According to iSuppli, only 3.6 per cent of PCs sold this year were shipped with a BD drive. And by 2013, that figure is only expected to rise to 16.3 per cent, far from a solid attach rate.

With install discs being replaced more and more often by downloads, movies being downloaded instead of watched on disc and the insanely cheap price of mass storage, it’s no wonder people aren’t willing to shell out the scratch for a BD drive. They just aren’t that useful.

The era of physical media is over, and Blu-ray was just too late to the party to really catch on like past formats. It’ll still have a relatively successful life in the home theatre world and with enthusiasts, but it’ll never come close to touching the saturation level of DVD. And really, that’s fine with me. [iSuppli]

But what price is the sweet spot? Blu-rays discs are never going to be as cheap as DVDs (until DVD doesn’t exist any more, I guess), but at what point does buying an HD version make more sense financially than just picking up a boring old SD version? I reckon that $18.77 is getting pretty damned close, but then again, I’ve started buying everything on Blu-ray anyway.

So, what price is cheap enough for you to pick up Blu-ray exclusively?

[Big W]

[News.com.au; Image: Charlie Brewer]

His Millennial Disks (say that 3x fast) can be read in regular DVD drives, despite being made with a secret sauce of “persistent” materials—he drops words like gold and obsidian, which makes it sound expensive. Indeed, they cost $US30. For DVDs. That you can never rewrite. A Blu-ray version is in the works (will they cost $US100?).

And it might be a lie! The plastic—his discs’ weak point, your discs’ strong point—could die before the disc reaches a thousand years old: “That plastic may limit us to a few centuries or a thousand years for now.” Is there a warranty? Plus, shouldn’t it be Millennial Disc, not Disk?

Also, will the slot-loading disc drives in the bellies of the invading aliens be able to read Millenniata’s Millennial discs in 1000 years? These are the kinds of compatibility questions we should be taking seriously today, before they become a problem tomorrow, like with magnetic tape today.

If only there was a way to copy data to lots of different places, so that if it died in one place, it would still exist in another place. That would be really super great. [Herald Extra via Slashdot]

And dear god, lady, have you not heard of Bittorrent? The cherry on top is that she was also charged with assault and battery. Pretty hard to put a fight up with that many movies in your panties, but I suppose it would nullify all hits below the belt. [newsok via Obscurestore]

GE just announced that they’re fitting 500GB of data on discs the size of DVDs through “holographic storage” technologies. It’s OK to be a bit lost. This clip explains the idea in more tactile terms.

While CDs are read in 2D space (one layer), and DVDs are read in much the same way (but with an extra layer+ of data), GE’s holographic storage uses the entire disc density for storage. Data drawn through chemical reactions floats if suspended in gelatin.

Or…you could let the expert explain it in his own words about a minute in to this clip…Mr. Fancy Goggles and his fancy blue shirt. [via boingboing]

Sheinhardt Wigs GE engineers have announced a breakthrough in the formerly retardedly-expensive field of holographic storage: by making the holograms smaller, they can squeeze 500GB on standard-sized optical discs.

And the even cooler part is that the base tech will be very similar to the laser systems used to read CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs today, so the new holographic-enhanced players and drives would still be backwards compatible with previous optical discs.

Still quite a while until this approaches the realm of a product, but it’s good to know about the next stupid format war this will surely spawn well before it happens! [NYTimes]

This is done by stacking the DVD layers on top of Blu-ray layer with permeable layers of varying thickness in between. The differing wavelengths of blue and red lasers allow them to penetrate to a specific depth and read off the corresponding layer. Though the concept is far from new, Infinity is the first to bring these discs into production. [AV Watch]

Speaking with Edge, a Microsoft spokesperson explained:

While we have had some users contact us with concerns about scratched discs, it is much less than 1 percent of the total Xbox 360 user base…Xbox 360 is designed so that it will not damage a game disc as long as the console is not moved while the disc is spinning. Too much movement of any game console, not just Xbox 360, can cause scratches on a disc.” The spokesperson said that this was the reason Microsoft added a warning on the disc tray that needed to be removed before the first time of use.

What do you think? Did Microsoft do due diligence? [Edge via Kotaku]

Of course, this isn’t exactly shocking—Dean Takahashi revealed just how startlingly troubled the Xbox 360 was from the get-go. Hiro Umeno, a Microsoft program manager, said in a declaration about the disc-scratching problem that “This is … information that we as a team, optical disc drive team, knew about. When we first discovered the problem in September or October (2005), when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what’s causing the problem.”

The solutions considered—and rejected—were to increase the magnetic field of the disc holder (could’ve interfered with the disc opening and closing), slowing the disc speed (could’ve increased load time) and to install small bumpers (too expensive, costing between $US35 million and $US75 million). Instead, they went with a warning in the manual not to move the console with the discs still inside, a warning that Microsoft itself thought was insufficient, according to an internal email. A consultant for the plaintiff notes that Sony and Nintendo “almost always incorporate the possibility that a console could be moved while a disc is rotating inside in the designs of their products.”

Moral of the story seems to be not to buy rev. A hardware from Microsoft, perhaps the only major company to not pass muster under our maxim it’s safer than ever to do so. [Seattle Tech Report via Xbox 360 Fanboy]