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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."
"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).
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...
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Kids with your fancy optical media and lasers and whatnot. I'll stick with my betamax thanks.
-=Bang Bang=-
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.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
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.
Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.
Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.
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?
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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
Best "String" Ever!
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 ...
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.
Offhand, the read speed for 1x in bluray is 36Mbit/s. So we get 432Mbit/s.
For comparison, 1x DVD is 10Mbit/s.
It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?
...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.
Nick
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.
640Kbit/sec oughta be enugh for anybody.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Wow, mine only goes to eleven!
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.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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.
wow...you're not much for the technical side of things are you?
>>>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.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?
Cool! So now I can watch a 2-hour movie in 3 minutes!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
Ow! Economics and making sense on slashdot! Stop it!
/me takes an aspirin
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.
The optical naysayers are right. A few PS3 games are already showing degradation of the foil backing, making them absolutely unplayable now.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Putting moderation advice in your
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.
Nullius in verba
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?
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.
If you build it. They will come.
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 :(
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
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.
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....
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
And how much do OUM media and OUM drives or readers cost?
It is as much as mixing buttons and drop menus into a toolbar and calling it a "ribbon" is innovating. It's marketing spin.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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).
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.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Let alone the extended edition
But I also said this:
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.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Works well for the Nintendo DS.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
There's a reason most people haven't heard of it.
Remember that Nintendo abandoned cartridges for a 1.5 GB mini DVD.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Have you tried the OCR built into Acrobat? Or is that just a bundled-in version of the same OCR engine?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Those DS cartridges are limited to 256MB in size, that limits the kinds of games a DS can do.
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...?
to have a laser tech article that *DOESN'T* end up with the "sharkswithfrickinlasers" tag associated with it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
+1 Correct Grammar Mod parent up for proper use of disc/disk.
Paradox
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?
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.
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.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
That's 150GB/hour...
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.
Best "String" Ever!
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.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
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