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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."
would be for AOL to use CD-WOM (Write Only Memory) technology.
sulli
RTFJ.
It's bound to be more expensive than the super cheap plain CD-Rs. I actually think these would only have limited usefulness.
with not only aol software but MSN also.
CD-ROMRW
The kiddies could use a program to take care of their little Pokemon/Yu-gi-oh/the popular electronic pet du jour, and write it to the cd when they're done and carry it around for them. No need to carry around a disc to play your saved game.
Not a big jump till we get to the C-DRM or CD-MCA huh? :P
~geogeek
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
Wouldnt CDRW-ROM make more sense? why would you have a write once portion of a disc with a part already stamped. With a CDRW-ROM you could save your games on the game cd, no more save files or memory cartriges.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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.
Good: Knoppix CDs that boot themselves and then let you write to a small section of the CD, so that you can keep a permanent record of the files you write in the computer lab.
Bad (and the likely goal): CDRs that have DRM features written at the beginning of the disk to keep you from writing "untrusted" content to the rest of it. Watch these replace normal CDRs and hurt the CD remixing industry. (While the RIAA collects a higher piracy tax on them anyway.)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
how is it a cool new idea to uncheck the 'finalize cd' button?!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Or, you could limit how many times a program can be installed ... endless possibilities.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
This is actually semi-good thing.
:)
Imagine game that you dont need to install, it plays off the CD itself and writes save games there. Bad thing about it -- games could become "one time playable" only.
Or even worse -- one time installable software, that writes some reg. info to CD itself.
How about some exams on CD that you pass or not pass and it saves your results directly to CD?
But again, could be possible to create copy of this CD and do this again, and again, and again...
I can't seem to get to the site (/.'ed?) but one use that springs to mind is being able to update the data for some application. Right now you purchase some app that might come on a cd, lets say a mapping app. When you want to install updated data, you either get a new cd, or you download, but you can't have the updated stuff with the cd, since it's still on the machine you downloaded. With this, you could download and burn the update and still have everything together.
Another app could be a way to distribute homework to students. The homework/text is on the stamped portion. As the students do their homework, it can be burnt on the cd. At the end of the year you have a permanent record of the class. You could extend this to storing markup information (bookmarks, notes, etc) and adding supplemantal info as well.
Possibly, anyway. We pay a levy here on blank CDRs. BUT, they must be blank. SO, with something like this, you might be able to conveniently skirt said levies, with a small reduction in capacity.
I think this is a great idea. If one could extend this idea into maybe a CDRW-ROM allowing a lot of writes or perhaps even a DVDRW-ROM. This way for game consoles, you can actually save your game without the need of a Hard Drive (XBox) or a memory card. This might bring back some of the concepts that were promised by the cancelled (in US) N64 DD, allowing a game to be very changeable. Imagine an RPG like this, like where a lot more of the scenery can change, you slash your sword along a wall, turn off the console, load it up again the next day and you'll still see a little mark on that same wall. More so, in an RPG like game, there would be even more interactivity, like where you can change entire landscapes with your "magical" powers. This is something that would be hard to do on a game console, even with an 8 gig HD which I doubt developers would want to be half full because of one game. I'm curious how expensive this technology would be though.
Oh yeah, what is that place where you could donate AOL cd's too? he he he I need URL
buffering...
As of February 19, the No More AOL CDs project has collected 141,803 CDs.
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.
Wouldn't this idea make it possible for people to abuse AOL's name and give out the CD again (some way or another) with additional malecious programs. This would easily trick many people into installing them and then the blame would go into the CDR-ROM producer (AOL in this case).
I always believed the inability to write over a distributed CD coming from a kind of trusted company is a good idea because it disallows such kinds of faking.
Khalid
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
So let me get this straight:
We've come so far ahead in technology that we now have Recordable Read Only Memory!?
Maybe I should invest in that frozen hell stock after all..
arcane for life
Tons of people in the computer lab I used to work in would keep AOL floppys to save stuff on, because even though they were totally unreliable they were abundant and free.
This would be a really good idea for bands jsut starting out. Record a CD with three songs and leave the rest blank, give away free. People burn other stuff on the end, and hear your tracks first. Free advertising marketed to people who might actually dig your sound.
Of course, you could do the same with recorded commercials...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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)?
How is this different than multi-session? The site is slashdotted and equiring minds want to know ...
It's a disc that is divided into two segments. One segment is your standard ROM disc, that sounds like it will be stamped using normal duplication methods. The remainder of the disc is to be surfaced as a CD-R, allowing people to burn information on there.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
1) People who would use AOL.
2) People who actually know how to burn a CD.
You'd have more success packaging foie gras with Milwaukee's Best.
yeah, and then we collect them, fill them up with porn and let them lay around in places.. Maybe we can even take bets on howlong it will take for the first lawsuit accusing AOL of distributing pr0n..;)
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
If AOL used this technology getting by AOLS auto-run installation would not be worth getting to any files burned on them.
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
No one wants to touch an AOL cd. ewww.
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.
--------------------
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
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!
More info can be found on the manufacturer's site here:
http://www.optical-disc.com/CDR_ROM.htm
~GoRK
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
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"
Good plan, but you forgot the most important part:
6) Profit!!
(sorry)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
You don't use the flood of AOL discs as a renewable source of drink coasters?
My karma is in a nose dive
Shortly after the MD was released, I recall reading about Sony's intention of releasing an MD-Data. This was to have come in three flavours:
The MD-Data had a capacity of only 140MB, and I never actually saw one on sale.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
runs off the disk
:(
Runs off the disk? That went out of the window with the BBC Micro.
I've not been in programming for a while, but apparently it is no longer possible to write a program that does not require "installing", and the creation of about 6 bazillion registry entries.
"It may sound funny, but if AOL started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
Back when AOL used to send out 3.5" floppy discs a lot of people wanted to get as many as possible. They'd format the discs, rip off the label, put their own label on and use it later.
I remember seeing sites that listed a bunch of methods on how to get more. Thanks to AOL you never had to buy floppys again! But unfortunately, as everyone knows, they switched to CDs and now everyone would rather see less of 'em. If they were rewritable that would probably be a different story for many -- and thus even if CDR-ROM was an option AOL might not do it for this very reason.
Consider this scenario :
Games don't use the windows registry at all, or they use temporary registry settings if necessary. All configuration info is kept on the CD.
The game is essentially playable off the CD. Your saved games go BACK ON the CD. Which is nice. That way you can carry around all your settings in a neat little package whereever you go.
(If this looks familiar, it's nothing but the Linux concept of keeping configs in files).
Why would games want to do this?
1) There is no issue of hard drive space.
2) The entire game is now portable.
3) It would be so much more convenient to customers.
4) It wouldn't cost them more.
5) They could even take this one step further by creating their own bootable CD thereby eliminating the need for a specific OS, but then...I'm not sure that's a very good idea as it turns a game company into an OS producer too, unless the micro kernel the game runs on is standardised for all games. If you manage that, you've essentially given PC users almost all the convenience of console gaming!
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Now imagine this... a custom linux computer interface whittled down to fit in 300 or so megabytes and configured to boot properly and DHCP across a wide array of hardware. The other 400 are for you to store your files and settings for later use. Set it up with a few essentials - text editor, web browser of your choice, various clients, *maybe* some basic compiler tools.
Take the CD anywhere you chose to and use your own interface/desktop from any PC in the world that will let you have access to the CDROM drive and the reset switch.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I quite like this idea of disks that have rewritable sections of them because they will permit an increased deal of organisational neatness.
If one were to decide to install an old game from a few years ago you would first have to find the install disk, then the various disks on which you've saved patches you've downloaded. Then perhaps if you use any expansion packs with the game you then have to find that disk too. If you're as untidy as I am this could get to be a real nightmare.
By the sound of this, however, you could just store the relevant patches and expansions (and maybe even keep a copy of a file containing your preferences) on the writable portion of the software's install disk and have it all in one place. Could be neat.
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.
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.