Just to be clear, I was referring to Vista Pre-RC1. But I was not aware that RC1 for IE came out. I did get Beta 3 a few weeks ago, so I haven't been keeping up.
Specifically, it is "Pre-RC1 build 5536.16385". I haven't tried it yet. We tried one a few versions back here at work for our presentation computer with a projector, and it had some issues with IE7 and some of the conferencing sites we use, so we switched back to XP. That may have been IE7 Beta 1 or 2, and we are up to 3 now, so it COULD be fixed, but I haven't had the time for a re-install.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE IF YOU ARE GOING TO KEEP ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT.
We purchased 3 of them for our IT staff in the local office. All 3 failed within 3 months of ordering, and 2 of the replacements failed after that (within a month of replacement). We had them switched out for some Cruzer Micro and Minis, and have been fine ever since (several months now).
My theory is the metal on the case. While strong, I think the metal in the case conducts static and shorts into the flash chips or USB controller inside. I don't even know if titanium conducts or not, and Sandisk denies there is a widespread issue with these drives, but go read the amazon.com forums on this product and you will be scared off.
It's a shame. They are a wonderful design, no caps to loose and the drive slides inside the case to protect the USB connector. But it's useless if you can't trust it. One of mine worked one second when I had it plugged into a laptop, then I dismounted it, walked 10 ft to my computer, plugged it in and it was DOA. I think it may have been the static from the carpet, I had it hanging around my neck. You're better off with a plastic one and just back it up periodically to protect against loss or damage.
And how exactly do you determine if someone is muslim? It isn't like it is tattooed on their forheads.
Richard reid and Jose Padilla didn't exactly fit the typical muslim mold. There are muslims of just about every kind of race you could imagine.
Ok, so the young and male part you could profile. But it still doesn't fix the problem. And if you start focusing on a profile or several profiles, they will just try to slip something in outside that profile.
Atta from 9/11 and most of the others were clean-shaven, and wore "western" style clothing (ie, they didn't advertise their faith with religious robes or anything.
It just doesn't work. So I ask you again. How do you know someone is muslim? How do you deal with the false positives and the false negatives of your profiling system? You are just going to discriminate against all young males? Good luck with those lawsuits, and I hope it doesn't affect the economy or airline industry too much. False negatives? Hope another terrorist doesn't manage to do something bad to a plane, or Bush isn't going to hide behind his BS about no attacks since 9/11.
How long was there between the 1st WTC bombing and 9/11? Was the bombing in 1993? I don't remember. If so, 8 years is a pretty long time. 2 presidential terms to be exact. Yes, they have tried and failed between those dates, but they are patient and methodical. Bush's fear tactics don't prove anything.
"I know, its far easier to blame our government and Bush (in fact its popular among some segments) but the truth is that they didn't create this enemy."
They didn't create it, but they are doing a hell of a job spreading it and acting as terrorism's recruiters. Useless wars in Iraq based on lies. Diversion from Afghanistan. Bin Laden still at large. A republican controlled congress wasting time on grandstanding for sports-doping. Pushing off the minimum wage vote and then destroying it by give-aways to the rich. I have 3 words for you to describe all this:
FAILED CONSERVATIVE POLICIES.
"This will continue until this group is either rendered harmless or their attempts so futile they go back to doing what they did before."
And since it is impossible to render them harmless, we are screwed. This warmongerring administration with it's 1984 fear policies isn't going to solve anything. Look at Israel. They may have just made it worse for them with this military adventure in Lebanon. You now have a displaced population of lebanese whose homes and cities are being destroyed. You think they are just going to say "oh, maybe we should do something about Hezbollah since the Israelis bombed us". No. Hezbollah has social programs in Lebanon. Some of them are going to join hizbollah and become terrorists themselves, and contiunue fighting a guerilla war. Bush has done the same for us in Iraq. There were no terrorists in Iraq before we got there (ok, maybe like 2 or 3 if the whole Al-Quaeda + Iraq connection is to be believed, which is dubious at best). Now there are thousands, and we don't control anything. There is a civil war going on NOW, despite the administrations attempts at re-defining words (which they are very good at, and they learned from Clinton very well). The population of Iraq is at war with itself, some with the "coalition" forces, some with the puppet government. I'd say that pretty much defines civil war. But this administration is all about fake-Turkey PR and flight jackets with Mission Accomplished signs, and posturing for the right wing. Pathetic. Comic book guy says "Worst. Administration. Ever"
If you voted for Bush, you are a tool. Bush was known as "the Texas Souflet" long before he was president. A lot of hot air in other words. He has also been called a horseless-cowboy, for his playing cowboy in texas with an empty ranch. It's all show. And that's what angered me most about his election. People said they could trust him. Look where that has gotten us.
"Apple playing off its fans' disdain for Microsoft is nothing new. I saw a bumper sticker mocking Windows 95's backward-compatible long file name support reading "CNGRTLNS.W95" with an Apple logo."
I read that, and I chuckled. Then I realized how much of a dork it made me, realizing that I understood it. Who would have understood that back in 1996? Not many people, relatively speaking (compared to the amount of drivers on the road). Yeah, the CNGRTLNS part can kind of be spelled out, but the W95 part? Computers really didn't hit the mainstream until a year or three later. Mainstream as far as every idiot owning something they don't know how to use. Which lately, due to spyware and phishing is translated into something they don't know how to use, that actively tries to hide and redirect the cause of it's problems (both from Microsoft redirecting crash issues back to 3rd party drivers and spyware telling you your machine is hosed, then ransoming a fix, etc).
And the N64 was, for the most part, a dismal failure. Nintendo learned from their mistake. Sony does not pay attention to history, they are blinded by their success with the PS2.
I love my PS2, but I'm tired of Sony's arrogance. I don't need them to force another new format on me, I'll get blueray or HDDVD when I'm ready. I don't want ATRAC or BETA. I don't want their overpriced memory sticks. I don't want "Magicgate" technology included in the cost of my devices so they can lock other companies from selling memory cards etc, so they can gouge me $35 for an 8 meg memory card (I know they are cheaper now). I certainly don't want them rooting my computer with software intended to block me from using music I purchased. It was that same arrogance that kept the PS2 above $250.
F Sony. I'll probably look into the WII once the first price break hits on the next gen consoles. I still have a stack of games to play from the last 2 console generations.
That would be nice, but this is not always feasible. Sometimes you are just under deadline. Example: my company is rolling out an IVR. They came to me a week before the release and said "we need a system that we can have our employees search who was in the IVR and verify their payments with our bank system, and log what those employees did in the IVR, so we can meet PCI compliance" (Paymant Card Industry, you have to log who has access to payment information, among other reasonable but annoying requirements). Site is done, it's missing a lot of functionality (you have to add users and change passwords directly in the back end DB, there is no admin page yet), but it gets the job done and it meets the requirements of logging and allowing access to certain information based on access level. I would have liked to have more time, but I didn't. I will continue to work on it after it is released, but there will be future projects that will take time away from this.
It would be nice to spend all the time you need to get something done right the first time, but that comes at a certain expense. Look at Duke Nukem Forever. While I applaud them for wanting to get it done right, they are now a punchline/joke. There has to be a middle ground where you force a release otherwise the risk you take in continually extending deadlines is higher.
That being said, I am not using Rails. I glanced at it and was instantly confused; I don't quite understand the whole purpose of it. I'd rather get "closer to the metal" so to speak. I'll stick with LAMP for now, until I have more time to investigate the rapid software.
it would be nice to get a text message on my cellphone or an IM when my laundry is done at the community laundry room. I hate having to go check it. There is no reliable amount of time you can wait to know it will be done, and I don't want to leave my laundry sitting around too long; Underwear gnomes and all.
Boring. Lame. He modded a case. An easy one at that.
Here I thought this was going to be an article about the REAL redberry, China's rip off of the blackberry.
This is not newsworthy. Someone paints a case and thinks it is special. Well I have the only briefcase PC configured a certain way, because I built it. Put me on front page slashdot! I'm so damn special.
This guy couldn't even be bothered to get the equipment or learn to do it himself. He had to go to a body shop and have them do it.
Yes, local prices would go up as well. But not only do we have to deal with rising energy costs and their subsequent inflation of costs across the board, but what about the politics of the countries that we import from?
What happens when/if the Chinese manage to unionize? What if they start getting real benefits like we enjoy in the US?
The US economy is operating on exploitation right now. I think we will continue to see repurcutions from it, increasing in severity.
Right. They can NOW, but the gist of my post is that energy costs are generally rising, and they are unstable, and a little turmoil somewhere can cause big problems elsewhere due to instability. It is only going to get worse with China and India picking up steam. Why ship food when you can grow it locally or somewhere not so far away?
The US has really lost it's way. We don't MAKE anything anymore. We rely on other countries for so much. Lets hope the shit doesn't hit the fan with respect to Taiwan/China. We are sending everything overseas. Our white collar stuff. Our manufacturing. Our agriculture. What will we have left? We can't be bosses and managers for the rest of the planet, they will figure that shit out on their own and realize they don't need us. We need to be more self sufficient. If we get rid of all the low paying jobs, what will happen to our country? Crime will skyrocket. Homelessness will increase.
Your crappy "free market" ideals with regards to offshoring and importing tend to leave out real-world physics and political concerns. It takes a lot more energy to ship something from China than it does to manufacture it here. Energy costs being what they are, this is only going to become more and more of a problem, and I think the whole sad affair of offshoring will eat itself alive and evaporate. Granted, this doesn't affect the tech industry like it does manufacturing.
Also money paid to employees to manufacture a product made in a country typically stay in that country. You can call it socialism, but I call it taking care of your country's national interests. Socialism itself isn't a bad thing, it just has never been done right.
If you want to talk about a "free market", why don't you include the whole picture and connect the dots?
If we are paying them X number of dollars for offshored work (different than just outsourced), and someone in the US makes 8-10 times X, sooner or later, someone in the offshore is going to realize that this data is worth a lot more than they are being paid to work with it. The incentive is much higher for law-breaking, and the penalties, being in a foreign country, are harder to enforce.
It is too high a risk. You trust that the execs "thought a bit harder and made more careful studies than you have in the 5 minute interval between reading and replying", but look at Enron and Worldcom in the US. Corruption and exploitation are rampant. And with disclosure laws being what they are, we may never know how bad something may go down off shore.
You need to think a little harder and stop having blind faith in the "free market". The system works differently when you go outside the borders.
Just because you made the decision to join the military, doesn't mean you get to shit on everyone else. You made your choice, and for your sake I hope your family is behind it 100%, or you aren't going to have them forever.
The original poster came asking for advice on an important issue. You can contribute, or you can run your useless mouth. If you choose to run your useless mouth, then you should be marked as troll.
Best of luck to you, I hope we pull out of that useless country, the Bush gang go on trial for war crimes or whatever, and our soldiers in the mideast can come home until some other warmongering village idiot neo conservative picks a new target.
No, actually it is the perfect machine to test an OS on. It is not a server, it isn't used by an employee whose time equals money for the company. If it doesn't do something we need it to, we just throw a laptop onto the projector and continue on. Basically we are just running it because we have access to the Beta program. That's it. It may figure in to our future plans, but now it's just to try it out.
I'd like to point out here that you can put your own HD in a PS2 and install games on it using HD Loader. You don't need the Sony drive unless you want to play FF11.
I happen to think it's M$'s fault anyway, the whole spyware deal. It's their OS, they SHOULD have a scanner in it. Granted, some spyware gets on there in other ways, ie bundles, tricking the user into clicking on something, etc. But there should still be a way to scan for it. I don't think spyware scanning should fall under the antitrust thing. They wrote an OS, it is their responsibility to make sure it works. I don't care about the business that has sprung up underneath M$'s problems. Half of them are fake anyway, giving the scanner away, then charging for the fix; when most of the time the scanner put the problem there in the first place (if there even was a problem), or it adds it's own spyware.
Mine took about 2 years before it started crapping out.
Have you tried messing with the "white gear"? There's a gear you can use to adjust the height of the laser. You just have to open the cover, open the top of the DVD drive, and you can see the gear. Mark it with a pen so you can always put it back where it was. This got a few more months out of it.
Currently mine will play CDs fine, but DVDs give it problems; so I use HDloader to play games instead, copying them over on my PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, I was referring to Vista Pre-RC1. But I was not aware that RC1 for IE came out. I did get Beta 3 a few weeks ago, so I haven't been keeping up.
Specifically, it is "Pre-RC1 build 5536.16385". I haven't tried it yet. We tried one a few versions back here at work for our presentation computer with a projector, and it had some issues with IE7 and some of the conferencing sites we use, so we switched back to XP. That may have been IE7 Beta 1 or 2, and we are up to 3 now, so it COULD be fixed, but I haven't had the time for a re-install.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE IF YOU ARE GOING TO KEEP ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT.
We purchased 3 of them for our IT staff in the local office. All 3 failed within 3 months of ordering, and 2 of the replacements failed after that (within a month of replacement). We had them switched out for some Cruzer Micro and Minis, and have been fine ever since (several months now).
My theory is the metal on the case. While strong, I think the metal in the case conducts static and shorts into the flash chips or USB controller inside. I don't even know if titanium conducts or not, and Sandisk denies there is a widespread issue with these drives, but go read the amazon.com forums on this product and you will be scared off.
It's a shame. They are a wonderful design, no caps to loose and the drive slides inside the case to protect the USB connector. But it's useless if you can't trust it. One of mine worked one second when I had it plugged into a laptop, then I dismounted it, walked 10 ft to my computer, plugged it in and it was DOA. I think it may have been the static from the carpet, I had it hanging around my neck. You're better off with a plastic one and just back it up periodically to protect against loss or damage.
And how exactly do you determine if someone is muslim? It isn't like it is tattooed on their forheads.
Richard reid and Jose Padilla didn't exactly fit the typical muslim mold. There are muslims of just about every kind of race you could imagine.
Ok, so the young and male part you could profile. But it still doesn't fix the problem. And if you start focusing on a profile or several profiles, they will just try to slip something in outside that profile.
Atta from 9/11 and most of the others were clean-shaven, and wore "western" style clothing (ie, they didn't advertise their faith with religious robes or anything.
It just doesn't work. So I ask you again. How do you know someone is muslim? How do you deal with the false positives and the false negatives of your profiling system? You are just going to discriminate against all young males? Good luck with those lawsuits, and I hope it doesn't affect the economy or airline industry too much. False negatives? Hope another terrorist doesn't manage to do something bad to a plane, or Bush isn't going to hide behind his BS about no attacks since 9/11.
How long was there between the 1st WTC bombing and 9/11? Was the bombing in 1993? I don't remember. If so, 8 years is a pretty long time. 2 presidential terms to be exact. Yes, they have tried and failed between those dates, but they are patient and methodical. Bush's fear tactics don't prove anything.
"I know, its far easier to blame our government and Bush (in fact its popular among some segments) but the truth is that they didn't create this enemy."
They didn't create it, but they are doing a hell of a job spreading it and acting as terrorism's recruiters. Useless wars in Iraq based on lies. Diversion from Afghanistan. Bin Laden still at large. A republican controlled congress wasting time on grandstanding for sports-doping. Pushing off the minimum wage vote and then destroying it by give-aways to the rich. I have 3 words for you to describe all this:
FAILED CONSERVATIVE POLICIES.
"This will continue until this group is either rendered harmless or their attempts so futile they go back to doing what they did before."
And since it is impossible to render them harmless, we are screwed. This warmongerring administration with it's 1984 fear policies isn't going to solve anything. Look at Israel. They may have just made it worse for them with this military adventure in Lebanon. You now have a displaced population of lebanese whose homes and cities are being destroyed. You think they are just going to say "oh, maybe we should do something about Hezbollah since the Israelis bombed us". No. Hezbollah has social programs in Lebanon. Some of them are going to join hizbollah and become terrorists themselves, and contiunue fighting a guerilla war. Bush has done the same for us in Iraq. There were no terrorists in Iraq before we got there (ok, maybe like 2 or 3 if the whole Al-Quaeda + Iraq connection is to be believed, which is dubious at best). Now there are thousands, and we don't control anything. There is a civil war going on NOW, despite the administrations attempts at re-defining words (which they are very good at, and they learned from Clinton very well). The population of Iraq is at war with itself, some with the "coalition" forces, some with the puppet government. I'd say that pretty much defines civil war. But this administration is all about fake-Turkey PR and flight jackets with Mission Accomplished signs, and posturing for the right wing. Pathetic. Comic book guy says "Worst. Administration. Ever"
If you voted for Bush, you are a tool. Bush was known as "the Texas Souflet" long before he was president. A lot of hot air in other words. He has also been called a horseless-cowboy, for his playing cowboy in texas with an empty ranch. It's all show. And that's what angered me most about his election. People said they could trust him. Look where that has gotten us.
"Apple playing off its fans' disdain for Microsoft is nothing new. I saw a bumper sticker mocking Windows 95's backward-compatible long file name support reading "CNGRTLNS.W95" with an Apple logo."
I read that, and I chuckled. Then I realized how much of a dork it made me, realizing that I understood it. Who would have understood that back in 1996? Not many people, relatively speaking (compared to the amount of drivers on the road). Yeah, the CNGRTLNS part can kind of be spelled out, but the W95 part? Computers really didn't hit the mainstream until a year or three later. Mainstream as far as every idiot owning something they don't know how to use. Which lately, due to spyware and phishing is translated into something they don't know how to use, that actively tries to hide and redirect the cause of it's problems (both from Microsoft redirecting crash issues back to 3rd party drivers and spyware telling you your machine is hosed, then ransoming a fix, etc).
And the N64 was, for the most part, a dismal failure. Nintendo learned from their mistake. Sony does not pay attention to history, they are blinded by their success with the PS2.
I love my PS2, but I'm tired of Sony's arrogance. I don't need them to force another new format on me, I'll get blueray or HDDVD when I'm ready. I don't want ATRAC or BETA. I don't want their overpriced memory sticks. I don't want "Magicgate" technology included in the cost of my devices so they can lock other companies from selling memory cards etc, so they can gouge me $35 for an 8 meg memory card (I know they are cheaper now). I certainly don't want them rooting my computer with software intended to block me from using music I purchased. It was that same arrogance that kept the PS2 above $250.
F Sony. I'll probably look into the WII once the first price break hits on the next gen consoles. I still have a stack of games to play from the last 2 console generations.
You and I know that old games can be good, but to a magazine, everything is
BUY BUY BUY!
NEW NEW NEW!
EVERYTHING WE SAID LAST ISSUE IS BS! Go spend $500 again this month, let use tell you what our advertisers want you to buy.
I actually hit Slashdot's lameness filter on that one, had to take out some capital letters. See, Slash code agrees with me.
That would be nice, but this is not always feasible. Sometimes you are just under deadline. Example: my company is rolling out an IVR. They came to me a week before the release and said "we need a system that we can have our employees search who was in the IVR and verify their payments with our bank system, and log what those employees did in the IVR, so we can meet PCI compliance" (Paymant Card Industry, you have to log who has access to payment information, among other reasonable but annoying requirements). Site is done, it's missing a lot of functionality (you have to add users and change passwords directly in the back end DB, there is no admin page yet), but it gets the job done and it meets the requirements of logging and allowing access to certain information based on access level. I would have liked to have more time, but I didn't. I will continue to work on it after it is released, but there will be future projects that will take time away from this.
It would be nice to spend all the time you need to get something done right the first time, but that comes at a certain expense. Look at Duke Nukem Forever. While I applaud them for wanting to get it done right, they are now a punchline/joke. There has to be a middle ground where you force a release otherwise the risk you take in continually extending deadlines is higher.
That being said, I am not using Rails. I glanced at it and was instantly confused; I don't quite understand the whole purpose of it. I'd rather get "closer to the metal" so to speak. I'll stick with LAMP for now, until I have more time to investigate the rapid software.
it would be nice to get a text message on my cellphone or an IM when my laundry is done at the community laundry room. I hate having to go check it. There is no reliable amount of time you can wait to know it will be done, and I don't want to leave my laundry sitting around too long; Underwear gnomes and all.
There is no such thing as "reverse" racism. You're either racist or you're not.
Boring. Lame. He modded a case. An easy one at that.
Here I thought this was going to be an article about the REAL redberry, China's rip off of the blackberry.
This is not newsworthy. Someone paints a case and thinks it is special. Well I have the only briefcase PC configured a certain way, because I built it. Put me on front page slashdot! I'm so damn special.
This guy couldn't even be bothered to get the equipment or learn to do it himself. He had to go to a body shop and have them do it.
Yes, local prices would go up as well. But not only do we have to deal with rising energy costs and their subsequent inflation of costs across the board, but what about the politics of the countries that we import from?
What happens when/if the Chinese manage to unionize? What if they start getting real benefits like we enjoy in the US?
The US economy is operating on exploitation right now. I think we will continue to see repurcutions from it, increasing in severity.
Right. They can NOW, but the gist of my post is that energy costs are generally rising, and they are unstable, and a little turmoil somewhere can cause big problems elsewhere due to instability. It is only going to get worse with China and India picking up steam. Why ship food when you can grow it locally or somewhere not so far away?
The US has really lost it's way. We don't MAKE anything anymore. We rely on other countries for so much. Lets hope the shit doesn't hit the fan with respect to Taiwan/China. We are sending everything overseas. Our white collar stuff. Our manufacturing. Our agriculture. What will we have left? We can't be bosses and managers for the rest of the planet, they will figure that shit out on their own and realize they don't need us. We need to be more self sufficient. If we get rid of all the low paying jobs, what will happen to our country? Crime will skyrocket. Homelessness will increase.
Oh, and to add another point.
Your crappy "free market" ideals with regards to offshoring and importing tend to leave out real-world physics and political concerns. It takes a lot more energy to ship something from China than it does to manufacture it here. Energy costs being what they are, this is only going to become more and more of a problem, and I think the whole sad affair of offshoring will eat itself alive and evaporate. Granted, this doesn't affect the tech industry like it does manufacturing.
Also money paid to employees to manufacture a product made in a country typically stay in that country. You can call it socialism, but I call it taking care of your country's national interests. Socialism itself isn't a bad thing, it just has never been done right.
If you want to talk about a "free market", why don't you include the whole picture and connect the dots?
If we are paying them X number of dollars for offshored work (different than just outsourced), and someone in the US makes 8-10 times X, sooner or later, someone in the offshore is going to realize that this data is worth a lot more than they are being paid to work with it. The incentive is much higher for law-breaking, and the penalties, being in a foreign country, are harder to enforce.
It is too high a risk. You trust that the execs "thought a bit harder and made more careful studies than you have in the 5 minute interval between reading and replying", but look at Enron and Worldcom in the US. Corruption and exploitation are rampant. And with disclosure laws being what they are, we may never know how bad something may go down off shore.
You need to think a little harder and stop having blind faith in the "free market". The system works differently when you go outside the borders.
Just because you made the decision to join the military, doesn't mean you get to shit on everyone else. You made your choice, and for your sake I hope your family is behind it 100%, or you aren't going to have them forever.
The original poster came asking for advice on an important issue. You can contribute, or you can run your useless mouth. If you choose to run your useless mouth, then you should be marked as troll.
Best of luck to you, I hope we pull out of that useless country, the Bush gang go on trial for war crimes or whatever, and our soldiers in the mideast can come home until some other warmongering village idiot neo conservative picks a new target.
No, actually it is the perfect machine to test an OS on. It is not a server, it isn't used by an employee whose time equals money for the company. If it doesn't do something we need it to, we just throw a laptop onto the projector and continue on. Basically we are just running it because we have access to the Beta program. That's it. It may figure in to our future plans, but now it's just to try it out.
Java doesn't work. We run it on a machine with a projector in our conference room. It was looking good till we tried to join an online conference :)
Can't necessarily blame MS for Java though. Although I can blame them for trying to change the spec and the whole Sun-MS lawsuit fiasco.
I'd like to point out here that you can put your own HD in a PS2 and install games on it using HD Loader. You don't need the Sony drive unless you want to play FF11.
This is the RIAA.
You are in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Come out with your hands up, bend over, this won't hurt a bit.
I happen to think it's M$'s fault anyway, the whole spyware deal. It's their OS, they SHOULD have a scanner in it. Granted, some spyware gets on there in other ways, ie bundles, tricking the user into clicking on something, etc. But there should still be a way to scan for it. I don't think spyware scanning should fall under the antitrust thing. They wrote an OS, it is their responsibility to make sure it works. I don't care about the business that has sprung up underneath M$'s problems. Half of them are fake anyway, giving the scanner away, then charging for the fix; when most of the time the scanner put the problem there in the first place (if there even was a problem), or it adds it's own spyware.
UCF in the hiz-ouse!
Maybe we will be known for something besides the guys who did Blair Witch?
No, the stick is something else. This is definately a white gear.
d -error-fix/
http://mattread.com/archives/2004/01/ps2-disc-rea
That is just the first google result I found. Scroll down a few pages.
here's another
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/ps2repair/4.shtml
If all this doesn't work, you can always buy a new laser assembly. They are about $40-55 depending on where you go.
Mine took about 2 years before it started crapping out.
Have you tried messing with the "white gear"? There's a gear you can use to adjust the height of the laser. You just have to open the cover, open the top of the DVD drive, and you can see the gear. Mark it with a pen so you can always put it back where it was. This got a few more months out of it.
Currently mine will play CDs fine, but DVDs give it problems; so I use HDloader to play games instead, copying them over on my PC.