I've bought an iAudio XL5 with 30 GB HDD, USB Host (!), video screen and all that. Ok, it doesn't index ID3 tags and doesn't offer genre- or artist-based playlists like an iPod, but I can put on *whatever* data I want, and copy that data to *any* computer I like. Or cameras. Or USB sticks. Or whatever tickles my fancy. I'm very, very happy with it, specially since it delivers a whopping 40 hours (!) of battery life on one charge.
Now MD is one of the examples where Sony fails. Their Cameras are good, great even. They plug into anything, do drag & drop, have good build quality, etc. But their music-players all suck. Too much DRM, too proprietary, too much hassle. Besides, I was never impressed with the sound quality. The MD uses compression just like MP3 and OGG, but at the end of the day OGG wins the bout with MP3 at its heels. But still nothing beats the sound of a good CD player.
Having said that my MP3 player doesn't just offer me music on plane rides, I too use it to dump my camera's contents on, to share things with people and generally as a data transportation device. Which is something a MD player never will be. So you get 5 functions for the price of one, and I like the sound of that deal.
I couldn't agree more with this comment. Let's see.... Currently more than 6.400.000.000 people on the planet. Sligtly less than 300.000.000 in the USA. You do the math.
Frankly I get the feeling that if the US went into "splendid isolation" (where did I hear that fail before?), the rest of us (6.100.000.000 people) would be doing AOK without all of y'all, while you couldn't even get your hands on a pair of Nike shoes anymore (made in China, remember?)
Frankly I think it's about time the Americans too realised that alone, they are insignificant. Just like the rest of us.
> Wabbachucha don't go to the bother of flying to the mainland to get their kids vaccinated when their has never been a single reported > case of measles on the island
This is exactly how many natives of small islands around the world got killed. During the 17th and 18th century, the world (ie European colonists) came crashing into these places, and lo and behold all of a sudden the biggest threat to the island is something as stupid as the flu. It's how the Dodo got extinct, it's exactly why his analogy is not flawed.
Your analogy proved his point. All you need to do is open a history book.
Hey man, we obviously work for different customers.
All the ones I've done consulting for here in Sweden have a SW protection period of 2 weeks on their backups with the exception of off-site monthly copies that have 4 weeks. After that they all replace their backups.
Current customer has clustered OPC superdomes that are linked to a SAN with a bunch of XP-512's for storage and a couple of tape robots for their non-archival backups. The XP's are the vessel for the data in years to come while backups just exist for what-if scenarios and, as you so correctly pointed out, for the paranoid backups before maintenance stops.
Common practice where I'm from. Then the question is... Where do you work ? I'm curious.
If that's what you want to believe, that's alright. It's not what my trainers throughout the years have taught me, and it's exactly the kind of expectation that got me numerous aggravated customers on the phone.
You go ahead and archive your stuff on DLT for 30 years, son. Don't come crying on my shoulder when you can't restore your pictures of that last barbeque with your dad.;-)
And by the way, it may be that the superdlt will read dltIV formats, sure enough. But how large a part of the equasion is that really?
Not with a DLT 70/80. The DLT 70/80 (at least the ones HP OEMed from Quantum) had adaptable read/write heads that could align themselves to the tape. Partially this was necessary due to the head layout.
DLT 70/80 uses a particular layout of read/writeheads on the tape, and the head needs to be tilted in order to accomodate for DLT 30/40 read/write compatibility. A really, really cool mech though.
Bottom line is that newer DLTs don't suffer from that particular problem.
Unless you're talking DDS drives. With DDS, the head alignment mechanism allows for a situation to arise where you write something to tape with one particular drive that's seen the best of its days, and which you then cannot read back with any other drive.
The gentleman/lady who so catagorically replied to your message saying that tapes are crap really probably hasn't got his/her backup strategies together, though.... Tape will work, specially if you're talking DLT or LTO.
As an addition, High-quality "golden" media last slightly longer than their blue and green counterparts. Silver CD-ROMS (original, non-burnt) are surprisingly only supposed to have a shelf life of 5 years.
CD-RW are supposed to have a shelf life of 30 years, as do MO-media. Provided you store 'm in a cool dry place. Which the Travelling Wilbury's wrote the following song about:
Well I woke up this morning The place was such a wreck I couldn't reach the bathroom Thought I'd better clear the deck I tried to call the lawyer And ask him what to do He referred me to his doctor Who referred me back to you And when you checked the manual You kept in side the case It said put it in a cool dry place
I drove around the city Looking for a room That was high above the water Where my things could be in tune There was noone to help me Nobody even cared I had to got through hell To get those things up there I paid my first subscription Then I joined the idle race and they said "store it in a cool dry place"
I got guitar, basses, amplifiers and drums Accordions and Mandolis and things that sometimes hum Cymbals and Harmonicas, capos by the score And lots of things in boxes laying all around the floor
Some places they get milldew And others get too hot. Some places are so damp that Everything you got just rots All kinds of condensation Directories of the rain There's not much compensation When everything's been stained Some have sentimental value that Cannot be erased Go store it in a cool dry place
We got solids and acoustics And some from flowered board And some are trimmed in leather And some are made with gourds There's organs and trombones And reverbs we can use Lots of dx-7s And old athletic shoes I bought a great big building It took up one whole block I made an inventory Of all the things in stock The place was getting longer I was up all night I used up all my pencils But I went onto spite The blury of my vision The sweat upon my face I've got to put this stuff away I mustn't leave a trace The landlord's breathing down my neck He say's it's a disgrace So I said "put it in a cool, dry, place"
You wondered where I got the distinction from between backup and archival. I've been doodling with computers since I was eight years old, but more to the point I've been working for HP for the last 7 years. During the first five years of that time I did technical support for DDS/DLT/LTO/Magneto-Optical/QIC-tape and CD-R(W) amongst others.
That background has taught me the specific physical limitations of most of these media, as well as their intended use as seen by the engineers that made the products in the first place.
In the five years that I did phone support, my main problem was people that had been "in the business" for 12+ years and had never seen some of their misconceptions corrected, thus calling in with problems that occurred because of incorrect expectations with regards to the behaviour of the product. Some of these misconceptions are born out of overzealous sales-people promising the world while they don't know what they're talking about either, of course.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss your experience. All I'm saying is that it's a big, huge field of endeavour, this IT business, and one cannot possibly be an expert on everything.
I've been in the dicking-with-computers-business for 20 years now, if you count the ZX-81 that I got from my bro when I was 8, but I still know absolutely nothing. Except a thing or two on backup devices and pokes.
Yes, tape will rot. As will anything that is magnetic.
DDS tape has a guaranteed data retention period of 2 years, but then you may face head alignment problems if you replace the drive. DLT and LTO have data retention periods of 5 years approx. Head alignment problems don't form a problem because of the nature of the mechanism.
This is however not the point. The point it that a harddrive is not an ARCHIVAL medium. Neither is tape. Harddrives are the work horses for on-line data and tape is meant as a BACKUP. Backup meaning a copy for safe-keeping under a very limited time (ie next week, when tuesdays tape is run again, or... well, you get the point... ).
CD's (CD-R(W)) offer a theoretical data retention span of 20-100 years depending on who you ask. So that is safer, but still not perfect.
A Service Level Agreement with a maintenance company would do the trick too, but is expensive.
But why archive? Doesn't an automated backup to a tape robot with a weekly rolling schedule combined with a RAID 1/5 solution for your single disk failures satisfy your needs? What is so damn important that you need Off-Site ARCHIVAL rather than off-site backups?
With the falling prices of both tape and disk cost per megabyte, it's affordable to keep all relevant data on the drives of the server and then do backup to tape if needed.
The red light district is one of the cooles areas in town. De Waag Society is located in De Waag, an old (15/16th century) building that's situated between the UVA (universiteit van amsterdam), the red light district and chinatown (if you can call it that). It's a wonderful area with great pubs (amongst which Café de Jaren, de Sluyswacht, De Waag, Drama-café) and the Waterloo market with the Stopera within a couple of hundreds of yards from each other.
All these clueless lusers populating internet has made it a pr0n haven, spam hell, security risk and information liability. The Geeks ought to take it back.;-)
As for me, my foot is receiving urgent messages from my brain: "Please insert me briskly and repeatedly up Anonymous Coward's bottom!"
Right. There is Reed solomon on the disc. Sure. Very very rudimentary Partity checking mechanism. Again, the lack of EDC and ECC schemes that I was referring to was, again, the added and more complex layers of ECC and EDC that are present in the yellow and orange books. And it's these ECC/EDC schemes that folks always believe that are "more flawed here than there".
Which brings us to the copy protection scheme. Which one are you referring to? I'm only aware of the one you can disable by use of a marker, that doesn't mess with the individual frames (otherwise it stands to reason that marking out a session won't make your other frames copyable all of a sudden) at all.
Explain?
But the other properties of the disc and it's readers are probably just as large a factor in the no-hiccup-playback of your audio. (placement of the reflective layer, lasers reading the discs, firmware/software that interprets what it gets from a CDDA disc....)
Right, OK. You want nitty gritty. When adressing a public, always bear in mind what they need and want to know. CD-ROMs, mixed mode discs and so forth have a whole array of EDC and ECC coding included in there that the Red book standard doesn't. Reed-Solomon is a very, very rudimentary form of parity checking, and I meant the EDC/ECC schemes referred to in the other standards. But OK, you're right... The Public is seldom homogenous. Added a quick rundown below.
Red Book - CD Audio -Defined by Philips and Sony in 1980 and published in a red binder, hence Red Book. -Standard needed so a CD made by any manufacturer can be read by any CD player. -Physical Block Structure, 75 blocks are read per second, each block divided into 98 24 byte frames. -Frames are encoded using EFM (Eight to Fourteen Modulation), CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed Solomon Code) codes are inserted for error detection and correction.
Yellow Book Standard -Sony and Philips found that error rates on audio CDs were low, decided to use them for computer data. -1983 Yellow Standard for CD-ROM announced as an extension of the CD Audio standard. -An extra layer of error correction was added. Has 2 modes, mode 2 has less error correction and more data -"Mixed mode" disc has both audio and CD-ROM block structure on different tracks.
Green Book Standard -Announced in 1986 to help with synchronization of audio and data tracks. -CD-I (Compact Disc-Interactive) built on the CD-ROM mode 2 block structure and interleaves audio and data. Also has 2 modes, mode 1 with additional EDC/ECC codes, mode 2 without.
Orange Book Standard -Announced in 1990 to address the new recordable optical media and provide specifications for incremental writes. -Divided into 2 parts, Compact Disc-Magneto Optical (CD-MO) and Compact Disc-Write Once (CD-WO) -Covers Multi-session discs, such as the Kodak Photo CD.
CD DA does NOT (and I've said so throughout this thread in other posts) have any EDC and ECC mechanisms.
Yes, claims that protected discs and unprotected discs take different amounts of Beating is FUD.
The TOC on audio is read without the audio player looking for additional "Sessions" (mind that CD-DA is a SINGLE SESSION standard, and that "sessions" is something different than "tracks"). This is why regular Audio-track-first Mixed mode CD's work in your sony discman in the first place.
So it doesn't go out and try to read the second session. And it works, because the first session is a completely standard CD-DA session.
The Computers CD-Rom player (and your mom's SUV's player) has firmware and drivers (mostly firmware) that tell it that a disc can contain multiple sessions. This means that it will try and look for those. Then it will bump into the "corrupted" session (the lead-in for that being pasted AFTER the lead out for the CD-DA session) and bum out.
If you mark out that whole session on the outer edge, it won't find it and you can copy and use your disc as normal. Simple as that.
So basically Sony and BMG (the Evil Empire) spent countless MegaDollars on research that resulted in a broken mixed mode disc. How fucked up is that? They deserve bankrupcy for their stupidity.
Another thing is that the first lead-in and lead out that form a TOC on a CD take 25 Mb off the disc. Then, every added session takes 15-20 Mb of space in TOC information. This means if artists start cranking out 74-minute CD's, the record companies won't have space on the physical medium to actually copy protect it AND be able to play it in a normal audio player.
One scratch could already kill your disc. The red-book CD-DA standard DOES NOT provide ANY EDC or ECC data on the disc, merely RAW digitised audio.
Trust me.
On the other hand, the sampling rate of 44.1 Khz is twice the (healthy, über-standard) rate a human ear can discern (22,05 Khz) which means that in all those bits and bytes it doesn't really matter if one or two get flipped because your ear is not up to the task of hearing so. Hence the decision to not do EDC and ECC on CD-DA, which gives us 74/80 minutes of music on one disc.
Plus the physical construction of the disc with 65% of it's thickness on the transparent layer on the bottom before getting to the reflective layer that actually contains the info, your CD's can get quite nasty scratches before compromising the actual data layer. Many readers nowadays have phase-shifting lasers built into the head assembly in order to be able to deal with the different reflective properties of the various media types (Silver CD-DA disks, CD-R's and CD-RW's all have different light reflecting percentages and properties... ), which in turn makes them more flexible while reading discs with a slightly mangled transparent surface.
This means, in a nutshell, that the damage must be extensive before the unhearable bit gets flipped in the first place.
You can claim it's a CD-ROM player. But to my nowledge there's never been any manufacturer that made CD-ROM, RW, R or DVD-ROM, RW or R players that didn't have facilities in the firmware to handle CD-DA according to Philips' standard. I'm not even sure if Orange book standard players have any clauses that make it necessary for them to be red-book compatible as well... Hmmm. Need to brush up. It's been 4 years since I supported HP's CD-writers.;-)
The red book standard is as naked as it can be. Basically it provides for:
1) A TOC. Table of contents containing information on track start and stop time. Generally a lead-in and lead out apply, taking approximately 25 Mb space on the disc. The rest is reserved for the body of audio data.
2) Digital wave info. A 44.1 Khz stereo wave recorded digitally onto the CD's surface. This is done in a non-encoded (let's not get caught in the semantical discussion on digitising vs encoding, please... ) way. There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme. The CDDA red book standard is a butt-naked RAW audio data standard.
The Red-book standard technically does not allow for fancy schmancy stuff such as mixed-mode discs, multiple sessions (which is how mixed mode is made) and such.
Adherence To The Specification WILL mean that a CD will be playable in any CD-player that has been made since 1981. Period. This is a non debatable point.
When I was 22, I moved to Amsterdam from my home town because I wanted to shack up with a Swede I had met who had come to Amsterdam on the notion that she was sick of Sweden. Had a grand time, moved to Sweden 3 years later and am still here.
Been working at HP all my career, and generally liked doing things the way I did it. No peace corps, no bombs, no real risks.
One thing that I've seen as an alternative is to quit it all and just backpack my way around. Sure, the economy isn't doing so hot worldwide, but Ireland and the Netherlands still pose an OK target for the more or less geeky with a language skill. Lots of call-centres, tech firms and other stuff goin' on there. There's also an ever growing market for English teachers in Asia, so the choices are yours.
I agree to the posts that spoke against the peace corps. Fuck that. I don't want to tell my grandchildren I was in a war(zone). Wars are barbarism, and I don't want to be barbaric.
Besides, travelling through the military? Jeez... It's much cooler to pack your bags and go and explore a country/people/culture on your own. That's the way to learn.
In the two and a half years I live in Sweden I haven't sought contact with any Dutch living here. Why should I? I didn't move to another country to hang out with people from the old one... Had I wanted that, I could have stayed the hell home. Point being that if you join the peace corps, you'll be in a separated cell from the rest of the society you'll be sent to, hanging with Americans in your spare time, taking orders from Americans, etc etc etc, you get the drift.
So to cut a long story short: just do it. It can and has been done. I do think you should get out of the US. Just to see what other things there are in this world besides the good ol' US of A.
>What she wants on this issue is right. Period. >Your logic is not required
I do have a tendency to get out of relationships where the decision making process tends to be unilateral.
As long as there's TWO people that are getting married and TWO people having a baby or engaging themselves or whatever, there are to voices to be heard.
If my logic is not required, my counterpart can go find someone whose logic he/she DOES require. And I hope my partner thinks the same.
I never said that my belief was magic. I just said that my belief was based on a more intimate knowledge of minerals.
>That is the only salient point in this discussion
I have a hard time believing that too. His girlfriend may want the diamond with the information that she has right now, but one could alter her stance by:
1) Offering alternatives 2) Making known your views on the nasty world of diamond cartels 3.... ) etc etc. Basically one talks to her and informs her.
Saying that she wants one hence she needs one to me means that you view your girlfriend as an almost non-sentient being that is incapable of abstract thought. In my own girlfriends case this would be an insult.
Doesn't open and respectful communication make your partner happy?
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I've bought an iAudio XL5 with 30 GB HDD, USB Host (!), video screen and all that. Ok, it doesn't index ID3 tags and doesn't offer genre- or artist-based playlists like an iPod, but I can put on *whatever* data I want, and copy that data to *any* computer I like. Or cameras. Or USB sticks. Or whatever tickles my fancy. I'm very, very happy with it, specially since it delivers a whopping 40 hours (!) of battery life on one charge.
Now MD is one of the examples where Sony fails. Their Cameras are good, great even. They plug into anything, do drag & drop, have good build quality, etc. But their music-players all suck. Too much DRM, too proprietary, too much hassle. Besides, I was never impressed with the sound quality. The MD uses compression just like MP3 and OGG, but at the end of the day OGG wins the bout with MP3 at its heels. But still nothing beats the sound of a good CD player.
Having said that my MP3 player doesn't just offer me music on plane rides, I too use it to dump my camera's contents on, to share things with people and generally as a data transportation device. Which is something a MD player never will be. So you get 5 functions for the price of one, and I like the sound of that deal.
I couldn't agree more with this comment. Let's see.... Currently more than 6.400.000.000 people on the planet. Sligtly less than 300.000.000 in the USA. You do the math.
Frankly I get the feeling that if the US went into "splendid isolation" (where did I hear that fail before?), the rest of us (6.100.000.000 people) would be doing AOK without all of y'all, while you couldn't even get your hands on a pair of Nike shoes anymore (made in China, remember?)
Frankly I think it's about time the Americans too realised that alone, they are insignificant. Just like the rest of us.
It's an older thread, but I'll reply anyhoo.
You wrote:
> Wabbachucha don't go to the bother of flying to the mainland to get their kids vaccinated when their has never been a single reported
> case of measles on the island
This is exactly how many natives of small islands around the world got killed. During the 17th and 18th century, the world (ie European colonists) came crashing into these places, and lo and behold all of a sudden the biggest threat to the island is something as stupid as the flu. It's how the Dodo got extinct, it's exactly why his analogy is not flawed.
Your analogy proved his point. All you need to do is open a history book.
Hey man, we obviously work for different customers.
All the ones I've done consulting for here in Sweden have a SW protection period of 2 weeks on their backups with the exception of off-site monthly copies that have 4 weeks. After that they all replace their backups.
Current customer has clustered OPC superdomes that are linked to a SAN with a bunch of XP-512's for storage and a couple of tape robots for their non-archival backups. The XP's are the vessel for the data in years to come while backups just exist for what-if scenarios and, as you so correctly pointed out, for the paranoid backups before maintenance stops.
Common practice where I'm from. Then the question is... Where do you work ? I'm curious.
If that's what you want to believe, that's alright. It's not what my trainers throughout the years have taught me, and it's exactly the kind of expectation that got me numerous aggravated customers on the phone.
;-)
You go ahead and archive your stuff on DLT for 30 years, son. Don't come crying on my shoulder when you can't restore your pictures of that last barbeque with your dad.
And by the way, it may be that the superdlt will read dltIV formats, sure enough. But how large a part of the equasion is that really?
Not with a DLT 70/80. The DLT 70/80 (at least the ones HP OEMed from Quantum) had adaptable read/write heads that could align themselves to the tape. Partially this was necessary due to the head layout.
DLT 70/80 uses a particular layout of read/writeheads on the tape, and the head needs to be tilted in order to accomodate for DLT 30/40 read/write compatibility. A really, really cool mech though.
Bottom line is that newer DLTs don't suffer from that particular problem.
Unless you're talking DDS drives. With DDS, the head alignment mechanism allows for a situation to arise where you write something to tape with one particular drive that's seen the best of its days, and which you then cannot read back with any other drive.
The gentleman/lady who so catagorically replied to your message saying that tapes are crap really probably hasn't got his/her backup strategies together, though.... Tape will work, specially if you're talking DLT or LTO.
Very true.
As an addition, High-quality "golden" media last slightly longer than their blue and green counterparts. Silver CD-ROMS (original, non-burnt) are surprisingly only supposed to have a shelf life of 5 years.
CD-RW are supposed to have a shelf life of 30 years, as do MO-media. Provided you store 'm in a cool dry place. Which the Travelling Wilbury's wrote the following song about:
Well I woke up this morning
The place was such a wreck
I couldn't reach the bathroom
Thought I'd better clear the deck
I tried to call the lawyer
And ask him what to do
He referred me to his doctor
Who referred me back to you
And when you checked the manual
You kept in side the case
It said put it in a cool dry place
I drove around the city
Looking for a room
That was high above the water
Where my things could be in tune
There was noone to help me
Nobody even cared
I had to got through hell
To get those things up there
I paid my first subscription
Then I joined the idle race
and they said "store it in a cool dry place"
I got guitar, basses, amplifiers and drums
Accordions and Mandolis and things that sometimes hum
Cymbals and Harmonicas, capos by the score
And lots of things in boxes laying all around the floor
Some places they get milldew
And others get too hot.
Some places are so damp that
Everything you got just rots
All kinds of condensation
Directories of the rain
There's not much compensation
When everything's been stained
Some have sentimental value that
Cannot be erased
Go store it in a cool dry place
We got solids and acoustics
And some from flowered board
And some are trimmed in leather
And some are made with gourds
There's organs and trombones
And reverbs we can use
Lots of dx-7s
And old athletic shoes
I bought a great big building
It took up one whole block
I made an inventory
Of all the things in stock
The place was getting longer
I was up all night
I used up all my pencils
But I went onto spite
The blury of my vision
The sweat upon my face
I've got to put this stuff away
I mustn't leave a trace
The landlord's breathing down my neck
He say's it's a disgrace
So I said "put it in a cool, dry, place"
You wondered where I got the distinction from between backup and archival. I've been doodling with computers since I was eight years old, but more to the point I've been working for HP for the last 7 years. During the first five years of that time I did technical support for DDS/DLT/LTO/Magneto-Optical/QIC-tape and CD-R(W) amongst others.
That background has taught me the specific physical limitations of most of these media, as well as their intended use as seen by the engineers that made the products in the first place.
In the five years that I did phone support, my main problem was people that had been "in the business" for 12+ years and had never seen some of their misconceptions corrected, thus calling in with problems that occurred because of incorrect expectations with regards to the behaviour of the product. Some of these misconceptions are born out of overzealous sales-people promising the world while they don't know what they're talking about either, of course.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss your experience. All I'm saying is that it's a big, huge field of endeavour, this IT business, and one cannot possibly be an expert on everything.
I've been in the dicking-with-computers-business for 20 years now, if you count the ZX-81 that I got from my bro when I was 8, but I still know absolutely nothing. Except a thing or two on backup devices and pokes.
Oh, didn't mention Magneto-Optical because that's REALLY not cheap.
Yes, tape will rot. As will anything that is magnetic.
DDS tape has a guaranteed data retention period of 2 years, but then you may face head alignment problems if you replace the drive. DLT and LTO have data retention periods of 5 years approx. Head alignment problems don't form a problem because of the nature of the mechanism.
This is however not the point. The point it that a harddrive is not an ARCHIVAL medium. Neither is tape. Harddrives are the work horses for on-line data and tape is meant as a BACKUP. Backup meaning a copy for safe-keeping under a very limited time (ie next week, when tuesdays tape is run again, or... well, you get the point... ).
CD's (CD-R(W)) offer a theoretical data retention span of 20-100 years depending on who you ask. So that is safer, but still not perfect.
A Service Level Agreement with a maintenance company would do the trick too, but is expensive.
But why archive? Doesn't an automated backup to a tape robot with a weekly rolling schedule combined with a RAID 1/5 solution for your single disk failures satisfy your needs? What is so damn important that you need Off-Site ARCHIVAL rather than off-site backups?
With the falling prices of both tape and disk cost per megabyte, it's affordable to keep all relevant data on the drives of the server and then do backup to tape if needed.
Just my 2$c.
Hey man,
;-)
The red light district is one of the cooles areas in town. De Waag Society is located in De Waag, an old (15/16th century) building that's situated between the UVA (universiteit van amsterdam), the red light district and chinatown (if you can call it that). It's a wonderful area with great pubs (amongst which Café de Jaren, de Sluyswacht, De Waag, Drama-café) and the Waterloo market with the Stopera within a couple of hundreds of yards from each other.
I know where I'd be spending my time....
Yo man,
;-)
The D00d has a point in what he is saying.
All these clueless lusers populating internet has made it a pr0n haven, spam hell, security risk and information liability. The Geeks ought to take it back.
As for me, my foot is receiving urgent messages from my brain: "Please insert me briskly and repeatedly up Anonymous Coward's bottom!"
--Have a good day.
Could you then give me a rundown of the various methods you know except the one that I mentioned that gets killed with a magic marker?
I'm not too hot on the other ones, you see.
Yeah you're right. Reed Solomon. I know the drill. I didn't mention it because I thought I could get away with it.
I DID mean the extended EDC and ECC that is mentioned in the other specs that take up Additional space on the Data disc formats.
Picky bunch. But I'll keep that in mind for next post.
Right. There is Reed solomon on the disc. Sure. Very very rudimentary Partity checking mechanism. Again, the lack of EDC and ECC schemes that I was referring to was, again, the added and more complex layers of ECC and EDC that are present in the yellow and orange books. And it's these ECC/EDC schemes that folks always believe that are "more flawed here than there".
Which brings us to the copy protection scheme. Which one are you referring to? I'm only aware of the one you can disable by use of a marker, that doesn't mess with the individual frames (otherwise it stands to reason that marking out a session won't make your other frames copyable all of a sudden) at all.
Explain?
But the other properties of the disc and it's readers are probably just as large a factor in the no-hiccup-playback of your audio. (placement of the reflective layer, lasers reading the discs, firmware/software that interprets what it gets from a CDDA disc....)
Right, OK. You want nitty gritty. When adressing a public, always bear in mind what they need and want to know. CD-ROMs, mixed mode discs and so forth have a whole array of EDC and ECC coding included in there that the Red book standard doesn't. Reed-Solomon is a very, very rudimentary form of parity checking, and I meant the EDC/ECC schemes referred to in the other standards. But OK, you're right... The Public is seldom homogenous. Added a quick rundown below.
Red Book - CD Audio
-Defined by Philips and Sony in 1980 and published in a red binder, hence Red Book.
-Standard needed so a CD made by any manufacturer can be read by any CD player.
-Physical Block Structure, 75 blocks are read per second, each block divided into 98 24 byte frames.
-Frames are encoded using EFM (Eight to Fourteen Modulation), CIRC (Cross Interleaved Reed Solomon Code) codes are inserted for error detection and correction.
Yellow Book Standard
-Sony and Philips found that error rates on audio CDs were low, decided to use them for computer data.
-1983 Yellow Standard for CD-ROM announced as an extension of the CD Audio standard.
-An extra layer of error correction was added.
Has 2 modes, mode 2 has less error correction and more data
-"Mixed mode" disc has both audio and CD-ROM block structure on different tracks.
Green Book Standard
-Announced in 1986 to help with synchronization of audio and data tracks.
-CD-I (Compact Disc-Interactive) built on the CD-ROM mode 2 block structure and interleaves audio and data. Also has 2 modes, mode 1 with additional EDC/ECC codes, mode 2 without.
Orange Book Standard
-Announced in 1990 to address the new recordable optical media and provide specifications for incremental writes.
-Divided into 2 parts, Compact Disc-Magneto Optical (CD-MO) and Compact Disc-Write Once (CD-WO)
-Covers Multi-session discs, such as the Kodak Photo CD.
CD DA does NOT (and I've said so throughout this thread in other posts) have any EDC and ECC mechanisms.
Yes, claims that protected discs and unprotected discs take different amounts of Beating is FUD.
The TOC on audio is read without the audio player looking for additional "Sessions" (mind that CD-DA is a SINGLE SESSION standard, and that "sessions" is something different than "tracks"). This is why regular Audio-track-first Mixed mode CD's work in your sony discman in the first place.
So it doesn't go out and try to read the second session. And it works, because the first session is a completely standard CD-DA session.
The Computers CD-Rom player (and your mom's SUV's player) has firmware and drivers (mostly firmware) that tell it that a disc can contain multiple sessions. This means that it will try and look for those. Then it will bump into the "corrupted" session (the lead-in for that being pasted AFTER the lead out for the CD-DA session) and bum out.
If you mark out that whole session on the outer edge, it won't find it and you can copy and use your disc as normal. Simple as that.
So basically Sony and BMG (the Evil Empire) spent countless MegaDollars on research that resulted in a broken mixed mode disc. How fucked up is that? They deserve bankrupcy for their stupidity.
Another thing is that the first lead-in and lead out that form a TOC on a CD take 25 Mb off the disc. Then, every added session takes 15-20 Mb of space in TOC information. This means if artists start cranking out 74-minute CD's, the record companies won't have space on the physical medium to actually copy protect it AND be able to play it in a normal audio player.
DumbA$$e$.
One scratch could already kill your disc. The red-book CD-DA standard DOES NOT provide ANY EDC or ECC data on the disc, merely RAW digitised audio.
Trust me.
On the other hand, the sampling rate of 44.1 Khz is twice the (healthy, über-standard) rate a human ear can discern (22,05 Khz) which means that in all those bits and bytes it doesn't really matter if one or two get flipped because your ear is not up to the task of hearing so. Hence the decision to not do EDC and ECC on CD-DA, which gives us 74/80 minutes of music on one disc.
Plus the physical construction of the disc with 65% of it's thickness on the transparent layer on the bottom before getting to the reflective layer that actually contains the info, your CD's can get quite nasty scratches before compromising the actual data layer. Many readers nowadays have phase-shifting lasers built into the head assembly in order to be able to deal with the different reflective properties of the various media types (Silver CD-DA disks, CD-R's and CD-RW's all have different light reflecting percentages and properties... ), which in turn makes them more flexible while reading discs with a slightly mangled transparent surface.
This means, in a nutshell, that the damage must be extensive before the unhearable bit gets flipped in the first place.
You can claim it's a CD-ROM player. But to my nowledge there's never been any manufacturer that made CD-ROM, RW, R or DVD-ROM, RW or R players that didn't have facilities in the firmware to handle CD-DA according to Philips' standard. I'm not even sure if Orange book standard players have any clauses that make it necessary for them to be red-book compatible as well... Hmmm. Need to brush up. It's been 4 years since I supported HP's CD-writers. ;-)
What do you mean, encoding?
The red book standard is as naked as it can be. Basically it provides for:
1) A TOC. Table of contents containing information on track start and stop time. Generally a lead-in and lead out apply, taking approximately 25 Mb space on the disc. The rest is reserved for the body of audio data.
2) Digital wave info. A 44.1 Khz stereo wave recorded digitally onto the CD's surface. This is done in a non-encoded (let's not get caught in the semantical discussion on digitising vs encoding, please... ) way. There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme. The CDDA red book standard is a butt-naked RAW audio data standard.
The Red-book standard technically does not allow for fancy schmancy stuff such as mixed-mode discs, multiple sessions (which is how mixed mode is made) and such.
Adherence To The Specification WILL mean that a CD will be playable in any CD-player that has been made since 1981. Period. This is a non debatable point.
Hey man,
When I was 22, I moved to Amsterdam from my home town because I wanted to shack up with a Swede I had met who had come to Amsterdam on the notion that she was sick of Sweden. Had a grand time, moved to Sweden 3 years later and am still here.
Been working at HP all my career, and generally liked doing things the way I did it. No peace corps, no bombs, no real risks.
One thing that I've seen as an alternative is to quit it all and just backpack my way around. Sure, the economy isn't doing so hot worldwide, but Ireland and the Netherlands still pose an OK target for the more or less geeky with a language skill. Lots of call-centres, tech firms and other stuff goin' on there. There's also an ever growing market for English teachers in Asia, so the choices are yours.
I agree to the posts that spoke against the peace corps. Fuck that. I don't want to tell my grandchildren I was in a war(zone). Wars are barbarism, and I don't want to be barbaric.
Besides, travelling through the military? Jeez... It's much cooler to pack your bags and go and explore a country/people/culture on your own. That's the way to learn.
In the two and a half years I live in Sweden I haven't sought contact with any Dutch living here. Why should I? I didn't move to another country to hang out with people from the old one... Had I wanted that, I could have stayed the hell home. Point being that if you join the peace corps, you'll be in a separated cell from the rest of the society you'll be sent to, hanging with Americans in your spare time, taking orders from Americans, etc etc etc, you get the drift.
So to cut a long story short: just do it. It can and has been done. I do think you should get out of the US. Just to see what other things there are in this world besides the good ol' US of A.
Cheers,
Chris.
Hehehe... I've been called a lot. But naive... It's nice again though. It's been a while. ;-)
>What she wants on this issue is right. Period. >Your logic is not required
I do have a tendency to get out of relationships where the decision making process tends to be unilateral.
As long as there's TWO people that are getting married and TWO people having a baby or engaging themselves or whatever, there are to voices to be heard.
If my logic is not required, my counterpart can go find someone whose logic he/she DOES require. And I hope my partner thinks the same.
Or is this a remarkable view on relationships?
I never said that my belief was magic. I just said that my belief was based on a more intimate knowledge of minerals.
>That is the only salient point in this discussion
I have a hard time believing that too. His girlfriend may want the diamond with the information that she has right now, but one could alter her stance by:
1) Offering alternatives
2) Making known your views on the nasty world of diamond cartels
3.... ) etc etc. Basically one talks to her and informs her.
Saying that she wants one hence she needs one to me means that you view your girlfriend as an almost non-sentient being that is incapable of abstract thought. In my own girlfriends case this would be an insult.
Doesn't open and respectful communication make your partner happy?