At 02:33 AM 7/7/03 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

On 2003-07-06, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks@lne.com:

...

There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to allow or export this flexibility.

I'd guess either because of a) terminal stupidity or b) benefits to scale in making it sure people go with compatibility. As there probably have to be some limits to how stupid engineers capable of making things like writable CD's can be, I'd have to go with the second alternative.

Frankly its obvious you haven't worked (or thought about the constraints) on a commercial product with a deadline / resource constraints or worked on something extremely cost sensitive like commodity drives/chipsets. Here, ponder this: why are there no oxygen sensor or manifold temperature or ignition-phase (etc) displays in ordinary cars? (Although there probably are in custom race cars) You know (much like the analog CD signal) they're being measured and used by the ECU. So, why not? Chew on that one for a while, grasshopper. Economics is applied physics.