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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, I have enough trouble keeping track of cds, the smaller they get, the more likely I am going to be to forget them and suck them up in the vacuum or something.
What?
Just some ideas.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I think he means the market for optical data storage in general... Seeing as Philips was the one inventing the CD, this seems about right...
xchg
jmp emailMe
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
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).
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
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
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!
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 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)
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.
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.
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
Shit. Sorry: not enough caffeine. I need to read the article more clearly. It's the standard 12cm discs that will be 27GB.
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.
I beg to differ, there are many reasons why this can catch on:
- If it offers fast read/write/rewrite without packet writing software and just functions like a floppy, it could catch on because CD-Rw still adds another level of complexity
- If the discs are cheap (<$0.50 each) people will choose them over writeable DVD.
- You can't put writeable DVDs or CDs into your tiny digicam.
- If these discs are designed so the actual optical storage is in a very durable protective sheath, they could catch on because CDs and CD caddies are so easy to scratch/break
-Essentially, all of these add up to the 'sneakernet' factor
And to think, this could be the precursor to that little disc you see in Star Trek First Contact that Zephram Cochrane plays when he launches the warp ship. Teehee!
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)
Philips created the CD. About 18 years ago.
And that includes 3" CDs of course, which were the first portable digital audio media, and still used in stuff like digital cameras today.
Fross
but this is getting so small it will become a liabilty and get lost...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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?
comes on 3 or 4 coin sized CDs
81-108Gb of install media?
Oh, you must mean Office XP 2004 + service packs.
RTFA They say it'll hold 27GB on a CD size...
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...
Click here or here.
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.
I used to back my Amiga HD up using identical technology. It's slow and error prone. The data gets written to the VHS tape multiple times because of the inherent potential error of converting a string of 1s and 0s to a visible format and then writing it to a low-grade analog recording device. There is no computer accessible search/find function so you either restore the entire backup or you do without the one file you just hosed.
If you didn't use the highest quality VHS tapes you could find your chances of having a good backup when you needed it were pretty slim.
It's a nice idea, but it's a hack solution.
This new 27Gb format for standard-size disks (On rereading the article, I realize I was smoking crack talking about this trashing the DataPlay on capacity and on the distribution of programs on them) is, I think, going to be the new standard for archiving. :). i think this would be quite ideal unless these are released when 2 tarabyte hardrives are the norm. i wish the slower optical storage methods could keep up with the size increases in drives.
i would have to agree with you on this one. i hadnt read that part yet either
-- john
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.
Click here or here.
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
Personally, I don't think the primary application of these will be CD replacements. Too many people are happy with their CDs right now, and don't want to replace them (which explains why DVD Audio is being so slowly adopted right now, as opposed to standard DVD movies which are flying off the shelves). These will be much better in PDAs, Digital Cameras, Portable Music Players (Imagine an Ipod with one of these drives), etc.
These things are far too small to be effective as Audio CDs. Too small to keep track of, too small for artwork, too small to effectively prevent theft in stores without very large surrounding packaging. And Philips is trying to shrink these even more!!
These discs will have a much better use for Data than Audio. This is the mistake that DataPlay is making; smaller discs that hold less than CDs and are copy-controlled; they will flop immediately. However, Philips knows that what is good for citizens (I hate to be called merely a consumer) is good for their bottom line. If they have their way, these will be small, efficient, and not copy-controlled.
"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!
Get another cheep 100GB hdd
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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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You already can...
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.
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.
> 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.
"Too many people are happy with their CDs right now..."
I respectfully disagree: There are lots of people buying solid-state MP3 players because of their size. I have a Rio that is smaller than a pack of cigs, and runs on one AA battery.
Media like this could make tiny MP3 players a very hot commodity. With CD's, 5.5" is a small as the player is going to get.
"Derp de derp."
What does size have to do with selling new players?
It's not like one of these in a standard CD form-factor is going to play in your discman. Ever tried to play a DVD on your discman?
"And that includes 3" CDs of course, which were the first portable digital audio media, and still used in stuff like digital cameras today..."
:)
Just an FYI: At CompUSA I found some 2.5" x(roughly) Black CD-RW's. Yes, RW's. I bought them because I plan on getting a mini-CD MP3 player from ThinkGeek.com eventually, but in the mean time I've found them useful in carrying data around the office. For example, I needed to get a network driver to somebody so I just burned the disk and carried it over.
Did it make a difference that I used it instead of a full sized CD? Not really, no. But when I'm ferrying data between here and home (pedestrian), those little guys are much easier to carry than their big older brothers.
In any case, if you're interested in these CD RW's, they're at CompUSA. I paid $13 for 10 of them.
"Derp de derp."
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
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.
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
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
"Wow, you must either be carrying around a LOT of files...or you are one weak motherfucker."
Heh. So I carry around so much data that I require smaller sized CD's that have less data storage?
Dontcha think you should have applied a little more logic before coming to such a ridiculous assumption.
CD's are too big to fit in my pocket. Mini-CD's fit. There, logic. Nice, iddn't it?
"Derp de derp."
1, How can we read the labels?
:(
2. How hard will they be to keep track of?
3. What happends to liner notes?
*sigh*
I'd be happy with 4" disks that hold about 4GB of data.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant