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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
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.
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.
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.
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=
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.
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).