Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Thu, 28 May 2009 18:33:17 -0600, somebody wrote:

> > the supremely stupid physical form of the CD

> What's wrong with the physical form?

  Naked optical media was a braindead idea from the start.

  Classic music CDs work mostly. The data density is relatively low (by
modern standards at least) and they have so much error correction information
that the CD has to be *really* scratched before it starts giving errors
(although I'm pretty sure most people have their own stories about non-working
music CDs). Nevertheless, it's still a bad idea: The optical data is just
there, naked, without any protection, and can easily be destroyed inadvertedly
by scratches, dirt and whatnot. Just accidentally drop the CD and you might
have a scratch.

  Then they came up with the brilliant idea that hey, we need a new format
with a lot more capacity than the CD, so let's create the new format to
have the exact same shape and size as a CD so that players can support both.
Good idea, except that you get all the problems of a naked optical media
squared. Cubed. Due to the immensely higher data density, DVDs are like a
hundred times more prone to get problems due to stains and scratches. Once
again: Barenaked optical media, no protection whatsoever, extremely easy
to detroy inadvertedly by accident.

  Now we are doomed to have all future optical media have the same flaw,
for the simple reason that they want the players to be backwards-compatible
with the older optical media. Backwards-compatibility sounds all nice and
practical, but in this case it's simply repeating past mistakes.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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