It's called taking the piss.

I work for a small ISP and we encountered this recently.

We bought a few SuperMicro small form factor chassis (http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/512/SC512-260.cfm), and found that with the drives positioned directly next to a high speed prop, the performance of the disk went from a static 125Mb/sec to as low as a few kb.

The drives we initially bought were WD 1TB Green Drives, and we thought it was initially a "Green" feature. But with thorough testing (and after replacing the drives with Barracudas which suffered, but not as badly), we concluded the fault was singularly because of the vibration.

In the end we packed the prop with foam padding -- between the drive and prop, padding the drive's power cable, and between the prop and chassis (above and below).

Problem went away. But it took us a couple of months, a LOT of back and forth between our supplier, the distributor, and SuperMicro (the latter ignored it), and cost us a bunch more money and time than we had quoted our customer for.

when CD-Rs first came out, they came in several very distinct classes.. and those classes were determined by the type of ink used. iirc, blue ink was the worst with about a 1-2 year life span, green supposedly had a 2-5 year lifespan, gold were supposed to have a 20 year lifespan, and silver pressed CDs were supposed to last 100 years.

The game changed when they started mixing the inks, and I don't know how this affects DVD-Rs as I lost interest, but I was always sure to buy the more expensive gold CD-Rs to back up my porn^H^H^H^H important documents.

No doubt the amount of CDs now being produced lowered the cost, but I'm sure that cheap mass production also affects quality adversely.

But this seriously isn't news. PAR2 has been mentioned to death, which sounds like a good thing. I've never used it myself, important docs like insurance, inland revenue stuff, and other odds and ends get copied onto several CDs. I mean, they're so cheap now, you'd be silly not to at least do that.

More appropriately, I call this BS FUD. It reminds me of the prelude to the current gen of consoles how all the publishers were whining that the games are so much more advanced and that they are spending a lot more money developing them. They tried to use that as a vehicle to bump game prices up. They succeeded to a degree, but not as much as they initially wanted. They wanted to charge (in NZ Dollars as that's what I'm familiar with) an average of $140-$150. As it is, most games are being released at $100-$120 with big releases going up to $140, where the last generation they cost $90-$100 with big releases at about $110 or $120.

So I think that this is just a way of them putting the seeds out to try and bump prices up again.

Why do I believe this is bullshit? Because these days game developers use ready-to-run engines. The amount of work they have to do is pretty minimal compared to their workload if they had to build the engines from scratch each time. It also means that using one engine, the game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal rework.

So I'm calling BS. They're able to get games into production much faster thanks to ready made engines, and they can release the games on multiple platforms to maximise their profits. They've never been able to do that as much as they have with the current gen consoles. Next gen it will be even better for them, therefore minimising their cost per platform.

true enough. I buy CDs because they work out cheaper than buying digital copies. On top of that, I've always got the physical media, so if my computer blows up, or if the service shuts down, I can still play my media.

Digital music would have to be *much* *much* cheaper than a physical CD for me to even consider it.

Charge me the same or more and let me do less with it? I don't think so.

I think you'll find that the 360 is their 2nd time around (3rd if you count their input toward the Dreamcast)..

maybe 3rd(4th) time lucky eh?

I'm fully aware of that. But contributing to a kernel and writing a complete one from scratch are two separate things. Maybe they could though, I don't know.