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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 :)
Indeed. How many Libraries of Congress is that, anyway?
found a Japanese site with pics http://www.zdnet.co.jp/news/0210/04/nj00_sffo.html
Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
That Philip is a mighty smart guy. I wish I could make optical discs.
2G of pr0n in 3cm! Wow, that's smaller than my... oh, never mind.
First versions of the disc will be:
a) Ready for sale in two years.
b) Store only 1 Gb.
c) Expected to cost £70 / drive.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Two years from now the world's smallest optical disc will let your cellphone store five two-hour movies...
OK, I can see a small disk like this being very useful, but WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone? "You can do this with your cellphone...you can do that with your cellphone."
How about simple things, like actual coverage?
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly.
i don't mean to be a wet blanket here but announcement like this on slashdot are pretty common, and most of the time it takes a few years or so for the product to become widely available. more often than not, due to bad marketing decisions or various other reasons, the product doesn't even see the light of day.
yea i know its nice to read about it and the article says 2 years more, but that's what they say all the time. rewritable DVDs were such a hot topic once but when they actually came out all the different formats and standards adopted by the different companies made it pretty much unsuited to mass-market adoption, not to mention the price of the drives themselves, though those have dropped a bit since.
speaking of drives, the article mentioned the cost of the discs, but not the cost of the players themselves. the discs might be dirt cheap after a while, but are the drives going to cost too much for the average consumer to afford? and should it be cheap enough to be competitive with DVDs and HDTV will this get any opposition from rival companies who may view this as a threat to their products?
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?
This thing belongs inside a digital video camera. I mean, all that work on jitter resistance must have some point....
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.
"Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I think that if you held a spinning bicycle wheel by the spokes you would either get sore fingers or get dizzy really fast.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
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.
Let us put this in the proper context for /.
The disks will hold *** 10 HOURS OF PORN! ***
Now, see how simple that is?
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
"There will be some small loss of space on the disc itself as a result", said congressman Payme Goode, "but the disc will still have abundant free space, a good 1.44 Meg, available for the end-user's data".
Any purchaser of the disc will require a license. In order to apply for the license, the applicant must first submit to a thorough background check and will be profiled and fingerprinted by the authorities. Once granted a license to use this dangerous technology, the licensee will be required to carry the license at all times or face a penalty of 50 years in prison with no parole.
"We think that this is a very fair and equitable act", Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying, "It nicely balances the rights of the individual user against the recording and motion picture industries' rights to ensure that all digital technology is hobbled to the point of being useless".
Sigs are bad for your health.