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Sony Develops 25 GB Paper Disc
jaaron writes "TOPPAN Printing and Sony today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Yes, that's right, *paper*. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California."
I thought IBM had done this already.
Wow, it must write in REALLLLY tiny letters.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Now you can pass notes with BANDWIDTH!
There go my plans for a paperless office.
Man, that punchcard has gotta have teeny-tiny holes.
When I was in college, I could cram 50GB of information on a 3x5 crib sheet by writing really really small.
Well, I guess that's one way to ensure a bit more privacy...
Your warez stash being raided? Eat the evidence!!
I wonder how this new disc would deal with heat, though. Since most reading devices--and just being inside a closed space--produces heat. Heat and paper aren't necessarily a Good Thing.
i dont know if i can write small enough on the paper to beat the storage capacity. Can I at least use the backside?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
A paper disk huh?
Sounds like yet another Sony product to wipe our asses with...
Here's a picture of the 25GB disc. It's a little big right now, but once they up the density, I'm sure you'll see it in more consumer products.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Archeologists ten thousand years from now will wonder why the march of civilization ended in the twenty-first century. They really should be working on a STONE disk, don't you think?
How many paper discs would you need to fit the Library of Congress? Oh, nevermind.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Seems like they would be very easy to damage.
Not by rocks though. Paper kicks rocks ass till both boots are shitty.
But what if there are hanging chads? Is that bit a one or a zero?
I talked about this with a friend, though not Blu-Ray. I think we figured it using a 300 DPI printer with 8.5 X 11 sheets of paper. A dot of black ink would be a 1. No dot would be a 0. It turns out that the capacity is pretty low. I'd post the math, but I'm pretty sure I'd mess it up somewhere.
I think we decided it would get interesting if full color was used and different colors meant different binary combos.
Anyway, good on them if the discs can be made for cheaper than current DVDs.
From the article:
The worldwide production of optical discs is approximately 20 billion per year and optical discs are being adopted widely.
What is it minus AOL?
Extending this thread, it's too bad Sony didn't work on this with P The "Bounty" version of the AOL disk could pre-emptively clean up those annoying coffee drips and the "Charmin" version, well the AOL disks would finally actually be useful.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Awesome! One third of the way there.
Now all we need is a Rock based disk and a Scissors based disk. Then have them fight it out for world dominance.
"good old rock, nothing beats rock!"
no
I'm reminded of the old Commodore 1541 5.25" floppy disk drive, that could format a paper plate without errors.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
.. accessorize my Paper PC (ZDNet announcment)
>since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily,
Yep. Scissors cut paper disc, paper disc cuts fingers, fingers bleed on scissors, causing them to rust.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
So Dilbert was right, smaller fonts can save on disk space.
This will certainly make partitioning much easier being able to use scissors instead of software. Partitioning on the hardware level. Imagine that. ;-)
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
So will we still call them CD burners? It'll be like Farenheit 451. CD burners will be used to destroy data and some of us will remember when CD burners actually wrote data.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
If they can solve the problem of data loss from folding a disk. (I guess it can be done using massive redundancy).
We can send share data by throwing paper air planes at each other.
How cool is that?
You know you've been on slashdot too long when you ready that game title and think
"oooh. that's nasty"
oh wait, goaTEES.
Steven V.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Now my new set of AOL coasters will be absorbant!
after Sony releases the new College-ruled version.
The office toilet is always out of paper - now Sony has finaly provided a "backup"...
Do you think it will come in extra soft? 3 layers?
We can now put information down on paper!!!
Just think of what we can do now!
You could like....put a whole book or something on it!
Nah...that'll never work.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
true 25GB isn't enought space for the LoTR super-extended-extra-long-aren't-you-glad-you can-pause-it-to-go-to-the-bathroom edition
There is no need to get up to go; as the movie is printed on its own toilet paper.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Then, if you get raided by "the man" your can simply ignite them like a magician. *POOF* No more incriminating evidence!
You mean.... your illicit copy of "Cheech and Chong Up in Smoke"... up in smoke?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now movie rental stores will be asking...
"paper or plastic"
Sony may be on to something here. Imagine encoding information onto the paper using some sort of symbol system that humans could be taught to interpret just by looking at the sheets? No computer necessary?
Sheets of paper encoded like this could be cut square (most efficient use of space) and then bound by the edge so datasets larger than one-sheet's-worth could be looked at in a sequential fashion.
These things are likely to be kind of bulky; if it ever takes off, there might be public buildings where people could borrow from a large repository of these paper-encoded datasets.
This is kind of mind-boggling; it is likely to be years before Sony or anyone else takes it to this next step.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hey, is that a spam server I see?
.. *swallow* !!
Not any more..
*eject*
My dog ate my presentation and backup of quicken.
Look how far we've come from paper tape to paper disc!
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
One of the most popular variations [of Rock, Paper, Scissors] is called "Cat, Microwave, Tinfoil". Cat beats tinfoil by ripping it up, tinfoil beats microwave by starting a fire, and microwave beats cat by cooking it. This version was created because, to the creators of Cat Microwave Tinfoil, it doesn't make sense that paper beats rock by covering it (as it doesn't damage the rock, while on the other hand it can destroy the paper by tearing it). [from Wikipedia]
Hey won't it be nice to roll a fat one with a longhorn logo on it.
Got Code?
No. They'll call it "two-ply".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
is it just me or does this bring a whole new meaning to 'burning a disc'?
sorry for that, i couldn't resist.
Moo.
How about a mobius strip
Next thing you know, they'll make the disc readable by the naked eye, patent it and then start suing printers.
if it was possible, you could come up with digital video disks made from cow chips, and they would still charge the same price for a movie.
You haven't seen much of what's come out of Hollywood lately, have you?
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
wood-free paper
not-wet water
My head is starting to hurt.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Of course, they'd probably just use the labels and keep the disks blank.
Ok... so if you made discs out of all the books in the Library of Congress... how many Libraries of Congress could you store?
Has anyone posted an item recently on the latest audio encoding advances which make it difficult to make digital copies?
The music industry is working on a new type of CD. It is not that compact, actually: I am guessing that the "medium pizza" size is to make it difficult to actually steal from music stores.
The discs are black, and instead of being encoded with laser-readable bits, the surface is covered with one very long spiralled indentation (or groove). Information engraved in this indentation can be read through a tiny stylus and converted into sound.
To further thwart the digital p2p "rip and post it on Kazaa" world, the audio technology is actually analog instead of digital.
The technology required to burn these things is rather bulky and expensive. Prototypes have been produced by a new audio company called "Decca" (Digital Encoding Concern Company - Advanced), some of the prototypes have turned up at garage sales. These are typically stamped with very old dates (1938? 1941?) to confuse people.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"If I want to try out a game ... I could get the cheap $5 full version paper demo, try it out, and when the disk finally breaks down..."
They could use PD-RW (Paper Disc Rewritable), which uses disappearing ink instead of regular ink that is used for PD-R. As a bonus, the burner doubles as a disc label printer.
I guess advances in technology still can't help mother nature.
s/head crash/no ink/g
Please, oh please, tell me I dont have to wrangle through OfficeDepot looking for ink cartridges for my disks now.
Intelligence is like four wheel drive, having it just means you'll get stuck in more remote places.
Wait, isn't that the same... Oops, I forgot! I said Music Industry.
I meant that now AOL can reduce the price of their CDs.
...The Photocopier.
-JT
So instead of AOL coasters we'll now be receiving AOL kleenex?
Nyo nyo, the Neko Boy has spoken.
You know that some joke company will come out with Flash paper-based discs.
Personally? I can't wait until some sucker asks if they can borrow a Paper-Rom (or whatever we'll term them), and he hears a "Whumf!" coming from his drive after he starts trying to burn something to it.
But what if when you burn the CD, you burn the CD?!
"I have a new computer with one of those new Paper-ROMS and it seems to be acting up"
'What do you mean?'
"I went to staples and picked up some computer paper and cut it into a disk shape and put it in and now there is a burning smell coming from the drive"
more like AOL toilet paper
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Which would still be susceptible to moisture wicking and bloating.
Microsoft Office has been succeptible to bloat for many years now. This wicking thing, that will be a new phenomemon.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"Where's your homework?" "My dog ate my hard drive..."
How many years have you been working in the encription coding department now that you finally realized that you actually learned something?