Bill’s Mind

May 28th, 2007

I ran out of blank DVD-R discs today, and since nobody in town ever has good media (Verbatim, TY) in stock, I ended up trying a different brand as recommended by the store manager and my former boss. They are Philips 16x DVD-R, and they are the worst garbage I’ve put in my burner, EVER! The media ID is “CMC MAG. AM3″, which is a well known manufacturer of garbage media.

I often wonder why a well-established company like Philips would ever dare put its name on such shoddy products. Lots of other big names do it too: Maxell, Memorex, HP… they all sell rebranded media from low quality Chinese suppliers, yet they charge premium prices for the brand name. With the explosion of digital media, there is a huge market for reliable, worry-free discs. The way it is right now, you can never know what you’re really getting when you buy name-brand media. One week your Maxell might be made by Ridata or Prodisc, the next pack you buy might be from CMC Magnetics or Optodisc. The only way to know is to buy it and find out the hard way, and since nobody accepts returns on opened packages of recordable media, you’re screwed.

If you want to avoid problems, I highly recommend using only Verbatim or Taiyo-Yuden Premium DVD-R media. Beware of impostors however, as there are some less-than-reputable vendors selling fake TY discs. For CD-R, there’s the poorly named MAM-A that produces some of the highest quality CD-R discs available, and they also have a special line of “archival quality” media that’s explicitly designed to last for decades. The problem with premium brands is they can be difficult to find locally so you usually need to buy them online, thanks to fantastically flawed market forces.

The average Joe doesn’t know or can’t tell the difference between good and bad media, so they will buy whatever’s cheapest. I’m absolutely convinced you could take a package of poor quality media, spray it with liquefied manure and sell it a dollar less than the cheapest brand, and it would sell like hotcakes. That’s how blissfully stupid the average consumer is. The same kind of twit who buys a $9.99 Nova DVD player and puts up with the skipping and stuttering, dismissing it as “normal performance”. This trend of cheapskate consumerism is biting us in the ass as product quality degrades year after year. Well here’s a secret: quality products don’t have to be expensive. They certainly don’t cost that much more to manufacture, but the cheap products are more profitable on volume. Guess what happens if everyone goes back to buying the good stuff ? The price will go down, as the quality manufacturers will cater to their consumers, so someone tell me why the hell are we throwing money at all the cheap Chinese knockoffs ?

May 28th, 2007

Domain tasting, from Wikipedia
This is a throw down. The practice known as “domain tasting” or “domain kiting” must be put to an end. It is unethical and just plain sneaky… Read the rest of this entry »