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Quarter-sized CD's?
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.
For some reason, MD didn't take off in a big way in the US, but in Japan and Europe, they are a huge success. In the UK you can buy pre-recorded minidiscs in the music stores, like CD's or vinyl.
Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player. They have totally replaced tapes and the walkman over here.
Just because the US seems to have ignored them for the last 5 years does not make them a failure...
I've had minidisc players for over a year and I see people carrying them everywhere. Over here they seem to be going from strength to strength.
There's still not much selection available prerecorded, but I don't think most people want to use them to replace CDs, just for replacing tapes and replacing CDs for on-the-move purposes.
I'm not putting down the "mother is the necessity of invention" concept. Just the idea that to create an integrated device, it must be totally incompatible with all devices. The CD is amazing: originally a read-only music format, it's now also read/write, holds data, pictures (with sony cameras that burn cds), movies (video cd), and compressed music (MP3 CD players). It also comes in a couple of form factors - the regular 8cm, the smaller version, and the credit card shape.
I think that the thing that is different about the dataplay (and that the article just barely touches upon this) is the pervasive use of encryption. His main goal is not to integrate the functionality of all devices, but to create an incompatible and secure format. Yet, the reasons why businesses would want this are a little harder to explain to the average person, so I'm just poking fun at his "I want to integrate all these evil incompatibilities" cover story.
(yep, just feeding the trolls...)
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I hope this is true, but only time will tell. If they allow these disks to be available for recording on a computer, unrestricted (as CD-R is currently), the record companies would surely complain.