Slashdot Mirror
DVDead? The Future of Memory is in Fluorescence!
Adas writes "We've slapped an article discussing and presenting something that could make your brand new 6X DVD-ROM drive blush in its bay. It's called FMD-ROM and is is slated to be ready for production before the end of this year. The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB! In the future, we're looking at capacities of up to 1,4 _terabytes_ per disc, and transfer speeds of up to 1GB per second. Wipe the drool off your collar and read on here. "
because it looks more attractive. the shiney surface of the CD is an awe-ing aspect of CD's and boring plastic containers of floppies don't draw attention. So when CD's came out, they LOOKED a lot fscking cooler than tapes (and they sounder better, or something... who cares THEY ARE SHINEY... AHHHHH) minidisks are shiney and tiney (hehe) but they have a boring computer-nerd aspect of looking like a floppy disk.
We are a visually intrigued society. The computing illiterate society obviosly doesn't understand the vast expansion of technology and goes with fads (I have to say no more than tommy hilfigger) So if a fad is in the form of a self-maintaining media, then us computer nerds are in luck. otherwise we are stuck with shitty, shiney media.
what ever happened to jams anyway :P
I'm sure there are technologies like this for other platforms, but . . .
It's name is XIO. The interconnect system used on SGI's Origin, Onyx2, and Octane systems. With a slower cpu (250MHz R10k) you get around 720MB/s peak. That means, with a Origin2100 (the lowest-end of SGI's "supercomputers", others can do much better, maybe even by an order of magnitude or so) you would get around 5.0GB/s sustained (or 6.24GB/s peak). As you speed up the cpu (the 300+ MHz R12k), the bandwidth is increased.
This of course means that even a desktop Octane is able to do 1.6GB/s/port (six ports of course). With only two cpus the Octane would begin to run out of steam after a little while, but that still blows the pants off of standard pcs.
Of course, this has been around since 1996; sgi should be releasing a new line to replace the current in the coming months, so it will be exciting to see what *it* will be capable of.
Yeah, they could, if they're allowed to control it. I'm sure something can be done, though. Remember that DVDs are primarily specifically designed for videos, then additionally made to work for data storage. FMD-ROM is a data storage medium; there's no standard for putting video on it yet.
I dunno, maybe I'm just rambling.....
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems.
CD's, like hard disks, use run-length limited (RLL) data encoding to prevent too many 0's or 1's from showing up in a row. Presumably one could devise a similar code for FMD's to ensure that no part of the disk has too many layers with the same value.
Devising compact 2D and 3D RLL codes for holographic storage is actually an interesting (and AFAIK still open) theory problem. A good description of the math involved may be found in the book Symbolic Dynamics and Coding by B. Lind and D. Marcus.
I actually found more info (of the sort *I* was looking for :) on their press releases page.
:)
They expect production to start in the first quarter of 2001. Hey, if we've got cheap 140GB removable storage by 2002, I'll be pretty happy.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This technology sounds fascinating, and I firmly believe that we'll keep being able to store more information more cheaply for a long time.
:)
But when can we expect this to happen? I didn't see a timeline or anything. Could someone who knows more about this technology speek up?
Sure, it'd be great if some new technology obviated the need for all this DVD madness, and it'd be wonderful if we didn't have to worry about commercial interests messing it all up. But how likely is that?
I was interested in buying an ORB drive, since they hold more than ZIP drives and are supposed to be pretty speedy. But I didn't, because I had a ZIP drive, and I didn't really need an ORB drive. I'll probably upgrade to a 30-40GB hard drive, and if I'm not storing full-motion video on it, I can't really conceive of needing much more right now. I'm sure the future will find a way to prove me wrong, though.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
"Hard disk drives are the fastest seekers of disc memory today, and speeds under 5Ms"...
Apparently they have very old hard drives with access times in the order of mega seconds!
Personally I thought that the article was very badly written. It had the tone of a second rate salesman - infact, it reminded me of spam.
Honestly. I don't want to wait for someone to release 140GB of data for me to read. I want to make it myself. An FMD-ROM does me no good, really. I'd have to by new equipment to read it, and no one's producing discs for it. But if I can make it, I will.
I am not going to try to fit my CD label information on that silly inner ring. If I write on the disk, isn't that going to ruin it?
Mm
I've looked into my crystal ball and found some comments that will be posted to slashdot the day those are announced:
This is all well and good, but I can't help thinking this is exactly what the MPAA boys need right now. A nice new format to sell to the public, obsoleting that leaky-as-a-sieve legacy DVD format.
They can lock it up WAY tighter than DVD, make sure no software players are made available, further curtail fair use, and make damned sure there's nothing us hapless customers can do about it. Anyone fancy one region per US State?
Paul.
(Apologies for the sour note. It's late.)
Sorry about the drool but I really don't have a towel that big. Let's get this straight. 140GB on a tiny thingy with insane ( RAM like ) transfer speeds and I am not supposed to drool ?
:)
The only downside I can see with this is that regardless of production costs it will be priced "for high end servers". I.e. at more than 10X the per megabyte cost of regular Fiber channel ultra SCSI 3 drives.
However maybe in a few years it will drift down to what we can afford. Although RAM might become so cheap that a couple GBs of it will be the norm. A UPS will then be made a standard part of power supplies ( makes more sense with Crueso ) just so your machine will have time to dump it's "working data" to "disk backup".
So the race is on for what we will be able to afford 1st. As for me personally I plan to put my pocket in the high end anyway
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The Register had a report back in last October, 05, of the same thing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/991005-000013.html
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Now is the time to mail the companies that are making this and tell them we won't accept or buy anything as hacked around for extortion purposes as DVD has been. No area locks, no encrypted data weak or otherwise, no "licensed players".
If anyone cared to look at the contact page, they could notice the addresses of the company labs: Israel, Russia and (unlisted, but mentioned) Ukraine. Seems like some clever people tapped into a very rich source of brains: Russian scientific community (many Israelis are former Russians :). I hope they'll have more money than the Elbrus team, because we could live without faster processors (RC5-64 can wait :), but you can never have enough storage.
Yeah, if you store them in liquid shit.
If you take good care of your CDs, they aren't going to die anytime soon. Seriously, that 5-10 years thing is a worst case senario.
I try not to store the only copy of data on a CDR... I've had the stuff on the back tear off by accident.
Anyhoo, how old are CDs? I didn't know you could get them 20 yrs ago...
LCD Projection Device? Does it project LCDs?
I think that pretty soon storage will get so out of hand that nobody will care... becuase they have the option to store more data than they could reasonably use in their lifetime. Of course, there are physical limits to storage because there are physical limits to physics, but before we even reach that point we will be able to store more data than it is feasible to do anything with.
Apparently, Sony's tight control over the Beta format meant that they wouldn't allow porn to be pre-recorded on it. VHS had no restrictions. Which format succeeded? :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
typo i assume, i think he meant 120mm because that's what a cd actually is
The card idea sounds much more marketable. Forget flash memory, minidiscs, and CD's - these are inexpensive (relatively - they said something of about $10 to produce one), shock resistant (nearly no moving parts - I'm sure they could be made very resistant to all but the heaviest shocks), small, fast, and very big (1tb on a 50 layer card? wow!).
I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).
Then there's the portable applications... notebooks, portables (like webpads), cameras, players, etc. that have a media that is quick, large, and small.
--onyx--
You know, come to think of it, a caddy system like I described is not needed, and more trouble than it's worth. As it is, you almost have to wreck cd's on purpose for them to be completely and irreversably unreadable.
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."
But pre-pressed CDs yoy buy are protected - sort of. What is scratched is usually the covering layer of plastic, which can be cleaned in various ways to remove the scratch.
(Of course, if the scratch is deep enough, the metal will also be scratched, in which case you may need a replacement.)
Still doesn't beat those 5 1/4" Apple floppies people could fold double to take in their wallet, unfold, insert and they would still work. :-) Unless that was an urban.legend.
This is quite correct. Many of the claims made were shady, and while the technology itself may be feasible after a lot of engineering, the article cited here is certainly a lot more questionable.
Logic errors picked at random, because I'm too tired to cut it to ribbons thoroughly right now:
Previous layers will still fluoresce as your UV beam shines through them - just not as brightly. However, they will fluoresce over a larger area, conserving total luminosity. Therefore, you'd better have extremely good selectivity in your readout optics if you don't want stray light mucking things up. Depend on the previous layer bits averaging out? Bet I can find special cases that still cause problems. Summary: This is not magically superior for layering.
The problems facing multi-layer pit surfaces are exactly the same as those facing multi-layer fluorescent surfaces as described above. No better, and no worse (well, a few implementation differences in error correction, but you get the idea).
Shady support. Wheels have been around for thousands of years. Does this mean that they are obsolete now that we have alternatives?
Analogy, as well as logic, is stretched a bit thin here. Data layout is similar, readout scheme is unrelated. FMD, by coincidence, would use very similar layouts in any spinning-disc devices (I have yet to see a convincing description of how they'd make a credit-card sized solid-state device with this technology).
Short version: Technology is mildly interesting but nothing spectacular. DVD technology has the same potential; neither is much easier to implement. Article itself is vapour, heavy on hype and short on actual thought.
The safe way of doing it is to put a cup of water inside the microwave. This provides a load for the magnetron.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Also, they use it in other countries besides the US, like Mexico.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
The release of DVD devices was delayed for several years while all the providers of media content debated how best to hamstring DVD players with encryption and region control. I expect that, if FMD is marketed for media playback, we may be in for another long and frustrating delay.
Even if FMD devices show up in stores in a year, I wouldn't expect many movies to be released in FMD format for quite a while. It would not be a mistake at all to just buy a DVD player now (or wait a month and buy a Playstation II -- they do DVD, right?). DVD is just taking off, you'll have to wait years for the next big consumer media format.
The CD is not arranged in this manner:
Ink Label
Plastic
Metal
Plastic
That would actually be a pretty good design, and well protected. However it is actually like this:
Ink Label/Metal
Plastic
So, you can scratch the bottom plastic layer very deeply before it becomes a problem. But if you so much as lightly dink the other side, you'll have a completely unfixable mess because the Ink/Metal side is the actual data layer. I find it interesting that most people take special care to keep the plastic side safe, when actually the most vulnerable and dangerous side is the label side. Try it out with an old CD. Take a sharp instrument and scrape the label, then turn the CD over, you'll see it is permamently damaged.
V
Still doesn't beat those 5 1/4" Apple floppies people could fold double to take in their wallet, unfold, insert and they would still work. :-) Unless that was an urban.legend.
Not an Urban Legend. We used to take Apple 5.25 media out of the jacket, play frisbee with it, and then put it into the drive and be able to use it. Think of the bit density on those things. 120k over a surface area something like 19 square inches. My back-of-an-envelope calculations say that's only 1350 bits/sq inch on average.
(I know that's a crude calculation -- I didn't take into account the actual size of the media, I guessed it was 5.25 less a 1.5" hole, and I didn't take into account intertrack spacing or intersector spacing either, but I think intersector spacing is a nonfactor because I think those drives used constant angular velocity).
Been there, done that.
Yeah, I noticed that too. I think it's centimeters, not millimeters.
-Smitty
± 29 dB
umm, well, the standard fs used on most DVDs (video ones, anwyay) is "UDF" but i think you can use anything you want. (note "using anything you want" will almost certainly result in not being able to use the resulting DVD in a video-only player.)
the standard video format that has come to be known as "dvd" when used in conjunction with DVD-video is MPEG-2 with i forget what sound format, i think dolby (if that's actually a digital format), and some other tricks to allow interactive stuff, different sound/subtitle tracks, etc. Sometimes all this is encoded with CSS encryption, sometimes with country codes and some other junk. There's a _lot_ of information on this-- it's _very_ well documented by the DVD consortum (except the CSS bit, which is documented elseware by the people who reverse engineered it) if you would just look it up.
The FMD thing is, at the moment, just a way of storing data. Like the DVD drives were at first. No mention was made on planning to make video drives out of FMD. There may be eventually but this is probably a little early. in the meantime, there is nothing stopping you from just making an FMD disc and just dumping a bunch of MPEG-2 or whatever format you like on it. Well, nothing stopping you except for the fact that the equipment to make it is not available.
I dunno. either way, you can look this stuff up just as easily as i can.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
alright.. so it's based on returning flourescent light.
so what happens if you look at it under a blacklight? is it cool?
and do you get the same spectacular lightshow if you put it in a microwave as you did with a CD-ROM?
how can we expect to adopt this technology without clear answers to these questions?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"Constellation 3D, Inc., formerly known as C3D, Inc. prior to its name change on 28 December 1999," has links to other news reports on its site (http://www.c-3d.com/), such as stories from Bloomberg and EETimes (most informative, with quotes from the IBM folks who started DVD). Also interesting is that they own Strata, which makes a well-known 3D-editing/rendering package.
As I was driving today, listening to CD's (no, I don't have an MP3-Stereo, but that's another issue), I came to a part of the CD where it started skipping like mad. Yea, I treat my CDs like crap, but even after a while with normal usage, they start scratching up.
Why can't we have a format that's protected? 3 & 1/2 inch floppies were held inside plastic casing (that broke a lot, but that's another issue), Minidiscs are held in plastic casing...
Why do we have to go with CD type media?
Beta provided better image and sound capabilities, and was the choice of alot of TV Studios throughout the 80's.
Beta is still the choice of many TV studios. Beta is not dead, it's just limited to professional use.
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
VHS stored 6 hours on a tape, Beta 4 and change.
This is your argument? I'm sorry, but that's a really stupid argument. So I can store 3 movies on one cassette instead of two (never mind the added hassle of fast-forwarding when I just want to watch the third one); that's not enough to outweigh far superior video and sound quality, not to mention a freeze-frame which looks like a photo, and adjustable slow-motion which is completely free of any interference lines; and that's on my Beta which I still own from 1985. Of course Hi-Fi stereo was already standard on Betas by then.
For most users, VHS was BETTER because that was the feature that mattered.
Is this an assumption? Or is it what you preferred? I think most people who observed the decline of Beta will agree that it was the flooding of the market with VHS recorders while Sony stupidly hung on to its patent which resulted in an ever-shrinking base of Beta users (proportionately), which in turn led to fewer movie studios releasing their movies in Beta; there was also an interesting phenomenon where most retailers spouted extreme amounts of FUD along the lines of "You don't want to buy Beta, it's on its way out and will probably be dead in a year", leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy, which nonetheless took a lot longer than a year.
What's next? You're going to tell me that the Mac is better, too?
A far better analogy is MP3 vs. CD Audio:
'What's next You're going to tell me that CD Audio is better than MP3?' Ummmm... sure. It's just that MP3 allows up to 10 times as much music in the same space. Imagine if MP3 only gave you a 3 to 2 compression ratio; not too impressive right? I think we can safely assume MP3 would be a non-issue if that were the case.
GET A LIFE!
Thanks, I have one already. Can I get you one perhaps?
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
MEMS (Micro Eletromechanical Systems).
I belive this is the project you are looking for: 10 Gbyte Personal Multimedia MEMS ROM Data Storage Card.
There is a fun index of projects here.
The article mentions transfer speeds of 1 gb/s, which I don't believe, actually. What is driving this? There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes me thing of how this is possible; by having 8 layers, for example, one can multiply a CD's transfer speed by 8;
So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...
Actually, I can think of some nifty tricks one could try, but then it wouldn't be backwards compatible with CDs...
There's nothing saying that a 'pit' in the FCD needs only store one bit of info; each pit could, for example, store 2 bits of info, intensity and phase.
So I shine a laser at a pit, and get back 2 bits of info; it can be reflected at intensity 0 or intensity 1, as well as be returned in the same phase, or opposite phase as the original laser. 4 different signals can be returned, which can be mapped onto a 2 bit value.
Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!
Any other ideas?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
So I got to thinking that one could also encode chirality into the 'pit'.
I dunno if phase can actually be encoded; anyone with a better grounding in optics able to correct me?
Anyway, intensity can be encoded via size of a pit.
Can phase be encoded by the depth of the pit? Changes of a quarter wavelength will change what phase bounces back; it can either constructively interfere or destructively interfere with the original beam... that might work.
Then one can also encode chirality into the pit, as well, so that the light gets reflected as either right or left handed... thus we can actually get 3 bits of info into 1 CD sized pit; That still gets us, with an 8 layer disc, 3 bytes of data at a time, or only about 200mb/s throughput.
I guess FCD pits can be smaller than CD pits, because they actively flouresce? This affects the areal density, but it seems I can't think of any real way to increase the throughput beyond 200 mb/s...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I dunno about the layer selection problem you mentioned.
If each layer flouresces at a different frequency, such that all layers flouresce at once, you get a single beam that is the sum/product/total of every layer. All that needs be done is that the piece of hardware reading the beam demultiplex it into component signals; a decent prism will split it into it's respective signals, to be read(in parallel). You would not select one layer at a time, then, but all n layers at once!
So a 40x CD becomes 320x, read, because you can read 8 bits at once, rather than 1 bit at a time.
Notice this is not nearly as simple using pits, because one can not encode frequency selection in a passive medium; phase, maybe, and polarity, but not frequency.
And I agree that there is no need to reinvent the wheel
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Some of what is mentioned in the article makes sense, and a lot of it really is just hype and excitement.
For example, if you get a nine layer disc that flouresces at 9 different frequencies, one laser could then do a read on a byte + some sort of parity at once; feed the combined signal into a fast enough demodulator, and you can effectively increase the speed of the drive by a factor of 8 over the current top of the line; a 40x CD becomes a 320x FCD. That's about 46.8 mb/s, on the assumption that the hardware demodulator can keep up with the data stream. A 5 layer disc of the same type would only be 23.4 mb/s, but that's still plenty =)
This, however, saturates the SCSI bus, excepting for the fastest/widest standards, I think.
However, this isn't all that great, as the author expects. Latency/seek on the disk would be the same, so even if you can stream data at this tremendous rate, except for linear reads, as in music, movies, or copying, it wouldn't be all that useful(any more than standard CDs and DVDs)
It is to note, however, that I can't see how one could make a writeable version of this technology; Would one need an N laser system, one for each layer? Or would we have to wait for semiconductor lasers that could adapt and change it's own active frequency based on current or voltage?
Anyway, all the FCD proposes is to apply towards CDs what has already been done for HDs; by placing disks in parallel, increase the speed of read or write, ala RAID, though in this case because it is optic, you can crowd all the data into one channel(fibre optic) until it needs to be demodulated or something...
Or am I missing something else?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Then we will have DVD-like cartel all over again. Mark my words. With such a technological risk, they must have applied for lots of patents for FCD.
Hasdi
Sure, this will be (the?) a way to go.
But Michael at INCH.COM !!! sure does not know how to convert metric (decimal) sizes!!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
How is a CD-ROM 12mm in diameter? That's like 0.5"
I remember reading somewhere that cd's only have a lifetime of about 10 years, and cdrw's only 4-5 years. This kinda worries me since I have cd's that are getting near 10 years old... Does this technology offer anything to improve this? Of course, wherever I heard this (and for the life of me I can't remember where...) could have been competely inaccurate, so feel free to correct me...
I don't think DVD is going to die very soon. FMD players are still in the prototype phase, and I'd be very surprised if a consumer version came out that was affordable by the end of the year. Usually when a new technology comes out in the audio/visual field, it should have a good feature lacking from previous technologies. For example, vinyl records. Records were great, but 8-Track and cassette tapes were more convenient. Then cd audio came out, and offered a lot better sound reproduction from tapes, while still being portable. Then MiniDiscs came out, being even more portable and supposedly providing better sound through use of 24-bit audio. The list goes on and on. Point being: I'm happy with VHS and DVD's.
Now what I do with 140 gigs of space? I can see it being used for computer storage, but not many uses in the audio/visual market. The latest Audio and Video technologies are very very impressive, but I don't see any way we can improve on them unless you can find a person who can hear 6732466khz audio frequencies, and view super-high resolutions on your average television set and justify ditching high resolution DVD's for it. Now, we'll always have the audiophile/techhead market, but the masses won't abandon DVD's just yet.
The URL for the info is: http://www.c-3d.net/tech.htm
Here is a choice section that tells what has actually been achieved:
3.1.4) Results
10 layer disks with CD density have been demonstrated (650 Mbyte per layer). The above mentioned requirements have been fulfilled:
-Splat
If people put their energy into writing better code instead, we'd be a lot farther along. Gizmo-porn is just a distraction, imho,
140 GB translates into
...
28 movies (~5 gb each)
28,672 mp3's (~5 mb each)
2,446,677 jpegs (~60k each)
That's an aweful lot of nudie
But then again, when (if at all) this becomes available, the Web has probably grown way beyond that... Oh well.
Another good reference is this page at Search Engine Watch.
The reason that this is not getting more attention is because this is a company that nobody has heard of before, with no known exployees, that is making extraordinary claims, yet has never publicly demonstrated any working technology. This is complete vaporware.
I'd like to see more press once these people actually do something. In the mean time, I have incredible new processor technology in the works that will increase performance 1000-fold while only consuming 1 watt and maintaining x86 compatibility! Really!
Buy a $100 "color corrector". Perfectly legal, strips it right out. It's just a decoder+frame buffer+encoder.
You may have bought the movie, but if it was an encrypted disc, you committed the act of "circumvention of an access control mechanism" and thus violated the DMCA, fair use be damned.
I had a Sony CD-ROM at a previous job that apparently worked just like this!
Seriously though, despite the current DVD bullshit, this (the FMD, I mean) does not make much sense at this time.
There is a fairly large base of DVD players in the homes of consumers (I have one, but I haven't used it in about a month, for fairly obvious reasons).
Basically, we *have* to get the DVD people to play nice or we're pretty much screwed. Good luck getting a more open format in...
They were looking for a computer science wizard, specifically "...someone who can provide innovative solutions for the management and transfer of multi-terabyte(!) sized image data sets."
If you set your wayback machines, you'll realize that things like FibreChannel and other Really_Flipin'_Fast(tm) things are not as old as that 'help wanted' ad!
There will always be someone who wants more, faster, (and of course) cheaper!
Ever notice that MCSEs advertise the fact, but Sun & Novell certified people don't?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I visited the page and it makes me VERY happy. Here I was thinking that the little clear discs on my spindles were just packing material, but now I know the TRUTH. Wow, 140 gigs on what I had thought were just protecting the other CDs, glad I didn't throw those away! Doesn't seem to work in normal CD drvies, so I guess I'll have to pay a lot of money for the drives to read them. Hope the people packing those spindles of blank don't find this out, or else tehy'll start chargiung a lot more!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Having read, an article a couple of days back about Holographic memory reseach (I think it was in Nature Mag). I was wondering what the "big" diffrence is between the two type of technologies.
I mean, it seems you can just add as many layers as you want up to the point the transparency of the accumulated layer gets too bad.
Murphy(c)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That is pretty damn fast. I am working on an Fibre Channel adapter and I know that blows any single port FC adapter on the market out of the water. Also, that kind of speed is going to need a tight driver so that it doesn't just suck up all the processor. I wonder how many I/Os per second per processor percentage they can get? What about megabytes per second per processor percentage? This is the real question. It is one thing to be fast but it is another to be able to run well. For example, some EIDE drives are nearly as fast as slow SCSI drives, but EIDE controllers require much more host cpu power.
-- soldack
This thing makes a lot of claims at their site. This article then goes crazy with it. Their site claims that it is possible to make things with this technology that could go at 1 gigabyte per second. I say perhaps. Maybe. But probably not. This thing is vapor ware and the author of this article is totally irresponsible, if not unethical, in hyping this thing. The greatest thing since WWW opened shop? Please! He then goes on to take the someday numbers from the company's site and assume that this technology that is different from CD-ROMs will increase in performance at the same rate as CD-ROMs. He ignores the issues of a controller and a BUS for this thing. PCI sure isn't going to do it. Perhaps one of its successors will handle it. Oh...and we will use it instead of RAM. Sure. Perhaps it will also be used for primary cache on the processor? Give me a break!
If I want big and portable, I will go with DVD. If I want big and fast, I will go with a RAID over Fibre Channel. Only if I wanted vapor would I go with this!
-- soldack
Computer components have been getter faster and faster. This may be the start of truly pervasive computing...pervasive in the sense that it will be everywhere, unnoticeable, and unexceptional. All the rules blur, then change when computing is implicitly and immediately accessible to everyone and everything, everywhere, any time. Think of electricity. First it was a novelty, powering the useful light bulb. But soon, when it became pervasive, huge new fields and inventions sprung up because of it. The time between articles proclaiming a new technology or discovery, and its application, get smaller and smaller. This might be the real thing (tm), the nodal point. We might now be starting to take our first step into Neuromancer or the Matrix.
Or this could just be another step in the mundane march of progress...what do I know?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It's like Betamax vs. VHS, like DAT tapes and all those other cool technologies that lost out because they weren't backed by the big money. The MPAA and assorted hoodlums have poured cash into DVD, and you're damn right they're not going to give up. FMD is, admittedly, scads better than DVD (as opposed to the nearly equal Betamax/VHS), but the problems remain the same.
One other thing - From what I understand, to manufacture one of these, you need to laminate the disk in 10 steps (or however many layers you have). Does this technology allow for FMD-burning, i.e. FMD-RAM? I see nothing about it in their tech or marketing pages... That takes out another advantage of CDs, that you can make your own, for the UNIX/NT tape-backup market and other things (mp3). You need to have big money to set up a plant to make these, and that means you need to get studios releasing movies and software companies releasing titles on this format, which means you need to get coalition backing to assure everyone that they won't get left out in the cold with an incompatible product, and... guess what, it's been done already and they're not about to give up. Yay DVD-consortium.
Wah!
I seriously doubt it. I've guessed that the amount of data on the Internet is more like the petabyte range.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
When this technology was first publicly disclosed a year ago or so, I talked to several people at C3D and questioned them about the 1 giga*byte* rates described on their home pages. (Search past threads for my handle and C3D). Since this bandwidth was as fast as RAM and an even bigger breakthrough than the capacity jump I was intrigued and highly skeptical.
You're right that they get one factor of 10-100x from the extra layers. Disk bandwidth grows essentially linearly with the number of layers. But the other factor of 10-100x comes from another technique (and there's a catch.) They can split the laser beam into multiple beams and read the results with a CCD-like sensor array for parallel read capability. Cool. This is described somewhat in the white paper on their website, if I recall correctly. The big catch is that this parallel-read capability does not occur with the high-capacity round spinning disks, but only occurs with the smaller flash-card form factor devices that don't rotate (and have simple rectangular regions for data, I suspect).
Unfortunately this suggests a technology with a very small market niche. For starters, most I/O busses actually run at slower speeds, creating somewhat of a disconnect until Intel's PCI and PCI-X successor "Infiniband" comes out in 2002 or whenever... And what good are 1 GByte/sec read rates when they're for a flash-card device that only holds 10 GB?
--LP
P.S. Read-write was also a serious technical challenge requiring significantly different materials when I talked to them ~9 months ago. Keep your eye out for progress on that.
I could see having a wallet in my car full of these, with 'better than cd quality' sound (24 bit audio at something like 48k), uncompressed, and a car player that can hold and change 3 of them right there in the deck! (because the cards are so small).
This is what got my attention. Yea, those 140 GB discs are a neat idea, but not terrible practical just yet. However, the 1 GB cards are. If this company could make them affordable (i.e. about $20 each and reasonably priced read/write drives), this could finally begin to kill Zip/Jaz disks, and would definately put floppies to shame. I hate magnetic media...
My only concern is, again, the price. Flash cards could have killed the floppy disk years ago, but even now they're still too expensive per megabyte to do the trick. The key is to make these cards affordable, and we may finally be able to have reliable portable storage.
On another note... how about a device the size of a modern hard drive using this stuff? :) Like I said, I hate magnetic media... even if this is a little slower on the seek time, I'd like to see what could be done in making a hard drive replacement out of this stuff.
____________________
Tension, apprehension
And dissension have begun
I Estimate this thing won't be out for another year or so, so I've still got time to start building a library of Ranma, Cowboy Bebop and Sailor Moon DVD's before the changeover occurs. The fact that this new doohicky can be made backward compatible with crusty old archaic-ass DVD's is a plus. Ooooh, gods--and what will Quake IV be like?? I imagine the Id guys must be droolin' with the prospect of all that space to play around in. God I love technology!!
I thought they were describing what must be in a laptop.. however... 25lbs.. that's one big fat laptop. Seems to me if all they want is less than 25lbs.. they could actually use a desktop. I doubt my computer system would weigh more than 25lbs if it had a LCD monitor.
I'm still waiting for someone to properly implement a molecule-based data storage system (using a light-sensitive protein like rhodopsin), but in the meantime this is a pretty nifty new technology. 3D data storage is the way to go. :)
smallstar
"They" need to make a format that is economical to make for the common jo3. Folks, until they do, we're stuck with high quality VHS for our means of casual recording. It's sad to think that we can do DNA testing and clone sheep but we are forced to record onVHS!!!
:wq
But then they would lose money on re-sells and they won't let that happen....
:wq
Call me paranoid, but I'd bet the farm on one of two things happening from here:
1. The technology will never come to the market. It will be swamped under a flood of bureaucratic regulations/"standards", and dead before it hits the ground. A few years from now, we'll have an "Ask Slashdot" feature that asks "What ever happened to FMD-ROM?".
2. The company, Constellation 3D, will be bought out by another company, who will force encryption/proprietary extensions on it and the whole DVD-fiasco will ensue again.
You see, the MPAA and others of their ignoble ilk have invested a hell of a lot of time and effort in DVD. They don't want that screwed up by some other format just because it is technologically superior and far better for the consumer. If this ever does come out to the market, watch for FUD saying "It's not secure; it can't be played in your DVD-player; it's not The Official Product; it's nonstandard" and another thousand lies.
So, what can we do about this?
Well, I'd advise Red Hat/VA Linux/Some Other Linux Company that's filed an IPO and has now got stacks of cash coming out of their ears, to act soon, as soon as the thing seems viable. Invest in the company - if it looks like the Next Big Thing, consider buying out Constellation 3D. Find out what the standard is, make a FMD-ROM driver, open-source it. Get the information out there, make it clear that DVDs are *not* the way to go. Use facts, not FUD - in fact, actively *fight* FUD, something that I don't see many Linux companies doing.
But don't stand still, or I can guarantee that we'll never see this product become accessible to us all.
AND
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/01/133232.shtm
Must... find... new... material... sleep.. overpowering ... reason... I .. never... sleep... damnit...
Why is it good stuff gets mentioned once (if ever) and vapourware gets repeated over and over and over again? Is it wishfull thinking?
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
The last time I worked on this stuff was doing meteorological imagery a decade ago - good-resolution satellite pictures compressed about 3:1 using "compress" (the LZW-based predecessor to gzip), which was enough that I didn't need to do anything fancier. (Radar images got into trouble, because they compressed about 50:1, so my first cut at the software compressed the stuff faster than the input across the network
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
140GB is a nice start, but it's not really that big :-)
My building has about 70 people on our LAN, typically using laptops with 2GB disks. A 140GB disk would let us get _one_ backup for everybody; you'd need another for incrementals. (Realistically, compression helps a lot, and half of that capacity is identical copies of Microsoft officeware. But lots of buildings have more than 70 people.)
A few years back a network architect at a Weapons Lab That Shall Remain Nameless tried to figure out how big a LAN would be enough, so they could install a secure LAN once and not have to replace it like the previous few. You can do this by making the user's I/O devices the bottleneck - not their computers, but their eyeballs. 2048x2048 pixels, 32 bits deep, times two eyes, times 30 frames/sec is about 1 Gbps. You might need more horsepower back on the supercomputer, but if it's all their eyeballs can handle, it's Enough.
So a 140GB disk gets you about half an hour of uncompressed video - it's Not Enough. (Of course, if you don't mind lossy video compression, it's plenty big enough...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah. The industry has invested too much money in
the DVD technology.
They will not let this technology appear on market
If it works, that is.
Martin Widmark
Everybody knows that we are the evil boys, making noise with deadly toys.
12:45... Restate my assumptions... Ultra-neat cool movie: www.pithemovie.com
1 GB/sec?! I wasn't aware that there was any consumer electronics item that could transfer that fast. It may be theoretically possible, but I don't know of any device controller - IDE, SCSI, etc. - that has a transfer rate that high.
I wonder if it's actually possible to get speeds that high.
No comment at this time
SpamMan
I wish the freaks that come up with all these great new technologies would put freaking jackets on the things. That is like the biggest problem with CD's. They don't have jackets, so they get scratched and dirty unless you're super careful with them. When they made DVD, they could have fixed that, but no, they didn't. So with double sided ones it's even worse beacause the label has to be on the stupid inner ring! If they put jackets on them, they'd be more reliable, easier to label, more convienient AND self cleaning.
ARRRGGG!
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
The article sounds pretty impressive, and i would surely like to have one in my computer... but...
why is there a picture of what looks like a consumer grade HiFi component, with a `C3D Inc' sticker on it, whereas the photo above, of a `Clear Card' looks like it has been glued together in 10 minutes... When you click on the image of the HiFi thingo, you get taken to a picture of a rather dubious, non-descript piece of lab equipment with one of these FCD's sitting inside it. It all looks a bit dodgey to me...
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
:P
"The madness will stop when you can store the sum total of every bit of information any intelligent being anywhere has ever recorded in something too small to be seen with the naked eye" and the BeOS can already handle filesizes that large. Scientific American says that the sum of all *recorded* information is about 100 petabytes, and the BeOS can handle 18,000!
hehe :) i laughed, even if the moderators didn't...
--
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
Two other Slashdot stories have been posted on this. One was mentioned,
http://slashdot.org/articles/ 99/10/04/1124236_F.shtml
But I don't think the other one was...
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 12/01/133232.shtml
-Jason
Bill,
/. is that MOST of the readers here are still in school, and haven't hit the "real world". You know, the ones that have HUGE problems, so of which we look at go "That's nice, let me know when things get 100 times better", and the world where software developers need to get paid, because we have a Wife, some kids, 2 cats and a mortgage to pay
The problem is that this is being done real time in the camera! But even if that DOES work, for the bulk storage of the back 7.5m hours, we'll still need 4000+ platters. Even when it gets to 1.4 Terrabytes/disk with it'll be 400+ platters.
The big thing that I'm trying to pint out to some of the readers is that there is more to data storage requirements than "A Lot of MP3s", or "My Home Video collection"
It seems to me that one of the major problems I see on
Sigh
"You could take your entire desktop with you wherever you go, and just pop it into a PC anywhere, connect, and work like you were at home." The base station could run on a transmeta chip emulate your machine and because the network would change it could reconfigure your machines settings to reflect this..true mobile computing...but would your network admin at work let you have that much freedom..We live in interesting times...the Chinese curse has arrived!
I ever remember seeing it on slashdot one or two times. DVD hasn't even taken over the world yet, so I seriously doubt this will have any effect for at least 2 years or so.
In short, I'll believe it when I see it.
nice.
Don't you mean GiB?
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
Reading the article, the subject of 3D cube-style memories was brought up. The need for spinning mirrors in order to redirect lasers was posted as a potential problem. Laser printers and photocopiers had this same 'problem' several years ago. Now I'm not sure if/how it would work with a laser, but with LED printers (which are basically laser printers with an LED instead of a laser) a hologram film was able to take the place of the moving mirrors. This dramatically reduced the price, complexity and durability of these printers.
Would anyone out there with some experience in this area care to comment on whether this would be workable, via perhaps 3 or more holographic film pieces, in a 3D cube-type memory? If so, it would seem to be within our technological grasp already to make relatively inexpensive readers at the very least, and writers shouldn't be too difficult beyond that.
GPL: Free as in will
exept when typing "the"? :)
------
-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
Back in 1990 my parents bought me a computer for my eighth birthday. It had a 20MB hard drive. At the time, that was huge. The people who sold the computer to my parents said that I would NEVER be able to fill such an incredibly large hard drive. Of course, I did, eventually. :)
Anyway, I can think of a very good use for such a large data storage medium:
3D bitmaps.
Think about that for a moment. Yep, that's where the future is headed. Instead of making 3D games out of large polygons, we could use 3d bitmaps and have near-perfect detail and much simpler rendering algos to do it with.
------
-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
On page 2, I began to get skeptical.
Not only did the writer sound like he was a 13 year-old girl talking about the hot guy she saw on the beach the other day, but the things he were saying were, well, unbelivable. For example:
Please, read that again, because that's more than 20 times faster than any hard drive around today, and 100 times faster than any DVD-ROM drive on the market.
So what you're saying is the piece of round plastic in the picture (on every single page) holds more space and runs faster than any hard drive on the market? Why isn't Intel scrambling over this? If that piece of what could be ordinary plastic beats the hell out of my 6 gig hard drive, why haven't any hardware manufacturers at least caught up some of the way? I mean, the highest-end comps I've found have no more than 40 gigs, max. This beats that by a whopping 100 gigs.
And please, tell me the picture at the bottom of this page doesn't look like something out of Star Wars.
I won't believe this until I see it in action.
------------
"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
If you're not a specialist in the use of light energy, how can you make claims about a technology that you have only read about in a 4 or 5 page long non-technical article?
One of the things that bugs me on /. is a bunch of IT monkeys slamming others for "not getting it" when it comes to OS's, then turning around and acting as if their knowledge of computers translates into prowess in physics.
"Lend your ear while I call you a fool" Ian Anderson
I said the same thing 15 years ago about my 10 MB MFM drive.
I have seen this technology mentioned in so many different news-sites prior to this, and it was on a few months ago. Sometimes Slashdot's topic moderation technique is questionable, or maybe it's completely random?
An in-phase beam means a '0', while an in-phase beam means '1'.
Ummmm....riiiight....does anyone know how that should really go?
I think this may just be the best thing to happen to personal computing since the WWW became publicly accessible.
I think someone is being paid by the manufacturer....
I particularly enjoy the rant about the archaic quality of CDs and DVDs, which segues into an explanation which leads me to believe that FMDs are still that basic transmit-reflect bianry concept. Spin, anynone?
I've come up with some possible outcomes from the fluorescence based memory, if they ever come up with this kind of memory, that can be written many times.
Yeah, that's great, but that's kind of the problem, right? I don't care if it can hold 1.4 terabytes. I want to be able to write to it! It would be an unjust world indeed in which AOL could send me 1.4 terabyte FMDs while I'm stuck with my 250 megabyte ZIP drive.
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Like the Tom Lehrer song, I firmly believe in being prepared for the future. Thus, who wants to volunteer to start the FMD Defense Fund?
-Ravagin
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is NPR! And that means....it's time for a drum solo!"
Karma: T-rexcellent.
First: Beta was superior in video quality &c, HOWEVER, as I recall the length of a BetaMax movie was limited to 90 minutes while VHS at the time could stretch on to 4 or even 6 hours. Beta was never truly accepted by the movie industry while the DVD has a rapidly growing acceptance. Further, reading the article it seems that this technology will be very difficult to make into a writeable or re-writeable form and may very well *not* be reverse compatible with DVDs or CDs. If so, that would automatically hinder its acceptance. To top it off, if the reader was designed to read 8 layers it would probobly very difficult to make that same reader read 16 layers, should such technology come out. It should be noted that this is just a rough guess based on what I know about lasters from Physics II. Finally, DVD is already fairly well entrenched. Most computers today now ship with DVD as a option and DVDs are beginning to see acceptance by movie rental groups and home buyers. The new technology is probobly going to encounter "not sufficiently better, soon enough" ---------------------- "There is only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be." -- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
-Hartwell
The first time I saw this, I submitted it, only to find out it had already been posted. Oh well. And now it's posted again. Oh well. At least this time I can write a response to it.
140 gigabytes is overkill, at least for most applications. Sure, it'll be a boon to those in the mass-backups business (screw tape drives, just get one of these puppies and a dozen disks...), but to anyone else, it doesn't seem too useful. I certainly don't want to watch any movie that could fill one of those things, and if I ever get that many mp3s it won't matter if I can store them on portable media: I won't be able to listen to a fraction of them before I get back from wherever I went, even if it was a road trip to Alaska.
Two applications for this stuff:
One, it will make for some damn interesting programs, if anyone manages to fill one up. Think of a 140 Gb RPG...it'd take you years to finish! Or, they could make it relatively short, but simply stunning in it's detail. The problem with this is A: you need one hell of a rig to take advantage of the (say) photo-realistic graphics and stereo quality sound, and B) you have to have the FMD-ROM to play the game! This doesn't seem like much, but it's really nice to be able to run a program without the disk (especially if the program is to be used by many people). Of course, if we get 14 Tb hard drives, that wouldn't be a problem, you could still do a complete install. Of course, we'd need the processor power to deal with all that data...
The other possible application: keep the technique, but shrink it. These things are basically the size of current CDs. I know they have a 'smart card' sized version with a smaller capacity (but also smaller size). This is perfect. I really can't see any good reason to have that much read-only space, unless you feel like carrying around a couple databases in your pocket. But something smaller than a credit card, holding 'only' 10 Gb or so...now that'd be useful! Or even a version the size of a 3.5" floppy disk...make an FMD-ROM drive that'd fit in one of my 3.5" bays! I don't care if it won't hold as much data, because it already holds way too much! With the current trend toward PDAs and ever smaller, thinner laptops, a medium that would match and exceed DVDs in performance and capacity, and yet be smaller than a floppy disk, would be perfect.
Combined with a few other key advances (like nanometer-scale transistors to make ever smaller and more powerful chips, Crusoe-like engineering to make them more efficient, field-emission monitors and such to vastly increase output quality, new data transfer methods like firewire to make it easy to get huge amounts of information from one medium to the next) we could conceivably see, in a few years, a machine that would replace nearly everything you currently carry around: it could do phone calls, act as a fully functional laptop, HDTV, game system (with performance exceeding that of a PSX2), and you could carry around all the information you'd ever need in your wallet. Couple that with wireless networking, and a migration towards less paper (with such things as 'smart' paper being looked into) and you might be able to go down to your favorite cafe for work.
Tap into a wireless service provider (at least 20 mbps over the airwaves, probably more), access your company's network, and start telecommuting from anywhere that has cell phone access.
Wow, you don't really notice tangents until they come up and smack you. That's enough rambling for now.
Then again, I could be wrong.
but for stuff like major backups, it'd be great.
:)
keep in mind: this is ROM. you write it and then you can't change it ever again. you'd probably want your own burner to do it (you don't want to entrust someone else with your data) and we don't know how big and expensive FMD burners are. These reasons might make it too expensive to use FMDs for backups in some enviroments (except for stuff that will never change). If one person changes one file on their computer, the backup is innaccurate and you'll need another one. I think a solution that can be erased and rewritten to (like tape drives or RAIDs) would be better.
Of course, if you were going to backup 'secret LANL project #10385: Operation Blow up half the planet' and you weren't planning on changing it (why would you want to change it? the USA doesn't need one of those plans anyway, it's just for historic reasons that you keep it on file...) it might make sense to use one of these things...but don't forget: you can't build a secret electromagnet in the archive door to wipe the disk if someone takes it out
The famous 640k quote wasn't at the fore front of my mind, and of course I'm sure we can fill 140 gb...but not with my current desktop. It just can't handle that much information (unless it was a few trillion pages of text). If moore's law holds true we'll probably see rigs that can really take advantage of 140 gbs of multimedia, or whatever.
Then again, I could be wrong.
It looks like the Sony Vaio PCG-X9 that was the subject of an article earlier in the day fits NASA's bill quite nicely! I understand that Linux works quite nicely on newer Vaio laptops.
Go NASA! Go Linux!
Too bad its not true.
The conclusion paragraph on C-3D's webpage states:
I guess to the author, there's no difference between 1 and 01101011.-pf
Make affiliate bucks
vr sinc i droold on my kyboard, the "" ky dosn't work!
If this is a hoax, it's a pretty impressive one. Not the article posted to /., but the company itself. Lessee... fully developed site, contact information, white pages, press releases, links to articles in the independent press (that exist), deals with another company (Toolex, which exists), and even an SEC filing that anyone can go look up that says much of the same thing. This includes, as someone pointed out, data on subcontractors in Israel, Russia, and Ukraine. It also includes numbers for patents already filed, including one for the optical pickup for the drive. The white pages are from an actual demonstration for industry execs (I suppose they could lie about that, but it seems rather silly), which is pretty impressive for vaporware.
To me, this looks like a company that is deep in the red and desperate for cash, but which has an actual product, and is engaged in the final push to get the capital needed to bring it to market. Sure, some of the claims are a little on the PR/fantasy side, but what hardware manufacturer isn't guilty of that? The foundations of the technology appear very real.
Alexis
ASAIK FUD := Fear, Uncertanty and Doubt
flying pigs forsale.
On Sept. 13, 1999 the Moon as you know it was replaced by a hologram and artificial gravity for planet earth was turned
Of course, you could always read this article :)
-----
No Zen is good zen
Terabytes on a disk? maybe now google.com can sell the internet on cdrom.
Hey all! I was just thinking that if this became available, mp3.com could sell their whole site on this, and we wouldn't need download.com, winfiles.com, cdrom.com, and all the other file repositories on the internet anymore. Thnx Fuller
#BBS-Files on DALNet IRC, Come and Chat about the good old days of BBSing!
Finaly, something that will be big enough to install windows 2003 with IE 7!!! thank god they won't be limited to only 15GB, think of all the "features" they'd have to cut out then!!!!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
My god ppl....I can't believe all of the shit I'm hearing from most of you! "It won't work," "It's a hoax," "Why bother, we don't need that much space anyhow." For christs sake, you have all turned into hippocrites.....Don't you remember back in the day when you wanted a hard drive and 500MB was enough? But what happened? People with a thirst for excelling and pushing things further developed bigger and better hard drives....I for one don't see this as a step backwards by any means, in fact it may just be the beginning of a whole new era of computing. If everyone said "oh that will never work" all of the time, we'd never be where we are today. It is the ability to have an OPEN MIND that spawns this cool new ideas and inventions. Think about that next time you open your mouth to complain......
what worries me is the spectre of data obsolescence. While i'm really into larger and faster storage i can't help but wonder how long it is until my data cd's aren't readable. anyone used a 44mb syquest lately? i've lost plenty of personal files by neglecting to copy stuff cause i didn't have time. pen
Once in December of last year (by CmdrTaco), and once even earlier. It was shot down then, and I don't see why it'd fly now.
In 2001, Arthur Clarke describes how the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings that sowed the seeds of mind on the planet Earth discovered how to store 'knowledge' = 'data' in the very structure of space itself, and to preserve their thought for eternity in frozen lattices of light. That was just before they apparently uploaded themselves into the universe's permanent swap file and disappeared forever.
Hmm...
...Yet another slashdot article on some super storage technology to be available Real Soon Now. I guess we were due for one of these.
I don't want to see anything about this ever again unless it's in the following form: Company X has this device and medium that can store this much. It costs Y $$$. You can order it directly from www.CompanyX.com.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I guess it makes me glad I haven't bought a nice DVD drive yet. This is probably the reason so many corporations have not adopted the DVD for their movies yet, they were invested in this. That WORM stuff sounds bad. I wonder how Open this thing will be.
we will assimilate them.
> HA! you say? Remember Beta? and it was a SUPERIOR technology... BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! THANKS FOR PLAYING. I'm sick and tired of people saying Beta was better. It wasn't. VHS stored 6 hours on a tape, Beta 4 and change. For most users, VHS was BETTER because that was the feature that mattered. What's next? You're going to tell me that the Mac is better, too? GET A LIFE!
---------
---------
See who's a dork today! Check out dork.to
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! THANKS FOR PLAYING.
I'm sick and tired of people saying Beta was better. It wasn't.
VHS stored 6 hours on a tape, Beta 4 and change. For most users, VHS was BETTER because that was the feature that mattered. What's next? You're going to tell me that the Mac is better, too? GET A LIFE!
---------
---------
See who's a dork today! Check out dork.to
I think that when they bring this out, they should do away with the market friendly, but easily damaged, shiny spinny things.
Okay, so it might be good to make it a disc as opposed to a cube or something like that, but that's not really at issue. What is at issue is that any 12 cm plastic disc is going to get scratched. I have glasses with polycarbonate lenses, and they required a special coating because they're so scratch-prone (but very hard to break, for all those times I play around with explosives). The coating cost $40 extra on my glasses lenses, and I wouldn't want a scratchable disc, no matter how fault-tolerant the system is. I like 3.5" floppies. They feel safe. You can throw them, you can put them in your pocket, you can spill soda on them, and you can put labels on them. I would imagine that a label would pretty well screw up this system. I think it's about time we let the shiny spinny things go the way of the punch-card. Sure, it's pretty to watch all the patterns on these AOL coasters, but I think it's time we grew up and started protecting our data.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
BetaCAM != BetaMax AFAIK the studios use BetaCam (the professional standard), and not BetaMax (the VCR standard). Similar names, different standards. for more on the Beta vs. VHS arguement: http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.h tml
BetaCAM != BetaMax
s .html
AFAIK the studios use BetaCam (the professional
standard), and not BetaMax (the VCR standard).
Similar names, different standards.
for more on the Beta vs. VHS arguement:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vh
Yes, I am a corporate spy working for a huge corporation. We are currently running a prototype storage cube that is fully functionaly. We have not yet been able to reduce the size to the dimensions that have been suggested in all the hype (1cm x 1cm x 1cm) but so far we have it down to 1m x 1m x 1m but not all of the storage area can be used in the cube, because we had to cut breathing holes for the little mexican boy that points the flashlight at all the data.. also it was hard to transfer the information from the cube to where it was needed (we couldn't hear him say what the data was without the holes). Our next milestone is to have a trained chimpanzee hold the flashlight (optical data pickup as we like to call it) - with this advance we hope to compact the box to as little as 30cm cubed.
----------------------------
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
When talking about things with mass, like a print head, moving the media (paper) makes sense. When speaking about photons, this doesn't make sense.
Remember, the more mass you move, the more lash (imprecise movement induced by moving that mass) comes into play (pun intended).
No, what would be exciting would be to use something other than a mirror to move the laser. some sort of reflective substance that can be manuplated using electric fields. Now that would really uncork a lot of spin off technology....
---
I was using black holes to make gravity lenses, fell in and made a spectical of myself!
C Scheffeild
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Hmm... From this point of view you can understand the DVD cca. If I remeber nobody thougth about that within 3 years we can own affordable DVD worm. Now we can store filmlibrary on ONE disk with quiality of DVD! Hmmm... they will attack this way... technology overcome these b****
Let us not forget that DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disk, the idea being that it can be used for many different types of data. Of course, since video was the most heavily promoted use, DVD has, for many people, because synonymous with video.
140 Gigs is perfect for the next version of Microsoft Office! (If you don't install the clip arts)
hmmm... I once owned a Sinclair ZX-81. With 4K of RAM, I was able to run Vu-Calc and keep my budget in good shape... Now that I use Excel, my budget must include a special field for "computing"...
Jean-François Lauzé (AKA: Trix!)
www.trix.qc.ca
but the problem is, that is read only. It's a nice idea, but the technology is going to have to be recordable, or people are going to find ways to crack it....i.e. dvd's and if it is a hoax, I will cry myself to sleep for at least 2 weeks
I've seen all you guys write that this is a hoax. Well, let's turn this into an about.com thing: Can someone explain why this is a hoax to me, please? Email and/or reply in /.
We see this all the time when new-tech comes out; it's often the product the masses believe is better that gets the cookies than the product that is truly better designed.
As to the Mac, frankly it IS better... on the INSIDE (the motorola chip is just simply more efficient, and the i386 instruction set sux ass) but since Apple has been fascist about letting the architecture specs out, we haven't seen good OS's/software for it. i386 has been made cheap, and OS's/software (fuck you very much Bill Gates) have been MARKETED hardcore enuff that the masses bought the PC's, even though their fundamental architectural design was/is notably inferior.
If only we could turn back time, and force apple to open the original architecture up to linux development... *sigh*
"When it comes, the apocalypse itself will be part of the process of that leap of evolution."
Due to the relatively small user base that DVD has, I think it is possible, (if this technology can happen cheaply)that we may see DVD disappear.
HA! you say? Remember Beta? and it was a SUPERIOR technology...
If these puppies fly, your DVD player is gonna wind up in the basement with those old Kiss Albums, that rowing machine that was going to change your life, and your pile of RONCO products...
Home Made Turkey Jerky anyone?
I keep seeing the term FUD being used to describe many things in /.
I have not seen any reference to this elsewhere so without asking I tried to figure it out.
Does it stand for : Fucked Up Disinformation?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
Don't know where the Header came from as it directly contradicts what a recent report Constellati on 3D, Inc. -CFMD- Sets Goals 2000 - 2001 said that their "Goals" were going to be. The article, from business wire, indicated that their first product would not be seen until 2001: "The target date for commencement of production is the second quarter of 2001." So sue me if the html doesn't work...
Is there a storage density equivalent to Moore's Law? Consider a standard drive bay: 1980, single density single side 5 1/4 inch floppy, I think 340 KB. 1981 some smart guy made a square hole punch (you know you bought one) and all our single sides became double sides. double density arrived the same year so we got 1440 KB. 1984 1 Meg hard drive cost 1000 greenbacks (oooh ahhh!) Mac introduced the 1.44 3 1/2 inch but 1.44 Meg and 1440 KB are dogs of the same litter. You just didn't have to take the thing out and flip it all the time. I think I had a 420 Meg with my DX2/66 PC in 1990. 3.2 Gig in 1996. Now? 34 gig in 2000. I guess I'll stop writing for a sec and draw myself a chart to see where I'm going with this.... Looks like each year density increases by 50%... So Perdo's Law states that storage density increases by 50% each year. I should qualify that with "consumer" storage density simply because I can remember drooling over $50k, 56 gig optical storage for servers in the early 90's. So, all of the sudden this fluorescent plastic storage fits right in the natural curve. If something really breaks the curve, get excited. BTW, has anyone figured out when Moore's Law will mandate nano-computers (nanomachines required for the assembly)? I am not a computer architecture engineer and a physicist but someone out there must be. I'm sure Perdo's Law would dictate nano-storage eventually. I believe however that since the sum total of man's knowledge is probably more than doubling every year, Perdo's law dictates you will never have the sum total of man's knowledge on your desktop or pocket or implant... where ever you decide to stick it.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
This may be a horribly stupid idea, but if so it is not suprising considering I am not a computer engineer. Would it be possibly to make a CPU out of a multilayered cube like they talk about? Or at least with that kind of speed I would think they could make a modified cpu with a lot of speed. Seems like there should be a similar solution that would virtually eliminate the need for transitors. Again, I appologize if this is dumb.
I'd rather see this technology used to make the discs smaller and more portable. Something of this capacity with a disc that's half the size would be far more usable.