Allen,
A very interesting post from the Motley Fool's web site by a "power user" who calls himself Whackamole.
Continual reference to 'software pirating' being a primary use of some of the optical media, with the implication that the technology is at fault, is totally inappropriate and completely irrelevant to the progress of computer science.
I agree completely that optical storage solutions are the future. But for now, and the foreseeable future, for the average computer user, present-day optical solutions are too expensive, too big, too slow and too complicated.
I consider myself a power-user. I do lots of image editing, a good bit of web design, and some music editing. I have very little need for anything bigger than my Zip. Occasionally, I borrow a friend's CD-RW drive to archive some images, but that's a rarity ( and it's a pain in the *ss to do.)
Anybody who doesn't think that the primary current use of CD writers is game, software, and music piracy is seriously deluding themselves. Very few average users have a need for that kind of storage capacity for any other reason. Hint: very few output files from any program are larger than 30 Mb ( high quality photographic images and music files may get that big), very few whole programs are bigger than 250 Mb, but today's video games are routinely over 400 Mb.
I have lots of geek friends with the newest and baddest (including CD and DVD writers), and, trust me, they are being used for file transfers, but not for Excel worksheets, if you get my drift.
As I have stated before, Zip hasn't even begun to come into it's own yet. The reason we haven't seen the long awaited explosion in disk sales is because, contrary to popular opinion, Zip, for the average user, is too big, not too small. As more novice users become involved with more and bigger files, such as images from their new digital cameras, multimedia clips downloaded from the net, archives from their tax and accounting programs, etc.,etc.,etc., Zip disks will begin to see the exponential growth we've all been waiting for.
Couple this with the incredible potential of Clik! and the announcement of optical properties and intentions, I still see IOM as a great long-term investment, and,in fact, have been adding more in the fives.
Still long (and feeling positive),
WHACKAMOLE
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