Exactly. Germany has been improving the former for ages (up to insane levels, i.e. ever stricter building code) and now also is working on the latter. Good insulation for houses is not optional here, so that better insulation brings little, if any ROI.

Really? The 8 significant decimal places leave a lot of room when no new bitcoins are created any more.

It would have been horrible if it had been my tape library, but since it belonged to an investment bank I can still laugh today. (It was long before the crash and it is not related to it)

tar is another very useful program from the universe string comes.

I stopped using tapes after the QIC-80 (80 MB, compressed 120 MB). Later had a brief affair with a DLT library, long enough to learn a DLT design flaw (when the plastic lip breaks off from a cartridge the drive it is inserted into is damaged, mechanically unhooked. Very funny in a multi drive robot library when the defective cartridge is passed around, Could not stop laughing for days). Anyway, have you tried tar?

The problem is not the tape drive, but the software used to write the tapes. Using compression or encryption made it incompatible with other vendors.

Why don't you mount the images? For me it was as traumatic as being woken up by a SWAT team und 5 machine guns stuck in my face :-) I also have some backup data left on QIC(?) tapes but not seen a drive in ages. I think I was sane enough not to use compression when I created them, so there still is hope,.

My collection was sent to /dev/null in the 90ies when I let a friend use my computer for video editing. During booting he managed to enter the setup of the SCSI controller card and low levelled my 4GB drive.

All true, and before the cassette player we used reel to reel devices, exhausting our funds for the tape. The teenage audience probably has more funds today, but also many more options to blow the cash. But it is the same situation for the content industry: they do not really loose money in this segment from pirating, maybe just a little. Equating a pirated copy with a lost sale is complete bs. I financed my first floppy drive with a bank loan and went ballistic when the copy protection schemes gnawed at its health. The kind of ballistic I later went when CD protection schemes lowered my quality of life and installed malicious sw on my computers. Never bought a CD again, they completely lost me as a customer at the turn of the century. I had plenty of vinyl and legally upgraded nearly everything to CD.

16s appears to be the whole song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A12o3gjvKtg http://www.mp3lyrics.org/d/descendents/i-like-food/

I wonder if my original ADLIB could have done that. No, I do not consider sharing MID files as music pirating ;-)

well, 300bps was at the beginning of the 1980s, I upgraded to 1200bps around 1983. DEC Rainbow with 5MB disk a year later. Online pirating of movies or music still unthinkable then, since there was no (affordable) equipment to digitize, process or store such a huge amount of data. Basically the only stuff that was pirated was software. Throw in a few notorious cookbooks with recipes you needed to be a complete idiot to try them out. BBS was fun.

most of the 1980s there was no online pirating of movies or music. I remember downloading the K&R C ASCII book from CERN at 300 Baud, that took the whole night and corresponds to about 30s of mp3. Watched a stack of rented videos in the time it took to download. I think mp3 had not even been invented yet.

well, mine does, but I do not use it because they do not have the groups I need. Third party and offshore, ssl encrypted, for a few cents per day. Can fill a 2TB disk in less than 10 days.

Lets call that way Usenet. Seriously, why should I even use bittorrent?