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CES 2008 Hall of Shame
Romana Reynolds writes "The CES 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering Awards Showcase honored the Atom Chip Corporation, which was exhibiting the same 100GB, 500GB, and 1TB 'quantum optical' memory chips back in 2006. We actually wandered by, but long gone are the 'SolarMemory' chips, and he didn't know anything about Duke Nuk'em Forever. A little easy digging shows that they'd been making the same extraordinary claims and exhibiting prototypes at CES during the past three years, long enough to make 'atom chip hoax' the fourth suggestion on typing 'atom chip' into Google. I'm amused that the 'preeminent' panel of judges failed their vetting and gatekeeping functions. But I fear that Atom Chip will gather investors based on their recognition at CES, and continue in the game for many years to come, while honors at CES become a Hall of Shame."
Aren't they going to use that in the Phantom console?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Quantum optical? C'mon, is it just me or doesn't that just sound like they made that up after watching a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon on Spike?
My blog
One would think that after three years of showing mostly the same thing with little to no improvements that the organizers would have caught on and prevented them from coming. Smells like vaporware to me...
I well expect to get that $10k I invested into atom chip back, with excellent interest.
...
Yes, I know that my $10k investment is only worth $5 now, but that's just the cost of R&D, it'll come back!
It's not coming back, is it?
Seriously though, if their intention is to promote snake oil in the hopes of attracting investors then the least they could do is put more than an hour of effort into what is pretty much (at least in this industry) the primary corporate representation.
At least they didn't create it in Word. Now that would have really irked me....
Incidentally, I did a little digging on this, and it seems its owned by a Russin Scientist called Shimon Gendlin (based out of Long Island), who as per information here in 1997 owned two companies both pitching along a simmilar theme
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Sounds like Atom Chips does the Dew:
"The company has developed a series of new Quantum and Quantum-Optical devices for storing and processing information in a way that permits high-speed data accessibility, with a high degree of reliability, non-volatility, and extremely high-density in an extremely compact size."
Unfortunately, the rate at which fools part their money to other fools is astonishing.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Can we send them the Worst Website Ever award from Slashdot?
There is absolutly No way this is real. Check out this and look at the photo on the left, halfway down the page which is quite obviosly a headphone/audio jack. Most of the others are photoshoped or have a cobbled together look(remember Brian Frouds photo books? Particularly "Strange stains and misterious smells").
I smell investor bait and patent grabing: in ten years time, when this is actualy possible I see them coming out of the woodwork and suing anyone using this emerging tech.
Read my blog you know you want to
Anyway, as long as we're heaping ridicule on gullible technoidiots who keep falling for the same hype year after year, how did 2007's "Possible Cure For Cancer!" stories here ultimately pan out? Can I take up smoking yet?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Quick! Hire him as an editor!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Hmm lets see, about 1/2 the Panel is made up of CEO's and Prisident/Founders of various businesses. People so far removed from the technology they work in they probably couldn't tell you how their own products actually work.
Most of the other half are made up of Salesmen, Journalists, Evangelists and Marketing agents. People who don't know the right end of a lightbulb usually.
I saw maybe 2-3 people in that whole list that *might* have a clue about how technology works.
CES needs to get a new panel of judges who know their stuff. Maybe get some leading professors in the field to come judge? How about senior product "Engineers", you know the people actually making the stuff that ends up in CES?
Why else would they have monetized (read:fake search page) their previous company web site? No content, just a nice money grubbing content free website.
Maybe because with that site being linked from all over the web, they're going to rake in a carload of money?
Why all I see on their website is a picture of a laptop (how the hell could you tell the specs from the outside) and some memory sticks (MMC, USB, and SD) which have been photoshopped(not photoshopped, MS PAINTED) to add 2 or 3 pins, and maybe crop a bit of it here and there, and then super impose a random set of "free megabytes" I mean honestly what the hell is going on- what happened at the show because from the looks of this site he would just be ignored! There's nothing plausible about this at all.
Atom chips go great with quarkamole.
Thank you, I'll be here all week! Support your bartender!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Welcome to the World of Nanomicrons and Beyond!
Nanomicrons? Is that 10^-15?
Hahaha. Even more humorous is the link at the bottom of the page "Next Page", which should really read, "YES! Please give my brain another good kicking". Whoever wrote this page is the internet version of a crazy old guy eating out of bins, mumbling and throwing cats at people who come too close.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Seriously, the TimeCube page must have more than a couple "All Your Base..." gems buried in it.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
This page suggests that the memory devices they are creating have a small display to show the free space on the chip. Wouldn't this suggest that they are making these chips filesystem aware and able to read free space? Adds to the bogus factor... not to mention the 3rd grade quality of their site...
It's not file system aware.
When you run the file system on your pc computer, it opens the quantum disk and reads to the LCD on the side for automatic update! Thank you. [Buy Now]
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
I don't expect many think it is real. I just wonder if it is a very obvious scam, or some sort of performance art demonstrating the foolishness of the industry.
I wonder how Seagate (who, if I am not mistaken are the present owners of Quantum's disk drive business) or Quantum feel about the use of the word "Quantum" on the "Combo Card"?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The fact this has only got 25 comments several hours later means that nobody has got a clue what this story is about. This summary is made of fail.
Wow. That is quite an eye-opener. My favorite page is "Greenwich Time Debunked," which states:
"Old Hold For New Construction."
Absolutely brilliant.
I'm Peggy.
Their WHOIS record shows the registrant as "Domain Discreet," and their contact email as random-jumble-of-letters@domaindiscreet.com. If that doesn't scream "hoax" (kinda like everything else about them), then I don't know what does.
CES is and always has been more about marketing and hype than any actual innovation.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
...coz it's all "Patent Panding!"
It appears to me that they have proven that they will give out excellence awards to just about anyone, no matter how utterly stupid their claims are. I mean, that company has been showing off their vaporware since what, 2005? Virtually unchanged, too. Letting them in is a bit of an embarassment, but giving them an award?
They couldn't have made bigger clowns of themselves by coming to CES wearing clown noses, red wigs, very large shoes and nothing else.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Or porn. Or Liberal Propaganda. I'm just not sure these days.
~Sticky
They appear to have actually achieved at least one patent. Their news page contains a link to a description of "quantum technology" Which appears to be an abstract consisting of a jumble of barely related words, a reference to an otherwise unknown "Gendlin effect." and a child's sketch of a design for magnetic core memory.
However a google patents search uncovers an actual patent! Which is basically the same, but with more child's sketches, such as one of a transistor, and a page that appears to be practice isometric drawings, and several pages of black & white photoshop cloud noise renderings.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Did anyone else notice his "Gold Oscar" award from Europe?
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Check this out on their website:
http://atomchip.com/_wsn/page4.html
Welcome to the World of Nanomicrons and Beyond!
wtf is a nanomicron?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You are educated stupid - an evil ANDROID, your opposite brain destroyed by Evil ONE
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Well, you whipper snappers, when I was in school half the web looked like that. And actually time cube was still there as well. Its old and funny, but also sad. I did converse with Gene briefly, but he really can't be helped. Luckily, his insanity is mostly harmless. Just don't invite him to your university to speak, any attention just makes it worse.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Come-on - there's always crap and semi-crap at the show. There's vaporware by the load too. But most of the show was very cool, exciting, and stuff you can use today.
Here are 145 cool things I found at CES that I took a photo of. Great show - I hope I get to go again next year:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barl0w/
The most amazing thing this 'company' has achieved, in my opinion, is to win an innovation award at CES. They very successfully demonstrated the utter incompetence of the jury. Furthermore, if they are actually trying to trap investors with this, I think they should be allowed to. As the subtitle already suggests, this is a very effective method of weeding out the thickest of investors!
Allocated sectors will have approximately equal numbers of ones and zeroes, empty/erased sectors will be all zeroes (or all ones, depending on spin topology). So, you just count all the one bits (or zero bits), and divide by the total number of bits, then multiply by two.
Easy as pie!
Actually someone did make a USB flash disk with an E Ink display.
http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr90.html
Kind of easy to do on FAT too, just scan the FAT and count the zero entries.
Actually for a 1GB disk you could have ~65000 clusters or 16K each. That's 256 sectors of FAT, each holding 256 entries. When the drive is plugged in, scan the whole FAT and work out a free cluster count and total cluster count for the drive.
Whenever a FAT sector is overwritten just work out a delta between the old and new count of free clusters value in that sector and add it to the free cluster count for the drive, and update the display based on that. The cool thing is you don't slow down access at all, unlike if you need to rescan the FAT. You don't need to keep anything in presumably scarce controller RAM either, just a 32 bit free cluster count and a 32 bit total cluster count. And you don't need any software on the PC.
For a file system like NTFS or EXTx which uses a bitmap to track allocation each 512 bit bitmap sector gives the allocation status of 512*8=4096 clusters. The algorithm doesn't really change though - whenever there is a write to one of the bitmap sectors, work out a delta and add it to the free cluster count for the drive and then use that to update the display.
The drive firmware would recognize filesystems based on the boot sector and decide which sectors to monitor and which algorithm should be used to count the free clusters in the FAT or bitmap sector being monitored. For an unrecognized filesystem I'd blank the display, or maybe turn on a few segments in an error code pattern.
Of course in practice you'd probably only support the fuel gauge on the preformatted version of FAT, for support cost reasons. You don't want ReiserFS users yelling at you when the flash drive firmware dies when they reformat from Reiser4 which you do tested with to Reiser5 which you didn't because it wasn't released when you were testing. Same with people reformatting the drive with Vista and changing the NTFS version to one you haven't tested with.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The Atom Chip website has changed a lot since I first saw it, the only constant seeming to be the slogan about nanomicrons (femtometres?). "Back in the day", their website's images were mostly HTML-resized giganto-pics, but if you trudged through it, you found an absolute gem. They've taken it down for obvious reasons, but the Internet Archive still has the classic, the unforgettable, Solar Memory demo video.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
boring, next please!
Interesting... Does this mean that if another (reputable) firm does indeed develop a quantum memory device which they attempt to market, could Atomchip sue, claiming patent infringement? Maybe that's what's up here: the guy behind this does know enough to realize that someone, somewhere is bound to do so and he'll pick the right moment to pounce with his lawyers.
Just spackulatin'...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Actually, this is so damn stupid that it makes me really angry.
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!