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Trying to lure in customers to replace their DVDs or HD DVDs with Blu-rays, Paramount is offering ten bucks per title to do just that. Although Paramount and Dreamwork titles are involved in the offer, it isn’t good for just any Paramount movie.

According to HighDefDigest, the promotion will start with the release of Transformers on Blu-ray coming in just a few days on September 2nd. Hopefully you won’t mind messing up those boxes a bit though, since you need to include the proof-of-purchase tabs from both the DVD and the Blu-ray disk, along with the promotional certificate from inside eligible Blu-ray movies.  You also have to buy your Blu-rays before December 31, 2009 and have your rebate envelope postmarked before January 31, 2010.

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Not even a month ago, Pioneer had announced that they had developed a 16 layer disk with 400 gigabytes of data storage. Totally amazing, right? Well, apparently those engineers at Pioneer don’t like to sit on their haunches, because they’ve just announced the development of a 500GB disk that includes extra encoding layers (I’ve read it has anywhere from four to nine extra).  I’m not even sure what I’d DO with all that space on one disk.

Although details haven’t really been given about the development of the new disk, we can probably logically theorize that they followed the same process as it’s predecessor.  With the 400GB disk, data transmission issues were minimized by lowering the amount of crosstalk and hiking high-precision signal transmissions from each respective layer.

Both of the disks will work with Blu-ray players, though Pioneer is quick to stress that their strides in these ultra-high capacity disks will see more of an impact on the industry as file formats grow past the current limitations of the Blu-ray technology used today. Don’t look to run out to your local Wal-Mart or Staples to pick one of these puppies up today though, reports show that since they are still technically in the prototype stage, they aren’t available to the general public at this time, and won’t be for the next two to four years.

Via [ubergizmo]

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Widely used in devices like the iPhone, mini notebooks, digital cameras, Flash-based SSD hard disk drives and more, flash memory chips usually have a lifetime of about ten years. This is even being optimistic. When you are using applications that need a lot of repeat writing and rewriting however, this can cause the cells to wear out even faster, and you can find your flash device useless in only a couple of years. So, a flash memory chip that is purported to work for up to a century? Literally unheard of. But that is just what Japanese scientists say they have developed. Scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo also claim that the new chips work at a lower voltage than conventional chips.

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Samsung’s hybrid hard drives as most of you know, are a mix between flash memory which has faster read/write speeds then traditional hard drives and regular hard drives. They are being added as a buffer to replace the previous 2MB of cache that most of today’s drives have. The new drives will have 128MB or 256MB of buffer to allow for faster transfer of data between the processor, memory and hard drive.

The new HHDs are supposed to appear on the market by early 2007, about the same time that Windows Vista is released to the public market. Conventional cache is volatile memory that is erased when the drive is turned off. HHDs will add a new layer of cache consisting of Flash memory that is non-volatile which can be used faster when the drive is powered on of course.

Aside from the new buffer that is being added to the drives, nothing new has yet been released about how big the magnetic part of the hard drives will be yet. We can only hope they will all be TB level drives, but of course they will probably start out being just your typical 120GB and 250GB models.

Samsung is also still reportedly working on solid state hard drives (SSHD) that will be composed of completely flash memory which would allow for a huge jump in transfer speeds within the computer. It would almost eliminate the need for separate memory and hard drive storage space. You could realistically use virtual memory and it would transfer just as fast as traditional DDR RAM.

Read [TFOT]

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