Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser 194
Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."
obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
archiving video (see above)?
archiving MP3, I guess not many people have >100GB of MP3s?
an easy method of archiving an entire HDD in a few disks?
when you look into it only video/HD makes such a disk make sense.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
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Resistance to UV is only useful if you leave your discs out on your desk in the daytime. Come that point, though, i'd be more worried about coffe-rings after you mistake your archive for a coaster.
I added cork to a bunch of failed burns to make drink coasters. For the bigger non regular size drinking glasses (ever see the 16 oz coke holiday glasses/hugs?)
on topic:
I would like to have 100GB+ disk backup. If it was RW even better. I use RW DVDs for a few home based backup. Format the DVD-RW disk and use it like a big floppy. Yes, there are flash drive and external hard drives that are bigger, but this was setup before flash drives were out. Older non geek people trust a CD/DVD more then the flash drive
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Asking what a user will use it for is shortsighted. DVDs have not been enough for me for several years (I backup using HDDs, cheaper considering my time). Even 100GB disc isn't all that exciting - perhaps HVDs will come out with 320-1TB data, but I suspect flash will be there sooner anyway.
Yes, there is porn for some but that's hardly the only use. For me, I tend to scan in a lot of books that were never printed in quantity. Depending on the book, if it's just for information or if there are important p
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:4, Interesting)
How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?
I'd really have no trouble spending a few hundred dollars on a scanner that would basically do it for me. I really want to move to an e-book, but most of the books I love are rather modest Fantasy books that aren't available in e-book form. A flat bed scanner would take me probably a year to get my entire collection scanned in, and that just won't do.
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It'd require destroying the book, but.
Bansaw
Sheet feed duplex scanner
Just cut off the binding and feed in the book, it'll take a little while but you should have a nice PDF at the end.
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I imagine that the process is the same for precious books now, just with digital cameras instead of microfilm.
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I don't really have precious books, and since these things are going to disintegrate at the rate I re-read them anyway, destroying them in the process of scanning them is not such a bad thing. Plus it seems like it'd be faster :O
Re:how do you scan in books? (Score:2)
How, precisely, do you scan in books? Do you have to manually scan each page?
We have a project at work that is doing this with a small library of books (I think we're up around 35,000 pages scanned so far).
You cut the spine off of the book and drop the pages in the scanner's automatic document feeder. There are scanners available that can scan both sides of the page as they feed through - we're using a Kodak scanner that does about 50 pages a minute.
Pages are scanned to TIFF files and then converted to PDF. We are using Acrobat Capture, which is fairly reliable but as we get into
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Interesting)
and on a more serious note, what would a normal PC user use this for?
It's telling that people are likely, these days, to ask how a normal PC user would use these disks to store his own data, rather than how media companies will use this to distribute their products more cheaply.
Anyway, yes, this would be handy for backups/archives. What else do people use physical media for? I have to back up 5TB of data every week, so don't tell me that these disks have gotten too big for practical application. Even at home, it'd be nice to be able to back up my entire computer onto one disk.
Go ahead and figure out how to store massive amounts of data on cheap plastic with no moving parts. I'll figure out a use for it.
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Here's my backup method:
- Use c: or USB driver for temporary storage of not-yet-viewed movies & tv shows.
- if video is junk, delete it; If the video is good, buy the legal DVD or Bluray version.
- if not available legally (example: Earth Final Conflict), copy on both my C: and my external USB drive, so if one fails I still have the other.
I've never felt any need to burn anything to DVD-R unless giving-away material to a friend. The advantage of this method is I don't waste a lot of money on blanks, and
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Informative)
Well first, even if you buy a legal version of video, that doesn't necessarily mean you get media. iTunes movies and TV shows, for example, are sold without media. If you want to back that stuff up, you'll need something additional. Second, even if you have a legal DVD or Bluray version, you might want to backup that purchased copy. Third, I wasn't specifically talking about movies or TV shows. I'm not even necessarily talking about video.
And then beyond all that, backing up to an external USB drive doesn't necessarily serve my purposes unless I'm buying new USB drives on a regular basis. I'm not just talking about maintaining a running mirror of my current hard drive contents, but maintaining a backup. By that, I mean that sometimes you want to keep copies at set increments, like having a monthly backup that you keep and don't overwrite. Not only does this protect you from a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, but also protects you from data being deleted or overwritten.
Ideally, those backups should be on some kind of WORM media (so I don't accidentally erase something while I'm restoring) that's cheap, reliable, and lightweight. Even for my personal stuff, I can burn a bunch of DVDs and mail them to someone. Since they're light and small, shipping won't be expensive. Since there are no moving parts, I don't have to worry very much about them breaking in transit, but since they're cheap it's not a big problem even if they do break.
BD-Video players need a 2x drive (Score:2)
Further, the media companies don't need it to read any faster than 1x.
I see your point, but one small nit: The "x" for Blu-ray Disc isn't defined the way it is for CD and DVD. A 1x drive reads 36 Mbps, but BD-Video can be up to 54 Mbps for various reasons, so a BD-Video player actually needs a 2x drive.
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They're talking about the possibility of Bluray disks with 4 layers rather than 2, which means that media companies should be able to pack more data onto each disk. Or am I missing something?
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We're getting a bit off-topic here, but I personally think the better strategy there is to create two different backups: one of your OS/applications, and another of your profile.
For most systems, you aren't going to change your OS and applications very often, so it's kind of pointless to back them up frequently. It's nice to have an image with any customizations you might want, so that you can restore quickly, but backing up the entire OS with every backup is usually wasting space on you backup media, as
Re:obligatory! (and more serious..) (Score:5, Insightful)
Audio data doesn't necessarily mean MP3s. Storing your audio in a lossless format like FLAC means about 50% compression, so we're looking at ~250MB/album - 400 albums isn't especially unreasonable.
But who says the data has to be written all at once? I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it.
Good ideas (Score:2)
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* High def videos of their kid's birthday parties?
* Installing Windows $Name Ultimate Extreme we_promise_this_is_really_the_best_version 2010?
* porn?
* Lots of extra "can't skip past it" advertising at the start of movies?
* Extra space for all that next generation DRM?
* Half Life 4?
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I have 70GB of MP3s (over 11,000 songs), all legally ripped from CDs I own. Currently I use a USB hard drive for backup. Would this disk be more or less reliable than a hard drive? I've had problems in the past with DVDs written on one computer being readable on another computer, or even playing correctly in a Sony DVD player.
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I have 70GB of MP3s (over 11,000 songs), all legally ripped from CDs I own.
I'd almost say that MOST of the collections that reach that high or higher or probably, at least largely, legally ripped. When ripping your own CD's that you don't plan on sharing, there's often a trend to use really high bitrates or lossless compression formats. Afterall drive space is cheap and if you're not planning on transferring over a wire, then why bother with the low rate? Online most of the pirated (and even most of the purchased) songs are sitting around 128Kbps.
A 25GB 128Kbps collection becomes
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Archiving AVCHD video (Score:2)
The current crop of SD-card based AVCHD camcorders fills up a 16GB card in about 2 hours. As an added bonus, those files do not require any conversion to be viewed on a BluRay player.
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and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
People keep complaining about the durability of optical media, yet in the 15 years or so I've been using CDs I've had maybe one or two that became unusable due to excessive scratches or other issues - at least for pressed CDs. Some early CD-Rs failed, but in every case it happened within a couple of months of the initial writing. Every CD-R I've written over the past 10-12 years that survived the first couple of months still works fine now, and that is with no special care - stored in jewel cases, or CD wal
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How much of it do you actually listen to?
Let's see... around a minute a megabyte, that's 240,000 minutes, 4,000 hours, 166 days of continuous music.
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fail! you are not many people.
How many people does it take to have many people? Is it more than a couple several or more than a few several?
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neither are you.
audiobooks usually range from 200 MB up to 700-800 MB for a single volume. with educational audio books such as the TTC lectures, a single series can easily run well over 1-2 GB for a single subject--some series even run up to 10 GB.
the GP was simply sharing his personal experience. you're the one extrapolating your habits on to everyone else.
they wouldn't be selling 80 GB and 120 GB iPods if people didn't have 100+ GB mp3 collections.
Is this still releven? (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone wants to do back ups, why not simply buy a 1.5 TB hard drive for ~200 dollars?
I don't see why we need cds anymore...
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Distribution :)
I'm not going to send my mother a hard drive if I want to send her pictures or video. Right now I use DVDs.
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The Slide Show of the 21st Century.
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While YOU might not want hours of video of my daughter doing nothing in particular, I can assure you that my mother does :)
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is this still releven? (Score:4, Funny)
Old enough to look good in a bikini.
Young enough to land-you in jail, you DOMAI! ;-)
CD sometimes not so good... (Score:3, Interesting)
honestly, CD are too easy. simply google for "lost cds uk" and see what a total balls up various government agencies have made of giving all our data away freely,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+lost+cds&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a [google.co.uk]
hell teeth, it should of been easy enough to encrypt it on the CD as a minimum, or VPN it without using a disk.
yes, they are easy to use - but too eas
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.
if it is a stable read-only media that will cost a buck-fifty in bulk and can be slipped into a media-rated fire safe or safety deposit vault, I want it.
if you are serious about back-ups, a single HDD won't be enough. you'll want at least two or three drives for redundant storage- and a UPS to keep them up and running.
it gets expensive.
and still leaves your data exposed to damage from fire and flood.
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You don't really need to have the UPS, just backup nightly, and have the array online during that period. If you're using something sensible like ZFS you're not going to have to worry about disk corruption from the writes.
The bigger issue is getting and keeping the disks offsite. In the long run it's going to make no difference whatsoever between harddisks and discs if you're just going to keep them right next to the computer anyways.
Ultimately a pair of 1 TB drives are likely to be a far better solution th
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Once my projects (video, photo, documents, etc) are finalized they get archived to DVD's. Now DVD's are not overly reliable so I RAR the entire project into 4 gig chucks with a full archive of parity for every 36 gigs (min 1). Then each of those 4
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450mw beam (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that getting into dangerous territory (popping balloons, instant blindness etc)? Recently, high-power laser pointer sales have been banned on eBay and Amazon [bbc.co.uk] here in the UK, I'm wondering if similar restrictions might appear for drives like this.
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Isn't that getting into dangerous territory
Yup! Don't remove it. DVD burners already contain dangerous lasers, and those are in the 200mW range IIRC.
Re:450mw beam (Score:5, Informative)
When encapsulated within a system so that it is not possible for the beam to escape under normal usage then the whole system can be given a class 1 rating and a class 1 label. The laser itself is a class 3B and would have to have this rating if removed from the player. Current Blu-ray recorders are 250mW but are considered safe as they are encapsulated.
Ouch! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. And in other news, those metal things inside toasters get dangerously hot.
Personally, I've given up on using half-disassembled devices.
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Your nerd credentials are hereby revoked. Slashdot bylaws section 12, paragraph 23: to post here you must have at least one half disassembled and operable PC within 100ft of you at all times.
Instant +1 karma if run the system without any mechanical structure at all, beyond FR4 and off the shelf PSUs/HDs.
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Ha! As you can see by my handle, I was never a true nerd in the first place.
Although my PC's case has not been closed in about a year.
Aw, who am I kidding? C'mon guys, let me back in the club! :)
Re:450mw beam (Score:4, Interesting)
They are not retailing a bare laser, they are (well, someday) selling a drive. How is that any different than selling a microwave? Do you know what parts they use in those?
arrrg, should have been a car analogy. -slaps head-
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A car analogy would have been better : you could have made a link with terrorism !
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The fuel for cars is highly flammable and contains dangerous quantities of benzene a toxic carcinogen, as well.
Further, ethanol-based fuel contains a controlled substance in concentrations that are banned in most counties, and in quantities sure to alarm anyone concerned with keeping neurologically sedative drugs off the streets.
When are these death machines going to be banned?
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The laser pointers which fall into class IIIb (5-500mw) are all exposed and can be viewed directly.
Re:450mw beam (Score:5, Funny)
It's a big risk if if you're putting your head into the player and resting your eyeball directly over the laser diode. For people who do that, all we can hope for is more powerful lasers, or perhaps blu-ray players with sharks inside to which the laser is attached.
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No Thanks (Score:2, Funny)
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Invent? (Score:2)
They didn't really "invent" this, did they? They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.
And to answer what it'll be used for: Releasing a new generation of Blu-Ray players that aren't backwards compatible, forcing everyone who has bought a Blu-Ray to rebuy all their Sony-branded movies. Obviously.
No drives exist - just the laser (Score:4, Insightful)
Story states that the drives are 1 to 2 years away. Translation, they have no idea when drives might be on sale, or when 4-layer discs might be available.
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And don't forget the cost - double the laser intensity usually means far more than double the price. The biggest question is what the market would be. Most home users don't produce that amount of data, and enterprises have other storage options. The big driver for the Blu-Ray market is movies and PS3 games. Is 100GB something they need/want? Sure if it came for free, but seriously if you looked at HDDVD30 vs BD50 you'd have a hard time telling them apart. Many of the BD titles carry some absurdly large 8-ch
Worthless. (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter what the technical achivements, in the end you're still hooking it up to one of Sony's defective players. Pass.
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You were an HD-DVD fanboy weren't you? Bitter that your format ate dirt? I can understand the viewpoint of HD vs. SD, cost vs. utility increase but the Sony bashers are just useless to any conversation. Yes, you don't like Sony. Y
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I couldn't care less about HD-DVD, so way to knock that straw man down. The part where perhaps I miss the difference betwen Sanyo and Sony? Rhetoric gold.
The point is that Blu-Ray is defective by design, and it useful to remember it. Impeding the widespread adoption of Blu-Ray and the DRM-infected data formats that lay atop it is a worthwhile thing to do.
External hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link [pricegrabber.com]), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...
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You'll keep buying them as data and pixel densities increase and SNR improves (yes, "digital" does not equal "perfect" and the algorithms can always be made better).
Otherwise we'd all have Kinescope players at home and wonder why anyone would make a Blu-Ray drive...
DRM isn't there to make you buy new stuff every few years. You'll do that anyway. It's there so you will buy the stuff from them instead of from the pirates.
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And encrypted media ends up on P2P services 2 seconds later....
Relevance (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure.. (Score:5, Funny)
It can move a lot of data but is it shark-mountable?
How fast can you spin them? (Score:3, Funny)
Ok, this is great, but how fast can you spin them before they explode?
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Well a CD can be spun to 52x - any player reading faster uses multiple laser.
Martin
parallel (Score:2)
I know it's not quite as good as having a laser-toting shark in your living room, but I would have thought that the lower power lasers might be cheaper.
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It's still the cheapest way to distribute data. CDs/DVDs are produced for a few pennies - and even Blu-Ray is produced at a cost significantly lower than flash or magnetic media of the same capacity.
For backup, it probably will still make sense to use some kind of magnetic media.
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Precisely. It's why Sony, Sega, and later Nintendo abandoned ROM media for distribution of games. Making a cartridge was much, much more expensive that simply pressing a disc. The same cost analysis still applies today for Flash ROM vs. Bluray.
>>>can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers
(shrug). TDK already developed the ability to make 6-layer Blurays that can hold 200 gigabytes. The problem is that already-sold players do not have the ability to read more than two layers.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Because 50 GB optical media costs less than a dollar to press or burn, and 50 GB of flash memory costs about $100. And hard drives cost a minimum of $30 regardless of their size. Am *I* missing something here?
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
One caveat, flash memory is not as reliable of a storage medium as some believe, particularly as densities increase, particularly as they use smaller and smaller processes. Depending on the specific technology, and the level of error correction built into it, optical (even with dust and scratches) is more robust. Flash is great for sneaker net, or the family vacation pictures, but I'm not sure it's suitable for anything you care about.
As long as the market driving this media is digital photography, the concern about the occasional bit being flipped isn't going to change anything. Flipping a bit on almost anything else, is catastrophic.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess you've never heard of OUM memory technology. Same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media, but instead of using a laser to flip bits you use an electrical pulse to change the state of the glass from amorphous (bit 0) to semi-crystalline (bit 1) and voila no more worry about bit flip. It also is stronger than silicon wafers and can tolerate more heat and requires less power for changing bits. Also, due to using the crystalline structure representing 1 or a 0, it's non-volatile. Access times are faster than standard flash devices today. The read/write cycles are several orders of magnitude higher as well than current flash memory.
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In case somebody missed it: this is the same as phase change memory.
EETimes has the following interesting view on it. It seems that it's not for tomorrow yet.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=191900450 [eetimes.com]
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
So, can I buy it? Where? What does it cost?
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And how much do OUM media and OUM drives or readers cost?
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I've never heard of this tech, but the most optimistic lifespan of a CD-RW is 25 years, and in practice they usually die in less than 10 years. So if it uses the "same glass substrate that's used on re-writable optical media", then it's still not suitable for long-term storage.
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>>>So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.
Disagree. Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM. The same is still true today, and will be true in the future. A 50 cent disc (Bluray or otherwise) is cheaper than a $10 flash cartridge.
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You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers. Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?
I feel this could be the "give away the razor, sell the razor blades at a huge markup" scheme that's already affecting the ink/printer market. I'd rather make an large initial purchase and buy the "consumable" items cheaply, compared to the reverse.
I'm also saying this as a bluray player owner, and one who balks at spending $30 on a bluray movie. A flash drive movie would have the high costs of the medium plus the "high costs" of the movie... to result in an expensive "consumable" item. These things sh
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Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM.
Two things:
First, those were probably EPROM's, not flash, but don't quote me on it.
Second, supply+demand+moore's law = totally different situation today.
...I wouldn't be suprirsed if a 1GB EPROM costs more than used car....
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Not that there isn't a lot of truth to what you say but... The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s, whereas this new Blu-Ray laser has a stated read/write speed of 170 MB/sec. So, "cheap" Flash has a ways to go before it's competitive with optical media in strictly read/write performance, which for HD video is of utmost importance. The cost/benefit ratio changes for other purposes, but when speed is on the l
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The subject of this article, as well as key factor to deciding on Flash memory's fate, is SPEED. Cheap flash can read/write at 5-10 MB/s
That depends, if you're doing playback then it only needs to pass the playback speed which is for Blu-Ray max 54Mbit/s raw = 7MB/s. Sure putting it on there would be quite annoying, but if they're cheap enough you might only do that once. So you can either go slow and cheap, or get a fast card to write at high speed. And if you're downloading it and have enough ports you might download directly to the flash drive rather than download to main disk, which would eliminate the problem. Of course, if your friend
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/me takes an aspirin
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The optical naysayers are right. A few PS3 games are already showing degradation of the foil backing, making them absolutely unplayable now.
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All your numbers and calculations mean nothing because of one simple fact:
You'll never have a flash drive under $1. With optical media, it's a guarantee. In a few years, a BD-r will be 50 cents or cheaper.
Nobody will ever hand out a SD drive for distribution. It's too easy to lose a $10 card.
As long as optical media is cheap as in $/unit (NOT $/GB), they'll be around.
Yeah, right. Dual layer DVD(+/-)Rs are still over $1 each (except at some select online stores. In retail, try $2-5 each). No way BD-Rs are getting that cheap any time soon. Pressed disks probably will get cheaper, but the consumer available burnable ones? No way.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The entertainment industry still uses optical because it costs them only pennies to press optical media. Relatively speaking, it would cost them a lot more to distribute hard drives and flash memories that came pre-loaded with something I could watch or listen to.
For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.
Most computers and television sets still do not have built-in flash memory card readers. So other than USB sticks, having CF, xD, MMC, or any of those other formats might be useless if your destination cannot support it.
I think the issue isn't really the media format, but the availability of something that would support such formats. I would prefer flash memory over optical, simply because of its ease of use. And perhaps my perception of time is different, but to me it has always been faster to write to flash than to optical.
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For the average consumer, it's easier to stick a CD inside your car for music, assuming your vehicle has a CD player. Most cars do not have an auxiliary port, iPod jack, or USB slot. Only cars that have been made in the last few years might actually come with these options. Keep in mind, I'm speaking as someone that lives in the U.S., I'm not sure how different the options are in other countries.
Any decent 3rd party CD player has line-in, had one on the player I got ten years ago. The Yaris, Toyota's lowest-end car which is really quite nice, it has line-in as well, standard equipment. The sound system is quite nice. Not up to audiophile standards, obviously, no seal-skin wrapping on the wires to increase the sound's warmth and chewability, but it's nice. Actually, car audio's been sounding good on the imports since the 90's, stock speakers being more than sufficient.
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Can you get a third party adapter that gives you line-in? I know that for my car I could get one for around $100 (+whatever if I don't install it myself) and I think most cars have one of one sort or another.
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You have to think in terms of throughput too. It probably take a fraction of a second to stamp a DVD, whereas with a 'serial' data transfer it can take several minutes.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, optical media sucks. Ever hear of foil rot? There's actually bacteria that will eat away the foil backing of yur disc (usually starting at the inside or outside edges) and it eventually makes your disc unplayable, even if you don't touch it for years! Let's not forget that many optical drives are poorly built and will scratch a huge ring into your disc.
In my decade+ of using optical media, I've always preferred to just use an external Hard Drive. When the first USB burners came out, I bought one, rippe
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But... but CDs are made out of a polycarbonate. The samt hing that Bullet-Proof Vests are made of! They're therefore unscratchable! (See, I remember the late 80's well)
Sapphire! We need to make CDs out of Aluminium Oxide. First we need to mass-produce the stuff in enough volume that the perceived volume goes down. And then use it on PDA, phone, ogg player screens while we're at it.
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Pulses can be shorter, and therefore more frequent, for the same amount of reflected light.
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For comparison, 1x DVD is 10Mbit/s.
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Future, hell. Send 'em to the past. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's send some messages into the future, for one!
Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.
If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.
Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we ha
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It is as much as mixing buttons and drop menus into a toolbar and calling it a "ribbon" is innovating. It's marketing spin.