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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 :)
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.
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?
But you can't fit a dvd in your cellphone, or in (most) digicams.
A 3cm format optical disk will give the IBM microdrive a run for its' money. DVD+-rw won't go away, but the smaller format will have its applications.
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
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