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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."
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...
Yeah, I think there was one a week or two ago. Let me get out my Slashdot Archive CD and check.
Doh! Nothing there.
the music on the radio sounds worse every year?
It's nothing a little duct tape can't fix!
Keep the faith, share the code
that the billions of AOL cds in the world will eventually turn into something useful? like dust?
Oh, wait, the original article said immorTal, sorry, my bad. ;)
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.
Slashdot keeps its archives on CD-R. Each time they go to check for dupes before posting, they come up with nothing. :)
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
What media lasts LONGEST?
A wife's memory can store your screw-ups for perhaps an indefinite amount of time. :) Does that count?
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
And all this time I thought they were creating links to other sites before the pages were actually created.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
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
So you're saying that Slashdot is the geek's Reader's Digest?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.