Slashdot Mirror
Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2
DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters."
In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)"
libraries of congress per cubic mile is it?
Yeah, who else who measure in inches except the US and porn stars ?
At least right now what type of applications would this be good for? Do we really need that much storage? Perhaps if programmers wrote better code........... Then again remember when 2megs of memory was "the bomb" ?
Once it gets available to the public.
I mean this is useful yesterday and won't be available in years. Not even taking into account everyone bitching about standards.
...and you question the Japanese use of inch?
Get back to work you slackers...I want my data to be stored neither here nor there...but here just now!
They measure storage density in DVDs now?!?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
sure, that sounds like a lot of storage, but how many full-length german sheizer films can it hold? when will we start setting standards that are actually meaninful?
Cubit^2
This sounds like an achievement of biblical proportions!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Isn't a cubit the length of your forearm? that's a bit big for storage isn't it?
What the hell, is God telling them to build an ark?
For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I hope that they could use several head in parallel at the same time to increase the reading speed and also (why not?) the writing speed.
If I remember well, a company has already done this for CD-ROM, it was reading several track at the same time, they had a commercial product but I don't know if it sold well.
I wonder why it hasn't be done with HDD?
Note that I'm not talking about multiple heads (too expensive), but using one head to read/write several tracks at the same time.
The day will come when some people will record 360 degree video and every sound that happens around them all the time. No need for discussion about what happened, just replay it.
...gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it.
Really now, the Japanese are using square inches because Americans know what a square inch is, and they do a lot of business with the USA. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, they just happened to reach a "milestone" of 1.5 when measured in square inches. 1 square inch = 6.4516 square centimeters, so this is only about 0.235 per square centimeter. Maybe they should have a press release at 0.3/cm^2. But if it's less than 1, it's just not very good.
To resolve this issue, I propose the introduction of a new unit based on the meter and corrected by a factor based on Moore's law or whatever it is that governs storage density. The correction factor should be adjusted to allow for press releases oh... say... every 3 months so that stock traders will have something to speculate about. I propose that the new units be called "Horcs" in honor of no particular person, place or thing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The recoring area of a DVD is 14 square inches. So the density of this new recording technique is 14*47=658 times greater than a DVD.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
(assuming 4.7 GB DVD's)
the consumer superdvd burner will only burn at 2048k/sec for the first 6 months...
What I'd be interrested in is knowing how fast it reads, preferably in another sane measurement, like 8" floppies per forthnight.
Are these actual DVD's or a MPAA equivelent ala. RIAA?
First, they're only currently able to read 25kB/s. Yes, 25 kilobytes per second. They think they can bump up the read speed to 3.75MB/s. But it's the write speed that's curious. The prototype writes at 2.5MB/s, and they estimate they can bump it up to 125MB/s. A medium we can write to faster than we can read!
Second, their goal is 667 terabits per cm^2. Yep, about 2667 times more dense than the 250 gigabits per cm^2 they're claiming.
Are those cubits persianroyalcubits, northerncubits, irishcubits, greekcubits, hebrewcubits, homericcubits, olympiccubits, sumeriancubits, egyptianroyalcubits, blackcubits, shortgreekcubits, biblicalcubits, egyptianshortcubits, romancubits, assyriancubits or hashimicubits ??
That would never, ever work with magnetic hard drives.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Using the prototype, the researchers were able to read 25 kilobytes, or thousand bytes, of data per second, said Cho. This is relatively slow -- it would take 10 seconds to retrieve a 250-page book at that speed, assuming 1,000 characters per page. It is possible to increase the read speed to 3.75 megabytes per second, said Cho. This would make it possible to retrieve the information contained in about 150 books in 10 seconds. Current disk drives have read speeds of about 20 to 50 megabytes, or million bytes, per second.
So about 36 novels/hour.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2.
;-)
That's 2,412.1 petanybbles per acre, for those of you who prefer units with a little character.
I write in my journal
It's not so much the amount of memory that is important but about how small a package we can fit it in. This will allow tablet PCs and other PDA styled devices to have what the desktop PC world takes for granted. Also imagine the costs savings from application like outer space computing (every pound going up costs a fortune right?). Give people time and you'd be surprised what uses they'll come up with.
Me, pr0n.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
It's there. Look in the upper right. As far as the posting bonus, I don't know. I think they aim to being the signal out from the noise a bit, give new users a chance, that sort of thing. I'll post this w/o mine and see what I get (my other post, with the bonus, was scored a 1).
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
That got a 1 as well. Looks like a bug or something.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What is a nybble? I know about nibble (4 bits, right?) and nipples (2 bits ;)). Is it a simply misspelling or is it a real unit? It is kind of hard to know in these times when we get idiotic crap like MibiBytes (Yes, I have 671.08864 MibiBytes in this computer... need I say more?).
And to second a bunch of other people, stop with the inches. I seriously have a hard time taking someone scientificly serious when they don't use SI units today. And why are we still using inches for speakers and tires still?
But regardless of the dumb units, being able to save all that on a single unit (disc?) means I could get uncompressed video in high resolution with uncompressed audio. But I guess they will put something even dumber than regions on it and screw it up.
So, is all this for real?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
And since you, little AC with poor grammar, didn't get MY joke, that makes you even stupider.
now there are two problems with this:
1) without knowing how to set up exposure / apature / focus / whitebalance / and most importantly - general image composition - your chances of getting the right shot does not improve all that much with volume.
2) moreover, assuming that you are an amature and want to actually have some control over your images afterwards (i.e. store it in a raw format so you can adjust the exposure and stuff - btw it's very useful I seriously encourage anyone who can spare the space to do this), the transfer-rate is worefully inadequate. one raw 3Mpix image is usually some 6-9Mbytes; that's some 1.5-2 seconds per image. Considering that in the real world, 3fps is considered mediocre, continue to rely on your SDRAM buffers (for the ones who have the luxury of them) for a little longer. For JPEGs, high quality 2Mpix is still usually about 1M a piece - so don't expect too much if your camera actually have a decent pixel count.
anyway - not that it's not good news, or that I am humorless and don't get the joke - but I think microdrives will be around for a little longer for good reason.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
IIRC, nibbles and nybbles are the same thing, the latter being used by some people to distinguish the smaller-than-a-byte from the smaller-than-a-bite.
Why is it that we keep hearing about these great newfangled technologies which will 'revolutionize the storage industry', but we have remained content on using basically the same technology for the last 40 years? Are we ever going to see real applications of holo-cube or ferroelectric storage, or are the current industry giants just going to keep producing slightly bigger and slightly better magnetic drives for the next 40 years?
Ferroelectric density: 1.5Tb/in^2
8 bits to a byte -> 187.5GB/in^2
Hitachi's (formerly IBM's) 180GXP line packs 60GB to a platter. According to their data sheet, that is 45.5Gb/in^2. Convert to GB, and we have ~5.69GB/in^2.
When common HD technology reaches Ferroelectric technology, we'll have about 6TB in a top-of-the-line IDE drive.
If you want a little character, that should be 2.035e-2 Library of Congresses per cm^2. ;-)
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Ah, kinda like Tires/Tyres ;)
(British English in school, American English with girlfriend, BE/AE in books. I won't ever be able to speak/write just one of them)
This story definately wins the most Obfuscated Slashdot Headline award.
Let's see,I used to know what a cubit was. Well, don't you worry about that, get some wood, build it.
When cubits get to small we can start measuring things in "arks".
KFG
"One of the earliest types of measurement concerned that of length. These measurements were usually based on parts of the body. A well documented example (the first) is the Egyptian cubit which was derived from the length of the arm from the elbow to the outstretched finger tips. By 2500 BC this had been standardised in a royal master cubit made of black marble (about 52 cm). This cubit was divided into 28 digits (roughly a finger width) which could be further divided into fractional parts, the smallest of these being only just over a millimetre."
And someone reports the information density using this kind of a measure?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to flame here, but without reading the article, due to the very same reasons, I'm willing to bet my right testicle that it's made by US "scientist".
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
In marketing, bigger is better. Any unit which produces higher numbers therefore is better.
That's why we'll be using horsepowers and not kilowatts for car engines forever.
This also explains the use of cubic inches in this text.
-- From Denmark
Tyres are inexplicably measured in both metric and imperial units. Tyre width is measured in millimetres and profile as a pecentage of width, but rim size is in inches. Which moron thought that one up, then?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
His lab is here. Please try to stagger your access so you don't slashdot him.
The Japanese side of the main Phonon Device Lab has pdf'd scans of newspaper articles from September 10. The Japanese also uses 1.4 Terabits/sq. inch.
A drawing on the bottom of this page shows that his ultimate goal of 4 Petabits/square inch is based on a bit being stored in a 0.4 nanometer square, the size of one BaTiO3 crystal.
Interesting experiment on his page tells you in English how to make piezoelectric ceramics(in collaboration with Washington U.).
It looks like there are a whole raft of people from Tohoku U. at U. Washington doing nano-bio research, mems, piezoelectrics.. maybe sq. inch came from Washington. Their Center for Nanotechnology looks neat.
I wonder if they were involved in this storage technology development.
Of course "cm" isn't a sane unit no matter how you look at it. It's not an SI unit, and "centi" is not a standard SI prefix. SI acknowledges the prefix, but recommends sticking to the standard "multiples of three" prefixes. So it would be better expressed as 2.5 Pb/m^2 (assuming your calculations are correct, which I haven't checked).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
For those who have moved on from imperial measurement (and considering that DVDs are 3-dimensional objects) can someone give this measurement in DVDs/m^3 please?
Follow me
They could have used the Parsec then.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
has nothing to do with little critters running in wheels with generators, does it?
Damn.. there goes my midterm paper...
I'm sure glad there isn't a "really boring" mod option!
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
Yet the entire field of chemistry uses CGS units. As in, centimeters, grams and seconds.
Even if your units are more standard, they just don't have any meaning to anyone. 2.5 Pb/m^2? That really has no meaning to me. (For a second I thought you were talking about lead.)
I would have thought its fairly obvious why they are using sqaure inches rather square centimetres... It enables them to say they've broken through the 'trillion barrier'.
I shudder to think how much good drool has slipped into my keyboard reading hundreds of similar headlines over the years.. Put it in a CD/DVD size (or smaller) format that is cheap, (re)writeable, and durable (Right now all our opticle formats leave something to be desired in this department). Until then STFU. I'm still waiting for a DVD[+|-]R format whose media costs less than $0.50 a disc and can be burned in less than ten minutes.
So please, until something like this is available at Newegg spare us.
Kthx.
Click here to read too much about my personal life
Or about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits per square parsec.
That's 31 zeros.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hey! Guess what? It' supposed to make you laugh. I'm pleased you recognized it as funny.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
We should use bizarre measurements in everything, just to mess with people. How about the speed of light expressed as 1798639627696 furlongs per fortnight?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Maybe it's time to know that a SQUARE inch is .. um ... fuck ... about the length from the top of your thumb to the first joint SQUARED. Which really is a sensible unit, isn't it.
C'mon, open, free standards are good, no ?
Same one that decided on changing Irish road signs for distance into Km, but left the speed limits in Mph perhaps?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If there was some specially subtle joke of yours thatI failed to pick up, then please correct me and gloat over me. Otherwise stfu.
Looks like it. My bonus's gone, too.
Testing 123 testing. Testing 456 testing. Hahaha.
sulli
RTFJ.
20K DVD per cubit^2 is wrong anyways...
:)
1 cubit = approx. 18 inches
(1 cubit) ^ 2 = 18*18 sq. inches
47 DVDs * 18 * 18 = 15,228
Or is it considered acceptable to round up by 1000's when the number is only in the low 10,000s?
CSIRAC (1st generation computer that went online in 1949) had a storage drum that initially held about 1KB, so approximately 2^10 bytes. You can now buy 200GB hard drives off the shelf - roughly 2^37 bytes. So a contemporary hard drive is now 2^27 times bigger than that original device, and is probably about 1/100th the size and mass (so you could, if you were really trying to prove the point, throw in another factor of 2^5). Hardly "slightly bigger and slightly better". We haven't even discussed transfer rates...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What kind of devices/information could be available when this comes to market?
:)
Full time cameras? You can even use that kind of cameras as an enhanced agenda. Very good resolution earth maps? some kind of universal library? a personal google? or even a big percent of files shared in kazaa?
With this kind of things the future could bring some nice gadgets, like brain upload devices or holographic technology a la Star Trek
Anyway, the read time seems to be very slow for that much information, and even if the write speed is a bit better, could take years (?) to fill one.
And, of course, size of devices needed to read/write in that kind of memory also could matters.
Please correct me if I'm wrong:
3TB = (aprox.) 3.000.000.000.000 (12 zero's)
25kB/s = (aprox.) 25.000
3.000.000.000.000/25.000
= 1.200.000 seconds (to write a DVD sized medium)
= 20000 hours
= 833 days
= 2 years and 4 months!!!
WHAT!?
Well sounds kinda usefull...
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit
Well that may be the benchmark your using but I want all my vapourware data storage anoucements in Libaries Of Congress please.
interesting
Riiiiight. What's a cubit?
So instead of losing a mars probe because of miscalculations, we now lose a percentage of the data?
Of course, if it's measured in units USAians understand, it will be 'those other people' who will get it wrong, which is probably alright, yes?
Obviously they are Japanese cubits! They are a bit smallet than the others you listed.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Which would be 3,092.6 GB, or roughly 3 TBs. Now, let's see them make this, and this will probably replace current tape drives (being slow and all, unless they can make it read/write really fast) I think that at this density, it better be able to read/write at LEAST 750 MB/sec, if it's to be used as a backup drive, or over 1 GB if it's to be used as a common drive for whatever, games, encyclopedias, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yes, it is important. Because applications won't grow to fit the need if there is no room to grow. Yeah, I do remember when 2MB of memory was the bomb, I paid an extra $200 for that extra MB when I bought my 386DX-33. I had the best hard drive too, 80MB. Now I have 3x+ that in memory.
I see your point, but look where things have gone in the last ... damn, has it been 12 years already?! I don't think you can blame programmers for writing worse code. Look at what the code of today is capable of, versus the code of 1991. Wolfenstein 3d vs Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
No, we don't need the space right now, but we will find new and interesting ways to fill it if it is there. Imagine not having to uninstall your OS, just create a new 100GB partition, install the new OS to it, and boot to that one instead of the old one. We have gotten used to having to uninstall software because we have limited space to deal with. Think of all the things we wouldn't have to do if we had "unlimited" nearly instant-access disk space.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Originally, a cubit was meant to be the length of your forearm (from the elbow, to the base of the hand).
According to their figures (and some bad math), it would take 1 to 50 years to write a square inch at what they said was their desired maximum capacity (4 petabits) considering the write speeds they gave (from 2.5 MB/sec to 125 MB/sec). It also claims the current prototye is "not accurate enough for practical applications" but will be possibly in 5 years. I don't know, but possibly, by that time, another technology will arise with simular or better capacity and a write speed to fill it in minutes or hours though.
...perhaps we would just never have to delete anything again? maybe the computer can just keep a log of everything that's happened since it was turned on... ...on second thought, that might not be such a good idea...
The 25 kB/s figure is the read time; the write time is 100 times faster than that.
So accounting for the correction in the other post, it would take 13 days to read (as much data as) a DVD, but only 13% of one day to write one. (a bit over 3 hours)
13 days to read a DVD's worth of data is a bit problematic.
It may be impressive in the sense that ferro-electric might have decent seek and transfer times, but it's certainly not very impressive in terms of raw storage capacity. 47 DVDs in a square inch. Think of how thin the actual storage layer on a DVD is (not the plastic cover), and it seems pretty easy to reach that number or higher with DVD storage technology recnofigured into a cube of layers.
11*43+456^2
He's talking bytes where he means bits, bits where he means dots, inches along side with cm, and cubits where...god only knows (no pun intended.)
I thought he was going to use the 14.7 higmadoos in a wingwong measurement that's to commonplace with the schientiphic society, but he let me down.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Quite a coincidence, I was reading a two-year-old Wired yesterday talking about how far ahead the US universities were on what they were calling "moletronics". It seems a lot of people are caught up in the DVD/video aspect, but in the article they were talking about storing a terrabyte in a matchbook-sized piece of fabric and such. Putting a "black box" IN the skin of the airplane every few inches, etcetera. The scoop here for me is, does it mean that Japan has passed us in molecular electronics?
The Wired article was US-centric, and I wondered where Japan fit into this picture.
Does anybody know?
Also you have to remember that speed is a small concern at this point, this is VERY young technology. The main thing is that for $.10 you can make a vial of molecules. That vial of molecules will contain like 6 X 10^23 molecules capable of being used in place of transistors in electronic circuits. Imagine the new Transmeta 14BillionJigaHertz laptop. With the entire internet cached in RAM that only has to refresh power every 8 or 10 seconds, rather than 60ms like DRAM. Power usage, computing power, and storage amounts go through the roof. No moving parts either.
HP is using their redundant self-diagnosing design along with this technology, so that even if there are some reliability issues with the molecular "switches" giving up after a while, the system will be so redundant that it will turn off that bank of switches and continue on.
Anyhow, this topic really struck me yesterday and I was trying to shed some light. Anybody know the current state of affairs on US "moletronic" technology?
P.S. When this happens, they are going to need a LOT of software... Maybe GCC 23.5.1 will get ported...
LR
Just to think, years ago, it took 450,000 cubits just to store the genetic sequence of the known animal kingdom...
The full specifications are:
.5 a small child per coffee-table
Storage: 195.7 decabytes per 3.3 twips
Rotational velocity: 948 furlongs per fortnight
Weight:
Operating temperature: As warm as a large cow.
Operating noise range: Approx that of a dyslexic peg-legged mime performing an impromptu street rendition of Macbeth using a small matchbox containing 12 red ants as his only prop.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Riiiiiiight. ...What's a cubit?
That's because the academics who complain about stuff like that are the ones who only use them in trivial examples. People use cm because it is about the right size for a lot of applications (inches too). Metric still suffers from the too small/too big syndrome, where the units are spaced too far apart for convienence (3 orders of magnitude difference is a lot). Of course it's too late to complain now I guess.
I read the internet for the articles.
Of course the 20KDVD media is protected so it only plays in Region 1
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Go under prefrences/comments, they now have a 'karma bonus' option where you can set however much of a bonus you want for 'elevated' users. It's set to +0 by default.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I couldn't disagree more with this. Any number in the metric system is between 0 and 1000, with an appropriate prefix added to the units, which makes it convenient for just about every application. I don't see why measuring in millimetres is a problem. I routinely say "that gap's about 50 mil". Is that so much different to "that gap's about 5cm"? Can't see it myself. Contrast that with Imperial units, where people tend to say a vehicle weighs 3500 pounds. Surely that suffers from the "too big" syndrome far more than metric units?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I'd say:
1 Molehill (Imperial) = 1 Mountain (Metric)
Cheers,
Jonathan
The VMS operating system had (still has?) a configurable boot-time delay which is specified in microfortnights.
Shwoopah... Shwoopah... Shwoopah... Ding!!!
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
ferroelectric molecular optical storage nanotechnology many years ago.
I am sure the company is in talks with the Japanese as we speak.
The website for those interested is
www.colossalstorage.net
"For those of you using sane units, this is about 250 gigabits per cm^2."
Closer to 270 GB per cm^2. If you're using "sane" units, then there's 1000 bytes/kilobytes/megabytes in a kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte, not 1024.
SI is base-10 only. If you're going to insinuate that SI is the "one true measuring system," you had best get it right.
The parent said it writes at 2.5MB/s and reads at 25kB/s. You've reversed those numbers.
Also, when you did your calculation your quotient from the storage size/read speed equation ended up with the storage size/write speed answer. You then proceeded to divide by 60 to get the number of minutes it would take to write the media. You incorrectly convert that to days by dividing by 24 hours. You should have converted the minutes to hours first.
Granted, it'd still take 13 days, 21 hours and 20 minutes to write the full 3 TB at 2.5MB/s, but that's a better number than yours.
Cheers.
I think I'd much rather have fozzy, or kermit storage.
That said, personally I don't like gonzo.. Never trust anyone with a large nose who says he's not jewish. We all know they have such large noses because air is free.
You're nothing; like me.
Are those metric cubits or imperial cubits?
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Both systems have their advantages, but I'd say on the whole that Metric is better than Imperial.
The Imperial system seems to be better if you don't have to convert units. Because there are so many Imperial units, with essentially arbitrary scaling factors between them, you can often pick exactly the right intuitive units for the job. For example: inches, feet, yards, miles. And once you except that there are only arbitrary relationships between units, you can even use metric units like litres to measure bottles of coke!
The Metric system is definitely better if you ever have to convert between units. I'll bet you can convert centimetres to kilometres in your head, and I'll equally bet you don't know the conversion from inches to miles. Conversion between different types of units is also often nice in the metric system. For example, a litre of water weighs a kilogram.
On the whole, as a Canadian who is regularly forced to use one system or the other, I'd say the convenience of conversion outweighs the ability to pick an intuitive unit. If you need a geeky example why this is so: I often spend my time when riding my bike up long hills trying to figure out how many revolutions of my 27 inch bike wheel it takes to go a mile. I have to convert to metric units and back to even have a chance at doing the calculation in my head; especially if I want to calculate revolutions per second of my peddles into miles per hour.
I'd also like to point out that metric units can also be intuitive. Celsius temperatures make a lot more sense. Freezing and boiling points at 0 and 100 make a lot more intuitive sense than 32 and 212.
I'd like to repeat the plea to Americans to switch to SI. I wouldn't need two sets of wrenches, and I could free up a whole bunch of brain space filled with trivia like: there are 12 inches in a foot, 16 ounces in a pound (or is that 12 troy ounces?), and 128 ounces in a gallon (or is that 160 slightly smaller ounces in a Canadian gallon?). Since you Imperial unit users are accustomed to arbitrary conversion factors, I don't see why you can't just learn 2.2 pounds to the kilogram, 1.6 kilometers to the mile, 3.75 litres to the (American) gallon, and leave the rest of us in peace.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
I said *about* 250 gigabits per cm^2. 8% error is close enough here, especially given that there would be layers of ECC and formatting before the user sees anything.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Try to visualize 50mm in your head. If that's too hard, try visualizing 0.05m instead.
I bet you mentally converted that to 5cm when you thought about it. Large numbers of absolutely tiny units are hard to get a feel for, as are small fractions of large units. It's not about working numbers and moving decimal points around, it's about estimating and off the cuff calculations.
I read the internet for the articles.
Nope. I thought about a 50mm sized distance. Now when I thought about 0.05m, I did mentally convert that to 50mm, because that's the more natural unit. Now I'll admit that an engineering background (where everything is measured in mm) means I'm perhaps more comfortable with mm than the general public. But I don't see why anyone would have a problem with it, particularly if taught in school (rather than cm as is currently the case in the UK at least).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
You only have 240 mb of ram? That's so not 1337.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Or about 326.5 shitloads per half fingernail.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
What you can set is how much of a karma bonus you want to give people when you view the page. It dosn't really affect anything, and now there's no real reprocussion for not checking the box, as your posts can't go past -1.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
>The researchers' measuring device, dubbed >scanning nonlinear dialectic microscope (SNDM), >overcomes these limitations, said Cho. Guess that Cho really paid attention in his philosophy of physics course.
The numbers come out quite nicely for 1 in. stacks of IBM 90-column punch-cards per square fathom...there are 1,234 of them.
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
note the + sign. In some of my machines I have only 256.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Why are we not using measurements that the Universe has handed to us? I am, of course, speaking of the fact that a metre (or meter, if you're like that) is "the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second". How crappy a definition of a size is this? Why not create a unit that is the size of 1000 trillion Carbon-12 molecules strung end-to-end? That would make a lot more sense. I know that there is a unit type "dalton" that is 1/12 the size of a Carbon-12 atom, but that's rather ridiculous. While I would say "use Hydrogen", I'm thinking that would probably be WAY too small. :P
[insert witty comment here]
the atomic force microscope only writes on the surface 2D ( x by y dimensions).
Imagine if they could do 3D Volume Holographic Optical Storage Nanotechnology,
the data density, capacities, and bandwidth would go thru the stratisphere to ISS space lab.