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CDs May be Less Immortal than We Thought
Zordak writes "The near-immortality of CDs, sometimes used as an excuse by record companies as an argument for their high cost, may not be as eternal as touted. An article at CNN describes the problem of CD Rot rearing its head to deny you access to your music and data. The article also describes related problems with CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs."
cd rot has been known about for years, there's been other /. articles about it
While it might suck having to pay a nickel for music off of iTunes, at least I know that my data can be backed up in a manner of my own choosing.
I have been pwned because my
Has any /. reader not heard about this? Several times?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
They don't last 10 seconds in the microwave.
Most CDs that have come out in the last 5 years have been nothing but rot...
As if cd's would last 100 years.
becuase there is officially a limit on the number of times you can encode your files on to CD (used to be 10, lowered to 7).
-ashot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/22/165825 1&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=198
Everyone that collects stuff on CD-Rs knows they don't last long... I've got some from two years ago that don't work, and it's the first time they've been removed from their case since they were burned...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
I think the severity of this must have to do with some manufacturing technique. Some of the first CDs I ever bought are still in perfect shape, while others from more recent purchases are experiencing this. Anyone else confirm this?
We know CDs suck for longevity. This has been discussed on Slashdot more than JonKatz.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
For the past three or four years I've known not to trust CDRs beyond a year.
I spend a few hours reburning each cd, archiving the old ones and throwing out the previous archive.
It looks like the DVD format has stabilised somewhat so I may have to consider springing for a writer. while I'll still do yearly backup, I'll need seven times fewer discs.
I recently had to restore some data from CD-Rs I wrote a long time ago. One was labelled Sep 23rd 1993. Back when you got a 63minute CD-R for 25 ($40) a piece.
Everything restored perfectly. Now, I wonder whether todays discs at less than 1/100 of that price will even last remotely as long as those discs did.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
WE never thought they were immortal
How can something be 'less immortal' anyway? You either is or you ain't, no middle ground. Sort of like 'less dead', 'less unborn', or 'less unemployed'
One of the few, the immortal names, That were not born to die. Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867)
CNN is a bit late to catch up with this...
So, the RIAA has argued that we merely have a license for one copy of the music when we buy a CD. When the CD corrodes, does this mean we can turn in the rotted disc for a pristine one?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The dupes keep coming. Keep up the good work, CowboyNeal!
If this were a "real" news site like, say, GoogleNews, you would call it "informing me from several sources", not "why does this $%& Google News thing post so many dupes!!1!". Talk about selective perception. Just a thought.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
...to anyone who bought CDs in the '80s. I've got one particular first-generation Billy Idol CD that is totally rotted out.
CD's originally included Tellurium in their composition when they first came out, and a lot of people were concerned that it would oxidize. The effect would be that CD's produced in 1981 would become unreadable in ten years or so. I'm given to understand that aluminum is now used, but I wonder what ever became of those early CD's.
the music on the radio sounds worse every year?
The whole music industry may be less immoral than we've ever thought.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
This previous link
nt
It's nothing a little duct tape can't fix!
Keep the faith, share the code
Looking at the pictures, this is exactly what happens when I hold up AOL cds to my Van De Graff generator. Could static be causing it?
g-zilla
The article also describes related problems with CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs.
Good thing DVD -R and DVD+RWs aren't affected.
The idea is that you package bread in plastic bags already sliced. Saves lots of time. Oh yeah...I also heard a news report that someone has come up with the idea of making wheels round. Apparently the ride is much smoother than with other shapes. Of course it could just be hype...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Take my DVD collection, for example. Already the companies are battling to define the next standard. Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
A technology-independent, perpetual, safe storage service for the general public is just a business opportunity waiting to happen. So is the market to sell rights to a movie or song, independent of its format.
What media lasts LONGEST?
I mean, other than paper, or stone.
Ok, ammend. What DIGITAL media lasts longest? My first instinct is to say some type of tape, but tape drives seem to come in and go out of fashion fairly quickly. IDE drives might be another alternative...
So, for your money, what's the best media to store backups of your digital data? Anyone, anyone?
-- The unsig...
This is old news. I remember hearing about this back in 89 or so. The problem is worse if CDs are left out in open air, and in light. If memory serves, for longer lasting CDs, they need to be stored in the dark (not just in its case, but in a dark place like a drawer or safe).
I also think the newer CDs are more prone to this problem than the older ones. I don't know if the materials are much different, or thinner, in order to increase writing speed, but I have noticed that my newer CDs appear to show these signs fairly quickly, sometimes as early as just a few months -- especially if I don't keep them properly stored.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Just make sure you have the receipt, and ship it to them (them being the label).
that the billions of AOL cds in the world will eventually turn into something useful? like dust?
I think this is the third, or maybe fourth story about the fact that CDs which have not been around for 100 years to do testing on, may not actually last 100 years. Duh.
I think this is the third...
From article:
"I'm hoping they'll hold out till that next medium gets popular, and everyone gets to buy everything over again," he says.
Already has, its called digital format, usually MP3. Rip them and create digital back ups and worry about the longevity of the media of your digital backups. This usually means regular backups with multiple copies to restore from. Don't forget to put a copy of your backups in your sfety deposit box or other off site safe place. (I keep a set in my car trunk and just hope nobody steals my car and reads through my files.)
It needs to be heard in more public media to get attention of the public. The geeks get the low-down way before the public does. I'm willing to bet much of it is to suppress public outcry...
In the mean time, this opens the doors to perhaps yet another less fallible storage method. As an open-source advocate, I'm hoping some forward-thinking scientists are already cooking something up that doesn't require DRM be an inherent part of the mix.
Oh, wait, the original article said immorTal, sorry, my bad. ;)
Of Mp3s are ok:-) Actually, this condition is something that pushed me away from CDs. I almost broke down and cried when I could see through my "Ok Computer" CD. I still bought the next 3 albums from Radiohead, but I immediately rip'd them.
CDs are better than floppies, but... last forever... definitely not.
I can burn my mp3s as many times as I want.. =]
-ashot
All of the cd's that I have that have "rotted" or lost the metal layer that holds that data. Have been blank topped cd's ie no printing no nothing on top, just shiny metal. The cd's that I have that are labled or printed on don't seem to have any problem. I live in southern california and leave my cd's in my dark colored truck year round. Commercial Cd's and branded printed cd's seem fine as well as cd's with stickers on them.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
I say we send all the "rotted" cds back to the Music Companies and demand a Refund. If I paid for Near Immortal Music... then I want New Immortal Music - 15 years is not Near Immortal.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
The CD or the copyright?
One of the things that's bugged me is that AFAIK, CSS and the like have NO provisions whatsoever for copyright expiration. I guess the ??AA can use this as a reason for never having any.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You may have not been doing this for malicious reasons, but you're statement is inaccurate! :)
According to Apple's site you can write songs an unlimited amount of times. You can only write a specific PLAYLISTS X amount of times. I think it's 5.
I have burned songs to CDs quite a few times and never had a problem. I've made at least 20 backups of my music collection, including purchased AACs.
iTunes has a very fair and very liberal usage policy IMO.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
Oh great....now my whole AOL free trial collection will be ruined!
Indecision may, or may not be my problem! -- Jimmy Buffett
Dan KOSTER.
is that perhaps with a soft "O", like "Coaster". I'd say so. He should change his middle name to "2000".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is a dupe!
Ok, I've got my tin foil hat on for this one.
Is it possible that they are intentionally degrading the quality of CDs?
Soon to come out with a new "longer lasting" format with DRM.
I just unwrapped a 10 pack of CD-RWs I purchased 2 years ago. The failure rate is about 50%. I keep getting Track Following Errors or Bad Block errors. Tried burning with a Yamaha 3200s and my Thinkpad CDRW. Errors are given both under 2000 and different Linux distros.
Nice to see the price I paid for these went towards QA.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
When that beard turns white he will make a great Gandolf though.
1. If any of your CDs are damaged, it's probably your girlfriend's fault. Or someone else's girlfriend. We all know girlz don't know how to handle CDs (or LPs for that matter), right?
2. If you live in Oregon and insist on living in a cabin "heated by a wood-burning stove", leave your CDs elsewhere. Maybe with your girlfriend.
3. The RIAA has less to worry about than they thought.
Does slashdot keep its archived stories on CDs?
Due to the number of dupes I'm beginning to think so.
Consumers have adopted a system by which multiple redundant backups are constantly made and remade.
It's called P2P.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Laser rot has been a known significant problem with laserdiscs since the early 80's.
I've only got one or two CDs I've found with rot, but a number of laserdiscs do.
Annoying.
I bought a CDR back in 1996 or so ($1k for a 1x CDR drive!)... ironically all the CDR's I burned back then I can still read, but I've got several DVD-R's that have already gone bad in less than a year, and a good number of more recent cheap-o CDR discs that have gone bad.
Moral is, rot happens, and buy the higher end discs for important stuff.
You'll find 60 or 70 year old records that sound and play just fine. There is next to no deterioration of either the sleeve or the record if they're stored and unplayed. I'd imagine the lifespan would easily be hundreds of years. Sure, you get some deterioration in the form of clicks and pops but you'll never get a complete failure like a digital or even magnetic medium. Now that MP3-for-pay is coming of age, finding a stable medium is going to be a top priority for the average person. Heck, most people don't even backup their hard drives and duping CD-Rs is time consuming and wasteful.
Yeah, tis is pretty old news. For years I have noticed the silver part of the CD's, if held up to light, you could see through parts as if the part with the data on it just vanished. I guess that whole "Liftime" thing meant the lifetime of the CD. Sneaky. Oh well, at least my MP3's are a bit more persistant.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I'm not going to bother searching for the links to prove what I'm saying here, but rest assured it's true. I've read about fungus eating away the recorded surface, impurities in the manufacturing of the CDs, and many other weird problems that will cause CDs to rot ten days after purchase.
I don't recall a "license" ever coming in to it.
I thought their argument is simply that as copyright holder they are the only people entitled to create copies outside of "fair use".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Why do I now have an image of a CD with a huge sword yelling "There can be only one" on a hillside in Scotland?
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
You do realize that those clicks and pops when dealing with digital data means exactly that, right ?
it's okay for audio to have a click here and there - heck, that's how audio CDs deal with tiny scratches.. there's a small level of redundancy.
data is a whole different arena.
Similar to an older story?
So my CDs will rot. I have a perfect, jitter-free bit-for-bit copy of each one on my hard drive. If CD rots, discard and re-burn.
Voila
backup to tape!
(ah, they all come back into the fold...)
CBVS
free ipod and free gmail!
My question is this - what if some miscreant makes off with my original CD, and all I am left with is my MP3 copy?
I'm I still covered under "fair use" or did the thief make off with my fair use license too?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Not only is this article a dupe and also a dupe, according to popular site slashdot, CDs may be phased out in less than 5 years.
Why is it that this is covered every 6-8 months on every single news site? Old news, we know already... get over it...
-Imidazole
Hilarious Office Prank!
NYT discovers IRC, CNN discovers CD-Rot. I'll bet the next thing that happens is that Al Gore discovers the Internet.
Seriously, though, this explains why the american congress is pushing all the ideas of the MPAA and the RIAA, they really don't know what is about to hit them. And CNN is certainly not going to tell them this time, as it seems.
I'll only count a digital medium as immortal when it can stand up the punishment my 2-year old regularly inflicts on my CD collection. Titanium platter maybe? ...
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
Anyone know if the color and opacity of the CDR disk have an effect on durability?
Its been my observation that the darker blue medium and opaque CDRs work better than ligher colored (more silver) and more transparent ones. I think the Verbatim's from the 1x/2x/4x days are the best: Deep blue medium, yellow/gold/green recorded region, and the top layer was thick and not prone to be scratched off like today's CDRs.
Using this logic..CDR media gets worse as recording speed of drives are pushed faster. But I haven't found quantative data to back this up.
$cat
In Soviet Russia, the CD Rots you!
Wow, like Snake Plissken, I thought you were dead! (according to what a few people posted in a different thred today on Slashdot)...I'm glad to see the rumors of your demise were greatly exaggerated...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Thankfully most of the RIAA sanctioned crap blasted over the radio and Empty-V will not be playable in a few years. Then again, with most of this crap it was not intended for it to be listened to for more than 6 months anyways. The quicker we can cleanse ourselves of this, the better off we will be. But then again, this won't allow future generations learn from our past mistakes in ,cough "art" cough, and thus be doomed to repeat it. Then again, we save ourselves the embarrasement of being associated with this junk.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Hey, another CD rot story. Any one else getting a little tired of the crap that passes for news on slashdot lately?
I think he went the way of the Internet Stock Boom....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...I'm sure that the RIAA will begin immediately reducing prices!
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
that CD's are immortal, but for a limited time.
Shadows on the road behind, shadows on the road ahead...
I actually miss Katz. His articles were interesting, if not outright fun to read sometimes (in a sort of "wtf?" kind of way).
Join Tor today!
So this 5,000 dollar DVD collection I have may be rotting.
Great becuase I doubt if any go bad I'll be able to get them replaced. This could get expensive.
Problems are keeping the stack ordered and finding a punched card reader these days...
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
The phenomenon of CD-Rot has been known for at least 15 years.
I believe it comes about when there are microscopic pin-holes in the aluminium layer within the CD. Over time, an effect akin to surface-tension in liquids causes these holes to grow - until they get sufficiently large (and numerous) to cause enough data dropout to overwhelm the error correction mechanisms of the player.
CD's that never had pin-holes don't develop them later - which explains how come some disks are magically immune to the problem where others die in only a few years.
I once heard that you can actually see these pin-holes once they've grown to a size that's not yet large enough to cause permenant errors. Hold the disk up to a bright light and see if you can see them. This may give you time to back up one that's "on the way out" before you lose it completely.
I believe the manufacturers developed an alternative material for the reflective layer about 10 years ago - but most pressing plants have not switched over to it. I wonder whether their reluctance to do so is rooted in a desire to have people re-buy the same CD's over and over.
www.sjbaker.org
Was 10, is now 7.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I now have a dream that congress will use this to realize that we need our fair use back. I'm not holding my breath.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
I've got a problem with one or two (apparently) poorly manufactured CDs that have metal flaking off of them. I can tell where it is in each track when the laser hits a spot without aluminum backing. That's where there's a "blip" noise. Actually, they're both from the Decca London label. Not a bad label music-wise, but they sure use a crumby process to mass-produce their cd's. Otherwise, I have CD's that are over a decade old, and they play just as well as the day I got them, as far as I can tell. I doubt that tapes could really do as well. In any case, I've wondered if perhaps I could fix some of the defective cd's by spraying them with a reflective paint or something. Pity, but the classical muzak I listen to is likely to be available in all sorts of recordings, so it's no great loss. I'm more careful with my 2 Melodiya CD's, though. The recordings may still be available, but they're probably pretty hard to find.
when *click* i said *pop* lp's were *click* cooler.
A lot of my old CDs are unplayable now, but that's because they've had beer poured on them and have been stacked outside the case in stacks of 50 for months at a time. I think some of my CD-Rs from 97 will still play.
Anyway, now I'm burning *a lot* of DVD-Rs to fair use archive my favorite TV shows (about 1-2 discs per day, sometimes more). I'm being very careful to keep them in a case all the time, away from dust, not touching them, and I probably won't play them all that much.
I will probably buy a storage server of super cheap hard drives 2-3 TB in a couple years, plus I will probably copy them to higher density media again in a couple years. I'm spending about $0.70/DVD now, and I expect I'll end up with a couple or three hundred DVDs of TV (we'll have high-def on demand soon enough).
I just hope these DVDs last at least 2 years with good care, away from dust and light. Is that reasonable?
Never! Remember when DVDs came out?
DVDs have so much storage space, that every movie will have three soundtracks of your choice, seventeen language selections, and every key scene will be shot at six angles and you can choose which angle you want to watch it in!
Meanwhile, back in the Real World, DVDs still come with a single soundtrack, two or three languages (if you're lucky -- my Mandarin Chinese-speaking wife must get DVDs from Taiwan, *NOT* from Wal-Mart down the street), and sometimes a deleted scene or two, but *NEVER* alternate-angle scenes or anything like it.
Now we find out they don't last very long, and you gotta keep buying the same movies, CDs, etc every decade because they only last for a few years?
Surprise! You've been had. Again.
But don't worry. You can believe them when they say DRM won't lock you out of your media. And they won't change the terms of service on their DRM after you've already purchased the media, like Apple did.
Trust them.
fifth sigma, inc.
than the music that's on them.
Given he's pretty short, and goes by the nickname "Half" then I was thinking more like a hobbit/wizard hybrid.
:^)
Hi Mark
When someone describes any limitation on their existing fair use rights as a "very fair and very liberal usage policy."
the article mentions what happens if the CD were left in hotter conditions persistently. However could leaving CD's in colder conditions (such as refrigerating or freezing) the CD do anything to preserve it? Just a thought...
...in bed
I saw this site: http://store.mam-a-store.com/ which has "archival" type of CDs. How good are these? The site claims it has special CDs with special coatings, improved dyes, and even a water-based marking pen to label them. Does this stuff work? It does seem that plain old CompUSA recordables won't last very long, especially if they are marked with a Sharpie, which is what we all do. If I have files that I want to last for many years, what should I do with them? ---------- Free mobile porn
... and it's still prohibited by law to make backup copies of your CDs/DVDs in New Zealand.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"I'm hoping they'll hold out till that next medium gets popular, and everyone gets to buy everything over again," he says.
Get is a very interesting word choice. I'm just waiting for the class action lawsuit over this in a few years. It could finally be the death knell of the major labels. There have been so many billions of dollars spent in the last two decades for optical disk media, virtually everyone will be pissed when it dies.
Personally, I'm hoping that U.S. copyright will someday be reverted to its original sub-two-decade term, concordance with European laws be damned.
When they are using taxpayer money to do the tests, I don't see why the results (1) can't be disclosed and (2) shouldn't be disclosed (we paid for it!).
Having thought about this problem, I think I came up with a decent solution to cover my ass. I normally rip my CDs to wav and mp3 files as soon as I open the CD. The mp3s go to my portable player for playing, the wavs to a 2nd hard drive for home use, and the CDs back into their cases.
.wavs in a hard-drive backup means the only way I will ever lose any music (outside of crime or catastrophe) is if the CDs and hard drive all die together before I can replace them. It could happen, but the odds are against it.
:-)
While neither CDs, DVDs nor hard drives last forever, having the
This is off-topic, but I'm also looking forward to the day when portable players have advanced to the 400gb-1 terabyte storage level so that encoding in lossy formats like AAC, MP3, or WMA aren't necessary. Plain old wavs with their higher fidelity, boo-yah! One can dream,
Peace.
but Old Slashdot Stories seem to never decay.
Sure, there are hacks and work arounds...but they aren't always readily available.
For instance...I bought Battlefield 1942 and couldn't make a backup. My little sister destroyed the 2nd disc. Now I can't reinstall it. I couldn't make a backup because the original disc contained bit errors. When I contacted EA, they told me to go screw myself.
I thought we already knew all this.
On Preservation of Digital Information
Say Goodbye To Your CD-Rs In Two Years?
On Data Obsolescence and Media Decay
Or my personal favourite: CD-Eating Fungus Among Us
zeros and ones carved into stone? If you make them really small, you might get good density out of it...
Yes, many of the formats with problems have been discussed here several times before. But I find the following quote from the article especially disturbing and annoying (emphasis added):
So those extremely annoying DVD cases are actually designed to reduce DVD lifetimes and make us re-purchase the same license all that much sooner.
I have some tape backups that lasted a lot less than that. The reason? Can't find a machine that will read the tapes anymore. I heard that google had a hard time reading some old magtapes to get the old news archives off of them (circa late '80s).
It still plays nicely.
Interesting thing though, the CD and jewel case are much thicker than contemporary CDs...
1) the gold disk in each of the Voyagers
2) Rosettastones Rosetta Stone google cache: Rosetta Stone Cache
Back up your stuff onto high-capacity Hard Drives and put them in some little anti-static plastic baggies and keep them in the freezer. Once something more reliable and better per gig storage comes along upgrade. Or just upgrade all your media to the latest and greatset storage every ten years.
Creative Demolition
The Article was wrong about one thing tapes are definately a good storage medium. My Mum and Dad had some old real to real tapes sent over from england by their Mum and Dad, that were say over 30 yrs old. They lived in a shed for the last 20 yrs in a plastic bag going through tempreture variations from 0 degrees C at night to over 40 degrees C during the day throughout several years. I went to convert them to digital format and I thought I was going to have to spend weeks using a computer studio to refine the sound. But after all that abuse the tracks from these real to real tapes were of really good quality and it only took me an hour to clean them up.
Most of the problems of cd rot can be traced to the stickers used for labels, not the cds themselves.
I have seen post-it-notes pull the foil off older cheap cd-rs.
I saw one study a while back that showed that the biggest problem was the labels that people were putting on burned cdrs. They cause damage to the adhesive holding the foil to the media. It would not surprise me if it did.
Commercial cds (including data cds) are a different story. I have some incredibly old cds going back to the 80s. They all work fine.
DVDs tend to have a layer of plastic between the foil and the outside. (Probably just for this problem.) Of couse, that may just be the good brands...
Much of this story is standard media scare/hype. ("If you don't listen to us YOUR DATA COULD DIE!") It is based on a real problem though.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The record companies secretly helped design CDs so they would rot and deny people access to their music and data.
Sounds like a bad Scooby-Doo script.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I also have a Star Trek soundtrack CD from 1985 that works fine too.
Er, I'm not sure the phrase "works fine" can ever be meaningfully associated with a Star Treck soundtrack CD. ;)
Buy 2 vacuum's bombs from the old fridges, many "Super Mario"'s (pipes, pieces and tools), rubbers of bicycle's wheels ... and the small (oil_or_water)-barrel of hard plastic.
These 2 bombs are mounted in serie to extract 95%of_1st + (5%of_1st * 95%of_2nd) of air = 99.75% of air (remaining 0.25% of air in the barrel).
The barrel is divided in 2 halves and joined with the rubber of the bicycle's wheel.
And mounting the pipes are very easy with the good tools and specific pieces of "Super Mario" :)
open4free
Probably the same reason regualr appliance betteries haven't got much better in the last decade. if the stuff lasts too long why would you have to buy more or upgrade to the latest and greatest? Point being: Maybe they sell poor quality CD-Rs so that you have to backup(buy more frequently) more often.
Creative Demolition
Yes, but the license has a cash value of 1/20th of one cent. A pristine copy will cost you $17.99 minus 1/20th of one cent.
My other first post is car post.
I am under 30, and I think even the crazy court system would have to agree that is not "a lifetime". Funny they stopped printing this nonsense as soon as everyone own a CD player.
If any lawyer here would like to help file class-action, I am interested.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Seriously, who in their right mind can put its trust and record his/her essential data onto a mass produced medium with an average price of $0.10?
What do you think about using a quality hard drive as an alternative for long-term storage? Coupled with a drawer cabinet for the drive, open-sourced file system format, and a safe place for keeping it when it's offline -- this seems to me like a better long-term solution than CDs (well, at least for 10-15 years - until the disk interface changes...).
If I have to return another defective rented DVD for store credit one more time, I don't know what to think about DVDs. These aren't defective due to typical retarded-moron thumbprints and scratches, they are visibly defective with wierd amorphous patterns on the disk.
While DVDs are generally awesome...renting DVDs sucks big time (washing every single rented DVD to make it playable is just a big pain in the ass).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
They could easily have meant the lifetime of the CD. That would be just like lifetime warranty... for the lifetime of the device. It's happened before.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Luckily I woke up and escaped the tedium... OR DID I???
You know, you could probably ask to see the info through a Freedom of Information Act request...
Net Geeks There's no need to feel guilt I said Net Geeks For the software you built I said Net Geeks Cause you're not in the wrong There's no need to feel unhappy! Net Geeks You can burn a CD I said Net Geeks With your fave MP3s You can play them In your home or your car Many ways to take them real far! It's fun to violate The D M C A! It's fun to violate The D M C A-AY! You have everything You need to enjoy Your music with your toys! It's fun to violate The D M C A! It's fun to violate The D M C A-AY! You can archive your tunes! You can share over cable! You can annoy the Record labels!
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
Gotta love how CNN assumes that everyone is as dumb as their editors. Somehow I doubt anyone in the slashdot crowd hasn't known about the longevity problems in CDs for at least 5 years now. And yet this is suddenly "news"?
I just had this bizarre dream. I floating in empty space, bored, so I decided to check Slashdot to relieve the monotony. But all the stories were duplicates! Even the comments were just cut and pasted from old stories. That's when I realized, I was dead and in hell.
Luckily I woke up and escaped the tedium... OR DID I???
First the NY Times "discovers" IRC, then slashdot discovers CD rot. I'm waiting for the Wall Street Journal article on the rising economy of the Soviet Union...
List of ways cds become unusable:
1. Proximity to microwave ovens
2. Cats
3. Dogs
4. Spool stacking
5. Drive malfunctions (AKA: Ptouch+CDR=boom)
6. Drops
7. Scratches
8. Nicks
10. Desk Scrapes
11. Drive scrapes
12. Case scrapes
13. Resurfacing
14. Time
15. Sunlight
Use CloneCD. (you may have to look awhile to find it, because the company no longer sells it).
Like most things, I too am an expert in this field (CD media)
RiTEK or Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui are "semi acceptable"
CDRs use frail ORAGANIC dye prone to steady erasure and destruction from heat, light, water, etc.
All media sucks for long term archival except perhaps STAMPED glass platter cds using gold sputterred reflection. They are called "Century Discs" and you have never seen one, though they are special fabbed. They are inorganic. No plastic to "droop" no aluminum to oxidize slowly into powder over the decades. (Aluminum oxidizes in 2 millionths of one second when exposed to air but creates a semi-safe blanket of aluminum oxide a couple atoms thick and remains mostly reflective.) All cdrs are slowly rotting, but if kept cold could last a while and be readable in a "flat bed static CD scanner" in 2020 and later.
Start of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I own "mostly inorganic" glass platter PDO media for archiving with a four and a half thousand dollar device I bought once. It's a Maxtor (Maxoptix) Tahiti-II and each blank cost over 100 dollars. But the data will last centuries under ANY HEAT and ANY atmosphere and ANY Radiation and ANY magnetism because it uses PLASMA STATE recording. A rare earth element is heated past liquid, past gas state, into PLASMA STATE by a ridiculously espensive high powered laser, and while in this state, a strong magnetic field orientates the crystals of the cooling rare earth metal into north-or south orientation. A simple low power read-only laser can use a polarizing filter to readily discern this data. It can do so centuries from now. The Library of Congress uses these 4 thousand dollar recorders, and the US military... and also myself for pleasure. Yup I stored porn on these Tahiti-II glass platter inorganic discs! Too bad the timing-tracking marks embedded in these crystal media 125 dollar platters was imprinted using a plastic marking substance instead of the official "acid etching using H2SO3F+" Magic acid.
Only magic acid can eat a beaker or mark the inside timing marks of these special multi-century media... and Phillips Dupont CHEATED ME and fucking used PLASTIC which will rot away slowly over the next 75 years depriving our future generations of my porn collection. You can buy magic acid in special containers, or manufacture your own by mixing antimony pentafluoride (SbF55) and fluorosulphonic acid (HSO3F). It has an unbelievable pka of 20 and is powerful enough to protonate saturated alkanes forming carbonium ions... and etch glass without spending a lot of effort trying to use hyperboloid 5Kw lasers on clear glass.
UI am definitely going off on a tangent and I was still talking about CD reflectivity, so I will continue...
End of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I have visited pressing plants, sputtering plants, and even polycarb manufacturers for DVD and CDR, and taken a few 1,200 dollar a day seminars on laser head movement and design.
Refectivity in a CD or CD-ROM is irrelevant. The laser usually uses a "Quarter wave" plate and the frequency of the laser is specially selected and this rotated light has a 90 degree polarity difference (differential phase) that makes reading possible at high speeds. This is less relevant in CDR but very important in stamped media. I discuss this at length for you below a second discussion in my Side topic #2 on : CD Reflectivity Layers (not needing any metal or even being transparently covered)
Amusing Side NOTE : I am not just Mr Medical boy, Mr microbiology Man, Mr Lawyer, Mr Musician, Mr Trivia Buff, Etc... i am also Mr Computer expert and CD device consultant, and paid a couple times in my life to consult on CDR mechanism design.
The best CDRs use a special dye invented by Mitsui Toatsu Corporation (MTC), but no longer true after 2000 unless you have old stockpil
But when they work the fidelity is better... I have lost count of the amount of unuseable discs I have created over the years - CD's shattering as I have taken them out of the case, scratches where they've actually slid down under the car seat and given themselves a nice buffing up from outside to centre.. I could go on... The point is in real everyday use (lets say before the time of the iPod) CD's are, in terms of reliability, every bit as disposable as tapes.. In a strange twist of irony I should point out that the first CD I bought ever is one of the very few pre 1990 CD's I have left and is still in great condition.. But again I don't think the manufacturing was so cheap back then either..
This is actually false, at least pertaining to newer faster drives.
You're correct to the extent that you use the disc in the same (or an equivalent-spec) drive. However, CDs intended for use in audio players or old (=12x) drives should be burned at no more than 12x; burning at higher speeds is done using CAV (constant angular velocity), which tends to confuse low-speed drives.
the cd eating fungus
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I was glad to see a photo of someone else's CD's because it confirmed what I was unsure of.
This problem is worst on CHEAP CD's that I have, the extremely cheapy types (piss poor quality to begin with) are eating away like ants eating a cake at a picnic.
It started when my A/C went out two summers ago and I went all summer with the windows open. 99% humidity and temps average around 96-100 indoors. I had no idea what was going on, I though I had spilled toner on the discs (because I open a toner cart) and thought that the toner ate the discs but I couldn't find any toner spilled anywhere.
This pisses me off and it worries me, as I have LOTS of old CD's that I want and need to keep.
I need to calculate how much hard drive space I need to store them all on HDD, dump what I can to hard drives and put the hard drives away in a safe. I've got old hard drives that are 20 years old that I can STILL fire up and read the data after all these years. I've got CD's that are f*cked beyond salvage that I can ill afford to lose that are less than 2 years old..
Screw CD's..... I'm terminating my love afair with this SHITTY technology starting right now...
This solution is probably know by many and is almost always DMCA Illegal, but here goes...
.DLL files all over and/or requiring registry entries during installation. This is much more common as of late but some games are still old school and put stuff everywhere.
www.megagames.com, and other sites contain "cracks" for many games that will allow you to fully install most games out there and play them without the CD present. This allows for the distinct advantage of saving wear and tear on the CD/DVD(s) and/or making a backup of them. The catch is, for your purposes, this will only work under the following circumstances:
a) The games is fully self-contained in one folder/directory, and is not also putting
or
b) The game can be installed from the hard drive. This possibility is much more common in that almost ALL games can be installed from a folder in a local hard drive, but will still require the CD/DVD to be present to be played. All that is left to be done, then, is copy entire contents of the disk to hd folder, install from there, THEN apply the crack and back up the hard drive of the installer folder to a CR-R/RW DVD-R/RW +R/RW. If making a backup goes against your (legal) grain, just put the original CD in a safe place.
Why do they have to tie every freaking thing into the RIAA and SCO? It would be nice if this news for nerds site provided some more technical news and less social news. Really, as a nerd I just don't care that much about the RIAA. I'm sick of hearing about them. Their existence has little effect on me and my nerdness.
For that matter, I don't care to hear about every nut who thinks that Sun should opensource java, or Y should opensource x. Discussion of the ethics of software development is beyond boring to most people who actually develop software.
So, to some things up. Slashdot, I like you, but please stop being such a fanboy script kiddie website. Please call me again when you are mature enough to post more technical articles, less trash, and are ready to discuss long term commitment.
You know, something which I found funny was that my Zip Disks have stood the test of time pretty well - a lot better than the Zip 100 drives did, too.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
who would've guessed Gimli from LOTR fame listens to CD's? See the pic in the article.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/24/1253248.shtm l?tid=126&tid=137&tid=198
h tm l?tid=137&tid=198
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/04/22/1658251.s
It's good to know these things eventually filter down to CNN.
So, this is a perfect reason why we need to be able to back up our music CDs, so it's completely legitimate to break music CD copy protection in the name of fair use (making backups).
"The near-immortality of CDs, sometimes used as an excuse by record companies as an argument for their high cost"
I've never heard a record company state that a CD's near-immortality is a reason for its cost. Has anybody else? Can somebody provide a citation?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Star Command has taken all the old CD's leaving us with this Aluminum technology. All so they can make wings for their Space Ranger suits of that terillium-carbonic alloy.
"The reason why people, informed people at least, are buying from Apple"
No, that's why a few people with an inflated opinion of their intelligence buy from iTunes.
REALLY smart people real realize that CD's are routinely available for well under $9 US (http://www.bmgmusic.com). Further they understand that there is no restriction on the CD, I can sell it when I want, where I want, I can make copies to preserve the original, and the sonic quality is significantly better than iTMS.
Oh, did I mention it's cheaper per album? I suppose if you're ADHD and listen to top ten hits, you can save a few bucks, but generally artists worth listening to have entire albums worth listening to. Its not all about the hits. At least not to anyone over the age of 11.
Allow me to ask you a few questions
1) Do you think its okay that I can listen to a song that I purchased where I want, when I want, in any device that I want?
2) Is it okay that you can't sell the song when you're tired of it?
3) Do you find it acceptable that someone else tells you in what manner you may use the song?
OMG! I can't believe that fine groups like the RIAA would actually lie to consumers!
Kodak Gold CDs - which are the discs which quote 100 year life span, use an inert gold refective substrate, and the dye technology used for the write layer is quite similar to the dyes used for their film stocks. Typically these disc will have a slower maximum burn speed as they need slightly more heat/energy to set to dye state to a 1 or 0.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
If you haven't tried it, DO put a CD (that you don't care about!) in a Microwave, turn off all the lights, and fire it up - quite the light (and sound) show for 10-15 seconds! ;-)
That's a good limitation, because what it does is stop professional pirates. Because they, after all, won't just spend the $8/disc to begin with to make full sonic-quality copies.
They'll just go to iTMS with inferior sound and DRM to make the illegal copies. Not to mention these copies from iTMS won't be identified correctly because the bar-coding won't match.
But iTMS won't let those nasty pirates do their evil thing. No Sirreeeebob. Apple has it all figure out. And thank heavens for all the apple defenders.
His blog is like his article, stupid and incomprehensible.
No joke. Check it yourself. I'd call him a retard except its an insult to retards everywhere. Maybe "moron" is better.
If you think about it, paper is relatively high tech in comparison: read/write, random access to pages, zero energy consumption, and it last at least 750 years (if it carries the little infinity symbol -- see International Standard ISO/IEC 9706 (1994) Information and Documentation-Paper for Documents-Requirements for Permanence).
Absolute bs, many of my old CDs had these holes from the beginning and they still play fine here. CD player interpolation can bridge several millimeters of completely unreadable data, that geekish webdesigner probably tried to play his CDs back on his crappy CD-ROM to listen to it via the soundcard and his 50 bucks computer speakers.
Okay, so their lifespan isn't as interminable as the RIAA and MPAA would like us to believe. This isn't a new development. It's been known about for years, but (for obvious reasons) the mass-producers of these things aren't in a hurry to let us know that they'll only last a little bit longer than the average cassette, and only if you take extraordinarily good care of it every time you handle it for the rest of your (un?)natural life.
A new development, in terms of spacetime and the existence of all things, are these copy-protecte discs that don't even allow us to secure our purchased goods with backup copies.
Oh, and try this one on: last May my car was broken into, and several of my CDs were stolen. Lucky me, I backup most of my CDs. But I was recently approached by someone who was "concerned" about the fact that I have a 50-CD spindle of audio CDR's in my car -- naturally, the person is thinking piracy. And naturally, at least a few of the CDs are pirated copies -- but suppose none of them were: someone could quite plausibly be found guilty of music piracy to the tune of a couple thousand dollars just because their CDs are stolen. After all, if you don't own it, how can you prove that your copies are legit?
I no longer remember the purpose of this, so I'll end on that note. Just food for thought.
Dirty little secret: often you simply get another Whole new jewelcase too...i.e. including a new CD-Key!!!
I just had to make the Gibson reference.
"Less Immortal"
Anyone else see something wrong with that?
I really love the term "Fragile protective Layer"
It goes well with "Glass Bulletproof Vest".
What really matters is not how your cdrs have been rebranded, but who originally made them.
Fujifilm spindles that say "Made in Japan" on them are made by Taiyo Yuden, one of the higher quality cdr fabs... but Memorex "Made in Taiwan" can either be Prodisc or CMC (flaky).
I'm more than a little dissapointed that both my local CompUSA and Best Buy are replacing Made-in-Japan Fujifilm spindles with Made-in-Taiwan Fujifilm for 50 and 100 disc spindles, leaving me with the 30 disc spindles.
Remember Pioneer LaserVideo? Yep. Early Laserdiscs also suffered from rot, although the reason for that was due to poor sealing between the disc halves.
:) So now, I roughly fit 6 CD-R's on one DVD. Of course I've learned not to skimp on quality - especially now that each one of these discs represent 6 CD's and countless floppies worth of information!
I call my new DVD-based data storage solution: "6 discs away from disaster..." It works like this:
Before CD's, I had floppies - and boy DID I! Stacks and stacks of the things. When I got my first CD-R writer, I started to move all of my data from floppies to CD-R. That was almost 10 years ago.
Recently, I went through all my old CD-R's and backed up that data to DVDs. Out of a 250 or so CD's around 30 were irrelevant due to newer program versions and at least 10 had issues being read from the drive. In every one of those cases it was some cheap no-name disc with just a thin layer seperating me data from certain death. A single scratch was perhaps not enough to destroy the disc - right away - but over time, that scratch's rot grew like rust to encompass much of the disc's surface.
What discs I did salvage recently, I converted to DVD-/+R (I swing both ways).
So I guess the next big thing is Blu-Ray. Then I fit, what around 5 DVD's on one of those... Then what, Dual Blu - 10 DVD's on one. Then maybe... Holocube tech? Oh, to put it all on one small cube!
But beware the heartache if you were to LOSE THAT to rot!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It's sooo nice to see someone at Sony has a sense of humor.
I do RMAs for an IT shop (among a bazillion other things). My #1 item is AIT tapes (#2 is 3Com NICs, BTW).
We use Sony branded tapes (SDX2-50C and SDX2-36C) and Sony branded drives.
I figure we have about 500 tapes, and run four a night, Monday through Friday. Maybe, 263*4= 1,052 tape runs a year.
I replace 20 tapes a year under RMA. Geeze, that's as bad as my first-gen Matsushita "RCA" VHS VCR.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
last time i checked, immortality was a boolean kind of thing- you can't be semi-immortal any more than you can be semi-dead.
...this reminds me of that Seinfeld where Jerry was arguing with George about the possibility of over-drying his clothes-
...Your stuff has to be done by now. Why don't you just see if it's dry? Just--you know--
GEORGE
JERRY
No, no, no! Don't interrupt the cycle. The machine is working! It--it knows what it's doing; just let it finish.
GEORGE
You're gonna over dry it.
JERRY
Ya--Ya can't over dry.
GEORGE
Why not?!
JERRY
Same reason you can't over wet. See, once something is wet, it's Wet. Same thing with Death. Like, once you die, you're dead. Right? Let's say you drop dead an' I shoot you. You're not gonna die again; you're already dead! Ya can't over die, ya can't over dry!
I have a Yes 90125 CD I bought in 1985 and it plays just fine. The only CD I have that has visible "pin holes" is Pink Floyd Ummagumma, but it also plays and rips fine. Way before I bought a computer I used to record my CDs onto video tape using my Sony HiFi VTR. I still have tapes I recorded 15 years ago that still play just fine and are so close to "CD quality" that you would have to know what artifacts to listen for to tell the difference.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
The ladies may not find you handsome, but they should at least find you have a handy amount of slashdotisms memorized.
(In Soviet Russia, I for one welcome our beowulf clusterlords)
I have read past articles on this. If I recall, the high quality CD-Rs with the gold background last for one hundred years. The ones with the blue background ten. However, a research team once wrote data to different discs made by different manufacturers. They stored them in a dark place for two years. After this period of time some of the discs would not read. Unfortunately they did not disclose which brands did not last.
Why? I buy name brand CDRs because I trust Maxell and Sony more than Joe's Blanks and the cost is not that much higher. If I'm wrong about that, fine, but this quote from the article doesn't say anything that would counter that long-held name-brand belief.
Just because manufacturers change their methods, doesn't mean the quality control goes away (again, I'm assuming it's there in the first place). It just means it's harder to test lifetime endurance.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Last sentence from article: "I'm hoping they'll hold out till that next medium gets popular, and everyone gets to buy everything over again," he says.
Anybody wonders wether they spread FUD to prepare the field for a new sales round? Remember, media industry wants you to buy the same shit over and over again, like it majorly happened when they introduced the CD in the first place.
Interesting point about the article: "Koster", who's CD collection rots away, is *not* furious, seeking for replacements or thinking about sueing the industry. No, like being befallen by fate, he accepts the damage calm like a cow, being happy that some CDs still work. And his (and the articles) bottom line, i.e. that he and *everyone* will buy over the whole stuff again someday, to me just looks like smearing the idea right into your face.
He must charge huge royalties too, because his musical "The Marriage of Figaro" charges a lot more for tickets than Lloyd-Webber ones like "Phantom of the Opera". That Mozart guy must be raking the money in!
Check out CDs, DVDs Eyed For Long-Term Archival Use, because a lot of this has already been covered...
The "immortality" of CD's reminds me of the way immortality is often portrayed in sci-fi stories............with a catch.....usually a physical vulnerablility.
Live forever, but if you get a cut, you will die..etc..etc.
CD's are just way too dainty with the way they can easily be mishandled.
Perhaps something like the mini-cd wrapped in a cartridge would be the answer.
However, we all know how the RIAA is about being innovative so I will quit my bitching now.
Steve
wait till ya see BLURAY disc... that promise anything from 25-50gb storage!! ofcourse no gurantee on how long they will last...
Why does yahoo do this
Kodak no longer sells the "Gold" CD-R's that are supposed to last for a very long time. However, Mitsui (Colorado Springs, CO) is still selling them.
I'm pretty sure that if I lock a record in a clean room it will still be there centuries later - or am I missing something?
I suppose I expected CDs to last longer than a few years. But the thing that shocked me the most was what you're supposed to do for maximum longevity: don't stick labels on them! Cripes! All those fancy labels are contributing to my bit rot!
Please read this for the correct usage of that term.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
another optical disk format.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
I recently dug out the first CD I ever bought: Beethoven's 9th Symphony, recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic. I bought it when I bought my first CD player (duh) in 1984. I ripped it into iTunes last month :-). Still sounds CD-quality to me...
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
That is because the music sucks.
When they are on TV you are distracted by how little clothing they have on.
Hey Mark, glad to see you're still kicking and making international news.
(Old RW Math drone)
This fellow says that about 20% of his CDs have rotted. My collection is only about 600, but I have zero (count 'em) zero bad disks. I know this because last year I went back and ripped every one of them to MP3s. And chunks of my collection go back to the 80s like his does. If he's got a 20% failure rate, there's something wrong with the method or environment he's storing in.
CDs costs less than 5c to create, if it's something popular. they claim "high cost"? the booklet inserted probably costs more than CD itself.
I have a bunch of CDs from the LAYLAH label that are rotting. The label has acknowledged this, and its disc supplier offers a replacement plan for discs that are still in print. specifically reissuing CDs that are known to rot. Mine still play, so I haven't tried to replace them yet. I own about half the CDs on their list.
AOL CD's don't rot. What gives?
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
I have CDs I burned last decade that still work. I just keep them in a CD case and use them when I need to.
Is it just me?
I had one CD go bad once, where it looked like a pinprick whole in the data layer and I could see light coming through the other side...I ran my fingernail along the other side and easily created new holes, like the layer had gotten thinner. But this was a really used CD that I carted around a lot and was just a working backup I used in a ton of computers.
Consumers have adopted a system by which multiple redundant backups are constantly made and remade.
Should read:
Consumers have adopted a system by which copyrighted materials are illegally distributed, thereby stomping over copyright holder rights, under the guise that they have the right to do it.
You don't need P2P to make digital backups. Get real. Why would you bother with a lossy ripped version anyway when you could make your own APE file? Of course, with the bandwidth these days, people are pirating entire APE files now. But that doesn't matter to Slashdotters, the more the merrier, right?
Didn't you know that Bill Gates said something about 640KB, Linux usage is going to overtake Mac usage, the iPod Mini is a failure...oh, yeah, and everyone is allowed to violate copyright holder rights and pirate everything "just because?"
Everyone else understands that copyright holders have the rights to the distribution of their works. But Slashdot doesn't care about what artists want--they just care about furthering piracy for selfish reasons, ripping people off.
Related to games, almost every new game comes in paper slips now. It's a pain to index them now. >:(
Is no good if you're wrong, sometimes honesty displays overwhelming ignorance.
Case in point:
the Beatles got away with this repetative song stuff for fifteen years.
a) They recorded music for 8 years.
b) If you think their songs are repetitive, you're just an ass.
My point is that I shouldn't have to commit illegal activities just to continue with the legal activities that were previously granted to me.
I've been saying this since CD's really hit the market. I was working in top 40 radio at the time we switched from vinyl to CDs. What I noticed is that CDs do degrade over time. It's like they lose their dynamic headroom, but not their fidelity. In other words, frequently played CDs had to be turned up a little more than others. I attributed this to the cheap alluminum (sp?) or the plastic oxidizing (or something) in the prescence of light.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm sure I can reproduce this and it is easily measurable.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Think about it. Sticky labels use glue. Glue contains solvents. Solvents eat plastic. CDs are made of plastic. Therefore sticky labels eat CDs. QED.
And then there's the fact that improperly positioned labels can cause imbalances which make the CDs unreadable at high speeds.
Sticky labels were never a good idea. It doesn't take much of an understanding of chemistry or physics to realize this.
However, the article was about stamped, not burned CDs (the commercial CDs that were introduced in the early 80s and touted as lasting 10,000 years). Anyone who bought Deutsche Gramophon discs in the mid-90's would be aware of this problem, and there was an article about it in Electronics & Wireless World back in 1997.
Once again, Slashdot brings us the latest, most up to date news.
Hard drives and RAID.
1 PC with raid built into the motherboard (150bux)
a few 120gig drives, with mirroring happening.(100bux a piece)
when one of the drives fails, remove it, replace with new one.
Everything i store, i want access to, if i have it stored on a tape its useless to me.
Say its 1am on a saturday night, relaxing at home, pretty drunk, having a good time with some friends, and we decide we wanna watch Men In Black, ( divx backup on harddrive of course ) i browse over to server, media/video/m/ and start up the movie. now, if i was using tape backup for all the movies i've divx'ed this simply wouldnt be possible.
re: running out of space,
i have 240 gigs of space right now, all the dvd's i've divxed take up about 95 gigs, music is around 20 gigs. by the time i hit the 240 gig limit, harddrive space will have increased enough that i will replace the 120 gig drives with 200 or 300gig drives, which will increase my space to 400-600gigs, unless of course, i just buy another copy of the current setup, then i would ahve 400-600 + my current 240gigs so, almost a terrabyte, and i never had to spend more than 100 bux on any given part.
Kyle
Parent is extremely informative. Post not funny.