Slashdot Mirror
New Optical Disk That Holds 140GB
NoCashValue writes "There is an article on Wired News about a new optical disk that can hold up to 140GB of data on a disk the size of a CD ROM." Still pretty vaporouus, but they claim a demo is forthcoming at Comdex.
I could clear my entire cd rack by pressing my collection to one of these?... well, let's be honest... maybe two of these :) :) :)
I bet the recordables will be like CD-Rs. The whole disk will be flouresced, and the laser will simply burn the floursecense away to record a binary 0.
Just because they could make the media smaller and still hold a relatively obscene amount of data does not mean they can necessarily make the reader correspondingly smaller...
Even if you have a really small CD I doubt you could make a reader the size of a Palm (at least for any reasonable sum of money).
>Then you could do one of those mandrake full installs of 2gigs+ :)
if you think that is big, try a full install of SuSE. 6.4 was 5 CD's of programs and one of source, or a DVD with everything on it. A less than full install of mine, clocked in at well more than 2 gigs.
(Please note, this isn't an accusation of fraud or conspiracy; I'm just curious what an adequately convincing demo would be like)
This is like the third time within a year this story has been posted. And it is not vaporware the technology has been around for years.
h tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/12/0424207.s
You see a problem, I see potential. - Vincent 'Vinnie' Antonelli
I saw this technology a LONG time ago. The company has had working models since last April/May. They have been sort of sitting on it though because they did not want to just license the patent rights to other companies to actually manufature it. Instead, they have been spending the last year making deals to aquire manufacturing facilities and buying other companies so that they themselves can make this product (they want their cake and eat it too). In the past 2 months they seem to be making deals to license this technology with 2 or 3 of the major manufacturers, but will also be makeing them themselves. This tech is FAR from vaporware. It really does do what they say, and may become the new standard in the next few years. They have 2 different versions of it actually. One is a CD-ROM sized solution that has the 180 GBs on it, the other is a mini-disk sized solution that has more space then a standard DVD. It may well become the new digital movie format to use. The only problem that I can see is that it does not, or has not, seemed to be completely backwarde compatible without adding a seperate standard laser used by a normal CD-ROM and when doing so, it will only be as fast as a standard CD-ROM, not having the major bandwidth improvement that the layered CD medium that the high capacity disks will use (they have a greater read spead because it can read several layers at the same time, but this is not a necessary part of the technology as it would quickly max the system bandwidth to the device on todays standards). I actually made some good money on their stock last December thru January. I got in before a 3:1 split and they the stock jumped up 30 points after the split.
The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 70 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.
To me, this means over 70 different royalties that consumers will have to pay when purchasing the media and readers. Suppose we'll have to pay higher pre-sale taxes on the readers for the government to distribute to copyright holders (since we can copy so much more copyrighted material)?
science is a religion
if there was only a way you could you use this to store from your HDTV card while its recording, kind of like TiVO records as it comes in.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Seems kind of fishy, but I guess we'll see when the product comes out. :-)
Not for long. Hard disk capacity has been doubling every year for at least the last 5 years and it looks like that trend will continue. Here's what that looks like for the next 5 years:
2000: 80GB @ $300
2001: 160GB @ $300
2002: 320GB @ $300
2003: 640GB @ $300
2004: 1.3TB @ $300
2005: 2.5TB @ $300
These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
As for storage interconnect technologies, I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004. (Infini-band is the newest, just recently specified, mesh interconnect that is expected to replace PCI/PCI-X in the high-end).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This 140 GB disc wouldn't by any chance be the
same technology described in this story?
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
CD & DVD magnetic? Grooves? The reporter is obviously clueless. No point in reading any further.
(BTW: This storage medium was announced two years ago.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Actually, our busses are fine. SCSI runs at 160 MB/s (14 min for 140GB), ATA is at 100 MB/s (23 min for 140GB). You're referring to the storage devices, which currently peak at somewhere around the 20 MB/s mark. Nevertheless, the busses will improve, too. Serial ATA promises 6 gigabits in the not-so-distant future and surely there will be competitors.
> These optical drives are going to need to come out pretty quick to ever match hard disk space
> and even then, they will probably be quickly left behind.
Well, you're probably right about that. History certainly would make you think so.
> I wouldn't be surprised to see disks with native Infini-band interfaces by 2004.
Never heard of that. Which means I must get off my behind and do some storage tech reading.
That is, it's not a Cool Idea being worked on by some small and unknown company anxiously seeking investors. It's not some guy in a Japanese garage with a flying car design, or some once-great game consol company desperately trying to hype up their next box before their upstart competitors snatch the limelight with some asshole in a coyote suit.
This disk tech has some real money and a technology sound enough to convince other companies to retool in order to produce the materials needed to go full steam ahead.
My question is this:
I need WAY more than 650 mbs of recordable disk storage. In my line of work, I fill many, many CDR's with hi-res graphics. And I know many other people who are also feeling the pinch.
But I wonder if we're actually going to get a useful consumer level recordable version of this new product. We haven't got a decent recordable DVD system, and with all the concerns of the MPAA, I wonder if this tech won't be shafted too. I have honest files I need to back up and move quickly between often changing companies, and it's stupid having to blow ten or more CDR's to do it. We NEED a standardized, inexpensive large format read/write system for PC's, and if the movie industry puts a choke hold on it, then I'll be about ready to start pulling my hair out. Or start lobbing bricks.
-Fantastic Lad, the most pissed off lad of them all!
Gentlemen, we have the technology to rebuild this man, but if we can make more money by only doing a half-assed job while hitting him with an endless stream of service charges and repair fees, then that's exactly what we will do! It's the American Way!
Gouda head.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Well another side of the coin is that technology inventions like this make it increasingly hard to control copyrights. Media is much easier to control if it is hard to reproduce. Frankly, I don't see decreasing control over copyrights as a bad thing. I don't think that anyone should be able to own the rights to any idea/work for more than 20 years.
But seriously, how can the govt possibly police every single home to make sure that these things aren't copying music or movies. Even if it could I don't think the government will risk making criminals out of everybody.
Hmmm. Perhaps, but I was also under the impression that once you put the disc inside a caddy, or enclosed cartridge environment the disc was unable to be steadily spun as fast, with as little margin of accuracy as without the case. *shrug* maybe not though, because Magneto-Optical discs have a cartridge shell. I would be interested in a technical perspective from any so qualified person.
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
love your sig
The article mentioned that the existence or nonexistence of florescent materials in the layers determins whether data is there or not... How easily would they be able to make devices for home users to record there own disks? I go through a 50 pack of cd-r's in about a month. If I could burn these disks then I could save alot of money.
The new disk of Ph.D. Pavel is like a regular CD but slightly thicker. It is 10 mm wide and it 120 mm in diameter; but it becomes a ... 10,000 layers and it has a recording capacity of 10,000 Gigabytes!
tridimensional optical memory, multi-layer, which means, more specifically, that one can record, at atomic level, on
An eloquent comparison which any expert can understand: if at the Library of the Romanian Academy, one should record the 1.6 million books and all the other printings, one should
need about 80,000 regular CDs; if everything is recorded on Hyper CD - ROM, then only five CDs are enough! This disk invented by the Romanian Pavel would have a longer lifetime,
at least 5,000 years, the stocked memory can never be lost - one knows that a magnetic CD loses the information after 2-5 years!
Heh, now talk about your hyperbole...
Yes, I'd love it if this were true too, but I highly highly doubt it (and even if so, not for years).
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
As soon as it's financially feasible for companies to make them. Let's face it, right now there are way too many choices for hand-held geek toys for any one format of a 2" disc to be financially feasible. Now, odds are that some of these geek toys won't be around in six months, while some more will have been added. But once the market for the geek-toy-of-the-week calms down and standards can actually be predicted, we should have a 2" disc for data storage. There's no reason other then money and standards not to do it.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Or This?
It's called FMD-ROM and is is slated to be ready for production before the end of this year. The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB!
-Dorsey
-Dorsey
If you can't beat them, exploit them. *Then* beat them... -Milk & Cheese
The site for Constellation 3D, the company producing the FMD drives, is http://www.c-3d.net/.
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
It begs the question, how big are towers going to get for End Users?
Although I'm anything but an end-user, the computer of the future as I have it in mind is an easily upgradable Motherboard-like-thingy which is conveniently hidden somewhere with a nicely stylished USB2/FireWire Hub somewhere in which you can plug your just as nicely stylished drives. Although I'm a hardly a fan of the I-Mac, but IMHO it did revolutionize computer design. Now how long until Joe Schmoe can buy a desk with an integrated computer in it and the Firewire hub somewhere on the back?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Swoogan
Swoogan
sigs are for losers...and ppl who can think of one.
"Scratch once, lose eighty times the data!"
Learn from your parents' mistakes: use birth control.
So, the ignore for six months part is over. This should actually be ready now.
Swoogan
Swoogan
sigs are for losers...and ppl who can think of one.
It isnt vaporware anymore, comdex is next week, and they also have a demo scheduled this month in conjunction with Miramax Films for the premiere of the movie Bounce delivered via satellite. From what I have heard with interviews with the company, the ROM drives should be out by the summer next year and the WORM(write-once-read-many, basically like a CDR) should be out 6 months later. If this technology is viable then it would be a great way to make backups of data (an entire system backup on 1 FMD disk, or maybe every simpsons episode ever made).
Note: I have invested money in Constellation 3D, I am biased, so dont take my word as gospel.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Let's take it on good faith that this is not vaporware and will actually ship within the next 5 years--a fairly reasonable timeframe I think. That means that finally removable storage density has caught up with hard drives, and that it doesn't take 10-100 disks anymore to backup a modern HD.
This brings us to another important topic, data transfer rates. Most decent removable drives connect to IDE, SCSI, USB and parallel port. Forget the last two, they offer only convenience but no performance. Even with IDE and SCSI all current removable drives peak at way below their top rates. Let's assume a very optimistic 10MB/s (which is closer to HD transfer rates than removable drives) and do the math for a 140GB disk:
140GB * 1024MB/GB = 143,360MB
143,360MB / 10MB/s = 14,336s
14,336s / 3600s/h = ~3.98h
So it would take me about four hours to fill that disk with data. In a couple of years my main HD will be about that size, and it will take me 4h to do a full backup. For backups that might be somewhat tolerable, but these disks will be hawked as super floppies. Pop it in, drag that HDTV movie onto it, wait a couple of hours, remove it and run to your friend's house to play it. What's wrong with that scenario?
What I'm saying is that we're approaching storage densities where our current data transfer busses simply can't reasonably cope anymore. We really need gigabit level transfer rates, and media that can cope with that kind of read/write speed. I simply can't see sequential technology like HD and CD-ROM keeping up. We need either new materials that can write MUCH faster or new parallel access technologies that read/write multiple tracks at once. And the transfer technology that goes with that--maybe gigabit ethernet, 1.6Gb 1394 or who knows what.
didnt slashdot speak of these disks a while back? Interesting, but we still havnt seen them on the shelves yet.
I am keeping an eye on Norsam's storage. Uses an electron beam instead of a laser, and an electron microscope to read the pits. 200GB per 5 inch disk; 10 of these stack in a cube, and then a wall mount of 30 cubes. 60 terabytes. mmmmm. Obviously these would not be form home use. These are still in vapor, but Norsam has some cool stuff they are doing now. They use licensed LANL tech to do nanotyping and create permanent analog storage discs that are read with an electron scope.
Note that STUPID Canadian tax on media!
Enlighten me, please: What tax?
www.dealsdirect.com:
Blank CD Cursor 80 Minute 12X CDRs - 50 pack spindle (NA), $44.75(CAD)
Do you mean the $1/CDR tax they never got around to passing?
Kind Regards,
Kind Regards,
Bruce
Remember 5.25" disks? Remember how we used to accidentally get dust and thumbprints on the exposed magnetic media and lose our data? Remember how happy we were when 3.5" disks came out and we no longer had that problem?
So one year is always enough to go from announcement to release? How long was DVD worked on before it was released? Years. It's not enough that the technology works. It has to actually get accepted. The 140GB format requires a bluer, more expensive laser. They came out with a 25GB format months after that which would work with normal DVD lasers. But you still need to convince people to burn and sell FMD discs. The drive is useless unless there is FMD media people can use. It's not going to be a writable media in the beginning. And they also don't plan on making the drives themselves, they want to license the technology to the big CD/DVD drive makers. That requires a lot of convincing. The DVD consortium members (especially Sony and Toshiba) get royalties off DVD. Those companies won't like the idea of losing that revenue stream. FMD could be a competitor to HD-DVD, and they may not like that.
Nice big optical storage. Now we can rest assured that the install image for Windows "Whistler" will still fit on one disc. :)
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
DVD killer? No... in order to get studios to agree to support a format, they want there fingers in it, a la DVD, given CSS, Macrovision and region coding, yet this time they will tighten their hold even further if they can.
As for the 5" (actually spec'd as 12cm, 5" is close enough), the DVD consortium deliberately chose CD size so that they can use and convert existing machinery and infrastructure. They at one time hoped to use CD jewel cases I think, but gladly the keepcases prevailed.
I still consider this vapor. The company's sample FMD in their web site's picture appear to be the protective clear blanks that you get at the end of CD-R spindles. I don't know if flourecents can have a quick enough response time to be usable as a compact storage medium, or be manipulated at a such compact level. They are welcome to disprove me, but in 5 years they will be competing with other technologies as well, assuming this is real.
had an article on these a while ago. One of the coolest things about them was that since the lazer's got to read through several layers, the whole thing is clear.
Any spoon would be too big.
Fingerprints, etc. don't disturb that much on CDs and this FMD because they are not in the plane of focus of the optics (The plane of focus is inside the media where the pits are, not on the surface).
This is similar to the situation when you wear glasses (if you do): you normally don't see the dirt because you can't focus on it (it's too close), it only makes your view a little blurry. Once you take your glasses off, you can see the dirt clearly, because you can focus on it.
you forgot Nataly Portman. And can you overclock this baby (I mean *not* Nataly Portman).
I don't know about that. This is still a spinning medium and access time with non-solid state devices will always suck. Given the density of this, and the spin rate(12x (eventual) max for CD-based technologies), you could persume some massive bandwidth (probably harddrive speeds) However, RAM is a moving target, and things like 1T-SRAM (SRAM that only uses one transistor) are offering SRAM-type speed at densities approaching regular RAM (128mbit chips) I don't think we'll ever get rid of RAM, it simply makes too much sense.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What kind of a drive are we going to need to read these things? And more importantly, will we able to buy said drive next Christmas incorporated into a PS3?
Sorry, couldn't resist...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
It's been in the "real soon now" stage for a while. I'd like to see some progress (not everything, but something demonstrating they're closer). Perhaps if they really do have something at Comdex that'll be cool, I'll certainly stop by to see it.
Be impressed with the technological feat.
Ignore it for the next six months (or in Daikatana's case, three years)
When the subject gets out of the vaporware stage, become amazed again; even more so than before since it actually exists.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It has been posted three times that I can remember, it was on freak tech for a long time, I think it still is.
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
It's impressive how portable information is getting.
As a cd sized thing:
I used to be able to carry a lot of text
Then I could carry a long book
Then I could carry an album
With Mp3's I can carry all of a groups works
With Dvd's I could carry a whole movie or a mess of books
With this thing I could carry around 18 movies or around 97 thousand books.
Technology rules sometimes.
I volunteer to demo this, thx : )
Imagine how much [____] I can store on this!
Where you can fill in the gap with any or all of the following exciting words:
Pr0n, mp3s, Divx rips, Warez, Source code, Grits.
Thank you.
Oh yeah, and it'll work REALLY well in a fucking beowulf cluster too!
What will it be called anyway? OAS-ROM (Obscene Amounts of Storage Read Only Memory)?
Or maybe MS-ROM, because this'll probably be the only thing big enough to hold a full installation of Windows 2010.
----------
this is definately not current news;
I read this a LONG time ago on
FreakTech (near the bottom of the page)
I beleive it was posted about
11 MONTHS AGO!!!!!!!!
I submitted it months ago myself and
thought it was rejected because it
was ??Old News??
WTF ????
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
The FMD stuff has been around for a while. /. before, too. Basically, its a clear CD where the pits flouresce when the laser hits them. I can't remember, but their webpage I think said 30 layers.
It's been listed on
Here's the link for the ClearCard:
http://www.constellation3 d.c om/products.html#clearcard
Hmm.. maybe this explains why the product is still vaporware.
Because in the article they do mention making credit card sized discs and smart media type cards.
Even if the unit will be too large to fit into the palm, you could easily attach a "FMD-ROM drive" to the back of it and for the larger bulk of the drive you still get obscene amounts of storage.
Unless this product seems viable in a general consumer market this company won't take off. Making just a smaller form of storage in my opinion would be more useful.
:)
Using like mini FMD-ROMs for units such as Palm pilots and digital cameras would be amazing.
Yes the article mentions something similiar but it seems to only be hinting towards smaller discs.
This way you could have a full bootable linux system on this tiny disc that you insert into your Palm and boot off of. Then you could do one of those mandrake full installs of 2gigs+
Bouillabaisse? Pardon my ignorance...please define Bouillabaisse.
Connah
Connah
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
An article HEREInfoworld details a 10-Terabyte Optical Disc. The inventor of the disc says that it may become commercially available in a year (it was stated in oct).
An important part of this disc is that it is very stable -- instability occurs only after 5,000 years.
I remember hearing about these flourescent(sp) discs a few months ago (it was vapor then too). But the time has given me an opportunity to think about the nature of storage in the not-so-distant future. Everyone here must have at least a vauge familiarity with the C60 buckyball molecules. Supposedly, if the nanotechnology advances enough, the need of a hard disk or any other type of very-slow-compared-to-RAM will be gone and the computing world will have come full circle. All memory both for storage and So, what I am asking is that will these discs be really necessary by the time they 'mature'? By the time FMD burners become inexpensive enough for the average Joe, will they be ready to go on the shelf? DVD's were around for a few years before they got to the level where they are now, and they still have a long way to go. Even years before they were introduced into the market, they were vapor just like these FMD's are now. I recognize that there will most likely still be a market for (relatively) permanent storage of data without a power source. What I am wondering is if nature might have already shown us something really different. CDs, DVDs, and now FMDs may store using different techniques, but they all use the same idea of using a laser and microscopic pits to store data, and it's fundamentally two-dimensional. Even with 10 or so layers, it's still 2D, just like hard disks and RAM. With C60, it has the potential to be 3D. I just picture being able to do so much more with memorty that way, it might just be that I'm nuts.
Wise man say, choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them...
So what if it can hold 140 GB?
... very compressible (like 99.999% compression; my math is probably a little off). Until I see these things in catalogs or on the store shelves, i give a big 'whoop de doo' in their general direction.
What are the access times? What about data integrity? What about reliability? How much do the disks cost?
If you get really creative, you can store 140 GB on a CD-rom; the data just has to be
-egon
might be old hat in 5 yrs. Details here.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Or asking for deposits to get on a waiting list to be able to buy it.
Remember the company that was mentioned here twice with the Turbo prop, retinal scanning flying pack?
Fight Spammers!
I just wish somebody would invent similar capacity RAM: fast, cheap, huge, and persistent. Then we wouldn't NEED hard disks.
OS/400, despite having a butt-ugly user interface, is an interesting system in the way that it handles, for example, user spaces, but in particular, memory. It treats memory and disk as just a big bunch of memory (AFAIK).
Man, I want that big, persistent bunch of ram. 100 gigs ought to do. Hard disks suck.
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Please, when designing the the data format of these things, just make it a bucket 'o bits.
Don't require special region-unlocking/decryption hardware! Make it simple and flexible.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Moronic1, you are indeed correct that this is old as I've been wondering what's been going on with this company for over a year now. We found out about if a year and a half ago and thought that it was pretty phat. Yay Physics!
Fruit flies like bananas... Time flies like the wind...
This is the third time slashdot has posted this story. The company used to be called C3D. A flourescent effect is used to illuminate individual layers in a multilayer CD. This effect allows a laser to read only that layer.
The DVD roadmap has this level of storage potential - I think the spec called for 4 layers of data per side of a DVD disk, and double-sided disks, for somewhere in the 1XX Gigabyte storage capacity range. The rollout wasn't for another 3 or 4 years though.
And I had only just finished up setting up an optical-laser-writing-to-clear-packing-tape jukebox you mentioned a month or two ago.
Now you're telling me the lastest cool thing is this???
I'm telling you, it costs a lot to be on the bleeding edge... sigh...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Why do I have the feeling that Iv'e seen this before...... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/12/042420 7&mode=nested
That gives me an idea...
with such a huge storage medium,
what are the chances of actually getting such a thing?
Imagine a full LIBRARY on a disc...
selling say all the works of a given feild
up to that time (like EE)...
with maybe a little librarian-bot to search it for you. (okay, I stole that from Snow Crash).
Still... the info-junkie within me is reduced
to violent jitters at the idea.
Anyone know a way this could be done legally?
I know that direct publishing of such a thing would violate copyright laws of all the
majors copyright houses... there any way around
this?
Dreaming of "Earth's SF/F, Vol 1: 1900-2000"
-Slackergod
DOH!
sorry 'bout the URL typo...
her it is: FreakTech
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I haven't looked rediculously hard, but I can't find any mention of how fast this thing is supposed to be. Anyone know?
What we really need is a storage medium that can access fast enough to where access time isn't really an issue, and then we can simply do away with ram, once we can have a solid state storage that accesses faster than RAM does today. That will be a very big technilogical step, IMHO.
Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
The Constellation 3D products page mentions a 5Gb 50mm version.
From the article: "In a throwback to the DIVX days, the media is also intelligent, and the company is building in technology that will let content resellers, such as movie studios, limit the number of times the disc can be accessed. FMD-ROM would also have a different copy-protection scheme, which will keep out the DeCSS crowd. " They just never learn, do they ?
I defintely read about this before about few months before in /.
I don't think it's vaporware. Everyone talks about DVD killers, and in reality they probably will be.
I would like to point out that no DVD disk could hold enough of the upcoming, "ready or-not, you will get this shoved down your throat" HD-TV, to be viable consumer product. FMD would offer a good solution to this so you could have your HD-TV movies, and so on.
Movies currently have to be downsampled and "pan and scanned" to be able to see them right. Even for DVD. The FMD disk offerers true movie quality, (especially since movies are being shot digital now, e.g. Mission to Mars, Star Wars: Ep II.)
So I would say this now. Don't invest in DVD. It's a great format, but it's not going to have the longevity that VHS did.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
That is a good point. Will access to all excellent recordable mega-giga-storage devices be indefinitely delayed by those entertainment bozo's?
...except one: Bouillabaisse. There, now every possible troll is covered.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
1.) Why is everyone in the company selling out?
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/c/cfmd.html
2.) Why isn't c3d listed as an exhibitor at Comdex? (looong load, even with broadband)a nner/exhibitorsall.cfm
http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/pl
I love the vaporware like everyone else, but from the drawing board to affordable production to mass market use is another thing altogether.
CDR has finally got to the point that media is a commoditized item. That took a LONG time.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
In my line of work (marine seismic surveys) a decent sized survey will be about 100GB - the intermediate processing steps will be a multiple of that. Given that acquisition technology steadily improving, the initial amount of data is only going to go up. So rather than hand a client a treuckload of 3590 tapes, we'll be able to slip them a credit card, with all the intermediate processing history and data as well. I like it. If the access speeds are up to snuff, then we'll be able to get rid of all those huge arrays of disks that we have in the machine room. This just looks better the more I look at it.
Carousel is a lie!
This is all well and good, and it would be mighty cool if it actually existed. Too bad it doesn't, and we'll have to wait and see if this ever gets off the ground.
I would like to see the prices of the drives/media for this technology. I'm sure they would be through the roof.
Anyway, when it is first released, what would be the purpose? I'd just as soon buy a couple of big SCSI HDD's and store all of my pr0n/warez/divx rips/source code on them, rather than give my left nut for something that won't be compatible with anything anyone else has.
-
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
A car stereo using this technology to play a plain and simple audio CD which has 140GB of music and a maximum of say, something like 10000 tracks. With this kind of storage, who needs compression anyway?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Theres a reasonable Byte article on these things here. These things sounds like DVD killers, assuming they're practical. They hold more, they're just as speedy, and they could be made at a good price.
But.. they're 5 inches across still. When are we going to get something smaller? Why not stick 30Gb on a 2 inch disc? That'd be a killer for portables.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
http://www.romanian-daily.ro/2000IUN/RED387.html
(...I hope it's not)
In a related story, Bulgarian scientists working on developing practical time-travel have independantly confirmed this news.
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No, that's a different technology completely. Sorry I cant provide any more information.
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Remember caddies? Remember how we bitched? Remember how the cd-rom manufacturers removed them? My bet is that a cartridge would make a helluva cry again.
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
That slashdot editors dont actually read slashdot.
My proof? This article, which told about the development of this cool-ass tech months ago.
Vaporware? Can you pass the crack pipe? They've been working on this, and we've be reading about it, for some time.
This stuff is so cool, btw. Why use slow balistic calculations in games, when you've got enough space to store a lookup table! (Okay, that's rediculous, but this is still coolness)
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Didn't we see this over a year ago?
I feel really enthused about the disk and it's potential. But why are they only showing the prototype now? They've had one working for over year...
/99 /1 0/0 4/1124236.shtml
Anyone else remember this article from Oct 99?
http://slashdot.org/articles
I really hope they actually start production on these. wouldn't you love to get one into your TiVo?
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Be in Your Senses
this?
A fully working prototype of a 150GByte read-only disk has been demonstrated by C3D Inc. The clever part is their "Fluorescent Multilayer Disk" technology. Rather than having only one or two layers (as per CD-ROMs, DVD) these new disks have 10 layers, which can be read simultaneously giving data transfer rates exceeding 1 gigabyte per second....
-henrik
If this materializes, I would imagine that fingerprints, mouse poop, and/or scratches would render these useless. If someone who has any say in the matter is reading this, please create a sealed cartidge for the finished product so that my music doesn't end up in a useless format on the floor of my brother's car.
More
opppsss....
The latest figures are in the region of 10.8 TB for a device of that size - more than four times the original value.
According to Mike Downey, head of Cavendish Management Resource, which is handling the commercial issues associated with the technology, the research also applies to DVD style storage media, "That figure has also been revised upwards: to 245GB on a single sided device," he said.
It sounds like I should put off buying a new 20 gig HD.
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