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Atomic Scale Memory
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material."
A better prediction would be that there will soon be 20 posts about how this new technology will allow folks to enlarge their pr0n collections by a factor of 10,000. I'll bet they're rolling in even as I type.
Steve
Also, you could store the contents of:
149 200GB Fluid Bearing WD HDDs
45850 CDs
116400 256MB Flash Memory Cards
298000 Zip Disks
931300 32MB Memory Sticks
OR!!! 20696000 1.44MB Floppies
No offence guys, but come on. Post meaningful figures.
Its actually 250 trillion bits per square inch.
28.42 TB per square inch.
Now thats impressive.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
First off, if this is widely used, won't this
be expensive?
A small fraction of a cents in gold per 1000 terabytes. Your computer already has much more gold in it than one of these would require.
I realize that these are gold MOLECULES,
Gold ATOMS.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Congratulations on being the first anti-Microsoft post of this article!
Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available for storage
Asimov's corollary to Parkinson's Law of data: Backlog expands to overfill planned extensions.
I'm sure we'll find a way to use it...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Atomic scale \b{is} essentially a vacuum. It's the same size as or smaller than any potential nasty air molecules!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It seems to me that over the past several years lots of research has been done on possible storage medium, yet the basic PC storage structure has yet to change. I remember reading on /. where someone figured out how to get 10 gig on a roll of scotch tape, but I still have magnetic drives. Do you have rolls of scotch tape in your machine?
This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.
This reminds me a bit of what they said to one of my ancestors, when he invented the wheel: "what good is that? What we REALLY need is something to fly, this 'riding' thing is just too slow and way too bumpy. Besides, where do you want to go anyway?"
It's this kind of mindless (an really cheap) new-idea-bashing that really irritates me...
what exactly do you mean by "rogue neutrinos"?
neutrinos are "little neutral things". they can travel through cubic light-years of *lead* before the probability of an interaction becomes close to one.
i don't think that you need to worry about the neutrinos.
(besides, how often have neutrinos wiped out the contents of your regular harddrive? not even i have had that sort of problem)