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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."
Seems like they would be very easy to damage.
It is when you factor in what becomes of those 'cheap discs' when they end their life cycle and end up in a landfill.
Imagine what this could do for the rental business. Now, I'm not about to get rid of my DVDs, and I hope they don't stop selling them: I rather like "owning" a movie I can play whenever Iike.
But getting on an airplane, and instead of "renting" a movie, I just but the cheap $2.00 one. This is what DiVX could have been without the annoying DRM and phone calling back method.
If I want to try out a game, such as "Jak and Daxter 14: Goatees for Everybody", I could get the cheap $5 full version paper demo, try it out, and when the disk finally breaks down say "Well, I can either buy another $5 version and finish the game, or pay $30 for the full version".
Either way, Sony doesn't come across looking evil, and I get what I want.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So there's just a tenth of a millimeter protecting the recording layer. And I thought I had issues with CD's getting scratched...well, at least there's the "hard coat". But wait, there's more!
Next section in the PDF says (emphasis mine):
The hard coat is optional. Wouldn't it be convenient for the manufacturers to release discs without the hard coat, that get easily scratched, that need to be re-purchased to be replaced?
On a side note - man, the Japanese are really good at making things out of wood and paper, aren't they?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
it's not the cost of the recording media that makes movies and music expensive, otherwise CDs would've come down in price like the industry promised (ha!) when the technology first came out.
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.
> Might be fun to try and print out and scan back in say a knoppix cd in as ... you have a scanner?"
> few pages as possible, "what you mean you don't
have a cd drive
In which case, the limitation isn't the write head, its the read head. So where are scanners now, 1200x600 last time I looked. Which puts us around 15MB for a double sided page.
So although it may be a little difficult to put out a Knoppix CD just yet, but that is easily more than enough for a linux distribution.
Maybe for secure applications? IDS, Firewall etc.
Only problem is that none of my computers have the scanner as a boota option.
Something tells me that this still isn't the most efficient way to use paper to distribute porn tho.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
>Since the disc is made out of paper, and the current number of optical discs is about 20 billion per year, it is easy to use even more trees.
Hopefully, they'll be able to manufacture them using recycled paper.
The Truth About Slashdot
The present CDs are very close to 1.1 mm thick, although I do have one that is close to 1.5-mm thick. THe diameter of a thick black hair is about 0.11-mm and that of a blond (natural) is about 0.08-mm. When I pick up a (0.12 x 0.050)-mm particle (I work with those) I cannot tell which side of the tweezers if sticks to, and my tweezers are needle sharp.
This is all true, except when one particular manufacturer has a monopoly on a product, exactly the way copyright allows. Only Disney can authorize the reproduction of Disney movies, and if Disney decides they want to put them all on volitile discs that will be damaged easily, it's their choice. If you decide you want a Disney movie, you'll have no choice but to buy one of their discs that are designed to fail, or make an illegal copy yourself on a more durable medium. Copyright based industries don't compete with each other in the same way other industries do because their products are non-substitutable. When I buy bread, I can substitute any of the different brands with any other. If I want a LOTR movie, I can only get it from New Line Video, regardless of which store I go to.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
At the rate things are going, however, we're likely to run out of both at about the same time.
With trees, there's also the factor that forests are a good deal more than just trees, and trees do more than just stand there (like oil generally does). Problem is that nobody ever managed to put a price on oxygen manufacturing, pollution abatement, flood/drought/weather moderation or many of the other things that forests do.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Put another way, if you REALLY wanted to see, say, Hellboy, substituting Spawn wouldn't help you. If you wanted to see Ella Enchanted, subtituting The Princess Bride wouldn't help. In comparison, if you wanted a sandwich, it probably doesn't matter if it's on OvenJoy, Safeway, or Wonderbread. The vast majority of people wouldn't know the difference unless they saw the bag it came in.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.