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Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Disk Capacity
Makarand writes "Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light, acting as magnetic
sensors may expand the storage capacity of hard disks many times. Although, technologies
exist to increase hard disk capacity, reading data bits reliably from such disks has proven
difficult because as data bits become smaller their magnetic fields are weaker and difficult
to pick up. Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields
using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood.
As the sensors are only a few atoms wide the electrons travel along a straight line
in the conductor greatly enhancing the binary signal picked up from the data bits.
These sensors could also be used to detect biomolecules in low concentrations."
Ah yes, a sweet first posting.
post ????
Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light,
:)
Is it just me or are we getting too clever?
Soon we'll be storing gigabytes on a single atom...
Get your own free personal location tracker
That depends on how many spins an atom can have at once:) Welcome to the world of quatum mechanics.
To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?
wouldnt it be better to concentrate on more reliable rather than greater storage ?
Tiny filaments of nickel, thinner than a wavelength of visible light
Then how do we know they're there?
I dunno... First we had giant magnetoresistance, then colossal magnetoresistance... Ballistic just doesn't seem to fit. We should call it gargantuan magnetoresistance, or Herculean... I know! Let's call it "humongous magnetoresistance"!
How can you care about something as trivial as hard disk capacity when 7 astronauts are dead and our nation is on the brink of war. Is America really that heartless and indifferent? If so, I'm quickly losing what little faith in humanity I had remaining.
...as I had the first HDD failure warning this evening on my "auto destruct after 12 months" IBM 60GXP. I wouldn't mind so much if it had been hammered, but it's in a PC that gets used about twice a month. Does 99.9% of the population care less about the availability of 200GB hard drives? Surely the priority should be data security, then speed (it's the biggest bottleneck in your PC), then capacity?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Where and when will I - a normal consumer - be able to notice all those fantastic advances, like pixie dust, nickel filaments etc.? Sure, I notice a nice increase in storage capacity, a decrease in cost (and a warranty decrease;) - but nowhere I can see fantastic, large changes!
If I had a nickel for every time...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It's always important when matters aren't entirely understood to choose carefully, namely the one in possession of the puffy little shoes.
Phhh. I knew that and I'm not even American...
Cheers,
Ian
The most horrible space tragedy in recorded history occured one day ago, and all you people can do is talk about whether nickel can raise disk capacity? My *god*, folks, get some priorities here!
Zack looked at the other four men around the table, sipping his beer. "I swear, if I EVER get that bitch alone again," he said, "I'm gonna show her what happens to a cock-tease!"
"Fuck her," said Steve. "Fuck her AND her bitch mother. I hear that her husband left her way back when 'cause she'd only ever let him fuck her so that she could have a little bitch daughter all her own."
"Sounds right," said Dan. "Man, right on second base, and mom walks in on us... and Terry and her bitch mother are all smiling and laughing, and me with a hard-on that would break boards, man..."
Five men, all with the same story. A teasing little teenager, bringing them back home, getting them all hot and bothered, and then laughing as her mother came in, and threw them out, hard and wanting.
"Tell you something," said Brad, as he sipped his fifth beer, "we should do something about it."
They looked at each other, and started to smile. A plan started to form, and over the next few days, as the beer dissipated, the plan remained, and grew. Terry Smith and her bitch mother, Marian, were going to have a really bad day, really soon.
After a couple of weeks of preparation, the five conspirators were ready. Three of them put on ski masks and dark clothes, and waited at the Smith house. It was a nice, big place, purchased with the money Marion got from the divorce settlement. They'd watched it for over a week, getting the schedule down. Marion would come home from her office in the middle of the day, working very close. This time, when she pulled into her garage, however, three men ducked in behind her car as the garage door closed. They stayed low, so she couldn't see them... until it was too late. As she stepped out of the car, Steve stepped up, and before she could scream, he hit her in the stomach with the stun gun.
She collapsed to the hard concrete floor, body trembling from the pain, and the three men went to work. Taking her keys, they opened up her trunk, bound her wrists and ankles with rope, stuffed a rag into her mouth, and taped it in place with duct tape. Then they threw her in the trunk, and slammed it.
Half an hour later, after having themselves a nice lunch out of her refrigerator, Steve drove her car to the adult bookstore on the outskirts of town where they'd been making their preparations. One down, one to go!
Brad and Dan waited in the house. Terry would come home after school in the little red convertible her dad's money had bought her, park on the street, and come in the front door. Every day, like clockwork. Today was no exception, except that when she went to the kitchen, Brad and Dan were waiting in the pantry. She barely had time to yelp before she, too, was hit with the stun gun. Brad bound the chesty teenager while Dan went and got their car. They put her in the trunk, bound and gagged, in the garage, and then they carefully and casually drove to the bookstore. Fun time had arrived!
The doors of the adult bookstore were closed for a while, and the "Open" sign turned off. Marian, fully recovered by the time they took her out of the trunk, was kicking and screaming as she was brought in the back door, through the supply room, and into one of the video booths. Zack and Dan carried her in, laughing the whole time. No more ski masks. It wasn't going to matter if she recognized them.
In fact, it was great that she did.
Once in the booth, they forced her to the seat, and held the stun gun to her chest.
"Now stay the hell quiet," said Zack. He turned on the video screen, which wasn't showing the usual assortment of porn. What it showed was an overhead view into two booths, side by side, from a hidden camera in the ceiling. "If you make a sound, I swear to god I'll fry you with this thing."
Marian, remembering the pain of the stun gun, sat still, fuming. She watched the screen, looking around, occasionally, for her chance to escape.
On the screen, she saw three men bringing Terry into one of the booths! She started to protest through her gag, but Zack just prodded her in the tit with the prongs of the stun gun, and she quieted down, eyes wide. What were they going to do?
Terry struggled against her bonds, and the three men that held her, to no avail. She'd been tied very well. Brad and Steve held her down on her back on the bench in the booth, as Carl pulled a long knife, and started to cut away her clothes.
Marian's pleadings started again. Zack let them go on for a minute, kind of enjoying them, before he grabbed the front of Marian's blouse, ripped it open, and hit her on the bare flesh of her left tit, above her bra, with the stun gun. She doubled over, her scream cut off by the gag and the horrible tightness of her shocked muscles. When she was able to unbend again, Terry was naked and bound, her big tits jiggling as she struggled against the three attackers in her booth.
"It's time your daughter found out what happens to chicks to cock-tease all the time," said Zack. "And you too, for that matter."
They pulled the gag out of Terry's mouth, and she tried to bite Carl's hand as he did.
"You BASTARDS... let me GO... I SWEAR, I'll KILL YOU..." she was screaming, all anger and rage. Marian sat up proudly, her daughter wouldn't give in to these thugs!
Then, Steve grabbed Terry's head tightly, and dug his thumbs into the joint of her jaw, forcing her mouth wide open with the pressure and the pain. Brad forced a ring-gag into her mouth, behind her teeth, and strapped it cruelly tight to her head. Terry continued to scream, but with her mouth forced open, the words weren't making much sense any more.
Then, as Marian looked on, horrified, they forced Terry to her knees, and pressed her face against one wall of the booth. Looking more closely, she could see a hole in the wall of the booth, against which Terry's helplessly open mouth was forced. As Brad and Steve held her there, Carl strung rope through eye-rings on either side of the glory hole, and tied Terry's head tightly in place.
"That's a glory-hole," said Zack, as Marian's eyes filled with tears. "Know what one of those is for? I'll bet your high-falutin' lifestyle doesn't include stuff like that. Men take their pleasure through that hole, not that you'd know anything about men's pleasure. But you will, bitch. You and your daughter will."
Marian shook her head, clearing the tears out of her eyes, as she watched the three men in Terry's booth bind her even more tightly; wrists behind her back, ankles bound together, then ankles and wrists bound together. She was forced to kneel at the glory hole, unable to move her wide-open mouth even a centimeter away from it. Then, the three men left the booth. Marian feared they would go into the adjacent booth and take advantage of her daughter, but instead, she saw them coming into her own booth, less than a minute later.
"Here's the deal, mom," said Brad, as he stood in front of her. "Your daughter's going to learn a lot about pleasing a man, today. We don't care if you learn shit, but you need to be taught a lesson, don't you?" He reached down and ripped open her blouse the rest of the way, and dug her big fat tits out of her expensive lace bra. Marion started to struggle, but Zack put the tip of the stun gun directly against her nipple.
"You make a sound, a single fucking sound," he said, "and I'll go stuff this stun-gun up your daughter's cunt, and tape the trigger down. Got me?"
Marion, horrified, nodded. She sat there, passively, as the five men pulled and tore her clothes off, stripping her completely naked, ruining her thousand dollar outfit. She kept her eyes on the stun gun, and on the screen where Terry knelt, helpless, moaning and squirming. Brad unbound Marion's feet, and her back was forced to one wall of the booth. Zack and Carl pulled her ankles wide apart, as Brad held her shoulders against the wall. She felt the wood of the wall behind her, and an opening, which her ass was pressing against. She looked at Brad, eyes wide and pleading, shaking her head, but Brad only smiled.
Her widespread ankles were tied to eye-rings set in the wall, and they forced her to bend over. Her wrists were tightly bound behind her back, and then the bent her over further. As Brad held her down with a hand on the back of her neck, Dan knelt by her, reached around, and spread her ass-cheeks. She could feel cool air on her exposed anus, and started to struggle. They only held her more tightly, as Dan ran rope through the eye- rings on either side of this glory hole, and around her waist and thighs, forcing her ass-hole tightly to the glory hole. Then, Carl got under her bent-over form, and began to wrap coils of rope around her dangling melons, binding them tightly at the base, making them swell under her. The ends of the ropes were brought down to the floor, and secured tightly in an eye-ring in the floor.
Then they grabbed her long hair, pulled her head far back, and tied her hair to one more eye-ring in the wall with one more length of rope. Her face was only a foot away from the video screen where Terry waited pensively, mouth to the wall.
Zack stroked Marian's naked body with the prongs of the stun gun, then Brad pulled the tape off of her mouth, and pulled out the rag.
"Please," said Marian, the agony in her bound breasts dulling her thinking, "don't do this... please, you can do whatever you want with me, but not Terry... PLEASE!"
"Shouldn't have helped her tease all those cocks," said Carl, as he tweaked Marian's nipple. Marian shuddered, but didn't scream. She knew, if she screamed, she'd feel the stun gun again.
"It was all my idea... please, not her... she's all I've got, please don't do this to my little girl!"
The men looked back and forth to one another. "So," asked Zack. "Is Terry still a virgin?"
"She... oh, god, don't," said Marian, shock setting in.
Brad slapped her, lightly, knelt down to face her. "Is Terry a virgin?" he asked again. Zack reached under her with the stun gun, and pressed the prongs to Marian's swollen nipples.
"Y-yes!" said Marian. "You... you can't take that from her, not like this... please... she's never even touched a man's penis before!"
"Well, she's gonna do a hell of a lot more than touch one, today," said Brad. He pulled out a good-sized cock gag, and held it in front of Marian. "Open up, or we'll shock your tits."
Marian, crying almost uncontrollably, opened her mouth, and Brad forced the six-inch cock gag into her mouth, nearly choking her, the head of it resting just at the entrance of her throat. As he strapped it into place, she realized that if she relaxed, she wouldn't gag on it. Tears of humiliation welled up in her eyes; she'd never sucked a cock before, not even a rubber one, and having this thing in her mouth, here, in front of these men she and her daughter had humiliated, was more than she could bear!
"Show time," said Zack. Brad, Carl, Dan, and Steve left the booth, and Zack knelt down next to Marian.
"You see, we've been setting this up for a while," he said. "Now, we're going to open the book store back up, and let all the regular customers come in. We've been telling them there would be a special surprise for them, tonight. We even put ads on the Internet, so a hell of a lot of horny guys are going to come in, looking for some satisfaction."
Marian's eyes widened once more, and she started to gag on her protests as she shook her head. Zack kissed her on the cheek, chuckling.
"At some point tonight, me and all my friends are gonna take our turns, too. But I doubt you'll be able to tell when it's us."
He left her in the booth, alone, eyes locked on the screen, watching her daughter, who had no warning about what was about to happen.
As Marian watched, tears dripping down her cheeks, she heard the sounds of people coming into the store. She pulled at the bonds on her wrists and ankles, pulled up against the ropes on her tightly bound breasts, but there was no escaping. She watched Terry, saw her pulling at her own bonds, hoping against hope that she could get a hand free. She could hear Terry's moans across the store, and silently begged her to stop, to not draw any attention to herself. Marian would have tried to moan herself, to attract attention away from her precious daughter, but the cock-gag in her mouth denied her the opportunity.
As she watched her daughter struggle, she saw a man enter the booth next to Terry. Marion's throat constricted at the cock-gag, as she tried to yell, to scream, to beg, to plead. The man bent down, and looked into the hole, smiled, and stood up. As Marion watched, helplessly, the man opened up his pants, pulled out a five-inch cock, and stuck it through the hole in the thin veneer wall. Terry was caught completely by surprise, and squealed loudly around it. The man grabbed a pair of handles that had been conveniently provided in that booth, and started to shove his cock in and out of Terry's helpless mouth.
"Suck it, bitch!" he said. There was no sound from the video, but Marian could hear the words from the nearby booth. "Fucking whore, suck it!"
Marian wanted to close her eyes, but she found she couldn't. Maybe Terry would get away, maybe she could break free, but there she was, being brutally mouth- raped by this complete stranger. Terry's slim body writhed and squirmed, her ass swaying back and forth, as the cock slipped in and out, faster and faster. Marian's throat constricted in sympathy as she heard Terry gag on the cock, again and again.
The man's hips drove the cock brutally into Terry's mouth, until his body tensed up, and he moaned loudly. Marian almost threw up, realizing that the brute was cumming in her precious daughter's helpless mouth. The man pulled his softening cock out of Terry's mouth, and tucked it away, as Terry gasped and coughed through the ring-gag.
Marian blinked the tears away as the man left the booth, and was immediately replaced by another. She recognized Zack, and she said silent prayers as Zack smiled up at the camera, and flipped her the finger. Then he unzipped, pulled out a considerably larger cock than the last man's, and shoved it deep down Terry's helpless throat.
Marian was so intent on watching the video monitor that she didn't hear the sounds from the booth next to hers. She just felt something hot and slippery at her helplessly exposed anus. She tensed every muscle in her body, straining against the ropes on her, as the stranger behind her started to shove his hard cock into her, HARD. She gasped through her nose as the head of it popped into her virgin shit-chute, and screamed a muffled, choking scream around the cock-gag. She closed her eyes, the sounds of Terry gagging on Zack's huge cock filling her ears, and soon, the grunts and groans of the man behind her, as he slowly forced more of his big cock up her ass.
Marian's body trembled as the cock slowly forced it's way in, her asshole squeezing down on it hot and tight. She tensed her every muscle, trying to expel the raping intruder, but that only seemed to excite the man inside of her. After what seemed like forever, she felt her ass-cheeks tickled by pubic hair, and the man's cock was entirely inside her. The burning agony of the anal rape tore through her body, and her spastic, gagging moans were totally insufficient, but the only noise she could squeeze out.
She opened her eyes again as the man left his cock there, feeling her heat and tightness. On the video screen, Zack was holding onto the handles, and force- fucking Terry's helpless throat hard and fast, looking up into the camera as he did. He was smiling, an evil smile, that seemed to say "you're next, bitch."
Then the man in Marian's ass started to fuck his big cock in and out, tearing her open. Even as tightly bound as it was, her body jerked back against the wall, time and again, as the big cock dragged out of her rectum. Her big tits were yanked mercilessly as the cock pounded her violated hole, bringing even more pain.
She heard Zack's moans as he came in Terry's mouth, and watched as he very deliberately pulled his cock mostly out of her mouth, and jacked the last few drops onto her tongue, forcing her to taste his cum. With a satisfied smile on his face, Zack zipped up his pants, and left the booth; to be immediately replaced by another stranger.
The cock in Marian's ass pumped into her harder, and faster. Tears of pain and humiliation spilled to the floor, as her butt was used brutally. The man would pump hard, then slow down, pump hard, and then slow down. He was deliberately taking his time, making the horrible anal rape last, and last. Marian lost track of the number of times the cock was rammed into her helpless chute. She felt him drive in deep, hard, and then an odd warmth filled her ass. With disgust, she realized that the man had cum up her ass. Her eyes widened once more as the man's cock was slowly withdrawn, her tight anal rippling milking out every drop from the rapist. She felt his cum! They weren't wearing condoms, or anything! Even the men raping Terry's mouth weren't using rubbers!
She closed her eyes, body wracked with sobs, as the implications of multiple unprotected rapes lashed her mind. She heard the door to the booth behind her open, and close, and wasn't that surprised when another cockhead was buttoned into her helpless, torn asshole. The pain wracked her again, causing her to jerk hard against her bonds, helpless, in agony.
She lost count of the number of men that used her and Terry, somewhere around ten or fifteen. She knew there were a lot more than that. The constant pain, the terror, and the humiliation took their toll; she passed out after an hour of the torment, which didn't stop the delighted bookstore patrons.
She woke up, muscles aching, scalp burning with the constant pull on her hair, breasts numb. She was still tied in the same place, and the same position, but the rapes seemed to have stopped, at least for the moment. She looked at the screen, and to her terror, Terry was no longer there! Marian tried to scream for her, but the cock-gag prevented any but the most pitiful mewlings out of her mouth.
Then, there was another pressure at her anus, but this one was different. Where the many cockheads that had pressed there were hard and soft at the same time, this one was only hard, ungiving. And it was HUGE! Her asshole, brutalized as it was, could offer no resistance as the vast intruder forced it's way inside her.
Again, the gag prevented a full-throated scream. The thing pressed in, harder, and deeper, it's length covered with sharp little nubs, that bit into her flesh and scraped along her torn anal canal as it slipped in. In her pain-shrouded mind, Marian didn't realize that she was being fucked with a huge, knobbed dildo. She thought that she was in hell, and finally, Satan himself was raping her ass. Her mind started to come apart under the agony of the brutal dildo rape. It had to have been over a foot long, and wider by far than any of the cocks she'd been forced to take there. Once it was inside her, it rested there, and she slowly started to realize what was actually happening. "Please," she prayed, silently, "just let it stay there, please, don't let it fuck me!"
Her body quivered in helpless agony as the huge dildo started to slide in and out of her, tearing at the walls of her asshole, bringing blood and cum out with it with every stroke. Marian's eyes squeezed shut, her mind racing madly. The cocks that had raped her ass had left when they'd cum. When would this end? How could it end?
The dildo raping went on for a good long time, Marian couldn't tell how long. It seemed that it would be going on forever, when the monster was finally dragged out of her ass. She could feel cool air flowing much, much to far inside her, as her tortured anus refused to close, dripping blood and the cum of dozens of hard anal rapes. There was a shuffling of many feet from the room behind her, and the door opening, and closing.
Then the door of her own booth opened again, And Marian looked at the men standing in the door, hate in her eyes.
They looked at her, laughing, for a moment, then parted, revealing Terry. She was naked, her wrists tied behind her back, but there was a strap around her waist, and at her pelvis was mounted a huge, black rubber dildo, covered with knobs, dripping blood and cum.
"MOM!" she screamed, stepping into the room, and falling to her bruised and raw knees. "Mom, I didn't know! I didn't know you were here!" Her voice was hoarse and raw, her lips red and swollen from the vast number of oral rapes. "They told me... they told me if I did this, they'd let me go!"
Tears spilled down her cheeks, as she rested her face against her mother's. Zack and Brad stepped forward, took Terry by her shoulders, and lifted her to her feet.
"That was hot," said Carl. "So, Marian, is your daughter better at fucking your ass than we are? Be honest, now?"
The men laughed as Terry wailed in anguish. Four of the men took Terry away, leaving Dan with Marian.
"So, you want to go home, now?" he asked, holding her chin between thumb and forefinger. As best as she could, with her hair still bound, Marian nodded.
"Then you've got to do something for us." He untied Marian's hair, and unbound her tits, and helped her to stand up straight against the wall. Marian stretched her muscles, grateful that the anal raping was over. Dan untied her ankles, and helped her sit down, carefully, on the bench. Her ass was burning and bleeding, sitting was hard, but it was a vast relief to take the strain off of her legs.
She looked at him, expectantly, terror in her eyes, gag still in her mouth. Dan pulled a gun out of the back of his waistband, and her eyes widened even more.
"We could kill you both," he said, "and no one would know. None of the guys that fucked you two, today, know what you looked like. We could make you disappear, and no one would ever know. Got me?"
Marian nodded.
"Now, my four friends are tying your daughter down to a cot in the back room. We've all cum four or five times, now, and we don't really want to screw you two whores any more. But Terry's still a virgin, and she doesn't deserve it. She's way too good at being a cock-tease to be a virgin."
Marian could tell what was coming, and her heart dropped into her stomach. Dan ran the tip of the gun barrel around her swollen nipples.
"So we're gonna take you to her, and give you the strap-on that we let her use on you, and you're gonna take her cherry. But none of this gentle 'mommy- daughter' crap. You're gonna call her a slut and a whore and you're gonna make her think that you WANT to rape her, that she's a dirty little fucking bitch and that she deserves it."
Dan held the gun to Marian's temple. "And if you're not convincing, you and Terry go away. In a long, slow, nasty way, forever. Got me?"
Marian's mind rebelled at the suggestion, at the horror of it, but she realized she had no choice. These men could do whatever they wanted to them, she had to take the chance, however small, however painful, to save her and her daughter's life.
Dan took the gag off of Marian, who remained silent. She'd learned her lesson.
"Good girl," said Dan. "Now, let's go take Terry's cherry."
Dan helped the shaky Marian to her feet, untying her hands.
"Just remember, you try anything," he said "and it's all over for you and your little bitch."
"I-I know," said Marian, through bitter tears. Dan led her to the supply room in back, where Terry was laying on her back on a thin cot, her arms and legs spread out wide, and tied underneath. She looked up at her mother with tears in her eyes, as the four other conspirators smiled and laughed among themselves.
"Mom-oh, god, mom, I'm so sorry... I didn't know it was you!"
Zack stepped up to Marian, and handed her the monstrous strap on, still glistening with her blood and the cum of uncounted rapists. She started to protest, not this, anything but this, but the memory of the gun in the hands of the man behind her stopped her. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly, as she strapped on the monstrous thing.
"Mom, what-what are you doing?" asked Terry, as Marian approached her. "You...you can't!"
"Shut up, you little bitch," said Marian, hoping she sounded convincing. "You deserve this!"
She got on top of her virgin daughter, poising the head of the dildo at Terry's untouched pussy lips. Terry's widespread thighs quivered with the effort of trying to pull them closed.
"God, no... please, I'm sorry... I'm SO sorry!" squealed Terry, her eyes locked on the monstrosity pressing at her cunt. "I swear, I'll be good mommy, no please!"
Marian almost cracked. Only the sure knowledge that she and her daughter would both be killed if she didn't continue drove her on. She carefully guided the head of the monster dildo to her daughter's virgin opening, and started to thrust into her.
"NO... MOMMY... IT HURTS!!" screamed Terry, as the head started to enter her. Marian paused, and slapped her.
"Listen, you little bitch," she said, her teeth clenched, "just shut up and take it." She hated herself more with every word, but what choice did she have? Then, she put her weight down on her hips, and the monstrous, knobbed dildo inched deeper into her daughter.
"DON'T... please, not that... don't take it... NO!!" screamed Terry, as she felt the huge, stretching invader hit her precious maidenhead. "Mom... you said I had to stay a virgin-why are you DOING THIS TO ME?"
"Why do you THINK, you little BITCH?" asked Marian, tears in her eyes. It actually did make her a little angry, that after all they'd gone through today, she didn't realize that Marian was being forced into this act. A little anger was all it took, she thrust her hips forward, and the dildo ripped through Terry's virginity painfully.
Terry could only scream as Marian buried the rest of the dildo up her hot, tight pussy; scream and thrash her head about, her young breasts jiggling from the effort. Marian started fucking her with brutal strokes; the harder she went, the faster these men would let them go.
The conspirators smiled and laughed, commenting on Marian's style and technique as she brutally dildo- raped her daughter, until Marian's legs, trembling from the exertion and stress of the day, gave out on her, and she could no longer go. Terry wept and screamed in her mother's ear, and the five conspirators stepped forward and pulled them apart, the dildo glistening with fresh virgin blood as is popped free of Terry's violated hole.
Marian, helpless with exhaustion, fatigue, and pain, sat next to her bound, raped daughter, weeping.
"Just so you know," said Zack, "We've been taping this whole thing. We got some good stuff, too. We're going to be jacking off to you two whores raping each other for a good, long time."
"You bastards," said Marian, breathing heavily.
"Now, you get any funny ideas, like going to the cops or anything," said Brad, "and we'll put you two all over the Internet, and send daddy's lawyers a few copies of you raping your little girl. Won't that be fun?"
"You-you can't!" said Marian, as Terry continued to cry.
"You just go on home," said Carl. "It's gonna be a long time before you two get off on cock-teasing again."
They untied Terry, dragged the two women out back, threw them, naked, into Marian's car, and left them there.
The five watched as, eventually, they drove off.
"Gonna do 'em again?" asked Steve, as he popped the top on a beer.
"Don't see why not," said Brad. "Give 'em a week or two to recover, and bring 'em back. And see if Terry's got any cute friends."
"Right on," said Dan. "Let's go watch the tape. I wanna see the look on her face when I'm fucking her ass."
How much slower will hard drives be? Or will they get faster? ...it just sounds slower to me, :)
Shouldn't more reasearch be made into solid state memory? I'm not a big fan of hard drive noises and grinding... but hey any research is good research
Now the term "going ballistic" has a whole new meaning!
This sounds cool though, sounds like Moore's law will keep moving along...
The average consumer doesn't need this technology. Large capacity hard disks have no place in regular civilian hands as it's just used for the storage of pirated materials. Following the logic of outlawing high capacity gun magazines (which is appropriate since government rule must be preserved at all costs including the obsolete second amendment) then there is no reason that high capacity hard disk drives should also not be kept out of civilian hands. At the very least a $1000 tax should be laid on all hard disk drives over 2GB. Permission from the government should be required as well before aquiring one of these devices.
This is a very sensible solution to stopping piracy. Only a pirate, DMCA violator, or terrorist would disagree.
Though the data storage application could certainly serve to fund the development and popularisation of this technology, it seems possible that in the long term the quoted "secondary" application may actually be the primary one. If the device can be tuned to detect virtually anything, it has obvious applications in industrial processes, bomb detection, and so on. This is incremental to existing efforts in these areas.
However, if it can be further trained to distinguish, it essentially amounts to an electronic "sense of smell". This is very exciting and has innumerable applications, especially in combination with other sensor devices and realtime feedback mechanisms involving both software and hardware.
A hypothetical consumer application might be to control the temperature that a bread product is grilled at, bringing it to a perfect (and user-selectable) stated of brownness, while turning down the heat in individual spots at the slightest hint of burning. Wonderful development
Could I interest anyone in some toast?
The article says nothing about writing data at such high densities. Something about this invention reminds me of the chip in the Terminator's head....
-- thinkyhead software and media
You probably haven't noticed because not only are capacities going up, costs are going down as well. That 200 gig hard drive is selling for less money than 200 meg drives were when they first came out. The capacities are becoming so enormous that they're threatening to become meaningless; most computer users wouldn't know the difference between a 60 gig drive and a 20. (They might not even know where to look to find out which they have, for that matter.) As a result, companies are spending as much of their resources on dropping prices as they are boosting size.
Last time a drive failed on me, I made it go ballistic too, and it offered little resistance (however the concrete offered considerable resistance). Is this a similar thing?
Maybe it's just me, but i don't think news about harddrives is very important at that moment.
The most horrible space tragedy in recorded history occured one day ago, and all you people can do is talk about whether nickel sensors could raise hard disk capacity? My *god*, folks, get some priorities here!
It works, but they don't know how. Looks like a recipe to future problems.
If this works, in a production environment when it exposed to certain radiation, radio signals, heat/cold, etc it not, will be dangerous to rely in that kind of things.
"It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.
Spontaneous flipping still poses an upper limit to magnetic data storage capacity. Basically, if you cram lots of bits too close together, they will start flipping each other.
r ch.nsf/pages/frontier399.html
see: http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresea
under storing information for info on pushing this limit
The they figure out - Geez, you use a handfull of nickle and you can make enough nanosensors to supply the geek industry for a year...
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
a 2^9C magnetic field for a single bit. The data would last FOREVER and have hardly any degredation! Now we'll just need a few warehouses to store it, anyone want to invest?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What chafes my drawers is that fact that we're looking to increase capacity and not reliability. Isn't the average life span of a hard drive only about 5-7 years? What ever happend to solid state storage??
that get's a little nervous about the idea that my data is accessed through a sensor 'only a few atoms wide'?
"As the sensors are only a few atoms wide" I wonder if they would dislodge/misalign if you dropped the hard drive by accident, or even moved it to fast.
Most people do not need large 200GB drives for their home computers but they are often used in servers. The advancement of servers is helping to get a more stable web community and since the internet is currently the main driving force behind computers this is quite important.
I agree. I think that the hard drive manufacturers need to stop focusing on how big they can make drives, and to start focusing on ways to make drives more reliable. A 200 GB drive is useless if it dies after six months.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Tiny whiskers make huge memory storage UPI Science News From the Science & Technology Desk Published 1/31/2003 4:07 PM BUFFALO, N.Y., Jan. 31 (UPI) -- New, tiny magnetic sensors could help break a technical barrier to ushering in the next generation of computer disk storage capacity, researchers reported Friday. The sensors, filaments of nickel thinner than a wavelength of visible light, are capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields. Although it is already possible to increase hard drive storage capacity many times, the process has lagged because technology has not existed to read the data signals, researcher Harsh Chopra, a materials scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, told United Press International. "Now we can," he said. The problem with expanding storage disk capacity is that as data bits become exceedingly small, their magnetic fields become correspondingly weaker and harder to read, Chopra explained. In order to read data signals reliably, the signals must produce a large enough change in the electrical resistance of the computer's magnetic sensors. The signals also must produce those changes at room temperature. In findings to be published in next July's issue of the journal Physical Review B, Chopra and physicist Susan Hua described sensors they have developed that are both small and sensitive to improve the density of hard drives. The sensors are actually microscopic whiskers of nickel only a few atoms wide. Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage. The sensors result in "much clearer signals," Chopra said. For comparison, he explained, imagine normal magnetic sensors can read a signal that begins with a strength of 1 and swings between an "off" reading at 0.8 and "on" at 1.2. The new sensors can read a range that swings between minus 1000 and plus 1000. That degree of sensitivity means terabits of data -- or trillions of bits -- could be crammed into a square inch of disk space. About 160 terabits comprise the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Chopra said the extreme sensitivity of the new sensors is due to a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance," or BMR. "Normally, when electrons travel in a wire, they go in a zigzag pattern, scattered by impurities or temperature-dependent effects," he explained. "Here the conductor has become so small, the electrons travel in straight paths." Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet." Meanwhile, Chopra and Hua are experimenting with sensors made of other substances, such as magnetite and chromium oxide. They are using a manufacturing technique developed originally by researcher Nongjian Tao, of Arizona State University in Tempe. With it, they said, they can reproduce the sensors reliably and simply. Because the sensors remain sensitive at room temperature, they should attract industry attention quickly. "The normal cycle for (such technologies) from discovery to implementation is about six to eight years," Chopra said. The research is "very exciting," said K.L. Murty, director of the National Science Foundation's metals research program. "It could have a big impact on magnetic storage -- hard disks -- to put in more memory. It might also have a lot of biomedical applications," he said. Chopra said the sensors also could be used to detect biomolecules, even in low concentrations. Each organic molecule could have its own fingerprint in terms of affecting whiskers' voltage. "It might only be two to three years (until we have) a working device in biomedical applications," he said.
"It's Magic!" is ok for childrens, but not if you want do to something serious.
I hereby declare this technology sufficiently advanced!
Tiny whiskers make huge memory storage
From the Science & Technology Desk
Published 1/31/2003 4:07 PM
View printer-friendly version
BUFFALO, N.Y., Jan. 31 (UPI) -- New, tiny magnetic sensors could help break a technical barrier to ushering in the next generation of computer disk storage capacity, researchers reported Friday.
The sensors, filaments of nickel thinner than a wavelength of visible light, are capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.
Although it is already possible to increase hard drive storage capacity many times, the process has lagged because technology has not existed to read the data signals, researcher Harsh Chopra, a materials scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, told United Press International.
"Now we can," he said.
The problem with expanding storage disk capacity is that as data bits become exceedingly small, their magnetic fields become correspondingly weaker and harder to read, Chopra explained. In order to read data signals reliably, the signals must produce a large enough change in the electrical resistance of the computer's magnetic sensors. The signals also must produce those changes at room temperature.
In findings to be published in next July's issue of the journal Physical Review B, Chopra and physicist Susan Hua described sensors they have developed that are both small and sensitive to improve the density of hard drives.
The sensors are actually microscopic whiskers of nickel only a few atoms wide. Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage.
The sensors result in "much clearer signals," Chopra said.
For comparison, he explained, imagine normal magnetic sensors can read a signal that begins with a strength of 1 and swings between an "off" reading at 0.8 and "on" at 1.2. The new sensors can read a range that swings between minus 1000 and plus 1000. That degree of sensitivity means terabits of data -- or trillions of bits -- could be crammed into a square inch of disk space. About 160 terabits comprise the entire contents of the Library of Congress.
Chopra said the extreme sensitivity of the new sensors is due to a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance," or BMR.
"Normally, when electrons travel in a wire, they go in a zigzag pattern, scattered by impurities or temperature-dependent effects," he explained. "Here the conductor has become so small, the electrons travel in straight paths."
Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."
Meanwhile, Chopra and Hua are experimenting with sensors made of other substances, such as magnetite and chromium oxide. They are using a manufacturing technique developed originally by researcher Nongjian Tao, of Arizona State University in Tempe. With it, they said, they can reproduce the sensors reliably and simply. Because the sensors remain sensitive at room temperature, they should attract industry attention quickly.
"The normal cycle for (such technologies) from discovery to implementation is about six to eight years," Chopra said.
The research is "very exciting," said K.L. Murty, director of the National Science Foundation's metals research program. "It could have a big impact on magnetic storage -- hard disks -- to put in more memory. It might also have a lot of biomedical applications," he said.
Chopra said the sensors also could be used to detect biomolecules, even in low concentrations. Each organic molecule could have its own fingerprint in terms of affecting whiskers' voltage.
"It might only be two to three years (until we have) a working device in biomedical applications," he said.
--
(Reported by Charles Choi, UPI Science News, in New York)
Why do we continue to invest in research to make bigger and faster storage devices that have moving parts, which gives you speed limitations, noise and reliability problems? I won't be happy until I have a storage device that is silent, as reliable and as fast as DIMMs or L2 cache.
I've also heard of IBM working on Holographic storage, Crystal Storage, and Molecular Storage.... It just seems IBM's R&D groups are more interested in winning patents than actually pumping out viable products-- they aren't exactly known for their innovations in the modern computer age, and are probably more interested in trying to attract US Gov't investments.
Now how long will it be before Steve Jobs comes along, flirts with the CEO of IBM and steals everything only to have Bill Gates come along and steal it off him...
To the Laws of Physics.
Is 1 TB on my keychain for under $10, and all i want to know is how soon!??
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Microscopic $/MB is great, but only if you use all those megabytes.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
can you please stop posting in tt?
or did anyone else read the subject as: Nickel Sensors Could Raise Hard Dick Capacity
What does this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
If this was news for electrical engineers, or news for computer scientists fine it would be on topic.
But this slashdot is supposed to be News for Nerds! This means stories about cartoons, government conspiracy theories and why windows suxorz.
Check his posting history; all his posts mention toast. It's still good for a chuckle because it's only his second day posting.
10 toast related posts in the last 24 hours. Anonymous Toaster will have to be pretty creative to keep up that pace without getting on everyone's nerves (hot grits, anyone?) Anyway, that's what keeps things interesting around here:)
Quote:
'a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood'
Now, would you trust your data to a phenomenon that is not completely understood? I know I wouldn't
Maybe you're right, in which case they won't buy them. Those that do need them, though, need them badly.
Me, for instance. The last video I did took up 50gb in image data while I was making it, for only 3 minutes of final result. Luckily for me, I only needed to make three minutes worth. If it had been a feature length video... well, I couldn't have done it.
You trust your EXISTENCE to phenomena that are not completely understood.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Ballistic Magnetoresistance?? Souds almost like technobabble; I had a funny thought that you could automatically generate alerts like this every six months using a random "new technology" generator.
June 2003: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Ferrous Multipliers*!
January 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Quantum Isolators*!
June 2004: Scientists have found they can dramatically increase hard drive capacity using *Magneto Flux Capacitors*!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
I am not so concerned about packing more into less at the moment as disk space (ide anyways) is soooo cheap... I would be much more interested in technologies that improve seek times or improve rpms without having to go to a big expensive raid array....
This is just another harsh reminder that I will never see the day that you don't need to buy better hardware anymore. Just when you think they have finaly run out of possibilities for improvement, they go and do this. (I was hoping solid state drives would get cheap within the next few years...kiss that thought goodbye.)
Then again, I want moores law to be fulfilled already, I hate practicaly buying a new computer every 3 years.
I've got a bad 41GB IDE HD with bad sectors, a bad 30GB with bad sectors, a dead 20GB HD and a 60GB IDE HD that is acting irrational. I've also RMA'd three 30GB IDE HDs in the last year.
The ironic thing is I've got five 5.25" full height 9GB SCSIs that are 10+ years old and they work PERFECTLY!
Before increasing capacity, I'd rather see them increase RELIABILITY. I don't care what they specs say about MTBF. I want real world reliability because I am tired of restoring or having to recover failing drives.
What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.
I had a conversation a couple of days ago with a coworker about how to improve data density on CD's. One of the ideas I suggested was that instead of packing more bits onto the CD, why not colorize them? A red bit would mean one bit of data, yellow would mean another, and so on. That's just an example. It just seems like they could be putting more data on a disc by changing the way the bit is detected.
It strikes me that there MIGHT be a way to do this in the magnetic world, but I really am not well informed on this topic. Who knows, maybe it's already being done. Enlightening information would be appreciated.
I guess the real point of my post is that adding more density to the drives isn't the only way to increase storage.
Nickel filaments are capable of picking up of these weak magnetic fields using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood.
You want to store your important data using technology you don't understand?
- Why log in, no one cares anyway.
now i just had a hdd crash on me
:( =
40GB of more or less important data vanished
i guess it's my own fault for not backing it up sooner (ironicaly i just bought 50 empty cd-r the same day)
but then as we saw in a previous post even cd's and dvd's arnt the perfect solution if we want to preserve data. my guess is that if we want +100 years of safe storage we would have to use piramids since those have been standing for more than 5k years.
then speed ok i usualy work with 1 realy fast smaler drive and a slower big drive.
some time ago i saw a pci card that had 16GB ram on it that acted like Vdisk. great make that 80 or more and i'm sold purrrrrrrfect for dv
realy do you want a disk spinning in your case at 2000000 rpm @ 10000k just so you can cap a rerun of Dr who at a littel higher bitrate?
anyway cheap temp storage = good
1TB for 200$ gime gime gime gime now!
solid state hey i want it
dont get me wrong there but it wont be secure and it isnt going to be cheap.
=> damn i just droped my memory drive cristal
splattered in to a bilion pieces, now i gotta defrag
..I guess we can't trust gravity either. Time to rewrite textbooks and remove the word gravity, since apparently we can no longer trust it!
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
...ultimately improves the quality and quantity of pr0n.
Carbon nanotubes? Like fullerenes, except they're long cylenders instead of spherical. And they conduct electricity quite well.
Repeal the DMCA!
At Terabytes per square INCH(!), I'll cheerfully put up with a little sluggishness in the new media, thank you very much.
Is it fascism yet?
I don't know what all the fuss about the 60 GXP is about. I've had one running nonstop in my Tivo for 2.5 years with nary a problem. Of course those OTHER 3 I've replaced in my computers kind of ruin the averages ...
Incremental developments in computer technology result in better, faster, cheaper products!
A lead researcher on the team is quoted as saying: "Yes, this means that current developmental trends will continue..." while another: "We really thought we'd reached the end, but, with this, we can continue revolutionizing the world just like we did last year!"
In other news, the sun is due to rise again tomorrow sometime in the morning....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
After failure number 3, I gave up on sending my GXP back and bought a Seagate. No problems yet...
Why should they? All they need to do is ensure that the drives will last about 2 years, after that, the insatiable demands will have them putting out 500Gb and larger drives, relegating the 200s in the realm of obsolete.
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
They are trying to make disks more reliable. Fluid dynamic bearings (FDB) don't wear out as easily as ball bearings. You know...that grinding sound that your disk makes as it spins up and searches for data...yeah that goes away with FDB.
:) Sure beat tapes at least.
I was just checking out a drive by western digital yesterday with FDB...a 160Gig unit. I think it was about a buck a gig, and I would assume much more reliable than my current lowly 30Gig and 20Gig drives...
ahhh...progress...
Hell, I remember being able to work on those REAL hard disk drives. You know, the cartridge ones. Roughly 15 inches in diameter...placed on a unit that stands up to your waist...with a reader arm as big around as my thumb that juts in and out like a pogostick....
Yeah, those were the days. Those drives are still usefull for the sake of basic electronics study though...makes it nice so that the students can see teh inner workings of a disk drive. I think they only stored like 8 Megabytes....maybe less.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
There are funny off-topic posts. There are trollish off-topic posts.
And then there's that . Some moronic pervert thinks it's cool to repost a rape fantasy from alt.sex.stories (without the content warnings). Is there any way the editors can remove it ? It simply should not be read (and shouldn't have been written, either).
Whenever I was at the arcade or Bugsy's Subs, and I lost my last man playing Berzerk, the machine would say "coin detected in pocket!" If we had working quarter sensors back in the 80s, then what's the big deal with nickel sensors now?
Girls have been saying this for years; Size doesn't matter. Anywho, what girls really want is reliability, at least that's what I have been told.
Then again, I'm slacking on that end, among others....
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Well, if you want 3 seconds boot time, you'll need flash ram, not standard RAM, as they lose the info when you power off. (And no, always-on or UPS is not a solution. The day you trip over the power cord to your machine, it'll be CLEARED). It's not so cheap (at least not on the order of gigabytes), and in fact you do need some. Even a standard popular game like NWN easily eat up 2gb alone.
As for corporate machines, they would probably rather boot their machines from a always-on server which can hold the most common programs in a ramdisk anyway, and simply take the penalty of loading them to ram from disk on the few occasions when the server reboots.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Now that we can have (massively?) increased storage capacity per square inch, shouldn't we start seeing hard disks in the 3.5" form factor that are really 4+ way RAID volumes with a builtin hardware driver to make it behave as a normal disk would? That way you'd get basically what you have now but MUCH more reliably and maybe even a little more capacity. (depending on the massiveness of the change this development can cause in size/data ratio)
Running a PC or a 1U web server on a single hard disk is making for an awfully large failure point if it dies--it's the least replaceable component cause of data loss and they die a lot. Introducing redundancy at this level could help a lot with that issue (and help high density multicomputer serving become more reliable and fault tolerant)
Brian
Yay! now i can backup all the porn on Kazaa....and still have room to spare!
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
8 shades of gray is only 2^3, or three bits. There are 256 possible states in one byte.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
I just got backups all over my keyboard...
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
magneto flux capacitors?
"the only place we could get that much storage is... a bolt of lightning!"
Excuse me, but when are we going to start concentrating on speed?
We need the PC to become 10x smaller and 10x faster. And I don't mean processor speed. The thing slowing the PC down most is the HD and we badly need to remove this as the bottleneck.
"Ballistic Magnetoresistance?" I thought that was the resistance offered by the magnetic platters when I use my .45 to read-protect my drive from the FBI/BSA/MS.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
This sounds like vaporware. It will never make it to the market: "ballistic magnetoresistance" just doesn't capture the imagination. Extraordinary magenetoresistance was a good start, but I'm looking for the next biggest thing in hard drive technology from either "bloody huge magnetoresistance" or "fucking enormous magnetoresistance" technologies.
Geez. They might as well have named it obese magnetoresistance. Ballistic my ass.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
In order for that to work, Joe sixpack is going to have to stop buying computersbased on (GB|MB|MHz)/$, and will have to stop buying hard drives at Fry's based on the biggest frive available under $129...
IBM, Seagate et. all sell to their markets - it'll be a while before priorities change.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
3.Lastly, Windows XP Pro, installed, takes around 1Gb of space (omg.. that's just ridiculous.. someone shoot me for using XP, I _must_ be a terrorist)
Yeah, I remember I was shocked when my 2K install took up ~900MB, about three times as much as my previous win98 install. Still, have you looked at any modern linux distros recently? Easily twice the size.
How do we know those shorter wavelengths are there if we can't see them?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
They would want us to store all our sesitive, cherished, irreplaceable, valuable data on HDs "using a phenomenon called "ballistic magnetoresistance" which is not completely understood." :)
That makes me feel so relaxed
Tesla might've had his own measuerment, and it may very well be better. Different units are a bitch.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.