Some of the Fuji's are still Taiyo Yuden. You can find them at Best Buy you just have to make sure the ones you get read "Made in Japan".
Tru' dat, but they're running out. I nabbed a 30-spindle of the good ones at OfficeMax a couple weeks ago on a rebate deal, but they're getting few and far between as the old stock runs out.
Verbatim CDRs say "Made in India". Do you know anything about that? Any guesses about their quality?
Some recent Imations are also made in India. Googling for the mfr name I halfway remember, . . . aha - Moser Baer. That's the only Indian mfr I know of, though there could be more. I don't know anything first-hand about their quality - this forum has some ratings:
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/12824
...but the ones they list *frequently* disagree with my own observations (e.g., they list Ritek as recommended - and that's just wrong), and don't seem particularly self-consistent, in any case. But there are a few interesting links there, as well.
I'm kinda bummed to find out that Verbatim's not making all their own discs any more - they were one of the few left I considered trustworthy.
I've been a consistent audio CD-R hobbyist/trader since 1997, have burned upwards of 5000 discs, and the ONLY CD-Rs I've ever had go bad on me were ones with labels stuck on 'em - and MOST of the ones I've acquired with labels HAVE gone bad. A long time ago, I thought labels would protect the more delicate top coating of a CD-R - and over the SHORT term, for discs that are handled regularly/carelessly, maybe it's so - but over the long-term, I observed this speculation to be quite wrong. Buy a brand with a good top-coating already on it (Verbatim, Mitsui), and you're far better off.
I've successfully used BlindRead/BlindWrite (www.blindread.com) to perform raw reads of otherwise unreadable discs - and I'm talking CD-Rs that can't be ripped in a CD-ROM, played in a stereo CD player or *anything*. BlindRead instructs the reading device to ignore the error-correction encoding, which may only confuse matters when the disc is mechanically damaged/degraded. Once read in (as an "image") and burned to a second (usually RW, to conserve resources) disc, I could frequently recover the content in sufficiently flawless (for audio, at least) condition for material for which I had no other source. A few discs were just lost completely. (Taught me to NEVER erase or record over the master DAT.)
A note on manufacturers: It's getting more difficult all the time to find blanks sourced from reputable manufacturers. a) most "brand name" blanks [Fuji, H-P, Imation, etc.] are actuallly manufactured by other companies [Ritek, CMC Magnetics, Taiyo Yuden, etc.]; b) the "name brand" companies change their sources to minimize cost at whim and with no notice to the consumer; c) there's usually little outward indication of the actual manufacturer to tell you, when looking at spindles of blanks on a store shelf, who made them, in order to decide which to buy.
Up till sometime last year, Fuji and H-P sold re-branded Taiyo Yuden blanks. T-Y blanks have tested (in BLER tests similar to the Library of Congress studies cited in the story) as competitive with the best quality brands, FAR better than Ritek-manufactured discs and those of other mfrs. (Sorry, I don't have a ready reference for that data at hand,...) But recently, both Fuji and H-P have gone to another source - the only outward evidence of which on their packaging is a "Made in Taiwan" where there used to be a "Made in Japan" legend, and the spindles look a little different; SOMETIMES the label side of the disc is different, but not always.
In order to determine the actual manufacturer of a blank, you need to use (on the Windows side) a utility program such as CDR-ID or Feurio (www.feurio.de), the latter of which displays the manufacturer in a pre-burn dialog box.
As a side note, other brands whose blanks tested at the top of the curve, were those manufactured "in-house" - Verbatim, Mitsui and Kodak all make/made their own blanks, and they tended to have better quality control. Of course, they also tended to be more expensive, and Kodak has since stopped making their own blanks.
Another thing I've noticed recently about "off-brand" CD-RW blanks (and I'd guess it's the same for CD-Rs, but I've never bought any CD-Rs branded by these low-budget outfits), is that it appears that ValuDisc (ValueDisc? Valu-Disc?) and possibly KHypermedia blanks are REJECTS from other re-branders. I snagged a spindle of Valu-Disc CD-RWs on a free-after-rebate deal at OfficeMax a couple weeks ago. On close inspection, the top coating appears to be a thick blue dye/paint layer, made from many, many skewed layers of logo-print, all in the same color, and augmented with a few solid layers, apparently in order to disguise a logo that had originally been applied to the surface of the disc. Anybody know anything about this? Are they selling blanks that were labelled for one reseller, rejected "en batch" by that seller's QC, and then painted over to cover the original branding? I've not written data to any of them yet, and so don't know how they perform,...
Strangely enough, the two of you have exactly equal amounts of credibility based on what you typed. Somebody please provide references to real data!
For years now, I've been seeking out water-based markers to write on CD-Rs, and they're increasingly hard to find. The first ones I bought - Dixon Ticonderoga Redi-Sharp Plus markers - were discontinued, and I'm running out of them. Anybody know of any other specific brands/makes of water based markers?
Douwe-Egbert's, red-bag variety. This is the SMOOTHEST coffee I've had. You can make it stuh-RONG (and I do), and it still has hardly any bitter edge to it.
There are a few places on the 'web that sell it mail-order - do a search and find the one with the cheapest shipping near you.
It's a pun. One of his books (an anthology or collection) was called "Ellison Wonderland," a pun or allusion on "Alice in Wonderland." The website "Ellison Webderland" is a logical extension of that. A little klunky? Yeah, sure. But if you realize where it came from, certainly not so gratuitously *wrong* as the word "wedberland" on its own seems if you consider it as just a techno-ignorant neologism.
To put in another way: this is a 5 inch diagonal display - say 3x4 inches - that rolls up into a 2 inch wide tube. Yes, that is a HUGE improvement.
But, when they scale this up to, say, a 17"-monitor-sized display, having that rolled up into a not-much-larger-than-4cm tube will be a big improvement.
As others have said, besides, the flexibility allows the device to be fixed to other flexible articles, like clothes, where the ultimate bending radius isn't really the major concern, so much as some bendability.
So yer threshold of excitability is inversely proportional to the size of the tube being contemplated... Not that there's anything wrong with that...
As for the bit parts, there are dozens of chances for cameos. For example, Bill Murray and Steve Martin should play Magikthies and Vroomfondel.
Brilliant! These would be perfectly appropriate 'big names' to play tiny (literally) bit parts; in general, I hope they avoid big names for the main characters - way too distracting, and all too often chosen in order to bring in the viewers, and emphatically not because they're just right for the part. Will Farrell (sp?) as Ignatius J Reilly in the upcoming A Confederacy of Dunces? Puh-LEEZE!
Ah, Douglas Adams, you left us too soon. I had the pleasure of seeing Douglas speak (along with Ray Bradbury) a couple/three years ago at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. He talked about writing and various things, and read bits of H2G2, and was generally hilarious. Ray Bradbury - who has had at least one stroke, and whose voice was slightly shaky - just talked about writing and answered questions - and was inspiring, if a bit maudlin; it was wonderful to hear stories of his early days as a writer.
Who ever would have thought that Bradbury would outlive Douglas Adams, some 30-ish years younger?
(Douglas did a meet-and-autograph session afterwards, but Ray sent only his apologies for not having the energy to join in. Ever the geek, I had Douglas sign my (pretty rare, apparently) first American edition of The Meaning of Liff (not the more common The Deeper Meaning of Liff) - look this up if you appreciate peculiarly British humor and a long tolerance for pursuing a simple comic premise through a whole book's worth of punchlines.)
You don't necessarily have to fool a person with a phony bill - or even have a two-sided copy - to get real cash for it. A couple of my friends in college put a photocopied dollar bill into a change machine (for shits and grins, not seriously expecting to get change back), and got four quarters back. Apparently, the change machine could be calibrated "looser" to allow worn/folded bills through, and this allowed their not-really-very-high-quality one-sided black-and-white bill to pass. They were so unnerved at their success that they told campus security the next day, and gave the quarters back.
Query: If one checks the "Clear screen" checkbox, and sets the clear screen timeout to 1 minute - does that recover most of the CPU time?
Yep - that's exactly what I do. When I still let the graphics run full-time, I was averaging 17 hours or so per unit on an AMD 1.67GHz/512MB RAM machine. With the 1-minute black-screen, I average a hair over 4 hours. Oddly, my 2.4GHz P4/1GB RAM/800MHz FSB - half again as fast if you measure by CPU speed only - clocks in only about 20 minutes, or ~8 percent, faster.
Totally unrelated to iMacs, and probably totally unrelated to DRM, but I used to have a Phillips 8x CD-RW (CDRW800, maybe?) drive that also had no manual eject hole. (The stupid thing had a little flip-open door in front of the actual disc drawer; the drawer itself was separate from that front bezel, and so it took me a while to determine that there was no eject hole - talk about a silly cosmetic design feature taking precedence over a basic hardware functionality.)
I'd been using the drive for playing and burning for several months with no issues, when one day I stuck a CD in it to play, and after it played (and I inadvertently left it sitting in the drive for a day or so), something went wrong somewhere and the drive stopped responding to any hardware and software actions. Hitting the Eject button on the drive did nothing, hitting 'Eject' in the CD player app did nothing (this was under WinNT4), telling the drive to 'Eject' in an Explorer window did nothing. Trying to get other applications (ExactAudioCopy, etc.) to talk to the drive did nothing - it was as if the device didn't exist anymore. Rebooting (into safe mode or any other mode) did nothing! (I'd expected at least some flashing of the LED, but nada.) The drive was totally unresponsive, apparently dead - it wasn't recognized by the OS after that reboot (and yes, I did check verify the cabling - it was getting power and the data cable was fine).
Coincidentally, I'd obtained that particular drive as part of Phillips' class-action laswuit settlement regarding their older CDD2600 series of CD-R (not CD-RW - this was early consumer CD-R) drives that occasionally weren't able to write the advertised amount of data to a blank. Notably, as part of the suit settlement, the usual warranty on the drive was replaced with one that warranted exactly and only, in exclusion of all other guarantees, that the drive would be able to write the advertised amount of data to a piece of media - the sole flaw that brought on the class-action suit.
For many discs, I would have shrugged and given up, ripped the drive out and tossed the whole thing. But, to pile coincidence on top of coincidence, the disc that happened to be hostage in the drive was a limited edition (of, like, a few thousand copies, I think, maybe even only a few hundred) John Zorn disc (actually, disc 2 of a 2CD set), and the limited edition was totally sold out. (I don't know if the disc has any DRM schemes on it - it's possible, but unlikely; it was made during the time the first SunnComm and Macromedia schemes were being implemented, and I know the iMac problems had already manifested themselves. The disc, however, was put out on an indie label, and has no logos or insignias or anything that would indicate DRM protection.)
So, there I was, stuck with a dead drive with no warranty of replacement (not that would have mattered), containing a disc that I had essentially no chance of getting a replacement copy of, and my only option to recover my disc was to carefully destroy the drive, since the drive HAD NO FARKING MANUAL EJECT HOLE!
I did this successfully, retrieving the disc un-scratched, but disassembling the drive down to nearly the molecular level in the process.
Needless to say, I inspect every drive I buy now to make sure that manual eject hole is still there.
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Tru' dat, but they're running out. I nabbed a 30-spindle of the good ones at OfficeMax a couple weeks ago on a rebate deal, but they're getting few and far between as the old stock runs out.
Some recent Imations are also made in India. Googling for the mfr name I halfway remember, . . . aha - Moser Baer. That's the only Indian mfr I know of, though there could be more. I don't know anything first-hand about their quality - this forum has some ratings:
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/12824
...but the ones they list *frequently* disagree with my own observations (e.g., they list Ritek as recommended - and that's just wrong), and don't seem particularly self-consistent, in any case. But there are a few interesting links there, as well.
I'm kinda bummed to find out that Verbatim's not making all their own discs any more - they were one of the few left I considered trustworthy.
I've successfully used BlindRead/BlindWrite (www.blindread.com) to perform raw reads of otherwise unreadable discs - and I'm talking CD-Rs that can't be ripped in a CD-ROM, played in a stereo CD player or *anything*. BlindRead instructs the reading device to ignore the error-correction encoding, which may only confuse matters when the disc is mechanically damaged/degraded. Once read in (as an "image") and burned to a second (usually RW, to conserve resources) disc, I could frequently recover the content in sufficiently flawless (for audio, at least) condition for material for which I had no other source. A few discs were just lost completely. (Taught me to NEVER erase or record over the master DAT.)
A note on manufacturers: It's getting more difficult all the time to find blanks sourced from reputable manufacturers. a) most "brand name" blanks [Fuji, H-P, Imation, etc.] are actuallly manufactured by other companies [Ritek, CMC Magnetics, Taiyo Yuden, etc.]; b) the "name brand" companies change their sources to minimize cost at whim and with no notice to the consumer; c) there's usually little outward indication of the actual manufacturer to tell you, when looking at spindles of blanks on a store shelf, who made them, in order to decide which to buy.
Up till sometime last year, Fuji and H-P sold re-branded Taiyo Yuden blanks. T-Y blanks have tested (in BLER tests similar to the Library of Congress studies cited in the story) as competitive with the best quality brands, FAR better than Ritek-manufactured discs and those of other mfrs. (Sorry, I don't have a ready reference for that data at hand,...) But recently, both Fuji and H-P have gone to another source - the only outward evidence of which on their packaging is a "Made in Taiwan" where there used to be a "Made in Japan" legend, and the spindles look a little different; SOMETIMES the label side of the disc is different, but not always.
In order to determine the actual manufacturer of a blank, you need to use (on the Windows side) a utility program such as CDR-ID or Feurio (www.feurio.de), the latter of which displays the manufacturer in a pre-burn dialog box.
As a side note, other brands whose blanks tested at the top of the curve, were those manufactured "in-house" - Verbatim, Mitsui and Kodak all make/made their own blanks, and they tended to have better quality control. Of course, they also tended to be more expensive, and Kodak has since stopped making their own blanks.
Another thing I've noticed recently about "off-brand" CD-RW blanks (and I'd guess it's the same for CD-Rs, but I've never bought any CD-Rs branded by these low-budget outfits), is that it appears that ValuDisc (ValueDisc? Valu-Disc?) and possibly KHypermedia blanks are REJECTS from other re-branders. I snagged a spindle of Valu-Disc CD-RWs on a free-after-rebate deal at OfficeMax a couple weeks ago. On close inspection, the top coating appears to be a thick blue dye/paint layer, made from many, many skewed layers of logo-print, all in the same color, and augmented with a few solid layers, apparently in order to disguise a logo that had originally been applied to the surface of the disc. Anybody know anything about this? Are they selling blanks that were labelled for one reseller, rejected "en batch" by that seller's QC, and then painted over to cover the original branding? I've not written data to any of them yet, and so don't know how they perform,...
For years now, I've been seeking out water-based markers to write on CD-Rs, and they're increasingly hard to find. The first ones I bought - Dixon Ticonderoga Redi-Sharp Plus markers - were discontinued, and I'm running out of them. Anybody know of any other specific brands/makes of water based markers?
Douwe-Egbert's, red-bag variety. This is the SMOOTHEST coffee I've had. You can make it stuh-RONG (and I do), and it still has hardly any bitter edge to it.
There are a few places on the 'web that sell it mail-order - do a search and find the one with the cheapest shipping near you.
You almost hit on my standard euphemism, there, but not quite. . .
My system is almost like clockwork in this respect - 45 minutes after downing the first cup of coffee, it's time to drop some friends off at the pool.
It's a pun. One of his books (an anthology or collection) was called "Ellison Wonderland," a pun or allusion on "Alice in Wonderland." The website "Ellison Webderland" is a logical extension of that. A little klunky? Yeah, sure. But if you realize where it came from, certainly not so gratuitously *wrong* as the word "wedberland" on its own seems if you consider it as just a techno-ignorant neologism.
Even got a gemstone or two this way.
Yeah, and that great Rolleks watch, too! What a bargain.
But, when they scale this up to, say, a 17"-monitor-sized display, having that rolled up into a not-much-larger-than-4cm tube will be a big improvement.
As others have said, besides, the flexibility allows the device to be fixed to other flexible articles, like clothes, where the ultimate bending radius isn't really the major concern, so much as some bendability.
So yer threshold of excitability is inversely proportional to the size of the tube being contemplated... Not that there's anything wrong with that...
As for the bit parts, there are dozens of chances for cameos. For example, Bill Murray and Steve Martin should play Magikthies and Vroomfondel.
Brilliant! These would be perfectly appropriate 'big names' to play tiny (literally) bit parts; in general, I hope they avoid big names for the main characters - way too distracting, and all too often chosen in order to bring in the viewers, and emphatically not because they're just right for the part. Will Farrell (sp?) as Ignatius J Reilly in the upcoming A Confederacy of Dunces? Puh-LEEZE!
Ah, Douglas Adams, you left us too soon. I had the pleasure of seeing Douglas speak (along with Ray Bradbury) a couple/three years ago at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. He talked about writing and various things, and read bits of H2G2, and was generally hilarious. Ray Bradbury - who has had at least one stroke, and whose voice was slightly shaky - just talked about writing and answered questions - and was inspiring, if a bit maudlin; it was wonderful to hear stories of his early days as a writer.
Who ever would have thought that Bradbury would outlive Douglas Adams, some 30-ish years younger?
(Douglas did a meet-and-autograph session afterwards, but Ray sent only his apologies for not having the energy to join in. Ever the geek, I had Douglas sign my (pretty rare, apparently) first American edition of The Meaning of Liff (not the more common The Deeper Meaning of Liff) - look this up if you appreciate peculiarly British humor and a long tolerance for pursuing a simple comic premise through a whole book's worth of punchlines.)
I made backup copies of some twenties, but they were in a lossy format, and came out as fives.
You don't necessarily have to fool a person with a phony bill - or even have a two-sided copy - to get real cash for it. A couple of my friends in college put a photocopied dollar bill into a change machine (for shits and grins, not seriously expecting to get change back), and got four quarters back. Apparently, the change machine could be calibrated "looser" to allow worn/folded bills through, and this allowed their not-really-very-high-quality one-sided black-and-white bill to pass. They were so unnerved at their success that they told campus security the next day, and gave the quarters back.
Yep - that's exactly what I do. When I still let the graphics run full-time, I was averaging 17 hours or so per unit on an AMD 1.67GHz/512MB RAM machine. With the 1-minute black-screen, I average a hair over 4 hours. Oddly, my 2.4GHz P4/1GB RAM/800MHz FSB - half again as fast if you measure by CPU speed only - clocks in only about 20 minutes, or ~8 percent, faster.
I'd been using the drive for playing and burning for several months with no issues, when one day I stuck a CD in it to play, and after it played (and I inadvertently left it sitting in the drive for a day or so), something went wrong somewhere and the drive stopped responding to any hardware and software actions. Hitting the Eject button on the drive did nothing, hitting 'Eject' in the CD player app did nothing (this was under WinNT4), telling the drive to 'Eject' in an Explorer window did nothing. Trying to get other applications (ExactAudioCopy, etc.) to talk to the drive did nothing - it was as if the device didn't exist anymore. Rebooting (into safe mode or any other mode) did nothing! (I'd expected at least some flashing of the LED, but nada.) The drive was totally unresponsive, apparently dead - it wasn't recognized by the OS after that reboot (and yes, I did check verify the cabling - it was getting power and the data cable was fine).
Coincidentally, I'd obtained that particular drive as part of Phillips' class-action laswuit settlement regarding their older CDD2600 series of CD-R (not CD-RW - this was early consumer CD-R) drives that occasionally weren't able to write the advertised amount of data to a blank. Notably, as part of the suit settlement, the usual warranty on the drive was replaced with one that warranted exactly and only, in exclusion of all other guarantees, that the drive would be able to write the advertised amount of data to a piece of media - the sole flaw that brought on the class-action suit.
For many discs, I would have shrugged and given up, ripped the drive out and tossed the whole thing. But, to pile coincidence on top of coincidence, the disc that happened to be hostage in the drive was a limited edition (of, like, a few thousand copies, I think, maybe even only a few hundred) John Zorn disc (actually, disc 2 of a 2CD set), and the limited edition was totally sold out. (I don't know if the disc has any DRM schemes on it - it's possible, but unlikely; it was made during the time the first SunnComm and Macromedia schemes were being implemented, and I know the iMac problems had already manifested themselves. The disc, however, was put out on an indie label, and has no logos or insignias or anything that would indicate DRM protection.)
So, there I was, stuck with a dead drive with no warranty of replacement (not that would have mattered), containing a disc that I had essentially no chance of getting a replacement copy of, and my only option to recover my disc was to carefully destroy the drive, since the drive HAD NO FARKING MANUAL EJECT HOLE!
I did this successfully, retrieving the disc un-scratched, but disassembling the drive down to nearly the molecular level in the process.
Needless to say, I inspect every drive I buy now to make sure that manual eject hole is still there.
Didn't Start Wars Episode 1 have ugly spots all over in it? They even had a name for 'em - Jar Jar somethingorother?