Philips has announced that it will equip all CD-RW drives that they produce from early 2002 with EasyWrite Technology, another name for Mount
Rainier support.
Philips is, besides other big names such as Dell, Hitachi, Roxio, Matsushita, LG, Acer and Gateway, one of the developers of the format and therefor this announcement is not suprising.
Recently, open source developers were granted royalty-free access to the format following months of closed-door negotiations. |
The purpose of the format is to make CD-RW drives (and, in the future, recordable DVD drives) easier to use, primarily by allowing drag and drop functionality. This would let users treat the drive as a floppy drive or hard drive, making it an easier to use storage medium.
While packet-writing applications are already available from various third parties that allow this kind of functionality, the Mount Rainier initiative hopes to include this functionality seamlessly into the operating system, making it invisible to the user.
Formatting delays are also eliminated. This will happen as a background operation, allowing users to drag and drop immediately to their discs.
Native support for Mount Rainier is good, using a CD-RW drive should be made as easy as possible, especially because CD-RW drives get more and more populair, you almost can't buy a new system without one...
Source: TheRegister
