Incredible storage.....aaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhh....
But will it be big enough to hold a days worth of posts from FR :-{
Incredible storage.....aaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhh....
The surface of CDs and DVDs are made up of microscopic grooves filled with areas known as pits and land regions, which carry the information. Normal CDs and DVDs carry one bit for every pit. British researchers, however, have now come up with a way to store up to ten times the amount of information from each pit.
British physicists have developed a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that all the episodes of the "The Simpsons" would fit on one disk.
Peter Lorok of the Imperial College London, speaking at a conference in Taiwan Monday, described how he and his colleagues created a way potentially to encode and store as much as one terabyte, which is 1,000 gigabytes, of data. That's 472 hours of film, all on one CD.
That is more than all the extant episodes of "The Simpsons."
Known as Multiplexed Optical Data Storage, it works on a double-sided, dual-layer disk.
Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and zeros.
When read back, CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit.
Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a "step" sunk at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back. 
Vapor DVD stuff?:)
so which companies medium will winout and ruin it for the rest of us?
Bookmark for the marvels of technology!
As "K" said in "Men In Black" -- great, now I have to buy the White Album again. ;') Blu-Ray and other laser based storage systems are in a race that I think they will ultimately lose.
Those tiny memory chips we use in our iPods and digital cameras (and other devices -- wouldn't it be nice to have answering machines that used those same chips?) are huge -- I saw 512mb in various formats tonight -- and cheap -- $46 and change for one. 512mb is a healthy fraction of a CD. The contents can be rewritten as needed, and more quickly. The price is coming down all the time. Also, they're more compact than a CD, and use very little power.
Zip Disks are handy, I've used them for years (since my Apple II days; and got interested in them because InSite Peripherals, which developed the enabling technology, licensed it to Iomega after their own drives, which were 20mb, didn't quite work right), but the media price was never competitive with CD-Rs. Burn a bad one? Suncatcher, try again. Cheap. Even the CD-RW (which IMHO isn't a very good format) uses cheaper media than the Zip.
Jaz, Jaz 2gb, and Clik (a silly 40mb mini format) were even worse when it came to media prices.
bump