Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser

Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."

Comments

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Optical media seems like it sucks with how easily it can get dirty and damaged. Between hard drives and flash memory why are we still using optical media?

mayhaps someone can clue me in...

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

optical is easier to see thus easier to read and write.

Re:I don't get it

[MightyYar]

It's still the cheapest way to distribute data. CDs/DVDs are produced for a few pennies - and even Blu-Ray is produced at a cost significantly lower than flash or magnetic media of the same capacity.

For backup, it probably will still make sense to use some kind of magnetic media.

Re:I don't get it

[profplump]

Because 50 GB optical media costs less than a dollar to press or burn, and 50 GB of flash memory costs about $100. And hard drives cost a minimum of $30 regardless of their size. Am *I* missing something here?

Re:I don't get it

[Clandestine_Blaze]

The entertainment industry still uses optical because it costs them only pennies to press optical media. Relatively speaking, it would cost them a lot more to distribute hard drives and flash memories that came pre-loaded with something I could watch or listen to.

For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.

Most computers and television sets still do not have built-in flash memory card readers. So other than USB sticks, having CF, xD, MMC, or any of those other formats might be useless if your destination cannot support it.

I think the issue isn't really the media format, but the availability of something that would support such formats. I would prefer flash memory over optical, simply because of its ease of use. And perhaps my perception of time is different, but to me it has always been faster to write to flash than to optical.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't speak to other cars as it's the only one I seriously considered when I bought a few months back, but any basic Honda Civic with at least air-conditioning (ie not the cheapest of the cheap) has an aux/"iPod" port.

Re:I don't get it

[squiggleslash]

I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.

At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.

This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.

However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.

Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.

Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.

So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.

Re:I don't get it

[electrictroy]

Precisely. It's why Sony, Sega, and later Nintendo abandoned ROM media for distribution of games. Making a cartridge was much, much more expensive that simply pressing a disc. The same cost analysis still applies today for Flash ROM vs. Bluray.

>>>can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers

(shrug). TDK already developed the ability to make 6-layer Blurays that can hold 200 gigabytes. The problem is that already-sold players do not have the ability to read more than two layers.

Re:I don't get it

[Austerity Empowers]

One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.

As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.

Re:I don't get it

[electrictroy]

>>>So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.

Disagree. Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM. The same is still true today, and will be true in the future. A 50 cent disc (Bluray or otherwise) is cheaper than a $10 flash cartridge.

Re:I don't get it

[jeffmeden]

Not that there isn't a lot of truth to what you say but... The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s, whereas this new Blu-Ray laser has a stated read/write speed of 170 MB/sec. So, "cheap" Flash has a ways to go before it's competitive with optical media in strictly read/write performance, which for HD video is of utmost importance. The cost/benefit ratio changes for other purposes, but when speed is on the line it's disc or hard drive, flash just isn't there yet.

Re:I don't get it

[Machtyn]

Ow! Economics and making sense on slashdot! Stop it!

/me takes an aspirin

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

The optical naysayers are right. A few PS3 games are already showing degradation of the foil backing, making them absolutely unplayable now.

Re:I don't get it

[jollyreaper]

For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.

Any decent 3rd party CD player has line-in, had one on the player I got ten years ago. The Yaris, Toyota's lowest-end car which is really quite nice, it has line-in as well, standard equipment. The sound system is quite nice. Not up to audiophile standards, obviously, no seal-skin wrapping on the wires to increase the sound's warmth and chewability, but it's nice. Actually, car audio's been sounding good on the imports since the 90's, stock speakers being more than sufficient.

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

Yes, optical media sucks. Ever hear of foil rot? There's actually bacteria that will eat away the foil backing of yur disc (usually starting at the inside or outside edges) and it eventually makes your disc unplayable, even if you don't touch it for years! Let's not forget that many optical drives are poorly built and will scratch a huge ring into your disc.

In my decade+ of using optical media, I've always preferred to just use an external Hard Drive. When the first USB burners came out, I bought one, ripped the drive out, threw in a hard drive, and that was that. I learned quickly that optical media is just not the way to go, regardless of how cheap it is in the long run. Until they make those discs absolutely unscratchable by normal means (to you optical disc engineers - look up the Moh's Hardness Scale and you might have a clue for once!) I've pretty much given up on optical and have done all data collection via download or sneakernet.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but how do you "press" a 50GB flash drive? How much does the equipment cost to "press" a drive per second, compared to optical? The "write" bandwidth of a BluRay press is ludicrously large. To get equivalent bandwidth you'd have to write many many flash drives at once. What would the equipment to do that cost?

Re:I don't get it

[Kjella]

The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s

That depends, if you're doing playback then it only needs to pass the playback speed which is for Blu-Ray max 54Mbit/s raw = 7MB/s. Sure putting it on there would be quite annoying, but if they're cheap enough you might only do that once. So you can either go slow and cheap, or get a fast card to write at high speed. And if you're downloading it and have enough ports you might download directly to the flash drive rather than download to main disk, which would eliminate the problem. Of course, if your friend wants a copy that'd take a while, but if they're cheap you simply swap. I used to do that with floppies back in the stone age, I'd get some from my friends and they got some from me. Don't get me wrong, it would be a lot more convienient with 170MB/s but the problem isn't quite that big.

Re:I don't get it

[squiggleslash]

Let's assume Blu-ray will come down to $50 per drive within two years. Let's also assume my pricing predictions are correct, as are yours (BD-RE is $20 right now, and pressed BD discs are $2.50 if done 100,000 at a time.) Let's also acknowledge that $10 is not the floor for SD cards, it's fairly easy to find sub-$5 cards, either directly or in packages (ie four for $20, that kind of thing.)

You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers.

Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?

Make the same calculation a year later. Also imagine a situation where someone can take their big-ass SD card into a store and have additional content added to it.

Ultimately though, it boils down to this: the price per gigabyte for solid state is plummeting, plummeting to the point that for lower volumes, it's already much more cost effective than Blu-ray though not DVD. Optical storage is also coming down in price, but nothing like as quickly. So at some point in the near future, one is going to overtake the other. For rewritable media, that's very soon, easily within the next three years. For pressed media, it may take five years but the convenience of SD (or CompactFlash or whatever) may well render that timeline irrelevant.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

My 2005 Toyota Camry sport edition (came with better than 'stock' audio from the factory) does not have a line in or aux. It is really annoying because I live in a radio dense metropolitan area and those "plug your music player in and broadcast to your car's radio" things don't work at all here. On the few occasions I have driven to the boonies or the mountains, they work fine. But in a metro area - nope, not worth anything.

Re:I don't get it

[owlstead]

In case somebody missed it: this is the same as phase change memory.

EETimes has the following interesting view on it. It seems that it's not for tomorrow yet.

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191900450

Re:I don't get it

[evanbd]

So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?

Re:I don't get it

[Malluck]

If you build it. They will come.

Re:I don't get it

[tibman]

For years now i've been using a $4 cassette tape adapter to plug the Ipod into my Jeep. And yes, that means i have an ancient Ipod the size of a brick with a screen in various shades of gray :(

Re:I don't get it

[Rakishi]

Can you get a third party adapter that gives you line-in? I know that for my car I could get one for around $100 (+whatever if I don't install it myself) and I think most cars have one of one sort or another.

Re:I don't get it

[RulerOf]

Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM.

Two things:

First, those were probably EPROM's, not flash, but don't quote me on it.

Second, supply+demand+moore's law = totally different situation today.

...I wouldn't be suprirsed if a 1GB EPROM costs more than used car....

Re:I don't get it

[squiggleslash]

Well, here's the thing. Does it still need to be "pressed"?

You go into Movieworld (or whatever they're called.) You browse the titles, wander over to the checkout with your selection, buy the movie, and walk out of the store.

The clerk then yells into the back "Customer just bought Hockey Mom President, need a refill."

Some guy at the back inserts an SD card into a writer. An hour later, he checks back, sees the card has been written, pulls Disney's packaging from a sealed envelope, inserts that into the transparent outer lining of the case and puts the SD card into the case itself, walks out, and puts it on the pile of "Hockey Mom President" boxes.

Disney loved it. They just needed to print the packaging and ship a hundred copies sealed to various movie stores together with a single SD card containing the master.

The movie store loves it. All they need to have in stock at any time is a big pile of blanks - blank cases, blank SD cards - plus the (easily storeable) packaging Disney et al sent. The day before a major release they do, of course, have to prefill a bunch of SD cards, but SD card writers are $1 each, so their computer can make 64 copies at a time without breaking a sweat. Oh, and if they don't sell 64 copies, they can always recycle the cards.

The only loser in the entire scenario is the idiot who bought an awful and highly improbable movie about a dimwitted soccer mom who managed to become a Governor before being picked as a Vice President by a doddering-old politician with stage-three cancer.

Re:I don't get it

[Urkki]

And how much do OUM media and OUM drives or readers cost?

Re:I don't get it

[avandesande]

You have to think in terms of throughput too. It probably take a fraction of a second to stamp a DVD, whereas with a 'serial' data transfer it can take several minutes.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Most computers and television sets still do not have built-in flash memory card readers. So other than USB sticks, having CF, xD, MMC, or any of those other formats might be useless if your destination cannot support it.

I think you might be surprised by how many computers come with integrated card readers these days.

The point is kinda moot, though, because how many computers and televisions have built-in Blu-ray players? Yeah, didn't think so. If flash storage really catches on and replaces optical disc for movie distribution (which I don't think it will), you'll plug a player in via HDMI or whatever, just like you do now with your disc-based players.

The form factor will make it convenient to integrate directly later on, when you have the equivalent of TVs with built-in DVD players. (These are at the low end of the market, though, because a real home theater buff is going to want a separate player.)

Re:I don't get it

[Silentknyght]

You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers. Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?

I feel this could be the "give away the razor, sell the razor blades at a huge markup" scheme that's already affecting the ink/printer market. I'd rather make an large initial purchase and buy the "consumable" items cheaply, compared to the reverse.

I'm also saying this as a bluray player owner, and one who balks at spending $30 on a bluray movie. A flash drive movie would have the high costs of the medium plus the "high costs" of the movie... to result in an expensive "consumable" item. These things should be priced to be as cheap as possible to spur as many impulse purchases as possible.

Re:I don't get it

[squiggleslash]

But I also said this:

Make the same calculation a year later. Also imagine a situation where someone can take their big-ass SD card into a store and have additional content added to it.

This isn't a classic razorblades model, because razorblades don't generally get any cheaper (and in any case, it's not like the blades are being sold at cost, which is what we're talking about with SSD.)

Re:I don't get it

[Trogre]

But... but CDs are made out of a polycarbonate. The samt hing that Bullet-Proof Vests are made of! They're therefore unscratchable! (See, I remember the late 80's well)

Sapphire! We need to make CDs out of Aluminium Oxide. First we need to mass-produce the stuff in enough volume that the perceived volume goes down. And then use it on PDA, phone, ogg player screens while we're at it.

Re:I don't get it

[roguetrick]

Works well for the Nintendo DS.

Re:I don't get it

[sexconker]

There's a reason most people haven't heard of it.

Re:I don't get it

[sexconker]

Remember that Nintendo abandoned cartridges for a 1.5 GB mini DVD.

Re:I don't get it

[Skrapion]

Do you mean cartridges work well for the Nintendo DS?

Well, of course they do. The GP's argument wasn't that cartridges should be abandoned, just that they're more expensive to manufacture. In the case of the DS, Nintendo has some unique requirements -- like long battery life and resistance to pocket lint -- that preclude optical media as an option.

Re:I don't get it

[Skrapion]

I've never heard of this tech, but the most optimistic lifespan of a CD-RW is 25 years, and in practice they usually die in less than 10 years. So if it uses the "same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media", then it's still not suitable for long-term storage.

Re:I don't get it

[Skrapion]

The optical naysayers are probably right in the long term, but I doubt it's going to be replaced with flash media. In the end, neither medium can beat the cost analysis of digital distribution.

Re:I don't get it

[CronoCloud]

Those DS cartridges are limited to 256MB in size, that limits the kinds of games a DS can do.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology.

ovonic unified memory MEMORY?

Nope, never heard of it. Better check the notes on my Personal PDA or access the internet using TCP Protocol.

-fire

Re:I don't get it

[Tsujiku]

+1 Correct Grammar Mod parent up for proper use of disc/disk.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a vision for a new computer storage/application distribution method based on flash. The idea works really well with the low cost of flash.

Imagine a flash memory format that allowed multiple flash cards to be stacked into a single, spring loaded, reader. They have contacts on both the top and bottom surfaces which allow them to form a serial bus connecting the entire stack of cards.

Now imagine that most major applications were distributed as VM's on these cards, with some sort of standard inter-application communication protocols for copy and paste and similar and similar tasks.

So, you purchase and download an image from the developer, write it to the card and put the card in your application card stack. Your OS automatically adds it to it's available application pool. You start the application, it runs the entire app and it's operating environmentm off of the card.

Change OS's, no problem the applications are actually VM's, so they are cross platform compatible. New computer, just pull the cards from the old and put them in the new... no long reinstall. DRM could be done in hardware, effectively tying the software to the card (it would be broken of course, but it would be tried too).

I think of it like each app is an atari cartridge... but your atari can hold dozens of games at once.

Re:I don't get it

[CopaceticOpus]

Fascinating. If the trend continues, here is the size of the flash drive you can get for $10:

2007 = 1 GB
2008 = 5 GB
2009 = 25 GB
2010 = 125 GB
2011 = 625 GB
2012 = 3 TB

2017 = 9 PB
2021 = 1 Exabyte (Or 10,000 Libraries of Congress)

This seems extremely unlikely. The question is when does it break down? 2009? 2012?

Re:I don't get it

[electrictroy]

Also backward-compatibility with the old Gameboy Advance. If Nintendo had decided to ignore the previous console, as they did with the Gamecube, then they probably would have followed Sony's path towards a mini-disc in order to save costs.

The largest cart Nintendo made for the N64 was only 64 megabytes, and the producer had to sell it for $60. The same game on the PS1, Resident Evil 2, was two discs long, covered 1400 megabytes, and only cost $50 upon release. Discs are simply cheaper than solid state devices.

It's mainly a construction issue. It's cheaper to press a couple layers of foil into a disc shape, than to etch layers out of silicon & then carefully package it inside a die, with additional external leads. Plus the disc can store the bits much more tightly than a ROM can.

Re:I don't get it

[Clandestine_Blaze]

You're right that many computers do come with built-in card readers. I haven't purchased a pre-built PC in a long time, but saw the current selection at a local Microcenter, and almost all of their pre-builds had the card readers.

Newegg is also selling a $150 Blu-ray DVD ROM, but I don't see the average PC user buying and installing one of these.

Re:I don't get it

[Khyber]

That life span was for older CD-RW discs that used a dye, not current-gen optical media which uses Chalcenogide glass. Not all CD-RW media were made the same.

Re:I don't get it

[aminorex]

While I may not agree with her politics, it is appalling to me that such misogyny can go unreplied on Slashdot. Palin is the *only* one of the 4 top-ticket contenders with actual executive experience. As compared to Obama/Biden, she actually worked a union job in her lifetime. Rather than promising to return big oil windfall profits to the people, she's actually done it. Attack McCain all you want -- he deserves it for the Keating 5, for Iraq 2, but until you have something more than sneers and misogyny, leave Palin out of it. She's the best candidate in the race, and not in small part because she is a hockey mom.

obligatory! (and more serious..)

[apodyopsis]

"man thats a lot of porn!"

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

archiving video (see above)?

archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?

an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?

when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.

and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[L4t3r4lu5]

Resistance to UV is only useful if you leave your discs out on your desk in the daytime. Come that point, though, i'd be more worried about coffe-rings after you mistake your archive for a coaster.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?

root@Thesaurus:~# du -sh /space/stuff/audio_collection/
240G /space/stuff/audio_collection/
root@Thesaurus:~#

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[rolfwind]

Asking what a user will use it for is shortsighted. DVDs have not been enough for me for several years (I backup using HDDs, cheaper considering my time). Even 100GB disc isn't all that exciting - perhaps HVDs will come out with 320-1TB data, but I suspect flash will be there sooner anyway.

Yes, there is porn for some but that's hardly the only use. For me, I tend to scan in a lot of books that were never printed in quantity. Depending on the book, if it's just for information or if there are important pictures - they can take up a lot of room very quickly.

With the invention of epaper, books are going on the list to music (mp3), movies (not just porn), and images as stuff people look to a PC to store. Movies will become a factor again as HD rolls out -- they take up a ton of space. Not too mention images from an high megapixel camera take up a lot of space. In the next 20 years, I also expect more and more devices that will feed data into computers automatically, feeding the need for more space.

I'm not of the crowd that wonders what we'll do with the space, I'm actually disappoint that it seems we stagnated in HDDs with capacity. We went from 10GB to 500GB in such a short time. I don't think the push to 10TB will be so easy. I could use it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

archiving video (see above)?

archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?

Well, you could, for example, keep all your music using a lossless format.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?

It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.

Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.

Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[BlackSnake112]

Resistance to UV is only useful if you leave your discs out on your desk in the daytime. Come that point, though, i'd be more worried about coffe-rings after you mistake your archive for a coaster.

I added cork to a bunch of failed burns to make drink coasters. For the bigger non regular size drinking glasses (ever see the 16 oz coke holiday glasses/hugs?)

on topic:

I would like to have 100GB+ disk backup. If it was RW even better. I use RW DVDs for a few home based backup. Format the DVD-RW disk and use it like a big floppy. Yes, there are flash drive and external hard drives that are bigger, but this was setup before flash drives were out. Older non geek people trust a CD/DVD more then the flash drive. They can hold it, they understand it. The flash drive is a little scary for them. The size is a lot smaller and easy to lose.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Audio data doesn't necessarily mean MP3s. Storing your audio in a lossless format like FLAC means about 50% compression, so we're looking at ~250MB/album - 400 albums isn't especially unreasonable.

But who says the data has to be written all at once? I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really all that telling. Disk "burning" is a very serial process not suited to large-scale manufacture.

Further, the media companies don't need it to read any faster than 1x.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Skye16]

How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?

I'd really have no trouble spending a few hundred dollars on a scanner that would basically do it for me. I really want to move to an e-book, but most of the books I love are rather modest Fantasy books that aren't available in e-book form. A flat bed scanner would take me probably a year to get my entire collection scanned in, and that just won't do.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to back up 5TB of data every week,...

Don't you get sore down there? I mean, 5TB of porn a week, geeze man! Or maybe you should lay of the Viagra or see a urologist.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[sukotto]

* High def videos of their kid's birthday parties?
* Installing Windows $Name Ultimate Extreme we_promise_this_is_really_the_best_version 2010?
* porn?
* Lots of extra "can't skip past it" advertising at the start of movies?
* Extra space for all that next generation DRM?
* Half Life 4?

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[0100010001010011]

It'd require destroying the book, but.

Bansaw
Sheet feed duplex scanner

Just cut off the binding and feed in the book, it'll take a little while but you should have a nice PDF at the end.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Locke2005]

archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?

I have 70GB of MP3s (over 11,000 songs), all legally ripped from CDs I own. Currently I use a USB hard drive for backup. Would this disk be more or less reliable than a hard drive? I've had problems in the past with DVDs written on one computer being readable on another computer, or even playing correctly in a Sony DVD player.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[electrictroy]

Here's my backup method:

- Use c: or USB driver for temporary storage of not-yet-viewed movies & tv shows.
- if video is junk, delete it; If the video is good, buy the legal DVD or Bluray version.
- if not available legally (example: Earth Final Conflict), copy on both my C: and my external USB drive, so if one fails I still have the other.

I've never felt any need to burn anything to DVD-R unless giving-away material to a friend. The advantage of this method is I don't waste a lot of money on blanks, and I can easily erase stuff off the USB drive if I decide I no longer need it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[bennomatic]

I used to work in the UC Berkeley library's conservation department, and what they did for scanning purposes--really, archiving rare works to microfilm--was to set the to-be-preserved books in a frame, manually flip a page, lower a non-glare glass cover over it to flatten the book, and snap a picture from a camera above.

I imagine that the process is the same for precious books now, just with digital cameras instead of microfilm.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[HTH NE1]

fail! you are not many people.

How many people does it take to have many people? Is it more than a couple several or more than a few several?

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

fail! you are not many people.

s/fail/proof/

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Skye16]

I don't really have precious books, and since these things are going to disintegrate at the rate I re-read them anyway, destroying them in the process of scanning them is not such a bad thing. Plus it seems like it'd be faster :O

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[gfxguy]

How much of it do you actually listen to?

Let's see... around a minute a megabyte, that's 240,000 minutes, 4,000 hours, 166 days of continuous music.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[MBGMorden]

I have 70GB of MP3s (over 11,000 songs), all legally ripped from CDs I own.

I'd almost say that MOST of the collections that reach that high or higher or probably, at least largely, legally ripped. When ripping your own CD's that you don't plan on sharing, there's often a trend to use really high bitrates or lossless compression formats. Afterall drive space is cheap and if you're not planning on transferring over a wire, then why bother with the low rate? Online most of the pirated (and even most of the purchased) songs are sitting around 128Kbps.

A 25GB 128Kbps collection becomes a 75GB 384Kbps collection.

That said, I guess I'm just an "audio noob", but my digital music collection barely breaks 6GB. It fits comfortably on a Dual Layer DVD. Now my "video" collection on the other hand, spans close to a terabyte. It's not currently backed up unfortunately, so I'm looking at something like a Drobo or some other RAID5 type solution where it's still on hard drives, but I have some redundancy if one fails.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Theoboley]

7... and a midget.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Fzz]

I'd just be happy with 20 duplicate copies of a standard definition DVD movie on there. Then there's some chance it will last more than 15 minutes once my 2-year old son gets hold of it.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno how rolfwind does it, but I used to work for a State University that had some of this equipment to do it:

http://www.merrittgraphics.com/services/scanning/bookscan.php

But IIRC, you are talking about 6 figures to even get up and running with this kind of kit...

But they were pretty sweet to watch run, they could photograph all the odd or even pages in a in a ~500pg book in about an hour, of course then you had to reset it to get the pages on the other side of the binding, but still scanning a whole ~500pg book in ~2hrs with nearly 0 user intervention is pretty good.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.

And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.

Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

They're talking about the possibility of Bluray disks with 4 layers rather than 2, which means that media companies should be able to pack more data onto each disk. Or am I missing something?

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[c0ol]

Try This -Download Movies to D: secondary drive so torrents don't slow down primary disk use. -Convert said movies to VOB format -Burn movies to DVD5 or DVD9 disks -Write name of movie in sharpie -Watch movies on PS3 in HD

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[lysergic.acid]

neither are you.

audiobooks usually range from 200 MB up to 700-800 MB for a single volume. with educational audio books such as the TTC lectures, a single series can easily run well over 1-2 GB for a single subject--some series even run up to 10 GB.

the GP was simply sharing his personal experience. you're the one extrapolating your habits on to everyone else.

they wouldn't be selling 80 GB and 120 GB iPods if people didn't have 100+ GB mp3 collections.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[demonbug]

and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).

People keep complaining about the durability of optical media, yet in the 15 years or so I've been using CDs I've had maybe one or two that became unusable due to excessive scratches or other issues - at least for pressed CDs. Some early CD-Rs failed, but in every case it happened within a couple of months of the initial writing. Every CD-R I've written over the past 10-12 years that survived the first couple of months still works fine now, and that is with no special care - stored in jewel cases, or CD wallets, or some just tossed in a plastic bag and put in a drawer. What do people do to their optical media to screw it up so badly, and apparently so often?

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Gyga]

If I can write on it multiple times I could backup my entire hard drive five times (maybe more, I only use about 10gb of my 20).

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[skynexus]

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even have to be a duplex scanner, work with OCR, or automatically produce PDF's. I figure that as long as I can have something that produces the damn digital photos of pages, the most agonizing step is done, all else being a matter of arranging the proper mix of software and scripts for post-production, something that can be done in due time (the same way I trust decent devices for reading will be available for mass consumption sometime "soon"). Meanwhile, I would finally be able to throw away the tons of books without feeling bad about it.

Having said that, it has been utterly frustrating finding an affordable solution. The thing to look for are document scanners I think, price starting at around 500 USD last I checked. Those were crap, so moved up to 1000 USD, but reviews were not kind to those either. Concluded that something around 5000 USD was more to my liking - those could handle duplex, scan insanely fast etc ad nauseum, none of which was critical to me, except for reliability: handle arbitrary sheet sizes and not having the feed jam. Now I just need to wait for the price to radically drop. *sigh*

Note that when say that some feature are non-critical, I don't mean that they aren't nice to have. Duplex auto-feed scanning are obviously very nice features, but that would mean the price would be insanely inflated, and I rather save that money (I'm not a public library). If the thing can only feed sheets slowly, I don't care, as long as it does so reliably, on arbitrary sheet sizes. Post production stuff, as I said earlier, can be dealt with later.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[dangitman]

I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).

Try gold-plated optical discs. They hold up really well.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[kesuki]

"I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it."

while this is indeed the case, i no longer trust leaving optical media 'open' this is just yet another vector for your archival data to wind up married with a polymorphic rootkit that automatically installs on every windows platform every time the disc is inserted into a system.

there are many sophisticated ways to hide a polymorphic rootkit, the easiest of which is to get access to system management mode, and then hide inside 'deleted' files on the filesystem. windows by default only overwrites deleted files when there is a need for it, or when you defragment the hard drive. this is by design, to make recovery of accidentally deleted files easier, but it gives sophisticated polymorphic rootkits that run in SMM free reign and makes them impossible to detect. it's easy for a rootkit running in SMM to replace it's 'deleted' files if the user defrags, this is a standard feature in rootkits, to replace their files if they're erased.

and yes i've come across rootkits that do in fact infect 'deleted' files, there is even a way to protect them from deletion by overwriting, even if the files are deleted! only way to restore the space the rootkit is using is to format the volume.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[mattack2]

1.5 TB drives are already under $200. Seems to me the capacity is still growing very quickly.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Nirvelli]

Just bought a new video camera.
It's HD, and it stores on a Hard Drive.
Have to back that up somewhere.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[Anonymous Coward]

canon dr-1210-c has autofeed and is reasonably cheap; no duplex though. That and a nice big guillotine and abbyy fine reader is all you need to make decent ebooks quickly (proofing takes the largest part of the time)

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[cornelius1729]

I have to back up 5TB of data every week

I think it's time you admit to yourself that the pr0n habit has gotten out of control...

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[electrictroy]

>>>iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media

Which is why I said CD or DVD. I like the permanence of having an actual disc that I can store on my shelf, plus since CD is uncompressed, and DVD is encoded at 5 megabit/s average, both these formats are superior quality to anything you'll download off Itunes. ----- I don't know what the lifespan might be. My oldest CD is almost 20 years old, and it has not deteriorated, so I fully expect it will survive until I'm dead.

For home videos I'm still using Super or standard VHS-C tape. My oldest videos are also twenty years old, and they still preserve family memories without any visible loss.

Re:obligatory! (and more serious..)

[nine-times]

That's fine. I'm not saying you're not allowed to buy CDs or DVDs, but none of that addresses the issue of backups. Unless you're just ripping it to your computer anyway, and your purchased media is the backup. In that case, if I burn my stuff to DVD as a backup, then we're pretty much in the same boat.

Is this still releven?

[Bragador]

If someone wants to do back ups, why not simply buy a 1.5 TB hard drive for ~200 dollars?

I don't see why we need cds anymore...

Re:Is this still releven?

[MightyYar]

Distribution :)

I'm not going to send my mother a hard drive if I want to send her pictures or video. Right now I use DVDs.

Re:Is this still releven?

[L4t3r4lu5]

8 hours of High Definition video of your holiday to Jamaica.

The Slide Show of the 21st Century.

Re:Is this still releven?

[MightyYar]

While YOU might not want hours of video of my daughter doing nothing in particular, I can assure you that my mother does :)

Re:Is this still releven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I don't know, how old is she?

Re:Is this still releven?

[westlake]

If someone wants to do back ups, why not simply buy a 1.5 TB hard drive for ~200 dollars?
.

if it is a stable read-only media that will cost a buck-fifty in bulk and can be slipped into a media-rated fire safe or safety deposit vault, I want it.

if you are serious about back-ups, a single HDD won't be enough. you'll want at least two or three drives for redundant storage- and a UPS to keep them up and running.

it gets expensive.

and still leaves your data exposed to damage from fire and flood.

Re:Is this still releven?

[Gates82]

Diversifying my archives has helped me in the past. I run two servers, one with a RAID0 and another with a RAID6 array. The RAID0 is used for access and runs backups to the RAID6. While this is a fast, and reliable system I still go through drives regularly.

Once my projects (video, photo, documents, etc) are finalized they get archived to DVD's. Now DVD's are not overly reliable so I RAR the entire project into 4 gig chucks with a full archive of parity for every 36 gigs (min 1). Then each of those 4 gig archives get RARed into 250 meg chunks with 2 parity files; plus 5% recovery in each archive. This has proved very robust as I have had to recover a 100gig project in the past.

I can loose several discs and many individual files to corruption and not loose the project whereas if an HD goes everything is gone. The only concern becomes shelf life and with this kind of storage capacity making several copies becomes much more feasible. Just my 2 cents.

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:Is this still releven?

[east coast]

You mean the portable solution that costs about a dime and you can give them away like candy and not care? If I were only worried about my own data I would agree but if I'm giving data to others? CDs are the safe bet and they're more durable in shipping than a drive is.

Re:Is this still releven?

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone wants to do back ups, why not simply buy a 1.5 TB hard drive for ~200 dollars?

I don't see why we need cds anymore...

For Off-site backups. It takes to long to transfer that many GBs of information to an off-site server; with discs, you can store them off-site.

Re:Is this still releven?

[electrictroy]

Old enough to look good in a bikini.

Young enough to land-you in jail, you DOMAI! ;-)

Re:Is this still releven?

[hedwards]

You don't really need to have the UPS, just backup nightly, and have the array online during that period. If you're using something sensible like ZFS you're not going to have to worry about disk corruption from the writes.

The bigger issue is getting and keeping the disks offsite. In the long run it's going to make no difference whatsoever between harddisks and discs if you're just going to keep them right next to the computer anyways.

Ultimately a pair of 1 TB drives are likely to be a far better solution than either optical discs or one 1.5TB hard disk.

Re:Is this still releven?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why we need cds anymore...

When your hard drive fails, you'll know.

Re:Is this still releven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think we wouldn't want video of your daughter doing nothing in jamaica... in a bathing suit... wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more...

Re:Is this still releven?

[mdwh2]

Backing up to media has the advantage of extra redundancy (I'd rather my data is stored on a new disc everytime I do a backup, rather than just a single drive, which might die, or get stolen/destroyed along with your main drive). Discs are more portable, making it easier to send to other people, or carry with you for extra protection (i.e., offsite backup when you're not at home).

Also there is the point that the cost of discs goes down, whilst hard drives instead increase in capacity rather than getting cheaper, so although it's not cost effective now, it may well be in future.

I mean, if you have 700MB or 4.5GB you want to store on a separate device, do you use a cheap disc, or go out and by a 700MB or 4.5GB hard disk?

450mw beam

[lobiusmoop]

Isn't that getting into dangerous territory (popping balloons, instant blindness etc)? Recently, high-power laser pointer sales have been banned on eBay and Amazon here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.

Re:450mw beam

[MightyYar]

Isn't that getting into dangerous territory

Yup! Don't remove it. DVD burners already contain dangerous lasers, and those are in the 200mW range IIRC.

Re:450mw beam

[Maddog Batty]

When encapsulated within a system so that it is not possible for the beam to escape under normal usage then the whole system can be given a class 1 rating and a class 1 label. The laser itself is a class 3B and would have to have this rating if removed from the player. Current Blu-ray recorders are 250mW but are considered safe as they are encapsulated.

Re:450mw beam

[Somegeek]

They are not retailing a bare laser, they are (well, someday) selling a drive. How is that any different than selling a microwave? Do you know what parts they use in those?

arrrg, should have been a car analogy. -slaps head-

Re:450mw beam

[L4t3r4lu5]

I wouldn't have thought so. The laser in an optical drive is enclosed and often disabled when the drive is ejected.

The laser pointers which fall into class IIIb (5-500mw) are all exposed and can be viewed directly.

Re:450mw beam

[nawcom]

Isn't that getting into dangerous territory (popping balloons, instant blindness etc)? Recently, high-power laser pointer sales have been banned on eBay and Amazon here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.

And you thought Blu-Ray laser diodes were dangerous hehe...

Re:450mw beam

[Spatial]

A class 3b laser, I think (less than 500mW).

It's a big risk if if you're putting your head into the player and resting your eyeball directly over the laser diode. For people who do that, all we can hope for is more powerful lasers, or perhaps blu-ray players with sharks inside to which the laser is attached.

Re:450mw beam

[Anonymous Coward]

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/94/94klaser.phtml

Warning: Amazin' Laser Can Be Used For Good Or Evil, Please Use Only For Good.

Re:450mw beam

[Yvanhoe]

Fuel explodes !
A car analogy would have been better : you could have made a link with terrorism !

Re:450mw beam

[zippthorne]

The fuel for cars is highly flammable and contains dangerous quantities of benzene a toxic carcinogen, as well.

Further, ethanol-based fuel contains a controlled substance in concentrations that are banned in most counties, and in quantities sure to alarm anyone concerned with keeping neurologically sedative drugs off the streets.

When are these death machines going to be banned?

Re:450mw beam

[AmberBlackCat]

What happens if you buy the Sony one and your motorized face just falls off?

Re:450mw beam

[Anonymous Coward]

What is dangerous is people measuring speed of lasers, particularly in mW!

Re:450mw beam

[aminorex]

And a car has enough stored energy to destroy a small commercial building. But seriously, half a watt is enough to take down a jet, if luck is against you (and the eyes of the crew). And yes, I know what a magnetron tube is, and because of that my next-door neighbor thinks God is telling him to give me half his paycheck.

No Thanks

[MaxwellEdison]

Kids with your fancy optical media and lasers and whatnot. I'll stick with my betamax thanks.

Re:No Thanks

[Colourspace]

Betamax? I have to read my tapes with a very small compass and a bit of graph paper then imagine what the bits would be like read out thankyouverymuch!

Re:No Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Betamax? I have to read my tapes with a very small compass and a bit of graph paper then imagine what the bits would be like read out thankyouverymuch!

Paper? I use clay tablets!

Re:No Thanks

[MaxwellEdison]

CLAY?! You mean to tell me you had access to fire?! Fire was still in beta for us, except that beta hadn't been invented so we called it the other Alpha! I was so happy the day grass was invented because I could finally yell...

GET THE HELL OFFA MY LAWN!

Re:No Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Betamax? I have to read my tapes with a very small compass and a bit of graph paper then imagine what the bits would be like read out thankyouverymuch!

Imagine? Use another sheet of graph paper, you cheap slob. Use a whole pad if you're reading an animated GIF.

Invent?

[halcyon1234]

They didn't really "invent" this, did they? They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.

And to answer what it'll be used for: Releasing a new generation of Blu-Ray players that aren't backwards compatible, forcing everyone who has bought a Blu-Ray to rebuy all their Sony-branded movies. Obviously.

Re:Invent?

[Anonymous Coward]

They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.

Sanyo put the blue man group's faces through the latest in juice extraction technology : )

No drives exist - just the laser

[Somegeek]

Story states that the drives are 1 to 2 years away. Translation, they have no idea when drives might be on sale, or when 4-layer discs might be available.

Re:No drives exist - just the laser

[Kjella]

And don't forget the cost - double the laser intensity usually means far more than double the price. The biggest question is what the market would be. Most home users don't produce that amount of data, and enterprises have other storage options. The big driver for the Blu-Ray market is movies and PS3 games. Is 100GB something they need/want? Sure if it came for free, but seriously if you looked at HDDVD30 vs BD50 you'd have a hard time telling them apart. Many of the BD titles carry some absurdly large 8-channel LPCM tracks or similar that simply waste space. There are lossless options that easily could reduce it to half size with no loss if they needed another 5GB or so. I think we'll see 2-layer violet laser before 4-layer blue laser get anywhere.

Worthless.

[jesdynf]

No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.

Re:Worthless.

[Anonymous Coward]

not for backups. I could give a shit about blu ray for video, but for backups it is becoming appealing.

Re:Worthless.

[sanosuke001]

How is this insightful? He said nothing. Sony's players are defective how? I have a PS3 and it plays BD movies. Doesn't seem defective to me. Also, you won't be hooking this up to a Sony player as it's a Sanyo product. Sanyo != Sony even though a lot of the letters are the same.

You were an HD-DVD fanboy weren't you? Bitter that your format ate dirt? I can understand the viewpoint of HD vs. SD, cost vs. utility increase but the Sony bashers are just useless to any conversation. Yes, you don't like Sony. Yes, they've made some stupid moves. No, not all their products suck.

Aside from the DRM in BD (which is pretty much par for the course and not a Sony-only issue) what's wrong with BD? If you don't like HD video, stick to DVDs. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. And if you're going to bash Sony, do it on a Sony article.

Re:Worthless.

[jesdynf]

I couldn't care less about HD-DVD, so way to knock that straw man down. The part where perhaps I miss the difference betwen Sanyo and Sony? Rhetoric gold.

The point is that Blu-Ray is defective by design, and it useful to remember it. Impeding the widespread adoption of Blu-Ray and the DRM-infected data formats that lay atop it is a worthwhile thing to do.

Re:Worthless.

[Kohath]

See? It's "defective" because the dogma says it is. It's "insightful" because the moderator shares the dogma. (And because neither the original poster nor the moderator seem to know that lots of different companies make BD drives and discs -- not just Sony.)

DRM is so bad that you don't have to think about it to know how bad it is -- or even to know remotely what you're talking about. So no thinking.

Re:Worthless.

[jesdynf]

Is there a point you're trying to make here?

I mean, I could reply to say that all these people who make Blu-Ray components do so under license from Sony and (unless I'm wildly mistaken) agree to abide by the rules Sony has laid down under that license... but why bother? You're just going to come up with another level of fractal wrongness. But to take it even this far, you obviously know what I'm talking about because you otherwise couldn't've associated it with this dogma or that one, or made these irrelevant distinctions.

Given that you're aware of what I wanted you to know, I'd say I've done what I meant to do -- reminded people that Blu-Ray is not a good thing. I grant that you disagree with the point I was trying to make, and I assume that you're replying in an effort to sway people to your position, but if this is the kind of A-game you bring to public discourse I'm not especially worried.

CD sometimes not so good...

[apodyopsis]

because its worked sooo well for the UK government.

honestly, CD are too easy. simply google for "lost cds uk" and see what a total balls up various government agencies have made of giving all our data away freely,

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+lost+cds&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

hell teeth, it should of been easy enough to encrypt it on the CD as a minimum, or VPN it without using a disk.

yes, they are easy to use - but too easy and too insecure in idiotic hands (though that goes for just about any storage medium I suppose).

but I agree with you totally, I'll not entrust a HDD to parcel force, its bad enough buying one on the 'net anyhow and they are professionally packaged.

Ouch!

[Nerdposeur]

Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.

Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.

Re:Ouch!

[Austerity Empowers]

Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked. Slashdot bylaws section 12, paragraph 23: to post here you must have at least one half disassembled and operable PC within 100ft of you at all times.

Instant +1 karma if run the system without any mechanical structure at all, beyond FR4 and off the shelf PSUs/HDs.

Re:Ouch!

[Nerdposeur]

Ha! As you can see by my handle, I was never a true nerd in the first place.

Although my PC's case has not been closed in about a year.

Aw, who am I kidding? C'mon guys, let me back in the club! :)

Re:Ouch!

[j_sp_r]

Does a mechenical engineer get +1 karma if it runs without transistors?

Re:Ouch!

[5of0]

Not if he can't spell mechanical.

Re:Ouch!

[shiftless]

Is a cardboard shoe box that has had holes cut in it to mount a motherboard and hard drive considered a "mechanical structure"?

Re:How fast in m/s?

[L4t3r4lu5]

I think (IANAPhysicist) that it can pulse faster due to the higher beam power.

Pulses can be shorter, and therefore more frequent, for the same amount of reflected light.

External hard drive

[Aceticon]

WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).

That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.

The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...

That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).

PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...

Re:External hard drive

[Microlith]

The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format

As if the public were totally innocent with respect to this. They don't trust you and their fear is well grounded. Not saying I agree with DRM, but I see why it's there.

after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...

Well my DVDs haven't exactly, you know, stopped working. And AVI contained XVIDs don't spontaneously uprez from 720p to 1080p last I recall.

More like, they won't distribute un-DRMed videos because "teh internets" have shown that unencrypted media will end up on P2P services instantly. DRM slows them down a bit at the cost of some customer annoyance and they seem to be OK with that.

Re:External hard drive

[Migraineman]

Unfortunately, the Big Studios' profits are hindered by your convenience. Yes, you bought Harry Potter: Double-Secret Book of ... Secrets, but if you don't pay for each and every viewing, how is the blue-collar stage hand or audio technician going to get paid?

Re:External hard drive

[.sig]

"teh internets" have shown that unencrypted media will end up on P2P services instantly

And encrypted media ends up on P2P services 2 seconds later....

Re:External hard drive

[blair1q]

You'll keep buying them as data and pixel densities increase and SNR improves (yes, "digital" does not equal "perfect" and the algorithms can always be made better).

Otherwise we'd all have Kinescope players at home and wonder why anyone would make a Blu-Ray drive...

DRM isn't there to make you buy new stuff every few years. You'll do that anyway. It's there so you will buy the stuff from them instead of from the pirates.

Re:External hard drive

[mdwh2]

That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.

Yes, it is now (in fact the drives don't even exist, I presume). But that's rather short sighted.

Historically, the price of discs of a fixed size has fallen to the point of being very cheap each. Meanwhile, whilst hard drive capacities increase, the cost of the cheapest drive does not decrease.

Consider, what you said may well have been true when CDs or DVDs were first conceived. But can I now walk into a shop and pick myself up a stack of 700MB or 4.5GB hard drives for a few pence each?

Relevance

[anubis7733]

I think that even though the actual drives born of this technology are still a couple of years away, it is a big step. You may argue that the drives will be crippled by being tied to Sony, or that nobody will be using optical media that large, but I say with the current trend these discs will be very welcome. Everything will shift to HD and now you can easily fit multiple HD movies on a single disc. This also allows for the easy and even redundant back-up of a hard drive. If it will only take 10 mins to fill 100GB of the disc, then you could easily create 2 copies of your 500GB external in a couple of hours. That way when it dies with a stupid 1 yr warranty(never buying WD again) you have it all saved.

Re:How fast in m/s?

[Spatial]

Offhand, the read speed for 1x in bluray is 36Mbit/s. So we get 432Mbit/s.

For comparison, 1x DVD is 10Mbit/s.

Sure..

[soulsteal]

It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?

They have a secure datapost service...

[Nick Ives]

...it just wasn't used. How they managed to pin the whole fiasco on some poor AO (that's second grade up from bottom on the clerical scale) I'll never know.

Re:How fast in m/s?

[Kingrames]

640Kbit/sec oughta be enugh for anybody.

Good ideas

[HalAtWork]

Yeah, archiving audio/video... with digital distribution becoming common, that's definitely a good use. Also if you have a PC hooked up to the TV as an audio/video jukebox, you could archive all your rips, which are time consuming to create. If you download a lot of podcasts or if you've got Steam, if you take a lot of pictures on your digital camera, you've got a lot of data you need to archive, especially with ISPs insisting on bandwidth caps.

12x player?

[Anonymous Coward]

Deja vu.

12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser?

[noidentity]

We have a laser whose beam travels 12 times the speed of light and just using it for higher-density video discs? Let's send some messages into the future, for one!

Re:12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser?

[jebrew]

wow...you're not much for the technical side of things are you?

Re:How fast in m/s?

[fr4nk]

Wow, mine only goes to eleven!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

All your numbers and calculations mean nothing because of one simple fact:

You'll never have a flash drive under $1. With optical media, it's a guarantee. In a few years, a BD-r will be 50 cents or cheaper.

Nobody will ever hand out a SD drive for distribution. It's too easy to lose a $10 card.

As long as optical media is cheap as in $/unit (NOT $/GB), they'll be around.

Re:Mod parent down

[Nathanbp]

All your numbers and calculations mean nothing because of one simple fact:

You'll never have a flash drive under $1. With optical media, it's a guarantee. In a few years, a BD-r will be 50 cents or cheaper.

Nobody will ever hand out a SD drive for distribution. It's too easy to lose a $10 card.

As long as optical media is cheap as in $/unit (NOT $/GB), they'll be around.

Yeah, right. Dual layer DVD(+/-)Rs are still over $1 each (except at some select online stores. In retail, try $2-5 each). No way BD-Rs are getting that cheap any time soon. Pressed disks probably will get cheaper, but the consumer available burnable ones? No way.

Re:Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck is doing mass distribution from burnable disks?

Re:Mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash drives are already being given away for free. Optical media readers have never dropped below $10 in my experience, and I believe those were clearance prices.

If you meant media, which is what I suspect you mean, then it's anyone's guess as to what the pricing will be. A quick check on Amazon reveals a number of sub-$5 1Gb SD cards. Sub-$1 SD cards in the medium term? Doesn't seem impossible to me.

Nintendo DS games are shipped on cards smaller than CompactFlash cards and only slightly larger than SD cards. I don't see any reason why SD cards can't be used to distribute content.

How fast can you spin them?

[wonkavader]

Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?

Re:How fast can you spin them?

[krischik]

Well a CD can be spun to 52x - any player reading faster uses multiple laser.

Martin

Re:How fast can you spin them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?

From: PowerLabs

A standard compact disk has a diameter of 12cm. If this disk is to spin at 35000RPM, the peripheral velocity at the edges of the disk (.377m circumference x 583.3 turns per second) will near 220m/s, or 722fps, or 792km/h or 492miles per hour

-fire

Re:How fast in m/s?

[Locke2005]

Cool! So now I can watch a 2-hour movie in 3 minutes!

Future, hell. Send 'em to the past.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Let's send some messages into the future, for one!

Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.

If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.

Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."

Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.

Never mind.

BD-Video players need a 2x drive

[tepples]

Further, the media companies don't need it to read any faster than 1x.

I see your point, but one small nit: The "x" for Blu-ray Disc isn't defined the way it is for CD and DVD. A 1x drive reads 36 Mbps, but BD-Video can be up to 54 Mbps for various reasons, so a BD-Video player actually needs a 2x drive.

Re:How fast in m/s?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so glad I can receive almost three uncompressed bluray streams at the same time.

Re:how do you scan in books?

[name_already_taken]

How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?

We have a project at work that is doing this with a small library of books (I think we're up around 35,000 pages scanned so far).

You cut the spine off of the book and drop the pages in the scanner's automatic document feeder. There are scanners available that can scan both sides of the page as they feed through - we're using a Kodak scanner that does about 50 pages a minute.

Pages are scanned to TIFF files and then converted to PDF. We are using Acrobat Capture, which is fairly reliable but as we get into older books the error count goes up. The are a number of manual steps too; for example the software has to be told which parts of each page are text or pictures, and then after the conversion to PDF, the resulting PDF has to be retouched to fix OCR errors and standardize the fonts - Acrobat Capture likes to change fonts in mid-sentence for reasons known only to itself. Adobe seems to have abandoned development on Acrobat Capture - it's been at version 3.0 since the Acrobat 5 days, so it's a little antiquated.

parallel

[bugs2squash]

Surely reading a disk can be done by multiple lasers, each offset a little radially.

I know it's not quite as good as having a laser-toting shark in your living room, but I would have thought that the lower power lasers might be cheaper.

Archiving AVCHD video

[melted]

The current crop of SD-card based AVCHD camcorders fills up a 16GB card in about 2 hours. As an added bonus, those files do not require any conversion to be viewed on a BluRay player.

Invention, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really an invention if you're improving an existing technology?

Re:Invention, really?

[kimvette]

It is as much as mixing buttons and drop menus into a toolbar and calling it a "ribbon" is innovating. It's marketing spin.

full-disk backups

[phorm]

Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk

It would be nice to be able to create on-the-spot full-machine restore disks. Great for a monthly/semi-monthly backup in case the machine/drive dies (replace drive, plug in disk, and auto-restore).

Re:full-disk backups

[nine-times]

We're getting a bit off-topic here, but I personally think the better strategy there is to create two different backups: one of your OS/applications, and another of your profile.

For most systems, you aren't going to change your OS and applications very often, so it's kind of pointless to back them up frequently. It's nice to have an image with any customizations you might want, so that you can restore quickly, but backing up the entire OS with every backup is usually wasting space on you backup media, as well as wasting time. If you do have to restore the whole thing, it's not much more difficult to restore the OS/apps, and then afterward restore the user profiles.

Also, as a side note, making those sorts of full-machine restore disks in OSX is pretty easy. It's a bit harder to make a bootable DVD or something, so it's better to use some sort of USB drive. But you can easily install a full version of OSX onto a USB drive that will boot on almost any Mac, and then make a full disk image that can be copied to any Mac, made bootable, and you're done. You can even do a differential update to your backup image to make the whole process faster. Some of this, I'm sure, is made easier by their control over hardware. Still, I think other OS developers should be trying to match the ease with which OSX can be imaged.

Still not enough for LOTR on one disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Let alone the extended edition

Re:Attn: Barack Obama supporters:

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it bother you that corporate boards are pledging allegiance to John McCain? Does it bother you that they've promised to escalate the class war if he is elected? Does it bother you that his policies looks very similar to those of George W Bush, who crippled America's economy and induced famine by starting a war in the middle east and giving the profits to his corporate buddies?

Re:how do you scan in books?

[FLEB]

Have you tried the OCR built into Acrobat? Or is that just a bundled-in version of the same OCR engine?

Digitizing a book

[Anonymous Coward]

The cheapest way to make a good copy is to use a digital camera. A $200 Canon Powershot works fine, but if you are going to do it a lot, make sure to get a remote shutter.

1) Create a bright, evenly lit white surface and place the book on it.

2) Suspend the camera above the book, framing the open book as desired. A cheap wire shelf propped above a pair of boxes works fine if you cut out a little hole for the lens.

3) Press the button, turn the page.

4-999) Repeat step 3.

It take me about an hour to do an 800 page text book, averaging 1.5MB per pair of pages at 3kx2.5k resolution. And that's without remote shutter. Image Magick (GPL) can then shrink them down to 500K each with no noticable compression differences in one go.

Beats the hell out of carrying all my textbooks vs. my laptop.

is is really that fast?

[lpq]

12X...100GB holds 8 hours of HD, so...that implies it would take 8/12 Hours to write 100GB?
Um...wait a second...
That's 150GB/second, what bus are they using to write to these things?...I mean that's like
12Gbps...or about 4 times the max-SATA link speed....?!?

I don't think you are going to see a 12X HD-BRD burning on a home PC anytime soon, or am I missing something...?

Is it just once possible .... ?

[mark-t]

to have a laser tech article that *DOESN'T* end up with the "sharkswithfrickinlasers" tag associated with it?

Pioneer ?

[smoker2]

Considering that Pioneer released news of their 20 layer, 500GB BluRay discs a couple of months ago, what makes this news special ?
I would have thought that Pioneer would be the first to market as they are manufacturers of the hardware anyway.

You're missing your units

[mdwh2]

That's 150GB/hour...

Re:You're missing your units

[lpq]

*Doh*!!!

Sometimes I don't see trees for the 12X magnification. Thanks!
(just too excitable at speeds...)
-l

 

OS changes

[phorm]

Actually, I find that the OS changes quite a lot, mainly due to patches, updates, etc. Most of these wouldn't likely be too difficult to re-download, but it would still be more convenient to have a "one-stop restore." Heck, having a seperate OS restore might be more valuable, if you could fix the OS core of viruses etc while keeping your documents in place.

Maybe one idea might be to have a "core" restore disk, and then another one for person stuff like documents, etc.

The "core" disk could be re-usable (up to capacity) but just adding differential updates with whatever has changed since the last backup.

This is mainly for windows users though. I'm not much of a windows user myself ('nix) but having an up-to-date restore disk would do wonders for a lot of the people I've done private repair service, etc for.

Of course, expecting those people to do backups is another thing entirely, but at least I could write a restore point here and there for the "regulars" who tend to much things up fairly commonly.

Re:OS changes

[nine-times]

Yeah, having a completely up-to-date restore disk for the OS is helpful, but as you said, you can always re-download the patches. A visit to Windows update, running Software Update, or running apt-get aren't difficult, won't take too long, and there will be no data lost. It's often not worth trying to get a daily snapshot turned into a bootable rescue disk every day. Once every few months is probably more than adequate.

Documents, on the other hand, are something that I want backed up as frequently as is feasible. How often it is "feasible" depends on the backup methods being used, but I treat backups of my own files very differently than my OS restore image. Not only do I do them more often, but I worry much more about losing them or having them exposed to outside parties. (obviously)

Re:OS changes

[phorm]

Weekly/Monthly OS-restore on disc, regular file backups synced on a USB drive (thumb or external HDD, depending on volume) has usually been the way I go.

When I have to completely rebuild a client's dead system (OS reinstall) I try to image the disk if I have time. That way the next time's a lot faster. Saves me time, saves them money.

Re:Camera and OCR for text-only

[Anonymous Coward]

If you only care about text, you need the following:
Tripod, high resolution camera, good lighting, GIMP or Photoshop with scripting ability, OCR software.
Set up camera on tripod, facing camera, take a picture after every turn of the page.
Photoshop or GIMP script to halve the photos, and perspective correction to straighten the text to make it easier for the OCR software to read the text.
Dump the images into your OCR software, sit for a couple of hours running through the correction checks by the OCR software, then enjoy your text file!

Obviously if you don't want a text file and just a graphic, you can dispense with the OCR software, but deal with a much larger file size.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion