I believed this one completely. I even tried the Web site and wondered how fucked up a Web framework project could be when none of the links - supposedly on a Web site built using their own product - worked! Shows you how much confidence I have in most of these projects...
Why not?
It was completely plausible that some OSS clowns would name their project after a braindead movie!
"Increasingly, the expectation of content for free is what is worrying these same companies."
Morons don't realize what I've been saying for some time now: people have NEVER paid for music. They pay for ACCESS to music. Not the same thing at all.
The only time people paid for "music" is the phonograph era before cassette recorders were invented. And even then they were STILL paying for access not the music itself. It was just that they had no other option (except reel-to-reel tape recorders - and some people used those.) When technology makes it possible to copy media - whether it's reel-to-reel, cassette recorders, CD copiers, or digital file downloads, people will use it.
Content should be free or low cost because it has limited costs to produce and low cost of distribution - compared to a live performance - and thus limited value to the consumer. PERFORMANCE - which means access to the performers - is the way to make money.
Live broadcast over the Net is the future of music. It will increase the connection between performers and audience, eliminating the "album" (which is less efficient) as the means of that connection and reduce (if not eliminate) touring costs, as well as reducing the need for the marketing and promotion services of "labels", thus increasing the artist's profit margin.
It WAS good - eventually. Unfortunately it destroyed my 2006 when I upgraded shortly after it was released (my mistake, I know - never upgrade until the bugs are cleaned up), so I switched to Kubuntu.
Try not to screw up this time and I might switch back since Mandriva is superior to Kubuntu in my view.
But not until three months have gone by and the most egregious bugs have been removed.
President Bush today announced airstrikes against the North Korean Embassy would be conducted over the next week.
Bush bypassed Congressional approval for this action by using RIAA pilots who volunteered for the mission.
House Leader Nancy Pelosi made a statement saying she did not disapprove of this military action because it benefited the media industry in her state - and besides, AIPAC didn't complain either, so she assumed it was all right.
Well, actually her career is going reasonably well - just not in the United States. She's doing well in England, according to Wikipedia, having been in any number of British productions and won a number of awards doing so.
But in the US her career is dead as a doornail compared to Moore. Here she got typecast as Dana Scully. Doing the role again probably doesn't suit her at all, given that she's spent years trying to get out from under it.
In comparison, Jodie Foster had other reasons for not wanting to do Starling again, although reprising a role didn't interest her either. Foster had problems with the script, and I suspect she had problems with Thomas Harris, who appeared to have stuck a lot of Foster's real personality and history in tiny places in his book if you read between the lines (Harris has a rep for black satire - the whole Lector series was intended as satire, not thrillers.) So she demanded a ton of money and royalties, and the producers dumped her for Moore. De Laurentis even made a nasty crack in public about how Foster wasn't sexy enough for the role compared to Moore (he later apologized publicly.)
And nobody can beat Jodie for doing cold and cerebral. That's why I was amused to see her doing comedy and sexy in "Maverick". In this last one, "Inside Man", she also broke tradition by being the "bad girl" of the flick. Not to mention "A Very Long Engagement", when she went over the top and did a hot sex scene - at 43!
Jodie is hot because she is intense, not funny (but in person she can be very funny - but it's not her main personality trait.)
Interestingly, Jodie WAS in an X-Files episode: doing a voice over. See here. It's going to be replayed this Tuesday on TNT, even!
According to IMDB, the following is even more coincidental:
The voice of Betty the tattoo is spoken by Jodie Foster. During the first scene in which we hear Betty convince the man (who has the tattoo) to assault his neighbor, the music playing in the background is "Doesn't Somebody Want to be Wanted" by the Partridge Family. One of Jodie Foster's earlier roles was in episode 3.18 of "The Partridge Family" (1970), "The Eleven Year Itch" in which she punches Danny.
Have you seen Duchovny's wife, Tea Leoni? She's hot. Check her out in the Will Smith movie, "Bad Boys". She has SERIOUSLY long legs.
Both Moore and Anderson have the one usual redhead problem - serious freckles. I think Marcia Cross is about the only redhead in Hollywood who has a limited number of freckles (or has figured out what makeup to use to deal with them). She's the best looking redhead I've seen. Not that freckles are a showstopper by any means, but they tend to be a distraction from pure female beauty. Some redheads look like they've been sandblasted.
"Dude", sex appeal has nothing to do with actual ACTING.
Anderson is a good actress (doing TV for years tends to do that to you), but she can't really compete with Moore who is a recognized excellent actress with two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe. Anderson received an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two SAG awards. In total, Anderson has won about 12 awards, Moore twice that at 22.
Furthermore, acting is about experience and intensity and Moore has both in greater degree than Anderson.
Actually I need to modify my previous statement about Anderson's career - it's dead in the US, but going well in England, according to Wikipedia.
Uhm, Julianne is born in 1960 - Gillian in 1968 - which makes Gillian thirty-nine this August. Not that big a difference. It's not like Julianne is 50 and Gillian 30.
Also you haven't seen a recent picture of Gillian, have you?
Why?
Because there are very few out there. I haunt SuperiorPics.com and you almost NEVER see Gillian any more. As it happens I do have some - see below.
Her career is as dead as Bush's next plan to "win in Iraq'.
As to looks, I don't see any significant difference between this woman and this woman. They're both freckled redheads getting long in the tooth (but not so long in the tooth that I wouldn't do either of them.)
OTOH, I'm beginning to wonder about Julianne's career - this is the second time she's picked up a high-profile role from another actress (the first being Clarice Starling from Jodie Foster.)
"of all nations America is the one that has traditionally been a haven for immigrants from all cultures"
The operative word here is "traditionally".
Once the immigrants got here, they immediately began discriminating against NEWER immigrants. Look at the histories of the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Middle Easterners, the you-name-it.
That hasn't stopped.
It's human nature - if you're not one of "us" - for no matter how small a set of "us" (down to order 1 for me) - you're bad.
I still use a LiteOn DVD reader - which wants to spontaneously close its door whenever I open it - but I do burning on the NEC. Even the NEC's door seems more solid - when it opens it sounds like a bank vault compared to the LiteOn.
I think the consensus of burner experts is that NEC is way better than LiteOn. I see NEC being sold by the local computer shops - but not LiteOn. With the essentially zero difference in price, NEC is the way to go.
I agree with that entirely, but it also extends to the people writing the software and the devices.
I have a client (more than one, actually) running QuickBooks 2007. This POS has to run as Administrator on a Windows box. There is theoretically a way to change that but the Web page describing it is extremely long - and there are no guarantees that the next update (QuickBooks has released many recently because the 2007 version is buggy as hell) won't screw that up.
So in essence the entire small business market - and the accountants servicing that market - in this country is running on software that runs on Windows in Administrator mode.
Why not just post everybody's credit card numbers on the Net now? It would just be a little easier for the hackers.
I tried to get my client to switch all his workstations from Administrator mode to limited user mode. Then the staff complained about "productivity issues", which boiled down mostly to not knowing about Runas and using Windows XP Home which causes issues with customer attached drives (the company does media conversion and has to attach drives from customers to their workstations). So now they're all back in Admin mode until I can figure out some solutions to their main issues.
But the kicker is the owner asks me why it's a problem to run in Admin mode if they have adequate AV (which they don't at the moment, but that's another issue) and other security measures and are behind a firewall. I have to explain to him that protecting a network involves a lot more than just securing the perimeter (not to mention that a firewall with a default password is hardly secure). You have to assume everything inside the perimeter is untrustworthy as well.
It's the lack of comprehension of security at all - and the lack of interest when it involves actually changing user behavior - that is the problem.
And that only changes when a company gets nailed to the wall from a security incident. And the longer they go without one, the worse their security gets. Only if they're one of the lucky - or utterly uninteresting - ones do they get to go for years without a security incident.
Which means the luckiest companies have the worst security, probably.
"I just hope we can survive as a country till Noon Jan 20, 2009. Regardless of who wins the not too well concealed game of musical chairs, we at least will be rid of one 'born again Christian'"
Hillary is a Methodist, I believe.
From my standpoint, not a significant improvement - especially given that she's as much a war hawk on Iran as Bush is, because she owes AIPAC and its rich Jewish supporters a ton of money for her campaign. General Clarke is right about that.
Besides, all the evidence is that Bush will attack Iran this year. The consequences of that will reverberate FAR beyond the 2008 election, no matter who wins - unless whoever wins unilaterally stops that war on January 20th - which is highly doubtful.
The Russians are saying he will attack Iran NEXT WEEK on Friday, April 6. I wouldn't assume they're wrong until we get past that date. And that will only mean we don't know the exact date.
The Iran British sailor thing is giving him the perfect excuse that the 48% of morons in this country (referenced in an earlier article posted here) will have no trouble believing.
It's on ALREADY - and nothing that happens in the 2008 election is going to solve the problems this will cause.
This is the beginning of the end of the "American Empire" - if Vietnam wasn't, or Iraq wasn't, Iran certainly will be. It will also be the beginning of the end of Israel - the second proximate cause of this.
What are these nearly 50% of morons in this country going to do when Transhumans come down the pike?
They're going to try to exterminate them.
And they will fail - getting exterminated in the process. Because, contrary to the Star Trek and Terminator movies, there is no way humans are going to outmaneuver Transhumans. Can't happen.
This applies to most other humans worldwide, I suspect, since religious stupidity is not limited to this country.
The human race will be mostly gone from the earth by the end of this century (by extermination, transmogrification, or their own hand) - and late, too.
What's your time worth? As someone said, backing up 100GB of data - something I do periodically and I do it on DVD - takes time. I back up over 200GB of data off my machine to DVD - it takes me most of a day of personal attention. Backing that up to an external hard drive would take much less time and require nothing more than starting the transfer (depending on how the files are being selected of course).
That said, DVD (or tape, of course) is better for offsite archival storage than disk in many, if not all, cases. But nothing can beat disk for fast, local, immediately available backup.
And disks are getting cheaper and with more capacity all the time. While tape is approximately matching disk capacity - and even speed if you buy high-end units - tape drives that can handle that capacity and speed are way more expensive than disks.
It's a no-brainer. The only reason I haven't switched yet to disk backup for everything is that I can't right now afford to buy the drives vs buying 50 DVDs at a time. Plus I'm waiting to upgrade to a whole new machine, at which point I'll move the current machine to act as a file server and attach an external USB or NAS drive system as a backup. This will give me three tiers of backup - the workstation, the file server, and an external backup. Then I can still periodically burn to DVD for offsite storage if I want to.
It's common knowledge among the CD recording crowd that Taiyo Yuden - a Japanese brand - is the top maker of media. I always buy Fujitsu brand DVDs (although not CDs, because CDs are less critical) because most of their media is made by TY. It's an issue with the proper spreading of the dyes, apparently. The Japanese have the quality control standards that the Taiwanese simply don't have (except in cases where a Taiwanese company is using Japanese equipment and methods, which does occur.)
Check out the forums catering to people who burn music and video on DVDs like cdfreaks.com. A lot of these guys report their success or failure matching particular media with particular drives by measuring the artifacts on burned disks. They have any number of utilities to do this.
Taiyo Yuden comes out on top.
Of course, if your particular drive was never tested with TY by the manufacturer and doesn't happen to like that kind of media, that won't help. The quality of the drive matters, too. I dumped LiteOn after having numerous mechanical and burning problems. I switched to a NEC drive which has performed flawlessly for well over a year now.
Spent much of last night on remote access to a client. I was TRYING to get some REAL work done, when Windows notified me that the Windows Genuine Advantage (oxzymoron at its finest) wanted to be updated.
Stupid me, I let it.
"Access denied".
Spent over an hour searching through Web sites and Google Groups for the one page that had the info I knew from past experience (stupid me again, I didn't save that page the first time) would bail the stupid POS out.
Finally found it - had a link to a version of WGA that would actually install and satisfy the Windows Update icon.
Let me reiterate my position for all the MS shills here on/.:
WINDOWS IS SHIT! And so are all the MS shills here!
Add Hewlett-Packard to that list - the morons have a printer driver that appears to be PORT SCANNING ALL 65,000 ports over and over, flooding my event log collection program with "Windows firewall has detected an application listening" crap. Already a dozen or more HP programs are in the Windows Firewall Exception list - this one wasn't. Still have to find out WHY the stupid thing is port scanning over and over...this is the same program that some people have reported seizes 100% of their CPU capacity - now I can see why. I already know what HP will advise from a Google search: turn off the security audits or turn off the firewall. Brilliant solutions...
Slashdot Mirror
I believed this one completely. I even tried the Web site and wondered how fucked up a Web framework project could be when none of the links - supposedly on a Web site built using their own product - worked! Shows you how much confidence I have in most of these projects...
Why not?
It was completely plausible that some OSS clowns would name their project after a braindead movie!
"Increasingly, the expectation of content for free is what is worrying these same companies."
Morons don't realize what I've been saying for some time now: people have NEVER paid for music. They pay for ACCESS to music. Not the same thing at all.
The only time people paid for "music" is the phonograph era before cassette recorders were invented. And even then they were STILL paying for access not the music itself. It was just that they had no other option (except reel-to-reel tape recorders - and some people used those.) When technology makes it possible to copy media - whether it's reel-to-reel, cassette recorders, CD copiers, or digital file downloads, people will use it.
Content should be free or low cost because it has limited costs to produce and low cost of distribution - compared to a live performance - and thus limited value to the consumer. PERFORMANCE - which means access to the performers - is the way to make money.
Live broadcast over the Net is the future of music. It will increase the connection between performers and audience, eliminating the "album" (which is less efficient) as the means of that connection and reduce (if not eliminate) touring costs, as well as reducing the need for the marketing and promotion services of "labels", thus increasing the artist's profit margin.
It WAS good - eventually. Unfortunately it destroyed my 2006 when I upgraded shortly after it was released (my mistake, I know - never upgrade until the bugs are cleaned up), so I switched to Kubuntu.
Try not to screw up this time and I might switch back since Mandriva is superior to Kubuntu in my view.
But not until three months have gone by and the most egregious bugs have been removed.
They should start using hot babes - no shortage of them around.
Imagine the next release candidate being named the "Carmen Electra".
President Bush today announced airstrikes against the North Korean Embassy would be conducted over the next week.
Bush bypassed Congressional approval for this action by using RIAA pilots who volunteered for the mission.
House Leader Nancy Pelosi made a statement saying she did not disapprove of this military action because it benefited the media industry in her state - and besides, AIPAC didn't complain either, so she assumed it was all right.
"it was pretty good for light comedy fare."
Better than Microsoft Outlook?
Well, actually her career is going reasonably well - just not in the United States. She's doing well in England, according to Wikipedia, having been in any number of British productions and won a number of awards doing so.
But in the US her career is dead as a doornail compared to Moore. Here she got typecast as Dana Scully. Doing the role again probably doesn't suit her at all, given that she's spent years trying to get out from under it.
In comparison, Jodie Foster had other reasons for not wanting to do Starling again, although reprising a role didn't interest her either. Foster had problems with the script, and I suspect she had problems with Thomas Harris, who appeared to have stuck a lot of Foster's real personality and history in tiny places in his book if you read between the lines (Harris has a rep for black satire - the whole Lector series was intended as satire, not thrillers.) So she demanded a ton of money and royalties, and the producers dumped her for Moore. De Laurentis even made a nasty crack in public about how Foster wasn't sexy enough for the role compared to Moore (he later apologized publicly.)
Me, too.
And nobody can beat Jodie for doing cold and cerebral. That's why I was amused to see her doing comedy and sexy in "Maverick". In this last one, "Inside Man", she also broke tradition by being the "bad girl" of the flick. Not to mention "A Very Long Engagement", when she went over the top and did a hot sex scene - at 43!
Jodie is hot because she is intense, not funny (but in person she can be very funny - but it's not her main personality trait.)
Interestingly, Jodie WAS in an X-Files episode: doing a voice over. See here. It's going to be replayed this Tuesday on TNT, even!
According to IMDB, the following is even more coincidental:
The voice of Betty the tattoo is spoken by Jodie Foster. During the first scene in which we hear Betty convince the man (who has the tattoo) to assault his neighbor, the music playing in the background is "Doesn't Somebody Want to be Wanted" by the Partridge Family. One of Jodie Foster's earlier roles was in episode 3.18 of "The Partridge Family" (1970), "The Eleven Year Itch" in which she punches Danny.
Have you seen Duchovny's wife, Tea Leoni? She's hot. Check her out in the Will Smith movie, "Bad Boys". She has SERIOUSLY long legs.
Both Moore and Anderson have the one usual redhead problem - serious freckles. I think Marcia Cross is about the only redhead in Hollywood who has a limited number of freckles (or has figured out what makeup to use to deal with them). She's the best looking redhead I've seen. Not that freckles are a showstopper by any means, but they tend to be a distraction from pure female beauty. Some redheads look like they've been sandblasted.
"Dude", sex appeal has nothing to do with actual ACTING.
Anderson is a good actress (doing TV for years tends to do that to you), but she can't really compete with Moore who is a recognized excellent actress with two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe. Anderson received an Emmy, a Golden Globe and two SAG awards. In total, Anderson has won about 12 awards, Moore twice that at 22.
Furthermore, acting is about experience and intensity and Moore has both in greater degree than Anderson.
Actually I need to modify my previous statement about Anderson's career - it's dead in the US, but going well in England, according to Wikipedia.
Uhm, Julianne is born in 1960 - Gillian in 1968 - which makes Gillian thirty-nine this August. Not that big a difference. It's not like Julianne is 50 and Gillian 30.
Also you haven't seen a recent picture of Gillian, have you?
Why?
Because there are very few out there. I haunt SuperiorPics.com and you almost NEVER see Gillian any more. As it happens I do have some - see below.
Her career is as dead as Bush's next plan to "win in Iraq'.
As to looks, I don't see any significant difference between this woman and this woman. They're both freckled redheads getting long in the tooth (but not so long in the tooth that I wouldn't do either of them.)
OTOH, I'm beginning to wonder about Julianne's career - this is the second time she's picked up a high-profile role from another actress (the first being Clarice Starling from Jodie Foster.)
Well, we care nothing for your karma, so join the crowd.
BTW, caring about karma is how you don't GET karma...
story? That was much funnier than this one.
The only funnier one would be "Richard Stallman hired as Microsoft open source evangelist."
(Now I wait for the FSF fanatics to tell me the difference between "open source" and "free" software - because they can't take a joke either...)
"of all nations America is the one that has traditionally been a haven for immigrants from all cultures"
The operative word here is "traditionally".
Once the immigrants got here, they immediately began discriminating against NEWER immigrants. Look at the histories of the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Middle Easterners, the you-name-it.
That hasn't stopped.
It's human nature - if you're not one of "us" - for no matter how small a set of "us" (down to order 1 for me) - you're bad.
Chimpanzees have better manners.
Badly worded, of course, but what he meant was that the number of features the TARGET database needed to be usable with DBI-Link was being reduced.
In other words, he's trying to get DBI-Link to work with MORE databases in the future.
Oh, wait, were you being funny?
Never mind.
One word: FoxPro.
PostgreSQL is LESS capable than MySQL? (Slower at some things, maybe, but LESS CAPABLE?)
Leave the crack pipe at home next time.
I still use a LiteOn DVD reader - which wants to spontaneously close its door whenever I open it - but I do burning on the NEC. Even the NEC's door seems more solid - when it opens it sounds like a bank vault compared to the LiteOn.
I think the consensus of burner experts is that NEC is way better than LiteOn. I see NEC being sold by the local computer shops - but not LiteOn. With the essentially zero difference in price, NEC is the way to go.
I agree with that entirely, but it also extends to the people writing the software and the devices.
I have a client (more than one, actually) running QuickBooks 2007. This POS has to run as Administrator on a Windows box. There is theoretically a way to change that but the Web page describing it is extremely long - and there are no guarantees that the next update (QuickBooks has released many recently because the 2007 version is buggy as hell) won't screw that up.
So in essence the entire small business market - and the accountants servicing that market - in this country is running on software that runs on Windows in Administrator mode.
Why not just post everybody's credit card numbers on the Net now? It would just be a little easier for the hackers.
I tried to get my client to switch all his workstations from Administrator mode to limited user mode. Then the staff complained about "productivity issues", which boiled down mostly to not knowing about Runas and using Windows XP Home which causes issues with customer attached drives (the company does media conversion and has to attach drives from customers to their workstations). So now they're all back in Admin mode until I can figure out some solutions to their main issues.
But the kicker is the owner asks me why it's a problem to run in Admin mode if they have adequate AV (which they don't at the moment, but that's another issue) and other security measures and are behind a firewall. I have to explain to him that protecting a network involves a lot more than just securing the perimeter (not to mention that a firewall with a default password is hardly secure). You have to assume everything inside the perimeter is untrustworthy as well.
It's the lack of comprehension of security at all - and the lack of interest when it involves actually changing user behavior - that is the problem.
And that only changes when a company gets nailed to the wall from a security incident. And the longer they go without one, the worse their security gets. Only if they're one of the lucky - or utterly uninteresting - ones do they get to go for years without a security incident.
Which means the luckiest companies have the worst security, probably.
"I just hope we can survive as a country till Noon Jan 20, 2009. Regardless of who wins the not too well concealed game of musical chairs, we at least will be rid of one 'born again Christian'"
Hillary is a Methodist, I believe.
From my standpoint, not a significant improvement - especially given that she's as much a war hawk on Iran as Bush is, because she owes AIPAC and its rich Jewish supporters a ton of money for her campaign. General Clarke is right about that.
Besides, all the evidence is that Bush will attack Iran this year. The consequences of that will reverberate FAR beyond the 2008 election, no matter who wins - unless whoever wins unilaterally stops that war on January 20th - which is highly doubtful.
The Russians are saying he will attack Iran NEXT WEEK on Friday, April 6. I wouldn't assume they're wrong until we get past that date. And that will only mean we don't know the exact date.
The Iran British sailor thing is giving him the perfect excuse that the 48% of morons in this country (referenced in an earlier article posted here) will have no trouble believing.
It's on ALREADY - and nothing that happens in the 2008 election is going to solve the problems this will cause.
This is the beginning of the end of the "American Empire" - if Vietnam wasn't, or Iraq wasn't, Iran certainly will be. It will also be the beginning of the end of Israel - the second proximate cause of this.
In other words, Bill - from the industry and end users to you - FUCK YOU!
Bwahahahahahah!!!
This "makes my day" - to quote that other icon of action movies!
By end of this year, Linux will have gained another couple percent market share - if not ten percent! All thanks to your stupid greed, Bill!
Bwahahahahahah!!!
Eat a dick, Bill!
Hey, Microsoft shills! Have a nice day!
Bwahahahahaha!!!
What are these nearly 50% of morons in this country going to do when Transhumans come down the pike?
They're going to try to exterminate them.
And they will fail - getting exterminated in the process. Because, contrary to the Star Trek and Terminator movies, there is no way humans are going to outmaneuver Transhumans. Can't happen.
This applies to most other humans worldwide, I suspect, since religious stupidity is not limited to this country.
The human race will be mostly gone from the earth by the end of this century (by extermination, transmogrification, or their own hand) - and late, too.
Have a nice day, chimps.
What's your time worth? As someone said, backing up 100GB of data - something I do periodically and I do it on DVD - takes time. I back up over 200GB of data off my machine to DVD - it takes me most of a day of personal attention. Backing that up to an external hard drive would take much less time and require nothing more than starting the transfer (depending on how the files are being selected of course).
That said, DVD (or tape, of course) is better for offsite archival storage than disk in many, if not all, cases. But nothing can beat disk for fast, local, immediately available backup.
And disks are getting cheaper and with more capacity all the time. While tape is approximately matching disk capacity - and even speed if you buy high-end units - tape drives that can handle that capacity and speed are way more expensive than disks.
It's a no-brainer. The only reason I haven't switched yet to disk backup for everything is that I can't right now afford to buy the drives vs buying 50 DVDs at a time. Plus I'm waiting to upgrade to a whole new machine, at which point I'll move the current machine to act as a file server and attach an external USB or NAS drive system as a backup. This will give me three tiers of backup - the workstation, the file server, and an external backup. Then I can still periodically burn to DVD for offsite storage if I want to.
It's common knowledge among the CD recording crowd that Taiyo Yuden - a Japanese brand - is the top maker of media. I always buy Fujitsu brand DVDs (although not CDs, because CDs are less critical) because most of their media is made by TY. It's an issue with the proper spreading of the dyes, apparently. The Japanese have the quality control standards that the Taiwanese simply don't have (except in cases where a Taiwanese company is using Japanese equipment and methods, which does occur.)
Check out the forums catering to people who burn music and video on DVDs like cdfreaks.com. A lot of these guys report their success or failure matching particular media with particular drives by measuring the artifacts on burned disks. They have any number of utilities to do this.
Taiyo Yuden comes out on top.
Of course, if your particular drive was never tested with TY by the manufacturer and doesn't happen to like that kind of media, that won't help. The quality of the drive matters, too. I dumped LiteOn after having numerous mechanical and burning problems. I switched to a NEC drive which has performed flawlessly for well over a year now.
I feel for you.
/.:
Spent much of last night on remote access to a client. I was TRYING to get some REAL work done, when Windows notified me that the Windows Genuine Advantage (oxzymoron at its finest) wanted to be updated.
Stupid me, I let it.
"Access denied".
Spent over an hour searching through Web sites and Google Groups for the one page that had the info I knew from past experience (stupid me again, I didn't save that page the first time) would bail the stupid POS out.
Finally found it - had a link to a version of WGA that would actually install and satisfy the Windows Update icon.
Let me reiterate my position for all the MS shills here on
WINDOWS IS SHIT! And so are all the MS shills here!
Add Hewlett-Packard to that list - the morons have a printer driver that appears to be PORT SCANNING ALL 65,000 ports over and over, flooding my event log collection program with "Windows firewall has detected an application listening" crap. Already a dozen or more HP programs are in the Windows Firewall Exception list - this one wasn't. Still have to find out WHY the stupid thing is port scanning over and over...this is the same program that some people have reported seizes 100% of their CPU capacity - now I can see why. I already know what HP will advise from a Google search: turn off the security audits or turn off the firewall. Brilliant solutions...