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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.
Sony MiniDiscs didn't take off because they had shit fidelity. You might recall that it was the high end of the audio market which paved the way for the current CD market, i.e. I paid $650 for my first CD player, equal of which today costs ~$100. MP3, though popular is still far from mainstream, probably because the cost is too high for personal MP3 players (when you consider what it costs to buy a cheap portable cassette or CD player), besides, MP3 has low res. audio, too. CDs aren't necessarily here to stay, but they still work very well. (Of course, quality is also heavily determined by who issues the recording and how good a production job they did.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a pre-recorded minidisc in any U.S. store. So yes, I'm going by my experience... In the U.S. at least, if you got someone a minidisc player as a present, most of them would wonder what it was.
From what I know about japan, them nips just eat the MDs up. Over there in addition to prerecorded minidisc stores, they have cd rental stores, so you can just rent the cd, listen to it,(copy it) and return it a few days later. I guess they don't have as many concerns about information crimes. They also have these really cool stick batteries(about 2x as thick as a stick of gum), and tons of really cute pop stars.
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