Posted on 07/11/2009 8:41:34 PM PDT by Swordmaker
a grown up version of Harry Potter, minus the cape.
A few years ago, I took a grad-level course wherein I wrote a paper on storage devices. I pulled my punch and did not include my prediction of the extinction of the disk drive; I had no need to make controvertible assertions, and I did get an A.
One thing I wrestled with was the elimination of the DVD. There were all sorts of 3D-DVD technologies emerging, which I didn’t see as terribly promising. (Not to say that they wouldn’t come to market, just that they would only prolong disk technology, not save it.) On-line videos (NetFlix) were already coming out, but I figured infrastructure would lag. Something had to replace the video store, and I couldn’t picture video stores switching directly over to SD. What would be the technology that would be halfway between a video store and a SD boot?
These video kiosks which I had not known of at the time are exactly it. Installing a feature to transfer single-viewing videos to your flash drive instead of getting a disk is simple.
Yikes! I need it... :-)
Two years ago I was helping a friend fix his Windows PC along with another friend of his who was a Senior Microsoft Engineer and owner of six tech companies of his own including Inova (he wrote the power management software for the white LED flashlights that extended the battery life). He pulled out a Flash Drive that was slightly larger than normal that also had its own little LCD screen along with a slide switch. He handed it to me. The LCD screen said "32GB." He told me to push the switch to the other position... when I did, the screen now displayed "2TB!" I laughed and said "Great joke gadget." He replied, "Nope, it's a prototype. The 32GB mode allows regular Windows computers to see it... at least a lot of them will."
I asked him how much it cost... after he said "If you have to ask, you can't afford it!", he more seriously replied that if they were sale, they would be ruinously expensive. In a couple or three years you'll see them for sale when we get the price down and the memory dies more reliable. The failure rate on the dense memory chips is over 85% right now. That isn't good enough for production runs yet. I'm still waiting.
Heh. I haven’t used my optical drive on my notebook yet. I downloaded all my software that wasn’t included. OpenOffice, the GIMP, Chrome, Putty, VLC media player. I thought I’d miss MS Access (the included MS Office didn’t include Access), but I got use to MyPhpAdmin. And the only games I’ve bought have been on Wii.
No, that's Steve Jobs... Bill Gates is Ron Weasley. Steve Ballmer is Vincent Crabbe...
Big mistake. I need my DVD drive to watch movies, and Netflix doesn’t deliver them on SD card.
I think the in-home, album art package will be about the size of a postal card... the in-store retail blister packs will be about the same size as currentlytoo big to slip into a thief's pocketand still hard to open.
A lot of people watched movies on Beta Tapes... then on VHS Tapes... then on Laser Disks... now DVDs... Netflix does provide downloadable movies. It's only a small step to sending out movies on SD cards instead.
No, but you could take some of the later 5.25” Apple II floppies and hook them up to the Mac. It would work, albeit not well.
And then there was the LC and LC II which had an Apple IIe on a card internally - which could connect to a 5.25” Apple II drive and transfer files to and from the Mac.
I do video for my son’s sports team. I have to distribute the video to some extremely non-technical people. They can just barely get a conventional DVD player to work. The DVDs are $0.30 in bulk. No way I can distribute the video on SD.
Also, what’s the archive lifespan of a SD versus a properly stored DVD. No where near as permanent I’ll bet.
External optical drives aren't gonna disappear. The question is whether they'll be standard on every laptop. External optical drives will still be available -- even today, you can still get USB floppy and Zip drives.
The bottom line is that DVDs hold data. Movies, installers, whatever it is, it's just data. When another medium becomes smaller, cheaper, faster to load, more reliable, and with a smaller, cheaper, more reliable drive to read it, that medium will take the lead.
Apple was ahead of the curve in dropping removable magnetic drives, and while this article takes some leaps, when optical drives become obsolete I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is the first to drop them. As it did 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, RS-232 ports, CRTs and dial-up modems.
lolz
Those were the days.
Netflix does do streaming video. ..and you can rip DVDs to SD cards.
That said, DVD disks are a great cheap distribution medium. Pressed disks are cheap and quick to produce. They (and Blu Ray) will remain a staple of the retail store for at least 10 years.
DVD drives will quickly disappear from laptops. They make the computers larger and more fragile than necessary. Remove the DVD and spinning hard drive and you can build a tiny, robust computing device.
IMHO, the next generation of small laptops will be tablets. For portable operation, you can use a soft keyboard like an iPHone. Heavier users can use a bluetooth or usb keyboard. With a tablet design, you also get rid of the hinge, which is the other weak link of the laptop design.
For the sake of argument, I’m typing this post on an Apple bluetooth keyboard that is small enough to fit into a laptop case.
One difference between the two: as an “electrical device”, flash memory cards would not survive exposure to an EMP pulse; optical disks (non-electrical) would.
I’ll keep backing up the really important stuff onto 2 disks, stored in cool, un-sunlit places far apart.
Rotating media are so 20th century.
I totally agree. Optical is dying quickly.
I envision the day where the mailings will stop and Netflix can only be downloaded.
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