2006-11-27
Some words of wisdom on email certification programs
Vernon Schyrver in news.admin.net-abuse.email:
The trouble with all "Good Guys" lists is in who pays. Maintaining a comprehensive list that can be widely used is expensive. [...]
Sooner instead of later, those who have financial reasons for seeing themselves certified as good assume the financial burdens and so are given control. Organizations whose mail is never blocked can't find a reason to pay third parties for testamonials. They tell their correspodents "If you want my mail, orders or whatever, whitelist me or otherwise arrange to hear from me, but if not, that's ok too." That leaves organizations that for various reasons don't inspire enough trust on their own to pay for and so run the "Good Guys" list.
(From Message-ID <eittga$26l6$1@calcite.rhyolite.com>.)
Why I don't rip my CDs
From a comment here:
I would suggest that you rip [your CDs], though.
I have no interest in ripping my CDs for a number of reasons:
- I listen to whole albums at a time, cycling through my collection
in an essentially fixed order. This means that at any given time I'm
only really interested in the next few CDs and having everything sitting
on disk is of no particular benefit.
(Cycling through my collection this way avoids the twin perils of burning out on albums that I really like and forgetting neat stuff.)
- although disk storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, I have enough
CDs that ripping my entire CD collection would still take enough disk
space to be annoying. I just don't feel like dedicating that much
space to something I already have perfectly good copies of.
- I listen to my music at both home and work, which would require either replicating the entire collection or dealing with sloshing data back and forth. (Transporting actual CDs back and forth is much easier; I just grab the top few from the 'to listen to next' stack.)
There is something to be said for ripping CDs for archival purposes (digital data can be more durable than silver platters that are now out of print, and I have already had a couple of CDs succumb to disc rot). However, that would require a lot of disk space, since I am neurotic enough to insist on ripping in a lossless format if I'm doing it as an archive.
(If you do want to rip CDs, though, current Linux software seems to make this pretty effortless. I have been pleasantly impressed, since the last time I tried this it involved manual usage of cdparanoia and similar things.)