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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.
Just some ideas.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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
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
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 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!
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
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
Solomon's Law (from Dwight Solomon, a very wise man I used to work with): Storage capacity will always expand to fill storage availability, plus 10%.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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?
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.
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.