Just a quick note for those who may be looking to try shoving their LG DVD/CD writer into an external USB enclosure. Chances are, it won’t work. Symptoms include errors mentioning “disc at once” problems immediately after trying to burn the disc.
I ran into this over the weekend, but the drive works fine as an internal drive. From searching through forum threads, this is pretty common to LG optical drives.
Before anyone gets upset, this article doesn’t describe all computer sellers on eBay. I know there are some that are honest and occasionally just have a problem.
I recently received a call from a lady whose son had purchased a computer on eBay for her and had it shipped to her house. He lives on the other coast and never saw the computer, other than the pictures in the auction. The seller contacted him after the sale and said the case had been tipped over and the plastic on the front cracked and he had to remove the innards, and put it in another case. (hint #1 there was a problem)
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I sat in on a “webinar” (I REALLY hate that word) the other day for a very large company that was presenting its application virtualization product. The salesperson had told us he would even have an engineer on hand to answer questions we may have. Well, they did, but they didn’t mention the engineer would be giving the presentation.
I don’t believe the guy presenting had ever actually been through the set of slides before, since he was constantly correcting himself on what the slides depicted. As an engineer, he may have known how it worked very well, but he couldn’t describe it clearly. I bailed on the presentation after listening to the first thirty minutes of “uh”s and “om”s.
The lesson to learn from this is to be sure the people selling your product are actual salespeople, not the people who designed or manufactured the product. High-level presentations are meant to simply clarify what the product is and why the client needs it. Oh, and make sure the people selling your product aren’t just reading the presentation, the prospective client can do that on their own.
MSN Music DRM key servers will go dark after August 31. That’s right, another lovely benefit of DRM is that the issuers of the keys can just decide to stop authorizing them. After August 31, those who purchased the music from the MSN Music store now have to either keep the OS and computer that the music resides on, or lose it forever.
You know what’s really odd, though? Those terrible people who downloaded music from Napster in the late 90s are still enjoying their tracks…. If any reps for corporations and media conglomerates are reading this, I have a word of advice. If you are trying to push users to use DRM’d content, you’re doing it wrong.
On another note, remember the article I wrote a while back about Windows XP key activation? What happens when Microsoft shuts down those activation servers because they want you to buy the next version of Windows?