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Philips Blue Laser Itty Bitty Disc Drive
Acid-F1ux writes "Over at news.com they are running a story about how Philips is demonstrating a prototype miniature disc drive that uses a coin-size disc capable of storing nearly twice as much data as a standard-sized CD. "
"I guess I'll have to go buy the White Album again."
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The article didn't say anything about how fast the drive is. Any more info?
With all the new pushes towards something to replace the CD, I'm glad to see Philips involved again. They did well with the CD and this sounds like somethingt really useful and worth an upgrade as oppose to things like DataPlay.
-N
... you KNOW this has to be a marketing ploy :)
Cool tech though, by all means.
Anyone else smell TekWar?
Imagine getting drunk, playing cards with your friends, and accidentally placing your pr0n collection as ante instead of a quarter...
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I hope they put a case around it ala minidisc. It's so hard to keep your CDs unscratched as it is, a tiny disc will only make it harder.
N
God is real unless declared integer.
Sweet. I can fit 1000 of these things in my bed-side stand, vs 30 CD's. And they hold more too. More pr0n!!
Coin sized disc? Can I use them at the peep show instead of tokens?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I'd hate to work in tech support after this technology starts proliferating...
Instead of: "The cup holder on my computer is broken!"
It will become: "The coin slot on my computer ate my quarter! I was just trying to pay for my Amazon order in cash..."
------------------------------------
Spiral out... keep going.
SO with this new technology replaces the CD the RIAA will charge 30$ a one of these becuase its a new techonogy. And I think i have a hard time not losing my CDs now... Just wait. I dont know about paying for a HighEnd program that costs like 500$-2000$ that comes on 3 or 4 coin sized CDs? If you ever needed to back up that would be the case.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Good movie.
Keep Austin Weird!
While it sounds great I can only wonder about how long it will take before this technology is affordable enough for the average user. And does any IT company out there stop and think that there is such a thing as too small?
Okay, yes this is somewhat offtopic, but am I the only one who is seeing this story text render all screwy with Mozilla (the words "demonstrating a prototype" are all mashed over the top of each other), but appear just fine in IE? I would think that if any site were to be sure to render properly in Mozilla, it would be /. Or maybe it's just my comp. I did find it amusing, though.
Do not read this sig.
Now I'll have more small crap to loose! To quote Crow T. Robot - "I wanna dance!" ;)
But it seems like there are a lot of new ventures into the storage device market... I wonder when all the dust settles which one will be adopted the quickest. My bet, is that it'll be the one with fewer moving parts, and the highest seek rate... sounds like IBM, but the dust is far from being settled....
dmarien
This will be a wonderful tool for our business. We store a lot of items on cd media, and our vault is filling up at an incredible rate. We use several medium's to back up our data, but some clients require their data be kept on cd's to avoid having to buy a 4000 dollar dlt drive if they need some of the data. We could save a lot of room if we used this instead. I am all for it, since the 3" discs didn't quite work out the way Sony wanted. Hoorah!
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
It seems like the idea still needs a whole lot of work. I mean, yes, it gets lots of cool points for having coin sized discs...but how do you carry them around. I have problems finding cds...what do you do about things that are even smaller. And, how do you carry them around and still take advantage of the tiny size. It seems having a disc clanging around in your pocket with your change would be a bit tough on it...and it seems that putting it in a nice firm jewel case would up the size a good bit. Does anyone know how they plan to take care of problems like that?
this is probably like all those other "new standards" ...
anyone remember the data minidisk ? dataplay ? dvd+r ? countless others?
let's hope this one gets cheap, medium fast, and marketed *very* quickly.
yeah right...
why must new techology always like to be smaller. Instead of fitting twice as much on a coin sized cd why not fit a lot more Gb on a regular sized CD?
1, How can we read the labels?
2. How hard will they be to keep track of?
3. What happends to liner notes?
Still, interesting idea. But why not make cd-sized discs that could hold 20-50 CD's worth of information? That'd be what.... 0.2 LOC? (Library of Congress)
TODO: Something witty here...
It takes a lot of money to develop and market a mini-drive for devices," Craig said.
"The advantage for Philips is that they have been in the market for years," Craig said.
Am i reading this right? Philips has been in the market for mini-drive devices for years?
The technology is pretty damn cool, but it's like every other bit of cool technology we hear about - more than likely it'll take years before it's in wide-spread use. In this case, I don't really see the point though. A DVD can hold much more information and because of that my DVD drive is good for playing discs that contain movies, lots of media, games, regular CDs, whatever. There's no reason to add another (smaller) data storage format to the PC... ...and in the case of other consumer-level products that might use this: what's the point? The main use for CDs right now is to hold audio, but the vast majority of artists can't even fill a CD with music.
So, really, what's the point?
(by the way, I AM aware that the technology is cool, I just think that making a tiny disc that doesn't offer any real storage advantage was a poor choice to make use of it)
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
Just some ideas.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"The advantage for Philips is that they have been in the market for years..."
:) Wonder if they could be benifited from having a 3 cm wide CD that holds 1 GB of data :)
Really? The only thing that comes to mind when i hear their name are their high quality electric shavers
dmarien
Only a prototype? YEARS ago, on Beyond 2000, i saw a demo of this technology.. and only now they have come up with a prototype? I guess it's called Beyond 2000 for a reason...
Can somebody please just come up with a convenient, inexpensive storage medium that allows me to back up these giant (~100GB) hard drives. I haven't had a decent backup medium in years and the commercial stuff is far too expensive for the average consumer.
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
At what stage will these advances in data storage become pointless. Getting a HD that can store 100Gb is possible today. These advances mean that today we can store 14 or so DVD movies on a single drive, in future, and we are only talking 10 years here. You will be able to store "Blockbusters" entire collection on your hard-drive.
So there must come a point where financially there is no reason to buy a bigger drive because consumers cannot use it up.
Now big business and the military will always be able to use it up. As will scientists and universities. But for the consumer this is talking about the day where your MP3 player stores millions of albums and is the size of a credit card... question is "how will you plug in the headphones"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Too little, too late. It's not a big enough capacity to replace CD's for storage while a much bigger format (DVD) is getting ready to take hold. ZIP drives faced this. They had greater capacity than floppy disks, but with CD's taking hold, they seemed like a waste to many people. Sure, they sold quite a few, but their window was bigger and their capacity were still 80x bigger than floppies. This, however, is twice the capacity as a CD? Not enough. If you want to make something, make it atleast comparable to DVD in capacity. I don't think most people really care that much about physical size when it comes to removable media.
News.com had a link that points to related stories, in case you want the bigger picture.
Located here, it contains a story from May 2002 (when they were first getting the technology ready).
That's right. Philips' blue lasers shrink discs.
Let me guess the next story.... IBM opens Linux technology center ? ;)
Assuming there's a direct relationship between surface area and memory capacity. so this is nit even a two-fold improvement over DVD (I think a dual layered DVD holds about 9.4G of data).
My other sig is extremely clever...
It's the development of the cost-efficient blue LED that is responsible for the blue laser. It's development is also responsible for the massive, low-power, groovy LED video displays in Vegas, NY, Tokyo, etc.
Best Windows Freeware
...it isn't hard enough to lose backup CD's as it stands.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
If there things cost less than $20, they'd totally wipe out the microdrive niche for high-end cameras - who cares if each picture takes 20MB when i've got 5 of these in my pocket.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The credit card form factor is better for rescue CDs, in your wallet for those times when the server won't boot at a client's place. These are just for PDAs and cameras and maybe walkman jukeboxes, once they are burnable for cheap of course.
It would seem that a lot of you missed the point that the form factor is just "cool" so they're mentioning it, but of course this will scale up to high capacity optical 5" discs, each fitting the contents of the British Library AND the library of congress...
Or how about using these discs inside old 3.5" disc cases? That would make them easy to handle and should they be RW it would be a bonus.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
why not use the same technology to mass produce a recordable 5 1/4 inch (or so) media that I can do my backups on without having to break my archives into a series of CD's? If they mass produce it quickly and make it inexpensive enough, the proliferation will give them a huge jump on their market share. Still, if they want my business, it'll have to run in Linux...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Ok, they came out with coin sized disks. That's only a marketing ploy. There are too many problems related to having small disks (just read the first 50 or so responses).
But, imagine how much data they'd be able to store on CD sized media with the density they are using on a coin sized disk . . . now *that* is interesting!
A (hopefully) cheap way for me to back up my data without having to resort to SAN or tape.. The article mentions that they're hoping to get standard-size discs to store upto 27GB of data... I could back up my home system on just *3* CDs!
.wavs to play in the non-MP3 car stereo) only to find out that your favorite player can't read it....
Of course, given the price of DVD writers initially, I'd expect these to be quite pricey when they first come out.
I didn't see any mention of backwards-compatibility with current devices. Imagine burning 27GB of MP3s (or
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
In other news, i'll continue using my standard 700MB CDs.
God, this is the kind of new technology that makes me giddy!! Imagine the things that could benefit from tiny mass storage devices. Imagine your digital music player that holds 1000 MB instead of a paltry 64 or 128. A digital camera that holds hundreds of high-resolution photos instead of 30 or so. Sure, these aren't new ideas, but they'll be so much BETTER with this tech. Remember in MIB when he's got the enitre Elvis collection on one of those tiny disc's? That could become a reality in the not so distant future. The possibilites of a cheap, portable, mass storage medium has me drooling. I have a few questions though.
How much? Just how expensive will devices based on this technology be?
Standard? There appears to be a lot of key companies in this "Blu-Ray" group. Does that mean consumers can expect a standard medium, or are there going to be 5 different manufacturer versions that we need to check compatability agaist.
When? When will these devices become available to the public? Or, more likely, how long will it take for the 'How Much' question to be answered with 'cheap enough for your average consumer'.
Re-Writability? Are these devices write once, or can the be re-written several times over? I've been waiting for the difinitive floppy disk replacement for a long time. Zip hasnt cut it. Super-disc hasn't cut it. But cheap portable 1 gig storage? Yeah, now you got me interested.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
This looks pretty cool but one has to wonder if it will make it or if it will go the way of the minidisc. I guess the market will decide, but right now CD's are pretty entrenched (even with the MP3 players that are out now).
The Anti-Blog
I would lose those....too small. ;)
Great Linux Site
I can't find my keys, and they expect me to be able to manage these?
Portable Storage is kind of like other portable devices, there is a size that is too small. The super small Motorola flip-phone? Too small for me, I'd lose or break it.
What might make more sense a a group of these in a cd-player magazine type configuration. It's big enough to keep track of, and holds a crapload of info. Not small enough to fall in between your couch cushions never to be seen again. Just think of how much change you find behind, or beside the driver seat in your car. I can wash my car every couple weeks with what rolls out of my pockets.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
"This little sucker is going to replace CDs. Looks like I'm going to have to buy the White Album again." (Men in Black)
The prototype drive measures just 5.6 by 3.4 by 0.75cm--suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, handhelds and cell phones--but the company is continuing to work to shrink the drive.
.WAV action.
Two things :
(1) Make excellent conversation recorders once the recording devices get small enough.
(2) Now I can set my cell phone ringer to say : "Excuse me sir, but you have a phone call." in CD-quality butler-style
Tim
---
I guess I should start calling my cell phone Jeeves.
But the most important things these days is bandwidth, there are now two major bottlenecks in a PC: from CPU to RAM and from RAM to permanent (random access) storage.
Also, as discs make more noise when they spin faster and people want ever more quiet PCs, the experienced noise of storage devices will most likely be a more important factor than how much it can store.
And probably energy consumption for portable devices...
It's good to see that they used a standard measurement for size (a US quarter) but how about the standard 'Libraries of Congress' instead of this 'two cds' crap. Who the hell knows how much a cd holds, anyways???
do not read this line twice.
"The group is pushing a new blue-laser format for standard-sized CDs, which will increase their capacity to 27GB"
:)
THAT will be cool... 120 gig HD on about 5 CD's...
hehehe
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
So there must come a point where financially there is no reason to buy a bigger drive because consumers cannot use it up.
That would seem to make sense, but in my experience it's simply not true. No matter how unbelievably enormous my hard drives seem when I get them, over time I really have no trouble filling them up.
My theory is that (a power user's) disk usage scales proportionally with the amount of available disk space. You get a new drive, and fill it up with less 'compressed' data - like using lossless codec instead of MP3, and >1GB DivX files instead of 500MB ones. Install more games in "FULL" rather than playing off the CD's. And use duplicate disks in RAID for backups.
Itty Bitty Disc Drive? Let's just call it an EDBDCD-ROM.
Is anyone else reminded of the discs they used on SeaQuest? Those were about this size, but they came in mini-disc style cases. I love it when technology catches up with SF predictions.
In some ways, we'll never catch up to SeaQuest, though. I don't imagine there are many hackers who look like Jonathan Brandis, for instance.
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Spiral out... keep going.
Oh size DOES matter. You can't fit a 5.25" disk in a digicam, and the 3.5" disks make for a bulky mess (Sony's CD digicam is a little to big to fit in your pocket). With a coin size disk they will work nicely in the average pocket size digicam. I think the disk will have to be enclosed in a little plastic case (about the size of a compact flash or smart media card) or they will get lost in your pocket and damaged.
I agree! Why don't they keep the 12cm format, allowing people to put GBs of data on it? Can you imagine? You could put a whole movie on MPEG-2 format in such a disk! Perhaps, you could even put extra material, let's say, making ofs, commentaries, etc. They could even create double layered media, allowing for larger capacity. These versatile disks (let's call them DVDs, for Digital Video/Versatil Disk, for now) would be really cool. I would certainly by one!
"I don't really see the point [...]. A DVD can hold much more information"
Did you bother reading the article? Or, do you actually understand the DVDs that you seem so fond of?
This mini CD can hold 27GB of data. DVDs are much smaller, as well as being four times the diameter. The biggest DVDs (dual-layer, dual-sided), which I doubt you see very often, are just over half the capacity.
For some reason, I forsee a lot of these devices getting lost around laudromats and arcades.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Do I hear an opportunity knocking on my front door???
[Knock Knock]
Homeowner: May I help you?
Me [beaming]: Hello maam, I'm here to make my rounds.
Homeowner: Your rounds?
Me: I'm here to collect the money in your computer.
Homeowner: Oh yes, right this way...
Me: [tinkering] Maam, Is this a slug?
Homeowner: [shocked] I... I... thought
Me: You thought you could get away with it?
Homeowner: [shakes head]
Me: I'm going to need you to pay your balance off right now, maan.
Homeowner: You take cash?
Me: Why certainly! [smiles + winks + thumbs up]
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
IBM has had a similar sized drive for a while, what fit into a full size PCMCIA slot. Also, I would imagine that these drive are just as fragile as regular hard drives, which would make them less suitable for things like cameras and phones, which is the stated target. The article didn't really go into that.
Does anyone know if these things are somehow more durable than a normal hard drive?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Shit. Sorry: not enough caffeine. I need to read the article more clearly. It's the standard 12cm discs that will be 27GB.
Philips is developing blue laser technology for use as a digital video recorder, but with removable media. See it here. It sounds like they want to continue to use a hard drive like in TiVo for short term storage, but then have a built-in (re)writable media for removable storate built on optical blue laser technology. Seems like a pretty neat idea to me, but I doubt this particular techology will stick.. too costly to impliment, and all the momentum is moving towards DVD.
only 2 dollars for 4 G of storage ;)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
How durable are they? i assume with a smaller laser, they're just putting more lines and bits onto one CD. with lines closer together, wouldn't that mean that even a slight smudge would obliterate obscene amounts of data? thus, they really need a case, as previously stated. which would only work with the small "coin sized" version, and not with the regular CD/DVD-sized version (those would just be monstrous)
You thought you misplaced your CD now:
Examining pocket contents:
quarter
quarter
dime
nickel
*lint*
quarter
"Ah ha! Theres my pr0n collection!"
I would welcome the opportunity to have 1.3gb's accessible by a PDA or other small handheld device
I doubt something like this will take over the music industry and replace regular CDs, but for handheld devices such as cameras and mp3 decoders -- this is perfect. Instead of carrying around your normal-cd-sized Discman, you will be able to carry a much smaller and lighter device for listening to music. For cameras, this could easily replace the microdrive (if they can get the burning technology small and cheap enough to fit in a camera)
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
what makes you think well still be using headphones and not peizoelectric implants? either way plugging in is the way of the past.
I want 2D games back.
The article seems to suggest that the CD's will be writable, but it does not specifically state that they are. They talk about camara's and replacement for flash cards, but that only holds if these babies are Blu-CD-R's, not if they are just Blu-CD's
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
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Ceci n'est pas un post
why dont you use cheap ide drives and stick them in removable caddies? you can fit over 300 cd's on one of the big 160 gig drives. if you put them in a caddy you can unmount the drives and remove them for storage. i would imagine the cost for the harddrive solution would be comprable, and the retrieval and storage would be more conveniant.
just a thought.
-- john
Everybody keeps talking about how they are going to lose them easliy. I want to know how the hell anybody is going to be able to label them/read the labels? And will game discs come with packaging that is 20 times too big instead of 5 times too big?
but this is getting so small it will become a liabilty and get lost...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
-
It's only 500MB(Or was that 1GB... small change anyway)
-
They're shooting for $10USD, and longterm plans no lower that 8
If they were WAY first to market, they could get some sales from early adopters and those whe have to have the "coolest" stuff, but with vastly superior product from the big guys just around the corner, I'm afraid they're going to lose their shirts on this one. Too bad they couldn't have gotten it out back when they planned to.Okay. How did that happen? Looks like "Preview" did a "Submit" as well. I probably fatfingered (fatmoused?) it.
Gotta buy the White Album again....
The MiniDisc is not so mini, and it requires lossy compression to store a full album.
I've never seen a non-Sony MD player. Is the technology licensed to any other companies?
just read the article...
The group is pushing a new blue-laser format for standard-sized CDs, which will increase their capacity to 27GB.
-- john
I read something in Popular Science a couple days ago -- quick blurb about the blue-laser DVDs which will be holding 27G, enough for a couple hours of high-definition video..
I can't WAIT for this technology to become available.. There's no way in hell I'd consider D-VHS, it's only selling point until this was the fact that a DVD couldn't hold high-def video due to storage capacity..
Hopefully we'll see a blue-laser DVD player with (PLEASE!!!) backwards compatibility and High-Def upconvert capabilities (even though most HD sets do this for you anyways)..
Everyone is making their own propritary formats and promptly saying IT will be the floppy/CD-R of the future. I'll tell each and every one of you what the format of the future is: PCMCIA, PC Cards.
That's right, if every PC came with a couple front-mounted PCMCIA slots, we would have the PERFECT solution. You could boot off of flash cards with capacities from 4MB-2GB... At about $0.50/MB. They're cheap enough to hand around, and, unlike floppies or CDs, no matter how big of a file you want to hold, you can get a card with the exact capacity.
Of course, with a small adapter, you could stick in CompactFlash cards as well. And you aren't limited to just solid-state either.
If you wished, you could stick a small hard drive (2.5") in an external case which plugs into a PCMCIA slot. Then you have a drive which the BIOS can't even tell isn't native (it sees it as a drive on a new controller), unlike USB, where you have many limitations in function and speed (PCMCIA slots are just like little hot-swapable external PCI slots). In addition, unlike the low-power USB/Firewire ports, bus power would be suffecient for ANY drive.
Of course, those who want capacity, but don't want large size can spend a little more for PCMCIA or CompactFlash hard drives. No worries about battery-life, and a pocket drive that can be transfered to any system.
And finally, those ports could also be used for NICs, CD Burners, crypto-cards, modems, etc.
I do have one problem... There isn't any cross-platoform file system out there! FAT32 is the most compatible, but doesn't support filesystems larger than 32GB, requires defragmenting, and doesn't support serious file attributes. What would be great is something like a UFS/FFS filesystem drive for Windows! That would solve all my problems... But, even something like a port of XFS, or Reiser FS to MANY more platoforms would work (but geez, the number of platforms is staggering. Most already have UFS/FFS support.)
So? Any suggestions?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I knew I had seen this story before... or at least something like it...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Interesting the article mentioned DataPlay... The big controversy was they were implementing all sorts of RIAA-friendlyness right into the format... It wasn't really that much of an improved technology, just another attempt to sshlt on consumers and shove DRM down our throats. Being that this is Philips, not Sony or some RIAA lapdog, I'd wager to say they were less concerned with protecting their money^H^H^H^H^Hartists' rights, and more concerned with making a good, reliable format that consumers and the computer industry will actually want to use.
you know in all reality phillips owns alot of patents including the CD format. maybe we should start riding them about letting the mpaa/riaa use there patents. i mean not completely stop them but hold them hostage and get them to lower prices.
of course thats about has likely as MTV actually playing music.
or a top 20 band that has talent.
(*now thats what i call a sick joke*)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Whatever you do, don't buy the Black Album (aka The Emperor's New Clothes) as we don't want Messrs. Hetfield and Ulrich to benefit from this new technology :-)
Stick Men
Note: Philips is concerned with protecting their money.
But what's good for the consumer is good for Phillips . Happens to bad for the RIAA, but Phillips obviously doesn't care too much for them, because the RIAA's pushes at DRM, etc. hurt sales of Phillips products.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Sorry boss... I did those TPS reports you wanted, but unfortunately I used them to do my laundry last night.
Rofl..ok, I dont' have the points to mod this up or I would ;)
;)
NTL, I'd say this could actually make a great _intentional_ betting scheme.. everyone brings a half dozen disks of pron and the betting begins..
G
I think I'll just wait for holographic storage (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010423S0113) before I change from CDs.....
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Shit. Sorry: not enough caffeine. I need to read the article more clearly. It's the standard 12cm discs that will be 27GB.
Yeah. That's what I was saying. It'd be cool if Philips was showing off some regular CD-sized discs that can hold 27gb of data - but a tiny one that can hold 1gb isn't very interesting.
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
"...uses a coin-size disc capable of storing nearly twice as much data as a standard-sized CD. "
I'd prefer, say, a coaster-sized media that stores 20x the capacity of a CD. CD's are becoming small, and just as I would find little use for a dot-sized media that could store the contents of a floppy drive, I will find less use for any size media that can hold a CD-worth of data by the time it would take to make such a device ubiquitous.
And the Mac OS X users wouldn't complain about it either. OS X already supports UFS.
NTFS is a tough nut to crack. At least HFS+ has specs available. I'm not sure because I've never looked at the code, but there may even be source code for an HFS+ file system in the Darwin project. There are at least two commercial HFS+ file system drivers for Windows, but that could leave Linux users in the cold. (Does Linux have HFS+ support yet?)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I've wondered in the past what the smallest form factor for technologies like this is, in terms of human usability. A CD isn't particularly big, and it's physically easy to insert into a player. It's considerably more difficult to insert a quarter ($.25) sized disc into a slot; how many quarters have you dropped over the years trying to feed vending machines, video games, etc? How many CDs have you dropped while trying to load them?
The same thought goes for devices like PDAs, phones, and laptops. Logic says these should be as small as possible, and probably unified into one device. But human hands require large keyboards (if keyboard input is used) and human eyes require large screens (if visual output is used). A nice thought is screens which fold up like paper, and unfold to whatever size is required. Audio output and input (voice recognition) don't require much physical size, but there are many tasks which are not well suited for voice input. Or so I think, but then I'm used to a keyboard.
Great. Just what I need in something portable like a camera is another moving part. The nice thing about flash memory is that is doesn't have any moving parts = fewer things that will wear out or have to made shock resistant.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Yes! Now I can have one of the little disks like on cherry 2000.
thus, they really need a case, as previously stated. which would only work with the small "coin sized" version
A case about the size of a compactflash card would be perfect. That'd be my ideal removable storage media if it were around that size and as durable. Easy to smuggle on those corporate espionage jobs too.
I lose enough change down the couch and car seats, now I have to dig for my CD's too.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
The issue of taking any sized disc (12cm, 3cm, what have you) and using pits small enough and densely packed enough to achieve the capacity that Philips has doesn't seem practical to me.
When you consider that a blue laser with a wavelength of ~425nm is reading information off of a 3cm disc, that makes the pits pretty damn small. When you're talking about capacity in the 1GB range on such a disc, the disc simply must be a multi-layer (probably 3-4) multi-substrate hybrid unlike any DVD or CD we know.
With this new technology, people must realize that such a disc is incredibly susceptible to scratching and will require a caddy. When DVD was still being discussed back in the day, it was assumed that the discs would all be in caddies but that was deemed inappropriate by marketing folks.
A 1cm scratch on a 12cm CD disc renders the disc with 83% of the surface intact and 581Mb of 700Mb intact. Compare that to a DVD with 5.7Gb of data... that's a loss of 969Mb!
Now, a 1cm scratch on a 3cm disc is a 33% loss of data. Scratch this disc and you lose 348.16 Megs! That's not good! Hey Philips, ENFORCE CADDIES! -Hualon
"Ever have a problem when you're lying naked on your money..."
Hehee, and you could come into some money!
graspee
In the Star shows they are always manipulating memory devices about the size of a credit card. Thats a good size for human hands. Round ones may role away and waste corner real estate.
In trekno-babble, an "iso-linear memory card" holds "kilo-quads" of data. People have speculated that means 10^18 bits (one thousand quadrillion) or a hundred million gigabytes. I'd guess about every atomic particle need be a memory cell then. Hey, with Moore's law adding a zero every five years, thats just 40 years from now!
However, with things like the USB keychains you can do this. I think we should try to get away from formats like CDs and look at expanding on things that are more self-contained. I think that is the way of the future. I await my 50GB USB (or even firewire!) keychain.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Get another cheep 100GB hdd
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Phillips format will win out, of course, just like their Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).
somethign the size of a quarter = 2CDs, why not make the media the size of a normal CD? Wouldn't that make it hold a whole lot more data?
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Why change the size? Well, if they didnt change the size of the disc then they are losing tons of money that they would be making on the new players, for these new discs. Plus people with small minds are attracted to small things, or and you are more likely to lose the new disc, therefore requiring you to buy more.
"where are we going, and why am I in a handbasket"
Does someone make a magic market small enough to break the copy protection?
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I hope that they aren't putting in all sorts of Digital Rights Management crap, such as DataPlay has done. Hint to anyone in charge of this stuff: people don't want to pay money so that will be RIAA happy. People want unencumbered technologies that treat them like adults, and give them the flexibility to do as they see fit.
company invented uv/blue volume holographic
storage technology and is developing its
patented technology.
http://colossalstorage.net/colossal.htm
There's an interesting link at the bottom of the story with infor on "Blu-ray Disc it's exactly what you talking about.
25gb - (copy protection * encripton )= 650MB.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
thus, you'd need a large media size, such as CD size.
which would be way too bulky by that point to be acceptable.
i agree though, perfect for digital cameras. or digital video cameras. yeh, i'd use a regular CD sized disk in a protection case for a video.DVD uses a green laser.
The Blu-Ray technology is cool, but I don't see the point of this 3cm device. IBM has had their 1GB CompactFlash drive out for a couple years now. They can feasibly increase its capacity to 6GB. Toshiba has a PC Card (typeII) drive that's got at least 5GB and they may go to 20GB.
Introducing a new proprietary format for storage is stupid, unless it really breaks some new ground. I am not impressed with 1GB on a 3cm disc.
27GB on a CD is great. If they stick to the CD format costs will be kept down and hopefully CDRW read/write speeds will keep increasing. Maybe we will be able to use them as our main storage.
"The group is pushing a new blue-laser format for standard-sized CDs, which will increase their capacity to 27GB. "
How long before Circuit City discontinues Pre-Recorded DVD sales in favor of the new SUPER-CD movie format.
A.C.
Instead of researching a way to make the media easier to lose than a ink pen or loose change, I would much rather see the technology used to increase the density on a 5" disc. Not only would it not be so easy to lose, but you can fit x-many of those tiny discs on one convinient medium.
Seriously, with 8 gigs of mp3s, I would like to put them all on one portable medium.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I believe that if twice the content of a CD-ROM can be stored on something the size of a coin, the technology should be extended to discs the size of CD-ROMS.
What I'm really looking forward to is discs the size of CD-ROMS with storage capacities in the multi-exabyte range, which can be completely "burnt" in a few minutes... that would be really huge. I can imagine companies with tons and tons of data running automated systems that transfer nearly all of their rarely-changing data to these discs, and union-mounting them for the ability to modify data. Better yet, if the discs could be read and written like a hard drive, you'd really have a solution.
Oh yeah... what drives me mad about burning CDs is that you can't do anything else with the computer at the same time, or it screws up the CD. I can't understand why CD-RW drives can't be built with 700 MB of RAM inside the drive. When you insert a CD, it would immediately begin copying the entire CD into the RAM for really fast access. If you try and access something that isn't in RAM yet, it'll read it directly off the disc, placing it in RAM at the same time. Once all the RAM is full, all accesses to the CD-ROM are nearly instantaneous. And when you want to record a CD, all the data will be transferred in a matter of perhaps a minute, and then you can do whatever you want with your computer while the recording process happens in the CD-RW hardware, with no computer intervention. Aren't our main processors doing enough already?
Seriously, the main processor should do computations and things that are critical to the efficient operation of the computer. For all other purposes, including user interface and whatever, there should be other processors. Imagine how fast crap will run if your desktop, including X, your wm and everything else ran inside a separate processor. It wouldn't even need to be such a fast processor, and better yet, if the user interface crashes, it won't bring down the rest of the program. But I digress. Oooooooooooh well.
A foldout smart phone that stores its extremely robust embedded Linux OS on one of these CD's along with a slew of applications, a nice color display, and a 256 MB flash card to save your work. That would rock out while doing the goat sign.
> That's right, if every PC came with a couple front-mounted PCMCIA slots, we would have the PERFECT solution. You could boot off of flash cards with capacities from 4MB-2GB... At about $0.50/MB. They're cheap enough to hand around, and, unlike floppies or CDs, no matter how big of a file you want to hold, you can get a card with the exact capacity.
That's your innate flaw of using PCMCIA Flash. Real hard drives, even USB2/Firewire adapted, cost at most (and this is high) $4 / GB. Blank CDs cost, what, nothing per CD? I wait for deals and only pay tax (and get a rebate for the actual price) anymore.
Zip offers a cheaper alternative for high storage. At around $.05-$.10 / MB for a disk ( = $5-$10, 100MB) for a (usually) bootable disk high realtively high read/write storage.
The problem with your argument comes with the very high price. Now, for a 4MB flash card, $2 is just fine. But they'd never get away with $50 for the equivalent of a Zip disk in size, much less the $1000 it would cost for a 2GB card. I can get a 180GB SCSI hard drive for that cost.
I'm not saying I wouldn't want to use PCMCIA for lots of things, but with it's current cost it really is not feasble.
Anyway, Philips thought that it was only good enough for 'talking letters' (and it was then). It took a few Japanese companies to convince Philips that the cassette could be tweeked for music, but Kudos to Philips, who did invent it.
Blue wavelength is tremendously smaller then red, and that is the entire developement here, right? I mean, yes they have to master details like light production, focus, etc... but blue leds have been around for ages.
Am I missing something, or should this have been invented, like, 5-10 years ago? What has been holding it back? Anyone know? And why are we stopping at blue? Is UV not feasable?
The wavelength difference between blue and UV isn't as large as between red and blue, but if you make 2.7x10^10 (is that right?) blips incrementally smaller, you gain a lot of space.
Anyone else see an article like this in another 20 years claiming to use UV to fit 1300Mb onto a bit of wedding confetti?
Remember the old puzzle?? How many grooves on a record?? Two .. one on each side.
This is an issue where size shouldn't matter. Record grooves started on the outside, so the dumb needle had to know what size the record was in order to be placed down. CDs start the 'groove' in the center. So other than having the same, standard sized hole in the middle, there is nothing that prevents a CD player from playing a 2", 4", or 12' CD as long as it can accomodate the physical CD.
The only thing that may prevent CDs from not even having a hole at all are the speed and size of the data in the inner rings v/s the outer and having to hold and spin the CD. Just start at the center and work the laser out until it finds something it can read.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
CDs are okay for STATIC content... The problem is simply that there is no easy way to delete or change a file, even if you are only on systems with CD-RWs. With a hard drive and such, you can write and rewrite to your heart's content. You can even boot off of them... Those CD limitations are exactly why we still have floppy drives. I admit CDs will still have their place... But who said they had to go extinct? I pointed out that those same PCMCIA ports can be put to good use by plugging in other devices such as CD burners, et al. Any way you look at it, PCMCIA is a MUCH better solution than USB for CD writers, Hard Drives, NICs, solid state storage, etc.
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NTFS still requires defragmenting, and doesn't _really_ support extended attributes well.
HFS+ may work on OS X and Windows (perhaps even Linux) but what about all the others? Even if FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, got drivers, commerical Unices are out in the cold. What about HP-UX, Tru64/DEC Unix, Solaris, AIX, OpenVMS, and the like... Many flavors of Unix include UFS/FFS support (including Mac OS X as you mentioned), so I automatically thought of UFS drivers for Windows as the perfect solution.
On that thought, I've considered EXT2, but besides not being as stable or as widely supported, it doesn't have solid drivers for Windows (go ahead, write to it under Windows two or three times and watch your data disappear).
I'm still open to suggestions.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I can just see it now...
With all change given out at (insert every store, fast food place, and other vender here), you get AOL version 8.0!! Yes, it is the quarter sized thing that gets you a couple million hours on AOL for 50 days... If you want the username and password though... you must ask the service desk...
(and thus, small quarter sized disks with a stamped AOL logo on the front invade the change of Humans everywhere.... and it is SO easy!)
ThinkGeek offers the Teac Mini-CD/MP3 Player, pretty compact unit (3.7" x 1.1" x 4.1").
I'd buy one right away but, oh wait, ThinkGeek doesen't ship outside the U.S... (idiots)
crazy dynamite monkey
Will it come with an itty-bitty felt-tip pen so I can listen to the content of the discs?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm not old enough to remember much about this stage in any past next generation format wars. I barely remember 3.5" floppies coming in.
:) For a few years now there have been allot of new formats fighting for the top. DVD is dead, its only living because the MPAA pushes it. As far as im concerned, its out-of-date and burners and disks are too expensive (lots of people will argue there). Zip is pretty much there, but its just too small to be anything other than a document and image carrying format. Lots of new formats are arriving with "superior" digital rights management (its amazing how that phrase almost makes it sound good!). At the moment, its a tangled mess of proprietary junk. Im sure we have hit a stage like this before?
Obviously, from what i see. CD/CDR/CDRW has pretty much taken over the floppy for exchanging data. And you know a format has truly been tried and tested when people start using units as coasters, and manufacturers make card-shaped versions
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I used IDE drives (or ATA, whateever) and have always complained that drive accesses take 100% of my CPU time. When I was using SCSI, I didn't have this problem since the controller was separate. Kind of like I/O acceleration. SCSI is expensive, though.
The previous poster mentioned Burn-Proof technology, I'd like to second that notion.
What is with this incessant desire to make things ever smaller and smaller? I'm just going to take my teeny tiny Motorola V. Series 66 phone, my ultra slim Fujitsu LifeBook S-4510 , which of course is running with QNX as the operating system, viewing the worlds smallest website and neatly set them all in my Mini Cooper S and drive off the nearest curb, falling to my death while transferring all my life's memories onto my IBM Microdrive.
It is if you're using a 6+ megapixel digital camera and each RAW shot takes up 7.5MB. The only way the D60 gets to 1GB today is through a microdrive.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I'd missplace the disk, and probably the drive too, about 30 minutes after purchasing them. I can't keep track of my media as it is. There's never a felt tip sharpie pen around when you need one. Not to mention the choking hazard it poses for the small computer users.
Love and Peace,
Valen
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen
OK, maybe I listen to different bands than you do (:-), but there are lots of two-CD album sets out there, and they've figured out how to cram that into a jewel box while making it only mildly dangerous to open while driving a car ... It's probably more common for old hippie bands releasing lots more material, but unfortunately, a twice-the-capacity-of-CD disk isn't enough to hold an entire night's concert without compression (though if you make the player smart enough to handle shorten lossless compression you could fit most concerts on the new disk format, if not usually on the old.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The main market for these "coin sized disks" will not be to replace the CD but to be used in places where previously the only storage options were solid state. Think about having 1GB of data storage in your cell phone for example, no more limits on the number of contacts or amount of programs. Also think of the PDA market, now you can port real program over to these things since you will have the space to run them from. Of course all this assumes that these disks will run at decent speeds and not to very movement sensitive. Don't just think of these as a replacement for the standard CD, think of theese as a replacement for those damn flash RAM cards.
a paint made from cd-rw material could be used for a new data storage system.
Need more space? just paint some more!
Or just think what could happen if it were used on the body: "Honey, take off your shirt again, I need that file....."
Pi
At least for now. CD-Rs go on sale for as little as 15 cents, at which point it doesn't really _matter_ that they're write-once. And unlike floppies, the write-once feature makes them much less likely to propagate viruses, because you won't be reusing them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think the storage space would be good and easier but the cost, durability, and expected quality/efficancy are not thought of or miss judged. I'd strongly suggest a few personal tests for YOUR personal needs/uses for the disk They sound like an amazing peice of work and I'd probably be a 'Ultra Mini Disk' user!
~Entaundo
I agree to a point with the noise issue. Check out tomshardware.com for some noise test on disk drives. The newer/more expensive ones are less noisy than older/cheaper ones. My in-laws have a 10,000RPM drive that's much quieter than any of my 7,200RPM drives, for example.
Also, I would debate the speed issue, unless you do a lot of drive-sized copies, or are concerned about network storage. I think that for what the average Joe uses his drive for, the current (133) internal data/bus speeds are adequate. Why do think this will be an issue with larger disks?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
wow all these clueless posts whining about losing these cds etc. geech it up geechtards try reading sometime, this is not a standard to replace current sized cd/dvd's, this is a small media solution for current "PORTABLE DEVICE" space limitations, theres no intention for it replacing the cd in mass volume, they have normal sized blue-laser cd's that can store upwards of 30gig that they are trying to bring in as a new standard in the next few years that will finally have enough space to allow true high definition video for dvdplayers (blue laser of course)..
try reading the article, they are meant as a replacement/solution for current "PORTABLE MEDIA" limitations, such as flash memory etc, not as a replacement for normal cd/dvd's in mass volume, so quit all the "omg so small ill lose or damage it!".. they have blue-laser discs that are standard size that can hold upwards of 30gig aiming to replace current dvd's because they have the space to allow true high definition video now & of course everything else..
p.s dont wet ur pants at a few words and remove my post again, accept the truth..
I guess it depends upon the application. As far as my computer and audio/visual collection is concerned: yes, I would like to see 12 cm 27GB discs. There are other applications though where I consider 12 cm too much, which also rules out DVDs and their derivatives. Perhaps this 12 cm 27GB disc technology could end up being used for high definition DVD?
Yes, carrying Linux on a Flashcard would be cool - but you've got to worry a lot more about Viruses if you go plugging writable devices into random machines, and lots of people aren't going to let *you* boot *their* laptop from your flash in case you might do Bad Things with it. We've gradually gotten PC users out of that habit by giving them Microsoft Virus-Propagating Email Systems instead :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
PCMCIA devices *can't* have flakey drivers... Unlike other external interfaces, PCMCIA works on the same level as the BIOS. So, if you plug in a Flash card, or external PCMCIA hard drive, no special drivers are needed. In fact, for all your computer knows, you just plugged in a new PCI IDE controller, with a hard drive attached to it.
That is a great improvement over USB (1.1/2.0), in which only a subset of functions are implimented... Which means, good luck running scandisk/chkdsk or defrag on a USB hard drive Firewire doesn't seem to have that limitation, but it is rarely included on computers, and PCMCIA will always be faster, supply more bus power, and for the same reason that PCMCIA doesn't need to worry about drivers, PCMCIA will always be more compatible with more systems and software.
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> I'll tell each and every one of you what the format of the future is: PCMCIA, PC Cards.
... Or are the 'Clik!' drives making a comeback I haven't heard of yet?