Movie Playback From 1TB Holographic Disc

qorkfiend writes "Optware Corp. has announced successful playback of digital movies on a new holographic recording disc with a reflective layer. Known as the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed. The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD."

Comments

Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a big file format, and it will take a while to download.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[timts]

it will be a lot faster with internet2 and high speed fiber

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[bircho]

A DVD has 4.7Gb right? But people trade quality for size, and rip it to 700Mb files. How about Telesync?

There's FLAC, but a lot of people just use 128kbps Mp3.

Big file format IS NOT a solution to piracy.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

No, but it is a solution to increasing the value of the product. And value is the reason people buy things.

I mean, there are lots of people who buy DVDs of content freely available on the internet. Atom films and many of the Flash animation sites generate healthy profit from DVD sales and I'm surely gonna buy that Strong Bad's 100th Email DVD when it comes out, even though I have all 111 flash files on a DVD already...

Why? Because the quality is better and the format is more attractive and convenient. Making the assumption that it is going to be rather difficult to stop piracy, one way for the industry to encourage people to buy films is to create formats that have even HIGHER quality with even MORE convenience and to release them SOONER in even nicer packages.

DVD is a first good step towards that goal...tape sales used to be sort of an afterthought, just another use for movies that were intended to make money during their theatre run. Now, DVD sales might bring in a substantial percentage of a film's take, and some media (especially TV series and indie films) make MORE money on DVD then they did first run. As a result, the industry is releasing movies earlier and with more extras than you'll find in a 700 meg XVid file.

There will always be people who are satisfied with shite quality willing to pirate. The goal of the industry should be to fight the pirates the only way they can (through lawsuits) while simultaneously making it easier and more worthwhile for people not to become pirates in the first damned place.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[severoon]

Oooh! Yay! I can hardly wait for the VHS vs. Betamax-style format wars to begin!

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Jugalator]

A DVD has 4.7Gb right? But people trade quality for size, and rip it to 700Mb files. How about Telesync?

Huh?

I'd say it's more like this: What format is used for piracy is directly related to how common the media is on the market. CD's are probably still more commonly used than DVD's, but one can't say that DVD hasn't became much more common only the last few years without lying.

I've also seen some Telesync rips being more and more commonly as DVDR to minimize quality loss.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Jugalator]

Bah, I see that was a Telecine... Maybe I confused them with those. :-)
Anyway, although these are higher quality than TS's, these are also sub-DVD quality.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Anonymous Coward]

On your last statement, sort of. Big file format is not THE solution, but it IS part of a solution to much piracy, IF it can outstrip hardware and network speeds.

You could argue that hardware and network speed demands will up as soon as the file size ups as well. That could happen, but realistically, market forces on network bandwidth gets squashed compared to hard numbers from the physical product. It's easier to deliver a 1 TV disc in the same way a CD or DVD is delivered today than to up the bandwidth universally such that piracy of a 1TB disk is feasible.

Even content development and playback tools could be massively up'd in performance to handle large formats but that does not correlate well with an increase in necessary bandwidth for piracy.

The argument of ripping and compression tools comes into play heavily, esp. considering increases in hardware performance, but there was already an excellent followup effectively takign that argument out. People who pirate compressed videos may be keeping them but weren't that interested in buying the real product. The content providers have more to worry about full, uncompressed rips akin to music CDs than something akin to what is happening with most video media like DVD (although their time it coming fast).

The fallacy in the big file format as a solution to piracy is that the strategy cannot stand alone. And the content providers and equipment makers are no where to be seen to provide the second factor to that strategy.

As you already know, 1 tb is a huge amount of material, esp. when using compressed formats (not that you would need to) like mpeg2 with really high bit rates. Any and all traditional media (TV, cinema/movies) right now can be placed on holo disks at full color, resolution, and uncompressed rates.

The problem is that playback sucks. HDTV? Pitiful. QuadXGA? Getting there, but still crappy. The tech may be there to get high resolution playback to the home, but hell, the MPAA and MS can't even even agree much less get a high resolution movie experience to the theaters.

Want to create the content? You need a freakin cluster a la Lord of the Rings. And that's cinema quality. You haven't even factored in strong 3d immersive environments like CAVES.

Right now, saving massive content is not really so much an issue. Processing for playback is not really an issue. It's the viewing devices like TVs that need to be up'd, as well as the content creation tools. Those, so far, have not kept up. While big file formats could squash piracy, it's not going to happen because no one can create these massive files with content that people are interested in, much less play them back in all their intended glory.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[astrotek]

yay! someone that understands economics.

and to think some people think that because 16oz can of soda costs the same as a 2L bottle of soda its only because people are greedy and the rich like to gouge the poor for everything they have.

You buy because you have a preceived WANT and a preceived NEED for something.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[RobDogAlpha]

Sure it is... now all the theives will be able to buy one single disc on the street that holds all the music, movies and video games that would have taken them weeks to steal with P2P! Yea for big media and kids with no values!

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

Shit man, you ever try carrying a 2 liter bottle around NYC? You wind up looking like this guy ! It's worth paying an extra $.11 and getting half as much to not look like an idiot. If it weren't, we'd all buy our clothes at Wal-Mart. Value is not simply a matter of material per dollar...there's the quality of the material and its applicability to your needs that must be considered.

Heck, most of the time generalizing something -- adding more material and/or features to it -- DECREASES its overall value. You hope to make it up in volume, but it's entirely possible that the generalization process will kill your product. If you've got X hours to spend on the creation of set of features, and you increase the size of the set, you decrease the time per feature. If a person only cares about three of the features -- and somebody spent their X hours on only those features -- your product will probably be inferior for their needs. Or soda in a machine -- $1.25 for 16 oz of Coke seems like a really big rip off until it's 2am and you're in the middle of nowhere, thirsty as hell.

Back to DVDs: the goal of the motion picture industry should be concentrating on what people WANT from a movie. It seems -- based completely unscientifically on what my friends tell me when THEY get new DVDS -- that people want high quality pictures with accurate multichannel sound, tons of interesting content (e.g. deleted scenes and backstage videos of the stars goofing off), attractive packaging (I know four guys who bought the Two Towers Ultimate set just because it came with a Gollum bookend) and early release, while the movie's still in the back of your mind. So-called copy protection isn't selling DVDs, isn't stopping illegal copies and isn't making it easier to pursue damages from infringement, so why bother?

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because the quality is better and the format is more attractive and convenient.

So the reason you buy official content rather than downloading unauthorized versions isn't a matter of ethics, but of convenience.

The goal of the industry should be to fight the pirates the only way they can (through lawsuits) while simultaneously making it easier and more worthwhile for people not to become pirates in the first damned place.

And, the industry corporations should bend over backwards to outcompete those offering alternative versions of the content they paid to manufacture?

This screams "sanction of the victim" to me. Shouldn't the content producers set the terms of distribution and acquisition? Not under your system - the pirates, the law violators, get to do that.

Added-value is a kludge solution that is not sustainable over the long term. The only thing sustaining it now - despite your desperate pleas to the contrary that "it's worth it to buy" - is widespread ignorance of the general ease of piracy.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[jp10558]

But one thing I have to ask is, will this format actually look higher quality on a normal TV? Cause if it doesn't no-one will upgrade till HDTV or whatever becomes far more commonplace.

Hell, the average person cannot tell the difference on a TV of a DVDShrink transcoded disc to 47% quality and an original DVD disc. It's a limitation of the standard TV's. On a computer screen it looks like crap, but on TV looks the same.

My point then is that, this may be 1000 times better quality, but if you need the next resolution leap past 1080p to see it, quality will not sell the players and discs.

And convienience won't either. DVD's were a major step up from VHS. Noticable quality, sound, no reqwinding or wearing out/strectching of the tape, smaller, easier seeking/skipping etc.

But what do these have over DVD? They are the same size, and presumably will have the same navigation abilities. The quality improvement won't be noticable on the next generation system of audio and video, much less what is in homes now, and for at least 5 yrs to come I would guess. So what makes these attractive?

All 3 LOTR extended edition movies and appendicies on one disc? Ok there that is a draw, but really - how many movies are just - hollywood homocide - not epic, not a trilogy, no real interesting advances to make it... So no big extras. So what is the draw?

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats partially why DVD Audio hasnt really taken off. No one has the sound equipment at home to notice a difference, and most people are happy with what they have.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Wile_E_Peyote]

I love it. An incredible piece of technology and rather than marvel at it, you're all wondering how this will affect piracy.....

W.E.P.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

Whoa. The problem is there are plenty of people in the world who don't understand or conveniently ignore the ethics involved. Heck, even here on Slashdot, where people should understand that digital content has value attached to it, there was a general consensus that pro-copyright morality shouldn't be taught in schools (spun as "we don't want the BSA lying to our kids").

You should never attack a problem on only one front. A combination of ethical debate to discourage pirating as a lifestyle, positive reinforcement through quality products and negative reinforcement through legal damages brought against copyright infringers is the most effective plan. It is not "sanction of the victim" or appeasement to change a policy which is obviously troublesome in the wake of a crisis. If somebody stole a stereo from an unlocked car, I'd start fucking locking my car. I wouldn't leave it unlocked with a sign that said "stealing stereos is a crime!"

As for "added-value" being a kludge...well, let's look at a few of the added value solutions that seem to be working pretty well. Cable television, bottled water, cellular phones, women's lingerie...all have taken a basic desire and created an industry around enhancing it in subtle ways. You can still watch tv, drink, talk on the phone, or wear underwear on a budget -- this hasn't buried any of these industries. In fact, the very suggestion that added value is a "kludge" is laughable, it flies in the face of reason, reflecting on the success of such industries over the past 150 years. They've beat the hell out of agriculture, steel and manufacturing.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

That's because most people have been buying home theatres, which sound terrible for anything but the trick they were designed for. Poor directional bass response (what do you expect from a 3.5 inch woofer) bolstered by overpowered unidirectional subwoofers creating an unnatural thump at the crossover point and 4 or more speakers to create positional audio without true staging...all because they can say, "look, 5.1! 6.1! 7.1! DOLBY, THX, WOOT."

Positional audio is a trick designed to make up for poor speaker placement in unusually shaped rooms and cheaper electronics. You can achieve the same effect along with great clarity with a nice set of stereo speakers and a good, discrete, linear analog amp. I like to break it down like this for my friends:

How many ears do you have, and how many of those ears can detect bass?

If you have $1000 and the option of buying 2 speakers or 7 speakers, which set up will have higher quality speakers and by how much?

I've been watching DVDs on a pair of Event studio monitors (with McIntosh silk dome tweeters) for the past two months and I will take my setup over positional audio any day of the week. It's more subtle, the sound is more accurate, and you can actually tell the difference between digital audio and analog audio. Plus I don't have to run wires all over my goddamn living room.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

Actually, some of the biggest problems with DVD quality -- specifically, the reduction in chromatic information and the subsequent tendency towards color bleed -- could be solved quite easily with more bits per pixel or block. That RGBCMY pixel TV wouldn't have to interpolate the halftones if they were IN the datastream already.

There are other great uses for this technology, such as putting the regular and directors cuts, wide and fullscreen versions all on the same disk with the same resolution, MULTIPLE resolutions on one disc to promote future higher definition technologies along with lower power small form factor playback devices and, of course, the nefarious possibility of putting a whole BUNCH of films on one disk and then selling the "keys" to play them. DivXL.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[suraklin]

I do not think you are giving 5.1 a fair shake. I currently have a 5.1 setup, and no it is not a "home theater in a box". Stereo sound is fine for most DVDs and music but there are some soundtracks that are done really well and convey decent directional sound. It can really envelope you instead of the full frontal assualt you get from a pair of speakers in front of you. A really good example of this is not a DVD but the SACD 30th anniversary of Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon. The multichannel area of the disc is stellar and proves it is more than a gimmick.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[}InFuZeD{]

Not everyone has a computer that they could rip a 1TB video to. So they're going to have to re-encode it as they rip, which I imagine is quite a task for a file that large.

It would definitely discourage me from ripping it.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Sj0]

Anyone who bases their business model on morality is a fool. Either compete in the market or get out. thumbing your nose at those who drink from the river when the bottled water plant is right there may make you feel good, but it won't put food on the table.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[extra the woos]

I agree with suraklin here... people say you "can't tell the difference between cd audio and dvd-a (the real audio version) unless you have expensive sound equipment, and that 2 speakers is all you need... And usually its from the audiophiles...well

I CANT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 192kbps mp3 and a cd... can't.. i'm not "audiophile" I just like to listen to my music. Mp3's sound fine to me. I like positional audio for games sooo...

I got the cheap 7.1 creative labs speakers ($99 or so!!!) from newegg. I wasn't expecting much. But my sound card has true dvd-a support... I put in a dvd-a disc and was BLOWN AWAY by how amazing it sounded.

It's like the difference between a good but not perfect cassete tape and a cd. Sure i'm sure if you had the perfect cassete and stereo it might be hard to tell the difference but get real. Its very noticeable... DVD-A IS GOOD.. (i've never heard a sacd i dont have the stuff to play one)...

And I'm not just saying that because it "seems" to be good.

My mom was gone when my new computer arrived and I set up the new speakers etc... She walked into my room when i was playing the dvd-a sampler I had... she never comments no music except that "its too loud"...

Her first comment was "how much did these speakers cost?" I reply, $99... she goes.. "wow..well...I was going to be upset but...that sounds *amazing*"....

I've told my friends to sit down at the optimal listening point (my chair of course)...and then started up the dvd-a player...no one i've played it for has been less than amazed about how it sounds.

So don't listen to the "audiophiles".... fuck 'em... You don't need $1000 speakers to enjoy DVD-A and their uber spendy 2 channel fuck-me-in-the-wallet speakers aren't needed to enjoy the audio... DVD-A and prolly sa-cd (i dont know never heard it) can be enjoyed fine on $99 speakers..the difference IS REAL.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dbIII]

A DVD has 4.7Gb right? But people trade quality for size, and rip it to 700Mb files

In that case there was so much resistance to getting the things out in the market, (resistance because of fear of copying strangely enough) that release was delayed so long that mpeg-2 was superceded by formats that could fit the same quality into less space - making copying much easier. I think I heard of DVD ten years before I ever saw one, that's a long time to develop better video and sound compression. With some DVDs with poor digital transfer you can get the same quality in other formats in a lot less than 700MB.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Wile_E_Peyote]

So no big extras. So what is the draw?

How about the draw of being able to carry around a TB of data in a CD case?

W.E.P.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Or soda in a machine -- $1.25 for 16 oz of Coke seems like a really big rip off until it's 2am and you're in the middle of nowhere, thirsty as hell

You've obviously never been in the middle of nowhere, thirsty as hell, with only $1.10 on you.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[dasmegabyte]

I've heard the Creative $99 setup, and it's not bad, it's true.

But for $500, you can get a set of Energies that blows it away. Head and shoulders. And you wouldn't have to be an audiophile or listen to fruity jazz to hear it. First record I spun on my eXL:22s was Rocket to Russia by the Ramones, and I instantly heard instrumentation subtleties that my old Aiwa system didn't have the sensitivity or the range to reproduce. And the soundstage...you'll know when you hear a good one, because you don't hear music from two or 5 or 7 speakers, you just hear music from everywhere. You can't place where the speakers are. It's awesome.

It's also a sad fact that you CAN tell a 192 kbit mp3 when played through really accurate speakers. Listen to the percussion. MP3 compression is TERRIBLE at percussion, because it's no good at modeling repetetive attacks at low intensities or slowly oscillating sustains like a cymbal crash. AAC is a little better and OGG is GREAT at percussion. But if you're hearing music (playing music while paying attention to something else) as opposed to LISTENING to music (playing music with your full attention on the work), you will never notice these things. That's why I love the iPod...it's just accurate enough that I will never notice the compression while performing activities that I would need the iPod for (driving, working out, mowing the lawn, posting to /., etc).

Nobody NEEDS to spend $500 or $1000 or $6000 for a speaker system. But nobody needs to spend $99, either. You spend whatever you want to spend to get as much clarity as you can handle...the point of diminishing returns is wherever you set it. My point is, if you're gonna dump your money into sound and you want verity (as opposed to sonic coverage), you are almost always better off getting better speakers than you are getting more speakers. Now that I have these Event studio monitors, and I'm essentially hearing what rock musicians IN the studio when they're mixing, I feel that I'm set for a while. I tried using them with my old eXLs in the rear and the very good speakers on my WEGA acting as a center channel, but it sounded terrible compared to the simplicity of good stereo.

Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of people who buy X.1 speaker sets only know what to do with 3 out of the X+1 speakers. Sub on the floor, right and left center on the desk. But the rears, center channels, wide R&L...there's no room on the desk and most people don't like being caged with speakers behind them. These people aren't even using their X speakers to the fullest...for $99, they could have got a SWEET pair of stereo speakers with big bass and good shielding. Heck, for $75 you can get a pair of Sennheiser headphones that will blow away any speakers under $1000 (either the HD-280s high efficiency DJ phones or the HD-580 circumaurals, which are a goddamn dream)...they fit on a desk and the bass won't wake up your downstairs neighbours every time you put on some porno.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[jp10558]

I'm not arguing data backup here, nor storage. That of course is useful.

But the company isn't marketing this as a storage device, they are selling it as the new movie medium. So most people aren't going to care if a movie medium holds 8GB or 1TB, they will care how good it looks, what extras it has, and how many shows, movies or whatever is on it.

Re:Okay, maybe Mark Cuban was right

[extra the woos]

"HD-580 circumaurals, which are a goddamn dream" I have the 570's and agreed =) sooo comfortable, as well...

Finally, I will sell the (iI)nternet on Disks

[Anonymous Coward]

First I will protect the internet from attack including This Land is My Land. And was Mark CueBall right about media size halting piracy? But, didn't we just read that size doesn't matter.

size..

[peculiarmethod]

Since when is 12 cm the size of a DVD or CD?

pm

Re:size..

[garompa]

said, "comparable" doesn't mean is exactly the same size.

Re:size..

[gfxguy]

Not "same size" but "comparable to".

Re:size..

[Kentamanos]

Since their creation?

Re:size..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is 12 cm the size of a DVD or CD?

Since people started rounding to the nearest unit.

Re:size..

[mr_c0w]

Since they started using the metric system to measure CD's and DVD's.

Re:size..

[Trolling4Dollars]

The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD.

The key word is COMPARABLE. English. Learn it. Love it. Live it. ;P

Re:size..

[alyre]

Since always!

Re:size..

[glpierce]

If memory serves, CDs & DVDs are 5" in diameter.

5.0 in x 2.4 cm/in = 12.0 cm.

Re:size..

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Umm... since always dude. That's centimeters, not inches

Re:size..

[Kentamanos]

Do a google search for 5.0 inches and CD's. Then do one for 12cm and CD's. Then measure one with a ruler. I'm not sure what the grand parent's point was, I've always seen them referred to as 12 cm. Maybe I missed something?

Re:size..

[psycho]

since when are there 2.4 cm to an inch?
try 5.0in x 2.54 cm/in = 12.7cm

Re:size..

[Anonymous Coward]

12 cm is damn near, if not exactly, the size of a DVD or CD. Gotta love it when you make a fool out of yourself, right?

Re:size..

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Hmm- maybe since a CD was less than 5"? 5 inches = 12.5 cm in my world, how about yours?

Re:size..

[endeitzslash]

There are 2.54 cm/in, not 2.4.

Sheesh.

Re:size..

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this get marked Insightful?

Re:size..

[bugnuts]

5 inches = 12.5 cm in my world, how about yours?
5in = 12.7cm in my world, but math actually works for large, slow objects here. I hope dc(1) still works, too.

Re:size..

[crtfdgk]

Despite the size argument, if you actually read the story, the picture on otware's website shows that the holographic disk is cleary bigger, albiet not by much.

Not to mention if you wanted diameter, what kind of geek are you if you measure it right away? You have to use some type of un-stretchable wire to get the circumference, and use good old C = Pi times D!

Re:size..

[bvdbos]

As always: trry google. 5 inch = 12.7 centimeters. But I just measured one and a cd is actuallually 12 centimeters = 4.72440945 inch (at least according to the almighty google). As the compact disc is licensed by philips, 12 cm would be a logical size (more logical then 5 inch anyway)

Re:size..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since about 1980 for CDs, and 1995 or so for DVDs... I think.

Re:size..

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is 12 cm the size of a DVD or CD?

since before August 31, 1982

Re:size..

[glpierce]

My apologies, you're quite right. That's the first time I've ever made such a mistake - probably due to the fact that I spent most of the morning taking measurements to fix an airflow problem in my office. The numbers are still bouncing around in my head.

Re:size..

[Trolling4Dollars]

Hehehe... I tried your "man woman" thing and got this:

$ man woman
No manual entry for woman

I guess digital coitus is off limits? The real question is: who is doing the manual entry and who is being entered? ;P

Re:size..

[mrak and swepe]

In my world, the inch is an obsolete unit of measurement, retrodefined to be 25.4mm.

You're welcome to join me here.

Re:size..

[squistle]

From the caption of Fig. 3 in the article (emphasis added):

The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD.

The key word is not "comparable" but "equivalent".

Re:size..

[Trolling4Dollars]

You RTFA. I didn't. :) So let's blame it on the original submitter and we can both be happy.

Re:size..

[msebast]

Since 1979.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

One gigabyte?

[swordboy]

One gigabyte transfer speed?

Per second? Hour? Day?

My netflix movies come overnight. If I get 4, that works out to almost a gig per hour...

Re:One gigabyte?

[56uSquareWave]

No just one gig in total, once you have got that one gig you are stuck, so choose very very carefully!

Re:One gigabyte?

[Laivincolmo]

The article states 1GB per second...

Re:One gigabyte?

[Daverd]

Says the article, 1 GB/sec.

Re:One gigabyte?

[Negaiss]

[redundant]
Why does nobody these days bothers to RTFA...
I mean.. This is an amazing technology! 1TB!!! What kind of a geek are you if you don't print out this article and meditate on it for some days to come..?

Re:One gigabyte?

[Xeo 024]

It's one gigabye per SECOND.

"transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD)"

Read more here.

Re:One gigabyte?

[AKAImBatman]

It's pretty safe to assume they mean per second. A CD drive has a baseline speed of 150 kb/s. That means that a 48 speed drive has a transfer rate of 7,200 kb/s. Now if we increase the data density to 1 terrabyte, we find that we are now capable of reading 11 gigabytes at the same RPM. Given the greater complexity of this technology, they've probably reduced the RPMs to something more along the lines of an 8 speed drive. This would reduce the data transfer rate, but impose fewer stresses on the media.

Re:One gigabyte?

[bugnuts]

My netflix movies come overnight. If I get 4, that works out to almost a gig per hour...

As the saying goes, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with tapes hurtling down the highway."

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

per marklar

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of a geek are you if you don't print out this article and meditate on it for some days to come..?

One that has to go to work in the morning.

Re:One gigabyte?

[David Horn]

If no unit is given, shouldn't it be assumed to be in the pure SI unit? That would in seconds, so 1GB per second.

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with tapes hurtling down the highway

I like a slight altered saying:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon bouncing down the higway.
I like envisioning a pimple faced nerd racing to get his companies data to a job site to save the day...

Re:One gigabyte?

[superpulpsicle]

Well there was an old article from byte magazine about the Holographic Cube which writes data via light flashing on he cube. Technically that would be the ultimate solution since disk still requires a spin. And light flashing is about as big a non-mechanical advantage as you can get.

Re:One gigabyte?

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Per second? Hour? Day?

This is the LEAST confusing rate ever...1 GB per GB....It takes one gigabyte of transfered data (time) to transfer 1 GB data (amount) thus the rate is 1 GB :-)

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA-
"enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store as much as one terabyte of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD)."

Re:One gigabyte?

[red floyd]

Obviously it's per 12 Parsecs!

Re:One gigabyte?

[canavan]

How do you arrive at 11Gb/s? Looks like (7.2Mb/s / 0.64 Gb * 1Tb) - That would be wrong. The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this. The amount of data that passes by the reading laser along the track would be just 40 times larger for the holographic media compared to a CD at constant RPM, which would result in 'only' 288Mb/s. With 1Gb/s, they'd still be a factor of 4 away, but that's still closer than your estimate.

Re:One gigabyte?

[EvilBudMan]

--It's pretty safe to assume they mean per second.--

This is /.

Don't assume anything, because you make an ASS out of U & ME.
ASSUME

Re:One gigabyte?

[chrisopherpace]

Yeah, but the latency sucks, and it *REALLY* sucks if you lose a "packet" due to a collision!

Re:One gigabyte?

[AKAImBatman]

48x = 7,200 kb/s
1 terabyte = 1e9 kb
1 CD = 6.5e5 kb

x = 7200 * 1e9 / 6.5e5
x = 11,076,923 kb/s

Yes, it's just a simple scaling function. i.e. Back of the envelope calculation. Doesn't mean it's exactly right, but it does give a general idea of how much more data can be read at the same RPM.

Re:One gigabyte?

[Masami Eiri]

per Fortnight

Re:One gigabyte?

[muskr]

If any of you had read the press release (RTFPR?), there would be no confusion. It clearly says that the bandwidth is pi gigabytes per nano-century.

If you check, you're a huge nerd. ;) If you're wondering what that says about me, stop right now!

Re:One gigabyte?

[Jugalator]

Hey, that's kind of how my very first CD-R drive worked. A cheap Mitsumi one. Yuck...

After around maybe 20 CD-R's, I was stuck and it couldn't write any more. :-((

Re:One gigabyte?

[wizrd_nml]

This is the LEAST confusing rate ever...1 GB per GB....It takes one gigabyte of transfered data (time) to transfer 1 GB data (amount) thus the rate is 1 GB :-)

No, the rate is just 1 as the two GB (GB per GB) would cancel each other out!

Re:One gigabyte?

[cei]

Yeah, but if you divide GB by GB the units cancel out... So you just get 1.

Re:One gigabyte?

[hackerjoe]

The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this.

You're assuming that the number of tracks increases at the same rate the linear density increases. That might be a reasonable assumption for DVDs vs. CDs, which are made denser by scaling everything down (which you can do because the light is a smaller wavelength and can resolve smaller features on the disc), but not so much for this format.

This format uses a red laser for tracking, so the tracks can't really be packed closer together than on a DVD; and anyway the big boost in data density comes from the holographic technology, which packs more data per linear unit, but does not pack it in a narrower space.

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is atrocious use of the lowercase 'b' in the parent post. It's posts like this that make people regard their 128kb/s DSL downstream as "fast" and then bitch when it never reaches 100kB/s.

Sigh.

Re:One gigabyte?

[canavan]

Well, as I said, they don't just increase the data density along the tracks, they also make the tracks less wide and pack them closer together. At constant RPM, you will usually only see an increase in speed around the square root of the increase in density for this exact reason.

If speed scaling was linear in the capacity, harddisks today would have to be in the vincinity of 14 Gigabytes per second, since back in 1990 my 40MB HD had 10000 in capacity and a factor 2 in rotational speed, or 20000 overall. With sqrt(20000) I get about 100MB/s, which is not too far from the real rates one would expect from modern HDs (which tur3600RPM and 700kb/s. Now we have 400GB HDs with 7200RPM, that's an increase of 10000 in capacity and a factor 2 in rotational speed, or 20000 overall. With sqrt(20000) I get about 100MB/s, which is not too far from the real rates one would expect from modern HDs (which turns out to be 80MB/s)

Re:One gigabyte?

[gravygraphics]

That's GigaBIT (Gb), not Gigabyte (GB) according to the EETimes article.

Re:One gigabyte?

[Speare]

1 GB / 1 GB = 1 (nondimensioned).

Re:One gigabyte?

[LoveMuscle]

... and as caravan points out that should be:

x = 7200 KiB/s * sqrt(1e9 / 6.5e5)
x = 282,407 KiB/s..

Re:One gigabyte?

[OrangeTide]

a gig per hour through netflix isn't too bad. I guess this saying would apply:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes"

Re:One gigabyte?

[Guppy06]

That sounds a lot like those damned 12,000 BTU air-conditioning units I keep seeing in stores. I'd hate to think about how many of those you'd have to go through in a week...

Re:One gigabyte?

[Geoff-with-a-G]

It takes one gigabyte of transfered data (time) to transfer 1 GB data (amount) thus the rate is 1 GB :-)

Wow, that's pretty good. That means they're using a protocol with zero overhead and their system never experiences any errors!

Re:One gigabyte?

[eggoeater]

Reminds me of a local diner that only has counter service. They have a sign that says:

We seat 100 people, 10 at a time.

Re:One gigabyte?

[jerde]

The areal density increases about 1560-fold (assuming 640Mb/CD), but the linear density increases only by the square root of this.

True... but I think this technology changes the concept of "linear density" entirely: with holographic page recording, each area on the disc encodes a 2-dimensional holographic image.

If it were just the same type of 1-dimensional spiral of pits, packed closer, you're right... it would take many many more revolutions to read the whole disc. But I believe this technology doesn't use a spiral pattern at all, so the data read speed could scale right along with the overall density.

We don't know, but it's possible that each holographic page has a large amount of data, but there are a relatively small number of pages on the disc: maybe only 100 "tracks" with a variable number of pages per track. But if each page holds hundreds of megabytes of data, that would still give you a high overall capacity.

(Of course, the technical details are sparse from the company... it's obviously press-release stuff, since they're talking about playing "digital movies" -- the type of digital content obviously has nothing to do with the underlying technology. Or maybe their point was that the playback mechanism is capable of a stable enough data-rate to support movie playback?)

- Peter

Re:One gigabyte?

[That's Unpossible!]

That's GigaBIT (Gb), not Gigabyte (GB) according to the EETimes article.

No, the company actually spells it out as "one gigabyte per second."

Re:One gigabyte?

[SirDaShadow]

This format uses a red laser for tracking, so the tracks can't really be packed closer together than on a DVD; and anyway the big boost in data density comes from the holographic technology, which packs more data per linear unit, but does not pack it in a narrower space.

So...assuming 256 "layers" or "states" of data per same DVD density and surface, that's 256*4.7GB=1.203 TB?

Re:One gigabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, no.

A disc is a two dimensional object and the bus it has to transfer over is one dimensional. So the disc space is measured as an area and the bus speed as a length. It transfers one square gigabyte per gigabyte, which is actually quite fast.

I would've thought it was obvious...

Re:One gigabyte?

[Alsee]

1 GB per GB

No, it's actually 1 GM per MB.

-

Re:One gigabyte?

[flyneye]

yeah,but if it wrote even one TB mp3 disc,wouldnt that play every song you ever heard?well maybe not but damn that would play a long time.hell how bout mpegs?WTF if you could only write 20 discs with this?how much erratta you got layin around?

Re:One gigabyte?

[mikeage]

No, 1GB/GB is just 1. To get a rate of 1GB, it'd be 1GB^2/GB, Note that this should not be confused with 1G^2B/GB, which is one petabyte per gigabyte. And don't even mention GiB...

but

[ormoru]

does it actually playback holographs!?

Don't tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they expect the technology to be on the market within a decade, right?

Just like all the previous amazing new storage technologies, of which only one or two percent ever turn out to be commerically viable.

Back in the '90s, weren't we meant to be using little holographic cubes by the year 2000? Funny how those never showed up, eh?

Re:Don't tell me...

[stratjakt]

These guys actually made one that works, though. The difference between this and those other announcements, is that the other ones rely on "magical technology" to be invented for them to work.

Just like we could build a space elevator in 10 years - just so long as someone invents a way to make carbon nanotubes.

Re:Don't tell me...

[chill]

Back in the '90s, weren't we meant to be using little holographic cubes by the year 2000? Funny how those never showed up, eh?

You mean you never got yours? That'll teach you to not leave a forwarding address...

Re:Don't tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years eh? I'm ready!

Re:Don't tell me...

[kfg]

Yeah, I mean really. I got mine used off ebay already. They didn't do a good job of cleaning it before offering it for sale though. I loaded it up and autoplay ran some movie of some chick with furry ear muffs saying "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."

Weird.

KFG

Re:Don't tell me...

[Mateito]

Back in the '90s, weren't we meant to be using little holographic cubes by the year 2000? Funny how those never showed up, eh?

That's because the Decepticons took them all back to cybertron. Duh!

Re:Don't tell me...

[Rakishi]

We CAN make nanotubes already, researchers do it all the time. The problem is mass-production and making them strong enough (theoretically possible), however given current trends the later should be done within 10 years.

Re:Don't tell me...

[king-manic]

Just like we could build a space elevator in 10 years - just so long as someone invents a way to make carbon nanotubes.

we can make them. just not long, or cheap, or many. so once we get those problems fixed, we can send something up. hey, screw carbon nanotubes, lets invent scrinth and just build a big tower.

Re:Don't tell me...

[gl4ss]

well, you are probably writing from a multi ghz computer.. with more lots of more ram than what you once had for hd.. with network connection thats faster than the bus on some earlier computer of yours.. and burn 4.7gb discs that you bought for pennies per piece..

hell, your mouse probably has more processing power than what went for a 'home computer' 20 years ago.

one of them becomes commercially viable, some things like the nuclear powered car just don't become practical.

Re:Don't tell me...

[Zen Punk]

your mouse probably has more processing power than what went for a 'home computer' 20 years ago.

Hey, I'll pit my TI-99/4a against your mouse any day!

Re:Don't tell me...

[identity0]

Well, at least you didn't get one that had some wierd ring burned into the image - hang on, I have to get the phone...

Bring on the pr0n!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think of how much pr0n one could store with one of those beasties!

Re:Bring on the pr0n!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could store 1TB of porn.

So close...

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

I wonder why the didn't make it EXACTLY the same size as a CD/DVD? One would think this would make life so much easier for everyone. I'd settle for ~900GB on a disc, if it meant it would fit in all the existing technology/drives/spinners/changers that are already out there...

Otherwise, this is just another "LASERDISC" with better technology that just won't catch on...

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just measured a CD. It has a 12cm diameter. This new disc has a 12cm diameter ... your point is?

Re:So close...

[kfg]

Ah leave him alone, he probably works on Mars landers and can't help it.

Or thinks that CDs were invented in America. Isn't everything?

KFG

Re:So close...

[Catbeller]

It IS the same size disc. Read the article.

Re:So close...

[Uber Banker]

Present CD/DVD drives will not run this, so no difference there making this a different size. Future drives capable of reading/writing this could be made to also read/write CDs and DVDs just as they are today - just have a different sized groove, like CD drives can play mini-CDs today. It is nothing like Laserdisc which was way way ahead of its time - so much so when it was at its peak most computers (certainly CISCs) had no where near the horsepower to read the file format (though some RISCs could).

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Phillips Electical HQd in the United States?

Re:So close...

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Look at the picture and tell me if the HVD and CD/DVD are the same size. Could just be an illusion, but the HVD looks bigger to me...

Re:So close...

[justforaday]

I'd settle for ~900GB on a disc, if it meant it would fit in all the existing technology/drives/spinners/changers that are already out there...

And what good would it do you to be able to put one of these new discs into your current CD/DVD player? It wouldn't have any idea what to do with it...

Re:So close...

[kfg]

No. Phillips is Dutch. They are HQd in Amsterdam.

KFG

Re:So close...

[dabraham]

I'd settle for ~900GB on a disc, if it meant it would fit in all the existing technology/drives/spinners/changers that are already out there...

umm, I assume that you're complaining about the slight difference in size (just shy of 12 cm vs what appears to be just over 12 cm (I did read the article, it says "The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD.", but doesn't give exact sizes, and the pictures makes it look a bit bigger)), not getting confused by cm vs. inches.

That said, I think that there are 2 important things

1. the H-drives should be designed to hold and play CD/DVDs (the way that cd players typically have depressions for mini-CDs)
2. the media should be small enough that a drive that can hold it will fit in a 5.25" slot.

It doesn't matter if this disc can fit in a cd drive as the drive can't play it.

The only other thing that I can think of that matters is that the case for one of these should be pretty close to the size of a CD jewel case so that you don't need to buy new furniture, but that's pretty minimal. If you're worried about cd library robots or something, well, I don't have one and I don't know anyone who does...

Re:So close...

[ejdmoo]

It has nothing to do with that.

I like to be able to put a CD in a DVD case, and vice versa. It's also nice to put a CD in a DVD player and have it play. Little convenient things like that.

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the correction :)

Amsterdam... isn't that in Canada? :) :) :)

Re:So close...

[silentbozo]

Also, you can use the same types of stamping and fabrication equipment, with a few extra steps thrown in. Having them small enough to fit in a drive that can go into a 5.25 bay also helps...

Eventually they'll probably come out with smaller versions, just as they have those mini-cds and business-card sized cds today.

Re:So close...

[MindStalker]

It so you can make a device that read the new format, as well as DVD and CDs. A increase in size could cause problems here.

Re:So close...

[ahillen]

Look at the picture and tell me if the HVD and CD/DVD are the same size. Could just be an illusion, but the HVD looks bigger to me...


Hmm, the article states: "The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD."

While Wikipedia says:
"CDs are available in a range of sizes but the most commonly available is 120mm (about 5 inches) in diameter. A 120mm disc can store about 74 minutes of music or about 650 megabytes of data."

So I would guess "equivalent" in this case really means "==", and that the different sizes on the picture are just an optical illusion... ;)

Re:So close...

[kfg]

No. Upstate NY.

KFG

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were the same size as CDs or DVDs, I could see someone putting one in their DVD player and getting pissed that it doesn't work. Because they didn't read the label, they don't know it's not a CD or DVD.

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I would guess "equivalent" in this case really means "==", and that the different sizes on the picture are just an optical illusion.

I'm not sure what the definition of "==" as you use it is, but the first definition of "equaivalent" is "Equal, as in value, force, or meaning." Of course here they mean size. I don't see why you are confused. Do you have your own personal definition of "equaivalent" that doesn't work here?

I also don't see how something being closer to the camera qualifies as an optical illusion. It's very obvious what angle the photo was taken at.

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the electronic devices, what about the cd and dvd jewel cases we've all invested in? Spindles, albums, and all kinds of other storage devices are made for cd size discs. What about all the cars and home theatre systems that have cd sized storage room? Shit what if I just wanted to make a stack of discs in the corner and end up with 5 different diameters to deal with?

Re:So close...

[AdrainB]

That's Philips with one "l". The other company invented the screwdriver.

Re:So close...

[kfg]

Ah! Well. That explains why my drive got fucked up then.

Any idea how to get a screwdriver out of one of those things?

KFG

Re:So close...

[Cocoronixx]

RTFC (Read the fucking caption)

Fig.3 Holographic Versatile Disc(TM) (HVD(TM)) on which digital movies were recorded (left). The disc diameter of 12 centimeters is equivalent to those of CD and DVD.

Pwnt?

Re:So close...

[ahillen]

I don't see why you are confused.

I'm not. The parent poster was... ;)

I also don't see how something being closer to the camera qualifies as an optical illusion.

Again I just took the words from the parent poster. But I'm quite sure that you can make a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background - if the angle is right and the difference small enough. I would call that an optical illusion. Whatever...

Re:So close...

[Da Fokka]

No. Upstate NY.

If they have an office there, surely it must be their main office.

Wrong.

Philips is Dutch, originally based in Eindhoven but quite recently their main office moved to Amsterdam.

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, it's in the Netherland's, moron.

Re:So close...

[ahillen]

...a smaller disk in the foreground seem larger than a bigger disk in the background... ...and I mean larger in the sense that you think it really is larger if you measure it. Point is, it can get difficult to judge once the perspective is not so straight forward.

Re:So close...

[kfg]

Philips is Dutch, originally based in Eindhoven but quite recently their main office moved to Amsterdam.

Didn't I just say that on the other side of the record?

KFG

Re:So close...

[nizo]

So I would guess "equivalent" in this case really means "==", and that the different sizes on the picture are just an optical illusion... ;)

I just figured that all that data made the TB disk look bigger.

Re:So close...

[LoudMusic]

So long as it fits in the 5.25" bay, it'll do just fine. Have you noticed that your existing CD / DVD tray has a groove in the middle for the smaller disks? Same thing will happen with these.

Though I'm calling "BS" on the whole technology. I'll believe it when I can watch The Princess Bride from one of these.

Re:So close...

[sevinkey]

3" mini-CD's seem to work fine in standard sized players... why couldn't the same concept apply to new players for this format?

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Astonishing that you can write but not read. Doofus.

Re:So close...

[yowi]

The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD.

I compared it to a do-nut and a coffee stain and it did well there too.

Re:So close...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have your own personal definition of "equaivalent" that doesn't work here?

It would be entirely in keeping with your own personal spelling of "equivalent." Jesus... you fucked it up in exactly the same way twice, DESPITE having the correct spelling RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.

Re:So close...

[Creepy]

There actually used to be singles released on small, ~1/2 sized discs (they called 'em 3 inch in the US, but they also called CDs 5 inch) that required a plastic adapter to fit in the CD player (but played in most players), which was eventually replaced by the groove thing in most players. I thought the (non-sony) mini-discs were dead and I would never see them again, then I bought a 16MB USB storage device that came with one. Of course, only ONE of my CD/DVD/CD+-RW drives have the groove you're talking about (out of 4) and not on the machine I wanted to install it on. Fortunately, I SAMBA mounted the drive and the install worked.

It made me wonder what ever happened to my old adapter and cd singles, though.

Re:So close...

[Zen Punk]

Why would this make life so much easier for everyone? It's not as if if current drives would be able to read the new super-holla 1TB hotness discs anyways. As long as it fits in a 5 1/2" drive bay, I don't see any major headaches...

Re:So close...

[afidel]

I saw a really cool use for those small cd's this summer. Pepsi was giving away singles with a big gulp sized Pepsi product at certain partners (Sabaro's pizza is where I saw it). The whole in the middle was where the straw went. Another good use is ~220MB credit card cd's which are basically a CD-R in this smaller size with opposite sides cut to make it the height of a credit card. I carry one of these in my wallet with a ton of tools on it.

Re:So close...

[andreyw]

Yeah really, considering the the LD recorded the video as a Pulse-Width-Modulated analog signal. I doubt sufficiently-fast and cheap Analog-to-Digital conversion technology and video processing even existed for "most" computers in the LD years...

Re:So close...

[LoudMusic]

Another good use is ~220MB credit card cd's which are basically a CD-R in this smaller size with opposite sides cut to make it the height of a credit card. I carry one of these in my wallet with a ton of tools on it.

Yeah, but after you cut off the edges to fit in a wallet how much storage space do you have left? Can't be much! You have to cut off half an inch on each side and that gets you down to a 2 inch radius.

I've also wondered how well the drive does with non circular disks. I've seen them in all sorts of shapes. The worst I've seen was one cut in the shape of a guitar. The weight was completely unballanced and made a horrible noise in the person's computer that was using it. The worst part, though, was that the user didn't understand why it was doing that. "It's not ballanced you dolt!" But I've seen some with edges cut like a circular saw, or star, or the like. I saw a Mickey Mouse CD that was actually ballanced pretty well. I was impressed.

Re:So close...

[afidel]

50MB for the credit card ones and 180-220 for the full mini's. You can fit a LOT of utilities in 50MB =)

More details

[Defiler]

Optware is using a polymer developed by Aprilis.
You can find more technical details here: Technical Publications
The founder of Optware used to work at Sony, and other technical guys working for them were involved with Blu-Ray. I guess they got tired of working by the hour. Heh. Finally, here's an EETime Article that goes into more detail about the Optware product.
Personally, I just want to know when I can buy a burner.

White Album

[jeffy210]

"Guess this means I'll have to buy the white album again..."

Re:White Album

[Aerog]

I believe the exact term will be "license on a per-user, per-session basis".

So, in fact, you'll get the joy of "buying" the white album over and over and over and over again.

Re:White Album

[Lullabye_Muse]

But I already have 2 copies of the record and 1 on cd, and possibly a copy on tape... Sonic bliss is a hassle.

Re:White Album

[u-235-sentinel]

"Guess this means I'll have to buy the white album again..."

Fortunately it and several others will fit on the same HVD disk :-)

Re:White Album

[freqres]

Please don't tell George Lucas about this, I can't afford any more special edition box sets. ;)

Re:White Album

[PainKilleR-CE]

but they can record it in a near-perfect digital (holographic) representation of the original analog recording, remaster it, and fill the whole 1TB with the one album, so they won't bother putting the whole Beatles collection on one disc. After all, they can almost do that on a DVD with CD-quality audio.

Re:White Album

[Anonymous Coward]

"Please don't tell George Lucas about this, I can't afford any more special edition box sets. ;)"

You mean you've been buying them?

Re:White Album

[momerath2003]

For the clueless ones who modded the parent "overrated," the parent is quoting Agent K from Men in Black.

Re:White Album

[Alsee]

Guess this means I'll have to download the grey album again...

-

Re:White Album

[freeweed]

You ever stop to think that perhaps some of us aren't clueless, we in fact do know the reference, but just find that repeating the same joke on every single story regarding storage technology to be...

Overrated?

Or are you one of the types that feels the need to preface joke posts with "Ob: simpsons" or "Someone had to say it"?

Hint: if you ever, *ever* have to explain a joke, reference its source, or defend its use - it probably just isn't all that funny.

Re:White Album

[momerath2003]

For the record, in all of my constant browsing Slashdot stories these last two years (or so), I've never seen a MiB joke. Simpsons and soviet russia and whatever show up everywhere; thus, they aren't funny. I had assumed that the moderators hadn't watched MiB or didn't get the reference.

Re:White Album

[freeweed]

Clicky

Heh. All that I could find are > 2 years old. You're absolved :)

Re:White Album

[momerath2003]

Thank you. :P

What about durability?

[ElForesto]

I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density. How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense? I can appreciate the cool factor of cramming so much data on a single disc, but if I have to handle it like a Fabrege (sp?) egg, what's the point?

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much would a stray finger damage a floppy disk? I'm sure if it becomes a problem they'll implement some sort of protection scheme like floppies have.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

A good solution to this could be diamond, but we don't yet have diamonds cheap enough for that, some day, some day... Or, how about that transparent alumina that was on slashdot a while ago?

Re:What about durability?

[Tyler Eaves]

Why not just mirror the data? If it's a 1TB disk, why not treat it as a 250GB disk, and then have 3 extra duplicate copies.

Re:What about durability?

[56uSquareWave]

I have to say what the hell would you need that much space for anyway? most normal users would never need that much space (no jokes about bill gates and 64k please), okay we might one day. Or if you are putting HDTV movies on disk But currently if you need that much space the you have something important and as the previous reply says whats to stop you wrapping the media in a hard 'floppy disk style shell'.

How long is it before everybody stores and shifts their personal data using the net or streams movies/radio off the net? I store nearly all my personal files on my server and never carry media. 99% of the time I can get the files I need through the net. This obsession people have with actually holding data seems a little out dated these days.

Re:What about durability?

[HarveyBirdman]

Historian: Be careful with those.

Underling: OK, I, ah ah ahhhhhh chooo!

Historian: Oh, dear. What did we lose?

Underling: Ummm... the 15th century.

Re:What about durability?

[gosand]

I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density. How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense? I can appreciate the cool factor of cramming so much data on a single disc, but if I have to handle it like a Fabrege (sp?) egg, what's the point?

They should give you the ability to halve the effective storage capacity in order to write redundant data. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but would help. Unless they put these in large 3.5" floppy disk-like enclosures.

Re:What about durability?

[SeanDuggan]

*wry grin* Yeah, because that's been so effective with CDs and DVDs. Both of them still effectively die with a single small scratch. Somehow I'm doubting this medium will be much better. That said, I'm hoping maybe they'll figure something out. After all, with that size, they're talking about more than just losing a single movie or someone's Word document.

Re:What about durability?

[Tom7]

Well, for one thing you can use error-correcting codes to translate that data density into robustness.

Re:What about durability?

[paitre]

I need this kind of capacity -TODAY-.
I'm not the only one. No - optical media is not as resilient and reliable as magnetic tape, but it sure as hell would make doing backups easier when dealing with multi-TB disk arrays :)

Re:What about durability?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Optical disks have been through this before, actually. The R/W optical drive on my NeXTCube used discs that were in a permanent caddy. Minidiscs use the same thing. It's no big deal.

Re:What about durability?

[non]

most likelz it would come in some sort of cartridge that protected surface access. really protected it. and just to be on the safe side the unit would perform all operations in a vacuum.

Re:What about durability?

[bluesnowmonkey]

Who cares? It's a frickin' TERABYTE. Put it in its own disk caddy and never touch it at all.

Re:What about durability?

[psetzer]

Well, I can't believe that I'm suggesting this, but back in the good old days, CDs were put in caddies. In fact, the best way I could see the holographic ones working is to have each in a permanent caddy or cartridge. You can protect it from scratches, fingerprints, and dust. It would certainly make them easier to handle, although more expensive and bulkier.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

If its truley holographic, you could break it in two, and each half would contain virtually all of the information of the original.

Re:What about durability?

[cybrthng]

I have to say what the hell would you need that much space for anyway?

Digital video applications would be great for this type of density. Just think of watching a raw-encoded HDTV .ts stream of a 4 hour show at 1920x1080p on a digital projection system without any lossy compression and not to mention plenty of space for a variable bitrate 384kbps per channel surround sound track.

Movie theaters could publish entire movies in hi-def on a single 12cm disk rather than a 45lb set of reels that are expensive to ship, bulky to handle as well as expensive to produce.

Not only would movie markets love this, but anything related to imaging, science and especially seismic & charting companies. Just imagine being able to contain an entire 3d map os seismic data of the earths crust across an entire ocean on a single disk.

Re:What about durability?

[Catbeller]

"I have to say what the hell would you need that much space for anyway? "

4K scanning resolution - what you need to have to preserve most of the image information on 35mm film -- will require 1 TB at least! The displays for 4K will come along when the media can support it.

After 4K scanned movies, there won't be any more increases in resolution. We can finally stop the new media dance...

Re:What about durability?

[baudilus]

You're not talking about durability - you're talking about redundancy.

You're not talking about durability - you're talking about redundancy.

You're not talking about durability - you're talking about redundancy.

You're not talking about durability - you're talking about redundancy.

Re:What about durability?

[shiftless]

I store nearly all my personal files on my server and never carry media. 99% of the time I can get the files I need through the net. This obsession people have with actually holding data seems a little out dated these days.

Not everybody has broadband.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

And when the building your server is in catches fire, the sprinkler system goes off and ruins your hard drives, all of your data is gone. With something like this you could do an entire system backup for several machines and walk out of the building with it. Should something happen you're not completely lost.

I mention this because it actually happened to a client of mine. Very nearly destroyed his, otherwise successful, business. Luckily he had a one week old backup on CD, so the losses weren't as bad as they could have been. He estimated losses of over a million $USD simply in lost financial data (the billing system was what got destroyed, so he didn't know who owed him what, what he owed his employees, where his custumers were located, etc.). The damages to equipment and the building were minimal in comparison.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's simple - it's time to use GOD DAMNED carts/plastic cases and never have the disk itself touchable unless abolustely required!

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had an account and mod points, I'd mod your post as -1 Durable

Re:What about durability?

[Viking Coder]

After 4K scanned movies, there won't be any more increases in resolution. We can finally stop the new media dance...

Yeah right. Something something 640K should be enough for something something... =)

What about 70mm film? That's four times as much data.

And that doesn't even account for higher framerates producing more data. Or more bits per channel producing even more data.

Yeah, it's fairly safe to use the old addage, "data expands to fill the available storage space." Video is no different.

Re:What about durability?

[IronChef]

I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density.

According to this site that's hooey.

"A common misperception is that a scratch will be worse on a DVD than on a CD because of higher storage density and because video is heavily compressed. DVD data density is physically four times that of CD-ROM, so it's true that a scratch will affect more data. But DVD error correction is at least ten times better than CD-ROM error correction and more than makes up for the density increase."

And that came from Disney, so you can trust it 110%!

Re:What about durability?

[freqres]

Unless they put these in large 3.5" floppy disk-like enclosures.

That's a great idea. They could even make them reusable so that you only keep your most used discs in the enclosures. Enclosure isn't a very marketable name though, I think 'caddy' would be a better name.

Re:What about durability?

[56uSquareWave]

No but everybody important has broadband ;)

Seriously though, how long before most people have broad band? I realise there are studies showing people who only really use email are sticking with dial up, but how long before ISPs start to phase out dial up, especially since phone companies are moving to VoIP?

Re:What about durability?

[Xepo]

lol, do your calculations first before making wild claims, I'm assuming 32-bit color, and 30 frames per second...which the frame rate at least is probably on the low-end:
(1920*1080 * 4 bytes per pixel * 30 frames per second)

straight from google:
(1 920 * 1 080 * 4 * 30 bytes per second) * 2.5 hours = 2.03680247 terabytes

You'd need 3 of these discs to store a two and a half hour movie in the format you said. Sure, these discs are massive, but don't underestimate the size of a movie...it's practically impossible at this stage of technology to work with raw video.

BTW, if you're planning on storing the video raw, why use variable bitrate? Why not just store the audio raw as well? Raw audio is actually manageable at least.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'd really like to be able to sample our data at a 4 ns sample rate and 12 (or even 16) bits per sample. Today. Right now. Of course it's not personal data.

You do the math, but that's huge. Right now we do only record 1/2048th of that because of the size (and the price of hardware to do it).

Books -> sound recordings -> film -> what's next? Do you really think we're done? I don't see things slowing down, but if 64K isn't enough I'm sure you think 640K is.

Re:What about durability?

[Tyler Eaves]

In this situation, what precisely is the difference? The effect is that it's harder to have data loss.

Re:What about durability?

[Proteus]

Thanks for the link. Elsewhere on that site, I found this (emphasis mine):

Keep away from radiators/heaters, hot equipment surfaces, direct sunlight (near a window or in a car during hot weather), pets, small children, and other destructive forces. Magnetic fields have no effect on DVDs.

It's nice to see that Disney regards children as "destructive forces" -- clearly, whoever wrote that is an experienced parent. :)

Re:What about durability?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're not talking about redundancy - you're talking about data repetition.

Re:What about durability?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're not talking about redundancy - you're talking about data repetition.

Re:What about durability?

[Jason Earl]

Anyone with small children can attest to the fact that they are the quintessential "destructive force." Heck, my children are good kids but that doesn't mean that I leave them alone for any period of time whatsoever with anything valuable.

Re:What about durability?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're not talking about redundancy - you're talking about data repetition.

Re:What about durability?

[Defiler]

Ignoring lossless compression, (which has come a long way.. check out CorePNG if you're interested) even HDTV doesn't use 4 bytes of color per pixel.
4:2:2 is the most common sampling format for HDTV, which greatly reduces the required bitrate.
Still, even 100mbps would be a huge improvement over typical high-def bitrates, and you can store a whole lot of 100mbps footage on a 1TB disc.

Re:What about durability?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're not talking about redundancy - you're talking about data repetition.

Re:What about durability?

[katz]

Assuming 70mm film could be approximated with 8000^2 pixels, you can see that an uncompressed two-hour film at 25 fps and 3 bytes per pixel would take up:

>>> res=8000; bpp=3; fps=25; sec=60; min=120
>>> cost = lambda: (res**2)*bpp*fps*sec*min
>>> cost()
34560000000000L

bytes (34.5 terabytes)

at fps=60, it would take 82.944 TB.

Re:What about durability?

[LeBlanc_Joey]

Well they could put it into a caddy a la floppy disc, minidisc, etc.

Re:What about durability?

[AdrainB]

All you have to do is rub some toothpaste on it. Works every time.

Re:What about durability?

[Canuck_TV]

The only place where resolution/bpc/film size still has the potential to grow is in the actual production industry. I could see myself editing 24bpc projects in AfterEffects in a few years for the sake of quality, but the bottom line in video is that HD is the end of resolution increase in a 2-dimensional display for the consumer.

Like the frame rate (which hasn't increased in 50 years) of 30f/s (29.98 for the purists) any more would be a waste - the human eye can't percieve much motion beyond that. Our eyes are good, but 16bpc is pushing it as it is.

We'll be making 20,000fps cameras for photo-finishes and slow motion, 48bpc images at original acquisition for scientific study, but the TV in front of your couch isn't going to be sucking any more bits until some kind of breakthrough in 3-dimensional displays.

Re:What about durability?

[JamesKPolk]

So we're not talking about... practice?

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad there's no Data repetition -mod?

Re:What about durability?

[multimed]

Standard disclaimer language aside, I think it's clear Disney sees children for exactly what they are (to them): a direct connection to their parents' pocketbooks.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the cool things about holographs, is the way in which data is stored, an interference pattern generated between a reference laser and the signal laser - not a series of ever-tinyer bits. Take a standard holograph film, clip off the corner and the original image can stil be veiwed from that small piece. Not bits, or pixels or flecks of silver nitrate.

So...how big of a footprint on the disk is the interference pattern? can successive holographic images of pages overlap (probably) without significant degradation (certainly-given the nature of a holographic image). If i scratch a standard holographic film, the image as a whole still exists in the entire sheet and is not lost. I suspect this is also somewhat true of this device, depending upon the physical size of a given holographic 'page' on the media surface.

Hard to tell tho, since the linked article is light on technical detail.

Re:What about durability?

[bwy]

Have you ever looked at the data side of a DVD you rent from Blockbuster? WTF do the previous renters DO with these DVDs? Drag them on the asphalt? Probably 1 out every 5 I rent has some sort of defect that usually occurs right at the "good spot" in the movie.

That is about the only thing I ever liked about MD... the optical surface was protected from human exposure.

Re:What about durability?

[Wescotte]

Obviously you've need heard of pr0n.

You can always make due with the amount of storage you have but it'd be nice to never have to get rid of anything.

Re:What about durability?

[Dravik]

ISP's will offer dial-up as long as it is profitable to do so.

Re:What about durability?

[Dravik]

Here's a question I've been meaning to ask. If we can't detect anything over 30 frames per second, how come 60 Hz is the minimum that monitors display? Isn't 1 Hz 1 cycle per/sec?

Re:What about durability?

[Dravik]

I still have one of those cd caddys around here somewhere

Re:What about durability?

[karnal]

" Digital video applications would be great for this type of density. Just think of watching a raw-encoded HDTV .ts stream of a 4 hour show at 1920x1080p on a digital projection system without any lossy compression and not to mention plenty of space for a variable bitrate 384kbps per channel surround sound track."

That kinda caught me off guard. You're stating that we should losslessly compress the video, but not have 24-bit, 96khz sampled audio tracks for each speaker in the theatre? You've just gone mad!!!!!

Re:What about durability?

[fatcatman]

Likewise. I could very much use the space. The grandparent must not be into digital video... I quit using a VCR when I discovered I could get better than VCR quality rips of my favorite TV shows online. One season of any random show is about 10GB. It starts to add up fast; I have hundreds of gigs of stuff now.

I've resorted to mirroring and backing up to another drive, but that gets expensive. I need 1TB discs and I need them yesterday. Getting them under $10 a disc soon and making them reliable enough that they don't randomly fail like half the CDRs I've used would be cooler than I can put into words.

Re:What about durability?

[Viking Coder]

Well, I agree with you that 16 bits per channel should be good enough for output (maybe not intermediate processing) for a long time. Even the experimental High Dynamic Range monitors aren't running at that, right?

But I absolutely disagree with your statement about 30f/s being the edge of human perception. Sure, you get diminishing returns, but clearly people appreciate differences up to 75 Hz, and I've heard that professional atheletes can discriminate down to 1/200 of a second.

HD is the end of resolution increase in a 2-dimensional display for the consumer.

My LCD pulls down higher resolution than HD, so I disagree.

Re:What about durability?

[TarrVetus]

I remember a time when CDs were contained in jewel case-like plastic containers, which you would then insert into the drive with the CD still in the case. This way you didn't have to worry about the CD getting scratched, and if the plastic case ever became smeared or scratched, you would just replace the case, leaving the CD intact.

I imagine that this method of packaging would be an easy solution to something as fragile as the holographic disks.

Re:What about durability?

[sfeinstein]

Who could possibly understand better than Disney that children are destructive forces??

YOU try walking around the park dressed as Goofey and getting punched in the nads every 3.5 minutes and then come back and tell me how sweet and innocent kids are.

Re:What about durability?

[Geoff-with-a-G]

No, silly. You need the holographic disc to store holographic movies. Truly 3D movies will take 1 TB, easy.

Re:What about durability?

[AtrN]

Let's just wait and see how long this comment lasts....

Re:What about durability?

[TheSync]

Yes, but theaters could also use HDCAM tapes which at 100 Mbps+ will give you quality almost totally undetectably different from uncompressed HD.

Re:What about durability?

[cybrthng]

True, raw audio is smaller than raw hdtv but even when broadcasting/imaging HDTV you don't use the full bandwidth of 4 bits per pixel so there is some "loss"

The increase to full 4:2:2 HDTV video at 1080p (progressive scan) and 384kbps variable bitrate audio would smoke just about everything out there and COULD happen with this technology relatively soon.

Atleast with some compression, a good codec and variable bitrate your not storing a bunch of "white noise" in data that could be used for video :)

I have a 120" projection screen - Current DVD-A audio sounds great to me - however Video sampling in large screens needs lots of work and the bandwidth & storage capacity of these disks would alleviate those issues.

Hopefully technology like this could put an and to D-VHS and low density (by this standard) Blue Ray and HD-DVD wannabees.

Re:What about durability?

[Thuktun]

I store nearly all my personal files on my server and never carry media.

Some people actually have to host data, unlike yourself. At some point you actually want to make BACKUPS of your data. (Hopefully the admin of the server who hosts your data does likewise.)

To back up a single modern computer, even a piddly 40GB drive, without resorting to expensive DAT drives and the like, you'd need a dozen writeable DVDs. Being able to backup all my computers on a SINGLE optical disk would be fantastic.

Re:What about durability?

[Catbeller]

Agreed, I was playing a little. 1 TB won't be enough for video.

Crank up to 4K lines of video. Don't compress the data at all: keep it lossless. Reintroduce frames, and crank it up from 25 fps, which after all was established when Edison was alive, to something like 75 - 100 fps.

You'll need disks with petabyte capacity.

But it opens up new possiblities. Movie theaters can use the media to replace film. Studios can downrez for anything from 240 line VHS to 4K superprojectors for the home. They can establish pricing tiers based on resolution. And with proper backup, studios can stop losing movies as the film media disintegrates.

Re:What about durability?

[jerde]

How much would an errant fingernail wipe out on something this dense?

Why do we insist on clinging to "naked" optical discs? They have always put magnetic media inside cartridges or flexible envelopes... Just because CDs and DVDs work well enough without caddies, must we reject that idea out of hand?

Design a really air-tight, substantial cartridge for these puppies, and don't let those fingernails near the media!

- Peter

Re:What about durability?

[Combuchan]

Poke fun as you may, but CD caddies simply rock for media storage and playback simply because you don't have to touch the disk to get it from the storage holder to the drive.

I don't know about most /. readers, but I find it infuriating to buy a $10 - $20 DVD or CD only to find it scratched a few months later and largely unplayable--you miss a scene because of a scratch on the DVD and the whole movie's screwed.

Caddies prevent scratching, dust, fingerprints, and a whole host of other maladies that CD's are succeptable to. Why we moved away from them is simply beyond me--storing optical media in a caddy just makes sense.

On a side note, does anybody remember the old Unisys machines that, with their "force read" option, would still even read a knife-slashed floppy? Whatever happened to that kind of media durability?

Re:What about durability?

[argent]

Back when data CDs started showing up, I read that the reason the data CDs were using the caddies and the audio CDs weren't was because originally they were all supposed to be permanently installed in caddies, but the marketing people wanted the CDs to remind people more of records than cassettes, and eventually the data CDs followed.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Too lazy to log in, btw)
Oh, I know there has been quite a bit of development on lossless compression, but the original comment said raw, as in, no compression. Which would take a lot more than a terabyte of data for a movie.

What does 4:2:2 mean? I can understand 16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit, but I have no clue how to interpret 4:2:2...

Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that the terabyte disc would be useless, or that you couldn't increase quality by a lot, I was just saying that storing it in raw formats wouldn't be feasible, and to encourage the grandparent to be a bit more careful with his claims. =P

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'll take the extra 24 GB.

Re:What about durability?

[drinkypoo]

I suspect that two real reasons CDs aren't all in caddies today are size and cost. It costs more to put a CD in a caddy than it costs to make a CD, and you can't stick a CD in a caddy into a device the size of a discman, it would have to be larger and that's not acceptable.

Re:What about durability?

[gfody]

4:2:2 is the relative space used to store the seperate channels of the image.

because your eyes are more sensitive to luminance (brightness) than chrominance (color), the image is seperated into lumi and chromi and the chromi channel is subsampled to half or even 1/4 the size of the lumi channel. the chromi can be further split up because your eyes are more sensitive to green than blue or red.

this is a good explanation

Re:What about durability?

[Pulse_Instance]

If I remember correctly they had a sliding metal door over where the disc was read, so why would you ever need to replace the case if it got smeared or scratched?

Re:What about durability?

[shiftless]

Seriously though, how long before most people have broad band? I realise there are studies showing people who only really use email are sticking with dial up, but how long before ISPs start to phase out dial up, especially since phone companies are moving to VoIP?

It's going to be a long, long time before "everybody" has broadband. There are many areas of the nation where broadband is simply not available for various reasons. Here in Alabama, only people in the bigger cities have access to broadband, and many of us who live in rural areas or smaller towns just don't have access to it.

Re:What about durability?

[hypertex]

Bring back shuttles

Re:What about durability?

[BillyBlaze]

I'm too young to remember whether this was true, but were the caddies standardized? If not, I'm not surprised they failed.

Re:What about durability?

[cheekyboy]

Personally, id rather stick to a HD because;

1. its smaller if you stack up a 200 DVDs thats about the same space as 10 HDs
2. its a lot SAFER, the HD wont fail, especially if you use it like a BIGASS floppy as it wont be spinning 24/7 so MTBF will be like in 5000 years time.
3. no seek times, much faster

Im very warry of all those mp3 CDRs and burned DVDs or divx avis on CDRs/DVDs that just might NOT be readable on some of these elcheapo blanks.
Pretty soon im going to go 100% HD, ill probably have em ofcourse in removeable trays, but lable one HD as mp3s and another as 2002-2004 movies or something. If I want to use it away from home, all i need to get is one of those usb/firewire cases and instant movie jukebox for all.

The only issue is what format to use so EVERY OS likes it, fat32 is a joke for large HDs, so its NTFS, what else will 'run' on windows OTB.

Re:What about durability?

[argent]

Those are good reasons why CDs aren't in caddies today.

What I was referring to was the reason CDs weren't in caddies when they came out in the early '80s, when there was no such thing as a discman, and nobody was making CDs except in bulk pressings, when nobody was selling CDs except in jewelboxes that wouldn't have cost much less than plastic caddies (remember, they wouldn't have to be rigid as caddies or jewelboxes that have to be opened and closed) and then those were packed in longboxes so they could fit in the record racks in stores.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

>My LCD pulls down higher resolution than HD, so I disagree.

Um... higher than 720p maybe. But higher than 1080i/1080p (1080x1920)??? That 2 million pixels dude. What resolution is your LCD monitor?

Re:What about durability?

[Alsee]

I have to say what the hell would you need that much space for anyway?

Well, if you use compression you'll be able to fit Windows Longhorn plus either Final Fantasy XIII or Baldur's Gate 4 on one disk.

-

Re:What about durability?

[drinkypoo]

Sure, caddies are standardized. I have a bunch of them, and I probably still have a 1x scsi cdrom that uses them somewhere, which I saved because it supports 512 byte blocks. So do most modern SCSI cdroms, but the older ones were either 512 or 2048 byte; Unix systems almost all needed 512 byte blocks, including sun, sgi, hp, ibm, et cetera, whereas PCs used the 2k block. Almost all toshibas and most plextors can be configured for either one, though on toshibas you may have to cut traces [which are designed for this purpose] to change them to 512b. Anyway that is a wide diversion but the point is yes, the caddies were always the same.

Re:What about durability?

[shadow_slicer]

You can do a lot more useful things with that 750 GB than just mirror the rest.
The first thing I would think to do (still mirroring) would be to interleave the mirrored data in such a way that the mirrored segments are as far apart as possible on the disk.
Also, instead of mirroring, you could use some error correction codes so that you can detect what a segment should say even if all the redundant sections are damaged.
On the extreme end you could use some of the slower (and more advanced) error correcting codes (like turbo codes or ldpc) to store all of the disk's data. Of course this would be amazingly slow, but you can't beat the reliability.

Re:What about durability?

[PantsWearer]

Television fakes 60 frames per second by switching out half the frame at a time (every other row). That's what the "i" vs. "p" means in the video formats that everyone's jabbering about. "i" is interlaced, "p" is progressive.

Motion picture projectors do something similar. They've by definition progressive, one whole frame at a time, but they have a lower frame rate than even TV; it's something like 27 f/s. They trick your eye by illuminating every frame twice.

It goes like this: first they show you a frame, then the slotted rotating disk (I can't remember the name for this) blacks it out by moving to a solid section, this it rotates to show the same frame again. In the next blackout, the next frame is moved into place and the cycle repeats.

Re:What about durability?

[iantri]

24 fps.

Just FYI.

Re:What about durability?

[iantri]

29.97 fps (NTSC), actually 59.94 interlaced fields per second. 25p fps/50i fps PAL.

And yes, the difference between 24fps telecined to 59.94 fields per second (movies, NTSC), 29.97fps progressive (some television programs shot on video), and 59.94 interlaced fields per second (most programs shot on video) is definitely very noticable.

Re:What about durability?

[iantri]

I have herad this too, and I think it is a load of rubbish.

In my personal experience, I have occasionally had huge problems with rental DVDs that have a small, almost invisible ding in them. I purchased a used set of Babylon 5 Season 1 discs. On one of them the video broke up and jumped 2 minutes in one part. The problem? A tiny spot (of something) on the disc. Rubbed off, played perfectly.

With an audio CD you can put a huge scratch through it and it will still play perfectly. In fact, in early public demonstrations of CD technology they would drill a hole in the CD and then play it, with little interruption.

Re:What about durability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give that mod +1 Funny.

Re:What about durability?

[Canuck_TV]

NTSC Television: 30fps (60 fields per second)
PAL television: 25fps (interlaced)
Film: 24fps (progressive)

Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can carry Emacs around with me....uncompressed!

Re:Excellent

[shfted!]

I'm afraid that you won't be able to run it many places yet -- 128 bit computers to meet its RAM requirements are rare.

Finally!

[Trolling4Dollars]

A way to back up all the data in my house. Now I just need to contact all the HD manufacturers and tell them to stop maker bigger HDs so that removable media and permanent media will come into parity in terms of relative size. Backup mediums should always be removable, random access devices with more capacity than the primary storage.

Re:Finally!

[csnydermvpsoft]

Backup mediums should always be removable, random access devices with more capacity than the primary storage.

SATA hard drives are hot-swappable. Removable caddies for them cost around $50.

Re:Finally!

[Trolling4Dollars]

That sounds like the kind of sweet goodness I've been looking for. Now... I just need to upgrade my home network to machines with SATA interfaces.

Combined with...

[ITWeeniesAreWorthles]

... recursive compression that results in an asymptotic curve towards a minimum size for already-compressed data over 'x' runs that I've been working on, and you can store pretty much anything on a single holographic disc!

Oh yeah, and the obligatory mention of a Beowulf cluster of these things, and how we all bow down before our new holographic data masters, and Bababoowie...

ITWeeniesAreWorthles

When can I buy the burner?!?

[Astadar]

Me thinks that'll keep people from copying for quite a while. Doesn't sound like it'll be a anywhere near a consumer device for quite some time.

Not to mention the cost of media...

Not to put a dampner on things...

[AKAImBatman]

...but you can call me when these things are an actual PRODUCT. Many companies have been claiming massive data storage abilities, some in the range of hundreds of terrabytes! Yet not one has provided a realistic product. Problems include:

- Too costly to manufacture at a profit
- Holographics are too susceptible to damage from scratches or normal wear
- Lasers are difficult to keep calibrated
- whole bunch of stuff I'm not aware of

I really would love to see a format that could play hundreds of hours of uncompressed HDTV video. Despite all the press releases, the reality is that it's just not here yet.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[bobbis.u]

Even if it was practical, cheap and profitable, they would never make such a quantum leap in one go. Most people would be able to buy one of these drives and probably not upgrade again for 10 years. No respectable company would sell a product once, when they could instead realease incremental improvements every year for 10 years.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[ArsonSmith]

"they would never make such a quantum leap in one go"

advertisers sure like that term cause it sounds so grandiose, but a quantum leap is actual the smallest measure of distance that has any meaning what so ever.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[MindStalker]

- Lasers are difficult to keep calibrated

Thats the main point in this new disk. It has preformated bumps that don't interfer with the holigram. This is used to calibrate the timing of the reading.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[cynical kane]

Wrongo! The Planck distance is the smallest measure that has any meaning.

A quantam leap is an instantaneous leap, which is presumably the meaning used by marketers.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[fireboy1919]

Presumably molecules leap Planck distances to get from one point to another though, right?

Your definition could use some precision, I think.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[AKAImBatman]

Whoa! Settle down. My only point is that this technology is probably farther away than this press release would make it appear. Many people (including myself, once upon a time) assume that just because it has been announced in the media, it's a reality. This simply isn't the case. The highway of technology is littered with press releases for technology that just plain violated the laws of physics, much less failed to produce a working product.

Now if you want to talk about all the aerospace technology developed in the 50's and 60's that has never seen the light of day, then I'll join you in an upset tirade.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[pHDNgell]

advertisers sure like that term cause it sounds so grandiose, but a quantum leap is actual the smallest measure of distance that has any meaning what so ever.

You should discuss that with whomever wrote this page. In particular:

It is sometimes said that a phrase such as 'a quantum leap in technology' is inappropriate, because 'quantum' supposedly means 'small' in quantum mechanics, so a 'quantum leap' would be a 'small advance'. However, 'quantum' does not actually mean 'small' in quantum mechanics; it means 'indivisible' or 'all-at-once'; but that indivisible logically implies smallest-possible. A quantum leap is an advance that happens all at once, rather than gradually over time. If advances are classified as either evolutionary or revolutionary, then a quantum leap would be the latter.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if ten years ago there were many companies claiming massive storage abilities, in the range of hundreds of gigabytes..

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[cynical kane]

You seem to be under the impression that the universe is a grid made of Planck-sized boxes. It isn't. Particles can still be in continuous motion. And molecules are far, far bigger than the Planck distance.

See the other poster who replied to this thread, who defined "quantam".

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[danila]

OK then. But in regards to this particular company, I tend to believe in their technology a little bit more. Sure it's just thier words, but if they managed to do everything from writing information (and not a few bytes, but a multi-Gb movie, presumably) to reading it and showing it, they are much closer to a finished product than many companies before them.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[Anonymous Coward]

terrabytes

- bytes that are properly grounded

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[Kanasta]

I thought when you cut a hologram into bits each bit contains the WHOLE of the original.

Re:Not to put a dampner on things...

[AKAImBatman]

I think you're confusing Holographic imaging with holographic data storage. Holographic data storage works by stacking layers of media, with each layer sensitive to only one area of the spectrum. All other spectrums pass through to the next layer down. This allows you to "stack" information like hard drive disk platters.

One gigabyte transfer speed?

[HtR]

Heck, even my old 300 baud modem has a "one gigabyte transfer speed", if you measure in bytes per decade.

so fast!

[Lord Ender]

A 1 gigabyte transfer speed! That is so fast! I could store this new disk in my new 12-minute wide closet.

Re:so fast!

[HarveyBirdman]

I could store this new disk in my new 12-minute wide closet.

Wow! You measure closet size in light minutes? Where do you live?

Re:so fast!

[mekkab]

Probably one of those gawd-awful McMansions inappropriately located on 1 kiloWatt of land!

Re:so fast!

[HarveyBirdman]

Huh? A kilowatt of land is just a handful of atoms, isn't it? Depends on the matter -> energy conversion efficiency, I guess.

Re:so fast!

[pete-classic]

How do you know it's light minutes? Could be arc minutes. So now we just need to know how far he is from the closet.

-Peter

Re:so fast!

[pohl]

This thread started at 80 copious-buttload-pounds of funny, but now it's down to a few femto-buttload-pounds.

Re:so fast!

[zx75]

Uh, minutes is a valid measurement of distance. Its used in measuring fractions of a degree on the surface of the globe... so may I be the first to say that you have one hell of a huge closet.

Re:so fast!

[birdman17]

Wow! You measure closet size in light minutes? Where do you live?

12 parsecs from Kessel.

Re:so fast!

[king-manic]

I could store this new disk in my new 12-minute wide closet.
Wow! You measure closet size in light minutes? Where do you live?


apparently, at least 107 925 284 880m from one side of his closet.

Re:so fast!

[pchan-]

I could store this new disk in my new 12-minute wide closet.

the lorentz equations give us the ability to translate between the 3 (major) spacial dimensions and the temporal dimension. simplified to one spacial dimension, and assuming your closet is not (relatively) accelerating, you can say that 1 second is equal to approx 300,000,000 meters.

so, uh, your closet is fucking huge.

Re:so fast!

[MindStalker]

Well its still smaller than a light-minute.

Re:so fast!

[iabervon]

Between the Sun and Mars, probably.

Re:so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

depends on the size of the globe. he never said it was Earth.

Re:so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

er,

More like from Earth to Mercury when the Sun is directly between the two.

Re:so fast!

[Lord Ender]

Uh, minutes is a valid measurement of distance. Its used in measuring fractions of a degree on the surface of the globe... so may I be the first to say that you have one hell of a huge closet.

Wow. You make a pedantic joke and feel like such a wise-ass, only to discover there is always an ass with more wisdom than you out there.

Well, to reclaim my honor, I subimt that minutes is a radial measurement, and is completely worthless as a measurement of distance unless altitude is also known. The joke stands again as funny. Wiseass.

Re:so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's the economy these days.. Though having to spend 2348 years just to travel from one side to another would sure have gotten boring after a while.

Re:so fast!

[minister of funk]

Does it matter if he is in or out of the closet?

Re:so fast!

[fr2asbury]

Hey! I've been there!

Re:so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

However you need to take into account that Mercury been out of the closet for quite while already..

Re:so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Parmin" != 60 parsecs.

Re:so fast!

[jerde]

Should funny be measured in some sort of clown-units?

- Peter

Re:so fast!

[Alsee]

Maybe he's 12 light minutes away? That would make it a 467,000 mile wide closet. That's a lot more reasonable than a 12 light minute wide closet (134 million miles).

Or maybe he meant 12 minutes, as in there are 4 infintesimals in a minute, 24 minutes in a miniscule and 1152 minutes in an itsy-bitsy. An isty bitsy is half a teenie weenie. In case anyone still doesn't get it, look here.

-

Re:so fast!

[pete-classic]

Well, it depends entirely on the depth of the closet. We really only need to know how far he is from the door (and the angle off the normal to the door) to calculate the width in some usable unit.

Oh, that wasn't what you meant, was it?

-Peter

Re:so fast!

[haroldK]

Are those metric or SAE buttloads?

Go get a CD and a ruler

[HarveyBirdman]

Since when is 12 cm the size of a DVD or CD?

I just measured one. 12 cm.

ObSheesh: Sheesh!

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I thought CD's were 12 seconds wide.

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I thought CD's were 12 seconds wide.

Duh, they're either 74 or 80 minutes long...sheesh!

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Jugalator]

Duh, they're either 74 or 80 minutes long...sheesh!

And the data they can store weighs in at 650 or 700 MB.

Always hated that terminology. :-/

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Anonymous Coward]

How many phonebooks is that?

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Anonymous Coward]

They are 60x60x360 seconds all around

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[jeffgeno]

Damn, I thought CD's were 12 seconds wide.

They could be, but it depends on how far away they are.

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Anonymous Coward]

As one minute on the equator is a nautical mile a CD is only 0.0039 seconds wide. Of course you can also argue its 6.2 km long...

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[alphorn]

Using your built in ruler?

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[Sotogonesu]

Funny, I measured it to be 4 and 185/256".

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[BlowinTrees]

The disc size is 12cm, comparable to that of a DVD and a CD. the word comparable is comparable to the word similar... is it considered unpatriotic to be able to eyeball 12cm? if so then i wasn't able to verify this by glancing at my desk.

Re:Go get a CD and a ruler

[pete-classic]

Please contact me to make royalty arrangemnets.

-Peter

Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[FerretFrottage]

I love the technology, but you got to make the media more durable. I hate today's DVDs/CDs that scratch from the slightest mishandling. Those of use with kids (not intended for parents with 30+yrs still living with them, I mean young childen) know the horror I seeing your 2 yr old running around with you prized XXX DVD screaming "I want watch Blues Clues, plez)

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Aadain2001]

You know, you might want to hide your porn better in the future then ;)

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[FerretFrottage]

Hey, I meant XXX the movie...get your mind out of the gutter

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet mother of god, did you just admit to owning that movie?

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Uber Banker]

That, sir, is a far graver crime.

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to make a cart/plastic case STANDARD, and have the drive remove the disk - so silly to have the disk itself touchable - drives should refuse to take a disk unless it's in a cart.

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Anonymous Coward]

best post evar

Re:Pretty damn cool...now make it durable

[Alsee]

2 yr old running around with you prized XXX DVD screaming "I want watch Blues Clues, plez"

oooooo! Daddy! Look how looong Blue's nose is!

-

Ah...

[ImaLamer]

But when will the computer writers and re-writers be released?

I'd love to backup my hard drive onto this media. Let's see, I can put my hard drive onto it 6.25 times!

Ok, so what can this be used for besides keeping copies of my families DNA or all the books at the public library?

Re:Ah...

[Mateito]

Ok, so what can this be used for besides keeping copies of my families DNA or all the books at the public library?

Um.. pr0n?

This is Slashdot.

Re:Ah...

[Tlosk]

Over the past year I've been saving my CD and cassete tape collection to WAV files because I'm both concerned about the physical media they are on deteriorating further and because I like being able to quickly convert to new compression formats as they come out. But with a little over 600 titles, that adds up to a huge amount of storage. While I don't think I would ever trust anything other than a hard drive to be the sole holder of this material, it would be nice to be able to have a backup or two, and CDs get me right back where I am in terms of the space occupied by the originals. DVDs save some room, but still not enough to make it hassle free. I think one of the big trends on the horizon as we go to larger and larger capacities will be a move towards loss compression formats. Just watch a DVD on a plasma screen if you think there would be no benefit lol. And with the increased format sizes coming up (HD-DVD and DVD Audio) it will only get worse. We've lived with JPGs, MP3s, and MPEG encoding for so many years that I think most of us just take it for granted that you have to live with a little loss in quality, but it's not a given, it's just a tradeoff required by current storage/throughput limitations.

Re:Ah...

[pangloss]

why wouldn't you at least use a lossless audio compression codec?

e.g. FLAC, APE, SHN...

Re:Ah...

[Anonymous Coward]

With a 1Gb/s transfer speed without having RTFA a rewritable one would make for a decent hard drive or RAM style functioning disc

Re:Ah...

[Tlosk]

In principle there's no reason. In reality though, the tradeoff between space consumed and the difficulty of re-encoding to wav/managing has to be in my benefit.

I've found a few good lossless compression formats, but none of them in my experience have robust and friendly tools for managing the compressed music to make it availabe for reencoding in other formats. Also there's the issue of needing over double the space during that process unless I want to sit down and go album by album, deleting as I go.

In other words, it's just easier over all to maintain my archive in uncompressed WAV.

Re:Ah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, finally I can get all this pr0n off my hard drive!

splicing

[SalMoriarty]

now how am i gonna splice my one frame of pornography in the middle of those things?

In other news

[endeitzslash]

Sony has announced a new Holographic+ format that is identical in every way except that it is totally incompatible, requiring onerous license fees.

Sony executives reached for comment would only say "Have you seen my new house? It's made of MONEY!".

Re:In other news

[exhilaration]

Sony has announced a new Holographic+ format that is identical in every way except that it is totally incompatible, requiring onerous license fees.

... and only plays ATRAC.

Re:In other news

[Impeesa]

"Do you like my hat? It's made of MONEY!"

Re:In other news

[bwy]

And it curiously comes in a "stick" format.

Re:Units?

[no soup for you]

Tsk tsk for not getting your units right. One gigabyte transfer speed? What? One gigabyte per second? Per hour? Per Martian solar year?

No, its one gigabyte per library of congress

Special Edition

[mitchellandrews]

Does that mean I have to buy Star Wars again?

Re:Special Edition

[Zardoz44]

Greedo shoots first...in holographic disks.

Re:Special Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if the MPAA has it's way. Otherwise, Fair Use and a burner says NO.

Re: Special Edition

[MenTaLguY]

In holographic disks... Greedo shoots you?

Re:Special Edition

[rjstanford]

Yes, but not for another 27 years or so - just before the holoQuBe comes out in fact. So I wouldn't worry about it.

Re:Special Edition

[cylcyl]

Yes, and it will be worth it, since the movie will be holographically rendered 3D images and not require a player

Mas choices

[StevenHenderson]

Sweet. I was just thinking how we needed another format to compete with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for the future technology. Tri-mode DVD players anyone?

Re:Mas choices

[stretch0611]

In other news there are already three different file formats for this one making the DVD (+R) / (-R) choice seem easy.

Re:Mas choices

[StevenHenderson]

You forgot DVD-RAM - that makes 3. Oh, and by the way, you have the best sig ever. :)

Screw Blu-ray

[Anonymous Writer]

They should just skip Blu-ray and release this one. It may take a little longer to get into production, but why would peope buy Blu-ray drives if this one won't be far behind?

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[Iron Clad Burrito]

The same reason people buy video cards when the next generation is only 6 months away, I'd suppose.

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[crazy blade]

Are you crazy? No way! First:

1. Produce Blue-Ray
2. Market it
3. Wait until everybody has it
4. Profit

Then:

1. Produce HVD
2. Market it
3. Wait until everybody has it
4. Profit AGAIN!

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[Anonymous Writer]

That's assuming organisations like the RIAA and MPAA would allow HVD. A single HVD music CD of MP3s is probably all that someone would ever need, so the RIAA would be against it. And as for movies- even without the improved video compression currently available, movies on HVDs would be the equivalent of CD-ROMs of MP3s, so the MPAA would be against it. Although, maybe it would be okay for HDTV. If consumers could get ahold of HVDs before the RIAA and MPAA got their claws into it, people would buy these things like crazy.

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[fatcatman]

That's assuming organisations like the RIAA and MPAA would allow HVD.

News flash: Those fuckers don't get a say in this.

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[Anonymous Writer]

News flash: Those fuckers don't get a say in this.

I'm not so sure about that. They have crippled DVD-ROM drives with region coding at the hardware level. Hardware can be hacked, but the MPAA is actually involved with the hardware manufacturers to do this sort of thing. In France, blank media is actually taxed with the money going to record companies, so they actually do political lobbying to get involved with hardware as well. If the HVD company has nothing to do with the RIAA or MPAA at the moment, that is no guarantee that they won't eventually. With the deep pockets of those organisations combined, they can probably buy their way into any company, or at least into legally and politically interfering with one. But yes, you are correct that they are fuckers.

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[ZeroExistenZ]

Don't SKIP the Blu-Ray!

By the time HVD is out, Blue-ray will be dirtcheap. Before HVD would start getting cheap[er] there has to follow yet some new tech appearing in geeks' wet dreams around the world.

Plus imagine the possibilities? The Blue-ray is based fitting more data on one disk by having a smaller contact point[w/ the laser] allowing more data to be stored. HVD is holographic but still uses the conventional 'less precise' red lazer as read inhere.

(Although, I thought to read ultra-violet light has outdone Blu-Ray already, which would result in even more mindblowing storage capacities.)

So,
cap_ratio = cap_Blu_laser / cap_Conv_laser;
HVD * cap_ratio = HVD_II; // geek(do_drool, hamster_porn);

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[fatcatman]

They have crippled DVD-ROM drives with region coding at the hardware level.

Isn't this because they own patents regarding DVD technology (perhaps not the hardware, but certainly the software required to decrypt their discs) and can legally force the issue? "If you want your player to be capable of playing our stuff, you have to license our technology, and part of that license agreement requires you to implement region coding."

Seems to be just a civil issue as opposed to some government law demanding it. Someone could produce a DVD player without region coding legally, but they'd get their pants sued off in a civil court.

Re:Screw Blu-ray

[Anonymous Writer]

Someone could produce a DVD player without region coding legally, but they'd get their pants sued off in a civil court.

A story about a situation just like that came out the day after this story was posted.

CHuDSS?

[cunninghammer]

OK,

Task one - make a product that works. Great!
Task two - get marketing in there and come up with a better acromyn, because CHUD's is already taken.

Obligatory Star Wars comment...

[www.sharkdefense.com]

Now in Super High Definition Video:

"... help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope..."

Re:Obligatory Star Wars comment...

[Mateito]

"... help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope..."

Except Lucus will replace Carrie Fisher with Natalie Portman in her underwearless outfit from Episode II.

Actually, maybe that's an edition I would buy...

Just wait til tomorrow

[lightdarkness]

Don't worry everyone, we will see another story here on /. in a day or two, on a new storage mediea that is faster and better. I think it's getting rediculous all these new storage devices, Who needs 100 tb of storage for personal use (reafering to another storage device)

Re:Just wait til tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

ridiculous.

Re:Just wait til tomorrow

[boristdog]

We probably won't ever need more than 640K of RAM, either.

Re:Just wait til tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

puhhhhlllease! My first hard drive was only 40 MB and I thought I'd never fill it up. I now have more storage than that in my CELL PHONE.

Download the internet

[waterlogged]

"Could you just put the internet on a disk for me so I can bring it home"

I swear I used to get this question......

Well with that much space you could cache a good part of it huh.

Re:Download the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn kids. I remember back when you *could* fit the Internet on a disk and bring it home with you.

Re:Download the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a revenue generating idea for Google. If the disk is cheap enough, I may buy one for offline use.

Re:Download the internet

[Keitopsis]

And in the early 80's, I would never fill a 50MB hard drive. Then file formats got larger, carried more detail and information. Now it is pretty hard to prevent multimedia files from being larger than 50MB.

Anyone thinking 500 pico-pixel 128-Mbit color depth with dub-over and closed captioning for 14 languages 3-D immersive "movie" entertainment product. Product includes versions of the sketchboard, segmented raw, Directors cut, release version, 10th anniversary edition, and voiceovers from just about anyone who cared enough to review it. Now! with xml annotated production script with changes.

(All written in a file format that uses 10^128 bits for data that could be stored as ulong)

Granted, Noone would care to assemble a product like this, and if they did, it is arguable that noone would care.

Re:Download the internet

[arodland]

Why would I want to watch a movie with 5^(-10) pixels per frame?

what is it?

[sometwo]

Here's a tutorial on Holographic storage: http://www.inphase-technologies.com/technology/

Back in the day

[Cr3d3nd0]

I remember back a long time ago on Reading Rainbow Levar(sp?) Burton visiting a research lab and them showing him a working model of holographic memory. I'm not sure which episode it was but I remember them saying we would have holographic memory "by the end of the decade" Damn vapor... (and no I'm not mixing this up with star trek)

Re:Back in the day

[stratjakt]

We do have it, did you not RTFA?

This is an actual physically existing thing, not some theory and buzzwords written in a proposal.

The technology exists. It just isn't sitting on the shelves at Office Depot yet, but it exists and works. And if you had deep enough pockets, I'm sure you could acquire one.

It's not vapor. It's just not ready to compete with, say, an array of HDDs or big-ass tapes in terms of price yet.

This one is big, though. They have a way to write on "normal" media, that is, preformatted optical discs very much like DVD-Rs. So producing the media won't be a problem. The writing technique they came up with sound's like it requires much less engineering than other holographic processes.

My bucks are on this being the first "holo" tech to market. Probably won't beat BluRay or HD-DVD, but will likely be the tech that makes both of those obsolete.

Re:Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

"did you not RTFA?"

You must be new here...

Re:Back in the day

[The Ape With No Name]

My bucks are on this being the first "holo" tech to market.

But when? In the next decade? Before DukeNukemIII? I love the 'Real Soon Now' meme. Wait. Can that even be a meme?

Re:Units?

[AKAImBatman]

No, its one gigabyte per library of congress

How... modern. In MY day we would have said "1 gigabyte per olympic size swimming pool". And we LIKED it that way!

Bah, kids these days. ;-)

New backup medium?

[grunt107]

Since this would seem to have the same life span (rot) of DVD/CD, this could be useful for short-term, full-system backups (depending on what that 1G throughput really meant).

Don't really see the need for 1TB movie/audio capability. Even the LOTR trilogy does not need this much room.

Re:New backup medium?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't really see the need for 1TB movie/audio capability. Even the LOTR trilogy does not need this much room.

The recorded movies were played back in a series of meetings from July eight through 12

5 days of pr0n?

Re:New backup medium?

[Anonymous Coward]

My God, you're right! I bet this technology will be use by *pirates*!!!! Let's pass a bill banning holographic data storage. Think of the children!

Re:New backup medium?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't really see the need for 1TB movie/audio capability. Even the LOTR trilogy does not need this much room.

Yeah, and we only need 640k of RAM, right?

I hate vapor-ware as much as the next person, but lets not rule out the possible need for it in the future.

Re:New backup medium?

[stratjakt]

Oh, I don't know.

How big would LOTR be if you kept it at it's original theatre resolution (the resolution that all that CG was rendered at/for), and wanted to keep the raw video and audio data, and not subject it to lossy compression techniques like MPEG2?

Re:New backup medium?

[Rotkiv]

yeah, but instead of Having 12 dvd's when the extendeds are packeaged together, you could have 1 holographic disk. I can see myself in 50 years watching that *old* movie with one disk... for 400 hours. sorry, no, no i can't see myself watching it in 50 years.

Re:New backup medium?

[Johan Veenstra]

10^12 / 1920 (pixels horizontally) / 1080 (pixels vertically) / 3 (bytes per pixel) / 25 (frames per second) / 60 (seconds per minute) = 107 minutes.

So this new holographic disc can hold 1 hours and 47 minutes of uncompressed HDTV video. You would still need 6 discs for the entire trilogy...

Re:New backup medium?

[Anonymous Coward]

you forget the sound. uncompressed 24 bit 8.1 would be 9*24 = 216 bits (27 bytes) of audio data per frame and 6220800 bytes of visual data per frame. for a total of 9,331,240,500 bytes per minute

and the sound takes up so little data that it ends up being the same number of minutes

Damn straight

[maynard]

Personally, I just want to know when I can buy a burner.

200GB LTO tapes just don't cut it any more. Seriously. Trying to move terabytes at a time with ten or twenty tapes is a real bitch. Never mind relying on I2 to transfer that amount of data in a short time span. A 1GB disc would be a Godsend for those of us doing data intensive applications. --M

Re:Damn straight

[Anonymous Coward]

pssst, 1999 called and they want their dvd burner back. Man we have today 9 gb duel layer dvd burners and that is at least 8 fold over what your looking for. Wtf?

Re:Damn straight

[Mateito]

200GB LTO tapes just don't cut it any more.

SDLT600 is your friend. No, I don't work for quantum, and the SDLT is far from perfect in the resiliant-to-shock department, but they are the best we've got at the moment. IMHO.

Re:Damn straight

[fatcatman]

200GB LTO tapes just don't cut it any more. Seriously. Trying to move terabytes at a time with ten or twenty tapes is a real bitch.

So move terabytes with 1 or 2 tapes.

SAIT. 1.3TB per tape. Available now.

Re:Damn straight

[fatcatman]

No, SDLT is yesterday's news. SAIT tapes are 1.3TB a pop. I have one sitting on my desk right now.

Re:Damn straight

[jabuzz]

While SuperAIT is nice, it is really only 500GB native per tape, because Sony claim 1:2.5 compression. I would love to know what they back up to get those sorts of ratios.

Back in the real world this is 1000GB native per disk so is twice the capacity of first generation SuperAIT. If we used Sony's dodgy compression ratios this is 2.5TB per 12cm disk and a transfer rate of 320MB per second.

Like a previous poster said, I just want to know when I can buy one.

Re:Damn straight

[Mateito]

Gotta admit I know nothing about SAIT, and a very quick websearch keeps popping up the name "Sony".

Who actually makes the drives?

If they are Sony, I'm not going near them until they're absolutely tried and tested. In the last 10 years, every Sony badged media from 5-1/4" floppies to Exabyte 8mm tapes to DLT40 to SDLT to DVD-R has given me grief. I don't know why I've had so much trouble.. other people swear by them... but I will not touch Sony media. Guess I'm just jinxed-

Re:Damn straight

[fatcatman]

While SuperAIT is nice, it is really only 500GB native per tape,

True. But it's still the best thing going in portable storage right now.

This 1TB disc is twice the size, but you can't buy it today...

Re:Damn straight

[fatcatman]

Yeah, it's all Sony - both the drives and the tapes.

Never underestimate...

[GillBates0]

the bandwidth of a bunch of 1Tb holographic disks waddling down the corridor in your overweight sysadmin's backpocket.

Don't need no trucks no more.

Re:One gigabyte transfer speed?

[garompa]

RTFA

I'm looking forward to the following shows....

[DeadBugs]

NBC - The complete 1st season
LOTR - Super extendend limited edition trilogy (1 disc set)
Johnny Carson - The complete tonight show with audio commentary
Google Cache Magazine - DVD-ROM
And all of my 100's of DVD's being re-released in Super High Definition uncompressed format.

Re:I'm looking forward to the following shows....

[kfg]

NBC - The complete 1st season

You could probably fit that on a VCD if you were willing to fake the hours of test pattern with a jpeg.

KFG

Re:I'm looking forward to the following shows....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I read WIRED too. =\

Re:I'm looking forward to the following shows....

[Jesrad]

What about the complete works of A. Hitchcock on one disc ? Or the complete cinema production of 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, one disc per year ?

1TB would be enough to record nearly 25000 hours of audio, what about the complete works of Kipling, Hemingway and Tolstoi combined, as a fully indexed, searchable and commented audiobook ?

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

'with a transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD)'

Do you need me to post the rest of it?

Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mekkab]

12cm == 5 inches

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

12cm = 4.7244 inches, actually.

I am only stating that by looking at the picture provided, the new "HVD" seems to be a tiny bit bigger than a normal dvd/CD (which are in fact, 120mm).

Maybe it's just an optical (no pun intended) illusion, maybe they are the same size.

I did not infer that this new HVD is 12 inches, and is the actual size of a laserdisc, jusouno. Perhaps I should compare HVD to Betamax instead, to clarify?

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Epi-man]

12cm == 5 inches

WTF? This is supposed to be a geek site yet we get this? The correct statement is 1 inch == 2.54 cm (this is by definition). Another correct statement would be 5 inches = 12.7 cm, or 12 cm is approximately 4.72 inches, but you sure as heck can't say "twelve centimeters is defined as 5 inches" which is how your post would read. Come on people, let's at least try and stay close to accurate!

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Anonymous Coward]

1 inch = 2.54 cm by definition? I don't think so. Wasn't the meter supposed to be some fraction of the earth's diameter? I think the 2.54 bit works out by coincidence.

If I am wrong, let me know.. I really am curious.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mekkab]

Sorry bub, us engineers are taking over. And rounding off? Its what we DO. Next time, I'll use "~="

Sound good?

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Timmmm]

You are wrong.

It used to be

1 inch = 2.5004 cm or something, but they changed it to
1 inch = 2.54 cm

The meter used to be defined in terms of the Earth's diameter, but they changed that so it is the distance light travels in a somethingth of a second. A second is defined in terms of the decay of ceasium.

The only unit that is arbitrary is The One True Kilogram which resides in France.

As far as I know.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aw, c'mon! If rocket scientists have trouble with converting metric to "real" (whoops, just bought me some "Troll" points with that one, I bet...) you can't expect /.-er's to all agree on it!!

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Epi-man]

Sorry bub, us engineers are taking over. And rounding off? Its what we DO. Next time, I'll use "~="

Sound good?

Not many engineers I know (myself included) are happy with only one significant digit and if you make such a gross approximation, you sure as heck don't write it as a definition! Where the heck did you get your degree from anyway? Of course, now we are way off topic and shouldn't get too personal...

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mekkab]

Johns Hopkins. My classmates were worse. And actually, if you want more precision than my gross approximations, you have to pay me. This is slashdot; nothing here deserves more than a gross approximation.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[PitaBred]

I thought a gram was defined as the amount that a cubic centimeter of (totally pure) water weighs?

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Epi-man]

Johns Hopkins. My classmates were worse. And actually, if you want more precision than my gross approximations, you have to pay me. This is slashdot; nothing here deserves more than a gross approximation.

I guess that's what Rice and Purdue do to a person, drill it into their head that "back of the envelope" means 3 digits minimum! Too true that /. doesn't justify much more.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mekkab]

Also I've been dealing with measurements for my house recently- anything below an inch isn't worth it. I've also been dealing with mortgage numbers; anything under $1000 isn't worth it.
When dealing with VLSI in school, you can believe I was just a bit more precise! ;)

3 digit minimum? Instead of engineer, you can call me a slacker.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mabinogi]

Actually, by saying 12cm == 5 inches, he's saying 12cm is equal to 5 inches.

If he had said 12cm = 5 inches, THEN he would have been saying 12cm is defined as 5 inches.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Mithal]

If you think that the precision of a calculation is related to the number of digits you show in the result, I really pity you. If you assume a human is about the same shape as a cylinder, the volume you will calculate is going to be very imprecise, even if you use 5 digits in the measured radius and height.

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[aussie_a]

Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

No

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[mekkab]

ok

Re:Mod Parent Up FUNNY!

[Epi-man]

3 digit minimum? Instead of engineer, you can call me a slacker.

I like that one, it made me smile on a Monday morning.

Wow

[Lullabye_Muse]

1 tb > 50 gb > 4.7 gb
Jump to lightspeed anyone?

Next stop: isolinear chips

[cyberchondriac]

I don't think it'll take us 200 more years before we see this kind of storage.
http://littrell.doroch.nl/data/engineering/tech/Is olinearChips.htm
We already have commercial holographic storage now. The disparity in the technological predictions of STtng is miles wide, they were so conservative when it comes to computer technology.
http://littrell.doroch.nl/data/engineering/tech/Is olinearChips.htm
How long before we stop using discs all together ? Anyone care to guess ? 5 years ? 10 years ?

Just in time!

[rlp]

That'll sure come in handy as soon as I set up my home IMAX theatre.

They're Scurvy-Dog Pirates!

[endeitzslash]

What movie did they play back, hmmm? How did that movie get transferred to the holographic disc? Did they rip it from a DVD? Did they pay all of the required fees for showing it to a room full of people? I see lawsuits forthcoming.

Re:They're Scurvy-Dog Pirates!

[Ingolfke]

It wasn't a real movie... it was just a hologram of the original movie. So I think it's ok to copy or show this derivative work. Sort of like when Luke was talking to Obi Wan Kenobee in Star Track Episode II (maybe it was Episode III - Wrath of Kahn?)

You remember that right?

And by the time they get here...

[samael]

I've been reading about Holographic storage for years. I'm sure that eventually we'll have it and it'll be pretty neat. But by the time it gets here it'll just be a step up from some other incremental technology.

This just in

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, the MPAA just crapped its pants

Re:This just in

[TheLink]

Yeah in excitement, they will soon be able to sue people for 1000x more.

Is This The Last Disk?

[blueZhift]

Given that so called ordinary people will not need a Terabyte's worth of storage anytime soon, if a writable version of the 1TB HVD gets to market could this be the last disk you'll need? Hmmm, probably not since history has shown that we always find a way to exceed whatever the maximum storage capacity of a given medium is. I guess people will just fill them up with movies and pr0n. Oh, I'm sure Doom 4 will probably come on one or two of these!

Another question is will the recording and movie industries ever let something like this reach the market. Even if there are never writable versions for the consumer market, they seem pretty skittish about anything that might further ease the storage of digital data. This should be fun to watch!

Re:Is This The Last Disk?

[CoolRay]

I shudder to think how many of these will the next version of Windows ship on...

Thing money

[oliverthered]

12CM disks haven't been patented yet.

Re:Units?

[Graabein]

No, its one gigabyte per library of congress

Actually, it's per station wagon full of tapes.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[rasteri]

RTFA: They're only doing this to make a buck.

Hang on a minute, isn't that the only reason any company develops any product?

One gigabyte....

[timmy_otoole]

per parsec.

Re:One gigabyte....

[philbert26]

per parsec.

Tonight on Fox: when being a smartass goes wrong.

I know, it's really George Lucas' fault.

Re:One gigabyte....

[psmears]

per parsec.

... equals roughly 400 microbits/mile:

You have: gigabyte/parsec
You want: microbit/mile
* 417.2423
/ 0.002396689

Re:One gigabyte....

[Anonymous Coward]

Parsecs: Not too great, but not too bad either.

Re:One gigabyte....

[pclminion]

Assuming you're transmitting bits with a laser pointed out into space (i.e. the bits are moving at the speed of light), then a spatial data density of 1 GB per parsec would imply a data rate of only 77 bits per second. Kind of teh suck, if you ask me.

This could rule the backup market...

[jdbo]

...on the consumer end.

Given the proven nature of tape-based backup (and the anecdotal/proven(?) volatility of optical-disc backup), I figure the enterprise market won't touch these w/ a 10-foot pole - at least not until it's been on the market for many years.

However, the low-end/consumer-level backup market is mostly using CDs and DVDs these days (due to the cost associated w/ tapes/drives). I see that market segment moving to this more or less instantly, while growing at a VERY rapid pace (similarly to what happened with Zip disks/drives about a decade ago).

(And yes, I am assuming that this won't hit the market for a few years - however, given that the biggest standard drives are about 250GB now - and uncommon - it seems unlikely that drives will commonly be much larger than 2 TB 4 or 5 years out, such that HVD would be an inconvenient backup solution (compare the inconvenience of backing up a 40GB drive -> 10 DVDs, vs. a 4 TVB drive -> 4 HVDs).

The above presumes that they can get the tech out there for a market appropriate price - while the article doesn't shed much light on pricing, I can't imagine that new HVD media would cost too much (prob. a similar prive curve to DVD). However, the price-friendliness of the servo-technology they describe is pretty much an unproven quantiy, so who know how much the players/burners will go for...

Whether the media companies follow-suit and use the media to distribute movies (i.e. create compatible players), I have no idea. However, people will lilely be backing those movies up on these HVDs, even if only to re-burn to MPAA-approved-media-of-the-week later, as I don't see digital distribution of (uncompressed, un-DRM-encumbered) digital HD coming down the pike anytime soon.

Re:This could rule the backup market...

[TheSync]

This could also rule the archive market for broadcast. I know several television producers using DVD jukeboxes and LTO (100-400 GB) tape robots. 1TB/disk is a jump up, and without the access time problems of linear tape.

Re:This could rule the backup market...

[fatcatman]

however, given that the biggest standard drives are about 250GB now - and uncommon -

Huh? 250GB drives are everywhere. Hell, you can buy 400GB drives now.

Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

It's been 17 seconds since you hit 'reply'.

Stupid lame filters.

Blu-RIAA

[oliverthered]

Well, the RIAA and MPAA will probably cripple blu-ray, and then stop producing DVD's, forcing a switch.

Isn't that...

[Anonymous Coward]

what the princess recorded her message to Obi-Wan on? (the disk she stuck in R2)

I'm scared

[LouSir]

Collinear Holographic Data Storage System - C.H.u.D.D.S !!!! Chud is back. Help...

Re:I'm scared

[AlphaJoe]

Collinear Holographic Data Storage System - C.H.u.D.D.S !!!! Chud is back. Help...

I keep seeing reference to this. Where is the "U" coming from?

Re:I'm scared

[SuiteSisterMary]

CHUDs.

Anti-competition?

[baudilus]

You work for Sony, right?

Wonderful

[Hirsto]

Nothing like increasing Optical storage capacity by 2.3 orders of magnitude over present 4.7Gig writables and 2 orders of magnitude increase over the proposed 10Gig writable. Can't wait to transfer all of my DVDs and CDs to a single disk!

CHDSS was the backup name

[worst_name_ever]

I understand that the working name was Collinear Holographic Optical Analog/Digital System, until focus groups revealed that consumers expressed a strong preference for video storage solutions not named CHOADS.

Yeah, that would be a typo

[maynard]

Heh. :) Yeah, I meant a 1TB disc. Whoops. Still, it's pretty obvious from the context. --M

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

So? I mean... You sound Red, comrade.

Most things done in the world are done for profit. And you know what? If this holo-thingie works, and the price is right, I'll buy the fucker.

The only trouble I might have is if they try to screw with us DRM-wise, and they make it for better or worse, completely useless compatibility wise.

FMD Discs

[minerat]

And in 2002 we were supposed be getting damn close to have Flourscent Multilayered Discs. This was 1TB as well and they had fully functional prototypes. *sniff* *sniff* http://www.zzz.com.ru/index.php?area=articles&acti on=show_article&article_id=135&session_id= 0

Re:FMD Discs

[The_REAL_DZA]

Yeah, I've been watching them for quite a while, too! I'm really disappointed that we haven't seen anything of them for so long (of course, I guess unfulfilled promise is something we geeks ought to be used to by now...)

One gigabyte transfer speed?

[harlows_monkeys]

...the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed

Cool, but can it make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs?

MPAA Complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where they got the movie they put on that thing.

MPAA Logic:
This movie must be pirated since they can't buy these things in the store yet. Sue them.

Personal Comment:
I've already got seven 250GB firewire drives daisy chained on my production workstation. If my ReiserFS filesystem was a little more small cache friendly I could play Super High-ResiDefition 12.2 Surround Sound movies from it.

Re:MPAA Complaints

[56ksucks]

What I imagine is that with a disk format this large they can make ultra high quality movies in an uncompressed format so that no quality is lost to compression.

What about physical storage for containers?

[jbn-o]

Present drives won't read these new discs, but will the new discs require a carrying or storage device that has different dimensions than a common CD/DVD jewel case? If so, that sounds like a pain to deal with to me.

Re:What about physical storage for containers?

[Anonymous Coward]

What use is all your storage containers if you only need 1 of these babies? (Oh - except for the next Windows OS release - that would probably come on 2...the 2nd full of patches).

Re:One gigabyte transfer speed?

[maxchaote]

Actually, that would be 11.826 GB/decade, at 300 baud. So you'd be able to transfer 1.1826 GB/year, or 1 GB in just 331.402 days!

Storage space galore...

[It doesn't come easy]

On the other hand, why be satisfied with a mere 1 terabyte of storage space when you can have a 100 times more...

http://www.physorg.com/preview785.html

Did you know that you would have to take 1,000,000 pictures a day to fill up a 100 terabyte disk in one lifetime?

Re:Storage space galore...

[It doesn't come easy]

Whole writeup here: http://www.nanonewsnet.com/index.php?module=pagese tter&func=viewpub&tid=4&pid=5

Re:Storage space galore...

[CokoBWare]

OMG try saying "Michael invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals" 5 times fast!!!!!!!!!!!!

Looks cool though.... I've always wanted to backup my 60 GB hard drive in around a minute ;)

Re:Storage space galore...

[Proteus]

Did you know that you would have to take 1,000,000 pictures a day to fill up a 100 terabyte disk in one lifetime?

I don't know if your math is right, but for the sake of argument, let's say it is. Consider this:

30fps video cameras: 30fps * 60sec * 60min * 24h = 2,592,000 pictures per day. So, if I recorded, say 12hours of video a day, this would fill up in my lifetime. Never mind sound recording and multiple versions (edited/unedited/etc.).

Of course, the same applies if I have 12 people shooting for an hour a day. If we say "a lifetime" is 100 years, then also imagine this: 1200 people shooting 1 hour of footage a day (by the above math) would fill 100TB in just 1 year.

And none of this takes into consideration higher-resolution imaging like 3d-scanning, medical imaging, and so on. There may be little use for the home user, but there will always be uses for more storage.

Re:Storage space galore...

[Canuck_TV]

That's only 11.574fps. Perfectly likely to happen. Video is 30 ;)

And you'll have to quantify with a frame size there... ;)

Re:Storage space galore...

[qbwiz]

Did you know that you would have to take 1,000,000 pictures a day to fill up a 100 terabyte disk in one lifetime?

What about with my spiffy 1 terapixel camera?

Re:Storage space galore...

[fatcatman]

Did you know that you would have to take 1,000,000 pictures a day to fill up a 100 terabyte disk in one lifetime?

Uh, no it wouldn't. My digital camera takes pictures that are 6 megs a pop. That's only 166 pictures on my 1GB CF card. So, 116,000 pictures per TB, or 16,600,000 pictures per 100TB.

I think I'm going to live longer than 16.6 days, big guy.

Hell, just what sort of shitty camera do you have where you can fit a million pictures in a terabyte? What's that, 100kb a piece? That camera must be a relic of the stone age (eg, 1990s)...

Re:Storage space galore...

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on your picture format, right?

Given: 100 TB = 109,951,162,777,600 bytes...
Given: 36,500 days (100 years) lifespan...
Given: 100,000 bytes avreage size of a quality jpeg picture...

109,951,162,777,600 / 36,500 / 100,000 = 30,123.6 pictures per day. Not 1,000,000 pictures per day, but still not bad. Where do I get mine?

One little scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

...And you lose access to about 100GB, if not the whole f'ing TB!

Also, to everyone who seems persistent with the "Internet-on-a-disk" comments; here's a little urine in your coffee:

At our site we backup 6TB of data/night. Given that we're not even that big of an Institution (medical), I'd reckon the Internet is pushing into the exabyte range by now.

And the majority of that is probably pr0n.

Already seen in the future

[plimsoll]

Big deal. Any old holophone can play movies, it's just a matter of how smart the operator is.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

When will the corps learn that customers don't want to be treated as mere cash cows?

When it stops being lucrative.

WATCH OUT!!

[fadethepolice]

They could get arrested for that if the device doesn't recognize the broadcast flag.. Where did they get this movie? hmmm...

Re:Next stop: isolinear chips

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to be... it's that singularity thing.

Library of congress - someone had to say it?

[Mastadex]

SO, how many library of congress books would fit on one of these disks?

Also what if we loaded a minivan up with these disks and drive the van from washington to moscow. would we have the most PHATest connection or what?

Lousy Acronym

[ewhac]

Known as the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System...

CHoDSS? ("Choads")

Schwab

300GB is still not 1TB

[maynard]

Yeah. SDLT would help, but it's still only 50% greater capacity over current LTO drives. Considering a current hardware investment in LTO, switching to a new tape format would have to offer considerably more than that to warrant the transition. And yeah, you are so right about the sensitivity of these tape cartridges to shaking and drops. Which in a tape safe isn't much an issue, but during a FedEX shipment definitely is cause for concern! --M

mmm pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for the pr0n industry.

Latency

[hike2]

They say on there that this thing has "one gigabyte transfer speed". Does that mean that in a second's time you can read/write the whole disk?
Anyone thinking what I'm thinking? Hard drive replacement and now the the limiting factor is going to be the width of the data path from the drive to mem/cpu
That brings up the latency issue though ... what is it? I could not find any info on there about that, or maybe I missed it.

Re:Latency

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize there are 1,000 GB per TB, right? It would take ~17 minutes to read the entire disc at 1 GB/sec transfer speed.

Holographic Disk +/-?

[Ant2]

This will undoubtedly begin the H+/H- wars...

Losing data from scratches

[dan_sdot]

I guess this means that these new discs would be even more sensitive to scratches.
What they should do is put the discs in a small case with a protecting flap that the player slides open to read.
Just like a floppy, where the data was stored on the magnetic disc on the inside of the case and was protected by the sliding thing. They really should have started doing this with dvds, but for this, it is almost mandatory.

Re:Losing data from scratches

[maduro55]

Like the older CD-ROMs in the cassettes?

Re:Losing data from scratches

[dan_sdot]

Like the older CD-ROMs in the cassettes?

I guess, but I didn't know that they made them like this originally. Do you have a link to a picture of this?

Re:Losing data from scratches

[dgagley]

They were called Optical Disks and there are a few still out there. They worked SIMILAR to the CD and DVD but had a bit more capacity. I used to use them transferring data from an art station to the Image setter. The platters were thicker and they were double sided. The occational bumps and bangs on the case of the disk would make them sometimes un-responsive when they got older.

Re:Losing data from scratches

[pclminion]

I don't know the details of how this particular holographic technology works, but one of the attractive features of some kinds of holographic storage is that the data is distributed across the entire recording medium. Thus, damage to localized areas of the recording medium results in no loss of data whatsoever (assuming the data was recorded using an error-tolerant encoding).

So these things might actually be much, much more tolerant of damage that traditional discs.

Re:Losing data from scratches

[anubi]

I had some of these too. They were known as WORM drives in those days.

The "Tahiti" series was really popular. I had the PRIAM WC-525. Stored around 250 Megabytes. You got one chance to write. You screw it up, you don't write anymore to that disk. And the disks cost about $150 a pop at that time.

I was told at the time the disks would be readable for at least 100 years. However, I cannot get my old drive to read my disks. I think dust got on the lens, and I have yet to figure out how to nondestructively open up the drive to dust it off. These were made before the day of ASIC, so they are full of circuitry.

I was using these things for backup of old DOS CAD drawings, as in that day, I could fit everything me or anyone else in my group had ever done on one disk.

Incidentally, the old DOS CAD programs I was using damn near 20 years ago still work fine. And I still use them. I still have access to all that work I did. I sure miss the cut-to-the-bones simplicity of those old programs. The databases were open, understandable, and the executables ran quite happily on anything I dropped it on. If a program didn't have some little feature you wanted, you could open it up in a debugger and fix it. Or branch to a helper program you wrote in C++. Even if you didn't have the source code.

Damm I miss those days.

Re:Losing data from scratches

[maduro55]

I wish I did. They were flat and slightly larger than the disk(about the size of a slimline jewel case). You put the disk in and slid the whole shebang into the CD-ROM. I remember them being used by Toshiba and Sony and some others. Good protection, but damned inconvenient. If I ever see 0one or find one again I'll get a pic and post it or send it to you. enjoy, Ron

it's for the gold Re:In other news

[NuShrike]

"I funded a deep space mission to find 2 neutron stars and smash them together to create enough gold to build my mansion!"

Old News for nerds. Stuff that used to matter...

[uodeltasig]

Everyone has his or her own version of this technology, but what about actually make use of it... "Holographic memory offers the possibility of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of data in a sugar-cube-sized crystal." http://computer.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memo ry1.htm And what ever happened to Mini-disc, they had a great idea to but a case around the disc so when we lightly grazed it with our hand we didn't loose our important data we tried to backup. So if you want to impress us... A.) Do the same thing in a small little crystal that I can carry around and not have to worry about scratching and make it reasonably priced and big enough to just buy one crystal. B.) Go back to the old school days of mini-disc and put it in a permanent protective jewel case so I don't have to blow on it and baby it like an old Nintendo.

Anyone have info on touch screens?

[Anonymous Writer]

We already have commercial holographic storage now. The disparity in the technological predictions of STtng is miles wide, they were so conservative when it comes to computer technology.

I'm still waiting for the ST:TNG touch-screen computer consoles. Seriously. I wonder why touch screens have never taken off, even as an additional feature to existing hardware that use other input devices. The whole point of using a mouse or a trackpad is so you could manipulate GUI elements in a manner as close as possible to directly manipulating them with your finger. Ergonomics is a factor, though. Lifting your hands off a surface to manipulate a GUI isn't as efficient as moving them around on a flat surface with input devices close to each other. But as for keyboards, zero-force keyboards are already around, so a touch screen version should be viable.

Anyone else have any opinions/info on touch screens? I'd be interested in links. And does anyone know about touch screens that can handle more that one point being touched at the same time? I presume one of the limitations of touch screens to work as efficient input devices is that most (that I know of) can only handle one point being touched at a time. Making a keyboard would require at least two touch points, for key combinations like the shift key. And as for simulating something like a piano keyboard or a multiple-control console on a touch screen, that would require handling many more points simultaneously.

Re:Anyone have info on touch screens?

[Mr.Sharpy]

At least for typing, smooth surfaces suck because of the lack of tactile feedback. Now, once we master artificial gravity like on Star Trek, perhaps we could have touch screens with tiny gravity generators underneath to push on your fingers as you manipulate the smooth surfaced controls.

Re:Anyone have info on touch screens?

[Anonymous Writer]

At least for typing, smooth surfaces suck because of the lack of tactile feedback.

I'm not too sure about that, for myself, personally. Maybe it might take some getting used to, but and audio "click" feedback may be all some people need, while others wouldn't like it at all. Like I mentioned, there already are some zero-force keyboards, but I've never tried them out, so I don't really know. The touch sensitive controls on the iPods that came out before the current click wheel version may give a sense of this, as well as the controls on the current Apple Cinema displays. I actually like the concept of flat souch-sensitive surfaces, because it eliminates the wear-and-tear of moving parts. This would make it more impervious to things like dirt and spills, and I presume this makes it last longer.

Re:Anyone have info on touch screens?

[pclminion]

Check out the Kameleon. It's a multifunction remote control, not a touch screen, but it has numerous Star Trek-like features, like dynamically reconfigurable display, a pleasing rubbery feel instead of a slick glassy surface, etc.

Re:Anyone have info on touch screens?

[fatcatman]

You can buy touchscreens, they're relatively cheap. People don't use them because a mouse is much less expensive and it's more of a strain to reach up and move your finger across the entire screen.

Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't [conscienceless greed] the only reason any company develops any product?

Nope, never heard of social responsibility, never heard of ethical business practices, never heard of economic justice, fairness, honesty, social justice...

Well, I'll make a wild guess here and suppose that you just might be... American?

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[tolan-b]

Actually the only responsibility a company has, other than obeying the law, is to generate profit for its shareholders.

If it does something out of the goodness of its heart that costs its ahreholders money, then its been negligent.

Now ethical trading can be a way to make money as a unique selling point, but not purely because it's nice.

I'm not saying this is a *good* thing, but it is, unfortunately, the truth.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the only responsibility a company has, other than obeying the law, is to generate profit for its shareholders.

If it's a public company, sure. Unlisted companies don't have the same constraints.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[sysopd]

Actually the only responsibility a company has, other than obeying the law, is to generate profit for its shareholders.

Not exactly. A publicly held company has an obligation to its shareholders. But that doesn't really matter unless a majority share is held by the public and not by individuals (ie, company officers)-- Since in many companies, officers are paid more in salary than dividends or trade value.

That brings up another point, many companies give paltry dividends, if any at all. Then generating profit for shareholders is not related to what the company does really at all, but moreover how the market feels about the company which is somewhat determined by press releases and quarterly statements but is largely indeterminate and random in nature.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[odin53]

A publicly held company has an obligation to its shareholders. But that doesn't really matter unless a majority share is held by the public and not by individuals

Not to beat a dead horse, but WHY OH WHY do people believe this? A corporation is a corporation is a corporation, whether it's public or private. A corporation that has shareholders ALWAYS has a duty to its shareholders (or rather, the management has certain fiduciary duties towards the shareholders). It does not matter whether a corporation is public or private when it comes to this basic duty. Public companies are more susceptible to getting SUED by shareholders, in part because they have to disclose so much information, but that doesn't change the nature of the obligations toward shareholders.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[pclminion]

If it's a public company, sure. Unlisted companies don't have the same constraints.

Wrong, a private company has exactly the same constraints. However, since most private shareholders tend to be employees or owners of the company, they have less reason to bring suit against the corporation since they'd only be hurting themselves. But it is possible.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[pclminion]

Well, I'll make a wild guess here and suppose that you just might be... American?

It works the same in most (but maybe not all) other countries with stock markets, as well.

The problem is, a corporation cannot be socially responsible for its own sake, if that causes a loss of shareholder value. It's illegal. Blame the laws, not the corporation.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[That's Unpossible!]

If it does something out of the goodness of its heart that costs its ahreholders money, then its been negligent.

Perhaps, but how the hell would you ever prove this?

Target stores donate a percentage of profits to local charities. That is technically costing the company profits. Are they negligent? Probably not, people may tend to do more business with them because of their charity. I believe it would be impossible to prove negligence in any case, so your point here is moot.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you could suck my cock in a socially responsibe manner. jesus christ get off your soap box and donate your retinas to charity, give your car to a drugged out bum, and go demine some minefields. maybe a few appendages later you'll realize your stupidity.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That Target donates a percentage of it's profits to local charities is indeed true. The idea that it does this out of social consciousness is laughable. It does it because it gets a tax break from doing so that more than makes up for any "loss" incurred to profits by making said donations. This tax break does indeed lead to increased value for shareholders. In effect, not making charitable donations to reduce tax burden on the corporation would be negligent to the shareholders.

Note that I do not support this tax relief system for corporations (I think it sucks in a monumental way) so no corporate greed monger flames are needed.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[That's Unpossible!]

Note that I do not support this tax relief system for corporations (I think it sucks in a monumental way) so no corporate greed monger flames are needed.

So you honestly believe that corporations pay taxes?

Taxes on businesses are just indirect taxes on regular people. Businesses necessarily pass these expenses on to consumers (higher prices on goods), investors (less money for dividends), and employees (less money to hire new employees or pay existing employees better wages).

This is just one reason why I support the FairTax.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[cft_128]

OK, I'll bite:

Name new technologies/products developed without profits as a big motive? Even the most altruistic sounding products are usually part of some bigger PR campaign.

Oh, as a side note to you snide comment: the product in question was developed by the Japanese, America does not have a monopoly on profitable companies.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[afidel]

Not all incorperated entities have shareholders. For instance a subchapter S corp in beholdent only to the owners which ARE the company. There are other forms of incorperation which do not involve giving out shares of the company, for instance a closely held private firms assets might be wholy owned by a single individual, in that case the proprieter may do as he wishes with the company and its assets as he or she is beholdent only to themselves. Incorperation was at its inception nothing more than an incubator of business ment to shield proprieters from personal responsibility for the actions of the business. The fudiciary responsibility of publicly traded companies came MUCH later.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[budgenator]

1. Corporations only give a perentage of their profits to the tax-man so making a charitable contribution will always lessen the post-tax profits

2. charitable contributions give less benefit to the corp than other deductions like depreciation on capital equipment would.

3. corporation are not sentient so they have no consciousness social or otherwise; but their board, shareholders and customers do.

4. if Target's marketing team figures out that their main demographic is upper-middle-class soccer-Mom's who give mostly to charity XYZ, then so will Target.

5. Corporate tax-rates are less than individual tax-rates; so the share-holders would benefit more by giving less and paying more to the share-holders who could make their own charitable contributions with the money.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[stfvon007]

Name new technologies/products developed without profits as a big motive? Even the most altruistic sounding products are usually part of some bigger PR campaign.

Linux

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[JimBobJoe]

Actually the only responsibility a company has, other than obeying the law, is to generate profit for its shareholders.

If it does something out of the goodness of its heart that costs its ahreholders money, then its been negligent.

Err...kinda. The company has the responsibility to tell shareholders what it is doing...it's entirely possible for the company to say "we are switching into social consciousness mode, at the expense of future profits...so if ya'll don't like that sell now." As long as it tells shareholders what it's doing then it can hardly be held negligent.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Mikeydude750]

Linux is different because it was not developed by a corporation. It was developed mostly by a group of people who felt that they wanted to contribute to the greater good of the computing world a new operating system.

If Linux were developed from the start by a corporation, it would be a lot different(if not in design, then in spirit).

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[odin53]

Not all incorperated entities have shareholders.

This is why I said "a corporation that has shareholders..."

For instance a subchapter S corp in beholdent only to the owners which ARE the company.

Subchapter S is a tax election -- it has nothing to do with the structure of the corporation, and hence has nothing to do with the fiduciary duties of the management to the shareholders of the corporation.

There are other forms of incorperation which do not involve giving out shares of the company, for instance a closely held private firms assets might be wholy owned by a single individual, in that case the proprieter may do as he wishes with the company and its assets as he or she is beholdent only to themselves.

No form of incorporation does not involve the giving out of shares as a fundamental feature. Certainly there are other business entities that don't feature the selling of shares; but remember that those entities still involve fiduciary duties, though the application of them may differ from those of the corporation.

In any case, a corporation doesn't have to issue shares, of course, and doesn't have to issue shares to more than one person. Your point about the closely-held corporation is only valid if there's ONE shareholder, and it still doesn't affect my point that the management has fiduciary duties toward the shareholders. In a solely-held corporation, the management STILL is on the hook -- but obviously no one will be suing anyone.

Incorperation was at its inception nothing more than an incubator of business ment to shield proprieters from personal responsibility for the actions of the business. The fudiciary responsibility of publicly traded companies came MUCH later.

Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not going to bother explaining the rise of the corporation and other limited liability business entities, but the upshot is this: incorporation is about (1) about making doing business more efficient, and (2) about raising more capital for a business than the business could do so otherwise. Limited liability is something that a *shareholder* has, first of all, and limited liability of shareholders as a feature of corporations came later than the concept of fiduciary duties of the management.

Also, the unique responsibilities of management of public corporations came later -- you're right -- but those come from regulation of the sales of securities (which private companies STILL have to follow most of), and are not the same as the overall fiduciary duties from corporate law that the management of both public companies and private companies share alike.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, the only responsibility they had was to generate a profit. If that means disobeying the law, they act illegally.

Re:Never heard of social responsibility, huh?

[cft_128]

Linux

I have a sneaky suspicion that all of the companies that work on Linux do it because they believe it will make them or save them money. I know I should have explicitly said corporation, but as corporations were what the thread was about I assumed they were implied.

storage

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the point in having millions of tb when it's scratched by dust? that's a bit dramatic but you get the point, it might as well be the Storage Holographic Integrated Technology, and it means nothing unless it actually comes to market and stays there, unlike many other storage types have in the past. don't get me wrong, i think it's an awesome idea, i just think it needs to be protected for durability and come to market, no more promises of the future, i'd just like to see it.

Re:storage

[Anonymous Coward]

1) it is very easy to put discs in a caddy and keep using them with the right drive without ever having to take them out if you are that concerned. large data houses would go one better and have them in a jukebox. 2) DVDs are much better at resisting scratches than CDs (better parity information), it really isn't as bad a problem as it used to be and HVD will likely follow suit 3) worse case just use half the disc for additional parity information, there are already ways to burn CDs with extra recovery data like this.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not; we're all painfully aware of companies that develop products purely to achieve world domination!

You'll only need 3 of them

[srenker]

to install Longhorn.

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

More like ludacris(sp?) speed.

Re:Units?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of the standard press units like "Library of Congress", "Volkswagen Beetle", "width of a human hair" etc., the "Olympic size swimming pool" must be the most idiotic. How many ordinary people have actually ever seen an Olympic size swimming pool, or would recognize one if they saw it? At least with the Library of Congress, most people realize that what it means is a hell of a lot data. But an Olympic size swimming pool? Is that larger than a football field?

Re:Units?

[AKAImBatman]

I'm kind of partial to "the Empire State Building on it's side" measurement. Trying to imagine that is quite a feat!

QUICK! Make a standard!

[erroneus]

Make sure that copy protection isn't part of any given protocol. Muhahahaha! Too late? oh...

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[torstenvl]

DRM is to protect profits...

How can you be for and against something at the same time?

You sound Black, comrade. As in out in the dark.

Soyuz nerushimiy respublik svobodnikh splotila nevyeki...

In Other News.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The MPAA has sued Optware Corp. under the DMCA for manufacturing a device that will be used for storing movies and for copyright violations by making an unauthorized copy onto the disc.

The MPAA's Jack Valenti has commented that the Studios are going after the full $150,000/violation, and since it's equivilent to 85,104 Double-Layered DVD burners, they are going after $12,765,600,000.

your kid did you a favor

[fribhey]

your kid did you a favor.... even if you do own that god awful movie, why would you admit to it?

I imagine a PC with holographic mass stor

[zijus]

I imagine a 1 cm thick holographic hard disk, on a PC, with only 10 Tb capacity... My god I'd have to rip 0.1 Mega CD to fill that up ! Or I could miror 10 K times my super-duper Gmail account. It's gonna be supra-cool.

dont scratch it

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of losing a few jpg's you can now lose your entire financial accounts database or pr0n collection, all for the sake of a single tiny scratch/fingerprint
we have anough trouble with cdr reliablity but losing 700mb is not so bad to losing multi-gigabytes to a scratch

Shhhhhhhhhh!

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll figure it out soon enough.

Rates vs measures (off-topic)

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's like those camping stoves and lanterns I see advertized as producing "20,000 BTU". Last I checked the BTU was a measure of energy, not power...

Anyone know what's up with that?

Re:Finally, I will sell the (iI)nternet on Disks

[aminorex]

Actually, if they'd drop the size by about 25%,
they'd do much better. Then it would fit in a
shirt pocket.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I could back up my entire porn collection on six or seven of these!

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Idiot.

doo doo doo DOOO.. Reed Solomon

[doublebackslash]

Have you ever heard of Reed Solomon Error Correcting Codes?
You should check them out.
I'm thinking they allready built them into the design, and the 1TB is accounting for them allready.

Re:doo doo doo DOOO.. Reed Solomon

[Tyler Eaves]

Yes, but I'm talking about something even more radical. The idea being that the copy is on an entirely different section of the disk. Imagine being able to take a CD cut it in half, and then being able to read all the data from either half (ignoring structural issues). The idea is to be able to take heavy, but localised, damage.

Re:doo doo doo DOOO.. Reed Solomon

[Kiryat Malachi]

There are all kinds of schemes to do this that are far more efficient than simple repetition/majority vote setups (lets say your two halves of the disc don't agree - which one is right? you need at least 3 copies in order to maintain integrity in a situation where you don't necessarily know which one is trustworthy).

Reed-Solomon is one of them. Hell, a simple 8-bit plus parity with the bits spread across the disc so that a localized scratch could only catch one bit of 9 would do better than simple redundancy.

It isn't more radical; coding theory has lots of good ideas, and a lot of them deal with bursty errors like CDs tend to suffer.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy. I recognize the right of these companies to protect their profits. I don't illegally copy their stuff. But I also blieve in fair use, and my right to protect my investments.

When their DRM is so encumbered that it pathologically limits the way in which I can display or otherwise use their work--like the latest, pseudo-standard, proprietary, encrypted incarnation of DVI that will disallow me from watching a freakin' movie on the display device of my choice, inluding disabling component video, like some DRM people have suggested--then I will have no part in it.

I was comfortable with the level of DRM on DVD, even before DeCSS. It was unfortunate that I could not watch a typical DVD on Linux, if I so wanted, but then, nobody created a liscenced player until recently. When they only allow display to an authorized device, and none other, then I'm not happy.

It's like buying a Toyota car that can be run only on Toyota fuel, on Toyota roads.

That answer it for you, bub?

The obligatory

[CoolRay]

... Now imagine a RAID array of these...

2d vs 3d volumetric

[emorphien]

Holographic storage is pretty cool, but pretty tricky.

There's already several technologies close to coming out for 2D storage on to a compact disk sized product. These have a current density of like 1 gb/cm^2 I think and transfer speeds in the hundreds of mb/s to gigabytes. That's what this article is about. A few companies are already looking at it and they're trying to reformulate to support rewritable media better.

The transfer speed is awesome because unlike a CD where data is read off bit by bit, data is transferred to and read from the holographic disks in 1024x1024 squares (1 megabit). The size of the spatial light modulator is 1024x1024 cells. So one single read action pulls off a megabit of data. That's hot shit IMO.

The one that gets me really interested is 3d volumetric storage which would be like storing data in a crystal. They talk about densities of a terrabyte per cubic cm, with transfer rates of a terrabyte per second. This I want to see. Unfortunately I forget the material they're using (I did a presentation on it a while ago) but once you "read" from it the light rearranges the structure and data is lost. So right now they're one time write and one time read devices. Not do good for a hard drive.

Re:2d vs 3d volumetric

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good for a hard drive, but I'd bet there are many software companies who would find this excellent for distribution.

Re:2d vs 3d volumetric

[silicon not in the v]

Unfortunately I forget the material they're using (I did a presentation on it a while ago) but once you "read" from it the light rearranges the structure and data is lost. So right now they're one time write and one time read devices.

So those would be Heisenberg discs, right?

Re:2d vs 3d volumetric

[emorphien]

yes, actually that's been considered from what I remember. Even with the 2d discs like this article mentions, some formulations break down with repeated reads, so they could be used to bring back that stupid divx movie thing where after x number of viewings it would basically desintegrate.

d-skins

[eberry]

You need to invest in DVD condoms. Check out d-skins - protective disc skins.

HAL9000

[Anonymous Coward]

The HAL9000 uses Holographic storage, so a chronological erasure would not work

Obviously one step nearer with this

Re:HAL9000

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

The HAL9000 uses Holographic storage, so a chronological erasure would not work Obviously one step nearer with this

Made a tapeworm, its a program thats fed into a system that will hunt down and destroy any desired memories.

write ones or full RW?

[hitmark]

anyone know? and do they have a limit on the number of times? like say a cd-rw have these days (about 1000, not for the media itself but the small area used for calibrating the laser. its in a standard cd-r format for some reason)...

if it is unlimited RW (atleast 1000000 times, minidiscs have this) then its well worth it as a replacement for the floppy...

Re:write ones or full RW?

[TheLink]

Well if it's 1TB, write once isn't so bad for many types of usage.

How delicate is it?

Interesting but wouldn't at current be useful...

[trisight]

The only real way this would be useful (from a movie standpoint) would be if they included a series of TV shows or movies. Otherwise until a burner came available it would be useless... Once a burner for end user could be developed then it make sense on the common market.

Wonder how many years we'll have to wait for this one?

ATTN: MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny? True, but mod parent Insightful!

Enough space

[toxique]

C00l !!! At least enough space to plop all my pr0n stuff KMA

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[the chao goes mu]

So, production of goods for consumers somehow harms consumers? We would all be better off if nothing were produced? Or maybe onbly some nice hand woven clothes and other manually crafted goods? Yeah, the dark ages were SOOOO much better than now, what with all the hand crafting and personal touches, and without the horrible science and technology like medicine and such... God! Using the internet to press some neo-luddite message? How amusingly blind.

And, no I am not reading a different meaning into this. Anyone who argues "people before profits" is arguing against the modern world. Profits drive people to benefit other people. If you think otherwise just look at the Utopias created by "compassion", such as the former USSR, Cambodia, et al... Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's also closer to perfect than anything else anyone has suggested.

Cool!

[PsiPsiStar]

I wonder what they look like if you put them in the microwave.

12cm *is* the diameter of both CD & DVDs

[chiph]

Been that way since early 1983.

Chip H.

Prototypes, prototypes, prototypes!

[norminator]

They announced that they were able to do it. This is a prototype, and could very well be a long way off. The /. crowd should be understanding of what that means. It does not mean that movies will be available at Blockbuster on Holographic discs later this year. With new technologies, prototypes like these are usually pretty buggy, but they prove the concept. TFA states that the 6 investors watched movies in meetings (My kind of meeting!) but I'm sure up to the minute they were done playing, the engineers were sweating bullets, worried that something wouldn't work out right.

/. is a forum for nerds who want to know about the bleeding edge of technology. The bleeding edge is almost always years ahead of production (and often demand, too). Look at OLEDs: I saw a 15" widescreen prototype from Sanyo at CES 2003 (Jan), but Active Matrix OLEDs are used at most in 1 consumer product (Kodak camera), which doesn't even ship in the US, and for all I know, may not be shipping anywhere anymore. That doesn't change the fact that it's a cool technology that will change a lot of things. We've just gotta be patient. I think everyone else here knew that.

just think..

[56ksucks]

..if you could write to this disk at the same speed as you could read from it, and do it on the fly, you would not need a hard drive.

Re:just think..

[TheLink]

Depends. There's this inconvenient thing called seek time.

How long does it take for the drive head to move to part holding the data you want? If it takes 150 ms (typical for optical drives) then you'll still be needing hard drives (which are 10x to 20x faster and still considered too slow).

Also, how many times can you write to the disk?

500GB uncompressed, 1.3TB compressed

[maynard]

If you're burning a pile of binary data, the ondrive compression won't be of much use. But still, 500GB is quite the improvement over 200GB. News to me. Guess I'm not spending enough time reading up on new hardware, thanks for the tip! --M

Re:500GB uncompressed, 1.3TB compressed

[fatcatman]

Actually, the compression isn't bad. I write data that is already compressed pretty well with gzip, and still get 600-700GB per tape.

Now, if you're backing up highly compressed data such as mpeg audio/video, you won't see much improvement...

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I look at the Utopias created by "profit" right now all across the world I find you amusingly blind.

For example, I look at Africa where millions of people sick with HIV aren't receiving treatment because the poor countries they live in cannot afford the overpriced medication that profit-motivated drug companies sell in richer countries.

Many of these people will die, in the end not because of profit, but because of greed.

But you cannot see the difference between profit and greed, can you ?

Ho, and can you kindly remind me of the profit-driven entity who paid to develop the Internet in the first place ?

Yeah, didn't think you could do that.

Poor bastard.

2 liters in NYC?

[uncl_bob]

Since when did bottles in america contain 2 liters? I just thought everything was in oz. and the like. / A wondering Swede.

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[jp10558]

Interestingly enough, at least since 1986, when I can remember back to.

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[dasmegabyte]

Liquid measure is an unusual thing in the States, we're sort of schizophrenic about it. Milk, paint, gasoline and blood are all measured in "English" -- gallons, pints, quarts, ounces and the like. Soda pop, cooking oil and liquor are generally measured in metric. I say generally, because it's not so easy. Soda comes in 12oz, 16 oz, 1 litre, 32 oz (which is a bit less than a liter), 2 liter and 3 liter containers. Beer comes in 12 and 16oz bottles but hard liquor generally comes in 750 ml, 1 liter, 1.5 liter bottles.

I believe the schizophrenia stems from a desire for package uniformity in beverages that are also marketted overseas. But it does create wierd situations like going out for a gallon of milk and 2 liters of coke, or drinking 2 ounces of whiskey from a 750 ml bottle.

Incidentally, how many mililiters are there in a swig? Or, let's say, a metric shotglass? Do you get more liquor from a 2 oz shot or the metric equivalent -- and does the variance explain US policy with reference to the rest of the world?

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[daveashcroft]

in the UK, a public bar can offer spirits in EITHER 25ml or 35ml (1/4gill) measures. They have to apply for their licence to do so, and somewhere prominent in the bar there will be a plaque advising the patrons of which of those volumes a "standard measure" is.

And to make it worse, if you are in england/wales, you generally have to drink it up before 11pm as thats when the bars close. In Scotland however, its a WHOLE different matter :D Thank god for scottish licensing laws! :D

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[daveashcroft]

just to clarify.....a bar can offer either 25ml or 35ml measures. NOT both.

Sorry for not being clearer.

(hangs head in shame)

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[Pulse_Instance]

Around here, Western Canada, we call our liquor bottles 26's 40's and 60's for whatever metric equivalents those work out to, I have never bothered to figure it out. For shots of liquor we also use 1oz and 2oz not metric, most of the trades people use the english measurement becuase 1/2" is easier to eye out then 1.25 cm. Whether or not the liquor is just slang for Western Canada or not I am not sure.

Re:2 liters in NYC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Liquid measure is an unusual thing in the States, we're sort of schizophrenic about it. Milk, paint, gasoline and blood are all measured in "English" -- gallons, pints, quarts, ounces and the like. Soda pop, cooking oil and liquor are generally measured in metric. I say generally, because it's not so easy. Soda comes in 12oz, 16 oz, 1 litre, 32 oz (which is a bit less than a liter), 2 liter and 3 liter containers. Beer comes in 12 and 16oz bottles but hard liquor generally comes in 750 ml, 1 liter, 1.5 liter bottles.

Vodka and other hard drinks came in 1.750 liter, not 1.500 liter and have for the last 10 years at least - Vodka is what I buy. The cheapest brand is the brand of vodka I buy. And For 20 years here in New York, New Jersey, And Florida it has always been available in 1.75 liters and NEVER in 1.5 liters.

Soft drinks, on the other hand, I used to get in one two or three liter plastic bottles. Just last month, the two liter sizes all disappeared and were replaced by 1.5 liter sizes at a price HIGHER THAN 75% OF THE OLD PRICE. In other words, Coke et. al. are planning to profit from the average person's illnumeracy - AGAIN.

By the way, the 3 liter soda pop is store brand cola (and other flavors) at the price of Coke&Pepsi's former 2 liter bottle (Coke and Pepsi compete on price like two people on a see-saw compete for being up or down - the price dance apparently prevents an illegal price collusion charge).

Yeah, plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, plus think of all the pr0n!

Re:Units?

[pclminion]

Assuming a LoC is a measure of information, then the unit "gigabyte per LoC" has dimensions of information/information, i.e., no dimensions at all. It is not a unit.

TERABYTE

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, is nobody able to spell TERABYTE anymore? It has nothing at all to do with our lovely planet "terra". *sigh*

Not only that

[CaptainSuperBoy]

I hear it draws 500 watt-hours.

Is It Recordable?

[timeOday]

I didn't see anything about whether the new format is likely to be recordable by consumer-affordable equipment.

If so, it would be fantastic - finally *something* with capacity on the order of magnetic disks.

If not, I guess it's just a little better way to watch movies - once we all invest in new 16 megapixel TV sets.

I'd better check.

[Mr Z]

"(!tfel re'uoY) !thgir eht no sdneirf on tog t'nia uoY (!thgir er'uoY) !tfel eht no sdneirf on tog t'nia uoY"

It's ok. They're speaking Chinese.

Why is a gas nozzle smaller than diesel?

[Myrrh]

The reason here is probably analagous.

Computer users in general are not the smartest folk. Present company excluded of course, but avid Slashdot readers are in the minority of those who use computers worldwide.

In other words, stupid people are going to try to stick these things into a CD/DVD drive, and when the drive doesn't read the much newer disc, the person is going to call Tech support and complain.

Sizing it differently (I would assume bigger, but maybe it's smaller to still allow a disc to fit into a 5.25" drive bay) would alleviate some of the confusion.

Re:Why is a gas nozzle smaller than diesel?

[Firethorn]

Did tech support get lots of calls when DVD came out? They are the same size. You'd just need a campaign to educate users. You'd be better off not calling it a CD or DVD-B or something.

Re:Why is a gas nozzle smaller than diesel?

[Myrrh]

Well, I don't really know. Is there a central location where they keep such statistics?

My bet is that Tech support folks actually did receive many calls about DVDs not working in CD-ROM drives. Such information is unverifiable, though.

Probably the same will happen with this, initially, and then it'll die down.

Ooooh, should be handy for TV series ...

[Kaemaril]

I for one am looking forward to the day I can buy a disc with all of Star Trek, ST:TNG, ST:DS9, ST: VOY and Enterprise on it.

Though I suspect the Enterprise section may never have to fear wear and tear :)

What about durability?

[jcr]

This could be a great backup medium, if we can count on it having a few decades or more of shelf life..

-jcr

speed?

[Transcendent]

the disc has a one terabyte storage capacity and one gigabyte transfer speed

...ppeerr what?

Re:speed?

[luna69]

yep.

See previous excellent comment about the Kessel Run.

Heh.

Looks about right

[bar-agent]

You know, I saw the photo, and I said to myself, "Yep. That is exactly what a holographic disc should look like. They got it right."

It's all gold, depth, and rainbows.

1 TB? Ha!

[ReagansUndeadBrain]

That's nothing! I used an EUV source for writing the holograms and switched from red to blue for encoding. I recorded this morning if you'd like to look it over again.

Now if you'll please excuse me, I have to get back to my study of high-energy tachyon pulses.

Re: truck loaded with tapes

[RespekMyAthorati]

That's nothing: I calculated that a freight train, going 100 Km/hour, having boxcars stuffed with 200G harddrives, delivers about 1400 TB/sec. Typical ping time: around 2 weeks.

Get rid of spinning disks already!

[kumachan]

Great another spinning disk. I wish we could move away from things with motors - fans, spinning disks etc If it is cool holographics why not leave it stationary and move the laser

Re:Get rid of spinning disks already!

[Dwedit]

How are you going to move the laser without a motor?

Re:Get rid of spinning disks already!

[pclminion]

How are you going to move the laser without a motor?

Perhaps develop some kind of substance which changes refractive index when voltage is applied to it? In fact, I think certain piezoelectric materials fit the bill.

Or, perhaps shoot the laser through a water bath -- electrodes in the water bath can cause small bubbles of hydrogen gas to form in specific locations. As the laser passes (or does not pass) through a bubble, its path will be altered.

How about shooting the laser at a piece of charged foil. The foil can be moved by controlling the voltage on a nearby electrode.

I can think of a zillion ways to do it without a motor.

Re:Get rid of spinning disks already!

[tony_gardner]

It exists, and it's called an acousto-optic modulator. a lot of old fax machines used to use them to steer a laser onto the heat-sensitive paper. don't know what they use now though.

So does this mean

[zrk]

Hal 9000 can have proper memories?

Uh oh

[Zareste]

Movie Playback From 1TB Holographic Disc

Future headline: "Unfortunately, the project was closed after the MPAA sued Optware for all they've got."

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[jon3k]

Speaking of amusingly blind ...

It was a government research project. You think they worked for free?

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[Vancorps]

How so very shortsighted. Saying that a company should treat people as people by no means requires that you are against technology. Look at Ben and Jerry's before it was bought out. The company put research into bleaching paper and came with a more environmentally sound and here's the important part, less expensive process.

Coming from VT I can say Ben and Jerry's did a lot for the community of which it is a part. Saying that a corporation has no responsibility for anything it does is downright stupid. That happened at the beginning of the 20th century with factory workers being treated like slaves. Technology should benefit everyone and not just those with all the money.

Linear vs. Surface Density.

[Rob Riggs]

Come on, Mods. This is not informative!

This post ignores the parents assertions about surface density vs. linear density, which is exactly correct. Unless one has fourty+ read heads reading in parallel, the read speed does not scale with surface (planar) density. Each track will have 40x the linear density of CD, and there will be 40x as many tracks to read.

Note that even at 1GB/s, it will still take 10 times as long to read the 1TB disk as it does a CD at 48x.

If the parents post was true, we'd be reading our 250GB disks at ludicrous speed (or 1GB/s) based on simple extrapolation from the read speed of an ancient 4200RPM, 2GB Western Digital HD I have.

Re:Linear vs. Surface Density.

[AKAImBatman]

But data rates on hard drives DO increase with more heads. This holographic storage is designed to act like multiple heads. Since the data is "stacked", you can read more on a single pass. My 11GB may not be correct, but neither is the assertion that the speed would be ~200MB/sec.

Obligatory Super Troopers Reference

[Psymunn]

"I don't want a large Farva, I want a goddamn litre of cola!"

"I don't know what that is."

"Litre is french for give some fuckin cola or I'll kick your ass!"

And how did they pack that much into one disc?

[urbaneassault]

Deal with satan! Just check out the photo! That left disc has issues! Red beady eyes and huge gnashing teeth... hmm, maybe i inhaled too many solder fumes today...

How about an LVD-sized holographic disk system?

[hypertex]

Now that would be a backup! Capacity guesses?

Offtopic slightly, I've recently wondered why most HDs sold today are 3.5 inch, one-half-height HDs, but the case will accept a 5.25 inch full height drive in each bay. Did they just throw away the tooling? Why not start producing full size drives and up the capacity?

Canadian Drinking

[Psymunn]

13 ounces is 375ml, a.k.a. a mickey (not to be confused with mickeys from the states)
26 ounces is 750 ml, a.k.a. a 2-6.
40 ounces is just over a litre and called a 40 (pronounced fo'tie because you want to seem cool and gansta)
60 ounces are not too common and thus don't deserve a slang term.
120 ounces is a texas mickey because, afterall, everything is bigger in texas.
and, everyones favorite, a 2-4, is a case of 24 beers (a.k.a. a flat)
all this information becomes quite improtant if you ever plan on doing any camping on the west coast or just emulating the folks in the mocumentary fubar.

Availability?

[kc01]

So when can I get a 16384x burner?

(can you imagine how long it'd take to burn a disk on a 1x drive?)

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[gigahawk]

The drugs are widly expensive because ineficient socialist economies will pay any price for the drugs with their peoples' money. If people had it to do they just couldn't afford the drugs and they'd die, therefore the drug companies would also die. At some point the drug companies would have to offer the drugs at a rate that they could make a profit at or else they'd go out of business funding research for products that don't sell. Some people would still not be able to afford them, but more people would. By letting a governments control the supply and demand of a product for an entire market you innevitably raise its price because they will still pay. The answer is to continue increasing technology and innovating new things. The day will come when food, medicine, and other technology are so abundant and cheap that everyone will have it. This might be hundreds of years, but it will happen. Also make sure to keep governments out of the supply/demand pricing structure because you doom any services for governments/economies of lesser economic prosperity. This is as much Europe's fault as America's. This product is about increasing the technology available to us. It is about innovation. It is also about making money. The consumer (i.e. world) is better off when people have an incentive to create new technologies. How can a holographics video disc be used greedily anyway? It's a damn disc that holds information.

Mistake?

[Jozer99]

"gigabyte transfer speed"?!?! Ok then, my car has a 155 mile top speed. My printer prints 15 pages black and white, 12 pages color. My resting heart rate is about 80 beats. My cars gas economy is 18 miles. There, all done.

Re:Mistake?

[pclminion]

I suppose you also take issue with the term "gigabit ethernet" then?

Re:Mistake?

[Jozer99]

As a matter of fact, yes, I do take issue with "gigabit ethernet".

Sorry, I haven't had my nap OR my medicine today...

No, they are 4.75 seconds wide

[mangu]

I just measured one: exactly 4.75" wide. Which translates to 12cm on a more advanced measurement system than the medieval one they use in exactly two countries in the world today, one of which is Burma/Myanmar.

Re:No, they are 4.75 seconds wide

[Anonymous Coward]

I just measured one: exactly 4.75" wide. Which translates to 12cm

exactly 4.75" translates to exactly 12.065cm. In fact a CD is closer to 4.72", clearly not exactly 4.75".

And they're 2 channels wide.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

And customers stop MOOing...

Good idea

[Nuguns101]

I got a good idea! since these "holo disks" are so goddamn small and can hold like.....1 terabyte of info, why don't they just stuff one of those into the computer instead of an old fashioned magnet drive? think about it.......I'll never have to delete another porno again to free up space.......

Of course there's no 1TB drives...

[AllNicksWereTaken]

Of course this will work. There are no 1Tb hard drives to copy the.. ...oh wait.

More to big disks than just picture quality

[cryptochrome]

You should have taken the LOTR uncut plus extras on one disk to it's logical conclusion. Specifically, you can cram a lot more of the same quality on one disk. Say, an entire season - or even run - of DVD quality television, encoded at high bitrate, without having to sacrifice any "extras" like alternate audio tracks. Plus extras galore. (and the disks we have now could stand to support much broader data and functionality, but that's another story).

Re:More to big disks than just picture quality

[jp10558]

But the point is that the entertainment industry doesn't do this.

Take CD's, we all know they can usually hold 18-22 songs, but how many Albums have more than 12 songs? Some of the greatest hit's ones, often it is 10 songs, about the same # that fit on an LP.

What about MP3 CD's? There are plenty of MP3 CD players being sold by many manufacturers, but I've never seen an MP3 CD for sale in Walmart. Here they could fit 140 songs or so on that CD, but they don't.

What about the - say Anime DVD's? They put 2-3 episodes on one DVD, where 6 will fit easily with extra features.

So just what precedent makes you think they will ever release an entire season of episodes on one disc?

Re:More to big disks than just picture quality

[Anonymous Coward]

to it's logical conclusion

"its".

Re:More to big disks than just picture quality

[chaoaretasty]

On anime DVDs at least, the norm is 4 eps with some at 3 and 5 (usually to make up the odd numbers in a season), they also do require extra quality because compression artifacts are much more visible in animation than live action and they have two audio streams.

Re:More to big disks than just picture quality

[cryptochrome]

Exactly. 5 is actually getting into the range where artifacts really start becoming visible. It's a common issue on regular movies which are more than 2hrs long as well.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[budgenator]

Having the servo information shielded by a dichoric filter that only alows it to be read by a red emitting laser does raise a lot of DRM ideas such a placing meta-data on the tracks, obfuscated de-cryptions keys and the like.

Personaly, I don't have a problem with DRM as long as;

1. It isn't a thinnly veiled method to keep independents out of the market
2. The standards are published so OSS developer aren't kept out as well
3. Publishers replace defective and damaged media at reasonable cost
4. 
   yeah I know like any of that is going to happen, but that's how I feel about it.
   

Price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhuh and the price and compatability is?

Holograms and Durability.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually a very very complex and interesting question.

Traditional holograms... the interferometric recordings of 3 dimensional objects have an interesting property: data about all parts of the object are stored EVERYWHERE on the hologram.

You damage a part of the hologram, you still get the entire image of the original object, but it (for example) gets a little fuzzier or you have an angle you can't view it at...

Yes, I know it sounds wierd but it is true... I didn't fully understand it until my second semester of graduate optics.

I really wonder if the holographic structure of the data storage will improve the robustness of the media.

Re:This format is worthless. Pure profit motive.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sometimes they develop products to avoid spending a buck.

And technically, companies that are not incorporated can be as whimsical as their owners. They might have to answer to the IRS for stuff that's too unrelated to profit, but still.

Watch out

[tqft]

"Also I've been dealing with measurements for my house recently- anything below an inch isn't worth it."

Ever been in a house where the wall is 3/4in out from plan? The bedroom furniture did not quite fit properly - inbuilt wardrobe door hit bed when opened [don't ask me why it was not a sliding door]. The ensuite layout had to be rejigged and the wife was pissed off (thankfully it was not my money, house or wife).

You have been warned.

Check plan vs layout to ~0.1in

Re:Watch out

[mekkab]

ugh! Thanks for the heads up! Just got an e-mail from the builder regarding placement of island in the kitchen... I'm thinking this is one of those times where I'll need to whip out the measuring tape!

Let's do the math

[corysama]

Given a 1 terabyte disk, how hi-def could the video be? Let do the math. I'm going to assume base-1000 marketing measurements where "1 terabyte" is actually exactly 1 trillion bytes.

Assuming a 2 hour movie at 24 frames per second...
2*60*60*24 = 172,800 frames
1 terabyte / 172,800 frames = 5,787,037 bytes per frame

If we stick to uncompressed but low dynamic range pixels then we need 3 bytes per pixel...
5,787,037 / 3 = 1,929,012 pixels per frame

That's actually slightly less than the 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) highest-end HDTV image.

Of course, WMV9PRO compression supposedly delivers something like 2 hours of 1080p on a standard DVD. If we accept compression, the math becomes much easier. Given that 1 terabyte is roughly 200 DVDs you can do:
1) 400 hours of 1920x1080 video
2) 2 hours of 26,880x15,120 video
3) any balance between 1) and 2)

Personally, I'd like to see some of that extra space go to delivering 72 frame per second, 16 bit per channel video. That 6x multiplier would still give us approximately 66 hours of 1080p video even if the compression only scaled linearly.

Let me know when it hits the shelves. ;)

More info...

[Twinbee]

Lots more info available from this site.

Key quotes:

"Optware plans to commercialize the technology in the first quarter of 2006". "Much less expensive consumer versions could be on the market as soon as 2007" "The company is initially planning to use the technology for enterprise applications. Drives for this market will cost about $20,000 and will initially use 200GB HVDs, with a target cost of about $100 per disc." "Drives for home users will cost about $2,700, about the same as commercially available Blu-ray Disc players cost now." "Future developments of the technology could take its capacity up to 1TB of data on 12-centimeter discs the company said."

1gb/s?

[Kanasta]

Why are these things getting faster than my hard disk? Hell, they:re offering 100mb ADSL here now. I don:t think my HD can write at 100mb.

Whats going on??!

Re:1gb/s?

[Anonymous Coward]

i really hope you are joking

http://compnetworking.about.com/b/a/2003_10_05.h tm

Stubborn testy little fucker, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you're only giving me a task that I enjoy, right maynard? I enjoy ruining your goatee-stroking pseudo-intellectual good time. It's funny how you've come full circle because you can't stand any other conditions. Prepare to periodically be smaked down with modbombs, maynard.

Re:One gigabyte transfer speed?

[luna69]

Mod parent funny and insightful...(I was wondering when someone would notice the units problem...)

...Mod previous posters who missed this as slow on the uptake, unless they thought it was too obvious to comment on, in which case mod them as spoilsports.

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[NuclearDog]

"How can a holographics video disc be used greedily anyway? It's a damn disc that holds information."

Well, they could patent something really generic that covers their disc and most other logical solutions for storing this amount of data on some sort of disc, then charge $15 per disc or something, while it costs them $2 to produce, and due to the patent no one could market a cheap alternative.

That greedy enough for you?

ND

interesting, it looks a lot like...

[zonker]

a small laser disc...

Re:Next stop: isolinear chips

[syukton]

The disc is just the simplest hardware method for moving a physical object closer to another object. In this case the two objects are a piece of disc which contains a desired piece of data and the piece of equipment responsible for reading the data from the disk. It's actually a spinning disc and a motorized reader which moves in and out on the disk, but the point is that it's technologically simplistic and easy to manufacture.

If we could do something cheaper, I'd give it 5 years. I say cheaper because people are reluctant to replace what they've got unless you can give them more value than they have right now. So it has to be cheaper in order to be widely accepted. But I'd give it 5 years.

But you couldn't do it in the USA. You'd have to do it elsewhere first. Japan likes new gadgets, start there.

Sir? Step AWAY from the Kool-Aid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux ... was developed mostly by a group of people who felt that they wanted to contribute to the greater good of the computing world...

Sorry, but in general that's bullshit. The vast majority of the volunteers did it (and do it still) because a) it was cool code to work on, and b) they wanted to use it. This is true also of many of the folks working on it for pay at IBM, Red Hat, etc. Sure, they may believe that it's for the Greater Good, but that's not the essential motivation.

This is all abundantly documented.

Re:Right: Kill the profits and the beast dies.

[gigahawk]

That's another government related problem. All I see here are a bunch of government related problems. Patents are too general and last too long. Bigger government seems to always cause more and more issues because it's impossible to keep a handle on eve market all the time, as Communist Russia found out.

Finally...

[jo42]

...I will be able to put my pr0n collection on one disc...