Storing Data In Cow Guts?

supersandra writes "News.com reports that companies are exploring how to use molten silicon, designer molecules, and even protein globules from cows as data storage media. The media made by Nanochip using molten silicon, called ovonic media, is similar to CDs or DVDs but can store much more data because the tools for reading and writing data could potentially be 25x smaller. Nanochip demonstrated a 1-inch square chip of material that could contain a terabit of data. ZettaCore has created a complex molecule that can retain or release up to eight electrons, exhibiting a voltage level that can be read as data, and thus each molecule can represent 4 bits of data. Another company, NanoMagnetics, uses a magnetic core surrounded by animal protein, and can also achieve a terabit of data per square inch."

Comments

Cow Protein Storage?

[grunt107]

And you thought DVD rot was bad!

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[severoon]

I would upgrade my hard drive to something with this kind of density if it weren't for the smell!

sev

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[ifreakshow]

Can't wait till my hard drive gets mad cow.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[nametaken]

Yeah, my temperature concerns have just escalated. Looks like my future drive coolers will have to be made by Frigidaire.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Sepper]

Can't wait till my hard drive gets mad cow.

Or the other wait around...

"Your big Mac is going to be late. We had to clear the W32.StuffIT.AA virus out of it..."

And if this ever captures the market, I'm sure someone will pattern the idea of the 2 headed Brahmin From the Fallout games...
"Twice the head, Twice the stomachs, Twice the storage! At the same Low Low Price!"

I have the feeling that every comment on this story is going to be anything except Serious...

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[kfg]

"I'm sorry boss, but the TPS report got munged by a computer bacteria."

I wonder, does this mean that our storage devices will all have four partitions?

KFG

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[PapayaSF]

This will bring a whole new meaning to the term "memory dump"....

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Aerog]

Well, if you have a system with a good cooling unit, you could potentially freeze the drive. Then all you have to worry about is freezer burn.

OTOH there's suddenly a really simple, and possibly delicious, method of disposing of incriminating files.....

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Rei]

Great... another thing we vegetarians need to try to avoid purchasing :P

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[w3weasel]

UGH! awwww.... eewww!
HONEY! Ther are MAGGOTS in the memory!

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[drinkypoo]

Unless you're a vegan, it shouldn't bother you much. I know plenty of vegetarians who wear leather... And I try not to associate myself with vegans.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[grunt107]

Must be a MS worm

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Rei]

The difference between "vegetarian" and "vegan" is eggs and milk. Leather still involves killing a cow.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Dyolf Knip]

Supposedly it causes the blood vessels in your eyes to contract which somehow makes you sneeze.

/shrug

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[orangesquid]

When I step out into the sun, sometimes I go into sneezing fits that last several minutes.

Yes, this really happens to people...heh... I sure as hell wish it didn't though sometimes...

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Rei]

In practice, however, the only generalizable difference is eggs and milk (and, like you said, honey). People who are vegetarian for moral reasons don't use any products which require animals to die. Milk, honey, and eggs do not require animals to die.

I'm speaking as a vegetarian but not a vegan, BTW.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[scotch]

The difference between "vegetarian" and "vegan" is that the first is generally mildly malnourished and disease ridden while the second is severely malnourished, disease-ridden, and is usually agressive to the point of being annoying. Both classes are easy to beat in a fight, though, so don't worry about them.

HTH, GDR,

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Rei]

Ah, but the production of the products does not implicitly require the killing of the animal. If everyone ate a vegetarian diet as such, those things would not occur.

Cows are not exclusively killed for their meat either. They're killed for all of the products resultant from their slaughter, which is why vegetarians in general try and avoid *all* of these products - to reduce the value of the slaughtering the animal.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[billstewart]

The other reason eating dairy products and eggs results in dead cows and chickens is that producing them requires producing lots of baby cows and chickens. The female babies get to grow up to produce milk or eggs; the male babies grow up to go to McDonald's.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[billcopc]

Nah, most likely it'll hoof-kick the flashlight up your posterior.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Rei]

Less and less these days. More and more animals are being bred through artificial insemination. Even simply centrifuging the sperm can notably skew the offspring ratio ; timing can also influence the gender of offspring, and there are a number of other methods under investigation. Centrifuging alone gives, in humans, about 86.7% accuracy for females and 89.2% accuracy for males according to one study. I'd, if anything, expect the rates for your typical farm animals to be even more dramatic.

Re:Cow Protein Storage?

[Grizzlysmit]

And you thought DVD rot was bad!

We at the Rawhide Memory corp resent that comment.

Roll em roll em roll em ....

Cool thing about cows

[Neil Blender]

They come stock with a 4-way.

Storing data in protein globs?

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

If it's anything like the data in my secret directory, I forsee an irony overload of epic proportions.

Re:Storing data in protein globs?

[wankledot]

god help you if it includes "protein globules from cows" as well.

So...

[The-Bus]

With cows having several stomachs, can you have a RAID then? How do you defragment the drives? Cowto-Bismol? And I'm saying right now I'm not gonna be the one that's going to "retrieve" the drives that aren't needed in the cow anymore.

Re:So...

[smclean]

I'm not gonna be the one that's going to "retrieve" the drives that aren't needed in the cow anymore.

Don't you know that technology already exists to make maintainance of cow-based RAID arrays a 'snap'? pictures

Protein Memory

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Great, now the places that ban USB keys as a 'security risk'
will also ban beef jerky.

Re:Protein Memory

[mdvlspwn99]

Better hope you never confuse your data as jerky...I'd hate to accidentally consume a year's worth of work.

Ok?

[Comatosis]

Cow Guts eh..next they will use human brains! ;)

Is this kosher?

[DrewMIT]

anyone more familiar with kashrut than I know if this would be considered kosher? Like if an observant Jew were to handle the media would he then not be able to have a dairy meal?

This is a serious, if off topic, question. Anyone?

Re:Is this kosher?

[KevinKnSC]

Similarly, would these offend the Hindu belief that cows are sacred, thus ending Indian outsourcing?

Re:Is this kosher?

[dr_dank]

You should be ok as long as you don't eat the cow drive and wash it down with a glass of milk.

Re:Is this kosher?

[Billy the Mountain]

Yeah, but I thought it was not kosher to wear, for example, leather shoes while attending a Green Bay Packers game wearing the obligatory cheese hat.

Re:Is this kosher?

[OhHellWithIt]

I think it depends on how you kill it. At least it's not the hip joint, or chitterlings.

But seriously, I think you have to eat the item for the rules of kashrut to come into play. I'm sure you'll find at least two or three dissenting opinions.

Re:Is this kosher?

[trolling]

Cow is sacred ~= Data is sacred

Who knew.

Re:Is this kosher?

[Anonymous Coward]

They even have McDonald's hamburgers WITH BEEF in India nowadays.

Re:Is this kosher?

[petsounds]

Well, it will definitely offend vegans such as myself. I imagine Hindus wouldn't be too keen on this, either. And what about the anti-GMO movement in Europe?

I never thought I'd have to worry about whether my media storage contains animal parts! What's next, hooking up genetically-altered electro-hamsters as a power supply?

Re:Is this kosher?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck? Someone on slashdot is smokin some gooood crack, because this is the furthest thing from insightful I've ever seen.

Re:Is this kosher?

[KevinKnSC]

Agreed. I've said some insightful things, here and there, but this one was really going for funny.

Re:Is this kosher?

[TheCyko1]

What's next, hooking up genetically-altered electro-hamsters as a power supply?

Well... that's what the Kids Next Door do. Man, that show must be ahead of it's time.

Re:Is this kosher?

[micromoog]

Well, it will definitely offend vegans such as myself.

I guess I should tell you, then, that your computer's case already contains animal products.

Re:Is this kosher?

[the chao goes mu]

Bingo!

Unlike the other posts, this one is absolutely correct... Kashrut applies to things being eaten (or preparation of food), so unless you cook on your drive, or eat it, kashrut does not apply.

Remember IANAR (The yeshiva version of IANAL)

Re:Is this kosher?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Similarly, would these offend the Hindu belief that cows are sacred, thus ending Indian outsourcing

Ask Mangal Pande how he felt:

The First Indian Uprising of 1857
The Indian Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny) as known to the British or The First War Of Indian Independence as known to the Indians was a period of uprising in northern and central India against British rule in 1857-1858. It is also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny, and the Revolt of 1857. It is widely acknowledged to be the first-ever united rebellion against colonial rule in India.

Causes
The most famous reason for this mutiny is the use of cow and pig fat in .557 calibre Pattern 1853 Enfield (P/53) rifle cartridges. Since soldiers had to break the cartridges with their teeth before they could load them into their rifles, this was offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers, who considered tasting beef and pork to be against their respective religious tenets. In February 1857 sepoys refused to use their new cartridges. The British claimed to have replaced the cartridges with new ones and tried to make sepoys make their own grease from beeswax and vegetable oils but the rumor persisted.

Mangal Pande and the march to Delhi
In March 1857 Mangal Pande of the 34th Native Infantry attacked his British sergeant, wounded an adjutant. General Hearsay, who said Pande was in some kind of "religious frenzy" ordered a jemadar to arrest him but the jemadar refused. Mangal Pande then turned the gun against himself and used his foot to try to pull the trigger to shoot himself. He failed, was captured and then hanged on April 7 along with the jemadar. The whole regiment was dismissed as a collective punishment. Other sepoys felt this was too harsh.

On the 10th of May when the 11th and 20th cavalry assembled they broke rank and turned on their commanding officers. They then liberated the 3rd Regiment. The rebelling forces were then engaged by the remaining British forces in Meerut. Meerut had the largest percentage of British troops of every station in India 2,038 European troops versus 2,357 sepoys. The British side even had 12 field guns while the sepoys lacked an artillery. The British forces could have stopped the sepoys from marching on Delhi.

On the 11th of May they reached Delhi. They were joined by other Indians from the local bazaar. Here they attacked and captured the Red Fort (Lal Qila) which was the residence of Bahadur Shah Zafar. The sepoys demanded that he reclaim his throne. At first he was reluctant but eventually he agreed to the demands and became the leader of the rebellion.

About the same time in Jhansi, the army rebelled and killed the British Army Officers. This led to a left Rani Laxmibai, the queen of Jhansi, to defend herself and her kingdom. In 1858, when the British army once again marched towards Jhansi, the Rani assembled an army of 14,000 volunteers to fight the invaders. The war lasted 2 weeks but eventually the British won. The queen escaped on horseback to the fortress of Kalpi. Here she organized a few other kingdoms to rebel against the British. These rebel forces captured Gwalior from the British. The British placed a prize of Rs. 20,000 on the capture of Rani Laxmibai.

I think the answer is that it would offend religious Hindus (not all Indians), and they would probably not use cow protein in the final product.

Re:Is this kosher?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Hrm. From that article it seems that the prohibition might not be against using cow products, but rather the act of consuming cow parts.

I guess I don't know how Hindus would feel about the beef drive.

Re:Is this kosher?

[Sgt York]

I can see how this would be a problem for ethics-based vegans (as opposed to health-based vegans), but why would it pose a problem for anti-GMO types? It's not a GM product. Ferritin, or something like it, is found in a lot of animals.

Actually, there is a possible solution for the vegans. I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure there's a microbial version of this protein. Hindus can be easily taken care of, they can use ferritin from pigs. Jews & Muslims can use the cow stuff. The rest of us can use whichever is cheaper.

Now I await the deluge of virus and bug jokes for the microbe comment....

Re:Is this kosher?

[petsounds]

I just had time to fully read the article:

"'We get it from animal sources,' he said. Humans produce ferritin. But instead of getting it from employees, NanoMagnetics buys its ferritin from collagen manufacturers who get it from cows. The company is currently looking at ways to produce it in the lab 'because my wife is a vegetarian,' Mayes joked."

So it looks like they are already cognizant of the possible backlash by the vegetarian/vegan community. I have no problems with lab-grown ferritin; it's just the support of the dairy/beef industry that I'm not down with. Kudos to NanoMagnetics for their foresight.

Cow chips

[stanmann]

There is a joke here about cow chips vs Mod chips vs micro chips, but I can't find it.

Guess I'll have to look for a computer that uses one of them there cow chips for storage now.

Re:Cow chips

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

> There is a joke here about cow chips

I'll give it a shot.

"Dude, what's that smell?"

"My system just had a core dump!"

Next-generation storage for old generation RPGs...

[b0r0din]

Running a MOO will never be the same.

Pouring molten silicon into a cow?

[spun]

That's despicable! How could they even... Oh. Okay, I read the rest of the article.
[Roseanne Roseannadanna voice] Never mind!

Re:Pouring molten silicon into a cow?

[dexter riley]

You mean [Emily Litella voice]. You should use your [Roseanne Roseannadanana voice] for when you're installing some of this new cow memory into a computer, and you get a itty-bitty glob of cow protein stuck on your fingers! So you try to flick it off the end of your finger, but it just stays there! So you keep flicking it and flicking it, and then you try rolling it around and around on your fingers, and it's just hanging there, and you're looking at this little fleck of cow guts on your finger, and you get so sick to your stomach, that you think you're gonna DIE!

Thank Goodness!

[ZagNuts]

Now a single cow can cover all of the basic food groups: meat, milk, and data!

k-zed

[k-zed]

Eight electrons.. If we have eight possible voltage levels, that's 3 bits of data, not 4 (although more accurately with eight electrons you would have nine levels)

Re:k-zed

[b0r0din]

The fourth bit is reserved for the cow's mouth.

Re:k-zed

[James Turpin]

They might mean that it can vary between -8 and +8 inclusive, which gives 17 states, {-8,-7,-6,-5,-4,-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}. You need 16 states for 4 bits, so that would do it. Or maybe you could take advantage of the 17th state by storing data in base-17 rather than hexadecimal - but thats just weird and would require processing to convert. Unfortunately, this will liekly lead to multiple formats depending on how the 17 possible states are mapped to the 16 hexadecimal digits, or whether all 17 states are in fact used to achieve maximum data compression.

Re:k-zed

[Relic of the Future]

Base 17? Conversion... compression... Gah! No!

How about parity? Parity bit good...

Re:k-zed

[James Turpin]

But its not an extra bit. An extra bit would give 32 states, not 17. You could use it as an error indicator. Divide by zero and get 17 for the output. That sort of thing. But not parity.

Of course, this all presupposes that I understood the article correctly, and that this will actually be used in a real computer... Otherwise its could be a moot point.

Cows Worthless

[tbigity]

Finally...cows can contribute to the good of man! I mean, granted, beef, leather, pleasant odors etc., but now: BOVINES, THE UNGULATE OF THE FUTURE!

I'm not liking this.

[djh101010]

Makes the whole concept of a "data dump" a lot less appealing.

ovonic media?

[camusflage]

According to the article, it's ovonic media. If you're using cow protein globules, wouldn't that be bovinic media??

iCowPod?

[Klar]

Will apple use this to make crazy iPod's... humm or maybe Gateway should cause they have the whole cow thing going on anyways. 1 terabit of data per square inch could translate into several mp3 files...

Re:iCowPod?

[Yaztromo]

Will apple use this to make crazy iPod's...

Ever try to plug a firewire cable into a cow?

To paraphrase Kryten: "Now, I presume that, uh, when an iCowPod wants to recharge they do it much the same way mechanoids do. Indeed, I have located what I presume to be the recharging socket, but for some strange reason it doesn't appear to have the standard six-pin adaption. Now, do I have to use some kind of special adaptor? Because no matter what I do, the lead just keeps falling out".

Yaz.

New Intel Commercials

[ArmenTanzarian]

EET MOR CHIKIN

or rather, "EET MOR KOW" until they buy those guys out.

Re:New Intel Commercials

[Dr Caleb]

EET MOR KOW

Until the cows wise up and start wearing fake pig masks. Imagine a whole field of cows looking like this going "OINK. OINK OINK." and looking around to see if anyone notices.

Hmm...

[JoeLinux]

mount /dev/moo? I think I saw a webpage about that once..

Re:Hmm...

[Sepper]

<quote>I think I saw a webpage about that once...</quote>

Must have been:
_________
< cowsay! >
---------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||

And I'm Sure it had super Cow powers.. Moo!

Re:Hmm...

[Cat_Byte]

mount /dev/moo

mke2fs /dev/moo -L "Moo" -T fatcow

I guess filesystem type would be fatcow...not fat16 anyway.

Cow Guts Raid

[pt99par]

Since cows have 7 stomacks maybe a cow gut raid would bring faster or more reliable cowgut storage

Re:Cow Guts Raid

[belg4mit]

4! Ruminants have (3 or) 4 compartments in their stomach.

Re:Cow Guts Raid

[pt99par]

Well maybe an upgrade to 7 stomachs wold be a good alternative.. it has not happen very much on the cow storage front for a couple of years

Re:This is not funny because...

[RetroGeek]

You mispelled scared

Mhhh... menudo....

[MannyO]

...and to think I eat at least a couple GB of menudo every sunday morning.... ;)

I know....

[Kickstart70]

....Let's store the data in self-replicating prions!

Then "Mad Cow" becomes a Good Thing!

Acronym's for this new techology

[TXP]

Two acroynm's that come to mind are:

MB = MooMoo Bulls
HDD = Heffer Disk Drive

Walk into Byte Burger...

[suso]

I can see it now.
I'll have a 5 terabyte burger, large fries and a coke.

Re:Walk into Byte Burger...

[JPelorat]

Two Big McTeraburger RAID meals and a Hot Optical Pie!

Ancient Tech!

[MooseByte]

Feh! The Sumerians were reading goat entrails for information ages before this came along.

Re:Ancient Tech!

[Soulflame_2]

The good news is there is plenty of prior art to prevent anyone from taking out patents?

Re:Oblig. Simpsons Quote....

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it's not pig gut...

Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Homer: Heh heh heh. Oh, yeah right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

Uh oh!

[cinderful]

Vegans are gonna be forced to use slower, less compatible soy-protein alternatives.

Re:Uh oh!

[kalidasa]

Vegans are gonna be forced to use slower, less compatible soy-protein alternatives.

Maybe, but Apple will give them a sexy green polymer shell and call them soyBooks.

Re:Uh oh!

[The Wang]

Re: Your sig He's been released.

Re:Uh oh!

[gstoddart]

Yeah, but overall they'll find their data is more reliable due to fewer hormones and additives.

Moof!

[rharder]

Sorry, prior art. Apple already has dogcow, a computer-cow hybrid. I'm sure the USPTO will grant a post facto patent for all bovine-bit business.

Sentient meat?

[djh101010]

Come on, you expect me to believe that this meat can _think_?

Re:Sentient meat?

[Tackhead]

> Come on, you expect me to believe that this meat can _think_?

"So where does the thinking happen? Where is the memory stored?"

"Globules of protein in the intestines of cows."

"Bullshit!"

"Yes, precisely! You're getting it!"

Beef...

[theJerk242]

even protein globules from cows as data storage media.

...is what for storage.

Interesting stuff...

[Arcanix]

But if you notice only the carbon nanotube idea at the end seems to offer a speed increase which is what we really need. Tons of storage is great but until HDs start increasing in speed significantly they will remain the primary bottleneck in most systems.

In case anyone is wondering...

[AKAImBatman]

...this is pretty much the type of research a computer scientist does. So if you're thinking of going for your PHD in CompSci, just consider for a moment whether you REALLY want to be combining the math of CompSci, with the Molecular Biology of cow guts.

Re:In case anyone is wondering...

[MooseByte]

"So if you're thinking of going for your PHD in CompSci, just consider for a moment whether you REALLY want to be combining the math of CompSci, with the Molecular Biology of cow guts."

Instead you can focus on your undergrad CS degree and go straight to combining the long hours of development with the endless bullshit from middle management. :-)

Not as impressive...

[Roguelazer]

I was really impressed until I saw that it said "terabit". As in 1/8 of a terabyte. Which isn't a terrible lot...

1 terabit = 2^40 bits = 1099511627776 bits
1 terabyte = (2^40) * 8 bits = 8796093022208 bits

:(

Re:Not as impressive...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still 128 gigs... Thats a good deal in my book.

1099511627776 bits = 137438953472 bytes = 134217728 kilobytes = 131072 megabytes = 128 gigabytes.

Re:Not as impressive...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, this was a demo of a 1-inch square chip of material. How many square inch is one CD?

Re:Not as impressive...

[Dark Lord Seth]

It's still roughly 131 GB per square inch. Ask any photographer who uses digital cameras often wether 120 GB of of storage would be be considered insignificant.

Re:Not as impressive...

[DMUTPeregrine]

1tb/in^2= 8 TB/8 in^2. If a CD has a non writable diameter of 1 inch, and a total diameter of 6 inches, (I don't have a ruler here...) then the total area is about 27 in^2. This gives a CD sized object almost 3.5 Terabytes of storage. Pretty damned good.

Mad cow

[mind21_98]

I dunno. If the material came from a cow with BSE, the chips might start randomly losing data. ;)

Fisher Price's new update to See 'n Says...

[shik0me]

"The cow says 011011010110111101101111!"

Re:Fisher Price's new update to See 'n Says...

[Stray7Xi]

Shouldn't 011011010110111101101111 actually be 010011010110111101101111.

Am I the only one on slashdot that thinks 011011010110111101101111 just looks funny.

Re:Fisher Price's new update to See 'n Says...

[zcat_NZ]

Probably. :-)

8 levels, 3 bits per molecule. Hmm.

The cow says \115 \157 \157

xb/s

[kulakovich]

achieve a terabit of data per square inch.

yeah. and transfer speeds approaching 1b/sec.

Any idea how slowly RNA encodes a datastream? It ain't quick.

kulakovich

Re:xb/s

[Sgt York]

This doesn't use molecular biology to store the data, just to make the infrastructure. There is an iron-carrying protein in blood called ferritin. It can hold single atoms of iron quite tightly, and keep it coordinated in a specific location, and in a (kind of) specific way. I'm guessing these guys make an array of conjugated ferritin (which would be fairly easy and cheap to do, especially on a large scale) and then use some mechanism to alter the oxidation state of the iron in the protein and assiging each either a 1 or a 0. It still uses standard magnetic reading, it's just the medium that's changed. Or at least as far as I can tell from the article.

bovonics?

[techmuse]

Wouldn't that be "bovonics"? Or perhaps Bovinics?

Next thing you know...

[Chatmag]

AOL will be giving out free sign up discs, disguised as Big Macs.

I can see it now...

[Mr. Bad Example]

"My new protein storage module doesn't work with my machine."

"Driver conflict?"

"No, lactose intolerance."

Also, regarding the terabit-on-a-chip:

"Nobody move. Help me look on the floor here..."

"Contact lens?"

"No, the Library of Congress."

Warning: Terrible Puns Ahead

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Maybe now Gateway really can make cowculators. What, you've got beef with my joke? Maybe we can take the bull by the horns and steer this conversation in another direction.

Re:Warning: Terrible Puns Ahead

[garignak]

What, you've got beef with my joke?

Yeah, it's udderly bad.

Inaccurate reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

According to ZettaCore's web site, each molecule has four states (two bits), not four bits.

Holy Cow!!

[$la$hcreep]

You can be sure this work will never get outsourced to India.

I'm a PETA member, you insensitive clod!

[theMerovingian]

Cow guts are inhumane...

use NAUGAHYDE instead.

Re:I'm a PETA member, you insensitive clod!

[Country_hacker]

How inhumane!! How cruel!! Do you know how many naugas gave their lives for....Oh, nevermind.

Re:I'm a PETA member, you insensitive clod!

[MustardMan]

People for the Eating of Tasty Animals? YUM.

Or maybe you mean those vegetarian hippies. To them, all I can say is... For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three

I've never heard of such tripe!

[OhHellWithIt]

Does this mean that in addition to having some script kiddie scramble my storage, I'm going to have to worry about mad cow disease, too?

Forget it, I'm becoming a vegetarian again!

Associated new product

[be951]

Norton Anti-prion.

Now we know what aliens want from cows!

[ergean]

The secret is out.
I bet that they didn't want all the media hipe about cow mutilations, so now they use a human corporation as a shield for their operations.

Moohhhhaahhhhaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh Great...

[spoonboy42]

Here I thought that computing was a hobby that was compatible with my vegetarianism (unlike, say, my Dad's deer hunting). Guess I'll have to switch to underwater basket weaving.

Re:Oh Great...

[Al Dimond]

'Eh, me too.

I hear there are some excellent underwater basket weaving programs in major universities... my HS bio teacher suggested some to me when I chose an answer in yards instead of meters on a multiple choice test because the answer was actually closer to being correct.

I wonder what makes animal protein useful for data storage... and, the eternal vegetarian question... can it be replaced with soy?

(or perhaps a kind of slurry made of beans and lentils? ok there goes the end of my ideas...)

Too many comebacks

[UnknowingFool]

Storing Data In Cow Guts?

Must . . . resist . . . snide remark. Must . . . talk like . . . Shatner

Mahler

[Al Dimond]

Or, in the case that you listen to Mahler, maybe half of an mp3 file.

Re:Mahler

[supersandra]

Mahler's 10^12, the Symphony for 1000 Terabits?

Re:Mahler

[Al Dimond]

Actually, that sounds more like Glass than Mahler.

So..

[NanoGator]

... would my dog eating my homework be prior art? If so, I wish that had really happened.

Wait for it...

[Obiwan Kenobi]

With these new innovations, when you tell the support guy your computer is sick, you're not just jokin around!

*dodges tomatoes*

Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week folks. Who's from Milwaukee?

Now if only we can use the proteins of humans...

[jakel2k]

Oh... the flood of jokes ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ideas...

I'll call the chips Solent Green (White)

This will revolutionize the p0rn industry and the mass storage industry.

Mass Storage industry will be in bed with the p0rn industy

Finally people can recycle the tissues in the basket by the computer.

Sperm banks will no longer have a monopoly.

Prostitiution will be legalized to harvest raw materials.

1. Collect human extract
2. ??? << Make storage devices
3. profit!!!

Where do the jokes end? -- brain buffer overrun

Will it run under Windows?

[WormholeFiend]

When I visited the Veterinarian Dept. of a local university, I was shown a cow with a window on its side.

Students could open the window at their convenience to check the insides of the cow.

Ugh.

Re:Will it run under Windows?

[WormholeFiend]

I just remembered the proper term for it... it was a "fistulated cow".

Re:Will it run under Windows?

[British]

Was that by chance at the University of Minnesota?

Re:Will it run under Windows?

[pyrrhonist]

Was that by chance at the University of Minnesota?

It could also be Iowa State. They showed me their cow on a tour, but unfortunately, she turned away so I only got to see the window for a second. I guess she's bashful about it.

Lets place the pr0n into the cow's

[Man in Spandex]

ballz!

The biggest problem

[Dark Paladin]

Is when we all have computers embedded in our skin, and they start placing spam in our foods to transmit messages to us.

No, not Spam. The other kind. Then again, you have to wonder just what a virus would do to this information transmitting proteins. No, not that kind of virus, the other kind.

No, I don't know which kind either. I just confused myself.

Judging by the article....

[boschmorden]

it seems that the (animal) FAT filesysem will be back!

Re::: ducks ::

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

If only they can somehow expand this technology to work with proteins from animals from the ursus or lupine families, then imagine the RAIDs you could create.

A bear-wolf cluster, if you will...

Moo of death.

[Trillan]

Be careful with the Iomega drives. If someone provides you with a bad cow, it may damage your drive such that it damages all other cows you use. The damage is subtle, but eventually all the data on your cows will be lost.

Extraneous words removed for practical readers...

[stienman]

... can ... could potentially ... could contain ... can retain ... can be read ... can represent ... can also achieve ...

Thanks, but I'll wait for "does" and "Is on sale for less than $100/terabyte."

-Adam

New School Excuse...

[TiggertheMad]

"I'm sorry teacher, but I put my homework on one of those new super DVDs, and it got MadCow disease."

Cow Guts?

[nlindstrom]

If I can store my data in cow guts, could I instead choose to store my data in the goatsex man's guts? There's plenty of bandwidth going in!

Two things

[wurp]

Firstly, up to 8 electrons stored, unless you can detect which of the electrons is being stored, only yields 3 bits (one molecule can have a "value" of 0-8, actually the last one is superfluous). It would take a range of 0-15 electrons to get 4 bits.

As to ovonics, ovum means egg. Maybe it just refers to the shape and biological nature of the globules.

Re:Two things

[fred fleenblat]

Firstly, up to 8 electrons stored, unless you can detect which of the electrons is being stored, only yields 3 bits

Some of the electrons may have different potentials and thus could be differentiated from the rest. Not enough detail is given to evaluate the theoretical information content of the molecule independent from their claims.

Re:Two things

[Lord Bitman]

though it seems much more likely the poster just doesnt know how to divide, asked mscalc to convert "8" to binary, and then counted the digits.

Re:Two things

[wurp]

Yeah, hence my caveat about "knowing which electrons are being stored". I would be surprised if they can detect that unless they use multiple different colored lasers to detect which frequencies they get, gah, can't think of the right word - electron orbital jump and subsequent fall back to the ground state. That thing.

Of course, I didn't RTFA so I really shoulda just kept my mouth shut :)

No.

[mfh]

Indian outsourcing will never end. They'll just find cow replacements, and considering how much they hate Pakistan... well you can only imagine the horrible spell jamming technology that will ensue. [obscure reference #58830]

Center-Cut hardrives?

[Blacklantern]

this would look kinda funny on a spec sheet 2.4ghz processor 512mb memory 6.2oz top sirlion Hard drive I wonder if the heat processor could cook the hard drive? mmmmmmmmmm Dataaaaaaaaaaa

Look at the bright side

[Engineer-Poet]

You could accomplish secure data destruction and give yourself a protein supplement... at the same time!

Straight from the horses' mouths

[00zero]

The companies are light on details, but this is how they describe their work.

Nanochip, Inc.
Tech overview

Nanomagnetics
Tech solution description

Zettacore
Tech descritption

cheaper and easier

[5amTheButcher]

FMD disks, a third of the way down the page. A lot closer to reality, but also illustrates how pie-in-the-sky so many of these theoretical storage solutions are.

I used to have that t-shirt... sadly, lost...

[Al Dimond]

I don't know if they would grant Apple a patent that broad, seeing that dear Clarus' innovation lies in its dog-cow interface, not in the already-existing dog and cow themselves.

Vegetarians

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

So how are the vegetatarian/enviromentalists going to react to this? Are they going to protect the environment or protect the cow?

Re:Vegetarians

[drinkypoo]

Cows' digestive systems produce prodigious amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas. In addition, grazing eventually leads to soil depletion and a loss of topsoil which can change weather patterns and decreases the quantity of arable land. As such, you cannot simultaneously protect cows and the environment.

Re:Vegetarians

[dstone]

you cannot simultaneously protect cows and the environment.

Within a generation of cows that are already born, of cour you're right. But, if we'd just stop eating the damn things, then we wouldn't have to breed them by the millions. Thus we can simultaneously stop inflicting additional cows on the environment and stop inflicting our unnecessarily harmful practices on cows who would otherwise be born into a life of nothing but suffering.

Re:Vegetarians

[drinkypoo]

Yeah well, meat may be murder, but meat tastes good. The fact is that we evolved to eat a combination of food including meat, and it is probable that we are meant to eat mainly meat. I'd get tired of chicken awfully fast if it were the only kind of meat I ate, so, up with cows! Now on the other hand, maybe we can design some kind of cow flatulence collection system that we mount on their ass and use the resulting product to help solve our power problems.

How do you say that cows know nothing but suffering, anyway? They do spend a few years wandering around eating the best food the ranch can afford to make available to them :)

Re:Vegetarians

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Protect the environment. You can't use "setenv" on a cowdrive.

Re:NetBSD!!!

[nlindstrom]

I give it a year before NetBSD is running on cows!!

Nah, BSD is dead!

Re:I already store my personal data in cow hide

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we all know what your storing in the cow. If you want to call it "personal data", go for it.

Yummy

[itsnotthenetwork]

Stop, your making me hungry. mmmmm, cow guts...... Droooollll....

I can see the future...

[Billy the Mountain]

ID...Step Name.........Type....................
1....Backup Database...Transact-SQL Script.....
2....Chew Cud..........Operating System Command

Cult of the Dead Cow

[Lethyos]

I wonder what the cDc's take is on all of this...

What is that god-awful smell?

[triffidsting]

Oh, its just our new server farm. Whew!

Interfaces

[ledbetter]

So if your new Hard Drive is made with cow protiens, will the interface be Cereal ATA ? ;)

yes, but

[Knights who say 'INT]

Will Larry the cow be satisfied with the state of current Linux distributions?

Will there be APT (the package management system with Super Moo Powers) repositories in this?

How about ultradensity storage I can actually buy?

[swb]

These articles show up from time to time here, and they never seem to materialize into real products, at least not at a price point that anyone outside of the Military-Industrial Complex could afford.

What's next for REAL data storage?

Cow Patties!

[john_smith_45678]

We have silicon wafers, floppy disks, CD platters, so I nominate the following as a name for this new technology:

Cow Patties!

Name that Product!

[PMuse]

Yes, soon all our memory will be Cow Chips.

So....

[Vinnie_333]

So...I should hold out on that 250GB drive I was gonna buy, then?

What would really be cool is ...

[Vaginal Discharge]

if we can engineer these protein memory to "grow" as our storage needs grows. Make a transgenic system where modified bacteria or yeast can make self assembling versions of these proteins. Then these proteins will integrate themselves onto your existing storage medium. This way, add some nutrients to your storage system and it will keep growing. Cool huh?

THREE bits, not FOUR

[Theovon]

Perhaps I don't get it, but if each molecule can hold up to 8 electrons, and you can somehow determine how many it's holding (but they're interchangable, like storing them unordered in a bucket), then you can only use that to store 9 different values (zero through 8), which is about 3 bits worth of information.

If they're not interchangable, then you have 8 bits, which is... well, 8 bits.

But the fact is, I doubt they can count the electrons, let alone make a measurement without disturbing the molecule, so I would expect those 8 electrons to be a necessary level of redundancy (like how more than one iron oxide crystal is used to store a bit on a hard disk platter) in order to get any reasonable amount of redundancy.

Re:THREE bits, not FOUR

[neonleonb]

The blurb said that they measure charge, so we can be sure: no, the electrons are not interchangable, since you can't distinguish between the charges of 2 different electrons.

If I could mod you up, I would. It's definitely not 4 bits.

This adds a whole new meaning to....

[linguae]

beefing up your computer.

Re:This adds a whole new meaning to....

[linusunil]

hmm so that's what "Longhorn" is all about?

Re::: ducks ::

[linuxpyro]

I wonder if it would be possible to create this kind of storage within an animal as it is still alive... One of my cats is pretty fat, he'd probably take quite a few terabytes.

PROFIT!!!

[nusratt]

Excuse me while I go call my broker to check the price on cattle futures.

Oooh, so THIS is how it started...

[TheCyko1]

I get it now! Skynet is trying to kill all humans because of mad cow disease!

McDonalds

[newtbrick]

So the songs are going to come inside the big mac now?

BS.

[QEDog]

This article is so much Bull Shit.

Wow, that wasn't offtopic!

Uhm... Oops...

[Hobadee]

You: Hey! Where did my file go?
Farmhand: The one that was in Betsy?
You: Ya, the file was in Besty...
Farmhand: Well sir... You ate the file last night...

Was that Jerky?

[ackthpt]

Ooooh! Beef jerky! Rghghgh.. *chomp* *chomp* *gulp* Aahhh!
</Homer>

Hey, has anyone seen our system backup?

<Homer>
D'oh!
</Homer>

Atkins Danger

[Bruha]

That's real cool but I'd hate to have to hide my data from carb fearing atkins dieters.

Re::: ducks ::

[uberdave]

Obviously the animal to use for data storage is the elephant.

New programming language.

[BigZaphod]

Well this is the perfect application of my COW programming language! It should run like.. umm.. some really fast thing!

Re:New programming language.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Why not just make a BrainFu*k isomorph, instead of the giganticly complex kludge you created? Like Ook, the programming language of chimpanzees!

BlueFern can compile and run BF, and can convert to Ook! (along with quite a bit of other stuff. I've included an example Moo.lng file for BlueFern's conversion mechanism, this works with a Moo language designed as a BF isomorph.)

<NAME>
Moo!
</NAME>
<EXTENSION>
Moo
</EXTENSI ON>
<COMMENTS>
</COMMENTS>
<HEAD>
</HEAD>
<AD D>
Moo. Moo.
</ADD>
<SUB>
Moo! Moo!
</SUB>
<OUTPUT>
Moo! Moo.
</OUTPUT>
<INPUT>
Moo. Moo!
</INPUT>
<POINTUP>
Moo. Moo?
</POINTUP>
<POINTDOWN>
Moo? Moo.
</POINTDOWN>
<LOOPBEGIN>
Moo! Moo?
</LOOPBEGIN>
<LOOPEND>
Moo? Moo!
</LOOPEND>
<FIRSTTEN>
</FIRSTTEN>
<CLOSE>
</CLOSE>
<CREDITS>
BigZaphod
</CREDITS>

Re:New programming language.

[BigZaphod]

Why? Is there something wrong with being slightly more original than just doing what everyone else has already done except with different tokens? I realize that COW isn't much different than BrainFuck, but that wasn't intentional at the time. Actually, it happened rather accidentally since I hadn't really looked much at BrainFuck before doing COW--it just turned out very similarly.

I also don't see how COW is a "giganticly(sp) complex kludge." But... whatever. Your defined COW-variant is cool--but it isn't COW.

In any case, COW is an esoteric language. Being efficient or somehow compatible isn't even remotely the point anyway. Its all about having fun and playing with ideas.

You should erase the drives with these:

[Kris Thalamus]

Every good sysadmin should have a few cow magnets to spare.

Artificial Intelligence

[tchernobog]

They always said that a big problem about A.I. is to implement the enormous flow of data that an artificial ``mind'' has to manage at every second. Think about just one of our five senses, the main, and about a not-compressed AVI file continously being scanned for information...

Now we discover that complex proteins (if I got it right) can be the right move in this sense... so what's the path? We always think about A.I. as sentient _machines_, what if we discovered that the only way to implement intelligence, is through what we already are?

I read somewhere that memory density in a human gene is about 10^25 bits/m^3, around 1'164'153 gigabytes/mm^3. Do these researches bring us a step nearer the goal of recreate intelligence providing the technology for a new ``steel'' memory?

Technology is always going forward. But maybe it's science we lack... us computer geeks should keep this in mind, since we often confuse the two things.

Sickening

[foolip]

Animals (most of them anyway) aren't ours to make food, clothes or hard-drives from. It's pretty amazing what "products" parts of the dead end up in... I hope this technology never makes it out of the lab.

New Company Name

[chris_mahan]

Introducing: Menudo Storage Systems.

What goes around ....

[psydid]

And now we're right back to getting information by reading entrails. Guess I better work on my shamanism degree.

Straight from the cows mouth!

[coopaq]

"Drink my milk, eat my meat, where my skin, store your data in my guts! I don't give a fuck."

Eh?

[tietokone-olmi]

Shouldn't that be bovonic media, if it's made from the proteins in cow guts?

Gut Strings?

[Star_Gazer]

Thank god it is cow and not sheep gut.

Otherwise I could see myself in a few years, playing cello with geeks around that keep steeling my gut strings because "my gut is full".

Disclaimer: I am not yet playing on gut string, but plan to do so when being advanced enough. My current set is Jargar Medium A+D and Dominant G+C. Not that anyone here would care :)

Well...

[Big_Kahunaca]

It would come with 4 times the storage right out of the gate......

You know what they say...

[Pig Hogger]

Garbage in, garbage...

At least, it's COW guts, not BULL guts.

Re:How Moo-ving!

[tehshen]

Measured in hamburgers, indexed by reastaurant: McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc. (Although I'd be more than worried if McDonald's burgers contain 1048576 times the bit storage capacity as Wendy's)

the good thing

[gotem]

is that "The dog ate my homework" excuse will work again

If a molecule can store one nibble...

[maxchaote]

If it only takes two molecules to store a byte of information, does that mean Google's next server rack could be the size of my pocket calculator?

Perfect for bullshit.

[Axe]

Pefectly acceptable place for Bullshit data, I guess.

Holy Cow!

[swimgeek]

Had to say it.

Re:Troll!? (yes, I know it's OT)

[Bastian]

What, and the parent wasn't a troll? Let's leave the troll moderation to people who are actually trolling rather than using it to push a side in some half-assed squabble.

It's true that this cow-gut memory storage device wouldn't be vegan, and it's fair to poke fun at vegans over it. But it's also true that the hormones and additives that go into mass-produced meat have adverse effects on humans that have been measured and documented in research. (Real, peer-reviewed research. All that bullshit pseudoscience 'research' that PETA and its spinoffs do doesn't count.)

What was that thing they used to tell us in grade school? Something like "Don't dish it out if you can't take it, too."

Wohoo!

[Solokron]

Now I can store 2 terabytes of porn in my penis!

Re:The nuance

[Bastian]

I think maybe the nuance here is that doing what's right for the environment isn't always fun. To the extreme environmentalist, it doesn't matter how good meat tastes because the only thing that matters is the environment. To the extreme hedonist, it doesn't matter how much you're harming the enviornment because you can't be bothered to make concessions for things like that. Nobody's saying anything useful with an argument as cursory as "Meat is murder" or "Meat taste good."

While we're on it, the evolution argument is totally shaky. We also evolved to hunt and gather for food rather than sit in cubicles typing all day to earn it. This fact is clearly illustrated by the problems we have with obesity and RSI related to our sedentary lifestyles. You can also make a fairly defensible argument that we did not evolve to be monogamous in any way shape or form, but that's still not saying that monogamy is a bad way to live your life.

Hell, if you're going to argue evolution, then it's silly to even pretend that you can argue about what we were meant to do. Evolution is about as existential a basis for an argument as you can get, and if you're going to accept it as a valid method of reasoning you've got to be willing to abandon arguments based on concepts like predetermination or some sort of Grand Purpose (unless you somehow fit God into the scheme, but that's also completely aside from the point).

You can use evolution as a basis for an argument if you're willing to argue that we should be slaves to our genes, but at that point you're pretty well forced into agreeing that we should be squatting under trees eating (and wearing) raw scraps of rotting carcasses becuse that is, in fact, what we evolved to do.

Unless you're willing to further argue that our brains allow us to go beyond the limits of our basic evolutionary foundations. But then you've suddenly gone full circle and admitted that you can't use evolution as a sturdy argument for anything because you've just really argued that we should be exercising some reason and agency in our choice of lifestyle.

And as one last point, the whole thing about how much a cow suffers has a lot to do with the farm practises. Free range cows do spend a few years wandering around eating the best food the ranch can afford to make available to them. Too bad everything that isn't explicitly labeled free range generally comes from feed lots rather than ranches.

At least

[commodoresloat]

it gives me a chance to finally complete my business plan that I've been working on. This is what I have so far; thanks to slashdot I can finally fill in step 2:

1. Collect cow guts
2. ???
3. Profit!

vegans are sellouts

[commodoresloat]

I won't eat anything that casts a shadow. So there!

(now where's my pocket mulch?)

Cow proteins?

[snic]

Shouldn't that be Bovonics then?

Will any of this actually prove useful?

[Bralkein]

It seems like I hear about these "breakthroughs" all the time. I hear all about carbon nanotubes, being able to store a terabyte in a 1cm^3 glass block, and now bits of dead cow, electrons stored in molecules, and liquid silicon.

I think it's very impressive that so much research is going into all this, but I still have the same old kind of hard disk and the same old kind of optical disc that I've had for years. Solid state storage seems to be pretty similar too, the only thing that seems to change is the size and speed, but not so much the basic underlying technology. I'm starting to wonder just how many ways there are of storing data, but more importantly, how many of those ways are actually practical. I am concerned that maybe there are a few people who are just making a lot of fuss about nothing much in order to make themselves sound more important. I just want to see the research dollars going to good use. I mean really, really honestly, is a cow truly going to provide the ultimate storage solution?

Can anyone actually give me a good example of one of these recent breakthroughs that is actually going to come to market anytime soon? I want my USB toothpick data storage!

Milk

[zaphodchak]

Imagine, getting a free DVD, download, file, or whatnot in your bottle of milk. Mmm; pasteurized, digitized, 1% milk!

I Can Go For This!

[Master of Transhuman]

Melt humans down and instead of using them for "Soylent Green", use 'em for chips!

Or put another way, use cow chips for chips!

I forsee the return of the Old West

[Oloryn]

Or at least the cattle rustling part of it.

Why do I think...

[sjs132]

Now Viruses will really corrupt your data! Also... In Mother Russia, the cows use your to store their data! Sad... Sad...

Mad bovine memory module

[Mitch Monmouth]

Now corporations accused of fraud can blame the loss of "missing files" on mad cow disease.

Re:Troll!? (yes, I know it's OT)

[Bastian]

This is true. The growth methods used in agriculture nowadays severely deplete the nutritive qualities of the food, and a lot of the chemicals probably aren't that healthy, either. A lot of GM foods tend to be a lot worse, too.

Of course, these things tend to concentrate as you move up the food chain, so there's a decent chance that you'll find more pesticides and herbicides in a pound of beef than a pound of corn.

Cowboy Bebop

[ryu1232]

So when can i have my Data Dog, and can I name him Ein?

Deja vu!

[quarkscat]

Who says that history does not repeat itself?

FROM:
(A) oracles reading goat's entrails

TO:
(B) Oracle Databases reading cow's entrails.

We have come a long way, baby!

Chip ethics?

[akh]

Having to ask the salesman whether the RAM is Vegan... Never expected that would happen!

virus heaven

[wolflike]

Could a cows internal storage contain viruses/virii ?? we could be in trouble if there is any crossover