Whither the Portable Optical Drive?

"The MacBook Air and the Ultrabook come without a piece of hardware that's been a mainstay in laptops for a long time — the optical drive," says a piece at CNET. "Maybe because they really aren't that necessary anymore." I would have thought otherwise a few years ago, but traveling in the meantime with a small netbook was certainly handy. Since that machine died, I think I've used the optical drive in its low-end laptop successor a grand total of once, which was to test its wireless compatibility with a Live CD Linux distro.

Comments

Speak for yourself

[unity100]

There are a lot of situations in which people need to use optical drives on laptops. The uses range from gaming to application installs, to backup.

Only having to use your portable with alive cd to 'test wireless compatibility' tells me that you are a sysadmin, or another i.t. professional. chances are high that you rarely do what normal people do with that portable but work. let me break the news about common people to you - people still move data on cds.

Re:Speak for yourself

[nwoolls]

I gotta say, from my own laptop usage, my wife's, sister's, mother's, and others, I think you are the one whose needs aren't in line with common people.

What applications are you installing you bought on CD? Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam, Origin, and the likes. Backing up is done more and more to external drives or offsite hosted services.

Re:Speak for yourself

[hedwards]

Unless you're looking to be locked into vendor DRM, you're stuck with an optical drive for some things. I have a Samsung external USB DVDRW that I plug in from time to time. I don't use it very often, but I do need it sometimes as USB booting is still unreliable at best when done from a thumbdrive.

Plus, I have 3 computers total and only the desktop has a built in optical drive, next time I get a new desktop it won't. By that measure having one driver per several computers isn't unreasonable, I only spent $30 on it and I mostly use it for DVDs.

Re:Speak for yourself

[amanicdroid]

My external DVD burner works brilliantly for the rare occasions that I need it and shaves unnecessary bulk from my daily carry.

I've spoken for myself per request.

Re:Speak for yourself

[0100010001010011]

USB, Network, etc. I removed the optical drive in my MacBookPro and it was one of the best things I ever did. I dropped in an SSD HD and I haven't used my DVD-RW once since then as an external drive.

I bought an old laptop from ~2001 for $10 to use as a shairport jukebox. I PXE boot it with NFS. Over a gigabit ethernet network it's plenty fast.

Re:Speak for yourself

[poity]

True, but how often does one install software from disc while away from home base? The drives are usually a $60 difference, and I find it more useful to have a 2nd battery in the optical bay instead, and get a $15 desktop burner in a $5 USB enclosure.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Stormwatch]

Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam, Origin, and the likes.

Which I refuse to ever do. If it doesn't come DRM-free, it will come from TPB!

Re:Speak for yourself

[beelsebob]

Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?

Re:Speak for yourself

[MimeticLie]

If you're only buying DRM-free games, you're still probably not using CDs.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Trilkin]

Bedlam, Space Bunnies Must Die, Dark Reign...

Re:Speak for yourself

[kesuki]

i haven't bought cds in a long time, but i still use them -- when a dvd or blu-ray isn't needed. i think that the idea behind this is to stop end users from wiping their drives or installing OSes thumbdrives are nice but i see more virus activity over that port than optical drives. in a netbook/tablet optical drives aren't needed, but in a real laptop or desktop optical media is a valuable tool, more than just for piracy.

but yes one can use a netbook and online games, streaming tools etc. but eventually the cost of clouds will surpass our resources.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Flytrap]

People have such short memories (or are too young to remember).

When the iMac came out without a floppy disk dive in 1998, exactly the same sentiment was expressed. PC makers gasped, then heckled Apple... But before long they too followed suite and started gradually phasing out floppy disk drives.

Then too, it was the dreaded focus group that dragged out the eventual demise of the floppy - people like you in focus groups saying "... keep the floppy drive, just in case I need to revert to my trusty sneaker-net". Of course we know what every focus group has to say about Adobe Flash... just about the same thing that they have to say about the CD drive now.

Steve Jobs loathed focus groups... that kind of makes sense when you are launching something that consumers do not know they need yet, like a new product. But focus group are useful tools, when used properly. The problem I have found (at least in financial services) is that focus groups are use to make the decision, instead of gauging the acceptability of a decision.

Re:Speak for yourself

[BradleyUffner]

Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?

All the games that I bought previously that were only available on cd / dvd at the time. I have no intention of buying them again just to make them available digitally when I have perfectly good disks.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Grishnakh]

Personally, I'm a software engineer and I use my laptop (ThinkPad T510) for all my work (when I'm not traveling, I ssh in from my main computer so I can enjoy my dual large monitors and real keyboard and mouse). I almost never use the optical drive; however, it's one of those things that when you do need it, you're glad you have it. If I didn't have it, I'd probably have to have a USB optical drive "just in case", and of course that's an extra thing floating around to deal with. I much prefer having it integrated into the laptop.

Maybe eventually it'll go the way of the floppy drive, but not yet, there's still people using CDs/DVDs for distributing software and data. I mostly use Linux for work, but I still get CDs from vendors with their specialty software, BSPs, etc.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Stormwatch]

How about the Humble Bundle or GOG?

Re:Speak for yourself

[Stormwatch]

Sorry, replied in a hurry and misread your post. :P

Re:Speak for yourself

[Rising Ape]

Games are often available at a lower price on physical media, strangely, and I suspect the price would be a lot higher if the *only* place to get them was Steam.

Re:Speak for yourself

[drsmithy]

When the iMac came out without a floppy disk dive in 1998, exactly the same sentiment was expressed. PC makers gasped, then heckled Apple... But before long they too followed suite and started gradually phasing out floppy disk drives.

The problem with Apple dropping the floppy drive when they did, is that they didn't *replace* it with anything. If the iMac had shipped with a CD-RW drive, there probably wouldn't have been much grumbling at all.

The same is not really true today, with widespread distribution via download, ISO images, etc.

Though I am amazed, given Apple's eagerness to abandon the floppy, that they didn't ditch the optical drive in their laptops years ago to replace them with more batteries.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

Exactly. Optical drives have been replaced by USB flash. Hard drives are next.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

Create .iso file. Move on.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

Actually, they replaced it with free storage on .mac. You know... "cloud storage" before the world knew what cloud storage was.

Re:Speak for yourself

[drsmithy]

Actually, they replaced it with free storage on .mac. You know... "cloud storage" before the world knew what cloud storage was.

Firstly, .mac wasn't around until years after the first iMac.

Secondly, "the internet" hardly counted as a reasonable replacement in 1998, when most people were still using dial-up modems, if they had internet connectivity at all.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Grishnakh]

Apples are a little different from PCs. With Apple, Apple the company makes all the rules; they control the hardware and the software (at least the OS, and they make a good bit of application software too). It's almost a vertical monopoly in a way. So if they want to cut out the floppy drive, that's no problem for them, and the 3rd-party app makers just have to follow along.

With PCs, it's rather different; the OS is mainly controlled by MS, while the hardware is standardized and made by tons of companies. For a long time, it simply wasn't possible to eliminate floppies, only because stupid MS required them for driver updates for Windows XP. No floppy drive meant it was impossible to install certain hardware (like SATA drives, IIRC) when installing Windows. The PC makers are very limited in what they can do by Microsoft. So, for instance, it's basically impossible (unless I'm missing something) right now to not have a PC with an optical drive, because how would you reinstall Windows? With Macs, that's not a problem, I'm sure Apple has some other way of doing it, but unless MS has changed things with Win7, I'm not sure how you'd reinstall onto a computer without an optical drive.

What's more, most PC application software still comes on DVD discs. Maybe Apple's changed that in their realm with their app store or whatever, but if you buy a copy of MS Office or AutoCAD or whatever, it's still going to come on a disc, and MS, not having the power over their "ecosystem" that Apple has over theirs, can't as easily change this.

Re:Speak for yourself

[AK Marc]

let me break the news about common people to you - people still move data on cds.

I realized they were dead when I, as a sysadmin, was dropping user CDs in the server with the drive mapped on the user PC to be able to use their CDs.

Re:Speak for yourself

[PopeRatzo]

Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam

That was the case until AT&T started this 150gb data limit and I get throttled and charged extra if I go over.

This week I bought Skyrim on disk. It was the first game I bought that way in a long time. Years.

I wonder how Steam feels about the new data limits being put on by telecoms.

Re:Speak for yourself

[PitaBred]

Wait... games on CDs don't have DRM on them? Since when?

Re:Speak for yourself

[BradleyUffner]

Create .iso file. Move on.

Right, I'll just get a microscope so I can look at the dvd and create the ISO by hand...

Re:Speak for yourself

[hedwards]

That's a pretty blatant misrepresentation. The question at the time was when would the floppy be obsolete. At that time CDs were still fairly expensive to use, IIRC the CD burners that were included were still several hundred dollars, I know my ZipCD was over $200 about that time. Floppies were affordable and mostly worked. Most files of that era were still small enough to fit on a floppy as internet connections and most programs didn't require them to be huge.

So yes, the ridicule was well justified, nobody believed that the 3.5" disks were going to survive the future, but it wasn't until years later that they were really ready for being removed from computers.

Re:Speak for yourself

[mobets]

Reply to remove a mistaken mod, but while I'm at it...

The last copy of Office I bought came as an ISO from Microsoft's website (dreamspark). The windows install media can be copied to and made bootable from a USB hard drive or thumb drive. All of the other software purchases I've made recently (Acronis and Quicken) have been on the vender's website with installer or ISO downloads.

The software sections of most retailers seem to be shrinking. I don't find this surprising.

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Nope, sorry, gotta disagree. before the flood dumb shit (who thought they would ALL be in the same damned place) I got 3Tb of HDDs for $93. Even the cheapest low rent SSDs would cost easily 20 times that to give me the same amount of space. Not to mention as a couple of my gamer customers found out SSDs currently really have to be judged by the hot/crazy scale as in smoking hot performance, crazy failure rates.

Maybe in a decade when they figure out how to make MLC as reliable as SLC and figure out all the controller bugs MAYBE, but even then i kinda doubt it. More likely what we will see is a next generation hybrid that will have 128Gb of SSD and 1 to 2Tb of HDD with the ability to turn off the HDD completely when in motion or not in use. With an aware OS you'd get the speed of SSD with the storage space of HDDs. Hell if you made the SSD module replaceable you wouldn't even have to give a shit about SSD failure, as the HDD could have a hidden partition with the OS backed up regularly and in the event of failure the HDD would boot from the hidden partition and tell you to have the SSD changed out.

As for TFA one thing I DO see flash replacing is DVD burners. i can easily see a day where you will have a single burner at home to whip off DVDs (I still say BD isn't gonna make it, they haven't been able to get the price per disc down low enough to make them suitable for small backups or handing out to friends) while all your other machines simply access the DVD burner through the network when they need it. I know i picked up a USB case for my DVD burner from my dead laptop when I switched to a netbook (they have them for like $7 on Amazon) but frankly i haven't needed it once. i just use my 16gb flash stick or the network for everything.

i just wish they'd come up with a cheap replacement for DVDs for archiving. what we need is something that backs up say 100Gb or 200Gb that is close to the price of blank DVDs, or hell even $2 a pop for that amount of space would probably sell. have it on the PCIe bus and you could probably move the data at a decent enough clip but for backing up data that is gonna sit for years you still really haven't seen anything come close to DVD. i have 1X DVDs i burned with my very first burner that are still just as easy to read as the day i bought them.

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Really? Where please? Because by sticking to the Steam sales I get some crazy cheap gaming goodness. I got five FEAR games over the Halloween for $7 by the time i threw in the games the boys wanted I got something like 9 games for $22.

Don't get me wrong i personally hope your right and they have free shipping! the cheapest I've found is Amazon and then you either pay $7 a game or you get gouged on the shipping, like how I paid a penny for Kane & Lynch II (yes I had to buy it just to see how bad it was and ZOFG its horrible!) and $4 to ship. Funnily enough the game uses Steam so it just ended up in my steam collection anyway.

BTW if anybody here likes MST3K and wants a game that would be perfect for MST3K heckling do NOT get K&L II, its just smelly, get "You Are Empty" which I swear has 20 foot killer mutant attack chickens! but K&L II I swear has the WORST targeting system in history! there is just no way you can have fun with a game where you empty a sub-machine gun less than 20 feet from a guy and do NOT get a single hit!

Re:Speak for yourself

[MaskedSlacker]

You're not REALLY this stupid in person, are you?

$dd if=/dev/cdrom of=idontknowshitaboutcomputers.iso
$cp ./idontknowshitaboutcomputers.iso /media/MYUSBFLASHDRIVE

Remove flash drive, insert into new, optical drive-less computer.
Jerk off to goat porn.
Rinse and Repeat.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several hundred DVD's here that become coasters if I lose my optical drive. I have no way of backing up data if I lose the optical drive.

Anyway who claims we don't need them is a madman or an idiot.

Re:Speak for yourself

[BradleyUffner]

You're not REALLY this stupid in person, are you?

$dd if=/dev/cdrom of=idontknowshitaboutcomputers.iso
$cp ./idontknowshitaboutcomputers.iso /media/MYUSBFLASHDRIVE

Remove flash drive, insert into new, optical drive-less computer.
Jerk off to goat porn.
Rinse and Repeat.

Since your solution to not having a dvd drive involves having a dvd drive, I'd say you have the "stupid" thing reversed.

Re:Speak for yourself

[UnknownSoldier]

Nice link on the hot/crazy SSD failures ... reading how Coding Horror suffered a backup failure reminds me of the oblg. Linus quote "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it" =)

Re:Speak for yourself

[DarwinSurvivor]

You do know that a $70* hard drive will hold the equivalent of almost 3000 DVD's right? That's like 2 cents/DVD. It's true it would take a while to transfer them, but if you ever had to restore that backup, you'd be doing that anyways.

* Yes, I know HDD prices recently went up about to about $250 for that 2TB drive, but they will go back down once the supplier issues go away. But even at that, you're only looking at about 8 cents/DVD.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Lord_Jeremy]

Speaking of Apple, both the MacBook Airs and the latest Mac Minis are lacking optical drives. Mac OS X has a utility preinstalled that can mount the optical drive of any other Mac or a PC with a download from Apple. Mac OS X Lion as an upgrade is sold both as a software download and on a flash drive.

Re:Speak for yourself

[beelsebob]

Since this article is about not having a DVD drive on your laptop and instead relying on ones about the house to get any last dribbles of content onto your laptop, I'd say he doesn't.

Re:Speak for yourself

[znerk]

there is just no way you can have fun with a game where you empty a sub-machine gun less than 20 feet from a guy and do NOT get a single hit!

... and this is how automatic weapons behave in the real world. Full-auto is not your friend. ;)

Re:Speak for yourself

[znerk]

Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?

... and please do tell me how you get those installed without a suitable internet connection.

Oh, and before you go calling me a Luddite, I bet you can tell me at least 5 reasonable situations entailing someone not having available at their current location an internet connection suitable for installing a game that might require up to 20GB of downloading before being playable.

Re:Speak for yourself

[znerk]

Crap must be someone new at Apple PR running the above account. Can't keep history straight.

Must be the Reality Distortion Field. I guess Jobs left it behind when he left.

Re:Speak for yourself

[znerk]

That's a pretty blatant misrepresentation. The question at the time was when would the floppy be obsolete. At that time CDs were still fairly expensive to use, IIRC the CD burners that were included were still several hundred dollars, I know my ZipCD was over $200 about that time. Floppies were affordable and mostly worked. Most files of that era were still small enough to fit on a floppy as internet connections and most programs didn't require them to be huge.

So yes, the ridicule was well justified, nobody believed that the 3.5" disks were going to survive the future, but it wasn't until years later that they were really ready for being removed from computers.

For example, my (admittedly cheap) ASUS motherboard doesn't even have a floppy connection on it - I had to purchase an external USB floppy drive in order to install XP64 on it, because the hardware drivers required in order for the OS to even see my hard drives (SATA (fake)RAID) have to be installed from A:

Re:Speak for yourself

[f()rK()_Bomb]

It's very rare for normal people to use cd, I'm in college now as a mature student, everyone just moves files on USB or net books, no CDs. I see the same thing with my older friends, the only things they use CDs for are the Xbox. Pc games and apps are all bought online, I haven't had a disk drive for years.

Re:Speak for yourself

[gl4ss]

games could be distributed on micro-sd's or usb sticks.

I'm actually surprised they're not doing it already, it would allow crazier copy-protection schemes(code the game ai to use some extra chip on the stick for example.. some stupid cheap atmel, but it would be a bitch to clone/crack anyways ).

Re:Speak for yourself

[Bitmanhome]

Skyrim is what, 20GB? Since you'll be spending the next couple weeks (at least) playing the thing, you're in no danger of going over your limit.

Granted, you might be able to have the box version delivered faster than the download, but that's a different argument.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Pascal Sartoretti]

There are a lot of situations in which people need to use optical drives on laptops. The uses range from gaming to application installs

100% of what I install comes from the net. Besides games, who still buys shrink-wrapped software ?

to backup.

Can you remind me the maximum size of a DVD ?

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Thanks but I found out about the SSD problem the hard way. I had two gamer customers with more money than brains (one of them his grandma is on a Skulltrail because he has gone through THAT many machines chasing the benches that the Skulltrail was the slowest he had left over) and they both bought the SSD which at the time had the top bench. one was an OCZ I believe, the other Intel and BOTH had them go tits up in less than a year! I mean sure they got a replacement for free, but who cares about the drive? Their data was poof!

After trying to get their data back I decided i really really REALLY don't want SSD, thanks anyway. i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning, I'd get SMART errors or delayed write failed or heat issues or more noise or something. with those SSDs it was just...gone, that's it. Despite the story that SSDs are supposed to fail to read only that was not the case, hell even the BIOS wouldn't see the OCZ and the Intel would be seen but you'd try to get the data off and it'd just corrupt it.

So while Atwood at CH can say "go for it!" while listening to his $400 headphones I frankly don't want to be making hourly backups or not be sure if this time will be the time i flip the switch and get "boot drive not found". With 8Gb of RAM in both my desktop and netbook all the programs I use are loaded into RAM anyway so SSD isn't gonna win there, and with hybrid sleep frankly the machine is up and running before I can finish taking my first sip of coffee. The only places I've seen SSD kick HDDs is in boot and large application loading but the price and risk simply isn't worth it to me.

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Sure an AK maybe as the recoil on those bitches would get you but we are talking EVERY WEAPON IN THE GAME behaving like that! And being a country boy i've shot my fair share of weapons including some of those found in the game like the M16 and the 12 gauge pump and there is NO WAY you would miss with a 12 gauge slug at less than 20 feet! Hell at that distance you could cut someone in half with 3 well placed shots!

if they have a demo or something everybody here should try it just to see how "WTF?" a game can be. When you end up using a 9mm everywhere because even an H&K military weapon can't even hit a guy standing 20 feet away? Or even aiming you can't pop them with a 12 gauge at 12 feet? that is SERIOUSLY fucked up man, WTF were they thinking? I emptied SIX CLIPS in an M16 and had to go scrounge for more ammo because I couldn't even hit a single guy standing behind an apple cart from MAYBE 14 feet away, if that!

Re:Speak for yourself

[unity100]

perfectly put.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Little Brickout]

You've been able to install Windows without an optical drive since at least Windows 98.

Re:Speak for yourself

[PopeRatzo]

Skyrim is what, 20GB? Since you'll be spending the next couple weeks (at least) playing the thing, you're in no danger of going over your limit.

Of course, but my daughter watches Netflix since she has finished her finals and my wife, who is a mathematician who does fluid dynamics, runs simulations via Amazon's cloud.

We use up a lot of bandwidth. Now that Skyrim is 20GB, NFS The Run is what 18GB, etc, there's no way I'm able to stay under AT&T's 150GB limit.

Re:Speak for yourself

[BrokenHalo]

Plus, I have 3 computers total and only the desktop has a built in optical drive, next time I get a new desktop it won't.

My desktop machine will always have an optical drive for two reasons:

1. I am a troglogyte who still uses a CD player in a moderately high-quality sound system, and
2. It is still useful to burn DVDs of recorded TV shows, since HDD space on my PVR is far from inexhaustible. Also, that device has no other means of making a backup...
OK, a 3rd reason: My desktop machine will only be replaced in its entirety if (or when) component manufacturers abandon the ATX form factor...

My new laptop (a cheapie Asus box replacing a recently-defunct second-hand MacBook) has no optical drive, but other than the minor inconvenience of having to find a spare thumb drive for my ArchLinux install, I don't really care.

Re:Speak for yourself

[BrokenHalo]

i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning...

I can, since it happened to me not very long ago. The HDD in my last laptop (the MacBook to which I referred in an earlier post) died without warning just a few weeks ago. It was fine one day, then the next it was rattling and banging away, and refusing to let the machine boot.

Worse, it happened at a time when I had got lazy with my backups, so I lost quite a lot of stuff. A bit embarrassing, really, since I'm big on insisting other people take proper backups, so I've had to eat a generous helping of crow.

Re:Speak for yourself

[TheRaven64]

Sounds about right. I've had this laptop for about four months now, and the only times that I've used the optical drive were for playing DVD movies, and that was only because my DVD player broke. Software all comes via the Internet these days - even games from gog.com. Creating a bootable USB image is less effort than a bootable CD. I put a BluRay burner in my NAS when I built it for backups, but I don't have much need for the optical drive in my laptop and an external one would probably be more convenient (i.e. not get as hot!) when I did want one.

Re:Speak for yourself

[TheRaven64]

Only if your laptop is your only computer. Rip your CDs/DVDs on another machine, transfer them to a NAS or external hard drive, and copy them to the laptop as needed.

Re:Speak for yourself

[TheRaven64]

The iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998. iTools, which became .Mac in 2002, was released in 2000. The iMac shipped with a 56Kb/s modem, which was far slower than a floppy drive.

The first Steve Jobs machine to miss out the floppy drive came with a 120MB magneto-optical drive, which actually was a sensible replacement (if you ignored the fact that the disks were a lot more expensive).

Re:Speak for yourself

[BrokenHalo]

* Yes, I know HDD prices recently went up about to about $250 for that 2TB drive, but they will go back down once the supplier issues go away.

I haven't been keeping track of prices, but as a matter of interest, what makes you imagine those supplier issues are likely to go away?

Re:Speak for yourself

[Vegemeister]

People with legacy software on optical discs also tend to be in possession of legacy computers with optical drives.

Re:Speak for yourself

[petermgreen]

The iMac shipped with a 56Kb/s modem

It also shipped with 10/100 ethernet.

Re:Speak for yourself

[arglebargle_xiv]

If that were the case, then sales figures for portable optical drives would back it up. Many people buy MacBook Airs and many more have bought Netbooks that don't have optical drives. Mac Minis are coming out without optical drives too. Did sales drop? Are people returning their purchased laptops, "ultra books", Netbooks, Mac minis, ipads, etc by the million?

Exactly. I have an Ultrabook (well, it wasn't called that when I got it two years ago, but Intel have labelled it for me now, as well as tripling the price over what I paid for it) without an optical drive, and I've needed one exactly once, ever, to install Visual Studio (I copied it to a USB key from the install CD and used that instead). All an optical drive does on a lightweight laptop is add a lot of extra weight and bulk, for something I'd never, ever use.

Re:Speak for yourself

[sgt scrub]

This is an interesting thread and makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if drive failure isn't built in. I bought 6 1.5T Seagate drives for my multimedia box. I replaced them with 3T drives 1 year ago and moved each out to different machines, less 3 that I sold to a friend. Since then my 3 have died, all this month, with the dreaded "clickety click" sound from hell. ie. p00f gone no way to recover data won't spin up fux0rd. My friend called me and said he was getting sector error warnings booting off one that I had sold him. He tried running a quick dd to move all the data to a different drive but it failed, no more spin for you 10 minutes of dmesg I/O error fail, in the middle of getting all the data moved. Of course it all could be related to the fact the drives run hotter than an old GPU trying to run Skyrim with everything maxed out. I guess I'll know when the other 2 drives go tits up that they have a 3 year life span. Anyway, thanks for the info on the SSD's. I was thinking "solid state" == will last for ever. Now I know better.

Re:Speak for yourself

[penguinstorm]

I'm not *done* with my optical drive, but I'm done with an internal one that costs a fortune to fix/replace/repair if something goes wrong.

I'm basically expecting the next 15 inch Macbook Pro to have no built in optical drive, offer an option to have an SSD for the OS and a set of spinning platters to store huge amounts of data and to be compatible with Apple's $79 external superdrive.

This will let me rip a CD or a DVD when I need too, and to leave it at home when I don't. When it breaks it'll cost me $79 for a new one, and not the $150+installation (which I can do myself, but takes time) for my current MacBook Pro.

I don't expect there to be a "15-inch MacBook Air" per se, as the Airs are really focused on super portable machines, and offer a limited number of ports to connect and expand too. 15" machines are the workhorse of the laptop world, striking a balance between the desktop replacement 17" screens and the portable but squint inducing 13" screens.

I could be wrong, of course, it's been known to happen.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Scarred Intellect]

Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam

That was the case until AT&T started this 150gb data limit and I get throttled and charged extra if I go over.

Doesn't that count as a limited connection?

Or have they stopped advertising Unlimited Internet? I don't know, I don't get caps like that, but someday I will.

Re:Speak for yourself

[penguinstorm]

Recordable DVDs are completely unsuitable for archiving.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Rising Ape]

Well, I paid £5 less for Portal 2 on Amazon than Steam were charging. Steam is sometimes cheaper, but not always, it's worth searching around.

Re:Speak for yourself

[captjc]

I like steam. When steam has a sale, you can pick up a bunch of games for dirt cheap. However, when there isn't a sale, games take forever to go down in price. Amazon and many physical stores price PC games to sell after a few months. If you can wait 3-6 months, you can get games fairly cheap on disc as compared to the "everyday low price" on steam. Don't forget about the used market, as well.

Re:Speak for yourself

[captjc]

Hell, Windows 95 and below didn't need an optical drive either since they could come on floppies!

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Actually as a builder I can tell you why this happened, as we builders have been spreading the word to each other at all the places we hang out. you see when Seagate bought Maxtor they got Maxtor's ultra cheap ass ARM source and that has been a disaster. like Nvidia with bumpgate Seagate refuses to admit the problem and instead has pushed out firmware that slows the drives down enough the drive can survive warranty before going tits up but Seagate won't be safe to use on anything above 500Gb (below that they are using Seagate ARM controllers, above that Maxtor) for a year to two years until the shit product gets out the channel.

I know they are high since the flood but if you need a large drive your best bests are Samsung and Hitachi drives. all of their 1Tb or better drives left in the channel are from their last 3 batches before selling out and I can tell you from my own exp and that of my fellow builders they are excellent batches. I have put EcoDrives as OS drives because the fat cache and lower heat makes for excellent boot drives, and both the Samsung and Hitachi drives I've put in hellish situations like construction trailers and they take hellish abuse and keep on purring. I was impressed enough with the Samsung EcoDrives that I have 3Tb running in my own machine, yanking my failing Seagates (surprise) and replacing them with a 1Tb EcoDrive for boot and a 2tb for data. my benches went up by 40%, even though the Seagate was 7200RPM VS 5400RPM for the Samsung, but again that is most likely due to firmware crippling trying to get the Seagate drives to survive past warranty.

Sorry you had that happen to you but if you'd have hung around NewEgg and Tiger and read the reviews you'd see we are all avoiding Seagate like the clap because of how much we've been burned. it is like the great Maxtor shitpile in 04 where every other drive was DOA and the ones that worked often wouldn't last a year. the new Seagates are just absolute garbage as you sadly found out the hard way. get Samsung or Hitachi while they last, and after those are gone the WD Caviar series.

Re:Speak for yourself

[MikeBabcock]

I like my games on disc despite having a 15Mbit connection ... because strangely, my limit is only 30GB/mo. Discs also give me something to trade or pass off to friends, downloads don't.

Re:Speak for yourself

[jabelli]

(I still say BD isn't gonna make it, they haven't been able to get the price per disc down low enough to make them suitable for small backups or handing out to friends)

They're down to $1 a disc for 25G BD-R, that's not cheap enough for you? Yeah it's almost twice the price of a DVD+R DL, but it's also nearly 3x the space. The drives are down to about $100 too.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

Becuase of course flash prices are going to stay as they are forever. Wake up. Mechanical media is goign to die, and its going to happen pretty rapidly. At best, hard drives will be reduced to backup/archival media because they're simply far too slow. The biggest bang for buck i have ever seen in 25 yrs of computing is moving to SSD - and the sizes are such now that they are plenty big enough for the data that people actually need. High speed internet will only help that even more as people no longer need to hoard media and can stream it on demand.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

I had a had drive failure 2 months ago. Maybe i should give up hard drives and badmouth them as being faulty technology? Luckily it was my backup drive. Shit happens, if you don't have backups you deserve whatever failure you get, whether your primary drive is mechanical or flash.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

So i need to swap discs about 40 times to back up one of my drives? At pa for $40 worth of disks? Rather than just buy a portable hard drive of 2tb in size for not much more, especially when you consider the wasted time in being disk jockey... BD for backup = pointless.

Re:Speak for yourself

[smash]

So, what computer have you been using those CDs/DVDs in for the last decade, genius?

Re:Speak for yourself

[Bitmanhome]

FYI, AT&T has a 250GB option, but you need to buy other stuff to get it, like TV and/or the higher speed connections.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Guspaz]

Both distribute digitally, so again, you're not using CDs.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Guspaz]

Then again, I've been using my SSD for a few years now without failures, and nobody who I know with an SSD (of which there are probably four or five) have suffered any failures.

SSDs do fail, yes, but not nearly to the rate that you're suggesting that they do.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Guspaz]

Unless you're a laptop-only user, the vast majority of cases where you actually need an optical drive can be solved by putting a $20 optical drive in your desktop and accessing it over the network on the laptop. There are a variety of ways to do this, and Apple's solution ("Remote Disc") can be hosted on either Mac or Windows to be accessed by your optical-free computer (like an Air or Mini).

While I have required optical drives on occasion, it's been at least half a decade since I've needed an optical drive on the road.

Re:Speak for yourself

[dudpixel]

How about watching DVDs?

You kind of need an optical drive for that.

Sure, you can get your media on iTunes, but the quality is terrible and it takes long enough to download that it completely defeats the purpose. It takes 5 minutes to hire a DVD from the video store vs 1-3 hours to download on iTunes, and iTunes normally costs MORE.

If you plan your entire week on Sunday, and then start all your downloads on sunday night, then good luck to you - I do not want your boring scheduled life.

Same goes for bittorrent - in the time it takes to download any movie, I could've been to the movie store, hired the movie, watched it, and then returned it.
Bittorrent is for people who are too tight to pay $4 for a movie rental, yet rich enough to afford the $50K lawsuit which no matter how much you deny it...is inevitable.

I should mention that I'm all for online content delivery, but even when it is available, its not yet good enough to replace physical media (including the delivery mechanism & time).

Re:Speak for yourself

[shutdown -p now]

How much do you buy off Steam every month that you hit a 150Gb limit? I mean, even with the updates, you'd need to buy a dozen titles every month.

I've used Steam as my main source of games for 6 years now, and in that time I've been on very different kinds of connections (having changed 4 countries). The only time I needed to do any explicit traffic management to make sure I don't hit the cap was when I was on a 40Gb cap in Russia - and even then it was because I also regularly downloaded different Linux distros to try them out.

Re:Speak for yourself

[PopeRatzo]

How much do you buy off Steam every month that you hit a 150Gb limit?

You know, that's a good question. I'm just taking it on AT&T's word that I went over last month. Don't know how I could check.

My daughter watches Netflix and I stream off southparkstudio and Adult Swim Fix a couple times a week. I also download a couple of movies and maybe Big Bang Theory via iTunes.

Does that sound like it could be 150gb? It doesn't appear that anyone has breached my wifi router.

Re:Speak for yourself

[penguinstorm]

Remote disc isn't "Apple's Solution." The external superdrive is. Remote Disc requires you to own another computer, so it's a solution for a small number of people.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Guspaz]

How many people do you know who own a Macbook Air and have no other computer whatsoever in the house?

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Exactly. I can get 8Gb DVD DL for 40c a disc in bulk so for anything smaller I need to archive like software downloads it is MUCH cheaper than BD, and for the things I'd want the larger storage space for such as OS backups and VMs BD simply doesn't give you enough space for the price. its a lose/lose for BD as far as I'm concerned, not to mention the cheapest burners i've seen are nearly $100 a piece and frankly the BD ROMs really aren't that much better so to change out my two main machines along with at least one of my families machines so I can share data I'd be looking at $300+. finally with DVD I can hand one off to ANY customer and be pretty damned sure thye will have NO trouble reading it. I haven't seen anything but netbooks in the past 5 years that didn't come with at least a DVDROM/CDRW, most having full burners. hell DVDs burners are $17 a pop on newegg now so if one dies? who fricking cares.

What we need is those holodiscs they have been promising us for years, 200gb to 500Gb a pop at $1 to $3 a disc. slap one of these on the PCIe bus and you'd have excellent long term archival backup and i could load my 60Gb music folder, all the raw WAV tracks I've been working on, my videos, anything I'd want to store long term in a form factor and price point that would be perfect for the job. IF BD would have came in 04 and they had gotten the drive costs down to sub $50 then it could have maybe replaced DVD, but now? I still say its a dead end.

Re:Speak for yourself

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I mentioned the Steam SALE. I have NEVER bought a game on steam that wasn't part of one of their sales, any other time is pointless! But is you have Steam and subscribe to GOG emails frankly you should never run out of cheap gaming goodness just by loading up when its cheap. at the rate i'm going it'll take me a good 3 months if I did NOTHING every evening but play games just to go through what i already have from Steam and GOG.

I have something like 16 games on Steam (only started Steam about 6 months ago) and over 40 on GOG and out of those there are a good 7 that I have barely played on Steam and a good 20 I've not gotten around to on GOG.

So if you plan it right, and load up when they have the crazy sales, frankly you shouldn't need to pay full price ever unless you are one of those that plays "Call of Warfare Modern duty" for the MP, which of course is only really playable if you get in in the first couple of weeks. Lucky for me the boys both want Steam games for XMas so i'm just gonna sit on the money and when the crazy Xmas sale hits me and them are gonna go nuts and load up. By the time the spring sale comes around if I'm lucky I'll have MAYBE gone through 60% of what i get for Xmas. Having too many games? Is a problem I can live with, load that 3tb up baby yeah!

Re:Speak for yourself

[nobodie]

IINAAF (I am not an Apple fanboi) but i do give Apple (and the late Mr Jobs) credit for recognizing the end of the floppy disk drive when they shipped the first iMacs without them. At the time it was a radical move because "everyone" was still using it. He was right, just plain right. In this case I also agree, as, I suspect most people on this forum, who use other lighter, easier, more reliable tools for data transfer (there is no one, single replacement for the CD, but while some are more ubiquitous than others, to say one is the inheritor would be a mistake. Jobs expected that email sending of files would replace the floppy, which was not really what happened. I think the same will be/ is true with CDs and DVDs)
  ANyway, I haven't used a CD more than once in the last year (a buggy motherboard that didn't want to read the USB drive for boot) and that was just a guess that worked. I don't even have a working optical drive in the house at the moment, until my wife gets back with her old lappie.

Re:Speak for yourself

[justthinkit]

ONE: A 2TB drive will hold 250 DVDs, not 3,000.

TWO: Given a max of 8GB on a DVD, 250 will fit on a 2TB drive. If the drive costs $250, "per DVD" cost will be 100 cents/DVD, not 8 cents/DVD.

Either your math (or mine) is scary.

Re:Speak for yourself

[DarwinSurvivor]

Gah, sorry, accidentally used the math for CD's instead of DVD's. Also, as I stated, the $250 cost is only temporary until Thailand gets back on it's feat. After that, expect the ratio to be around 27 cents/DVD. Factor in that HDD's can be rewritten (no space wasted due to old versions of backups long since redundant) and DVD's start making even LESS sense from a backup standpoint.

I use an optical drive to install the OS

[Anonymous Coward]

and that's about it

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[BagOBones]

I just installed my last os via USB. It was much faster than via optical drive. (speed depends on quality of USB drive)

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[hedwards]

Assuming it works, the times I've tried that I've found it to be a hit or miss affair. I'd rather do that because I don't want to waste a disc on something I might only use once.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[betterunixthanunix]

I take it that your operating system of choice cannot be installed from a thumb drive?

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[Deorus]

Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[wisnoskij]

It is still a very hit and miss affair, many many USB drives will simply not work when doing this and I have had absolutely no luck installing XP with any USB device.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[wisnoskij]

That does not make sense, if you have a blank HD then you should not even be connected to the internet...

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Couple things going on here. Sounds like Lion has built in recovery partition is the first thing. The second thing is it sounds like the firmware on new Macs includes sufficient smarts to connect to the internet to restore the OS to a blank hard drive. " Internet Recovery" they call it. Not really a feature of Lion because it's built into the firmware.

Unfortunately it sounds like options are limited to get OS install media, in case, you know, you don't want to wait 5+ hours for it to download.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[guruevi]

Welcome to the world of not-BIOS. Open Firmware (PowerPC) and EFI had HTTP boot image support since forever (Mac OS X 10.3?), they just required your DHCP to give the coordinates, now they just have skipped the whole DHCP discovery part and just pointed the coordinates to an Apple iCloud server.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[ModernGeek]

Not as limited as you would like to believe: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD256Z/A

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[znerk]

It is still a very hit and miss affair, many many USB drives will simply not work when doing this and I have had absolutely no luck installing XP with any USB device.

I have a suggestion, if you still want to be able to do this:

Create a bootable Linux USB drive. Either include an OS image on the disk, or pull one across the network from your fileserver, and use dd to put it on the drive. Of course, this requires that you have managed to get XP on that hardware at some point in the past...

I still think CDs are the way to go for cheap, disposable media, but the above might help you out.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[znerk]

This is due to Apple's firm control over the hardware - they don't need to include umpty-bajillion NIC drivers, as they already know what's in the box.

Aside from the "Where can I find physical install media?" issue you mention, my other concern would be "What do I do when Apple deallocates the server that allows me to do this on this particular model?"

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[arkhan_jg]

The firmware on a new (shipped with lion) mac is capable of restoring the recovery partition to a blank drive; and the recovery partition then goes on the internet, and the recovery partition can run Disk Utility and also verify the machine is eligible to install lion via internet download. If it isn't, you can still use your app store account to verify you purchased lion.

Having tested this in anger on an imac (we bought a bunch of them to dual boot with windows, and I wanted to see what happened if I twatted the recovery partition and wiped the disk using our pxe-booted linux cloning environment). I was quite impressed that it does all work, though I had a partclone copy of it and the gpt partition table just in case. Of course, we needed cd-boot on the mac to load pxe, as the imac doesn't support pxe natively.

The other option of course is to do a usb install; you can buy one outright from apple, or just make your own from a lion mac.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[LinuxIsGarbage]

That's twice the cost of the digital download. There's no cheap option for new Macs.

One can create their own recovery USB or DVD, but based on years of Windows experience, many people won't, and most people complain about having to do it. So it's not like not shipping an install disk is a new revolutionary Mac only feature.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[Vegemeister]

Life is too boring with only one computer. If you have two you can afford to screw around and have fun, 'cause no matter how bad you fuck things up, you can always google up a solution on the other machine. You really ought to get a second. Even an old machine is good enough. Mine is a socket 478 Pentium 4. I got the mobo and CPU for $15 on Craigslist.

Also, with only one computer, how would you download and burn an OS disc?

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[Vegemeister]

1. Grab ethernet cable.

2. Take Mac to physics building.

3. Plug in to 1 Gb/s internet2 pipe.

4. ???

5. Profit!

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[tokul]

Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet [apple.com] into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.

If you use your brain, you would know that you haven't wiped some hidden os partition, which includes basic gui and networking. If your computer is completely wiped out, it will boot only from removable media or from local network.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[MikeBabcock]

I usually do OS installs over network, but USB works too :)

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[ProfessionalCookie]

You've never heard of NetBoot. My most recent MacBook Pros support NetBoot over WiFi. You can boot the full OS without an local drive, at all. NetBoot over the internet is just a matter of loading the bootloader image over the internet rather than the local network. So the only issue to handle is discovery, so if you have the URL burned into firmware, that's done. Not hard.

Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?
Most of that stuff is still sold on cd/dvd...

You filthy pirates are downloading it right... We need more laws!

Re:Well..

[hedwards]

If you have a computer you can do what I do and rip the discs to the HDD and then just copy them either over the network or on a thumbdrive to the laptop. At this point even Windows allows you to conveniently mount an ISO without external tools.

But yeah, I'm guessing most folks get around the limitation by piracy.

Re:Well..

[icebraining]

GP is just a troll. Besides, even Office can be bought and downloaded nowadays; most people I know at least don't use much software anyway besides that and the browser.

Re:Well..

[antifoidulus]

TFA specifically mentions the Macbook air, on which you can install the OS and tons of apps from the mac app store and it even has a built in recovery partition from which you can always boot if you need to re-install the OS.

Re:Well..

[JWSmythe]

    I do that all the time. When I get a new disk of anything, I make an ISO of it. That way, if it gets scratched, broken, lost, or whatever, I still have the image. Installing from an ISO mounted as a virtual drive is faster too. :)

    At one office, we had to install a piece of software on a dozen machines (licensed for all of them). It was a breeze, using remote desktop to get to all of them, and mounting the ISO from a shared directory. It would have taken someone much longer to go to each desk, put in the CD, install it, and proceed to the next. Without fail, if I had someone do that, they'd be dragged off to fix every little problem the user had encountered with anything else too.

    But don't worry, the guy you were replying to was just a troll. :)

Re:Well..

[nabsltd]

But yeah, I'm guessing most folks get around the limitation by piracy.

Considering there is no way to buy full-HD movies and TV shows that doesn't require to have an optical drive somewhere in order to watch them, I'd say that yes, BitTorrent has greatly reduced the #1 reason to have an optical drive in your computer.

Although you can have a standalone Blu-Ray player, I'd rather just use my computer and rip the movies than deal with updating firmware.

Re:Well..

[R3d M3rcury]

...assuming the recovery partition doesn't get hosed and assuming you never want to upgrade the hardware inside your computer.

Don't get me wrong, I agree. The only thing I use my laptop's DVD drive for is for ripping movies and music, mostly because I dislike the DRM used on downloaded movies and I still occasionally buy music on CD.

I could get by without an optical drive, but I would be dependent on Apple for all of the movies and music that I would want to watch.

Re:Well..

[SuperMog2002]

It's actually pretty easy to image the Lion installer on to a USB key or an SD card. It's a good idea to keep one around, so if you need to reinstall for whatever reason, you can just boot from it and you're on your way.

In addition, every machine that ships with Lion has a feature called Internet Recovery. Basically, if your hard drive is completely blank, the Mac will download the recovery partition from Apple to get you up and running again. Once that's downloaded, you'll have access to the same tools the regular recovery partition would give you: Restore from a Time Machine backup, or download and install Lion from scratch.

Re:Well..

[Vegemeister]

msi installers for the win.

Re:Well..

[Vegemeister]

Why the fuck would you waste space on and SSD for a 'recovery partition'? Dammit Apple.

Re:Well..

[JWSmythe]

    Ya, that one didn't play that way.. It was very determined that you *will* babysit it through the install.

Re:Well..

[Pope]

I've used an external FireWire burner on my MBP for a few years, because it's faster and far more reliable than the built-in one. I can also use it on my Mini when I need to burn stuff from that machine too. I don't remember the last time I used the actual optical drive inside my MBP.

Battery bay more use

[isorox]

I have a DVD writer for my laptop, but my laptop as a whole benefits a lot more from the extra battery.

I do keep the writer, and a couple of blank dvds and cds with my in my bag though, along with
* an external hard drive
* empower + ac adapter, with anything-to-anything plug adapter
* 5 port netgear switch
* a few cables
* gaffer tape
* leatherman
* cable ties

And after a particularly problematic experience in Gaza, I've added a tiny USB keyboard to the list. Trouble is, the bags getting a little heavy, and the CD drive is the only thing I don't use on a regular basis.

Re:Battery bay more use

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . along with
* an external hard drive
* empower + ac adapter, with anything-to-anything plug adapter
* 5 port netgear switch
* a few cables
* gaffer tape
* leatherman
* cable ties

Hell, with all that stuff, MacGyver could build an atomic powered laser . . .

And after a particularly problematic experience in Gaza, I've added a tiny USB keyboard to the list.

Hmmm . . . I must have missed that episode . . .

Re:Battery bay more use

[qualityassurancedept]

I have never had any gaffer tape in my laptop bag, so I am interested to know how that might be more useful than an optical drive in any use-case scenario involving a portable computer. : )

Re:Battery bay more use

[PitaBred]

Not specifically with the computer, but getting systems/cables set up for presentations or work in a new location. It's pretty handy when you're a consultant. I sure as shit don't miss the work, though.

Re:Battery bay more use

[isorox]

FYI to everyone, Gaza is an advanced densely populated urban area which includes slums and wealthy areas. You can get most any computing need met at any tech/computer store at very competitive prices, a USB keyboard is available anywhere at walking distance.

Yup, if you know where to go. The lack of keyboard added an hour to my trip, which had been curtailed to 1 day due to changing entry requirements (was meant to get 3 days). As you know, 1 day means about 4 hours on site if you're coming in from Israel, it was a *very* rushed visit.

The roads are paved, we have cars, there are normal malls just like in Isreal or Europe, and wireless phone/3g service is universal except maybe in some underground dead areas.

The signal's better than 3g in Jerusalem, which refuses to let me make any calls this week.

Movies

[the eric conspiracy]

Please let me know how you are going to play back movies etc while in an airplane at 30,000 feet.

Re:Movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital Copy FTW.

Re:Movies

[Anonymous Coward]

from the hard drive, or a USB stick... duh!

Re:Movies

[voidptr]

Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.

Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?

Re:Movies

[bubkus_jones]

Rip to hard drive? Yeah, you need an optical drive to read the disc, but you can use an external setup and leave that at home, or rip it on a desktop and transfer the files to the laptop. Or download them.

Re:Movies

[tepples]

Step 2 needs a dvd drive

Which need not be inside a laptop's case. It can be on a desktop PC or on a USB port.

Re:Movies

[artor3]

You have a DVD drive on your home PC of course. The discussion is about whether they're needed in laptops. And if you only own a laptop, I'm sure you could get some USB DVD drive to use at home.

And FYI, DVDFab can remove the crap, shrink the file size, and output in different formats. There's no real need for steps 3 & 4.

Re:Movies

[Yaztromo]

Please let me know how you are going to play back movies etc while in an airplane at 30,000 feet.

I suppose if you want to watch in a manner which drains your battery dead the fastest, you could go that way. Personally, I prefer carrying and watching my movies in a more portable form, such as data files stored on a HDD, my iPad, or flash media.

Yaz

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.

Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?

Most people don't have the time or inclination to rip DVD's to disk - especially if you simply rent them and drop them in the mail or simply rent locally. Or, if you have a full season, it's a pain to rip them them all vs carrying a cd case. In addition, as laptops get thinner and move to SSD disk space becomes more valuable - I can carry a broader selection with me than I can if I rip it to disk.

Tablets are nice but not really a viable solution for most people because of the price.

I think optical drives are on the way out - but we may see them around for a while especially if Apple decides to build one of the ultra-thin concepts they've patented.

Re:Movies

[the eric conspiracy]

I have pretty good luck finding seats with power outlets.

Copying data files leaves you vulnerable to copyright issues if your laptop is searched by a government agency.

Re:Movies

[MMC Monster]

Which means your desktop needs an optical drive.

Which I totally agree with. The only time I use the optical drive on my desktop is to rip DVDs to something suitable for my home media NAS.

On my laptop? Just realized that I've had the same DVD in the drive for over a month now. A movie that I never got around to finishing. If it was interesting, I would have ripped it to watch on the big screen (via XBMC/openelec).

Re:Movies

[brentrad]

250 GB USB external HD and an Asus Transformer Android Tablet with the keyboard dock that has full size USB ports on it? Worked pretty awesome for me when I flew to Vegas for a conference last week. And with the mini HDMI port on the tablet and my mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, I was even able to plug it into my hotel HDTV and watch the same videos in my room (as well as streaming my whole home mp3 collection over WiFi using Google Music.)

Of course the fact that I get the vast majority of the videos I watch downloaded from newsgroups and not from DVDs makes this setup that much easier. But I do have a vast library of physical DVD videos, so I wish there was a way to connect an external DVD drive to an Android device and watch DVD movies (Cyanogen please make this happen!) My wife brought the DVD issue up as the only thing stopping her from switching from a Windows laptop to an Android tablet, and I think it is a very valid point if you have many legacy DVDs in your collection. I wouldn't want to have to rip all my DVD movies for travel.

Re:Movies

[brentrad]

so where does the source come from ? Unless you download it from bit torrent

Newsgroups. Oh wait we're not supposed to talk about those. ;)

Re:Movies

[brentrad]

I really think that Android needs to support external DVD drives and watching DVD movies. Yes I know downloaded videos are the future, but during this transition time when lots of people have both physical DVDs and downloaded videos, it would definitely help ease the transition.

Re:Movies

[jedidiah]

Ripping an entire season of some show is not that much of a burden. Although admittedly there aren't really any good "shiny happy" GUI tools for this. It's something that's easily automated once you get past the "metadata" hurde.

Of course this requires having a little Script Fu.

Admittedly, your average Windows or Mac user isn't.

So yeah, the mundane case here will be a bunch of spinny disks and some device capable of dealing with them. All of us geeking out about our highly geeky solutions (even Handbrake qualifies here) isn't terribly relevant to the market at large.

Plus spinny disk media takes up a lot of space. Even compressed, it's perhaps not something you want crufting up your tiny SSD on a MBA with.

Re:Movies

[hedwards]

DVDShrink does that for you, although then you're stuck with VLC or similar to play it, but it's really that difficult. And all of it without having to visit the command line.

Re:Movies

[TooMuchToDo]

I fly Southwest and Virgin America quite frequently; I've watched Netflix and Hulu on my Macbook Air each time. Also, my entire movie collection has been ripped to MP4s with Handbrake and are stored in the provider who is behind Nimbus.io ($6/100GB/month of storage).

Drives? I don't need no stickin CD/DVD drives.

Re:Movies

[qualityassurancedept]

Well, I use k9copy most of the time. I have a Windows 7 laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 in Virtualbox. In my virtual Ubuntu machine I have mencoder, acidrip, k3b, k9copy, and vlc. I suppose you would also have to have the Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras with libdvdcss2 installed. Since I have guest additions installed for Virtualbox, I was able to add shared folders to my fstab, so my video folder in my Windows 7 partition mounts automatically when I start my virtual machine and I can save my ripped DVDs to my Windows 7 folder with no problem. I can convert the fully ripped dvd to an .avi file with acidrip or k9copy and thereby watch it on my android phone. I also have a little acer netbook that runs Ubuntu for which I have an external optical drive that I use for ripping to save battery life on my main laptop. So, honestly, it isn't that hard and it doesn't require handbrake at all and the optical drive is rather useful since I can use it with either one of my laptops.

Re:Movies

[kesuki]

backing up data you own is in the law in the US
see 'are emulators legal' on gamefaqs.comhttp://www.gamefaqs.com/features/help/entry.html?cat=24
that pertains to software and movies are software(yes they are they can't be played back without decryption which is done in hardware or software thus requiring code to run)

Re:Movies

[kesuki]

as far as search with 2 proof of purchase tabs on every dvd and blu-ray you rip you can cut and paste the PoP and show the name or movieid number on said proof of purchase.

Re:Movies

[PitaBred]

It's not hard to rip movies, and once you do it once you're done... it's something you can just go check every now and then and swap disks when necessary while you're doing something else. Kinda like doing the laundry.

Re:Movies

[voidptr]

I would posit that for the majority of people who spend enough time on commercial airplanes in a year that staying entertained is a problem, the cost of a tablet is not that prohibitive; but ripping to a hard drive makes just as much sense for laptop use too.

Not only can I carry enough ripped DVDs in 32GB to stay entertained on a round trip cross country flight and a day or two in the hotel, but it's a he'll of a lot more convenient than lugging around a box set or two of DVDs, particularly now that a i5 or i7 series machine can encode a hour of DVD quality video in about 15 minutes or less. And iTunes rentals is actually a fairly viable option sometimes for some people.

Re:Movies

[mgblst]

Wow, if you can't figure that out, this may not be the site for you. Maybe your lost your way from knitting patterns for men?

Re:Movies

[brentrad]

I've calculated that I have something like 20 TB worth of data on physical discs, I don't exactly have that much storage space or money to buy that much storage. A way to access the discs I already have without having to convert them into something else would be more convenient for me. In other words, choice is good.

Re:Movies

[Vegemeister]

That's a pain in the ass. It's a few hours of googling up the proper tools and scripting and disk jockeying. No thanks. Just download it from the Pirate Bay.

Re:Movies

[Vegemeister]

>.avi

You should join the rest of us in the 21st century. h.264 is much more efficient, and your phone probably has a hardware decoder.

Re:Movies

[cheeks5965]

Tablets are nice but not really a viable solution for most people because of the price.

[[citation needed]], i.e. I call shenanigans.

iPad 2 $500

refurbished iPad $300

Kindle Fire $200

Another way to put it, since you have a bro-crush on your spinning media, a kindle fire = 8 DVDs. so unless you live in a favela, it's hard to justify the claim "not really viable for most people."

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

Tablets are nice but not really a viable solution for most people because of the price.

[[citation needed]], i.e. I call shenanigans.

iPad 2 $500

Well, $500 is a lot of money for many people - and that's only for 16 GB or about 20 hours of video (if you have nothing else on it).

refurbished iPad $300

Out of Stock - all three models

Kindle Fire $200

Another way to put it, since you have a bro-crush on your spinning media, a kindle fire = 8 DVDs. so unless you live in a favela, it's hard to justify the claim "not really viable for most people."

I like the Fire, but with 6GB of expandable memory it's limited as a portable tablet for non-connected use, such as the OP's airplane example. With any of the tablets, the media costs are still incurred; so the 8 DVD reference is irrelevant. More to the point - you can no longer just rent a DVD, get one from the library, etc; now you must plan ahead and rip a selected set. In addition, the cost of ripping in time is a barrier to tablet use; and I don't want to repurchase my DVD collection simply to be able to use it on a tablet.

I think the DVD is going away, but right now it is still the most convenient and common way to distribute video to a broad audience. It's often the cheapest as well, especially with the availability of used, rental, and sale priced media. That's why I think the next step is to slim the see of the in computer DVD mechanism before it finally disappears.

/., by it's nature, attracts people with bro-crushes on the latest tech gadgets (I personally really want a new iPad but am waiting for the next-gen) who tend to forget that "newer" doesn't alway's translated to "better enough to replace the existing in the short term." I think DVD's, from a cost and convenience standpoint, are still the most viable option for most people to use when traveling. Anecdotally, I see more people using them sitting up front than I see iPads or other tablets. That will change, but not in the near term, IMHO.

Re:Movies

[cheeks5965]

I see that you've conceded your original point, that tablets are too expensive for most people. You even admit you're getting ready to buy one yourself, as soon as the newest, fanciest, most expensive one comes out!!!

thank you for agreeing with me that you were incorrect before.

Re:Movies

[qualityassurancedept]

not being an expert, I thought .avi was a just container format... when I use acidrip for example, I select the x264 codec for the rip but the file is named with a .avi extension. Same for k9copy.

Re:Movies

[mjwx]

Please let me know how you are going to play back movies etc while in an airplane at 30,000 feet.

I suppose if you want to watch in a manner which drains your battery dead the fastest, you could go that way. Personally, I prefer carrying and watching my movies in a more portable form, such as data files stored on a HDD, my iPad, or flash media.

Yaz

Those USB devices will drain your battery fast as well.

This is why I keep a slower but larger 640 GB 5400 RPM drive in my laptop. Yep, slower loading for games but more storage for everything else. The spinning disk does not use as much power as a spinning disk in a USB caddy.

I do have an optical drive in my laptop (I use it for games) but it uses no power when not in operation. I could have got the non-optical drive version for $150 less, but decided I wanted to keep the optical drive.

Re:Movies

[Vegemeister]

That is... highly nonstandard.

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

I see that you've conceded your original point, that tablets are too expensive for most people. You even admit you're getting ready to buy one yourself, as soon as the newest, fanciest, most expensive one comes out!!!

thank you for agreeing with me that you were incorrect before.

Nice try, but really wanting something and buying it are two different things; which just gets to my point that tablets are still too expensive for most people.

But thanks for playing anyway, HAND.

Re:Movies

[fuzzywig]

In the Venn diagram that is life, there are /. geeks who are into knitting. Exhibit A.

Re:Movies

[cheeks5965]

which just gets to my point that tablets are still too expensive for most people.

Ah, the infinite loop. Once again, [[citation needed]]

Re:Movies

[Yaztromo]

Those USB devices will drain your battery fast as well.

A solid-state USB key with some movies on it is going to use significantly less power than a DVD drive will.

This is why I keep a slower but larger 640 GB 5400 RPM drive in my laptop. Yep, slower loading for games but more storage for everything else. The spinning disk does not use as much power as a spinning disk in a USB caddy.

Thanks for making my argument for me. You have a large, slow disk built into your computer that uses the battery efficiently. Why then, would you playback movies on a secondary, lower capacity, removable drive that is only going to chew up the battery even faster? You have an efficient device your system can't do without, and yet you watch movies on another, less efficient device that you can do without? Where is the sense in that?

If you are in love with your optical drive, it's not my intent to deprive you from it. I hear some people are really attached to their phonographs too. But there are significantly better ways of storing and playing movies while at 30 000 feet than using a DVD drive that use less power, allow you to carry more media in less (or no additional) space, and gives you significantly more flexibility.

Yaz.

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

which just gets to my point that tablets are still too expensive for most people.

Ah, the infinite loop. Once again, [[citation needed]]

According to BlueKai, median household income is over $100,000 a year for the iPad buyers. Given that is 2x the average US household incomes, the demographics show it is too expensive for most buyer. I do not have exact numbers, but I'd guess that group is roughly 15% of the population.

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

Well my household income is less than 100k, and I have THREE iPads! My subjective experience trumps your anecdotal estimation.

Sorry, but your evidence is anecdotal - my estimation is based on economic realities and data.

Re:Movies

[Registered Coward v2]

I think you're conflating several related but different ideas. Average != median. Some != many != most. Btw my karma went form positive to terrible in one day. I didn't even know you could have terrible karma!

I meant to say 2x the median US income; which it is (intact it is more than 2x but 2x is enough to make my point.

As for many vs one vs most when you have a buying profile that is significantly more affluent than the median consumer I'd say that means your item is too expensive for most buyers. Not all; but certain a significant enough % to say "most."

Not sure who is modding you down but the mod makes no sense to me.

X61s

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a five year old X61s that didn't come with an Optical Drive. I'm sure there are older laptops of a similar size...the almost 10 year old X40 series for example. I don't think it was the Macbook Air that killed the optical drive so much as it has been other technologies that made it irrelevant. Most Linux distributions can be installed via USB, and even Microsoft provides a tool to create a USB-installer for Windows 7. For OpenBSD, I install via PXE.

I also have a 12" Elitebook that came with a built-in optical drive, but it just seems so much heavier to carry around than the X61. That added weight is not worth the maybe two times a year I actually need the optical drive.

Four uses remain

[tepples]

Gaming in markets with broadband? Steam. Application installs in markets with broadband? Mac App Store, Ubuntu Software Center (which has paid repos now) or whatever Windows has. Moving data from one PC to another? USB flash drives. On-site backup? External hard drives, especially if your data is over the 4.something GB limit for DVD-R or DVD+R media.

But this still leaves several uses for optical discs: 1. operating system installations, 2. application installations in places that can't get DSL, FTTH, or cable Internet, 3. burning music CDs for people who don't already own and use a suitable PMP, or 4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC. I admit most of these can be done on a USB burner kept at home, and that's what I use with my 10" Dell.

Re:Four uses remain

[smash]

OS install = net boot or USB flash. Application installs = USB flash.

Re:Four uses remain

[PCM2]

4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.

I love /. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.

Re:Four uses remain

[nabsltd]

But this still leaves several uses for optical discs:

You forgot 5. Disposable sneakernet.

In other words, if I have a bunch of data that fits nicely on a 9GB DVD, I can burn it and give it to somebody. Despite the fact that flash drives are now found in boxes of cereal, you can still buy 8 blank DVD-R DL disks for the price of one 8GB flash drive.

Re:Four uses remain

[znerk]

4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.

I love /. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.

And lest we forget, BluRay just won the media war a couple years ago - those drives are only now getting cheap enough to call them "consumer hardware".

Optical drives should be external

[Anonymous Coward]

Optical drives should be external. They cost $30.

For that price, you could throw one in your laptop bag, and plug it in when you need it.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=420&name=External-CD-DVD-Blu-Ray-Drives

I don't believe in built-in optical drives; I use them rarely. They're useless dead weight. Much prefer that the space they took, be replaced by more battery... which is always useful. Or leave both off and make the laptop lighter and slimmer.

Re:Optical drives should be external

[Anonymous Coward]

Much prefer that the space they took, be replaced by more battery... which is always useful. Or leave both off and make the laptop lighter and slimmer.

Another good use for the optical bay, is to put an SSD in. You can buy SSD-to-optical-bay adaptors quite cheaply.

This way, you could have a small and inexpensive SSD for use as a fast boot disk. And the existing huge spinning hard drive for media. Best of both worlds.

If you're careful and put all your important things on the SSD, the hard drive can spin down, giving you more time on the battery.

But whatever's in there, much more useful than an optical drive.

I use an optical drive for....

[einhverfr]

I use the portable optical drive for:
1) Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format
2) Listening to CD's
3) Watching some DVD's
4) Occasionally rescue CD's come in handy when a root password is forgotten.

No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[Yaztromo]

1) Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format

Virtually all of which are available online, usually as newer revisions with errata included. Indeed, the CD that ships with the hardware is usually the last place I check for PDF documentation, as there is virtually always more up-to-date documentation online

.

2) Listening to CD's

Are you the one person who doesn't have some sort of portable music player, or who hasn't ripped all their music CDs to a more portable AAC/MP3/FLAC/ALAC format? For playback on a laptop, any time you need to be running off battery playing back a file off your hard drive is going to consume significantly less power than doing the same off spinning physical media.

3) Watching some DVD's

Again, having these files stored on the hard drive is more efficient for a portable device. And there are a number of legal solutions for renting, downloading, and streaming movies available online that doesn't rely on physical media.

4) Occasionally rescue CD's come in handy when a root password is forgotten.

Since the article (and your post) specifically mentions Apple, in their case all modern Apple systems are perfectly capable of booting from USB or Firewire. I do understand that in the PC world booting from removable USB keys can be really hit-or-miss, but in the Apple world this isn't a concern. Booting from USB is faster, and requires less dedicated hardware in your portable system that you wind up having to carry around the other 99.99% of the time when you're not trying to recover from a forgotten root password.

I've already made the decision that I don't need to carry around an optical drive that I use <1% of the time in my next laptop. An external drive or drive sharing across the network to a dedicated system will be more than sufficient in the event I need to move data to or from optical disc.

Yaz

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[znerk]

To further this line of reasoning, you can't (legally) loan an avi or mp4 file to your friend to watch, and you can't (legally) hand your friend an mp3 file to listen to, whereas with physical media you can transfer ownership temporarily, and your friend can explore new audio or video content without having to pay a(n additional) licensing fee.

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[jimicus]

No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....

Indeed. The fact that the Macbook Air is selling like hot cakes - indeed, estimates suggest it accounts for 28% of Apple's notebook sales - is neither here nor there. Apple's users want optical drives, and they're prepared to vote with their wallets.

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[mfearby]

Speaking as somebody who abhors DRM and the various limited digital music stores out there (with pathetic, mostly-pop rubbish catalogues), I agree with the post above your reply. Optical drives are invaluable for playing or ripping CDs, and I will never give up my CD collection and start buying these horrid music downloads from equally horrid online stores that more often than not tie you into iTunes or some other evil ecosystem (and since I use Linux, they don't work for me anyway, and if they can, courtesy of some hack, then that's unacceptable anyway).

No thank you very much! It's my CD collection for me from now until the day I die. I have about 1,400 of them so that ought to keep me busy, and yes, I have ripped most of them them but I also play them in my car and also in my kitchen stereo. There can be no substitute for owning the real thing, IMHO. All these people buying into proprietary online digital music stores will be sorry when the day comes that the store dies and your music is screwed. It has happened before, and it will happen again. And I'm not going near iTunes (since I use Linux) and because its offerings are so paltry that I laugh at its catalogue's meagre range!

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[tepples]

Are you the one person who doesn't have some sort of portable music player

I have a PMP, but a lot of people find it easier to stick CDs in a car stereo than to fumble around with a PMP and a Jupiter Jack.

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[Yaztromo]

I have a PMP, but a lot of people find it easier to stick CDs in a car stereo than to fumble around with a PMP and a Jupiter Jack.

Fair enough, but I do have to point out that playing CDs in your car stereo has nothing to do with laptops abandoning the format. Indeed, not playing CDs in your laptop means you can just leave them in the car without lugging them around everywhere you go.

Yaz

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[einhverfr]

I don't know. Can I loan my computer to a friend to listen to MP3's?

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[znerk]

Sure, i could hand my friend my PC, or my mp3 player, or what have you. Should I have to hand my friend a stack of several hundred music CDs, if I just wanted to loan him a particular album by a particular artist? "The entire collection" is not exactly a convenient package size, nor is it consumer-friendly to lose access to my entire library of media because I want my friend to listen to a dozen songs from a particular artist.

"My entire media library, as well as the viewing/listening device" should not be the only method I have of sharing my media. This is one of the reasons I like to purchase physical media, and one of the reasons I dislike purchasing digital media without a physical format to go with it.

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[Jumperalex]

playing back a file off your hard drive is going to consume significantly less power than doing the same off spinning physical media

I agree with your overall sentiment but you do realize the irony of how you said what you just said? Right?

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[einhverfr]

If I can loan my computer, can I loan an external solid state drive?

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[znerk]

At some point, you're going to have to admit that you're not loaning anything - you're handing your friend an additional copy of a file containing copyrighted content, and thus violating the copyright legislation.

File storage devices are too large to be "wasting" by sticking a dozen songs on them and handing them to a friend. Unless and until I can get my hands on 640MB USB drives for $0.50 each, furthering this discussion is futile.

Re:I use an optical drive for....

[einhverfr]

but where can you possibly draw the line? I mean if my friend copies it, the friend is the one creating the unauthorized copies, right?

Cap

[tepples]

Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam, Origin, and the likes.

Unless you live somewhere where typical home broadband plans cap your monthly download in the single digit GB range.

Re:Cap

[__aaqvdr516]

I'm on a 600 MB/day limit on my home ISP. I just recently built a new computer for my wife. The GPU came with a free copy of a game. Based on our normal usage patterns, I'll have it downloaded from Steam sometime in the next six months using the leftover bits at the end of the day.

Central Virginia.

Re:Cap

[cthulhu11]

I've had ISDN at two times in the past. On occasions when I needed to do large downloads fast, I went to a coffee shop or library. Not ideal, but it wasn't the end of the world.

Re:Cap

[Vastad]

It wouldn't hurt to email the makers of the GPU or the promoters of the offer and explain your issue. They may be kind enough to send you the DVD or BRD (sans any packaging, just the disc). Just ask nicely and don't expect too much and you might get sorted.

Good luck.

Re:Cap

[badkarmadayaccount]

Long range packet radio uplink? I see you are a ham - I know the laws, but who the hell will start scanning channels, modulations, and other parameters, and run the results through a packet sniffer, just to find a ham using crypto or the like.

Re:Cap

[nobodie]

I hope you're not on the Central Virginia Coop system?

External

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?

By going home, pulling out your external USB burner, plugging it into the side of your laptop, installing the software, and unplugging the burner.

Re:External

[binarstu]

The answer to "How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?" is not, "by using an optical drive." Sorry. Your "external USB burner" is still an optical drive.

DVD are not important anymore

[agathius]

DVDs aren't in much use for some time already. from my observations very few people still using it for the purposes different than OS installing. I was absolutely happy to replace DVD by a HDD on my laptop, and I think we can expect OSes to be installed via internet in a couple of years, everything's ready for that.

Re:DVD are not important anymore

[hedwards]

Having a local backup that you can't delete or change is something that's useful sometimes. And unless you're dealing with large files a DVD is great for that.

useless for me

[amoeba1911]

Yeah, optical drive is useless for me. I hardly ever use the optical drive on my desktop, let alone on my laptop. Optical drives are useless for professionals who know what they are doing, but for computer novices optical drives are still a necessity. If you ever buy a game or an application it comes on an optical media. You even need to have it in the drive to use the software.

For now, it is cheaper to ship software on optical media instead of some kind of read-only usb drive. There are huge benefits to that though, first of all, a microsd card takes up much less space and weighs a lot less than a dvd. So, maybe one day we will see software that comes on usb drives instead of dvd. That day will mark the death of the optical media, except perhaps for long term archival, stuff i never want to see again but can't get myself to delete i burn on a dvd and throw the dvd into the basement. :)

Re:useless for me

[agathius]

So, maybe one day we will see software that comes on usb drives

Doubt it. DVDs are much cheaper than any flash storage, but internet is even more cheap ;) there's a point in assuming that DVDs are for novices though.

Re:useless for me

[Tyrannosaur]

I'm assuming you buy lossy music as well from Apple. I don't wanna live in this world anymore.

Re:useless for me

[ColdWetDog]

I'm assuming you buy lossy music as well from Apple. I don't wanna live in this world anymore.

Well, you are a dinosaur....

Re:useless for me

[jedidiah]

I used to use DVDs for disposable media storage before USB thumbdrives and hard drives became cheap, plentiful, and large enough to displace them.

DVDs are still tops when it comes to being cheap and disposable.

They beat thumbdrives by at least 20:1.

Re:useless for me

[hism]

I buy audio CDs and like to rip them because I usually ruin my CDs very quickly. So the CD drive isn't useless to me. I may be focused in computer science, mostly hung up with math and algos, a bit behind the tech curve, but I like to think I still qualify as a computer 'professional.' : )

Re:useless for me

[Tacvek]

And I assume you buy lossy music on CDs instead. (The abuse of dynamic range compression, plus the inherent limitations of the CD format[1], rate mean that CDs are definitely a lossy medium.)

[1] Mostly the 44.1kHz sample rate. Technically the 16 bit amplitude is a limitation, but not as much of one as the sampling rate. Music with very extreme variations in dynamic range could in theory benefit from going to 24 bit depth, but good luck not losing those quiet parts to noise in your amp.

Re:useless for me

[stms]

That day will mark the death of the optical media, except perhaps for long term archival, stuff i never want to see again but can't get myself to delete i burn on a dvd and throw the dvd into the basement. :)

Even for that external hard drives are more convenient, reliable, and cheaper.

Re:useless for me

[thegarbz]

Optical drives are useless for professionals who know what they are doing, but for computer novices optical drives are still a necessity.

Professional what? Or are you just making huge generalisations?

Only last week the "professionals" on this very site were talking about industrial SCADA systems. The general consensus is don't connect them to the network and don't allow USB ports.

Well that's just great, now I get to be called a novice for following the advice of professionals too.

Optical drives are damn useful and they have their place, just because you don't know what that place is doesn't mean they are useless if you know what you're doing.

Re:useless for me

[Darinbob]

I use mine now and then. My internet is not that fast and the CD/DVDs are what my software comes on and where I have backups. If I visit my parents they have dialup so it's impossible to use the internet for software installs. I could use USB thumbdrives but at this point I have more optical media to be written than I have spare USB drives (and the discs are more readily and safely recyclable compared to landfill destined chips). MicroSD is nice but not a lot of people I might mail stuff to can use that.

This feels like yet again one of those things where the kids do something new and then are baffled that the entire world is not following suit.

Re:useless for me

[martin-boundary]

Yeah, optical drive is useless for me.

That's ok, you're still learning to use computers. Once you get a bit more experience like us professionals, you'll realize those drives make excellent coffee cup holders.

Re:useless for me

[voidptr]

Slot loaders make pretty terrible coffee cup holders, and I doubt there's too many laptop manufacturers shipping tray loading optical drives anymore. Even on desktops I think a lot of vendors are using slot loaders thes days.

Re:useless for me

[znerk]

That day will mark the death of the optical media, except perhaps for long term archival, stuff i never want to see again but can't get myself to delete i burn on a dvd and throw the dvd into the basement. :)

Even for that external hard drives are more convenient, reliable, and cheaper.

... but less likely to survive the airborne trip into the darkness.

Re:useless for me

[znerk]

I don't use slot-loaders in any system I build - they're too finicky, too flaky, too prone to eating discs, and there's no way to get the disc out without power.

Similarly, I have several laptops in my household, and not a one of them has a slot-loader.

Trays are what you use when you want to make sure not to chew up your disc.

Re:useless for me

[tepples]

As for the dynamic range compression, I agree with you that it is a problem, but I was under the impression that record producers applied it to M4As from the iTunes Store and MP3s from Amazon MP3 just as much as to CDs. As for the 44.1 kHz sample rate, can you ABX the difference between a 96 kHz sample and the same 96 kHz sample with all frequencies over 20 kHz filtered out?

Re:useless for me

[captjc]

No, that is a coaster ejector. You put the coaster inside, and eject it when you need it.

Re:useless for me

[Tacvek]

As for the dynamic range compression, I agree with you that it is a problem, but I was under the impression that record producers applied it to M4As from the iTunes Store and MP3s from Amazon MP3 just as much as to CDs.

I'd be surprised if the producers did not do exactly the same thing to both.

As for the 44.1 kHz sample rate, can you ABX the difference between a 96 kHz sample and the same 96 kHz sample with all frequencies over 20 kHz filtered out?

Keep in mind that the Nyquist Sampling Theorem only strictly applies to perfectly periodic signals. Second many people can hear frequencies somewhat above 20Khz. Third, the ear does not strictly separate audio by frequency, and actual waveform has some effect. Thus it is entirely possible to construct a waveform where the difference between 96 kHz sampling and 96kHz sampling with frequencies above 20Hz filtered do sound distinct. I'll admit though that for most audio the difference is not noticeable even by experts.

But CD audio is sill lossy relative to recording masters, and all recorded audio is strictly lossy relative to original sound waves. To make the mistake of believin otherwise is madness.

Hello, 2007.

[Mostly Harmless]

Netbooks and ultraportables don't have optical drives? What's next, cellphones without mechanical number pads? How do people come up with this stuff?

Re:Hello, 2007.

[osu-neko]

They come up with this stuff the exact same way they come up with leaving the 5.25" floppy disk out of your new desktop machine. What on earth would you want it for? If you're one of the two people left on Earth that has a need for one, you can install it yourself.

Re:Hello, 2007.

[Mostly Harmless]

I must have forgotten the /sarcasm tag at the end of my post. The point is, netbooks and ultraportables don't have optical drives pretty much by definition. They don't come with them not because they're not necessary, but because they're netbooks and ultraportables. The author is using old news to support a disjoint claim.

If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD

[tepples]

Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format

I'm assuming you don't carry a printer around with you (unless it's one of those new Polaroid products or something). Leave a USB disc drive where you leave your printer. Before iTunes Store, iTunes software was specifically for doing exactly this.

Listening to CD's

If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD to your computer with an external drive and music library software that has come with just about every home computer since 2002.

Watching some DVD's

If you can stop by home, you can copy the DVD to an MPEG-2 file on your computer with an external drive and VLC media player.

Occasionally rescue CD's come in handy when a root password is forgotten.

Which are ideal for USB flash drive. Any machine from the past decade that's new enough not to have a floppy drive is probably new enough to boot from USB mass storage as easily as it boots from a hard drive.

Re:If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD

[mjwx]

If you can stop by home,

Yep, sure, I'm just going to fly 6000 KM's back home so I can watch a DVD.

Any other pearls of wisdom?

I use an optical drive for games mostly, yes there is steam but I dont feel like buying my back catalogue on steam and my old games (Deus Ex, System Shock, KOTOR) are the games that get the most use on my laptop when travelling. Plus I dont entirely trust Steam, so I like having the install media (with all related engine and art assets) under my control.

The optical drive is still there on most machines because most people still use it and dont want to hunt around for a portable drive let alone have the patience or skills to rip a DVD. Most wont even know what VLC is. Unlike the floppy drive, it's still in regular usage, buying programs on floppy disks was rare in 1997, buying programs on DVD is not rare in 2011. It will be a very long time before the average person stops needing an optical drive.

Re:If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD

[tepples]

Yep, sure, I'm just going to fly 6000 KM's back home so I can watch a DVD.

If you're 6,000 km from home and trying to play a local DVD, you're probably in a different DVD region anyway, and you'll use up two of your drive's allotted region switches to watch the DVD and then go back to watching one of your own DVDs. Blame voters who let copyright owners become this powerful.

If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

Any OS can be installed easily from USB drives.

As long as the computer is new enough not to have a floppy drive. Older machines, such as my grandma's PC on which I installed Xubuntu today to replace a thoroughly rootkitted Windows XP, tend not to recognize USB boot media.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[mikael]

Some laptops such as Sony Vaio PCG_GRT don't have floppy disk drives, nor do they have USB boot capability. The only way of OS update is via DVD or CD.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

How do you propose to make this partition without already having a working operating system?

Re:If the PC is new enough

[froggymana]

Any OS can be installed easily from USB drives.

As long as the computer is new enough not to have a floppy drive. Older machines, such as my grandma's PC on which I installed Xubuntu today to replace a thoroughly rootkitted Windows XP, tend not to recognize USB boot media.

Or in my experiences, tend to only have USB 1.1, making CD installs incredibly faster.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[ksd1337]

Then all you need to do is burn a bootloader like PLoP to a CD and use it to boot the USB drive.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[ksd1337]

Magic! Or butterflies! Take your pick. :-)

Re:If the PC is new enough

[redback]

Chicken, meet egg.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[hairyfeet]

Yes but TFA is specifically talking about new machines like netbooks. i have to say that I too thought I would need one when i switched to a netbook, even bought an external USB case for the DVD burner that was in my old laptop....and I've never plugged it in past testing that it worked.

Once I picked up a 16Gb flash drive I've found I don't hardly need DVDs anymore. for my older games there are disc images and Alcohol 52% and for newer there is Steam. Frankly the ONLY ones who haven't joined the new way of doing things is the damned MPAA who won't simply sell you an AVI file, nope you got to have a DVD burner to rip it and transcode it. Is it any wonder TPB is so popular?

Re:If the PC is new enough

[Stargoat]

Whither the Portable Optical Drive? FTFY.

Hither came the Portable Optical Drive, black cased, laser eyed, CD loaded, a ripper, a reader, with gigantic data capacity and gigantic IO, to store the information of the Earth on its removable media.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[smash]

THey also tend to generally not support software which is not available on optical media.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[Lumpy]

The computer maker will put it there for us. Dell and HP know what is best! They will choose the holy OS for us all!

Nerds will use a paperclip in a usb port to enter it in a serial binary format.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[milkmage]

FWIW this might just solve that problem

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elegantinvention/isostick-the-optical-drive-in-a-usb-stick

There has been a lot of misconception about the functionality of isostick. All the optical disk magic takes place in the isostick itself, it doesn't matter if you're in the computer's BIOS, an OS, anything -- whatever you plug it into will see both an optical drive and a flash drive. Absolutely no software is required for this. The software mentioned is a convenience for configuring it, but all settings are ultimately stored in config files on the flash portion, which you can edit however you please. I hope this clears up some confusion about the isostick, and I hope you like it!

Some BIOSes only see the first drive a device presents, so isostick's optical drive comes first so you don't have to worry about not being able to boot from it!

Re:If the PC is new enough

[bemymonkey]

Isn't the topic of discussion the lack of optical drives on *new* computers? I mean... the optical drive on your old computer that won't boot from USB isn't going to shrivel and die just because new devices no longer include obsolete tech...

Re:If the PC is new enough

[znerk]

You don't pop in a LiveCD and dd the drive over the network as one of the steps in making a new PC yours?

Oh, wait... no optical drive. Right.

Well, toss an image on a thumb-drive, then. Principle is still sound.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

Well, toss an image on a thumb-drive, then.

But if you have apps that aren't ported to Linux and don't run under Wine, where do you (legally) get that image?

Re:If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

Yes but TFA is specifically talking about new machines like netbooks.

And when the netbook is the only "new machine" in a household, one must use the netbook and a USB burner to make operating system install discs. Or maybe some of the households I visit are really behind the curve.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

If the old computer in a household gets hopelessly infected, and the new computer is a netbook, guess what I have to plug in to the netbook to make OS reinstall media for the old computer.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[BrokenHalo]

The computer maker will put it there for us. Dell and HP know what is best! They will choose the holy OS for us all!

Asus likewise. Seems a dumbass idea to me, so the first thing I did with my new laptop was delete that partition, since I don't want Windows anyway.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[bemymonkey]

I thought the old computer had an optical drive... why would you throw away your OS install media?

Re:If the PC is new enough

[tepples]

I thought the old computer had an optical drive... why would you throw away your OS install media?

For one thing, things often get lost in moves. But in my case, even though the owner managed to find her Windows disc, we went with something else this time because the operating system that came with the machine (Windows XP) makes it too easy to catch a rootkit or a fake antivirus compared to, say, Xubuntu.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[Guspaz]

From Microsoft. They do distribute ISOs of Windows, you know. They don't care much about the physical media, it's all about the product key and activation process these days.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[znerk]

Well, toss an image on a thumb-drive, then.

But if you have apps that aren't ported to Linux and don't run under Wine, where do you (legally) get that image?

I was actually referring to tossing a small bootable install of Linux on the thumbdrive, to facilitate using dd to push the image of the drive over the network. g4u is a good example of something designed for this purpose.

Sorry for the confusion, I should have been more specific.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[MaskedSlacker]

Sure I do. That doesn't make getting rid of recovery disks for recovery partitions a sound decision.

Re:If the PC is new enough

[ksd1337]

Lol! I don't understand why this was modded Funny (but I'm not complaining ;-). Using a bootloader on a CD to boot a USB seems counterproductive (why not just boot the CD itself?), but a USB is far faster than a CD.

I dumped them years ago. Couldn't be happier.

[Leslie43]

I got rid of my dvd rom years ago, I almost never used it.

Ubuntu and MS both tell you how to install from a thumbstick and MS Office is even sold on them. In a year I would imagine you will be hard pressed to find a system with a rom drive. I do hook up a usb external on occasion to read or write a disk, but that's rare. Netflix, Hulu and alternatives take care of movies, Steam and similar handle games. USB sticks handle the rest.

I don't take dvd's on a plane, it's cumbersome and the drive eats batteries, copy the files to a folder and use VLC if you must.

Live USB memory stick Live CD

[LoudMusic]

And your one use of the optical drive was actually a detriment to the function you were attempting to accomplish. It would have been better served on a USB memory stick. Faster speed and the ability to store changes. Not to mention far more capacity, AND less power consumption on your laptop.

Buying software on the Internet

[tepples]

If you ever buy a game or an application it comes on an optical media.

That's funny; I didn't get any optical media when I bought a copy of Portal on Steam.

Re:Buying software on the Internet

[znerk]

That's funny; I got optical media when I bought my copy of Orange Box at the retail store. Interestingly enough, Steam was more than happy to accept my CD key and allow me to play the game without using the disc to install... but just in case, I have physical media, too.

Re:Buying software on the Internet

[petermgreen]

just in case, I have physical media, too.

Physical media that requires steam to decrypt and install so if you can't get online or steam disappears the disc wont help you.

I also remember reading (during the early days of steam) that you were forced to update as part of the install and that said update meant substantial downloading even if you did have the disc. Dunno if that is still true.

Re:Buying software on the Internet

[znerk]

Physical media that requires steam to decrypt and install so if you can't get online or steam disappears the disc wont help you.

Bummer. Guess I won't be buying any more Valve games, then. Out of curiosity, can you provide a link with supporting information?

Re:Buying software on the Internet

[petermgreen]

There was a flurry of news articles on /. and similar sites about it at the time. Turning them up now seems rather tricky though.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/04/10/23/0812224/half-life-2-retail-to-require-steam-activation is one example.

Re:Live USB memory stick Live CD

[amiga3D]

One possible use is for security as you can burn a live CD and since it's read only it can't be hacked. It's paranoia at it's utmost but very effective.

We need those optical drives

[Hentes]

How else could we run DRM-d software?

Hello, 1999 or 2000 rather

[siddesu]

My first "netbook" without an optical drive was a Sony Vaio Picturebook - like this one: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/199809/98-085/index.html. I used it happily on the road until about 2003, when I upgraded to a Victor Interlink - like this one: http://www.kemplar.com/jvc_741.php.

Both still work, and the Victor with Linux still puts most netbooks to shame.

Re:Hello, 1999 or 2000 rather

[JackAxe]

I recall the Sony. I don't have any mod points -- rarely do -- or I'd mod you up.

Floppy drive flashbacks

[Twinbee]

Yes I would welcome the death of the CD/DVD drive, like the death of the floppy drive. USB drives do everything they do for just slightly more cash. And the upside is it make laptops lighter. I for one would much rather use that extra space for a 2nd hard drive, so I can use the SSD for Windows/Linux, and the other hard drive for my data.

Hopefully, the same will happen to the desktop soon enough.

Don't need an optical drive even for live Linux

[Joshua Fan]

Take a Linux CD ISO and extract it to a FAT32 USB drive (7-zip can do that). Delete isolinux.bin and rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. Then grab syslinux.exe and run "syslinux.exe -mifa [drive]:"

You can still use the drive for storage.

There are also many tutorials out there for installing Windows 7 from a thumbdrive.

Re:Don't need an optical drive even for live Linux

[znerk]

Uhmmm, that is only the crippled Ubuntu that you have to jump through those hoops. On all other Linux versions, you can directly copy the installation ISO file to a memory stick using dd and it will boot.

Which ones? Because I haven't seen any that are even as simple as the "crippled Ubuntu method" in your parent's post. Most of them require downloading additional software to format the USB device and/or write the (custom, img-not-standard-iso) image to the device, at least when using Windows to create your bootable USB device.

Interestingly enough, there isn't a Windows "dd" command, and the fact that you would need "syslinux.exe" would indicate that the parent's method is for using a Windows PC to create the bootable USB device.

Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[Anonymous Coward]

Uses for Optical Drives:

1. Ripping CDs to Itunes, whatever you use (Rhythmbox, Amarok) to manage your MP3s. A lot of people still buy CDs, or have some to rip.
2. Recording LPs to HD, burning CDs to play in stereos, etc. A lot of folks still have stereos they'd like to use.
3. Watching Netflix / Redbox DVDs, not everyone wants to watch em on a big screen. Or rip the DVD (takes a long time). Sometimes you just want to watch it and be done.
4. Guaranteed boot unlike sometimes iffy USB Flash drives.
5. Archival backup, cheap and easy. Great for weblogs, code base, important docs etc.
6. Commercial software, upgrades, etc. This is particularly true for naive users who tend to delete stuff they should not (like their download, say). Non technical users know to save the install CD/package, they'll often delete the download.
7. Burning Library Audiobooks to CDs, and then ripping them via Itunes, RubyRipper, Soundjuicer whatever. This is good for a number of reasons -- a lot of non-technical folks have CD players they like to use to listen to audio books and don't have or want to use MP3 players, burning the CDs also allows you to rip them to MP3s without time-limits etc. You can do this with both the Overdrive Media downloads, and the regular CD audio books (just copy the CDs).

I love having an optical drive, I consider it mandatory for any serious computer not optimized for light-weight. Netbooks have their place, but for anything serious and regular use I want that optical drive. I use it all the time.

Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[Darinbob]

Agreed. I think it is amazingly arrogant that because some people buy all their stuff online with music stores and DRM that they think they entire world does the same thing. Real people still have CDs we've collected over the years. Retail outlets still sell music on CDs, they still sell software on CDs, and they still sell movies on DVDs. If no one used this stuff then why are they still being sold?

What is the proper pejorative word that's the opposite of Luddite? I'm tired of those gadget freaks who think the world revolves and them and the latest thing they bought.

Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[voidptr]

Nobody is selling music with DRM on it anymore. The cds that I bought over the years have long been ripped and sit in a crate in the garage that hasn't been opened in in a long time.

As for the rest, of course there's still a need for optical drives for a lot of people and will be for some time to come. What there isnt anymore, is the need for every computer sold to have one permanently attached. Nobody's going to stop offering them on all of their desktop lines anytime soon. A lot of laptop users may keep an external in the drawer a home, but there's no good reason to cary the weight and bulk on a real portable every day for most of us.

Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[mjwx]

I love having an optical drive, I consider it mandatory for any serious computer not optimized for light-weight. Netbooks have their place, but for anything serious and regular use I want that optical drive. I use it all the time.

This,

In a cheap netbook, an optical drive is something I can live without. In a proper laptop costing $500 or more, I expect an optical drive unless I'm specifically looking for one without. The optical drive is not going anywhere any-time soon.

Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[Jumperalex]

All solved via an EXTERNAL optical drive. They are cheap, small and don't need external power. Which means if you absolutely need to take it with you, it is easy. Otherwise you get to perform almost all of your stated activities at home and then pick up and leave, relegating the optical drive to your desk at home.

as for boot from USB ... if it works once, it is gaurenteed from then on. If you buy a laptop that can't boot from USB then my two comments are: do better research and return for a different laptop. Well a third, try another USB because now adays if there is a usb boot problem it is as likely to be the computer/bios setting's fault as it is the USB sticks fault.

Like it or not optical drives ARE going away as a built in feature in the near future for main stream laptops. Just like Floppies went away. Like it or not manufacturers cater to the ever increasing "arrogant" (re below poster) majority of folks who see no need for a device that is rarely used, often when NOT mobile, and is easily satisfied with an external option.

Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People

[dwightk]

Agreed. I think it is amazingly arrogant that because some people buy all their stuff [online with music stores and DRM] on CD-ROM that they think they entire world does the same thing. Real people still have [CDs] floppies we've collected over the years. Retail outlets still sell music on [CDs] audio tape, they still sell software on [CDs] floppies, and they still sell movies on [DVDs] VHS. If no one used this stuff then why are they still being sold?

What is the proper pejorative word that's the opposite of Luddite? I'm tired of those gadget freaks who think the world revolves and them and the latest thing they bought.

1997 called and ftfy

They couldn't figure out what happened to the "s" element, so they just used brackets...

SecuROM?

[Junta]

I don't want an optical drive in my laptop. It's added weight and a little noise on reboot. For me this is no problem, I never ever use the optical drive and my question doesn't apply to me since I run linux exclusively anyway, but do SecuROM gimped games work with USB attached optical drives? I could see that as a major inhibitor to a lot of people.

Re:SecuROM?

[ksd1337]

but do SecuROM gimped games work with USB attached optical drives? I could see that as a major inhibitor to a lot of people.

I'm sure TPB has some great fixes for that problem. ;-)

can't escape the media teat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your need for media consumption so great you can't go a couple of hours without it?

unetbootin

[khipu]

You can just write ISO images to a USB stick with unetbootin. Various distros and operating systems also have other ways of creating bootable USB sticks.

And if you really want to, you can still buy external DVD drives.

Re:unetbootin

[hedwards]

You can, but unetbootin is pretty unreliable sometimes it works but other times it inexplicably fails to actually do the job. It might work for Ubuntu, but most of the time I have to try three or four times to get it to write the appropriate files to the disk.

Re:Live USB memory stick Live CD

[thue]

If you install grub onto your USB stick, then you can have a whole collection of live CDs, which can be accomplished by copying the iso to the USB stick and adjusting the grub configuration file. See for example http://www.panticz.de/MultiBootUSB

Photos

[the eric conspiracy]

If you travel with a high resolution camera you are going to want an optical drive to back up you photos.

Re:Photos

[gnasher719]

If you travel with a high resolution camera you are going to want an optical drive to back up you photos.

A little 500 GB 2.5" USB hard drive is ten times faster, ten times more reliable, and cheaper.

Re:Photos

[jedidiah]

Get a bigger memory card.

For backup purposes, a hard drive would probably be much more effective. Use the one in the laptop or an external one. Use two if you are really paranoid.

DVD seems like a ugly backup medium if you're on the road.

Re:Photos

[the eric conspiracy]

Nope. Memory cards are very prone to failure and with a hi res camera they fill up fast. Travel to some remote place and finding a memory card is corrupted when you get home totally 100% sucks. Hard drives - vibration sensitive and memory sticks are not that great either.

Dump your photos onto BDRs and mail them home and you have a great backup against losing a hard drive or memory card or theft or loss of luggage.

Re:Photos

[thegarbz]

You're talking about failure of flash memory (generalising mind you) and then advocate using the most easily damaged of all optical media to transport you data? And trusting the Postal service? Assuming you're not out of your mind maybe you need to do some research into memory cards.

They are rarely corrupted by themselves. It is usually a software error and a power failure on a device during writing that causes corruption. Evenly heavily thrashed cards these days are far more reliable than any other form of media that goes though above standard abuse (which I would say tossing in the back of a bag and running around all of another country would count as). Write count limits are rarely reached unless you're a professional sporting shooter who holds his finger on the shutter button, and even then you'll be replacing your camera shutter before your memory card.

MicroSD are easily lost, SD cards suffer a problem of the little R/W switch breaking, but CF cards are quite robust. Mind you I do keep mine quite clean. It's been through the wash twice, no data was lost. Memory cards are about as tough a storage medium you can currently buy.

Re:Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. That basket sure can hold a lot of eggs!

Re:Photos

[the eric conspiracy]

My personal anecdotal experience is exactly the opposite of what you claim. I've lost photos four times on flash media, and never on optical media that I've mailed home.

Visit any high level photography forum and you will find it populated by many people who have had sad experiences with flash media data loss.

Re:Photos

[lostchicken]

Okay, so buy two. Still cheaper and smaller.

Re:Photos

[mjwx]

A little 500 GB 2.5" USB hard drive is ten times faster, ten times more reliable, and cheaper.

You had me up to the point that it said 10 times.

A DVD drive will write at 20 MB/s, a 5400 RPM drive writes at 20-40 MB/s, in reality, if you're using USB you can expect about 20-30 MB/s.

Secondly, a DVD is a lot more damage resistant then a mechanical drive. Drop the mechanical drive and you pray it works again, drop the optical disk and you just pick it up. If we are talking about reliability, the best way to ensure you have data integrity is by having multiple copies. So that would be multiple DVD's or multiple 500 GB USB drives.

As for cheaper, a DVD is A$0.0.20 (100 pk off the shelf, can be bought cheaper in bulk) a 500 GB optical drive is A$80 for something cheap and cheerful. 500 GB is 114 DVD's give or take a fraction of 4.4 GB, that's $22.8 for 500 GB. The entire 500 GB needs to be overwritten 4 times before it's worth more.

Now that that's been said

The right tool for the right job. A portable HDD is about convenience, not data integrity. I use my portable HDD for things I want to move not backup or keep. Portable disks are not that safe and Murphy's Law is omnipresent.

I think it is fair to say, the GGP being a professional (or professional level) photographer that data integrity is more important. Having some experience in the matter as far as media goes.
Tape > Optical > Enterprise HDD (inc ent. SSD) > Consumer HDD (inc SSD) > Flash (cheap) > * > Cloud.
Optical is the best consumer grade backup and archive you can get. Easy to make multiple copies, easy to store, not senstive to excessive moisture/magnetics, not prone to damage. Not to mention the ease of sorting.

Point in short, if I'm moving 12 GB around my machines, plug in that USB drive. If I'm archiving off or backing up 12 GB, give me optical.

Re:Photos

[thegarbz]

I do. There's something in common amongst most of the complaints and that they are not regular posters. That's the information bias right there. There'll be a lot of people who subscribe to a forum just to ask a question / vent and then disappear to never be seen again. It's what makes complaints in general less useful for deriving statistics.

The failure modes of flash media are known. Flash also fails safe. The failed operation is nearly always a write operation rather than a read operation which ultimately fails a checksum. But more importantly flash media is stable over time and will withstand physical abuse short of a high power alternating magnetic field. This is quite unlike a HDD which has a finite force that can be applied before it gives up (usually that number is reached by slightly less than a drop from waist height the drive just sustained), and as mentioned BD discs are incredibly fragile, so much so that they originally came in cartridges to keep them safe. My personal favourite though was the CD someone lent me at school which had a small crack in it. Put it in the drive and the thing bloody exploded, no CD, no drive.

One thing the forum posts also have in common is they are nearly all a case of "I went out, took pictures, and now I can't read the files on my computer." None of them talk about carrying the card around for weeks and then not being able to use them later. Unless you camera has a BD burner in the back that doesn't actually save you.

Really in summary flash does have failures, but few if not any can be mitigated by converting to a different media, and the fail safe method of failure means nearly always that the data is recoverable up to the point where the incorrect write action happened (usually the allocation table after writing an image)

Replace it with a modular battery.

[lanner]

Years ago, back in 2001, I had a nice Dell laptop with a modular DVDRW drive. However, you could hot swap out the optical drive for a second battery pack. I pretty much ran with this second battery pack in all the time, and it was awesome. It added an extra 60% or so of extra battery time to the laptop and I could go a real-world six to eight hours of use before the power ran out.

My new MacBook pro has a DVDRW drive in it and it's just complete wasted space. The battery life for this MacBook Pro is already pretty good, but it would be very awesome if I could put a modular battery in there. FYI, I have one of the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros, so I can very easily get to the battery and hard drive. I loath the fact that they un-did this feature of the MBP in later models. Jerks!

Re:Replace it with a modular battery.

[jasomill]

I have one of the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros, so I can very easily get to the battery and hard drive. I loath the fact that they un-did this feature of the MBP in later models. Jerks!

The manual for my "early 2011" 17" MacBook Pro explains the (easy) procedure for replacing the RAM and hard drive (and theÂ"non-user-replaceable" battery is right next to the hard drive). Given that the "late 2011" MacBook Pros are just speed bumps, what you say no longer appears to be true (for the 17", at least).

Windows repair

[Onymous Coward]

How do I make Windows repair media without an optical drive?

Re:Windows repair

[redback]

use a usb stick

Re:Windows repair

[Onymous Coward]

Sure USB is the answer (or there may even be other media options), but the question is how?

Thanks, AC, for the a detailed answer, but even the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool requires an ISO. This netbook came pre-installed. There is no disc, no ISO. And I would rather not buy an ISO of Windows 7 when I already own the OS.

But thanks for the link to the WU/DDT, I'll see if I can leverage that somehow, and I'll keep looking for either a free ISO or a way to use the existing installation's files.

Re:Windows repair

[petermgreen]

apparently digitalriver are a MS distribtion partner and there are freely downloadable links on thier servers for windows ISOs. http://techpp.com/2009/11/11/download-windows-7-iso-official-direct-download-links/

There is a tool out there called "activation backup and restore" that can back up the big brand OEM activation and restore it onto a clean install of windows made using generic windows media. Alternatively you can use the product key on the COA sticker to activate though this may require a phone call to MS

Re:Windows repair

[Onymous Coward]

Thanks, that's good information!

Re:DRM built-in to DVD-RW drives

[jedidiah]

Some brands of optical drive have been known to do really stupid things. The name LG comes to mind for some reason.

We're going to have to chop other things too

[Anonymous Coward]

The thickest part on many Ultrabooks is the USB/VGA ports. In order to get the ultimate in thinness you would have to use wireless everything or very thin ports like the Xoom power connector. Also my use of discs is falling thanks to Steam/Streaming. Only my Windows install discs are my "necessary" ones and a cheap USB drive works for my netbook.

I still use the optical drive

[kerashi]

Of course my notebook doubles as entertainment when I travel, and I usually have a handful of DVD's or Blu-rays to watch. If I didn't have an optical drive, I'd have to convert my collection on my desktop and transfer to my notebook, a time consuming proposition considering how large my collection is and how lazy I am.

Re:I still use the optical drive

[LinuxIsGarbage]

So you carry several laptop sized DVD/CD wallets instead?

Re:I still use the optical drive

[znerk]

What if you buy them "on the road"?

Re:Live USB memory stick Live CD

[hedwards]

That's interesting, I'll have to try that. I personally use discs for that because I haven't yet found a convenient way of booting from USB that works reliably and conveniently. IIRC EasyBCD will do that as well if you have a Vista or 7 install.

Still use DVDs...

[Zakabog]

I had a MacBook Pro and used the DVD drive sometimes to install store bought software, like Aperture, Final Cut Express, Adobe Master Collection CS 5, OS X Snow Leopard.

It was really handy having CDs since I had a photography job where the clients wanted to see photos. My laptop was being repaired so I just brought my girlfriends, installed the software on site and had no problems at all. I don't like the app store for distribution (I don't have a credit card and I can't even download free apps without one since the 'None' payment option is gone for new accounts) and even with it, if I have no internet the app store is useless. Thumb drives are a nice distribution method but most of my software still comes on CDs/DVDs. Until they change that (and not with internet stores, I mean thumb drive media) I still like having a laptop with a built in optical media reader.

Read-only backup.

[couchslug]

No longer fashionable since you can store all your stuff in the cloud, but nice to have.

18 years for me... 1993, Toshiba Portege T3400

[neurocutie]

I've been using laptops sans floppy or optical drivers for 18 years +/-. If memory serves, it dates back to the FIRST TFT active matrix laptops. Toshiba was a leader in "subnotebooks" and came out with the magic combination that would carry through to today: active matrix LCD screens and lithium batteries, the T3400, T3600, T610 and T620. These were 3-4lb subnotebooks without either floppy or CD drives. Prior to these models, everyone was using PASSIVE matrix screens (ugh) and NiMH batteries (double ugh).

So nothing new about running around without optical drives. Whenever I need to load software via CDROM, just use the network and a shared optical drive from a PC, etc....

I went from burning hundreds to almost zip

[TheRealQuestor]

Over the last year or so with the prices of USB sticks coming down so much and most PC's being able to boot from said sticks I RARELY burn anymore. Iso mounting, Iso Extracting. Or pushing it to a usb is all I pretty much need any more. Not to mention for 4 bucks I can put 3 CD's or pretty much 1 dvd and re-write it over and over and over at a much faster clip then burning. Having a killer network WDS Server doesn't hurt either as I've put every OS that I need to install on my WDS server and now I RARELY need to boot to a usb key anymore either. [still haven't figured out wireless remote boot but hey] It does all my *nix installs and all my windows installs and was worth every penny. I can't imagine NOT having a deployment server. All tech is supplanted eventually by whatever is more convienent and cheaper.

Blueray Marked the End of the Disc

[NicknamesAreStupid]

Sony did a great job of winning the battle between blueray and HD-DVD, but lost the war. With the mandatory DRM, high cost of media (especially rewritable), and "wait till we cover our costs" business model for the next generation, the polycarbonate disc has now lost out to flash memory and streaming media the same way that iLink (a.k.a. Firewire or IEEE1394) lost to USB, HDMI, and Ethernet. DVD still dominates because of those blueray constraints, but DVD's limited capacity is starting to squeeze it out just as it happened for the floppy disc.

P.S. I know it is not spelled 'blueray' but didn't want to get a trademark notice from Sony for using it in this post.

USB optical drive

[cryptoluddite]

Just get a USB optical drive. They use two USB ports to legitimately get enough power, although you can usually just use one plug. They're basically just a laptop optical drive in a box and work just fine for almost everything, even installing an OS from scratch usually works. And you don't need to have it inside the computer for the 99% of the time you don't need it.

Still need one.

[DaveGod]

Optical drives are one of those things that people need very rarely, but that's not the same as never.

Sure I could probably make do with a single optical drive in the entire home. At work, we could probably share one external unit between 50 people. I'd view an optical drive in a laptop as a negative - wasted space and weight.

But no optical drive at all?

Portable optical drive for servers

[Culture20]

Portable optical drives are incredibly useful for servers, especially the 2U ones that are packed with 12 HDD bays where there's no room for any optical bays, or the 1U ones when you're cheap enough to go without (some vendors charge a lot for a simple DVD-ROM drive).

Second battery slot

[Hadlock]

I told my mac-fan buddy I might buy a laptop, his response was, "you HAVE to buy a macbook"
 
My response was, "did they add in that feature that lets you swap out the optical drive for a second battery yet?"
 
He was not amused.
 
Seriously though; even with slimline optical drives, they take up an absurd amount of space in laptops, add more weight than a li-ion battery, and generally aren't useful. At least make them removable, with the option for a second battery.

Re:Second battery slot

[PCM2]

I have an HP laptop that came with a built-in optical drive (you can't swap it out), and I'm not kidding you, with the screen brightness turned down, the stock battery gives me around 7.5 hours running time, with WiFi enabled. Long gone are the days when you had to lug around a couple extra pounds worth of pluggable drives and extra batteries. The whole kit n' kaboodle weighs 4.4 lbs -- heavier than a MacBook Air, to be sure, but lighter than a lot of women's purses.

Re:Second battery slot

[Hadlock]

I get about 5 hrs on my netbook, which isn't bad, but I wouldn't mind being able to leave the charger at home. I think 12 hours (real world) is the sweet spot for battery life. Enough time to use the laptop at 50% brightness + wifi while sitting in the airport, in flight, 2-3 hours on your trip, and then the trip home.
 
Actually most of my friends and family have netbooks these days, and they sort have standardized the power adapter for netbooks, so I have been able to mooch off of them when I am running low. 12 hours of battery life would be great though.
 
No idea what my netbook weighs - the heaviest laptop I have owned in the last decade was a 2001 Powerbook G4 Ti @ ~5 lbs. The era of clunky heavy laptops ended in 2004 or so (unless you're the type who includes "desktop replacement" in their regular vocabulary). Li-Ion batteries are so damn light that they don't really factor in to the weight of the computer anyways.

Re:My harddisk is smaller than your 200 CDs.

[thegarbz]

I'm sorry but that's just plain wrong. If you're travelling with a high resolution camera the LAST thing you want is to backup to optical drive. You're typical CF card is 16 or 32 GB, many people travel with multiple cards.

So am I going to go home at the end of each day of my holiday and sit down for an hour or two and burn 8 or 16 DVDs? Hell no. Not when I can just plug in my usb HDD to the laptop click copy and then disappear downstairs for a meal instead.

My last holiday generated 400MB of images. My USB harddisk is thinner than 5 DVDs, It's lighter than 15 DVDs, There's no way I'm going to be dragging 100 of the things on my holiday. Not to mention that it is far less likely to cause problems by some customs agent wondering what I'm doing returning from Thailand with what looks like 100 bootlegged movies.

Somebody make money with this idea!

[wisebabo]

Build a standalone DVD drive with a USB/Memorycard slot.

When the user pops in a DVD-ROM, the drive copies an image of the disk onto the memory card. When the memory card is popped into a computer, an exact copy of the disk shows up!

Of course this would have problems with copy protected media but for software installs it could be useful. Most importantly it is simple enough that your grandmother could use it.

Re:Somebody make money with this idea!

[seandiggity]

Build a standalone DVD drive with a USB/Memorycard slot.

When the user pops in a DVD-ROM, the drive copies an image of the disk onto the memory card. When the memory card is popped into a computer, an exact copy of the disk shows up!

Of course this would have problems with copy protected media but for software installs it could be useful. Most importantly it is simple enough that your grandmother could use it.

Unfortunately, the problems with this go beyond just DRM. CDs and DVDs have been around for a long time, during some very turbulent decades in computer history, and have seen all kinds of format changes and shifts in technology. Even cloning an exact copy of a CD or DVD to disk can be difficult, let alone taking a bootable CD/DVD and creating a bootable USB thumb drive from it. On linux distros we have all sorts of tools to deal with this kind of thing, so I guess you could just try to make a slim distro that dealt with most popular use-case scenarios and embed it on a device...however, I would assume such a gadget would be a customer service headache, and I can't imagine it being very profitable.

Re:Somebody make money with this idea!

[Anubis IV]

Said exactly what I was thinking, far better than I would have said it.

Re:Somebody make money with this idea!

[jimicus]

The problem with any idea like this is that tooling up a factory for mass production and R&D are both fantastically expensive. So much so that you need to sell units in enormous quantities to make it back.

The product is inevitably going to cost more than a USB DVD drive and appeal to a much smaller number of people.

Optical drives are WORSE for novices

[SuperKendall]

Optical drives are useless for professionals who know what they are doing, but for computer novices optical drives are still a necessity.

I think this is totally backwards.

Novices have a LOT of trouble burning non-music CD's. But what they also have trouble with ironically is handling optical discs with any degree of care.

Over the past few years I sent out CD's to a few people that wanted some files. Every time, something happened that meant basically they got no files (sometimes in fairness it was the post office at fault).

In the end I just send USB sticks now. Yes they are a little more expensive than a CD, but they work every time. They pretty much cannot be damaged in transit my any regular forces.

The CD has been dead for years, people are just waking to that now...

Re:Optical drives are WORSE for novices

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Novices have a LOT of trouble burning non-music CD's.

Novices have a lot of trouble burning music CD's. Not closing the disc is but one of the problems. Frequently the problem is burning it as a data CD. You know, 18 MP3 files in ISO9660 format.

Some can't understand the concept of an MP3-CD, a data CD with 100MP3s on it, and a portable or automotive player that can read it.

Re:Optical drives are WORSE for novices

[PitaBred]

And those are still a pain in the ass. An audio adapter of some sort to your music player or phone is much handier, and removes another device from the chain. I personally just use Bluetooth A2DP to my car stereo, which removes yet another cable.

Re:Optical drives are WORSE for novices

[tepples]

An audio adapter of some sort to your music player or phone is much handier

Unless your car stereo is a CD player + radio with no cassette and no line-in and no Bluetooth, as one might get on a low-end used car. At that point, you have to get a Jupiter Jack, audio quality be damned.

How do app packages get onto USB flash?

[tepples]

OS install = net boot or USB flash.

Please see my other comment.

Application installs = USB flash.

But how does the program get onto the USB flash in the first place? USB flash is not a cost-effective medium for distributing works to the public. It costs a lot more to buy a blank USB flash drive than to buy a blank DVD-R or DVD+R, and once you get into the thousands, stamped DVDs become even cheaper than that.

Use vs. carry

[tepples]

Sorry. Your "external USB burner" is still an optical drive.

I am aware of that. Though one still needs to use an optical drive with a laptop, one rarely needs to carry an optical drive with a laptop.

Not Necessary?

[Fnord666]

It's not that the optical drive is no longer a necessary piece of kit at all and that the medium has gone the way of the dodo. It's that it is no longer a necessary piece of hardware for a computer that is intended to be portable. They add weight to the machine, take up valuable internal space, add complexity, and are rarely used. As a Write Once Read Many storage media, DVDs still have valid uses. I just don't think that those uses justify the "expense" for most consumers. If you think you need one, consider buying an external drive. Just don't buy it until you actually need it. I'm betting you won't ever have to purchase it.

Still in the wagon

[jones_supa]

Why must it be all the time so heavily rationalized that optical media is a thing of past? For starters, I'm not sure if flash memory is a proper archival medium at all. There's one use for optical discs already. I also like to play stuff straight off CD/DVD and not waste my time in stupid converting/encoding. They are also nice stable formats unlike your video codec or memory card type of the day.

What I consider as a smart idea though is that you have a single (or more if you need) USB drive and use it across all computers. There's usually not a need for it to sit inside the computer all the time.

Re:Still in the wagon

[jones_supa]

I actually now crafted a list of some points of danger related to long-term archiving data on flash chips, which you might want to think about.

• Prone to ESD
• There is a risk that the data might get tampered when attached to computer
• The long-term integrity of flash cells is uncertain
• Plethora of different memory cards make it hard to know for which there will be readers available in distant future
• USB sticks and some other devices (CompactFlash?) have the controller included which might add problems to the mix
• The devices are so small (which is also an advantage) that they are easy to lose

Some of these points apply also to HDDs and, with those there's the risk of mechanical damage. Then again, the data on optical discs might as well fade away, but I don't think it's that bad problem if you use quality media and store them appropriately. For "live" use I think flash is excellent, especially as we can replace the crappy-slow HDDs with SSDs.

The desktop is DEAD...LONG LIVE THE DESKTOP!!

[Psychofreak]

Well, really it matters little to me about the optical drive. In the last year I have used an optical drive once to read the CD which contains the service manual to my garden tractor...in PDF format...if I consult this manual more frequently I may just have to put the file on the laptop.

Phil

My desktop doesn't even have an optical drive....

[mynis01]

It has one 5400 rpm 2 TB drive with an xfs volume that I access once a month or so and a couple SSDs. Why waste power having all kinds of internal things installed that you never use.

Blu-Ray Anyone

[Physician]

I guess everyone out there is pleased with the video quality available from downloadable movies. I prefer to watch everything in Blu-Ray and refuse to download movies until such time as the quality exceeds Blu-Ray. Now, I understand in the case of Apple that none of their computers support Blu-Ray which is why I will stick with a Windows machine.

No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

I try not to buy things that don't come on disk. Old habits die hard, but I can't keep myself from thinking about wanting to play some game 10 or 20 years from now, and wishing the company that made it hadn't gone under for whatever reason.

I still play Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft (and the Broodwars expansion), Quake2, Quake3Arena, and many other "old" games... and I have multiple disks of a couple of them, for retro-gaming LAN parties. I won't buy StarCraft II because I can't be sure it will work next week, next year, or a decade from now - who's to say Blizzard will still be around (and won't have deactivated the activation server)?

Installation from physical media, without a requirement for an internet connection at any step of the process... it makes me happy to know that I can play these 10 and 15 year old games without worrying about whether the companies that produced them will go under.

As another example, how will we (legally) install Windows, when Microsoft shuts down the activation server for the unsupported version?
There's still nothing "wrong" with XP, despite the Vista/Win7/Win8 hype.

I have a huge collection of DVD/VHS movies, despite having digital versions of almost all of them (I'm still in the process of format-shifting them). Physical media says I never have to contact an "activation server" to "acquire and authenticate" media that I already paid for, even if my home file server dies in a fire, flood, or other major disaster (yes, many of my physical copies of my movies are stored offsite).

Another (possibly irrelevant) example: I have iso images of Linux operating systems dating all the way back to 1996, "just in case". I also have images of my Windows install media through the years. Yeah, I collect some weird data. I've just gotten into the habit, over the years, of making backups of everything.

My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[igb]

My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.

I've got some data on a reel-to-reel tape written on a Pr1me, and another from Multics. I've got some data written on QIC-11 on a long-obsolete low-volume Unix box. I've got some punch tape. All of these things might be readable in extreme circumstances (although I think the Multics data would be extremely challenging, what with 9-bit bytes and all) but for practical purposes they're dead.

On the other hand, I've copied my home directory from system to system for the past twenty-five years. I've got files with Unix time stamps in the mid 1980s (including, usefully, a Kermit'd copy of most of the data from the Multics system).

Data you want to keep needs to be on current systems, with current backups. Outside a narrow time window, older media isn't readable without extreme measures

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[Little Brickout]

In order to use your 20 year old software, you have just obligated yourself to maintain 20 year old storage peripherals. Congrats on your new hobby.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[BrokenHalo]

Heh. The tape drives in the Proneme machines I worked with were notoriously unreliable, so I took the first opportunity to siphon my files off to other formats. My first machine (or rather my employer's) was a Burroughs B3700 back in the late '70s, and I still have FORTRAN, assembly and COBOL source code (plus a few now-useless binaries) dating from then.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[thsths]

> Outside a narrow time window, older media isn't readable without extreme measures.

That used to be the case, but the PC changed the game completely. You can get a box that is a few years old, connect a 5 1/4" drive (I saw one just recently), and it should still be able to the read the disks of the original IBM PC. You will struggle with some of the early MFM hard disks the XT used, but even modern motherboards still come with the AT connector. Once your data is on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM you should be fine for decades to come.

Now I am not saying that media will always last that long. Especially floppy disks are hit or miss after a few years, and optical media degrade, too. But the issue of format incompatibilities is much less several than it used to be, since standards and "de facto" "standards" have revolutionised (commoditised?) the IT industry.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[rapidreload]

I've had the same nagging feeling over my use of Steam - will it work in 10-20 years from now, or will Valve have closed down and terminated the servers? Since it's such a nagging feeling it's kinda ruined my interest for a while in purchasing more games on Steam, but recently I've managed to resolve this to my satisfaction with a little logic:

1. Gabe Newell (owner of Valve/Steam) has publicly stated that if (God-forbid) the time comes to close down Valve, there will be a patch released to allow Steam clients to launch without requiring a connection to the authentication servers, basically making them standalone launchers. This claim has been repeated elsewhere by fanboys and continues to be stated if someone raises this issue, and given this isn't a legally-binding promise I have no real faith in it being executed should the worst happens, but it's at least some sort of acknowledgement.

2. All games on Steam that are not MMORPGs (and hence wouldn't benefit from being standalone anyway) have a crack floating around on the Internet, as the DRM for Steam was defeated ages ago. Should it be necessary, I would just have to acquire all the cracks for my purchased games and it would end the problem entirely. This would be made easier since if Valve did go down, a LOT of people would be wanting these cracks, and so an unofficial repository on TPB or whatever would inevitably appear.

3. Would I even want to play such games in the future? I can't stand playing DOOM/Quake/Quake 2/old adventure games anymore. Even with source ports of their engines to incorporate modern effects and features, often enough the gameplay has aged far too much. Not that the Call of Duty crap is any better, but I prefer games with more depth like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which incidentally has a working, patched crack which I tested recently anyway). Besides, some old games are just too ugly to have much fun with once your standards for graphics quality has been risen to modern standards. Doesn't mean I'm a graphics whole, but pixelated DOS games are only really good for nostalgia in most cases.

4. The nature of scale means a HUGE number of people would be affected by Steam being disconnected. It stands to reason a solution to help everyone continue to run the games they purchased would naturally result from such a size of affected people. Community-based solutions from some smart gamers who are also programmers can result in wonderful things.

Oh, and by the way - who cares about installing Windows "legally" if the activation servers go down for an old version? If you're already paid for it, you shouldn't feel bad about obtaining an activation crack to continue to use the software you bought. There's nothing wrong about empowering yourself in such a situation.

tl;dr - if software requires activation, a solution that allows you to still run the software if the server is down has likely already been found, or if it affects enough people, will be found.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[real-modo]

I had 52 three-and-a-half inch floppies in a box. Five years after storing them, I got them out to look for something (the manifest was incomplete). Six of them worked. I don't have them any more.

I have a friend with a collection of Zip disks. They're in an unknown state, because no-one we know has a reader.

If you think that CDs or DVDs burnt on a consumer-grade burner are going to last more than three years - well, you _might_ be lucky. I wasn't.

Merely possessing the media isn't enough. You have to devote time to curating your collection - checking that the media still work, making fresh copies every couple of years, and migrating to newer (less obsolescent) physical media. Once you've built up enough data, it's just easier and quicker to do this when everything is stored on hard disks.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

Punch cards are still readable - admittedly with a third party service (unless you've got a punched card reader in a disused basement somewhere) - for example, this site offers the service.

CD-ROM data is currently readable, and has been for 20 years or so. I still have my old Return to Zork CD (Surprisingly enough, I still occasionally whip it out and toss it in DOSBox for some retro gaming fun - yeah, I'm a weird geek, probably even a dork).

BluRay is a recent development in storage media, and the drives for PCs are only now getting inexpensive enough to call "consumer grade" devices. Those drives are backwards-compatible from BluRay through DVD to CD. I don't see that changing in the very near future.

Admittedly, at some point I'll notice that I need to rip iso images of all my optical media... but you can still buy brand-new VHS players at the big-box stores, so I'm not too concerned about having the rug yanked out from under me.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

The optical disc was invented in 1958. Admittedly, CDROM is only 20 or so years old, but BluRay drives are backwards-compatible for DVD and CD media. My "20 year old storage peripheral" may have been manufactured last month.

Got any other half-baked ad-hominem attacks, today?

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

If you think that CDs or DVDs burnt on a consumer-grade burner are going to last more than three years - well, you _might_ be lucky. I wasn't.

Technically speaking, the ink/dye used in "burned" media should last 7-10 years. It often doesn't, because most people don't keep their burned media in a cool dark place, undisturbed by vibration.

Pressed discs, on the other hand, have an unknown lifespan; if cared for properly they could conceivably last long after you stop breathing. Most commercial media is pressed. My 15-20 year old games certainly are, and still work perfectly when I dust them off and lovingly place them in my drive for a bit of nostalgia.

Return to Zork lists a 2x CDROM as part of its system requirements. It was released in 1993. I still have it, and play it for a couple hours every couple years, just because I find it again while digging for something or other in my media storage area. I should probably burn an iso of it, to avoid having to find the physical media each time I think about playing it... but half the fun of playing it is coming across it while looking for something else, and popping it in later that day because I set it on my desk in case I had time.

"Want some rye? 'Course ya do!" (the plant's not the only thing that's potted!)

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

... and would they do that for all their current software if they suddenly went out of business for some reason?

There's no reason to believe they would be that nice, and plenty of reasons to think that the first thing they'd do is pull the plug on the webserver farm, then go fire all the programmers - money has a nasty habit of making people into real jerks.

Re:No Substitute for Physical Media

[znerk]

1: "not legally-binding". That pretty much sums it up.
2: I shouldn't have to break the law to play a game I legally purchased.
3: I still play games that are nearly 20 years old. I'm not saying I'm normal, or that this behavior is anywhere near "prevalent", but it is a fact.
4: So you're saying that a large number of people would need to break the law? See #2.
Oh, and by the way - If you are any kind of serious about certifications, ethics, or legalities, then you don't do things that can land you in court (nevermind jail). There is a provision in the DMCA for software interoperability, but I wouldn't want to be the test-case for "cracking" XP's activation once the servers go down (for example).

tl;dr - Technical possibility, with or without ubiquity of method, does not indicate legality. See "P2P Piracy", "mp3 controversy", and/or "Jammie Thomas". I'll ignore the many ethical concerns associated with this topic at this time.

Sooner than expected, but about time...

[CAIMLAS]

It seems like only yesterday, still, that floppy drives stopped shipping with desktops. Time flies - that was what, 5-8 years ago?

Truth be told, I've not build a machine for myself with either a floppy drive or CD/DVD drive in some time, aside from my main workstation. There are really only a handful of times I've needed one, and I suspect I'm somewhat the exception in how frequently it's needed (as I work in IT, and have done entirely too much "home PC repair").

* burning OS install media
* copying the rare movie I purchase
* playing rented DVDs
* reading some vendor's supplied media (due to the nature of where I work, many distributions still come on manually burned, Sharpie-labeled media).

And, that's it. If I didn't work in IT, I suspect I'd not even have a working optical drive in the house. (The last time I had to use an optical drive, both the one in my system didn't work, and the spare I had - which was IDE - didn't work. So I took about 5 minutes to set up the environment and booted off the network like I do with everything else, instead.)

My wife's laptop has a DVD drive, which we use regularly to watch movies (both for us and the kids). This is very useful, because Netflix doesn't ship USB flash drives. :D

These days, DVD burner drives are a dime a dozen. I suspect most of the cost is due to material cost alone. They're cheaper than a commodity, really, and probably aren't long for this world as a common or easily acquirable device, what with the cost of USB flash drives continually dropping. With the ubiquitous network, I suspect we'll likely see "install media" go away outright, at some point relatively soon.

Provided the computer is new enough

[tepples]

Windows 7 can be purchased on a USB drive

Provided the computer is new enough to be able to run Windows 7 or to boot from USB. In a household with an early-XP-era PC and a netbook, one might have to whip out the netbook and external burner to make a reinstall disc for the old computer.

While MS Server 2008 can be installed via USB or an ISO file I would imagine that servers will still have an optical drive.

Server configurations of the Mac mini shed the optical drive before desktop configurations did.

USB key storage is more work than it looks

[UnoriginalBoringNick]

I have a handful of USB keys that I am prepared to plug into someone else's machine, but they are all formatted with two partitions, a linux boot partition and an EXT2 data partition. Last time I checked, Windows couldn't see the second partition of a USB key and by design couldn't read an EXT2 partition, so if the machine accidently boots from Windows my data partition should safe from Windows malware and I have automated the re-formatting of the linux partition which is necessarily formatted as FAT

Needless to say that I only plug my keys into a strange machine that has been switched off and ensure that the machine boots from my key.

I spent several days of trial and error tuning my USB key formatting routines to work out what slightly non-standard format was necessary to boot a particular vendor's notebook and I dread finding a different vendor who will require me to do the same research in future.

On a much more pragmatic level USB keys are great if you can fit ALL your data on them. Once your data is spread among many keys, some of which are physically identical you really miss the large flat surface of a DVD onto which you can write a summary of its contents.

Each to his/her own

[LongearedBat]

I might not need my optical drive often, but it's good to know it's there when I need it.

On a recent trip interstate I brought along my father's MacBook Air. I couldn't rip my friends' CD's 'cos I didn't bother bringing the "dead weight" external drive.

My girlfriend uses her laptop as a portable DVD player. Easier to manage when it's all in one piece.

My point is that some people prefer having in-built optical drives, for practical reasons. Other people prefer not to, for practical reasons.

As long as both options are available, then each to his/her own.

Not in laptops/SFF

[itsdapead]

If no one used this stuff then why are they still being sold?

Its not a case of "who uses this stuff?" its a case of "who uses it so often that they need one permanently bolted into their laptop or small form-factor system?".

I'll need a CD/DVD drive for the foreseeable future, but like hell do I need to lug one around with me every day. Also, I've found the slim-line CD players used in laptop/SFFs to be one of the most common points of failure (most of mine have packed up or ceased writing DVDs after a year or so - both in PCs and Macs). An external USB CD/DVD/RW drive costs peanuts (no need to buy the expensive Apple one) and can live in a nice dust-free cupboard apart from the occasional times it is needed - and if it does get borked I don't have to perform warranty-breaking surgery on my laptop.

I still occasionally play "real" CDs on my home hi-fi and watch "real" DVDs and Blu-Rays on my home TV - but the only reason I ever stick one into my computer is to rip it for use "on the move". Software on CD/DVD is just as likely to be DRM-encumbered as downloads (I've got several old games on CD that are useless because the copy protection is incompatible with modern systems) - often more restrictively than, say, Steam/App Store which let you run software you purchase on multiple machines.

Don't fret, just as you can still buy floppy drives if you need them, you'll be able to buy optical drives for your tower systems and external enclosures for a long time yet.

What is the proper pejorative word that's the opposite of Luddite? I'm tired of those gadget freaks who think the world revolves and them and the latest thing they bought.

Latest!? I've been using MP3s for any non-lounge-based listening for about 10 years, downloading software more often than getting CDs for at least 5 years and using CD/DVD for file exchange less and less for 2-3 years - partly because the half-life of a laptop optical drive seems to be about 6 months anyway, and with the emergence of services like DropBox (or good ol' ftp servers) for exchanging files too big to email. We're now talking about optical drives being optional for the next generation of ultra-portable laptops. Get some perspective.

Re:Not in laptops/SFF

[petermgreen]

We're now talking about optical drives being optional for the next generation of ultra-portable laptops.

Truly ultra-portable laptops have never had internal optical drives. They didn't have internal floppy drives either. When you are trying to shave off every last bit of volume and weight off a machine removable media drives are one of the first things to go. Some did ship with external optical drives largely because it's only fairly recently that there has been a standard way of making external bootable optical drives*

What has happened is

1:after being a small niche for many years ultraportables are starting to become more mainstream as people realise they no longer need to carry a big heavy laptop around.
2:apple has started pushing the macbook air which is thin and light but not particularly small (originally 13 inch, now also comes in 11 inch, rumours say it may later come in 15 inch). As always everyone is trying to copy apple**

* which means USB to IDE/SATA chips that BIOSes know how to talk to.
** of course copying apple doesn't guarantee copying apple's success, look at the lukewarm reception to andriod tables for example.

Activation limits

[tepples]

Discs also give me something to trade or pass off to friends

Even when PC games have activation limits and even console games have DLC and multiplayer activation limits?

Re:Activation limits

[MikeBabcock]

I own four bookshelf shelves of video games. I regularly have people I know drop off a game I haven't played, or loan out a game they haven't. Sometimes they're recent, more often they're not.

If you decide you want to play online, the $10 online multiplayer cost is still much cheaper than even the $40 or $20 discount version of the game at the store, so yes, even then.

I stopped playing PC games when my console started giving me a better overall experience while sitting on my couch playing on a big screen.

Re:Activation limits

[tepples]

I stopped playing PC games when my console started giving me a better overall experience while sitting on my couch playing on a big screen.

So what do you do when you hear about an indie game from a developer not yet big enough to attract the attention of Sony or Nintendo?

Re:Activation limits

[MikeBabcock]

I point out that Sony takes in indies all the time and that if you think you're too small you're just not trying because they're perfectly willing to work with you.

The factories will be rebuilt

[tepples]

Factories making parts for hard drives will be either fixed up or rebuilt in less flood-prone areas. Once those come back online, prices will slowly fall again.

Re:The factories will be rebuilt

[BrokenHalo]

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I was under the impression that the Chinese had nobbled most of the world's supplies of the lanthanides used for those cool magnets in disk drives. I would have thought that might be a tougher one to crack.

Re:The factories will be rebuilt

[tepples]

Some parts are made only in the PRC; others are made only in Thailand. Shortages of the parts made only in Thailand drove up hard disk drive prices.

Costs

[DrYak]

Costs are the real limit.

Currently, a game box is only a soft plastic case, a pressed DVD, a nice paper cover outside the case, and a small leaflet with the serial number inside. That's it.
I'll be surprised if more than €1 goes for the packaging cost.

Using a piece of electonics instead of the pressed optical media, specially if the electronic isn't a standard piece of equipment (memory card) but must contain some custom part (a cheap micro-chip), would dramatically increase the costs and logistics. *it could even cost more than €3 per package! Oh my god!!!*

Companies prefer moving the extra chip on the cloud and use internet-based DRM activation.

Price

[zigfreed]

it is still cheaper to burn a $0.10 - $0.17 CD, $0.20 - $0.32 DVD+R or a $0.75 DVD+RW than it is to trade a flash drive or flash card at $1/GB. Even at 5.8MB/s (4x DVD+RW) it's faster than the cheapest Class 2 SD card on newegg.

Re:400GB

[thegarbz]

Because being an order of magnitude off in my example really helped my case ....

Can't be ABX'd

[tepples]

Keep in mind that the Nyquist Sampling Theorem only strictly applies to perfectly periodic signals.

Put the CD on repeat and then tell me how periodic a CD signal can be ;-) But seriously, that's why there's a 2 kHz buffer between 20 kHz, the design spec for CD, and 22.05 kHz, the Nyquist limit, so that the filter has a chance to roll off.

Second many people can hear frequencies somewhat above 20Khz.

Perhaps most of these "many people" are too young to work lawfully and therefore too young to buy CDs with their own money. By the time I got into college, my ability to hear pure tones over 17 kHz had already gone away.

Third, the ear does not strictly separate audio by frequency

In either the second or third case, you'd be able to ABX it, and as you point out, experts can't most of the time.

But CD audio is sill lossy relative to recording masters

Agreed. It's just that in most home use cases, the loss of CD is acceptable, and in most mobile use cases, the loss of MP3 and M4A is acceptable.

Unavailable for seven months

[tepples]

I admit that I was extrapolating from Nintendo's qualifications document (on warioworld.com) because I couldn't find any qualifications document on Sony's web site. This Sony press release mentions a web site that has been unavailable for over seven months.

Re:Unavailable for seven months

[MikeBabcock]

Nintendo is notorious for being very anal about who they allow to be licensees.

Sony on the other hand has the Minis program, as well as having on several occasions helped small studios publish games on the system that would best be qualified as niche or strange. I'm including Flow and Flower, the strange guitar music shooting game whose name I can never remember, and that art house project that everyone played through just for the trophies.

(I'm not leaving out Microsoft on purpose; I'm just not as familiar with their programs although I'm certain they're easier to access than Nintendo)