Slashdot Mirror
Gigabyte Matchbook Drives From IBM
A number of people wrote in about the New York Times article regarding IBM's new storage breakthrough. They've been working on their microdrives for some time now, and it appears to be paying off. 1 gig in something the size of a pack of matches. Cool.Update: 06/20 04:58 by H :Check out the press release from IBM, thanks to Asbestosrush.
A=dv/dt. So if your dv is high enough, and dt is small enough, then 1500g, even for a 3ft drop, is reachable. What is the G load on a flea when it jumps? It's kind of staggering, especially when compared to the 4-5g or so limit to keep the crew sort of comfortable on the Space Shuttle during its launches, or to keep you going back to your favorite roller coaster.
Has anyone noticed who wrote this article. None other than the infamous John Markoff. By reading this article and the NY Times you support him and all the disinformation he helped the government spread about Kevin Mitnick. I propose a boycott of the NY Times until they terminate their relationship with Markoff.
Depends on which shelf you're shopping at.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why go through the hassle of doing this rather than just sign up with fake info once and let their cookies log you in each time?
Or just use the various cypherpunk/cypherpunk or slashdot/slashdot names that are appearing all over?
I have the text files for all five books in the HitchHiker's "trilogy". Total size: 1.13 megs.
So I expect I could get a lot more than 200,000 pages of text onto a 1 gig HD.
Digital cameras. With a Microdrive like this, you can finally get real use out of the TIFF modes.. JPEG must die! ;)
Round numbers help, but 2m/sec is not far off. It is easy to take two steps, aka 1 full stride, which for me is about 6 feet in one second. Try taking ten strides, or twenty steps at a normal walking pace while watching a clock.
BTW, what does this have to do with teaching kids and reality?
Other than that, I know for sure it does not take anywhere near half a minute to make it to the bathroom from here and it is more than 60 feet away. So, some pedestrian designers must assume Grandma and a walker or the equivalent. BTW, when was the last time that you saw someone moving at a 2ft/sec.(crawl) bang their shin?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Is that funny?
no. it's dilbert. dilbert is ment to be trendy, not funny.
Instead wouldn't you like a storage device that could outlast the batteries in your Digicam?
http://www1 .nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/2 0blue.html
Gosh has the hacking level declined here. People don't even check for ways to shorten their code anymore!
well shit on me. i didn't even realize that i had a nytimes cookie set when i tried that one. next time, more rigorous testing methods are in order.
my apologies.
Yeah, I remember the Microdrives... blech!
I wonder if the name is still Trademarked??
Even if it is, ol' Clive would probably be too ashamed to say so
There are 80-minute CDs available now. (Can't be read on some drives, though...)
you left out 'assasination' .. that's always a good one..
--
Delphis
I like the shock resistance of hardware memory too much. It's going to take a long time and a lot of field evidence to convince me that the shock resistance of that drive is good enough while it's on. (Note that the 1500G rating is only for when it's off.) Until then, I'm happy with 32M and 64M smart media cards for my digital camera, and solid state memory for my Palm Pilot and cell phone.
On the other hand, this bodes well for laptop drives. I'm willing to be very careful with my laptop while it's on. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
although having a compact flash springboard would be very cool for other reasons... you can probably get a significantly better deal on CF than the ~$10/MB you get with the 8MB springboard.
the real question is: can the OS/CPU handle such large amounts of data?
Digital VCRs (TiVO, RePlay, AOLTV) record 1GB = 1 hr TV.
Would lap-top/clip board TVs be useful?
a new kind of media is needed to take control of the industry now that we are in a new age of technology, cd-roms are infeasable due to aesthetics, it's large and clunky size, and in storage space. I think floppy disks have a much better design, and the standard amount of gigabytes would fit perfect into something the size of a floppy, using a one-gig-per-matchbook area as a measurement. true, small media is harder to identify than cdroms(well, floppies arent), but perhaps that can be solved with catalogings and a hand held bar code reader tells what information is on the disk by just scanning a sticker on it.
--
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
wait until I get my paws on one of those 2000x1600 cameras
2048x1536 (1024*2x768*2)
That's not true at all. At Earth's surface, the acceleration due to gravity for all objects (excluding air resistance and other such factors) is 1 g = 9.8 m/s^2 = 32 ft/s^2. It's called free fall because you're falling... freely. All objects that are falling freely at the same place will be accelerating at the same rate, and thus not be accelerating relative to one another.
If the acceleration on the trip down were 0 g, then a falling object would not speed up. If this were true, then the object would never fall. At the beginning, it's not falling, and if it doesn't speed up, it'll just stay there.
Also known as an off-by-one error. Some things to ponder:
A microdrive sitting on Earth would be undergoing 1 g of structural stress, yet would not be accelerating.
Astronauts orbiting Earth are accelerating at(undergoing a change in velocity {velocity is speed and direction} at the rate of) 1 g yet are said to be in a 0 g environment and are undergoing no structural stress.
A microdrive sitting on Earth while the mad Dr. Horticulture continuously turned up Earth's gravitational field to 10,000 gees would spontaneously fail at some point above it's acceleration limit of 1,500 gees -- yet would be sitting perfectly motionless (minus parts inside breaking) and not accelerating the whole time.
A microdrive in space, accelerating toward a massive object at 10,000 gees -- far beyond its design limit for structural integrity -- would be able to operate flawlessly and would be undergoing no structural stress (as long as the source of gravity was far enough away that we could ignore tidal forces).
A microdrive dropped from sufficient height toward a concrete section of a 1 g Earth to undergo 1,500 gees of structural stress would actually be accelerating at (undergoing a change in velocity at the rate of) 1,499 gees.
Glamatron:
Fifteen hundred gee. That sounds like a lot.. but what does that mean in real terms.
1,000 gees is "equivalent to an eight-foot drop to concrete."
blueg3:
The acceleration on the trip down is 1 g.
The acceleration on the trip down is 0 (zero) g. That's why it's called free-fall, kidz.
go here.
I'm in a programming course right now... well.. will be in about 6 hours... umm.. yeah...
;(.
Anyway, our instructor seems to favour Visual Basic over C++ and seems to know Java (accedently used typeof instead of typedef when writing an example program on the presentation screen). My problem is that I know this stuff so I either sleep through or not show up at class. It was the same last year too.. they get to the really interesting stuff near the END of the term, and just as it's getting good... its over...
All programming students listen up. Take your text and flip to the chapters near the back -- the ones your instructor may not take you to. After the term is over, try some of the more difficult stuff for the heck of it - you'll be better off for it, especially if you have programming classes in subsequent terms. (I know it may not count for much, but since I started in this course I've written a huffman based compresser, wrote a simple programming language/interpreter, make a simple web-browser, all from scratch... from reading ahead)..
IMO, Java is no substitute for well written, portable, C++. Too bad my school is dropping C++ courses in favour of Java courses... sigh... time to choose another college I guess.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
How about a picture of the damn things. Show us what it looks like!
> Someday I'll fire up my old QL and see how well the Microdrives keep over the years.
:-)
Let me give you the sad news - they're much worse than disks at keeping data; I've tried getting my QL to work again last year:
* The keyboard contacts had corroded - about half the keys didn't work any longer
* of all my microdrives (12) only two could still be completely read; the others were corrupted in varying degree.
Luckily I had also invested in a floppy adapter + 3.5" 720K floppys - these still worked, the pc keyboard (old cherry, using real microswitches) I rewired to match the QL keyboard matrix also worked
Still, I ended up transfering all the files+ tape images to my PC; the QL emulator works GREAT there. Can you imagine the nostalgia trip of playing your favorite textadventure again after MANY years? (Lost kingdom of ZKUL - loved it).
Anyone got nice programs for QL ?
you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
The babes dig a man with a big, hard...drive.
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
"Postive"? For being a grammar nazi, you sure do spell horribly.
"the ability to withstand a 1500-G shock. That is equivalent to a drop from a normal office desk onto a medium-thickness carpet"
What planet is IBM labs on, that this kind of acceleration happens in 3 feet? Would the surface of the sun even provide this much G force?
Maybe you need to read this
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Every few weeks or so, IBM's storate division announces a new breakthrough in storage technology. The vast majority of these, while extraordinary, have not and will not ever make it to market. Why is this division so prolific, yet product-free?
a) digital camera, as has been said a bazillion times, would be a *great* use! My camera takes up to 16MB smart media cards (or maybe 32, but I won none of those), which means I can hold not all that many photos ... lots at low-res, a fair amount at large-resolution and higher compression, not many at highest setting of both.
... same thing for digicams, though, which are likely to get even rougher treatment ...
... I would like to be able to put more books on tape, timeshift more old radio programs, listen into the depths of my CD collection, etc. Higher bit-rate would be nice, and the advantage of totally modular storage like this is that it doesn't tie you to aparticular playback mechanism ... maybe V'aghUrbitz will become the dominant audio format! :)
b) But it could also be a good size for the primary storage in Web-pad / largish palmtop, though I wonder about the durability
c) Yeah, sure, portable audio as you say
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Now that we are starting to see micro-gigabyte drives, will we also see a new bus-line so that we can string 70+ of these tiny drives together in a raid style array? Are they fast enough for such an idea? If so, once the price comes down on them, I can see app-servers that take up 4U rack spaces suddenly only using 1U and holding 5 times the ammount of data. Sounds like some good stuff comming from Big Blue, I just hope the price isn't so high that it turns back into vaporware.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Oh we're *well* past the theoretical limits :)
Living inside that 40 megs has been tough...
Can't wait til this comes out for laptops. Reminds me several years ago I knew a circle of friends all with type 3 PCMICA drives. They only held 40 megs/disk, but they loved it, exchanging warez and so forth realizing that they would quickly be phased out.
You can buy IBM microdrives up to 1/2 gig right now, and the IBM deskstar 75 gig drives have been available for about a month.
If you want a 1 gig microdrive, wait a month.
This isn't vapor. IBM ships.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I remember how you could format the tape a couple of times, and each time you'd get a different capacity. So if you didn't like the capacity you got, you'd just try another format.
I've never seen the technology (an infinite loop of tape) again. I wonder: did that design have so much problems, or is it just because floppy disks became cheap enough?
(The good old days of the 8-bit computers... Does this mean I'm getting old? :-)
WWTTD?
Both in size (matchbook) and in capacity (1 gig).
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
About 153391689 7 digit numbers (no need for the dash). No need for names (that just wastes space).
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
God dammit! I'm at work!
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
It has applications in vertical markets, such as the military, where weight is paramount.
At one point in time, we had to create a box that weighed 8 pounds, counting the batteries for 72hr operation, AND could take a 3 foot drop operating and 5 foot drop nonoperating. That 175g operating spec that someone mentioned sounds REAL nice!
Fast, good, cheap. Pick any 2.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
1000 Gig/5 MB-Average-MP3-file-size = 200 mp3 files (mf).
*Bold added for emphasis
<sarcasm>1000 Gig microdrive?? where, where? I want a terabyte (yeah, yeah, I know its only 0.9765625 TB) that the size of a matchbook!</sarcasm>
Oh wait, you just made a typo. Darn, that would be really cool if it existed. Just wait another few years...
And yes, I know I've made some very similar posts to this one everytime someone makes a typo.
Mark Duell
Except my fool younger brother keeps striking his matches on it and overwriting all my data!
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
This is great and all as a break through in the ongoing minturization of Computer hardware. But of what real use is a 1GB matchbox except to store *.MP3's. This is just an add-on component for your portable *.MP3 players.
This is nothing more than a new removable media format in my eyes.
I'll tell you what. I am going to forget I saw this article so I can really be amazed when here they made something useful like a 10GB drive the size of a matchbox. Now this is something I can actually use.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
actually 1 CD = 74 minutes of music = 650 MB
Dropping the drive from a meter or so on to a hard (i.e. tiled) floor could cause the drive to experience over 1000 g
The battery pack for a pacemaker is a bit bigger than this. implant a smaller battery and the driver. surely the space between my clavicle and my shoulder blade could hold this :) Run the wire for the tiny transducer to my inner ear. Wireless link in my other shoulder for d/l'ing new files to the unit. Audible user interface, I'm set. Sign me up.
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
No but they do dream of electric sheep.
:P
Now why doesn't RIO get its act together to support more memory. I bought a 128 flashchip and my Rio500 would even recognize it. With a microdrive instead, it would make a mighty powerful mp3 player.
"Where is my mind?"
This is innovation. How the hell dare companies like Microsoft even think about the word innovation when you look at what real research and development gives. But what gives me a sickening thud in the pit of my stomach is that this is the very same IBM who ruined the whole fucking future of microcomputing with two stupid monumental copouts when they are the ones who should have been leading the industry forward. IBM were big, they were monopolistic, and they trod on everyone's toes, but they were responsible - at least they were until those two stupid decisions. That's why I feel like crying when I see the sort of stuff they're still capable of even now.
Adam:What kept you?.
Adam:What kept you?
God:Rome wasn't built in a day
There *is* power information on IBM's website:
c ro/datasheet.htm
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/mi
It is (cleverly, I suppose) quoted in watts per megabyte. For a 3.3V supply, 0.000495/0.000967 watts. I'm not sure what the two numbers mean; perhaps the first is the 1GB drive and the other is the 512MB drive. If so, they both consume about 1/2 watt. There is also a 20ma "standby" (not spinning?) current, which would be 0.066 watts.
How was that book? (Do Androids dream of electric sheep) Have always been meaning to read it.
I ate my sig.
A single drive alone may not perform well, but at that size and capacity, you could group them together and make a mutli-GB RAID 5 in an enclosure no bigger than a single HH 3.5" hard drive, put a SCSI (or even IDE) front end on it an you've got a hard drive with incredible latency, throughput, AND data reliability. Got a bad sector? Just open the casing and replace one of the cartridges.
The only prohibitive factor being the cost. I doubt anyone would pay $5k for a 9GB drive.
actually it's 740.. it's only 650 if you put data on it, which uses less of the available bits on the cd (the rest are used for error correction, etc). Try ripping a 74 min audio cd and see how much space it takes up :)
Nope, 1 CD = 740 MB of audio. So you could fit about 28 more minutes of audio before this 1 gig drive is full. Best to keep your music in MP3 for now :)
... when can I actually buy one off the shelf?
I am, therefore you think.
Naturally, as you state, the prices will fall once there is incentive to do so, such as competition and lowered costs. Right now they're basically only competing with CF cards, so they can price the drives at the revenue maximizing point.
Come on, now... he could recycle the "Microdrive" trademark for the new version of his C5. I want a C5!!! :^)
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
anoncoward/anoncoward works, too.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
Still, if it has a fast write speed, It could deffinitly be an alturnative to compact flash. Pretty soon.
I think people are going to able to store every bit of data they have on a small device like this, and carry it around with them, That would be handy. If your bored.. pull out ur drive and listen to a choice of over 2000 mp3z, or whach you favorite movie with some other device.
~~~
Sigmenation fault.
I'm excited about the potential for watch-based applications. A "book of matches"-sized Gb drive is small enough for people to start developing mp3 player watches, personal communication watches, etc... I can't wait for the future!
I have no
Or if you go with some kind of lossless compression, you'd still get a 2-1 compression ratio, which is good enough for 2 hours. Not as convenient as having 10 hours of music, but sooner or later the audiophiles will have the storage for high quality digital audio.
Try zipping (or gzipping) a WAV. Voila, lossless compression.
nt
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
i just posted the same question...i'm having the same problems. curses, foiled again!
am i just crazy or does the partners.nytimes..... thing not work any more?
if you look at the spec page, it states that even when in use it can withstand 175 G. that is rugged. now if Diamond can make use of it in the Rio, i might buy one.
I can just see the headlines a year or so from now...
Cupertino, CA -- Apple has just announced their decision not to include support for microdisks of any kind, claiming that they are legacy technology and will probably fall into complete disuse in six months. Steve Jobs comments on Apple's decision.
"We are on the edge of a new era in computing. At the Apple labratories we are developing a new way of transferring data between computers. With the proper training and the right hardware, we have discovered a way to form a mind-meld with your computer and transfer data directly to or from your brain. We have reached speeds in excess of excess of 2 TB/s and we have no idea what is the limit of the human brain in storing data."
When asked about the effects on the human brain, Jobs refused to comment apart from saying that they are reviewing the effects. The interview was then interrupted by a man sloppily dressed and drooling babble "Macintosh -- Mind-meld" before he was escorted out by a pair of men in black suits and sunglasses. Jobs remarked "Oh no! The test subject!" before hastily excusing himself and asking us to leave the building.
Dave
cool.. thanks for the link. :-)
I guess I'll research the vibrational sensitivity on my own
Fifteen hundred gee. That sounds like a lot.. but what does that mean in real terms. I mean, how hard do you have to huck the thing against a concrete wall to shock it? I presume it's definitely good enough to be able to shake a sackful out onto a table (assuming they become cheap enough to buy a sackful for under $25,000.)
I've always thought it would be cool if there was a tough enough medium that Gibson-style hax0rs could wander around with a grimy shoebox full of data cartridges.. something analogous to the box of audio cassettes you might expect to see in the back of a rusted 1984 Firebird.
I was a Spectrum user back in 1983, and was an "early adopter" of microdrives.
Each cartridge could store 85k of data using the official formatter. Using a third-party formatter (which also checked for bad sectors) you could fit 100k, which was more than twice the Spectrum's 48k of RAM, onto a cartridge.
Loading time of a full 48k was under 5 seconds, compared to over 3 minutes using the standard cassette drive.
I used microdrives for four years, and lost 2 cartridges out of around 100. One died of old age (it was one of the first I got), the other broke when I first tried to format it. When I gave my Spectrum away in 1990, I tested ten of the cartridges at random; they all loaded.
As for disks, between 1985 and 1990 there was a format war between Sony's 3.5" and Amstrad's 3" format. Amstrad eventually lost, but in the early days it wasn't clear-cut. The first 3.5" disks were single-sided, single density, and could store 180k of data. They cost more than two microdrive cartridges, and the Shugart disk drives for the Spectrum cost far more than a microdrive.
Sinclair may have trademarked the word "Microdrive" in a computer storage context, but from what I gather he's been happy to let it lapse. IMHO, IBM's Microdrive gives me an instant nostalgia buzz, and I'm looking forward to running a Spectrum emulator and all the programs on a single Microdrive in my Psion NetBook.
Love and kisses,
Simon
--
-- Free Luna!
There was aslo something called the Hobbit drive, but I can't recall if this too used tape loops.
Are the data catridges used by Dec Vaxen loops? I saw one once, but didn't have the nerve to take it apart.
Let me guess, you're trying to use alkalines in your digital camera, right? If so, then don't blame the batteries for your mistake. With decent (1400-1600mAH) NiMH batteries you can usually get at least an hour or two of continuous use out of most digital cameras. When they run down, you just swap them out and recharge them. Two sets of batteries and a good charger (like the Maha C204F) can easily meet your power needs with a digital camera for about 500 charges each. In my experience, the Microdrive has had very little impact on battery life - I can still get between 50 and 100 pictures with the LCD on continuously and normal flash, zoom, and autofocus use. For batteries and chargers, go to Thomas Distributing. You may also want to look at the Batteries message board at the Digital Camera Resource Page or Andy Baird's batteries page.
I know that the 340 meg IBM Microdriver is in use in TRGPro Palm-clones. Here's the page: http://www.trgpro.com. Notice right under the gray bar they have a photo of a PalmOS device with 340 megs of storage. That's really something. But blowing the 1-gig barrier is way-cool. With 1-gig drives you can now store fairly massive databases in a PDA. I can imagine this is very useful within some companies. I know I'd be impressed if I were talking to a company's big cheese asking him some obscure detail about the company, and he pulls out a PDA and checks his database. That would be cool.
Way to go IBM!
Suddenly I hear Homer saying "Hmmm all this computer hacking is makeing me thisty."
Laugh and the world laughs witht you. Cry and the world laughs at you! SNARF
I've got an older Dell 133mhz laptop with 1.6 gig harddrive that just isn't enough room for a dual boot system. I'd like to get one of these microdrives or one of the higher capacity flash memory cards and boot from it but I don't know how. I wonder if there's some tweaked version of my laptops bios out there or something.
I'm just waiting for those Micro Fusion Cells from Fallout. Hmmm... I wonder what will happen when there are common handheld batteries that could easily electrocute you...
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
I have worked with compact flash designs for years, and CF II is nothing more than a slightly thicker version of the standard CF card everyone is familiar with (sometimes refered to as CF I). Also, the CF interface is very similar if not almost identical to ATA, hence it is very easy to tie these devices into an ATA/IDE controller.
As for a replacement for everyones computer, don't forget that these devices often do not have the same amount of RAM buffering found on traditional hard disks, and that performance often takes a back seat to overall size. Power drain will also be greater due to its mechanical nature. But all said, it would still be cool to use one of these in a PDA/camera.
all of you apparently just read microdrive and assume its an old post if you notice IBM announced 1GB microdrives, not the 340 of the past.
moo.
I think this deserves a little postive moderation. That takes a lot more work then just rewriting the URI with the old s/www/partners/ trick.
Keeping
Finally. I want small huge amounts of storage. Get me 20 Gigs in a matchbox, and then I'll be happy! Make it faster than L1 cache, and I'll be happier.
Wow, this almost makes MP3 obsolete for storing music portably :) Admittedly you could use that for 100 hours of "CD-quality" MP3s, but no true audiophile is going to accept that. Erm, well, no true audiophile is going to accept CDs either, but anyway...
But seriously, this is an amazing capacity for a hard drive this small, and it seems pretty robust as well - they say it can withstand up to 1500G. However, surely the physical limits of magnetic hard drive technology must be approaching - this has a density of 15 billion bits/square inch - what is the theoretical limit?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Someone remind me, but whatever happened to the American Computer Company and their 90 gb, solid state device that plugs into a Slot 1 port... hmmm, looks like IBM might have stolen their technology ;-) Nah, I definitely give props to IBM as I own two of their harddrives and they're beautiful pieces of equipment. I love you IBM!
Fruit flies like bananas... Time flies like the wind...
The current IBM microdrives are practically unuseable on WinCE PDAs; they'll kill a charge in less than an hour. Power consumption is *the* key issue with any PDA peripheral.
This could be just what we need. If they do this, think about it. It would lower PC harddrives some, wow can't wait to see who will follow!
Got shack?
ShackCentral Network
Worlds best gaming network!!!
I'll second that!
science is a religion
Maybe finally we can start getting some MP3 devices out there than can store my growing free (as in beer) music collection. I just can't deal with these things that think 64 MB is a reasonable amount of memory to have.
Also, these things included in some of the new Crusoe based webtop devices could start giving Linux some serious penetration into the embedded market.
As always though, TANSTAAFL as IBM has been known to keep it's microdrive prices high for the duration of the product's life.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
It looks like nytimes has shut down the 'partners.nytimes.com' back door. Oh well, you can try 'slashdot2000' without the quotes as username and password.
I read that this has been possible for a fair length of time, but was not released for marketing reasons. This was in the June issue of PC World (The UK one, not the Ziff-Davis one)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Sure, there are lots of them, think professional recording gear and a pair of Sennheisers.
----------------------------
Linus H. Torvalds on rollerblades! You know, there are uses for compactflashes other than stuffing Britney Spears on them! Goto dpreview.com or Steve's digicams and other and see why we need larger storage media. I have 48MB CF in my camera and I can fit 140 images on it. Maybe good for one day, but hardly for 2 week vacation. (Unless I get more flashes/portable storage/nearby cybercafé) And I have old 1280x760 camera, wait until I get my paws on one of those 2000x1600 cameras.. Btw, I want that Canon D30!
J.
It was the basis for the movie Bladerunner.
There seem to be two versions of it out there. When I first got it, there were a few points where it had "***" to indicate missing pages of manuscript--the author's suicide prevented completion. When I bought a used copy a couple of years ago, that had apparently been cleaned up.
[Hmm. I *think* that was this book. Or was it _The Unteleported Man_?]
_Gladiator at Law_ (Pohl Anderson?) is another one that's been changed. I read it maybe 20 years ago, and bought a copy (after years of looking). In the process of updating it (after 20 years?), it lost a lot of its bite . . .
Think back 20 years. $500 was the price of a 100K floppy . . . controller not included; add another $100 for that.
Disks to feed that drive were $5@, though small discounts were available.
A couple of years later, a 5mb drive became available for micros. I think it started at about $5k, tumbling to $1500 after a couple of years. They were awkward under CPM, which had no directories (although user numbers let you do a tiny bit of organization). The apple II divided it into something like 35 deparate 143k drives.
Oh, and it was about $50 to align those floppy drives. If you moved thi machine a lot, this was a regular occurrenc e . . .
Quest marketed a "stringy floppy" which sounds like the same thing for hte version of the Elf. It wasn't all that much less than the floppies of the time, though, iirc.
I want to say that there were a couple of similar things, but I can't think of them offhand.
These things are amazing; a guy at work showed me a 350Meg model in a compactflash adapter, which is great for digital cameras, except I wonder what the battery drain would be like.
Anyone know?
--
Try banging your shin against a coffee table.
Lessee...assume walking speed of about 2 meters per second...assume table is fixed and does not flex...assume leg/foot speed is 2x walking speed as it is coming forward in your stride...assume skin on shin is 2mm thick and will deform completely upon impact.
Accelleration = change in velocity / change in time.
A = (4m/sec - 0m/sec) / (2m/1000 / 4m/sec)
A = 4m/sec / 0.0005sec
A = 8000m/sec/sec
1G = 9.8 m/sec
Soooo
Ag = 8000m/sec/sec / 9.8 m/sec/sec = 816G on your shin. No wonder it hurts!
OK, so you have to run into the table to get up to 1500G, BFD.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Heh. I'm startled to discover that there are others who measure technology advances by the opportunity to ingest them.
I was thrilled when the first matchbox hard drives came out. "My god, I could swallow it!" And then those super-small modems: "My god, I can swallow the Internet!" And cameras: "My god, I could do a helluva webcam!"
I'll be estatic when I can choke down a high-resolution projection monitor...
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I love the ghost stories like this one that are so short-lived... Someone should make an index of these. Sometimes the blurb is more informative than the story that gets left on the homepage. What is the criteria for this? Does taco get a posting point even though the story gets remarked?
Anyway, visit the link above to see the OTHER story about the IBM drive. It's like driving through a ghost town!
~GoRK
Seriously. Many digicam and PDA owners report low battery life after switching from flash to the microdrive. 1.2GB type II PC card flash memory is available. Now you know.
If your carrying around a 1 gig match book harddrive, then it is safe to say that won't be getting any babe's phone numbers.
Linux O Muerte!
Think how many babe phone numbers I can store on a 1 GB matchbook cover...
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
1000 Gig/5 MB-Average-MP3-file-size = 200 mp3 files (mf).
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
I agree that MP3s aren't as good as advertised, but I don't think you're going to be able to tell the difference when it's playing over Palm Pilot speakers.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
First of all, the term "theoretical limit" is a bit vague, but the limit which seems most directly relevent is what they call the superparamagnetic limit. This is the point at which the thermal energy which tends to randomize magnetic moment are stronger than (or just as strong as) the amount of magnetic energy stored in an individual bit. This effectively means that you may be able to store the bit, but it won't stay stored very long. Anyway, most scientists "estimate" this limit to be about 100 Gb/sq. in. (IIRC) I say "estimate" because magnetic field calculations is still more of an art than a science, and the calculations make some pretty strong assumptions about geometry. I believe the above mentioned limit assumes all of the magnetic moments are alligned in plane, for instance, which is very poor arrangement from a Gb/sq.in. perspective, but currently is the only practical way to arrange a drive. There are also other assumptions about the media being uniform, the substrate being flat, etc., etc. When we no longer assume many of these assumptions, we have more opportunities for greater density, at the expense of greater technical challenge, so the question really should be, "What is the theoretical limit assuming the same fundamental drive design", and as I said before that is about 100 Gb/sq.in. By the way, the read head design alone has changed fundamentally at least two times in the past 10 years (inductive heads, magnetoresistive heads, and GMR heads), so the assumption of drives remaining fundamentally the same until we reach this limit is a pretty weak assumption.
And you get a very wearable, very useful computer.
I WANT. NOW!
www.eFax.com are spammers
I want to know if there's going to be any way to hook it up to a handspring visor, because that would REALLY kick ass. Someone should make a compactflash springboard adapter, that would be REALLY useful.
-motardo
Note to self:
Figure out an interface for this and a lego mindstorm so that an AI program in LISP maybe created for my Lego creation. A little duct tape to secure the drive to the mindstorm. And I can take over the world!!! (Providing that I do it in the 10 min before the batteries go dead)
New and old photos of the IBM Microdrive can be viewed here: http://www.wirephoto.net -- Mike
(Reuters) -- International Pyrotechnical Devices, based in Poughkeepsie NY, today announced the debut of the PFA or Personal Flame Accessory. It is a paper matchbook which holds one billion matches. "Our goal is one smoker - one matchbook," said company founder, Fred E. Tunalu. The PFA, which is about the size of an IBM System 360, will contain copious cover art which is precisely targetted at the consumer. "By formatting each matchbook at one specific person, we hope to deliver the ultimate in marketing to a narrowly defined demographic," he said. (continued on page 42)
HP had matchbook-sized drives about 6 years ago, and HP reps gave out little plastic mockups of them to any designer who'd listen, as they tried to find a market for the things. Not enough capacity for a laptop, and palmtops were still at the Newton level. The first major application, of all things, was heart monitors. Those have now switched to flash memory. So these things have been around for a while, looking for an application. The Palm XVIII, maybe?
Put this puppy in a digital camera and you would have something you could really travel with. Most photographers would have no problem spending $500 on that much storage- High-rez uncompressed photos galore!.. And for the average consumer, you could go crazy with snapshots over a long vacation in that much space. Now we just need the speed to get rid of latency, a simple yet powerful cataloging system and a 30 -year battery.
air and light and time and space
The iPlay MP3 player by maxtech take CompactFlash cards, so it should be able to use the 1 gig microdrive when it is released.
In 1982 Sinclair annouced Microdrives for the ZX Spectrum, although it took a year for them to arrive. The QL and ICL One-Per-Desk (a QL clone with integrated Lan and telephone) also used them.
They consisted of a loop of tape in a matchbox sized case. Capacity was approx 80-100K (wow!). Reformatting after use would increase the capacity due to tape stretch.
They were unreliable anf propriatory (only Sinclair made them, and they sold initially at 5 UKP per cartridge IIRC). They were also slow due to seek times in seconds.
Typical Sinclair - designing their own solution when cheap storage, such a 3.5" floppies, was already emerging.
I wonder if the name is still Trademarked??
hymie
There was nothing on IBM's website about power and speed. Does anyone know how these to metrics compare to the flash used in MP3 devices?
As a side note, it is now possible to choke to death on a multi-gigabyte hard-drive.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This kind of technology is clearly a boon for portable MP3 players.
Will Metallica now sue IBM?
What's that smell? Ah, that's my karma burning...
It's often said that only small companies are innovative. The number and range of cool technologies that IBM (about as big as they get) are turning out, from IC to storage technology, seems to contradict this.
Come on, it's much easier to do s/www/www10/ instead:
http://www 10.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles /20blue.html
The hacking level on slashdot is amazingly low these days.
IBM triples capacity of world's smallest hard disk drive.
Halo Data Devices are introducing a 250Mb microdrive in a type I compact flash format. Small enough to fit in loads of devices, not least my trusty Psion 5.
How about some other uses...
But the killer app...
Build a system with this for storage, one of their nice low power, high integration PPC chips for CPU, and their `toothbrush' eye projector displays, ViaVoice for input (and a keyboard jack), add a wireless interface and linux.
They seem to have almost all of the pieces together now.
The last part of the article talks of a Tiqit Matchbox PC priced at $1,495. Imagine a matchbox sized MP3 player with 1 GB storage. The price might not be there, but the idea of 1 Gig of music stored in a space smaller than your wallet is quite attractive. Maybe the future of wearable computers is coming closer...
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
At this size you could make a laptop with a RAID array in it... that's what everyone needs. :)
BlackNova Traders
And that brings me to my point: it's wonderful that IBM has a microdrive like this, and it speaks volumes for miniaturization and where technology is headed. But what is the expected use for most people today? Not much. At $500, this is way out of range of all but a few consumers. (Heck, it would cost more than the TRGPro itself!) At present perhaps the best feature of the 1GB microdrive is to drive down the price of the 340MB microdrive so people can buy them instead.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
To get around it, find a NYTimes partner. The easiest way is to go to Google and search for "link:partners.nytimes.com". Take the first one off the list, PressDemo. Go to their site and look at their links to partners.nytimes.com. Note that they are all of the form "http://partners.nytimes.com/somepathtosomestory?. html?Partner=PressDemo&RefId=YY1js4EFnnn n.FnBoj"
To get the story you want (i.e.library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/20blue.ht ml) just substitute it in there. So, hit the link http://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biz tech/artic les/20blue.html?Partner=PressDemo&RefId=YY1js4EFnn nn.FnBoj anv voila.
Now, I won't defend this as being either convenient or ethical, but it works.
I can see the headlines now: Los Alamos Nuclear Secrets Flushed Down Toilet.
The Los Alamos Laboratory reported that two matchbook sized disk drives were lost. Investigators suspect an employee accidentally dropped them into a toilet...
(AP)--In the latest of a series of embarassing security breaches, officials at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory reported that two matchbook-sized hard drives were topped with peanut butter and eaten, allegedly by its newest employee, one H. Simpson. Sources quote Simpson as responding, "D'oh!"
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.