Remember that the platters are small, not picture windows. And dropping a drive is likely to trash the heads, arm, and even motor; I've seen a recent generation drive that was dropped and the frame deformed enough that it was unusable.
Glass does deform slowly, but as you said this is more on a geological scale. The drive will be obsolete in a few decades, the glass will be flat for centuries.
Glass has been used before for disk platters. There is long existing technologies for making very flat glass plates, much better than most metals. Glass is fairly light and stiff, attributes desirable in disk platters.
While by no means impossible, an good, free, and open codec will take some work. A lot of the basic algorithms are patented; some codecs involve shovelfulls of patents in their licensing.
Even when a good & open codec is available there's the problem of getting it widely used enough to make it of any significance. As others have stated, the music and consumer electronics industries isn't going to jump on the bandwagon of anything they see as undermining their profitability.
I believe that for such a codec to become widely used it would take rapid porting to all common platforms, as stable releases.
Beyond that it will take the use of the format by enough of the musicians to make the music companies pay attention. This likely means getting enough upcoming performers to distribute using the format that the industry views _not_ supporting the format as losing money.
This would perhaps lead to a change in how the industry works. Rather than focusing on the distribution of recordings as such, they would concentrate on getting payment for other's use of the tunes and lyrics, and distributing hard formats - albums - with physical goods such as photos, buttons, nose rings, noisemakers, and whatever, that don't do so well over electronic distribution.
I'll agree that all to often certification means little, like degrees. And you'll find people who strongly disagree with that statement - "if someone is t oo lazy to get a degree then they probably are too lazy to engineer, too". But I've worked at companies where 60% to 90% of the top engineers were non-degreed.
I think you will find, in many cases, either a size relationship, ora distance from the technology relationship. In little company the people who understand the work you'll be doing talk with you and make the hiring decision. In a large company, or in one removed from the tech you'll be handling, this is less true.
In a larger company :
A) The government watches the hiring practices.
B) The bosses don't want to government to dump on them. They have Human Resources people to reduce this risk.
C) HR, in order "to be fair", sets up guidelines and standards for positions. HR doesn't really understand the work done by people in those positions. Thus outside yardsticks, certificates and degrees, become important.
D) Managers don't want to get dumped on by their bosses if a new hire turns out bad. Certificates and degrees give CUA protection - "well, he had the right credentials", and the pointy haired boss goes off thinking "maybe we need to change our requirements."
I've interviewed at jobs where HR, using their standards, has told me "you really don't fit the job description", and when I went ahead and interviewed been told "you're the first person HR has sent us that fits." The piece of paper is the bun you give the watchdog, what's in your head gets you hired.
" In a fast moving industry like the computer industry, a patent is obsolete after a few years, let alone 7 or 17." We've been here before. Back in the early days of industrial organic chemistry, the growth of synthetic dye production in the 1860-1890, there was both rapid introduction of new products and trival modifications of existing products. Fortunes were made and lost, industrial giants came into being, scams were run. And a process could be obsolete in a handful of years. An important difference was the tendency of industries to ignore patents issued in different countries. There was some parallel development in the industry, so long as the infringing company avoided marketing in the regions where the competitor held the patent(s). Note that in the early days of the US patent system there were few large organizations, patents tended to come from and be used by individuals.Things have changed, R&D often (but not always) is expensive, and a large capital base is needed to product a truely new technology. The idea of tying time-to-grant with time-to-run on patents is interesting. You get the flash on something that's "obvious" before anyone else, patent it quickly with the patent in effect for a short period of time. Perhaps you make money, most likely no one bothers fightinh it because the patent expires in a year or so. Much software would land here. Alternatively, you spend years refining a process/device, let the PTO work it over for several years, and get a longer duration patent allowing you to get the process/device into production and recoupe your development costs.
As I remember the MPC555 it has a rather wimpy idea of memory management, more like 4 external memory regions/chip selects. And it doesn't directly support DRAM (the 8xx and 82xx lines do. It was really intended to run out of that 448K Flash and 26 K of internal static. I'd think you'd do better taking an 860 and outboarding the A/D D/A stuff.
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Glass does deform slowly, but as you said this is more on a geological scale. The drive will be obsolete in a few decades, the glass will be flat for centuries.
Glass has been used before for disk platters. There is long existing technologies for making very flat glass plates, much better than most metals. Glass is fairly light and stiff, attributes desirable in disk platters.
Even when a good & open codec is available there's the problem of getting it widely used enough to make it of any significance. As others have stated, the music and consumer electronics industries isn't going to jump on the bandwagon of anything they see as undermining their profitability.
I believe that for such a codec to become widely used it would take rapid porting to all common platforms, as stable releases.
Beyond that it will take the use of the format by enough of the musicians to make the music companies pay attention. This likely means getting enough upcoming performers to distribute using the format that the industry views _not_ supporting the format as losing money.
This would perhaps lead to a change in how the industry works. Rather than focusing on the distribution of recordings as such, they would concentrate on getting payment for other's use of the tunes and lyrics, and distributing hard formats - albums - with physical goods such as photos, buttons, nose rings, noisemakers, and whatever, that don't do so well over electronic distribution.
I think you will find, in many cases, either a size relationship, ora distance from the technology relationship. In little company the people who understand the work you'll be doing talk with you and make the hiring decision. In a large company, or in one removed from the tech you'll be handling, this is less true.
In a larger company :
A) The government watches the hiring practices.
B) The bosses don't want to government to dump on them. They have Human Resources people to reduce this risk.
C) HR, in order "to be fair", sets up guidelines and standards for positions. HR doesn't really understand the work done by people in those positions. Thus outside yardsticks, certificates and degrees, become important.
D) Managers don't want to get dumped on by their bosses if a new hire turns out bad. Certificates and degrees give CUA protection - "well, he had the right credentials", and the pointy haired boss goes off thinking "maybe we need to change our requirements."
I've interviewed at jobs where HR, using their standards, has told me "you really don't fit the job description", and when I went ahead and interviewed been told "you're the first person HR has sent us that fits." The piece of paper is the bun you give the watchdog, what's in your head gets you hired.
" In a fast moving industry like the computer industry, a patent is obsolete after a few years, let alone 7 or 17." We've been here before. Back in the early days of industrial organic chemistry, the growth of synthetic dye production in the 1860-1890, there was both rapid introduction of new products and trival modifications of existing products. Fortunes were made and lost, industrial giants came into being, scams were run. And a process could be obsolete in a handful of years. An important difference was the tendency of industries to ignore patents issued in different countries. There was some parallel development in the industry, so long as the infringing company avoided marketing in the regions where the competitor held the patent(s). Note that in the early days of the US patent system there were few large organizations, patents tended to come from and be used by individuals.Things have changed, R&D often (but not always) is expensive, and a large capital base is needed to product a truely new technology. The idea of tying time-to-grant with time-to-run on patents is interesting. You get the flash on something that's "obvious" before anyone else, patent it quickly with the patent in effect for a short period of time. Perhaps you make money, most likely no one bothers fightinh it because the patent expires in a year or so. Much software would land here. Alternatively, you spend years refining a process/device, let the PTO work it over for several years, and get a longer duration patent allowing you to get the process/device into production and recoupe your development costs.
MPC860,a PowerPC from Mot, not i860 from iNTEL.
As I remember the MPC555 it has a rather wimpy idea of memory management, more like 4 external memory regions/chip selects. And it doesn't directly support DRAM (the 8xx and 82xx lines do. It was really intended to run out of that 448K Flash and 26 K of internal static. I'd think you'd do better taking an 860 and outboarding the A/D D/A stuff.