Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)
The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.
I legit have been considering buying a minidisc player, just for the sheer cool factor of them. Sometimes truly special form is lost as function evolves.
minidiscs should have been the standard CDs became. no one would have considered holding a 3.5" floppy disc gingerly by the edges and placing it into a tray to read. the case is critical.
however, the industry realized people were replacing their scratched cd's, so they'd sell 2, 3 of the same disc to the same person. Source: worked at a record store in the hight of the CD age when mini discs were all but essentially snuffed out
I mean, maybe not the mini disk specifically, but yah, a cartridge system for CDs would have been better.
Mini disks are super cool but they’re a lot more materially demanding than a CD, CDs being just aluminum and plastic, where as a minidisc has some truly wacky elements in it’s make up to get the magneto optical and curie point to work.
I mean you clearly know way more about it than me.. but yeah some kind of carrier/cartridge protecting the disc and we'd probably still be using CD-W-RW's
The mini disk was a truly weird system. Half way between a cassette and a CD. CD used a laser to to reflect off bumps(or dyes in some varieties) on the disk to get a signal, and a cassette would use a metal head to detect magnetization along the tape to get a signal.
The mini disk used a laser to read the magnetization around the disk. Essentially the magnetism would change the polarity of the light as it bounced off, and by measuring what the polarity of the reflected light is, the device got the signal.
Writing to the disk was also wild, as unlike the cassette, the magnetic field of the disk couldn’t just be changed by putting it next to a strong magnet like. Instead, it had to be heated up before the magnetism could be changed, this heating was done with the laser, and was very precise compared to a cassette’s method. This meaning way more information could be squeezed on to the disk than on a cassette.
