Recently in the Media Lab, Chaos Manor Associate Daniel Spisak experienced a rather extreme case of hardware failure; the burner in the new video workstation had died. Here is his report:
Recently in the Media Lab we embarked on a new project to build a top of the line 3D graphics and video editing workstation and review bed. The Media Lab is nearly as chaotic as Chaos Manor. Hardware and software comes in and out of the facility constantly and whenever a new project starts we have hardware musical chairs. Components are shuffled around to ensure all the systems in the lab have enough hardware to get their assigned tasks done. It's hard to keep track of what equipment is in what system.
We had some large DV captures to archive to DVD on our new workstation, "Atlas." Without thinking I grabbed an 8X DVD-R blank, inserted it into the Pioneer drive, and fired up Nero. Everything was great until Nero suddenly stopped registering the existence of the DVR-103 unit in Atlas. It wasn't until after I reinstalled Nero and rebooted the system that I tried hitting the eject button to get the blank out of it. Nothing happened.
Suddenly it dawned on me. Atlas's Pioneer DVR-103 burner was one of the units old enough to have been affected by the infamous high-speed firmware bug; insert a 4X or higher DVD-R or 2X and higher DVD-RW blank and the drive's firmware would burn the drive out within 2 minutes. Sadly, in the confusion of multiple system swaps our drive's firmware was never updated even though we thought it had been. The lesson here is that if you have an older Pioneer unit that is listed on Pioneer's update page make sure your firmware is updated!
Fortunately we had just received a Plextor PX-716A 16X DVD+-R 6X DL burner to install in Atlas.
Extending Enterprise Value with Web 2.0 In this webcast we will talk about how to simply build and quickly remix Web 2.0 applications and the role of the IT department and how they support mashups. We will discuss how IBM can help IT teams adapt existing enterprise systems as well as develop unique ones that can support end user driven mashups in a reliable, scalable and secure way. We will highlight a simple scenario adapting an enterprise information source for mashups and how to test it. We will also cover how IBM can help you build agile, fast and simple web applications based on dynamic scripting languages that dramatically reduces development time. Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 12pm PT / 3pm ET
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
