Sony's Blue-Violet Laser the Future Blu-ray? 260
JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese researchers from Sony and Tohoku University announced the development of a 'blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser,' which Sony is aiming to use for optical disks. The new technology, with 'a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region' and a power out put 'more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology, while retaining a practical size. Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated."
Oh no. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Here come some more shark comments. Sheesh!
I think for the next April Fool's day Slashdot should automatically reject all comments that contain the words 'Shark' and 'XKCD'. Think of all the people that'd get!
Re:Oh no. (Score:4, Funny)
The world looks mighty good to me,
'Cause goatse holes are all I see.
Whatever it is I think I see,
becomes a goatse hole to me
Goatse hole how I love your anusy gue,
Goatse hole I think I'm in love with you
Whatever it is I think I see,
becomes a goatse hole to me.
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You, troll, have ruined the tootsie roll song forever. FOREVER. ):
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They were already there, hence it's automatically on topic. It's almost like saying "Sigh, here comes another Slashdot story..." which will inevitably relate to the much more important topic surrounding shark mounted lasers.
Hence, I'm happier with this Slashdot story because it's actually *more* on topic than usual.
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Seriously... I've just about had my fill of the damn shark joke. Yes, it was a brilliant movie, but it and the flood of quotes it spawned are all 13 years old. For the love of God, let the shark quote die.
Oh no.. does this mean we'll be hearing that stupid chair joke until at least 2018? *sigh*
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aside from the comments, I have no idea what you are all talking about. Enlighten me, please?
Re:Oh no. (Score:5, Funny)
In 2005 there was some story that Steve Ballmer threw a chair. Every day since then somebody has made a +5 Funny post referring to it. According to Slashdot, if Steve hits a red light while driving to work, he'll throw a chair, and the idea of that is really really really funny.
Re:Oh no. (Score:5, Funny)
According to Slashdot, if Steve hits a red light while driving to work, he'll throw a chair, and the idea of that is really really really funny.
Well... I personally think it is pretty funny that Steve Ballmer keeps a chair in the trunk of his car to throw out into traffic whenever he hits a red light but hey maybe I'm a bit odd...
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In Soviet Russia, shark quote lets you die!
Yet Another Format War on the Way... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, as soon as Sony brings this to market, some other company, or group of companies, will unveil a competing product incompatible with Sony's, starting yet another format war. Too bad these guys can't just work together and agree on a common format and save us all time, money, and having to deal with dead formats (e.g. HD-DVD).
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The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
*props to RvB
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If your storage medium has to explicitly allow your content then someone is doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
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If your storage medium has to explicitly allow your content then someone is doing it terribly, terribly wrong.
Yeah, they were very stupid about licensing, and that's why, even with, what a year+ lead, HD-DVD died an embarassing death. This is one case where the market really DID decide.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
HD-DVD was supported by Warner Brothers and Universal.
Blu-Ray had Disney.
In home video, that is all you need to know to predict a winner.
Disney was the rocket that launched the ABC television network into orbit in the mid 1950s.
When Disney moved to NBC and all-color programming, the big screen B&W set was on the fast track to oblivion.
The big screen HDTV is family entertainment -
and Disney has 87 years of product to meet that demand.
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The only reason HD-DVD didn't take off was Not enough repeated letters in the name to be catchy. This time they'll try HHDVVDDBVD.
The reason HD-DVD didn't take off was because they didn't allow porn.
ya got that backwards. HD-DVD did allow porn, initially Blu-ray did not.
Re:Yet Another Format War on the Way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yet Another Format War on the Way... (Score:5, Funny)
An equally-large problem will be finding "50 high-quality movies" from the current crop.
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Of course, as soon as Sony brings this to market, some other company, or group of companies, will unveil a competing product incompatible with Sony's, starting yet another format war. Too bad these guys can't just work together and agree on a common format and save us all time, money, and having to deal with dead formats (e.g. HD-DVD).
This is the first time I've ever seen an Insightful mod used on the proposal that a Sony format should be unanimously adopted.
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He never said the Sony Spec was to be the one to rule them all, but rather he suggested they all work together to make the next spec to avoid a format war.
I would like to append something to that request, set all the features in stone, so consumers wont have to worry about firmware upgrades or hardware upgrades every time someone says hey wouldn't it be cool if... and then puts it into production. Sure the PS3 can keep up with the evolving blu-ray specs but not every device can.
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He never said the Sony Spec was to be the one to rule them all, but rather he suggested they all work together to make the next spec to avoid a format war.
Well... I guess you're right that it's ambiguous. I read that out of it because he said that somebody would come along with a competing format after Sony did. But, yeah, I see your point.
I would like to append something to that request, set all the features in stone, so consumers wont have to worry about firmware upgrades or hardware upgrades every time someone says hey wouldn't it be cool if... and then puts it into production. Sure the PS3 can keep up with the evolving blu-ray specs but not every device can.
I'm not really certain how I feel about that. We have cheap flash memory and processors now. Why not make a standard piece of hardware updatable? Well.. okay after I typed that I realized we were talking about Sony. heh
Another new format? (Score:2)
People haven't even moved from DVDs to Blu-Ray yet, judging by the amount of shelf space still given to DVDs.
Is Sony TRYING to kill off blu-ray?
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History is easy to forget. DVD was around on the shelves for almost a decade before it hit mass consumption levels. Blu-ray will probably see the same time frames, and this update to the format will take years of research and development before it's even commercially viable.
Don't sweat it.
Re:Another new format? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another new format? (Score:5, Informative)
History is easy to forget. DVD was around on the shelves for almost a decade before it hit mass consumption levels.
No, it wasn't.
DVD came out between late 1996 (Japan) and early 1999, depending on where you lived. Here in the UK it apparently came out in late 1998 (*), and in 3-4 years sharply falling prices were already seriously eroding the VHS market. I got a DVD-ROM drive for UK £40-45 circa 2002, and that wasn't especially cutting edge (nor expensive!) by that time.
(*) Or so Wikipedia claims. However, I remember DVD-ROM drives and decoder cards being offered- albeit it at a notable premium- as a mainstream option when I was choosing a PC in Spring '98.
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Yes, but they didn't announce Blu-ray right when DVD was starting to get really popular.
Leaking information about a successor to Blu-ray this early is an Osborne.
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Hah, remember analog Laserdiscs?
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None of that three objections at the end matter much in a format for delivery of content for consumption; especially with its mass stamping for pennies.
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heya,
Not to nitpick - but they have the diode, lol.
It's just the specs, and a marketable product they don't have yet =).
But otherwise, your post is spot on, it'll probably be at least half a decade before this comes to market - they have to miniaturise and mass produce it before.
Cheers,
Victor
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I'm not whining, I just find it amusing that Sony is exhibiting their typical behavior and beginning the process to shoot themselves in the foot. Again.
I'm in the camp of opinion that DVDs are good enough for almost all of the garbage being pushed out of hollywood, and that optical media in general has a limited future at best as other technologies outpace it.
By the time they've made this into a real product (Score:5, Insightful)
Or worse, we'd be walking around with 1Gbps wireless connections and we'd be streaming HD movies from YouTube.
So unless they've figured out how to cram like 1PB or even 1EB on an optical disc, they're walking down a blind alley.
Re:By the time they've made this into a real produ (Score:5, Insightful)
We'd already be walking around with 500GB USB sticks.
Or worse, we'd be walking around with 1Gbps wireless connections and we'd be streaming HD movies from YouTube.
And the "HD" YouTube videos would still look like shit.
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You're right, I think the article is way off the mark. I don't think there will be another viable packaged video disc format. The article makes no mention of possible use in fiber optics, the higher information density could allow much more information to be transmitted, assuming it is at all compatible with fiber.
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Is there such a thing as "compatibility" with fiber? I mean, I know that optic fiber's frequency-transmission characteristics aren't perfectly flat, which probably yields more or less signal attenuation, but it's not like photons come in different 'formats'.
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I look forward to the day spinning optical media dies. Hard disks are decent, but optical media is fiddly stuff. Lot of poor quality optical drives out there. They don't last, and they often error out halfway through a burn. They're slow. As if a motor to spin the disks isn't enough of a mechanical weak point, they insist on powering the trays. Device drivers for both Linux and Windows are flaky. And the disks! They decay, warp, and scratch. And lastly, the politics. There are the format wars of c
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one benefit tho is that a fried drive do not lead to lost data.
Convenience over Quality (Score:2)
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True; how long would it take to download ~5 TB (20x 50 GB) over a 1 gbps connection? What if they were lower quality, or compressed in a lossy way, and we still could torrent them, or even just stream the whole thing from Netflix? I suspect the convenience of streaming (or of downloading them ahead of time) will outweigh this.
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But hard drives aren't, even with necessary migration to mitigate drive failure.
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Why the plug for "24?" (Score:2, Funny)
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No, it'll store the L Word but mute all the volume to stay extra manly.
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In fact, researchers have dubbed it the Man's Blu-Ray. [youtube.com]
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Presumably the disks would not include 24 with all the commercials, so one season would actually be quite substantially less than 24 hours of video.
um (Score:4, Interesting)
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Like hard drives?
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For delivery, not storage.
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I'm not so sure. Netflix instant viewing is nice, but that quality definitely doesn't equal full HD. Better than DVD, sure, but not better than BD. Network speeds could increase, but I wouldn't bet on them increasing significantly any time soon, in the USA, with the way our telecom companies are run here.
Streaming distribution of HD content might be feasible in an advanced country like South Korea or Finland, but not in the USA. Our network speeds just aren't fast enough.
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And suddenly people here want to practically completelly give up their control over media? How did that happen?
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Netflix happened. For $9/month, you can watch just about all the streaming movies you want (plus check out one DVD by mail at a time). That's way cheaper than buying DVDs, and it's easy and free to re-watch something you've already seen.
Yeah, if they were trying to push a pay-per-view model, that probably wouldn't work so well, and the Slashdotters would insist on getting the DVDs by mail so they could rip them before returning them. But unlike all the other media companies these days, the guys at Netfli
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Yeah, this is exactly the route we want to go down. I, for one, can't wait for the day when there is no longer any way to watch a movie without twenty minutes of advertising in every hour.
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We are, at least this media. It'll be as popular as SACD and DVD Audio, which is to say not at all. Ever notice how they could sell DVDs with about 1000 of those iTunes tracks, but they don't? This won't be used to sell more on one disc, it'll be to tell you that you need BeyondHD resolution and lossless 384KHz/48 bit audio for your bats because otherwise you'll miss the overtones. Looking at the encodes I see that even BluRay is often overkill. Outside of backwater countries like the US the connection spee
Great DRM mechanism ... (Score:2)
Use it too many times, the media is burned to a crisp.
"Why isn't this thing working - let me look in and see if there's anything clogging the ....AGGH MY EYEBALLS!"
Now if they can make a switchable converter that will let it emit in visible light, little Johnny the future serial killer can also tease cats
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My dog is color-blind, you insensitive clod! :-)
Seriously, longer-wavelength light exhibits less scattering [wikipedia.org]. You wouldn't be able to tease a cat or dog a block away with a near-uv light.
405 nm (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia, the light used in a bluray laser is also 405 nm, so that isn't the new part, in case that was confusing for anyone else.
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50GB? 100? 200? 20xWhat? (Score:2)
Instead, the maximum size a standard Blu-ray player can read is apparently 100GB, and I've never seen one that big. Everything is 50. 200GB discs exist, but rare as unicorns, and I guess unplayable with a special 200GB-Blu-ray drive.
That article doesn't even mention
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Wife: (eyes rolling) Why do you need *another* movie player?
You: But hon! This one uses a 405 nanometer laser! That's in the blue-violet region!
Now all you Blu-Ray movie watchers can sit thru non-skip-able commercials about the "amazing Hi Def picture of the Blu-Vi-402" movies coming soon!
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Now all you Blu-Ray movie watchers can sit thru non-skip-able commercials about the "amazing Hi Def picture of the Blu-Vi-402" movies coming soon!
I'm constantly amused by the fact that these commercials were first put on VHS tapes in order to stop the movie from getting damaged, while on modern media they're the only part of the disk that never seems to get damaged. You can't skip the commercials, but the movie is guaranteed to skip! There's something poetic about that ....
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Well, assuming the contents are laid out on the disk in the most probable order of playback, they should be near the center; I imagine most scratch don't end up there.
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Well, since standard blueray is 50gb and it says this one is 25x bigger then the standard one should be 1250gb.
Though at that point I have to wonder, why don't you just sell the movies on a bloody external harddrive?
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Because mass pressing of optical disks will remain much cheaper... (that it doesn't have to filter to consumers is irrelevant; price of media doesn't dictate the pricing schemes of content owners that much - but it does dictate their margins, so...)
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Because it is to easy to read and write to a hard drive.
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How many Library of Congress National Film Registries is that?
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Exactly my thoughts. A standard BD player can handle 100GB, and some can handle 200GB, which for the "entire season of 24" quoted in the article is 4-8GB per episode, or around 12500kbps. This is more than enough to achieve said result. So tell me, why do we not currently have entire seasons on single discs? Because the manufacturers think we'll not be happy spending large quantities of our cash and only getting a single disc for it. It feels so much better if its an 8-disc box set or whatever. And be
damn (Score:2, Redundant)
Sorry, I'm not buying the capacity claims. (Score:2)
The limit on drive capacity is not switching speed, but focal spot diameter. If this is a 405nm laser, its minimum focus spot will be exactly the same size as the spot of existing Blu-Ray lasers (they're 405nm, too). What am I missing?
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CDs use EFM Encoding [wikipedia.org] to store their data, DVD's use EFMPlus and BD's use 17PP [cdrinfo.com].
Having a faster switching laser may allow for the run lengths to be different. But that's just my best guess.
Re:Sorry, I'm not buying the capacity claims. (Score:5, Funny)
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The limit on drive capacity is not switching speed, but focal spot diameter. If this is a 405nm laser, its minimum focus spot will be exactly the same size as the spot of existing Blu-Ray lasers (they're 405nm, too). What am I missing?
That somebody somewhere along the line hasn't thought about the implications of what they're talking about?
The laser described is a _100W_ laser. Because of the short pulse length, I'm not sure if this makes it a class 3B or class 4 laser, but in either case safety equipment
That's nice...but how much will it cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
If only (Score:5, Funny)
Format War Time Delay (Score:2)
I think a Blue-Violet replacement for BluRay is longer off than most other slashdot posters seem to believe.
Yet another format!?!?! (Score:2)
Geesh.
Confused! (Score:2)
Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated.
First they mention it being capable of holding 50 high-quality movie titles, following up in the same sentence with the show "24". I'm confused - which is it?
Blu-ray beat by hard disks already.. (Score:5, Interesting)
... the cost of 20PK of 25GB discs (500GB) is the same as a 750GB-1GB hard disk, with 2TB hard disks going for $99. The media for blu-ray is not cost competitive with hard disks any longer they better hurry up since by the time blu-ray discs become cost competitive so hard disks no longer offer more bang for the buck there will be new Hard drives out.
LOTR (Score:4, Insightful)
These can hold 20x the capacity, but you'll still have to buy the theatrical and extended special editions of LOTR separately
So really, Hollywood execs will render these discs moot, at lest as far as home entertainment purposes go.
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There's nothing wrong with physical discs, only that they're being overtaken by thumb-size USB flash drives for data storage, and are no longer an economical method of mass data storage. It's cheaper to buy whole hard drives and use those for archives than to use optical discs now.
If they'd get off their asses and make optical discs that can store 1 or even 10 TB, and make them cheap, then optical discs would be relevant again. Until then, forget it.
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For archival uses, write time shouldn't be a big factor, just sheer capacity.
Obviously, they're nowhere near as useful for temporary and portable storage as a thumb drive.
I'd really like to see a 1 or 10 TB optical disc that's cheap and makes it easy for home and small-business users to back up their data without having to buy stacks of hard drives. Tapes (like LTO) aren't a solution, because their drives are obscenely expensive and require special hardware (desktop systems don't have old-style parallel SC
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The only problem is that the drives are insanely expensive, because they're not used widely like optical drives are (it's hard to buy a desktop computer without one). No home user is going to spend $2k or more on a tape drive for backups. You can just buy a spare 2TB hard drive for $100 (though you don't get multiple snapshot backups that way).
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How does that have any significance in types of media which are naturally sequential? (writing? New discs will be meant to deliver what comes past current "HD", that's it)
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If they're anything like DVD-Rs and CD-Rs, then you'll be lucky if they last 10 years. Dye-based discs don't have long lifespans, only the pressed aluminum ones do (if they don't succumb to DVD rot, caused by faulty manufacturing).
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BluRay discs, on the other hand, were specifically designed for that purpose. first, they made the surface a lot more scratch-resistant than a DVD, secondly they crammed three times as much ECC data into a sector.
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BluRay discs, on the other hand, were specifically designed for that purpose. first, they made the surface a lot more scratch-resistant than a DVD,
Did they do this just for the factory-pressed (read-only) discs, or for the writable discs too?
Also, the main reliability problem with DVD-Rs isn't scratching (you can avoid that with careful handling), but with the dye layer degrading over time. That's a problem with any optical technology that uses dye for writability, and can only be lessened by using better
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Size-wise, the only requirement optical discs need to pass, to "stay relevant", is "in the range of typical single instance of media delivered on them" - that's it. CD does that, DVD does that, Bluray does that; next disk will probably have to merely suffice for this format [wikipedia.org] (accidentally, it means at least the higher range of what you think it needs to do to "stay relevant" - but that's beside the point as I said, it's a target which doesn't move continuosly...like your requirement, in reality, does)
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MD and ebooks, really? The former were the first readily available consumer way of copying music without much in the way of generation loss (present digital Walkmans behaving fine). Sony ebookreaders are also quite open; supporting DRM format, sure...but one which is sort of standard; supporting important unlocked ones out of the box. And memory sticks...just different.
Sony is far from a monolithic entity, with some divisions almost appearing like in some sort of struggle between them.
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The former were the first readily available consumer way of copying music without much in the way of generation loss
IIRC most consumer MD decks have SCMS so you could only make single generation copies digitally and for a second gen copy analog was the only option.
Plus even if you defeated SCMS you would still have the sound being encoded and decoded into atrac every generation.
Better than cassete certainly but still generation loss there.
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After 1 minute I wondered if the newsstory is talking about 24h
I'm guessing you're French. In France, the show was called "24h" (as an abbreviation of "24 heures chrono"). In most of the rest of the world, it was just called "24". Details [imdb.com].