Vista Can't Subtract

Another reason to avoid Vista: it cannot subtract. (I suppose we already knew that with the math bugs being found in Excel.) According to Microsoft propaganda, the company hires the smartest people in the world. Yet, they cannot subtract.

My uncle had one of his sermons posted to his German church's Website. My parents wanted to hear it, but are not savy in the Way of The Podcast. So, I downloaded the 30-minute MP3 file, converted it to WAV, and then wanted to burn it to a CD -- which they could listen to in their car.

Upon inserting the blank CD in my new notebook computer running the unfortunate Vista operating system, I clicked the omnipresent Burn icon in Explorer. (I have no idea why Explorer has the rarely used Burn icon, but lacks the far more useful New Folder icon.) After a few more clicks, Windows announced it could not burn the CD. I was to click the icon next to the filename to find out why:

Windows could not determine the length of the WAV file. Amazing, because there is a one-to-one corespondance between WAV file size and CD capacity. CDs hold 800MB of data, including WAV files that are just 319MB. The math is simple: 800 - 319 = sufficient space.

So, I switched to Roxio Creator Basic (included with Vista) and it had no problem (1) determining the size of the file; and (2) burning the CD.