At 11:50 AM 4/22/98 -0400, Dale A. Callaham wrote:
>Regarding the concerns about CD-Recordable media (lifetimes & technology,
>NOT philosophy), I would like to bring to everyones attention a web site
>that appears to have quite a bit of information and might be worth checking
out.
>
>It is: http://www.cd-info.com/
>
For those of you who have not looked at this site I am forwarding an email
below from the site's owner concerning false accusations about the lifetime
of CDR disks. I received this message as a subscriber to the Adaptec CDR
list, http://www.adaptec.com/support/cdrlist, another very useful source of
CDR information. The message was sent on 4/22/98 and was entitled An open
letter to the CD Industry.
-Duncan Stuart
From: Katherine Cochrane, [log in to unmask]
Dear Colleague,
After being sent yet another inaccurate and derogatory article about the
"short life expectancy" of Compact Disc and other digital storage media,
published this week in a leading business magazine (Business Week), I
wrote this letter to the editors of that publication:
---< begin letter to the editor of Business Week >---
I have just read the article "From Digits to Dust" by Marcia Stepanek in
your magazine. It is riddled with inaccuracies and misinformation. The
statement that CDs are adversely affected by magnetic fields is simply
untrue. Saying there are no standards for digital media durability is
likewise false. I happen to be on the committee referred to (but not by
name) in the article, the ANSI/PIMA IT9-5 subcommittee, who HAVE written
standards for media longevity testing. If these particular standards
have not yet been implemented in longevity testing, it's only because
they are too new, and such tests are expensive and time-consuming to set
up. The ANSI 9.21 standard was only accepted by the national standards
organization late last Fall, as can be seen in a press release available
in my website at <http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/industry/news/ansi.html>.
Longevity studies HAVE been conducted before, and their results can also
be seen in white papers published in my website. These results have
been available there for over 2 1/2 years.
The problems with this article are too numerous to address in one
message. Please see a page in my site (available from a link on the
home page) about an earlier article, published in the US News and World
Report issue of 16 Feb 1998, in which Dr. John van Bogart of the
National Media Lab, and Dr. Jerry McFaul of the SIGCAT Foundation refute
its erroneous premises and conclusions (which are repeated in the
article published in your magazine), and protest against the improper
misuse and misconstruction of National Media Lab data made by the
article.
Your magazine has done a serious disservice to the data storage
industries, and to consumers who are misled by this inflammatory and
inaccurate reporting.
Katherine Cochrane
President
The CD-Info Company, Inc.
http://www.cd-info.com
---< end letter >---
My question to you all is, what is being done by our industry to
counteract such flagrant attacks? Where is the press campaign? Where
are the letters from major manufacturers? Why is this misinformation
allowed to go unanswered? This article was faxed to me by someone who
has a data archiving consultancy in New York. They are being hurt
financially by erroneous attacks of this kind because their customers
read them and believe them since there is nothing out there to
contradict them. Owners of data hesitate to invest in archiving when
so-called experts tell them their data will not be safe if they do. In
this article, a disc publisher was quoted as saying that he didn't
expect his discs to last more than 5 or 10 years. The reporter even
claimed that there are no longevity testing standards, which is simply
untrue, but who is going to inform her readers that this article is
simply wrong?
After a similar article appeared in US News and World Report in
February, Dr. John van Bogart of the National Media Labs contacted me
and asked me to try to help counteract its damage. I posted a webpage
in my site telling his story, with links to accurate information in the
NML website. Several thousand people have read that now, but not, it
seems, the reporter, Ms. Stepanek. I also called Jerry McFaul at the
SIGCAT Foundation after reading the first article, and quoted his
reaction to it in my webpage. He called me today about the Business
Week article. "Where is OSTA?" he asked me. Where is the industry
reaction to these blatant and damaging attacks? SIGCAT and my company
are private entities, neither of which have the resources to take on the
task of countering this misinformation unassisted. Our organizations
are willing to do something, but we can't do it alone, and we shouldn't
have to. When is the industry going to put some resources into a
serious, effective publicity campaign to both reassure consumers, and
educate them about the true nature of optical digital storage? When
will longevity tests be performed and the data released openly, so we
can have some credibility for our claims that CDs are a viable archiving
medium?
If the manufacturers and application developers and other knowledgable
about digital media are not willing to stand up for this technology and
its users, who will? Are we going to let the know-nothings destroy our
industry, simply for lack of the will to fight back?
Write, call or email me or Jerry McFaul (mailto:[log in to unmask]). Meet
with us during the SIGCAT conference in three weeks (see http://
www.sigcat.org), or at RepliTech in San Francisco in June (http://
www.kipinet.com). Write letters to the editors of the magazines who
publish misinformative articles. Call or email your friends in the
press and give them good information. Urge your company to participate
in longevity testing and publish the results, and to support standards
committees. Let's do something effective to answer this threat.
Katherine Cochrane
President
The CD-Info Company, Inc.
256-650-0406 fax 256-882-7393
mailto:[log in to unmask]
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