"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Mr. T mrt@home wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
I can guarantee a shellac disc for a century now, which is pretty good.

Only because you won't be around in a century if someone wants to collect
on
that "guarantee".

No, I can make the guarantee because we have shellac discs around that
have
lasted a century so we know about the possible longevity of th medium.

You still have no idea what a guarantee is do you?
Just as the money fund managers say, "Past performance is only an
*indicator* of future potential, NOT a guarantee".!

MrT.

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 05:31:06 GMT, (hank alrich)
wrote:

What is to go wrong is not the easy things we think of before stuff goes
wrong; it's what later we find out we didn't think of back when. The
mfg's useful life stress testing for the new analog tape formualtions of
the day suggested the stuff would last long enough to forget. But they
must've forgotten about something during the testing, because in next to
no time at all, sticky shed syndrome wanted your oven for the afternoon.

If we were half as smart as we think we are we'd be twice as smart as we
are.

The last house I lived in with my parents, in Eastern Pennsylvania,
was heated with resistance wires in the ceiling. A neighbor's house
down the street had resistance wire heating in their driveway. (Yes,
it did refreeze on the street)

GE had been promoting that their nuclear power plants would make
electricity "too cheap to measure". One of their plants was 80
miles upwind of my family in 1979, and no; it wasn't too cheap
to measure. Electricity either.


We just never ever learn that the map is not the world. Oh, well.

Chris Hornbeck
"Assumptions are what we make when we don't know what's going on.
- ha

"hank alrich" wrote in message
.. .
I have one pressed CD here that got played once, spent a few days in a
very hot car in Weiser ID, and now is unplayable, and unreadable. I have
tape here I recorded in the 1960's that still plays decently.

But it wasn't in the car at the same time was it?
You can destroy anything if you try. IME CD's are harder to destroy than
tape.
Use whatever works for you, or your customers.

MrT.

"Chris Hornbeck" wrote in message
...

Nobody cares, guy. Sorry.

Agreed. I don't either.

MrT.

In article writes:

CD Audio uses an eight-to-fourteen lookup table ("EFM") for
just that purpose. There's also considerable interleaving in
large-ish chunks. Probably not insurmountable obstacles, as
you say.

Could you figure that out if you didn't have anything but a CD? If so,
you're smarter than I am (which is not difficult when it comes to
data).

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Mr. T mrt@home wrote:

You still have no idea what a guarantee is do you?
Just as the money fund managers say, "Past performance is only an
*indicator* of future potential, NOT a guarantee".!

Yes, that's because the money fund managers want you to take all of the
risk. They don't want to take any of it. A guarantee is about who takes
the risk and archiving is about minimizing risk.

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 19 Jan 2005 07:05:26 -0500, (Mike Rivers)
wrote:


In article writes:

CD Audio uses an eight-to-fourteen lookup table ("EFM") for
just that purpose. There's also considerable interleaving in
large-ish chunks. Probably not insurmountable obstacles, as
you say.

Could you figure that out if you didn't have anything but a CD? If so,
you're smarter than I am (which is not difficult when it comes to
data).

Could I? Ya gotta be kidding. But Logan might be able to. The EFM
is one of a finite number of strategies to keep the number of
sequential 1's or 0's below a certain level. And the
interleaving is a well-of-course-now-that-somebody-else-
has-thought-it-up logical way to add some robustness to
the media.

A smart young person with the data stream and a computer could
parse the data in a finite number of tries and figure it out.
So, I think, probably yeah, Logan could. I'd have to learn too much
first. And that'll never happen.

Chris Hornbeck
"Assumptions are what we make when we don't know what's going on."
- ha

"Mr. T" mrt@home wrote:

But it wasn't in the car at the same time was it?

What does that have to do with the failure of a pressed CD? All the
event demonstrates is after exposure to heat in the interior of a car
with windows slightly opened for ventilation, a replicated CD failed.
Why did it fail? We know what are the mechanisms so far discovered for
the failure of magnetic tape. What are the mechanisms for CD failure
over time?

And yes, I have reels of tape here from teh '60's that have endured
similar treament and still play, including some reels of the sterling
RadioShack brand.

--
ha

"Mr. T" mrt@home wrote:


Should be easy unless all intelligence is wiped from the face of the earth.
I see you are doing your bit :-)

You're packing one ****load of assumptive assertions, with little
offered to support that ****load but hot air. It's easy to say
something's easy when one knows little of it. You apparently know little
of much.

--
ha

hank alrich wrote:

And yes, I have reels of tape here from teh '60's that have endured
similar treament and still play, including some reels of the sterling
RadioShack brand.

So, when DID radio shack go offshore with tape manufacture? I know their
plant in Texas was alive in the eighties and that the transfer on paper to
Hanny took place in the mid-nineties, but when did the actual manufacture
change?

I suppose I should call their press relations guys and ask.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Mr. T wrote:


IME CD's are harder to destroy than tape.



If your experience doesn't include a lot of Time, sure.
Remember, Time Changes Everything.



It's kind of a no-brainer that a CD takes more impact to destroy (and
LOTS more magnetism, or only somewhat more heat) than tape, but
mechanical destruction isn't the only mechanism.

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 06:55:42 GMT, Chris Hornbeck
wrote:
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 05:31:06 GMT, (hank alrich)
wrote:

GE had been promoting that their nuclear power plants would make
electricity "too cheap to measure". One of their plants was 80
miles upwind of my family in 1979, and no; it wasn't too cheap
to measure. Electricity either.


No one in the business of selling electricity would EVER let himself be
quoted as saying "Too cheap to meter." A moments thought should reveal
precisely WHY no one in the industry would say that. Hint: How do they
make their money?

The quote is from the head of the US AEC in 1954, Admiral Lewis L.
Strauss. IOW, a government policy wonk.

Moreover, he was talking about nuclear FUSION which was "about forty
years off" in 1954 and which, fifty years later, is STILL "about forty
years off." (or at least it was when I was working for Princeton Plasma
Physics Lab) (Talk about Geek Heaven....)

On 2005-01-19, hank alrich wrote:

I have one pressed CD here that got played once, spent a few days in a
very hot car in Weiser ID, and now is unplayable, and unreadable. I have
tape here I recorded in the 1960's that still plays decently.

Leave your tape in the car and compare apples to apples :-)

james of tucson wrote:
On 2005-01-19, hank alrich wrote:


I have one pressed CD here that got played once, spent a few days in a
very hot car in Weiser ID, and now is unplayable, and unreadable. I have
tape here I recorded in the 1960's that still plays decently.


Leave your tape in the car and compare apples to apples :-)

I have tapes that have been in the car for 20 years. Through desert heat
and northern winters. And still play fine.

On 19 Jan 2005 09:29:25 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Mr. T mrt@home wrote:

You still have no idea what a guarantee is do you?
Just as the money fund managers say, "Past performance is only an
*indicator* of future potential, NOT a guarantee".!

Yes, that's because the money fund managers want you to take all of the
risk. They don't want to take any of it. A guarantee is about who takes
the risk and archiving is about minimizing risk.

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?

Or a nice bordeaux...

Al

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 13:23:59 -0600, Joe Sensor
wrote:

james of tucson wrote:
On 2005-01-19, hank alrich wrote:


I have one pressed CD here that got played once, spent a few days in a
very hot car in Weiser ID, and now is unplayable, and unreadable. I have
tape here I recorded in the 1960's that still plays decently.


Leave your tape in the car and compare apples to apples :-)

I have tapes that have been in the car for 20 years. Through desert heat
and northern winters. And still play fine.

I have some that melted, or at least the case did.

Al

Joe Sensor wrote:
james of tucson wrote:
On 2005-01-19, hank alrich wrote:

I have one pressed CD here that got played once, spent a few days in a
very hot car in Weiser ID, and now is unplayable, and unreadable. I have
tape here I recorded in the 1960's that still plays decently.

Leave your tape in the car and compare apples to apples :-)

I have tapes that have been in the car for 20 years. Through desert heat
and northern winters. And still play fine.

And they don't use the clear polycarbonate shells, I bet. We all found out
the hard way that the high precision polycarbonate shells from companies
like SHAPE reduced azimuth error a little on cassettes, but didn't hold up
in hot cars.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

play_on wrote:
On 19 Jan 2005 09:29:25 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?

Or a nice bordeaux...

Well, around here the latest new fad seems to be buying Beaujolais nouveau
and actually drinking it. Right off.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 19 Jan 2005 15:26:59 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

play_on wrote:
On 19 Jan 2005 09:29:25 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?

Or a nice bordeaux...

Well, around here the latest new fad seems to be buying Beaujolais nouveau
and actually drinking it. Right off.

I thought that was the whole point with that wine, to drink it right
away.

Al

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
Well, around here the latest new fad seems to be buying Beaujolais nouveau
and actually drinking it. Right off.


No one is going to get this are they....

Chris Hornbeck wrote:
On 19 Jan 2005 07:05:26 -0500, (Mike Rivers)
wrote:
In article
writes:

CD Audio uses an eight-to-fourteen lookup table ("EFM") for
just that purpose. There's also considerable interleaving in
large-ish chunks. Probably not insurmountable obstacles, as
you say.

Could you figure that out if you didn't have anything but a CD? If so,
you're smarter than I am (which is not difficult when it comes to
data).

Could I? Ya gotta be kidding. But Logan might be able to. The EFM
is one of a finite number of strategies to keep the number of
sequential 1's or 0's below a certain level.

It's probably not amazingly hard to figure out, although it's
hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone from the future.

When you encode 8-bit quantities into 14-bit quantities, you
have an interesting thing that comes out of that. There are
256 (2^8) possible 8-bit values. Each 8-bit quantity always
turns into the same 14-bit quantity, but there are 16384 (2^14)
possible 14-bit quantities. Therefore, what you're going to
see is the same 256 14-bit values over and over again, and
the other 16128 possible 14-bit values will mysteriously never
appear at all in your data (barring physical errors, which will
only make them appear very infrequently). So that's going to
be a very very strong hint that each 14-bit number corresponds
to an 8-bit number.

But then you're stuck on another problem: which of your 14-bit
quantities goes with which of the 8-bit quantities? Maybe
you'll be able to look at the data and see something obvious.
Maybe 4-bit quantities are actually converted into 7-bit
quantities, in which case you've only got a list of 16 things
that need to be matched up with 16 other things. Hopefully there
is some pattern you can find. One possible pattern is that the
14-bit values and the 8-bit values might just line up properly
if you put each list in numerical order from smallest to largest.
(Or if you put them in some other obvious order, like, I dunno,
Gray codes or something.)

Another possible helpful thing is that 14-bit values need to be
able to be transformed back into 8-bit values as easily as possible
because all players have to do this (and players need to be
cheap). So there should be some pattern that could be easily
implemented in hardware logic; it would be stupid to require all
CD players to look up every 14-bit number in a giant list. (Well,
not *that* stupid if you use a ROM, but stupid anyway.) So that
eliminates a whole lot of the possible mappings.

As an aside, this type of problem is equivalent to decrypting
a message encrypted with a substitution cipher. Substitution
ciphers have been around for a long time; in fact, it's believed
that Julius Caesar used a particular type of substitution cipher
(not surprisingly called a Caesar cipher) to communicate with
his armies. Substitution ciphers are basically the simplest
form of cryptography, and there are some good techniques for
breaking the codes. (I only know one of them, because I only
took that one semester of cryptography, and I barely made it
through!) But the fact that there are techniques doesn't mean
that it's necessarily easy. If the code isn't easy to break,
this could be the biggest obstacle to being able to play CDs.

In conclusion, I don't know if it's easy or not. :-)

- Logan

Scott Dorsey wrote:
play_on wrote:

On 19 Jan 2005 09:29:25 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?

Or a nice bordeaux...


Well, around here the latest new fad seems to be buying Beaujolais nouveau
and actually drinking it. Right off.

Nouveau is nice in a sort of novelty way (hehe...) Have you had any of the unfiltered Beaujolais that Kermit Lynch brings in? Old-school stuff that can age nicely, and one heckuva find IMO. Zowie...

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell
you
something about failure modes.

Never mentioned it.
Mike is the one claiming past history with *similar* product, is some sort
of iron clad guarantee of future performance.
Ampex thought so too with 456, but didn't put the guarantee in writing of
course :-)

MrT.

"hank alrich" wrote in message
. ..
"Mr. T" mrt@home wrote:

But it wasn't in the car at the same time was it?

What does that have to do with the failure of a pressed CD?

Has everything to do with the RELATIVE abilities of CD and tape under the
same conditions of storage.

MrT.

"hank alrich" wrote in message
.. .
You're packing one ****load of assumptive assertions, with little
offered to support that ****load but hot air. It's easy to say
something's easy when one knows little of it. You apparently know little
of much.

But apparently a hell of a *LOT* more than you though!

(even cryptology, which I do know very little about, I admit.)

If you think CD encoding is harder to crack than DVD CSS, you should say
why.

MrT.

play_on wrote:
On 19 Jan 2005 15:26:59 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
play_on wrote:
On 19 Jan 2005 09:29:25 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

But you're the one who thinks that accelerated aging tests actually tell you
something about failure modes. If accelerated aging is so great, why can't
they make a good Scotch in six months?

Or a nice bordeaux...

Well, around here the latest new fad seems to be buying Beaujolais nouveau
and actually drinking it. Right off.

I thought that was the whole point with that wine, to drink it right
away.

No, traditionally it's a gamble. You buy it and you put it down, and either
you wind up with an amazing wine or a terrible wine a few years down the road,
but with the same initial investment.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Mr T = Phil?

On 2005-01-19, Joe Sensor wrote:

I have tapes that have been in the car for 20 years. Through desert heat
and northern winters. And still play fine.

I haven't experienced too much northern winter, but I know what the
desert can do. There isn't much that can stand up to the sun in Tucson.

"Mr. T" mrt@home wrote:

Has everything to do with the RELATIVE abilities of CD and tape under the
same conditions of storage.

And since the cassettes that were also in the car still play, your
point, again, is...? My point is that we do not yet understand the
potential failure mechanisms for digital media. Hence, our speculation
that such media will offer longevity is just that, speculation.

--
ha

play on wrote:

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 16:49:09 GMT, Les Cargill
wrote:


hank alrich wrote:


james of tucson wrote:



You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will
be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them
suddenly." They will have had centuries to prepare, and while there
might be sympathy for those who procrastinate, there will also be
success for those who did not.


The whole of the Petroleum Age will not last centuries; it'll be about
150 years, end-to-end, and the downside of the curve will be much
steeper than was the upside, given the skyrocketing demand for crude oil
as formerly undeveloped nations race to get their own hot tubs.


First, it is unlikely that developing nations will crave hot tubs.


Since you seem to be such a literalist, let me interpret for you...
I'm sure Hank meant "hot tubs" as a symbol of middle class
aspirations.

Al

I understood it that way exactly, but exposure to
folks from other regions of the world has taught me that
it's simply unlikely, especially "car culture".

--
Les Cargill

hank alrich wrote:

Jay Kadis wrote:


DNA is unstable and must undergo constant
error detection and correction just like digital audio.


So what's the best type of dither for those kind of signals?

--
ha

Predators work pretty well.

--
Les Cargill

Surely someone will pick up the slack; there is money to be made. But who
would have thought professional magnetic tape would precede arc carbons in
death?

Steve Kraus wrote:
Surely someone will pick up the slack; there is money to be made. But who
would have thought professional magnetic tape would precede arc carbons in
death?


well I have not experianced anything that could even duplicate much
less better a carbon arc for follow spot or burning offset plates

we have flashmedia that kicks tapes ass back to the stone age
George

In article . net,
Steve Kraus wrote:
Surely someone will pick up the slack; there is money to be made. But who
would have thought professional magnetic tape would precede arc carbons in
death?

JAI is still making red oxide tape of doubtful quality in India. It is
about par with Indian carbons.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
In article . net,
Steve Kraus wrote:
Surely someone will pick up the slack; there is money to be made. But
who
would have thought professional magnetic tape would precede arc carbons
in
death?

JAI is still making red oxide tape of doubtful quality in India. It is
about par with Indian carbons.

Public radio's "On the Media" program had a report tonight about the
imminent demise of analog tape, not a very well informed one. After ten
minutes of not discussing the real audio issues, and repeatedly saying that
tape is dead and this is the end of an era, the reporter during the last 30
seconds said, "Well, actually, Chapter 11 doesn't mean production will end
forever, there are companies planning to take up the slack, and experts give
the technology another 10-20 years." It sounds like the guy didn't have his
facts straight, put the piece together, then discovered he was probably all
wrong, so he went back and added a couple of lines taking it all back. Bad
reporting.

You could probably find it at the network's website. I think "On the Media"
comes from PRI, not NPR, but couldn't swear to it, since I'm usually out of
the car by the time credits roll.

Peace,
Paul

Here it is... for your listening pleasure...
http://www.onthemedia.org/stream/ram.../otm012105g.ra