I agree that this is on the up and up. I was in the Philippines in February of 2000 and I remember walking thru a small shop and finding any number of movies on VCD, but the one that caught my eye was Suart Little. It wouldn't ahve been so bad if it wasn't still in theaters in the states when I left.
Aside of that, you could buy just about any PSX game for 40 Piso, or right around a buck a pop at the time.
The RIAA and MPAA need to force their producers and artists into policing their staff, and back off the people buying or downloading the merchandise. The whole Copyright Wars(TM) thing is off target. If the government treated drug dealers like counterfieters and industry movie leakers, the drug dealers would get fat checks and never have to fear prosecution. The industry has to stop the suppliers, and the suppliers are themselves.
As with anything, there's pros and cons with hard disks vs. tape. The popular myth is that hard drives that are sitting idle for a long period of time have a shorter usable shelf life than DLT or 8mm tape. If the drive is properly stored (not in a box on a shelf) it should outlast the tape simply because of the nature of the hard disk's environmental seals.
Some experts say that magnetic media such as tapes and disks can be kept safe for five to 10 years, whereas optically etched media such as CD s and DVDs can have an average life span of five to 30 years depending on the whitepaper you reference. Since you can only put about 4.6GB on a DVD, it'd still take a few to get the storage of a single DLT or 8mm tape.
The problem isn't with dependability so much as it is usability or affordability. Hard disks are typically inexpensive in these times, unlike back in the mid 90's, when it would cost you $275 for a 4.3GB hard disk. You can get 5 times as much storage now for half as much $$$.
The reality is, you can typically store more data, especially non-critical data, on cheap hard disks. I have a Compaq DLT tape drive that I use to store all my MP3s on because it's a lot safer to archive long-term data on DLT than it is on disk. I also have an Exabyte 20GB 8mm tape drive that I use to backup audio and video with, as well as other typically static critical data. Otherwise, the two workstations I have in my basement have Kingston pull-out drive bays and I swap out between 20GB disk drives almost daily. I take a 20GB drive to work and anything I store on my workstation there gets backed up to that drive, and comes home with me nightly, and placed on my machine at home. Additionally, I built a FreeBSD fileserver that has a samba share for the Win2K machines and that also serves as my tape server. That fileserver has a pair of 60GB hard disks in it and whatever sits on those disks gets backed up to tape nightly, using incremental backups thru the week and full backups on Sunday night.
Using large drives is a cheap and easy way of having dependable storage but I don't think it's the best for long-term storage. If you slap a DLT tape or drop it, it'll tend to continue to hold data, whereas if you drop a hard disk... well, you get the idea.
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I agree that this is on the up and up. I was in the Philippines in February of 2000 and I remember walking thru a small shop and finding any number of movies on VCD, but the one that caught my eye was Suart Little. It wouldn't ahve been so bad if it wasn't still in theaters in the states when I left. Aside of that, you could buy just about any PSX game for 40 Piso, or right around a buck a pop at the time. The RIAA and MPAA need to force their producers and artists into policing their staff, and back off the people buying or downloading the merchandise. The whole Copyright Wars(TM) thing is off target. If the government treated drug dealers like counterfieters and industry movie leakers, the drug dealers would get fat checks and never have to fear prosecution. The industry has to stop the suppliers, and the suppliers are themselves.
As with anything, there's pros and cons with hard disks vs. tape. The popular myth is that hard drives that are sitting idle for a long period of time have a shorter usable shelf life than DLT or 8mm tape. If the drive is properly stored (not in a box on a shelf) it should outlast the tape simply because of the nature of the hard disk's environmental seals.
Some experts say that magnetic media such as tapes and disks can be kept safe for five to 10 years, whereas optically etched media such as CD s and DVDs can have an average life span of five to 30 years depending on the whitepaper you reference. Since you can only put about 4.6GB on a DVD, it'd still take a few to get the storage of a single DLT or 8mm tape.
The problem isn't with dependability so much as it is usability or affordability. Hard disks are typically inexpensive in these times, unlike back in the mid 90's, when it would cost you $275 for a 4.3GB hard disk. You can get 5 times as much storage now for half as much $$$.
The reality is, you can typically store more data, especially non-critical data, on cheap hard disks. I have a Compaq DLT tape drive that I use to store all my MP3s on because it's a lot safer to archive long-term data on DLT than it is on disk. I also have an Exabyte 20GB 8mm tape drive that I use to backup audio and video with, as well as other typically static critical data. Otherwise, the two workstations I have in my basement have Kingston pull-out drive bays and I swap out between 20GB disk drives almost daily. I take a 20GB drive to work and anything I store on my workstation there gets backed up to that drive, and comes home with me nightly, and placed on my machine at home.
Additionally, I built a FreeBSD fileserver that has a samba share for the Win2K machines and that also serves as my tape server. That fileserver has a pair of 60GB hard disks in it and whatever sits on those disks gets backed up to tape nightly, using incremental backups thru the week and full backups on Sunday night.
Using large drives is a cheap and easy way of having dependable storage but I don't think it's the best for long-term storage. If you slap a DLT tape or drop it, it'll tend to continue to hold data, whereas if you drop a hard disk... well, you get the idea.