Month: December 2008

DVD+-R Life Expectancy

David Pogue apparently had some problems recovering data from some DVDs he burned a few years ago and is all up in arms at the apparently short life span of DVD+Rs and DVD-Rs,

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.)

Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old!

Tried them on another machine. About half of them were readable.

Tried them on a MacBook that I’d been sent to review. Incredibly, mercifully, they all came through fine. I was able to rescue all those original iMovie projects and copy them onto new, bigger, cheaper hard drives.

Pogue concludes from this that burnable DVDs are excessively fragile, but based on what he describes it sounds like either a) the problem was with the DVD burner(s) or b) he’s not storing them properly.

Let me provide a different perspective. In my basement I have about 8,000 DVDs burned over the last 5-6 years. For media, I’ve always picked up whatever was on sale at Best Buy or Office Depot. I file the DVDs into soft cases designed to hold 100 CDs/DVDs, put those cases in large plastic bins, and then file the bins on some shelves in the basement I bought for just that purpose.

After reading Pogue’s piece I grabbed a couple dozen DVDs at random from across projects and times and copied the contents back to a hard drive on PC I borrowed. I didn’t have a single problem copying data from any of the DVDs.

Which is not to say I trust DVD as the only or even primary solution for long term backup. In fact, the issue that is quickly approaching with DVD burning is that the cost of magnetic media is quickly falling to the point where it will soon be cheaper to store data on a hard drive than on a DVD.

Today, Amazon.Com will sell you a 1.5 terabyte hard drive for $130 or less than 9 cents per gigabyte. At that price, optical media is close to not being cost effective when you factor in the inconvenience of burning, storing and managing all of those DVDs.

Gallery 3 Development Begins

After releasing Gallery 2.3 back in October, the folks behind the “your photos on your website” software have decided to free the 2.x version and begin work on Gallery 3 which will include an rewrite of the software.

Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we’ve decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project “Jallery“, and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It’s definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we’ve set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal. Read on for details of why we’re doing this and what you can expect.

In the comments to the announcement, one of the developers emphasizes increasing the performance of Gallery as one of the goals of the rewrite. As awesome as Gallery is, I’ve noticed that now that I’ve got more than 22,000 photos online using it that it has seriously slowed down in a number of areas, especially in adding new photos.

If they can achieve significant performance increases, the rewrite will more than justify the inconvenience it will create among people who have modified the code or written plugins for 2.x that will almost certainly have to be rewritten for 3.x.

Master Replicas Studio Scale Nautilus

Unfortunately they don’t have any really good photos of it on their website, but Master Replicas is planning to release this “Studio Scale” model of the Nautilus from Disney’s classic 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This sucker is 6″ x 31″ x 6″ and costs $499.

With more than 19,000 rivets, a removable skiff, and detailed wheelhouse interior, Master Replicas’ Nautilus is the most detailed model available in this scale anywhere in the world.

Master Replicas Nautilus

The Golden Rule Is Still Not Much of a Moral Principle

Charter for Compassion is yet another group of people who for some reason think the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or similar nonsense) should be made the basis for some sort of global morality,

By recognizing that the Golden Rule is fundamental to all world religions, the Charter for Compassion can inspire people to think differently about religion. This Charter is being created in a collaborative project by people from all over the world. It will be completed in 2009. Use this site to offer language you’d like to see included. Or inspire others by sharing your own story of compassion.

Give me a break.

As I’ve said before, the problem with the Golden Rule is that it is simply a check against hypocrisy. Beyond that, however, it is entirely compatible with a long laundry list of immoral acts. There is nothing in the Golden Rule, for example, that would render the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks wrong.

It doesn’t even seem like the organizers of this effort have really thought about the Golden Rule beyond some sort of wishy washy feel good nonsense,

. . . the Golden Rule is our prime duty and cannot be limited to our own political, religious or ethnic group.

Huh? Clearly those religious traditions that the Charter for Compassion cites saw nothing wrong with limiting the Golden Rule to apply only to a relatively circumscribed group of people (i.e., “those who agree with us”). One could adhere to the Golden Rule while slaughtering the non-believers down the street with nary a contradiction.

Consider a call to action such as, “Infidels should be murdered.” All the Golden Rule really ends up saying is that I should only agree with this statement if I too am willing to be murdered if it turns out I am an infidel. Since most religious people generally operate on the principle that someone else is an infidel, there’s not contradiction there at all.

What the Charter for Compassion folks are really doing is outlining a broader moral vision and trying to pass it off as some sort of universal view by repeating “Golden Rule” like some sort of mantra that will smooth things over.

I can’t wait to see how they handle genuine debates such as that surrounding abortion. Should I oppose abortion since clearly I would not have wanted to have been aborted as a fetus, or should I favor abortion because I would not want other people telling me what to do with my body.

That’s a real moral dilemma — and one the Golden Rule pretty much  does nothing to help solve.

As George Bernard Shaw put it,

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Succinct Guide to Serial Films

I have a special place in my heart for serial films which had their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. AMC’s FilmSite.Org has a nice multi-page essay on the history of the serial film, highlighting some of the better ones (which is relative considering the generally low quality of serials) and tracking their eventual decline with the rise of television.