Hi again,
i'm not meaning to nitpick, but i do feel i am having to write again long - hand, what i already wrote. This hopefully should dismiss any perceived ambiguity, not that i think i was ambiguous to start with
Well no, you directly connected it to the article by mentioning
what you thought the IBM'er was pointing to. And in fact, he was
quite explicitely pointing to good quality discs having five year
expectancies as a maximum, not at low qualty substrates having that
kind of maximum life expectancy. The lower quality discs were
given even less than five years. That is very much at odds with the
ten year report. So you got it quite wrong, which is odd since
that was one of the core points in the article. Based on what the
IBM'er said, a 10 year disc would be quite unexpected and casts a
pretty bad light on either Gereck's assessment or the article's
ability to report accurately.
You make good and fair point. But also you obviously recognised the distinction, and that i wasn't making categorical attributions, so i wonder why you chose your argument as you did. No harm done.
The article is in fact very poor, as if it was really a product of a boozy holiday season for hacks. It doesn't even state whether it is current production media. But one might infer that, when it's posted as a news article. So my "get out of jail" card is the question whether CD-Rs were made of sterner stuff back in the day they were impressive to have.
This is why i didn't hold a line and doubt a 10yr old disc being fine. Not only because of that, but because 1) there's always a possible exception, by dint of chance 2) arguing publicly over one person's anecdotal evidence is a sure way to drag the discussion downhill 3) as you may have noticed, my biggest point is not "CD-R is so useless, you
must go to tape" but the relative benefits of tape once you scale into bigger data sets and that i see no point in the optical game at the same time as many potential pitfalls.
It seems to me that the reasonble thing is either to doubt the ten
year report or to doubt the article's or Gerecke's assessment.
You are right, in principle, from your perspective. Please try to comprehend, i did not post the article with a comment "this guy is totally right, i believe everything he says as God Gievn Truth". I merely wasn't towing that particular line that you have fed me above, nor am i. I'm skeptical both of Gerecke's arguments, because they're almost off the cuff, as well as i'm skeptical optical media makes any sense for long term archival. I hope still that someone who really knows about optical writable discs can add some more concrete information as to the state of things. But i digress . . .
Well, i read the article, and it was very short on explaining
itself, leaving me to infer what the quoted IBM guy was hinting at.
I think you failed to comprehend what i wrote, and that a point can
be raised by implication. You've read my post as literal grammar,
incorrectly.
Yes, it is an ambiguous statement. But since you previously
attributed the article with content that it didn't include, your
comment certainly made me wonder.
Where was it i categorically attributed anything to the article? I've just re-read the entire thread, and nowhere do i make claims about what the article says. I did
speculate about what the article might import. You have inferred intent from my words, which assuming rather a lot i think, when you take what you see in my words, as opposed to what was written, as argumentative "fact".
I don't feel like debating comprehension, but please also don't take my comments personally.
I think the article conclusions are startling, if you consider how little context is given. But like you misread my intent above (that somehow i should either dispute the poster's longevity claim or else dispute the article), i was making a wholly other point - that top tape drives are surprisingly affordable to even a serious amateur, and that owning one circumvents a host of nuisances associated with optical writable media, of which the linked article is just a reminder.
One last time, with a caveat this isn't intended as personal comment, but i feel you're making a semantic mountain out of a molehill, and are skilfully reinterpreting my words contrary to both fact and intent. This results in false and useless argument, and if you display too, as above, little understanding of how a tape system is actually operated or what it's capabilities are, then i think your effort wholly specious. N.B. i am not claiming particular knowledge about optical media, just they have in my experience long been rejected for long - term high capacity archival in commercial and Govt. applications. There are two parts to that argument - handling and capacity inconvenience, and studies indicating the failure or bit rot rate doesn't give any advantage over tape, if you factor in recopy necessity for tape as well as optical. That equation may change however with holographic storage, or much higher density writeable optical. Other factors such as data transfer rates may very well give the final edge to optical, as tape is just about maxxed at 20 to 30 MB/s, compressed, unless you use multiple drives. We do need much much faster transfers.
cheers!
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Proof, it it ever were needed, that Mr. Rockwell is not a Brit
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'This may be a blessing in disguise for fast-shooting fudge packers, since you'll start having the D200 lock up on you before you're really full, and it will free up again for another few shots.' [
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/d200-high-speed.htm]
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