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From: albaugh@dms.UUCP (Mike Albaugh)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <1181@dms.UUCP>
Date: 30 Nov 90 00:33:33 GMT
References: <0094070F.B370E000@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Organization: Atari Games Inc., Milpitas, CA
Lines: 29

From article <0094070F.B370E000@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>, by sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney):
> In article <1990Nov29.162726.11411@mozart.amd.com>, brett@cayman.amd.com (Brett Stewart) writes:
> 
>>What this has to do with computer architecture is that the economics
>>here pretty much predict that the things on our desks will have CD
>>slots Real Soon Now, and this stuff will become indispensable to us.


	Which might, of course, revive the raging flame-war from
sci.electronics about the increase in error rate with time on this
supposedly "read only" media. I don't mind the occasional drop out
in ZZ top, and probably wouldn't even see the "interpolation" that
audio CDs do when they are a little more confident that the errors
were "small", but I don't really want to deal with "just a few little
errors" in, say, "as" or "ld". :-)

BTW: I know about error correcting codes, etc, but the story from
the audiophiles is that the little "correction light" (_If_ you have
one) tends to light more and more often with age (of the disk), which
perhaps explains why newer decks tend not to have them. "Don't lets alarm
the users, now" :-). And a n-bit correction scheme with n-1 _known_ bad
bits gets us a bit close to the edge...

				Mike

| Mike Albaugh (albaugh@dms.UUCP || {...decwrl!pyramid!}weitek!dms!albaugh)
| Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST)
| 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035		voice: (408)434-1709
| The opinions expressed are my own (Boy, are they ever)