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Data Storage

6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance 325

Posted by timothy from the say-that-3879-times-quickly dept.
gardolas writes "'Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second.' HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies."
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6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance More

6 Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance

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  • 1TB...that's a lot of... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ambelamba ( 771710 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:02PM (#11585020)
    pr0n, of course. :D
  • Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PMJ2kx ( 828679 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:04PM (#11585043) Journal
      Back in 1998, when IBM unvailed their 18GB hard drive, I asked the same thing. Now, 120GB is standard hard disk size. So, who knows...you might actually find a use for 1TB.
      • I think the OP was pointing out this is 1TB of ROM not RAM [or disk... whatever]...

        I could use a 1TB disk where I could random access it for read and writes... but just write once?

        That aside... fucking super duper quadruple high res copies of no-plot cliche movies... that's progress!

        Tom
        • if you can write to it in a multisession fashion you can put multiple DVD movie disc image files on it and write them in batches, as you need room. It would be an excellent way to back up your movie collection. Used the same way, it would also be a fantastic method of storing security camera video in the long term.

        • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by (negative video) ( 792072 ) <meNO@SPAMteco-xaco.com> on Saturday February 05, 2005 @07:41PM (#11586093)
          I could use a 1TB disk where I could random access it for read and writes... but just write once?
          With appropriate software, write once can give you a versioning file system with a tamper-proof history.

          Also: think video. 6000x4500 pixels at 30 fps, using 2:1 lossless compression, is 1215 MB/sec. This technology would be perfect for digital movie production.

      • i.e. massive archiving of video media. ahem.
      • 18GB on a 5.5 drive? Now that was livin'! Hell boy! I remember when hard drives were 5GB and came in disk packs the size of a hatbox. Floppies were 8 inches on a side and held 170KB; enough for the OS, your software and all your data files! And we considered ourselves lucky we didn't have to deal with boxes of punchcards anymore. Why, back then. . . . ZZZZZZ . . .

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:06PM (#11585066) Homepage
      Oh, bah. I'm sure when the CD-ROM came out, people liked to roll their eyes at people filling up 540 MB of storage. Even TFA answers your argument, and does a damn good job of it IMHO:

      If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up. High-definition broadcasting and gaming are also expected to add a heavy burden to existing home storage systems because of the size of the files. Two hours of HD programming takes up about 15GB to 25GB.

      There you go, if we do a wholesale switch over to HD TV, finally a terabyte of storage doesn't seem that outlandish does it?

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by macklin01 ( 760841 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:07PM (#11585071) Homepage

      Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. The massive storage would be so much better on a hard disk. I can't imagine wanting to carry a terabyte with me on a disk!

      Anybody who does scientific work, for instance.

      It's not hard to generate a few GB of data in a fluid mechanics simulation. People doing rendering (e.g., Pixar) also run into this ... -- Paul

    • You Forget Apple iHDTV 3D Holo-Garage Band (Score:4, Funny)

      by CheeseburgerBlue ( 553720 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:07PM (#11585075) Homepage Journal
      To effectively use Apple iHDTV 3D Holo-Garage Band home studio with patented QuickTimeHolo technology, we recommend using a G14 computer with a one button psychic-cursor and at least fifty quadrillion golybits of RAM.

      • fifty quadrillion golybits of RAM

        Groan. I HATE people who write things like "thousands of kilo" or "millions of kilo" instead of mega and giga. Jeez! Just use the right damn prefix!

        Instead of writing something stupid like quadrillion golybits just convert it to ohmygolybits in the first place!

        -
    • Yes, but I assume you do want backups for your terabyte hard drive? And you are going to want to move large, but less frequently used files (HD home movies anybody?) off the drive.

      On the other hand, watching somebody who just lost 1TB of data change colours like a chameleon would be interesting to watch.

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Funny)

      by evilmousse ( 798341 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:13PM (#11585113) Journal
      -obviousquote-
      "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
      -/obviousquote-

      • whee, my post is 40% 'redundant' to a post 45 minutes older than mine and another 2 hours older.

        i've been redundant to nothing too, is this modding supposed to be for info you already EXPECTED to see?

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rokzy ( 687636 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:18PM (#11585152)
      I have TB hard drive for my simulations. if I want to back up my data, you suggest 200 DVDs?

      this is progress. if you're so lacking in imagination that you can't think of a use for this then just remember that you are not psychic and don't know what secondary discoveries pursuing this technology will bring. when the electron was discovered how many people do you think knew how it would change our lives?
    • Don't worry about it ... the moderators got this one right for once: +2 Funny.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's only 1800 CDs, at full WAV (uncompressed) - I've got over 2500, so I'd already need to carry 2 discs just for my music. It's only 200 DVDs, so many movie/game collections would barely fit. And that's at full 5" diameter, which dates from the early 1980s as a "handy" (floppy) format. To bring it down to modern convenience, we'd want 2" or 3" discs, which include the spindle-hole "overhead": now we're talking about 250GB per disc, up against those storage requirements already mentioned. 640KB ought to
    • Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates, 1981. Oh, and how about "Holographic pr0n"?

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, that's what we need, a successor to technology that isn't here yet.

    • Re:Can you say worthless? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mz001b ( 122709 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @06:14PM (#11585549)
      Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage?

      I do computational fluid dynamics -- it is quite easy to generate a terabyte of data in a week. A typical 3-d simulation may be 10 terabytes (including restart files). You usually want to keep the whole dataset around for a while so you can analyse it, and probably need it to be easily accessable until you finish writing the paper(s) describing it (which could be 6 months or so).

      So, I could fill up several of these right now. All my data is stored on mass storage systems at various supercomputing centers, but it would be nice to have a local copy too. And RAID is not a backup -- I would like a true backup that I could place in a place physically different than my computer.

    • "Who on earth needs a terabyte of storage? And more importantly, Why would we want it on a non-hard disk. "

      Heh. This question is asked every SINGLE time a new capacity is announced.

      Here are a few answers:

      - Weta. They had so much data flying around while they were working on LotR that they ended up buying iPods and overnighting them to the necessary locations. A 1TB disc not only would have made their lives easier, but they also could have used a few of these to perform regular backups.

      - The entertai
    • Is it just me, or are there a large percentage of slashdot readers who do lots of fluid dynamic simultions on a daily basis?
    • Don't forget that as computers grow and change, the amount of data stored tends to rise quite a bit. In the earlier days of computing, 8 bits per channel for an image would have been unheard of, but now it's the standard. We're already seeing 16bpc images, and that essentially tripples filesizes. Eventually that will become the norm and 32bbc images will be the next evolution.

      If I understand correctly, these discs are poised to come out after the next standard of discs we're seeing, so they're two generati

  • Is there DRM built-in? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:03PM (#11585034)
    I fear this new advance in storage will just enable greater and greater copyright infringement and rob hard working content producers of their deserved income.

    I hope they have technology built in to thwart these evildoing pirates.

  • A timeline is emerging? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:04PM (#11585039) Homepage
    Wow, from TFA:

    HVD is a possible successor to technologies such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold about 25GB of data while dual-layer discs hold 50GB. Ordinary DVD discs, meanwhile, hold about 4.7GB. HVD technology will be pitched at corporations and the entertainment market, the HVD Alliance said.

    Hmm, there's a format war going on with the Blu-ray and HD DVD, and they're already plotting the successor. Of course, they don't give a date in the article or anything firm at all, so perhaps it is a bit of a pipe dream. I must admit, I liked this quip from the article:

    If history is an indication, consumers will fill the disc up.

    Considering when I got my first computer, and the salesperson chuckled and said 'there was no way in hell I'd ever fill up a 40 megabyte hard drive', it's nice to see that people finally understand the capacity of users to fill up every nook and cranny of a storage medium!

  • Hard disk bottleneck (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macklin01 ( 760841 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:04PM (#11585040) Homepage
    Too bad that a hard disk would be nowhere near to keeping up with a 1GB/s transfer rate. Heck, IIRC (and please correct me if I don't!) RAM would have trouble keeping up with that ... -- Paul

    • Re:Hard disk bottleneck (Score:4, Informative)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:07PM (#11585072) Homepage
      Well "technically" PC3200 means 3.2GB/sec. But yeah, in practice you only get [anywhere near that] that doing series of uninterrupted perfectly timed 8-byte writes to sequential memory...

      Tom
    • according to TFA:

      The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD.
    • Too bad? It just means that you can use one of these disks as an accelerator for your harddisks.

      Just rememember that most data on most disks isn't replaced daily, so a nightly backup suddenly also serves as a disk speed booster for the next day, for any data that didn't change during that day.

      In fact, if seek times are similar to the harddisks, then why keep the data on the harddisks at all? If the player+media is cheaper than a 1TB harddisk, it can be a cost saving in addition to a speed boost.

      Great pot

  • Holograph? (Score:5, Funny)

    by drivinghighway61 ( 812488 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:04PM (#11585048) Homepage
    Help us Obi-Wan Kenobi! You're our only hope...
    • I heard about this new technology a few years ago. I didn't realize it is about to be commercialized...

      Anyway, the parent poster's example on Star Wars has it right. Basically the projected holograph at a different angle (or viewed at different angle) shows a different holographic pattern (i.e., from the front, you can see the princess's face. But from behind, her arse).

      The different angle of the incident beam generates a different look of interference map, which in turn translated to bits. It doesn't see

  • Can't wait for the Digital Restrictions Managment (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:05PM (#11585051) Homepage Journal
    No doubt their top priority will be figuring out all the ways to prevent their customers from from using these disks in the way they want to use them. "Can't pause that there" "Can't watch that on that device" "No fast-forwarding through that" "Can't watch this in that country" ...

    Remember when technology used to be about enabling people, rather than disabling them?

    • And with 1TB of data to work with, they could make a movie look different and act differently in every country.

      For the rest of us, 1TB is a lot of pr0n, or hundreds of Linux distributions.

      • The "problem" they are trying to combat is not that they want the movies to look and behave different in different countries, it's that they want to be able to produce 500 prints of the film, show it in America, and then ship the second hand prints over to other countries to show in the cinemas. (Cinema prints are very very expensive to produce, it's cheeper to do it this way). They then want to release the DVD in America while it's still showing in cinemas in the rest of the world, and not wanting to lose
      • For the rest of us, 1TB is a lot of pr0n, or hundreds of Linux distributions.

        I can see it now: the new HVD Knoppix, now with the entire contents of sourceforge!

        Jedidiah.

  • CMC Magnentics? (Score:3)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:06PM (#11585068) Homepage Journal
    From the spell-checkers-are-overrated department...

  • 200 dvds ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by EpsCylonB ( 307640 ) <eps&epscylonb,com> on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:06PM (#11585069) Homepage
    The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's,

    That means nothing to me, can someone covert that into a more practical measurement like Libraries Of Congress (LoC) ?.

    • 1/10th of a LoC (Score:4, Informative)

      by seizer ( 16950 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:12PM (#11585110) Homepage
      The LoC is normally quoted at 10tb [techtarget.com].
    • Screw that. I need it in terms of how many elephants lined up in a row. My favorite I heard on the discovery channel one was how many 5' 8" woman standing on top of each other. They could have simply said 8 stories high as most people have been to a city, but not see a bunch of woman standing on top of each other. I love how numbers are converted to abstract ideas that are more difficult to understand than if they just said what they actually were. Once terabyte, I can relate to that that since I have
    • Yes, funny units. My biology teacher elaborated how incredibly huge amount of data is contained in human genome, how awfully many pages of books it would take to write it down. I recalculated that and found it would fit on 2 CDs leaving some spare place.

  • Souvenirs (Score:3, Funny)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <fireang3l.hotmail@com> on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:09PM (#11585089) Homepage
    I remember, back when I bought my first computer, I had the choice between a 25 and 50 megs Harddrive. The sales rep said :

    "Choose the 25 megs one, NO ONE will EVER need this much storage!"

    Guess what : Needs increase with time and technology. I'm sure if this tech get released after Blueray that we will have a way to fill up 1 TB without thinking too much about it.

    Now what we REALLY need is a PERMANENT way of storing data.
    • Uncompressed movies.
      3D raster images (based on "particles", not vectors - photorealistic 3D scenery for games)
      Complete backups (instead of incremental)
      Multi-DVD albums
      Data like global maps, global phonebooks etc.
      Same old contents, smaller disks (half-inch DVDs anyone?)
      Single-use encryption keys.
    • I should stop reading /. It makes me feel old. When I got my first home computer, the top of the range storage option was a 128K tape drive.

      And I still remember the day at work when I got upgraded to the PC with the high density floppy drive that could store over 1MB, and I would no longer have to swap between the disk with the os/editor and the one with the compiler on.

  • So depressing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lo0ol ( 799434 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:10PM (#11585098) Homepage
    Does anyone else find this horrendously depressing that they're already plotting the next format? Sure makes me frown on buying anything new in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format. :\
    • I understand where you're coming from but what's the alternative? Everyone using Mac LCIIs with a 20MB hard drive and a couple of floppy drives? Technology moves on. Don't let the marketing droids blind you to what the geeks are doing.

    • Re:So depressing (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cnettel ( 836611 )
      When CD-ROMs started getting reasonably common for PCs, there were plans for DVDs. Maybe you were happy because you haven't heard of them, but they were planned. That's pretty normal.
    • You do realise they were planning PS3 when PS2 came out? These companies make money by upgrades. You don't release a product without thinking of what's next. Same with software.

      I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years time DNA-based computers become a reality, but companies hide this fact and continue to loose electronics until they can't make anymore improvements. Only then will the upgrade to DNA-based computers be made.

  • Good Lord (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArmenTanzarian ( 210418 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:14PM (#11585124) Homepage Journal
    If they made the LOTR chronicles 1TB long, I think I'd have to get another job just to be bored enough to watch them.

  • Acronym confusion (Score:2, Informative)

    by mike5904 ( 831108 )
    Technically, the article stated that the transfer rates would be up to one gigabit per second, not 1 GB per second, as the summary states. That's certainly fast, but not beyond the capabilities of current hard disk/memory technology.

  • But.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:15PM (#11585132)
    But will they put some kind of protection around the disk similar to 3.5 Floppies or MiniDiscs? That's my one big beef about CDs. They're so fragile. I'm careful, but one false move can really mess them up. If you can fit so much on a disc, make them smaller, 2 inch diameter? but make them protected.

    • Re:But.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cnettel ( 836611 )
      What kind of damage to a CD do you have in mind? No matter how "protected" 3.5 (or 5.25) disks were, the failure rate per disk was, IMHO, far higher, and if we count failures per byte it just gets silly. Of course, this is when the ECC of the optical formats is taken into consideration. If you want protection, I think I prefer separate cases any day, but I wouldn't call a CD fragile. (BTW, what do you think makes them so damn cheap to manufacture that AOL can shell out loads?)
      • Floppy discs failed because they had had floppy magnetic media to deal with. I find that I can still pick up a floppy disk from 5 years ago and have all the data readable. I've never had a problem with data loss on a minidisc, and I treat them pretty bad. Of course I'm mostly referring ot CDRs when I speak of bad quality. When the discs you've left in a drawer, away from light, in a jewel case for 6 months won't read because the dye has leaked. I'd rather have my software and music cost 3 dollars more

  • Now that's an error message! (Score:5, Funny)

    by greypilgrim ( 799369 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:17PM (#11585143)
    "A tiny speck of dust has crossed the beam and 4gb of data have been lost." The bigger they get, they harder they fall.
  • The recent /, story on media longevity [slashdot.org] highlights the growing problem of decomposing data-layers on current generation optical disk technology. This new disk, with its even higher density, would seem to be even more likely to suffer from longevity problems.

    Perhaps the xxAA has nothing to worry about -- media buying customers will lose access to copied data through dye-decomposition sooner than through expiring DRM licenses.
  • a holographic projector (not the star trek thing, mind you) and we'd be able to watch holographic movies...just one way to use 1TB of storage, it may be even not enough.

  • Less hole (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:35PM (#11585270) Homepage Journal
    While they're increasing the density in a new format, how about making the spindle hole and clampable hub a lot smaller? Throw this density at a 1" disc, and a CD/DVD hole/hub will eat most of the usable area. Let's have a 1mm hole/hub, and use the whole medium. And while we're at it, let's finally get doublesided drives (without flipping discs): they've been promising doublesided media since DS/DD 5.25" floppies, and we're still waiting.
    • That hole serves a purpose. You'd have to spin the disk at a much faster speed to get the same sustained data rate if you made the hole smaller. And CDs/DVDs are already near their physical strength limits.
      • Huh? Why would you need to spin the disc faster? A smaller hole would only reveal more readable area. The smaller circumference would fit fewer bits per revolution, but it's all extra.
        • Working towards the centre, the amount of data read per revolution gets less and less - you'd need to increase the spin rate in order to get a high enough data throughput for the medium to be useful. But CDs and DVDs are already spinning at their max speed - any quicker than about 52x, and CDs will actually explode.
    • I always thought the reason the hole in CDs is the size it is partly to make them easier to hold safely. They could have made the hole smaller or bigger, but it just happens to be the right size to carry with your finger through it. There's only really 2 safe places to hold a CD, in the middle and around the edge. If you take away the middle, there are a lot of conditions where picking it up without scratching the bottom is much more difficult.
      • CDs are becoming distribution media, rather than storage media. So they're kind of disposable. And I'm talking about small CDs, which we could hold around their edges easily.

  • magnetoptical (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:40PM (#11585300) Homepage Journal
    How about a multilayer, "multiphysics" disc? Lay down several optical layers readable by focusable laser. Beneath them, a magnetic layer readable by HD heads. We might be able to get over 50% more capacity, without needing greater areal density. With doublesided discs, and pinhole spindle hubs [slashdot.org], we might be looking at 2" discs with 1TB capacity.

  • time for lossless video compression (Score:3)

    by 0111 1110 ( 518466 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:42PM (#11585317)
    IIRC uncompressed video requires at least 80GB/hour. So a two hour movie would require over 160 GB if you want to completely avoid compression artifacts. There are also lossless video compression algorithms like HuffyYUV (anyone have a link?) which allows for around 2:1 compression without any loss in quality. So that 160 GB movie would only be 80 GB. Also don't forget that storing the audio in uncompressed PCM or a losslessly compressed format like FLAC would also add to the storage requirements.

    I am not sure if higher resolution film transfers would increase the storage requiremtents even further. I assume it would. So this tech may only be somewhat overkill.
    • 32 GB = ~ 1 minute HDTV

      I went for a job interview at Snell & Wilcox (Google it) and they showed me a huge rack. They said, "This is a realtime HDTV compositing platform." I said, "That's a bit big, isn't it?" They said, "Yes, but it needs to be this big. It has 128 GB of RAM in it, because content producers need to mix in segments up to four minutes."

      At which point my jaw hit the floor.

  • Attention span of humans 50 mins, 40 mins, 30.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NigelJohnstone ( 242811 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:44PM (#11585327)
    Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.

    Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..

    Ironic isn't it?

    I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.

  • Add a flexible layer of hw gen. redundancy data. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:46PM (#11585339) Homepage Journal

    It'd be cool if they could put in a function in the hardware that would calculate and fill out the media with [standardized] redundancy data. You'd want it do be done in hardware to be fast, compatible and not generate unneccesary bus traffic.

    Basically, the burn software would feature a '[X] Fill out with redundancy data and finalize disc'-option box together with the '[X] Finalize disc' one.

    I've sometimes done this by hand [par2.net], but it takes forever to calculate the data, and you don't get it properly distributed over the disc, etc, etc. I think it'd be better done in hardware.

    Guess there's no hope though, it'd up the cost a dollar, and we all know that's just impossible to bear. <sigh>

  • But unless we get hard drive (or equivilent) that can support average transfer rates faster than that we're gonna have some problems.

    (Bus throughput probably won't be an issue. SCSI will probably be moving 1 GB/sec in five years.)

  • While higher and higher capacities are exciting... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sirReal.83. ( 671912 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:54PM (#11585393) Homepage
    You just know the PHBs will still use an entire disc to walk a 37KB spreadsheet thirty feet down the hall ;)
  • I remember reading about this in 2002. The problem was aligning the beam in the correct spot to read the data. If it was off just a little bit it completely missed the data. Has the error margin been increased?
  • Constellation 3D was creating or had created fluorescent read/write technology for compact discs, or rather Fluorescent Multilayer Discs (FMD). Their news releases claimed that a 1TB disc was in the works. This was three of four years ago.

    I liked their "Clear Card" the best, a clear credit card sized rectangle that held around 200GB to 500GB. Very Star Trek, like the isolinear chips. :P

    Too bad they had so much trouble business-wise, they seemed to be OK creating the product, just not the business par

  • Yeh, blu-ray.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @05:59PM (#11585435) Journal
    I was getting sick of that old redundant legacy blu-ray format, its about time we replaced it..

  • Might be worth mentioning... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ibringthelight ( 856732 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @06:11PM (#11585525)
    From the slashdot article:
    "about 1GB per second"

    From the cnet article:
    "transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second"

    Slight difference there of about eight times...

  • Bloatware (Score:2, Informative)

    by redmond_herring ( 839209 )

    If the boys and girls at Redmond keep expanding the windows kernel at it's current rate we'll need all of that 1TB and more!

    There's a cool article here [extremetech.com] for those interested in a little windoze history.

  • Successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies (Score:3, Informative)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @07:29PM (#11586027)
    Does it bother anyone else that they are talking to successors of products that aren't even out yet? I mean, if blu-ray doesn't hold enough data, then we've got a problem. Because with the existence of DVD's they've proven that even though the technology is there, the publishers don't want to put more than 1 movie, or 1 album on a single disc. If they did, I'd be able to go out and buy the a DVD with the complete TU-Pac library. The only problem with this is what happens when he comes out with something new. Then I have to buy another disc.

  • I hope they move quickly on it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Saturday February 05, 2005 @08:25PM (#11586364) Homepage
    Sometimes new tech like this gets passed on to the consumer before the XXAAs get to them. Sometimes they don't. That's why we never had "DAT" really catch on in the US -- too many rules and laws and crap -- DAT is a great format and it was just killed by XXAAs saying "but they will be able to make perfect copies!! We'll never survive!! WAAAAA!"

    Well, the CD got out without much hassle in spite of the XXAAs and was quite successful in even boosting the sale of their media rather than seeing countless "friends and families making perfect copies...waaaaa!" until they were out of business.

    I think history does a lot to illustrate that the consumer is not a threat to the XXAAs even with movie/mosic file swapping going on all over the place. The fact is, when people like it, it doesn't matter if they can get it for free on the net -- they want a nice box to put on their shelf and a nice piece of 'official' media that contains one of their favorite works. That part will never change and that's the money in their bank.... why they want to take their profits and give it to lawyers I'll never know...

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