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IBM Says Polymer Memory Could Be Ready By 2005
prostoalex writes "Polymer memory is hardly anything new, and we already had HP and Princeton announcing their prototype. In a Forbes magazine article IBM promises polymer memory that's five times cheaper than current flash memory, and expects the first devices with polymer data storage systems to be delivered possibly by 2005. IBM's Zurich Lab published this article last year with description of Millipede."
It's more than one "mer".
(Forecasting clueless Best Buy employees trying to sell computers.)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
This is good and all, but I don't see how this would affect me.
.. for ugh, making cheep stuff cheaper ;)
I have 1 gig of ram in my machine, and this is more then enough for me.
On the other hand, this is pretty cool for servers where one would need much RAM.
I remember talking to someone that was in VTECH and their servers had over 32 gigabytes of RAM - cant imagine how much that could cost (they were running one of those Unisys file servers and a user file server.)
Go IBM
Somehow I doubt that I - Mr. Consumer - will see the 5X price drop. I won't hold my breath.
IBM's Millipede May Challenge Flash Memory Tonya Vinas, 12.24.03, 4:06 PM ET
Some say The Information Age began with the invention of the PC. For others, it's the birth of the Internet, the development of the silicon chip or the global crisscrossing of fiber-optic cable that shifted our societal pivot from goods-production to information management.
In a couple of years, IBM's Millipede data storage system might also enter the debate.
Millipede harkens back to the days of computers gleaning information from punch cards, but this time, the information is stored in nanometer-sized indentations in a thin polymer film. According to the company, Millipede has the potential to provide significantly greater storage capacity than flash memory at a lower price. Another advantage: smaller and easier-to-use devices.
"Imagine a video camera in which each segment you've recorded is displayed in a directory with a unique file name, instantly accessed, appended or erased at the push of a button," says Christopher Andrews, communications program manager for the Armonk, N.Y,-based company. "If you're on vacation and want to erase an old segment to make room for something new, there would be no need to hunt with 'rewind' and 'fast forward' to find the section of the tape you're looking for."
Devices such as video cameras, portable video players and portable music players need more storage memory than flash memory can provide at an acceptable price, Andrews says. That's why most devices use tape or optical disks to store information. If these devices used Millipede-based storage cards, they could be smaller and use less power in addition to allowing data to be stored in downloadable files.
"Millipede will likely offer a cost per gigabyte approximately five times cheaper than flash in high-end cards," Andrews says. "Millipede would make a lot of sense in devices like PDAs and smart phones."
Although other companies such as Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) and Samsung are also pursuing probe-based data storage, IBM says it was among the first to invest heavily in research and development and is poised to be among the first to have probe-based devices on the market, possibly by 2005.
This year, researchers at IBM's Zurich lab began restoring and retrieving data files using Millipede technology. Much of the work on Millipede has taken place in Zurich, but other IBM locations are involved.
IBM plans to target flash memory immediately, a potential $10 billion market. Beyond that, Millipede could have implications in biotechnology and other nanotechnology fields.
Millipede is based on two "breakthrough technologies," according to IBM: thermomechanical recording, in which an extremely sharp tip on a microcantilever with an integrated heater makes and reads back nanometer-scale indentations in a specialized polymer film; secondly, creation and integration of thousands of thermomechanical probes in a micromechanical array, married with a micromechanical actuator that scans the probes over the polymer surface to store and retrieve data in various locations on the film.
IndustryWeek Magazine
2003 Penton Media
Provided By Pinnacor
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Does this also mean that all the old fogey polyester clothes can be recycled and used for memory? And if so will their absence of clothing be considered flash memory?
This could possibly mean cheaper rewriteable memory in gamebased devices, like GBA, who's successor will probably keep being cartridge based to support backwards compatibility. Is there a read-only version of this memory?
Is that supposed to be some sort of pun or is that just some freudian typo thingy?
And does anyone remember what crazy, non-magnetic-plate memory technologies that IBM was saying in 2001 would be ready by 2003?
Just checking.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Don't worry, when the good guys win you will be able to re-win your grant from SCO Group, which will be flush with 3 billion in cash.
Care to let us know what the hell you're talking about? No wonder they said SCO would destroy you. I'd hate to sit in on an IBM meeting. Furthermore, what do you care about being modded down? You're an AC, like me.
This could mean 256 MB compact flash cards for under around $20, as compared to $70 tday, or mp3 players that cost almost half as much as they do now.
To capture the market, this stuff has to either be:
1. Cheaper than flash or HDs.
2. More durable than flash or HDs (or even CD/DVDs)
3. Be faster than flash/HDs/optical media.
By the time this stuff comes out, trying to beat one of the three is going to be tough - by that time all of those existing technologies will be VERY mature. I'm already able to buy hard drives for super-cheap, so logically, flash is the intended target. The question is, by the time this stuff comes out, will hard drives become so tiny, cheap, and robust, that it's not flash that is the main competitor, but magnetic hard drives?
Of course, if IBM wants to give me petabytes of super-stable long-term storage that will fit in a shoebox, and only cost me a few hundred dollars, who am I to argue? At the very least, if it can replace tape, that might be enough to ensure a place for it, assuming optical hasn't totally displaced that market by then...
I dont know about you, but I am not surprised that some of the Original Star Trek technology is around now, ie Communicator = Cell Phone
But now we are doing some Voyager stuff, ie polymer memory, although I think voyager had some sort of Biopolymer memory, but still, im secretly pleased by these turn of events
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Crap.
this got modded offtopic, but the anti-racism was troll !
Oh yes! And we can call those storage device CompactFlash cards, because they're compact, made of flash memory and card sha... Hey! Wiat a second... Sounds rather familiar...
Hate me!
you too
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Well, we all now know that Timothy takes baths in vaporware, because his current "bain" must be the already existing "coming real soon now" technology.
Does anybody else remember mRAM and all of those holographic-3D RAM concepts from years gone by?
I'l believe this when it's in my digital camera.
Terrific. The iPod could really use this stuff it the new mini ipods.
Chrsitmas
And maybe you'll get a dictionary for Christmas!
I already do my bowling scores in hexadecimal. It make the other bowlers scratch their heads.
You know you've gone too geeky when you look at alphanumeric car tags and know what color it is. I've been thinking that I may buy a personalized car tag with my car's color represented in hexadecimal. Is that a FF0000 Chevy over there?
I want to see a RAM tech that allows for non-volitle (i.e. keeps its data even without power), and unlimited re-rewrites. This would be a great tech for laptops or PDAs as they could suspend very very easily and boot up to same state. This would be a fabulous tool as battery tech seems to be going nowhere fast.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Actually that wasn't a troll, that was a prominently displayed "critique of western hegemonism in popular media" on indymedia and the indymedia crowd was totally loving it.
I was more looking to give it a test run as a karma whore for a tolkien story, apparently it will not work, oh well.
When you think about it memory chips and potato chips have a lot in common.
Electronic chips get smaller in size the more manufacturers work on them while the memory gets bigger. Potato chips get smaller in size while you eat your way to the bottom of the bag and your thighs get bigger.
Mmmmm... potato chips...
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
This year I had the chance to go to the VLDB (Very Large Databases) conference in Berlin. The keynote speech was about this Millipede project.
I must say everybody in the audience was really impressed: from one side the technological aspects, bordering on nanotechnology, were very interesting. Seeing almost the same principle of vinyl discs miniaturized is really fascinating.
The other really interesting point is the impact that such a storage system will have for our systems.
Imagine, you have 10 Tb of space: what will change in the way you handle data? Probabily the first impact will be the disappearance of the deletion of files: why not keep all the old versions of a file if you have all this space? We could use it as we use packet writing on a CDRW. Or what if your iPod could store some Terabytes of data and restit to a lot more of shock (acceleration)?
The speaker made clear that the storage capacity is huge, but the performances are more or less the same of an HD from today: still the Millipede is highly parallelizable.
I think we must see these new storage technologies not merely as bigger HD, but as something different, with lot of space, but with a bit less of performance.
If you see it from a business perspective, remember that IBM sold its HD division to Hitachi about one year ago: it seems clear that they are going to concentrate themselves on new storage technologies.
Anyway, the future looks really interesting!
It has to be 2004 for the $99 iPods!
IBM's Zurich Lab
Engineers, neutral by nature, do research in a neutral country.
This just has to produce an unbiased piece of evidence. Chances are, it'll produce more than one.
by that time all of those existing technologies will be VERY mature
this is 1 - 2 years' time we're talking about, not 10. granted, technology moves forward quickly, but not THAT quickly. this new tech might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it probably wont deliver on all the hype (like the price), but if it is better than even one of the three other competing technologies you mentioned (and no, it probably wont be obsolete by then), that's still a good thing.
To capture the market, this stuff has to either be:
1. Cheaper than flash or HDs.
2. More durable than flash or HDs (or even CD/DVDs)
3. Be faster than flash/HDs/optical media.
Nope. Read The innovator's dilemma. All it has to do is:
- Have room for improvement
- Serve a niche market that the others can't
- Improve over time into something they aren't
Micro-computers (to use one of his examples) weren't cheaper (for the power), more durable, or faster than big iron. But they came in smaller increments and could serve markets that the big players couldn't...-- MarkusQ
Hard drives are great, mature technology, however, they--in my opinion--suck big time. First of all, they have moving parts making them prone to sudden death (thus why RAID exists). Second, they're slow as hell hence why people buy SCSI. But even SCSI isn't fast enough. I mean, nowadays the bottleneck for most computing tasks is the hard drive. Give me DDR RAM fast, solid state long-term storage and I'll be very happy.
As for CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, I burn a lot of them because they're so damn cheap. But I hate it. I once scraped off the surface of a CD-R coaster and almost cried at how easy the stuff flaked off. Not to mention there's no reasonable consensus as to how to properly label the damn things. I mean, you can't write on them, you can't label them...the only thing you can do is take a tiny sharpie and write on the inner circle, which doesn't do me much good. Even though there would be cost and size increases, I would love it if CDs and DVDs had caddies a la Mini Discs.
Yes, I agree these technologies are cheap and mature but I really wish there was some alternative. So, I for one welcome our new micro-millipede masters (terrible name, btw, I have centipedes in my apartment and they freak the hell out of me even though I know they're good to have around 'cause they eat other bugs).
Except that CF tops out at about 2-4GB at the moment, which is maybe enough to store a DV tape's worth of video after DVD-level mpeg compression, which costs a lot to do on a chip in real-time. Keep in mind that DVDs also compress a lot better because there's very little noise; home movies and the like have a TON of noise because the sensor and electronics are (comparatively) crap.
The whole point is that by making the memory 5x cheaper, you can make it 5x larger in capacity- now you've got 20GB, which is a little more reasonable for video...
Please help metamoderate.
When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
You're obviously not a programmer. Video is something that places demands on computing that grow to fill the available phenomenon. Double the available storage, and people will want twice the length of video, or twice the bitrate, or whatnot. It's an old phenomenon. As the amount of memory available has increased, so has the amount demanded by applications. To look at it another way, compare O(N^3) bubble sort to O(N log N) merge sort. Just because we have faster computers doesn't mean we can use inefficient algorithms. If I had a dime for every time I've heard some beginning programming student say "but with faster computers, why does time complexity matter?" I'd be, well, able to buy a cheap lunch.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
It's rather astonishing isn't it? here we are looking at technology that can increase our storage to petabytes (probably tons more) of storage, and a year or two ago we were worrying about, what was it?, 10, 20, even 30 gigs not being enough? In this world of 300 gig harddrives, and 120 meg floppy disks, rewriteable cds, and such, you have to wonder, when will our advance stop? and how would such a stop in our advance affect us? would we be able to cope with such? but this kind of advance, it is amazing no doubt, i am just in awe at this, and wonder if such storage technologys as in sci fi novels (like the plasma storage in such, (was it asmiov?)) will soon become a reality.
What about when you're downloading it ?
I'm actually thinking the original poster is correct. You can't compare compression to algorithms because algs have differences in complexity. The size of a compressed file is (in all systems I know) linear in the size of the uncompressed file. If you had a compression scheme that resulted in a file whose size was logarithmic of the input, I'd agree with you. But as things are, I'd consider a lack of compression more like the use of garbage collection. You lose efficiency, but overall it's easier for everyone
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
I'm not sure about that. Uncompressed video is gigantic. Huge. An hour of uncompressed video takes up about 70 gb, assuming it's regular NTSC rez. Thus you could barely fit a movie on your 100 gig media. It's much better just to use high quality lossy compression, such as MPEG-2 or Xvid or soemthing. If you crank the bitrates high enough, there is no visible artifacting or quality loss.
I'd much rather have 10 hours of HDTV video rather than an hour of uncompressed. Uncompressed video will only be feasable once media can hold hundreds of gigabytes, rather than the 9 gigs that dual layer DVDs hold today.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
In a Forbes magazine article IBM promises polymer memory that's five times cheaper than current flash memory
but will be five times more expensive in the stores
good 'ol marketing.
You're forgetting about bandwith. Storage is one thing, but transfer is another.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Hard drives suck for many applications. Compared to all the other silicon parts in a computing device hard drives with their movement fail more often and take less shock than pretty much anything else in a computing device. This is why everything from embedded devices to the MP3 players you wear around your neck while jogging use flash, because it's solid state. I say this because for much of the market (that is not PC's) hard drives are not an option, and that today pretty much leaves flash. If those people got something better your MP3 player, watch, router, cable modem, coffie maker, and all sorts of other embedded things could become much faster, much quicker. Remember, many of these things RUN FROM FLASH, so access rate is huge.
Don't forget -- if we move to this technology world-wide, we'll have mass-storage media that will probably survive an EMP. OK, the actual reader itself will be toast, but the media will survive.
I keep thinking: I want to record something about myself for future generations that will, in one form or another, survive. Right now my best bet for that is printing onto acid-free paper and having it bound, or doing microfiche. This potentially could solve that problem!
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
frodian typo?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I sort of hoped it would be some sort of write once, read many like CDR's are. It lends permanence to data that's comforting--sort of like how you know the books on your shelf will never change.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
All I want to know is how fast it can access p0rn
"The research team is now building a prototype, due to be completed early next year, which deploys more than 4,000 tips working simultaneously over a 7 mm-square field. "
"Initial nanomechanical experiments done at IBM's Almaden Research Center showed that individual tips could support data rates as high as 1 - 2 megabits per second."
4K * 2Mbps => 8Gbps peak
4K * 0.5 GBytes => 2GBytes (in ~3mm square)
Personally I'd be more than happy with a
- Large (~200GB)
- Compact (~1 inch , square)
- Fast (8Gbps)
Storage medium for, well, just about ANY device which requires 'permanent' storage. SERIOUSLY! I'd be happy with something that has only 1% of that 'in theory' performance.It just remains to see if they can scale up the size, and achieve their expectations on performance in the final product.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
If you don't use video compression, then for today's data transfer speeds, storing and viewing uncompressed video is grossly inefficient--you'll still have to contend with the relatively slow data transfer rate. Assuming a USB 2 connection gives you a 480 Mb/s data rate with the overhead of start and stop bits[1] this gives us 480 Mb/s / (8 data bits + 2 start/stop bits) = 48 MB/s. Suppose a compressed two-hour movie takes up 800 MB of space (divx ;-) can provide a 10:1 compression[2]). This would take 800 Mb / 48 MB/s = 16.6 seconds to transfer[3]. If this movie were originally an 8 GB DVD, the same transfer would take 166.7 s. But this is still with mpeg2 compression. Fully uncompressed, the movie requires *far* more space. According to this link, 4 minutes at the "CCIR-601 digital video standard"[4] would take 4.7 gigabytes. 2 hours into 4 minutes is 120 min / 4 min = 30 [units]; 30 * 4.7 GB = 141.0 GB. Over a USB2 connection, that takes 141.0 GB / 48 MB/s = 2937 s to transfer, or almost 50 minutes. And we're not even considering the data write rate on the device OR the bandwidth load on the device's bus (the CCIR-601 standard can take up between 165.9 and 270 Mbit/s).
:)
;-) Wiki page
Devices always make a practical tradeoff between the bandwidth requirements of the data stream and the computing power required to decode the stream's frames.
Incidentally, I learned a lot about the different compression schemes out there. Thanks for your prompt
- Roey
Notes:
1. I looked up the USB spec but couldn't verify whether it is synchronous or asynchronous (and even then if it uses start and stop bits), so I assumed it uses start and stop bits. It shouldn't make that big a difference anyway.
2. DivX
3. Universal Serial Bus Wiki page
4. CCIR-601 Wiki page
Here are some reasons why you're wrong:
1) Bandwidth. Even if storage increases by the factor of 20 you envision, that doesn't mean bandwidth will.
2) Would you rather not compress your video, or have better quality and more of it? Uncompressed video is RIDICULOUSLY large. 640 x 480 x 24bpp x 30fps = 221 megabits a second (27 megabytes a second) That means you can store about an hour of that in 100 GB. DVD quality is about 30:1 compression.
I don't think this would cause people to keep uncompressed AUDIO around (where audio is only 150K/s, compressed maybe 10:1 or or so); basically the cost of compression is pretty small. If your other resources are finite, it makes a lot of sense.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Assuming it's Write Only, if the capacity was extremely large in a small size, then everything one downloaded to the device would remain and a small flash memory can be used to keep track of everything, included deleted songs. Perhaps 2005 was too far off, perhaps it's coming in January MacWorld.
If IBM can get this technology to back up 10TB in one small package that sells for under $100 per cartridge they will own the market for offsite storage. This sounds like a lot but it's only one order of magnitude greater than the largest tape drives around now.
Linear? Perhaps; I don't know much about video compression algorithms. But I do know that uncompressed video is huge, so if it is linear it must be a fairly significant factor. If you have real numbers I'd be interested to know.
I don't like your GC analogy but I'm not sure I have anythign better. I can't think of any good examples of a strictly linear gain.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
How about XML versus binary file formats? High level languages versus low-level ones? Java versus C? Compressed file systems versus uncompressed ones? Compressed protocols (like ZModem) versus uncompressed ones (like FTP)? ASCII versus Unicode? 32-bit pointers versus 16-bit pointers? Bit-packing versus byte or word-flags? You are right about one thing: Data expands to fit the space allowed it. But one reason it expands is because people jettison inconvenient or expensive compression technologies in favour of raw data (which can be easier to manipulate). But on the other hand, video compression will still be very important for Internet transmission no matter what happens with hard disk sizes.
I'll check again, but I think bubble sort runs in O(N^2) time. The pseudocode is like this:
The theory being that you go through the list one item at a time, and if that item is greater than the item after it, you swap them and move on to the next item. That happens N-1 times, and since a single item will move at most N-1 times (from, say, the end of the list to the start of the list), we have a running time of O(n^2 + 2n + 1) time, which we simplify to O(n^2) time.
Linear? Perhaps; I don't know much about video compression algorithms. But I do know that uncompressed video is huge, so if it is linear it must be a fairly significant factor. If you have real numbers I'd be interested to know.
This is actually pretty much true. It's linear with a huge factor. Compressed data for audio and video are often measured by average kbps, while the uncompressed stream has an exact kbps rate. If it were not roughly a linear factor then this would be meaningless.
I think it should be possible to do better than linear, but to my knowledge there are no video codecs that do. It's be a lot more difficult and we're already getting incredible compression ratios.
But we're a very long way away from that, and I hate to see that much wasted anyway. Maybe I won't care so much when I get a 60 exabyte hard drive.
First of all, they have moving parts making them prone to sudden death (thus why RAID exists).
Not to mention that those motors eat power and convert it into noise. I've never heard a CF card whine.
terrible name, btw, I have centipedes in my apartment and they freak the hell out of me even though I know they're good to have around 'cause they eat other bugs
Centipedes and millipedes are completely different critters. Millipedes look sorta like the super-ultra-stretched limo equivalent of pill bugs (or whatever those little roly-poly things are called) and are herbivores.
Judging by context, I'm guess you need to know the other language, whatever it may be.
A man walks into a bakery and asks the man at the counter, "Can you make a cake and then have it boxed up and sent someplace?"
"Sure," he says.
"Excellent," says the man, "can you make me an e-shaped pie?"
"Yeah, I think so. Come back tomorrow."
So the customer leaves the bakery and comes back the next day. The baker shows him the pie.
"You idiot, I wanted a lowercase e!" he says.
"Oh my, I'm terribly sorry. Come back again tomorrow and I'll have that done."
So once again he leaves, and once again returns the next day.
"There you are sir, one lowercase e pie. Is it alright?"
"It's perfect!"
"Would you like me to box it up for you?" the baker asks.
"No thanks," the man replies, "I think I'll eat it here."
Actually I am a programmer. I remember when people said 56k modems would overload the CPU. Heck I remember when 2400 baud modems actually did overwhelm CPUs. The fact is, CPUs can already handle the bandwidth of uncompressed video and future CPUs will barely blink at video, just as today audio hardly affects CPU load. So do some research before you pretend you know, sonny.
I've read twice now in the media that the bandwidth of the fiber-optic systems now in place is only about 5% in use. Despite that, not all connections are fiber-optic yet. For the internet I admit, divx will be the answer for the time being.
Let me see. 720x480x2 (16 bit color) = 691200 = 675kB per frame. 24 frames per second for a Hollywood movie = 15.82 MB per second. Times 3600 for an hour is 55.62 GB without sound.
Therefore, a two-hour movie is 111.2 GB without sound. If we kind on sound and compress that, for the joy of having perfect DVD-level video, I'm not far from my original estimation.
If you get greedy and desire 24-bit color, that will cost more, 166 GB per two hours.
But let us suppose that we were to accept a small amount of lossless compression, like Huffyav. That would ease the immediate burden substantially for the near term. But I don't think compression will ultimately be necessary.
it's actually 720x486 @ 30 fps. film only runs at 24 fps projected. when it's transferred to video it has to become 29.97 fps in the 3:2 pulldown.
The point is: you don't need uncompressed video for home viewing. You don't. Really good compression is just fine. And I'm picky. MPEG2, DVCAM, and whatever the utter crap codec satellite TV uses don't cut it. But some ultra-nice compression is better than uncompressed because you get a pristine image for less space. Even with some great new storage medium with vast, nearly limitless capacities, it will still run out.
What you need uncompressed for is editing video/video effects for obvious reasons. That is the only thing you need uncompressed for. Your source tapes should be uncompressed (whether you're shooting on video or transferring from film).
To a person surviving on $10,000/year, %100,000/year seems like more than they would ever need. Likewise a million/year to a person making $100,000 - but it never works that way. Expenses always expand to fill available income - just as storage needs always expand to fill available storage.
Didn't know the names so found this link, and they sure as well would also freak me out! :-)
But the page says: Centipedes require moist habitats. If they are plentiful, there may be an underlying moisture problem that should be corrected.
Just wanted to bring it to your attention!
Yeah, because we're absolutely sure that newer, huge storage media will be just as cheap.
We also know that video resolutions will NEVER rise above what they currently are. You know, similar to how VCR gave way to DVDs. That won't ever happen again, right?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Seems as if you didn't read the article.
Millipede does have moving parts. The polymer moves under the needles, which read and write to it through heat.
They also mention that they've designed it to be resistant to external vibrations. Which implies that it could be adversely affected by some types of vibrations.
It also has an ability to be rewritten only about 100,000 times, apparently, making it not suitable as a hard disk replacement.
It seems as if this tech at least initially will be good for what IBM is saying it's good for: as a FLASH replacement, at least for some applications. It doesn't appear to be useful as a general-purpose storage device.
Hard drives aren't going bye-bye all that soon, it seems.
HALLELUJAH brother!
I've said that so many times that I'm long-since tired of saying it.
I certainly do hate optical media myself, but I like hard drives to a limited extent. I'd be more than happy to use compactFlash for everything if it wasn't so expensive (speed isn't _much_ of an issue for 99% of my storage needs).
Black Widows eat bugs too, but most people tend to kill them off. IIRC, Centipedes are rather poisonous, to the point they could kill small children/elderly/animals, so I'd suggest wiping them out ASAP.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One day you'll look back on this and wonder why you ever wasted your time worrying about compression. When ten movies fit on one disk/whatever without compression, giving crystal-clear video, no one will think "yes, let's compress that!".
actually i thought it was funny :)
:)
but don't let the door hit your ass on your way out
When ten movies fit on one disk/whatever without compression, giving crystal-clear video, no one will think "yes, let's compress that!".
No, when that happens, everyone will think "Hey! Let's increase the framerate, increase the pixels and increase the color depth, then compress it all so we can fit 100 of these better movies on the same device!". Currently, uncompressed NTSC video is about 18MBps, or 144Mbps, which is 18 times more data than a DVD video stream (which includes audio, subtitles and control data as well), and DVDs use the old MPEG2 compression algorithm. If you see occasional compression artifacts in your DVDs, you can be sure that if they compressed to the same data rate using MPEG4, the result would be perfect.
Looking into the future, assume we double the frame rate, increase resolution to 1080 lines, increase the color depth to 4 bytes per pixel, and store full-raster data, then the video data rate increases to about 300MBps. That would make an uncompressed two-hour movie over 2TB in size. Assuming storage sizes continue to double every 18 months, 2TB disks (or whatever) should be commonly available in 15 years. To get 10 uncompressed movies you'd need 20TB, so add another 3 years or so.
OTOH, if we can get 50:1 compression, that 2TB movie becomes a 43GB movie, and your 10-movie storage device is only a year or two away (since 200GB drives are pretty cheap now).
Further, it just doesn't make sense not to compress video. There is so much redundancy that can be discarded. I mean, even stills can be compressed dramatically without degradation, and think about how much similarity there is between each video frame and the next. Good codecs like MPEG4 can achieve 100:1 compression ratios with some degradation, or 50:1 with no perceptible degradation at all, and we can probably expect that to improve.
Video will be compressed. It's just dumb not to do it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yeah, you're right. I wasn't thinking.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Your arguments aren't bad, because it's true that people will always want more, but at a certain point capacity will be a non-issue. You don't compress text files, do you, or HTML? Of course not. Capacity is huge by comparison. In the near future with MRAM or polymer it will be huge compared to current video standards.
In addition, I expect there will be at least factor you aren't considering that determines how things will go.
Namely, as with audio there will always be purists who demand perfection. In the future, with lossless compression and large capacity fast media, a Huffyav-like compression will be able to please the purists and perhaps a more educated public as well.
For this moment though, we are stuck with Divx, and that's not bad (after three passes).
And I'm picky. MPEG2, DVCAM, and whatever the utter crap codec satellite TV uses don't cut it. But some ultra-nice compression is better than uncompressed because you get a pristine image for less space. Even with some great new storage medium with vast, nearly limitless capacities, it will still run out.
For very large media, HuffYUV would work well. It is a lossless codec primarily used for video capture. You can get about a 2:1 reduction over uncompressed. Of course, there are lossy codecs as well that would preserve near perfect image quality for a fraction of the size of HuffYUV.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Bandwidth: the CPU, memory and video can already handle the bandwidth of uncompressed video.
Maybe, but my DSL certainly can't.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Namely, as with audio there will always be purists who demand perfection.
Right. So what do those audio purists do? FLAC. The same may happen with video, and video is much more compressible. Most uses will still use high-quality lossy compression, though, just as most uses of still imagery are lossily compressed now, even though available storage can certainly handle lossless compression. But for most uses there's just no point.
For that matter, there's really no point even for the purists. Have you ever seen a study in which people successfully distinguish between CD audio and 260kbps MP3, or 200kbps Vorbis?
Also, your comparison with text and html is a poor one. Text and HTML *are* compressed. Frequently. Many web servers use mod_gzip, for example, and many text documents are compressed for storage. Source code is one kind of text that is nearly always stored, transferred and managed in compressed form.
For this moment though, we are stuck with Divx, and that's not bad (after three passes).
Not bad? Divx is very, very good. Try encoding with Divx at, say 4Mbps (half of the max DVD data rate, and still nearly 40:1 compression). And you don't even need to bother with multiple passes (I've never used more than two passes, personally).
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You must keep the faith. Technology will adapt to suit your needs. Even your DSL.
Lets think about this for a second. HDTV at 1920x1080, 24-bit color @ 60fps = 1920x1080x3x60 = 355 MB/sec. So your 100gb disk buys you about four and a half minutes of video.
I don't expect infinite bandwidth and memory and CPU cycles ever. Given that, a basically free 30 fold increase in storage and transmission efficiency will continue to make sense. And as compression codecs become better (powered by more powerfull processors) I see the size per pixel per second of movies going down, not up. This will allow higher resolution, higher framerate, higher quality movies to be practically used on computers.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!