W00t! DVD drive!
From Telkoth.net
One of my friends at work, Angel, was nice enough to hand me an old DVD drive of his. Seems he already has three CD drives, each with a combination of at least two abilities from the following list:
- read a CD
- read a DVD
- burn a CD
- burn a DVD
He had no need, therefore, for a drive which merely reads DVDs, so he's letting me use it (for an unspecified amount of time).
The first thing I tried was popping in a DVD I got from Computer Music magazine. As is to be expected from any CD shipped around the world three times before making it to its destination, the CD is quite scratched up, giving my computer some problems, especially since it insists on doing the whole autorun thing. All I want is the samples off the DVD, I don't give a damn about their fancy Flash menu system, so I looked for a way to disable autorun. I seem to remember it being an option for each drive, but that may have been some other version of Windows.
Anyway, I was able to find out how on-line, of course. An article posted about a year ago by engadget came up. Not only did it tell me how to disable autorun, it also told me something terrifying:
Apparently SunnComm almost tried to sue a student for writing a paper which explains something useful: by holding down the SHIFT key while inserting a CD (or any removeable storage device), you temporarily disable Windows' desire to perform the autorun on that device. Apparently SunnComm's brilliant anti-piracy feature required you to be using Windows with autorun enabled.
No fucking duh they dropped the suit. How can you sue someone for explaining a operating system feature? I mean, Microsoft had already published the fact that you can hold down SHIFT to bypass autorun. That'd be like trying to sue me because I pointed out that, I dunno, some company used your connection to the internet to confirm that your copy of their program isn't pirated, so all you have to do is not be on-line when you run the program. "Oh God! He told people they don't have to be on-line all the time! Sue him!"
Whatever. It's an old article. At least SunnComm realized "oh wait, we're being dumb," and dropped it.
Ooh, and did you know that since then, SunnComm apparently fixed this SHIFT key "attack"? Whoop-dee-do, SunnComm. I've got autorun off, to prevent problems like when Windows keeps trying over and over and over again to read the autorun info from my scratched DVD, preventing me from doing anything else useful with the drive [sigh]. I don't want to hold down SHIFT everytime I enter a CD, just in case it's damaged.
Well! Time to get back to PsyPets. It's a happier thing to do than hating dumb people. Heh.
