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Can Ten Billion Gigs Fit In A Test Tube?
Nipple writes: "Using Nanotechnology scientists ar Rice University have been able to store 10 billion gigabytes of data on physical storage small enough to fit into a small vial. The whole story appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and
can be found here." No indication is given of which calculations for data density the tiny vial pictured would be able to hold that much, but the idea of all the books on my bookshelf (and yours, and yours, and yours ... in fact, all the books I ever want to read) stored inside the stylus of my 9-day-battery life, white-LED-backlit wireless anything box is pretty tantalizing.
So all you need is two of these vials and you've exceeded 64 bits of address space.
Check some articles about this in Wired and Scientific American. They are about Tour and Reed. It talks about their plan on developing molecular computers. Sounds like they are very close to coming up with transistors but have quite a ways to go to come up with wiring!
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
There's more interesting information about the binary powers here
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The web page for the Tour Group at Rice University can be found here. It has links to other articles on molecular computing. Beware, the page has a 500K picture on it, not very modem friendly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, the article doesn't say that they've been able to store anything like that. The article says:
Ten billion gigabytes of data can be stored in this vial, according to Molecular Electronics Corp.'s cofounder, Jim Tour.
And they say that they've demonstrated the use of a molecular form of DRAM. Now these are pretty good advances already, and I believe nanotechnology will definitely change the way we look at computing, but please, Timothy: These guys don't have a secret RAM plant set up ready to conquer the world overnight.
Not just yet, anyway.
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Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
I worry about, its needing a tape autochanger the size of a house to back it up on for when I lose it down the back of the sofa.
Bob.
This seems to be another example of the focus of the computing industry: create better and better hardware but use it to run software which hasn't really changed much in the last decade.
People are always making this sort of claim, yet no-one ever provides any evidence to back it up. I thoroughly disagree with your assertion. I say that software has changed a lot in the last decade.
Ten years ago, apps were small, slow, and lacked features. I couldn't do real-time video editing in software, heck I couldn't even playback video in software. Nothing as complex as a web browser existed ten years ago. I didn't have applications like Photoshop or Gimp that allow me to perform very sophisticated image manuipulation.
Try running some 10 year old software on today's hardware. It runs faster, but it feels archaic, feature-less and flat compared with modern software.
And that's just looking at the outside of the software. If you look at the code, its also changed radically, with the introduction of object-oriented programming and large-scale software engineering.
Just seems to be another excuse to create sloppy programs/bloatware.
What you call bloatware, other people refer to as fast, stable, feature-rich software. Of course there are bad applications out there, just as there were ten years ago or twenty years ago. But there are also whole classes of application that just weren't possible a decade ago, not just because the hardware has improved, but also because we understand how to build large-scale software like never before.
Sailing over the event horizon