Japanese researchers have figured out a way to cram a Blu-ray slaying 42GB onto a single, old fashioned DVD. How have they managed this? By making the small pits that hold the data bigger.
By replacing the shallow old flat-bottomed holes with new, high-tech v-shaped gouges, the discs have room for a lot more data. Apparently the same technique will work for CDs, too.
You're too smart to believe this, right? There must be a trick? There certainly is. A new data reading and writing technique has been developed by the Tohoku University researchers. Because the holes have sloping sides, the lasers can be bounced off at various angles, giving each pit the potential to store any one of a byte's worth of bits. Instead of just one or zero, there are now a range of values in between.
Smart, but as James Sherwood of The Register writes, why bother? Instead of building new hardware to do this to DVDs, why not do the same thing to Blu-ray, upping the storage by an order of magnitude? Half Terabyte optical discs? That's what we're talking about.
Source: WiRed
