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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."
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
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.
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 whole music industry may be less immoral than we've ever thought.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
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...
Stabilized? They just came out with a sixth standard (DVD-R DL), and a seventh (DVD+R DL) is just around the corner.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
IANAL but I do believe this fits into the DMC. Violation of the DMC is ILLEGAL... if you disagree with that... welcome to the club, write your congress person.
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
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!).
No public, common hard disk driver enforces DRM. You won't be able to play the files on multiple machines, granted,
know what? fuck that. plain and simple.
when i buy a book at the bookstore, i don't need some secret decoder eye-ring to read the damn thing. if i did, than this limits my being able to fairly use my purchased book in whatever manner i choose.
when i buy something, i buy the damn thing. when i rent, then i rent it.
don't tell me that i'm buying something when i'm actually renting it.
more and more offshore mp3 websites with awesome collections are sprouting up offering songs for as little as 2 cents a song.
sure i can sit here and say that i'm cheating the artists by illegally purchasing music online, but let's get the facts straight: in most cases, artists don't benefit from CD sales other than making their contract look good. i'm tired of handing my money over to the RIAA everytime i buy a CD.
do away with the RIAA, let the artists benefit 100 percent from music sales, and i'll go back to legally purchasing music again.