Apple has built a way around the last, best thing optical discs were good for.
Consumer devices use common digital storage technology such as flash memory, hard disk drives or optical discs.
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So for a whole plethora of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to get rid of optical discs in desktops and notebooks.
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Optical discs in general have experienced a decline in unit sales for the last several years with only the new Blu-ray format increasing in sales.
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However, as the size of content grows with higher resolution there is still a role for local storage technologies, such as optical discs, at least for some time in the future.
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As can be seen, traditional film use is 15% or less with digital technologies such as optical discs, hard disk drives, magnetic tape and flash memory are the bulk of modern recording media.
The company claims that if optical discs written with this process are stored in a location where they are kept from cracking or chipping the data can be read back years later perhaps even 1, 000 years later.
Recently a company from Utah called Millenniata has introduced an optical disc technology utilizing a disc in which the data is etched (or engraved) into a ceramic substrate rather than stamped on plastic like conventional optical discs.
Regarding the longevity of storage media many of the products that we use today, hard disk drives, flash memory, optical discs and magnetic tape will react with the ambient environment and gradually lose the data stored on them or disintegrate over time.
In his 50-year career, Ovshinsky received more than 400 patents in the U.S. and more than 800 foreign patents covering a range of technologies, including nickel-metal hydride batteries, rewritable CDs, DVD optical discs, flat-screen liquid crystal displays, hydrogen fuel cells, thin-film solar cells and others.
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As we learned when the console was initially announced, the Wii U's "proprietary high-density optical discs" hold up to 25GB of data -- equivalent with that of Sony's single-layer Blu-ray format on the PlayStation 3, and much larger than the Xbox 360's dual-layer DVD format.
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The piece also states supposedly final retail hardware specs for Microsoft's next game console, including a 64-bit D3D11.x 800MHz GPU, an 8-core x64 1.6GHz 4MB L2 CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB of on-board memory, USB 3.0, HDMI-out, and an optical drive for 50GB discs.
The piece also states supposedly final retail hardware specs for Microsoft's next game console, including a 64-bit D3D11.x 800GHz GPU, an 8-core x64 1.6GHz 4MB L2 GPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB of on-board memory, USB 3.0, HDMI-out, and an optical drive for 50GB discs.
You'll also find a bevy of Microsoft and Toshiba software pre-installed, and while it only tips the scales at 3.79-pounds, you'll have to lug around an external optical drive if you need to spin any discs.
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