From: discar@nosc.mil (Joe Discar)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Some more misconceptions regarding OS/2 and NT
Date: 19 Aug 92 15:13:06 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego

In article <1992Aug18.214051.25793@njitgw.njit.edu> dic5340@hertz.njit.edu (David Charlap) writes:
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>What I don't like is the CD-ROM software you find in stores - they
>typically want over $300 for one application - even ones that sell for
>less money on floppy.  Corel Draw! is one example - the CD should cost
>LESS than the floppy version, not more - it costs about $10 to press a
>computer-grade CD, compared to the $0.50 per disk it costs to write HD
>floppies.  This gouging is giving the CD-ROM market a very bad name.

Actually the Corel Draw CD comes with gads more Clipart than the floppy
only version.  Whether or not it's worth the extra cost is subjective
(I personally don't think it is).

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>Personally, when I find a CD-ROM player for under $300 that will play
>my audio CD's as well (with or without software control) ...

I bought a Sony 535 CD-ROM player for $229 (internal version) with interface
card.  It plays audio (through a earphone jack in the front)--and if you're
electrically inclined, you can build an RCA-jack cable and plug it into the
molex connectors in the back (but you'll need an amplifier, such as a stereo
to hear it).

The way that CD audio works is the playing software tells the drive to start
playing audio beginning at a certain track... and then the computer is free
to do other things (no TSR required).  I find this pleasant--but discovered
that the CD was much more useful as a data drive (I keep Microsoft--eeek---
Bookshelf on most of the time for my writing).

>....that works
>with OS/2 2.0, I'll get it....

This is the clincher... and one of the reasons I don't jump for OS/2: device
support.  My CD-ROM drive works fine under Windows because (as most people
here will point out ad nauseum) it is built on top of DOS.  I suspect 
that OS/2 will support my CD player in a DOS box--but I haven't tried it,
having given up on OS/2 when it wouldn't run my network.

>For now, no such player exists (the only
>cheap ones don't play audio disks, and have no OS/2 drivers)

Well, half right.  There are cheap ones that play audio disk.  It's OS/2
support that's hard to find.


>
>>CD-ROM will NEVER replace a good hard disk.  But remember this: hard disk
>>technology is getting cheaper, and software is getting larger.  What 
>>better installation medium is there than CD-ROM?  Tape?  CD-ROM is cheaper
>>to reproduce--and the "failure/decay" rate is much lower (making the
>>media more reliable for large amounts of data).
>
>But the vendors charge more money for the CD's than they do for tapes
>and diskettes.

Some vendors do (although I can't think of one that doesn't justify it by
supplying more "product"--however useful said "product" is).  But I picked
up a CD called "Hall of Fame" consisting of over 300 megabytes of shareware
software... the out-of-retail-store price?  A whopping five dollars.  What's
funny is the same retail store had a shelf of shareware software they were
selling for $2.00 per 1.2 megabyte 5.25" disk.

I'm no rocket scientist (apologies to any rocket scientists who may be
reading this), but that sounds awfully cheap to me.
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy