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Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB
CAMags writes to tell us that a Harvard Professor is claiming to have developed a new variant of a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR) that, when layered on a DVD, can store up to 50TB of data. From the article: "The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and color before returning to its 'ground state.'"
It's alive!
bacteria, not a virus. Your data's safe.
....or is it? MWAHAHAHA!!!
I heard they're buggy.
Isn't that the guy from the Simpsons?
http://religiousfreaks.com/I hear the copy protection stinks!
My apartment isn't messy -- it's just data backup.
Disclaimer: I'm Indian as well.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Now I want to program in RNA so that it generates the DNA automatically for me. And then, watch the ____ out!
- Kal`Goblez
Just a bottle of Lysol.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
It's probably gonna be extremely impractical and mega expensive. We'll have forgotten about it in 36 hours anyway.
Just hearing the "VD" will make it impossible to get a date! Now include the geek part?!? Fuck 'N A
Can't we call it "Ferrari"? That way I can walk up to a girl and say, "I have a Ferrari".
It's all good and well, but who can stand the smell?
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe I'm crazy, but what I want from portable data storage isn't more storage space but a much faster data storage option. What I want to hear is that someone has come up with an optical/solid state storage option that can perform at 1GB/second in the lab (and they will have a production model within 10 years).
50 TB of sweet, sweet porn.
FTA :
:
However, there's a flip side to it also.
"Science can be used and abused. Making large amounts of information so portable on high-capacity removable storage devices will make it easier for information to fall into the wrong hands. Information can be stolen very quickly. One has to have some safeguards there," he added.
It's funny, it reminds me the answer I gave to the interviewer at my first interview
- Now that you tell me your qualities, I will ask you at least a drawback
- Mmmh, I think I'm too perfectionnist, I can sometimes take too much time to do something perfectly well...
I hate all sigs, mine included.
They've inadvertently created the first computer to require deodorant.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/bionet.microbiolo gy/browse_thread/thread/29e4ea67615297b5?hl=en
I remember this stuff from the mid 90's. They were layering it on WORMs back then.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Lonely women with much time on their hands form an organization to fight the bacteria holocaust that happens when discs get scratched or trashed.
"They too deserve to live!" They'll say...
Will Sony add it to the PS3 so they can finally push the price to 4 digits?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"Prof Renugopalakrishnan now opines that the protein layer could also allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information."
In other words, Duke Nuke'em Forever will be released on these discs.
Can you say vapor ware?
Any time you use an organic compound for storage, you need to worry about the organic half life of the device. Writable optical media uses organic dye, and will only last several years in storage. I didn't see anything in the article that indicated this technology would be any better...
FTA:Since the intermediates generally only last for hours or days, Prof Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues modified the DNA that produces bR protein to produce an intermediate that lasts for more than several years.
I'd like to know a little more specifically how long "more than several years" is. Anyone want to enlighten me on the current rate of decay on hard drives?
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
Data capacity is one thing, unless it lasts longer than magnetic tape without special housing requirements I would imagine this will be filed under 'Interesting but forgotten'.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
ok so they can write data that small, maybe I am confused but I thought the advances to dvd and now to "blu-ray" had primarily to do with the laser being able to focus on an increaseingly smaller area to both read and write to the disc. So I'm thinking there will have to be some major major advances before anyone can read or manipulate that data. This whole concept seems pretty far out there and maybe just someone trying to get some hype and funding. but who knows.
Now I wonder what caveats are there to overcome.
Normal CDs are actually "damaged" by the laser during recording. Here it's about photochemical effect. Much lower power may be needed which may allow for more data but also for really fast erasing the DVDs by simply exposing them to light. More, how to return it to base state? Seems not to be rewritable. The data lasts a few years. Would there be some "refreshing process" needed?
And last but not least: Is there anyone interested in manufacturing it, or will the harddrive makers buy the patent, then bury it to prevent competition?
There were quite a few such "revelations" like TESA-ROM (1TB on a roll of transparent adhesive tape) but they all vanish without trace... why?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What happens if and when the bacteria mutates? What happens to the data then?
This is an intereting technology non the less.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
So what if "Information can be stolen very quickly." I'm sure people were saying that back when hard drives increased into the low megabytes too. I'd hate for this sort of technology to fail to filter down for such a stupid reason.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Imagine the datarate if I were to hop into my car, drive across the country, and load this disk into a computer in California.
Even if the trip takes me 48 hours, that is still 303 MB/s!
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I wonder why these numbers are so greatly exaggerated. Why can't scientists leave the theoretical figures behind and talk about realistic numbers?
Anyway, once we actually reach data storage of that magnitude on a disk, we'll have to face the problem of seek time and transfers. It would be ridiculous to post so much data on a disk, so when this technology is mature, I'm sure disks will be obsolete.
Scientists should spend more time on figuring out how to leave the world of milliseconds and approach the nanoseconds. Remember, the only thing that's running on milliseconds in a computer is based on platters. I'd rather move on from that and get my 50 TB later.
Full Tilt
to clean your DVD's.
Why don't we just store all our data in strands of DNA and be done with it.
;)
Then we could carry arround our entire porn collection in a small cancerous lump on our neck.
50 TB should be enough for anybody.
Good ol' Bill.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Feeding your movie collection!!!
PFY to BOFH "The database is growing too fast!" BOFH "Stop feeding it."
Guy with long name invents something
Joy
Hanky the Christmas Poo!
:)
I can see it now.. they will make a turd shaped burner.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
lasts for more than several years Thats a good's good enough for me! hmmm...
Because you can - or because you should?
I remember reading about this compound or something very similar back in ~1995, in one of the popular science or computing magazines. It claimed there would be organic 3d memory cubes in 8 years.
These guys just can't win...
Technology like this rarely ever goes commercial. Selling this one will be even more difficult when you imagine your data is being stored on boogers.
Currently theta testing the prototype "Event Horizon" server-scaled desktop box with a 50 Gigameg of Ram.
FTA:
Since the intermediates generally only last for hours or days, Prof Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues modified the DNA that produces bR protein to produce an intermediate that lasts for more than several years.
Straight from the horses mouth: not really. Honestly, I don't really need archival quality retention of 50+ years, I'd be fine if my removable media lasted reliably for 10+ years. As it is, I'm not convinced that database backups my company makes on CDs will last more than 5. Arguably we don't need data that's older than five years, but for accountability purposes I'd rather it be a gauranteed shelf life of 10 years, or at least as far back as the IRS would look in case of an audit.
><));>
Gives a new meaning to "dirty movie".
Interesting: anti-biotics and hostile microbial interaction, (and light itself) could endanger the data.
I wonder how carefully these 'discs' would have to be stored?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I think it's worth mentioning that the protein in question is notoriously difficult to work with. As a G-protein-coupled-receptor (GPCR), it's normally found spanning a cell membrane: aka imbedded in lipids (fats). This makes it very difficult to work with from a solubility/structure standpoint.
Depending on what you consider acceptable for a structure, people have only known the atomic-level details of rhodopsin for the last few years (http://tinyurl.com/jtj6gPDB). Bacteriorhodopsin has been a bit more accessible, but it too is a fairly recent structure. For a protein as highly studied as this family is, that's not much time at all. This is why so much effort has been placed on really convoluted methods to obtain the structural information indirectly. For one example that involved some computational methods, see http://tinyurl.com/kawwr.
And here's another thought for you: GPCRs transmit a photon signal to a physically-transmitted biochemical cascade. So although you can make rhodopsin change conformation with the right light-based input, how can you read the structurally-conferred output?
Although I appreciate the fundamental science being carried out by the research group mentioned, I think it's bad form to mislead the general public with overreaching claims. If you're really interested in high-capacity storage, I think that the engineered protein cages, based upon viral capsids and similar structures, have more potential for nano-level storage as a means to create highly regular, tailored metallic materials.
if you are interested to see the surface of such a storage media before even somebody have build it, have a look here: http://www.pdb.org/pdb/explore.do?structureId=1QM8
and just imagine not seeing only one protein but a whole lot in one surface :)
greetings from a molecular biologist!
I've got the whole world... in my hand...
I, for one, welcome our new 50TB storing Halobacterium Salinarum overlords.
Man is it just me or did no-one have anything of value to contribute? (yes the question is framed ironically)
I for one welcome our bloated bacterial overlords.
I wonder if it has an odor...
It's always confirmation bias!
I find it strange - even prejudiced - that the man's ethnicity be bought into the headline of the article. Am I missing something that links this bacteria to his 'Indianess'?
bR has been an exciting "material" to work with for some time. I remember back in the early '90s when I first read in Mondo 2000 about a report given at the 2nd International Nanotechnology Conference from researchers at a Japanese university. Apparently they were looking at the potential to design an optical computer using bR since it reacted to light in the femtosecond range. I am glad to see that optics and speed are still sexy enough to keep inventors interested.
~ psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
In a related story, MPAA requests an injunction against a harvard professor in attempt to block production of a 50TB storage device for consumer PCs. When asked for the basis for such action, an MPAA spokesperson stated "There is absolutely no legitimate use for such large amounts of storage, the only use we can ascertain is hosting of illegal movie downloads for re-sharing on P2P networks."
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
How many Libraries of Congress in 50TBytes?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 50TB DVDs!
Say hello to my little sig.
Why yes son, it was kind of dirty, so I just cleaned it with my anti-bacterial spray.
...
AAAAAAAHHHHHH!
it's not dirty, it's organized using stochastic improbability theory
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...oops, it's not readable anymore.
Selling 1000TB bacteria-laden refrigerator, Firewire + USB, $200 obo.
of someone buying a patent to "bury" a good technology. Just about every elementary economics textbook clearly demonstrates how that if the technology truly has a benefit, the company would make MORE money by using the new technology than hiding it.
What happens if I drop my hard drive (or there is a leak)?
I go on vacation and come back to find the cat is dead and all of my neighbors are sick....?
We'll have forgotten about it in 36 hours anyway.
A dupe article will come along in a day or two to remind us.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I have a obsessive compulsive disorder over germs (you insensitive clod).
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
eom
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Storing Windows Vista on a disc using bacteria...
Sounds like a suitable medium for the data...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And what if my bacteria gets a virus and that virus becomes air borne and kills my cat and then all the cats in the neighbourhood start dieing. Then before you know it the virus mutates and starts infecting humans. End result, end of the world. I mean, it 'almost' happened lots of times before, like with SARS, West Nile and the bird flu. Right?
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I have my outlook calendar living under my toe nail and I backup my blog in the toilet every morning.
Oh yeah, Bill Clinton didnt have sexual relations, he was just backing up his ipod on that woman's dress.
How about another application--- ;)
Discs that "auto expire" if not kept in the fridge
No, seriously.
They currently have another problem. How do you read the data? The protein is colored and shaped differently if it's been activated by light; either we use some sort of biological reader that bonds to the rest state of the protein but no other, or we shine light on the disk to see what color each bit is--oh, looks like that file is just 0xEEEEEE and takes up the entire disk...
If there are multiple intermediate states, could more than one be used by the device? Instead of base 2, could it use base 3 or higher?
Esoteric reference.
ehmmm... does it work on linux?
..except the discs are square instead of round. They are calling it bacteriorhodopsin-ray. Catchy.
These would be great for data security!
Today we have to burn, shred, and otherwise annihilate drives when we're done with them in order to be certain our data is safe... With these we simply open the top and wipe them down with your favorite anti-bacterial soap!
Though, that may be a problem if anyone wants to turn these into some sort of DVD-style disk. "Hey, the disk is smudged, I'll go get some soap!"
Does this mean my stack will grow uncontrollably? What about garbage collection? Will this storage medium be under threat from BASIC instincts? Sic 'em, Friskit!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
WOW.... 50TB of porn on a single disc. That's a lot of hot XXX action. You could put an entire internet's worth of porn on one disc. hmmmmm.... 1) Get hold of 'bacteria-ray' discs. 2) Download all internet (Or just get Slashdotter to bittorrent their stashes-same thing) 3) ?????? 4) Profit!!
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
His claim of terabyte storage shows an extreme naivety (or one could argue ignorance) of fundamental physical principles the good doctor should be aware of. It is true that there must be some medium capable of handling data storage on such a small scale, but the real hang-up, at least in terms of commercial viability, is the light source which reads the medium. Any dolt who knows next to nothing about high definition dvd's at least knows the major technological innovation involved is a commercially available blue light source (blue puts the Blu in Blu-Ray), not any groundbreaking technology involving the discs (though to save myself from flamebait, there have been advances here). Now, traditional dvd's/cd's are in the 700nm range, high def systems are around 400nm, and the industrial systems used to make microchips (yeah, these are expensive and not at all portable) can only burn chips 45nm thick. A light source of a couple nanometers (the quantity he uses for his predicted size) puts us into the soft x-ray range. Big deal if we have a storage medium. We won't be able to read or write to it (cheaply enough for consumers, that is) for decades. If I were this guy's employer, I'd investigate whether he ever completed a bachelor's degree in science, much less a PhD. This is a fundamental oversight on his part.
example is one most often cited and quickly refuted. If Exxon, or anyone else, had such a device, they could make far more money selling the engine than the oil - a LOT more. So much, in fact, that any tiny market imperfection would be dwarfed and correspondingly ignored.
Think about it this way - if Exxon could build an engine that saved me 1000 gallons of gas over the lifetime of my car, I should be willing to pay at least a $2000 premium for it, right?
Now, how much money does Exxon make selling me 1000 gallons of gas? Figuring a un-realistically high margin of 10%, they make no more than $300.
Now, if you are greedy-bastard Exxon exec holding the patent for this new engine, which do you do? Sell engines or sell oil?
For the love of Pete, its Halobacterium salinarum. Can we please use latin binomials properly.
50TB, hm, lets see, that should be about the right amount of space to save a lifetime of MP3 in decent quality (1min ~ 1MB, 100y*365d*24h*60m -> 52'560'000), probally even a bit of video when better compression is used. Could be interesting when one day we have enough space to store absolutly everything we see and hear on a single disk, your whole memory on disk.
But is this bacteria harmful to humans? and what if it mutants into something that could harm humans?
How about another application--- ;)
Discs that "auto expire" if not kept in the fridge
I thought we already decided with the original DivX that this was not such a good idea.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You're comparing $2000 in sales to $300 in margin. If you're going to compare sales to sales, then it's $2000 vs $3000. Even if you compared margin to margin, I would suspect they would be in the same ballpark as well.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Exxon has huge infrastructure of refineries, tankers, oil fields. This all would go worthless the moment they start selling these cars.
Junk all the tankers. Sell worthless oil fields. Shut down the useless refineries. Build infrastructure for the new cars. And explain to your competition that they should shift from mining oil to growing corn instead of uniting and performing a hostile takeover. Exxon might start making more money per unit sold, but their current property becomes worthless. Would you rather have $1mln in your pocket and earn $30k/year or have just debts, earning $40k/year?
The new technology would kill current oil industry. An independent startup selling such cars is just as dangerous as a rogue oil company in the lobby making use of such a patent. One profits, all lose. They won't remain inactive. And even if none of the competitors stepped in, Exxon, would take years to pay back for shutting down oil operations and starting the ecological ones.
Seems the textbooks assume zero investment, zero value drop in related market segments, and perfectly honest competition.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Yes, your data will die, but in the given scenario, it will mutate to a virus and EVERYONE (and his cat) will have your data.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Does anyone else find it ironic that
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In other words, $2000 MORE than I would pay for a non-super engine. This is 100% profit for Exxon. Actually, since I assumed gas was $3.00/gal, that number should be $3000, not $2000.
And even if they did, Exxon is getting a 10:1 trade. I am sure Exxon would be willing to let all of its oil fields disappear into the void if I could make ten times as much selling cars.
You need to rephrase your numbers...would I rather have one million in capital, depreciating to zero over five years (standard assumption for a corporation) and making $30k/year, or scrap the capital few hundred thousand and license for my new patent to GM and Ford for $250k/year? You are being confused by sunk costs.
I work for a major corporation. Even in our notoriously-fast segment (electronics manufacture), we project everything into the indefinite future. The bottom line is whether it will pay off in the long run, assuming normal rates of interest, depreciation, etc. We do also have shorter-term targets, as cash-flow is another major issue for a corporation.
Don't be confused by sunk costs. If you built a widget factory, and now realize that a wadget factory would make you zillions, you will build a wadget factory. Yes, they can afford to lose $300 to make $2000...who couldn't? who wouldn't?
The problem of stickiness and compatibility is a real market failure, but unrelated to what we are talking about.
or technology? Yes, they keep an aura of sentimentality around "natural" diamonds in order to keep the prices high in the face of cheaper synthetics, but that is a different issue - taking advantage of customer irrationality. Reminds me a lot of Whole Foods and the like, actually.
So you'd rather own a car company than an oil company?
Exxon pulls in $10 billion in profit a quarter - thanks to goings on in the Middle East.
So with 17 million cars sold in the US in 2005, if Exxon made that $2000 premium on every single one of them they'd still pull in less than their current profits from oil.
So what if it degrades? I'd still love to have 50TB discs that last for 2-3 years instead of a few GB that lasts a few years. This is a new technology designed to give higher capacity, not longer shelf life.
Go back and read the original comment, fucknut. He said buyers would pay a premium of $2000, implying $2000 of margin in addition to the standard margin. So the $2000 to $300 comparison is valid.
A dirty DVD that really *can* give you VD!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
That gives a whole new meaning to "this dvd stinks".
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted
Over the past couple of years I've read several articles about new hyper-size storage devices that have been 'prototyped' like this. Most notably, about cubic storage devices, as well as optical ones. Still, it seems that none of them have come to anything, as we are still using disks just with more platters and smaller dots.
Maybe some hardware site would like to make an overview article of storage device announcements over the past years, and how they turned out? Could be a fun read.
The scientist "Professor V Renugopalakrishnan" said he needs that much storage to save his full name, Angirasa Bharatwaja Yajursahidyayi Rajashekara Yerlangadi Venkata Samba Siva Rao ....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Finally, a disc with some culture on it!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
...the future of optical storage is in negative refraction materials. This technology will never mature in time to beat it.
Why would that be an issue?
/professor/, so he's actively contributing to society. It's not the same as sending the job over there.
He's working. Here. Paying US taxes, and being paid a fair wage. He's a
I'm sure someone here's upset, but they're just xenophobic.
Why is that you hear about all these amazing and wonderful discoveries, but in five years I still won;t be burning or using or hearing about 50 TB DVDs? I hate technology news
...so will the extra storage allow better quality and make movies "come to life" alot more?
They make a lot more money from owning oil (lately at least) than selling it.
Under this hypothetical scenerio, Exxon trades $3k in sales for $3k in profits. That is ALWAYS a winner. The numbers will always work out this way, because margins are always less than or equal to one (and typically much, much less).
True, but do you really want to have to get a UPS for your fridge, in order to keep your data cool in the case of a power outage?
Every time there was a big blackout, you'd have geeks lining up to beg for slivers of dry ice from the power company in order to keep their porn collections from warming up and expiring.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Are bacterial formats supported in linux yet? I'm sticking with Windoze until linux really does everything it should do, like play my entire DVD collection from one disk. My Ubuntu box also still hasn't learned voice recognition yet, even though I swear at it a lot, and it has yet to wash my car, even once.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Must rewrite the data after reading it every time. sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow !
you can't leave your new hard drive in the car - proteins denature at 120 oF ....
can't leave the hard drive in the car - protiens denature at -20oF
There is a long list of people who have proposed using biological molecules such as proteins and dna in electronics apps.
I challenge someone to give me a SINGLE example of a billion dollar product, or anything even close.
Hint: the first, and one of the most succesful products from the whole biotech/genetic engineering thing was better laundry detergent additives......
bio molecules are fragile things that are incredibly $$$ on almost any basis, and the handling of these molecules wold require complete revamping of mfr lines, eg, proteins and dna exist in sterile water with a little salt.....
Well... In that case soon the media industry will push for some kind of legislation that makes it utterly illegal to store discs in fridges, and guess what? they will start selling you content on that kind of discs, and when you say that the new Britney Spears' VHD-DVD your daughter bought last week stinks, well... for the first time, your daughter will agree with you about it.
Your ad could be here!
Wow! You managed to read things into my post I couldn't even have IMAGINED.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Couldn't a protein CD be easily wiped by the heat of thermite instead of metal magnetic disks? Wouldn't this be a much better solution then that giant permanent magnet system on rails to wipe a drive securely.
"more than several" huh? Gotta love that level of presision.
Develop A superlens. Since it isn't affected by the diffraction limit, you can focus any light you want to any scale you want, right down to the atomic layer. The "only" problem is that e and u have to both be exactly -1, but once that material is created, look out optics...
Ironic? I find it more inspiring that such a diverse range of people can communicate about the same thing, and that this truly is a global age.
Does anyone else find it ironic that /. (which is a US-based site--with readers from around the world) posts a link to an article from an Australia news site, talking about developments of an Indian-born scientist, working in the US?
No. News sources in the US suck!
my vote goes for "BVDs".
fridges will become illegal circumvention devices
Free as in mason.
How about another application--- ;)
Discs that "auto expire" if not kept in the fridge
I thought we already decided with the original DivX that this was not such a good idea.
CONSUMERS decided it wasn't a good idea.
The **AA would probably LOVE it.
Imagine:digital data that degrades...
Your 3 day rental from Blockbuster wouldn't ever have to go back...
Actually, if I were a greedy exec and I was holding the patent I would hold the patent until the oil was running out or enough nations privatized oil to hurt my profits, then, and only then, would I start to make royalties on selling engines.
Rhodopsin is a very interesting protein.
It was a favourite model of protein scientists in the 80-es because it is one of the very few proteins that will easily form crystals. It is also extremely stable (for a protein) in its non-excited form. So if any photosensitive protein is ever used for storage it is possibly the best candidate.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Manufacturers have moved to inorganic materials only, e.g. silicon-copper alloys, which seem to offer much better stability than organic dyes, for the first generation of the new 30-50 GB disks at least.
Here's an article on a disk that stacks several different types, each of them inorganic:
TDK develops 200GB recordable Blu-Ray disc with six layers
That changes things, but not in the way that you expect. It makes it even MORE impossible to keep the genie in the bottle, according to basic game theory. Exxon would have every incentive to introduce the engine under this scenario they did before. So would Shell or GM or whoever owned the competing technology. Any way you cut it, the marginal choice is $2000 or $300 (actually, the $300 is too high, because Exxon would not be eating just its own business, but that of Shell, Chevron, etc). Outside of idiotic regulation, which is essentially implausible in this situation, nothing would stop this from coming to market.
Bacteria** can grow at an exponential rate*, so perhaps this is the first storage device which will keep itself alive and increase it's storage space. ;D
* Given 'standard nutritional conditions' and an 'optimal temperature'
** I am not a Biologist or anything close to that (IANABOACTT)
People with a lot of data-erasers (a.k.a antibiotics) will be considered terrorists under the "Keep Our Data Alive Act"...
With current write speeds on consumer-level drives and the bus that they're connected to, it'll take you the better part of 2-3 years to write 50TB to it.
Two immediate things that come to my mind is
1) do you really need to recover data from more then 5 years ago
2) does your db actually even fit on a cd (only asking cause we have index tablespace which use up several gigs of data much less databases themselves).
/. had an article not too long ago about a Taiwanese company that had developed a 2 TB XD card or some solid state format - something that could fit in a pocket. 50 TB CDs are fine, but still awkward in form and difficult to be carried around.
1. Does this hint at the revival of the pocket PC market or uberphones with 1-2 TB micro drives?
2. Will they finally be able to unleash the resolution reins on cameras (which, to my understanding have been limited by the solid state memory cards)?
3. Will HDTV / TiVo have a different face now that large amounts of data can be piled in?
4. Will bandwidth squeeze become an even larger issue when storage becomes a non-issue?
I would love to see endless memory...I just wonder what will change most on the consumer side which has been so limited by storage in the past.
Just give it a nice dose of Penicillin or Erythromycin, and you're done. (Ensure the full course of antibiotics are taken, otherwise super-resistant storage strains will result...)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
...that windows Vista will ship on it? :-)
You just *know* than my other sig is funny...
Editors get it wrong again. I studied this technology back in 1998 for a technical writing class. Only then the target was to create a cube (1cm^3 would hold 1Gb) and make 3D storage. Of course, it was only 3 years away then.
The protein bacteriorhodopsin is related to the hodopsin family of light & color sensitive proteins used in human eyes. It's just a very unfortunate name that the prefix bacterior was chosen. Nearly everybody makes this mistake. However, if they read TFA they would know that.
[From memory]: Now the really cool part about this protein is it reacts to certain colors of light. Bathing it in red (I think) light causes it to return to a base state (logic 0) and hitting it with the right sequence of blue & green light causes it to flip into a different light reflecting state that is stable (assuming it doesn't get the precise wavelength red light from above) and forms a logic 1 state. The biggest barrier to the technology back then was the state change took several milliseconds and since the physical format was a 3D cube paging addressing was an issue. Basically, it made great archival storage but was too slow at random access to replace harddrives.
Organic doesn't nesessarily mean that it has a short life span. Look at oil deposits, those hydrocarbons have been there for millions of years.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Bacteriorhodopsin must be related to the rhodopsin that is the photosensitive pigment in the eye. It gets "bleached" when exposed to light which is why it takes a while for your night vision to return after looking at a bright light.
My suspicion is that bacteriorhodopsin evolved originally to protect microorganisms from the damage caused by UV radiation, especially in the pre-photosynthetic period in the earth's history when there was no ozone layer. Such pigments are probably the origin of photosynthetic chemicals like chlorophyll. The excess energy absoarbed by the pigments was being put to use to drive other chemical reactions. Our ability to see and plant life may be related.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
First off, a car that doesn't use gas wouldn't shutdown the oil industry. There are still thousands of essential uses for petroleum and derivatives.
There are millions of gasoline cars that would not just go away overnight. Look how long it took to get rid of leaded gas. The phase-out started in 1973 and went to 1996 for cars and 2008 for other uses. What companies like Exxon would do is cut off the investments to maintain the infrastructure, letting it rot as the demand subsides (it doesn't work out perfect, of course). There would probably still be some demand for airplanes, landscaping equipment, etc.
Actually, it wasn't crystallized until 2000 by Krysztof Palczewski. At present, it's still the favorite model of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), since it is the only GPCR that has been crystallized (GPCRs are involved in numerous signal transduction pathways).
If it was "just a change" then yes. But look at the thread above. What if it was a HUGE war (which would likely occur if (unlikely) Exxon did it? The "new" cars instead of being (normally) more expensive than traditional ones, would be sold at huge loss, to gain a market share for one technology. Very cheap new cars, very cheap fuel (also sold at loss to create incentive to use it instead of the competition's fuel), only few fans of the old cars wouldn't move or keep using the old ones. The transition would be rapid and violent. And not only cars... to create more incentive for use of own product, and try to enter other markets. Transition in other domains would be slower (an engine is only a small part of price of a big airplane) and in some would not occur (plastic is not going to go anytime soon) but it would happen.
Still, the up-front losses created by investment into winning the war and likely heavy decrease of value due to much lower demand for oil, would kill or seriously damage all losers of that war. Not worth the risk. Too much to lose, too slim chance of victory, even if the victory would be spectacular. People don't spend their whole salaries on lottery tickets, companies avoid investing in technologies that may bring loss or endanger current position.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Thanks for the correction.
I guess I remember wrong. I swear that I remember quite a few diagrams showing its structure floating around in the days before I degenerated into a sysadmin/network person. Either my memory is playing tricks or that was based on other methods.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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It's considered to be more time stable than hard drives, conventional mass-produced CD's and DVD's, flash-RAM, and others.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Yeah, there were earlier structures based on cryo-electron microscopy and homology modeling.
A fat lot of good those proteins will do on a disk if we can't read and write it. The limitation behind current technology is the laser, not the size of the bit. Red and blue lasers have wavelengths of hundreds of nanometers, so there is no way we could read or write to the protein disks with current cheap laser technology. Blue lasers have smaller wavelengths, which is why blue-ray is able to store more data.
Once you get down to wavelengths in the tens of nanometers or smaller, we're talking UV and X-rays. Those aren't cheap, and they should be able to create smaller bits on their own! This protein technology is useless reading and writing it optically.
It is time to make DNA read/write devices ... wouldn't that be cool!
You could load real viruses in there.
My dream medium would be a disk that could hold as little as a normal CD but it would be able to survive for hundreds or thousands years. People tens of thousand of years ago stored their data in stone tablets and we can still read them today, today's data is stored mainly in digital medium that will be dead in a few years, but as the data looses it's importance it you begin to fade away. I can imagine that in a few thousands of years from now the 20th century will be akin to the dark ages, no one will know anything about what happend.
Also posterity problems aside, I would like to backup data and forget about it until it is actually needed. This is my dream.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
costs unless they wanted to. They simply could license the technology to GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. Actually, this is what they would do. They could license it to close to $3k per engine (allowing the car companies and consumers a small cut, just to lure them along). It would then lose a few hundred bucks in gas profits for each license sold. This is absolutely safe and sure as rain. What would be dangerous is to hide the technology and hope no one figures out a way around your patent.
My company regular introduces products that replace the need for old ones - we eat our own lunch all of the time. So does every other company on earth. Why? Because if our new product is better than the old one, we can sell it for more. There is more surplus benefit (consumer + producer) to capture, more pie to be divided. As long as we hold the patent, we can make the consumer just a whee bit better off and keep the rest of the new pie for ourselves. This is a mathematical certainty.
I am no longer infected.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066765/quotes
Hey geek's, nerd's, and ppl with too much time on there hands. When/If this tech ever comes out, I will find a way to share it! everyone will be able to upload to it. video, programs anything... this belongs to the world eh.
cost 200 times what a potato does (or your computer's main processor costs a few hundred million times what the dirt it was made from cost) then we do not have much to discuss. I have no idea what you are talking about in most of these cases. You can buy cheap crappy cables, awesome cables, and everything in between. The difference is more on the outside than the inside - are they coated in cheap plastic or quality material? I don't think I want a printer cartridge that is five times as big. Five times as cheap would be nice, but ink ain't cheap. There is plenty of competition in that market. Are you just bothered by the "sell the razor cheap, sell the blades high" business model? It is quite common, and is not indicitive of a problem. If you think big pharma could cure the common cold but chose not to you are absolutely ludicrious, and know virtually nothing either about medicine OR business. Curing the "common cold" is like curing cancer - both are not one condition, but hundreds of variants. Therefore, there is no "cure". And yes, big pharma has done lots of work on tackling some of the more common types of viruses. If and when they make a successful drug, they will make zillions.
Uh huh...the econ PhDs are wrong. I should trust a guy on slashdot, who just says it is so!
So does soda. The former have a large volume and are fragile, the latter is heavy. Heck, the transportation costs for gasoline are more than 5%...and gas is easy to move. I not have a color printer. Waste of money and effort. I can print pictures for 12 cents at dozens of online shops. Printing b&w on my crappy inkjet is similar in cost to having it done at a print shop (8-10 cents/page).
There are virtually no drugs for "the common cold". There are over-the-counter treatments of the symptoms, but nothing I know of for treating the disease is actually out of the lab.
Most of those econ PhDs are making six figures and/or and have summers off. Tough life.