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It's okay, in 75 years Japan's government will still be keeping them alive. That's why you can still buy floppy discs on Amazon.
Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.
Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
Nonsense. Plenty of American businesses still rely on them too.
I still use floppy disks from time to time. There are several USB floppy drives in my shop at work for when the network has issues and we have problems posting G Code to our mills.
We must cut all options for the end user to own anything, let'em pay subscriptions instead.
In a SONY board meeting, probably.
Eh, I doubt many people are burning their own Blu-ray discs - this does not apply to discs you buy that already have films on, they are manufactured differently, and are still being made.
But even if you do archive your personal data onto Blu-ray discs, there are still other manufacturers besides Sony.
This really isn't a big deal.
So Disney already stopped selling dvds/Blu-ray’s in Latin America, select Asian markets, Australia, and New Zealand…
Just a matter of time.
What does a movie company not producing movies on discs have to do with ending production of rewrite-able discs?
I believe they've said that this doesn't change their production of non-rewritable Blu-rays.
This is just blank writable discs, movies and TV shows on bluray will continue to be produced... for now.
As long as there are people for whom streaming compression isn't acceptable, there'll be a market for Bluray movies/TV shows.
Don't fret, Verbatim will still be making recordable BD-Rs. However, this will mean that there will be no more 128GB BD-Rs, we'll be stuck with only 100GB BD-Rs (Sony is the only company that makes 128GB Blu-rays).
I recently ordered a pack of 128GBs from Japan. I'd recommend you do the same, because the prices are gonna skyrocket.
May I ask what uses you have for them?
Backing up personal data, mostly stuff from my childhood that is irreplacable. Sure, I could just put them on a HDD, but then I'd have to replace it every 5-10 years. Data stored on Blu-ray can last a long time.
Data on hard drives also generally lasts a long time. Much longer than 5-10 years.
And make sure you're constantly monitoring those discs, disc rot is very much a thing for all optical medica.
MDiscs are ISO rated for hundreds to thousands of years.
https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-379_3rd_edition_june_2010.pdf
Rated for, but that doesn't mean they're all actually manufactured to that standard.
CDs were rated for like 50+ years originally I think. We found out real quick that was an optimistic number, especially when you buy the cheapest thing around.
ISO certification does require a bit more effort than just the bare minimum necessary to legally advertise specific claims about a product.
That doesn't mean some M-Disc manufacturing is immune to shitty business practices of the manufacturer, but they do have to meet certain manufacturing specifications.
The 128GB blurays have always been very expensive. The smaller discs are cheaper per GB.
I really wish there was a viable alternative for physical backups. Blu-ray just doesn't have enough storage space, tape is expensive, and hard drives need to be periodically read.
I've read about holographic WORM media, but I just don't think there's enough consumer demand for the hardware and media to ever be as affordable as blu-ray.
Once upon a time, I could back up all my important data to a stack of DVD-Rs. How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though? The "best" alternative is to build a second NAS for backup, but that's approaching tape drive levels of cost.
How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though?
By spending money. 100T is a quite a lot of data and big data sets cost money to properly maintain.
Checkout AWS S3 “Deep Glacier Archive”. It’s perfect for data you only “read” in recovery events, since you have to wait up to 12 hours to retrieve the data. I backup my Plex this way.
Based on their 100T of data the .00099 per GB pricing will have them spending $99 a month, or $1200 a year, for backup.
You have to ask yourself if that’s worth it to you.
For me? Yeah, I don’t want to rebuild these datasets.
After a few years, it'd probably be cheaper to get a second NAS and store it at a friend/relative's place.
A NAS is supposed to be redundant. You can use offline HDDs as NAS backup.
I have a BluRay drive capable of burning but I've never needed it for that. I've been mostly using it for my ancient cd collection.
I find it kinda funny Sony tried so hard to own the standard so many times thought they eventually got it but then the Internet made it irrelavent almost instantly.
I don't like Sony.
Am with you. Their midrange phones still have headphone jacks, though. I like that.
Yeah their phones do generally still do things like microsds etc which is very nice I also like the psp but I've bought so many Sony products that develop weird faults straight after the warranty and the fact they alway push propriety cards etc.
Its a weird company where divisions seem to actively sabotage each other I just don't trust them at all.
I also like the psp
I like it too. I've even made a few calls with the Skype version for it.
Lots of Star Wars and Forgotten Realms and Russian fantasy books and lots of porn stories have been read in its web browser.
The music player felt nice.
In general, I feel like that's how "smartphones" should be.
Sony phones are pretty great for stuff like this tbh
MicroSD
dual SIM
headphone jacks (this is despite Sony being one of the biggest names in Bluetooth audio and therefore more likely to benefit from getting rid of 3.5mm)
they stuck to notification LEDs longer than anybody (sadly stopped on their newest gen IIRC?
dedicated 2-stage camera shutter buttons
no notch, no hole punch
stereo, front-facing speakers
first to embrace water resistance on smartphones
an OS that doesn't treat you like a complete baby. It shows some relatively advanced options in the settings app and actually explains what they mean and why you'd want to use them. I appreciate that.
shockingly FOSS friendly, even going as far as providing bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub, as well as contributing more to AOSP code than anybody other than Google themselves, despite being a niche OEM
There's a few things that suck. They need to extend their software support, their naming is dreadful (yes I know it follows the camera division naming, it's still dumb), and they try to charge Apple/Samsung prices despite not being in the same dominant market position. But overall their Xperia division actually puts out some good stuff IMO.
(this is despite Sony being one of the biggest names in Bluetooth audio and therefore more likely to benefit from getting rid of 3.5mm)
What's fun about that is the bluetooth sucks in many experia phones. So if someone wanted to use a bluetooth device they'd be better off just getting a new phone. My friend has fun with his Tesla where his wife has to turn bluetooth off on her phone before they get in otherwise the car will only connect to her phone and not load his profile/get angry if she gets out.
Sounds like a Tesla issue
Bluetooth sucks with everything else, and is unusable according to him. It's definitely the phone's fault not the car.
Can you recommend any specific model of Sony phone? I'm thinking it'll be my next one. I have an older Sony Vaio that I loved, and it ran Linux like a charm. Need a new phone and will only buy one with a microSD slot so...
I've never had a need to burn a blu-ray. When bd-r's hit the scene with their obscenely priced recording drives, it was only maybe a year or two before flash memory had already become cheap and fast enough that any volume of data large enough to justify a BD was better served on a 16/32gb thumbdrive unless it needed to be distributed in volume, and I've never needed to make enough identical copies of something to justify the $200-$300 that the first drives cost.
It sucks losing an option but I actually doubt most anyone will notice. 3rd party manufacturers will keep making disc's for a while anyway.
I use archival blurays for cheap, deep storage for decade plus usage, not something I'd trust to flash memory or even a hard drive. Tape is an option of course but that's pricey.
Is this just Sony's own production of consumer writable Blu-ray discs, or is it like, Sony preventing other manufactures from producing them as well?
It's just consumer writeable. Blu-ray movies will be fine, and other companies will be manufacturing consumer writeable Blu-rays as well.
Just their own. Other manufacturers are fine.
Did anyone ever burn their blu ray discs? There has been so many better options like USB sticks and external hard drives ever since the launch of blu ray.
Blue-Ray Discs are basically the only viable WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) that is available to normal and small scale professional users. The cheapest alternative, Tandberg RDX is a few hundred bucks per TB. And these are far inferior in terms of protection against outside influences compared to BD media.
And considering that a lot of professional data (e.g. tax reports) are legally required to be saved on WORM in a lot of countries it is indeed an issue, even more so in times of crypto/ransomviruses. None wants to loose their precious baby or wedding photos to a untimely virus. And no, normal Dropbox/OneDrive is no proper backup. And USB drives/external harddrives degrade over time, especially if not used.
Yes, they are the best medium for long term backups, as optical discs should be fine for decades. Hard drives and USB sticks are liable to fail within a few years.
