cd

On Wednesday, President Obama is due to visit an Intel plant in Arizona. Here's why.

Obama aims to highlight manufacturing in America--one of the State of the Union's themes--and it's hard to find a better example of that than the world's leading chipmaker. Intel is now one of America's foremost manufacturers, boasting some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world, many of them sprinkled throughout the U.S. 

Its development fabs (fabrication plants) in Oregon are the most cutting-edge of its leading-edge factories and have already received one presidential visit, in February … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about optical media not ejecting from the system, Firefox suddenly not opening, how to disable Safari-only mode in Lion, a missing Mac App Store option in OS X, and desktop backgrounds changing after waking from sleep. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: CD not ejecting from the system MacFixIt reader rlhbond asks:

Pioneer's new BDR-XD04J contains a mind-numbing array of disc burning and playback options that should cover you for the next several years.

Perhaps the biggest highlight is support for BDXL BD-R discs, which means you can burn those fancy triple-layer 100GB and quad-layer 128GB Blu-ray discs in a tiny package. This is supposed to be the world's smallest BDXL-compatible portable drive. … Read more

Forgive my excitement, but Sonic CD just hit the iPhone--and it's only $1.99.

Sega has done some questionable things--to say the least--with the Sonic franchise, but Sonic CD isn't one of them. Sonic CD, despite the misleading title, isn't a soundtrack or a music game. It's one of the biggest, and best, side-scrolling old-school Sonic games ever made, but it was only available for the short-lived Sega CD, a CD-ROM add-on for the Sega Genesis (it also saw brief life in a 2005 Sonic compilation game for the GameCube and PS2). I actually owned a Sega CD, and Sonic CD was its best game by far--though technically that wasn't saying much.… Read more

Audio gifts are always a great idea for anyone who likes music or home theater. Here's a quick round up of affordable goodies, priced from $100 or less!

Logitech Mini Boombox First thing, the "Boombox" name might be a little misleading; this tiny thing can't boom, but the Logitech Mini Boombox does sound better than I could have imagined for its size, and price, $100. I'm not of fan micro speakers, but this one ain't bad.

The Zoom H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder The Zoom H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder ($100) is exactly what … Read more

Ever wish you could share albums of photos with less-than-tech-savvy friends and family?

Google Picasa offers a great way to show off a collection of photos with its slideshow option. This will be especially handy for those holiday moments coming up when picture-taking is at a yearlong high.

To begin, you need to have Picasa installed, as well as at least one album or collection of photos you'd like to make into a gift CD/DVD. If you plan on including a slideshow option on the disc, you should also make sure the pictures are … Read more

Whether you listen to music from the cloud, MP3s, CDs, LPs, cassettes, or 8-track tapes, it's always in stereo. So while multichannel SACD, DVD-A, or music-only Blu-ray discs trickle out, only a very small handful of recently recorded music is available in multichannel sound. If there was any real demand we would have surely seen an uptick in the number of surround releases, but that's not happening. Stereo rules the music world, which is why high-quality hi-fis aren't going out of fashion. Onkyo's new A-9070 integrated amplifier and C-7070 CD player are both sound investments.

The … Read more

Perhaps the question should be, "Did Steve Jobs help or hurt the sound of music?" He did not invent digital music or MP3 players, but that didn't stop him from redefining the way people buy and listen to music.

Then again, Napster was around before iPods and iTunes, and it allowed people to amass gigantic music collections at zero cost, which I don't see as something to be proud of. Having 10,000+ songs on an iPod is one thing, but do people ever really listen to all of that music? Record labels could not compete … Read more

Windows 8 will let you open and view ISO and VHD files all on its own, according to the latest "Building Windows 8" blog from Microsoft.

Posted yesterday by Microsoft engineer Rajeev Nagar, the new blog post, titled "Accessing data in ISO and VHD files," revealed that native support for ISO and VHD files was one feature often requested by users, prompting the company to add it to its upcoming OS.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) files are image files that hold the contents of a CD or DVD. Large programs available for download through the … Read more