14 DAY TRIAL // I thought that I could talk this week about the crayon or electric colors which have conquered the technology market, being used for memory sticks especially, but also for our already beloved DS Lite, which features a so called 'royal pink', meaning that it is 'a politically correct expression' for the same pastel pink that made my head explode this summer. But I changed my mind.
However, this color has been adopted also by men and now the streets of Bucharest crave for just a stain of black in this pink world. And believe me, its not so fancy-shmency to dress in pink when you are a guy, but the fact that Nintendo adopted the fashion for its great DS Lite it's just too much for me.
But I'll move on to another, more interesting subject, a controversy which is making the headlines for more than three months.
It's about discs and storage in general and about formats in particular - the Blu-ray, HD DVD and AVCHD to be more exact, but also about the latest discoveries in the storage research field.
So, if you remember it all started nicely a few months ago when the Alliances were made, 'the Blu-ray gang' having the most chances of winning, as they were many and all of them powerful. They are the leaders of the market and I'll mention only Sony, the main backer, Pioneer and Samsung. The latter launched the first ever Blu-ray compliant player but became afterwards neutral when it has announced that it intends to develop a hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD player. A double-agent it appears. Way to go!
"We don't have a plan to make an HD DVD-only player, but are considering a universal player. We are preparing HD DVD [support] now and if we launch a universal player it will be the end of this year or early next year," said Kim Du-Hyon, an assistant manager in Samsung's home-platform product planning division, in a briefing with reporters at the company's headquarters in Suwon, South Korea, IDG News Service agency claims.
Then came the devices? Everything you can imagine, from full-featured notebooks to players, burners, discs, of course, and movies released by Universal, the HD DVD ones, and by Sony Pictures, the Blu-ray compliant media.
But all was going well until last week when the bad news came to town, tearing down the Alliances and delaying the products' releases. Until that crucial moment in time, the analysts were the only ones who raised up the flag, saying that the battle will end up in a disaster, as it resembles to the Hollywoodian Betamax/VHS combat which took place in the 1980s, generating millions of dollars losses and puzzlement on the retail market.
Moreover, "The average person probably doesn't even care," said American Technology Research analyst PJ McNealy. "The fourth quarter of 2006 is when the clock really starts on these items. The first big real push will be the holiday season of 2007, but then you still have the rival format issue clouding things." They don't care? But what about the media and the storage capacity which could satisfy the needs of any computer user?!
Another format alliance emerges? in vain it seems
Oh, well they were wrong, as the clocked has stopped and all the good guys in town do nothing but wait for a miracle or for an end of the components crisis.
And now Toshiba calls for an amnesty in this battle, saying that the company will back any initiative that is aimed at developing a hybrid format, which will settle down the Alliances. "We have not given up on a unified format. We would like to seek ways for unifying the standards if opportunities arise," said Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba's president.
But Sony answered by announcing along with Panasonic that they have developed a new format - the AVCHD - which was licensed today and that they intend to create another backup Alliance, in case 'the Blu-plan' fails I assume.
But Panasonic proved to be a back-stabber. I'm exaggerating of course, but it has announced that it will develop its own HD format. "Panasonic's efforts to develop the technology to record HD images onto SD Memory Cards and construct a new playback and editing environment, in addition to its establishing the AVCHD standard for 8-cm DVDs, will serve to further stimulate development of products that take advantage of the characteristics of both media," said the company.
More precisely, this new HD recording technology, especially created for SD Memory Cards, will have the same features as the AVCHD standard, a very capable encoding procedure which is able to record 1:1080i and 2:720p images in HD format on an 8 cm DVD disc. However, the combination of both standards enables the manufacturer to produce smaller and more compact camcorders with an increased image and sound high-quality. And that's the catch - technological duplicity and the more human - "I what it all".
More precisely, 1:1080i is an HD standard featuring 1080 scanning lines which are connected between each other, and 2:720p is also an HD standard, although this one is using not a connected scanning, but a progressive one, which features less scanning lines - only 720.
'The Superman-Hacker Returns' and the formats are ruined
Even if the players just knocked over the retail market, the movies have already been hacked, as the editors from a specialized German technology magazine found out just last week that the security shield has a really big whole (a bug) and you don't have to "struggle' in order to break it down. And, what is actually hilarious is the fact that the editors used Toshiba Qosmio and Sony Vaio for the job. I can only imagine what they felt (the manufacturers I mean) when they found out that their notebooks are the back-stabbers.
And now comes the cherry on the cake, only for the journalists, of course? Two reports created by some undisclosed Asian sources showed that the Blu-ray backers will launch their players next year in January, and there is a laser diode shortage that will determine a serious delay of the Blu-ray disc burners' launches.
The first report indicated that the Blu-ray Aliance will not be present at an important consumer fair held in Berlin this month, and the products will be showcased in January during the next Consumer Electronics Show organized Las Vegas. On the other hand, the second report showed that most of the Optical disc drive (ODD) manufacturers are already delaying the launch of their announced Blu-ray products due to a laser diode shortage.
It seems that the crisis was determined by the small number of suppliers - only two - Sony and Nichia, and by the PlayStation 3, which is due for launch in November and the mass production necessitates most of the manufacturer's laser diode. Moreover, at this moment, Sony is the main supplier of laser diodes for Royal Philips Electronics, BenQ and Lite-on IT. So, they can all take a long vacation, waiting, I hope not in vain, for some components.
But today was Toshiba's turn to sink its teeth into HD DVD's soil, as it has publicly announced that it will delay the launch of its high-definition optical disc recorder based on the HD DVD format to July 27. But it seems that the problems will be solved in a short notice, as the issues are related strictly to the supply of components, and not to a bug occurred in the software or a malfunction in the production processes.
This 'there is no serious problem' announcement has been made also by the other Alliance, but after some time we discovered that it is just dust that covers the volcano of some big production issues.
Bye-bye 'Miss Asian Pie' of formats
So, I can say with my hand on my heart: "The Blu-ray & HD DVD kings are dead! Long live the new kings!" because the crown of storage capacity has been passed over to other better formats. And when I say better, I mean that if the Highlander was still alive (lol), he would be beheaded, as these discs can survive for up to 5.000 years with all the information on them and we are speaking of libraries stored on these little babies. Imagine the entire Metropolitan library on just one CD?
The first one -the Hyper CD-ROM - is a tridimensional multilayer optical memory, a glass disk with storing capacity of over 10,000 Gigabytes (GB), which can be manufactured by using commercial equipment. More precisely, the user can store on a disk with a 120 mm diameter and 10 mm thick more than 1 PB (1,000,000 GB).
The Hyper CD-ROM is, according to the definition given by the inventor, an "optic tridimensional multilevel memory" so it can store data in over 10,000 different levels inside a glass disk 10 mm high and 120 mm in diameter. "The most attractive aspect is that the support for storage (i.e. fluorescent photosensitive glass) is a very stable in time medium (information can be read during all the life of the glass - estimated to at least 5,000 years)," has written Dntb web site.
The second format is said to boast a storage capacity of up to 50TB (terabytes - 50,000GB) and has been developed by a Harvard Medical School team of researchers who discovered that the proteins, previously applied onto a common DVD, increase the storage capacity. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan, one of the researchers, said that, in this moment, a protein-coated disk could store up to 20 times more than a just released Blu-ray support.
"Using modified proteins from the membrane of a salt marsh microbe called halobaterium slinarum -- also known as bateriorhodopsin (bR). The proteins store data by capturing light in a very natural way. Light is converted to chemical energy, a series of intermediate molecules that are unique. The molecules then return to a "ground state", which is a chemical change in which they are all the same. Professor Renugopalakrishnan was able to modify the protein DNA so that the unique state, or "intermediate" stage, would last for years instead of breaking down in a matter of hours. With this modification, any unique intermediate state could be considered a 1 while a "ground state" could be considered a 0," detailed Daily Tech.
So I am wondering again. Why isn't there in the outer space a manufacturer that intends to adopt at least one of these formats and mass produce these storage goodies?!
I understand that they have invested big time in the battle, in devices, in research and in the Alliances', but why don't they choose a support with a larger storage capacity? They will still be the leaders and the suppliers of technology, and we are speaking about one which could last for 5.000 years? Oh, well I think that we will dream of these media for a long time, but I hope my children will benefit from such an innovation that could entirely change a whole world, not just the IT one, but everything.
I don't know about you, but this battle, the back-stabbers and the politically correct announcement are starting to get on my nerves.
Photo Credits (image 2) - Taiwandc.org
