Slashdot Mirror
Massive Storage Advances
pra9ma writes: "Scientists from Keele University, in England, have suceeded creating a system that enables up to 10.8 terabytes of data to be stored in an area the size of a credit card, with no conventionally moving parts. This along with 3 other forms of memory which could
revolutionize storage. The company said the system could be produced commercially within two years, and each unit should cost no more than $50 initially, with the price likely to drop later. "
I'm unconvinced about their compression algorithm, but if it
works, this is gonna be amazing.
Great, just when napster is closing up shop. Now what do I use 10 terabytes for?
Stop posting ridiculous stories like this, and you will save terrabytes in bandwidth and storage requirements for all the "you've been had" comments.
lets say we have:
11010111 10110100
Those are our two bytes.
How would you record the difference?
The 'difference' would be:
01100011
Now how is that take up any less space? Just a little food for thought.. no?
I JUST MADE A MESS ALL OVER MY KEYBOARD!!!
Nothing like technology induced orgasms... yummy
What's with this obsession with text? Text is not at all significant in disk space usage. At a reading rate of 3 minutes/K, that means it takes you 10 000 years before you have finished your first Tb of text. Pah. (Oh, and I know scientists from Keele, the concept that they could produce something like this is laughable).
Go to AudioGalaxy. Once you do, trust me, you'll just laugh that Napster is goin' down. I've converted many of my friends, all who say it's much better than Crapster.
-kidlinux.
Yeah, so that when they run out of oil,and have sapped us from all our money on oil, they'll bring that battery patent out of the basement, mass produce the things, and then suck money out of us using that.
-kidlinux.
They're talking about compressing text, which implies ordinary, lossless compression. MP3 isn't even in the same ballpark.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Just imagine what this would do to firms like StoreageTek if true. It will wipe them out. Why spent £0.5M on a Powderhorn solution (~400TB) when you can spend £2000 on 40 credit cards that can hold the same.
Macka
Which is why your PDA currently can't store thousands of hours of music and hundreds of thousands of images. And HTML versions of all of the O'Reilly books and all the RFCs. And (display permitting) full-length movies. And a several-hundred-meg "working set" of documents you may need access to on the road. And a backup of your hard drive, just in case.
Sure, these things aren't vital, but they're certainly not useless.
My Web Page
--
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
Its all part of the bullet-proof spam-proofing, my friend.
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
heh heh...
he said barney miller
heh heh...
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Blah blah blah huge hardrives possible yadda yadda blah any minute now blah blah blah revolutionize blah blah blah you'll never actually see this technology in use anywhere yadda yadda blah blah....
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
As you (and I) said, not useless, but hardly "required" That's all I'm sayin'. And my pint about cellphones still holds true.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I think the average slashdot thread would compress very well :)
Jilles
I'm not quite as quick as most here to completely dismiss this stuff as impossible. They might be eggarating a bit, but more likely than not they've got some pretty clever ways of storing a lot of data on a small area over at Keele. People have proposed gee-whiz storage stuff for years, gotten working prototypes in the lab, but have yet to produce something which has the combo of cheapness and speed of the trusty harddrive. If they have figured out a way to get storage anywhere near what they are talking about, at anywhere near $50, conventional wisdom leads me to guess that the read speed has got to be abysmal. I'm not ready to throw out my harddrives quite yet...
So to repeat what every other poster has already said, which putz put this story up? I could point you to stories from The Onion that make more sense.
Imagine a plank of wood, 2" x 2" x 6'
Its crosssection is credit card size, they
didn't specify a height.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
This sounds a little familiar. I invented an algorythm that allowed compressing data over and over and over. This was back in the old Amiga days. It it took like 2 days to compress an already compressed 512K file 2 or 3 times to 100K though. I haven't got around to doing it on a PC of todays speed. It was pretty amazing really but when it takes such a long time I never bothered to find out the limits it would go to.
I'm interested to see if it's anything that I have already done. Does anyone have any details on the patents?
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Data access time is around 100 Mb/sec.
Don't expect it to replace hard drives any time soon, let alone RAM. 100Mb/sec is pretty slow, compared to, say Ultra-2 SCSI (640Mb/sec), or Ultra ATA/66 (528Mb/sec).
AV recording capacity, 33.34MB / minute, 10.8TB = 323,935 minutes of recording for one 16 layer PC Card storage device. Woo. Fucking! Hoo. !!
Becoming a gargoyle (a la Stephenson) would be a practical reality
One of the major ways to save bandwith with client-server games is to have a large library of precomputed models, textures and animations. If the game ships on one of these cards, it would be possible to automatically pre-render every possible combination of every possible movement and texture of every model in your game to a near photo-realistic level of detail, letting you just transmit an index. And still have space left over for an abridged Library of Congress.
Ever find yourself needing to look up something on the 'net, but lack access? Whip out a Net-on-Card and find what you need.
I just hope it's not vapor. Please, PLEASE, don't let it be vapor.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
Just in case someone accidentally clicks it in a drunken stupor. ;-)
Execute? [Y/N] _
I used to work for a company that made compression software. They used static (i.e. non-adaptive) compression models that where carefully constructed by hand in a high level computer language that was specially designed for writing compressors. You could build compressors for *specific* data that blew all general-purpose compressors out of the water. As a proof of concept we squeezed the 4.2MB text version of the King James bible into 800KB, so that you could carry it around on your Magic Link (the Magic Cap PDA). It was a hell of a job (we even provided fast random access and free text search capabilities) and I really don't think a generic model can do better than that.
--
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
A search on Google for "Ted Williams Keele University" returns pages on www.cmruk.com -- an unreachable site.
/. itself has posted about this before: back in August 1999. Nobody seemed to believe it then either.
But the cache once again comes through: here. However, it's still light on details, though it does mention that the Prof is Professor Emeritus of Optoelectronics at KU, and that his "main focus over the last thirteen years has been the research and development of 3-dimensional magneto-optical recording systems."
It appears that this has been in the news before, as early as September 1999, in The Register. I can't say that I'm impressed with the other "scientific curiosities" they mention CMR promoting, like "Zodee," the "disposable toilet cleaning device which avoids the hygiene problems associated with conventional toilet brushes."
And now that I look closer, it seems
See also Unitel, Inc. They claim to be developing HOLO-1, "the first practical quantum-computing device, which can be economically manufactured and introduced into the current computer industry." The esteemed Prof. is listed in their subcontractors section complete with picture.
-- gold23
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
It depends on what is in the source file.
Your source file is probably generated by Microsoft. It is not unusual to see MS filesizes that are 100 to 1,000 times larger than the actual text. The padding can contain long strings of zeros, which can be highly compressed.
Try compressing a text file generated in a plain ASCII editor. You might get different results.
The newly released Opera for Linux is ad-sponsored freeware
After a bit of background search on Google...
Surprise, surprise...
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/10/1235259.shtm l
As I looked at the previous Slashdot article, I noticed that the article mentioned a follow-up. The link was dead, so again - Google to the rescue.
This is the follow-up from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/6071. html
More details have emerged regarding the amazing '2300GB on a PC Card' memory technology developed by a Keele University team led by the remarkable Professor Ted Williams.
(Even as we speak, Register scriptwriters are working on the pilot episode of Prof. Ted, Craggy Island's very own quantum mechanic: "Feck! Girls! Many-particle Wave Functions!").
The team's system crams 86GB of data storage per square centimetre of physical medium, and uses a magneto-optical system to read, erase and write data within the solid state system. That allows, claim the researchers, a data access rate of 100Mbps.
We also learn that Cavendish Management Resources (CMR), which is providing the business brains behind the Keele/CMR joint venture, Keele High Density, is also pioneering the following scientific curiousities, among others: "Zodee -- A disposable toilet cleaning device which avoids the hygiene problems associated with conventional toilet brushes. With major application in hotels and hospitals, this product is likely to be of interest to manufacturers, and downstream processors, of paper tissue."
The Register says: Expect Intel to launch its Downstream processor Real Soon Now.
"Disposal Speculum -- A unique inflatable vaginal speculum which cost effectively solves the problems of current instruments. This project has caused worldwide interest from manufacturers of medical disposables, and is likely to make a major impact on the speculum market."
The Register says: We always preferred the Sinclair Speculum.
"Light Weight Wheel -- A totally new concept for a combined light weight wheel/hub, likely to be of interest to manufacturers of automotive wheels and/or hubs."
The Register says: Wheel meet again, don't know where, don't know when...
CMR is promoting something called X-Cel. We're not sure what it is -- something to do with concrete, apparently -- but we're told Bill Gates already has his lawyers onto it... ®
which is a more informative link - or at least its full of more technobabble
v
There's a perl package for doing all sorts of nifty optimizations of your input text, replacing four and for syllables by the digit 4, and analogously for other word sounds. Suprisingly readable even at high levels of compression.
freshmeat will have a link for you. I'd probably search under pager.
erm. I didn't mean depth of the tree, I mean length of the leaf information.
"Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form. "
;)) in my DESKTOP. Something in me is wanting to believe this is 10.8 TB, but reality kicks in and 10.8GB seems much more feasable. Can anyone validate the claim of TB or is it a typo for GB?
Um, I don't know ANYONE who needs 10.8 terrabytes in a mobile phone, or even in a hand-held computer. Want I WANT is 10.8 terrabytes (These are the size of credit cards, and only $50? Give me a RAID-5 of 10 or 20 of these
The Professor states that his storage technology works "with no conventionally moving parts" - maybe he is using unconventionally moving parts instead? O-)
Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form.
Of course, hand-held computers and mobile phones will find these things useful. But certainly nothing else might. Certainly not EVERY COMPUTER ON THE DAMN PLANET. Where do they get these people?
This was first devised a year ago, they have just managed to create a prototype. I think the Financial Times article is wrong when it talks about compression. The technology (as far as I can remember) involves layering memory technology on top of each other and then storing the data in a 3D format which allows much greater storage than, say, just adding the storage capabilites of each layer together. Much greater is a slight underestimate. Obscenely greater is a better description. I doubt their $50 pricetag though. Okay, the drive itself might be cheap but I suspect the interface to connect it will cost a fair bit more.
Keele High Density plans to float to commercialise the technology further.
I hate it when they start writing in ivronics. I think I can guess what float means in this context, but who knows with this sexy biz language. (For those who are wondering: ivronics is a specialized dialect of English spoken by primarily white, upwardly mobile business types.)
The first invention is a method of compressing text stored in binary form, which expresses information as a series of noughts and ones, by comparing each word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words. This compresses the data to an eighth of its normal size.
There is nothing in this that says ASCII to me.
http://www.cmruk.com/cmrKHD.html is a somewhat detailed (but very dry) technical paper on the proposed technology.
Don't ask me what it says, tho; I'm no solid state engineer.
present day... present time.... hahahahahahahahahaa
present day... present time... hahahaha...
This old article seems to be exactly the same thing.
First, I have serious doubts as to the integrity of this "discovery." What they tell you: "I just wrote a program that rips dvd's to a 1 meg file" What they don't tell you: "It accomplishes this by dropping off any and all sound. Then, it reduces the frame rate to 1fps and compresses this from nice full screen video to a little 200x100 video."
And if this isn't fake... they say $50 and downwards from there. Let's assume for a minute that they can actually manufacture these for $50. Notice I said manufacture. Now I figure the following costs per unit:
50 Production
70 for profit
40 R&D recovery
20 media (advertising, etc)
20 customs/importing
75 retail mark-up
equals
325 total
Now I'm not saying that these numbers are anywhere near the actual costs, but look at how you $50 product could easily get to cost $300 or more.
And... I have yet to hear anyone mention the reader. If this media is perhaps removable, or otherwise requires some type of reader/writer device, who's to say that the reader won't cost a lot more. I remember a good number of years ago, when CD recorders were thousands of dollars, but the media was by no means expensive.
Anyway, that's my two cents....
---------------
CoyboyNeal is God
For the same reason you would have poked your eye out as a kid. Or broke your neck. Just ask your mom.
Huh? Moore's Law is about processing power. What does that have to do with this?
Uh... Was that sarcasm? If so, good work. If not, then why would you suggest that this story deserves a repost?
Not everything that is in a concept stage is vaporware. Things take time to evolve. Magical technologies dont just get off the drafting board and into consumer hands overnight. Its unfair to label it vaporware because you have the ecomomic attention span of a walnut. *Patience*, under development does not mean vaporware.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
If this is actually real, casual recording of one's everyday life is about to get a whole lot cheaper. (Not to mention the art of bugging.)
Hmm, recording data on metal oxide (read: magnetic) using fiber optics? (read: light)... Where's the magnetic read/write head? Yes, there's MO, but this sounds very fishy...
...Does anyone else remember the "infinite" compression algorithm many years back? A company claimed to be able to use the algorithm to "recompress" almost any type of data an infinite number of times, until any file could occupy 2K. I suspect they fooled dozens of non-technical types before they closed up shop and fled the country...
A few questions. First, is there any widely-used operating system (or BIOS, for that matter) that can even address, let alone use a 10.8 terabyte drive? Second, I see no reference as to what kind of interface will it have (IDE, SCSE, USB *shudder*, etc.). Third, since this will have no moving parts, could this be considered solid state storage? Finally, since there are no moving parts, wouldn't this have incredibly quick access times?
Of course, anyone who knows any information theory will instantly recognise this as utter drivel, but it's a good way of grabbing people's attention.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Ok. According to my late night calculations this would mean ~4,000,000 days of 128k mp3s. I honestly am not sure if this much music exhists in the real world, but if it did I'm guessing the winamp playlist would fill up my 30gig drive.
And it's only $50?
I always take these new storage rumors the same way I take somebody telling me that apple has a new product that doesn't suck: "I'll believe it when I see it, and thats never gonna happen."
Note: If any of you mac people actually get moderator status I guess I just got moderated down...
Click here to read too much about my personal life
"local colorful character is colorful"
Shouldn't that be "local colorful character is"?
My compression's more logical than yours.... If you don't under stand what "is" is, then just let me alone.
DAILY ROTATION
Now, it's not the fault of the editors, but I am getting really tired of all of these people with their "high capacity," "cheap" memory. Just tell me when you have a WORKING MODEL that I CAN ORDER from your website. Until then, I am going to sleep.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
dude, the hard drive companies are just gonna pick it up and start making it... end of story. anyone who is smart just buys their possible competitors and makes off like a bandit.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I am mad! What if I have my own layout or Dvorak or something and I want to email you. I'm suing!!!
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Using my semi-linear fergulseon trinaric algorithms.
Couple that with a succint arbitrary byte foam agent through a C.K.I. softlense and you're at over 5000:1.
Of course, I won't show anyone anything regarding the science behind these claims.
It's just a claim.
Anyone know a good V.C.?
What about access time? Details, details!
Chris
"An increase in transmission bandwidth capacity of 8 times, obtained by using the new KHD compression system - which works on top of, and in addition to all existing compression techniques. The effect is to compress the binary code itself by a factor of eight." (my emphasis) and
"An increase in processor speeds of up to 8 times when processing data streams due to the effects of the KHD binary compression system - a 1.5 GHz chip emulates the output of a 12 GHz chip."
That sounds like they're saying they can take previously compressed data and squeeze it down still further by a factor of 8 (oh really? I think not), and all this "an xMHz chip emulates an 8xMHz one" sounds like purest undiluted nonsense.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, most people are wrong. As you seem to be aware, most ordered systems are trivial to describe: x^2 + y^2 - r^2 = 0 describes a circle, and that's all the information it contains. A vaguely circular collection of random points requires a lot more effort to describe, and therefore has more information.
Random digits are "useful" in most contexts because each digit is "relevant", each digit is a "surprise", each digit means something. Nonrandom digits usually don't tell you anything you hadn't already worked out from their predecessors.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
Would it even need to be rewritable? Most tech comes out initially w/ read-only/write once (CD, DVD) drives, with recorders or rerecorders (I guess that should ahve been rewriters) priced way out of reach for Joe Schmoe. But the prices come down & they become readily available. Besides, what was it? 10tb? With that kind of space you'd rarely *need* to erase anything.
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
This *news* is nearly a year old. The patent process is ongoing and IP licensing should start this year. Forget about buying into this invention - UK universities are public bodies.
It says I invented a storage device with infinite capacity, problem was it took forever to find anything. (I did not make this up, soemone else did, but I have laughed at the notion for years).
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Any UK /.ers want to call up the "Managing Director" of this project? Maybe ask him a few questions about it to see just how vapor this ware is?
Tel: 44 171 636 1744 (in the UK)
Got the phone number from this page.
Hmm.. methinks maybe the hallowed Professor has maybe decided that 'plain text' is UNICODE?
It makes 8:1 compression ratios that much more within the grasp of mortal man
Molt
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Yes, finally a cheap and effective way to store some of my MP3 collection!
But then again, you realize what I said once about 5 and a quarter floppy disks..."Holy cow! I'm never going to need more than 10 of these things! They're HUGE!"
-- Bandit450...If-Else-Do-*TWITCH*!
What bollocks! Oooh look, they invented run length encoding.
My UID is prime!
If you divide 3,400,000mb data by a transfer rate of 100mb/s, you'll find that it would take 9.44 days to read or write all of one, probably about twice as long to defrag.
I don't know about that. I remember in a recent Information Theory course I did at Uni, we learnt that the information content of an ensemble with 26 different equally possible outcomes is 4.7 bits per symbol. If those symbols happened to be the 26 letters of the alphabet, and the language was English, then this dropped to 4.0 bits per symbol (due to the redundancy in the English Language). The implication seems to be that 8 bits for ASCII text is only about 50-60% efficient (forgetting entirely about capitilisation and punctuation for now)
Your statement would imply that 1 bit of information would be enough to tell you (in context of course) which letter out of the 26 possible ones follows any given letter. So for example, given the sentance:
The cat _
you would only need 1 bit of information to tell me which character is going to go next.
I feel somewhat doubtfull......
Although if you are correct, please reply to me because I do have an interest in this topic.
Doing the math,
2**16=3**x
log(2**16)=log(3**x)
16*log(2)=x*log(3)
x=16*log(2)/log(3)
x=10.094876 "trits" to store a 16-bit word
Still a bit short of 8:1!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
You are right, until competition comes in which there is none of right now, unless they are going for standards dominance.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Example: Spanky ==>It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
Could somebody please submit this story to Slashdot so it gets mentioned?
And, of course, it's possible that the inventors of the algorithm are using one of those data sets that are particularly easily compressible. The article claims only that their 8:1 compression was on text in binary format, not straight ASCII. If they were using MS Word documents, or something encoded in 16 bit/character unicode, an 8:1 compression might be reasonable.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Big Macs. They have the additional advantage that they are not only exactly the same size everywhere, but are of exactly identical molecular composition, unlike credit cards.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Just think about mp3 files, .zipped files, jpeg, mpeg, pdf. Most content file formats are compressed, the big exception being executable files, text files, and almost all older Microsoft file formats (DOC, PPL, XLS, WMF, BMP). So compression won't help you.
Moreover, if you bild compression into the hardware, you have unpredictable storage information.
Doesn't Rambus already have a patent on this?
They say that it could hold 10.4 terrabytes. They then say that it could revolutionize all this small stuff... True, but...10.4 terrabytes... wouldn't that revolutionize FULL SIZE stuff as well?
what isn't being mentioned here?
incredibly slow i/o speeds or something?
1) I do know what entropy means. I know that compression and entropy are not explicitly linked, but they are related, and the most efficient algorithms come close to the entropy ratio.
2) I specifically referred to ASCII. You don't need to tell me that a 16-bit representation and an 8-bit representation of the same data will reduce to the same thing when compressed properly.
3) 10:1 is about one bit per byte. If you want to be picky, you could say 0.8 bits per byte. So you heard a different rule of thumb that is a little more specific. That doesn't invalidate the one that's slightly rounded, especially when it happens to correspond exactly to the algorithm in question.
I've been getting crap like this all week. Why do all the trolls now feel they must post correct responses to my posts that nonetheless fail to disprove them, and assert superiority while they're at it? I suppose I might as well ask why my sister likes Britney Spears...
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Sorry. I've been getting shit like this all week, just all of a sudden. All of it comes from ACs or people with very high slashdot IDs who have only posted one comment in the past few weeks, almost as if they're after me. Yeah, probably just a coincidence, but I'm pissed off nonetheless.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Before Turning To The Dark Side and joining the commercial world, I spent a while at Keele University (though involved with CS, not the optoelectronics group).
This is far from a sudden announcement from an obscure eccentric - there's been serious, respected high density storage research going on there for ages, since writing data to round shiny things was a dream.
The fact that they've been talking about similar projects for a while doesn't make it vapo[u]rware - thats just how research works. Turning pure science into a consumer product doesn't happen in Internet time. Ok, it might have problems - they haven't said enough about data transfer, robustness, manufactoring issues - but it sounds like they're moving the science forward and that's what counts.
This of course was only true if you weren't using your processor for anything else at the same time...
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
So you are saying that decompression doesn't use the processor?
All I said was that compression is only going to give you a performance boost if disk IO is your bottleneck. If your processor is often at 100% adding decompression to the mix is going to slow it down...
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Well they aren't the only ones. This article hit ZDNet yesterday and it has things like "...the Mitnick trial, which is slated to commence in early 1999" in it.
Hey, with this you could make your cell-phone's hold music the latest Britney Spears mp3!
They're building a new utopia here, don't be so quick to knock it.
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
---
I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
- US5519200: Identification and information storage devices
- US5629474: Production of a sensor for carbon monoxide or water vapor including a semi conductor metallic oxide, catalyst, and rheological agent
There are a few other patents for Edward W Williams in the UK, but it's not clear if it's the same person.If anyone actually sees this through all the crud - I was just wondering where I could go for a more technical discussion or nerdly discussion on the merits of what is being proposed here.
The 10TB leap would be a huge one, and it appears that they're using a single mode 5 micron fibre and able to read/write with a 0.1 micron spot size - so my guess that the signal is somehow modulated to reflectively hit different areas of the MO - but at current levels of fibre transfer (100MB/s) it would take roughly 125 days (sustained) to fill the 10.8TB .. of course then you could have the entire Library of Congress ..
Is there anybody who knows more details about the signalling, or is there a more intelligent discussion elsewhere on some of these issues?
50$ cheap? In fact, it seems the price went up. Aforementioned /. article talks about 30$. I have strong suspicions, though that that should have been in £...
There's a -not very informative- press release on the site of Keele University. There's an e-mail address, but I suspect that covers only the commercial aspect of the thingee.
I'll finish off with some Register articles: here, here and a cached planetit article.
Can we have a counter on the front page that increments every time an article is posted with some company claiming to have a new storage medium that will hold _ terabytes in _ cubic centemetres and will cost _ dollars when it's available in _ years? Counters are fun.
----- sXe
Yup. And it's even got the same 2-year window that the TCAP story had when it first came out. Their time has come and gone (The TCAP story came out in '98, and they were saying it would be available by 2000).
Actually, now that I think of it, it seems like almost all vapourware initially announces itself to be ready for commercial consumption in about 2 years. Why is this, I wonder? Is 2 years a magic number that is close enough for people to get excited about it, but far enough away that people end up actually forgetting about it by the time it rolls around? Hmm...
Suffice to say I'm not planning on holding my breath for this technology either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Imagine taking the wrong card to the grocery store...
The cashier swipes the card and the display starts cycling though all of your porn instead of charging your account.
I work for maxtor and if this guy thinks we waste 40% of our space on error correction, he's on crack.
I doubt I am supposed to say actual hard numbers, but its definitely 5%
More data, damnit!
The company said the system could be produced commercially within two years, and each unit should cost no more than $50 initially, with the price likely to drop later
Will there be a RIAA/MPAA tax on it? 10.8 terabytes is a *lot* of space.
---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The way I read the few details on the article, the "$50 a unit" means each 1cm^2 (about .25 of a terabyte judging from my credit card). That brings it down to only a 25 fold increase
Still pretty good, but if you take away the 8x compression (for text only - zip gets better than this) you get a 3x increase.
3-fold increase in gigabytes per dollar in two years? Sounds pretty normal, maybe even a bit low.
sig's not here
foo@bar ~>dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.txt bs=1024k count=10
foo@bar ~>ls -lh
foo@bar ~>gzip -9 foo.txt
foo@bar ~>ls -lh foo.txt.gz
Dear Lord, Some cleaver sod has managed to reduce this file to .0974 of its original size.
Kicks their ass.... Given the correct data with the correct algorithm I could do even better.
Hmmmm lots of zero's, ok its commpressed.
>cat foo.txt.supercompression
0xlots
> Hurrah, now gimme lots of money and some free /. publicity.
"Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form. "
We are talking about 10.8 Terabyters - That works out at about a trillion SMS messages... now some people might call that overkill - even if the adverising agencies get really into SPAM SMS.
All right! Since the article says they will be commercially available in two years, that means we will have them in only 6 months :-)
The Technical Paper by Prof E. W. Williams can be found here
You know it's not really a *law* right? It is technically possible to break Moore's *law*.
T. Bradley Dean
tbdean
While the information density in english text is about 0.6 - 1.3 bits per word, actually compressing data to that extent is not really possible. And even if it were and worked perfectly on english text, it wouldn't help you much - the majority of your data would be binary anyways (thus this algorithm wouldn't work). 8-fold compression is certainly not achievable in general case in practise. Most of the data volume (music & graphics files, like JPEG, MP3s and your 1337 p1r473 divxs) is already in acompressed form and you can only get a few percent off of it in the best case. So for the most of the data volume, their method would do nothing anyways.
--
No. Low entropy means highly compressible; high entropy means not very compressible (due to the data being disordered). He was right and you were wrong ha ha ha ha ha ha.
No need to cry
Also, the most important dimension of a credit card is its thinness. When people claim that devices are credit-card sized, they usually mean in only two dimensions. This technology is another example of that - the thing is 10mm thick. That's not sleek enough to carry around in your wallet!
You shouldn't show it - if you're getting visibly pissed off it's all the more entertaining for the ACs.
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/07/22/237232.sh tml
/.!
Worse yet, only one person in the posts has pointed out that this is old, and not even from
Any spoon would be too big.
The FT article that was linked to in the post says that an optical fiber is used for reading. This reminded me of Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NFSOM) which is a technique used by a research group where I was a graduate student. To read more about it look under techniques at the Awschalom Group web page. For this NFSOM technique an optical fiber is tapered and coated with a metal to produce a tip with an aperature of ~100 nm. With a spot size of 100nm square it would be possible to fit about 1 Tera bit in the space of a credit card. Of course, this does not sound like a completely solid state device. The optical tip must scan over the recording material.
I also found another article which seems to have been written by a more clueful journalist. They report that the data is stored on layers within the substrate. With the areal density that might be accessible using NFSOM and 16 recording layers within the material it might be possible to reach the densities they are claiming.
It certainly seems that technology like this could take a long time to be developed into a product, but the university announcement does say that they have already received some patents on the technology and they sound optimistic about how much more work is needed. That stance is probably geared to attract venture capital more than anything, but who knows? -Dan
I've developed, in my spare time after school, a new 500.2TB hard drive that's *incredibly* small. My compression algorithm consists mainly of dividing by two, over and over again.
My lab has been largely automated, thanks to my genius. Unfortunately, the hard drive has become so small, I can't see it.
But really, it is in fact real.
Please invest in my company?
I need to buy an electron microscope now..
Damn!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Actually, 100 MB/sec isn't access time, its the data transfer rate. Older IDE/ATA disk drives transfer at 33 MB/sec, the newer ATA drives at 66 MB/sec. Some of the newer PCs have 133 and even 200 MB/sec memory buses, so this device can pump data roughly as fast as all but the newest, top-of-the-line boxes can handle.
The access time (latency) for a device with no conventional moving parts is probably (but not necessarily, as demonstrated by bubble memory in the mid-eighties) much less than that for a conventional hard disk drive, which is typically 6 to 9 milliseconds these days.
How can Rambus collect royalties off this?
aztek: the ultimate man
No sig for you!!
Oh, come on.
I've waited for this for about four years now - when they started making those IBM microdot drives in Ireland we got the first announcements of this new technology. These were supposed to go into production in 2001. Suppose a lot happens in 4 years.
Wonder if the problem is securing financial backing? With the quoted performance rate, maybe the drives are a little too good. (Probably not, they were probably just refining the thing - but I like to introduce a healthy amount of paranoia now and again).
8)
Concrete analysis...
Apparently someone is serious about it...
From a quick look at the abstract, the whole "new compression" thing is as it applies to laying data down onto the media. And from the looks of it, the big deal is it is using a hybrid of silicon and MO for a "3d" memory using the above mention "compression scheme".
I'm sure others can look at this and shoot it down for the rest of us
What else is all over the planet, and in the same size everywhere?
Try: Larry Ellisons Ego
Now, does it compress the text while it's in text form or in binary form? ie.- "words" as in the text, or "words" as in a preset amount of bits? If it's doing it with the text, then isn't this just Lempel-Ziv encoding? Setting up a table of patterns that are encountered and storing the reference to these patterns instead of the patterns themselves? And if this is the case, then only highly repetitive data would compress well. For example, some of the best compression found with Lempel-Ziv is found with Dr. Seuss books due to the fact every other word rhymes.
If however, they're compressing the binary representation, the repetitiveness might be higher, especially since it sound like they'd be using words. However, you'd have to ensure that the table references are smaller than the words you're replacing. And then there would have to be some sort of further encoding (ie.- Huffman) to actually compress the data. Regardless, this isn't a new invention by any means. Not that that's stopped anybody else from patenting.
On top of that, this would then be essentially a compressed drive. Even with no moving parts to physically slow it down, the decompression would reduce speed.
Finally, this sounds like it could only hold 10.8 terabytes of TEXT. Not very useful outside of e-libraries and basic data storage.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Looks like its just another company with greatly inflated figures trying to get investors...
Here are a couple of stories from The Register on this:
ONE - UK boffins reckon they can cram 10,800GB of data on a PC card
Monday, 9 October 2000
TWO - UK boffins unveil $35 '2300GB on a PC Card' RAM breakthrough
Monday, 9 August 1999
Note that the original stories said that the figures were in the thousands of gigabytes - this means TERABYTES
Cavendish Management Resources (CMR)seems to be an investment company. Keele University also seems legit, although the Cavendish website seems under the weather.
So it looks like they are making it through the vaporware stage, and approaching the heavy fog stage, before we a watch it materialize.
Bottom line for me is that I do not think I will hold my breath waiting, but I would love it to happen.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Big Macs.
But in France, they're called "Le Big Mac."
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
ACC is simply playing off of research found elsewhere. lets' see now...The Oxygen Project..
.... when you consider
Raw Computation... Scientific American August 1999...page 62 shows a graphic that looks
very similiar to the graphics of the TCAP.... Come to think of it, I even wondered if
Transmeta hasn't also played off this.
http://www.caga.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
But on more topic related comment.....This sort of memory compacity would certainly justify
interest in large databases like Deja/Google and http://www.archive.org
the possibility of selling terabyte copies of usenet history for very little while
using the income to financially support the continued recording and public access.
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
Ever wonder how a massive database as usenet (deja/google +) and
web history (www.archive.org) could become a financial asset? Well
when you can place it on inexpensive mass storage media and sell
copies for a little more than media cost, so as to afford the
continuation of recording and making free public internet access....
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
heh i'd pay the 40 bux for it anyhow, it's hella fast
--
... Since there are no numbers in the article, it makes me wonder if this "wonderful" new medium isn't slower than molassas in seibera.
A terabyte is nice.. but not if I can only read it out of a book faster...
Icars
Uh... Someone should check CCITT fax encodings for prior art with regard to that compression scheme.
It makes you wonder why they don't just title the damn story "vaporware"?
The first invention is a method of compressing text stored in binary form, which expresses information as a series of noughts and ones, by comparing each word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words. This compresses the data to an eighth of its normal size.
Doing this would slow down any computer by to reasonable of a factor for me to even consider it. Why would I buy a product that will waste my cycles as much as this would, rather than buy a conventional hard drive, which will have comprable space by then, for a similar price? (the $50 price tag WILL grow)
Sounds like those "3l!+3 w@r3z d00dz" ascii-munging scripts, but with a more reasonable ruleset.
Bah.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The problem with compression algorithms is that they're being based on absolutely unrelated crap that just happens to be distantly similar, like this whole blab about physics theory. When talking about data compression, entropy is simply the opposite of redundancy. You have some boring repetitive data, and you have some interesting unique data. Get rid of the repetitive data, and shrink the unique data as much as possible.
Why hasn't anyone brought up the topic of pattern-based and lookup-based compression ? What happened to the ancient compressors that had a table of frequently recurring strings that were replaced by a single 9-bit code. In a sense, it was a very bastardized form of indexing. For text files you could associate each dictionary word with a short numeric code, that lookup table being included in the executable. Since both the sender and receiver need the (de)compressor anyways, you're just moving oft-used data out of the target files and keeping only one copy inside the executable itself. For example if you have a bunch of PNG files that share similar header info, you could store a PNG header template in the compressor, which would then only include the varying attributes. This is a poor example since since a PNG header might be only a few hundred bytes, which would then be whacked down to perhaps 20-30 bytes, but the same theory can apply to virtually any standardized format. In fact it doesn't need to be bound to any particular format, as long as you have a way to spot these "template" constructs. This, combined with the generic shrinking power of Gzip/Bzip2 could yield moderately better results than just blind compression.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That American Computer Company is one of the weirdest sites on the net. It seems like just another computer hardware etailer, until you get to the bizarre claims of having alien technology recovered from Roswell that are soooooooo much better than ours. I always appreciated those sites that kept you guessing as to their veracity, and this is one of the best.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
I bet people could pick up a popular mechanics article and build one themselves if that were true.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Another major storage advance that never materialized.... http://byamerican.com/abouttcap.htm
LZ77 is the name of the compression algorithm. It's used in pkzip files.
Shave the Whales!
EETimes published this article back in 1999, which has a little more detail. Funny there was a theoretical 2 year time period about possible commercial products then too.
Yes, log base 2 of 26 is roughly 4.7. If each letter had an equal probability of occuring at every place in the text, you would need 4.7 bits per letter.
However, letters are not evenly distributed. the letter E is used much more frequently than the letter Z. For a start you can represent E with fewer bits and Z with more bits. (huffman encoding!)
Then you can also take into account letter pairing: the letter U follows Q more frequently than any other letter.
You can extend this to word and sentence length sequences and specialize your frequency data to the specific text you are compressing. The LZ.. family of algorithms do this.
With huffman encoding alone, you can get around 4 bits per letter (on average), even including capitalization and punctuation. (so you end up with ~60 symbols, which should take 5.9 bits each)
BTW, using adaptive algorithms, short sequences ("the cat") don't compress very well.
The first invention is a method of compressing text stored in binary form ... by comparing each
word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words. This compresses
the data to an eighth of its normal size.
Something like word pairing frequency? Like normal LZx compression, but with words instead of bytes?
Would that improve compression at all? (my thought would be no, unless maybe you had a huge text with few words)
"per square centimeter of surface area"
Perhaps the read/write mechanism requires six feet of unconventionally moving parts stacked on this credit-card sized device.
Hard to fit in your wallet...
Here's another article from 8/23/99 from the EDTN Network: EDTN Network
And for a completely ad nauseuous rehash of this vaporware from UGeek Geek News, 8/99: Go and be astounded!
Remember - if you haven't seen it before, it's new to you!
Cheers, Chuck
-nt
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
That's why I read slashdot through a 'gzip compressed ssh forward' to a fast proxy server when I'm on my dial-up connection. You can get page downloads at over a 100Kb/s with this method.
Out of interest: Does anyone (UK or globally) provide a compressed link to a high-speed proxy server for dial-up users? It sounds like a good commercial idea to me.
--
you know, moore's 'law' has nothing to do with magnetic or optical storage densities, right? just transistors. thank you.
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
How about a techno-hype category for the cool stuff we will never see? (so it can be filtered out)
This sig intentionally left blank.
To most people, information is stored in order, not disorder (entropy).
BTW, your black hole example was a very bad one because of Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation reduces the mass of a black hole, and therefore its event horizon, and therefore its entropy without releasing any information about what went into the black hole. Your precious information has just been destroyed.
No, you obviously don't know what entropy is. In your original post, you claim that in English, there is usually only one bit of entropy for every byte. Then you tried to use this to support a 8:1 compression ratio. This is utter bullshit. An 8:1 compression ratio would mean 7 bits of entropy for every byte. One bit of entropy for every byte would produce at most an 8:7 compression ratio. Entropy is the useless or redundant information. Just like in chemistry, where the term came from. Entropy is all the heat energy that can't be used for work, because it is too random.
Yeah, I know. And it's about processors, not hard drives. And the HDD industry was doing slightly better than Moore's Law at last I heard. But still, it's a usually reasonably good gauge of future performance for most computer components, even if it wasn't intended to be.
(And I'm kind of doubting that's going to happen. I mean, come on, 10 TB for $50 in 2 years? That's a bit ahead of Moore's Law.)
You better watch your bread-baking, unless you want to pay royalties on it later... Rambus is on the standardization committee; but I hear they're dropping out. ;)
"I've seen plays that were more exciting than this.
Honest to god... Plays!" Homer Simpson
for us folks that require HUGE amounts of storage, this would be a god send. i just hope that i don't have to put this device on the shelf next to my cold fussion generator...
DVD drives, CD drives, diskette drives, zip drives, and tape drives are generally not 'mission critial'. Besides, anybody using a Zip Drive for anyhting mission critical is a moron. I meant that servers, which generally don't rely on any of these input devices will have dramatically increased uptime.
"No moving parts" is the key. Hard drives are the last moving parts in computers, other than cooling fans. Once hard drives are solid state, not only will data stick around for much longer, but all computers will be much more reliable. Hard drive failures are the major reason for most system failures, and because it's the data, they're obviosuly the most catastrophic, too.
A cable wouldn't be enough, because black box would probably make it for $5. Now if this "cable" had some sort of controller on it that would do the trick. I can just see it now in microscopic text in the corner of the box ("cable not included").
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
It is difficult to understand what the technology is from the info available. To me, it looks like they deflect the laser beam instead of physically moving the laser. The problem with this is obviously a very limited area which the beam can scan. This is probably why they alwas say about the density, but never mention the capacity of the whole device. The density may be 86GB/cm^2, but if the area is 1mm^2, this is a 860MB storage device. This is still very interesting, but not revolutionary.
... is that it wasn't quoted from the New Scientist.
Ah, so you reckon their "10 TB of data" means "1.25 TB of data, which can represent 10 TB of low-entropy text". That's probably quite likely - and on closer reading, it looks like it is indeed $50 per sqare cm. But this development would still represent an unrealistically radical improvement in *aerial density* of storage.
--
Just to clarify, you mean that a 16-bit representation would compress to almost exactly the same eventual size; you don't mean that the compression ratio would be almost exactly the same.
Just thought it was a bit easy to misinterpret as it stood :-)
--
This reminds me of an old Barney Miller episode when I was younger. An inventor, invented a battery that would last for 10 years at full use. It would revolutionize the disposable battery market. The battery companies wanted the guy killed.
:)
Do you actually think, Seagate, IBM, Quantum/Maxtor, Hitachi, Fujitsu each who has invested billions in hard drives would like to see a product like this come out? Forget the drive companies, imagine the tape companies as well. There would be no need to back up to tape, because the media is so cheap and just replicate it.
Personally, I would love to have one! Just think of all the Pron and l33t warez I could store
dave
While recovering from heart surgery, former Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams decided to finish his phD in Electrical Engineering.
.384 batting average
With rejuvinated spirit (and heart), Dr Williams led his team to a thunderous start:
4 breakthrough technological developments
52 home runs
and a
An amazing comeback for the 80 year old slugger, which will surely earn him the MVP and Nobel Prize, a feat never before accomplished by a geriatric.
I won't have to decide which warez to keep and which to delete...with this type of storage I'll be able to keep it all!
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Weeell, all the new gizmos arround here always get connected to a computer other than mine and i have only a 10Mbit lan connection (embedded developers need no more apparently). So, assuming i had 10.8TB of worthwhile data and i wanted to copy it to the nifty credit card sized storage device in order to take it home (maybe to play it on my HDTV at super high resolution or something along those lines) then i would have to upgrade my 10Mbit lan connection or wait 3 and a half months...
how is it no one noticed the earlier slashdot article on this (when it was really, really vaporware)? I hate getting all excited about how the world is going to change dramatically a-la the genome project without good cause so I looked up our professor. Quite a lot. I found ... wow, so cool - the kind of thing that makes me very very happy to work in tech.
*i deny sigs exist*
1. he's hardly mentioned on the web *at all*. How does someone so luminary in his field manage to stay utterly unknown to the computer world at large?
2. ok you could argue *unknown* - after all he practically invented the nuclear magnetic resonance bodyscanner. Or so one article said in some official-looking website. Search on it - Ted appears in conjunction with nuclear resonance 5 times. All the exact same article, reprinted. I conclude that this is either the most underrecognized genius in modern science or it's rather unlikely we'll see this invention materialized based on the cred. of its inventor. But if it does
closed minded is as closed minded does
{I just want to know what every tech inventor's opbession is with everything being the size of a credit card. It's not like we are going to fit these in our wallets. "Sure Mr. Tanaka, I have my 20 terabyte database here in my wallet, care to swap?"} That's exactly the reason why they want to! Inventions become popular very quickly when they can fit in a pocket. {I dunno, I just wish technology came in different sizes I guess.} It does. Today, you can fit 10 TB in a desk. Tommorow, you'll be able to fit it in your pocket.
Seriously, if this is real then I'd say computers are finally exceeding the requirements of their users, on the desktop at least. Yet more profit warnings ahead in the desktop marketplace I expect.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
or maybe not
yeah, right. The "drive" itself will only be $50. Who wants to bet the cable to connect it will be around $15,000?
--Dave
http://patriot.net/~bmcgin/kjvpage.html
Go there (really) and download the zipped file with the ASCII version of the King James Bible. I just did this, and I got the following results:
Zipped file - 1,426,156 bytes
Unzipped document - 4,834,376
Winzip itself reports a 71% compression ratio.
hey, try bzip2 ;) its onlu 49 bytes or
.00000467300415039062% the size.
I have a great deal of trouble believing that technology such as this, no matter how cheap to manufacture, would cost only $50. What this kind of storage capacity would be worth to most people will dictate the cost, not the price or ease of manufacture.
rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb...
How much.....
Woops! okay, I missed a part. no need for a ton of replies pointing out my stupidity. I admit it quite willingly.
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Why yes, all my base are belong to you.
How did you guess?
when can I hook it up to my DV cam >> store 1000 hours of DV >> don't even want to think about how many mp3's 3 million? or so>> ? yea. . I think its vaporware.> as there are big companys speeding big bucks researching this stuff all the time>> a 100 fold leap seems a bit extream >>
if you care, Constellation 3D's site is here
What the hell are they thinking? Who in the world needs 10.8 Terabytes in a mobile phone or PDA?! I wonder if the author even knows what a Terabyte is.
The Financial Times, hum? Wonder if they're hiring journalists. Evidently the only requirement is to search web pages for "hot stories".
Don't post that kind of stuff that is bad.
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
You've obviously never seen my wallet. That would only increase its width by about 15%.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> How many people would really need 10.8 terabytes of storage?
I'm sure Windows 2004, with a full install of Office Suite 2003 could rise to the occasion.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
On second thought you are even wrong about your claim that "most people" would consider a random collection of bits of as ``informationless'' - the keyword is context. Typically a random collection of data indicates that your data does not obey a format you can decode (in human terms understand) and most technological and biological system obey a certain format i.e. some of the data is redundant to protect against loss during transition or storage. Imaging you wanted to efficiently record the days it rains somewhere in the middle of the Sahara. Probably "most people'' would write a little sentence - I am going to record all the days it rains and then proceed doing so. Basically you compressed a very long file binary file of thousand of years of meaningless (very little information) of ``sunny'' and ``rainy'' days in a very short readable file. If you go further back in time the Sahara was actually a pretty wet place so you probably put in a little sentence indicating that you changed your recording strategy (maybe depending on the season, etc) - this is in essence how compression algorithms work and most people actually understand that. Clearly no amount tricky is going to help you that much if you are trying to record the fairly random weather pattern (a lot of information) of the British Isles. One last tit bit - the very term ``bits'' actually originate in information theory.
BTW, the claim that Hawking radiation destroys information is a contentious issue ... just because Hawking believes it does not mean it's right.
I believe this is real, and you unbelievers will be sorry when the aliens come and suck your brains right through your tin-foil hats...yeah, that's right, the hats don't work anymore!...because I will have downloaded my brain into these modules and hidden it on Atlantis..............
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. " - Edward Abbey
Look, the point is that unless your data *looks* like a random string of bits, it is still possible to compress it. Only when entropy is maximised is your information completely non-redundant.
"moo" - cow 3, 1906
Wow, finally a credit card that can play Gary Numan's "Cars", just like in that American Express commercial...
Let's just assume for a minute that this is possible for text, as they claim. I wouldn't be able to give you any accurate numbers, but I would guess that my hard drive mostly contains image files, and executables. I don't see how they could get similar results on these types of files; especially with what seems to be a relatively simple algorithm. As well, I would never believe that a relatively small company would be able to develop 4 relatively unrelated technologies, all of which they claim are industry leaders!!!
Just keep it simple.
You're saying that every input x bytes has to be compressable to y bytes where y < x. But, in that case (since by definition there are fewer y's than x's) more than one x will have to have the same value of y. Which would mean that there is no way to decompress to the appropriate x value.
Either that or for some values of x, x = y.
But if the funky logic of the press release were correct, wouldn't you be able to compress indefinately?
Please, someone slap me if I'm not following this!
We're not scaremongering... This is really happening, happening
an Ipaq with terabytes of data! With a good da converter and some mikes I could record concerts directly without a DAT tape and make them available as soon as I was in my wireless network again... all from a pda. I knew this would happen =)
Republicans are Nazis. LetsRiot!
/me goes into dream sequence.
Byte: Wow, this new storage device is nice and roomy. I don't think it will ever fill up like the last one did.
Byte2: Don't forget what happened last time you said that.
Byte3: Whoa, he's installing something.
Byte: Oh no, its all cramped in here again. What happened? Pr0n? mp3's? whats taking up all the space?
Byte2: He just installed the new version of Windows and Office 2005!
Byte: Not again!
Byte3: Oh no its crashing!!
Byte: Ahhhh
-I fear the easter bunny.
Professor Ted Williams, Emeritus Professor of Electronic Engineering at Keele University, Staffordshire, England has developed a patented solid state memory system with the capacity of 86 Giga Bytes per square centimetre of surface area. The system uses a magneto-optical system not dissimilar to that of CD-ROM, except that the system is fixed, solid state, and has a different operating approach.
The system has applications for computer and processor memory for credit cards and smart cards, and for high security bank notes, among many other uses.
In computer memory format, the system has a capacity per sq cm in excess of 86 Giga Bytes of re-writeable RAM data - this equates to a memory capacity of 3400 Giga Bytes(3.4 Tb) within the surface area of a credit card! Data access time is around 100 Mb/sec. A single unit with this capacity, but using the computer's processor, has a physical size of about 3 cm x 3 cm x 1.5 cms (high). An additional advantage over existing data storage systems is that only 20% of gross capacity needs to be allocated for error correction, which is significantly less than the 40% for hard disks and 30% for optical storage.
More
It is better to be feared than loved
When I read the article, I thought they were talking about text files - were they not?
:)
I find it interesting that you interpreted that as meaning straight English ASCII text - as if someone actually has a hard drive full of files of plain english words (like what? a book typed into a text editor with no formatting? I don't know anyone who would make this assumption). Text files to me are source code files, web server logs, xml and html files etc.
I bet even then if you winzip'd your strictly defined plain english ascii text files you'd see 10:1. A novel idea might be to atually try it! Maybe your phd buddy could do that - I wonder if he knows what winzip is?
just did it too, you're correct, for that file.
The argument (see the thread) was that it was ridiclous to assume that the product was bogus, just because they claimed 8:1 text compression.
I had no idea that in order for someone to claim any type of compresion ratio they would have to compress your selected text file (kjb). Perhaps they calculated their ratio using slightly more normal examples - more common text files - like html and xml and code - which would have more redundancy then the kjb.
I compress text files all the time - code backup etc. and always get ~90% compression - thats why i chimed in. Thanks for the input though.
thank you - sometimes i think some of these posters prefer living in a little theoretical fantasy world rather than taking a few minutes to try the theories out practically.
I don't mean to slam you, but it bothers me when people post with seemingly limited or academic knowledge of a subject.
I'm no compression expert but I regularly get 10:1 compression on text files using guess what? WinZip.
Maybe as an academic matter, your colleague couldn't achieve better than 4.x:1, but maybe he didn't know everything there is to know about text compression?
Why you ask?
Simple. The stuff that really honest-to-God works is killed off, ususually by making the inventor a millionaire via buyout (though the corporataions and conglomerates try to spend as little $$$ as possible here). Second, the technology often runs into a fatal flaw (wait stand perfectly still.... don't breath **cough** YOU IDIOT, YOU BROKE IT!!!... the flux capacitor alone will cost how much to produce?!?) etc. Lastly, it might just be too far ahead of it's time to ever be accepted... it is laughed off as a joke (this is the ultra-rare).
We have all heard this type of story before (though the last one mentioned desity in credit card areas and pennies (small round US coinage :)
Food for thought: I'm still just waiting for a dual Athlon to become available.... ohhh maybe that 8 MB of L3 cache on the Micron chipset too... don't set your hopes too high. (side note, I love Athlons, in a healthy, non- sexual way :)
You could say we all just made up Tuttle. - Bejamin Franklin Pierce
holographic data storage?
laser-beam color differentiated data storage?
Other, as yet, vaporware media/devices?
"Was that sarcasm?"
if he'd laid it on any thicker I would've suffocated. maybe the reason we have people posting crap about CmdrTaco raping animals is because 95% of the people here can't understand more subtle criticism.
...and now even ShoeBoy is no more....time to nuke the site from orbit, I think
Tighter storage media also needs to safeguard the data on it better. Heaven help us all when we back up all our word processor documents to a tenth of a millimeter and a fly sneezes on it.
All that, and they packaged it in a Pentium II case!
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Did anyone else notice about a dozen freaking user-tracking cookies were installed by the news website? Several cookies for every damned advertisement, plus more.
:-)
Fortunately, I use Opera. It alerts me and lets me block 'em.
--
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
MPAA must be pissed off.
= 17,400 CD's (presuming 650MB per CD)
So is RIAA.
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Damn /if/ these things are real I want one now! Or at $50 a pop I'd grab several and have myself a nifty 100TB's of space to toy with. And I was happy w/ a mere 50GB. Well not really, I keep having to add new drives, but 50GB drives for less than $200 sounded good. Waiting is hard! :)
However I agree that a lot of people, including Slashdotters, seem to think anything that isn't out now is vaporware and anything that isn't likely to be out in less than two years is sci fi. Maybe it'd be nice if having an idea made it suddenly materialize but unfortunately a lot of it takes work and that takes time. That doesn't mean the idea is vapor, just that it isn't ready to slap in plastic bubble paper and post mark to every Sam, Dick, and Mary that knows how to order from AmazonSucksAwayMyCash.com.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Well that's pretty unremarkable. They've written a compression algorithm.
Yeah, mp3s are pretty unremarkable too...
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Just a thought here, folks....
I think it might be important that we get copy protection/copyright issues resolved before these new storage technologies arrive.
As more proprietary stuff is produced -- and if it has killer-app serious storage capabilities -- several things will happen:
1) people will realize that they can store all the movies they want to watch and trade on their peer-to-peer networks
2) The media bullies of america will realize this too, and rather than develop a new business model and adapt, will demand draconian restrictions.
3) It will be easier to slip the "protection" mechanisms into the emerging proprietary technologies....
Bottom line: we need to make sure the issue is resolved sooner rather than later.
--
Tweet, tweet.
From the article: "Possible applications for the memory include hand-held computers and mobile phones, which require large amounts of memory in a compact form."
Funny, I don't think of PDAs and cellphones as requiring large amounts of memory. My PDA has 2 megs, not 10 terabytes. My phone has about 32K, not 32 trillion K. Yet both seem to do their jobs pretty well...
Besides, cellphones, by definition, have wireless connectivity. What do they need gigs and terrs of storage for?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
OK. Physics analogy. We have a system (a text file) which has a set amount of entropy and a set amount of total energy. The free energy, therefore, is effectively going to be the total energy minus the entropy. (This isn't quite analogous to physics, because of dimensions, but here we're dimensionless. If you really care, assign k=1J/bit, and put us at a temperature of 1) Now, for one byte, the total energy is 8, the total entropy is 1 (again, dimensionally energy is 8 J, entropy is dimensionless (temperature is energy) so there's technically a factor of k lying around, but I don't care), so the free energy is 8-1=7. We can extract 7 bit of 'energy' from the system. Thus, we can reduce a byte from 8 bits to 1 bit without changing the entropy: thus, we can do it reversibly.
Hey. That sortof looks like a compression algorithm.
I wish I had moderator points left over... pointing out that he's an idiot (besides the flaming profanity) is the best I can do.
P.S.: I'm preemptively repairing a mistake of mine - the {1,0,0,0} distribution function becoming a {0, inf, inf ,inf} information content is slightly wrong: that's technically surprise, not information. Getting a quarter doesn't surprise you at all, getting anything else surprises the hell out of you.
:)
Surprise and information are related somehow, but I can't remember how, and I think my text on this is at work right now. So, if someone could fix that, I would be quite grateful.
How's that for a first on Slashdot?
No, it is not 'unrelated crap' at all - that's what information theory is about. "Pattern based" and "lookup based" compression is exactly identical to this style of compression, just using slightly longer 'objects', instead of individual bytes (chars).
And, for your information, entropy means exactly the same thing in compression as it does in physics: it's the total information available in the system. You can't compress something past its entropic limit without the compression being lossy. (There's no physical analog to information loss without black holes being involved, and even that's questionable).
What you're talking about is the fact that there are only "generic" compressors, rather than "format-specific" compressors - they treat all data as random byte-strings without any structure. I don't know if any 'format-specific' compressors exist: it seems that any useful program would have to include a whole lot of 'format-specific' types, and the main problem is that the things which store huge amounts of space *are* essentially random patterns of bytes.
No one's really worried about their text files filling up their hard drive. Honestly, I think if you can find a kind of file which compresses poorly via standard methods and takes up huge amounts of space, I'd be surprised. Video? Already have video-specific compression. Images? Already have image-specific compression. Audio? Already have audio-specific compression.
The problem with standard compressors nowadays has nothing to do with the method they use to compress: some extremely smart people are working on this, and they've found that this analog is exactly true - information theory works. Period.
Well, I don't have to address the problems in your argument so far, as other people have. But, as per the black hole example, yes, Hawking radiation might possibly be an anti-entropic process, which is very interesting. However, the point is hotly contended, as it's tied up in quantum effects, and you're dealing with a region where we don't really understand the quantum effects.
It wasn't a bad example - it was a 'curious' example, because Hawking radiation is a 'curious' process. It is anti-entropic, at least to our understanding of it. Granted, we don't have a happy black hole to play with in the lab, but... who knows?
Hey, after all this, someone actually might be able to figure out some way to generate a better-than-Carnot engine using a black hole. Its cycle time would probably be insanely high (of order billions of years).
My personal guess, however, is that we're all smoking crack and there's quite a bit more to Hawking radiation than we think due to other effects. For instance... how exactly does the area of the black hole change upon emission of a Hawking quanta? Does it change perfectly radially? It can't - that would violate causality. It has to 'ripple' across the black hole - this will cause a gravitational wave as well. It's possible that this gravitational wave may contain additional information/entropy as well. I don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
By the way, I will "make that argument", and if I use a word in a way that's counter-intuitive, sucks to be you. Change your intuition. But, as others have pointed out, I'm not using it counter-intuitively at all - entropy is information. Period. End of story.
Yes, but there's a way that they're related mathematically and I can't remember. There's a sum in there somewhere so you get a number rather than a distribution, and I can't remember. I want to say that the partition function is actually something like the sum of the probabilities in the distribution, but there'd have to be something multiplying the sum or you'd get 1. Quite unfortunately, I still can't find my text on this, so I can't check this.
Sounds like a litho-fab scanning tunneling microscope. Lots of people have been talking about them. It's about time someone talked about production.
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This is a highly unconvincing attempt at hyping what is in all likelihood a non-existant product.
/. html eater) similar to {HTML}{HEAD}{TITLE}foo{/TITLE}{/HEAD} they can be reduced to much tinier tokens, those 34 common ascii characters could be reduced to a 10-12 bit token, quite a savings.
:-)
Sound to me like a highly indexed hash table, with a large token space
by comparing each word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words
Not enough details there, but 8:1 compression using a token/hash scheme sound reasonable. I've heard that web search engines (altavista, google, and their ilk) use a similar algorithm to obtain between 10:1 and 20:1 compression on web texts, since there is so much redundancy in web pages. Since most pages have identical lengthy string sequences (trashed slightly because I haven't the energy to figure out the
Since I work with a lot of already compressed data, I discount any media compression claims. I'd avoid any storage media which incorporated hardware level compression, because it would eventually lead to problems. Real databases maintain their own raw partitions on disks, since they can create a highly efficient file system for their own purposes. When the hardware starts returning varying free space results because compression isnt working, DBs either fall over hard (sybase) or fill the logs with errors (oracle).
The magneto-optical-fluid disk sounds like they have a laboratory sized research project they hope to reduce to the footprint of a credit card, but they neglect to mention it towers 208 inches high
with no conventionally moving parts
Whenever something sounds like a marketing press release, with modifying adjectives like conventionally, it pays to be skeptical, the forte of slashdot.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Hasn't everyone been fooled so much by goatse.cx they just reroute it to 127.0.0.1 in etc/hosts?
Hrm. I thought lzw was the sliding window approach, where compressesd text was either verbatim text or a (go back n chars and copy c chars) tuple. The window is how far back you search for a good match. I'm sure there are wonderful dynamic programming algorithms to speed that search up. It sounds more like you are constructing a huffman tree with a non-uniform depth.
Or is that what LZW is? in which case what is the name of that sliding window approach?
What else is all over the planet, and in the same size everywhere?
This is not the first Earth shattering memory technology announcement. Why is it that these things keep cropping up with all these promises of delivery in the short term and never materialize. Can we really expect anything more of this announcement? Won't is just fade away never to be seen like all the other ultra dense ultra cheap memory promises of the past?
Keele University
The University College of North Staffordshire was founded in 1949 to become the University of Keele in 1962.
There was a deliberate aim to break away from the pattern of the specialized honours degree, avoiding as far as possible the divisions between different branches of study. Consequently, most students read four subjects in their degree course, two at honours level and two at subsidiary. At least one of these subjects must be from the arts or social sciences, and at least one from the natural sciences.
Many students have taken a four-year course, beginning their studies with the Foundation Year, in which they follow a broad course covering the development of western civilization.
Most students live on campus in halls of residence or in self-catering flats, and many staff also live on campus.
The Keele Estate
The University is situated on an estate of 650 acres, with extensive woods, lakes and parkland, formerly owned by the Sneyd family.
The Sneyds can be traced back in north Staffordshire to the late 13th century, but they came into the posession of the Keele estate in the mid-16th century.
The present hall was rebuilt in the 1850s for Ralph Sneyd (1793-1870) to the design of Antony Salvin at a cost of about £80,000. The grounds and gardens were magnificently laid out around it, and many interesting features survive today, such as the remarkable holly hedge, originally 199 yards long, 28 feet thick and 35 feet high.
At the beginning of this century, the hall was let to the Grand Duke Michael of Russia, who entertained King Edward VII there. Later, however, it remained empty, and troops were stationed on the estate during the second world war.
Publications are available which give the history of Keele in much greater detail:
A book entitled The history of Keele (edited by C.J.Harrison) is now regrettably out of print, but copies may still be found in appropriate libraries.
Pamphlets by J.M.Kolbert entitled The Sneyds; Squires of Keele, The Sneyds & Keele Hall, and Keele Hall; a Victorian country house are obtainable from Mrs D.Warrilow in Information Services (Tel. (01782) 583232).
Off the record; a people's history of Keele by Angela Drakakis-Smith, published by Churnet Valley Books at £8.95 (ISBN 1-897949-21-9) should be obtainable through any bookshop Keele; an introduction by Michael Paffard, obtainable from Chris Wain at the Alumni Office, Keele University, ST5 5BB, (Tel. (01782) 583370) for £3 (ISBN 0 9534157 0 8)
Keele; the first fifty years by J.M.Kolbert, published by Melandrium Books, obtainable from 11, Highway Lane, Keele, ST5 5AN, for £16.95 + p&p. (ISBN 1 85856 238 4)
c.m.wain@uso.keele.ac.uk
Seastead this.
with no conventionally moving parts
As opposed to, say, unconventionally-moving parts??
Now if IBM comes out and says they've found a way to squeeze 10 terabytes into the space the size of a credit card, I'll be impressed.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The blatant reposts are getting annoying.
This technology will be ready for market in two years? Is that two years from now or two years from when an almost word-for-word identical article about this was posted a year and a half ago? =)
What they don't tell....
is that they've gotten 8:1 compression on *unicode* english ASCII text.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
(Note: character != byte. That is only true of ASCII characters. If all you wanted to do is represent the 26 English letters it would only take 5 bits per character. We're talking language here, irrespective of representation.)
Go read a good cryptography book and straighten out your terms and definitions.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
You're compressing html - html is much more structured and redundant than english.
Using a liquid between the read/write head and the recording surface would help the optical coupling between the surface and head, but creates a whole new set of problems. Probably puts a ceiling on media speed, for example. A whole set of mechanical problems have to be overcome to turn that into a commercial technology. Whether it's worth the trouble remains to be seen. For a 4X improvement in MO drive densities, probably not.
(There's a neat variation on this idea used for scanning photographic film, called a "wet-gate transfer". The film is immersed in a liquid with the same coefficient of refraction as the film base. This makes minor scratches disappear.)
Why the hell would this be usefule in cell phones and PDA's? This has to be the most vaporous and hype ridden article I have ever seen. This is worse than what the local news reports on Napter (you all know what I'm talking about, they know less than the average person who uses Napster). If this product was real why the HELL would they give a SHIT about cell phones or PDA's? It could change so many things not the least of which is an AVERAGE COMPUTER. They could easily sell it for more than $50 and large corporations, small corporations and computer illiterate people would still buy it in droves. If this were real they would already be rich from investor capital. They would have generated more press than this from the theoretical possibility.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Ok, the statement from the university was alot better than the actual article,( http://www.keele.ac.uk/research/cmrkeele.htm) until I got to this
wristwatches could have vastly more power than today's PC Computers.
Can nothing about technology go without being tainted with sensationalism. I am not even going to point out why this wrong, as I am sure eveyone realized just how stupid it is without me having to say it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Way enough for all my pr0n and mp3z, or is it?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
The specific claimns are:
- Better compression (1/8 on text.)
- Impressive, but not impossible. This doesn't favor any specific hardware: any tech can use it. So now we are left with 6 years worth of hardware advances.
- Claim 2: quad density read/writes on mostly conventional media.
- Huh? No details given. Two year leapfrog from magic (coatings/software unchanged.) 4 years left to account for.
- Claim 3: 30-fold increase due to new coatings and materials.
- A five year advance.
- Claim 4: 10T on a credit card sized device
- This is an implementation, not an invention. No credit.
Three advances give us -1 years of technological leapfrogging: so the manufacturing process in 2002 should be about twice as expensive as current disk drive fab. All the major storage firms are demostrating lab models with ultra-high bit/cm numbers. Now a minor university team has made major simulataneous advances in compression, r/w density, coatings/materials, packaging, and, above all, commercialization.Excuse me while I snort beer through my nose.
The second invention involves a different way of recording and reading information, increasing four-fold the amount of data that can be held on magneto-optical disks, which are used for storing computerised data. The third invention provides new kinds of coatings and materials that can be used in disks, providing a 30-fold increase in capacity.
The fourth and most interesting invention produces a memory system that enables up to 10.8 terabytes of data to be stored in an area the size of a credit card, with no conventionally moving parts.
This is like a total technological troll.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
You'r right, gzip isn't that good:
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>bzip2 -k page.htm
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>dir page*
Volume in drive C has no label
Volume Serial Number is
Directory of C:\WINDOWS\Desktop
PAGE_F~1 02-13-01 12:17a page_files
PAGE HTM 59,243 02-13-01 12:17a page.htm
PAGEHT~1 BZ2 8,098 02-13-01 12:20a page.htm.bz2
2 file(s) 67,341 bytes
1 dir(s) 3,892.71 MB free
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>
That's a 7.32 ratio.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Riot! I love it, but it's not half as good as my multivariate transaxial parser generator. It can recompile the kernel in 0.2 seconds on my 386.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So access times are much slower than for a conventional hard disk.
8-fold compression by only storing the difference between words... could someone tell me how this is possible? Now, I know some amazing compression things have been done (.the .product) but this is just text.. I don't understand.
This man had way too little Ritalin this morning.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember in a recent Information Theory course I did at Uni, we learnt that the information content of an ensemble with 26 different equally possible outcomes is 4.7 bits per symbol.
That would be a very crude way to compress. LZW compression (and similar algorithms such as the one in gzip) find multiple-byte patterns, which are reduced to smaller and smaller bit representations as they occur more frequently. For example, if I had "ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC", it would figure out that "ABC" is being repeated and use a smaller number of bits to represent it.
That's why English text can typically be reduced by 8-10:1 compression, because there is so much redundancy in words. Try doing a gzip on a log-style file with lots of redundancy and you'll often see 100:1 compressions.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Hmmm. So they say they could house 3.4 Tb on a unit the size of a credit card? Hmmm. Well, since they say it will have an access rate of 100 Mb/sec, I take it it would take 9 hours to read everything from a unit of that size? Hrm... Hot-syncing might take a little longer then, huh?
-- dR.fuZZo
Take a look at Microsoft's latest release - Outlook Mobile Manager. The bit of interest is how they compress text [screenshot] using their *new* technology Intellishrink.
You can choose various levels of text compression from none, remove spaces/punctuation to remove vowels...
ugh
*** I am the real stylewagon
Well, I just took out a business card, and wrote on the back "The letter 'a', repeated 10.8 x 2^40 times". Did I just store 10.8 terabytes of compressed data in an area the size of a credit card?
Call the press!
This may be impressive, even revolutionary, but we need more technical details.
This is almost as believable as the paper phones of a few weeks ago . . .
Well, most people don't buy massive storage units so they can keep extra copies of the English translation of The Three Musketeers lying around. Data is often much more redundant than that. For example, in my job I routinely deal with very large log files (1GB+). These often compress to 1:100 or better due to the large amount of redundant content.
Every university has a few wack job Emeriti running around spewing garbage about something or other. Emeritus means "ok, you can still hang around, but stop bothering us."
Flat5
Back to the question: Why credit card sized? Simple. Its easy to hold either with the fingertips or in a fist, its easy to carry, it would fit in a pocket or a wallet, they are lite enough not to be noticeable. Most people could carry one or two of these to work with no effort. I would like to see you do that with a standard hard drive, or a zip disk, or even a floppy disk.
" . . . 10.8 terabytes of data to be stored in an area the size of a credit card, with no conventionally moving parts... ...Each square centimetre of this memory system is a closed unit containing a metal oxide material on which data are recorded, and a reader made of a fibre optic tip suspended above the material in a lubricant."
;|
notice the language: no conventionally moving parts... plenty of unconventional movement, though.
Which brings me to my point: how can this invention be aimed at the mobile/palm markets if the read head is floating in lubricants?! here's to hoping they license some skip/shock technology from the walkman crowd...
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
The first invention is a method of compressing text stored in binary form ... by comparing each word with its predecessor and recording only the differences between words. This compresses the data to an eighth of its normal size.
... oh wait nevermind.
Really? Just working on the above quote, I do not see much in the way of compression, especially 1/8th in size. It might work for a dictionary, but actual useful text is going to be less similar.
Another question I have is this actually REWRITABLE? I mean, I am reading this and they talk about recording and reading. However, is this write-once/read-many technology (in which case, it would be useful for technical reference)? OR is it write-many/read-many, in which I can upgrade my hard drive to 250x its current size for $50? I suspect it is the former, in which case, it is a nice idea but not as useful at first glance.
Even if it is only write-once, the ability to have 10 terabytes for storage in say a cell phone (even if I cannot reuse the data space) is still impressive.
-FlashfireUVA
what would one do with all that space? There isn't enough porn or music to actually download
As to my colleague, he'd read virtually all the published literature in the area, and he's a pretty smart cookie (he's now on a PhD scholarship at Princeton working with people like Tarjan). I think the thing I learned most from his efforts were that text compression is in a period of diminishing returns for improved algorithms - they're not likely to get much better.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
While it is correct that studies with humans have indicated that English text has about one bit of entropy per byte, suggesting a natural limit of about 8:1 compression, humans have the use of a whole lot of semantic information (they understand the meaning of the text and can therefore predict words based on that) that no compression algorithm I'm aware of has used.
I'm taking this with a large grain of salt, thanks.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Wow, a chemist using a term wrong... amazing. To be specific, entropy doesn't come from chemistry, it comes from physics. Granted, these two were identical fields at the time, or at least, closely related, but the term came from studying thermodynamics, not chemistry.
OK. A little background on information theory for you - you know, from Shannon, back in the early 1900s, I believe, though correct me if I'm wrong. There is an object in information theory called the partition function of an experiment - it is essentially the chance of getting any result from that experiment. There is then an object called 'information', which is proportional to the log of the partition function. The lower a chance of getting a result, the higher the information content gleaned from that experiment. For instance, if you had a box full of quarters, and you randomly pulled out a coin, the partition function would be (quarters, dimes, nickles, pennies) {1,0,0,0}. The information content of that experiment is klogW: (0,inf,inf,inf)- you don't learn anything if you pull out a quarter. You knew there were only quarters to begin with. If you get any of the other ones, damn, you're surprised.
What does all of this have to do with entropy? Well, in thermodynamics, which is, you know, where the term COMES from, entropy is klogZ, where Z is the partition function of the system: essentially the same thing. k is Boltzmann's constant - it comes from the Celsius temperature scale.
So, here's the news flash: Entropy is information. Period. Therefore, he was using the term CORRECTLY, not INCORRECTLY. Entropy is USEFUL information, not USELESS information. Guess what? This is the same in chemistry, too. The universe doesn't care whether or not you can use energy for work, and entropy has nothing to do with 'randomness'. A 'random' distribution of matter in a universe will collapse to a 'nonrandom' sphere, thanks to gravity: if entropy was randomness, then the universe would have just violated the second law - it went from 'random' energy to 'nonrandom' energy. (mass=energy, so don't even try it)
Entropy is information. Period. Hence the second law of thermodynamics- entropy increases because the information content of the universe is increasing. If you doubt me on this, here's a simple bit to convince you: you have a system which goes from state 1 to state 2, both of which have the same entropy. Therefore, there is a reversible process which connects the two states, which means that one can go from state 1 to state 2 and leave no tracks inside the system that the change had happened - i.e., the information content of the system is static.
I'm really getting sick of having to explain this constantly - I wish they would never teach entropy as 'useless energy' or 'unusable energy' - like the universe cares whether or not something can be used for work.
The link between information and entropy is entirely well known and extraordinarily important. For instance, if an object falls into a black hole, is there no record of its existance anymore? Is all the information that was inside that object lost? No - a black hole's area is related to its entropy, which increases with mass. Therefore, the 'information' (as far as the Universe cares) in that object is now somehow stored in the black hole's event horizon. Curiously enough, an object which falls into a black hole is, from the outside world, constantly getting infinitesimally closer to the event horizon. This is a weak argument, yes, and changing a few words could make it stronger, but this is offtopic, so I don't care.
In closing - you're wrong. Entropy is useful information. 1 bit of entropy out of 8 means an 8:1 compression ratio. Here, you've 'extracted' 7 bits of 'work' out of the system. The remaining 1 bit of entropy cannot be removed from the system, as entropy can never decrease. (or in this case, cannot decrease without destroying the system)
I think that "no conventionally moving parts" means that they are using a Wankel rotary engine to move the parts rather than the conventional 4-stroke design. I must admit that it is a pretty clever hack to figure out how to use mechanical storage to get that kind of density and even more curious that they chose the rather oddball Wankel design over battery power which is usually used for small devices.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I'm not at all surprised that they can get 8:1 compression of plain text. It is a rule of thumb for encryption that plain text, at least in English and with ASCII, has only about one bit of entropy per byte. While it is impressive that they've managed to get rid of almost all of the slack, it doesn't strike me as that hard to believe.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
KEELE HIGH DENSITY LTD
UPDATE - November 2000 During 1999 Keele High Density Ltd. (KHD) announced that it had developed a very high density memory system capable of holding 2.3TB of memory in the space of a credit card. Further work since then has resulted in some significant upward changes to both the capacities previously stated and to the applications the KHD technology addresses. Some of this work is continuing, and there are further patent applications to be filed. The information available publicly is necessarily restricted until those patents have been filed. The very high data densities are achieved through a combination of many different factors - some relating to the physical properties of the recording media, and some to the way of processing and handling data. The physical memory system is a hybrid combination of magneto-optics and silicon. The KHD memory system is applicable to both rotating and fixed media, and is not dependent on the laser-based media-addressing system used. Following the work undertaken since last year, the following data capacities are achievable: a) For rotating media, at DVD size, a single-sided capacity of 245 GB using a red laser. b) For fixed media, a single-sided capacity of 45 GB/cm, giving a total capacity of 3.6 TB on the surface area of a credit card, double-sided and using a red laser. Using a violet laser (now being introduced), the capacity at credit card size will be 10.8 TB. In last year's announcement from KHD the primary focus was on the fixed media application, which with a novel form of laser addressing, could be described as 'near solid state' - involving no moving parts in the conventional sense. However, this aspect of the technology will require some further R&D work to bring it to a mass-production scale - although it is believed that this will not present insurmountable difficulties. These constraints do not apply to existing rotating media applications (for example, DVD), using conventional laser systems, and there are no reasons why the KHD technology cannot be implemented within a short timescale - measured literally in months. A major development arising out of KHD's work over recent months, is that the technology achieving these very high data density figures has application not just for memory systems, but will also produce significant enhancements for the transmission and processing of data generally. This means that KHD's technology can achieve an effective increase in bandwidth capacity, because the very high data density properties, which are in addition to those from conventional compression methods, allow so much more data to be transmitted over a given bandwidth. The same advantages are also felt in terms of processing speeds. Work on this aspect of KHD's technology is continuing, but the current calculations show that an effective eight-times increase in bandwidth capacity and processor speed can be achieved. KHD's development represents a fundamental advance in computing technology, with the benefits being felt across many industry areas. Following completion of the patenting position, KHD will be looking to license the technology to companies for mass-production, and for the ongoing R&D work needed to make the 'solid-state' memory commercially viable. The technology has been developed by Professor Ted Williams at Keele University, Staffordshire, England, over a period of thirteen years. PROFILE: Ted Williams is Professor Emeritus of Optoelectronics at Keele University, Staffs, England, and visiting Professor of Electronic Engineering at South Bank University, London. Professor Williams was Director of Research with Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, Nobel Prizewinner, working on the invention and creation of the first NMR Scanner at Hammersmith Hospital, London. He has also held directorships with major international companies. His main focus over the last thirteen years has been the research and development of 3-dimensional magneto-optical recording systems. KHD's licensing and funding arrangements are managed by Mike Downey, Managing Director of Cavendish Management Resources. CMR is a venture capital and executive management company, based in London. CMR has supported the development of this technology. Further information from: Mike Downey Managing Director CMR, 31 Harley Street, London W1N 1DA Tel: +44-(0)20-7636-1744 Fax: +44-(0)20-7636-5639 Email: cmr@cmruk.com Web: www.cmruk.comThis article is pure crap. Professor soggybottoms invents ten fabulous new technologies that will instantaneously revolutionize the entire computer industry, all while fixing himself a ham sandwich...
film at eleven...
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
10.8TB = 1064 DVD's (presuming 10.4GB per DVD) = 17,400 CD's (presuming 650MB per CD) = 7,864,320 floppies (presuming 1.44MB per floppy) = 371,085,174,374 of those new MOT 256bit MRAM chips.
Anyone want to come up with some other ratings ?
Mark Duell
Let's see...
$ nc www.keele.ac.uk 80 /research/cmrkeele.htm HTTP/1.0
HEAD
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 11:39:15 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12
Last-Modified: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:16:30 GMT
ETag: "239a2-f60-37bd471e"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3936
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Last modified 20 Aug 1999? Not what I'd call "breaking news"... If you don't believe the server date, try this corroborating evidence: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/pipermail/postpc/1999-S eptember/000002.html
Why news.ft.com decided to post the story now, I couldn't say...
== Sparrow
Well that's pretty unremarkable. They've written a compression algorithm.
Oh, by the way, they have also invented
If that were true, why are they bothering to even *think* about their text compression algorithm? Fifty dollars a go? Who wants compression? If these people are telling the truth, we are talking about a thousand-fold increase in gigabytes per dollar over the space of two years.
The phrase "no conventionally moving parts" also brings to mind images of really whacky, non-linear moving parts flailing about. What the hell do they mean?
Absolutely no technical detail is given in the article, and as far as I'm concerned, this is yet another false alarm on the long road to entirely solid-state computer systems.
--
Why is it every piece of new tech is the size a a credit card? Can't be the size of a dollar bill? or what about a piece of sliced bread, considering all this new tech is the greatest thing since.
I just want to know what every tech inventor's opbession is with everything being the size of a credit card. It's not like we are going to fit these in our wallets. "Sure Mr. Tanaka, I have my 20 terabyte database here in my wallet, care to swap?"
I dunno, I just wish technology came in different sizes I guess.
Man, I am so glad that I read slashdot. Without slashdot I would have to sift through tons and tons of bullshit every day just to find the new and amazing technological advances of the age. But no, I read slashdot, so I can come here and find the best of the best, such as this dandy invention.
Wow 10.8 TB on a credit card, wahooo! What will they think of next? How do I send them guys my money? I couldn't find any address or nothing, but those english 'blokes' sure look like they is gunna go far with this invention - specially that text compression thingy - pretty damned original if I do say so myself. And then that storage mechanism 'no conventional moving parts' - I can't imagine how they got those conventional parts to stop movin, sound like quite a trick.
Anyway, don't you slashdot guys let the criticism get you down. I am with you. Don't listen to them naddering nabobs of negativism. They always persecute the dreamers!
I am looking forward to your next 'Light speed limit possibily violated' post with anticipation.
-josh
Here's a link from the university.It sounds like it's real to me.