Holographic storage kingpin turns staff and product into an illusion

Holographic storage developer InPhase Technologies has been promising the imminent arrival of its 300GB Tapestry drives for three years. But the constant setbacks and delays have now forced the Longmont, Colorado-based firm to cut a substantial amount of its workforce, according to several reports. InPhase was formed in 2000 …

[Robert Grant]

"the science behind holographic storage is sound"

Well, you learn something new every day :)

[SpitefulGOD]

Your amazing new technology

Blows ass, where are the bio gel packs we were promised by voyager?

[James O'Brien]

Hmm I wonder

How easy is it to erase one of these discs? Just so we can erase the failure or a smoke and mirrors company.

/Mines the one with the laser in it

[Anonymous Coward]

Bio Gel Packs?

THose where a source of power? not storage. Plus when they catch a Virus they get sick for real....

[Adrian Esdaile]

invest in these new technologies

Sounds like a top firm to be investing in - buy shares now while prices are low! They can only go Up! Up! Up!

Is the first title to be releaed on holographic disk rumoured to be Duke Nukem 3D?

Maybe they should diversify into fuel-aditive pills, run-your-car-from-water-mods, high-performance audio cables, dowsing and personal jetpacks.

Mine's the coat with the flying-car keys in the pocket.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the ones canned are the lucky ones

If there is anything to this technology, then another company will just scoop up the cheap R&D people.

Interesting idea, business badly run, that's what this looks like.

[SpitefulGOD]

@Bio Gel Packs?

They weren't a source of power your silly boy

"Bio-neural gel packs are a form of computer technology used by Starfleet, first developed circa 2370.

The gel packs form the basis of the bio-neural circuitry, which is essentially an organic computer system. The packs contain neural fibers surrounded in a blue gel with metallic interfaces on the top and bottom. They help store more information and operate at faster speeds than isolinear circuitry. "

[Mage]

They missed the boat

Blu ray exists now with about 50Gbyte?

A new 1T drive from a competitor will play bluRay. They are doomed now.

It's like the Philips V2000 fiasco. If it had launched before VHS & betamax as N1500/N1700 we would never have had VHS/Betamax. But by the time they got production quantities the VHS had won.

Inphase sounds worse off.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's pathetic...

...that we already had the technology to store vast amounts of data (GBs to TBs) on an optical media long ago (2000 seems to be ages to me at least). Not only that, but the technology, specifically the media, was reusable (rewritable) from the beginning.

Just in case everyone forgot: Fluorescent Multilayer Disc

And now we still doesn't have something similar that is readily available.

[Joe K]

Utterly obsolete

You can get bigger hard drives that that, for less money each.

Sure its a bit more of a hassle to shuffle a drive into a USB enclosure, but its gonna save you about $18000, and thats before media costs. Or you can just get network RAID arrays now.

I just can't see the point of these discs at all now.

[b166er]

Optical Shmoptical

Why hasn't anyone exploited the magnetic memory of water yet? (I think it was a BBC programme, that was investigating homeopathy. They showed that diluting Strychnine to the n'th degree would stop a rats heart. Then they placed a phial containing Strychnine on a coil on one side of a circuit, and a phial of water on a coil on the other side. When a current was applied, information from the Strychnine was supposed to to transfer from the Strychnine phial to the water one. IIRC, when they applied the water to the rats heart, it had the same effect).

And whatever happened to the project that could print xxxGB onto a sheet of ?paper? and then scan it back in when required?

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Joe K

"I just can't see the point of these discs at all now."

how about optical SSDD... There is about million of uses for that if they have reasonable rewrite rates

[Michael]

Archiving vast quantities

Archiving vast quantities of data is the point. Magnetic storage is ephemeral.

[Pascal Monett]

Shipping in December

If it's only a question of shipping, does that mean that all the research is done and they have a finished product ? Or are they going to ship a test unit to someone in December ?

Shipping, meaning in quantity for public availability, mandates that a product exists to ship. Without a final product - supported by benchmarks and reviews and blogs all over the Web - there is no shipping possible.

And if the company has canned half its engineers, well it sounds like the product is not going to be finalized any sooner.

Is this another Phantom ?