this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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VCRs.
Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.
But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.
with digital media recording has become a lot harder, thanks to Digital Restrictions Management
DVDs too. If I never burn another DVD again, that will be A-OK with me. I hate having to babysit those. Give me a hard drive, USB, or server to move data all day.
Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.
Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC's hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.
DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.
Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.
... I still have probably 100 blank DVDs and a hundred blank CDs.
But I also have a 3.5" floppy drive so I'm not a good measure to go by on these things.
I don't doubt it exists, but I'm kind of curious about workflows that still involve burning optical media in 2024.
I still see it in the courts, both criminal and civil. It seems to make more of an impact on judges and juries, because all the lawyers love whipping out the cd and sticking it in the ancient little laptop they plug into the tv on the cart like the teacher rolled out in the 80s and 90s.
Secure networks have their head in their ass about flash media. So, discs.
Edit: For more technical reasons see what ReversalHatchery wrote further down
Most healthcare systems are stuck in the old ways.
its still better in a sense. usb storage devices all have an internal "mini computer" that run their own code and have access to the USB bus of the connected computer, with the ability to even present themselves as a keyboard, a network adapter or a lot of other things. that's not a good idea to plug in to the hospital computer after it was given to the patient, and it is also not the best idea to just plug these in at home.
optical media on the other hand does not store code that is executed by the drive.
the problem is that pendrives have a firmware, and too much capabilities, even when not accounting for errors in hardware and code that participates in making it work. some of them (maybe most?) is even writable with the right tools, and the computer's user doesn't even need to know that it's happening.
the most famous web browser that allows any website access to your USB devices with just 1 or 2 clicks makes this even worse.
The US military uses tapes for long term storage still
Is tape optical Media?
Tape is still the best long term storage medium though.
It sucks, trust me
Honestly I really miss being able to record live TV with a VCR. I still watch tv with an antenna, mainly for football games, and it would be really nice if there was a way I could record them. Whenever I've looked into making my own DVR it just seems too expensive and confusing.
Manhattan TV seems to be a good product for me at the moment (UK). It's got all the HD channels live, and you can easily record them to disk.