Hitachi announced a new optical drive, a Hybrid SATA III which combines the optical technology with SSD. Details are non-existent, but combining an optical drive and with an SSD drive and you’re going to have one hot device. Hitachi announced the drive at the CEATEC trade show today, but didn’t mention any launch date, price, or capacity. [via Akihabara News] → Read More
Just as the technology world is on the verge of bucking physical media for digital storage, G.E. might have extended its life with a laboratory breakthrough. A G.E. lab has been working since 2003 to find materials and techniques to increase the reflectiveness of the holograms so they are actually readable by optical lasers. The breakthrough involved a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of… → Read More
As William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” A few years ago I thought streaming video was an impossible dream. Networks were too slow, we said, and no one cared about streaming. A few us held the torch high and shouted in a stentorian voice “We shall stream!” but it was still not to be. We had TiVo, but that was securely ensconced on a hard drive in a… → Read More
DigiTimes is reporting on Pioneer’s new layered optical disc. Each of the disc’s 16 layers holds 25GB, for a total storage capacity of 400GB. That’s 8x the storage on a double-layer Blu-Ray disc, which according to my CrunchGear companions holds an awful lot of porn. The new discs use a reflective layer, but should be compatible in existing Blu-Ray players, according to Pioneer. → Read More
This unholy union of wiimote and tribble looks to be a pretty relaxing way to move your cursor around, but somehow I don’t see it catching on in the mainstream. All you need to do is cannibalize a normal optical mouse, make sure it’s got batteries and a “hull” and you run your thumb over the sensor, making for a sort of optical trackball. Looks pretty weird, but it might be… → Read More
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