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Pioneer Ultraviolet Laser Promises 500GB Discs
No Fortune writes "Here's an article indicating that Pioneer is developing an ultraviolet laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers is shorter than the wavelength of blue lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk."
Microsoft Gamma Laser Promises 500 PB Discs
Here's an article indicating that Microsoft is developing a gamma laser for data storage. Since the wavelength of gamma lasers is shorter than the wavelength of ultraviolet lasers, the beams are finer and they can pack more data into per square inch. This gives a data rate 1,000,000 times more than the ultraviolet laser discs.
See subject.
Looks like I have to buy the White Album again.
...what color is it?
(I'm a fan of blue...)
That's almost big enough to put my entire MP3 collection on a single disk!
error correcting 15.8 megabytes of obscured data!
So now i can lose 500GB of data?
...
I'm moving to punchcards
No, but it can give you a nice tan!
Wake me up when we have Gamma-Ray discs.
Is it "disc" or "disk"? I can't tell, 'cause you're using both spellings in the same article!
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Now that I've paused to read the article...
The article only discusses write techniques. I'd like to hear if there are any peculiarities involved in reading it before I make guesses as to the delay before production. I'd also like to know if they only have a tube or if they have a diode already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have to wonder about the value added. Presumably they will suffer from the same degrading properties of other digital media with a proportionaly high price point. I suppose 10dvds could be storred on one makeing for only one point of failure for 10x much data.
I am invisble, and you can't see me.
Have they looked at how ultraviolet light makes many plastics degrade? The laser is one thing, and I can only guess they'll have fancy sapphire optics, but if you can't make a durable package for the data, who cares? And if you can't leverage the existing infrastructure, the odds are the answer will be, "No one who counts."
People more versed in physics than I am can answer this:
:)
The lasers used for optical media keep on progressing to higher frequency light, which is better able to resolve things. Where is the likely end for optical media?
Past ultraviolet light is x-rays and gamma rays I think... Will they be used for optical media? They are known as "dangerous", but perhaps in low power situations they aren't too bad? Or, you could just have the optical drive shielded in lead
Microscopes haved moved past light, into "electron microscopes", which used streams of electrons to resolve things that light cannot. Will that be possible with our optical media techniques?
Mod parent down, obvious and lame troll.
500 big ones could fit a lot of porno!
And there is nothing I want more than to wait 3.6 days for a disk to finish writing..
Yes, but how many times have you looked at the laser in your cd or dvd players? It's not like they'll be open.
...by putting sunscreen on them?
Here's an article indicating that Pioneer is developing...
Quoth the article:
Japanese hardware maker Pioneer has developed a technique...
Though not of any extreme importance, one should note the mild distinction between "is" and "has."
Just what my roommate needs. Now he'll hog the connection even more for his downloads with unlimited storage space.
These should really come in some type of protective casing. Like a floppy or something.
I have many CD's and they were pretty resilient to scratches. They played fine even if they had a pretty hefty scratch on them.
Then I bought DVD's and I brought them on over sea flights for entertainment. I was transporting them in one of those CD wallets and they just started getting unusable really fast. The smallest scratch and it would stop working.
I'm thinking that these disks can get a scratch that is smaller than can be seen with the naked eye and it'll still be a real problem for the disk.
So they should either have a protective cover like a floppy or they should have lots of redundant information physically far away from each other on the disk.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Troll...
But I'll bite anonymously...
Current CD and DVD players have lasers that are harmful to the eye. That's what the warning labels saying lasers are harmful to the eye. Go do some reading.
It's octarine, the eighth color of the spectrum, the color of magic.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
cd lasers are red
dvd lasers(?) and blu-ray are blue
after that is violet and UV
how come this is coming out now?
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
That is a lot o p0rn!!!
I can just see it now, Prince will patent the purple laser and the future discs will be known as NPG-ROMs.
The Lynxpro
Anyone else think that dust/scratches would be a big problem for a caddy-less optical disc of that storage density? Seems like you could loose quite a lot of data to a single scratch.
I see nothing about who developed the UV laser, all I see is that Pioneer is using them to write (and read) optical storage. The innovation is that they had to use a carbon mask to reduce scattering.
Of course, I can't read Japanese, so perhaps the original article is more informative and/or accurate.
Other companies already have UV diode lasers in production, like Nichia since 2002. However, I see nothing here indicating that Pioneer has developed the UV laser that they're using for this new disc format.
Anyone who reads Japanese care to track back and get more details?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
When in the recomended use of your CD/DVD drives did you see the laser? Yes.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
Which makes the prospect even worse
I am invisble, and you can't see me.
and we quickly find out that pioneer is working on this project for epic in order to release the unreal tornament 2005 collectors edition. Just think, only 2 of these discs will fit the game on it!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Take a look at this:
1 /0 2/0011220
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
For the benefit of any idiot who thinks parent poster is serious, allow me to point out that your current CD and DVD players use Infra-Red laser diodes, which are also invisible and dangerous. That's why your CD player will often have a warning on the outside.
Dr. Pantyhose is a known Troll. Please don't try to engage him in discussion, that's what he wants. Well, that and karma.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
to store a single SlashDot article and all of its duplicates.
Maybe we'll be using "Atomic Force" DVDs?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't look into laser with remaining eye.
So I assume the breakthough is that they made it into a diode? UV lasers exist now:t m
http://www.laserinnovations.com/sabrefred.h
CD lasers are infrared
DVD lasers are red
Blu-ray lasers are blue
Sugar is sweet
And I love you
Protection for ultra-violet discs? Through a little sunscreen on there my good man.
We're missing a big point in all this: We need better ways of preserving data, not better ways of storing more data.
--
does our rule benefit the earth? does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine?
Just so I trust that my precious video of that birthday party is conserved...
I am willing to only get 100 GB per disc, if the redundant copies in the 500GB space give me a good chance of seeing the 100GB I want...
Super-redundant error-tolerant copy software anyone? I sure want it to tbe open-source, so that I can trust it will survive for a few years.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
these discs have been known to create gi-nourmous explosions in microwaves that only 500gb capacity tech can do.
I'm sure that Pioneer has considered the fact that UV light gradually destroys most plastics.
So what type of material will these UV laser disks be made of?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
It's been what? 20 years now that we've been using CDs and their cousins. I wonder when we'll make the jump to a new medium and what that medium will be.
And what happened to FDs? they were supposed to be the next big thing (tm).
CD's use red
HD-DVD's use blue
Ultraviolet is sweet
OMG i just lost 500gb of data!
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
You can't buy 500GB White Album.You must buy Ultraviolet Album
For a second there I thought it said Ultra Violent Laser and I got excited thinking it was some new deathray or something, but then I re-read it. Wake me up when have something exciting, like sharks with frickin' ultra violent lasers attached to their heads.
Just to piss you off =)
How about temporary tattoos via a UV laser attached to a tattoo gun?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Here ya go.
Better yet cover them with this.
It should fix the knicks and scratches problem.
It occurs to me that 500 GB is just about enough space to store the 40,000 most popular songs of the last 60 years in 256-bit mp3 format.
I might be willing to pay as much as $200 for such a disk, as long as most of the money went to the copyright owners (performers?) instead of evil record company scumbucketry.
Alas, market forces have yet to work their magic to actualize this rather pleasant "convenience fantasy".
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Caution: Ultraviolet light. Do not stare into beam. May cause cancer in remaining eye.
Or 84615 minutes of MPEG4 Video per disk at 320x480p. That's about 770 DVD's (granted that's at a crapulent quality level) Anyone know who many porn DVD's are released each month?
.. but seriously though, why not just use X-Rays? Why the gradual progression towards larger and larger capacities?
"It's been what? 20 years now that we've been using CDs and their cousins. I wonder when we'll make the jump to a new medium and what that medium will be."
DNA
Wonder what this does to jitter control on mobile Pc's, finer beam means more possiblity of messed up a 500gb disc. Not sure about anyone else but I am pretty depressed when my DVD fails on a burning session considering their current cost. 500gb disc? Going to be pricy to chance I'm sure. /me clicks burn disc and holds breath
so now when i scratch my discs i lose even more data...
I just can't listen to anything encoded at less than 320 Mb/sec. But that takes a lot of storage, even if it's VBR.
When you notice a post by a guy posting as "Pantyhose," caliming to be a PhD and refering to a Stanford address no less, at what point do you make the call to take his ludicrous question seriously?
If I were you, I'd check the cable to my trollometer.
Nobody's gonna give my CD's cancer!
I don't actually care as long the said discs are made of corn!
My other dog is a Wienerschnitzel.
Reminds me of the guy in school who played a practical joke on another student by getting some glacial acetic acid (95% pure) and said "sniff this".
Of course, the other guy had a cold, sniffed and didn't smell anything. Sniffed some more. And more. Ended up with growths in the nasal passages that requred cauterizing, and no sense of smell.
Just don't make the users angry. You wouldn't like them when they're angry.
obviously the folks that made the blue laser devices had as much foresight as the razor-company engineers that felt that they had to make a three blade razor before they could make one with four blades.
ôó
I've just soiled my armor!
There were magazine articles about blue laser cd-rom drives in the early-mid 90's and it's only just starting to come out.
With shorter wavelengths, you can create smaller structures, packing more data on a disc. But to make that work, you also need the mechanics to support this. Moving a read/write head +/- 1 mm. is easy, moving it +/- 1 micron is not so easy. Maybe it will be much harder to produce mechanics that can accurately track such tiny structures, as they get smaller.
Where is the likely end for optical media?
2 words: "disruptive technology". As in: something else than optical discs as we know them. Candidates: cheap flash-like memory, nanotechnology, ....
You are aware, I hope, that Moore's Law only states that the number of transistors that will fit in a given space will double, right? Since neither hard drives nor optical media are using transistors as the storage medium, I fail to see the point of that post.
Oh, wait, I see it now. There's a link that you hope people will click so you get your kickback. How nice of you to spam us.
If not now, when?
Sure, everyone else can jump straight to ultraviolet, but I'm sticking with my proprietary PurpleRay format - it may not compete with ultraviolet in terms of data density, but nothing says "I'm a bad mother f*****" like a PurpleRay.
"how to make -R and -RW types of media"
you forgot +R and +RW
DRM, meet PRM.
Physical Rights Management... hell, share all you want, it will degrade away as you do.
Does your penis run Linux?
What, you don't remember when CD-ROM's came in those little cartridges(sort of like ultra-slim, funky jewel cases)?
You just stuck the whole thing in a drive, cartridge and all. I still remember copies of Grolier's Encyclopedia getting stuck in the drives of the Mac's at my school.
I think we should go back to those as our optical media become more and more dense, data-wise.
CD-ROM's pressed at the factory can be scratched to hell and still play, CD-R's are OK but a bit less reliable and lasting, and I'm practicaly walking on eggshells when I touch my DVD-R's because I've seen how sensitive they are to scratches. Something really does need to done.
Sleep is futile.
Most plastics lose clarity and become brittle under UV exposure. Focusing a UV beam, even if only at a miniscule power, at such a small track width seems to introduce a whole slew of new problems. I've heard that Blu-ray will be the last generation of plastic-substrate optical disks unless better UV resistant materials can be developed.
When we lost a floppy disk, we only lost 20 pictures at most. Alas, when we lost an optical disc, we lost an entire vacation's worth of pictures.
When media data storage rates double, reliability needs to double too!
Great! More storage capacity. But why announce it now, when I'll have to wait several years before it's ready? By then, holographic storage, flourescent media, and God knows what other types of storage will compete directly with this.
There have been many comments about using gamma/X-rays in order to write to discs and getting even better storage and people saying it's not possible because it would go right through any disc.
Last year in nuclear physics lab we did an experiment where we had a gamma ray source and a detector and took various measurements of how far they could go through various compounds (aluminum, copper, and lead). Let me say that 30 cm of aluminum blocked less than 10 cm of copper which blocked less than a cm of lead. I bet if they made the discs with gold* instead of whatever they use now they might reflect enough of low-frequency gamma or x-rays to read the discs, despite them being really expensive.
*I think too many people microwave discs to let people use lead.
**Techically gamma rays are produced from nuclear transition and X-rays are produced from high energy electronic transitions. I am pretty sure they would not use radioactive materials to obtain gamma rays and that they would use electricty to obtain X-rays but since this convention has been ignored so far, I didn't bother with correcting it in the actual interesting part of my post.
great! i just got my 16x Sony Blue-ray recorder!
... will no doubt make theirs out of plastic.
I think what will eventually push us to new media will be something more durable, more convenient (CDs are a pain), probably with the potential to be made cheaper, and hopefully with lower environmental impact.
Hopefully, anyway. Perhaps some memory card format - they're getting big enough now to be good for general use, though they're definitely not cheap enough yet.
This Japanese page has some pictures of pits from April 2004 press release. It says Pioneer has codeveloped with its group company Pioneer FA an Electron Beam Recorder (EBR). The Laser Beam Recorder (LBR) of the past used UV or deep-UV light whereas the EBR uses an electron beam. It says it will be able to deal with not only Blu-Ray disks, but also hard disks as it can deal with discrete track media and pattern domains. So what this says is first of all, a UV laser is nothing new, but on the other hand I can't access the Nikkei article so I can't tell what's going on. The link above shows two photos, a 4.7GB older format versus a 50GB newer format written by the EBR.
there are tapes that can also store hundreds of gigabytes. what I'm concerned about is how fast you can get that info off of the disc.
Sony and Phillips come out with competing ultraviolet disc formats. Then, 4 months later, come the competing UVD+RW and UVD-RW formats....
Been there, done that.
... might be useful even on my 4.7GB DVD+/-R discs.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
HD-DVD discs are red
Blu-ray's are blue
Pioneer loves UV
Which one's for you?
(bows)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Dear Phillip:
Please invest some money into a decent filesystem to make this new format suck less.
It seems as though if we moved into something like gamma rays or x-rays, and a material that could reflect said rays... and if they where built much like CDs are today where the reflective material is coverd by a layer of plastic (which tends to get scratched), it would be possible to scratch the crap out of a CD and still have something readable. Since gamma rays and x-rays would pass through the plastic (and scratches) as though they weren't even there.
Given most single songs are selling for around $1 a disk costing $200 for 40,000 songs would be a hell of a bargin. Talk about volume discounts! You're talking about a 1/2 cent per artist even if the record company was gracious enough to take no money for their rights and the disks were produced for free. Even if production and marketing costs 50% and the record company gave the artist 10%, far more than current rates, the artist would in truth only see $.00025 per disk. It'd take a lot of disk sales to pay for a trip to Star Bucks. Let's compare this to software? Let's say programers are paid a royalty with no money up front. Let's put the same 40,000 pieces of software on a disk and divide it in a similar way. Oh wait, takes more than one programer to create Photoshop. Let's take that same $.00025 per disk sold and divide it by the 25 programers on the team. That gives you $.00001 per disk per person. I hope everyone on the planet buys one or you won't make rent this month. We need legititate business models not gee I'd buy all the music ever written in the last 60 years for a couple of hundred. I'd love to buy a Ferrari if they could sell them for a couple of hundred as well. And the old argument of apples and oranges doesn't work. Ferraris may take materials and factories to produce but so does music and so do movies. Studio time is expensive and people deserve to be paid for their labor.
Parent comment always gets modded up on slashdot with regards to optical media... here goes.
Redundancy and error correction will make up for any casual-use scratches ("casual" meaning you generally take care of your CDs, but perhaps don't always put them back in their cases immediately or whatnot). The more space, the more error correction you have in the form of redundancy and things such as parity, not to mention faster chips allowing for interpolation to fill in any gaps that may exist.
Also, don't forget the way the data is physically read is AROUND the disc, so in order to do any real sort of damage would be to have large scratches also going around the disc. This is why when cleaning discs, you should always clean from the inside of the disc to the outside, NOT going around it.
Regarding your DVD problems, have you tried cleaning your lens properly (not trying to be a smartass, disc-read problems are more often than not a function of the laser)?
So in short, you have nothing to worry about (this also assumes that you don't buy a KMart brand unit with a poor laser). With more space, we get better error correction and opportunities for redundancy, and the physical nature of the media makes it more resiliant to every-day scratches (just remember how the data is physically read and it becomes apparent). If it wasn't for whatever strange reason, then the engineers who spend years putting the technology together would accomodate for that.
Hopefully that clears some of it up.
I think I've tried every DVD repair kit on the market. Even those that I figured probably were a hoax. Just because I have so many damaged DVD's that it was worth the risk I thought.
I have tried my damaged DVDs on many different players so I don't think that the laser is the problem.
I honestly think that DVDs are much more fragile than CDs.
Another thing which is weird with DVDs is that once it does find a bad spot it tends to lock up the system. I can't even skip forward or backwards.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
3 weeks to burn too.
What with K3b (.11.17) currently burning 4.7gb DVD's at about 1.2x
I can't wait!! (Did I really say that?!)
Looks like Bill Gates finally realised that 640k memory isnt enough for everyone
Reason I ask, is that when it comes to companies who literally collect a couple TB of data a day... tapes still seem to be used. If you can just burn 3-4 of these UB discs, I think it would be a lot nicer/perhaps quicker/more reliable. Guess on the flip side at least with tapes you can RW them. *shrug*
Heh. Normally I don't find *nix humor funny (you know, jokes about "mount" and so on), but your sig is an exception.
Well done.
My question is, do you think that a rewritable disk could be done this way? Or would the UV be too much for it?
And yet we have plastic disks right now.
UV light just does it somewhat faster.
It's clearly not an insurmountable problem.
Predicts Terabytes to Exabytes of data storage !!
http://colossalstorage.net
The DVDs bought overseas for 1-2$ are normally of very bad production quality. The scratches are not as much the problem as the faulty production. You can sometimes use a computer to copy the content to the hard disk (it will try more often than a regular DVD player, try various computers to find the best drive) and play it from there or burn it to a new DVD.
That's great that we can have 500 GB cheap optical disks and all, but aren't we reaching something of a bottleneck when it comes to disk access and writing? If it takes you an hour to write a 4.5 Gig dvd like it does me, then your looking at 4 days, 15 hours to write one of these babies. KEH'MON!
Then blue lasers have to get really cheap soon.
Screw optical storage, where, the hell, are the laser video beamers ?!
I know, I know... mod me offtopic...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Actually, thinking about the physical packaging of the media, one thing I've been wondering since DVDs came along is - why the hell do all new media have to follow the exact same 12cm form factor of CDs?
It seems crazy, to me, that we have all these 12cm discs with identically sized holes in the centre, that could contain completely different kinds of data.
If I pick up a shiny 12cm disc, what should I play it on? my TV? My Hi Fi? Or maybe it's a data disc and only makes sense to my computer. In the future, I won't be able to tell by glancing at it whether a disc will be readable in my blue-laser DVD player, because it may be a UV disc.
Admittedly, my DVD player can play CDs, and I only need one optical drive on my PC - these are advantages, yes. And we're probably stuck with the 13cm shiny disc format for the forseeable future now. But shouldn't somebody have realised, back when DVDs were created, that maybe there ought to be a standard way of telling them apart from CDs?
And don't even think about getting me started on packaging design. I mean, it maybe makes sense to put movie DVDs into packages the smae height as VHS tapes, because people may have an existing investment in VHS storage in their living rooms. But in god's name, why would you package DVD-ROMs in the same sized boxes as VHS tapes? In an environment where people have storage space for CD-ROM-sized boxes, introduce a stupid, oversized box.
What sort of box are they going to use for blue DVDs? And what can we do to stop them?
Because clearly, a 500GB optical disc has NO other use than for DVD piracy.
Hell, with 500GB, you could fit a pirated DVD box set on a single disc!
"This gives a data rate 20 times more than the blue laser Blue-ray disk." That's fantastic. Does it mean the data transfer rate is 20 times faster? Does it mean the data storage ratio for one of those is 20:1 if compared to a Blue-Ray disk? It's not that it's important, but.. Well, actually, it is.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Is it simply because a DVD is a lot wider than a HDD platter?
In magnetic recording devices, the data density limited by either the size of the head or the size of magnetic domains in the platter material. As I understand it, at this time the platter is the limiting factor. The density on a modern HD platter exceeds that of a CD or DVD disc.
With optical storage, the data density is limited by the wavelength of the photons interacting with the medium, as well as the detail of the medium itself. A DVD can store more data than a CD because of the smaller wavelength of its red laser. The blue laser in blu-ray discs as an even smaller wavelength, and yields even more data per disc. Obviously, the media need to be altered to accept the higher data density - and photon energy for recordable discs.
The size of the laser unit itself is not really relevant, as its output is focussed into a tiny point on the recording layer.
imagine all the porn. heh. I wonder when hard discs will becoem optical. and the phrase "hard disk" will become one of thoes phrases that people use and don't know quite what it means anymore....
1001100 1100101 1100001 1110110 1100101 1001101 1111001 1000010 1101001 1110100 1110011 1000001 1101100 1101111 110111
At 70 nm between disc pits, you're starting to reach the quantum limit (that's the UV laser). Simple dust particles too small for your eye to see could cause megabytes of data loss on reading and writing. I'm assuming they're either working out the problems (vacuum sealed discs) or already solved them. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next "disc" using x-rays or gamma rays.
:)
For instance, at the energies X-rays, you're now talking electrons. The chance of an error increases enormously. The media would have have to be made of something akin to diamond,or another type of crystal so that the diffraction of the rays could be interpereted as data. And even then, random "tunneling" and such could cause data issues. You'd also have to keep the radiation energy low, or encase the drive in a lead sarcophagus. And forget about gamma ray discs.
I think the next big step will be solid state (crystal matrices or the like) and not disk based. Though if they do work out the dust/scratch problem on the UV discs I'd probably get one.
~X~
~X~
Microsoft Gamma Laser has Expected Side Effects
(Columbus, Ohio)
In a strange but anticipated twist, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt was burning an archival disc of Japanese "bukkake" videos with his new MGL-550 Gamma Laser Burner, when the unit malfunctioned, showering Schmidt in gamma radiation.
Schmidt became incensed, his skin temporarily turning a shade of green and and his intelligence dropping to the level of former president George W. Bush. His vocabulary decreased and for a few minutes, could say nothing more than "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt SMASH!" and "..internets.."
Representatives of Microsoft call this the "Banner Effect" and tout the incident as "an extra feature, not a bug, NOT A BUG" of the new burners.
500GB would make a decent size for incremental backups.. TODAY!!
By the time they get their act together, this'll no longer be enough.
There isn't a good way to do backups today. 5GB DVDs is not enough to backup a 100 GB harddrive.. 500GB would allow 5 full backups on a single disk.. who knows how many incremental. That is efficient.
(Of course you would need 3 or 4 disks to rotate around to ensure your backups don't die all at once)
...on reading "Pioneer Ultraviolet Laser" was "What? Neither Pioneer spacecraft carried a UV laser!" Sad indeed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
it makes it easier to swap existing fabrication plants from one format to the other.
Hmmmm... try cleaning off the lens with a good cleaning solution. If you've already tried different players (good ones?), I don't know what more else to say.
The locking-up sounds a bit suspicious to me, though... I've never seen that behaviour.
This was posted on Slashdot about 2 or 3 years ago. I'm still waiting for them :P
Search for FMDRoms.
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
What are they doing to decrease the fragility of these media? Not much I'm afraid.
This story appeared recently here on slashdot about a protective CD coating that could withstand a wire scrubber. Assuming the protective coating doesn't absorb UV or anything like that, it sounds like the perfect solution.
There's actually a way to tell them all apart, but most people don't know about it. See, if you look really close at your disc, you should see some markings. Some will say "CD", some will say "DVD", and some will have a variant of this, like "CDRW" or "DVD-R". Hopefully, this information will be of service to you.
That's why these things are labelled differently, silly. If they were home burned discs, then it's your reponsibility to label them accordingly.
Why were CDs first packaged in cardboard boxed the same height as LPs?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
NT