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"Adopted" is up to dispute. How do you determine "adopted"? I think if you'd do your homework there's still more people with VCRs than DVD players, at least in the US, so I believe the DVD still hasn't been fully adopted in the US yet, especially considering it's just as easy to find a new movie on VHS as it is on DVD.

One could even argue CDs haven't been fully adopted yet: new tape players are still easy to find anywhere CD players are sold, and new music on tapes is still readily available. I think your belief that CDs were fully adopted in the early 90s is premature.

"That's around 15 years from invention to full adoption. It took DVD's something like 4 years to do that."

DVDs were actually invented in 1993, but at the time it was just video burnt on to a double-density CD. In 94, Philips and Sony announced a proposal for a high density disc called MMCD, which went on to become the DVD we know today.

So, 10 years later and DVD haven't come anywhere near killing VHS.

Apparently, someone's trying to make a living selling among other things a "virtual sound driver" for Windows machines. It's a sound driver that is able to write the stream straight to the hard disk. I'm not recommending anyone buy it (since it seems pretty cheesy to me), but here's a link talking about it.

Respecting intellectual property IS important.

That said, intellectual property is also supposed to pass into the public domain in a timely manner. That is no longer true. I honestly think people would have more respect for copyright if there were ever a chance it would end in their lifetime.

And frankly, my big gripe with the RIAA is not that they attempt to protect their livelihood and the rights of their artists. It's that in order to do so, they pick on the innocents: people who build generic search engines that others abuse, people who buy CD-Rs for general data use and yet pay a tax on them (actually seems to apply to pretty much any audio recording device or medium, and so on.

It's one thing to protect your rights. It's another to be so desperate you screw the bejesus out of anyone you can lay your hands on.

From http://www.cdpage.com/Compact_Disc_Variations/dana boot.html

The El Torito Specification is the brainchild of two engineers -- Curtis Stevens, of Phoenix Technologies in Irvine, CA, and Stan Merkin, formerly of IBM, and currently of Dell Computers in Austin, TX. The name "El Torito" is from the El Torito Grill Mexican restaurant in Irvine where Stevens and Merkin collaborated on the spec over lunch. The practice of naming CD-ROM standards after the place of their inception has a distinguished precedent. The ad hoc assembly of CD-ROM researchers and developers known as the High Sierra Group named themselves and their standard, which later became ISO 9660, after the High Sierra Hotel and Casino in Lake Tahoe. The El Torito Group, such as it is, was an even more ad hoc collaboration.

by ct

Now I'll be honest that I haven't looked into whether or not USB solid state storage is standard across the board, but if they're doing away with floppies then I had better be able to boot from my USB pen/key/dongle storage device if & when needed by simply changing the boot order.

Don't limit my options - period.

by afidel

Will they allow things like BIOS flash updates to run from El Torito cdroms?

by Masem

There's still plenty of good reasons for floppies. Most device drivers can still fit onto one floppy disk, and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD.

Secondly, floppies are still perfect rescue disk media: you can usually get any hard drive and optical media controllers onto one, such that you can delete nasty files or run checkdisk to make sure things are ok.

Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.

Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy?

by The Bungi

As long as they *provide* the pen drive or similar device, *and* place an easily accessible USB or FireWire port on the front of the chassis.

CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.

And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).

What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.

by Auckerman

On MacOS, Firmware upgrades can be done straight from the OS.

Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).

by BWJones

Dell is finally catching up to changes Apple made 5 years ago!

The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).

--dan

I never thought people were claiming it was fair use to give their friends and family recording. I've heard fair use applied to changing formats: e.g. from CD to MP3 or DVD to MPEG. I've also heard people apply the Audio Home Recording Act which says that "No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings". Basically saying there is no copyright infringment if a consumer noncommercially makes a copy.

It's possible that there are mixed up people saying "Fair Use" when they mean "Audio Home Recording Act", but that doesn't make the actions of music file sharers illegal.

Everyone should bookmark this site since this argument comes up every few days here on slashdot ;)

More info: geeky, geekier, geekiest. An interesting tidbit is that the data is interleaved serially, meaning the data and the parity codes are spread across wide arcs of disc. That's why it's recommended to clean discs from the center out, not around the discs (so if you scratch it, you damage unrelated segments).

So, I think the idea of duplicating your CD-Rs and sending them to your relatives is a good one. For more fault tolerance, just send some more copies to some more relatives.

On the other hand, one can hardly hold computer manufacturers and consumers accountable for the choice of file format that the recording industry made.

according to the audio home recording act, No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright [...] based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of [a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium] for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.

so, by my interpretation, (and IANAL), I can copy metallica for personal use, as long as I store it on a DAT tape! I've already paid Metallica for it, when I paid the DAT tax on the tape.

> not cheesy El Torito CD's that work by emulating a piece of crap floppy disk
I'm curious, what makes you say that ?

The El Torito Specification is the brainchild of two engineers -- Curtis Stevens, of Phoenix Technologies in Irvine, CA, and Stan Merkin, formerly of IBM, and currently of Dell Computers in Austin, TX. The name "El Torito" is from the El Torito Grill Mexican restaurant in Irvine where Stevens and Merkin collaborated on the spec over lunch. The practice of naming CD-ROM standards after the place of their inception has a distinguished precedent. The ad hoc assembly of CD-ROM researchers and developers known as the High Sierra Group named themselves and their standard, which later became ISO 9660, after the High Sierra Hotel and Casino in Lake Tahoe. The El Torito Group, such as it is, was an even more ad hoc collaboration.

While officially, the El Torito spec allows the emulated boot media to be 1.44, 2.88, or "hard disk" types, generally the support is sub-standard for anything other than 1.44 boot floppies. AFAIK, most Linux distributions still use 1.44 (or if they're feeling lucky, 2.88) boot images in the CD's because anything else just fails too often on too many computers.

This is kinda moot, but copying for your own use isn't "fair use". Time-displacement, or more generally media-displacement is infringement, but is protected from prosecution via the betamax case that went before the supreme court (84?).

IANAL, but check this out for some background...

There are two types of media used for DVD-RAM, type 1 and type 2.

Type 1 is a special double-sided disk in a cartridge that cannot be removed from the drive without data loss.

Type 2 are single-sided disks that can be removed from the cartridge and read in some normal DVD-ROM drives.

More info here: http://www.cdpage.com/DVD/dvdram.html

-LjM