What will be the next technology to go?

[root]

Oh I do remember, but would you trust solid state devices.... had quite a few usb sticks failed/corrupted and I do not intend to have a drawer full of usb sticks for the amount of existing software I have
I do have back ups on external hard drives.

Some people embrace changes enthusiastically, others don't!!!

The humble DVD will be around for quite a while....

never heard of DVD rot then?

I've got no end of CD's and DVDs that can no longer be read, either the disk is scratched, or has been left in the sunshine and is burned, or worst the foil layer physically de-laminates from the plastic layer.

there really is no long term solution for storage, even punch cards rot/rust/degrade

magnetic media demagnetises.
flash media de charges.
metal film media (DVD/CD) de-laminates.

 

[Dngrsone]

Well, CRTs are pretty much gone, now... incandescent lights are fading away...

I wonder which format will go first-- the full-sized book or the trade paperback? Books (like other print media-- newspapers and magazines) will still be around for quite a while, at least until we get flexible eInk displays that are bulletproof; but I don't doubt that one or the other format will be dropped due to production costs... then again, I expected print-on-demand to have gotten a better foothold than it has.

 

[dale]

I read this article (sorry, too long ago, no source) that a well manufactured CD/DVD lasts up to 19 years. 19 years is a lot less than permanent, if you think about it the type of data you'd like to burn and keep.

 

[Dngrsone]

I read this article (sorry, too long ago, no source) that a well manufactured CD/DVD lasts up to 19 years. 19 years is a lot less than permanent, if you think about it the type of data you'd like to burn and keep.

Well, a burned CD will last less than 10 years.

I remember when Sony introduced the Compact Disc all those many years ago and they promised us consumers that the cost for a music CD would go down as demand increased. It didn't.

Sure, the price for an album that came out three years ago might be low, but the cost of a newly-released CD is still as high as ever. The same is happening with Blu-ray. They think that people will get used paying the price, which indeed will happen, but they are losing market share, and the DVD will continue to dominate for a long time (and piracy will continue to thrive as long as it costs so much to get a legitimate copy, if that is even obtainable).

If, and that's a big if, the media companies want to phase out a medium, then they need to make the replacement nearly as cheap as what they want to phase out. Demand will increase quickly to make the production costs drop below their artificially low consumer costs, and the old medium will disappear fast.

 

[MMM]

never heard of DVD rot then?

I've got no end of CD's and DVDs that can no longer be read, either the disk is scratched, or has been left in the sunshine and is burned, or worst the foil layer physically de-laminates from the plastic layer.

there really is no long term solution for storage, even punch cards rot/rust/degrade

magnetic media demagnetises.
flash media de charges.
metal film media (DVD/CD) de-laminates.

Quite true, but a commercial CD/DVD has a so called estimated lifespan of 75 years if stored correctly where a burnt CD/DVD god only knows depending on quality & handling.
Not often a commercial quality disk fails unless abused.
I know nothing is perfect but I have multiple back ups on disks & Hard drives just in case one fails, been down that road a few times.

 

[foothead]

If you've been having disc degradation already on CDs/DVDs, you've been doing something very wrong. I recently ripped my mother's huge CD collection she's been having since the 80s, and not one of those discs had any sign of "rot." The only times I've ever experienced that were on new discs released on a new medium (mostly HD DVDs.) The notion of disc rot is generally something left over from the laserdisc days when the discs actually would degrade in a short period time, causing weird artifacts on screen. The manufacturing of optical discs has been pretty much perfected since then.

 

[root]

I'm talking about Data CDs burned around the turn of the millennium, (possibly shortly before)

Always stored in a CD wallet.

the foil has de-laminated from the disc in several places.

These disks were admittedly not the most expensive CDRs I burned install sets for programs I'd collected over the years, (windows updates/service packs freeware etc) so nothing that I am too bummed about loosing.

There have been reports of commercial DVDs (as in movies) degrading in physical quality.

I'm not talking about laser disks where degredation appeared as artifacts, I'm talking about data where missing foil = unreadable files, or entire scenes of movies that cannot be watched, or DVDs that cannot reach the end because they are corrupted in the middle.

it's not a widespread problem, but that wasn't the point.
the point was that optical discs don't/won't last forever, an sometimes won't last that long at all. I guess that the best advice is to keep storage media refreshed (so re-burn discs every decade or so.)
or use a proper resilient storage, such as HDDs arranged in raid. then your storage will tell you when it's failing and you can take action.

 

[Dngrsone]

20 years ago, we had programs that would read and rewrite disk drive tracks to 'refresh' the data. It was more necessary back then, but I wonder if those programs still exist...

Hard drives nowadays are much more robust and reliable, but that doesn't mean that the data shouldn't be refreshed every few years...

 

[MMM]

20 years ago, we had programs that would read and rewrite disk drive tracks to 'refresh' the data. It was more necessary back then, but I wonder if those programs still exist...

Hard drives nowadays are much more robust and reliable, but that doesn't mean that the data shouldn't be refreshed every few years...

I sure do remember that!!!! the old floppy disks..... had to keep them away from any thing that produced magnetic fields.

Still have a few old floppy drives & disks stored away for nostalgia.

 

[iPwn]

Any notebook that doesn't look like a MacBook Air.

Don't agree on this one. Reason?

We purchased several ASUS Zenbooks at work. They're great laptops, don't get me wrong. For work purposes though? You can't dock them, so to take your laptop to and from work each day (as I do) you have to disconnect 3+ cables. With the population losing their intelligence and gaining only a need for convenience, the only way that will be possible is if another interface is adopted that would reduce the size of the dock male > female connections. This is already possible as evidenced by the MacBook Air power adapter, but manufacturers seem to lack the innovation of applying new technology to "new technology."