Broken CD

Macintosh delivered the Mac Book Air in January, with no optical media (CD/DVD) drive. Many are singing their praises, many are cursing them. I fall into the former group. The Pirates Dilemma has a great quote:

Moving to all-digital media formats isn’t just the most efficient thing to do economically, it’s the right thing to do environmentally, and it wouldn’t be happening as quickly without companies like Apple accepting the reality of the situation when most media and technology companies won’t.

Optical Media needs to be dead…
At my house are over 1,000 old CD’s that are stacked and awaiting their recycle date. CD’s and DVD’s are terrible for the environment and not terribly easy to recycle. I burned a CD for the first time in months last week when I downloaded the newest Live CD of DSL to install on an old laptop. I hated that I had to do it, but I could not boot such an old machine from a usb thumb drive, unfortunately.

Why use something that is one shot?
We have long since retired single shot firearms, why are we holding onto this archaic media? I understand there is such thing as a re-writable disc, but they are much more of a pain than they are beneficial. Like the semi- and fully-automatic firearms of today we have new media to replace the CD/DVD. Hard drives are dirt cheap and flash media is coming down in price while also being faster than both disc drives and optical media. Flash / USB Thumb Drives are nearly indestructible (I’ve seen someone wash his thumb drive 3 times), have much higher capacities than CD’s or DVD’s, are compatible with nearly every operating system and computer, are 100% reusable, and are far smaller than optical media.

You have 1,000 DVD’s and 1,000 CD’s at your house?!
Personally I don’t have a single CD anymore. iTunes, Napster, and more have changed the landscape of music and no longer do CD’s hold our music hostage. I have a central entertainment server at my house which cost me just a few hundred bucks (far less than your CD collection). It houses all of my music and movies to stream across my network to any laptop and my two Xbox Media Center enabled consoles. Netflix has rentals which don’t require media to be mailed, try that for starters. You can legally rip all of your DVD’s onto a machine and we all know hard drives are dirt cheap (500 gigs for less than $100).

I’m weaned of Optical Media, so should you be.
My flash drive never leaves my side. My MP3 player keeps me rocking the time away. The internet holds all the files I need. My server feeds up my Movies and Music. While there is no optical media to be found! Join the Revolution!