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I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor

I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. At least we still have thumbsticks...

sebastianavina 3y ago
you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any platform...
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  m4a*. Or Opus.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >why bother You don't need an internet connection and don't have to worry about data caps or terrible jetliner satellite internet right then and there?
- defrost 3y ago
  Your experience may vary, in my experience: * things I've liked don't always stay on youtube or appear on spotify, and * streaming|internet isn't always available (remote area FiFo, underground, etc.)
- derwiki 3y ago
  Because it might go away? My Youtube saved lists are littered with removed videos. And I _do_ use a USB flash drive in my car of curated* music; it’s an always available radio station without and phone fiddling. *curated= just Grateful Dead recordings
- autoexec 3y ago
  Because when you have your own copy of something nobody is keeping track of what the date and time is when you watch/listen to that media along with how often you do it or what parts you view/hear more often or pause at most often, or where you are and what other things you are doing when you saw/heard it etc. You can enjoy your media entirely offline which is something you'll really want if you find yourself without internet access for some reason. In addition, you don't have to worry about that content suddenly going away without notice, or it being censored or modified at some later date. You also get the ability to play that media in your software of choice and can even re-encode the media to play on other devices using other formats. You can make your own edits. You can share your collection with others without forcing them to create an account and hand money/data to a third party. You can include things in your own collection that those third party streaming services might not approve of. When you give up on owning things you give up a lot more than just the item you would have had sitting on a shelf or the file that would have taken up space on your hard drive. There are lots of freedoms and opportunities you gain that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
- ponector 3y ago
  Not everything can be streamed. Streaming platform are applying censorship. Not everyone is signing in to provide their music to streaming. Also they usually stream not original tracks, but a remaster.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  1. I don't have to pay a monthly fee 1a. I don't have to listen to annoying and offensive ads 2. I don't have to worry about something disappearing 3. I can listen to the version I want (remaster vs. original) 4. I can listen to music in the codec of my choice: <320kbps MP3 sounds bad, and some people prefer FLAC, for instance 5. I don't need an expensive cellular plan to handle all that bandwidth 6. I can listen to my music on airplanes It's amazing this stuff is so hard to understand for people these days.
Kluggy 3y ago
some of us hold onto the past. I still have a Zip disk and drive (and a bunch of old media, all the way back to a 8 inch floppy) and I have a fairly large collection of 4k blurays
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  I am listening to some of my minidiscs at this very moment
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    I have vinyls
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Real Programmers gyrate the needle by hand
aidenn0 3y ago
Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Really? On a regular disk? I thought the upper limit was ~2.7M
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    Yes, their LS-120 drives could store ~120MB on a special disk, or allegedly 32MB on a regular 3.5" high-density disk[1]. It used SMR recording just like the modern spinny-rust hard drives of late that none of us particularly like to accomplish the latter trick. (I owned an ATAPI variant of this drive for time, but I sadly only ever used it for reading and writing normal disks of normal formatting.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
    - mgk123 3y ago
      The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the last drives which could also use 240MB disks. Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not support it.
      - ssl-3 3y ago
        I appreciate the correction. Eventually, right here, we'll all collectively remember the whole truth about the mysteries of this conglomerated and seldom-used removable media format.
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      Ah SuperDisk, I only know about it because there was a drive for the PowerBook G3.
- 3y ago
hackernewds 3y ago
> and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. fairly per the effort I'd say. previously content required a camera crew and helicopters. now a smartphone among the limitless content creators
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  That’s a grossly unfair comparison: 1. For starters you’re comparing TV production to YouTube content. The two aren’t even close to being equal in terms of budget. 2. Most popular content on YouTube still have at least professionals DSLRs and paid crew beyond just the influencers. Even if it’s just an editor or two. 3. I think the GP was talking about music rather then video content 4. Even with music, previously you’d have the record label pay for the studio costs, etc. What’s happening these days is that artists are generally getting paid less after deductions. Not before. That’s the unfair part.
  - robjan 3y ago
    In the past long tail musicians got nothing, now they get a handful of shrapnel from Spotify plays.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      In the past, those musicians got CD sales at local gigs. Does anyone buy CDs any more? Before then it was cassettes. Same format though: you’d see them at a pub and buy a CD / tape if you liked their stuff. The long tail of musicians have always been worse off though. Organisations like PRS would distribute subscriptions to the household names leaving smaller bands with next to nothing and the long tail with literally nothing. The meme of a guitarist sleeping on their friends couch is as old as the internet is. Fact is, most artists don’t make money. Just like most footballers don’t. And most sports car racers don’t. There isn’t ever going to be a way to pay every budding musician, painter, nor sports enthusiast for their time. However if one of these personalities do succeed enough to go professional, ie that being their primary income, they should at least be paid fairly.
jwells89 3y ago
In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain. Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops. It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case, or a full-on library in something similar to an early 2000s portable CD flip case.
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  there was also writable media. so... how about one blu-ray of MP3s?
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Would technically work, but if I’m keeping physical media around I’d want archival quality (original CD audio or at least FLAC). A Blu-ray would fit a lot of FLACs too though, if not nearly as many as it could MP3s.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  >It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. What's wrong with SD cards?
  - ballooney 3y ago
    Agreed! For anyone else who, like me, didnt really pay attention to SD cards for a few years, it’s quite amazing how cheap they are for their capacity now. 256GB from reputable people like sandisk for low tens of dollars. Used one as a good travel backup drive on a recent work trip.
  - camtarn 3y ago
1letterunixname 3y ago
In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition. At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's investment club lost on IOMG because they got in late and sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market appreciated excellent sales, they would've realized significant gains rather than losses. PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  >It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form Sorry, but this is BS. Floppies were supremely reliable, really to an amazing degree. That is, until sometime in the mid-1990s or later: at that point, the drives became cheaper and crappier, and the media quality went straight down the toilet. It was pretty sudden as I remember, and basically coincided with people moving to CD-Rs because floppies were no longer large enough for daily use. Ask your older friends or relatives if they had a lot of trouble with floppies back in the Apple ][ era, when that was the only disk drive on a computer and people routinely booted their computer with the same boot disk every day; floppies were quite reliable in those days.
holoduke 3y ago
In the old world there were hardly any digital content creators. Nowadays you have more millionaires on Youtube than total content creators back in the days.
ssl-3 3y ago
I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although transfer rates have.) But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough. And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about, but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them keep it was. Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it's an active computer device -- there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable media.) So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it). Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the same room. But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the end recipient directly.) As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily sending data, over the Internet, to a fellow peer? Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking years ago. (No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)
- francescovv 3y ago
  > What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the Internet And for mobile phones - without internet is similar, unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends, and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of "security". So I had to wait for cell signal to come back and send the file via whatsapp. To someone standing right in front of me.
xarope 3y ago
ah yes, Iomega zip drives, back in the days when you could stores 10's of 1000s of files and images in 100mb. Nowadays, that would be like, what, 10 smartphone camera pictures?
irjustin 3y ago
> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over time, but never really batted an eye after I've seen them. I enjoy rewatching clips that are mostly on youtube and rarely care for the whole movie.... I'm just one guy though. When I lost it with music, THEN i really cared. Caused me to seek physical media when I really like sometime, which sadly isn't always possible with all artists.
- bandrami 3y ago
  I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago. We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end. I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well all week (without using Starlink, which it seems isn't quite easily-rentable yet), which was a big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of spectators broadly showed up for the main race. And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant drunks loved singing. Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network available to let this happen. We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is obviously a very different world from mixing jungle). But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that existed on physical media that we could actually-touch. I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music at all, and just trusting that the greater network would behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to happen. That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-enough network connection to keep people moving in a place where there is a large crowd. (But yet: People actually do that?)
froddd 3y ago
Do you own a USB-C thumb drive? … Me neither :-/
- bombcar 3y ago
  I have a thumb drive with usb a on one side and c on the other. Insanely surprising how useful it is even at places with more networking than the NSA.
  - akaij 3y ago
    I bought a Transcend ESD310C specifically because of this. Really performant, too!
pantulis 3y ago
> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... This is a proper definition of disruption.
pilaf 3y ago
> Iomega Zip Drives Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than Iomega? I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't happen in the West. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
- mark_undoio 3y ago
  It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point. I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either). Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3], which were just so small and cute. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay
  - hinkley 3y ago
    There was a predecessor to the Zip Drive that could do 120 MB. I’m blanking on what it’s called. My friend who was into MD data was into those first, then Iomega killed them.
    - vikingerik 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk was 120 MB, but it came after the Zip drive, not before. The ones that came before the Zip were the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical , and various flavors of magneto-optical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
ReptileMan 3y ago
>Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. I torrent and spinning rust is cheap. So I do have media collection.
MikusR 3y ago
>most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator count has increased by orders of magnitude.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  Creator count probably hasn't gone up per capita. It's just that that one band I liked from my high school can put all their music on SoundCloud, have an Instagram page and a TikTok and be discoverable to people worldwide instead of selling cds they burned and applied inkjet labels to and selling them to other kids at the same school. I suspect it's more a matter of everyone being more visible, a helping of Dunning-Kruger, and a dusting of narcissism to choose to be visible to everyone because everyone cares.
prmoustache 3y ago
As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  For some recent holiday I had my girlfriend burn me a CD of an album I liked. (Legally bought DRM-free) I'd make her a mix CD, but there isn't much music we've listened to together. In fact, when I talk to anyone about music, the result is often a mutual "Hm, never heard of them" followed by non-interest. Music discovery is done independently and I don't usually want to get into other people's bands. I guess it used to be more social. I'm a late millennial, almost Gen Z. For me music is personal and not social. I listen to a lot of video game soundtracks.
  - digging 3y ago
    This reflects a lot of my experience. Music has become more and more personal over the years. I have one friend whom I introduced to a lot of music and we used to share often (links to songs etc). Over time, that friend began having their own vast personal world of music and we rarely share anymore. One of my favorite things to do with music is to create a curated playlist and imagine sharing it. Sometimes I actually will share it with that friend or my partner, and that's been well received at times, as a rule it usually feels like asking anyone else to listen to something I like is just burdening/boring them. Possibly worse, when you actually do connect with someone new about shared music taste... suddenly you open the floodgates and actually there's way too much music out there in your individual spheres so that sharing becomes exhausting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarian 3y ago
  Kids these days seem to screenrecord youtube videos, and then stitch them together in iMovie/cabcut/other.
LightBug1 3y ago
I remember being hyped running my first game on a 3.5inch disc on an Atari STE. I was like, I've arrived. This is the f'ing future! Even hearing "Iomeda Zip Drive" brings back incredible nostalgia!
unsupp0rted 3y ago
> most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world My local 1-hour photo lab clerk has been struggling as well
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bena 3y ago
I thought the next thing after CD/DVD would have been essentially thumbsticks. Or something more akin to Switch cartridges. Data access is data access, it seemed we could get more data in less space by moving to basically SSDs. But yeah, on demand(ish), always available(ish) content kind of changed the game.
flyinghamster 3y ago
Also along that line, as a competitor, were the Syquest Sparq and SyJet cartridge hard drives. Syquest was eventual acquired by... Iomega. For a while, I used a SyJet on a SCSI controller as a secondary hard drive for dual booting. Back in that era, I had to patch the Linux kernel to add my Adaptec SCSI card's ID to the list of PCI IDs it recognized, but the driver worked fine once that was done, and the official sources soon caught up. It worked well, but I rapidly outgrew it, and the cartridges were expensive and hard to find.
yxwvut 3y ago
I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.
- selestify 3y ago
  Do you have any sources I can use to dispel this myth the next time I see it?
- sema4hacker 3y ago
  I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000 copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have millions of listeners online but still not cover the production costs.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    How many times have you listened to your favorite album? Some of my CDs would have worn out in the 00’s if I hadn’t ripped them. In fact I had to use a disc doctor on a few to get a clean scan.
- afavour 3y ago
  > The total outflows to creators is higher Is that actually true, though? I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that bands only really make money from touring these days and that streaming money is basically a rounding error.
  - yxwvut 3y ago
    The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music). I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc
whycome 3y ago
> At least we still have thumbsticks... Except for the drift issues!! /s But even gaming has gone to the model you describe. There’s no more “holding” of something.
gloosx 3y ago
Dunno, "no one" is a bit exaggerated, vinyl records market is growing every year. Of course, due to really cheap and bulky storage devices available today people all around are collecting movies and music , maintaining their collections in meticulous order. I mean, it is obvious not everyone will accept not owning their movies or music, loosing all access to it the moment they stop to pay in exchange for questionable amount of convenience, so the streaming services are of no interest to them. In fact, some people even see that as caring and giving attention to what they watch or listen.
gosub100 3y ago
Creators hardly got paid anything back in the CD era either! Especially new bands that had no experience with the sharks at the record company. I remember back in the 90s one of the radio countdown shows did a bit on Madonna. They said because she was her own producer, director, manager, etc she cut out all the middlemen and thus earned a much larger share of each album sale.
mock-possum 3y ago
Y-yeah streaming sure has killed ownership of media… * glances nervously at the Ethernet leading into the NAS in the closet, overflowing with music and videos and books and games
maxglute 3y ago
MiniDiscs for peak portable storage aesthetic. I'm still holding out hope that maybe someday we'll go back to visible mini platters on portable devices.
- ecliptik 3y ago
  Not only am I holding out too, but I'm just swerving hard back to physical media for music and buying new MDs while Sony is still selling them. Be the future you want to see.
shiroiushi 3y ago
Yeah, things took a wrong turn somewhere, with people not valuing local storage and local control of data and just continually downloading the same thing over and over from some cloud provider, for a monthly fee. It made sense with Netflix, because most people don't re-watch movies often: they usually watch it once and never again, or if it's a favorite, maybe a handful of times. Plus, you normally watch movies at home, where you have a fast and cap-free wired data connection. With music, it just doesn't make sense to me, because I don't want to listen to whatever crap someone wants to shovel to me, and I like hearing the same songs over and over (you can never get tired of Led Zeppelin IV), plus I frequently listen to music while away from home, but somehow people have been suckered into paying for 1) a monthly fee to listen to the music they already know they like, and 2) another big monthly fee for a cellular data plan that allows this wastefulness of mobile bandwidth. Add to this the proliferation of SaaS, with people now running software from their web browser, and interacting with their data while it's on some remote server, instead of all local on their PC. Now, you can't do almost anything on a computer if you don't have an always-on internet connection.
throw10920 3y ago
> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. This comment breaks the HN guidelines[1], which state: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Going off from a story about floppy disk production into the unrelated topics content ownership and creator pay is the very definition of a generic tangent, flamebait, and an internet trope. Please don't degrade the quality of HN. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
M95D 3y ago
And the thumbsticks got almost as bad as the last of the floppies. Single-use throw-away chinese crap. I remember a very old XT computer with no HDD that was still booting from the original floopy in ~2001, used daily to play Pentix, until someone (me) connected it by mistake to 220V instead of it's 110V transformer.

sebastianavina 3y ago

you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any platform...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
m4a*. Or Opus.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>why bother You don't need an internet connection and don't have to worry about data caps or terrible jetliner satellite internet right then and there?
defrost 3y ago
Your experience may vary, in my experience: * things I've liked don't always stay on youtube or appear on spotify, and * streaming|internet isn't always available (remote area FiFo, underground, etc.)
derwiki 3y ago
Because it might go away? My Youtube saved lists are littered with removed videos. And I _do_ use a USB flash drive in my car of curated* music; it’s an always available radio station without and phone fiddling. *curated= just Grateful Dead recordings
autoexec 3y ago
Because when you have your own copy of something nobody is keeping track of what the date and time is when you watch/listen to that media along with how often you do it or what parts you view/hear more often or pause at most often, or where you are and what other things you are doing when you saw/heard it etc. You can enjoy your media entirely offline which is something you'll really want if you find yourself without internet access for some reason. In addition, you don't have to worry about that content suddenly going away without notice, or it being censored or modified at some later date. You also get the ability to play that media in your software of choice and can even re-encode the media to play on other devices using other formats. You can make your own edits. You can share your collection with others without forcing them to create an account and hand money/data to a third party. You can include things in your own collection that those third party streaming services might not approve of. When you give up on owning things you give up a lot more than just the item you would have had sitting on a shelf or the file that would have taken up space on your hard drive. There are lots of freedoms and opportunities you gain that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
ponector 3y ago
Not everything can be streamed. Streaming platform are applying censorship. Not everyone is signing in to provide their music to streaming. Also they usually stream not original tracks, but a remaster.
shiroiushi 3y ago
1. I don't have to pay a monthly fee 1a. I don't have to listen to annoying and offensive ads 2. I don't have to worry about something disappearing 3. I can listen to the version I want (remaster vs. original) 4. I can listen to music in the codec of my choice: <320kbps MP3 sounds bad, and some people prefer FLAC, for instance 5. I don't need an expensive cellular plan to handle all that bandwidth 6. I can listen to my music on airplanes It's amazing this stuff is so hard to understand for people these days.

Kluggy 3y ago

some of us hold onto the past. I still have a Zip disk and drive (and a bunch of old media, all the way back to a 8 inch floppy) and I have a fairly large collection of 4k blurays

inhumantsar 3y ago
I am listening to some of my minidiscs at this very moment
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  I have vinyls
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Real Programmers gyrate the needle by hand

aidenn0 3y ago

Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Really? On a regular disk? I thought the upper limit was ~2.7M
- ssl-3 3y ago
  Yes, their LS-120 drives could store ~120MB on a special disk, or allegedly 32MB on a regular 3.5" high-density disk[1]. It used SMR recording just like the modern spinny-rust hard drives of late that none of us particularly like to accomplish the latter trick. (I owned an ATAPI variant of this drive for time, but I sadly only ever used it for reading and writing normal disks of normal formatting.) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
  - mgk123 3y ago
    The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the last drives which could also use 240MB disks. Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not support it.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      I appreciate the correction. Eventually, right here, we'll all collectively remember the whole truth about the mysteries of this conglomerated and seldom-used removable media format.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    Ah SuperDisk, I only know about it because there was a drive for the PowerBook G3.
3y ago

hackernewds 3y ago

> and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. fairly per the effort I'd say. previously content required a camera crew and helicopters. now a smartphone among the limitless content creators

hnlmorg 3y ago
That’s a grossly unfair comparison: 1. For starters you’re comparing TV production to YouTube content. The two aren’t even close to being equal in terms of budget. 2. Most popular content on YouTube still have at least professionals DSLRs and paid crew beyond just the influencers. Even if it’s just an editor or two. 3. I think the GP was talking about music rather then video content 4. Even with music, previously you’d have the record label pay for the studio costs, etc. What’s happening these days is that artists are generally getting paid less after deductions. Not before. That’s the unfair part.
- robjan 3y ago
  In the past long tail musicians got nothing, now they get a handful of shrapnel from Spotify plays.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    In the past, those musicians got CD sales at local gigs. Does anyone buy CDs any more? Before then it was cassettes. Same format though: you’d see them at a pub and buy a CD / tape if you liked their stuff. The long tail of musicians have always been worse off though. Organisations like PRS would distribute subscriptions to the household names leaving smaller bands with next to nothing and the long tail with literally nothing. The meme of a guitarist sleeping on their friends couch is as old as the internet is. Fact is, most artists don’t make money. Just like most footballers don’t. And most sports car racers don’t. There isn’t ever going to be a way to pay every budding musician, painter, nor sports enthusiast for their time. However if one of these personalities do succeed enough to go professional, ie that being their primary income, they should at least be paid fairly.

jwells89 3y ago

In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain. Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops. It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case, or a full-on library in something similar to an early 2000s portable CD flip case.

ikari_pl 3y ago
there was also writable media. so... how about one blu-ray of MP3s?
- jwells89 3y ago
  Would technically work, but if I’m keeping physical media around I’d want archival quality (original CD audio or at least FLAC). A Blu-ray would fit a lot of FLACs too though, if not nearly as many as it could MP3s.
DeathArrow 3y ago
>It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. What's wrong with SD cards?
- ballooney 3y ago
  Agreed! For anyone else who, like me, didnt really pay attention to SD cards for a few years, it’s quite amazing how cheap they are for their capacity now. 256GB from reputable people like sandisk for low tens of dollars. Used one as a good travel backup drive on a recent work trip.
- camtarn 3y ago

1letterunixname 3y ago

In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition. At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's investment club lost on IOMG because they got in late and sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market appreciated excellent sales, they would've realized significant gains rather than losses. PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.

shiroiushi 3y ago
>It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form Sorry, but this is BS. Floppies were supremely reliable, really to an amazing degree. That is, until sometime in the mid-1990s or later: at that point, the drives became cheaper and crappier, and the media quality went straight down the toilet. It was pretty sudden as I remember, and basically coincided with people moving to CD-Rs because floppies were no longer large enough for daily use. Ask your older friends or relatives if they had a lot of trouble with floppies back in the Apple ][ era, when that was the only disk drive on a computer and people routinely booted their computer with the same boot disk every day; floppies were quite reliable in those days.

holoduke 3y ago

In the old world there were hardly any digital content creators. Nowadays you have more millionaires on Youtube than total content creators back in the days.

ssl-3 3y ago

I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although transfer rates have.) But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough. And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about, but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them keep it was. Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it's an active computer device -- there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable media.) So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it). Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the same room. But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the end recipient directly.) As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily sending data, over the Internet, to a fellow peer? Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking years ago. (No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)

francescovv 3y ago
> What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the Internet And for mobile phones - without internet is similar, unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends, and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of "security". So I had to wait for cell signal to come back and send the file via whatsapp. To someone standing right in front of me.

xarope 3y ago

ah yes, Iomega zip drives, back in the days when you could stores 10's of 1000s of files and images in 100mb. Nowadays, that would be like, what, 10 smartphone camera pictures?

irjustin 3y ago

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over time, but never really batted an eye after I've seen them. I enjoy rewatching clips that are mostly on youtube and rarely care for the whole movie.... I'm just one guy though. When I lost it with music, THEN i really cared. Caused me to seek physical media when I really like sometime, which sadly isn't always possible with all artists.

bandrami 3y ago
I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)
- ssl-3 3y ago
  I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago. We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end. I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well all week (without using Starlink, which it seems isn't quite easily-rentable yet), which was a big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of spectators broadly showed up for the main race. And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant drunks loved singing. Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network available to let this happen. We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is obviously a very different world from mixing jungle). But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that existed on physical media that we could actually-touch. I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music at all, and just trusting that the greater network would behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to happen. That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-enough network connection to keep people moving in a place where there is a large crowd. (But yet: People actually do that?)

froddd 3y ago

Do you own a USB-C thumb drive? … Me neither :-/

bombcar 3y ago
I have a thumb drive with usb a on one side and c on the other. Insanely surprising how useful it is even at places with more networking than the NSA.
- akaij 3y ago
  I bought a Transcend ESD310C specifically because of this. Really performant, too!

pantulis 3y ago

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... This is a proper definition of disruption.

pilaf 3y ago

> Iomega Zip Drives Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than Iomega? I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't happen in the West. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

mark_undoio 3y ago
It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point. I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either). Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3], which were just so small and cute. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay
- hinkley 3y ago
  There was a predecessor to the Zip Drive that could do 120 MB. I’m blanking on what it’s called. My friend who was into MD data was into those first, then Iomega killed them.
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk was 120 MB, but it came after the Zip drive, not before. The ones that came before the Zip were the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical , and various flavors of magneto-optical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

ReptileMan 3y ago

MikusR 3y ago

>most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator count has increased by orders of magnitude.

mauvehaus 3y ago
Creator count probably hasn't gone up per capita. It's just that that one band I liked from my high school can put all their music on SoundCloud, have an Instagram page and a TikTok and be discoverable to people worldwide instead of selling cds they burned and applied inkjet labels to and selling them to other kids at the same school. I suspect it's more a matter of everyone being more visible, a helping of Dunning-Kruger, and a dusting of narcissism to choose to be visible to everyone because everyone cares.

prmoustache 3y ago

As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
For some recent holiday I had my girlfriend burn me a CD of an album I liked. (Legally bought DRM-free) I'd make her a mix CD, but there isn't much music we've listened to together. In fact, when I talk to anyone about music, the result is often a mutual "Hm, never heard of them" followed by non-interest. Music discovery is done independently and I don't usually want to get into other people's bands. I guess it used to be more social. I'm a late millennial, almost Gen Z. For me music is personal and not social. I listen to a lot of video game soundtracks.
- digging 3y ago
  This reflects a lot of my experience. Music has become more and more personal over the years. I have one friend whom I introduced to a lot of music and we used to share often (links to songs etc). Over time, that friend began having their own vast personal world of music and we rarely share anymore. One of my favorite things to do with music is to create a curated playlist and imagine sharing it. Sometimes I actually will share it with that friend or my partner, and that's been well received at times, as a rule it usually feels like asking anyone else to listen to something I like is just burdening/boring them. Possibly worse, when you actually do connect with someone new about shared music taste... suddenly you open the floodgates and actually there's way too much music out there in your individual spheres so that sharing becomes exhausting.
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foobarian 3y ago
Kids these days seem to screenrecord youtube videos, and then stitch them together in iMovie/cabcut/other.

LightBug1 3y ago

I remember being hyped running my first game on a 3.5inch disc on an Atari STE. I was like, I've arrived. This is the f'ing future! Even hearing "Iomeda Zip Drive" brings back incredible nostalgia!

unsupp0rted 3y ago

> most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world My local 1-hour photo lab clerk has been struggling as well

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bena 3y ago

I thought the next thing after CD/DVD would have been essentially thumbsticks. Or something more akin to Switch cartridges. Data access is data access, it seemed we could get more data in less space by moving to basically SSDs. But yeah, on demand(ish), always available(ish) content kind of changed the game.

flyinghamster 3y ago

Also along that line, as a competitor, were the Syquest Sparq and SyJet cartridge hard drives. Syquest was eventual acquired by... Iomega. For a while, I used a SyJet on a SCSI controller as a secondary hard drive for dual booting. Back in that era, I had to patch the Linux kernel to add my Adaptec SCSI card's ID to the list of PCI IDs it recognized, but the driver worked fine once that was done, and the official sources soon caught up. It worked well, but I rapidly outgrew it, and the cartridges were expensive and hard to find.

yxwvut 3y ago

I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

selestify 3y ago
Do you have any sources I can use to dispel this myth the next time I see it?
sema4hacker 3y ago
I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000 copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have millions of listeners online but still not cover the production costs.
- hinkley 3y ago
  How many times have you listened to your favorite album? Some of my CDs would have worn out in the 00’s if I hadn’t ripped them. In fact I had to use a disc doctor on a few to get a clean scan.
afavour 3y ago
> The total outflows to creators is higher Is that actually true, though? I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that bands only really make money from touring these days and that streaming money is basically a rounding error.
- yxwvut 3y ago
  The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music). I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc

whycome 3y ago

> At least we still have thumbsticks... Except for the drift issues!! /s But even gaming has gone to the model you describe. There’s no more “holding” of something.

gloosx 3y ago

Dunno, "no one" is a bit exaggerated, vinyl records market is growing every year. Of course, due to really cheap and bulky storage devices available today people all around are collecting movies and music , maintaining their collections in meticulous order. I mean, it is obvious not everyone will accept not owning their movies or music, loosing all access to it the moment they stop to pay in exchange for questionable amount of convenience, so the streaming services are of no interest to them. In fact, some people even see that as caring and giving attention to what they watch or listen.

gosub100 3y ago

Creators hardly got paid anything back in the CD era either! Especially new bands that had no experience with the sharks at the record company. I remember back in the 90s one of the radio countdown shows did a bit on Madonna. They said because she was her own producer, director, manager, etc she cut out all the middlemen and thus earned a much larger share of each album sale.

mock-possum 3y ago

Y-yeah streaming sure has killed ownership of media… * glances nervously at the Ethernet leading into the NAS in the closet, overflowing with music and videos and books and games

maxglute 3y ago

MiniDiscs for peak portable storage aesthetic. I'm still holding out hope that maybe someday we'll go back to visible mini platters on portable devices.

ecliptik 3y ago
Not only am I holding out too, but I'm just swerving hard back to physical media for music and buying new MDs while Sony is still selling them. Be the future you want to see.

shiroiushi 3y ago

Yeah, things took a wrong turn somewhere, with people not valuing local storage and local control of data and just continually downloading the same thing over and over from some cloud provider, for a monthly fee. It made sense with Netflix, because most people don't re-watch movies often: they usually watch it once and never again, or if it's a favorite, maybe a handful of times. Plus, you normally watch movies at home, where you have a fast and cap-free wired data connection. With music, it just doesn't make sense to me, because I don't want to listen to whatever crap someone wants to shovel to me, and I like hearing the same songs over and over (you can never get tired of Led Zeppelin IV), plus I frequently listen to music while away from home, but somehow people have been suckered into paying for 1) a monthly fee to listen to the music they already know they like, and 2) another big monthly fee for a cellular data plan that allows this wastefulness of mobile bandwidth. Add to this the proliferation of SaaS, with people now running software from their web browser, and interacting with their data while it's on some remote server, instead of all local on their PC. Now, you can't do almost anything on a computer if you don't have an always-on internet connection.

throw10920 3y ago

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. This comment breaks the HN guidelines[1], which state: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Going off from a story about floppy disk production into the unrelated topics content ownership and creator pay is the very definition of a generic tangent, flamebait, and an internet trope. Please don't degrade the quality of HN. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

M95D 3y ago

And the thumbsticks got almost as bad as the last of the floppies. Single-use throw-away chinese crap. I remember a very old XT computer with no HDD that was still booting from the original floopy in ~2001, used daily to play Pentix, until someone (me) connected it by mistake to 220V instead of it's 110V transformer.