Word: cd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...avoided digital cameras, which bypass film and shoot directly to disc, because the sub-$500 models are sub-snuff in the quality department. That left low-cost scanners (which convert paper photos to digital bits) and Picture CD, a new photo-to-digits service from Kodak and Intel that's being introduced this month...
...been testing IBM's Aptiva E Series 585, which shipped to retail stores last week. At $1,899 (a monitor costs extra), the 500-MHz Pentium III desktop PC has the usual amenities, but comes with an internal Sony CD-RW drive. RW is industry jargon for rewriteable, which means it can handle discs that can be recorded over and over again, just like a floppy disc. CD-RW discs, however, tend to cost about $10 each and can be flaky, as I soon learned...
...loaded the golf-game disc in the DVD bay and put a blank CD-RW disc in the recordable drive. Adaptec's "CD-burning" software (Easy CD, Creator and Direct CD) was pre-installed on the PC and started automatically. Following the on-screen prompts, I created a duplicate of my game in about an hour. When the copy was made, the drive automatically ejected the disc, which I popped into my briefcase and took home to my top-secret night...
...tries, however, it started working. Go figure. Even more curious was that it took more than 20 minutes to install the program on my hard drive. When I used the original discs on a similar machine at work, it took less than five minutes. Why? It turns out that CD-RW discs use a less reflective material than CD-R discs, which makes them harder to read on older drives. Indeed, if your CD-ROM drive is more than a year old, it may not be able to read your CD-RW disc...
Something similar happened when I started duping music CDs. I made a copy of Art Pepper's Smack Up, but it didn't work in my 18-month-old portable CD player. The solution was a CD-R disc, which can hold up to 74 minutes of audio and worked just fine on my portable player, my PC and my Mac. You'll have to go to the Net to find conversion software that allows you to burn MP3s onto CDs and play them in your Discman, however. None was included. Why? Why? Why? I never got a good answer...