Day: August 20, 2001

Some of the stories at Cyber Age Adventures look interesting, especially if you’re interested in good comics fan fiction. The site received a nice writeup in the latest issue of Wizard magazine. The Wizard profile mentions that the site was the Grand Prize winner in Writer’s Digest‘s 1st annual Natoinal Zine Publishing Awards contest.

Fine, fine, but why do they have to play that stinking music when I visit their site?!?!? What really angers me is when I visit a site like this at work, and I’ve forgotten to turn down the speakers. The last thing I need is to have some crappy music start assaulting the ears of my coworkers just because I want to visit your site.

Stupid.

According to ZDNET, Hewlett-Packard will begin selling a DVD+RW drive early next month for $599. Along with being able to write to DVD+RW discs, the drive will also be able to write to CD-R and CD-RW discs at 12X and 10X speeds, respectively.

The ZDNET article goes on at length about a format war between DVD+RW and the competing DVD-RW format, but I’m not sure how much of a factor that will be. The bottom line is that both DVD+RW and DVD-RW media will be readable by consumer-level DVD players (at least recently manufactured DVD players with the most recent ROM versions). That puts them light years (pun intended) ahead of DVD-RAM which is cheaper and features storage up to 9.4 gigabytes, but uses a cartridge-based media.

I suspect the ultimate thing that determines whether DVD+RW or DVD-RW wins will be largely based on price, and considering the HP drive is coming it at about $200 less than the current DVD-RW drive offering from Panasonic, it just might have the early lead.

Not to mention an actual presence in stores. Best Buy, for example, will sell you a DVD-RW drive for $799, but only with a special order. An HP DVD+RW drive that’s actually on store shelves at $200 less is going to be a clear winner with early adopters.