RAM drives!
Cale,
Are you close enough to the R&D side to know why some unaffiliated and disaffected sort (like myownself, only smarter and gooder looking) hasn't come out with a personal flash player and BELAY the "Music Industry?"
al
Ha..! Not even close.. But your dead ON Al...! I'm just blown away that future "Red Box" movie rentals have not pushed a Flash Drive platform...
NO MOVING PARTS / RAM (random access memory WAYYY better than a laser disc)....! Small drives "memory sticks" that take up little room in a Red Box or video/music download vending machine... Cheap, and easy to mass produce. The drives can just set in the machine un - written and the buyer can list the movies/music they want and with a high cach/bandwidth the flash can be written very quickly < 1min per 4gig... When "if" the drive is returned, the drive is errased and checked for errors then returned to bay for re rental...
There can be an option for movie/music purchase or rental... Cheap enough to rent with copy protection software. A few bucks more will get ya copy write protected movie/music download option....
Set a standard for a flash drive size/shape and technology will continue to create more storage. Heck currently were there as far as storage 4-8gig is all that's really needed for BlueRay, it's the price... Get them out there for < $10.00 and throw in a couple dollar discount for returning the drive to the store/vending machine and this will WORK...!
Now a flash drive player unit... As I see it, the only difficulty is a large enough diplay and control buttons on typical flash drives... But maby a "control" module that's the size of current flash drives and just snap the USB flash drive into it and off ya go Mpeg city..! Still half the size of a Ipod or about the sive of the current Ipod RAM units (no hard drives).
Oh, and the software of your choise NO MORE ITunes Apple if you don't want...!
No More Disc Skips and Scratches, No more noise from the disc player, RAM memory access for FAST reads...............
Win, win, win................ Well, except for magnets...........! Stay away from magnets...! Only advantage for CD/DVD...
The future will be Flash Drives................ Heck, the RAM/ROM storage technology is supplanting optical drives for storage........ 200 gigabit per square inch on a Hard Drive platter is about all that's avaliable.. Any smaller and the Hard drive companies are gonna have to figure out how to write on the substrate (Hard Drive platter) atoms..........!!!!!!!!!!
Coming, Laptops with no hard drives.... Just BIG RAM.................Sweet!
Sorry for the Massive hijack Pete...
cale