I love my VoIP service. In the bad old POTS days, we'd get 3, 4... 5 telejunk calls a day, 7 days a week, some days worse than others.

Now I can block the telespammers, my phone only rings for the occasional low-level telejunker: usually a local duct cleaner, or some 2-bit company trying to hawk windows and doors. All the toll-free numbers go straight to voicemail.

Repeat offenders get auto-forwarded to an out-of-service number. But, just as the email spammers ignore 5.5.x SMTP error messages and keep trying an email address that will never deliver, it seems the tele-spammers' autodialers ignore "number out of service" messages too:

SelectiveCallFwd   112595140000002    Unavailable 2007-10-20
SelectiveCallFwd   112595140000002    Unavailable 2007-10-27

Here are a few more parallels:

Email Spammer	Tele-Spammer
Ignores 5.5.x mailer messages.	Ignores "out-of-service" messages.
Plays numbers game: harasses millions of email users with unsolicited messages for one lousy sale.	Plays numbers game: harasses millions of phone users with unsolicited calls and voicemail messages for one lousy sale.
Sells "sucker lists" of email addresses.	Sells "sucker lists" of phone numbers.
Routinely forges "from" addresses.	Routinely forges Caller ID.
Uses rogue ISP’s to host their "bulletproof" websites.	Uses rogue SIP providers to host their VoIP systems.
Obfuscates messages to bypass spam filters.	Obfuscates Caller ID to bypass Privacy Guard.
Uses cost-shifted advertising to spam your mailbox.	Uses cost-shifted advertising to spam your cell-phone.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, including parallels between tele-junkers and fax spammers.

My personal favourite site for reporting telejunkers: Who Called Us.

A few weeks back, I purchased a Panasonic DMR-ES16 DVD Recorder. So far, I'm really pleased with it. The functionality is great and it's very easy to use, even for a beginner.

Of course, I needed discs to record on, so I bought a stack of 50 no-name DVD-R's for movies we edited in MovieMaker from our mini-DVD camcorder. I also bought a stack of 25 4.7GB 4x DVD+RW's, manufactured by CyberHome [more CamelCase].

So far, 2 of the 25 discs have failed to format. Even if none of the other discs fail, that's a fairly bad failure rate.

Naturally, I did not have the luxury of checking out CyberHome's reputation, as I bought the discs on impulse when I got my DVD Recorder. In hindsight, had I visited their website [or in this case, webshite] I would not have bought this brand anyway. Seeing a domain-parking page with their logo would not have inspired confidence in their brand. Perhaps they can't afford to maintain their webshite, after federal agencies seized more than 20,000 CyberHome-brand DVD recorders that allegedly used Philips patents without a license last year.

Just in case anyone's interested (since Googling for "authoring engine failed" yielded only 2 search results with no clear answer) I managed to get PowerProducer to work in the end.

Since I don't have the time to test each of these 3 remedies separately, I did all of them before re-attempting the burn:

(1) Although I had over 12GB free, I deleted the source .WMV files that I had used in MovieMaker to make the final cut - this freed up ~2GB.
(2) Pulled a different DVD-R from the stack.
(3) Ran PowerProducer under an Admin account.

I really don't know which one (or more) of these remedies worked, but now PowerProducer is working again. Still, I stand by what I said originally: that hardware manufacturers test OEM software before releasing it with their products.

When I purchased an LG multi-DVD rewriter drive, I acquired a software suite with CyberLink PowerProducer [their CamelCase, not mine].

Honestly, this program is a piece of crapware. Not only does it take HOURS for it to generate the DVD top-menu, it seems to take just as long to actually finish the burn process, so I usually set it to do its work overnight.

So I set this program running last night and find a cryptic error message this morning:
"Burning Failed
PowerProducer has failed to complete the task(s) because:
(e0080007)
Possible cause(s):
Authoring engine failed."

I mean, what kind of idiotic error message is this? It doesn't tell me the cause, only that it possibly, perhaps, might be due to the "authoring engine failed" (whatever the fsck that is - Googling for "authoring engine" yields many different types of applications, from 3D RPG's to DVD's). Was the DVD-R bad? Did I run out of disk space? Not enough memory? WHAT?

Of course, it couldn't tell me this shortly after I started the burn process (I had it running for about 30 minutes or so before shutting the monitor off).

LG and all the other manufacturers who bundle OEM DVD software: you really need to test these OEM software suites before bundling them with your hardware.