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Recommended Reading: The dark past of Jessica Jones
The creator of 'Jessica Jones' serves up a dark mirror for our moment Joy Press, The New York Times Jessica Jones returns to Netflix in less than a week, and thanks to a couple of trailers, we know it's going to be dark and angry. The New York Times sat down with the creator of the show, Melissa Rosenberg, who has also penned the doom and gloom for Dexter and Twilight. Rosenberg opens up about how her own past helped her craft the show's protagonist.
Revisit the '90s with a collection of AOL CDs
The Internet Archive is a treasure trove for software geeks. In recent months, the site has hosted everything from GIFs from Geocities to Macintosh games from the 80s. Its latest blast from the past is an entire section dedicated to AOL CD-ROMs.
The Library of Congress is wrecking CDs to learn how to save them
Like it or not, CDs rot over time -- your well-worn copy of Soundgarden's Superunknown might not play anymore. Just how they rot is frequently a mystery, though, which is why the Library of Congress is currently destroying CDs (including those you donate) in hopes of improving its archival techniques. Researchers are using a combination of artificial aging tests and simple observations to see what factors trigger decay, sometimes with surprising results. As the Library tells The Atlantic, data loss varies widely between manufacturing processes, the lasers in CD players and even individual discs; experimenters can subject two identical copies of an album to extreme heat and lose only one of them.
The CD celebrates its 30th birthday, recalls a time when it was cool to play music with lasers
Like so many other technologies, it's tough to pin down an exact birthday for the compact disc. If we're tracing things back to the world of LaserDisc as a potential commercial product, we're talking years or decades earlier. As far as laboratory testing is concerned for the tech as we've come to know, love and subsequently abandon, the we're going back to the mid-70s in our journey. For the sake of simplicity, let's go with the first commercial record to be released on the format. That would be 52nd Street by one William Martin Joel, a release that came a few years after the album's issuing on vinyl, to coincide with the Sony's CDP-101, which let audiophiles do more than just stare in wonder at the shiny plastic disc they just bought.
Sony unveils in-car receivers with App Remote, taps into your smartphone music from October
Sony has been big on smartphone integration for car audio lately, having already launched its MirrorLink receivers earlier in the year for the more well-heeled drivers among us. The company is bringing that mobile tie-in down to Earth through a new quartet of in-car CD receivers. The MEX-GS600BT, MEX-BT4100P, MEX-BT3100P and CDX-GS500R all bring in App Remote, which lets the faceplate buttons steer local music or Pandora streaming radio coming from Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Walkman devices paired through a Bluetooth wireless link. The old-fashioned USB connection is still on offer for these and the HD Radio-toting CDX-GT710HD, while the whole collection can graft on the optional SXV200V1 tuner to carry the full Sirius XM satellite radio lineup. Differences across the line aren't completely clear from Sony's wording, although both the MEX-GS600BT and CDX-GS500R carry two USB ports as well as 5-volt RCA preamp outputs. You'll be waiting awhile to slip any of these receivers into a DIN slot, regardless of which one you pick: the GS500R ships in October for $199, and the rest hit the shops in November for between $149 to $249. %Gallery-162517%
Sony MiniDisc Walkman to stop spinning in September (video)
Aside from with a handful of stateside early adopters (and a few million others in Japan) eager to embrace any new technology, Sony's rather extensive line of MiniDisc Walkmans never had a chance to dominate the portable audio market. But for one reason or another, the company kept up production of the optical player / recorder combos for nearly 20 years, after the first Sony MZ1 launched in Japan in September of '92. With a countless selection of more affordable solid-state alternatives available today, however, it's certainly not shocking to see good ole MD go the way of the laserdisc and the cassette. Now, only one question remains: How long until we see the compact disc suffer a similar fate?
Compact Disc turns 30, MP3 doesn't bother to send a gift
We're not quite sure how much related celebrating went on this past weekend, but the iconic Compact Disc managed to hit the big three-oh. The IEEE was credited with presenting its prestigious IEEE Milestone Award to Royal Philips Electronics for its contribution to the development of the CD, and as the story goes, the award coincides with the 30th anniversary of the "historic demonstration of the first CD prototype codenamed 'Pinkeltje' on March 8th, 1979." While many would argue that the CD is on its way out in favor of smaller, highly portable MP3 files, the disc has definitely left a lasting mark on the industry. To date, over 3.5 billion audio CD players have been sold alongside 240 billion discs. Oh, and not to be a Debbie Downer or anything, but what are the chances that we won't be throwing an "over the hill" party for this here format?[Thanks, Sylva]
Portable CD players see a resurgence in the UK
Unless you have some unexplained obsession with gadgets of yesteryear, you probably haven't been paying close attention to how many brands of portable CD players your local retailers have been stocking. According to Currys over in the UK, however, it's being pressured to order up truckloads of 'em to satisfy the 50 percent uptick in demand compared to last year. Moreover, John Lewis (a department store) has begun stocking the units again some four years after originally putting them to rest. Analysts are asserting that the lagging economy is leading people to select these devices as stocking stuffers, with their ease-of-use and rock-bottom prices making them highly attractive in the current market. Word to the wise, though -- chances are that special someone would much prefer a low-end 1GB DAP over something they probably already have. Or, you know, a Pizza Express gift card.
Happy 25th Birthday, compact disc!
Has it really been a quarter-century since the first compact disc was pressed, finally freeing us from the infernal routine of rewinding our mix tapes? Well sure enough, Philips was kind enough to inform us that its very first CD rolled off the production lines on August 17th, 1982, which history will forever remember -- perhaps unfortunately -- as a copy of ABBA's The Visitors. Nonetheless, this first widely-produced optical disc format would end up changing our lives forever, ushering in the era of lossless copies, easy music sharing, and an unwanted little friend we've come to know as DRM. Now with some 200 billion discs having been sold worldwide -- and probably twice as many distributed gratis by AOL in its dial-up heyday -- it would seem that the original shiny little platter is unquestionably in its golden years, with more convenient or capacious formats replacing it on almost every front. So Philips, the readers and editors of Engadget are proud to join you in saluting the revolutionary product you helped pioneer -- and also offer our condolences that things, um, haven't worked out quite so well for you in the transition to MP3. If you want to learn some of our (mostly embarrassing) first albums on disc, keep reading after the break...
