What, already?

Wait, one terabyte? On a single disc?

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Mmmm.... Sounds delicious! Although I only ever expected that blu-ray was only going to be a short-term thing, so fortunately I never bought into it. I think I have like, one blu-ray DVD.

I'm not sure I'm sad about buying blu-ray yet... it has kept my brother from stealing all my movies... but a whole season on one disk? Awesome stuff!

Eh, it will probably be a while before it becomes really viable. Its like any other new format. Blu-ray technology was being developed in 2002. Though it will be cool once this is viable. Though I wonder how people will react when a company still charges 50 dollars for a whole tv season when it is on just one disc.

Othero, I'd just like to let you know how much I approve of what was in your "recently played tracks" at the time of this posting. (It was the entirety of Funeral.)

Sony, with a potentially dangerous business decision, attempt to compete with themselves

Cool! Now rage with me about how I can't find tickets to the Boston show!

I think it's a good time to do it. Blu-Ray burners haven't really taken off yet. HVD looks like it'll be manageable for the consumer market much faster than Tapestry. We're also talking storage on par with hard drives. Sony might be advertising this as a media thing, but what they're really doing is investing in the next storage technology.


In this case, the technology is already done. It's completely out of development and sitting around, waiting for someone to start manufacturing it.

The way I read it I thought this was pretty much that the laser technology was done. The discs for it have not been standardized yet. I expect it to be a bit of time before standards are set and we see anything rolled out. To go back to Blu-Ray, the blue laser diode was out far before the Blu-Ray disc. Only half of the package has been finished.

I think this kind of thing is somewhat of a detriment to the video game industry. The amount of time it takes to develop games these days is increasingly time consuming, especially when the standard of graphics has slowly increased over the years. Look at Final Fantasy XIII, for instance, which graphically is a stunning game. It took such a long amount of time for it to come out that by the time it was released nobody even really cared. I consider it a failure, actually.

I think you're correct when you say "this kind of thing" — it's not just media discs at fault, but computer-related technology in general.

In the 1980s, text adventure games could be created by one person or by a small team of people. To this day, they're still fun to play (in my opinion), requiring nothing but a tiny bit of software, very basic hardware and your imagination to enjoy. You didn't need a team of artists, musicians, voice actors, modelers, writers, two dozen coders, QA bureaucrats, and investors to create a game. The fact that that hurdle is a prerequisite now to create a game more than a few people will buy nips many excellent game ideas in the bud, I feel.

I consider the 1990s to be the golden age of computer gaming. Sure, you needed more musicians, artists, coders and investors in the 1990s to create a successful game, but I feel it was a good balance compared to today. Timeless classics (such as Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, X-COM, Jagged Alliance, Sid Meier's Alpha's Centauri, Master of Orion 2, and even StarCraft) could be developed in a couple of years or less. Innovation and crazy, unique ideas were accepted and encouraged. Those games were extremely fun then, they're still fun today, and they've aged very well.

Once 3D graphics became mandatory for success (anyone else remember the earliest 3D games? God they're ugly now, unlike their 2D counterparts), and once people started demanding motion-capture techniques, movie-like cinematic elements, voice acting and the most realistic graphics possible, the golden age came to a close. These days, developers really only go with tried-and-true formulae. There's very little innovation, because investors and developers aren't willing to take a risk on games with price tags in the multiple millions of dollars, and development times ranging from four to six or even seven years.

There are still good games released these days, to be sure. But frankly, I've never seen anything as amazing as Planescape: Torment in years, and there are more good games on the Nintendo DS than on the computer and all consoles combined. Sometimes, low-tech and 2D graphics are preferable and superior to the absolute best technology available.

I guess the hoi polloi simply can't or won't recognize that. I still play more games that were released between 1991 and 2000 than I do games released between 2001 and 2010. Lusternia itself is a delicious throwback to an earlier time, and we all spend ridiculous amounts of time playing it and enjoying the crap out of it. Sometimes, older is better.

This laser disc thing is nice and all, but increasing the amount on a single disc really just means slower load times. Blu-Ray is slower to load than a standard DVD already, requiring caching to bring performance back up to acceptable rates. Blu-Ray is also still plagued by inconsistent implementations and significant spec changes from one revision to the next, meaning that some discs just don't play in some players.

I'm still waiting for IBM's promised holographic storage devices.

I can't think of anything besides archival convenience that would require that much space on one disc. People filling it up just because it's there is going to be a detriment.

Just think: you could finally put all the movies that use "Matrix-like special effects" in the description onto a single disc... maybe.