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https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/06/30/do-we-really-own-our-digital-possessions/
During 2019, Microsoft announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers' consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers' eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the service – even those bought many years ago – will no longer be readable after July 2019. While the company has promised to provide a full refund for all eBook purchases, this decision raises important questions of ownership.
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We Don't Really Own the Digital Possessions That We Buy Online
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Could I have a drug overdose?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:45PM (12 children)
Anyone remember CDs? How many of them ended up scratched, or otherwise in the trash?
What about DVDs? How many have unplayable DVDs?
I pay for cloud because it is *more reliable* than the alternatives, even with possibility that X service falls over and dies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:57PM
i agree: "seeeeeeeed damnit(tm)!!"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:07PM (5 children)
Wow. Then you are just doing it wrong.
Keep the CD/DVDs indoors in a nice clean, dry place and they should last for many, many years. Do check them periodically, and avoid using the cheap crap like WinData. Also, if the data is important, then CD/DVD should not be your ONLY copy - keep a another copy on a large external hard drive. In combination, those make excellent backups. CD/DVD drives should be around for a long time. With CD/DVDs you don't have to worry about backups getting altered or corrupted by software. With an external hard drive, it is easy to access all of the data at one.
When your "cloud" provider (in this case, remote storage hosting provider) pulls their plug my CD/DVDs and hard drives will still be readable. And unless someone invades my house, I don't have to worry about some bag of shit in china drooling over my data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:54AM
Pushing 60TB of this. The nice thing is I basically made my own netflix by accident. KODI manages the whole thing very nicely. I do not even have to use the 'piratey' bits of the KODI ecosystem. I own my stuff and it is amazing.
What I was paying for cable per month a few years ago I can buy every month 5-10 seasons of some show and watch it without any commercials.
With hollywood getting a hard on for altering movies now to remove 'problematic' things. I have a copy that reflects mostly the original intent of the movie. With a digital sub they can add/remove whatever they like and pat themselves on the back for the amazing job they did.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:17AM (3 children)
> Keep the CD/DVDs indoors in a nice clean, dry place and they should last for many, many years.
Or go on amazon and buy digital licence and it should last for many, many years. Probably longer than the CDs. Also cheaper.
Nb: I don't typically buy a DVD drive with my desktop nowadays; I get laptops pre-built and DVD drive is a "non-standard" component for most.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @03:53PM
I switched to an external Bluray drive years ago. I hook it up on the rare occasion where I need to use optical discs, but most of the time it just sits around. Some things are just better with an external version. I have multiple computers, but just plug the drive in to whichever device I need it on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
I just buy the physical then rip it. Why not enjoy the best of both worlds? I have a nice backup AND the digital version, I control both. With digital they can change it on the server and I would never know. Or just like in this article suddenly I can no longer access it.
Sears once was one of the largest corps in the world. Look at it now. They were the Amazon of their day.
Also cheaper.
In most cases I have found that to not be true. Usually the price is slightly higher or about the same. In some rare cases it is a bit cheaper. Usually that is for out of print items and people are just price hunting. At that point it is off to craigs and ebay.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 06 2020, @08:53PM
I just buy the physical then rip it. Why not enjoy the best of both worlds? I have a nice backup AND the digital version...
Because Blu-Rays are expensive. It's much cheaper to just download your movies from BitTorrent...
Also, 1000 Blu-Ray movies (in their cases) take up a ton of space. 1000 x.265-encoded movies can fit on a single USB hard drive.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:33PM (1 child)
FWIW, I've rarely had a CD become unplayable. Even software from decades ago still works. I depend on this to occasionally recreate a virtual machine to install obsolete software. I've got backup copies, but I've very rarely needed to use them. And the commercially recorded CDs were/are even more durable, though less useful over the decades. Though I still occasionally install Alpha Centauri or Civilization: Call to Power (on a virtual machine mastered from a OLD Linux system CD).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @03:55PM
Same here, a small number have acquired a few bad spots, but the only outright bad disc I have is a warped DVD from over 20 years ago. Most of the time, as long as you promptly place them back into an appropriate storage case, they'll last for decades. I think the oldest ones were supposed to last the better part of a century. Which is probably true as long as moisture doesn't manage to get under the label and it isn't physically damaged in other ways.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:16AM
Anyone else remember when CDROM.COM was sold, and the new owners pulled the plug on all the hosted public archives, with zero notice?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:53AM
(Looks at literally hundreds of CD and DVDs, many of which he's owned since his university days - 20+ years ago - that are all perfectly intact, scratchless, read-perfectly, haven't degraded and aren't even subject to any extreme measures... I keep them in their cases and the case on a shelf - commercial, homemade, data, video, music...)
What the hell are you doing to them?
Don't get me wrong, I have cloud accounts for anything for the last 5+ years or so, just for convenience, but unreadable CDs and DVDs? Nope. My father-in-law still has his entire CD/DVD collection (thousands!) of everything he's ever watched or liked (back to 70's comedies and things that were originally on tape) in a big case that has been transported to the dozen countries he lives in - he literally bins the cases, puts them in a sleeve, and shoves them all in a huge case all jammed up against each other. That case has been on world voyages, through storms, the deserts of the Middle East, etc.
And quite a few of both of the above are CD-R's and DVD-R's that I've made for him.
Example: When I was in uni 20+ years ago, I downloaded some software and "ebooks" (just LaTeX files and Doc files and the like back then, not ePub or PDF!) and all kinds of things for my course. I burned them onto the cheapest of cheap CD-Rs (at 1x speed!). I always made two copies of everything and put them in a sleeved folder. I made dozens of them, each with two copies.
To this day, I can pull those CD-Rs and they verify against each other, against their CRC (yes, I recorded it!) in a master document.
The very best, though, is that I always burned-and-verified at the same time (it would take hours just to burn-and-verify two discs!). One disc - I can literally remember the exact one - burned one good copy and the second failed the verify. I checked it. I had time on my hands, so I actually run a compare and found the file on the disc that had the corrupted area. When I did a file compare, it was literally one byte different (and being a ZIP file it then threw a wobbler because it failed its own CRC check) to its partner and the original source.
I then found that I could literally copy that ZIP file, hex-edit the one-byte change, and it would become a valid ZIP file again, extract perfectly, and the contents were all intact. No word of a lie, I stuck a post-it note on that CD-R with the filename and which byte needed to be changed. 20+ years later... you can read that CD, pull that ZIP file off, change that one byte, and it will extract and work and exactly match it's mirrored partner disk! You can read ALL the CD's (and a couple of DVD-Rs I think). Every one. Every byte. Every checksum matches.
That case has been in my loft, on my shelves, through 4 house moves, etc. and all the disks - the cheapest, junkiest, CD-Rs - read perfectly, both copies, all the time.
I don't know what you're doing to your CDs, but I suspect that it's your handling of them.
Literally, in my lifetime, I have "owned" one "unplayable" DVD (not counting region restrictions, etc.) - it was a copy of Finding Nemo I bought cheap at a bootsale for my daughter, and it was scratched to shit from the second we bought it. That's it. One. I get that kids could trash them, they aren't invincible, but the only damaged one I have is nothing to do with me!
Cloud is better for daily use, I agree, but the other day, I literally looked around my workplace for a USB DVD drive that I could connect to my phone (it's cheaper to use an adaptor and a USB than it is to find a USB-C DVD drive), so I could watch physical DVDs in bed / on holiday / etc. I've just bought two HUGE box sets, about 50 DVDs and I'm working my way through them, and getting the ISO off them, storing it, sending it to my phone, playing it with VLC on my phone, etc. - especially with region protection etc. - is a pain in the butt.
However, I've had cloud cut out on me more (the service, not my connection) several times. There's a reason I have Google Play Movies and Amazon Prime, etc.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:55AM
Remember them - I still use them!
I still keep copies of software on CDs and DVDs. I have software in my library going back decades and they are all still perfectly readable. I like to keep the software and its repository backed up on a separate CD/DVDs, and thumbdrives would be wasteful in many cases. I only keep current software on my hard drives - backed up, of course. I've not had a CD or DVD go bad on me that wasn't due to incorrect handling or misuse. The oldest software in my archive is dated 1998, but I have manufacturer's disks for some commercial software that is older still.
Software is still distributed on CDs/DVDs, whatever made you think that they had disappeared?