You actually very wrong on this point. While you yourself may not need more than 4.3 Gigs per disc for storage, tone of people in many different fields of work and study use that space up in a second flat. There will be a huge demand for these drives once they get into the main stream and become available. Me personally cant wait until these things become available with my photography. I currently have over 2600 burnt DVD's for my scanned images. A high quality scan of a 4x5 negative, which is what I shoot 80% of the time, is usually 650 MB per photo with my Imacon 4x5 scanner, 48 bit, 4200 dpi. 6x7 and 35mm are of course smaller and can range anywhere from 100MB to around 350MB.

With the amount of film I shoot on the average week I go through around 30 DVD's per week with scanning. I would love to be able to compress my archive into 1/6 or even 1/12 the size with BD50. I wouldnt hesitate regardless of cost. Trust me HD storage on computers coundlt have arrived at a better time for a good number of people out there. 4.3 Gigs in todays world just doesnt cut it. Funny thinking that we used to be ok with the 3.5" inch disc, lol

PS...

Relatively speaking, very few people use recordable DVDs. There may be tons out there who use a lot of storage space, but recordable CDs still rule the market for disc storage by a HUGE margin. It's not because people don't need more storage. Rather, it's because CDs are so much cheaper, and people needing much bigger storage generally use external HDs for storage.

Note, kvrdave wrote, "there is not much (any?) real demand for BD drives in computers" and not "there is not much need for storage" which is what you seem to be implying. People have storage needs, but there is not much (any?) demand for 25 GB or 50 GB recordable drives/discs at current prices.

I would think you are the exception, but even if you aren't, I think people would rather pay $8 for 8 writable dvds and take a few more minutes than spend $49 on a BD 50 to do the same thing.

I do think that will change, like I said, when the price gets down quite a bit, but the BD blanks are absolutely cost prohibative compared to the benefit.

Well ill just say this, there is alot more demand then he is thinks there is. in my field People are dying for these things to come out and have been hoping for years that something would come along that was higher capacity. As for keeping my archive of pictures on HD's, there is just no possible way I could do that. I have been scanning 600Mb files for the last 5 years and you couldnt even get a 100GB drive back then. It would have been absolutly impossible to go that route. I need to have them on discs where I can grab one at a moments notice and be able to send it off to a client per thier request. Digital photography, is only going to increase the need for large capacity storage on a disc.

Not to mention I dont know one photographer that would trust his archival backup to a HD over a Disc. Trust me 4.3 gigs is nothing today in alot of fields out there. As for Cd still being the most popular format, of course it is, thats because half the people actually using discs for backup use they for hobby only like for downloading songs and movies. As soon as you turn your attention to the professional fields that fact disappears and DVD is by far the most used of the discs available. Just depends what part of the population your sampling. A huge portion of the people that actually use discs to backup thier stuff are people who download stuff of the internet and using an expensive storage solution goes against the whole concept of getting it free.

Anyways bottom line is there are fields out there that need this upgrade desperatly and like yesterday, while it may not represent the largest percentage of disc users, it certaily represents some of the computer industries most important clients and is again representative of the professional side, not the hobby side.

PS..

Interesting, after looking into DVD & CD sales overall I found ut that CD's passed the 1 Billion sold mark in 2005 whiile I could only find a DVD sales chart for 2004 but that chart shows DVD's up around 250 Million, Its a safe bet that from the growth shown on this chart that DVD's passed 300 million at least in 2005.

http://www.dvdforum.org/images/DVD_Recordable_Media.JPG


http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Optic..._2002-2004.JPG

Whats interesting is that taking these totals, roughly 2 times as much information is being stored on DVD's yearly than CD's by consumers and considering that over a billion CD's were sold last year that is saying something. While outselling DVD's like 3 to 1 is a decent margin, its not nearly as big as you were making out to be. The blank DVD market is massive in itself part of that number descrepancy is of course due to the fact that people who use CD's have to buy so many more because of the small storage space.

PS...

Since we're discussing STORAGE (your claim that tons of people NEED the storage space), then you also need to consider how many people buy recordable DVDs for video purposes. I'm gonna guess that a lot more people use recordable DVDs for videos than for storage. The number of people using recordable DVDs purely for storage purposes is probably not as much as you think.

In any case, given that Jobs is a pretty smart guy, if there were that much demand, then Apple would be producing BD drives already. Apparently, now is not the time yet.

Hence the continued separation in the two of our posts between the hobbyist and the professional. My argument was pointed strictly at the professional and was never referring to the Hobbyist. Hobbyists dont need anything, they want, a big difference. I am sure there are some people on the hobby side tht do want a BD drive or larger capacity discs but they are not willing to pay alot of money to store downloaded video or music on something as expensive as BD or HD-DVD. They could go just out and buy the movies or CD's they were attempting to rip at that price point.

As for Steve Jobs, he has already put Apple on the board at BD. He would never have done that if he didnt see the need for it on the computer side. He would have nothing to do with it at all, at least in regards to Apple if he didnt see a market for it in the coming future. One thing Steve Jobs understands, It is the Visual Arts side of computing. He is completly 100% aware that a 4.3 gig disc in todays professional computer world is completly 100% dated. Its time has come and gone and the decision to go with a HD advanced storage disc was decided a long time ago, they just chose BD somewhat recently between the competing parties.

The fact that they are not producing them has absolutly nothing to do with demand. The real reason is much more simple than that. they just released the new MacPro not even 5 months ago, Leapord isnt out yet and there is a massive shortage of blue diodes in the industry. Apple would never make the BD drive mandatory and it will without a doubt be an option. therfore he has nothing to lose by releasing an Apple BD drive. The people that need it will get it and the people that dont wont. It wont effect Appples bottom line at all. Again to think that the reason for Apple not having a BD drive already installed in a MacPro is because of demand is just simply false. It either has to do with shortage of parts, inclusion of software in leapord, or simply them having second thought about Blu-Ray itself. Apple is never quick at updating its computers with new cutting edge equipment and the overall point of this thread was not why doesnt Apple not have a BD drive in a Mac yet, it was why havent they announced anything yet as they are basically the last computer maker to have not made a statment regarding what the plan is.

The fact that Final Cut Pro is fully 100% HD supportive now, which is used by a ton of people in the video editing market, is just one drop in the Apple bucket where there is without a doubt demand at this very instant for HD storage discs. Apple computers are, and always have been, much more popular in the professional fields I keep referring to. Because of this fact, demand for these HD storage solutions will most likly be much stronger in the first few years on the Apple side than PC side when talking about percentage of overall users looking to adopt it. Apple knows this and is most likly working in software support to leapord for this very thing.

PS...

IT departments used to spend $200/tape for storage, and they had failure rates that would make anyone cry. $49 for BD will drop drastically by year end. Or soon at least. As PS keeps saying, the commercial market is huge for large, solid optical storage. BD so far is only missing the solid part, so time will tell. And PS is a photographer (think I have that right), imagine the video guys and what they need.

I love your comment on PC geeks. Windows is the ultimate hack job, yet this is exactly what they think. Such irony.

But, while the latest Macs are Jobs', at first he was not into them. That's part of why he left the company for awhile. And the latest ones (and OSX) are more like next-gen NeXT boxes than next-gen Macintoshes. Not that I'm complaining.

Agree 100% except Jobs didnt leave Apple he was fired. Ended up being the best thing that ever happened to him as he himseld says. Do a google search on his graduation speech at Princeton (I think its Princeton). An excellent speech that has a lot of insight into just what an amazing person Jobs is and just how much integrity he has.

You also bring up an excellent point regarding the price of different types of storage solutions such as Tape. I know first hand from stories from my mother about the problems and expense with Tape back-ups. She owns her own insurance company and used Tape Back-up for many years and I can still recall how expensive and unreliable it was for her. She almost had a breakdown on many occasions from back-up failures. I also rember how damn loud those Tape machines were, sounded like a mini engine in your office when they started up.

As for me, you are correct. I am a photographer and shoot both for money and for my own personal Art. I mostly shoot Architecture on the business side with some product and magazine work as well. Personally I shoot pretty much shoot everything and anything. As for what I shoot with, I shoot 80% 4x5, about 15% 6x7, and 5% 8x10 (way expensive) and still shoot 100% film so far. I have purchased a 4x5 digital back whihc comes this month so I am for the first time beginning to shoot digital and with the size of the images I will be getting from digital 4x5, Blu-Ray or even HD-DVD on the Mac cannot come soon enough, not even mentioning the archiving on disc described above. I would estimate that the total number of DVD's I own, incuding SD DVD movies, HD-DVD Movies and Blank DVD's used to archive my photography, to be in the area of around 6000 DVD's. It is completly out of control and I just cant wait for 50 Gig discs for storage :-)

PS..

Actually it was Stanford he gave the speech at. I figured I would post it up here as its an interesting read and an opinion that I not only 100% agree with but respect admirably.



“You’ve got to find what you love”
Steve Jobs

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.



The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.



My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky-. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.



My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and over flowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

If you think tape is bad, find a guy that has been in IT for 25 years and say, "Bernoulli". Then watch him cry. :lol:

If I remember correctly my mother used Colorado Back-up Tape systems. Not positive but that name is what is popping into my mind when I think back. I can just remember the super loud whirring noises the thing would make. I swear the thing sounded like it was about to explode, lol.

PS..