No optical drives?

On 08/09/2020 02:35, John Doe wrote:
Speaking of tit and optical media...
I really want to find "It's a Bikini World" (1967) on DVD, but that
would be online someplace. Need to figure out who the sexy "Liar Liar"
dancer is

Just in case you haven't already searched the Internet Move Database,
here's the link to the credits for the full cast and crew:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061827...f_=tt_ov_st_sm

Someone named Carolyn Brandt is listed as an uncredited "dancer" but her
IMDb entry doesn't show any clear pictures of her that'd probably nail
it down for you.

By the way, from the database entry for the movie it doesn't look like
it's ever been released on any home video fomat. Sorry.

none wrote:

John Doe wrote:

Speaking of tit and optical media... I really want to find "It's
a Bikini World" (1967) on DVD, but that would be online
someplace. Need to figure out who the sexy "Liar Liar" dancer is

Just in case you haven't already searched the Internet Move
Database, here's the link to the credits for the full cast and
crew:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061827...f_=tt_ov_st_sm

Someone named Carolyn Brandt is listed as an uncredited "dancer"
but her IMDb entry doesn't show any clear pictures of her that'd
probably nail it down for you.

By the way, from the database entry for the movie it doesn't look
like it's ever been released on any home video fomat. Sorry.

I can almost get a clear picture of her mouth/teeth in the Liar Liar
video on YouTube. That would pretty much solve it if it is Carolyn
Brandt (she has an unusual teeth formation). But the YouTube uploads of
that dance are low resolution.

But it is trivia...

On 09/08/2020 15.17, nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:


It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
internet for the masses, at least over here. The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time), but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.



backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible. Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)

Back in the high day of floppies, there were automatic floppy feeders.
You could fill it with a stack of a hundred floppies and do a hard disk
backup on automatics. Why not an autofeeder for DVDs, has somebody done
them?

Perhaps:

https://www.amazon.com/Acronova-Nimbie-USB-AutoLoader-NB21-DVD/dp/B00HQOOQCG

I'm unsure if it is only a duplicator or a feeder as well, for backups.
The description claims it can do backups.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
internet for the masses, at least over here.

i don't know about where you are but it was definitely available here
and elsewhere, but to your point, since floppies started to disappear
in the mid-90s, it's not surprising that the imac, which was released
in 1998, did not have a floppy drive.

another important difference is that macs did not need floppy disks
anywhere near as much as windows pcs.

where apple did screw up with the first imac was not including a cd
*burner* rather than just a cd-rom drive.

The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time),

exactly the point.

but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.

there were several types of removable storage available, including
syquest, zip, jaz and a few others.


backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible.

blu-ray will reduce the number of discs, however, it still requires
manual intervention to swap the discs, plus keeping track of which
files are on which discs for later retrieval. if anything changes, it's
another set of discs and another burn session.

cloning a 500 gig drive to another drive takes around an hour or so,
entirely unattended, and if something changes, the clone can be updated
with only what changed.

Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)

the thought of that is frightening.

Back in the high day of floppies, there were automatic floppy feeders.
You could fill it with a stack of a hundred floppies and do a hard disk
backup on automatics. Why not an autofeeder for DVDs, has somebody done
them?

how many computers ship with an automatic floppy feeder?

but even if someone did have such a device, it would still be
incredibly slow and impractical.

Perhaps:

https://www.amazon.com/Acronova-Nimbie-USB-AutoLoader-NB21-DVD/dp/B00HQOOQCG

I'm unsure if it is only a duplicator or a feeder as well, for backups.
The description claims it can do backups.

that costs $750!!

the same $750 can buy about 40 terabytes of hard drives.

or spend a lot less for a 4 or 8tb drive, which is probably enough for
most people, and significantly faster and more reliable.

On 8/8/2020 10:23 PM, micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.


It's not your imagination. Optical drives are going away.

But if you buy a computer without an optical drive, and you need or want
an optical drive, just be sure the box has room to add one. Adding one
is inexpensive ($25 USD or so) and easy to do.

Failing that, you could buy an external optical drive, one that plugs
into a USB port. I have one of those that I used to use with my laptop,
but since I no longer use my laptop, I no longer use that.


--
Ken

On 8/9/2020 12:35 AM, John Doe wrote:
micky wrote:

Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look
somewhere else.

I haven't even thought about an optical drive for years. I can't imagine
any piece of hardware requiring an optical drive nowadays. With a decent
or good Internet connection, media can be downloaded by the boatload.


That's true, but many people (me, for example) still have CD or DVD
installation media and other kinds of files on CDs or DVDs. Those CDs
and DVDs may not be needed often but if/when they are, I always want to
have a drive available for them.



--
Ken

On 8/9/2020 7:40 AM, Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/9/2020 12:35 AM, John Doe wrote:
micky wrote:

Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look
somewhere else.

I haven't even thought about an optical drive for years. I can't imagine
any piece of hardware requiring an optical drive nowadays. With a decent
or good Internet connection, media can be downloaded by the boatload.


That's true, but many people (me, for example) still have CD or DVD
installation media and other kinds of files on CDs or DVDs. Those CDs
and DVDs may not be needed often but if/when they are, I always want to
have a drive available for them.


Let me add that part of the reason I always want to have a drive
available for them is that they are inexpensive. If they were to cost a
lot, I might rethink that position.




--
Ken

micky wrote:

Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

I"ve been looking at microcenter.com. They have the advantage of
having a store in Baltimore that charges the same price as their
webstore,

Optical drives are getting phased out just how did 3.5" floppy drives
and did 5.25" floppy drives before. With the pace of increased capacity
of HDDs, optical discs became incapable to be used as backup media. CDs
at 700MB, DVDs at 4.7-SSSL/8.5GB-DSSL/9.4GB-DSSL/17.08GB-DSDL, and BDs
at 25GB-SL/50GB-DL/100or128GB-BDXL became too small. Rewritable BDs are
still viable, but only with special discs and drives capable of the
highest densities with costs far greater than other choices. Low
capacity, slow speed and being less reliable since the drive was a
mechanical device made them less desirable for everyday storage.
[Re]writable discs still rule for longevity of storage as long as you
get archival quality discs, but storing a stack of 10-100 BDs to cover a
2TB HDD or SSD takes up a lot of space and with proper storage, and the
longer the chain of media in a backup the more fragile becomes the
backup (one corrupted or lost disc ruins the backup), and those with
optical burners are familiar with using the failed discs for coasters.

As newer technology replaces old, and as price points drop to become
affordable to consumers, old technology gets supplanted. SSDs are
replacing HDDs, but SSDs are much higher cost per bit along with being
self-destructive-on-write storage devices. Someday something will
replace SSDs, too. Maybe by metal oxide resistive RAM (aka R[e]RAM),
but will remain a laboratory experiment until mass manufacturing get
deployed and hits a price point affordable to consumers.

You never mentioned which case and motherboard you were intending to
purchase. The case may have a 5.25" drive bay in which to mount an
optical drive and the motherboard might have internal USB headers or
SATA/PATA ports to which you can connect the optical drive. Put one in
yourself. Or are you asking only about pre-built computers where you
never have to figure out how to modify the build? In that case, you can
buy an external optical drive to connect to the computer via USB.

On 09/08/2020 16.30, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
internet for the masses, at least over here.

i don't know about where you are

Yes you do :-)

but it was definitely available here
and elsewhere, but to your point, since floppies started to disappear
in the mid-90s, it's not surprising that the imac, which was released
in 1998, did not have a floppy drive.

another important difference is that macs did not need floppy disks
anywhere near as much as windows pcs.

I don't know about that. But I developed custom software and I needed
something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a
floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression.


where apple did screw up with the first imac was not including a cd
*burner* rather than just a cd-rom drive.

The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time),

exactly the point.

That they were unreliable is weird, but true. Floppies made before the
90's worked for ever. Afterwards, they would fail the first time. I
needed to carry three copies to customers, or risk another trip.


but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.

there were several types of removable storage available, including
syquest, zip, jaz and a few others.

I remember magneto-optical media. Was too slow.



backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible.

blu-ray will reduce the number of discs, however, it still requires
manual intervention to swap the discs, plus keeping track of which
files are on which discs for later retrieval. if anything changes, it's
another set of discs and another burn session.

Sure. Same as DVDs, it is the same thing but bigger. A good backup
software can keep catalogs - I fondly remember PCtools backup. M$ bought
it and included it in version 6 of MsDOS, I think.


cloning a 500 gig drive to another drive takes around an hour or so,
entirely unattended, and if something changes, the clone can be updated
with only what changed.

Certainly.


Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)

the thought of that is frightening.

It wasn't at the time... PCtools backup was so fast that I had barely
time to label them. Specially if one had two floppy drives, it wrote
alternately to both.


Back in the high day of floppies, there were automatic floppy feeders.
You could fill it with a stack of a hundred floppies and do a hard disk
backup on automatics. Why not an autofeeder for DVDs, has somebody done
them?

how many computers ship with an automatic floppy feeder?

None :-D

They were not in my price bracket, anyway.


but even if someone did have such a device, it would still be
incredibly slow and impractical.

Oh no, it was astonishingly fast. For the times, that is. On recovery,
the floppies were slightly faster than the hard disk (because of the
seek times writing many files).


Perhaps:

https://www.amazon.com/Acronova-Nimbie-USB-AutoLoader-NB21-DVD/dp/B00HQOOQCG

I'm unsure if it is only a duplicator or a feeder as well, for backups.
The description claims it can do backups.

that costs $750!!

:-D

A modern LTO-8 tape drive is over 3000. An LTO-12, way more, but I
didn't find a quote. Not home things.


the same $750 can buy about 40 terabytes of hard drives.

or spend a lot less for a 4 or 8tb drive, which is probably enough for
most people, and significantly faster and more reliable.

Reliable, I'm unsure. The preferred backup media at enterprise level are
tapes.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 8/9/20 6:04 AM, knuttle wrote:

[snip]

Unfortunately they are removing the space for any drive on the new
laptops.Â* Most new laptops the have solid state drives and no optical
drive.Â*Â* It looks like the average solid state drive is about 256GB with
some 128GB and 500GB.

My newest laptop (from 2019) has a 256GB NVMe and NO mechanical drives
of any kind.

Hopefully after the panic is over, the prices of computer equipment will
return to what it was.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than
religion." [Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]

On 8/9/20 7:02 AM, Bill wrote:

[snip]

I would install a DVD drive on a system I built for myself.Â* I find it
convenient to have an inexpensive and disposable to tote around or share
my data if desired.Â* That may be an "old-fashioned" way to think about
it, but it works for me.Â* I think I paid less than $25 for my last one.

I do too. Also, if there is a 3.4-inch bay I install a card reader which
I use much more often than the floppy it was meant for.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than
religion." [Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]

On 8/9/20 4:38 AM, John C. wrote:

[snip]

"Normal" people? For archiving, I still use the HELL out of my DVD
burner. I just bought a laptop while in a hurry. Got it home and
discovered that it had no burner, almost returned it.

I'd rather have the laptop smaller and use a USB DVD burner if needed.

It's kind of like
the way a lot of newer TVs don't have RCA connectors on them so that you
can hook them up to your stereo. They want you to buy one of their
crappy sounding "sound bars".

You can get a converter (optical audio to RCA jacks).

I have data CDs from as far back as 1993. *All* of my CDs and the DVDs
that I've burned still work flawlessly. As long as they're stored in a
cool, dark and dry location, they are very dependable.

IIRC, I had one that failed, a commercial disk that had Windows ME on it.

OTOH, I don't trust thumb drives simply because they can easily be
accidentally overwritten.

"Read-only" can be an advantage sometimes.

BTW, as far as I can tell, the "write protect" on the thumb drives is
not real. It just notifies the controller but does not itself prevent
writing.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than
religion." [Edmond and Jules de Goncourt]

"Carlos E.R." wrote

| I distrust them because they're magnetic storage.
|
| Unless I'm lost in translation, they are not magnetic, they are flash
media.
|

Electrical? I can't say that I really understand it,
but it makes sense they could be vulnerable to
magnetic fields. I also read that SSDs can't be depended
on for more than a year or so without power. So I'm
guessing sticks are no different. That doesn't make
it a good primary backup medium.

| Unfortunately, they are ridiculously small. I have a BlueRay writer,
| which allows up to 100 GB. They are not cheap, but some are archival
| quality.
|

I guess that depends on what you need. My periodic
backup of email, program data, business files, etc, is
well under the 4+ GB I can put on a DVD. I also use
CDs, mostly for boot media. For example, I use BootIt
for booting/partitioning/disk imaging. That's very compact.
It used to fit on a floppy. It still might. It certainly fits
on a CD. USB stick? Maybe. But that introduces
complications. Not all machines can boot from USB.

"Carlos E.R." wrote

| It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
| happen for many more years.
|
| yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
| was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
| factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
| online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.
|
| Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
| internet for the masses, at least over here. The floppies were mostly
| inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time), but
| there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
| used Iomega Zips.
|

I think ZIP disks were the biggest waste of money I
ever spent. They were so brief. But 100 MB seemed
giant at the time. As usual, nospam has altered his
memory to fit the demands of Lord Jobs. He's probably
embarassed that he spent $100 for a USB floppy drive.
(Or more likely $300 for 3 of them.)

When I bought an eMachines PC in late 1998, Mindspring
sent me a set of floppies to install their Internet service.
And of course I wouldn't have been downloading software
on my 56Kb modem. All of it was store-bought. I even
bought PSP16 on disk just four years ago, at Staples. That
was the era when people would get angry because their friend
sent a picture of their cat in email and it tied up their computer
for 45 minutes, waiting for the download.

That eMachines was $500. A friend bought one of the first
iMacs around that time. He spent $2,700 for the iMac, printer,
USB floppy drive, etc.... and virtually no upgradeability.

I also remember helping a friend reinstall their Win98 system
at one point. I put back their Office 95, I think it was. Something
like 24 floppies.

|
|
| backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
| option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
| a ridiculous amount of time.
|
| 5 Blue ray disks. Feasible. Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)
|

That's a classic case of people not understanding backup.
A 5 TB system that was backed up, say, last month, probably
doesn't have more than a couple of GB of new files. But people
don't know how to do backup, so they think they have to back
up the whole thing every time.
If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk.
What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files.
I have 2 redundant, 500 GB SSDs that are nowhere near full.

You forgot to plonk my posts; My posts are only meant for people who are using Mozilla Thunderbird. In the meantime you can have this outdated voice message which I will update when I am on planet Mars.

https://technical.mytechsite.gq/Apps/NewsGroup.zip
https://mytechsite.imfast.io/Apps/NewsGroup.zip
--

With over 1.2 billion devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.