Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density

Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.

Comments

Other specs?

[Harmonious Botch]

How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc.

Re:Other specs?

[Enlightenment]

Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble. From TFA. Wouldn't this imply that they think its mean time to failure is pretty long? Of course, they didn't say anything about speed or durability. But nanoscale changes should happen pretty fast, right?

Re:Other specs?

[Enlightenment]

Whoops. That should read:

Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble.

From TFA. Wouldn't this imply that they think its mean time to failure is pretty long? Of course, they didn't say anything about speed or durability. But nanoscale changes should happen pretty fast, right?

Re:Other specs?

[NemoinSpace]

How about letting them build the thing first? Or do you suggest we form a statistical opinion based on the two or three prototypes that might exist? #places in circular file under vaporware for 18 months.

Re:Other specs?

[Danny Rathjens]

I was curious as to your claim of "shelf life of like forever" for the InPhase disks, so I checked them out.

50 year media archive life http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3

Among the manufacturers that have done testing, there is consensus that, under recommended storage conditions, CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD+R discs should have a life expectancy of 100 to 200 years or more http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4.html

Plus InPhase only sells the 300GB version now. Your claim to be able to call up and get the 1.6TB discs must have been made 3 to 4 years in the future since that is when their website says they will make the 3rd generation disks that are 1.6TB.
Plus one of those drives costs $18,000! (and the 300GB disks costs $180). I could build a RAID and replace hard drives every few years and still come out ahead price-wise.

Re:Other specs?

[MadnessASAP]

Really? You have $18,000 just lying around ready to blow on a holographic drive which looks to be about 2x the size of a Shuttle PC. Not very portable and ridiculously expensive, not exactly the best choice in thumb drive if you ask me. Of course you could use it for backup but even then a 1 TB drive costs about $400 so for the cost of that drive I can get 45 TB or more worth of storage and I'd be willing to bet that a disconnected HD placed in a fire safe is going to last a hell of alot longer then the 50 year shelf life InPhase gives their stuff.

Re:Other specs?

[Shuh]

You know why? Cuz right now I can pick up the phone and get a functional drive and disks that can hold 1.6TB each with a shelf life of like forever. And of course speeds of 120 MB/s reading. This 18 months stuff isn't going to cut it.

This article on inPhase from a few months back says "InPhase plans a second-generation 800GB optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MB/sec., with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010." (emphasis mine) So unless by "today," you mean "3 years from today," then yeah, you can get some sweet 1.6TB storage.

And you might want to check your credit balance before you whip out your credit card for one: "At US$18,000 for a holographic disk drive, InPhase has priced its product roughly mid-point between a $30,000 enterprise-class tape drive and midrange tape drives such as LTO tape drives, which go for around $4,000. The holographic platters will retail for $180 each." Of course, this is the amount they are charging for the 300GB version that was supposed to start shipping back in July. But you should be able to get this today -- if not "today."

Re:Other specs?

[X0563511]

They should be fairly durable, at least at rest. From the sound of it, it would be just like solid state in terms of hardiness (insanely good)

Speed... might be an issue... we will see.

Re:Other specs?

[pushing-robot]

I dunno, a cheap, low-powered memory technology should be good regardless of the speed. For one thing, you can RAID any number of individual cells, for another, most drive space in PCs and handheld devices today is used for music, photos, and video, none of which are especially disk-intensive. Even 1080p Blu-Ray is only ~5MB/s.

But that doesn't mean I have high hopes; /. rarely goes a week without some miracle new storage technology yet I'm still using hard drives and the odd flash chip.

Re:Other specs?

[Dr_Barnowl]

could build a RAID and replace hard drives every few years and still come out ahead price-wise. Everyone repeat after me ;

"RAID is not a replacement for backup."
"RAID is not a replacement for backup"

RAID does not protect you against rm -rf / , or another idiotware/malware.

Re:Other specs?

[julesh]

How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc.

FTA:

Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble.

"Almost infinitely reversible" suggests longer lifetime than flash.

Also, the "free-floating state" of the atoms not used to store 1s suggests that the "vaporware" tag is doubly appropriate.

Re:Other specs?

[Nosklo]

The new memory technology -- programmable metallization cell (PMC) As vaporware as this is, I'd prefer to call it programmable mentalization cell.

Re:Other specs?

[PopeRatzo]

How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc

Man, you guys are a tough crowd. This is a breakthrough for chrissake. I can imagine if Slashdot had been around when they reported Alexander Graham Bell's famous "Watson, come here I need you" experiment. You'd have been saying "But will he be able to get speech enhancement using minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude estimators?" And asking about Wiener filters.

But that's why I love you.

[he said "Wiener" filter, heh-heh]

Re:Other specs?

[grommit]

Hell, buy two hard drives, put both in the fire safe. Then every 2-3 years copy the data from those drives to new drives and you'd still come out ahead of that InPhase product.

Re:Other specs?

[Machtyn]

I hope you realize that wasn't his point. His point was, he could build a RAID setup to get 1.6TB, replace the drives once a year and still come out ahead when the 1.6TB single drive comes out. RAID 1 is not the only RAID out there.

I also get your point. RAID 1 is fault tolerance, not backup solution.

Re:Other specs?

[WuphonsReach]

Definitely not price competitive.

In the real world, I think the price point for a 300GB holographic disk is around $2000-$5000 for the reader/writer and $100-$150 for the disks. Otherwise, you may as well buy one of the 200-400GB tape units. Even then, I think the drive needs to get below $1500 and the media needs to drop below $100 per disk before it will be useful (to me).

Or I'll just continue swapping SATA disks... Figure $50 for the SATA tray and $80 for the SATA drive. For a lot more capability but with a much higher weight. But the big advantage with SATA drives in trays is that you're absolutely not locked in to any proprietary format. Any PC in the world that can deal with that filesystem can talk to the hardware.

Removable storage needs to be about 1/2 to 1/4 the cost of hard drives in order to be economical. Tape can get away with 1/2 the cost because it is (somewhat) reusable, but write-once media needs to be under 1/4 the cost.

Re:Other specs?

[nizo]

Actually Slashdot was around back then, but since there weren't any computers it was just a dozen or so people sitting around in a circle talking about stuff. Lack of technology wasn't the problem, since it all abruptly came to an end when several hooded strangers kept showing up day after day and setting people on fire; the first ever flame war was grim indeed.

Re:Other specs?

[CKW]

No, we would not have wanted to hear about Alexander Graham Bell's very very first prototype - not when we'd be forced to listen to 500 crackpot theories and 2000 other half-assed experemental prototype results, of which only one (and it'd be impossible to tell which one) would pan out.

Come back to us when you're selling/building the first 1000 phones Mr. Graham.

Similar to when the first plasma's were on the market for $10,000. We didn't want to hear about the plasma ideas and prototypes in the 1980's.

Re:Other specs?

[Arterion]

I do nightly backups from our production server to a second server. Both are running RAID. So effectively, I backup one RAID to another. Maybe that's what the GP was talking about? Making a specific "backup" server on his network, instead of tapes? Sure, this is different from tapes, but it's got advantages and disadvantages.

Re:Other specs?

[HiThere]

Unh...about those "soft spots":
such as the relatively limited number of write cycles

You *are* aware that this particular soft spot only exists because it doesn't matter for the designated application, aren't you? It's cheaper to build flash ram that wears out more quickly, and "more quickly" is sufficiently far in the future that most people will lose their thumb drive before they ever encounter this problem. If they cared, they'd use wear-leveling NAND flash, but it's cheaper not to, and the current version is "good enough for the purpose".

If they wanted faster speed, they could "RAID" the chips. They don't want the extra cost and complexity.

So your "soft spots" don't exist.

Presumably the people who licensed the patents got a better idea of what they were buying, but from here it looks like the target is either a video distribution system, a hard disk replacement for portables, or both. Whether either or both of these are practical depends on lots of details that won't show up in the popular press. Also, these guys are research scientists, not production engineers. The virtues and downfalls of their lab model don't say that much about what the production-for-sale model will be like.

Re:Other specs?

[HiThere]

I notice that you're reporting a consensus of the manufacturers.

Their opinion is in direct contrast with other opinions that I've heard recently (although not specifically about "InPhase". The opinions that I've seen put the shelf life at a couple of years...and specifically said that after about a decade the plastic would be so degraded that it couldn't safely be handled without cracking, and that it would have lost much of it's transparency. And that's only if you had stored it under ideal conditions (at standard temperature and pressure...but no light exposure at all, and sealed).

Now it's true that the comments were about standard DVDs. And they did admit that the original CDs (the ones on metalic films between glass plates, with pits burned into the metal to write [not a mere phase change of an alloy]) could be expected to last indefinitely...and even to be playable for centuries if stored under reasonable conditions (which included flat with no uneven pressure on them). But this wasn't true of the modern reformulations which were designed to allow low powered lasers in customer equipment to write them.

I notice that the CILR report specifically claims stability for the plastic used to seal the disks. This was specifically denied by the other report that I read, so that gives you one particular thing to investigate before you decide that the report is trustworthy. The other claim, that the phase-change alloy wasn't stable over time, would be much more difficult to check, and different DVDs might well use different alloys, so what is true for one might well not be true of another.

P.S.: I'm skeptical of BOTH reports. Current DVDs haven't existed in their current form for any natural aging tests to have been done. As a result, any projections of the stability of the current disks are, at best, educated guesses. Accelerated aging tests have a very poor history, being quite succeptible to biased or otherwise improper guesses as to what kinds of stress would mimic natural aging in a shorter timespan.

Re:Other specs?

[Danny Rathjens]

Yeah. Getting the deep truth on disk longevity seems very complicated. So I just simplified by comparing the manufacturer's claims against each other. I figured we could deduce from InPhase merely claiming 1/4 the time the cd/dvd-r manufacturers do that they do not think their disks are much better in that regard. I suppose there is a possibility that InPhase is just a lot more honest than the rest. ;) But it seems unlikely they have any longevity advantage as it stands.

Re:Other specs?

[Danny Rathjens]

Yes, that's what I meant. rdiff-backup *to* a big RAID costing a small fraction of $18k. We were discussing archival/backups - write-once media, no less! - not live servers. I actually have raid5 on web servers, raid0+1 on db servers, those all rdiff-backup to raid1 backup server, and then rdiff-backup off-site across the net to yet another raid1 backup server. Building multi-terabyte raid servers is very cheap nowadays. This method allows for backup restores as quick as it takes to copy the data. The big drawback is the finite amount of space - but it's re-useable and hardrive growth has been robust for several decades. ;) Maybe there are legal/ISO requirements for WORM stuff that necessitates wasting so much money, though. There are always trade-offs. :)

And it will be released in 5 years

[Daimanta]

Togheher with your flying car. No. Really.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[rubycodez]

ah, just in time for the Year of the Linux desktop, you mean. I look forward to using them in the Paperless Office we'll all have.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[robzon]

... aaaand with Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled! Yay!

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[risk one]

It's a shame that all that extra productivity will be completely negated when everybody gets addicted to Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[Spy der Mann]

It's a shame that all that extra productivity will be completely negated when everybody gets addicted to Duke Nukem Forever.

...included in the Spore doublepack!

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[timeOday]

I do think the paperless office is arriving. I work at a normal big company and none of our processes are paper any more. They've even decreased the frequency of internal mail deliveries because it was underutilized.

Looking around the web, I see a lot of stuff from around the year 2000 about how the paperless office is a myth and paper use increased for the previous 20 years, but more recently we seem to have turned a corner. Not that we'll be truly paperless, but the growth in demand for paper is less than GDP growth and usage per worker is actually falling. There's even a quote from a paper company in there.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[wlad]

I'm especially looking forward to using it in the fluently English talking board AI computer of my solar-powered, emission free, flying car.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[kiltyj]

Yeah! And Starcraft 2! Oh wait...

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[Nemosoft Unv.]

It seems you are not working at the company described in this WTF article...

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[timeOday]

Actually that sounds quite a bit like where I work. Paperless doesn't necessarily mean efficient :)

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[WuphonsReach]

I do think the paperless office is arriving. I work at a normal big company and none of our processes are paper any more. They've even decreased the frequency of internal mail deliveries because it was underutilized.

I'd contribute that to a few things:

- The web browser - which makes it easy for certain types of applications to be rolled out quickly

- TCP/IP - Five years ago, a lot of folks still didn't have dial-up. Now it is probably rare that you know someone whose computer does not talk to the internet over TCP/IP

- Larger desktop displays. A 22" 1680x1050 LCD is modestly priced and is an absolute dream size. It's large enough that users can actually see two documents on the screen at the same time. (The previous size, 1440x900 was also a good size in the 19" category.)

But I still print things out to jot notes on. I still have a clipboard and a pad of tablet paper on my desk to write on. So, technology isn't quite there yet. It would take something like electronic paper that I could write on, which would act like an extension of my PC/laptop. Watcom style tablets aren't good enough, because I can't carry them around or see what I'm jotting notes on. Tablet PCs are overkill (I don't want another PC to deal with).

It would need to be around 9x12, maybe 1/2" thick, 200-300 dpi, with the ability to display documents and allow me to take handwritten notes on it. Basically a rudimentary display and smart input device that I could carry around or use as a scratch pad. It will have to use industry standard formats (TIFF?) and allow users to print to it easily and move documents from device to device. Basically, a super-sized Palm III.

Re:And it will be released in 5 years

[rubycodez]

haha, what industry is that company in, we deal with government (city, county, state) and there is mountains of required paperwork, electronic version is NOT an option. bet the contracts your company signs are on paper

Oblig.

[thatskinnyguy]

Who on earth would ever need more than a terabyte?

Re:Oblig.

[snl2587]

I think it's not so much that humongous storage will be available, but that such storage will be so small. With this kind of technology more reasonable data storage sizes will be available at much smaller physical sizes, clearing the way for all sorts of new technology.

Re:Oblig.

[Asm-Coder]

* - Joke

  O
-|- - You
/ \

Re:Oblig.

[Justus]

Holy shit, the joke cut his head off!!!

Re:Oblig.

[tulare]

It was the nam-shub, obviously...

Re:Oblig.

[Seumas]

As soon as they reach a terabyte, I'll only need to buy eight of them to fit all my porn on. I, for one, am eager to see this technology realized.

Re:Oblig.

[Paradise Pete]

Holy shit, the joke cut his head off!!!

I thought he was just hanging his head in shame, but maybe you're right.

Re:Oblig.

[jamesh]

You could actually have a thumb drive implanted in your thumb!

Re:Oblig.

[jollyreaper]

Who on earth would ever need more than a terabyte of porn? Corrected it for ya. Resolution so high, you can count the genital warts.

Re:Oblig.

[Chandon Seldon]

There's this neat camera technique called "not zooming in so much". Although more detail in a shot framed the same way is nice, being able to see more context along with extra detail is awesome. This is actually one of the points that's *more* obvious when you think of porn, but it's just as true for conventional movies and TV shows - with higher resolution you can have a scene with someone talking without zooming right up on their face.

Re:Oblig.

[A nonymous Coward]

No, I think he just spaced out ....

Re:Oblig.

[Eggz Factor]

It's called IMAX.
30,000 lines of horizontal resolution in 2D.
30,000 lines of horizontal resolution foe each eye in 3D

Where is the IMAX porn?

Re:Oblig.

[Greyfox]

Well you know you start downloading those 3D pr0n files complete with sensory details and the space adds up really fast...

Re:Oblig.

[Belacgod]

Actually, Imax porn would be thoroughly awesome.

Re:Oblig.

[Ex-MislTech]

Time for the RAID5 array of 1 Terabyte USB keys....LOL

Re:Oblig.

[iNetRunner]

Well, sword fighting can do that to you. :) Though, if he was lucky that was only in the Black Sun.

Re:Oblig.

[Farmer Tim]

Another victim of a rapier wit.

Re:Oblig.

[pushing-robot]

Actually, there are some things better not seen at 586x magnification.

Re:Oblig.

[Anpheus]

My random number generator compresses very well, allowing me to store exobytes of random data.

I just use int rand() { return 4; /* determined to be suitably random via dice roll */ }.

(Credit: Randall Munroe at xkcd.com for part of this joke or the xkcd followers will flame me until I am but a charred husk of a person.)

Re:Oblig.

[jollyreaper]

There's this neat camera technique called "not zooming in so much". Although more detail in a shot framed the same way is nice, being able to see more context along with extra detail is awesome. This is actually one of the points that's *more* obvious when you think of porn, but it's just as true for conventional movies and TV shows - with higher resolution you can have a scene with someone talking without zooming right up on their face. This is true, but even at conventional distances, HD shows you a far more human picture than the actors would like. For example, the local news broadcast, it's now in HD. The camera is no closer than before but the extra detail shows off the flaws and imperfections of the human face. I would say this is a good thing because too many people see the smooth complexions resulting from pounds of makeup, studio lighting, low-resolution cameras and soft filters and think "Wow, that must be how she really looks." Too reality-distorting. I think the wrinkles and crow's feet will help give us some desperately needed perspective.

Re:Oblig.

[baker_tony]

you're one of these people who still watches broadcast TV, aren't you? Bittorrent, that's what these disks are designed for in my book :-)

Re:Oblig.

[TeknoHog]

Don't you mean: Who on Earth would ever need more than a Terrabyte?

Re:Oblig.

[Hoi Polloi]

I'm not ready for 586x butt pimples and pubic hair stubble.

Vaporware.

[The Iso]

We've all seen this a dozen times before. All "amazing density storage" is vaporware, even if we'll be able to buy it real soon now.

Re:Vaporware.

[thatskinnyguy]

Not to mention the price per gig will be ridiculous. Why not just get a MyBook or something similar and say to hell with all of this vapor nonsense.

Re:Vaporware.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Are you kidding me? putting 1.44 Mb on a 3 & 1/2 inch disk still blows my mind. If there is a nuclear holocaust, and I'm the smartest person left alive, I'd consider myself a genius if I could get to that stage. Or I suppose, as the smartest person alive, I could just invent a clay tablet and They'd worship me as a god. yeah, that seems easier. But still, man 1.44 mb! un-freaking-believable.

Re:Vaporware.

[rbarreira]

I don't think most people nowdays appreciate how much 1.44 MB is...

Re:Vaporware.

[The Iso]

I don't mean to say that we'll never have the advertised storage density - we all remember our first 100 MB system, or 1 GB system, or 100 GB system, whatever seemed impossible to fill at the time we were growing up - but you're joking if you don't have a product on the market which someone has bought.

Re:Vaporware.

[thatskinnyguy]

Then you would be right up there with Yoshiro Nakamatsu.

Re:Vaporware.

[nmb3000]

Slashdot certainly doesn't. I tried being clever and replying with the first 1.44MB pi (1 char = 1 byte) and got this error:

No discussion or comments found for this request. To create your own discussion, please use journals.

Kind of an odd error to get when it seems like something along the lines of "Post too large" would be more appropriate. A possible bug?

For the record, it was the first 1,509,949 digits of pi and I was quite proud of it.

Re:Vaporware.

[jollyreaper]

I don't think most people nowdays appreciate how much 1.44 MB is... They will if you make them copy it out in punch cards. My high school computer teacher used that as a threat. Then again, she also warned us to keep those little plastic sleeves on the 3.5 disks to prevent the spread of viruses. *shakes head sadly*

Re:Vaporware.

[Waffle Iron]

For the record, it was the first 1,509,949 digits of pi and I was quite proud of it.

You worked a little too hard. 3.5 inch floppy disks were measured in a bizarre combination of 10-based and 2-based multiples. A "1.44 MB" disk actually had a formatted capacity of 1.44 * 1024 * 1000, or 1,474,560 bytes.

Re:Vaporware.

[BillyBlaze]

According to the back of this envelope, on an unformatted floppy disk you can fit about 100 bits on an area the size of the period at the end of this sentence. No wonder the damn things never work. Heh, they were great for getting out of homework back in the day.

Re:Vaporware.

[Nimey]

That depends on the filesystem, does it not? That's the size of an MS-DOS formatted disk. I wonder what size you might get from the same disk if it's Minix-formatted, or HFS-formatted.

Re:Vaporware.

[Kjella]

It reminds me of an episode from Futurama:
Fry: "That clover helped by rat fink brother steal my dream of going into space! Now I'll never get there ..."
Leela: "You went there this morning for donuts."

I mean, take for example flight. It's one helluva achievement isn't it, to fly like a bird. Ever since the dawn of man we've dreamt of it, like the legend of Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci's attempts at a flying machine and so on until finally some daredevils like the Wright brothers actually did it. I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture, disgusted by the food and spent most of my time reading a book waiting for time to pass.

Or this little magic thingie I have that lets me speak to anyone in the whole world, through thin air (not all the way, but I'll skip the details). I mean, would you believe it? Instead I'm mostly annoyed on how it can't always get through walls, that I have to recharge it every so often and that it's part of the "always on" stress of modern life.

For that matter, that I can post this comment on a website halfway around the globe is a wonder of technology itself. That doesn't stop me (or everyone else, it seems) from complaining about their ISP and prices, support etc. or some shortcoming of the applications or protocols or whatever.

I think the point is that if you went around like "oh wow" appriciating common things that much, you'd never do anything but get dazzled all day long. Then again, it probably wouldn't hurt to enjoy what we have a little more, but still... and "how much 1.44 MB is" is rather far down on my list.

Re:Vaporware.

[ThisNukes4u]

If you only wanted to store one thing on it(in this case, digits of Pi) you wouldn't even need a filesystem.

Re:Vaporware.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a metaphor, and theyre mostly made of latex now

Re:Vaporware.

[Waffle Iron]

In this case it means low-level format into blocks and sectors. The higher level file system format is layered on top of this, and this overhead reduces user data capacity to less than 1440 KiB by an amount depending on which FS is used.

Re:Vaporware.

[Sanat]

Nice comment. It sort of follows the glass half empty vs the glass half full quip and really extends to nearly everything we do in life.

I've been a systems analyst since 1962 and have watched the computers go from large as a room to something that is portable and yet more powerful.

The first Hard drive was huge and the heads moved by hydraulics. It had storage of 360KB or so as i recall.

It is really incredible what mankind has dreamed and have subsequently produced with no slowing down in sight. If anything the creating has only become more rapid.

Re:Vaporware.

[ucblockhead]

Yeah....why I remember back in '98 reading a Slashdot article about a clearly vaporware process wherein a magnetic hard disk might someday be able to support almost a terabyte of data. I don't know why they keep publishing vaporware crap like that.

Re:Vaporware.

[ucblockhead]

I remember when I first got a 1200 baud modem and was ecstatically excited to have a piece of communications technology that could actually send text faster than I could read it. It was like science fiction!

Re:Vaporware.

[nmb3000]

You worked a little too hard. 3.5 inch floppy disks were measured in a bizarre combination of 10-based and 2-based multiples. A "1.44 MB" disk actually had a formatted capacity of 1.44 * 1024 * 1000, or 1,474,560 bytes.

While I understand where you're coming from, the GP simply said "how much 1.44MB is". I was going on the basic idea of a megabyte as 1 byte * 1024 bytes in a KB * 1024 KB in a MB. I know the real formatted capacity of a floppy varies by filesystem.

Re:Vaporware.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, I do stop to smell the technological roses frequently. I still get stuff done. Sometimes understanding the way things were helps figure out how things should be. There are a lot of technological dead ends in particular that are really fascinating. Most people don't make the platoesqe separation between the idea behind a device or software and the actual thing itself marred by various flaws.

I think 1.44 is special to me, because that used to be a back up routing I did as an intern. At the end of the day, I would run a dos script that copied the files over to a 1.44 floppy. It was also back up on tape, but working without source control, it was easiest to keep my own back ups than to disturb the guy in charge of the tape machine to see if he could try and find a file I had a month ago that I wanted to look at. I was young and stupid I re wrote grep because I didn't know it existed. I guess if you've every programed at every level from asembly to c,to lisp, to perl, to java, to erlang you really have a sense of understanding of progress and wonderment, which turns out is perpendicular to happiness.

Plus did you ever run the OS/2 warp demo on a single 3 1/2, it was incredible. I had no idea my crappy 386 was capable of such things. But it turned out the boxed version of the software wasn't free so I didn't buy it.

Re:Vaporware.

[MassiveForces]

Maybe you would appreciate it if it were explained in libraries of congress.... anyone?

Re:Vaporware.

[CarpetShark]

Ever since the dawn of man we've dreamt of it, ...until finally some daredevils like the Wright brothers actually did it. I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture...

Your conflict may be caused by mixing two quite seperate concepts: the freedom of adventure --- exploring the unknown, and achieving the impossible --- with fitting into society and going with the norms. Once, simple flight was one. Now, it is the other. The equivalent of flight today would be something entirely different -- more like what Burt Rhutan was doing (prior to the accident at least), or what people do when they build their encrypted P2P network on the ever-more-policed internet. Dreaming a long-since-realised dream isnt going to make you a dreamer.

Re:Vaporware.

[o'reor]

A clay tablet, eh ? Well Dennis Kucinich took it one step further than you : he came up with the pocket-sized Rosetta stone. (clip from the Colbert Show).

Re:Vaporware.

[tsjaikdus]

Poor thing. It's a little off topic, but my high school teacher (also a she) learned me that a steam engine will only work in a vertical position. That's because steam is hotter than air and can only travel upwards. Then again, my education does only provide for a marginal income.

Re:Vaporware.

[leomekenkamp]

Ah, I think that is the pain of getting old. Every time I see a program lagging in speed I think back to the days I had to program assembly language on a 8088 based PC. The 80286 on 6 MHz was quite fast when running highly optimized code (use XOR AX,AX because that was faster (1 clockcycle) and smaller (1 byte opcode) than MOV AX,0).

Around that time, the 30386 came out. At 16MHz that thing could run my programs so fast, it blew me out of the water. Makes me a bit said to see the sometimes abysmal performance and startup times of some applications and OS-es these days...

Re:Vaporware.

[PMBjornerud]

I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture, disgusted by the food and spent most of my time reading a book waiting for time to pass. I'm thrilled every time. I'm sitting in a hunk of metal with roaring engines powered by refined hydrocarbons from half a world away. Every reason to be thrilled.

Humans are good at adapting, the drawback is that we take things for granted after one generation. Flight? There are people living today that would find a supermarket is thrilling. Enormous amounts of food, just sitting in a house and waiting for you.

Re:Vaporware.

[ArsenneLupin]

Then again, she also warned us to keep those little plastic sleeves on the 3.5 disks to prevent the spread of viruses. *shakes head sadly* Why are you laughing? If you had kept on those sleeves all the time, no virus would have spread via these floppies.

Re:Vaporware.

[jollyreaper]

Why are you laughing? If you had kept on those sleeves all the time, no virus would have spread via these floppies. You're going to weep. Our lab was all IBM Model 25's. While you could get these with a tiny internal hard drive, most did not come with one.

So I sit down at my computer in the lab one day and she says I have to use a different one. "Why is that?" I ask.

"This one has a virus."

"No problem," I say. "We just turn it off, wait a few seconds, the RAM will be cleared and I can boot off my class disk."

"You don't understand. It has a virus!" she says, stating this with the wide-eyed self-importance that can only be achieved by someone who doesn't have the slightest clue concerning what they're talking about.

I give her a look in turn, using the tone of voice one uses when asking if coconuts are migratory. "Are you suggesting the virus burned itself onto the computer's ROM?"

She nods. "It could have!"

My eye starts twitching. "So this is what happens when you have unprotected hex?"

"I should think so. I told you not to copy that floppy."

Re:Vaporware.

[Pragmatix]

I think this is what pushes humanity forward. If we spent all of our time being impressed with our last invention, we would never move on to the next invention. By quickly getting bored with our accomplishments we look for something else to invent and briefly impress ourselves with!

Re:Vaporware.

[lapagecp]

I read your whole post and got the opposite message you were trying to send. Its absolutely amazing what we have and what we take for granted. Flight, cell phones, and the internet are absolutely incredible inventions. I was thinking about it a few days ago. I have a treo 700wx in my pocket. Many people would consider this an antiquated phone. Lets says I get a 6gb SD card, an IR blaster, and a wifi card for it then jump in my way back machine and go back 10 years. Now what do I have. I have a device that has the specs of a new desktop pc but also has a built in digital camera with amazing resolution and video capture. It can communicate with wifi if you can find it. It works as an mp3 player for all those mp3's about to flood the market from Napster. Its a completely universal remote. Oh and it fits in my pocket with all the above peripherals for under 1000. This thing was science fiction 10 years ago. Hell look at Star Trek. Captain Kirks communicator has nothing on my treo. I mean sure it doesn't use sub space or anything but I can play solitaire and take pictures of the local flora and fauna while on an away mission.

Slashdot is giving us raw data, here is what is happening in our universities and labs. We can read this and literally see the future. Yeah we may have to watch things and see if they ramp up or fade away but there is value in seeing the future. We might not all invent something as mundane as the treo but you might just get a good stock tip out of it.

Re:Vaporware.

[ArsenneLupin]

using the tone of voice one uses when asking if coconuts are migratory They are. However, they only migrate downwards... preferably when a careless tourist walks under the tree.

Re:Vaporware.

[neomunk]

I remember when I first got a 1200 baud modem and was ecstatically excited to have a piece of communications technology that could actually send text faster than I could read it. It was like science fiction! And I remember being jealous of my friends' brand new 1200 baud modems because my 300 baud COULDN'T receive text faster than I could read it, especially not *shudder* bandwidth hogging ANSI color text!

Re:Vaporware.

[BKDotCom]

I'm sure the 3.5" disk sleeve comment was a joke.

Re:Vaporware.

[Jesus_666]

All "amazing density storage" is vaporware

Like perpendicular recording? (And yes, I did hear the term "amazing density" in discussions about perpendicular recording.)

Re:Vaporware.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

So, we are all ADD?

Re:Vaporware.

[jollyreaper]

I'm sure the 3.5" disk sleeve comment was a joke. The teacher's name was Ada Simple. Now everyone's going to think I've been making this up.

Almost Infiniate?

[WillRobinson]

"Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble."

I would like to know the exact number of cycles this will take, plus or minus a few million times.

The technology looks like it would eventual deplete the material used for the interconnect. But than again I am not a physicist.

Re:Almost Infiniate?

[Hatta]

So if the analogy is like a crystal coming in and out of solution, think about this situation. If you have a sealed jar of saturated salt solution, and you can alter the solubility by changing the temperatures, how many precipitation/solution cycles would that go through before it stops working? Answer, almost infinite. Since the jar is sealed nothing can escape and the system will continue as long as you put energy into it. Now just imagine the same thing with an alloy, except you change the voltage instead of the temperature. Dissolving and precipitating doesn't use anything up.

Finally!

[WK2]

Finally, they will have a viable means to distribute Duke Nuke'm Forever!

Re:Finally!

[aichpvee]

Or a way to upgrade Zonk's memory for dupes!

Re:Finally!

[kaizokuace]

It's not called Forever for nothing. It takes a ForeverByte of storage.

Good news

[djupedal]

"researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years"

Screw consumers - think of the reviewers!

That should give fresh momentum to the "how much is too much?" swag topic taco seems to love so much...heaven forbid we should walk too close to the edge on that one.

In other news - Boston wins series. Yawn...

The problem with this memory....

[webmaster404]

The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[ILongForDarkness]

Absolutely. Also, indexing and searching the junk is an issue. I read a white paper a couple weeks ago about that. Everyone is keeping everything they download, taking a dozen pics a day, and then want to find one thing on their 2TB personal storage array. Also, filesystem efficiency is becoming an issue. Google and other large datacentres throw huge amounts of processing power an cashing hierachies at the problem, but how does that work for the home user? If we have 1TB thumbdrives, then we'll probably have 1PB internal drives, ouch.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[ratnerstar]

Ummmm...wouldn't that count as an incentive?

Re:The problem with this memory....

[Hao Wu]

In order for this professor's idea to work -- it MUST be AMAZINGLY DENSE.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[ScentCone]

The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.

Um... there ARE other uses for lots of storage, you know? Say, backing up in the field after spending a week shooting a couple thousand images per day with a digital camera that writes 50mb files?

Video?

Multi-track digital audio?

It isn't always about Linux distros, you know?

Re:The problem with this memory....

[Artraze]

Do you honestly think that's going to be a problem? Don't you think that the developers are going to care about transfers as well? How about RAM usage? You seem to be thinking that the only reason someone would optimize for size is to reduce its storage footprint. However, it's been true for a fairly long time now that storage far surpasses RAM and bandwidth capacities. Maybe if this technology can provide high performance swap space you might have some slight reason to be concerned, but these developers will have to transfer the data to you, which either means optical discs or paying for bandwidth.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[sammyF70]

may I silently weep ... 1MB/sec ... oh .. what a dream ... Try downloading and installing a Linux distribution with 50KB/s and you'll know what pain is. (Death, in this case, is if you're still on dial-up) Anyway, I agree with you on the principle. Too bad there aren't more progammers able to do THAT.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[SanityInAnarchy]

1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.

Well, things sadly do tend to move at somewhat the same rate. Linux distributions are bigger than they ever were -- to be fair, they include more than they ever did.

But as for coding, unless RAM gets similarly cheap, you're going to want your programs to be small, because they have to eventually hit RAM. That goes for things like cache size and bus speed, too -- big programs are slow in many ways.

And you seem to be assuming that programmers care more about disk usage than bandwidth usage -- I really doubt that.

But anyway, it would seem to be getting less relevant as fiber gets more common.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[doctorcisco]

You thought Linux was an Operating System, which simply enables your computer to run applications? And that these applications are what make your computer useful?

You must be new here.

doc

Re:The problem with this memory....

[Tim C]

if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site

Why would increasing hard drive capacity lead to heavier websites? I've been working in the web for 8 years now, and I have never once heard anyone say "Yeah, the page is a bit on the heavy side, but most people have big hard drives now, it'll be ok". The widespread adoption of broadband has lessened the obsession with page weight to a degree, but most of us still keep it in mind.

Why would an individual program be 300GB? Even if you're talking about a game, the size of the actual executables is insignificant compared to the size of the resources - the textures, maps, music, etc. For an OS, yes a lot of it is executables - but not because they're big, because there's so damn many of them. There's so many of them because it does so much; the days of an OS doing nothing but proxying access to the hardware are long gone. Now people expect (nay demand) filesystem browsers, web browsers, clocks, calendars, remote access software, games, dev tools, office software, media players, news clients, email clients - the list goes on and on. You think Vista needs a lot of disk space now, wait until MS is forced to include a competing product or two for each of the things that come with it, all because people demand choice and competition and their own preferred way of doing things. (But I'm starting to get way off topic there, so I'll stop)

We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.

Not everyone uses their PC primarily for downloading things. Some of us actually install stuff from DVD occasionally, or shoot photos or home movies or write music or create art or any of a dozen other uses that would benefit from increased storage space.

Re:The problem with this memory....

[sammyF70]

you mean, downloading and installing at 50KB/s? I live in the carribeans (can never get the spell of THAT right), and 512kb/128kb DSL is the only affordable option here (50 euros/month ... a 2Mb/128Kb line costs 99 euros a month) Getting a CD by postal mail actually takes longer than downloading the ISO (the last CD I received by mail took 1 and half month), and then you still have to get all the packages you might want that are NOT on the CD (or the DVD set). So ... it's either downloading and learning to be patient, or sticking to Windows or Macs. Never bothered with it when I was still on dialup of course. at 3 or 4KB/s, it would have been really hopeless.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[djupedal]

* how to back it all up
* how to secure it

Your newness is blinding - try Leopard's Time Machine...

Re:This is only part of the problem

[CatoNine]

Errr, providing the hardware actueally works:
- how to back it all up > On another one or two
- how to secure it > Using RSA crypto & blowfish
Nuf said.

oblig. gargoyles reference

[akirapill]

FTA: "Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible." Remember that gargoyles episode where like half of australia gets covered in nano crystals? That's what your room looks like after a drive failure.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[cheater512]

Mr. Darwin will take care of it I think. :)

Ah... disruptive technology...

[jamesh]

It's always fun when a 'disruptive technology' comes along and devalues all the research in similar fields. Assuming that this is what it claims to be, I wonder where 'moving parts' storage will be in 5 years?

Re:This is only part of the problem

[Jeremi]

how to back it all up

Buy two, they're small.

how to secure it

Best way is to build in a Bluetooth interface with encryption, then swallow the memory module. (small grappling hooks will secure it to the lining of your small intestine). That way if the bad guys want your private information, they'll have to (quite literally) go through you to get it.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[SamP2]

how to back it all up

I trust the manufacturer's word. I have no reason to believe a solid brand-name disk would ever fail.

how to secure it

Nobody needs to hack me, because I have nothing to hide!

Cost vs. Price

[Boogaroo]

It may cost 1/10th the cost to make, but I submit that we'll be charged double the current price simply because it's "new and improved." Just look at CDs vs. Tape or VHS vs. DVD.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[SnoopJeDi]

And also compare the price of VHS in it's heyday to the price of a DVD now.

When tech is new, it's always more expensive. That's why it costs so damn much to be on the cutting edge. But the prices curve down in decent time, as new super-expensive tech is invented and replaces it.

It's simple economics.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[Artraze]

I doubt it. CDs were a different product, and therefore a chance to extract mondo bucks from consumers. The "new and improved" argument had a little to do with it, but copyright and forced obsolescence of tapes was what actually allowed for the higher price. (i.e. Consumers had to buy the expensive new option because they had no choice otherwise, not because they were willing to pay the artificial premium for the newness.)

For this, however, there is no similar mechanism. To most consumers it will just look like a normal flash drive and work like a normal flash drive. Joe Sixpack doesn't care about the technology, and probably doesn't even know flash dives have limited write cycles (not that he'll ever approach them). Unless the new drives offer more memory or a better price, there will be no reason to buy one.

Of course, in the embedded market, this would be huge due to reduced power consumption and write cycles (which eliminates the need for wear leveling). Also, for more extreme environments (I'm looking at you, space) the fact that this memory changes physically and doesn't simply hold charge (which is rather easily changed) is also a major plus. Even with these advantages, I doubt that there will be any sort of price inflation in these markets either since these buyers know what they're doing.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[ddrueding80]

1/10th the cost per GB to make, with 100 times the capacity. Even if it were that cheap, these things won't be cheap.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[Boogaroo]

Interesting thoughts on this angle of the discovery. I had expected the "cost of development" and "new tech is always more expensive because it's not selling as many units," but you've gone another step. To wit, I'd not thought thoroughly about the fact that my examples weren't as "apples to apples" as I had intended.
It's interesting to think about the implications for space travel and the physical aspect of the media this offers. It'll be interesting to see if this tech plays out as well as we're imagining it.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[zenslug]

DVDs and CDs are very very cheap. We're talking about the physical media, not discs with content that you are paying for. As many around here complain, CDs are super cheap to produce. The cost of an audio CD is not linked to the price to physically produce.

The same will hold true of any new storage media. If it is indeed 1/10 the price, expect it to indeed be around 1/10 the price once manufacturing volumes ramp up.

Re:Cost vs. Price

[mgblst]

Blank cds and dvds now are a lot cheaper than tapes ever were. I think you are making the mistake of comparing them when they have added value (content such as music and movies).

Re:Cost vs. Price

[east coast]

I think you are making the mistake of comparing them when they have added value (content such as music and movies).

Not even. At least not on the DVD vs VHS aspect. I remember when 20 bucks for a video tape was the bargain bin price. Today you it's the norm for a new release DVDs.

Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but

[Ancient_Hacker]

Conventional memories rely on moving electrons in and out of insulating wells. This works both reliably and quickly. Reliable because it's a simple electrical process. Quickly because electrons are very light.

Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.

This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.

Re:Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but

[MisterCaptainFunKill]

Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.

Did you even read the article? It talked about the technology being 1000 times more energy efficient than what's currently in use. This isn't actually that hard to believe. The statement from the article that the process is nearly reversible speaks to the thermodynamically reversible case in which infinitesimal amounts of energy are used in each step of a reaction. Considering they're talking about assembling copper ions into nanowires, I think the speed will be quite reasonable. I mean, on the atomic level, reactions happen at the femtosecond scale and the actual solution is probably also going to be optimized for ion mobility. In terms of reliability, there isn't much you can do to screw something up at that scale if the thing is produced properly to begin with. I imagine if anything were to 'wear out', it'd be the array to which these ions affix to form the bridge.

I'm really interested to see how this technology matures, but as for now it sounds like a perfectly natural progression from what we have.

Re:Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but

[Waffle Iron]

If I'm not mistaken, the signaling delay of conventional circuits is dominated by the reactance of the electromagnetic fields, not by the momentum of the electrons. Therefore, there's not much basis to conclude that the momentum of copper atoms moving over a couple of nanometers distance will cause a significant delay reletave to an electronic circuit saddled by its capacitance and inductance.

Re:Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but

[Hells Ranger]

Actually the technology they present is quite realistic. I did look at the article and the technical paper available on their website. They are talking about building the conducting bridge in an heavily doped material where the conductible material are sphere of approximately 20nm with a spacing of approximately 2nm(approximately 2 atoms diameter).Submitting such a solution even if it a "solid material" to a differential potential will create a field who could cause something like electro migration. Depending of the field applied the particle in the matrix will stretch or contract the conductible material and create/destroy bridge. A movement of a few atom at that scale doesn't require a lot of power and in a matrix atom without a solid crystalline structure it would be made rather easy by the available hole in the structure.

For the number of cycling the material can do, they rate a rather big number of cycle. For that part I still held my doubt but for the rest they seem ok.

Good news for pirates

[LehiNephi]

On the other hand, having cheap storage on this scale also means that one of the largest barriers to HD-DVD/BluRay piracy will suddenly vaporize--everyone can have more than enough storage for all those pirated movies. Of course, the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...

Re:Good news for pirates

[Firethorn]

the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...

I can think of a traditional solution, used for games back when I was a kid...

Sneakernet. Hard to beat that bandwidth.

Of course, they're starting to offer 100mbit and even gigabit lines to the house, there was an article claiming that a scientist could get 100x the bandwidth out of copper a couple weeks ago*.

Worst case, netflix and it's competitors.

*Of course, I'll be surprised if his solution gave more than 2X, but it's out there.

1 TB

[dgun]

It would be great if they made it look just like a floppy. I would pull up a command prompt and format it everyday, just so I look like a smarty computer guy to all my coworkers.

And what a great excuse, "Sorry sir, I will get that report to you as soon as this thing formats. Oh, look at the time. See you in the morning."

Read/write (especially WRITE) speed?

[SamP2]

Cheap? Cool. Large size? even better. Energy efficient? Meh, I'm not in Greenpeace, but sure. And I'm even willing to believe it's reasonably reliable.

But how come nobody's concerned aobut the the IO speed? I wouldn't be too concerned about reading, but if writing/rewriting requires real-time rebuilding of gates, wouldn't it be snail-slow?

The IO of even regular hard drives already becomes a significant factors as drives grow exponentially larger and speed stays the same as always. If this is even slower, it'd become a serious deterrent.

Re:Read/write (especially WRITE) speed?

[safXmal]

I went to the website http://www.axontc.com/ . and found following description;
"Key Benefits
PMCm has a number of unique attributes that make it a highly attractive component for future systems on silicon:
Operation at low voltages ( 0.3 V)
High speed write and erase operations
( 30 ns)
Low energy to change state ( 1 pJ)
Physical scalability to tens of nm
Easy integration with IC logic circuitry
Operation as a low refresh-rate DRAM or as a true non-volatile memory with high endurance (based on the programming mode).
These features define a class of devices that are essential for projected electronics systems and which will be difficult to realize using developed versions of today's circuits. "

Hope that answers some of your questions

Re:Read/write (especially WRITE) speed?

[rprins]

It really irks me when someone says "Energy efficient? Meh.". You have any idea of the power consumption of PC's nowadays? It's almost like having your vaccuumcleaner on all day. Contrary to what you may believe we really should be more efficient with our power use. And if this will help all those server parks consume 10% less in five years that would be a great feat. Seriously, energy matters.

And I don't even think it's mentioned here because it's "green", energy consumption is always important in hardware, mainly because it also determines the heat generation. And it's an indicator of the electrical resistance, also influencing speed.

As if you have to be Greenpeace to appreciate energy savings.. pfff, a normal human being would do.

Re:Read/write (especially WRITE) speed?

[DanQuixote]

I wonder how many G's it can take. Does a 1 meter drop to concrete break all the little wires and "erase" the drive?

Re:This is only part of the problem

[DigiShaman]

how to secure it

The guys over at Ironkey.com seemed to figured that one out.

One down, one left to go.

I'd like to believe it but....

[mark-t]

... my gut says "no". In my experience, announcements of revolutionary technology that are much more than just a few months away from commercialization are typically attempts at funding for research on a proposed project, rather than an actual announcement of an existing viable product.

Re:I'd like to believe it but....

[julesh]

.. my gut says "no". In my experience, announcements of revolutionary technology that are much more than just a few months away from commercialization are typically attempts at funding for research on a proposed project, rather than an actual announcement of an existing viable product.

It seems they've been working on this, with funding, for the last 10 years. This technology has been licensed to actual NVRAM manufacturers (Infineon, according to their web site). I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[Presence2]

Don't forget how to power it. What's the point of exceptionally large storage for portable media devices if you still have to recharge every couple of hours before utilizing a fraction of it...be it either video, music, document/image processing etc. If only battery technology could follow the development curve of miniaturization even slightly.

Realism....redux

[Danathar]

Bla..bla..bla.....

Lots of cool stuff promised by lots of people (some of whom are cool).

Wake me when I can buy it.

Re:Realism....redux

[tomstdenis]

Well yeah questions not asked/answered

1. Yield, what are the production hazards, just because it's smaller than NAND flash doesn't mean it's cheaper.

2. Wear. How many re-writes can it suffer?

3. What temperatures can it run at, etc, etc, etc ...

Tom

A politically incorrect question

[saltydog56]

The technology sounds great, and if they come through with it I am sure it will lead to many innovations. However, am I the only one who feels a little uncomfortable with research done at a state university, funded by the public, and performed by unpaid or low-paid grad students being licensed by "Arizona States business spin off, Axon Technologies"

I know that type of arrangement may be common place today but I sure would like to follow the money trail.

Re:A politically incorrect question

[feyhunde]

As would I. Honestly the prof whose name is on the office door and the grant writer whose name is on the building are going to split the profits with the university.

If the grad students play nice, they get paper credits and a shot at a good paying job out of this. If they make noise and try and get money, they'll get screwed. It's happened before, and even if the grad student was working on an basement project at home and their job is just TAing, most University contracts say they get any pattens while employed, regardless of the job.

Diskless

[meeya]

are diskless machines gonna make a come back?

Energy efficiency not meh

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Energy efficiency is not at all arbitrary if it is coming out of a battery.

That's not an engineering problem.

[SanityInAnarchy]

We already have all kinds of good encryption.

Assuming this is cheap, you just buy another one to back it up on. (And if it's not cheap, you probably can't afford the first one, anyway.)

The bigger problem is a social engineering one. Someone is going to forget to backup, and someone is going to get their data stolen. But you can't solve these with technology any more than you can cause them with technology.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[deopmix]

I kinda wonder how much apple would charge to change the battery on THAT.

Speed may not be a problem (we'll see though...)

[adamkennedy]

At nano scales, physical processes are not necessarily slow...

Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies

[CustomDesigned]

That is really cool. Sure, rsync has been doing that for years for us geeks, but Apple took the concept and gave it a name and metaphor that I think everyone will understand. The metaphor will still work when they introduce the Apple remote Time Machine service for internet backups. I don't have a Mac, I'm a Linux guy (like to hack on projects), but I can appreciate excellent UI design.

Re:Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies

[Solra Bizna]

rsync makes incremental backups?

-:sigma.SB

Re:Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies

[TechwoIf]

Yes it does through the use of hard links. An example is rsync -aP /home/ --link-dest=/Media/usbdrive/20071105/home/ /Media/usbdrive/20072705/home/

I can not remember where the web page is located that had the info I used. Google return several pages, but only touch on "link-dest" for a short paragraph. Rsync docs are your best bet for farther info.

Re:Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies

[thue]

rdiff-backup, which uses the rsync algorithm, does. Works very well too :).

Re:Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies

[Solra Bizna]

Interesting, I didn't know about that feature. Time Machine has a few extra features (which could be implemented with a script) and a nice GUI (which could be implemented with a nice GUI), but now I see what GGP meant.

-:sigma.SB

Re:This is only part of the problem

[JensenDied]

* how to secure it
Your newness is blinding - try Leopard's Time Machine...

I see nothing related to security on that.

It also says that it "copies the entire contents of the computer", which isn't backing up a portable storage device which is what gp was questioning.

Hourly backups on removable media like your key chain sized USB drive is also a horrible approach as you would like to backup on connection and on disconnection without needing to wait for the backup to finish.

Well, youngin, many of us remember...

[CFD339]

our first 16k systems, our first 12 Megabyte hard disk (external) and the massive full height 80MB one that came along later. Anyone own a SHUGART drive?

Re:Well, youngin, many of us remember...

[Sanat]

We used 8" shugarts. The advantage it had over the other brand -Seagate Technology is that it ran cooler because the power was removed from the head stepping motor once it was on track/cylinder.

Al Shugart created Seagate Technology company and then lost control of it and thus created the shugart drive.

I heard that Al Shugart died a few months ago. A great mind and one of the inventors of the very first disk drive while at IBM

Re:Well, youngin, many of us remember...

[epine]

I recall the 5MB hard drive in an early generation IBM PC. Took something like four hours to run a format cycle, which even then seemed outrageous compared to 360KB floppy disk write speeds. Hated that machine. By the time you installed a compiler or two, no room left to do any work. On the 10MB machine, you could compile a program, *and* generate some listings to help debug the compiler (errors in the compilers of that era were almost as frequent as errors in my own code). One I recall from a C compiler: initialize a global variable with a pointer to another global variable? Not today, apparently.

For some reason, for all these years since, the storage curve has remained largely constant, with the exception of the jump forward when IBM release pixie dust and PRML technology at about the same time. The rule of thumb is that by the time the kinks are worked out of a new approach, the cost or performance is no different that what was on the curve already, and the technology either finds a specialized niche, or dies completely.

Bubble memory, anyone?

18 months?

[jcr]

Holy cow, that's fantastic. If I could carry my whole DVD collection on my iPod, I would. Not to mention, that dropping the storage cost like that would also make 4K video feasible.

-jcr

Stability?

[Effugas]

Someone mentioned that it takes an extraordinarily small amount of energy (1 pJ) to flip bits.

Will this be stable in the field? I mean, EMF should be able to elicit those kinds of potentials fairly easily.

Re:Stability?

[MrConspiracy]

IANA(condensed-matter physicist/engineer/etc.) but I assume that if they make this a mainstream product, they're going to package it pretty tightly: something to keep all those dissociated copper atoms together, some shock absorption, and maybe Faraday cage-like shielding to isolate it from EMF.

Re:Stability?

[julesh]

Someone mentioned that it takes an extraordinarily small amount of energy (1 pJ) to flip bits.

Will this be stable in the field? I mean, EMF should be able to elicit those kinds of potentials fairly easily.

I'm not sure about the energy requirements, but something I just read suggested it'll need about 0.25v to flip a bit. I don't suspect ordinary EMF exposure will be able to build up that kind of potential on such a small structure.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[Toandeaf]

Wait, are you suggesting that the only use, or even the main use, of portable storage is for using it with a laptop when you are not near a power outlet? Personally, I thought they were mainly used for backup or carrying large amounts of data with you when you are traveling. DVDs work fairly well for when you are on a plane.

Ya but...

[scarboni888]

Will they run Linux?

Re:Sucks to be famous

[Falladir]

tag the above "playingwithfire"

Re:This is only part of the problem

[djupedal]

"I see nothing related to security on that."

My bad - I forgot that OS X doesn't offer anything whatsoever in terms of security...sorry.

Writing Time for 1TB via USB?

[Zymergy]

How long would it take to fill a 1TB "Thumb Drive" over USB2? or even USB3?
Some Numbers...
1TB = 1024^4 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
USB 2.0 Transfer Rate = 480 Mbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_2.0
USB 3.0 Transfer Rate = 4.8 Gbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_3.0
1 megabit = 10^6 = 1,000,000 bits which is equal to 125,000 bytes or 125 kilobytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit
1 gigabit = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bits (which is equal to 125 decimal megabytes or 119.2 mebibytes, as 8 bits equals one byte) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbit
Some Math...
Time required to transfer 1TB over USB 2.0 @ (480 Mbit/s) is: (1,099,511,627,776 / (480*125,000)) = 18325.19 Seconds = 305.42 Minutes = 5.09 Hours
Time required to transfer 1TB over USB 3.0 @ (4.8 Gbit/s) is: (1,099,511,627,776 / (4.8*125,000,000)) = 1832.52 Seconds = 30.54 Minutes = 0.51 Hours
So,
Even if the USB 3.0 specification meets its proposed data transfer goal, 1 Terabyte would take about 1/2 Hour to transfer.
-I hope USB3 is around the corner SOON, because 5 HOURS over USB2 is a bit too long to wait while transferring 1TB onto a USB2 Thumb Drive!

Re:Writing Time for 1TB via USB?

[Jesus_666]

Note that USB2 isn't as fast as theoretically rated, usually acheiving something around 320 Mbit/s. So you'd need about 458 minutes or 7.6 hours to fill it.

Maybe this stuff will bring FireWire-3200 to the consumer... (Most likely, however, we'll be stuck with USB 3.0.)

Re:A new age!

[Gabrill]

Not to brag or anything, but my library of congress is bigger than your library of congress by at least a couple of Volkswagens and a baseball.

Ummm, why?

[phorm]

When would you ever have to transfer a full terabyte at a time? Unless you're doing a really bigass backup to this thing, you probably won't.
And if you are, well that's a hell of a lot faster and more convenient than burning 233 standard DVD-R's (about what it would take with non dual-sided discs) or writing the equivilent tape or network-based backup method. Heck, that beats out most disk-to-disk transfers.

Hey, Stick to The Rules

[Nom du Keyboard]

Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.

Hey, stick to The Rules. No new, paradigm-changing technologies are allowed to be announced as arriving in less than 5 years.

For that matter, they can't be more than 5 years out either!

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mdielmann]

Hey, stick to The Rules. No new, paradigm-changing technologies are allowed to be announced as arriving in less than 5 years.

For that matter, they can't be more than 5 years out either! Your rules seem to be a little too simplified. Here's the list I've refined over the years.

<=18 months - technically possible, but not necessarily economically feasible. You can buy them, but there's no guarantee you will. Think magneto optical drives. Almost guaranteed to be available in your lifetime.
3 years - rarely used. See 5 years.
5 years - Technically possible, probably been tested in the lab. You'll probably see this in your lifetime, if it doesn't fall off the face of the earth.
10 years - Theoretically possible, not tested in a lab. In about 10 years this will be announced again as being available in 10 years (again) or 5 years (progress, yay!). You might see this in your lifetime. The odds increase if you're under 30.
15 years - rarely used. Just like 10 years, but even the researchers are being cautious about it.
20 years - Nothing in the laws of physics say it isn't possible. This is still pure research. People studying this can be found with uncombed hair leaning back in their chairs staring at the ceiling. When their eyes are open. Things in this category stay in this category until such time as a breakthrough is made, at which time they may be announced as available in 10 years. Think commercial fusion power. You probably won't see this in your lifetime.
>20 years - not used. Things that would fall in this category haven't been seriously thought of (except by crackpots and sci-fi writers). You almost certainly won't see this in your lifetime. Unless it's a time machine.

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mink]

"Think magneto optical drives. Almost guaranteed to be available in your lifetime."

Gosh I hope so, seeing as quite a few companies claim to store medical records with them.

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mdielmann]

More like: "You can buy them, but there's no guarantee you will. Think magneto optical drives." Do you have one? I know I don't, and I was quite interested in them about 15 years ago. It was in production then, and may very well still be now, but I'd say their market penetration has lagged behind just about every other storage media that was available at the time, with the exception to Plextor's phased optical drive (offerred in competition to CDs).

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mink]

MO drives are quite often used in jukeboxes. I believe tape based jukeboxes have won out in the long run.

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mdielmann]

Pfft. I'll assume that an even lower than the penetration level of tape drives in corporate servers. Again, you can buy them, but that's no guarantee you will. Or, to put it another way: Do you have an MO drive? How about even one of your friends?

Re:Hey, Stick to The Rules

[mink]

No, but I did go for DVD-RAM once it was out, and in many ways it is like MO.
The main place I saw MO implemented was in storage arrays that had to be write once by law.

Now I'll have to buy the White Album again.

[goombah99]

That's the problem with these technology breakthroughs. I fell bad for blue ray and HD dvd, cause now everyone will have a drive big enough to rip to. That is if the 40 Gig version of this new memory costs more than a blue ray media.

New Game Delivery System

[Kingrames]

Since this probably means that game producers will be able to put their games on flash drives instead of CDs and DVDs, it would be even more convenient than having a backup disk.

That, and they'd be able to shrink down the size of game boxes again, from dvd size to, dare I say it, cigarette pack sized. Your next video game could be dispensed by a vending machine.

Re:New Game Delivery System

[tomstdenis]

Um, 2-4Gbyte flash drives are already commonly available. The loss versus a CD is the cost. A CD probably costs a penny or two to make in bulk (not including fixed overhead), whereas a 4GB flash costs $60.

So instead of buying a game for $50 you'd pay $110 just to have it on a flash drive?

Where this may actually come in handy, hint: recycling, is you buy a game at a store, they load YOUR thumb drive with the installer, you can then back it up if you want to. Thus eliminating the waste of shipping, packaging, and media.

Tom

Re:New Game Delivery System

[Cheeze]

you compared a 30 year old technology, the cd, with a technology that has been around less than 10 years, the flash card? You then compared the price of mass producing that 30 year old technology with the retail price of something that was commonly available only within the last 2 years.

Prices will drop, quickly.

Re:New Game Delivery System

[tomstdenis]

I don't see why. CDs are physically cheaper to make. Think about it, even at commodity prices even things like 8051s are still $1 or two per chip if not more. And they've been around longer than the CD.

Integrated circuits are more expensive to make than pressed pieces of plastic/metal. And always will be.

Tom

Re:New Game Delivery System

[Kingrames]

Yes, but HOW much more expensive is the important part.
If the CD is $0.02 and the flash drive is $2, people will buy the flash drive, and the CD will disappear.

Re:New Game Delivery System

[tomstdenis]

Maybe, but we're a long way off from $2 flash drives

And at anyrate, if you're just packing it, why not make it a "rom drive?" That'd be cheaper.

The idea I was suggesting is to re-use an existing product. As in, you can go and get a new game stored on your flash.

Tom

Doesn't matter.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a single write takes 100ms.

All you have to do is thread it. You can't do this with normal hard drives, short of RAID. But, like a well-designed flash array, you can pretty much parallize any write you want.

Of course, it means that the filesystem would have to know to do this, but I don't see it really having any serious implications on performance. If it functions as a solid-state device, then I'd assume it could theoretically perform better, actually.

Re:Oblig-Family jewels.

[fractoid]

That's a "docking port" on the computer. Yee-up.

Tin whiskers

[flyingfsck]

So he found a good use for tin whiskers? Otherwise, I can see how tin contamination will kill of his memory cells.

Race for the Bottom

[Shihar]

In the memory field the price will be just barely enough to reap profit and not a cent more. When it comes to semiconductors, MEMS, and other such devices, the amount of profit made on each unit when produced for mass consumption is amazingly small. The pressure and competition to build it smaller and cheaper leaves very little time for price gouging. If you want to see market forces working at their finest, just take a look at the semiconductor industry. Competition is absolutely brutal and prices fall at breathtaking speeds.

Hell, just ponder how much a flash drive is these days. I bought my first flash drive in 2004 or 2005. It was a little 32mb one that cost me something like $50. Just the other day I got a frigging two 2gb flash drives for $30.

You might get gouged in price for your iPhone, PS4, or whatever, but it wont be because they had to pay an arm and a leg for the memory. Memory prices go in only one direction, and they do it very rapidly.

Sounds like "whiskers".

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This sounds suspiciously like "whiskers".

These little puppies were first discovered by accident back when AT&T was "The Phone Company". If I've got this right: Bell Labs had come up with a new alloy for terminal blocks that they thought would have some advantages. Western Electric made some up and the Bell Systems deployed them.

Some time later they started running into trouble. Linemen would try to turn the nut and it wouldn't turn. So they cut some out and sent 'em in for analysis.

These long, thin, crystals of metal had grown through the boundary of the thread, welding the nuts onto the bolts. They were extremely pure and very strong - in the general neighborhood of the theoretical strength of the material, when things fabricated by normal processes fell short by a "factor of many" (more than one power of ten).

They cristened them "whiskers". I'm not aware of anything that came of that at the time.

But when the early satellites were going up (back when the very early printed circuits were the cutting edge of hi-tech), whiskers showed up again - growing between the lines of the printed circuit board exposed to vacuum and zero g, shorting things out. This is why early US satellites (heavily miniaturized to go on the small boosters) tended to flake out while early Russian stuff (big discrete components on terminal strips lifted by their big boosters) kept working - and why that reversed later, when the US had the problem solved and the Russians started miniaturizing and had to go through the same learning curve.

Once they figured out what was happening and came up with an alloy that didn't whisker, they played around for a bit with self-healing printed circuit boards. These had conductors of a whiskering alloy with a plating of non-whiskering stuff. Idea was that if a trace broke due to vibration during launch, the exposed core would whisker across the gap and make things run again (until it whiskered over to another wire and shorted things out.) During that time they also played with self-healing aluminized mylar capacitors, designed so that if the mylar developed a hole the cap would discharge through the hole, vaporize the aluminum around the hole, and things would then go back to normal operation.

I'm not sure that any of this actually worked out.

If these ARE whiskers-on-demand as storage elements, it's nice to see whiskers actually do something useful. B-)

Re:Sounds like "whiskers".

[rolfwind]

Interesting... more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)

Re:Sounds like "whiskers".

[GundamFan]

this Wikipedia article seems to corroborate the parent's post and provides some more detailed information on the phenomenon, I found it an interesting read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)

$1,250 for a thumb drive?

[FrenchSilk]

You can get a 2G thumb drive today for $25, or $12.50 per Gig. A 1T thumb drive at $1.25 a G would therefore cost $1,250. That is a pretty expensive gadget to hang off the side of your laptop. What is more, I bet that they aren't using the $12.50 a Gig price when they say it is a tenth the price of current flash technology. It wouldn't surprise me to see a Tb introduced at something closer to $2,500. But prices will come down with time, and it is certainly a good start.

Re:$1,250 for a thumb drive?

[Cheeze]

and why would you hang a 1TB usb thumb drive off of your laptop?

I could see it being an internal flash, like SD or compact flash, but transferring that much data over even a USB2 connection would take forever.

Re:$1,250 for a thumb drive?

[FrenchSilk]

That too. But that was the suggestion of the author of TFA, not me.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[fractoid]

Best way is to build in a Bluetooth interface with encryption, then swallow the memory module. (small grappling hooks will secure it to the lining of your small intestine). That way if the bad guys want your private information, they'll have to (quite literally) go through you to get it. Are you sure that's a good idea? Given that a Malaysian gang recently chopped a guy's finger off to steal his biometrically secured car, I don't think I'd like any security measure that would require said bad guys to extract my access key from my ass...

How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once to

[SmallFurryCreature]

Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.

These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.

Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?

Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".

We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?

How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?

All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.

Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.

Re:Sucks to be famous

[fractoid]

..because terabytes of data is more damaging than a few grams of cocaine? I don't think so. :P

Or, to compare oranges to oranges, a 1gb thumb drive could already store enough, erm, incriminating evidence to destroy a career, no need to get fancy. :P

Re:A new age!

[fractoid]

Sorry, how many human hairs was that?

Re:This is only part of the problem

[tpurdy]

* how to back it all up

Buy things in pairs. Use one to make a physical copy of the first. Works well for me. I'd make backups of myself, but the neighbors would complain about crowds hanging around my house? Imagine the home-delivery beer tabs?

* how to secure it

Make 'em small enough to swallow. Bad guys surveilling you from across the street? Slap that drive on a ham sandwich. Hmmm! Crunchy! Next time do it with peanut butter and jelly.

And that's just part of the goodness of tech advancements. Try securing a 3-1/2 floppy in a ham sandwich.

paperless office

[AliasMarlowe]

I look forward to using them in the Paperless Office we'll all have. Experience has shown that the paperless office is as useful as a paperless toilet. Business operations go much better with a sufficient supply of paper.

Re:paperless office

[MindKata]

Ah but soon we will have the epaper office ... just don't use it for toilet paper.

Re:life expectancy?

[julesh]

so if the proccess this uses if infinitely reversible, does that mean that the usual maximum number of writes associated with flash memory will be gone? or just increased by a huge factor?

That's "almost" infinitely reversible. Elsewhere, they've claimed it will be good for something on the order of 10^13 write cycles, i.e. about a factor of 10^6 higher than Flash.

copyright perpetual motion

[tsjaikdus]

I wonder what this means for the free money making industry. At the moment 'compensation' is calculated at 25 EUR for each portable music player and 0.15 EUR/GB for a harddisk recorder.

Of course, but...

[Wiseman1024]

Of course, but until a product is actually announced with a release date, this is just the storage technology of the week.

Tag storagetechoftheweek

Re:Of course, but...

[Enlightenment]

When that happens, though, it goes from being something created by awesome researchers to a corporate product and loses some of its allure.

Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density

[justinlee37]

Does the headline strike anyone else as a headline that could easily be used over and over and over, far into the future? I mean, I'd imagine that such-and-such years ago, a megabyte RAM stick was "amazing memory density."

Re:This is only part of the problem

[greyblack]

Somehow "Ironkey" seems to be a merging of the words "irony" and "monkey".

Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand the irony part.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I use security through clutter. I keep everything in one map. Every file has a cryptic name which only I can decyper, well, most of the time at least, just not on monday mornings. The map contains 10 files that are secret and about 25,000 intresting files I can't do without, I do intent to one day actualy look at them, if I can decyper their filenames at that particular day.
For backup, well, I have the same files in my gmail account, on 2 online harddisk services, on the 3 other computers I own, some of the files are printed and archived in a neat pile in the corner of my room (sorted from oldest to newest) and I sure my uncle Steve has a few of those files as well. The rest I can redownload if I ever need them and remember ever having them in the first place.
As for the real mission critical files, I use Kazaa: I put them in a zipfile, add an intresting movie or mp3, then share it. Most of these files are backed up on 125,400 computers, all spread out across the globe. Now who can say that about his backup policy? (other than the RIAA and the MPAA) The files are secure too, since I rename them to "My views on the political situation of flower gardens" and remove the extension.

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[10101001 10101001]

How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software?

About 3 to 5 years after they announce it's to be released "reall soon".

Let alone actually do the things they once promised?

5 years, 10 years, or never.

I think MS is, perhaps, the worst possible company you want to draw examples from on IT done right. This isn't because MS is specifically bad technologically. It's because they have a killer marketing department (ie, their marketing department is full of idiots who promise the impossible (because it'll boost sales) without any real knowledge of what is possible, probable, or really understanding what is being worked on*). Or was that your point?

*If Microsoft sold adult products, someone in marketing would overhear someone in the development department talking about some software sucking and would soon announce "Microsoft Blowjob.NET".

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[foobsr]

hologram storage

Just not exactly mainstream.

Capacity 300GB to 1.6TB (2010), media from $180 list price, drive at 18,000$.

And it is used.

CC.

You'll need more than that

[Chrisq]

By then you'll be downloading in HD Video 360 degree IMAX. Just imagine, you'll be surrounded by the bitches!

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[Gordonjcp]

Just not exactly mainstream

You can find just about any storage technology that has ever existed in use in someone's current product, right now. There is nothing out there that has no niche market use.

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[xtracto]

Or as it was put from a digg story some time ago:

1 GB 20 years ago, vs 1 GB now

If you think about it, nowadays you buy 16 GB memory in a 43x36x5mm card whereas 10 years ago you could only get at most 1 GB in a bigfoot hard disk...

This technology does look promising!

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[xtracto]

Oh, and after further researching, the guy has already about 72 patents on such technology (the last one in 2006) . The abstract of the relevant research is :

Nonvolatile memory cells based on solid electrolytes have many desirable attributes, including low-voltage and low-current operation and a simple process that allows them to be integrated with conventional CMOS processes with minimal additional masking layers. In this paper, we present a 2-kb memory block/testbed (1024 elements) using solid electrolyte cells. The compact memory design addresses many of the unusual operational issues associated with the solid electrolyte elements and allows for two digital bits to be stored and read from each cell with minimal circuitry. The design was fabricated in 0.18-mum CMOS technology and the simulation and physical data are presented. Multilevel-cell (MLC) operation was demonstrated for a 10-muA reference current with a 437-ns cycle time and sub-40-ns access times.

It's Memory Usable for Good or Evil.

[davonshire]

Granted this does seem like a technology of whimsical smoke. However I think it is one of many very high density solutions that are just on the horizon. And helps define some of the brighter and scarier aspects of this technology.

Today it's estimated that given almost any city, you can expect in a day to be viewed by hundreds if not thousands of cameras. Many of these cameras feed into security suites to be recorded just in case something happens and evidence is needed etc.

Here we have a very high density, extremely low power, probably non-volatile mode memory device. It would make dependable suspect tracking and recording attractively small. Spy devices need to be small and innocuous.

Then there is the question of usability as dependable storage. Would it be as dependable as current hard drives? If it was, why in the world would we keep making hard drives if these could take their place? So we get a boon for storage and the HD industry does a big belly flop because they are making huge, noisy, heat generating, power sucking monsters.

Yeah with every good there is always a bad. :) Some how some way.

Just some thoughts.
Happy Holloween.

Great!

[jgoemat]

It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory.

Flash memory is already pretty low-power, at 1/1000th the power of it, that might actually produce net energy gain :). Seriously, at 1/10th the cost

Kozicki says the first product containing the memory, a simple chip, is slated to come out in 18 months.

Then I'll be able to power it with those 75% efficient and 1/10th the cost solar cells that are supposed to be coming out "in 18 months".

Re:How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once

[foobsr]

You can find just about any storage technology that has ever existed in use in someone's current product, right now.

Just thought that vapor (as OP said) is less.

CC.

You're so close, but you presume too much

[heinousjay]

I do want to hear about them, so kindly start using the singular pronoun, because you only speak for you.

Re:This is only part of the problem

[mink]

Thanks to "Baldrics guide to Turnips" I can report "It's just like Goldy or Bronzy but made of Iron".