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Hardware

New 100GB Optical Disk From Taiwan 239

Posted by timothy from the shades-of-constellation dept.
Alt173 points to this article from Taiwan Economic News , excerpting: "The National Science Council (NSC) said Sunday that a local research team has successfully developed a new optical disc that can hold more than 100 gigabytes of information. The research team was led by professor Tsai Ding-ping of National Taiwan University. The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said. By using "near-field" optical technology, the 100-gigabyte disc stores more than any other similar product in the world. The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files, according to Tsai. The near-field optical technology also allows the bits of information on a disc to be spaced closer together to increase the disc's storage capacity."
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New 100GB Optical Disk From Taiwan More

New 100GB Optical Disk From Taiwan

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  • Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pgrote ( 68235 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:03PM (#3551638) Homepage
    Commented today, "This is it. We're done. This will kill the movie and music industry just like the VHS tape, CD and DVD."

    Senator Hollings responded, "We're asking China to invade Tawain today to stop this evil horde from joining the axis of evil."

  • Signal to noise ratio (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:04PM (#3551641)
    Great. Now instead of an album costing $15.00, and containing one hit and 14 filler songs, the CD will cost $1,500.00 and contain one hit and 1499 filler songs.

  • The article is kinda skimpy on details. Vaporware? It would be nice to know how fast this drive is. Anyone by chance know?


  • Theres only about 4 other better technologies.

    FMD being the main one, currently FMD is being stalled by the RIAA and MPAA because of piracy concerns.

    Holographic storage systems are better. (although these may cost alittle more)

    Ram based storage systems

    Even traditional harddrives.

    • Heres info on C3d (Score:2, Informative)

      by HanzoSan ( 251665 )

      Summary

      Constellation 3D's technology implements the concept of the volumetric storage of information. Data is recorded on multiple layers located inside a disc or a card, as opposed to the single or double layer method available in compact discs, and DVDs.

      The recording, reading and storing of the information is accomplished through the use of fluorescent materials embedded in pits and grooves in each of the layers. The fluorescent material emits radiation when excited by an external light source. The information is then decoded as modulations of the intensity and color of the emitted radiation.

      Background

      It has long been recognized within the data storage scientific community that, 2-dimensional storage carriers are insufficient for future generations of memory devices. Research efforts have therefore focused on ways to develop 3-dimensional storage including holographic techniques and multi-layer storage as illustrated below.

      The concept of multi-layer reflective optical discs has been proposed by Philips and IBM, and has been demonstrated up to several layers. In fact, DVD is an implementation of this concept with two layers.

      However for many layers, the coherent nature of the probing laser beam causes interference, scatter and intra-layer cross talk - the combination of which results in a signal that is degraded to unacceptable levels. In addition, reflective multi-layer discs encountered considerable technological difficulties in manufacturing of media commensurate with the formidable requirements for optical quality. For these reasons research efforts into multi-layer reflective technologies have been abandoned.

      The concept of multi-layer, fluorescent cards/discs (FMD/C) is a unique breakthrough, solving the problems of signal degradation associated with current reflective optical disc technologies of CD and DVD.

      As with a CD or DVD, data on the FMD layers is encoded on a substrate in a series of geometrical features or volumetric marks. Each layer will have a capacity approaching 4.7 Gigabytes (as in the case of DVD).

      With FMD/C technology, each storage layer is coated with a transparent fluorescent material rather than the reflective metallic layer of a CD or DVD. When the laser beam hits a mark on a layer, fluorescent light is emitted. This emitted light has a different wavelength from the incident laser light - slightly shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum - and is incoherent in nature, in contrast to the reflected coherent light in current optical devices. The emitted light is not affected by data marks, and therefore transverses adjacent layers undisturbed.

      In the read out system of the drive, the laser light is filtered out, so that only the information-bearing fluorescent light is detected. This reduces the effect of stray light and interference. Theoretical studies, confirmed by experimental results, have shown that in conventional reflection systems the signal quality degrades rapidly with the number of layers. In fluorescent read-out systems, on the other hand, the signal quality degrades much more slowly with each additional layer. Research has shown that media containing up to a hundred layers are currently feasible, thereby increasing the potential capacity of a single card or disk to hundreds of Gigabytes. Use of blue lasers would increase the capacity potential to over 1 Terabyte.

      Some of the technological advantages of FMD/ FMC products include:

      Increased Disc Capacity
      Initially, the FMD disc will hold anywhere from 25 - 140 GB of data depending on market need. Eventually a terabyte of data on a single disc will be achievable.

      Quick Parallel Access and Retrieval of Information
      Reading from several layers at a time and multiple tracks at a time - nearly impossible using the reflective technology of a CD/DVD - is easily achieved in FMD. This will allow for retrieval speeds of up to 1 gigabit/second.

      Media Tolerances
      By using incoherent light to read data the FMD/FMC media will have far fewer restrictions in temperature range, vibration and air-cleanness during manufacturing.

      Usage Flexibility
      FMD/FMC presents a wide variety of potential media sizes and types (read only, write-able and re-writeable) for a broad range of applications.

      Potential for Further Growth
      The technology is young and will grow and evolve, providing a clear road map for the future of data storage.

      The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 116 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.

  • Can someone explain what "near-field" optical technology is... how error-prone would this be? would it perhaps be rewritable?

    If someone could explain the concepts, it would be great. Cheers.

  • What fun. So will the quality of picture increase, or will they instead fill more of the disk with pointless guff like crappy menus, interviews with the man who cleans the shoes of the second team coach driver, etc? I know which one my money's on.

    Grab.
  • 100 GB is great, but if it is the size of the original Lazer Disks, or LPs, that might prevent it from taking off as a desired medium.
  • That's great!

    Now I need to buy at least two hard drives, just so I can fill this Optical disk to capacity!

  • They already have 160GB hard drives... why is this a big deal? It it a smaller form factor? Less power consumption? Faster?

    Sheesh. Talk about yer light news articles...

    • Yes, it would be a big deal to be able to backup my entire HD or all my CDs on a single CD-sized disc (though the article makes no mention of the size I'm assuming it's the same size as a CD/DVD). Come to think of it, the article really doesn't mention much of anything. Almost the entire article is quoted in Alt173's post.
      • FMD can store about a terrabyte.
        • >>FMD can store about a terrabyte.

          yup. and the amiga is making a comeback too....

          There is hereby officially a moratorium on any discussion of FMD or "Constellation 3D" until they can actually publically display a working product.

          We've been hearing about this vapor for years. Look up vaporware in the dictionary and it says "See FMD".

      • it says "super-sized" disk.
        Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out to have an 8" radius? ;)

  • Porn (Score:1, Funny)

    by JimmyG13 ( 530501 )
    The article failed to mention the most important use of this storage: all your porn on one disc!
  • "The super-sized disc ..."

    Huh?

    Can please somebody translate super-size in centimetres?

  • i/o speeds? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:06PM (#3551671) Homepage Journal
    any idea what the i/o speeds of these optical disks are capable of? the article doesnt seem to mention it.

  • Size matters (Score:5, Funny)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:06PM (#3551679)
    The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.

    What he forgot to mention was that, at present, the disc is roughly the size and thickness of a small kitchen table.

  • Scratches? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jeffy210 ( 214759 )
    Because it's denser, think of how much more a scratch will suck on this thing... when are we going to need error correction on these?
    • when are we going to need error correction on these?

      I'm pretty sure all or nearly all drives already do error correction. The high density may make it better to use longer codes, but it's really pretty trivial overhead. I know SCSI drives do ECC; if modern (post-1990) IDE drives don't, I would be very suprised.

      A scratch on a magnetic platter would really suck too, after all.
    • Since the data is volmetric, it seems like scratches on the disk wouldnt be that bad of a problem. I am by no means educated on this media (in other words, dont take me too seriously...) but if they are using some form of stereo-scopic laser in order to read the data, its possible the laser could move past the scratch and still get at its data.

      Anybody know if Im right?

    • IANACDE (compact disc expert), but I remember reading an article once on the history of compact discs... the music CD format allowed for inaudible imperfections on the media itself when the disc is manufactured, but CDs to hold programs and such could have no imperfections or else the CD would be worthless... To get around this, there is supposedly error checking (and correction) built into data CD-ROMs. I have no idea how or if I'm even right, so I invite the clueful to correct me on this.
  • What kind of bus would a drive that is, presumably,this blazing fast use? IDE almost certainly can't handle it. Is SCSI, Fibre Channel etc.. up to the task or will a new bus technology be required for these new optical drives?

    • Re:What kind of bus? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jobe_br ( 27348 )
      what makes you think that IDE can't handle? IDE, as much as SCSI, is a line-level protocol. Fibre channel, as much as firewire/usb is more of a connection medium/protocol, as it has the option to use SCSI as its actuall communication protocol. The limitations of YOUR IDE subsystem are likely from your IDE controller's bus speed, 33MHz, 66MHz, etc.

      Furthermore, this article isn't talking *at all* about a drive mechanism, but rather a technology for the media. The media may be extraordinarily large, but the access to it may be slow, think tape drives - as they've gotten larger, sure, storing to them has gotten somewhat faster, but it still takes a few hours to fill up a 40GB/80GB tape.

      This technology article is more concerned about talking about the expansion of how much data can be stored on one piece of media rather than how that data would be accessed, what applications that access speed would lend itself to, etc. The above post on FMC technology talks about speed-ups from using multiple lasers, each reading different tracks/layers - this would speed up access, otherwise, your only option is to spin a disk faster, which has certain practical limits.
  • They say that the disc is super sized. Any idea on how big that is? If it doesn't fit conveniently in the form fact of a PC, seems like it's not that great.
  • The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files

    Didn't we already go down this route with laser discs. I can't see it catching on until they can get the technology down to cd size.
  • Fit all my anime, games, warez, hentai, moviez, and pr0n on 3 disks... I'll wait for the RW drive @ around $200 and the disks for $20 before I buy though.
  • the MPAA and RIAA will buy up this tech and close it down by encrypting it like data play.

    think of what CDs will look like... I guess we will have to buy the while album again :-)

  • Big disks... and backups. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ldopa1 ( 465624 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:12PM (#3551728) Homepage Journal
    Frankly, this is too cool, however, I'm beginning to wonder where this'll end. Yes, I remember thinking that the 5 Meg hard disk I bought for the DecMate II that my family had was "all I would ever need, ever", but for personal use, I wonder what good 100 Gig is good for except having a HUGE music collection.

    With data compression getting better and better, and disks getting bigger and bigger, and everything getting cheaper, I think the next big thing is large volume back up media.

    Until writable DVD's come along, there isn't even a usable, cheap way to do a backup of my 80 Gig hard disk as it is. Right now, it'd take a stack of 100 CD-RW's to do it, and about a year or so. It seems the only practical solution is to buy two (or more) identical hard disks and then set up a RAID-1 arrangement.

    What I'm interested in is a fast, cheap way to back up my shiny new 100 Gig optical drive. Until then, forget it.

    • Back to the Future... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ando[evilmedic] ( 199537 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:35PM (#3551923) Homepage
      I think it's hilarious how you could substitute a few words in your post above, to be having the same problem seven years ago.

      80 Gig HD --> 2 Gig HD
      writeable DVD --> CDR
      100 CD-RW's --> 100 floppies

      Until writable CD's come along, there isn't even a usable, cheap way to do a backup of my 2 Gig hard disk as it is. Right now, it'd take a stack of 100 floppies to do it, and about a year or so. It seems the only practical solution is to buy two (or more) identical hard disks...
      • And can you see the same lament 5-7 years from now?

        100 GB HD -> 2 TB HD
        DVD-RW -> something new
        100 DVDs -> 100 something new

      • No, the situation is very different today than seven years ago. Seven years ago, tape with sufficient capacity to back up the disks-of-the-day, was affordable. The drive cost somewhere around $600 to $1000, and tapes were $10 to $20 apiece, and it could easily backup your 2 Gig disk. You can't approach that level of cheapness and ease in 2002 with today's larger drives.

    • "but for personal use, I wonder what good 100 Gig is good for except having a HUGE music collection.

      I have a use for these discs that I see growing in popularity: PC based PVRs.

      I have a home-brew PVR at home that I built with an old PC and a Hauppage WinTV card and a program called SnapStream (www.snapstream.com). I use it to capture my favorite shows so I can watch them later.

      The reason Im going with the PC approach vs the Tivo approach is that I want to watch an entire series in order, so I start recording the series from the point its at now, and then when the show starts from the beginning thats when I start watching. To do this, I need LOTS of storage. I presently have 2 80 gig drives, but Im concerned because they are nearly full and I dont want to use CDs to back them up, itll take too long.

      If I had 100 gig disks to store these shows on, that'd prepare me for when HDTV becomes successful. I would SO love to capture these shows at 1920p and keep them around. :)

    • With data compression getting better and better, and disks getting bigger and bigger

      Is compression really getting better and better? MPEG is getting smaller, but the quality is probably going down at the same time (however imperceptably). Lossless compression, which is what you need for data (= backups), is probably not getting better at the same rate that the disks are getting bigger.

      Until writable DVD's come along

      You can buy DVD burners right now for like $500. They've been available for more than a year.
      • ...for an *end* product that's not going to be edited again. A 500kb jpeg looks better than a 500kb png, at least for a photo. Likewise a 500mb mpeg will look better than a 500mb huffyuv avi (capturing codec, lossless).

        Of course a 1:1 lossless copy is the best you can do, but if you have to choose between resolution and lossiness (and you do), you're better off with a DivX at 640x480 than a lossless codec at 80x60...

        Kjella
      • Actually, the whoile deal with compression improving is that lossy compression is being done better and better. The results are more quality at lower bitrates. For an example, MPEG-1 uses square blocks to divide up the data and operate. This results in a blocky picture, but easier for the computer to process. Wavelet based algorithms are more intensive, but errors appear more as a blur than a big ugly block. Other things are happeining as to better identifying and quantifying what information can be eliminated without being perceived.
    • > I wonder what good 100 Gig is good for except having a HUGE music collection.

      Why, a huge pr0n collection!

      Seriously, you're right - we're now at the point where (rule of thumb = 10 hours per gigabyte for 192kbps MP3) you can store weeks of music on a hard drive.

      Assuming no revolutionary holographic projection technology, about the only practical consumer use for removable media >100GB is gonna be editing video or archiving uncompressed WAV files.

    • What I'm interested in is a fast, cheap way to back up my shiny new 100 Gig optical drive.

      The article is about DVD-sized optical disks, not optical drives.

  • So fitting... (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by schmaltz ( 70977 )
    ...the ultimate bootlegging medium, from the ultimate bootlegging country.

  • 100 GB? Laughable! :) (Score:4, Informative)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:20PM (#3551801) Journal
    See 10 Terabyte 3.5" disk drive [colossalstorage.net], here [colossalstorage.net] is your PDF. It might not be here yet, but it falls in the category of "optical" anyway. Also see this [inphase-technologies.com], they have existing demos.

  • Burning Speed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gounthar ( 212393 )
    I hope that the burning rates will be higher than the actual CD-ROM burning speeds, because at 8x, it takes about 24 hours to burn 100GB!
  • Can someone explain why this is news, because the article sure didn't. It was only one or two sentences longer than the description. I just bought a 120GB IDE drive for $125. Tell me why it is so impressive that there is now a 100GB optical drive. Yeah, I know, optical is cool - now tell me again why I should care about this?

    Save it for a Slashback at least. This is a front page story?

    • because instead of having a cd with 50 songs encoded in mp3, you can have a disk of 300-400 songs at cd quality. and a silver-platter disk is easier to transport then a hard drive.

      They would also be good for back ups.

      And the technology to do this is cool.
    • "I just bought a 120GB IDE drive for $125. Tell me why it is so impressive that there is now a 100GB optical drive. Yeah, I know, optical is cool - now tell me again why I should care about this? "

      Why dont you bring your hard drive over to my house so I can copy your music collection? Oh wait, that'd require shutting down my computer, taking a hard drive out, plugging yours in, and then hoping itll boot again. Maybe if you had a removable disk we'd be able to share our data.
      • > Why dont you bring your hard drive over to my house so I can copy your music collection? Oh wait, that'd require shutting down my computer, taking a hard drive out, plugging yours in, and then hoping itll boot again. Maybe if you had a removable disk we'd be able to share our data.

        You mean one of these [techarts.com]or any other removable drive rack [google.com] you care to buy?

        As for "hope it boots" - not an issue. Boot from primary, have a "racked" drive as secondary on the IDE chain. Your PC will never attempt to boot from the "racked" drive.

        If Windows, your drive letters may be temporarily fux0r3d depending on whether the first partition of your friend's "racked" drive was bootable or not (and if it matches what you did on your "racked" drive). (Who cares, you're only copying files.) The problem goes away when you reboot.

        If Linux, who cares, just as long as you know what type of filesystem's on the "racked" drive. Just mount and copy.

        Drive racks rock. The only problem is that there are they're not all physically compatible with each other. But if you and your friends can get together and buy a bunch of identical racks at the same time, "sneakernet" can be a cheap way to transfer gigs of data within minutes.

    • Start your own crappy banner-ad-funded weblog "news" site if you want to read stuff you find interesting, or figure out how to set your slashdot preferences. You could call it dickbag.org.

      Either way, shut up!

      - A.P.
  • Forget the 100GB, I'm more facsinated that the guy's name is Ding-ping.

  • Gift to the movie industry from heaven. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @01:33PM (#3551905)
    Lots of talk here about how this could be the "ultimate bootlegging product." On the other hand, if the movie industry is smart, this could be the "ultimate bootleg killer."

    The movie studios are very nervous about internet piracy, but there's a good reason why the vast majority see movies in theatres and rent or purchase DVDs instead of acquiring bootleg VCDs. The simple truth is that low bitrate videos suck. They have motion artifacts. They have substandard audio.

    They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.

    As the electronics industry begins to retool their equipment from CDR manufacture to DVD-R manufacture, the movie industry is going to run into the same problem as the music industry -- they are going to be selling a $15.00 product that can be trivially copied perfectly onto a $1.00 piece of media. Over the next decade or so, as internet bandwidth increases, we will begin to see file-sharing of actual DVD images.

    How can the movie industry make file-sharing of DVD images undesirable?

    The answer is by providing something much, much better. Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space. The movie industry should be preparing to transition away from DVD to a new "super DVD" format that offers at least HDTV resolution, and most importantly, a big, whomping data rate that is completely impractical for internet streaming, and completely impractical for copying to DVD without downgrading the video quality.

    Such a technology, available for the home, would quickly relegate DVD-quality recordings into the "low end" of video, at the same time that the price barrier on DVD-recording equipment falls through the cellar.

    The industry should also realize that copy protection is worthless. It will always be broken, and the longer it goes unbroken, the more severe the market effect once it is broken. The real solution to the piracy problem of inferior bootleg recordings is the age-old tactic of the salesman. Offer a vastly better product, and your customers will follow.
    • I would be very surprised if there were a sufficient market for this sort of scenario to occur. You are talking about people essentially ditching their entire DVD collection and switching over to some high definition version of DVD. I agree that high definition TV is pretty awesome. However, DVD is pretty darned good (much better than broadcast quality). And I have lots of DVDs and don't plan on replacing them. Also, the price of HDTVs will have to come down a lot. If think DVD is already too entrenched for a new high definition medium. By the time the new medium actually comes out and HDTVs become reasonably affordable, the battle will be over.

      My main fear about a new format is that it gives the studios renewed control - they are not likely to make the same mistake twice (re allowing DeCSS to happen). If one of the manufacturers of dvd equipment had not gotten careless with the encryption technology, is there any reason to believe that we would be able to rip DVDs today?Also, given the incredible stupidity with which the media companies have adopted the internet as a business channel, I wouldn't be too surprised if they tried to create any new high def media in the same vain as DIVX, where you constantly have to pay to play. The market dynamics that caused CC's version to fail would not be present, since the studios would control the content no matter the form (DIVX had to compete with unlimited DVDs of the same movies).

      • Re:Gift to the movie industry from heaven. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jms ( 11418 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @02:43PM (#3552486)
        If one of the manufacturers of dvd equipment had not gotten careless with the encryption technology, is there any reason to believe that we would be able to rip DVDs today?

        The DVD encryption game was over the instant that the first PC DVD player software was released. From that moment on, all of the secrets of DVD decryption were published and available for purchase ... and it was only a matter of time before someone with the ability to read machine language translated those secrets into something more accessable to the general public.

        But yes, had the DVD taken a hard line and absolutely refused to license DVD technology for computers, DeCSS would probably not exist.

        Contrast DVD encryption/decryption to DirecTV, where the decryption function is encapsulated in a smart card. Although people have created workarounds, allowing them to manipulate the smartcard to get free TV service, no one has yet determined the decryption algorithm contained in the chip itself. If they have, they are keeping it a secret.

        Encryption is a bit of a red herring though. The real issue is player feature control. There have been DVD rippers for years, but all of them required modification of a licensed DVD player. What made DeCSS dangerous to the DVDCCA was that it was a complete, standalone, unlicensed implementation of CSS. Being in the DVDCCA carries advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that you have access to the decryption algorithms, and are able to produce DVD players. The disadvantages are that you are subject to a licensing agreement, and you may not manufacture players with unencrypted digital outputs, and your player must impose macrovision distortion on the video signal.

        If DeCSS were not suppressed, then non-DVDCCA licensed hardware manufacturers would be able to start manufacturing and selling DVD players with no macrovision, and unencrypted digital outputs. This would place the entire existing DVD player industry at a self-imposed marketplace disadvantage, because they all entered into a "suicide pact" not to include those features.

        DeCSS is being suppressed not because of the danger of ripping DVDs, but because of the danger of the entire DVD player industry being usurped by a superior product -- that they have all sworn in blood to never provide for themselves. Internet file trading is just a smokescreen.

        I also disagree that DVD will be too entrenched for a new high definition medium. The marketplace would accept and require new "HDTV DVD" players to play "legacy" DVDs, and the new format would be noticably superior in a side-by-side comparison (on those big screens at Best Buy, for instance.) No need to ditch your DVD collection, but the new ones would look much better.

        Plus, for the first time, for digitally-originated movies at least, individuals would be able to own movies in their original theatrical format. That's a very nice incentive indeed. If nothing else, it would fuel the market for video projectors.

        My main fear about a new format is that it gives the studios renewed control - they are not likely to make the same mistake twice (re allowing DeCSS to happen).

        Well, obviously they would go with a new encryption algorithm in place of CSS, but I have full confidence and faith that our next generation of young people will be as up to the task of cracking the encryption as the current generation was up to the task of cracking CSS. In the end, it won't matter. People have had the capability of copying movies since the introduction of the betamax. Time and again it has been shown that the vast, vast majority of people would prefer to watch a movie in a theatre, rent, or purchase a legitimate, guaranteed copy then take a chance on a probably-inferior bootleg.

        As I said, the DeCSS war is all about keeping macrovision-free players with digital outputs off the market. It is not about internet piracy, or anything else.

    • Re:Gift to the movie industry from heaven. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sien ( 35268 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @02:25PM (#3552338) Homepage
      The problem with this is that the quality of DVDs is so high anyway that they are beyond the quality of most televisions at the moment.


      Just look at the failure ( perhaps I speak too soon ) of attempts at producing higher quality audio than CD and turning them into standards. For 90% of the world on 95% of the world's audio equipment going beyond CDs is a waste of money.


      Finally, for all their hopes and dreams, people can't just decree a new standard, these things take a lot of time before they take off. DVDs took about 5 years to catch on.

    • What you're saying is like saying that RIAA should stop mp3 copying by releasing the vastly superior "Audio CD" and relegate mp3s to the "low end" of audio. Wake up and smell the coffee.

      Ever notice how DVD audio never took off? Have you been around, say, South East Asia lately? Most people watch VCDs on 20" or less television sets. DVD isn't taking off even with rampant, cheap, good quality pirated DVDs sold openly because people can't see the difference. I'm reasonably sure that the only reason DVDs have taken off like a big boom outside the videophile arena, is the convienience of a disc compared to a tape, which is why I swear the HD-VHS will fail miserably.

      Note that most normal people don't want to spend the $10000 they need for a system that will give cinema-quality movies at home, and for very sensible reasons, cost-vs-benefit and the socialness of going to movies being two of them. I can easily see and hear the difference between a DivX and a "self-made" DVD (pirate digitalization from original movie rolls) and a real DVD. But my wallet also sees the difference.

      Kjella

    • Re:Gift to the movie industry from heaven. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @04:11PM (#3553147)

      They don't meet our quality expectations. A DVD is vastly superior. So is a 35mm print in a theatre. That's why Spiderman and Clones made over a hundred million dollars each in their first weekends, in spite of the fact that vastly inferior bootlegs were available "for free" on the internet.
      People do not pay for movies and skip bootlegs because of some quality expectation. It is mostly due to:
      1. They don't know about it. I can't tell you how surprised so many people I know are when I wave that little CD at them and say, "Hey, guess what this is?" Most folks aren't geeks who d/l movies off the Internet not because of quality, but because they're not geeks.
      2. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. People who do know about it often wonder...can't they track that? Won't I get in trouble? People don't like getting into trouble. And not many of them know how to d/l a movie that's in SVCD format, burn it, and watch it on their TV, so they're uncertain as to whether it's even worth it.
      3. Most people actually think d/l-ing bootlegs is wrong! ... I know, it's a shocker.

    • Current "digital movies", as projected in theatres, provide a vastly superior image to DVD, and require approximately 70-100 gigabytes of storage space.

      Every new technology claims to have a "vastly superior image". But when you get the thing home most of us duffers can't tell the difference. They can put out data with 100 times faster bitrate but if it can be compressed down to standard MPEG sizes without me notice the difference then it is as copyable as standard MPEGs.

  • Big storage, fine... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by C_Mattie ( 524585 )
    These advancements are quite outstanding. That goes without saying. What I am left wondering now (offtopic?) is with the advancements in large capacitiy drives both fixed and removable, what advances have they made in cataloging the contents?

    I would think this more an issue in the case here where media is removable... "Where is that disk with the watever on it?" If it is anything like my desk, it is probably under a coffee mug or something.

    But seriously, what kind of tools are there, if any, for such a situation?

  • The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.

    This equates to roughly 67,700 floppy disks, yet they still haven't found a way to get that 25-year-old piece of technology out of my machine.

  • Yeah, 150 CDs of full bit-rate, uncompressed data stream. that's 1500 CDs worth of MP3s. That's a far more relevant metric.
    • that's 1500 CDs worth of MP3s.

      Of course you're actually using MP3 basically for what it was designed for -- same music in less bits.

      Everyone else here is using some other lossless encoding that results in files larger than the PCM originals on the CD because when they're listening on their 802.11 wireless iPaqs while mowing the lawn they can hear the difference between the original and some crappy MP3.

  • Sounds great, but a research lab doesn't help us today. Does anyone know what the current maximum size for a commercially available optical drive is? I know some people who would love to be able to archive 30gig data segments onto a single medium, but I don't know of any that go that large (and no tape, it has to be front-line storage).

  • Some more detailed articles on the subject (Score:3, Informative)

    by S-prime ( 550519 ) on Monday May 20, 2002 @02:25PM (#3552332)
    The Taipei Times

    http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2002/05/17/story /0 000136369

    Bell Labs: Info on the technology itself.

    http://www.bell-labs.com/new/gallery/bits.html

    Homepage of Dr. Tsai's research group (contains Chinese characters)

    http://pnstl.phys.ntu.edu.tw/english/introductio n. htm
  • I think if what the Taiwanese developed does become practical reality, there may be already one possible use of this type of optical disc: the storage medium for digital projection systems used in movie theaters.

    Remember, from what I've heard Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones needs about 300 GB of disk storage for playback through a theater-quality DLP projector; instead of a large number of hard disks we could reduce all that to a single optical disc of 300 mm in diameter using this new optical disc process.

    So, instead of lugging six 35-pound reels of 35 mm film for a two hour movie, you only need a 2-pound 300 mm optical disc; given our considerable experience in mastering and duplicating optical discs it'll be way cheaper to duplicate and ship 8,000 to 10,000 optical disc copies of a movie intended for theatrical projection than to duplicate and ship 8,000 to 10,000 35 mm film prints.
  • Because they could.

    Why is somebody building humonguous drives that can store more data than I would be able to absorb in my entire waking lifetime? Will they sell me one? Maybe not or maybe two (you got to have backup.)

    Why is somebody building humonguous drives that can store more data than a small to average average business will generate in its entire corporate lifetime? Same reasoning.

    Its got nothing to do with me, or you. They do it because they CAN.
    All of scientific progress is based on "... ?" and all technological progress is based on "... !", the debris left by the answers.
  • The new disc can store 150 CDs of favorite songs or an equivalent of 20 DVDs, Tsai said.

    So I can't use this disc to store vast quantities of Celine Dion music? Excellent!

    Any more information on this Favorite Song Determination technology?

  • When are we finally going to see reasonably high-speed, high-capacity, semi-permanent, random-access, directly-writable media?

    The closest thing I've ever seen is magneto-optical, and that hasn't taken off at all.

    Instead, what we have is random-read, serial-write media like CD-R that requires that you build a filesystem image in memory or on a hard disk before you write it out to CD (or DVD).

    But what I'd really like to see is removable media with the same read/write characteristics as a hard disk (so that I can create and use a filesystem on it) but which is much more "permanent" (like CD-R).

    So why are we currently only getting one but not the other? Why can't we get both in the same package?

  • You see the problem with such a disk is it's inability to be written to more than once. By the time the damn thing wrote 100GBs of data to the disk, the media would have been leaped over by new technology!
  • After seeing the pic in the Taipei Times link I was totally disapointed. I was giving the first article the benefit of the doubt that they mean super sized in terms of data, not amount of plastic. Who do they think they are making album sized media? I get pissed off at Japanese optical media manufacturers for dragging their feet on bring the newer lasers to market quicker and such, but at least they stick to the standard CD size.
    It's particularly silly to see this being pushed on the island of Taiwan that entered the PC market which is now the backbone of its economy with power supplies and standardized case designs. I could understand if this was coming from Brazil or some other country trying to usurp the low end peripherals market by forcing a new form factor, but Taiwan? I don't get it.
    I would have been more impressed with a 20Gig disc the size of a CD. This product is obviously strictly experimental because it's ignoring some of the most obvious market realities as anyone who looks at the picture can quickly conclude.

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