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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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:42PM (7 children)
Well, it's an important subject, but we know Microsoft has had several services shut down like this. I don't know why anyone would want to buy from their "Microsoft Store" built into Windows at this point.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:17PM (2 children)
Micro$oft ReadsForSure!
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:50PM (1 child)
After Microsoft shut down Plays For Sure, they then created, and shut down Zune.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:45PM
ZuneToBeForgotten
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:39PM (3 children)
This is exactly correct. Microsoft in particular has a very bad track record for this, most notably with "PlaysForSure" and Zune (as another comment pointed out). What kind of moron would buy any digital goods from a Microsoft online store in this day and age? I feel a little bad blaming victims, but in this case, you had something like 15 years of warning, and should have known better.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:47PM (2 children)
There. FTFY.
Not letting MS off the hook here, but they aren't exactly the only ones encumbering the things they
rentsell. In fact, they're not anywhere near the biggest offenders in that space.(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:10AM
Yeah, it's everybody, not just MS. For example we (bunch of friends) used to get together and watch some paid-for SF series on Netflix a while back until they suddenly removed it and we'd have to sign up to and pay some other streaming service to watch the content we'd already paid for on Netflix. Apple-loving friend had similar problems, paid-for things would just disappear from time to time. Everything that you pay for online is rented, not owned.
This is why I buy everything as molecules, not bits, I can watch it, read it, lend it, feed it to the cat, whatever. I own it, I don't rent it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:29PM
There's a ton of bad actors out there, Apple and Amazon are by far the worst offenders, they both actively used DRM in order to push people to use their products. In both cases, there was a prolonged period where they used exclusive titles and DRM that wasn't available on competing devices to force people to buy their products. Amazon still does it where it's trivial to load ebooks from other vendors onto their Kindles, but there remains no legal way of loading the books onto other ereaders. Apple, at least discontinued the DRM eventually, but not before single handedly destroying the market for MP3 players. Prior to those antitrust violating policies there were a decent number of options available for MP3 players, some of which were far better than anything that Apple ever produced.
Barnes & Noble by comparison is slightly less terrible, but they've actively gone out and discontinued older DRM schemes and apps making it impossible to backup books from there, even though it used to be something that end users could do. To make matters worse, a lot of people were using 3rd party software to manage their libraries because the stock library software wouldn't do it. You'd have to arrange things on the device itself.
And don't get me started on Bluray discs which are physical discs that may or may not actually read in a given player because of the asinine encryption.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:50PM (7 children)
This makes for a great story. A technologically advanced society digitizes everything locked by paywalls and copyright are unable to recover the lost knowledge because of the walled gardens after some event or happenstance.
The year is 2075, in every household the refrigerator refuses to dispense food. All subscriptions have expired in what is now known as Redacted. It would have been called 'the purge' but that word is taboo after a settlement with Universal Pictures. Redacted is now the most commonly used word followed closely by injunction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:17PM (4 children)
Don't worry we can just pay for those hard lessons again (or even more).
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:51PM (3 children)
Every ten years there are a new generation of people who have forgotten the ancient lessons learned the hard way by their ancient ancestors.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:41PM (2 children)
Is there a website with these DRM discontinuation/disablement events on a timeline somewhere? This is the kind of thing that you want to be able to point people to when they say, "I'll just get the [DRM] version on [FAANG-scale company evil enough to flat-out ignore your complaints]"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:53PM (1 child)
Except this kind of stuff isn't anything new or even unusual. How does the line go from the 1997(!) movie "Men in Black"? "I guess I'm going to have to buy the White Album again."
That was a reference to the "minidiscs" that folks were trying to push on us back then. And we had the same issues with CDs, videocassettes and DVDs as well.
There is no reason (other than enriching those who control/rent media) to force people to repeatedly buy the same content. In fact, the First Sale Doctrine [wikipedia.org] was supposed to address that. But somehow "on a computer" invalidates this.
If you can't control your property, it isn't *your* property. Full Stop.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:34PM
Except you didn't have to do that except in unusual instances. Vinyl is still being produced with new albums and the players to play them were never discontinued. If you've got huge sums of cash, you can even get ones that will read the discs without even touching them. Yes, 8-tracks were discontinued pretty thoroughly, it's been decades since they were available for anything other than studio use, but cassettes appear to still be alive and kicking. Of course, you also have the failed or truly obsolete ones, wax tubes, laser disc, video on vinyl, Betamax, HD-DVD, but those shouldn't really count as most of them never sold well enough to get off the ground. I think the wax tubes are the only ones that ever had much penetration and even then it was followed up by a much more practical medium relatively soon after invention.
So, yeah, it did happen, but the likelihood of needing to buy a new copy based on obsolescence was more or less zero as in most of those cases, you could either retain the hardware to play the media you had, or you could transfer it to a newer technology.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:00PM (1 child)
Cats, Dogs Go Hungry as Internet-Connected PetNet Plays Dead [soylentnews.org]
Petnet's Smart Pet Feeder System Back after Week-Long Outage [soylentnews.org]
After Prolonged Service Outage, Petnet Shuts Down, Citing Coronavirus [soylentnews.org]
IoT cat eats human flesh
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:22PM
I keep getting reminded of the fact that reality is stranger than fiction. That book writes itself. Chapter 2. Snowball's play time of hell. Kitty massacre.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by captain_nifty on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:55PM (7 children)
This is why you break whatever DRM crap they put on and keep a local copy, or shop wherever you can find it without the DRM.
For ebooks and music this is fairly easy, even for video it isn't too hard to find utilities to strip out the DRM and make a copy.
Crap like this is why I have ~24TB of backups, it's not yours if you can't access it without an active internet connection.
The cloud is a lie meant to sell you the content again and again.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
For tape backups LTO-4 drives are the sweet spot for price per Gb. I bought an IBM LTO-4 drive for $35 on eBay. Its a fiber channel interface and those cards and cables are dirt cheap too. They don't fit very well in desktop cases but who cares. If you keep an eye out you can snag new tapes for $10 each. That's 800Gb of long term stable storage.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:42PM (1 child)
Even at those prices, I don't know why you'd bother unless you're really hording a lot of data. You can get a 4-5TB USB-connected backup HD for under $100 now, and with that you can plug it into any computer (there's no way for me to connect a fibre channel drive to my laptop), and you can access files randomly whenever you want to restore something, or just back up a few things, or do a sync, or whatever.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:40PM
One of the reasons why HDD are a great choice is that on top of just overwriting the parts of the backup that might have changed, you can easily verify the integrity of all the files on the disk. It can take some time to do, but the process is more or less automatic if you've got decent software. You can also choose which filesystem you use, I personally like ZFS for backups as it at least has the ability to verify that any file writes were completed. Good luck using any similar filesystem with tape.
For some things, I also prefer to use WORM technology of some sort, yes, you have to rewrite the entire thing if something happens, but you're safe from the most common source of data destruction, fat fingers.
That being said, I prefer to have my backups handled offsite and replicated across multiple geographic regions. It's just super nice to have a backup copy on site where it can be quickly restored in the most common cases of user error.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:01PM (2 children)
Quite right.
Rick Wakeman sold me a copy of his latest album recently in flac format. I could have bought a record or a CD, but as it's 2020 now I don't see the need.
As he didn't include any DRM nonsense I can copy it wherever I like.
Thanks Rick.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:13PM (1 child)
But what about his other music? I have quite a bit of it from one of his previous gigs [wikipedia.org]
Here's good example [youtube.com].
Fortunately for me, I purchased the album in question [wikipedia.org] and not only have the disc, but also had the technical knowledge to rip it as well.
This should *never* be an issue. When you *buy* something, it should be your property.
That doesn't change because the delivery mechanism isn't a physical one. What's more, most of the research has shown that making media available without DRM generally *increases* sales.
Even more, any vendor who can arbitrarily reverse the sale should be liable for breach of contract if they do so without the consent of all parties. That would put a stop to that shit pretty quick methinks.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:08PM
I have no doubt that is true. I would not have bought Rick's latest if he had included any DRM nastiness.
(Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:42AM
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
If you don't have a local non-proprietary copy, own is not the word you are looking for.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Zappy on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:10PM (3 children)
Recently experienced this kind of theft first hand when I got a new phone and some app I paid for was no longer available for download in the playstore.
Service chat lady was less than helpful and kept "explaining" the app was no longer available. And what was I complaining about, you see I wasn't the only one, the app was gone nobody could reinstall it. So why was I complaining.
Never got an acknowledgement when I said this made it more objectionable not less.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:38PM (1 child)
Can you file a complaint with the local attorney general/trade authority? Even just a call from them might be good enough to at least get you a refund and make them think twice about putting out crap in the future that they can't support.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @03:20PM
The long term solution is for people to stop paying for apps on these sorts of devices. At least with programs for desktops and laptops you have options for continuing to use them as long as you like, even if it means installing the OS into a virtual machine. The main exceptions I've seen are when it's tied to a hardware product of some sort, that can be hit or miss.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:27PM
This is why I occasionally back up the installed APKs on my phone I don't want to have to replace. There's an app for that, too.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:12PM (12 children)
2019? is that a typo or is this just a re-post of an old article?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Booga1 on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:24PM (2 children)
It's not a typo. We've even had articles on here about it. This is just a resurfacing of the issue as people keep running into stuff like this. Microsoft's just an easy target, but Apple is caving to China's censorship requirements now as well. It's the new trend, same as the old trend.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:30PM
News get slower to IAfrika, they must've be still on dial-up. I wonder if they heard about covid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:09PM
Of course they are because they want access to a "market" of a billion people and they don't give a crap about how those people are treated.
They (like every other corporation) also don't give a crap about how your government treat you either, just as long as the money keeps flowing.
Apple (and all the other corporations) were well aware they would have to cave to China's policies of the day when Deng Xiaoping offered them that access more than 30 years ago.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by c0lo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:40PM (8 children)
They are too busy to have noticed in time, the effort to "decolonise mathematical sciences" drains their attention capacity.
No, I'm not kidding [iafrikan.com], that seems to be a real thing there [journals.co.za]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:59PM (5 children)
It's not just Africa. Shit like this [wordpress.com] is exactly why your government is defunding the humanities. I hope other Western governments follow.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:07PM (2 children)
Maybe it is not shit [maa.org].
I must admit I was taken by surprise, but from the perspective of introducing students to mathematics they may have a point; even if those that succeed in getting into math's guts will abandon the sugar coating as no longer relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:34PM (1 child)
And if that fails, there are always the incentives of trade [theonion.com] and good old monetary [youtube.com] motivation (warning, last link is gratuitously cheesecake-heavy).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:16PM
MMMMM...Cheesecake [youtube.com]!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:27PM (1 child)
Nb: I know plenty of Oxford physics professors. I would say there is, rightly, concern about the representation of minorities in the university. In particular there is a thing where most of the students have been to privately funded schools; but ethnic minorities, male/female ratio are also a big deal. But no one is proposing renaming Fresnel diffraction or anything "wacky".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @07:14PM
So they're racists? Most math students would be of east asian descent if we wanted accurate representation based on the only metric that matters. If universities claim there's another metric that matters, job applications from graduates can go in the bin and they can go sue their former university.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:06PM (1 child)
Looking at the articles, they are *not* about decolonialising mathematics.
They are about using local examples instead of European and American examples when motivating applications of mathematics in locally used textbooks.
Not as silly as you suggest.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:30PM
I started [soylentnews.org] even without your advice.
On the other foot, the linked article [iafrikan.com] starts abruptly with "Is it possible to decolonise mathematical sciences?", so one may be forgiven for being taken by surprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:59PM (6 children)
Good Sources:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org] (Public Domain)
https://librivox.org/ [librivox.org] (Public Domain)
https://www.baen.com/ [baen.com] (DRM-Free)
https://www.tor.com/ [tor.com] (DRM-Free)
https://www.gog.com/ [gog.com] (DRM-Free)
Bad Sources:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/ [barnesandnoble.com]
https://store.steampowered.com/ [steampowered.com] (But you know you use them and they're not too bad.)
Worst Sources:
https://www.amazon.com/ [amazon.com]
https://www.epicgames.com/site/ [epicgames.com]
Too Good to Be True / Actively being killed off by publishers:
https://archive.org/ [archive.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:17PM
Then there's the form of rights management that doesn't encrypt the media, but instead watermarks it, so that if it is distributed widely, it can be noticed whose copy is being widely distributed.
This can go as far as subtle manipulation of the low-order bits in a digitized analog document (perhaps audio, video, or image) or as innocuous as putting visible text in front of the title on the front cover, saying something like "This Hendrik Boom's personal copy of ..."
Merely watermarked documents you can keep and use even if the watermarking organization disappears.
Although beware of selling your personal copy. Even if you behave the purchaser may not and leave you on the hook for trouble.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:33PM (1 child)
Maybe a decade pf two ago, there was an idealistic music site (called irate? or urate? or something?) that stored a database full of free/libre music. And it has a recommendation engine. You got to rate the music it provided you, and it would thereafter compare your ratings to other peoples' in order to find other music that was appreciated but other people with similar tastes to yours.
I have lost any links I had to that site. I don't even know if it still exists.
It had a steep learning curve. Not that it was hard to use. Its learning curve, not mine. But it took too long to figure out what I liked, so I kept getting random crap and I gave up on it. I may not have stuck with it long enough to train it; and too few others may have stuck with it for it to acquire any ratings for it to compare with mine.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:49PM
As far as music goes there's:
https://musopen.org/music/ [musopen.org]
https://www.mutopiaproject.org/ [mutopiaproject.org]
Haven't heard of anything other than eMusic [emusic.com] targeting more recent music. eMusic used to be much more idealistic with regards to DRM-Free things, but they were required a while ago. Since then, they seem more like just another mark in someone's portfolio. In any event, I used to hear about eMusic every now and again, recently I've heard nothing about them. Could be the MAFIAA err..., however you spell that music association acronym, decided it was simpler to just buy them.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:16PM (1 child)
Best Source:
bittorrent
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:12PM
libgen is a better source.
(Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @07:20PM
Knowing how Jason Scott thinks, I wonder if he's behind the pandemic free library project, worrying that there wasn't enough external replication of archive.org and hoping to change that for the better by causing panic.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by legont on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:07PM (42 children)
We don't really own them either or will not soon.
Cell phone becomes unusable not because it is broken, but because they update the server side of things of introduce bug fixes in newer barely supported versions. Copyrighted property is inseparable from the hardware. And so on. Soon cars will be like this and home appliances. On the other hand when people see that they can't really buy things they lease them. Even companies who produced and lease those things don't really own them either as they are in similar relationship with others. Real estate is not really property but can be viewed as on lease from governments because of high taxes. I can go on and on.
Hence, as Karl Marks predicted, private property is being destroyed by the very capitalists themselves.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday July 01 2020, @06:01PM (32 children)
Add in what should be durable goods that fail shortly after the warranty and have been made as close to impossible to repair as they can be.
All the downsides of Communism with none of the upside.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:50PM (27 children)
Add in what should be durable goods that fail shortly after the warranty and have been made as close to impossible to repair as they can be.
People keep talking about this stuff, but honestly I haven't seen any good examples of this. Do you have any? I've repaired durable goods, such as washing machines, in the not-so-distant past. A lot of times, you can get repair parts fairly cheaply on Amazon or Ebay, which frequently but not always are aftermarket (made in China, just like the factory parts). There's even YouTube videos showing how to do many common repair procedures for appliances.
The problem isn't that these things are hard to repair (they're really not, in my experience; you just need some basic tools), or that the parts are hard to get (they're not, thanks to the internet). The problem is that Americans these days are stupid and lazy and can't figure out how to use a screwdriver, even when someone makes a YouTube video showing them exactly how, and insist on paying a "professional" to do simple stuff for them. But these people have very high hourly labor rates, so the cost of repairing the appliance ends up being about as much as just tossing it and buying a newer one that's nicer, cleaner, has more features, and is more efficient.
In the "old days", it used to be that manufactured goods were relatively expensive (because manufacturing wasn't very efficient), and local labor costs were low, so it made sense to repair things instead of replacing them. That's turned around now: manufacturing is hyper-efficient, coupled with lower labor rates in the countries where the factories are located (but those labor rates aren't *that* much lower any more BTW), and local labor rates are ridiculous because rents have gone up so much, so it doesn't make sense to repair anything if you can't DIY.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:29PM (7 children)
I have tried to repair many many things, but modern stuff is designed to be thrown away, from the moment the designer starts thinking about it...
Some experiences from the recent past:
1. washing machine - 8 years old. Failure on main board, main board no longer manufactured. To remove panel, break plastic one way lugs (mushroom shaped force fit). So can't replace broken part, and can't put it back together even if you could get the part
2. house intercom/doorbell. 15 years old, so has lots of screws, come apart, but has machine soldered tiny parts - how many hours with an oscilloscope to find the broken/burned out part?
3. toy remote control car - one wheel broke - whole axle/bearing assembly is a single moulded lump.. no amount of special glue can reinstate the required structural integrity.
4. plastic insert/cover on vegetable drawers in fridge. Thin plastic. floppy. Small, shaped clips hold it in. Removing the try to clean it breaks the clips. Tray now falls down and jams drawers.. Clips cannot be purchased. Making your own is... interesting (too strong and the can't be pushed into place, to week and they don't support the tray)..
Why make it last 40 years, when you can get a new sale when it breaks after 5..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @02:56PM
That's a happy side effect. The main reason why they go through models so quickly is that it makes it impossible to properly research the item you're looking to buy. By the time the major issues are known and posted, they're just about ready to discontinue the model for a new one that's only slightly different and may or may not have the same set of issues.
Forcing people to buy a new one because there aren't any parts available is just a happy side effect for the manufacturers. In most cases, there's little stopping them from reusing parts in newer models other than their desire to sell a new product rather than have you fix the one you've got.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:29PM (5 children)
The other side to this is: how much did you pay for these things? Would you be willing to pay 3-5x as much for something designed to last longer, and be more repairable? Most consumers aren't willing to pay 1.2x as much for something better, so manufacturers are giving them what they want.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday July 03 2020, @02:19AM (4 children)
The thing is, many of the sins we're talking about couldn't have even saved 1%. Some even cost more than doing it right. People buy only the cheapest because most of the time, the more expensive turns out the be the cheapest with a shinier badge tacked on it.
If you're going to be ripped off, you might as well be ripped off for as little as possible.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 03 2020, @03:57PM (3 children)
Yeah, so you have expensive stuff that's just overpriced junk, and you have expensive stuff that's better than the cheapest junk. How are consumers supposed to know the difference? Doing research only goes so far; I've seen tons of product reviews for things giving them 5 stars, from people who've only used the product a short time, and then a few poor reviews from people who've had it longer. It's like this XKCD comic [xkcd.com]. Lots of great reviews doesn't mean the product is actually good, or lasts a long time. I imagine a lot of people just gave up and go for the cheapest after being burned.
Also, there's the issue that a lot of people don't *want* to keep things a lot time. What's the point of paying extra for something that'll last 40 years if you don't plan on keeping it more than 5? Especially when newer items will likely be more efficient, have better features, etc.?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:12PM (2 children)
Exactly. Then there's the constant churn. By the time a model has been on the market long enough for the first buyers to realize it fails way too soon, that model is replaced by a nearly identical model )that's probably built even more poorly) and so the later (all bad) reviews of the old model just disappear as "moot".
When good products lifespans exceed the owner's needs, they sell it on. That only works if there is good reason to believe the thing that should last 20-40 years isn't on it's last leg after 5. It keeps waste out of the landfill and allows people who are less well off to afford what they need.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 06 2020, @08:50PM (1 child)
When good products lifespans exceed the owner's needs, they sell it on. That only works if there is good reason to believe the thing that should last 20-40 years isn't on it's last leg after 5. It keeps waste out of the landfill and allows people who are less well off to afford what they need.
I think part of the problem here is that people just don't expect to get much money from (for instance, ~10 year old) used appliances in a secondhand sale. It's not like a car, where you do want your car to last 30 years so you can drive it for 5-10 years, then resell it for thousands of dollars to someone else. People just don't seem to expect that with appliances; when they buy a new one because the old one is ugly/dated-looking, or making some noises and not worth repairing because it's ugly or doesn't have newer features, they just get the new one delivered and the old one is taken away by the delivery people. In reality, it does seem like a lot of these end up going to places that repair them and resell them as refurbished, but this probably depends on the model. If you check out Craigslist, you can find people reselling refurbished appliances, so they are out there. But unlike cars where it's pretty common to either resell your car yourself, or to do a "trade-in" (which doesn't usually net quite as much resale value), there's just no such thing for appliances that I've ever heard of, nor have I ever heard of this (and I'm old enough to remember appliances lasting more than 3 years).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 13 2020, @10:37PM
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. People don't get much for used appliances because due to 'value engineering' potential buyers know they're more likely to be used up.
Sort of like the perceived value of a used car in the '70s with 150,000 miles on it, the general advice was just drive it into the ground then scrap it. By comparison, today, SOME makes have an actual resale value at 150,000 miles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:47AM
Good timing--just DIY fixed the house A/C. It's been trouble every spring since we had it installed about 10 years ago, including leaks, motor jam, on and on. First year or two on warranty & I was watching what they did.
This time the circulator fan had been working fine, then one cycle it didn't run, we all wondered why we were drooping, turned out it was several degrees above the setpoint. Remembered that it has a 3 speed motor (pick the terminal), so I pulled out the motor in the attic unit, moved the connector and...so far so good. The acid test will be to see if it starts again the next time the thermostat calls for cool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:52AM (2 children)
My parents upgraded to a high efficiency furnace a while back. The circulation fan squeals when it runs because the bearings have gone dry. The bearings and motor are inside a molded plastic shell that can't be opened without destroying it to prevent any kind of maintenance. Instead, the entire fan assembly must be replaced for several hundred dollars when a few drops of oil would solve the problem. The old furnace ran for over forty years without trouble due to basic preventative maintenance and probably had another forty left in it when it was replaced. I doubt the new one will last much more than ten because any kind of basic maintenance is impossible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:12PM
What brand of high efficiency furnace is that? I'm due for a new furnace and would like to avoid that brand!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @03:17PM
Possibly, or they sealed it to prolong the period before the lubrication runs out. Honestly, not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes things get sealed for legitimate reasons.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:48AM (13 children)
Try to get parts for an Apple some time (yes, a computer SHOULD be a durable good). Newer appliances now need a particular board to make them run. Not like the old days when you could swap out a timer or even repair the old one. A digital control board SHOULD last a lot longer than a mechanical sequencer, but they don't.
I am quite familiar with appliance and automotive repair.
Agreed about the cost of having someone else repair and about rent and mortgage. The outrageous cost of just treading water is a gigantic weight dragging our standard of living slowly down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:09AM (6 children)
The first time I ran into Expensive-Unrepairable was in fact an Apple desktop computer (Mac System 8 era). Fan died in the power supply and it was overheating. So I arrive, tools and replacement fan in hand, and discover that the whole assembly was RIVETED together such that there was no way to get it apart, short of a chainsaw. Owner settled for leaving the case open and a desk fan aimed at the innards.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:04AM (3 children)
I ran into a not quite so expensive but more egregious example. A VCR with some probably minor mechanical failure so that it didn't correctly load/unload a tape. I took the cover off and tried to put it through it's motions to see what looked wrong, and damned if it didn't have a hidden light sensor to detect the cover off condition and perform a PLANNED malfunction so I couldn't see how it was supposed to work!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:08AM (2 children)
Holy crap! the Mac was just poor design -- didn't look so much nyah-nyah-try-and-fix-this as what's the fastest and cheapest way to fasten it? (whole thing was made cheap as could be) but that VCR... yeah, that's just evil!!
Oh, speaking of evil... a tale I was told from back when software ran off floppy disks: if dBase (then thousands of dollars) thought you were making a move to pirate it, it would erase itself. And doing something like accidentally removing the wrong disk or in the wrong order would trigger it (I forget the details but it was way too easy to do by accident). Someone at a friend's former work managed to set it off... ouch.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:26PM (1 child)
Yeah, that dBase copy prevention was way over the line. Active and possibly irreversible retribution triggered by a hyper sensitive tilt switch.
DRM and other copy prevention is necessarily against any principle of robust software. Rather than trying to find a way to go on and just dealing with probably harmless quirks, DRM and copy prevention actively look for a reason to hard fail. Imagine if going to a 404 page caused the browser to just exit without saving state.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:31PM
Good analogy!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:15PM (1 child)
You couldn't drill the rivets? That's the normal way to remove them.
I bought an expensive aluminum tower chassis many, many years ago, and it got damaged in shipping. I got a refund I think from the shipping company, so I had a free but dented case; it was made of aluminum panels riveted together, so I drilled out the rivets, took it apart, bent/flattened the aluminum back into shape, then riveted it back together, and it was pretty much good as new.
Rivets are certainly not as easy to remove as screws, but it's not impossible.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:33PM
I thought about it, but there were about a dozen (and the thing was layered together so you couldn't even reach some of 'em) and sadly I lack a drill capable of going around corners into very small cracks. Wasn't worth the pretty good chance of hitting something vital; owner said never mind, I'll just use a desk fan, and so it went until the thing died entirely a couple years later.
If it were mine, yeah, I'd probably have completely dysmangled it and made it so it came apart gracefully whether it liked it or not. Or, why I don't like creatively tight packing when stuff might need to come out. (Of course, Apple and repairs...)
Good story about your case -- well worth the effort!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:20PM (5 children)
Try to get parts for an Apple some time (yes, a computer SHOULD be a durable good).
Apples aren't durable goods, they're luxury items. Are you going to complain about getting spare parts for a Bugatti car or a Coach handbag? When you buy an Apple, any repairs need to be done by Apple themselves, not by you or third-party companies. Honestly, complaining about this is silly. I've have no trouble getting spare parts for my Dell laptops.
Newer appliances now need a particular board to make them run. Not like the old days when you could swap out a timer or even repair the old one. A digital control board SHOULD last a lot longer than a mechanical sequencer, but they don't.
You can repair circuit boards too. This complaint just comes from people who don't understand electronics and whine that it isn't as easy as something mechanical. Circuit boards rarely fail, and when they do, the problem is usually cheap electrolytic capacitors. The other problem is usually cold solder joints.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:35PM
"Apples aren't durable goods, they're luxury items."
Exactly!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:39PM (3 children)
Apple is not a luxury good. I said computers SHOULD be durable goods. The comparison with Bugatti is a bit extreme. How many Bugattis do you see in the parking lots compared to how many iPhones and MacBooks you see around?
I understand electronics just fine. I have designed circuit boards and I have repaired them. There's no excuse for them not outliving a clockwork sequencer by a factor of 10. I note that the tools needed to repair a board do go a bit outside of the set of basic tools every household should have and be familiar with.
When you can get a replacement board, they charge outrageous prices for them. You could almost get a CM to make you a one-off for that price, but you'd still need to get the firmware from somewhere.
You can see the transition happening in some areas. Some gas water heaters have a safety sensor that detects when the burner fails to shut down and trips to shut it down. Once repaired, you press a reset button. Others have a one time "TRD" that breaks when overheated (or it gets old) and it blocks the air inlets smothering the burner out (leaving unburned gas spewing from the burner).
The most typical approach today is to use "value engineering" to get the marginal cost of production down followed by "value pricing" to make sure the savings stay in the manufacturer's pocket.
Dell has gotten better about repairability lately, but there was that era where if you swapped in a non-Dell power supply, it would blow the mainboard because they swapped 3 or 4 pins in the otherwise standard ATX connector.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:39PM (2 children)
Yeah, I remember the horror stories about Dell vs normal PSUs. It's a good deal of why my ...uh, computer museum... has but one older Dell, and it was amenable to normal parts. Tho I still recall the argument I had with a fan-of-Dell... someone sent me a top-of-the-line Dell because he was tired of fighting with its constant overheating just from admiring its navel. I took one look inside, dumped the shroud and the teeny tiny fanless heatsink, gave it a normal heatsink with a normal fan, and its operating temperature dropped *40F* degrees. Anyway the fan-of-Dell was horrified because surely they design 'em for best airflow and you'll ruin it! Um, which part of no-longer-overheating did you not understand??
The newer ones, tho... pretty much interchangeable everything, at least for the normal form factors. Which is probably nowadays the cheaper way to build 'em.
Um... how is that behavior by gas water heaters not an explosion hazard??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Friday July 03 2020, @02:14AM (1 child)
That's a damned good question! The theory is that once the flame is out, the thermopile will cool and shut down the gas valve. My preference is the resettable overheat switches that directly disconnect the thermopile from the valve. At least with that, if the valve itself is stuck, the gas will be burned off rather than building up.
The saga of fixing my water heater under warranty is a sad one. It did eventually get fixed, but only because I did the diagnosis myself and did a little social hacking.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 03 2020, @02:19AM
Good thinking... why are you not a designer of gas appliances? :)
We just put a new gas water heater in the rental house... I hope it does not have any of these weird newfangled ideas....
And yeah, *resettable* not one time and dead!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:20PM
For cars in particular, my mechanic can replace any of the un-computerized parts. But for anything involving the system computer, he needs to use special software to interface with it and the software varies for each major manufacturer. For some of the manufacturers, third party products that are reverse engineered versions of the manufacturer software are available. Very few of the manufacturers make the software available for free. Without it, you can't fix certain classes of problems. Every few years some of the automakers try to lock third parties out of accessing their vehicle software at all in some states, and independent repair shops in the US actually have a lobbying body that works with state legislatures to protect right-to-repair.
There is the relatively famous case of John Deere tractors, and John Deere's attempts to make it illegal to repair them unless you're an authorized repair service. See https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware [vice.com]
And I think the biggest example of planned obsolescence is smart phones. Eight years ago lots of smart phones were getting high ratings for ease-of-repair by third parties. Now most of them are getting low ratings. For the phones and tablets my wife and I have tried to repair ourselves, we've had a decent success rate with the tablets and a terrible one with the phones. If the Fairphone products supported the LTE bands in the US we would get one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:30PM (3 children)
How is that communism? I'm not trolling here. I honestly don't get it.
How can corporations using their *market power* to sell poor quality/planned-in obsolescent products and provide poor customer service without interference from the government be termed anything even close to Communism?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:39PM (1 child)
He's not saying that it *is* Communism, just that it's instituted all the bad features of same, without copying any (unspecified) good ones.
I don't really agree with him either, but monopolies are not good, even when only of a very minor thing like the drawer of a refrigerator.
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 Wednesday July 01 2020, @10:52PM
Which features? That's the part I don't get. As far as I can tell, it's (broken/distorted) capitalism, at its worst, all the way down -- Communism is just being used as a trope in an attempt to paint anything bad as being a result of actions by an out group [wikipedia.org] and not an issue which should be addressed, IMHO.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:24AM
By leaving you with no effective actual ownership of anything. You don't own your e-books, you don't own your OS (unless you give the corporate world the slip and install Linux of *BSD). Your major appliances are more akin to a long term rental. In many cases, functionality will appear, disappear, or change at the actual owner's whim, you just rented the thing.
So there we are, "Imagine no possessions...."
It's not actually Communism, it's just the downside.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @07:15PM (8 children)
It's better that people are forced to move on from old hardware. Most of these have old WiFi chips and cellular that have known exploits, which can't be fixed in software. If you can design a "perfect" chip, then there would be no reason to upgrade, but people should definitely upgrade rather than walk around pwned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:29PM (7 children)
No, products should be produced in such a way that chips are not pwned. Companies have to be held responsible for this for the lifetime of the chip.
If you don't agree with me, consider. If breaks are designed badly and the car kills the owner, the company is responsible. One of this days a software bug will kill the owner. Should - and I am looking at you, Musk - company be held responsible?
With bridges situation is even more severe. An engineer who designed a bridge attaches his stamp to the design and is personally responsible up to death sentence. Nowadays Google calls their people engineers. Engineers my ass. Irresponsible amateurs at best.
Once upon a time any sucker could built a bridge. We prohibited it. Same thing will happen to the software and soon.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:44PM (1 child)
How do you ensure products cannot be owned? If you have hardware errors that aren't detected, who gets the blame? Doesn't this just make the problem worse, by forcing companies to drop support for old products and "dangerous" use-cases very quickly to avoid liability? If companies are legally required to support their products, won't they just move out of the US entirely?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:23PM
Let them do it. There is weak intellectual property protection out there, quite a few terrorists, and aggressive local businesses. I am sure either our new domestic or native foreign companies will do them in no time. It's just the practice should be that a traitor company never gets the US protection of any kind - ever.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:54PM (4 children)
It's basically impossible to design a chip or software code that cannot be exploited somehow, unless you confine yourself to extremely simple software running on an extremely simple and slow chip that has no caches. There is no way for humans to design anything resembling modern computers that are this exploit-proof. Even simple computers in the 80s were routinely exploited, and had no real security; they didn't have much trouble because so few people actually had any kind of access to them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by legont on Wednesday July 01 2020, @09:17PM (3 children)
It is not possible to design a bridge that can't go down as well. In fact for serious bridges they calculate how often they will go down.
However, this was perhaps a lesser point. What pisses me off is that say computers in cars are pushed down my throat. I want a car with zero smartness. Being software developer since 80s I am afraid of software in anything important. I am especially afraid of software that I can't check myself. I fly home made airplane with no critical computers and I feel much much safer in it than in my car on my supermarket parking lot.
This has to be stopped and aggressive liability laws may do it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday July 01 2020, @11:52PM (2 children)
Righto. Look ma, no software and no caches - analog PID control using opamps [wordpress.com] for your cruise control. We'll just put a funky design for your fuel tank [wikipedia.org], I'm sure you'll take the time to check it for your satisfaction (large grin)
Point: human civilization will not work without a certain level of trust that enables the division of work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Thursday July 02 2020, @01:41AM
I have no problem with trust, but if trust were broken there got to be consequences. For example if my 10 years old modem is hacked, it is manufacturer fault and my losses, if any, have to be compensated plus some punishing for my suffering.
This perhaps sounds silly for you, but if you replace modem with car or airplane where your children are flying, it may look different.
Now, I realize that they are not ready to produce such a quality software. If so, I have a right to buy the same car without all this shit, which, by the way, is 60% of the price. Force them to make all of it optional and see what people will buy.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:33AM
Let me give you a real life example.
A friend of mine added an extra light to his BMW F650GS motorcycle. It is so called enduro type of bike. It is supposedly designed to go to places such as Alaska wilderness. The bike's computer decided that the system is overloaded and shut the bike down. He removed the light but nothing would bring the bike back to life until BMW dealer entered some secret code or something. Imagine it would happen in Alaska wilderness?
By the way, BMW is a real bunch of assholes. There used to be a company that tested their cars and bikes and published field self repair manuals. BMW sued them out of existence. Airbus engineers are the same - they believe they know how to fly an airplane better then pilots and do whatever possible to eliminate or at least stupidify pilots.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @04:40PM
Those who fail to appreciate RMS are doomed to prove him right. Welcome to dystopia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:34PM (1 child)
hmmm ... instead of giveing money back to the buyer, teh shitty m$hit should remove the DRM on their shit (via sanctioned cracking app) and instead give the money to the original author.
it is "very sad indeed" that m$ is banking on the lazyness of some shafted customers to "just let it slide" so that they can keep the monies.
furthermore m$ should reimburse customers also for the time required to get their monies back ('cause it will require time from the customer and the money will not appear in the account magically!)
i hope clubbermints will in future deal judgement with a heavy hand when companies et al insist on DRM enforcment of human knowledge only to later on abandon it...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:52PM
one could conjure up a fictional plot where DRM is totally legally used to "vanish information", eh?
say a genius has a .. uhm ... err... genius idea (but s/he is a bit greedy).
thus a "deal is made with publisher or distributor (who is secretly in bed with a entity opposed to "the knowledge") for exclusive distribution rights and DRM (to "protect profits").
all goes well until it is revealed that it was m$ and its e(vaporate)Books format.
and thus the genius idea ... vanished
(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?