Not a lot of origional, interesting material is being made right now.
Not quite right. There isn't a lot of original, interesting material being heavily marketed right now by the music industry. Quality music is still being generated, but not by big businesses.
Businesses are about efficiency. By definition, this means they are against change and churn. They want a stable, dependable money-making process that they can make small refinements to until it produced maximum profit. This means producing the same form-factor content repeatedly ad-nauseum, with little real innovation.
By definition, no business will ever sustain innovation or creativity, because efficiency will overtake them.
Other countries can pay their labor less and then sell the steel cheaper (including having it shipped to the U.S.). I do agree, however, that the tariffs are not the answer.
Imbalances between nations economies are only a temporary situation when you first move to a global economy. It takes time for economic forces to work and balance everything out, just like it takes time for salt poured into water to dissolve and become evenly distributed throughout the solution.
Opponents of global markets are basically isolationists with feeble minds and short-term thinking, fearfully trying to protect their own selfish interests.
You guys are going to go out of business one of these days, but it won't be soon enough.
ALL of your programs, from the RealArcade to the RealOne player, are incredibly bloated, invasive, and obnoxious. You guys are experts at shoving unwanted bloated shit down user's throats in the most insidious ways possible.
Start releasing ETHICAL products -- ones that ONLY install the pieces people ACTUALLY WANT, without slyly sneaking in ads, browser toolbars, and integrating deeply and irremovably into the OS in 20 different ways -- and you MIGHT have a shot at beginning to regain any respect most people ever held for your so-called company. Continue as you have been, and you'll go bankrupt like you should.
What's particularly obnoxious to me is that you guys file suit against Microsoft, claiming that they are to blame for your lack of success in the marketplace. Fucking whiners. Your lack of market success is due squarely to your own shoddy products and sleazy tactics. REAL PEOPLE don't use REAL NETWORKS because your stuff REALLY SUCKS.
...The special effects were great (no major laws of physics were broken except maybe FTL travel)...
Are you smoking crack? They still had sound in the vaccuum of space. Rocket engines, ships knocking into each other, explosions, guns firing. I suppose you can hear the Verizon Wireless guy out there too, huh?
It will be online for free for as long as you can serve it from your own web site.
And suppose I can't or won't serve it up on my own web site? Am I supposed to trust that there will always be a good samaritan somewhere to serve it up for me? Longevity is one of the reasons people buy the hard copy. They don't have to worry about it suddenly dematerializing.
There are three principles that make people want their own copies of things: longevity, convenience, and control. People buy DVDs even though you can rent just about any DVD you want from any major video store whenever you want. Why? Because it's more convenient to have your own copy sitting on the bookshelf at home. You know its been taken care of properly so there are no scratches and fingerprints. You can do whatever you want with it (write your name on it, play frisbee with it, etc) and not have to answer to anyone. And you don't have to worry about the video rental stores going out of business.
Haven't you all figured out SCO's approach yet? They are trying to disrupt the Linux community by creating an issue and taking manpower away from doing real work. The mere fact that Linus and Perens and others are wasting their precious time on SCO is evidence that SCO's approach is working.
Quit paying them any attention, and the problem will go away.
All three of these are ludicrously expensive solutions. Why isn't there a simple CD/MP3/OGG player out there (NOT hard-drive based, just CD) for under $10? For example, I'd be totally happy with my RioVolt SP-90 if it played OGG.
Come on people. Don't be ass holes. Telling the guy to "get a life", "get a girlfriend", or "get out more" isn't helpful. The guy already KNOWS he needs to do those things. The problem is, HOW do you do them? It's not like these are simple things you can just make happen because you want them to. I'm sure MANY guys on Slashdot know the frustration and hopelessness of wanting to a get a girlfriend while being too ugly/unpopular/geeky/shy/inexperienced to know where to begin or how to find success with it.
Try making helpful suggestions. The few suggestions I saw about "go to a bar", "walk your dog at the park", and "join a gym" were decent ones when it comes to getting out of the house, but they still aren't helpful when it comes to actually making real friends. Honestly, how many of your real friends did you meet while walking your dog, working out at the gym, or getting drunk at the local pub?
The real problem here is a deeper one. As a society, there are only a few limited numbers of ways to meet people, and for the most part they require you to be good-looking and outgoing, and into mainstream-ish things. If you're not particularly good-looking and you're not particularly outgoing, or you like more unusual types of activities, you're stuck, and it's pure hell trying to find friends, let alone a significant other. Society needs new methods to accomodate these people.
This guy should have been given a medal, not arrested! I'll be really happy when the governments of the world finally get a clue and make all forms of unsolicited marketing and harassment crimes punishable by death -- seriously. People who would go around intentionally causing problems for others just don't deserve to live in a civilized society with the rest of us.
The trouble with this is control. This sort of consistency would mean developers willingly going with someone else's design principles and UI guidelines...
It's easy. You just have to design the development environment (tools/APIs/SDKs) so that it encourages people to follow the standard. Make it easy for developers to write UI that adheres to the standard look and feel, and make it technically difficult or impossible to stray from it. That's why 95% of Windows apps or Mac apps look the same, despite being written by a diverse group of developers lacking central management.
That's why 95% of Windows apps store their configuration data in the registry. The fact that the system already provides a central, flexible way to store program metadata means that developers don't have to write their own way from scratch every time, and won't be inclined to.
That's why 95% of Windows apps look the same. They are mostly built using Visual Studio's resource editor and/or MFC/ATL, and the system supplies a default style for everything that you have to go to great lengths to override. So the path of least resistance is to write a standard-looking Windows app.
The problem with free *NIX-like OSes is that they were never designed from the start with these kinds of central provisions in mind. No one designed the system to provide a central way of storing program metadata. No one designed the system to provide a central application installer. No one designed it to provide a standardized GUI. So tons of different solutions were developed, and slapped on top of it, and nothing has evolved into a standard part of the system. Instead all you get are multiple different implementations, none of which are the clear winner, and the poor user has to install the support layer for every one of them on their PC if they want to be able to run all their applications. Talk about bloat and unnecessary complexity.
Basically, the thing Microsoft understands that the *NIX crowd doesn't is that the OS is a platform, to be leveraged for driving standardization. And oddly enough, standardization not only breeds profits for Microsoft, but better usability, simpler software architecture, and more prolific development within the platform. The *NIX crowd, which you think would be more developer-centric, still doesn't seem to get the importance of standardization.
It's not enough to package up a bunch of pieces into a distribution and name it. You have to promote it as being the standard, and positively encourage other developers to accept that it is the standard and to write to it.
You're exactly correct... but it will never happen. These online music services are only thriving because they guarantee the record companies and musicians some level of distribution control via DRM (Digital Rape Mechanism). Since Ogg and any other DRM-less format would force the suppliers to completely give up distribution control, they are totally dead-set against it.
Of course, people keep forgetting that if you can hear it, you can free it. You can rip high-quality copies from any audio device with a headphone jack using the Line-In jack on your sound card, and compress them to a restriction-free format such as Ogg. If more people started doing this, I think then (and only then) would the "fight evil corporate control" movement actually be making real progress.
Who, you ask? The people who make Gator, Xupiter, RealPlayer, and any other software that hi-jacks your computer or psychologically tricks people into installing things they don't actually want. They are actually worse than car thieves, because at least with a car thief you know what you're getting -- he doesn't knock at your door, claim to be an auto mechanic, and then drive off with your car, all the while claiming to be a legitimate business.
People like this, quite simply, all deserve to suffer incredibly long, incredibly painful deaths. They need to be made to feel the full effect of the pain they have so selfishly inflicted on the world around them.
I suggest sending them tons of spam telling them they've won a "free" vacation into space, then loading them all on board a one-way rocket destined for an agonizing, slow-deteriotion orbit into the sun. Oh, and fill their spacecraft with fellating pirhanas and skunks. That might grant them a very small taste -- approximately 0.0001% -- of the pain and agony they inflict upon millions of other people on a daily basis.
I don't get how people like that can sleep at night. They must completely lack any form of conscience or ethics.
I can't think of a single IM or chat application that was out before MSN/Windows Messenger that lets you know that someone is typing a message to you without actually showing them typing in real-time. The patent may be for a seemingly small details, but for the reasons enumerated in the patent, it is a surprisingly important distinction from a usability perspective.
Yahoo Messenger implements this same functionality now, but Microsoft's Messenger had it first. If anything, the motivation behind this patent is probably to squash Yahoo and any other would-be copycats from using the technique.
Surprisingly, this seems like a pretty good example of the way the patent system *should* be working. There's a real-life implementation, the patent covers an explicit idea (nothing too vague or NYI), and the people who thought up and implemented the idea first now have the right to use it exclusively, for a while.
The chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously.
Nevermind the fact that to pull off such a claim, you would need to duplicate or time-share every other resource in the system, such as video card, sound card, hard disk, motherboard chipset, yadda yadda yadda. It's just so much easier to wave your hands, get people excited, and claim that this new chip can single-handedly cure cancer and leap tall buildings in a single bound...
...they are planning to play a game called 'Starving Artist' with 5th-9th graders, where students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics only to be told by teachers that the album is already available for download for free.
That isn't a new game. I can't count how many times a teacher asked me to slave over a math problem only to tell me later the solution was published in the teacher's edition!
Why complain? We're supposedly all smart hacker types here. All it takes is one person to figure out how to break the technology, and suddenly all the smart people will be immune to traffic violations! I say we should push for a totally automated society, so that we can more easily bypass getting caught and enjoy the rewards.
Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would be lower for Linux than Windows?
The only reason I can think of is that no two Linux installations are even remotely close to identical. Linux comes in so many forms, different distributions, with different libraries, software, and packages installed, that to write a virus or worm that would take down 90% of the world's Linux systems at once would be impossible. There's just too much diversity.
In the Windows world, nearly all versions of 32-bit (and now 64-bit) Windows have the same libraries, services, and thus the same vulnerabilities. Far less diversity, so far more vulnerable.
On the one hand, consistency is good for end-users. They need it so they don't have to relearn the computer every time they sit down at a different one. But on the other hand, if all systems are identical, then a virus writer must only find one vulnerability to bring down the entire world. It reminds me of one of the big arguments against cloning for agricultural purposes: if all cows are clones, and a virus evolves that is totally fatal to that one particular genetic makeup, then all cows are dead.
ALL software is insecure by design. Security bugs are almost always the result of some design oversight. Maybe a code flaw causes a vulnerability, but a poor design permits that specific code flaw to make the system vulnerable.
Basing the claim that Linux or Macintosh are more securely designed on a relative lack of viruses or exposed vulnerabilities for those platforms is flawed logic. Numerous other factors are more to blame, including differing user base sizes and makeups (more Windows users), differing code maturities (Linux/UNIX is older and more code flaws have been ironed out regardless of secure-by-design-or-not), and the cultural attitude toward the software (people hate Microsoft and Windows, but who hates Apple or Linus?).
I keep all my CD-Rs in those book-like carrying cases from CaseLogic, etc (sheets of plastic/vinyl CD sleeves with soft coth backing). I keep the books closed and tucked on a bookshelf unless I'm actually retrieving or replacing a CD.
In my experience with CD-Rs over the last 10 years, you have to get many factors right for longevity:
- store the CDs in a temperature-controlled, dark place. Jewel cases are actually the worst way to store them, as they let in light and air, offer little protection in event of a drop or crunch, and unnecessarily take up more space.
- get CD blanks that have a thick enamel/paint layer over top of the metallic layer... most brands don't have this, although some (Verbatim DataLife Plus blue-bottom with the white enamel layer) do. For safety, what you do is get some of those CD labels that you normally use in a printer to print your own labels, and stick them over the disc. It provides added structural support and protection from UV rays, heat, etc to keep the metallic layer from crackling or flaking off the disc (which is usually how blanks go bad, in my experience).
- If you want a CD to last, burn it at half its rated burn speed or slower. If you burn a 48x disc at 48x, don't expect it to last too long, because the burn didn't "set" as well. (I don't know the technical details, that's just what I've noticed from experience).
- Use a decent burner. Plextor makes the best, or did for years at least, but generally speaking you just have to buy one that is capable of jitter-free, error-free data and audio ripping. (The drives that rip better are generally tracked better, and thus tend to yield better burns as well, I've noticed).
- Don't rely on BurnProof, JustLink, or other such features during a burn. Sure, it may be handy and deliver a working disc, but the way those technologies work results in a less homogeneous burn and the disc doesn't last as long. These technologies are just lazy-man's excuses to avoid purchasing fast-enough hard drives anyway.
These are the general rules I follow, and I have plenty of discs that are 5-8 years old that are still fine, particularly the Verbatim DataLife Plus discs with the blue-bottoms.
Spend two minutes looking over the discussion threads attached to this story, and you'll have all the evidence necessary to demonstrate that Linux and most UNIXes are nowhere near ready for the masses.
When so much technical prowess, time, frustration, and hassle is necessary just to install software, it means the OS is poorly architected and lacking coherency.
Windows has DLL hell and other problems, so I'm not saying it's a great example.. but it's certainly easier for most people to deal with. I don't know anyone who has had to manually wrestle with 14 package dependencies just to get a program installed on Windows, do you?
Mac OS X seems close to the ideal, from what little I've read about it. Single filesystem objects that contains everything necessary for a program to run, a sane versioning system to prevent runtime library hell, and none of this nonsense about forcing end-users to wrestle with insane dependency maps just to install a program.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a lot of origional, interesting material is being made right now.
Not quite right. There isn't a lot of original, interesting material being heavily marketed right now by the music industry. Quality music is still being generated, but not by big businesses.
Businesses are about efficiency. By definition, this means they are against change and churn. They want a stable, dependable money-making process that they can make small refinements to until it produced maximum profit. This means producing the same form-factor content repeatedly ad-nauseum, with little real innovation.
By definition, no business will ever sustain innovation or creativity, because efficiency will overtake them.
Other countries can pay their labor less and then sell the steel cheaper (including having it shipped to the U.S.). I do agree, however, that the tariffs are not the answer.
Imbalances between nations economies are only a temporary situation when you first move to a global economy. It takes time for economic forces to work and balance everything out, just like it takes time for salt poured into water to dissolve and become evenly distributed throughout the solution.
Opponents of global markets are basically isolationists with feeble minds and short-term thinking, fearfully trying to protect their own selfish interests.
You guys are going to go out of business one of these days, but it won't be soon enough.
ALL of your programs, from the RealArcade to the RealOne player, are incredibly bloated, invasive, and obnoxious. You guys are experts at shoving unwanted bloated shit down user's throats in the most insidious ways possible.
Start releasing ETHICAL products -- ones that ONLY install the pieces people ACTUALLY WANT, without slyly sneaking in ads, browser toolbars, and integrating deeply and irremovably into the OS in 20 different ways -- and you MIGHT have a shot at beginning to regain any respect most people ever held for your so-called company. Continue as you have been, and you'll go bankrupt like you should.
What's particularly obnoxious to me is that you guys file suit against Microsoft, claiming that they are to blame for your lack of success in the marketplace. Fucking whiners. Your lack of market success is due squarely to your own shoddy products and sleazy tactics. REAL PEOPLE don't use REAL NETWORKS because your stuff REALLY SUCKS.
If woodworkers like their hand-made chisels that much, maybe they should look into sexual deviancy counseling...
Are you smoking crack? They still had sound in the vaccuum of space. Rocket engines, ships knocking into each other, explosions, guns firing. I suppose you can hear the Verizon Wireless guy out there too, huh?
It will be online for free for as long as you can serve it from your own web site.
And suppose I can't or won't serve it up on my own web site? Am I supposed to trust that there will always be a good samaritan somewhere to serve it up for me? Longevity is one of the reasons people buy the hard copy. They don't have to worry about it suddenly dematerializing.
There are three principles that make people want their own copies of things: longevity, convenience, and control. People buy DVDs even though you can rent just about any DVD you want from any major video store whenever you want. Why? Because it's more convenient to have your own copy sitting on the bookshelf at home. You know its been taken care of properly so there are no scratches and fingerprints. You can do whatever you want with it (write your name on it, play frisbee with it, etc) and not have to answer to anyone. And you don't have to worry about the video rental stores going out of business.
How *long* will the book be online for free? Can you dog-ear pages in the online book? Can you read it while you're riding the bus or taking a crap?
Haven't you all figured out SCO's approach yet? They are trying to disrupt the Linux community by creating an issue and taking manpower away from doing real work. The mere fact that Linus and Perens and others are wasting their precious time on SCO is evidence that SCO's approach is working.
Quit paying them any attention, and the problem will go away.
Give me a break. Do you have any idea how many Wal-Mart customers would run into problems without Windows installed on their PCs?
Customer: "Why doesn't POPULAR_RETAIL_SOFTWARE_OR_HARDWARE_PACKAGE install or work on my computer?"
Wal-Mart employee: "Uh, because it runs the Line-Uhx operating system or something."
Customer: "I thought my computer ran Microsoft Word operating system?!?"
What a disaster!
All three of these are ludicrously expensive solutions. Why isn't there a simple CD/MP3/OGG player out there (NOT hard-drive based, just CD) for under $10? For example, I'd be totally happy with my RioVolt SP-90 if it played OGG.
Come on people. Don't be ass holes. Telling the guy to "get a life", "get a girlfriend", or "get out more" isn't helpful. The guy already KNOWS he needs to do those things. The problem is, HOW do you do them? It's not like these are simple things you can just make happen because you want them to. I'm sure MANY guys on Slashdot know the frustration and hopelessness of wanting to a get a girlfriend while being too ugly/unpopular/geeky/shy/inexperienced to know where to begin or how to find success with it.
Try making helpful suggestions. The few suggestions I saw about "go to a bar", "walk your dog at the park", and "join a gym" were decent ones when it comes to getting out of the house, but they still aren't helpful when it comes to actually making real friends. Honestly, how many of your real friends did you meet while walking your dog, working out at the gym, or getting drunk at the local pub?
The real problem here is a deeper one. As a society, there are only a few limited numbers of ways to meet people, and for the most part they require you to be good-looking and outgoing, and into mainstream-ish things. If you're not particularly good-looking and you're not particularly outgoing, or you like more unusual types of activities, you're stuck, and it's pure hell trying to find friends, let alone a significant other. Society needs new methods to accomodate these people.
Troll? Give me a break (again)! This is my real opinion, not a troll.
This guy should have been given a medal, not arrested! I'll be really happy when the governments of the world finally get a clue and make all forms of unsolicited marketing and harassment crimes punishable by death -- seriously. People who would go around intentionally causing problems for others just don't deserve to live in a civilized society with the rest of us.
The trouble with this is control. This sort of consistency would mean developers willingly going with someone else's design principles and UI guidelines...
It's easy. You just have to design the development environment (tools/APIs/SDKs) so that it encourages people to follow the standard. Make it easy for developers to write UI that adheres to the standard look and feel, and make it technically difficult or impossible to stray from it. That's why 95% of Windows apps or Mac apps look the same, despite being written by a diverse group of developers lacking central management.
That's why 95% of Windows apps store their configuration data in the registry. The fact that the system already provides a central, flexible way to store program metadata means that developers don't have to write their own way from scratch every time, and won't be inclined to.
That's why 95% of Windows apps look the same. They are mostly built using Visual Studio's resource editor and/or MFC/ATL, and the system supplies a default style for everything that you have to go to great lengths to override. So the path of least resistance is to write a standard-looking Windows app.
The problem with free *NIX-like OSes is that they were never designed from the start with these kinds of central provisions in mind. No one designed the system to provide a central way of storing program metadata. No one designed the system to provide a central application installer. No one designed it to provide a standardized GUI. So tons of different solutions were developed, and slapped on top of it, and nothing has evolved into a standard part of the system. Instead all you get are multiple different implementations, none of which are the clear winner, and the poor user has to install the support layer for every one of them on their PC if they want to be able to run all their applications. Talk about bloat and unnecessary complexity.
Basically, the thing Microsoft understands that the *NIX crowd doesn't is that the OS is a platform, to be leveraged for driving standardization. And oddly enough, standardization not only breeds profits for Microsoft, but better usability, simpler software architecture, and more prolific development within the platform. The *NIX crowd, which you think would be more developer-centric, still doesn't seem to get the importance of standardization.
It's not enough to package up a bunch of pieces into a distribution and name it. You have to promote it as being the standard, and positively encourage other developers to accept that it is the standard and to write to it.
You're exactly correct... but it will never happen. These online music services are only thriving because they guarantee the record companies and musicians some level of distribution control via DRM (Digital Rape Mechanism). Since Ogg and any other DRM-less format would force the suppliers to completely give up distribution control, they are totally dead-set against it.
Of course, people keep forgetting that if you can hear it, you can free it. You can rip high-quality copies from any audio device with a headphone jack using the Line-In jack on your sound card, and compress them to a restriction-free format such as Ogg. If more people started doing this, I think then (and only then) would the "fight evil corporate control" movement actually be making real progress.
Who, you ask? The people who make Gator, Xupiter, RealPlayer, and any other software that hi-jacks your computer or psychologically tricks people into installing things they don't actually want. They are actually worse than car thieves, because at least with a car thief you know what you're getting -- he doesn't knock at your door, claim to be an auto mechanic, and then drive off with your car, all the while claiming to be a legitimate business.
People like this, quite simply, all deserve to suffer incredibly long, incredibly painful deaths. They need to be made to feel the full effect of the pain they have so selfishly inflicted on the world around them.
I suggest sending them tons of spam telling them they've won a "free" vacation into space, then loading them all on board a one-way rocket destined for an agonizing, slow-deteriotion orbit into the sun. Oh, and fill their spacecraft with fellating pirhanas and skunks. That might grant them a very small taste -- approximately 0.0001% -- of the pain and agony they inflict upon millions of other people on a daily basis.
I don't get how people like that can sleep at night. They must completely lack any form of conscience or ethics.
I can't think of a single IM or chat application that was out before MSN/Windows Messenger that lets you know that someone is typing a message to you without actually showing them typing in real-time. The patent may be for a seemingly small details, but for the reasons enumerated in the patent, it is a surprisingly important distinction from a usability perspective.
Yahoo Messenger implements this same functionality now, but Microsoft's Messenger had it first. If anything, the motivation behind this patent is probably to squash Yahoo and any other would-be copycats from using the technique.
Surprisingly, this seems like a pretty good example of the way the patent system *should* be working. There's a real-life implementation, the patent covers an explicit idea (nothing too vague or NYI), and the people who thought up and implemented the idea first now have the right to use it exclusively, for a while.
The chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously.
Nevermind the fact that to pull off such a claim, you would need to duplicate or time-share every other resource in the system, such as video card, sound card, hard disk, motherboard chipset, yadda yadda yadda. It's just so much easier to wave your hands, get people excited, and claim that this new chip can single-handedly cure cancer and leap tall buildings in a single bound...
I hate it when a FAQ about X (in this case, GoogleWhack) fails to answer the basic question, What is X?
So, that said -- what the heck is GoogleWhack?
That isn't a new game. I can't count how many times a teacher asked me to slave over a math problem only to tell me later the solution was published in the teacher's edition!
Why complain? We're supposedly all smart hacker types here. All it takes is one person to figure out how to break the technology, and suddenly all the smart people will be immune to traffic violations! I say we should push for a totally automated society, so that we can more easily bypass getting caught and enjoy the rewards.
Are there other reasons why the likelihood of a "Sobig" or an "ILUVYOU" would be lower for Linux than Windows?
The only reason I can think of is that no two Linux installations are even remotely close to identical. Linux comes in so many forms, different distributions, with different libraries, software, and packages installed, that to write a virus or worm that would take down 90% of the world's Linux systems at once would be impossible. There's just too much diversity.
In the Windows world, nearly all versions of 32-bit (and now 64-bit) Windows have the same libraries, services, and thus the same vulnerabilities. Far less diversity, so far more vulnerable.
On the one hand, consistency is good for end-users. They need it so they don't have to relearn the computer every time they sit down at a different one. But on the other hand, if all systems are identical, then a virus writer must only find one vulnerability to bring down the entire world. It reminds me of one of the big arguments against cloning for agricultural purposes: if all cows are clones, and a virus evolves that is totally fatal to that one particular genetic makeup, then all cows are dead.
ALL software is insecure by design. Security bugs are almost always the result of some design oversight. Maybe a code flaw causes a vulnerability, but a poor design permits that specific code flaw to make the system vulnerable.
Basing the claim that Linux or Macintosh are more securely designed on a relative lack of viruses or exposed vulnerabilities for those platforms is flawed logic. Numerous other factors are more to blame, including differing user base sizes and makeups (more Windows users), differing code maturities (Linux/UNIX is older and more code flaws have been ironed out regardless of secure-by-design-or-not), and the cultural attitude toward the software (people hate Microsoft and Windows, but who hates Apple or Linus?).
Also, how were they all stored?
I keep all my CD-Rs in those book-like carrying cases from CaseLogic, etc (sheets of plastic/vinyl CD sleeves with soft coth backing). I keep the books closed and tucked on a bookshelf unless I'm actually retrieving or replacing a CD.
In my experience with CD-Rs over the last 10 years, you have to get many factors right for longevity:
- store the CDs in a temperature-controlled, dark place. Jewel cases are actually the worst way to store them, as they let in light and air, offer little protection in event of a drop or crunch, and unnecessarily take up more space.
- get CD blanks that have a thick enamel/paint layer over top of the metallic layer... most brands don't have this, although some (Verbatim DataLife Plus blue-bottom with the white enamel layer) do. For safety, what you do is get some of those CD labels that you normally use in a printer to print your own labels, and stick them over the disc. It provides added structural support and protection from UV rays, heat, etc to keep the metallic layer from crackling or flaking off the disc (which is usually how blanks go bad, in my experience).
- If you want a CD to last, burn it at half its rated burn speed or slower. If you burn a 48x disc at 48x, don't expect it to last too long, because the burn didn't "set" as well. (I don't know the technical details, that's just what I've noticed from experience).
- Use a decent burner. Plextor makes the best, or did for years at least, but generally speaking you just have to buy one that is capable of jitter-free, error-free data and audio ripping. (The drives that rip better are generally tracked better, and thus tend to yield better burns as well, I've noticed).
- Don't rely on BurnProof, JustLink, or other such features during a burn. Sure, it may be handy and deliver a working disc, but the way those technologies work results in a less homogeneous burn and the disc doesn't last as long. These technologies are just lazy-man's excuses to avoid purchasing fast-enough hard drives anyway.
These are the general rules I follow, and I have plenty of discs that are 5-8 years old that are still fine, particularly the Verbatim DataLife Plus discs with the blue-bottoms.
Spend two minutes looking over the discussion threads attached to this story, and you'll have all the evidence necessary to demonstrate that Linux and most UNIXes are nowhere near ready for the masses.
When so much technical prowess, time, frustration, and hassle is necessary just to install software, it means the OS is poorly architected and lacking coherency.
Windows has DLL hell and other problems, so I'm not saying it's a great example.. but it's certainly easier for most people to deal with. I don't know anyone who has had to manually wrestle with 14 package dependencies just to get a program installed on Windows, do you?
Mac OS X seems close to the ideal, from what little I've read about it. Single filesystem objects that contains everything necessary for a program to run, a sane versioning system to prevent runtime library hell, and none of this nonsense about forcing end-users to wrestle with insane dependency maps just to install a program.