Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!microsoft!edwardj
From: edwardj@microsoft.UUCP (Edward JUNG)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT: Please Consider 2MB -> 20 MB floppies
Message-ID: <57554@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 90 04:05:00 GMT
References: <344@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> <57380@microsoft.UUCP> <26f5b325.119f@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Reply-To: edwardj@microsoft.UUCP (Edward JUNG)
Distribution: na
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 50

In article <26f5b325.119f@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> mdeale@vega.acs.calpoly.edu.UUCP (Myron Deale) writes:
>
>>It is unfortunate that the industry failed to pick up and leverage
>>the large ODs, but it is clearly difficult to produce that kind
>>of magnitude of useful data for your average application, esp.
>>when the data is accessed with the rates, reliability, cost, and
>>noise of the NeXT optical drive.  Some day, not too far in the
>
>	A day much like today. If I might humbly add my 2 cents too;
>it's a real kick in the pants to record stuff off a CD (via a Digital
>Ears-like device, kudos to rmayfiel@data) and fill up an opti. Around
>here we have PS/2's and NeXT's in the same lab, and firing up the
>Beatles or R.Plant or Beethoven or Oingo Boingo (?) has netted a few
>priceless stares, I hesitate to admit. :-)
>
Well that *is* fun, but unfortunately the NeXT machine OD is just a
tad too slow to do real-time recording at 16-bit 44.1kSamples/sec
stereo.  Which is really unfortunate since sound is one of the things
that leverage the OD capacity that is tangable to many end-users
(gigabyte atmospheric datasets are not, and although large color
images *are*, the tools that require them generally require something
faster than the OD for loading the images, or something larger for
storing sequences).

I'm a big fan of OD; I have used them even before the NeXT machine
came out, assisting in the writing of various OD device drivers,
and prior to that, WORM.  But the mainstream market needs a better
device before it will embrace OD en masse.  Particularly there needs
to be better ways of creating large data for OD (and perhaps even
better laws, since distribution of rerecorded songs with a product
or even to friends and acquaintances is presently considered to be
a copyright infringement, and even samples are borderline) in order
to justify OD over CD-ROM as a mass-market requirement.

I might argue that if we can assume that people are going to become
more and more networked, then people will more likely assemble pieces
of existing data in novel ways than create huge volumes of new data
(again I'm talking mainstream), which argues that link/context information
rather than the entire datasets needs to be moved around.  Long-term
this argues against OD-like systems unless they can supplant primary
media (like HD), or become more effective as a backup media.
>
>-Myron
>// My opinions are 1) my own and not my employers, and 2) free.

--
Edward Jung
Microsoft Corp.

My opinions do not reflect any policy of my employer.