Hardware
Terabyte CDs In the Works At Harvard Labs
The key innovation is a nano antenna, which, by attaching to a commercial optical disc laser, can focus the, laser?s surface area from 830 nanometers down to just 40.
As smaller laser sizes mean significantly larger amounts of data per square inch, discs produced by the process could contain as much as sixty times more data than even the highest capacity products available today. According to Federico Capasso, head of the project and Professor of applied physics at Harvard:
“You’d be able to pack more than three terabytes [3,000 gigabytes] worth of data onto something the size of a CD.”
Currently it?s impossible to cram that much data into optical storage media because industry standard lasers are capable of focusing light to only half of their wavelengths. Capasso and his team avoided this roadblock, called the defraction limit, by integrating the aforementioned nano antenna directly into the laser.
Unfortunately, with consumer Blu-ray and HD-DVD players running at $1,000 and $500 US respectively, the 3-terabyte disc is a long way from being commercially viable. While Capasso and his team have done several optical experiments to further investigate the technology, much of the work being done is strictly theoretical. Regardless, I don?t think it would surprise anyone if Sony tried to cram a $20,000 nano-antenna disc into the Playstation 4.
Source : thetechlife.org
51GB HD DVD-ROM Disc
Toshiba has developed a triple-layer HD DVD-ROM (read only) disc with a capacity of 51 gigabytes. The new disc can store up to 7 hours of high-definition video and adds an extended capacity, high-end option to the already extensive line-up of HD DVD-ROM discs. Toshiba aims to secure approval of the new disc by the DVD Forum within this year.
Toshiba HD DVD-R Laptop
In late February in Japan, Toshiba will begin selling its first laptop PC in the world with support for the write-once HD DVD-R optical disc format. The G30/97A will be an upgrade of existing models of Toshiba’s hefty Qosmio G30 entertainment laptop. The computer is based on an Intel Corp. 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and has a 17-inch wide-screen display with 1,920 x 1,280 pixel resolution, which means it can show high-definition images from HD DVD movie discs. The 4.8-kg machine also features a 320G-byte hard-disk drive, digital TV tuner and HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) output. Toshiba hasn’t announced a price for the computer, which will run the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system. International launch plans were not announced.
Web: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/index.htm
Blu-ray and HD DVD Hacked Already
There’s a hole in the copyright protection for Blu-ray and HD DVD movies that you could drive a truck through. The funny thing is, it’s an alarmingly easy and obvious hack: Print Screen. Sure, you’d have to hit Print Screen and save each one for days to capture the thousands of frames that make up one HD movie, but it’s no big deal to automate this process and then stack the frames up, and there you have it—a near-perfect pixel-for-pixel copy of the Luddite movie studios’ buried treasure.
According to German computer magazine CT, Toshiba acknowledged the vulnerability and vowed that it would be plugged up with the next release of DVD player software. But still. We can only laugh when we recall the interminable demos where smug Blu-ray and HD DVD hucksters blathered on about how it was impossible to hack their invulnerable copy protection. You can’t lock down eyeballs. Information wants to be free, and this is just the first crack in those walls of Jericho, soon to be tumbling down.
Source : Gizmodo
