RIP: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 96

Dr. Ruth was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Jewish parents in 1928. In 1938 her father was loaded into a truck the week after Kristallnacht to be taken to a labor camp and she never saw him again. Her mother put her on a train to go to a boarding school in Switzerland the following year, and that was the last she saw of her mother. She kept in mail correspondence with her relatives during the war until it all stopped.

After the war, she went to the nascent state of Israel and joined one of the fighting forces trying to keep the country alive. She later married a Jewish soldier. She said of her growing up in an orphanage and losing her parents and family, “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis — because I survived — I had an obligation to make a dent in the world,” Dr. Westheimer once told an interviewer. What she did not know, she added, was that the dent would entail her “talking about sex from morning to night.”

She settled in at the height of 4'7", and was quite the dynamo. Rest well, doctor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/13/dr-ruth-westheimer-sex-dead/

Sony is slowly halting production of recordable Bluray discs

From the article: "In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued.

Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years. As the company put it bluntly, "We need to review our business structure in order to improve profitability.""

This will not affect production of discs for things like home video and computer games, just consumer recordable discs.

No doubt a lot of people are going to get stung by this. And I'm sure they're useful. But let's look at the computer that I'm on right now. It has 550 gig in use on the main drive. That's five discs to archive it. Five discs that have to be swapped out. OR one 4 terabyte external hard drive that I can do multiple generations of backups to and I don't have to swap discs out during the backup process: plug in the drive, start the backup, walk away.

Now, an external HD is not an archival backup, that hard drive will not last decades, which presumably the writeable discs will - if you keep track of them, AND they remain undamaged, AND your external drive keeps working or you can get another. Those are a lot of ifs and ands.

Backups have always sucked. And archiving materials suck even worse, speaking as a computer guy of several decades and a librarian.

https://www.techspot.com/news/103709-sony-killing-off-recordable-blu-ray-bidding-farewell.html