Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check

If you are confused by the title you now have an idea of how I felt when my computer has repeatedly spit up this exact phrase to me over the course of the last several months. Honestly, how could an error message like this make it through the quality control process? At this point, I would much prefer the computer to simply shout "No!" at me or print a big red X across the screen rather than try to present the illusion that it's giving me helpful information that I can use to solve the problem.

A little background is perhaps in order here. Sometime last fall I came home from work one day to discover that i-Tunes had crashed and wouldn't reopen. After trying various quick fixes I came to the conclusion that I would have to uninstall and then reinstall i-Tunes. Seems easy enough right? Well, when I went to run the uninstall program about 2/3 of the way through I had my first experience with the above error. I eventually traced it to a problem with Quicktime (which is required to run i-Tunes) and I thought that my problems were over but they were really just beginning. The uninstall for Quicktime wouldn't work, nor could I manually delete the Quicktime files, nor could I install a new version of it. All three activities resulted in my friend the cryptically unhelpful error message. The upshot of it all has been that over the last 6 months or so I have been stuck without i-Tunes and thus have been forced to listen to the same songs on my iPod. And although I have often stated that if music had stopped being made in 1996 my music collection would be largely unaffected, I still do enjoy having the ability to add and remove songs (otherwise, all I really have is one really big MP3 CD). So it's been kind of an ongoing project of mine for about the past 6 months. Once a month or so my frustration meter fills up enough to the point that I resolve to fix the problem and then after a solid 3-4 hours of fruitless effort my frustration is eclipsed by my discouragement and I give up until the next month. Rinse and repeat.

For all intents and purposes, computers have come a long way in terms of ease of use and self-monitoring. However, all it takes is one little miscue for you to feel like you're back in the days of MSDOS, staring at a black screen with the computer saying "Invalid command" or just simply "Error" after pretty much everything you type and the only diagnosis available to you was "this doesn't work". It also led me to think more about the evolution of computer use over the last 50 years. Originally, computers were used to perform manual operations that took far longer to do by hand. The key being that here when the computers broke (which they frequently did), we were able to perform the same tasks in the coventional way; it was just a lot slower. Eventually though, once they got sophisticated enough we started using them for things and calculations that we were unable to do without them. We also started forgetting how to do things the manual way since it was no longer pertinent information. Finally, we've started replacing the existence of physical items for the sake of their digital representations (i.e. we get rid of the CD or DVD once we've ripped it onto our hard drive). Up until 3 or 4 years ago, if my MP3 player didn't work I could always just pop on my CD and hear whatever I wanted. Now, though, I got rid of all my CDs and thus if my computer crashes I am just SOL.

Obviously this kind of thing has been happening for quite some time and I am not trying to spout a "2001" type or warning that we shouldn't leave everything to computers, but I do find it interesting, particularly because this is a trend that is just going to keep growing. I mean, have you seen the CD section at Best Buy lately? Up until about 3 years ago, CDs took up about half the store; now it's 3 aisles in a corner. I don't even remember the last time I bought one. Is there really any reason to think that as the speed of information increases that we won't be doing exactly the same thing with all our movies and video games too? I don't know yet for sure if Blu-Ray will replace DVDs as the standard format, but I do know for sure that it will be the last physical media format we have. Similarly, I think the X-Box 360, PS3, and Wii will be the last of the next-gen systems where you will have to purchase physical video game discs to play.

By and large this is a good thing, if for no other reason than the fact that it should cut down on the amount of raw materials needed to produce these items as well as cutting down on the refuse when they get disposed of (obviously that's offset somewhat by more hard drives). But it just makes for some interesting potential problems. Right now when you lose something like music on your computer it's just gone from your machine. There are still physical copies somewhere in the world. But what if that is not always the case? We could be looking at the possibility sometime in the future that when something gets erased it is just expunged from the Earth permanently as if it never existed. Obviously, that is an extremely remote and far fetched scenario, but it conjures up thoughts of some super-coded virus that learns how to break security on its own and corrupts every computer it touches. And it is my firm belief that should that ever happen, when an alien civilization comes to visit us in some distant time and tries to figure out what went wrong with life on this planet, they will eventually dig deep enough to be greeted by this message:

"Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check"

P.S. I did FINALLY manage to fix my computer this past weekend through a combination of "chkdsk" commands that eventually quarantined the corrupt file and allowed me to delete it. So you will all be happy to know that I can replace all the bad 80s music on my iPod with entirely different bad 80s music.