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A 140GB CD-ROM?
Pete Brubaker writes "PCExtremist.com is running a story about some clever individuals that figured out how to layer data on a CDROM to achieve storage capacities 200 times over conventional CDROM's. Thats more than 30 times the capacity of a double sided, double layer DVD. "
I already went through that with 'CD-Caddies' back in the eighties, and I don't want to go through it again, thank you. Drives that require not only media but mamby-pamby media enclosures SUCK. Media enclosures are an environmental condom for AOL lusers who can't figure out that you PUT THE CD BACK IN THE CASE AFTER USING IT. You all know the AOL mentality! They look at the 'Magic Space Age Disc' and assume 'Well, it LOOKS indestructable' and proceed to use it as a coaster, a chew toy for their mongrel child or as a mirror to pop pimples. Then, when the disc is greasy, scratched, mauled and/or in little bitty bits, they call up the company and bitch that their copy of 'Ascii Spelunker 1.0' stopped working for no good reason and that they should get another copy because 'Ima good Windas user. Ah even knows how to make it do that pretty blue 'an yella screen where it makes sure ahl my disk thingies ahr spinnin' and as such know more than the company whose disc got mangled ever could, and as the superior being DESERVE the FREE disc.
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I didn't mention legal issues because I was talking about codecs.
As in, you don't really need to hammer out all of the possible video formats, as long as there's a way to describe the format to the player (a codec) supplied on the disc or accessible on the net, etc.
This is like a player which understands MPEG files getting a disc with an AVI (for example) on it. The disc could include the codec, or a URL to download it. The player could either cache this codec in NVRAM, or simply load it everytime it was needed.
As for the legality... pretty much everything involving copyrights is now illegal, or will be as of the new year, in the USA. The Digital Millenium act really screwed you guys over.
But, even so, if it was designed properly and players had a large secret key that they could use for authentication, yes, you could run a system where the player not only downloaded the actual decryption system, but also an encrypted (for its secret key only) key which would allow viewing of the disc.
But, I think that any form of authentication being needed to view a copyrighted work for which you paid to be able to view, is evil. It's like DIVX... you have the right to view the content only as long as the company says you can, in the way they want, and while they are in business.
How about something like the Sony minidisc covers? It's a thin plastic cover. Inside the player, the disc slips out of the cover and is read by the laser.
The cover makes labeling really handy....
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
This story already ran on the Register yesterday. And, in case you didn't go read either of the sources, here's a link to the company and product in question.
LINK
It's the first one down - FMD ROM (Read Only Memory) Disk... Pretty cool how it's clear, huh?
I don't care if it's 30mm across or 5 1/4 inches across. If they don't offer a WORM device capable of matching their read-only device they don't offer it and it may be because the WORM process just doesn't work on larger disks, in which case you're stuck with DVD.
This is awesome, but have they figured out a way to ruin it by putting some shitty copy protection on it yet?
It won't be ready for prime time until they have.
And believe me, I'm sure they're already working on it!
Just a test to prove my understnding of how Slash works.. Methinks I will next grab the old 0.3 Slash code and pry about in admin.pl...
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Answers:
1. The maximum is 18 Gb, though you'd be pressed to find a DVD-ROM that actually used it.
2. While they are physically identical in size, there are numerous differences, the largest being their use of the UFS and micro-UFS filesystems on the discs instead of the standard ISO. DVD also uses a slightly different plastic, can support multiple data layers on a single DVD, and has a much higher data density.
3. The speed is nearly identical. I beleive a 6X DVD-ROM device is comparable to a 48X CDROM in terms of speed, but I may be off a little.
Corrections? Please do!
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It's funny how when you get rich, you suddenly have to live up to much higher standards. If you accidentally post a story that was posted two months ago, you're "busy buying cool shit".
Bill Gates, of course, is a prime example of this. If there's an article about Bill G or Microsoft here, some people seem to think they can turn their brains off and simply substitute all the S's to $'s to make a good post.
People, please think before you post. Just because someone has money doesn't automatically make them rotten. Just because a company has resorted to mean and soon-to-be-judged-illegal tactics doesn't mean that every single product they have ever made is buggy, slow and a security hole. Objectivity, please!
Both ATAPI and SCSI cdrom drives can be root mounted like regular media, I believe. If for some reason you need a module, you can use the excellent init.rd mechanism Linux provides as a high-level bootstrap for the real root media.
A simple way to determine which files need RW access would be to snapshot a RW HD partition of 640M, use it in a relitivly static way for a few days, and then compare the file checksums against the snap. (OC, there is probably a file monitor that does it too, I just don't know of one!)
Then the real question is how to provide for the RW space; Do we use symlinks, or a hybrid overlay mechanism?
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Sure. Office 2003, instead of having slides telling how cool the product is during install, could have full-motion video clips of Gates telling you the same thing. "Hi. I'm Bill Gates, and I'd like to tell you about the benefits of registering your copy of Office 2003."
I think the idea is great, but looking at the clear C3D I am forced to ask myself, "Self, how do you label the damn thing?"
Let every registered user rank every slashdot article and show the rankings in the main screen.
;)
Pretty cool idea too, but I'm hoping that by opening up the submission queue to many eyes, it should mean that the queues stay short (or can handle more submissions) and each queue moderator spends less time on wading thru them..
Just think, it's like fixing bugs of a journalistic type rather than a technical type, and as we all know, with thousands of eyeballs all bugs are shallow
Your Working Boy,
Hey, if I remembered it, he should: /. pays his rent, all I do is read the articles and occasionally mouth off.. (Though, in a manner of speaking, I _am_ paid to read /., but don't tell anyone that ;)
/.) without comment, and then released to the public, via a system of submission moderation similar to the system of comment moderation, and where submissions are then presented in user-configurable order..
/. code, I might even write it! C'mon Rob, et. al, it can't be _that_ ugly.. Or at least not as ugly as the code I inherited 4 months ago.... Couldn't be as hard as writing a mass-vhosting system that can manage tens-to-hundreds of thousands of donames and their associated websites (source available upon request, I just have to prefix all the perl files with the GPL)...
To prevent this, perhaps there should be a separate 'meta-slashdot' site where submissions are ranked by slashdot contributors (say, selected based on karma, instead of arbitrarily by the high priests of
If I could get my hands on the current running
Your Working Boy,
impress me too much, for a few simple reasons; they don't mention anything around re-writing and this isn't really a breakthrough. This is merely an enhancement of the technology used in DVD players to real multiple disk layers. The transparent medium lets you use a large number of layers because the laser light doesn't get refracted much by it as it would by layers with a particular colour. I would be much more impressed with a re-writable system. The disk technology isn't the one you should look at for a real prize winner, it's the type of laser used. They use a pulse-diode lasers which can be much more easily controlled then dye based lasers and use a good deal less power. Lets hear it for diode lasers!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Maybe at last we could see an end to all this "this article stinks!" nonsense.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
How it works is this:
The CD consists of multiple layers which are individually pressed in the usual CD way, then stuck together afterwards. The layers have different fluorescence frequencies, and a single frequency laser stimulates all the fluorecent layers at once. If I read their website right, the pressing process makes the usual pits in the plastic of each layer, and a fluorescent material is then put into the pits. At any rate, the data is encoded by having different thicknesses of fluorescent material for ones and zeros.
Because the fluorescent layers and the intervening glue layers all have identical optical characteristics from the point of view of the laser beam, and because the ones and zeros also look virtually identical to the beam, the medium appears almost completely homogenous, and doesn't scatter or refract the laser, so only the spot you're interested in gets illuminated, and the beam remains parallel right through the medium. This is what allows the highest possible spot densities, and the very large numbers of layers.
The writable version of this probably /will/ need multiple frequency lasers, to cause photochemical changes in each layer separately.
Well read down and as you increase the number of applications for the device, the capacity goes down. Read only manufactured in a plant: 140 gigs. Write once: 4 gigs. Current DVD recorders for $500 can store 5 gigs on a DVD, for $5 a gig. CD-R recorders for $100 can store 800 megs per CD at $1.50 a gig. How much would FMD cost per gig? Probably more than either of our two existing formats. Really there isn't even a single working FMD device in existance today. We're talking about a theoretical device which has been simulated on a computer.
This story was on slashdot a month ago.
Prototype 150GByte Read-Only Disk Demonstrated by Hemos on 01:56 AM October 5th, 1999 EAS 73
For an install disk. Well, not for a few years. Five maybe.
Graphics are HUGE. Movies are even bigger.
When everyone is playing games in 2048x1536x32b, and games have to either have tons of textures, or in the case of top-down games, tons of distinct landscapes, we'll be looking at 140GB and complaining that it's not enough.
A flight-sim could use this already. As could a decent off-road driving game.
And as it becomes available, people will use it, precalculating huge data structures to save themselves the trouble of doing it on the fly. (It's not always a bad thing... Quake's BSP trees are precalculated.)
140 hours of video could allow for a kick-ass interactive movie. Imagine if there was actually room to store alternate paths for a bunch of different decisions.
I've had the idea of, when space allows, including a map of all roads in North America (all roads mapped in electronic format at any rate) and not only pictures of actual building near the road, but a rough map of the land nearby. Imagine a driving game like Cannonball Run, where you aren't looping around some dull track, but the game starts in one city and ends in another, and all paved roads in both are in the game. Combine that with textures 3d models of the main buildings and landscaping that you can see from the road. Then further imagine you had the ability to go cross country, cutting across fields as a shortcut.
If storage wasn't a problem, the modelling/texture mapping could be handled with a GPS, a decent laser range finder, a high res digital camera, and some software. Toss it into a van and drive slowly around the area. The GPS knows where you are, space around you would be mapped with the laser, and buildings photographed for the textures. Simply things like light posts could even be identified and replaced with stock models.
It's beyond or capabilities now, but I bet in five years, EA Sports will be seriously considering it.
Furthermore, are these going to have a "wrong side"? CD ROMs are vulnerable to "media scratches" because they only put a very thin coat over the reflective media on the top side of the cd. I wonder what a media scratch would do to a multi-layered approach like this. How well are the layers bonded to each other? Can chipping occur due to weak bonding?
Oh well. Just seemed like appropriate questions to ask... If the technology is durable enough that you can use it without walking on eggshells (and isn't horrifically expensive), this could turn out really kewl.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I hate to think I'm the first person to point this out, but if the disc is transparent,
HOW DO YOU LABEL IT.
I look around my place and I have various CDR's and CDRW's with backup information, install programs, etc. They all have labels - they all have labels so i can tell what's on the disc, since I can't tell by shining my laser pointer at it, and since I don't want to have to put each one in my new drive to find out. I may be jumping the gun here, but the pictures and the article sure make it look like the thing is totally see through... but i regress.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Layering is an old and proven technology. DVD uses two layers. There's no logical reason why two should be the limit.
The tricky part is cost. A laser that is tunable to many wavelengths is likely to be more expensive than one that only does one or two. Creating the media is also going to be more expensive.
Why not just forget the electron beam and build your own chip fabrication plant. Make your own silicon wafers and burn them with an ion implantation gun. Then implant not billions but trillions of bytes of data on a single silicon wafer.
Probably irrelevant. General purpose computers are getting so cheap that by the time a format capable of replacing DVD (offering actual improvements) came around, the players would probably be integrated with a computer. (Even if the user didn't have a monitor and didn't ever explore that aspect of the device.)
So, as long as there was a filesystem on there, the format of the files is fairly unimportant as long as it's not proprietary.
Then if the disk needed a specific codec, it could simply ship with it, or the computer could grab it off the net.
And a general purpose computer would be able to understand that a raw image at 128khz, 64b is the same basic thing as 44khz, 16b, and use the same codec with different parameters, thus pleasing audiophiles who demand every last irrelevant bit be the same, and pleasing techies to whom a VBR MP3 is more appropriate.
On a slightly offtopic rant...
It pisses me off when people demand uncompressed audio of incredibly high data rates. Sure, some piece of music might benefit from having that fidelity at one point, but at all others, it's wasted. The appropriate design would use whatever bandwidth was available and use lossy compression. If that signal needs to be reproduced, then do so, but don't waste the bandwidth by representing all data equally when some is obviously more important.
For any digital lossless compression, a smart encoder could produce a better representation of the original by encoding a higher quality initial signal in the same space.
I submitted a story about FMD-ROM from OSOpinion two days ago and it wasn't posted:
C olinCordner2.html
http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/ColinCordner/
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
So why are they doing this with CDROM technology? Why not do the same thing with DVD? Instead of 650M/layer, you would have 4.3G/layer.
Of course, it isn't as simple as that, because DVD uses a tigher wavelength to squeeze the data closer together. Still, in theory, the idea is sound.
I guess it's a lot like manufacturing hard drives. You can add space by increasing the density on a platter, and you can add space by increasing the number of platters.
I get one of those disks with every 50-CD spindle! And here I've been thinking that it wasn't actually a CD at all, but some kind of protective covering. Silly me!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
According to the story, the technology can support ~10GB WORM drives, or ~140GB ROM technology.
Cost of writeable media and drives isn't listed; 10GB conventional magnetic disks currently cost ~$100, so this may not be particularly superior for backups, but it's still in the interesting range. They say the media cost should be similar to current CD/DVD, which may be realistic for mass-produced storage. They also don't say what kind of resources you need to produce the high-density ROM versions - is it only useful for large production runs, or can it make sense for one-offs?
The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc. This technology means that archiving large quantities of data becomes much more convenient for regular people, and for corporations that - remember when a Terabyte of data was huge? (and before that, a GB?) What can you do if you can archive all of your company's transactions, designs, etc., and reproduce them cheaply? How do you design policies on information retention when it's cheap and hard to make sure things got thrown away?
This could be interesting for security - having large WORM drives that are fast enough to run an operating system off, with write-once capability for log files, lets you run much more secure web servers, because it's hard to trash WORMs. How does this affect operating system design? A friend of mine did some work a few years back called "Stiff Unix", trying to find out what parts of the file system space Unix needs to have writeable, and what parts can be ROM. I think this was on *BSD; it'd be interesting to see how Linux can react to this environment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks