Paul Gilmartin wrote (regarding disc labels): >Fun when they come loose in the drive.
Which "never" happens with high or medium quality labels. Moreover, in the extremely unlikely event it does happen, it's not a new problem. If a label shakes loose from a tape cartridge, much worse things can happen in terms of cost and repair/replacement complexity in tape drives and tape libraries. Moreover, to my knowledge the label surface area on a CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc is larger than it is on a 3592 series tape cartridge, and a disc label doesn't have any corners. It's circular, not square or rectangular. If you'd like to commission an engineering study to estimate the probability of sticker unsticking incidents when you have more versus less of the sticky surface, and a circular sticker with no corners, I suppose you could. Of course, *somehow* a label size change (much less an *enlargement* of the sticky area and the deletion of corners) wasn't a problem when the physical size of the tape cartridge (and before that reel-to-reel tape spool) changed, several times, in past physical media progressions, plural. Just pull your sticker stickiness engineering study off the shelf from the last time the cartridge sized changed. :-) Then Paul Gilmartin commented about printers that print directly onto CDs/DVDs: >Better. But then you can't re-use the CD-RW. (a) That's not this use case. This use case involves receiving IBM software products and updates on physical media. IBM's physical media are already physically labeled, they will continue to be physically labeled, and thank goodness they are physically labeled. Any further physical labeling requirements on these discs would be subsequent to/in addition to IBM's labeling. You can continue using tape cartridges for your own physical media exchange needs within your organization, and between your organization and any others that'll accept them. (b) And no, that's just not correct. You can reuse IBM's physical media in the sense of physically relabeling them, in additive form. You can run discs as many times as you want through such printers. Just print in any blank space without filling the whole surface of the disc, then, upon subsequent print runs, print in some other space that's still free. Repeat as often as space allows. For example, if you want to print "Received on May 1, 2018" in any blank space that IBM didn't print on, fine. Then run the disc through the printer again to add "Loaded on May 2, 2018" or whatever. All fine, perfectly fine. ....Congratulations to the "heroes" of this world working so hard, so diligently to imagine problems that don't actually exist in reality (and probably never existed), without putting any effort into imagining how to solve those imagined problems. I'm sure those "heroes" are incredibly valuable to their organizations. I hope they're paid well. :-) [But I'm not picking on you, Paul. Not yet, anyway. :-)] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE, Multi-Geography E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
