New Business Card Rescue CDs

Linuxcare has introduced version 1.2 of their business card-sized rescue disks, which now contain 140 MB of recovery tools, Debian install capabilities, the X Window System, PCMCIA support, and ssh. From the picture they look pretty cool, too. I remember seeing the business card CDs at a COMDEX a couple of years ago, but this is easily the best use I've seen for them, and is a needed improvement over the previous version.

Comments

Interesting...

[Cerberus7]

I've never seen anything like this before. I checked Linuxcare's site, but couldn't find more about these things, and surprisingly there's nothing on their front page about it. Anybody got a link for more info?

PS - First Post :)

Re:Interesting...

[xtype]

Actually, I have seen a few of these.
I just received one in the mail the other
day from ON Semiconductor.
I was wondering where I could get writeables
in that size. It woul be neat to make my own.

Re:Interesting...

[um... Lucas]

I don't have a link for you, but I did see true "business card" size CD's at Seybold a few weeks ago. 3.5 by 2", but the CD area was maybe 1.8" in diameter. I think they said they stored 45 MB? So not as much, but so much more portable. Think of all those things you'd want on CD, but don"t want to be hassled to carry one...

It's also really good for web types around here... you can store basically your whole portfolio on the cd, and just give it out to acquaintances as a business card.

Re:Interesting...

[TaxSlave]

This bozo came into my bookstore one day, trying to sell me on some sort of scheme. He found out I was a computer guy, and thought I might be interested in this Internet business opportunity.

He handed me a CD shaped like a rounded business card. I popped it into the center groove of my tray drive CD-Rom and it fired right up with this annoying clipart-animation demo that I put up with as long as I could.

Basically, the only good thing I found in the whole situation was the CD thingy.

Here's a link.

<a href="http://www.bizcard-cd.com">www.bizcard-cd.co m</a>

Anyway, I kept telling him I wasn't interested in the scheme. I couldn't convince him that my idea for a web business had NOTHING to do with anything he was doing, but he eventually went away and I'm almost ready to launch :)

paperbacks.homepage.com

Re:Interesting...

[dattaway]

I'd rather have the linuxcare version with the debian, but had a good ride through there site trying to find one. Anyhow, google shows up some vendors of these business card cd's and cdr's:

http://www.bizcard-cd.com/
http://store.yahoo.com/c itiscape-retail/buscarcdr.html
http://thiscardrocks.com/
http://www.nimz.com/mbc.htm
http://www.cds.com/shapes/default.htm
http://www.mcmnewmedia.com/

and many more places selling them. If linuxcare is selling their custom version, I'd sure like to know! And pass a few around! :)

Re:Interesting...

[seligman]

From the CD-R FAQ:

Subject: [7-15] Where can I find CD-ROM business cards? (1999/07/18)

You can find CD-ROMs in interesting shapes, including business cards. These are functional CD-ROMs that are, for example, the same size and shape as a traditional business card (well, a really thick business card). They can have your name and contact information printed on the front, and can hold a modest amount of data, typically about 40MB.

As with 80mm CDs (see section (7-14)), you may have trouble playing these "discs" on CD-ROM drives that use caddies or have a "slot-in" design.

Some net.vendors:

http://www.cdshapes.com/
http://www.pocketcd.com/

Check out the second one, you can actually buy them online, though at the time of this posting, the link for pricing info is broken.

Re:Interesting...

[jmcglash]

I have been working on that my self. I found pre cut 3" cd-r media at CDR Outlet They also have un-cut 3" disks if your realy brave.
I just ordered some which the site says should ship in 2 days via ups ground not great for the shipping charges but I'm not ready to cut my own.

The description is as follows:

• 10 Pack $15.99
• Recording Speed : Up to 8X
• 51.219Meg or 5Min 51Sec of Audio
• LBA: 26224
• free clear sleeves with each cd

Re:Interesting...

[wcb4]

Probably the same uninteresting demo I saw. The idea is neat, but will always be marred in my mind by the fact that the first place I ever saw use it was AMWAY's online arm

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Disciplinary Technology, Reproductive Technology:
Exploring Birth Control and "Empowerment" in Indonesia from 1965-1998.
Indonesia
Indonesia will be used as a case study to examine why, although touted as a means of gaining power for women, birth control use often results in further disempowerment and fosters further dependencies*. The discrepancy between what birth control advocates claim will happen, ie a realignment of power, and what actually happens, ie a re-establishment of existing power relations, will be explained by looking at birth control as a disciplinary technology, and empowerment as a discourse and power relation in and of itself. By accepting and "buying into" empowerment discourse and conforming to the norms, desires, and subjectivities of the discourse, certain power relations are further consolidated not challenged.
The common usage of the term empowerment in development discourse including family planning is based on a European enlightenment understanding of the nature of power as well as the nature of self, and individualism. Such notions have not traditionally been part of Indonesian concepts of power and self. Further, Indonesian notions of gender historically and currently are important to consider in the context of "empowerment of women" and the meaning of such a goal in Indonesian terms. State policies and over all attitudes towards women are important to understand in light of this discussion (why?).
There is a government ideological assumption that Indonesian women obtain their identities from being wives and mothers, and this is commonly referred to as the concept of Ibuism. Ibuism (Ibu meaning mother) is a connotative term which refers to the ideological assumption that a woman's primary role is as wife and mother (Dani p6/Suryakusama). Ibuism is presented as a national identity and responsibility. Rarely in Indonesia are women considered outside their capacity of caretakers of men and children. Concepts of gender are of particular importance to understanding empowerment and reproduction in Indonesia primarily because woman is practically synonymous with wife and mother*. (Look at how gender / ibuism relates to family planning, position of women in Indonesian society, IE economic and political and social/reproductive power- private vs public, production vs reproduction. Primary and accepted role of women has been reproduction not production.

The expansion of modern western birth control into the so-called developing world, is dependent on a number of influential key players. In Indonesia those who have a stake and/or influence birth control use can roughly be divided into domestic and foreign, and government and non-government. .... who are they?

Birth control and family planning in Indonesia must be examined within the larger context of political, social and economic strategies and goals of the Indonesian State. The Indonesian State I am referring to is the New Order government which was recently overturned in May of 1998. The
Family Planning Program in Indonesia
The vast and diverse geo-political entity known as Indonesia today is infamously identified as one of the leading nations in population size and growth. Ranked as the fourth most populous country in the world, the island nation of Indonesia has come under intense scrutiny for its Family Planning Program (FPP) and birth control policies. Depending on who is asked, the response to how "successful" the Indonesian Family Planning Program (IFPP) is varies greatly. Although touted as a model to be copied in other countries by those who appreciate the apparent widespread participation in birth control use, the IFPP has also been extensively attacked by groups who recognize the high cost of health and freedom to the formidable number of Indonesian "acceptors."
Family planning in Indonesia, as in all countries, is highly politicized. The politicization is however, perhaps more obvious when the political and economic relations are precariously balanced as has been the case in Indonesia. Gaining independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1949, the nation's first president Sukarno, established intensely nationalistic political and economic, domestic and foreign policies aimed at strengthening and unifying a fledgling nation divided not only by vast geographical distances, but also by a multitude of language and cultural differences.
Sukarno's domestic and foreign policies reflected his strong nationalism. Relations with neighboring countries as well as with Britain and America were tense at best and confrontational at worst. His economic and social policies soon resulted in political turmoil and veritable social chaos. Amongst his controversial hard line nationalist stances was birth control and family planning.
Prior to and into the 1950s fertility in Indonesia, and mainly Java and Bali, the two most densely populated islands, was high. The average fertility rate exceeded 6 children. "Traditional" methods of pregnancy prevention, such as prolonged breastfeeding, abstinence, withdrawal, abortion, and marital disruption were in use during this period; however, religious and cultural beliefs, high infant and child mortality, a large rural or agricultural population, and a general preference for large families contributed to a rapidly growing demographic.
Along with cultural and personal beliefs, public reproductive activities were also (shaped) influenced by political strategies. Sukarno, attempting to prove to Indonesians as well as the watching world that Indonesia was a viable nation, rejected any suggestion* that Indonesia could not handle its growing population or that a large population was problematic. Although several groups within and outside of the country were becoming increasingly concerned with the high fertility rates and were calling for a state instigated family planning program, Sukarno pledged that Indonesia was strong enough to handle three times its population.
Such a political stand can be understood as strategic on several fronts. First, the Sukarno government felt that implementing a state run birth control program would have pessimistic undertones and would affect the already faltering confidence of the population. By agreeing to support birth control, Sukarno felt he would be admitting the government could not sustain the population. Sukarno was also less than optimistic about the success a family planning program would be for a largely rural, uneducated, and highly illiterate populous.
Nationalism-as in other countries with Nationalistic agendas-want to increase numbers of Indonesians-just come out of colonial war, Japanese occupation-want strong Indonesia to protect itself from further invasion.
In addition, the power dynamics of newly independent Indonesia were a precarious balancing act and Sukarno feared calls for birth control could potentially be ill-received by the Muslim community, a large and powerful political force.
Finally, Sukarno's stand on birth control as a political behavior can be considered in relation to traditional Javanese notions of power. According to Anderson, the Javanese concept of power is very different from the "western" understanding of the term. Power is contained within an individual and that power comes from concentration, not diffusion. Power is absorbed by and further added to ruler's own. Combine power from as many sources (groups) as possible. Sukarno's rejection of calls to limit the number of Indonesians can be understood as being an attempt to limit his following, which translates into limiting his power, which comes from the number of people following you; more people who believe you to contain power, the more powerful you are; concentration of power, unity of the nation, all believe in your power.]
By 1965, Sukarno's policies had resulted in serious political, economic, and social instability. The culmination of Indonesia's tribulations resulted in an attempted coup and a virtually unprecedented blood bath that marked the rise of military power under the tight reins of General Suharto. The massacre that ensued in the weeks following the coup left thousands, if not millions of Indonesians dead at the hands of the military, and the legacy of state sanctioned if not state instigated violence remains an important tool in controlling of populations to this day.
The shift in power from Sukarno to the New Order under Suharto had immense ramifications on every aspect of life and marked the transition from state rejection to state instigation for family planning in Indonesia.

Ideas about and state support for or against birth control has always been and remains to be highly political.
Over the course of the past 50 years, the acceptability and the infrastructure of family planning have evolved significantly, and this evolution has everything to do with transformations to political, economic and social conditions.
The declaration of independence of Indonesia

The history of population control in Indonesia is relatively long. The state-run Indonesian Family Planning Program was formed in the fledgling years of the New Order government of General Suharto in the late 1960s; the roots of the current program can be further traced back however, to the pro-natalist years under Sukarno with the inception of the International Planned Parenthood Indonesian chapter in 1954 (ref).
Historical Background:
traditional notions of power
status of women; ideologies of gender ie Ibuism

Transitions:
conception of power, empowerment language, "development"
World bank, IMF, UN, etc.

Family Planning Program:
history
language and objectives
methods

empowerment/birth control
creates norms- birth control use normalized
desire to use birth control has substantially increased
responsible citizen of indonesia and the global community uses birth control
"disempowered" are targeted - those not using birth control
distinct shift in level and necessity of violence and coercion in relation to birth control

what are the actual rewards for women who use birth control

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Link : www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd

I've got one from the CeBIT and they are really cool. Unfortunately they have an english keyboard installed, i'm from germany...

CU wumpie

a misnomer.

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't business card size. They are noticeably larger.

Re:a misnomer.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever actually seen these business card cd's in person (which obviously you havent), they are the same size as a business card.. just thicker and rounded on the ends..

Re:a misnomer.

[Black Perl]

Actually I saw one a while back from HP that was rectangular (and exactly business card size). I have never seen another one like it--most of them have the rounded edges. I think it only held 12.5 megs though...

Perfect for Ambulance Chasers?

[/]

I'm getting an uncanny image in my head of linux partisans handing these out to people who've just called customer service because their windoze machines BSODed:

"Have the data on your computers ever been hurt because of the negligent actions of an operating-system vendor? Linux could help you receive the relief that you deserve." Of course, the notion of a contingency fee would have to be revamped: "We don't make make money unless you decide to give us money instead of downloading the software separately on your own."

Re:Perfect for Ambulance Chasers?

[Yarn]

I've used linux bootdisks to repair damaged FAT partitions, or in a worse case scenario to retrieve at least *some* data from the hard drive. In the old days I'd have a floppy with norton diskedit on it, but with the extensions to fat all my old dos rescue disks are obselete, and any replacements are annoyingly oversized.

I'd like this so I can repair in style... :)

Re:Oh jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like what /. posts, go away, and make your own web site.

so... how exactly does that work?

[JudgePagLIVR]

I must have missed that past article. The cd's seem to have their ends clipped off. can the cdrom read them that way?

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[xtype]

Yes, ROM drives read them without a problem.
They are rectangle with the ends rounded.
I have seen/used a few of these. Motorola, ON semi. And some Limousine service.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[bonebill]

As long as they're rotationally symmetrical, they should spin without any judder.

The data track is a spiral running from the centre outwards. Since the centre portion of the "disc" is the same as a normal CD, the CD reader will be happy.

Obviously the "square" ends of the "disc" can't contain any data because any spiral tracks would include portions of the "disc" which don't exist.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[coyote-san]

They're mini-CDs, not full-sized CDs. CD media reads from the inner tracks outwards, so as long as the "disc" is balanced you could use any shape.

(Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.)

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[Catch22RG]

CDs are written from the center outward. The drive reads these business card CDs the same way you would read an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with a few inches chopped off the bottom.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[SeanNi]

> Well... I wonder why they left the short edge rounded. Some drives might need a smooth outer edge for mechanical reasons, even though there's no usable data there.

That's easy... they're to make sure the CD stays in place...

Think about your typical CD-ROM drive... the disc needs sme way to stay centred in the drive. Usually, there's a little "ridge" about 2/3 the way out from the center, to fit mini-CD's. The rounded edge ensures that these things will slip in and that ridge will hold them in place, rather than you having to worry about getting them exactly centered, or them "wandering" in mid-operation.

It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[Jason W]

What I really want is business card shaped CD-RW's. If the disc just has to be balanced, what is stopping someone from selling a CD-RW version?

Or could I just go to shop class and cut my own? :)

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[John Napkintosh]

Well, I don't spin 8.5x11 pieces of paper from the center outward while spinning them at high speed, I think it's been covered from the many many other descriptions of how CD-ROMS drives do and don't work. All I know is I've had on in my 8x ad 24x and they read just like normal CDs.

The only problem I ever had was opening the drive while the CD was reading at full speed (my 52x). It flew clear out of the drive. Could be dangerous if the CD was shaped... uniquely. And by that I mean EXTREMELY uniquely...

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[Anonymous Coward]

They left the longer edges rounded so that it will sit right in your cdrom drive. Mine loads on this tray thing that spits out, and the drive has to pick up the disc with this spinner thing in the middle. If it wasn't lined up right in the tray, then the thing would try to pick it up, fail, and make scratches on my cd.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[mindstrm]

Yes.
As long as they are balanced.
Remember, CD's can be of arbitrary size, and read from the inside out. These usually store about 50MB of data on them.

http://www.sculptedcd.com

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[kcarnold]

So in their present state, you can't really read anything outside the largest circular region on the disk. Darn.

Okay, so I don't really know that much about CD technology (what a shame), but I do know that you can record data in a number of sessions, and that newer drives (MultiRead drives, including most all CD-R[W]s) can read more than 1 session. Anybody know if you could somehow use that unused space by creating some more sessions to fill it in? You would need a lot of sessions to fill in all of it (how many sessions can you have on a CD anyway?) if this were indeed possible. I am assuming that the only reason that you couldn't just structure your iso9660 fs just right to avoid read/write on the clipped-off parts of the disk is because the laser is just going to wander over there anyway (read, Bad Thing).

Of course, a DVD in this size...

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[tommck]

It's not a spiral. It's concentric circles(sectors).

T

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[Ares]

Actually, it is a spiral, which is why you have to keep the buffer full when writing to a CD. Its impossible to reposition the laser to where it last left off when the buffer runs out.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a spiral. It's concentric circles(sectors).

Nope. CDs, unlike most disc media, arranges data in a spiral instead of concentric circles.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[bonebill]

I think you'll find it's a spiral, like I said originally.

There is a nice description at http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd1.htm, including the following words:

A CD has a single spiral track of data circling from the inside of the disk to the outside. The fact that the spiral track starts at the center means that the CD can be smaller than 12 centimeters if desired, and in fact there are now plastic baseball cards and business cards that you can put in a CD player. CD business cards hold about 2 megabytes of data before the size and shape of the card cuts off the spiral.

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[pocketcd]

Was the Motorola CD a card? When and where did you see it? What was it promoting?

Re:so... how exactly does that work?

[xtype]

Woohoo... get excited. hehe...
Yes, business card type deal, rounded edges, etc.
umm.... ICs or something. Not phones or service or anything like that.

how useful would this be?

[mnot]

I'm wondering how useful this would be. The main benefit of having it in this format is that you can put it in your wallet, right? Hopefully, you wouldn't need it *that* often, but you would need it at a moment's notice, so you'd probably have it in there for a while (possibly alongside other items with similar attributes, natch).

So, if this is the case, how long would it hold up? It is still a CD, after all; would it need similar handling as a normal CD? How likely is it that when you actually need it, it will still be useable?

Despite these reservations... where can I actually get one? *grin*

Re:how useful would this be?

[SpaFF]

Well I've had the one I got at ALS in my wallet since October and its still holding up fine. It saved my ass too one day when my webserver's root drive died.

-Lee

Re:how useful would this be?

[knghtbrd]

I've managed to crack mine. It's a little tough to get out of the sleeve byt if you realize there's not data around that round section you quickly get over the fear of a fingerprint at the round edges interfering with the reading.

I want a replacement or two, that's for sure! I've had my ass saved more than once by that thing.

Business card sized CD-recordables?

[rnt]

These oddly cut mini CDROMs aren't really new...

But wouldn't we geeks just *love* to get our hands on RECORDABLES of the same size!!!

Finally we can have some high-res pictures of our loved ones in our wallets (140MB... hmmm, quite a lot of loved ones, family, coworkers, pets, pictures of computers and whatever you want to take with you) :-)

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables?

[kaphka]

Yeah, but carrying a computer and CD-ROM drive around with you could be a pain.

Which gives me a (somewhat offtopic) idea... You know what we really need? Business card size disposable computers, with a nice little color LCD, and enough power to run a little kiosk-type browser. The technology probably isn't too far off...

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables?

[Rabenwolf]

I think they're selling recordables that size already over here in Germany...

I'm pretty sure I saw an ad for them the other day, I'll tell you more as soon as I find it...

cu, rabenwolf

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables?

[rnt]

You know what we really need? Business card size disposable computers, with a nice little color LCD, and enough power to run a little kiosk-type browser. The technology probably isn't too far off..

Not exactly disposable (quite a pricy toy in fact) and not nearly flexible enough, but still worth a look: Rex

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at the local computer show/flea market today and someone was selling these credit card size burnable CDs for about $1.50 each.

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables?

[_Nemmeran_]

I recently (2 months ago) Purchased 2 Rex's, and 2 Rex pros. (17 bucks for the rex, 14 for the pro! I love finding a helluva deal). I must say, its great to have a PCMCIA card with a half a meg in storage for my contacts when I dont have my Palm Vx w/ me. P.S. In case ya wanna know, I got em at OfficeMax when they were cleared out!

Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something? What do you use as
a cd-drive to read these things? Is it
something specific to laptops, or what?

Re:Reader

[Cid Highwind]

What do you use as a cd-drive to read these things? Is it something specific to laptops, or what?

Open your cupholder...err.. CD drive. See how there are two rings in it, the outer super-jumbo-slurpee sized ring is for normal CDs. The inner, coke-can sized ring is where these things go.

Re:Reader

[SeanNi]

Nope. Just pop it in a standard CD-ROM drive. Most have a little ridge in hem that will allow them to hold mini-CD's quite comfortably. Which is basically what this is -- a mini-CD, with the edges chopped off.

Of course, if you have a caddy drive, you're outta luck...

It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean

Found CD-R versions

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.octave.com/551519/en/cdrmedia/businessc ard.html

Re:Found CD-R versions

[Anonymous Coward]

I just ordered 50 of 'em... WICKED!!! I can't wait. I'll be the first on my block with 'em

Re:Found CD-R versions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're really good with a dremel tool mounted in a router fashion, I'd imagine you can cut your own cd's. The issue would be if they can be made balanced and the edges sealed as to prevent water from creeping into the inner plastic.

With a bit of work, I'd imagine a cheap automated machine controlled by stepper motors and old printer parts could be made to take advantage of those cheap 50 cent cd spindles. Senior project anyone?

Re:Found CD-R versions

[Jason W]

Here are some more vendors:

http://www.cdr4less.com/cgi-bin/web_store.cgi
http://cardiscs.com/citiscape-retail/buscarcdr.h tml
http://www.topexpert.de/cd_info_e.htm
http://www.i-mediacard.com/

The only problem I see...

[aressa]

I think this is a really cool idea, don't get me wrong, but:

These things don't work in mail-slot style ROM readers and they are precarious at best in caddy-readers... that is the only probelm I see.

I have a couple of old Plextor and NEC ROM drives that use caddys that live in my Linux box, and a spankin new mail-slot DVD drive in my new computer, so I would not be able to use these. Maybe I should have thought of that! :)

And of course the same goes for a a ton of Japanese market j-pop CD-singles that come on heart, star, and other shape (but balanced) CDs...

A

Re:The only problem I see...

[Megane]

They look like chopped off 3" CDs, so I think that a 3" CD adapter ring (the reverse of those old 45 RPM adapters) would clip onto it well enough. Of course you wouldn't be able to fit the adapter ring in your wallet.

Where am I?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this Slashdot or Ad-dot? Sometimes I wonder...

Absolutely!

[Booker]

There has got to be a HUGE market for that.... I know most CD-ROMs can read the lil' discs, but can CD-R's write them?
----

This is nothing but a marketing gag

[alter-ego]

And that's what all there business-card cd-roms are for. So don't expect a link on their website or something.

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables? (lQQk here)

[victim]

Ask and ye shall be linked. Look here for your very own business card CD-R blanks. Pricy compared to regular blanks ($2-$4 depending on quantity), but I never put a price on cool.

No affiliation. I just know how to use Google.

An own topic item for Linuxcare?

[alter-ego]

Are you making one for each company that has "Linux" in its name, or what?

Business card sized?

[cbustapeck]

From the looks of the picture, I have to wonder what sort of business card is being used for comparison. Because, assuming that the hole in the center is the same size as that of a normal disk (and it would have to be, wouldn't it?), these cd's are much bigger than normal business cards. Or perhaps I jsut have a non-standard sized implimentation of BusinessCard?

Re:Business card sized?

[John Napkintosh]

There was an Amway daughter company that was using these type of CDs for their marketing presentations. Quixtar was the name I believe. They hold seminars every now and then, and for people that are interested, then send them a CD in a little clear plastic case (much like a sleeve for your credit/bank card).

They can be used for much more sophisticated purposes however. Most noteable, as your business card, perhaps your entire website, authentication (probably not likely), medical/personal records, identification (probably not likely, too easy to forge/fake), Product documentation (no more bulky manuals), and many other things conceivable...

Re:Business card sized?

[Coldraven]

>They can be used for much more sophisticated purposes however. Most noteable, as your business card, perhaps your entire website, authentication (probably not likely), medical/personal records, identification (probably not likely, too easy to forge/fake), Product documentation (no more bulky manuals), and many other things conceivable...

Actually, medical and other lab facilities would be able to greatly benefit from these, since thier small size would allow for storing them in high numbers. (Blood drives and water analysis are two that come to mind.)

OTOH,I can also see these things being handed out as electronic "dog tags" at outdoor concerts, with colors/patterns denoting general access, vendor status, backstage pass, etc. and crappy radio station info/limited free isp gimmicks encoded on the data portion.

If it's done properly, a company like IBM could use these as an employee badge, with the wage slave/vendor/guest's user id & password encrypted on the data track.

140 MB?

[Frac]

how do they fit 140 MB of data onto this card? I believe those cards are itself trimmed from 8cm media cards, which hold 140 mb of data or 21 minutes. With the top and bottom trimmed, isn't the largest available data on the CD bounded by the shortest diameter? (in other words, much less than 140mb?)

Re:140 MB?

[xtype]

True, they are 45mb from what I have read.
The ones I have are like 20mb of data, 19mb, 23mb, etc.
The disc is less than 6cm tall.
a good cm of each end.

Re:140 MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

how do they fit 140 MB of data onto this card?

bz2 and gzip does wonders.

Re:140 MB?

[Frac]

bz2 and gzip does wonders.

certainly not for already-compressed media.

Re:140 MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are a freggin retard - for you to possibly think that a little plastic thingie cant hold 140mb of data? some day it will hold 140 gigabytes of data! so furthermore by codingf such a utility in IEEE you can greater the amount of data on such a disk. its a matter of digits! people are forgetting by going opitcal it is simply how small you write the numbers! by changing the magnification of the optical reader, and having it focus on smaller numbers, or even lines for that matter it is possible to add more data to a given surface! ok, im sick onf nopt making any sense, so im gonna go

Re:140 MB?

[Frac]

you are a freggin retard - for you to possibly think that a little plastic thingie cant hold 140mb of data?

cd-rom media of this size currently can't hold 140mb of data.

Re:140 MB?

[rusty]

I hacked up a compressed loopback block device, which is used on the card.

From the early prototypes we got around 2.5:1 compression on the stuff we put on there. I haven't seen the final ones.

Rusty.

Re:140 MB?

[_Nemmeran_]

Umm. It cant.

Re:140 MB?

[bz2]

bz2 and gzip does wonders. Thank You.

Re:140 MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linuxcare Bootable Business card uses something called cloop, which is a compressed loopback block device written by Rusty Russell. Someone has probably misquoted someone else in saying that the business cards actually hold 140 MB, but they do contain much more than the 50 MB once they are uncompressed.

I haven't tried to up the uncompressed and compressed portions, but it should be about 70 MB, depending on how you measure it.

Re:140 MB?

[Zurk]

is this the ext2fs compressed filesystem ? did you write it (the filesystem driver) ? if so, kewl.

Re:Multi-Level Marketing of Software

[Anonymous Coward]

and Bill Gates is Hitler... Now we know...

I want one! =)

[spam368]

Anyone know how to get ahold of one of the linuxcare ones?

Slot loading drives?

[ttyRazor]

Something tells me these things could cause problems with slot loading drives (they work like car scd players).

Re:Slot loading drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I like to blow my load in a nice tight slot. No problem!

Thanks for asking!

Re:Slot loading drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

you said load!

writables

[Duke of Org]

I got one of these in the mail on time, and it turned out it was a home-brewed cd, because it was a CD-R, and it still had a little room left on it, so I deleted the crap of it, and was able to fit a good 50megs on there of shareware games to give to a friend who doesn't have the internet

Re:writables

[Enahs]

if your name is joon ki hong please go back to spanking off and playing games. thank you.

Perfect, period.

[SkulkCU]

I don't know if it's all that bad. If a win box goes down, you can walk over to the owner and say, "here - the last 'rescue disk' you'll ever need!"

Oh wait, that was partisan. Guess you were right. Nevermind ;)

CD-R is $4 in small quantities

[Booker]

Hmm... now that is pretty neat. bizcard-cd has blanks for $4 each. Now where's my credit card...
----

Re:CD-R is $4 in small quantities

[_Nemmeran_]

4 bucks?! NO... www.cdroutlet sells for like 15.99 for ten!

Mini CDs

[IanCarlson]

These miniature CDs have been around for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, I have one with a "New Kids on the Block" single on it. :b

I think I saw an ISP using this media to distribute their software.

Anyways, the little CDs took off elsewhere (Japan, I believe), while they were mostly shunned here.

But, to be honest with you, unless you really dig "cool", they're a big fat waste of money. CD-Rs cost $1 a piece and these Mini CD-Rs run $2 - $5.

`course, a Linux distro on one of these is just cool as hell. I wonder if I could pick up a couple of hundred of these and pass them out at out next LUG meeting.

Re:Mini CDs

[Amphigory]

You bought a new brats on the block CD????

Get out of my way... I need to back away slowly.

--

Re:CowboyNeal: Fucking Liar?

[alter-ego]

Are you saying he isn't?

This sounds quite cool...

[Zarniwoop]

I've been a fan of single-disk distros for quite a while-- after Staroffice borked my libc a while back, its what I used to rebuild. This sounds like a pretty cool implementation of that, especially with X on-CD.

Does anyone have any more info, or has anyone ever used this? Could be really useful as a rescue distro...


The sun is going down, I say we follow it out of town- We've been here for far too long.

is there a way...

[acecccp]

Is there a way for me to make a decent backup card that would fit in my wallet with just scissors and a ruler? Anyone know?

Re:is there a way...

[Ig0r]

If you cut the disc it would expose the core (they used to be aluminum, don't know what they are now) and it would deteriorate.

Re:is there a way...

[Evro]

First, this is a complete guess.

You notice when you burn a disc that when you look at the data side you can see where the data was written? Like if you only write 100 mb, only the first centimeter from the center is used. Well I would guess that if you cut the corners but leave the written portion alone it would work. You'd have to make sure not to bend the CD up, too.

But like I said, this is a complete guess and I have no reason to think this would work other than it seems logical.

_________________

Almost

[Booker]

I seriously doubt that the little ridge holds it in place while it's spinning at god-knows-what RPM. I think the spindle clamps it down while it's spinning... but the ridge DOES make sure that the spindle is aligned correctly when the disc is inserted.

So, I'd guess that either rounded edges or a rectangle with rounded corners would work - as long as the resulting disc is perfectly inscribed in the correct diameter circle... some of the links in comments here show some wicked looking shapes (gears, fish, etc - just gotta balance it right)
----

Re:Almost

[uebernewby]

Notice, however, that they will ALL fit in either the small ridge or the large ridge. And apparently the small ridge seems to work fine for small round cd's

Re:Almost

[Rogain]

They help keep the disk centered while the tray is being drawn back into the drive.

It was a CD-RW?

[Booker]

Hrm, you said CD-R, but you erased it... it was a CD-RW? That's even cooler, but I haven't seen any of those for sale...
----

Re:It was a CD-RW?

[Duke of Org]

No it was a CD-r but there was space left over, and it let me re-mount it with my cd maker software and add more stuff. I might of been stretching the truth a touch when I said 50megs though, more like 20-25

LinuxCare CDs: Not so lame after all...

[rwg]

At the most recent Atlanta Linux Showcase, the LinuxCare folks tossed one of their business-card sized recovery CDs in my bag. (Gotta love freebies.) After the initial guffawing over its size (the usable data area on the CD is only about 3/8" across), I popped it in one of my machines at home and rebooted. It turns out there's only around 32 megs of stuff on the CD, but it's enough to make a pretty usable recovery CD. (For comparison, tomsrtbt crams everything on a specially-formatted 3.5" high-density floppy.)

One problem I had with the CD is that its size and shape makes it prone to "falling through the drive tray" when I use it in one of my SCSI CD-ROM drives. It's just small enough to slide through the slot in the back of the tray if the CD stops spinning at just the right position.

I've been carrying the CD around in my bookbag and using it on campus lab machines. When I need to ssh somewhere, I reboot the machine with the LinuxCare CD in it, run dhcpcd, run the ssh installation script (which pulls a .deb of ssh from a foreign server and installs it on the ramdrive), and ssh as usual.

As for availability, I doubt you'll find these things outside of computer shows. (Why not start a project to create a similar recovery CD?) As for its shape, look at www.shapecd.com for all the weird shapes you can have CDs cut. As for size, it's only slightly taller than a business card but not as wide.

Re:LinuxCare CDs: Not so lame after all...

[Pfhor]

Hey, Any case you could post an ISO of it somewhere? Would be a great tool for others.
If you need a place to keep to it, email me, just remove the *nospam from my email.
Would be a great tool for others to use, even if it isnt on a little cd / biscard

Business card media == subversive transport???

[Y2K is bogus]

With this business card sized media, you could put literally any data on the cdrom, up to 52MB (on the true business card sized ones).

Programs such as ssh, gpg, and other crypto sensitive stuff could be placed on here. To hide their contents, make a par-point presentation in staroffice and put that on there. That way, when you meet anyone, just give them one of these rediculously overpriced CDRs with your info on it, and they'll also get a copy of all the non-exportables.

Actually, the export business is getting easier now, but it doesn't hurt to put something important on them. Just think, if you were Kevin Mitnick and you wanted your data back from the feds, you could've just burned a stack of these things and mailed them to your friends. When you got out of jail, just call one of them up and have them send you your card back. With a stack of 50, the sheer volume would assure you access to your data.

Actually that brings up another idea for these, put copies of data you need to keep and mail them to people. Or how about a distributed collection of data, each person has to provide the business card to complete the library and access the data. You could make a high-tech easter egg hunt out of this.

Even better yet, you put the secret key to get at your fortune, spread across a bunch of these. You then mail them out to all your willed partiticpants. When you die, they ALL have to cooperate to get at your money!

How about putting a unique key on each one of these and having people use them as access cards, you could block out specific access cards and institute your own access policy.

This would be great for a website. You send each member a card that they have to use each time they access your website, as a password substitute. This would bypass user chosen passwords and provide the ultimate security for accessing a service. If one of the cards is compromised, cancel access for it.

Make up your own use for these!

Re:Business card media == subversive transport???

[RAruler]

I think they designed this trippy device.. oh.. I dunno.. maybe a decade ago.. called the 3 1/4 inch floppy disk.. and it could hold all sort of neat stuff, in fact.. at one point, the only way ya could install an OS was by one of these, or the older 5 1/2 inch ones.. in fact, I hold in my hand a 3 1/4 floppy disk full of PGP encrypted information. The only real difference is the amount of stuff you can put on them.

Re:Because you want us to.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did it. Cause i like the site. that's all ... don't blame the guy in the pict.erre

Where to buy?

[vectro]

Mabye I'm missing something here, but I can't find anything about them on Linuxcare's website. In there a URL where you can buy these things? :o

Re:Where to buy?

[X]

Dammit. I've been trying to find the *old* ones for quite some time now, and now they have NEW ones!

LinuxCare should really sell these things!

Anyway, the easiest way to get them is to go to a TradeShow where LinuxCare shows up.

really cool, but fragile...

[full_tide]

While they were giving a few of these guys out at the '99 Atlanta Linux Showcase my cohorts and I managed to sneak away with some. We tried them out when we got back and sure enough they worked great, had a cute LinuxCare bootlogo, most cd drives read them (except for the slot-load pionners...), but I thought I remember them only having 30MB (must have been version 1.1, b/c it also lacked the penguin on the left). I started carrying mine around in my wallet and got some great reactions when I used it good effect in BSOD-like situations.

Anyway, the lesson is, dont carry the damn things in your wallet, b/c it eventually got cracked and is now useless decoration.

~tide
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."

This is a great idea.

[Amphigory]

Notwithstanding the form factor, having a very featurful bootable rescue CD is a great idea.

Sadly, the CD's from most of the distros are useless for rescue, since they only have the bare minimum to install the OS. Has LinuxCare made ISO images available?

--

Re:This is a great idea.

[DaveHowe]

Hmm. My SUsE cd seems to have a very usable "boot to linux" mode that I have used from time to time.
--

Re:This is a great idea.

[astrophysics]

check out www.demolinux.org

Re:This is a great idea.

[Zurk]

just use a slackware floppy. it has all the stuff you need to mount yer drives and repair em. and its the equivalent of a linux system on a floppy.

Dutch TelCo sells rectangular card ROMS

[wfberg]

KPN Telecom (the big nasty comms monopoly folks in The Netherlands) sell so-called intern et cards.

Essentially discs with a browser, a mini-website portal thingy and a 'free' internet deal. They are fully rectangular.. If any-one saw those in CD-R, I'd buy them! The rounded-off ones.. No thanks.
--

blah

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah blah blah blah blah! stop whining!

I don't care what it looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

But I hate floppies with a passion and
would love to have a bootable cd that
has a robust distro on it that includes
networking(dial-up also), ssh, vi and disk
recovery tools.
With a full cd, you could even have an almost
full x installation... but That's not a
requirement for me.
I'm seriuosly considering just making my own...
I know how... I know what I want... I just need
to find the time... *shrug*
I'm tired of walking into the lab where even though they are using Unix in one flavor or
another... they don't have ssh and won't allow
me to install it. They do, however, have cd-rom
drives and they don't restrict access to the bios
(yes... dumb... but true.)
More fun for me ;)

Re:I don't care what it looks like

[fsck]

Slackware has a /live directory on its bootable CD. This may be what you are looking for.

Re:I don't care what it looks like

[Zurk]

try http://www.demolinux.org...you can modify it as you see fit.they have a debian version on the way and they currently run a redhat hybrid with suse install tools.

neato, but...

[einstein]

how durable are these things? can I stick it in my wallet and sit down without worrying about cracking my CD?

Re:neato, but...

[sterwill]

No, you'll shatter them. I grabbed a few from LinuxCare at the August 1999 LinuxWorld Expo show, and stuck one in my checkbook (internal "pressure" is lower than the wallet). I took it out two months later, to use it, and it had shattered into twenty or so small wedges of CD.

Maybe my mistake was to use the checkbook (which is more flexible, but has more room to move around). Perhaps the less flexible wallet would have been better.

--

Penguins Anyone?

[chow]

I was just looking at the shape CDs at bizcard-cd.com. Hmmmm. How long until we see a rescue disk shaped like a penguin? P.S. - Don't even think about it, I've already patented it. And anyway, I think Amazon just patented free thought....

They are a godsend when you really need them...

[_Roadkill]

My local LUG got some straight from LinuxCare to use at a Linux Demo Day if I remember right. Had some extras at our next meeting, so everybody snatched them up of course (I remember everybody going "Kewl!!!" ;o) ).

Well not two weeks later I downloaded and compiled a new kernel and misconfigured it to the point where I couldnt boot. I popped that LinuxCare disk in, booted and recompiled another kernel in no time.

I think it's much nicer and easier to use then using the rescue mode in RedHat's boot disks. Also, they good to use when someone wants a quick Linux demo too... :o)

It's sad to live in a world where knowing how to

These things are fun!

[toolj23]

I do tech support for a company who sent a large amount of these disks out as a promotion for a new product. Well, as you could guess we got plenty of calls where people had put them in the cdroms that don't have a tray that comes in and out. The ones that just suck the disc in. I even talked to one guy who put one in his regular cd-rom drive and when he opend the tray to take it out it had "eaten it" in his words. And now it was "lost somewhere in his cdrom drive."

I don't know how many people they had to send reimbursement checks out for their cdrom drives to be fixed but we got quite a number of calls about it.

Imagine if AOL sent out 20million disks like these. There goes 10million cdrom drives to the repair shop. Haha!

Re:These things are fun!

[SkipRosebaugh]

They did! We got one, and my sister decided to put it in our slot cdrom drive. Course, you can just shake it out, at least on our cdrom drive. Red Storm did this with Politika, put a demo on a minicd in the back of the book.

Re:These things are fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked for AOL, I've actually seen non-round AOL discs. One of them was a cat head. I can't really remember the others, one might have been a triangle I think.

They nixed the acircular (new word! mine!) ones because beta-testers had massive vibration/noise problems.

Re:These things are fun!

[Tower]

I got one of those mini-cds in that book. Nifty, cute... but it was a mostly just video interview with Tom C. Good stuff, but no full demo 8^)

Re:These things are fun!

[_Nemmeran_]

AOL did give a large number of these out as part of a promo for 'You've got mail!'. I picked one up from BlockBuster

Re:These things are fun!

[toolj23]

Actually...
having done tech support for aol, I now recall them sending out a bunch of mini aol cd's. I never got to see one so i don't know if they were the same thing as these or just regular mini disc cd's.

Re:These things are fun!

[LordXarph]

AOL did give a large number of these out as part of a promo for 'You've got mail!'. I picked one up from BlockBuster

I got one at Hollywood Video. It has a grand total of *132KB* of stuff on it. One little shell utility to dial an 800 number and download the 50 meg install that could EASILY fit on the uncut 3" CD...

What REALLY pisses me off is that the brochure that comes with the CD claims that AOL invented the 3" CD. Hello, my Two-Mix 3" single would like to speak with you now...

-Lx?

Balance

[Signal 11]

If you put these into high-speed CDROMs I bet you're running the risk of damaging/destroying the drive. Those things aren't balanced!

There's a reason CDs are circular rather than square - it has to do with centrifucal(sp?) force (and yeah, yeah, it doesn't exist - but people know what I'm talking about, so nyaah) - at high speeds that thing is going to be pushing upwards at an uneven speed. And the other problem is that as they spin up they generate airflow, which is now seriously screwed up...

Somebody tell me correct me if I'm wrong.. but that's just my take on it...

Re:Balance

[Jeffrey Baker]

You are wrong, they are balanced. If you like physics, work out the force vectors acting on the spinning CD, in both horizontal and vertical players. If you don't like physics, just take my word for it.

-jwb

Re:Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put these into high-speed CDROMs I bet you're running the risk of damaging/destroying the drive. Those things aren't balanced!

First, they're balanced. Place one on a fulcrum along the hole in the middle and it will balance every time. Besides, I highly doubt that if this were true Linuxcare would be selling them. Let's give their engineers a little more credit here, okay?

Second, the reason CDs are not square is because it would be a colossal waste of medium. You could only read data from the outermost complete concentric circle, meaning the outer four corner-ish areas of the disc would go to waste. (Remember that math problem where you have a circle inscribed in a square and you have to find the area between the circle and the square? All that area would be useless).

Re:Balance

[cfish]

for those claimming it's balanced.. well in this case it is.but
I think you havn't seen thier samples like www.shapecd.com. they have quite a lot of unballanced shapes. However. I doubt if there's any influence because the force of gravity is simply to small compared to the torque.

Re:Balance

[Signail11]

Utter nonsense, Signal 11. The inertial vector of the system (and by extension the angular momentum vector and any associated torque effects that airflow may cause) is directed outward normal to the plane of the CD, just like any other CD. Please try to learn something about a topic before posting.

Re:Balance

[fsck]

How did such an uninformed post get a +2 score? Oh yea, self moderation.
Karma whore.

.

Re:Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used mine in my 42x CD-ROM. No problems, if you stop and think about it they are balanced, just a different shape.

As you spin one around on your finger pick any spot the spot 180 degrees away is exactly the same size and in balance.

Re:Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, the reason CDs are not square is because it would be a colossal waste of medium.

Ummm, they don't make rectangular CD's. You have to burn the whole CD and then chop off pieces of it mechanically to make the CD rectangular..

I call that a waste. What happens to the leftover parts? Can they be recycled?

Cd card makers

[snubber1]

At RhinoCdCard.com they specialize in putting custom data on custom cut cds for a very low price.

They have one that is barely larger than a business card that holds 40mb, and they also plan on producing DVDs cut the same way.

----------------------------------------------

Buy them here....

[sliderpoint]

CD-R OUTLET they've got the 3" mini-cd and the business cards, both writable.

Re:Amway

[unitron]

They also used them for promoting their web portal (countdown 9/9/99 or something like that, was supposed to go online Sept. 9, 1999).

Is cd booting common now?

[unitron]

When did computers that'll boot from a cd become more common than computers with floppy drives?

Re:Is cd booting common now?

[Anonynous Coward]

Computers that'll boot from a cd are certainly less common than computers that have floppy drives, particularly if you discount iMacs completely and talk only of PCs.

However, most BIOS/motherboards made over the past 2-3 years are capable of CD booting. And when you can fit 140 megabytes of data onto a business-card sized CD, you can offer a lot more than the 1.44 meg a standard floppy allows.

Size and shape?

[slashdot-terminal]

Dosn't the size and shape determine how well the material can be read from an optical standpoint? I assume that cd readers are using a circular method of retrieving the data so how do they read it when large gaps (as seen from the bottoms being sheared off in the pic)? Just a thought.

Re:Size and shape?

[Stalemate]

I've always thought, and I could be wrong, that the laser started reading on the part closest to the center of the disk and read outward. As long as there wasn't enough data to push it off the edge, it wouldn't even go to the part where the top and bottom were cut off.

If you made a disk with one small file, the laser would never have a reason to go to the edge of the disc. I think it's the same idea here.




--

Re:Size and shape?

[slashdot-terminal]

I've always thought, and I could be wrong, that the laser started reading on the part closest to the center of the disk and read outward. As long as there wasn't enough data to push it off the edge, it wouldn't even go to the part where the top and bottom were cut off.



Thanks for the info I guess common sence would allow for that. Are cd's burned sequentially from the inside to the outside?

If you made a disk with one small file, the laser would never have a reason to go to the edge of the disc. I think it's the same idea here.



With the dimensions there what is the maxium file size that one could hope to attain?

Also aren't these things bigger than business cards? The pictured product seemed perhaps 100%-200% bigger than the total size when I last used business cards.

Re:Size and shape?

[Stalemate]

Yeah, I think they are written the same way as they are read.

I guess you could store 140 MB (I think that's what they said) on one of these before you were limited by the cut off part of the disc.

They looked larger than business cards to me also, but I really couldn't tell.




--

Re:Size and shape?

[osu-neko]

Actually, I believe that's the capacity of a ROUND 3" disc. These cut off ones only hold about 50MB.

--

Re:Size and shape?

[Stalemate]

oh, OK.

I guess I was a little confused there.

thanks


--

Re:Size and shape?

[demon]

No, a round 3" can contain somewhere around 200 MB or so. 140 MB is about right for the size of disc shown in the photo that was linked in the story - I have one of the LinuxCare bootable business-card CDs from the Summer '99 LinuxWorld expo, and it contains somewhere about 50 MB of data, but it's cut a LOT smaller too.

Don't leave home without Toms Rescue and Boot Disk

[geirt]

It has saved my butt more than once. Funny, I have used this disc to install primitive operative systems (read: ms) on a pc more than once. The single most used command is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/{sda,hda}

which will wipe out the entire disk including the partition table (don't do this on a disc which contains anything useful!). It makes it possible to install NT4 on a disk larger than 8GB without hassle, and Redhat installers will partition the disc without any nasty questions when the disc is blank. It is also useful when you want to erase a disc "beyond any recognition", ie. when someone else is going to use it.

I have used tomsrtbt to format a disc with fat, copy a win95 cd into it, booted the machine in dos and started the installation. Why? I didn't have a dos driver for the f*ing CD drive connected to a Sound Blaster controller.

http://www.toms.net/rb/

YES !! I want tomsrtbt ++ on a credit card size cd now !!!!

Don't leave home without it.

Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[Stan Chesnutt]

... or any other machine that just has a slot, rather than a tray that slides out?

And, I certainly realize that a "Linux rescue disc" probably won't work on a Mac ... I'm just asking about the physical compatibility ... flamers, cool yer jets ...

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[SkipRosebaugh]

No. The mechanism that grabs the cd is incompatable.

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The mechanism that grabs the cd is incompatable

of course! Didn't you know Macs aren't compatible with anything but themselves? You could you dare to ask!!?????!?!?!

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[chialea]

no, it's stylistically incompatable. look for one in tranlucent plastic in fruity colors.

Lea

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[mindstrm]

No. They do not work in slot load drives.
They will work in any drive that can take a standard 3 inch cd.

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[roomfull of blues]

So what about a chopped up 5 incher?

I am just dying to cut up a music CD in some wacky shape and slip it in the car stereo. :)
Dilbert: I have become one with my computer. It is a feeling of ecstacy... the blend of logic and emotion. I have reached...

Re:Do non-round cdroms work on the new IMac?

[cyberdonny]

> look for one in tranlucent plastic in fruity colors.

Or shaped like an apple, rather than a business card

You're wrong, sorry :) Ever see a propeller?

[Venomous Louse]

Propellers are not circular, and they are balanced. When you think about it that way, suddenly it's not counter-intuitive at all.

(BTW, this isn't quite on the point, look up how they load centrifuges: If they have seven identical things to go in a centrifuge, they put in three things, spaced 120 degrees apart. It's balanced, and you can forget about those three things completely. Then they put in the other four things, 90 degrees apart. They're balanced too, so the whole thing is still balanced. What's cool is they don't have to worry at all about where the four things are relative to the first three: They simply don't care, because the two groups don't affect each other due to the fact that they're balanced among themselvess. If you look at it, it looks wrong as all hell, but it's balanced right and it won't freak out at high speed.)

Properllers

[adamy]

So what you guys are saying is that if we take the edges off the CD and angle them upward on the forward facing half of each edge (which way does aCD rotate any way) we could get life, and turn our CD's into helicopers? Flying Linux boxes, the new weapon in the war agains Monopoly and ppor code. Course, we need to solve the counter rotarion problem....hmmm maybe two cd players. Or maybe we'll link to machines togeth to make the ultimate ggek flying machine. Makes you rethink the term Beowulf now doesn't it.

More interesting shape...

[RickyRay]

If you shaped them as a 3-point or 4-point star you could have a mini CD that doubles as a martial arts weapon ;-) Actually, existing AOL coasters would probably slice well to that same shape (I certainly wasn't going to put one in my machine!).

no X?

[cfish]

These things are too small to fit an X and a live filesystem on it. I don't quit understand why live filesystem isn't so popular. It's is the best demo format on any machines. Usually what I do is, pop a slackware 7 CD in a windows machine, boot from the CD, quickly configure network and X, then run X. Slow as it is, I still can demostrate netscape, and sometimes staroffice over the network.

For rescue, tom's root and boot disk is pretty darn good, and you can make one anywhere.

Re:no X?

[rusty]

I'm pretty sure we put the SVGA server on there at least.

Rusty.

They can get stuck.....

[jeff_C]

I've only seen two of these so far, both times I had to dig them out of a user's CD-ROM drive. Once was out of a drive that used a caddy. The second was a tray, but it had a large slot and the cd fell through. Usually you can just use a pair of tweezers, but once I had to remove the drive and "shake" it out.

They're kinda cool, but it'd be a nightmare if all my users got them.

jeff_C

Re:Don't leave home without Toms Rescue and Boot D

[Anonymous Coward]

I used

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/{sda,hda,fd}
or
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/{sda,hda,fd}

to wipe disks

Where?

[mindstrm]

Okay. I know that shaped CDs are not new.. and we hard about these CDs from linuxcare at te last show... but where can we get them?

Re:New new new!

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a hot grit?

Yup, the 50 meggers are what I get.

[Myself]

They're about the same price here at the swap'n'swindle.

My plans for it include a disc with the Windows distributed.net client, an autorun.inf and a bootable section. The autorun and the autoexec will both install the client. Simply inserting the disc into a Windows machine will contribute to my keyrate. ;)

Shhh....

My rescue CD is way too big to fit on one of these things. It nearly fills a 5" CD-R now.

More info on the CDs

[sumana]

Here is the info at the linuxcare website.

Saw the same one in Vegas...

[Myself]

Yup, he was convinced that the distribution medium was what made his scheme great and gave it the means to succeed where so many other commerce systems had failed.

I just kept him around long enough to get some pictures of the CD, since I'd never seen one before. He seemed amused by my quickcam too.

Cutting your own... Not a great idea.

[Myself]

When they make a real CD, they wash the media layer away from the outer millimeter before applying the coating. This allows the polycarbonate shell to be continuous around both sides of the CD, and air never touches the media layer.

If you cut your own and get the balance perfect, it'll work for a while. But who knows what oxygen might do to the CD-RW dye? The edges might become unusable after a while, and I don't know how fast it would spread.

I don't know the chemical makeup of the dye, but I'm sure someone could tell you why they go through the bother in the first place of keeping it away from air at the edge. cd-recordable.com used to have a wonderful section showing how CD-Rs are made, but they seem to have changed affiliations and that section disappeared.

Little clip-in adapters..

[Myself]

When 3" CD-Audio singles came out, many of them came with a small adapter which was basically a hollow 5" cd with some sort of micro clip mechanism to hold the mini in the middle.

I've never used one, and I think they might have required the mini to have a shaped edge, so that the clip wouldn't be thicker than the CD. So they might not be compatible with the mini CD-Rs and rectangular minis we're seeing now.

If anyone has one of these things, I'd like to hear about whether it works.

Yes, but slot drive owners should have the rings.

[Myself]

It's like Renault Encore owners carry a spare transmission in the trunk. You're responsible for making whatever adaptations are necessary to compensate for the shortcomings of your hardware.

Shouldn't those slot drives ship with an adapter ring or two?

Different ones hold different sizes.

[Myself]

The ones that actually fit in business card holders are 50MB. The slightly larger ones, which you can still wedge into your wallet, are 140. A plain round 3" is 200 or so, I think. 250 perhaps? Then vanilla 5"ers are 650 and you can get overburn-ready discs that go to 700 and if your drive is capable of it, some of these can go to about 708. Check www.ahead.de and look at Nero, everybody's favorite Win9x-based CD authoring software, which includes overburn support.

Expensive CDs... Colored plastic!

[Myself]

The guys at cd-recordable.com have been making colored, black, and aryan CD-Rs for quite some time. They go for about $2 a disk in bundles of ten.

So when are we going to see colored-plastic business card cut CD-RW discs?

Re:Expensive CDs... Colored plastic!

[pocketcd]

Fairly soon.

Oh wow. I'm smarter now, because of your comment.

[Myself]

*boink* That's the sound of my brain going "wow!".

Cool, thanks!

how to fix linux: pray?

[jyee]

i picked up a copy of the orignal linuxcare cd at linux world last year and tried to boot off of it to see what it had. it didn't boot.

so i mounted it to see what was on it. it didn't mount.

i was getting annoyed and for some odd reason put it in my windoze box. and voila! it worked! but not as i expected it to. the cd had 13 tracks 2 of which were readable. the cdplayer fired up and i was soon listenning to some gospel choir ala kirk franklin. truly bizarre. the second track appeared to be about 13 seconds of another song.

Re:New new new!

[Enahs]

Sandpaper at 250 degrees fahrenheit.

Macs have always been CD-bootable

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs have been CD-Bootable for at least the last 10 years.

Re:Macs have always been CD-bootable

[_Nemmeran_]

Yeah but is it worth booting at all?

Re:Macs have always been CD-bootable

[peter]

It is if you run any kind of Unix on it. There is an ssh-capable terminal prog, so they aren't useless even if they're in a computer lab where you shouldn't really hack them :)
#define X(x,y) x##y

Balance who cares

[uebernewby]

Centrifugal nyaah... but just draw a shape, any shape and then draw some lines that indicate the centripetal force when it's spinning. Anything that is kept spinning will never ever end up "going to be pushing upwards at an uneven speed". Things that spin may push upwards evenly if they are allowed to, i.e. when there's air to lift off on beneath and if there's space above to lift off in.

This doesn't make small-sized cd's a good idea, though. I've bought a couple, and they've all seemed to get lost.

Judging from experience..not such a bad idea

[uebernewby]

I've had a number of cd's get cracked, a few even had little chips broken off. They've been perfectly usable since, however. Only the parts with the cracks or the missing bits fail.

I'm guessing this is because the first edge of oxidation around the cut stops any further oxygen from creeping in.

I might be wrong though, and just have been lucky, but some cracked CD's are still usable after four years. So I suppose it's ok to cut your own cd's. The absence of a protective coating around any edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut cd doubles as an effective murder weapon.

Will it work on slot drives?

[krogoth]

I have a pioneer DVD-103 drive, which has no tray. These look like they work in normal drives, but will they work in a slot drive like mine?

I believe Microsoft pioneered these CDs

[mccormick]

Yeah, another interesting note is that I believe the cut-shaped 140mb CDs were the idea of some MSN Canada employee (I met the guy once.) If someone knows otherwise, by all means please let me know.

Has anyone seen the little IE5 discs? They're pretty cool (regardless of which evil empire company made them.)

Bootable recovery disk is on the linuxcare site

[Anonymous Coward]

When you get the bootable recovery disk, you will find a URL to the linuxcare web site where the BBC is discussed.

Linuxcare CD's

[Anonymous Coward]

Linuxcare gives the Bootable Business Card CD's away at shows, and they are avalible free of charge for Linux user groups the want to give them away. Contact the Linuxcare marketing department if you manage a Linux users group for a supply.

3" CD-R's & CD-RW's could be a floppy killer

[QuadraQ]

I've been screaming from the rooftops for a long time now that little 3" CD-RW disks are a perfect replacement for damnable floppies. Think of it, CD-R of that size could be used in 90% of the cd-rom drives in existence. If computer companies would start standardizing on new DVD/CD-RW drives and drop 1.44MB floppies, superdisks, and zips, then these sized disks would solve the tranportability problem of normal CDs. You eliminate a drive from the computer, maintain compatibility with CD's and DVD's, you still have access to larger CD's for backup purposes, I could go on an on! Best of all 3" CD-R/CD-RW disks can be used in almost all CD-RW drives already out there. Why don't they start selling these things everywhere?! Doesn't anybody have any "vision"?

-Frustrated Geek

Re:3" CD-R's & CD-RW's could be a floppy killer

[UnknownSoldier]

I had recognized the problem a few years, but was stumped. CD-ROM's are almost ubiquitous, but lacked write capability.

You have a VERY nice solution !

Where are the marketroids when you need them?!

Cheers

I want one now!!!

[spoonboy42]

This is soooooo cool. Just think, being able to carry a bunch of ultra-useful linux utilities around in your pocket. Hey, it even has X, if that's your thing.

One problem, though. Where can I get one of these things?

ssh

[Anonymous Coward]

> When I need to ssh somewhere, ...
SSH clients for windows:
http://www-stu.cai.cam.ac.uk/~ajb85/ssh. html

I recommend PUTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty /), it's just one 200kb .EXE file, implements telnet, has a good configuration, copy'n'paste like xterm ...
I just leave it in my homepage and get it with a browser whenever I need to ssh.

Re:ssh

[Zurk]

uuh. great. too bad its useless if someone has whacked a keylogger or backorifice onto the windoze box tho.

Re:ssh

[versus]

uuh. great. too bad its useless if someone has whacked a keylogger or backorifice onto the windoze box tho.

I wonder how can windoze keylogger do its job when your rebooted into live linux-on-CD ?

Re:ssh

[Zurk]

umm..dude..i was referring to the previous post where the guy sez he carries a windoze ssh with him.

Fold 'em in half, I say, and put a distro on 'em

[leonbrooks]

If a credit-card sized CD holds 40MB, then maybe an unfoldable one that comes out double the size (less a bit for the fold) should be able to do a couple of hundred megs. With "bzip2 -9" you could fit a useable distribution on that (especially if you replace monsters like Netscape with something lighter). Q: "What do you know about Linux?" A: Reaches into wallet... "Here, install this!" You might need some reversible brackety bits that slid across the fold, flick-knife style, to make it rigid enough, but I'm sure there are ways. (-:

malicious little boys like me...

[Anonymous Coward]

wow... imagine bringing a small bootable cd like these to future smack and installing linux on their windows laptops... dam funny, now lets just see if I get caught :P

or perhaps a simple virus would do...

goon (ty)
honestly though, I'm not THAT f*cked up...just would be darn funny...

Re:malicious little boys like me...

[yonderboy]

yeah. and then we'll go to Radio Shack and type into their computers

10 PRINT "LINUX RULEZ!!@@!!"
20 GOTO 10

Then we'll be really cool.

Re:malicious little boys like me...

[_Nemmeran_]

A.) Not really, that would be an immature display of a breach of hacker ethics, and just plain stupid.

B.) Radio shacks dont have PCs with CD drives, they just have dummies

QNX Demo

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's not Linux, but as long as we're talking about recovery boot disks, I've used the QNX Demo Disk (somewhere on www.qnx.com) to boot a screwed-up WindowsNT laptop and go browse deja.com to find the answer to my problem. A single floppy with a PPP stack and graphical web browser?

The Physics of Balance

[MacJedi]

Well, you guys seem to have the right ideas here but I'll post anyway, mainly because I'm a physics major and am supposed to know this stuff... :) If I'm wrong on any points here please let me know.

There are two main types of balance: static balance and dynamic balance. Static balance is how the object behaves under a force (usually gravity) if it is not being accelerated. Dynamic balance is how the object is balanced if it is being accelerated. In our example, the CD is being given a rotational acceleration around its principle axis. Interesting side note: your auto-mechanic has to do both sorts of balance when he rotates your tires, except he probably calls the second kind "spin balance".

To calculate dynamic balance you need to find the moment of inertia of the object. This is fairly easy for symetrical objects like normal CD's but with these weird shapes you will likely have to use a tensor and calculate moments and products of inertia. I'll make mistakes if I try to explain this. :)

Anyways, bottom line is that it is possible to have spin balance with weird shapes. Just try to keep the principle axis in the center.

/joeyo

Break easily!

[benasdf]

I got one of these handed to me at the "Linux Demo Day" a few months back. First time I sat down on a hard chair I heard a distinct cracking noise. Sure enough, the thing had cracked into a million little pieces. It's a cool idea - but I don't know if they really do too well in a wallet :)

You Want Slackware ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

In the official set, the second disc contains a complete, ready-to-run bootable install of Slackware...even has working XF86

CD Business Cards

[Andrew728]

I was trying to figure out why my hit counter was going crazy tonight then I stumbled upon this thread. Thanks for all the hits guys! If anyone need some questions answered email me privately I'm signing off for the night but will glady respond to all. We also have a faq page on our web site http://cardiscs.com Regards, Andy Carr Citiscape Shapes

Re:CD Business Cards

[Andrew728]

Sorry I thought you could see my email it's mailto:info@cardiscs.com Andy

RESCUE B-CARD CD'S ARE AT CEBIT in LINUXCARE BOOTH

[aftyde]

Hi Everyone,

If you come by our booth in Hall 6, USA Pavillion you can get them from us (Linuxcare), you can also get them from Linux International- also in the US pavillion!

Take care, Art..

Ok, so can't get from LinuxCare's site, but...

[demon]

Is there anyone who got some spares at LWCE @ Javits? If so, I for one want one of these new bootable recovery discs. I have one of the previous ones (the one that LinuxCare gave out in San Jose in August), but this looks much better. Please let me know - I'd definitely like to get me one of these.

AOL CDS!

[Andrew Dvorak]

I know I've received a few AOL CDs at this size, formatted with 40M of data.

i dont believe so...

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont think MS has ever 'pioneered' anything... except maybe BASIC for the Altair.

you fat punch

[Anonymous Coward]

take it back you bastard take it all back i hate you i hate you i hate myself i want to die

Here's LinuxCare Link [was Re:Interesting...]

[Christopher Cashell]

You can have their Debian based mini-distro soon, I've found the information on LinuxCare's site, here. At the moment, it doesn't say very much, but it does mention that more information will be provided soon, as well as ISO images, and source code!

They also have a mailing list setup for discussion of the business card. You can subscribe by sending an e-mail to the list request address, with the word 'subscribe' in the body.

This is one cool thing, and I've gotta give props to LinuxCare for this. ;-)

Re:Multi-Level Marketing of Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike most, I have actually tried to use it,

Even if you're stupid doesn't mean everyone else is. "Do or don't there is no try."

How about the content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so those discs look cool, but cutting up CDs to various shapes is an old thing. How about the content?

Besides, why can't they make ordinary sized CDs. As already pointed out, not all drives are able to read those discs?

Doesn't it break in pieces?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people keep their wallet in their backpockets (at least those who live in an area where we don't need to worry about pickpockets...). Don't these CD's tend to break when you sit on them? Or are they made of a special material that is more flexible than the usual CDs?

Old thing

[gurubert]

innominate have them, too. It's a debian 20MB rescue disk. I think it looks cooler than the one from linuxcare, because it's orange and really creditcard size...

Re:Old thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find the image of innominate's Business Card Rescue CD on http://www.innominate.org/~gpa/rescueCD/

MP3 on Small CDs

[Bucket]

Is there anything to stop some manufacturer making a small MP3 player that reads from these small CDROMs. The unit should end up being just a bit larger than a minidisc player. We could then place hours of music on these small CDROMs. Would the drives be able to spin fast enough? 4MB for a four minute track, 1MB a minute, 18kbytes a second? Would the power consumption for spinning the CDROM and decompressing the data be too great?

Kylie Minogue

[threaded]

I read of some chaps that took a hacksaw to a Kylie Minogue CD. The horrifying thing is that the result still played ...

As to AOL CDs: (I also read this on a web page but can no longer find the link,) fill a bowl with hot water, then threading a sink plug on its chain through the centre hole, dangle the arrangement in the hot water. After a short time the CD starts to melt and droop on the plug. Lift the result out of the water and hang, waiting for it too cool down and dry. Once cooled, remove the plug and invert the now vase shaped result, insert a candle and give them as Birthday presents and stocking fillers to non-computer literate folks. (Don't, whatever you do, give them to someone who is computer literate, except Sysops or Admins of course).

I also give drums and other musical instruments to young children.

OK that last one is truely evil ...

Ive seen these wreck a cd-rom drive

[Anonymous Coward]

I used a bussiness card cd once and it wrecked my drive. Anyone else have such an experience?

Mitnick (Re:Business card media)

[Coldraven]

Mitnick can't touch a PC, as part of his sentancing; if he wanted his data back, he could have one of his friends mail him box filled with twenty pounds (11.339809 kilograms) worth of Post-It notes. ^_^

Re:Business card sized CD-recordables? (lQQk here)

[_Nemmeran_]

I know these links have been beaten to death like a dead yak, but I must say they are 15.99 for ten at cdroutlet.com

Re:Fold 'em in half, I say, and put a distro on 'e

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be easy to create a bootable one that supports a ppp dialup, ethernet and ip networking ,
(that can be done on a 1.44 floppy so you might even put x windows on it).
It could then download the rest of the data (the latest version of the selected packages, and the latest kernel etc)install and reboot....

But, why arent there (as far as i know) any cd`s that have data on two sides?
You would have to put them upside-down (or eh...well you know what i mean) to read the second side...?

FTP site for ISO Image

[Anonymous Coward]

If anybody wants to upload the ISO image to my FTP 195.115.63.44 /Incoming It can be distributed from there.

Red Had install CD as rescue disk

[XNormal]

In more than one case I have found myself using the Red Hat install CD as a rescue disk whenever LILO failed for any reason.

I boot the CD, switch to the bash prompt on virtual console #1, mount my hard disk and chroot to it.


----

Physics

[UnknownSoldier]

> Those things aren't balanced!
Guess someone failed the moments of inertia calculations on the physics/calculas tests :-)

> it has to do with centrifucal(sp?) force
Did you mean Centripetal (or Centrifugal ) force?

http://explorezone.com/101/centrifugal.h tm

Cheers

AOL have sent out 3" CDs

[jdh28]

I had a 3" AOL CD but I don't seem to be able to find it atm.

john

Can you stick it in your wallet?

[sumana]

I've had it in my wallet for a day or so and it hasn't broken, but then again, I don't always sit on my wallet (front pocket, back pocket switching). I think it'll be fine. My advice is to put it in between two other nonbending cards, e.g., credit cards or some such.

Cisco credit-card CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

The current Cisco recruitment pack contains a credit-card size CD-ROM for Windows (email cravez@cisco.com for a Mac version) espousing the values of Cisco.

Can you say 'square peg in a round hole'?

What a way to recruit IOS programmers. I didn't bother applying.

Re:Fold 'em in half, I say, and put a distro on 'e

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at a CD-R or CD-RW. The data is actually stored in the thin coating on top of the disc. You can confirm this by taking a junked one and scratching the coating off, nothing else is there except the clear disc. To do double sided, you would need to have a sandwhich of two regular cd's, with some type of laser-impermeable material between. The clear plastic would have to be thinner than normal, otherwise your cd would be twice as heavy. The cost for this would probably offset any potential gain. Also, you could never label this disc. The closest, most practical approximation I've seen (or want) to this is the 2-cd sleeves or gem cases.

-M

a little warning

[cwj]

i got one of these a linux world in san jose last year, and actualy used it to recover a machine while we were there, however, i would warn against using these in cheap cdroms. i had mine become lodged in a cheap panasonic drive, and a friend of mine had a similar experience. works well, however, in laptop drives with snap-down centers (like are found in portable cd players).

Because it looks cool.

[DebtAngel]

That, and it since you are only cutting the CD twice after burning it, producing the things becomes (marginally) chaper

prior art

[gluke]

look here

A kit with bizcard CD-Rs, labels and software

[Black Perl]

A kit with bizcard CD-Rs, labels and software is here. 12 disks, 16 glossy labels, and software for $99. They offer everything separately, though.

Re:Multi-Level Marketing of Software

[Anonymous Coward]

cute. DOS was basically a glorified file loader. linux is unix. unix is a multitasking, multiuser OS. the two have as much in common as a horse and buggy compared to a ferrari.

patent on biz card CDs

[legoman]

A company called ShapeCD has a patent on business card shaped CDs. See the patent on IBM's site. It seems that there is also a patent on an X'mas shaped CD. Hmmm.

Where can I get a mini-CDR in the UK?

[daveewart]

All the links so far seem to be US based - one of them even allowed you to choose "United Kingdom" from a drop-down list as part of your address and then, when checking-out said that "UK is not a supported destination for shipping ..."

Anyone know of a place in the UK that sells these?

Solution to "weapons problem"

[marcus]

>The absence of a protective coating around any
>edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut
>cd doubles as an effective murder weapon

Heat the edges using a cigarette lighter, matches, or whatever. It smoothes those sharp polycarbonate edges quite nicely.

Re:Don't leave home without Toms Rescue and Boot D

[peter]

Using /dev/random would take _forever_ to wipe anything of any reasonable size. Reads on it block until there is enough randomness in the entropy pool to give out cryptographically secure random numbers. Using /dev/urandom would drain the entropy pool almost completely (unless the kernel keeps some entropy in reserve or something), besides the fact that it is much slower. (The kernel uses some complicated code to deal with the random pool, and I'm not sure that it could keep up with normal disk speeds of 14MB/s.)

I don't think writing random data over a disk is much more secure than writing zeros, and probably not worth it. Maybe it makes it harder for people who are trying to detect the remaining weak magnetic moments which the zeroing didn't reverse, but you could probably make that a lot harder by writing a disk full of ones after zeroing the disk. If things are _that_ important, it might be better to open up the case and trash the mechanism alignment. Then nobody would stand a chance on a modern high density hard disk. (the alignment is really sensitive in those things.)
#define X(x,y) x##y

Toshiba Ad

[ripcrd]

I got a Toshiba laptop ad recently in the mail that had one of these. I kept it because it had Quicktime 4.0 on it.