Slashdot Mirror
Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit
ChrisHanel writes "Yahoo News is reporting that despite the infinite climb data speeds seem to be making, scientists at Stanford say we'll eventually hit a barrier due to the inability to keep the data stable after a certain transfer speed. But no worries just yet; the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now." Apparently: "The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data."
While it does say that using the current magnetized bit storage system has a speed limit that is 1000 times the current, it is only with this method of storage. Hopefully by the time we could hit this limit we will have a new method of storage. Besides, if my data could be written at 1000x the max of current maybe I won't need memory any more (or maybe our storage will be memory). Anyone have any ideas what we will be storing at that speed? (other than everything happening around us and everyone else so we have instant replay on life).
Everything has a limit, even data transfer. Moore's law just means that someone will think of some other way to solve the problem faster and better.
Basicly we will just go back to using multiple headers ( so writting in parrel ) or switch to other storage methods other then magnetic storage.
I am still confident that a 747 full of DVDs will beat anything we have in the next few years. Sadly the latency is a bit too high for quake.
So eventually we'll hit a brick wall in speeding up our ability to download pr0n? The end is near!
Moo!
Well, if they can at least get some reliable results from pushing this particle accelerator thingy at close to the speed limit AND TEST IT....where's my particle accelerator drive?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data." I wish I had a particle accelerator just lying around, that'd be sweet.
you mean we won't get realtime streaming HDTV pr0n anytime soon?
i like how the post reads "fire up the particle accelerator". Seems like Stanford has those things just lying around eh? Oh I guess we'll start up the ol' particle accelerator today, she hasn't been running for a while. o.O (go bears!)
especially from reading The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing newsletter (now known as - The Harrow Report, it's that whatever barriers to computer speed increases are set up by theoreticists are quickly knocked down by other theoreticists who find ways around them.'
Of course, this doesn't mean that finding the barriers is a bad thing - it gives the next set of scientists something to aim for and pushes the boundaries of research.
A little planning goes a long way...
RAID arrays, SMP, GPRS, Data MUX's that use paralell fibre channels are all examples.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
but feeding the stream being sent. I guess if I wrote a program to transmit 010101... and my processor could keep up, then there isnt really a limit..
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
uaho we'll never keep up! Oh 1000x...and your desktop can't really do gigabit fiber yet..well, I'll be awfuly worried, but maybe we can manage.
:(){
However, Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said the project had few real implications for the data-storage industry.
"Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives,
Fools, cutting themself out of the linear accelerator harddrive market already. I'm switching to WD..Every advancement in technology has to hit a limit at some point. I don't see how this could be any bit of a suprise if thats what the article is trying to insinuate. Speed of light, eventual size of microprocessors, width of fibres, strength of metals etc... There is no infinitely 'advanceable' technology which should be obvious. Technology has come a long way in the past 100 years as well, the limits we discover will only continue to be found quickly.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
the transit rate of the average human digestive system has a maximum speed too, but you don't need to feed someone a cayenne and wasabi-laden, amoebic dysentery-infested mexican dinner plate in order to prove it ;-P
but, i suppose, you don't need to throw elemental sodium into a swimming pool to do basic chemistry either
so rock on particle physicists!
it must be fun to play with accelerators...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't it just a matter of increasing bandwith?
-- jaf
c
Magnetic tape: $1.75
Linear Particle Accelerator at a major university: $2,300,000,000
Picosecond access to your pr0n: Priceless.
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Remember that this only applies to magnetic media, so future writable technology (polymers, optical, solid state, etc) wouldn't have this limitation.
Anyone know what that amount to in termns of kbps?
the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now
You keep using that word watermark. I don't think it means what you think it means.
- Ingio Montana
everything in moderation
..we will all have a particle accelerator hooked up to eth0?
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
When my 800X drive stops meeting my needs. Until then, I don't even use the full potential of Firewire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet, I think I have room to grow.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
People once believed that if a train went too fast, that all the air would be pushed out of it.
This proposition is just a modern equivalent of that idea.
Perhaps electromagnetic pulses have a physical limitation with data transfer accuracy, but that is by no means the threshold of data speed in any way.
Once again, RTFA. It speaks of EM data - not all data.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Hard drives already have multiple platters with multiple heads. Use them all at the same time (striping). The use multiple drives at the same time. Problem solved.
And what they are ignoring anyway is that by the time we come close to reaching that "barrier", Google will be offering unlimited storage for any reason, we will keep all out data with them, and they will find some innovative way round it.
2^10 = 1024. So we have 10 doublings of the speed of data left to go right? How often do data speeds double? (Using these methods of course).
I wonder sort of progress will be impacted in practical terms. There are limits to everything of course. Just one more limit. I hope I'm alive to run into some of these scientific limits so I can see what innovative workarounds people come up with.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, no
The problem comes from the transfer itself due to the limits of magnetic storage. While this isn't mentioned in the summary, if you were to RTFA then you would see that the problem arrives when you fire electrons at a magnetic storage material fast enough (approaching the speed of light) they stop behaving in the expected way, and start producing random results. This of course is unacceptable for a storage medium, because if you increase the increase the pulses to write to the disk to near the speed of light it will result in random bits being flipped here and there and corrupt your data.
-geoff313
With some parallelism, the sky's the limit.
...it's called the speed of light
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
should be enough for everyone.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
This kind of thing crops up now and again in lots of fields. It's basically the same problem that keeps being predicted with our Interstate Highway system. There's a safe limit as to the speed that we can have cars travelling, and if the highways fill up, bumper to bumper all moving at that speed, we've reached capacity.
The most obvious solution there is the same as the obvious solution here: Add more lanes. If you have thirty-two lanes of traffic instead of one, you've increased your capacity roughly 32 times. Same situation here: Transmit 32 bits in parallel (simultaneously) down distinct channels, rather than in serial (one at a time).
Just as building more lanes is expensive, here the expense comes in multiplying all of the necessary hardware to handle wider data busses for as far down the path as necessary to deal with more data in parallel. Right now, we've got parallel busses inside our PCs, but the bits often end up serialized at some point inside our processors, down at the microcode level. All of these bottlenecks need to be categorized and eliminated to overcome such a theoretical data transfer limit. It will be neither easy nor inexpensive, especially when we decide we need to send and process, say, 2048 bits in parallel in order to meet our data processing needs. At some point, it becomes more economical to separate things on a higher level (add more processors, or add more PCs), similar to building additional highways rather than just adding lanes.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
This limit only applies to hard drive media, so the title should be "Hard drive media has a data transfer limit" not "data transfer has a limit".
Takes about two seconds to prove Stanford boffins wrong.
RAID.
Nuff sed.
Yes.
/dev/random to /dev/null isnt all that limited by HD speed. Or you can replace magnetic storage w/ something else.
If the data comes from/goes to a HD, if you take the HD out of the equation the limit goes away (for a while, perhaps).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
If you spin the disk more slowly, but have multiple heads then the limit probably doesn't apply- but the throughput would be the same.
And of course, you can always RAID your disks which does a similar thing. Or multiple platters, or...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Relativity shows that information cannot travel faster than light.
(very slightly off topic... sorry.) I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media. If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light. The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up. But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.
Computers use since ages parallelism to boost performance whenever necessary. Writing a TB file? Just use an array of 10 100GB HD in parallel. Do you need a 1 Tb/s link? Use 100 optical fiber channels at 10 Gb/s speed. etc.
Those dam scientists and ther "Particle Accelrator" always firing at everything they find in there office, first it was spiders , now old drives, next thing it will be Bruce Banner from accounting
I believe that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would suggesti a upper bound for how fast data can be transmitted over a single channel using photons. Can any physicist give me a reason why teh following reasoning would not be correct?
dx*dp = h/2*PI (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)
Which any one with a undertanding of physics would know implies that:
dE*dt = h/2*PI
E = hf would be the energy of a photon of frequency f. Therefore dE = h*df.
h*df*dt = h/2*PI simplifies to dt = 1/2*PI*df.
If we have a two state device, than this would be teh minimum amount of time we would need to detect a single bit change. Simply invert the equation to get the number of bits/second you could transmit over a single channel.
"1,000 times faster than what we have now"
:-)
What do we have now, according to the article?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Damn! I wish I had a job where I could say "Let's fire up the particle accelerator"...
"You must require 48mbps of bandwidth to connect to this port."
-Adam
Okay, here's what I think is wrong with this experiment to "determine" the limit. 1. They're firing one type of particle, an electron, at medium that is supposedly like today's media. A. Who's to say that media is what we'll be using in the future. B. Who's to say we'll ever collect data using fired electrons? That process is utterly different from the electromagnetic process used to read modern magnetic media. C. I see no indication that electrons fired at magnetic media represents an "edg-defining" experiment. Electrons are bulky and slow compared to photons, for example. Wait, do photons even exist?
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
They needed a faster way to get data to a printer than was available using current technology, so they created the parallel port. Data is sent via multiple pathways. So in the case of disks, you stripe them to combine bandwidth. Since most drives have multiple platters you just stripe across them internally. Or use a special head that writes to a single platter in multiple places at once.
Hmm...
Well, they always said, "Gigs will never fly".
Nevrar
Data transfer via quantum entanglement can go faster.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Im sure that a few years ago I heard a few claims that PCs wouldnt get past a certain speed. But it seems that they have been proved wrong more then once. Why wont this apply to data?? (if a cable has a max speed of x, run 2 cables and ge twice the speed!)
We'll find a way around that too. We're humans! We find a way around everything!
You'll never go back to that after you've experienced data transfer via bad news.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
I've seen it on Star Trek - Commandor Data was travelling at warp 7 !
I thought there are no limits how fast can he go...
"the scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data....
...The researchers noticed that the magnetic patterns left behind were somewhat chaotic"
:)
Well, there's a surprise for ya..... Would never have guessed that.... not in a million years, no, never.
Why do I get the feeling that this research evbolved out of trying to find cool stuff to fire particle beams into. Particle Physicist #1: The monitor was cool, but let's try the hard drive next. Particle Physicist #2: Electron or Alpha particle bombardment? PP #1: Alpha of course... (Giant flash of light) PP#1 and PP#2: COOOOOOOL!!!!!
Even at a 1,000 times faster than current capabilities, you'd never be able to catch up. By the time you reached 1,000 times faster, you'd still be behind. There's no end. Companies aren't just going to send out the very very best. They're going to get as much money as they can until the best is obsolete and then they'll release the next biggest thing. This gives their R&D time to come up with something better.
Enlighten us, he who can't even post one proper sentence.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My first computer, an IBM PC XT, was 4 Megahertz. That machine was built about 20 years ago. I am 21 years old today and I have no doubt that next year will yield the 4 Gigahertz processor.
(probably from Intel considering they're love for MHz, but actual performance aside the GHz will be there and yes I'm an AMD guy now)
I also have no doubt that by the time I grow to 40 years of age I will be checking pricewatch for the latest 4 Terahertz processor.
Sure they are talking about Hard Disk speed and not processor speed - consisting of a magnetic plate spinning around read by a needle, but consider that back in the day data was primaraly stored on tape. I find that the construction of a Hard Disk is analagous to a record player, and like all technology it will be replaced by something better. I'm not one to make wild perdictions about computing in the next 2 decades but a good idea would be that storage goes the way of solid state.
Heck, by the 23'rd century we might be using bubbles, or isolinear chips, or spending weekends fighting off nanite infestations from the boy
Just my 2 cents.
-Aardwolf
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Never mind.. first coffie, then type..
sorry
-- jaf
http://www.geocities.com/duanenavarre/PRISM-HDSS.h tm
http://www.aprilisinc.com/holographic_storage.htm
Peace !
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Hard drives today are like the good old magnetic tapes of yesterday. Huge storage, slow access. Access times are still in the milliseconds range, and transfer rates... Heck, transfer rates are ridiculously small compared to the huge capacities we are getting. Who cares about magnetization speed limit with those pending issues...
This is about reading in streams from magnetic media as far as I understood - but couldn't you store sequential data non-sequential and read it with different heads to archieve higher speeds? Seems logical to me... Just need a logic then to re-assemble all the data from the different streams into one stream.
Even if we would still use magnetism for storing data when we hit this limit, I think there are plenty sollutions...
Once you've tried IP over bad news you'll never go back. Ofcourse all pr0n is Goatse and online gaming always involves you being on the wrong side of a headshot but aside from that its aces.
-
Old news? Did the reporter heard about the speed of the light?
- "Tests Find Theoretical Data Speed Limit"
I am pretty sure the Stanford scientists know what they are doing. Only that the message gets deformed or lost with bad reporting.A theoretical something can be proven/confirmed with tests, not found.
and start producing random results
My only question is, if this is the only time they've run that test and they were not keeping exact track of every random change, how are they sure the changes really are random?? Maybe in 5 years from now another group of scientists will discover hey, those "random" changes were really just because of the underlying "insert scientist word".
The limit applies to emectroagnetic storage - so what about optical storage? Is this exempt from the limit? If it is, that's where the future lies, presumably
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
And what keeps track of the synchronisation between all these wonderfull links ? At some point the data must be used and processed in a useful manner. Otherwise the article would be "There is no limit to how much data can be processed by an unlimited number of computers".
I remember my 300 baud modem on the C64.
:-)
They said 1200 was theoretically impossible.
Within years they came out with a 2400.
Now lets talk QUANTUM baud.
That we are going to need a particle accelerator to transfer our data in the future?
Quantum cryptography has nothing to do with quantum entanglement. Besides the quantum cryptography is mediated by photons, so it's very much c bound anyway.
Magnetic tape: $1.75
Linear Particle Accelerator at a major university: $2,300,000,000
Picosecond access to your pr0n: Priceless.
For everything else, there's Mastercard.
While I sometimes have my misgivings about the human race - sometimes even downright cynical - I must say that on the other side, we have a wonderfull way of improving ourselves (at least in a technical sense) and solve problems.
;-).
/. article not too long ago, which told about a new holographic storagedecice?) As everyone knows, light travels way faster then any electron does, so we're not at the end of the road yet.
The data-speed limit that is being portrayed here as an unsurmountable barrier is only a small hickup to the road of eternally improving (in this case, speeding up) our technical tools. It always makes me remember my former professor, which was a wise man, but of an older generation and rather conservative of what humans are capable of. He always claimed this or that barrier would never be broken or that it would take ages (the human genome project was one of his pet-topics: when it was started, he predicted it would take at least half a century to unrafel our genetic code, but, a decade later, here we are
The fact is, I think there is little to no limit in our problem solving capabilities, and this is one more example. note that they are talking about *magnetic* datastorage/retrieval and transfer. while it is certainly true that electrons and magnetic bits will come to a boundary not to far away in the future, this, by no means, will be the end of our immer increasing speed-improvement.
For instance, we are already working on lighttransfer (actually, fibercables already do that), lightswitches and new photon-based storage mechanisms. (In fact, wasn't there a
And sen the recent article about entangled photons, maybe even the light speed isn't a barrier. (Though, admitedly, the carrier itself still has to be send, which doesn't exceed lightspeed, of course).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The particles may be in the same state but that in and of itself does not transfer any data. You need to send some data the old fashioned way in order to actually do anything with the quantum entagled particles (ie. say if the quantum bit is the same or different).
So we can all remember how long it took before this 'limit' was worked around. Articles like this seem like such poor tech journalism to me. Every time there's a limit we eventually discover a way to push it further or circumvent it altogether. I feel such articles should be written less sensationally.
-shpoffo
This is just like so many predictions from modems - I remember hearing that over 9600 was impossible (and before that over 1200). Ditto for Moore's 'law'. Granted it is a great observation, but the predicted demise keeps getting pushed back.
While the article makes it clear it is for magnetic storage, the headline doesn't. And, as with all the other limits, smart people will work through the problems or change mediums.
This is just over-hyping a research article which is making a good point - that there are limits to current technology extrapolation.
Boy is this ever a piece to get attention if I ever seen one. Bad title Slashdot! The article deals with magnetic media only.
Moore's Law should be put in the realm of economics, just as Say's Law. It is an observation on the _Behaviour_ of producers, who cater for a certain known demand and bet that their R&D expenses are reimbursed by higher prices for faster products. Because everybody is doing it, investing less means loosing market share, investing too much does not increase profits proportionately.
Some people seem to think that it is an physical law, because it has to do with microprocessors. if someone does make such an mistake, he deserves a STFU, as not to influence others with his uninformed opinion.
maybe the grand-parent-article thinks the barrier is temporary, and can be technically solved. RTFA:
"In order to go beyond this limit, some completely new technology will be required, of which we do not know anything yet," Pescia wrote.
we can not make affirmative statements on unknowns. THAT is ignorant.
as an economist, i say, that putting faith in economic laws is a receipt for failure, eventually ( at lim t-> infinite).
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
..otherwise they have to incorporate "detours" in trace lengths, so that the left and right-side data arrives at the same time. Also you got issues like crosstalk.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
achieve 100MHz bus speeds either. Er wait, never mind :)
Humans do have certain limits (despite humanist arguments to the contrary), but the limits in our ability to achieve higher data rates is probably many many times higher than the limit proposed here.
"Rewriting data involves sending an electromagnetic pulse that reverses the spin of selected bits. Accelerate the pulse and you shorten the time needed to store or rewrite information."
I thought that electromagnetic waves moved at the speed of light already, how are we "accelerating" electromagnetic pulses (besides taking all the air out of the hard drive so they travel C in a vacuum)
First time I read that, I missed 'up', and thought, is that such a good idea?
RegardselFarto
Infinite pigeons with infinite discs yields infinite data speed.
[scene - A man standing in a white coat in front of a panel of blinking lights with a large red button. Panel attached to wall with a small viewing glass]
:)
[Joe - frantically mashing the big button and peering through the window, laughing in a slightly mad fashion]
[Enter Bob, stage right - also dressed in a white coat]
Bob: [steady, staid tones] Joe, what are you doing?
Joe: [excited] It kept saying "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", "Bad Disk Sector", so I so I threw it against the wall, then I stepped on it, then, then, then it was still in one piece so....
Bob: [still steady]: Joe, you do realize that every time you push that button it sends another electron shooting down the particle accelarator...
Joe: [laughing unsteadily and still frantically pushing button]
Bob: And each time the particle accelerator fires it uses one tenth of our available power....
Joe: [unceasing in his manic button pressing]
Bob: Are you sure we have the reserves for this?
[cue blinking light above station]
[cue overhead voice]
Voice: Reserve Depleted, Switching to External Power Source
Joe: [giggling] ooOooh I think I got it good that time
[cue crackling electronics]
[Cue joe stops, steps back confused]
[Cue lights down, single muffled spot on scientists]
Joe: Umm...Bob, What Happened?
Bob: I believe that was the North-East US blacking out...I'm not sure they'll be happy when we tell them you were using the particle accelerator to get even with your floppy disk
Joe: Well, well, well, we'll just tell them we were doing a study, yeah, a study on, um, maximum data transfer rates, yeah, and, um, it took longer then we thought?
[cue final lights down]
Whee signature.
Newton's Law of Gravity, which can be applied as if it were law, so long as you are not moving, or really small, or .....
Laws are made to be broken.
The only link I can find substantiating this is Wikipedia's article on Moore's Law, which points out that hard disk performance has significantly lagged behind capacity. If anyone has hard figures for hard disk speed increases since the early 80s, please post.
The point is, that while a 1,000x theoretical limit might be of immediate concern in relation to CPU speed, extrapolating from the hard disk speed trend, we aren't likely to be hitting a 1,000x limit with hard drives any time soon. (And, as people have pointed out, this only applies to a single head in any case.)
This is assumes that we don't have virtually instantaneous massive data compression by then. By the time we reach that level I bet we will.
Derek Greene
Hey, where's my rimshot!??!
The scary thing is that someone will figure out how to fit that particle accelerator into a hard disk enclosure before we figure out how to make the battery on my laptop last a full workday without a recharge.
"But no worries just yet; the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now"
Why is Bill Gates doing PR work for these scientists?
Instead of trying to get people to download trojans, we'll have script kiddies trying to get you to download a fission reaction...gives a whole new meaning to the phrase.....
m3g4-pwn3d!!
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Yeah, this "speed limit" only applies to magnetic storage devices. By the time we have the ability to get anywhere near that speed we will have solid state harddrives anyways...
a little bit of German slipped in
"... this, by no means, will be the end of our immer increasing speed-improvement."
otherwise excellent English and I wouldn't have been able to identify your nationality without that lone word "immer", which is German for "always" (for the benefit of others); I deliberately refuse to write excellent English and drop many aspects of English grammar at my pleasure, because basically all current languages are crap and I'm waiting for people to construct a new, superior language (maybe I should stop waiting and start doing)
GrimRC
linkie b
The word is benchmark.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It doesn't really matter, because by that time the world would have ended.
And unfortunately Seagate admitted they were not planning on including particle accelerators in their hard disks any time soon...
See, This whole outsourcing thing works. With all that code going over the wire to India it will be important to know just how fast it can get there. Of course there will be a huge demand for scientists to work with particle accelerators to blow up hard drives and ram sticks to determine what media has the best potential for high speed transfer rates.
And really we all know blowing stuff up is more fun than writing code any day. (Unless you are writing code to blow stuff up) Thus sending our boring programming jobs overseas is ok, because it creates fun, high paying jobs in our nations particle acceleration labs.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
ermmm...esperanto? :-)
;-)
PS. Maybe I'm not german, but I'm so fluent in different languages one language flows almost unnoticable into the other?!
*cough*
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
... so the dream of surfing for porn at an infinite speed is over *sob*
You're missing the point here.
Bandwidth, or data transfer rate, isn't measured in meters per second. When we talk about data transfer speed, we're not talking about how quickly a bit can go from NYC to LA. That will just determine latency. We're talking about how rapidly you can put bits on "the line".
Obviously, if I have a message of even the tiniest size, I can't get it from NYC to LA faster than light. The real question is how MUCH data can I get there in a particular slice of time, say one second. If I have 100 pairs of fiber, then it's possible for my bandwidth across distance X to exceed
(1 bit * c)/ X meters.
The article is slightly mislabeled, because it's not about data TRANSFER so much as data ACCESS. They're saying that even if you have 100 OC-192's between your sites, you can only read from disk at one end and write to disk at the other at a certain rate, which they cap at 1,000 times current speeds. Their point is that there's no point in transferring faster than you can access, 'cause you'd just overflow your buffers and drop data.
Just like the multiple fiber pairs solution I proposed, this solution could be addressed with multiple disks. Given an ideal bus, you could hook up 100 drives to one end of this pipe and 100 drives to the other end, and the transfer could occur at 100 times the cap they claim.
And even that still settles for the assumption that we're using conventional magnetic storage, and with only one head at a time. This reseach shows a very specific limit, rate at which a magnetic bit can be flipped, which is then extrapolated falsely to impose limits on other things like data transfer. Read their facts, not their conclusions.
the problem arrives when you fire electrons at a magnetic storage material fast enough (approaching the speed of light) they stop behaving in the expected way, and start producing random results.
/dev/random to /dev/null isnt all that limited by HD speed.
-geoff313
if you take the HD out of the equation the limit goes away (for a while, perhaps).
-doormat
Actually, I bet dev/random would also have the problem of producing random results...
Yeah, and then in order to increase your transfer rates you're going to have to either RAID or have drives with independent heads. I know that there have been drives with two sets of heads, one on either end of the unit, but I don't know about any drives which use completely independent head travel mechanisms for each head/pair of heads.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Gooogle will by 2012 release a little app that will record everything you do on your PDa and sync it back to GOOGLE BRAIN SERVER.
Your pda/mobile will constantly record all audio/video/health details of you and surrounding people. Nightly this will be dumped to the google mummy server, and it will then analyze everysingle human on the planet , and also give you personal advise/health stats reports, counceling, teach you what you need, and also coordinate this between all your IM buddies so everthing interesting they learned/knew/saw will be advised to you in summary form.
Google will be your personal StarTrek Computer that will also keep everthing, so next time police want evidence they have it all.
Google Matrix will know it all. It will control the human populace. Advise it, nurture it, grow it, and take care of it like its own little children (1s and 0s)
Google will then systamtically know what each human is up to, where each person is heading and what each person is subconciously thinking. It will then be able to predict anything. It will be GOD.
The all might GOOGLE OF DDMINATION.
Google will baby sit your kids
Google will teach you, update you in realtime as things are 'thought of'
GOOGLE will turn the human race into BORG.
GOOGLE BORG is born.
GOOGLE will run civilizations, planets, star clusters. It will combine bouluf cluster 5 billion humans into accelerated human achievment, google is the architect. Google has been delivered electronically by god.
GOOGLE is GOD himself, GOD is just a 1 and a 0. A ying and yang.
GOOGLE will facilitate every human needed for every solution most efficiently and instantly. If a project requires the effort of the Manhatten project, it will combine 10 million minds into a week long burst session of minds, that would be equal to 10 years of 10000 people working hard manually.
GOOGLE will create the best art in the world, by pooling the best talent globaly and magically together.
GOOGLE MANAGER will replace every single mid/top level manager and all CEOs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He's not asserting that anything is being transmitted faster than light, only that there's an *appearance* of an effect traveling faster than light with no actual *information* traveling faster than light. For instance: imagine you did very refined calculations to determine the exact distances between three planets in the solar system. You then used an incredibly accurate clock to time a series of three light pulses so that each went off in sequence a second after the previous. To an outside observer, it would *appear* as though a signal was being transmitted at speeds faster than light, but in reality the information required to set up the effect had traveled at or below the speed of light. (Practically speaking, I doubt the accuracy of time synchronization would make this sort of experiment reliable, but what the hell.)
"186, 000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the Law."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Yes, just from the top of my head...
MFM hard drives from the early 80s had a claimed transfer speed of around 500-625 KB/s, give or take a little for the gap in read / write speed, which was damn fast for only 10 to 40MB.
Our midrange single-drive speeds for today top out at about 100 times that number.
Average access times have improved at a much lower rate. Typical average access times for an MFM hard drive were well under 100ms, but today's midrange drives can barely break the 10ms mark.
The hardware we have is currently pushing the limits of what we can produce affordably. Although we may be able to theoretically see 1000 times current performance with magnetic media, I certainly doubt that we can do even 10x better with current drive design philosophies.
What I expect to see to fill the gap betweeen now and wide acceptance of solid state storage is parallel storage. Sure, it's been in workstations and enterprise for years, but I'm not talking about a messy RAID 5 array with a big, expensive external controller. I'm talking about sandwiching multiple smaller disks into a standard 2.5" or 3.5" package, including internal drive array hardware.
These days, it's not about leveraging performance from one disk, but from many. This won't do much for access times, but it will quench our thirst fior bandwidth without making the drive's external interface more complex.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data."
So, this is like when me and a friend drank a bunch of beer and took a sledge hammer to my monitor, and discovered it couldn't handle more than about 10 foot-pounds of force? Shit, I could have told you that...
Actually there was a parody of The Matrix called "The Meatrix" about the issue of factory farms, staring "Moophius", a cow.
http://www.themeatrix.com/
And unfortunately Seagate admitted they were not planning on including particle accelerators in their hard disks any time soon...
If they did, that would give new meaning to "ghosting" a drive. They'd have to come with a product warning: Don't cross the bitstreams. It would be bad.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You're going to endanger us. You're going to endanger our application: the nice actuarial program that credited our account in advance before she became a null device.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
These problems won't be prevalent with holographic storage mediums. When they get it right.
Means what the grandparent described. You are just exposing the limitations of this one number as an indicator of data transfer performance. Most of the factors you describe are actually contributors to latency.
--
E_NOSIG
From your link:
I don't know if you are trolling or just ignorant. Either way STFU.
I'm not really sure of the point of this article. We all should know by now that technology is limited by knowledge and by other technology.
The more knowledge we attain, the better our technology becomes - therefore this speculation takes into account absolutely no technological advancement.
Thank you Captain Obvious!
One of the reasons why high-speed HDDs are not available is the problems of air flow inside the disk. At high speeds, those disks create hell a lot of vibration because of the air flow pattern between the disks.
By powering up my coffee machine, making some coffee and throwing it at my laptop.
Who moved my sig?
What I don't get is at the end of the movie after he offloads what he was holding, all of his childhood memories come back. But I guess that it's already hokey enough that they already have to rely on human brains for data transfer via sneakernet.
Scientists have discovered that shooting snail mail from a cannon at a mailbox proves that arming posties with rail guns will not realistically improve the speed of delivery. ;^)
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/02/22/1430225_F.sh tml
Peace !
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
It is NOT about data transfer, or even data storage. It is about magnetic writing. Did the submitter RTFA or just the also-incorrect title?
As far as storage, 10 years ago they could store a gigabyte in a 3D crystal the size of a sugar cube and read the whole thing back in a second. {HOLOGRAPHIC MEMORIES , By: Psaltis, Demetri, Mok, Fai, Scientific American, 00368733, Nov95, Vol. 273, Issue 5}. That was before the many advances in optical storage technology, particularly high frequency lasers. And using only ONE laser focus, which even DVDs already surpass.
As for transfer rate, look to astrophysics. Radio astronomers listen to signals using amplifiers that carry a billion channels at once. That's a hell of a parallel system. Turn it around and broadcast through it using plain old 8N1+stop protocol in parallel and you're moving 100 MB PER PULSE. Multiply that times your chosen broadcast primary frequency, say 1 GHz, and you're moving 100 petabytes per second, give or take the shift to the lowest frequency on the MUXing.
It's usually at this point that the engineers start sputtering about how impossible it is due to Fourier transform limitations, proving they're not aware that radio astronomers were listening to thousands of channels even before they had time/freqency analysis via continuous wavelet transform running in real time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
we need to encourage posts like this!!!!
Who's willing to lay odds that sooner or later, this guy's going to look like an idiot?
Some comments mention that errors are unacceptable.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned error correction to fight this random bit flipping...
Am I missing something?
What's the probability of a random bit being inserted? Are most bits inserted correctly or are most bits random?
Brain: The accident also involved a packet of non-dairy creamer.
Lawyer: *Dumbfounded Pause* No further questions.
We've heard this sort of thing before back in the BBS days. No one thought we could get more than 9600 baud with a modem over the existing POTs. Now we not only have "56k" modems but DSL technology up to 8Mpbs over short runs (available now) with much higher speeds on the way. Someone always comes up with a probably/theoretical limit on bandwidth, processing power, etc, etc and someone else always comes along and finds a clever new way to break that limit. It's a long way off before we hit the limit they are talking about with our current technology. Who knows what we'll have by then. I mark this article as plus one interesting but minus several points for not being important from a realistic and practical standpoint.
"Define Bad..."
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
The one with Mentats, of course!
Now say this faster than a hard disk can store it:
"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the Juice of Safu that thoughts aquire speed, the lips aquire stains, the stains become a warning, it is by will alone I set my mind in motion."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This site:
says that:
Is it possible to use gravity to communicate information faster than the speed of light?I thought I remembered Heisenberg's principle applying to information(it's interesting he refers to "information" in the next, not just matter or energy, if I remember Quantum Mechanics correctly)
That would mean Quantum Computing, non-photonic methods, etc... would still be bound, well except for the hypothetical tachyon communicator(tm), but those break enough rules they might just go through Heisenberg's principle like a knife through butter, should we ever find them(think of a speed written as a complex number, I know I get a headache just imagining it too).
Speed = latency
Bandwidth = Well, bandwidth
Need to move more people across the border? You dont need to break the speed limit, you just need a bigger truck.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
A week and no responses to the post. I guess not.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."