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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."
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
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.
Not only is it known about but there are ways around it. You can buy special archiving cd's that last much longer. Look for "gold" cd's to last longer. The problem is that organic ink just wont last forever but that doesn't mean you hafta use discs that die quickly.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
That is how many times you can burn a static playlist. Don't ask me why.
To make it inconvenient to mass-produce CD's from iTunes.
I write in my journal
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.
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.
Look, all you people bitching about how we heard this already need to RTFA. This is a different type of rot, that last article was about CD-R and CD-RWs, this article is mostly about industrially produced discs, made with a stamp not a laser?
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
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.
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.
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? ...
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But it's not iTunes' problem. Basically, all Apple cares about is making iTunes legit. By not facilitating mass production, they can claim they thier product doesn't contribute to piracy.
Once the CD is made, it's the same problem they've always had with CD copying. ie: not Apple's problem.
=Smidge=
this is about the 8th time this has been posted on slashdot. seems like the editors should be required to at least read /.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
I think we caught the RIAA/MPAA in a gaffe. If we are buying a single license for a movie or an album (as according to the RIAA and the MPAA), we should be able to go exchange our DVDs for whatever comes out next at no cost. After all, we paid for a license for that movie, notwithstanding the format. But, this will not happen in a million years. It seems they like to play both sides of the coin, as that is the most profitable. When we claim in a a physical product, they claim it is a license and when we claim it is a license, they say it is a physical product.
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.
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
Man, you're a moron.
If you want to burn your music using iTunes, you have to play by their rules. If you want to download music from iTunes, you have to play by their rules. If you want to use something else, that's fine. It's not a limitation on your rights -- it's a limitation on what you can do with iTunes! Their software, their rules.
It's not like it's an unreasonable lock in -- you don't have to use iTunes to listen to, or burn, music. It's not mandated by the government. It's just one program, and it isn't even that common. Jesus, a lot of you people on slashdot are some whiney motherfucking babies.
Ok, a couple questions.
1) Do you think it's fair to share music created by someone with everyone without their permission?
2) Do you think that the market would accept a case where it got to the point that you're locked into purchasing appliance from BIGCO? Isn't that why Linux/BSD are doing so well because even Microsoft can't make EVERYONE use their OS?
The reason why people, informed people at least, are buying from Apple is because their current policy is acceptable and very unlimiting unless you're a pirate. If their policy changed for the worse or if Microsoft got their way and took the market share, I would no longer buy it.
I think there's a point where the market finds conditions acceptable and where those in the market do not have to take an altruistic, idealistic stance *in case* something bad will happen. However, there is a point where a fight is in order, ala Microsoft.
Interesting discussion!
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
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"?
Ironically, Microsoft's ruthless domination of the commercial market (pushing out OS/2 and BeOS) may be seen as having been of great benefit to Linux/BSD, since it left them as the only alternative. But now I'm starting to ramble...
"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.
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).
I guess in 100 years, my backups will not any more have any value anyway. I'm not even sure there will still be CD reading drives after that time. After all, who of you still can read his old 5.25" floppy disks, even if they are still OK?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.