda instead of regular soda. If you're a 4-cans-of-soda-a-day geek, this alone saves you a good 500 calories a day with essentially no effort or change in lifestyle. Takes a few weeks to get used to the different flavor but you do get used to it. Later I switched to water and treated myself to a movie a week with the money I saved.
Swimming. My condo complex had a swimming pool. I started using it every day after work. At first I just dog-paddled around until I got tired, which didn't take long. But gradually I could stay out longer and longer and started doing different kinds of strokes around the pool. The key is gradually -- I didn't try to force myself to hit some arbitrary time limit, I just swam until I was nearly out of steam, then stopped.
Moderation. I sum this up as "put a little bit back." If I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I'd take my usual amount, then grab a handful out of the bowl and stick it back in the box. At restaurants I'd chop off a piece of my food and either give it to someone else or set it aside and not eat it. The idea here wasn't to go on a crash diet, just to cut back a bit while still enjoying what I usually ate.
Cooking. Rather than eating out all the time and getting God only knows how much fat and sugar, I started cooking my own meals more and more often. This was probably the biggest factor in my weight loss; when you control exactly what goes into your meals, you're able to control your intake of calories. Plus, believe it or not, cooking is a lot of fun once you get over the initial learning curve; it's a puzzle-solving exercise to figure out what's going to go well with what, how to optimize a recipe to take as little time and effort as possible but still taste good, etc. Unintended side benefit: after keeping at it for a few years, I'm a much better cook than most of the women I date, which can be a big turn-on!
Hitting a gym twice a week. Gyms are good for people who have no idea how to start exercising; they have staff members who are trained and paid to ease you into a workable exercise program. You may think only a dumb jock would work at a gym, and you'll certainly find them there, but you'll also find some of the personal trainers are smart, well-educated folks who consider it a personal achievement to get someone started on the road to fitness. The first time I visited a gym, one of the trainers recommended a series of machines I could go through, all of which allowed me to ratchet up the difficulty level at my own pace as I felt comfortable with it. I started off only being able to burn about 75 calories on a stationary bike (according to the bike's computer) but eventually worked my way up to 375 -- hardly championship cycling but enough for steady weight loss. And I got to listen to some good books-on-tape while I was at it.
Dancing. A little under three years ago a friend at work turned me on to ballroom dance, and it's how I get most of my exercise now. It's proof positive that exercise is not necessarily a hideous, awful affair. In many respects it's the geek's dream exercise program: it's highly structured yet intensely creative, it gets you close to attractive members of the opposite sex with essentially no effort, it's as much a mental workout as a physical one (especially for guys when the floor is crowded -- you'll have to use the same fast thinking skills you do in a good videogame) and it's a chance to be appreciated for your skills and expertise. And as a matter of fact, I'd say a good 75% of the ballroom dance guys I've met work in technology or science. There's a bit of a learning curve, granted, but name another geek-guy hobby that'll cause cute women to rush toward you but not get that far because some other cute woman got to you first!
The point is, it didn't take a massive, up-front dose of self-discipline to point myself in the right direction. I started off slow and built up over time, and now I'm in the best shape I've been in nearly 20 years. I'm maybe a bit more stubborn than some, but fundamentally anyone could do what I've done.
This will sound like a troll, but it's not: if you don't want to have to stay top speed on the hardware treadmill, try playing games that are a couple years old -- not only will they run lightning-fast on your year-old hardware, but they're a lot cheaper, they're more stable (having gone through several revisions of patches) and you'll find tons of thorough FAQs and walkthroughs on the net. In terms of gameplay, a 1999 game is just as likely to be fun as a 2002 game; it just won't look as pretty. Heck, I'm only now getting around to playing the first "Baldur's Gate" (for which I paid under $10 a few weeks ago) and it screams on my lowly 1.4GHz Athlon box.
I think there's no way around needing the latest, greatest hardware to play the latest, greatest games; the two go hand in hand, always have. And I for one love it, since it means games get immersive and realistic a lot faster than they would if nobody was pushing the envelope.
Doom 3 will push lots of people to buy fancy graphics cards now rather than a year from now, which will prompt other developers to release their snazzy eye candy games a year from now rather than two years from now, which will cause enough content to be available that the non-Doom crowd will upgrade sooner rather than later, etc. Not good for people on a budget, but people on a budget are rarely on the cutting edge of any technology, so no reason to expect games to be any different.
I've been doing social (ballroom, salsa, swing) dancing for nearly three years now, and I have to agree, it's a great activity, much more satisfying than any dance game I've played.
In many ways it's a perfect social activity for shy nerd types, in that if you get good at it and you're reasonably polite to your partners, members of the opposite sex will be scrambling past each other for a chance to dance with you even if you can't make idle conversation to save your life. You don't even have to speak the same language! That's true for both guy geeks and girl geeks. Best of all, getting good at it isn't a matter of having a natural talent; I was a complete klutz when I started, but I took a bunch of lessons and practiced diligently and now I'm having to turn women away.
It's not a purely physical thing, either; some social dances give your brain as much of a workout as your body, and (especially if you're a guy) they'll test your reflexes and on-the-fly decisionmaking skills as much as a good game of Quake will. When you're dancing, say, a tango, you're simultaneously threading your way around a dance floor full of other people moving unpredictably, staying in time with the music and listening to its structure so you can choose good steps to match its feel, planning your moves far enough ahead to end up pointed in the right direction, indicating your intentions to your partner slightly ahead of actually taking your steps (i.e., leading), and staying ready at all times to react gracefully to avoid a collision when someone suddenly appears right in front of you. It's a thrill ride, and that's not counting the attractive woman pressed up against you!
Most of the folks at the places I dance are science/engineering types, so I'm not alone in thinking it's a good geek pastime.
Ballroomdancers.com
has a decent list of places to dance ballroom. If salsa is more your speed, you can try SalsaWeb.com. Most social dance places offer cheap group lessons for beginners; look up your nearest one and give it a try!
One thing everyone seems to forget in this kind of discussion: patents expire. I remember lots of hubbub about the RSA patents on public-key encryption. Well, they came, they went, and the world didn't end in the meantime. Now everyone is free to use those algorithms with no worries about patent infringement.
Now, one could convincingly argue that software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, or that they should have shorter terms, or that the patent office doesn't do a competent job of checking for obviousness or prior art. I'd probably agree. But the fact remains that any damage done by patents is at worst a temporary setback to everyone else, not an irretrievable disaster.
At some point, MP3s will no longer be encumbered by patents.
And they should care about the open-source movement and the general software community why, exactly? They aren't a charity.
Not that I like what they did, mind you, but hurting the open-source movement isn't a good argument against it from the point of view of an executive who doesn't care about open source.
I'm sure this will get at least 150 "Ha, I switched to Ogg Vorbis months ago, told you so!" responses. But the fact that MP3's price just went up doesn't cause my portable CD player to read.ogg files all of a sudden, so for now it's still MP3 for me.
If this spurs the release of Ogg-capable portables and car players, though, that's good news for everyone.
I like RedHat's Linux. It does what I need, it's organized sensibly, patches are usually released reasonably quickly, and I can look at the source code. If one of those things stops being true, I'll switch to another distro with minimal pain and keep using the same apps I was using before. That ability alone means RedHat will never be another Microsoft.
And while we're on the subject, do commercials before the main feature at the movies piss off anyone else? $8 for a movie and commercials too.
$8? In my dreams! It's $9.50 here. I've worked out a system for the times I go to the local commercial-laden movie house with a group of more than two or three friends. One of us gets to be the sacrificial lamb; he or she goes in and waits through the commercials while the rest stand just outside the theater doors in a clump. When the ads are over, a quick cellphone call lets the outside group know, and they come in. (Obviously we all turn off our cellphones after that call!) Luckily there's a minute-long "and now, our feature presentation" animation that plays just before the movie, so the rest of the group is seated before the show actually starts.
Not really practical if you're by yourself or just going out with one friend, though, unless that friend enjoys hanging out alone in the lobby.
All the existing consumer DVD-R and DVD+R drives I'm aware of can burn CDs too, so I think there's no reason to believe this one will be any different.
Nobody is going to look at the label on a 50-pack in the store to see if it's a DVD-R or DVD+R.
As I read it, that's exactly what this new drive will be good for -- if you have a drive that can read and write both formats, then you won't care what kind of discs you're picking up. The only situation where you'd care is if you depend on some feature that only one format supports (e.g. interruptible writes on a DVD+R disc) which I suspect won't be a factor in the vast majority of cases. For Bill the Accountant who just wants to burn a backup of his PC's hard disk (or a collection of his pirated movies) one format is just as good as the other, so it'll come down to price per disc.
Slashdot Mirror
(Yes, I've tried posting to the Mozilla newsgroups, but this is exactly the kind of request that gets ignored by everyone there.)
You might try shopping for a family rather than just for yourself. Might increase the amount of food you have to buy on foot in 15 minutes on your way home.
Me, I'd consider a service like this even living by myself -- I value my time enough that the nearly 2 hours a week I'd spend getting food your way is a bigger price to pay than a $10 delivery charge for a week's worth of groceries.
Is it just that the one-time fee is too high? That, I could understand; this isn't the world's cheapest toy and they do need to bring the price down before they'll get true mass-market acceptance.
FYI, you can hack a TiVo to be accessible from the net, but at present it's definitely a job for the technically inclined. (I've done it to both of my TiVos and it works great.) The network-enabled ReplayTV models are probably worth a look if remote access is high on your wish list.
This baffles me. You were about to buy one, you saw they had a new pricing option you weren't aware of and weren't interested in, and that caused the pricing option you were aware of and interested in to suddenly be unacceptable? What am I not seeing here?
SonicBlue's boxes have no monthly fee. TiVo's machines are available with a lifetime service plan as well (you choose monthly or lifetime). So if it's just the monthly fee that's holding you back, have at it!
It will lead to that?
I agree it might lead to that, though even then I'd remain skeptical of the negative impact; the implicit assumption is that any of those people will give a damn what I'm doing on the web. Some might, but then some landlords and employers already care about things they have no business caring about, so this is hardly a new threat. There are already laws on the books saying they can't refuse to hire me or rent me a room based on irrelevant information.
More fundamentally, though, are you saying we should forbid people from exchanging information that could have harmful uses? To me that's the slippery slope; that way lies draconian DRM technology and the laws to back it up ("you might pirate our movies") not to mention simple censorship.
If people are free to exchange information at will -- which is something I believe in -- there are consequences that cut both ways, and to me, at least, it's next to impossible to retain the good consequences while eliminating the bad ones.
But we do agree, at least, that P3P isn't all it's cracked up to be. I think for a lot of site maintainers it's no more than "that thing I had to go read up on to get IE6 users to stop complaining that my site was forgetting their login names between visits."
And it's not that I don't care about privacy. I close the bathroom door same as anyone else. I just don't have an expectation of perfect privacy in certain contexts, and Web surfing is one of them.
"Information wants to be free" is a double-edged sword -- every one of us is an information source as well as a consumer.
David Brin's "The Transparent Society" has a good treatment of the issues, and I agree with most of what he has to say. Unless we put a stop to the development of information technology, the trend will be toward easier and more frequent gathering and wide dispersal of information, be it music, your surfing habits, the campaign donors of your favorite congressman, or next week's weather forecast. With the arguable exception of cryptography, just about every segment of the computer industry is devoted to increasing information flow. I believe that's a trend that ultimately results in far more good than harm. Which isn't to say there's no harm, but I don't think it's ever been possible to pick and choose the side effects of technological advancement.
I suppose I see the Internet as being inherently non-anonymous (a sufficiently interested party could be tapping my cable modem, either by court order or surreptitiously) because I do understand the technology, so the fact that it's not anonymous isn't an issue I feel it's really fruitful to worry about. I'd far rather get worked up about things I have a nonzero probability of actually changing, or at least that do me harm. Mind you, my definition of "harm" includes things like sending me spam, but I see little evidence that web site information sharing will ever be responsible for more than a fraction of a percent of the mountains of spam that already hit my filters.
In the instances when I really do want to resist observation by a third party, e.g. working from home which means I'm dealing with my company's trade secrets, I take care to encrypt everything I send. Even then, though, a sufficiently interested corporate spy or government agent could break into my house and install keyboard-monitoring software without my knowledge, or could be watching my monitor using a spy cam from the neighbor's roof. At some point you either have to go completely off the deep end with privacy paranoia or conclude that as an individual there's a point beyond which it's impossible to keep secrets from the world. From there it's a matter of figuring out where you think it's reasonable for that point to be, and it's on that score that well-informed people can disagree.
Sun's Scott McNealy summed it up pretty well, I think ("You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.") Obviously I'm in the minority here on Slashdot, but I think he's pretty much right.
I've been using SpamProbe (which gets invoked from procmail) with excellent results.
And if your friend starts to tell you about his day at work... what are you doing standing there idle while he yammers? Life is too short to waste time listening to other people go on about their banal, petty little lives.
People who want to waste time winding down rather than accomplishing something useful every second of their lives are all losers who deserve to be ridiculed and belittled.
Kill your campfire storyteller!
Yeah, like I'm gonna trust my network security to a company that isn't even on the net.
No problem, just sit one of these down at the controls of one of these and you're all set. It'll even clear away the floor if you want the room really clean.
For me, high resolution rendering is the main attraction of a new accelerator. Getting a decent frame rate at 1900x1440 (on my good 21" monitor) is really immersive. No console will match that any time soon.
But that doesn't stop me from buying PS2 games if they look like fun...
Bayesian filtering is really impressive, especially if you filter on word pairs rather than just words. I've been using SpamProbe for the last couple weeks and it does a fantastic job. But it's a server-side thing at the moment (I run it using procmail) so no help for folks who get their mail from their ISP's POP or IMAP server using Mozilla or another client.
Running isn't the only form of exercise. I'm 5'9" and used to weigh close to 200 pounds. Now I weigh around 160. Four years ago I decided enough was enough and made some changes, some big and some small:
The point is, it didn't take a massive, up-front dose of self-discipline to point myself in the right direction. I started off slow and built up over time, and now I'm in the best shape I've been in nearly 20 years. I'm maybe a bit more stubborn than some, but fundamentally anyone could do what I've done.
I think there's no way around needing the latest, greatest hardware to play the latest, greatest games; the two go hand in hand, always have. And I for one love it, since it means games get immersive and realistic a lot faster than they would if nobody was pushing the envelope.
Doom 3 will push lots of people to buy fancy graphics cards now rather than a year from now, which will prompt other developers to release their snazzy eye candy games a year from now rather than two years from now, which will cause enough content to be available that the non-Doom crowd will upgrade sooner rather than later, etc. Not good for people on a budget, but people on a budget are rarely on the cutting edge of any technology, so no reason to expect games to be any different.
In many ways it's a perfect social activity for shy nerd types, in that if you get good at it and you're reasonably polite to your partners, members of the opposite sex will be scrambling past each other for a chance to dance with you even if you can't make idle conversation to save your life. You don't even have to speak the same language! That's true for both guy geeks and girl geeks. Best of all, getting good at it isn't a matter of having a natural talent; I was a complete klutz when I started, but I took a bunch of lessons and practiced diligently and now I'm having to turn women away.
It's not a purely physical thing, either; some social dances give your brain as much of a workout as your body, and (especially if you're a guy) they'll test your reflexes and on-the-fly decisionmaking skills as much as a good game of Quake will. When you're dancing, say, a tango, you're simultaneously threading your way around a dance floor full of other people moving unpredictably, staying in time with the music and listening to its structure so you can choose good steps to match its feel, planning your moves far enough ahead to end up pointed in the right direction, indicating your intentions to your partner slightly ahead of actually taking your steps (i.e., leading), and staying ready at all times to react gracefully to avoid a collision when someone suddenly appears right in front of you. It's a thrill ride, and that's not counting the attractive woman pressed up against you!
Most of the folks at the places I dance are science/engineering types, so I'm not alone in thinking it's a good geek pastime.
Ballroomdancers.com has a decent list of places to dance ballroom. If salsa is more your speed, you can try SalsaWeb.com. Most social dance places offer cheap group lessons for beginners; look up your nearest one and give it a try!
Now, one could convincingly argue that software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, or that they should have shorter terms, or that the patent office doesn't do a competent job of checking for obviousness or prior art. I'd probably agree. But the fact remains that any damage done by patents is at worst a temporary setback to everyone else, not an irretrievable disaster.
At some point, MP3s will no longer be encumbered by patents.
Not that I like what they did, mind you, but hurting the open-source movement isn't a good argument against it from the point of view of an executive who doesn't care about open source.
If this spurs the release of Ogg-capable portables and car players, though, that's good news for everyone.
I like RedHat's Linux. It does what I need, it's organized sensibly, patches are usually released reasonably quickly, and I can look at the source code. If one of those things stops being true, I'll switch to another distro with minimal pain and keep using the same apps I was using before. That ability alone means RedHat will never be another Microsoft.
$8? In my dreams! It's $9.50 here. I've worked out a system for the times I go to the local commercial-laden movie house with a group of more than two or three friends. One of us gets to be the sacrificial lamb; he or she goes in and waits through the commercials while the rest stand just outside the theater doors in a clump. When the ads are over, a quick cellphone call lets the outside group know, and they come in. (Obviously we all turn off our cellphones after that call!) Luckily there's a minute-long "and now, our feature presentation" animation that plays just before the movie, so the rest of the group is seated before the show actually starts.
Not really practical if you're by yourself or just going out with one friend, though, unless that friend enjoys hanging out alone in the lobby.
All the existing consumer DVD-R and DVD+R drives I'm aware of can burn CDs too, so I think there's no reason to believe this one will be any different.
As I read it, that's exactly what this new drive will be good for -- if you have a drive that can read and write both formats, then you won't care what kind of discs you're picking up. The only situation where you'd care is if you depend on some feature that only one format supports (e.g. interruptible writes on a DVD+R disc) which I suspect won't be a factor in the vast majority of cases. For Bill the Accountant who just wants to burn a backup of his PC's hard disk (or a collection of his pirated movies) one format is just as good as the other, so it'll come down to price per disc.