Vorporeal said:
P.S.: By your logic, you can just say that developing the UMD drive couldn't have taken that long, as it's more or less a hybrid of a CD and a floppy disk MiniDisc.
Having has both Minidisc (not Hi-MD however) and a PSP, I think it would be safer to say UMD was more along the concept of a DVD/Minidisc hybrid. Much the same in disc size etc. The original Minidisc held approx 160MB of audio data and Hi-MD 1GB, allowing original discs to be reformatted to hold approx 340MB of data so obviously there was a compression scheme used to obtain higher data storage. So for UMD to hold 1.8GB of data they obviously used smaller pits and lands like DVD does in comparison to CD while maintaining the relative disc size and looks.
I know your point was to show how off the other posters logic was, but actually this should further show that making yet a smaller DVD type disc would be even more difficult at the time.
I actually loved my Minidisc recorder back in the day. If prices of hardware would only have dropped they might have replaced the Cassette sooner and spread more effectively. The transition to a device that could also play Mp3's was also too little too late when they could at one point have dominated that area in storage capacity/cost. Sony, always innovating. Always finding a way to sabotage their own idea's.
Sony should have made the UMD as a recordable format allowing blanks to be purchased for music and video authoring. his would have created more sales on discs and recorder devices and as we all know would not have made a difference to the Piracy of the world. There are strategies they could have taken OS steps to make the recorded discs not boot games. It would have been no worse then what has happened already. However, once Pirates cracked it all they would have still sold blank discs and recorders for PC's. Another lost opportunity.
Anyway, the Pandora has taken a long time. However, when my wife points out it still hasn't come I ask her if she thinks I could have done it any faster myself. When she replies "No" then I remind her who is making the device and she may roll her eyes, but she understands the point. At least, so far, I haven't seen the Pandora team getting set to sabotage their own device like Sony (PS3 bad marketing, claiming it's cost make it not targeted at households) , Microsoft (Obviously throwing the 360 out figuring it would be cheaper to deal with failures after launch and HD-DVD lol), Sega (releasing 32x then mentioning the Saturn coming right after, Quitting the Dreamcast so soon), Atari, Osbourne, Commodore , so many have done some bad things to hurt themselves.
The worst we can come up with so far, is that it has taken too long? I'd say that bodes really well for the future.
