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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
JL writes "New Scientist reports that Philips has a demonstration in Japan recently of a 3cm rewritable optical disc that can store four gigabytes. The drive is small too!"
Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)
I hope they don't try to burden this format with built-in DRM, because then it will 'flop' commercially so bad that it would put even Betacam to shame.
If this technology will be cheap enough, is this not potentially useful for portable music?
Imagine using these small drives as cartridges, such as the minidiscs. It would be great, and probably widley used. Just look at those old walkmans and such. They where great in their days.
Wandering away...
Have you noticed that if you calculate the value of those movies or especially MP3s on the disc (~16$/album, ~20$/movie) the value of a disc is more than the same weight disc made out of gold.
Btw. if RIAA catches you walking around with pocket full of these discs, and those discs contain more albums than an average music store. Can they charge you similarly as if you had robbed all albums from one of their stores?
WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?
Well, most of the world has pretty good coverage. The US is the exception largely due to its vast size, but this means that unusually for a piece of technology, the US market is considered secondary. Hence, so is increasing coverage.
The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly
It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.
Think about this:
Almost every school/University I have gone to has zip disks. This was a great Idea at the time because CD Burners were so expensive.
Now, CDRW's are cheaper than zip disks. Hell the burners costs almost as much as a small pack of zip disks. CDs are pennies.
My point:
DVD+/-Rs is a safe bet. Why would anyone want to move to a format like this 4gb optical disk. It's just another "Zip Drive" of the future.
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
Floppy disk replacement isn't a matter of medium choice, there are plenty: zip, superdisk, orb, flash, et al. The problem arises from the lack of flexibilty of PC BIOS in being able to substitute those other mediums, which are often ATA/IDE based for the floppy disk.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive. Even better would be a modular BIOS that would allow BIOS-level drivers to be installed so that BIOS could boot off of other buses -- USB, 1394, and so on without an operating system-level driver.
One thing I'd like to know from BIOS experts is why this couldn't be done (especially the third "floppy" ATA connector) and what legacy OSes (*cough*DOS*cough*) would think of a floppy disk with > 2.88MB of available storage? Do they have hard-coded storage variables that can't deal with a "floppy" with capacities larger than 24 bits?
If you can hide one under a coffe cup, think of the possibilities for information theft.
Think, a white coffee cup, a white 3cm casing, a little rubber cement... no one would even know that 1-4 gigs of sensitive corporate information was leaving the building.
Small enough to be tucked into the 5th pocket on a pair of jeans, slid into a shoe without much (if any) discomfort, palmed, hidden inside a container of stress putty, even tucked into a person's hair.
Hey, isn't that roughly the size of the iPod's wheel?
Hell, 3cm is small enough to hide almost anywhere...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
Like this?
They havent got it quite right just yet. However, I've been wearing a version that clips onto your classes for over 3 years now.
Actually, the area calculations aren't quite that simple...
In a circle, if I double the diameter from 3cm to 6cm, you do have a 4x area increase. But optical media, you have to consider the empty spaces left on the inside and outside edges. Increasing to 6cm could potentially more than quadruple the capacity - I esimate about 4.3g per side, 112g for a 12cm version.
What I really want to see is a 6-disc changer made out of a 12-cm CD-style plate - something like they suggest.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
"What I really want in storage is already covered by the CD, the floppy, and the DVD (though DVD is a little expensive"
This would be the ideal solution to the storage problem with increasingly larger digital camera images--along the lines of the Sony CD1000 that uses mini CDs.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
When are we going to get DivX ;-) player units anyway?
I've tried searching teh web, but It's nearly impossible to search for a "DVD/DivX ;-)" player without getting tons of old dusty websites about the Circuit City DivX fiasco.
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Interestingly enough, Philips got OUT of the music business right as MP3s were taking off...
1998 Seagram buys Polygram from Matsushita rival Philips for US$10.4bn
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
I think if Philips can resolve the issue of shock resistance and make a re-writeable disc in this new format that stores at least 3 GB, there's a better application: high-end digital still cameras.
.TIF format. This new drive could be perfect for professional digital still cameras, that's to be sure.
With professional digital still cameras already going past ten megapixels in resolution, even a 1 GB IBM Microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II slot ain't going to cut it especially if you store the digital still in uncompressed