Amanda’s Random Rantings

Everybody knows that Greenhills has long been known as some sort of a “pirate’s den” and it took the OMB this long to do the raid? Yes, they may raid the area every now and then but I bet a whole month’s salary that the purveyors of pirated stuff will be back hours after the raiding team leaves the place. This is a sad fact and unless the local government of San Juan cooperates with OMB, the unofficial title of “pirate’s den” will contiue to be stuck to the Greenhills shopping area.

The Beatles are having their catalog digitally remastered again. This time to not just release the new masters on a digital medium like compact discs but to offer the songs for download on the Internet. The records are currently available on compact discs from remasters done in the 1980s. The records are not available for digital download. The Beatles catalog would certainly be a hot item in the growing Internet music retail industry. Contrary to demand from both the retailers and the public, Apple Corps has refused to make the records available. Apple Corps representative Neil Aspinall said “It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get the publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc.” Translation: We’re still making good money on just CD sales so we can let the bidding war between Internet retailers escolate until we’re offered enough for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to retire.

IBM expert warns of short life span for burned CDs,” Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland says, “If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.” The article states that cheap CDs may last two years, while higher quality CDs may last five years. (If your experiences have been better than that, you should be very thankful.) This is in stark contrast to the 100 year life span of CDs that is often discussed. According to Gerecke, magnetic tapes are better for long-term storage since they have a life span of 30 years to 100 years. However, no storage medium will last forever, so timely migrating from one storage media to another is necessary.