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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.
How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc.
Togheher with your flying car. No. Really.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Who on earth would ever need more than a terabyte?
The game.
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.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
"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.
Finally, they will have a viable means to distribute Duke Nuke'm Forever!
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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.
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.
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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...
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
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."
FAQs are evil.
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.
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.
Energy efficiency is not at all arbitrary if it is coming out of a battery.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I kinda wonder how much apple would charge to change the battery on THAT.
rsync makes incremental backups?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
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.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
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. 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!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
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.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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?
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-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.