> Still, I wish that the industry would've put some basic sort of protection around the actual data. Enclosing the media in a cartridge of some sort, the way floppy disks or minidiscs work, would seem to make a LOT more sense. Blank minidiscs cost about a buck for a medium much less widely embraced than DVD, so I can't imagine that it would drive manufacturing costs up that much. The cynical part of me says the industry likes making rental outlets replace their media on a regular basis.

When Blu-ray discs finally hit the streets (they're still in development and about 3 years away, last thing I heard) they will, apparently, be in cartridges. This probably wouldn't drive up manufacturing costs much if you consider that when blank ones are produced they wouldn't even need a case. Those of my friends who have minidisc players just carry a handful of discs around in their bags, without any form of case; they're sturdy enough to withstand it.

Blu-ray sounds, to me, like a very exciting format. The only problem will be that when more storage space is available, it tends to get filled up that much faster. The problems of software bloat mean that nowadays, 20GB hard drives will still get filled up, and my poor little 3GB drive is flustered enough as it is. I reckon there's some sort of secret society behind all this, inserting an extra junk byte per data byte every year.

Si-"Could they be called Microsoft? Never"-gi