An unsealed court document reveals a startling quote from Hiroo Umeno, a Microsoft program manager.  “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.“  So it would seem that Microsoft was quite knowledgeable about the Xbox 360 design flaw which causes it to scratch disks in September/October 2005, before a single Xbox 360 had even been put into the hands of customers on the release date of November 22, 2005.

And yet Microsoft did nothing to fix their product before release.

What did Microsoft do after release?  Well, Microsoft did send people to “investigate complaints that the Xbox 360 was routinely scratching discs during demonstrations.”

And they did find a problem.  (Funny that, since they already knew what the problem was, it really couldn’t have been that challenging of an investigation.  Some might even have considered it procrastination…)

And they considered three possible courses of action:

1 ) Increase the magnetic field strength of the disk holder.  This was ruled out because it might interfere with the disk opening and closing mechanism.

2 ) Slow the speed at which the disk is rotated.  This was ruled out because it would make games take that much longer to load.

3 ) Install small bumpers to prevent the disk from moving out of position.  This was ruled out because it would actually cost money to implement.

So what did Microsoft do about their known and reconfirmed disk scratching product flaw?  Why, Microsoft chose option 4 instead:

4 ) Don’t bother fixing any defective Xbox 360s and establish the Xbox 360 Disk Replacement Program.

I mean why actually fix your product when you can institute a flawed system of customer-annoyance?  Oh, and a warning was snuck into future Xbox 360 product manuals, stating, “remove discs before moving the console or tilting it between the horizontal and vertical positions.“  Well there then.  That clears it all up!

In theory the latest versions of the Xbox 360 have a new DVD drive, which is quieter and less prone to scratching your disks.  I haven’t actually confirmed this myself, but I’ve heard it said here and there on the great wide interweb.  Even if it is true, this fix would be how many years later?

Is it any wonder that Microsoft is looking at class action lawsuits over their Xbox 360?

Yeah.

I’m not one to really get into this whole “console wars” things where people rag on each other for the title of the bestest console ever.  But with a team like Microsoft, I bet it’s kind of hard to defend yourself all that well.  This is probably why most of the “console wars” resorts to namecalling in the end.

Do you ever have ideas about things that you are dangerously undereducated on? Like you know just enough to be dangerous? Yeah, I do. And one thing I’d love to learn more on, through hands-on experience if at all possible, is exploring new and innovative automotive designs. Mostly I’m drawn to cars and motorcycles, which considering I’ve never even ridden a motorcycle may seem a tad weird. But just because I’m not an expert doesn’t mean I don’t have any ideas.

If I had millions of dollars, one of the first things I’d love to do is start my own out-of-the-box automotive design business. And one of my first R&D projects? Electric disc brakes.

Instead of a hydraulic system that pushes pistons into calipers that grab a disk, why not simply have a capacitor-backup (for safety) electro-magnetic caliper system? Imagine how much better response time an electromagnet has compared to a hydraulic piston and what that could do for traction control, anti-lock brakes, and so forth. But for that matter, imagine a system where water can’t get into a brake line because there is no brake line.

Toyota is already replacing their hydraulic power steering system with the electric power steering system that they pioneered for the Prius hybrid. They liked the electric system so much better that it’s moving into other cars now. It has fewer parts. It has less ways to break. It needs less maintenance. And best of all, it works better.

I think the same type of move could easily be done for brakes. More responsive brakes with less maintenance and failure points? Who wouldn’t want electro-magnetic brakes? Especially as more cars become hybrids, more cars are going to have electrical systems capable of supporting new ideas like this. The general concept is still ultimately the same anti-lock disc brake design. You just replace a complex and high-maintenance hydraulic system with simple maintenance-free electromagnets.

Yep. If I could open up Arah’s Automotive, electromagnetic antilock brakes would be one of my first projects.

Since I don’t have the money to do that in real life, I’ll just have to imagine. So I’m imagining Arah’s Automotive here, on my blog. This is where it begins.

What do you get when you take a common every day DVD and rethink it? You get five times the data storage.

What?!

Yes, that’s right. Over in Japan’s Tohoku University, specifically at the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, they’ve come up with a brilliant new idea.

Normally in a CD, DVD, BD (Blu-Ray), et cetera, data is stored in “pits”. It’s just a flat trough in the media that represents one bit, a 0 or 1, either the pit is there or it isn’t. Binary storage is not exactly the most effective means, but put enough bits together and it makes little difference. With a DVD’s red laser you can take a dual-layer DVD and get 8.5GB out of it. That’s not bad.

But it’s not great. That’s why we had to invent Blu-Ray disks. We needed a much higher density of pits so that with a shorter wavelength laser a dual-layer Blu-Ray disks (BDs) can store 50GB of data. That’s a big improvement.

Still, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat. These are the technologies we have today. But what if…

That’s what the Japanese folks must have said to themselves anyway. Because they turned the bit on its head. Literally.

Instead of using the standard flat pit that stores a single bit, a value of 1 or 0, they created a V-shaped pit. This V pit can be rotated to reflect the light in different directions. This allows a single pit to now store a byte value of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 instead of a bit value of 0 or 1. This means they can increase the data capacity of of any disk to up to five times what it holds right now. DVDs using this technology could go from storing 8.5GB to 42GB. BDs can go from 50GB to 250GB! And all without adding any additional layers. And, in theory, there’s no reason why they couldn’t increase the number of distinct orientations further. Imagine what the disks and drives of the future can offer if this catches on!

But layers, did I mention layers?

Yes. You see, DVDs and BDs typically have one or two layers. That’s it. Each layer is like a single disk. Stack two layers together and you get two disks. It’s that simple. Well, except that for the reader and writer it is anything but simple. You have to read one layer through the other layer. The more layers, the tougher that gets.

Which is why the folks at Pioneer must have lost their ever-loving minds. They’re touting their new technology for a 16 layer disk. Yes, that’s right, sixteen layers! In a BD, with 25GB per layer, that’s a 400GB single disk!

Of course, there’s a catch. Right now Pioneer has only proved the concept in read-only. So no writers, even in their evil laboratory (Mwa ha ha ha!) support writing to a disk like that. But, Pioneer claims that it has figured out the trick of working through the interference from the other layers when reading through a layer in a big stack-o-layers like that. Which is no small feat. If they work out how to write to all of the layers as well, they might really have something.

Now the real trick would be in getting these two teams of researchers together. A byte-per-pit sixteen-layer Blu-Ray disk would really be something to behold. That’s 2TB on one cute little disk. If someone could kick those out in three or five years that would be massively impressive!