Whither the Portable Optical Drive? 440
"The MacBook Air and the Ultrabook come without a piece of hardware that's been a mainstay in laptops for a long time — the optical drive," says a piece at CNET. "Maybe because they really aren't that necessary anymore." I would have thought otherwise a few years ago, but traveling in the meantime with a small netbook was certainly handy. Since that machine died, I think I've used the optical drive in its low-end laptop successor a grand total of once, which was to test its wireless compatibility with a Live CD Linux distro.
Speak for yourself (Score:5, Informative)
Only having to use your portable with alive cd to 'test wireless compatibility' tells me that you are a sysadmin, or another i.t. professional. chances are high that you rarely do what normal people do with that portable but work. let me break the news about common people to you - people still move data on cds.
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
I gotta say, from my own laptop usage, my wife's, sister's, mother's, and others, I think you are the one whose needs aren't in line with common people.
What applications are you installing you bought on CD? Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam, Origin, and the likes. Backing up is done more and more to external drives or offsite hosted services.
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Unless you're looking to be locked into vendor DRM, you're stuck with an optical drive for some things. I have a Samsung external USB DVDRW that I plug in from time to time. I don't use it very often, but I do need it sometimes as USB booting is still unreliable at best when done from a thumbdrive.
Plus, I have 3 computers total and only the desktop has a built in optical drive, next time I get a new desktop it won't. By that measure having one driver per several computers isn't unreasonable, I only spent $3
Cap (Score:3)
Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam, Origin, and the likes.
Unless you live somewhere where typical home broadband plans cap your monthly download in the single digit GB range.
Re:Cap (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on a 600 MB/day limit on my home ISP. I just recently built a new computer for my wife. The GPU came with a free copy of a game. Based on our normal usage patterns, I'll have it downloaded from Steam sometime in the next six months using the leftover bits at the end of the day.
Central Virginia.
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
That was the case until AT&T started this 150gb data limit and I get throttled and charged extra if I go over.
This week I bought Skyrim on disk. It was the first game I bought that way in a long time. Years.
I wonder how Steam feels about the new data limits being put on by telecoms.
No Substitute for Physical Media (Score:5, Insightful)
I try not to buy things that don't come on disk. Old habits die hard, but I can't keep myself from thinking about wanting to play some game 10 or 20 years from now, and wishing the company that made it hadn't gone under for whatever reason.
I still play Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft (and the Broodwars expansion), Quake2, Quake3Arena, and many other "old" games... and I have multiple disks of a couple of them, for retro-gaming LAN parties. I won't buy StarCraft II because I can't be sure it will work next week, next year, or a decade from now - who's to say Blizzard will still be around (and won't have deactivated the activation server)?
Installation from physical media, without a requirement for an internet connection at any step of the process... it makes me happy to know that I can play these 10 and 15 year old games without worrying about whether the companies that produced them will go under.
As another example, how will we (legally) install Windows, when Microsoft shuts down the activation server for the unsupported version?
There's still nothing "wrong" with XP, despite the Vista/Win7/Win8 hype.
I have a huge collection of DVD/VHS movies, despite having digital versions of almost all of them (I'm still in the process of format-shifting them). Physical media says I never have to contact an "activation server" to "acquire and authenticate" media that I already paid for, even if my home file server dies in a fire, flood, or other major disaster (yes, many of my physical copies of my movies are stored offsite).
Another (possibly irrelevant) example: I have iso images of Linux operating systems dating all the way back to 1996, "just in case". I also have images of my Windows install media through the years. Yeah, I collect some weird data. I've just gotten into the habit, over the years, of making backups of everything.
My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.
Re:No Substitute for Physical Media (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got some data on a reel-to-reel tape written on a Pr1me, and another from Multics. I've got some data written on QIC-11 on a long-obsolete low-volume Unix box. I've got some punch tape. All of these things might be readable in extreme circumstances (although I think the Multics data would be extremely challenging, what with 9-bit bytes and all) but for practical purposes they're dead.
On the other hand, I've copied my home directory from system to system for the past twenty-five years. I've got files with Unix time stamps in the mid 1980s (including, usefully, a Kermit'd copy of most of the data from the Multics system).
Data you want to keep needs to be on current systems, with current backups. Outside a narrow time window, older media isn't readable without extreme measures
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:4, Informative)
How about the Humble Bundle or GOG?
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Re:Speak for yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning...
I can, since it happened to me not very long ago. The HDD in my last laptop (the MacBook to which I referred in an earlier post) died without warning just a few weeks ago. It was fine one day, then the next it was rattling and banging away, and refusing to let the machine boot.
Worse, it happened at a time when I had got lazy with my backups, so I lost quite a lot of stuff. A bit embarrassing, really, since I'm big on insisting other people take proper backups, so I've had to eat a generous helping of crow.
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* Yes, I know HDD prices recently went up about to about $250 for that 2TB drive, but they will go back down once the supplier issues go away. But even at that, you're only looking at about 8 cents/DVD.
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there is just no way you can have fun with a game where you empty a sub-machine gun less than 20 feet from a guy and do NOT get a single hit!
... and this is how automatic weapons behave in the real world. Full-auto is not your friend. ;)
Four uses remain (Score:5, Informative)
Gaming in markets with broadband? Steam. Application installs in markets with broadband? Mac App Store, Ubuntu Software Center (which has paid repos now) or whatever Windows has. Moving data from one PC to another? USB flash drives. On-site backup? External hard drives, especially if your data is over the 4.something GB limit for DVD-R or DVD+R media.
But this still leaves several uses for optical discs: 1. operating system installations, 2. application installations in places that can't get DSL, FTTH, or cable Internet, 3. burning music CDs for people who don't already own and use a suitable PMP, or 4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC. I admit most of these can be done on a USB burner kept at home, and that's what I use with my 10" Dell.
Re:Four uses remain (Score:5, Informative)
4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.
I love /. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.
If the PC is new enough (Score:2)
Any OS can be installed easily from USB drives.
As long as the computer is new enough not to have a floppy drive. Older machines, such as my grandma's PC on which I installed Xubuntu today to replace a thoroughly rootkitted Windows XP, tend not to recognize USB boot media.
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Some laptops such as Sony Vaio PCG_GRT don't have floppy disk drives, nor do they have USB boot capability. The only way of OS update is via DVD or CD.
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Re:If the PC is new enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Chicken, meet egg.
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Whither the Portable Optical Drive? FTFY.
Hither came the Portable Optical Drive, black cased, laser eyed, CD loaded, a ripper, a reader, with gigantic data capacity and gigantic IO, to store the information of the Earth on its removable media.
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Any OS can be installed easily from USB drives.
As long as the computer is new enough not to have a floppy drive. Older machines, such as my grandma's PC on which I installed Xubuntu today to replace a thoroughly rootkitted Windows XP, tend not to recognize USB boot media.
Or in my experiences, tend to only have USB 1.1, making CD installs incredibly faster.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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The computer maker will put it there for us. Dell and HP know what is best! They will choose the holy OS for us all!
Nerds will use a paperclip in a usb port to enter it in a serial binary format.
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Informative)
I've spoken for myself per request.
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USB, Network, etc. I removed the optical drive in my MacBookPro and it was one of the best things I ever did. I dropped in an SSD HD and I haven't used my DVD-RW once since then as an external drive.
I bought an old laptop from ~2001 for $10 to use as a shairport jukebox. I PXE boot it with NFS. Over a gigabit ethernet network it's plenty fast.
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True, but how often does one install software from disc while away from home base? The drives are usually a $60 difference, and I find it more useful to have a 2nd battery in the optical bay instead, and get a $15 desktop burner in a $5 USB enclosure.
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Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?
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Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?
... and please do tell me how you get those installed without a suitable internet connection.
Oh, and before you go calling me a Luddite, I bet you can tell me at least 5 reasonable situations entailing someone not having available at their current location an internet connection suitable for installing a game that might require up to 20GB of downloading before being playable.
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i haven't bought cds in a long time, but i still use them -- when a dvd or blu-ray isn't needed. i think that the idea behind this is to stop end users from wiping their drives or installing OSes thumbdrives are nice but i see more virus activity over that port than optical drives. in a netbook/tablet optical drives aren't needed, but in a real laptop or desktop optical media is a valuable tool, more than just for piracy.
but yes one can use a netbook and online games, streaming tools etc. but eventually the
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
People have such short memories (or are too young to remember).
When the iMac came out without a floppy disk dive in 1998, exactly the same sentiment was expressed. PC makers gasped, then heckled Apple... But before long they too followed suite and started gradually phasing out floppy disk drives.
Then too, it was the dreaded focus group that dragged out the eventual demise of the floppy - people like you in focus groups saying "... keep the floppy drive, just in case I need to revert to my trusty sneaker-net". Of course we know what every focus group has to say about Adobe Flash... just about the same thing that they have to say about the CD drive now.
Steve Jobs loathed focus groups... that kind of makes sense when you are launching something that consumers do not know they need yet, like a new product. But focus group are useful tools, when used properly. The problem I have found (at least in financial services) is that focus groups are use to make the decision, instead of gauging the acceptability of a decision.
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That's a pretty blatant misrepresentation. The question at the time was when would the floppy be obsolete. At that time CDs were still fairly expensive to use, IIRC the CD burners that were included were still several hundred dollars, I know my ZipCD was over $200 about that time. Floppies were affordable and mostly worked. Most files of that era were still small enough to fit on a floppy as internet connections and most programs didn't require them to be huge.
So yes, the ridicule was well justified, nobody
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Firstly, .mac wasn't around until years after the first iMac.
Secondly, "the internet" hardly counted as a reasonable replacement in 1998, when most people were still using dial-up modems, if they had internet connectivity at all.
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The iMac shipped with a 56Kb/s modem
It also shipped with 10/100 ethernet.
USB optical drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Just get a USB optical drive. They use two USB ports to legitimately get enough power, although you can usually just use one plug. They're basically just a laptop optical drive in a box and work just fine for almost everything, even installing an OS from scratch usually works. And you don't need to have it inside the computer for the 99% of the time you don't need it.
I use an optical drive to install the OS (Score:2)
and that's about it
Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS (Score:5, Informative)
I just installed my last os via USB. It was much faster than via optical drive. (speed depends on quality of USB drive)
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Assuming it works, the times I've tried that I've found it to be a hit or miss affair. I'd rather do that because I don't want to waste a disc on something I might only use once.
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Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet [apple.com] into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.
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Couple things going on here. Sounds like Lion has built in recovery partition is the first thing. The second thing is it sounds like the firmware on new Macs includes sufficient smarts to connect to the internet to restore the OS to a blank hard drive. " Internet Recovery" they call it. Not really a feature of Lion because it's built into the firmware.
Unfortunately it sounds like options are limited to get OS install media, in case, you know, you don't want to wait 5+ hours for it to download.
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Welcome to the world of not-BIOS. Open Firmware (PowerPC) and EFI had HTTP boot image support since forever (Mac OS X 10.3?), they just required your DHCP to give the coordinates, now they just have skipped the whole DHCP discovery part and just pointed the coordinates to an Apple iCloud server.
Well.. (Score:3, Funny)
How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?
Most of that stuff is still sold on cd/dvd...
You filthy pirates are downloading it right... We need more laws!
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If you have a computer you can do what I do and rip the discs to the HDD and then just copy them either over the network or on a thumbdrive to the laptop. At this point even Windows allows you to conveniently mount an ISO without external tools.
But yeah, I'm guessing most folks get around the limitation by piracy.
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GP is just a troll. Besides, even Office can be bought and downloaded nowadays; most people I know at least don't use much software anyway besides that and the browser.
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I do that all the time. When I get a new disk of anything, I make an ISO of it. That way, if it gets scratched, broken, lost, or whatever, I still have the image. Installing from an ISO mounted as a virtual drive is faster too. :)
At one office, we had to install a piece of software on a dozen machines (licensed for all of them). It was a breeze, using remote desktop to get to all of them, and mounting the ISO from a shared directory. It would have taken someone much long
External (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you get software on a laptop without an optical drive?
By going home, pulling out your external USB burner, plugging it into the side of your laptop, installing the software, and unplugging the burner.
Use vs. carry (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry. Your "external USB burner" is still an optical drive.
I am aware of that. Though one still needs to use an optical drive with a laptop, one rarely needs to carry an optical drive with a laptop.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Informative)
Battery bay more use (Score:3)
I have a DVD writer for my laptop, but my laptop as a whole benefits a lot more from the extra battery.
I do keep the writer, and a couple of blank dvds and cds with my in my bag though, along with
* an external hard drive
* empower + ac adapter, with anything-to-anything plug adapter
* 5 port netgear switch
* a few cables
* gaffer tape
* leatherman
* cable ties
And after a particularly problematic experience in Gaza, I've added a tiny USB keyboard to the list. Trouble is, the bags getting a little heavy, and the CD drive is the only thing I don't use on a regular basis.
Re:Battery bay more use (Score:5, Funny)
. . . along with
* an external hard drive
* empower + ac adapter, with anything-to-anything plug adapter
* 5 port netgear switch
* a few cables
* gaffer tape
* leatherman
* cable ties
Hell, with all that stuff, MacGyver could build an atomic powered laser . . .
And after a particularly problematic experience in Gaza, I've added a tiny USB keyboard to the list.
Hmmm . . . I must have missed that episode . . .
Movies (Score:2)
Please let me know how you are going to play back movies etc while in an airplane at 30,000 feet.
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from the hard drive, or a USB stick... duh!
Re:Movies (Score:5, Interesting)
Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.
Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?
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Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.
Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?
Most people don't have the time or inclination to rip DVD's to disk - especially if you simply rent them and drop them in the mail or simply rent locally. Or, if you have a full season, it's a pain to rip them them all vs carrying a cd case. In addition, as laptops get thinner and move to SSD disk space becomes more valuable - I can carry a broader selection with me than I can if I rip it to disk.
Tablets are nice but not really a viable solution for most people because of the price.
I think optical drives a
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Ripping an entire season of some show is not that much of a burden. Although admittedly there aren't really any good "shiny happy" GUI tools for this. It's something that's easily automated once you get past the "metadata" hurde.
Of course this requires having a little Script Fu.
Admittedly, your average Windows or Mac user isn't.
So yeah, the mundane case here will be a bunch of spinny disks and some device capable of dealing with them. All of us geeking out about our highly geeky solutions (even Handbrake qu
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Which means your desktop needs an optical drive.
Which I totally agree with. The only time I use the optical drive on my desktop is to rip DVDs to something suitable for my home media NAS.
On my laptop? Just realized that I've had the same DVD in the drive for over a month now. A movie that I never got around to finishing. If it was interesting, I would have ripped it to watch on the big screen (via XBMC/openelec).
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Of course the fact that I get the vast majority of the videos I watch
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Step 2 needs a dvd drive
Which need not be inside a laptop's case. It can be on a desktop PC or on a USB port.
Re:Movies (Score:4, Interesting)
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You have a DVD drive on your home PC of course. The discussion is about whether they're needed in laptops. And if you only own a laptop, I'm sure you could get some USB DVD drive to use at home.
And FYI, DVDFab can remove the crap, shrink the file size, and output in different formats. There's no real need for steps 3 & 4.
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so where does the source come from ? Unless you download it from bit torrent
Newsgroups. Oh wait we're not supposed to talk about those. ;)
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Please let me know how you are going to play back movies etc while in an airplane at 30,000 feet.
I suppose if you want to watch in a manner which drains your battery dead the fastest, you could go that way. Personally, I prefer carrying and watching my movies in a more portable form, such as data files stored on a HDD, my iPad, or flash media.
Yaz
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I have pretty good luck finding seats with power outlets.
Copying data files leaves you vulnerable to copyright issues if your laptop is searched by a government agency.
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backing up data you own is in the law in the US
see 'are emulators legal' on gamefaqs.comhttp://www.gamefaqs.com/features/help/entry.html?cat=24 [gamefaqs.com]
that pertains to software and movies are software(yes they are they can't be played back without decryption which is done in hardware or software thus requiring code to run)
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Wow, if you can't figure that out, this may not be the site for you. Maybe your lost your way from knitting patterns for men?
Optical drives should be external (Score:5, Insightful)
Optical drives should be external. They cost $30.
For that price, you could throw one in your laptop bag, and plug it in when you need it.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=420&name=External-CD-DVD-Blu-Ray-Drives [newegg.com]
I don't believe in built-in optical drives; I use them rarely. They're useless dead weight. Much prefer that the space they took, be replaced by more battery... which is always useful. Or leave both off and make the laptop lighter and slimmer.
I use an optical drive for.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I use the portable optical drive for:
1) Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format
2) Listening to CD's
3) Watching some DVD's
4) Occasionally rescue CD's come in handy when a root password is forgotten.
No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....
If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD (Score:3)
Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format
I'm assuming you don't carry a printer around with you (unless it's one of those new Polaroid products or something). Leave a USB disc drive where you leave your printer. Before iTunes Store, iTunes software was specifically for doing exactly this.
Listening to CD's
If you can stop by home, you can copy the CD to your computer with an external drive and music library software that has come with just about every home computer since 2002.
Watching some DVD's
If you can stop by home, you can copy the DVD to an MPEG-2 file on your computer with an ex
Re:I use an optical drive for.... (Score:5, Informative)
1) Reading documentation manuals that come with hardware (like printers) on CD format
Virtually all of which are available online, usually as newer revisions with errata included. Indeed, the CD that ships with the hardware is usually the last place I check for PDF documentation, as there is virtually always more up-to-date documentation online
.
2) Listening to CD's
Are you the one person who doesn't have some sort of portable music player, or who hasn't ripped all their music CDs to a more portable AAC/MP3/FLAC/ALAC format? For playback on a laptop, any time you need to be running off battery playing back a file off your hard drive is going to consume significantly less power than doing the same off spinning physical media.
3) Watching some DVD's
Again, having these files stored on the hard drive is more efficient for a portable device. And there are a number of legal solutions for renting, downloading, and streaming movies available online that doesn't rely on physical media.
4) Occasionally rescue CD's come in handy when a root password is forgotten.
Since the article (and your post) specifically mentions Apple, in their case all modern Apple systems are perfectly capable of booting from USB or Firewire. I do understand that in the PC world booting from removable USB keys can be really hit-or-miss, but in the Apple world this isn't a concern. Booting from USB is faster, and requires less dedicated hardware in your portable system that you wind up having to carry around the other 99.99% of the time when you're not trying to recover from a forgotten root password.
I've already made the decision that I don't need to carry around an optical drive that I use <1% of the time in my next laptop. An external drive or drive sharing across the network to a dedicated system will be more than sufficient in the event I need to move data to or from optical disc.
Yaz
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I have a PMP, but a lot of people find it easier to stick CDs in a car stereo than to fumble around with a PMP and a Jupiter Jack.
Fair enough, but I do have to point out that playing CDs in your car stereo has nothing to do with laptops abandoning the format. Indeed, not playing CDs in your laptop means you can just leave them in the car without lugging them around everywhere you go.
Yaz
useless for me (Score:5, Insightful)
For now, it is cheaper to ship software on optical media instead of some kind of read-only usb drive. There are huge benefits to that though, first of all, a microsd card takes up much less space and weighs a lot less than a dvd. So, maybe one day we will see software that comes on usb drives instead of dvd. That day will mark the death of the optical media, except perhaps for long term archival, stuff i never want to see again but can't get myself to delete i burn on a dvd and throw the dvd into the basement.
Buying software on the Internet (Score:2)
If you ever buy a game or an application it comes on an optical media.
That's funny; I didn't get any optical media when I bought a copy of Portal on Steam.
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I'm assuming you buy lossy music as well from Apple. I don't wanna live in this world anymore.
Well, you are a dinosaur....
Hello, 2007. (Score:5, Funny)
Hello, 1999 or 2000 rather (Score:5, Informative)
My first "netbook" without an optical drive was a Sony Vaio Picturebook - like this one: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/199809/98-085/index.html [sony.net]. I used it happily on the road until about 2003, when I upgraded to a Victor Interlink - like this one: http://www.kemplar.com/jvc_741.php [kemplar.com].
Both still work, and the Victor with Linux still puts most netbooks to shame.
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Live USB memory stick Live CD (Score:2)
And your one use of the optical drive was actually a detriment to the function you were attempting to accomplish. It would have been better served on a USB memory stick. Faster speed and the ability to store changes. Not to mention far more capacity, AND less power consumption on your laptop.
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One possible use is for security as you can burn a live CD and since it's read only it can't be hacked. It's paranoia at it's utmost but very effective.
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If you install grub onto your USB stick, then you can have a whole collection of live CDs, which can be accomplished by copying the iso to the USB stick and adjusting the grub configuration file. See for example http://www.panticz.de/MultiBootUSB [panticz.de]
We need those optical drives (Score:2)
How else could we run DRM-d software?
Floppy drive flashbacks (Score:2)
Hopefully, the same will happen to the desktop soon enough.
Don't need an optical drive even for live Linux (Score:2)
You can still use the drive for storage.
There are also many tutorials out there for installing Windows 7 from a thumbdrive.
Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People (Score:5, Insightful)
Uses for Optical Drives:
1. Ripping CDs to Itunes, whatever you use (Rhythmbox, Amarok) to manage your MP3s. A lot of people still buy CDs, or have some to rip.
2. Recording LPs to HD, burning CDs to play in stereos, etc. A lot of folks still have stereos they'd like to use.
3. Watching Netflix / Redbox DVDs, not everyone wants to watch em on a big screen. Or rip the DVD (takes a long time). Sometimes you just want to watch it and be done.
4. Guaranteed boot unlike sometimes iffy USB Flash drives.
5. Archival backup, cheap and easy. Great for weblogs, code base, important docs etc.
6. Commercial software, upgrades, etc. This is particularly true for naive users who tend to delete stuff they should not (like their download, say). Non technical users know to save the install CD/package, they'll often delete the download.
7. Burning Library Audiobooks to CDs, and then ripping them via Itunes, RubyRipper, Soundjuicer whatever. This is good for a number of reasons -- a lot of non-technical folks have CD players they like to use to listen to audio books and don't have or want to use MP3 players, burning the CDs also allows you to rip them to MP3s without time-limits etc. You can do this with both the Overdrive Media downloads, and the regular CD audio books (just copy the CDs).
I love having an optical drive, I consider it mandatory for any serious computer not optimized for light-weight. Netbooks have their place, but for anything serious and regular use I want that optical drive. I use it all the time.
Re:Optical Drives are Mandatory for Most People (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. I think it is amazingly arrogant that because some people buy all their stuff online with music stores and DRM that they think they entire world does the same thing. Real people still have CDs we've collected over the years. Retail outlets still sell music on CDs, they still sell software on CDs, and they still sell movies on DVDs. If no one used this stuff then why are they still being sold?
What is the proper pejorative word that's the opposite of Luddite? I'm tired of those gadget freaks who think the world revolves and them and the latest thing they bought.
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Nobody is selling music with DRM on it anymore. The cds that I bought over the years have long been ripped and sit in a crate in the garage that hasn't been opened in in a long time.
As for the rest, of course there's still a need for optical drives for a lot of people and will be for some time to come. What there isnt anymore, is the need for every computer sold to have one permanently attached. Nobody's going to stop offering them on all of their desktop lines anytime soon. A lot of laptop users may keep a
SecuROM? (Score:2)
I don't want an optical drive in my laptop. It's added weight and a little noise on reboot. For me this is no problem, I never ever use the optical drive and my question doesn't apply to me since I run linux exclusively anyway, but do SecuROM gimped games work with USB attached optical drives? I could see that as a major inhibitor to a lot of people.
Re: (Score:2)
but do SecuROM gimped games work with USB attached optical drives? I could see that as a major inhibitor to a lot of people.
I'm sure TPB has some great fixes for that problem. ;-)
Photos (Score:3)
If you travel with a high resolution camera you are going to want an optical drive to back up you photos.
Re:Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
If you travel with a high resolution camera you are going to want an optical drive to back up you photos.
A little 500 GB 2.5" USB hard drive is ten times faster, ten times more reliable, and cheaper.
Re:My harddisk is smaller than your 200 CDs. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but that's just plain wrong. If you're travelling with a high resolution camera the LAST thing you want is to backup to optical drive. You're typical CF card is 16 or 32 GB, many people travel with multiple cards.
So am I going to go home at the end of each day of my holiday and sit down for an hour or two and burn 8 or 16 DVDs? Hell no. Not when I can just plug in my usb HDD to the laptop click copy and then disappear downstairs for a meal instead.
My last holiday generated 400MB of images. My USB harddisk is thinner than 5 DVDs, It's lighter than 15 DVDs, There's no way I'm going to be dragging 100 of the things on my holiday. Not to mention that it is far less likely to cause problems by some customs agent wondering what I'm doing returning from Thailand with what looks like 100 bootlegged movies.
Replace it with a modular battery. (Score:3)
Years ago, back in 2001, I had a nice Dell laptop with a modular DVDRW drive. However, you could hot swap out the optical drive for a second battery pack. I pretty much ran with this second battery pack in all the time, and it was awesome. It added an extra 60% or so of extra battery time to the laptop and I could go a real-world six to eight hours of use before the power ran out.
My new MacBook pro has a DVDRW drive in it and it's just complete wasted space. The battery life for this MacBook Pro is already pretty good, but it would be very awesome if I could put a modular battery in there. FYI, I have one of the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros, so I can very easily get to the battery and hard drive. I loath the fact that they un-did this feature of the MBP in later models. Jerks!
Windows repair (Score:2)
How do I make Windows repair media without an optical drive?
Somebody make money with this idea! (Score:3)
Build a standalone DVD drive with a USB/Memorycard slot.
When the user pops in a DVD-ROM, the drive copies an image of the disk onto the memory card. When the memory card is popped into a computer, an exact copy of the disk shows up!
Of course this would have problems with copy protected media but for software installs it could be useful. Most importantly it is simple enough that your grandmother could use it.