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Presenting The CDR-ROM
nachoboy writes "Here's a cool new idea: the CDR-ROM. Allows a portion of the CD to be written and them mass produced, leaving the remaining area recordable by the user. It may sound funny, but if AOL started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
It's bound to be more expensive than the super cheap plain CD-Rs. I actually think these would only have limited usefulness.
Multi-session CD writes offer a similar functionality. The first widespread use of this was the Kodak PhotoCD - you could put your photos on the same CD again and again until it was full, because it used multi-session.
E000-VB14-G8RY
DVD-R, maybe....but CD-R's are simply too small. Apple and SUSE as an example distribute using DVD. The message is smaller media is already on the demise, so why encourage it. Otherwise, a 'reusable' piece of (free) storage isn't a bad way to gain some respect.
Similar to how Secure Digital memory works, since you can't alter the contents of the ROM portion of the disc. It could contain secure hashes, or even codecs or other encryption/communication code. You buy a stack of the discs and burn songs onto them at the music store, then they only let you play them x number of times, a la SD. Or maybe you buy music CDs with the music already in the ROM part, but the R/W part is updated each time you play it. Or the R/W part must be encoded with some kind of machine specific ID so you can't play the disc in other players.
I know I know I'm being totally paranoid. There are a million and one potential NON DRM uses for this idea.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Could enable publishers to have CD-KEYs on software/games that are unique for each printed CD. Doesn't make the software uncopyable/uncrackable, of course, but it would make things a big harder on Joe Compaq who knows about 'serialz' sites but not much more.
This sounds like a good way to spread viruses. Imagine all of those AOL CDR-ROMs lying around in your building's mail lobby being picked up and loaded with trojan horses say and then put back in the lobby all with friendly AOL logos already on them. Even if they had been originally shrink wrapped, most users who 'd be interested in signing up for AOL wouldn't think twice about sticking the CD into their PC and running it.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
The problem with this idea is that you can't mass produce CDs like this with a writable area for the consumer. For one, it's a totally different process to make the media. It's also more expensive. Not only that, why should I use this monster? I can't erase what's already in the session. It's like using those preformatted Zip disks with that 50ways.exe and not being able to delete it. Oh, so I can store a few documents amongst the hundreds of megs of AOL crap on the CD. Talk about a autorun nightmare...
You're also rising the cost of manufacturing disks. Eh, I guess you could burn the CD roms by hand, but that would take forever even on a mass produced scale. You end up looking like some pirate operation. Plus how do I know the CD hasn't be adulterated somehow? At least with a silver CD I know that if it's fake, they went to a lot of effort to get a facility to make it. Gold, Green, or Black CDs can be made by anyone.
Eh, why bother? Just buy blank CDs. They're cheap enough and you know what you're getting. You're also putting only what you want on them.
I think it is a great idea. You could have an OS boot, probe hardware, write optimizations to cd.
Or save user specific information.
This OS could be for a game or could be for some sort of appliance. Maybe game console, TIVO type thing.
Not good at talking to large group forgive me.
I don't see much use for this in the PC market, but it would be wonderful for game consoles, by allowing a disc to save characters and savegames, in addition to the Game itself.
Easy...
Install once, write on the CD "I have been installed" and refuse nay other installation attempt.
The reason (almost) all games have to have a harddrive footprint has nothing to do with saving games, and everything to do with the latency and transfer rates of CD-ROM drives.
TODO: Something witty here...
1) Release CD of Music, Software, etc.
2) Place in computer and run program
3) Program reads BIOS, Hardware config, Windows GUI, etc.
4) Program writes this data to CD-R portion
5) Use CD on a different machine -- whoops data doesn't match calling "Piracy Police"
Sure, I would grab lots of free AOL CDR-ROMs everytime I saw their display. Use them when I needed to archive away a modest amount of data. What good would that do AOL, to have a few geeks who know better than to use their "service" snarf up all their free media? Strikes me as the last thing they would want.
The only people who are likely to use these are people who see them as yet another way to impose copy protection and further restrictions on the users. Install and write to the CDR-ROM. Information already written there? Opps, you need to buy another copy of the tax software to use on this computer. What, you say you bought a new computer? -- too bad, but another copy. You say you need to recover your tax data from 2 years ago and the 2 year old version is no longer sold in stores? Too bad, our copy protection prevents you from installing again.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This would be great to create a single purpose server (gateway, webserver, whatever). You can boot off of them AND have some permanent storage (for logs, config, etc)! You'd probably still want ramdisk swap and /tmp partition.
I can think of all kinds of uses for such a CD.
bp
No doubt companies would try to use the feature for copy protection and/or DRM. Simply write some machine identifier to the disc, and then presto, your software can demand that the user 1) keep the disc in the drive and 2) only run it on the machine that corresponds to the locked-in identifier.
Of course, for the competent user, this would be about as hard to defeat as the infamous "enhanced CD" scheme that you can defeat with a felt pen. But it would still be annoying and user-hostile. Although that seems to be a consciously decided marketing strategy for the Big Content conglomerates these days.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
But only if you put it in a writer drive ;) I've got a 12x4x24 CD-RW drive and a 4xDVD/48xCD-ROM drive, which one do you think i install stuff from.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
CDRs that have DRM features written at the beginning of the disk to keep you from writing "untrusted" content to the rest of it.
Could you describe how this could possibly be implemented? You'd have to have something in the CD burner, or software on the computer, which can take advantage of the data which is written to the pre-written part of the disk to enforce these "DRM" features. But 1) the disc is supposedly fully compatible with all existing CD burners (which don't have said features), and 2) anyone can use their own software for burning CDs (cdrecord, at the minimum).
Basically, without proof, I don't see how this is anything more than paranoid...
I have thought about this idea before, but it's a really half-baked idea. Here's why:
Manufacutring cost:
It's more expensive to produce a disc like this than it is to manufacture a blank CDR or a pressed CD-ROM. For any application where this type of thing would be required, it could easily be written during the manufacutring process onto a regular CDR. I would imagine that there is roughly an equivalent cost to producing one of these hybrid discs versus publishing on CD-R to begin with. In addition to this, think about all that would be involved with retooling a plant to be able to manufacture discs with a different ratio of CD-ROM to CD-R, not to mention the additional burdens it's going to place on testing equipment that will have to be able to verify both the pressed disc and the blank section.
Reduced capacity:
The CDR-ROM disk will have a reduced capacity compared to a normal pressed CD-ROM or a CD-R because no data will be able to be written at the point at which the two disc types meet. The reduction in capacity would be small, but prevalent.
Drive compatibility problems:
Secondly, the huge installed base of CDROM drives out there will not have good compatibility with this kind of a disc. Most drive firmware treats CD-R and CD-ROM media differently to achieve optimum read performance with different kinds of media. When you put this hybrid thing in your 50x cdrom you got three years ago, it's going to spin up to maximum thinking it's a pressed disc then read error all over the fucking place when it hits the CDR section. The onl thing to do is to fake the cdrom into thinking that the disc is a CD-R in its entirety, but then you don't get any of the advantages of having a pressed disc anyway, such as increased read speed without new drives that cater to this special format.
Software compatibility problems:
Due to the way ISO9660 works, the table of contents (including the TOC for the data on the pressed section) will likely have to be re-burned by any software that writes to the CD-R section of the disc. Thus, a faulty burn would render the entire disk unreadable by most systems.
The only good application I can think of for this is for a console game system where you have the luxury of ensuring a uniform set of hardware capabilities between users, and the ability to break standards to accomplish this weird hybrid design stuff. A game could keep save data on the disc or extra game data or something while protecting the game data itself. The media, though, should be CDRW and not CD-R. For those of you who remember, think about the dreamcast's data format -- use some kind of DVD format for the "outer ring" of game data, and use CDRW for the inner ring of PC/CDROM compatibility. You could pop your Xbox2 game into your PC to download new levels or whatever. Unfortunately, internal storage, and fast network connections inside of future (and some present) game consoles would render this idea pretty pointless also.
~GoRK
Maybe it isn't the same because part of the CDR-ROM is actually cut, but isn't this the same idea in principle as is behind multisession CDRs? Can't write over the part that's already written, but you can write on the rest of the disc.
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David Borowitz
Then people like me could host "Mystery Science Theater"-esque parties where we make fun of the movie. Loads of laughs, and the memories would last indefinitely!
I know you're making a joke but since it would be a multi-session CDR, everytime you burn a new session it burns a new TOC, simple delete the AOL files in your cd burning software and while they will still be there, they wont be listed in the new TOC.
I have read most of the comments, and they all seem to tend toward the negative uses, so I am going to offer a counter-example. MoviX. You could mass-produce a bootable cd that would be capable of playing any movie or mp3/ogg file(s) you happened to burn onto it.
I wouldn't mind a spindle of these.
-bhs
even if one didnt have a Read only drive u could always rip the iso burn to blank then install from the burn leaving the original untouched.
I can point out a big problem with this.
We desperately want our files off of the CD because it takes TOOOOOOO LOOOOOOOOOONG to load from CD. Hell, if I thought I could get away with it, I'd store my entire game in RAM so it'd be blazing fast.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
The games manufacturers could even make the CD-writer try to scribble all over the ROM area so you couldn't copy it onto a writable disk.
This sounds like an idea that's most useful for console systems. Avoiding the need for a hard disk or a pluggable RAM cartridge for game saves seems like it would be a big win.
In the PC world, things are more problematic - I wonder whether the market penetration of CD-RW drives (as opposed to just CD-R) is large enough to make this useful for a few years to come? If only 30% of gamers have them, the games manufacturers aren't going to be very interested.
www.sjbaker.org
Pretty soon the DRM on the cd will check to see if it'll accept what you're writting to it.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.