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Creating Nanotech Of The Nearly-Now
Believe writes: "CNN has this article about how recent advances in nano technology could be used in consumer appliances (CRTs, Hard drives, etc) as soon as next year. It's nice to see some nanotech applications that could be seen in the real world sooner than the '5-10' year range." What's most intriguing here to me (besides Weija Wen's "white powder of tiny particles") is the establishment of an Institute of Nanoscience and Technology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. One million dollars though, seems like, well -- like nanofunding.
For perspective, CD-R in the early 90s cost about $1500 for a drive and $20 for media. CD-R didn't see consumer acceptance until these numbers fell about 4x, to ~$400 for the drives and $5 for media. Widespread use required a 10x drop in prices. And this is a technology whose competitors (floppies, Zip disks) had serious flaws. ATA Flash, on the other hand, needs prices to drop by a factor of about 400, just to be on par with a mature, reliable, accepted technology. And, even if those prices were achieved tomorrow (via some miracle) there are still a lot of cons:
- it's slow -- under 4MB/sec versus 20+ MB/sec for a typical hard drive .
- it's not especially dense: it appears you can get 1GB on a PC card, which works out to maybe 20GB in a 3.5" IDE enclosure. New magnetic disks fit 20GB on a single 3.5" platter; you can put five such platters in one enclosure.
- it has a finite life, typically <500000 rewrites per sector. This is fine for digital cameras, but it's no good for a busy database or swap partition.
So when will ATA Flash replace Winchester drives? Considering it took CD-R 10 years to overcome one obstacle against weak competition, and flash has many obstacles and strong competition, I'd say never.That doesn't, of course, preclude the invention of some new solid-state product. A cheap, dense, low-power, reliably non-volatile SS technology would be truly great. But these innovations aren't falling out of the sky (new memory-related inventions are few and far between) and it has a lot of catching up to do before it bests the phenomenal attributes of a $200 hard drive. I didn't sell my Quantum stock today, and I probably won't tomorrow.
cheers,
mike
..that a 'consortium' of software and hardware manufacturers are working on 'copy protected' hard-drives that send burrowing nanomites into your brain if you try to make illegall copies of the latest Nsync MP3.. of course if you are collecting Nsync MP3's the nanomites may not be able to get much of a foot-hold in your grey matter..
air and light and time and space
Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords. :-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years). .V / _` (_-<_-<
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make world, not war
That's "grey goo", and it describes a scenario where replicating nanobots start replicating out of control. More general ones that can use materials found in the environment to replicate could theoretically turn the planet into a literal "goo" of assemblers after disassembling everything else on the planet, and the planet itself.
Of course, simple engineering choices can eliminate this possibility from ever occuring. The "black goo" scenario, where it is intentional, is probably more likely than grey goo.
Regardless, it's not really relevant at this time, they're far far away from reaching that point yet. They don't mean "molecular nanotechnology" here, they just mean working at the nanoscale level. "Nanotechnology" has become a buzzword.
It's not molecular nanotechnolgoy until they're creating machines at that level.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."