Slashdot Mirror
Coming Soon, 250 DVDs In a Quarter-Sized Device
Several readers have remarked on a new technique developed by scientists at UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst that has the promise of achieving storage densities of 10 terabits per square inch. "The method lets microscopic nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces. ... Xu explained that the molecules in the thin film of block copolymers — two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together — self-assemble into an extremely precise, equidistant pattern when spread out on a surface... Russell and Xu conceived of the elegantly simple solution of layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal. When the crystal is cut at an angle... and heated to 1,300 to 1,500 degrees Centigrade... for 24 hours, its surface reorganizes into a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges that can then be used to guide the self-assembly of the block polymers."
Who cares how many DVDs? How many Libraries of Congress is it, that's what I want to know.
This seems like it has some potential. Hopefully it will make it out of the lab considering how many times I've seen the promise of amazing technology only to find that eventually it isn't practical or has some sort of manufacturing limitation. Oh, and while you're at it, when you do create this "new technology" don't riddle it with DRM issues.
"This fascinating little gadget is supposed to replace the CD; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again." - Agent K, Men In Black
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Good, lets keep the size of the discs the same, use the same 1080P resolution and use losslessly compressed audio and video. Oh, and let the big movie studios use their expensive equipment and processing power to make it 60fps rather than letting everybody's bluray player magically turn 24fps into 60
f- coming soon
coming soon should be only be able to be used if it in on shelves in 90 days or less.
my Holographic Versatile Disk, we'll talk about this. At the moment, it's all vaporware.
Let's face it, no major manufacturer is going to decide what technology to use based on storage capacity, it will be based on how restrictive it will be to the end user.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If they can make this technology work with solid-state re-writable memory, I can see huge leaps forward in storage for portable music player solid state memory. The possibility of storing 250 to 500 GB of media files on a portable music player the size of the current 4G iPod nano is very enticing, to say the least.
And it may finally spell the end of the hard drive, replaced by a solid-state "drive" in the 750 GB to 1.5 TB range.
my mini-van full of 9-track can hold 3 TB, and is real. don't bother me with this vaporware speculation!
...and heated to 1,300 to 1,500 degrees Centigrade... for 24 hours...
I certainly hope they can improve those figures. From a manufacturing standpoint, that sounds very expensive.
I have a bad feeling about this...
Not only is it just stupid to use DVD equivalents to give an idea of the size (how many elephants equals a libraries of congress anyway?), but they're off by an order of magnitude.
8.4GB * 250 = 2.1TB, not 10TB.
I'm sure it will be available commercially in 5-10 years!
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
This technology should kick-start the backup market as people will have to continually restore all their photos, music and movies every time they leave the last chip somewhere they forget about.
Hopefully the backup/restore device will be bigger (and static) so that it, too, doesn't get easily lost.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That's like... more bits than all the atoms in the UNIVERSE! Logically, we should be able to back up precisely on Universe on each device.
I saw the headline and my first instinct was to look for the 'ohnoitsroland' tag...
Never thought I'd miss the guy.
Considering that we've been able to artificially make sapphires for over 100 years now... and that things like the glass on your grocery-store's barcode scanner is probably made from sapphire glass (a thin wafer of cut sapphire)...
Well, I'm thinking that it's not that large of a problem.
This growing trend of announcing lab discoveries which _might_ hold commercial promise _sometime_ in the future, _maybe_, are really kind of annoying.
What do these accomplish ? Do they show the people supplying the research $ that something is being accomplished and that the researches aren't just sitting around the lab smoking fatties ?
Vaporware just doesn't do these "discovery" press releases enough justice.
Could some clever person out there think of a nice derogatory term for them ?
Something to do with flying cars, maybe.
Absolute statements are never true
They mean "soon" as in the sentence "you will be having sex soon".
== never
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can fit my entire porn collection on just 4 discs, each the size of quarters? That's amazing!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
TFA is unfortunately incomplete. So far what they seem to have is ten terabits per square inch, but the bits are all zeros.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I so resent research scientists selling some cute tinkering on a nano-scale as having imminent potential for practical high-density memory or some other technology. Almost none of these stories have any chance of ever resulting in something that works and is economically competitive. The scientists in question know that very well, they're just putting a practical applications spin on it because popular-science writers/press/websites go for that. Pimps.
It's a good thing that it's microscopic nano-scale, as opposed to macroscopic nanoscale!
MPAA/RIAA lawsuits against anyone who buys these devices, because obviously you can't afford to fill that device with legitimately purchased content or you'd be as bankrupt as they're going to make you with the lawsuit.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
I was astounded. Somehow, the structure of DVDs can be changed, and they can be shrunk to such a degree to allow 250 of them to be stacked in one quarter ( presumably US) sized container.
Turns out, they just were talking about the data on the DVD, not the physical object. There goes my "shipping company based on carrier pidgens" concept.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Man, I'd hate to see your change purse. The quarters in my pocket are just under an inch in diameter, or about 0.7in^2 per side. Allowing for a hub and spindle opening, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of that is available for data, which would be closer to 2.3-3.5Tb. Surprisingly close to the article claims (others above have posted 2.1Tb values; I didn't do the math).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I wonder how long it'll take us to invent genetic memory. Let's think of what it'd really require. It requires encoding memory into your reproductive packages. How many generations back would you include? Most likely as many as possible.
Thinking about it, we've got 9 months to grow and develop inside another human. I wonder how much/little engineering that it would take to have neural downloads straight into the kid's memory right up until birth. Of course you could always run into the Dune problem where past personalities want to take control of the new generation. That's one of the reasons that the memories might be useful, but entire personalities would be dangerous.
Who needs history education if you could remember it happening through your relative's view point?
Of course some things folks might want to forget or try to force future generations not to remember.
I hate it when someone uses "coming soon" in the title of a story when production of the technology is at least 10 years off and industry adoption isn't even in sight. Oh, and don't forget there are a half dozen other nanotechnologies promising the same thing as this one, such carbon nanotubes and scanning tunneling microscopy, atomic force microscopy, holographic storage, heat-assisted magnetic recording, and quantum dot technology.
Well, say what you want, right here with me, in my wallet, I have a horse. Smaller than a quarter.
Precisely, the complete genome sequenced and sorted. On a 2GB MicroSD card.
"A lot of books" is an odd abstract that doesn't really impress me. But the idea of a full, unabridged, complete set of information which describes a real lifeform in full, contains the program of all the life functions, all the complexity of neural system, all the mysteries of instincts and social behaviors, the complexity of senses, the strength, immunity, lifeforce of a powerful creature - all this potential, described as a bunch of files consisting of rows upon rows of letters AGCT (gzipped).
Sure we have no technology to reproduce a living creature from this data alone. But that looks like a really small problem compared to all the incredible knowledge achieved through billions of years of evolution, to solve all these problems of creating a standalone, self-repairing, self-replicating, self-defending, and quite pretty to that, piece of "biotechnology" - actually, the solution to re-creating it from that data (only on different media) is right in that data. We just can't really use it.
250 high quality movies, in some future? blah.
A horse in my wallet, now and today, that is what impresses me, really.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Please hook me up with whatever you're smoking; it seems pretty powerful.
What was once true, is no longer so
You have to keep the substrate heated to 1500 degrees Centigrade for twenty-four freaking hours? That's a LOT of expended energy to create the doggone thing, isn't it? Something tells me it takes less energy to make those 250 DVDs.
I don't think this process is going to be qualifying for an Energy Star rating any time soon. Here we go again... using MORE energy like there will never be a Peak Oil event tomorrow.
Don't like the "coming soon" headline for this product? Too bad. What do you expect? The editor is kdawson.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
Also, sapphire is quite expensive, even artificial one.
But from the description it looks like it's only needed as a tool to mass-produce these, reusable. Meaning you make such one sapphire matrix and then use it to produce bulk amounts of media which may be a simple plastic coated with these polymers.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How long will it be until storage technologies that reply on motors and spinning disks and some form of stylus (magnetic heads, lasers, etc.) are a thing of the past? Or are there fundamental reasons why motor-driven media will always have an edge over their solid-state brethren for the foreseeable future?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Go read your math book again. 4 pi r squared is the formula for the surface area of a sphere. You might know those as "balls", though I do wonder if you have any.
What was once true, is no longer so
10 terabits per square inch
None of your tech mumbo-jumbo, please. Just tell me how many Libraries of Congress per width of a human hair.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Hopefully its not a problem. This was one of the first things I wondered about after reading the article. I then found: this link which explains the process much better.
"With this technique, the researchers were able to achieve defect-free arrays of nanoscopic elements with feature sizes as small as 3 nanometers, translating into densities of 10 terabits per square inch. One terabit is equal to 1 trillion bits, or 125 gigabytes." (from the site) - so about 125 gigabytes per square inch. That is quiet a bit of space, however I still think its a far cry from what they make it out to seem like.
I mean 125 gigabytes per square inch? How many of those would fit on something the size of your pocket..that is maybe, say 5 square inches? It would only fit maybe 1.2 terabytes... (please by all means create a grid using square inches to see how many would fit on an object roughly the size of a "normal" pocket..don't forget to round it as it'll be a platter not a complete rectangle) At this point its not worth the press release they put out unless they can get disk compression or shrink the amount they can fit per square inch even more. Otherwise the normal disk platters we have at >1 terabytes are going to trounce this and are already probably cheaper. Don't get me wrong I could see this as another step to downsize platter size, but unless they're putting multiple platters of these things in a disk then the idea of fitting the library of congress is still a far reach. And even if they do it won't fit in your pocket well...
Yes I do realize that the library of congress thing was a stretch and concocted here, but that should be their endeavor imo. Not only would it make a good marketing move, but imagine what else you could fit besides the library of congress on a single disk...although it does bring up a relative question of how reliable over time the drive would be.
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Salesman: I can sell you a ticket to Berkeley, or Amhurst.
Later, what happens if your home reader springs a leak and loses (looses ;) all its helium? As the tags suggest, this won't be leaving the lab soon.
Considering if you made a square 1" by 1" in dimensions you would have a square large enough for a quarter to fit inside of (being 1 square inch) since the quarter's diameter is 0.955 inches. I fail to see how you get 36 square inches out of that.
- Toast
There's something wrong there. Perhaps you don't know how to use brackets, or perhaps you really did square right at the end as your use of brackets implies? In either case, your figure is laughably wrong.
Put the maths aside and try applying some common sense. Single sided, 36 square inches is, not surprisingly, equivalent to a 6 by 6 square. That's like a bathroom tile. Even if you count both sides, it's like a square with sides over 4 inches. I for one don't have any beermat sized coins.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
LOC is a nice measurement, I want the technology to progress to the point we can digitize an entire colonization team, load them onto a ship with equipment necessary to reconstruct them and then send that ship to the farthest reaches. It's all about saving the evils of man so we can propagate.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
If you've got the energy later in the day you could maybe do something about the run-on sentences?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and the surface area is equal to 4*pi*r squared...
Spherical quarters? Neat, but how many can you fit in your pocket?
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
4*pi*r squared is the surface of a sphere not a circle.
And even if it were the surface of a circle, the formula would properly be written 4*pi*(r squared), which is NOT the same as (4*pi*r) squared.
In other words, your Canadian quarter may be a bit bigger than my American quarter, but your brain seems to be a bit smaller than your Canadian quarter.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...the Bandwidth War.
this is really cool, don't get me wrong, but is size the most important thing now? so what if we can get 250 DVD's into a square inch, what if there are only 10 DVD's worth watching in the first place?
All kidding aside though, i wonder more about how fast i can get my data than about how small it is physically. Think about it, do you really want to carry around your entire cd/movie collection everywhere you go? what if you loose it or it gets stolen? I'd rather have a gigantic drive attached to my server at home where i can have it backed up consistently and have it secured, then just access the info via the net. what i need is bandwidth, thats the problem.
Is this similar to CD/DVD with bumps and grooves and read/written by a laser? Or is it more like solid state drives/memory where the assembled block copolymers provide a foundation for the formation of transistors? More generally, is it random access or is there a seek time involved?
Recordable memory technology available to the public will only ever be allowed increase at a set rate over time.
We hear whispers of astonishing technologies over the years. Sci-fi words like, 'Holographic' and 'Crystal' float like mist, but then nothing. And amazingly storage technology seems to grow only at a steady, reliable pace using the most mundane, already-tooled up factory standards. Heck, the holographic disk thing was released last year after the steady commercial creep of the 'cutting edge' had passed it by. Probably allowed to exist because it was considered a small-fry potato by the military.
I find it frustrating that the public is treated like a retarded child. Everybody knows that the real state of the art is well-funded and kept secret. And yet we all still cheer like fools when some 'new' advancement is made, as though our lives in the public sector are anything but fastidiously planned. There isn't any chance or invention for us. Who the heck knows what the state of real cutting edge technology is today? I have some educated guesses, some verifications, and the kinds of things we were capable of doing ten years ago would make certain aspects of Star Trek look like the "Toys R Us" version. But the people who could tell us, and some of you spineless cogs visit here, are under writs of secrecy.
The public is stuck in a neurotic state of cognitive dissonance. We know there's a real score, but we act like the one we're given is the whole deal, even to the point where we forget that it's not even close.
Oh my!
Touched a nerve there, didn't I? --Was it the phrase, "Spineless cogs" or simply pointing out an obvious truth that nobody likes to think about? --The reaction against which (moderation into negative troll dust) is indeed the purest expression of, "A neurotic state of cognitive dissonance" as you're likely to get. Other than shooting a person dead for talking about the elephant in the living room, that is.
The most disturbing part is this. . .
The more I learn about human nature, about auto-reactions, about willingly self-imposed slavery and above all, about how virtually everything people say to themselves and to others is a lie either conscious or unconscious, the more I understand how those driving the machine can do so with such callous disregard for humanity. --I don't agree with it, but I certainly find I understand its origin.
-FL
I have all of Wikipedia, all of Google, all of YouTube, in fact all of the data available on the Internet here in my pocket on a device about the size and shape of about 30 playing cards.
It's constantly updated and refreshed in almost real time.
It's my iPod. I get all of this as long as I have an Internet connection somewhere nearby.
In practice, that's really good enough for me. Why would I want to carry around terabytes of data that I couldn't trust to have not gone stale since it was committed to memory, 99.99% of which I have no need for?
-- My Weblog.
I really want to know how far a stack of paper with this much data would stretch.
Oh my!
Touched a nerve there, didn't I? --Was it the phrase, "Spineless cogs" or simply pointing out an obvious truth that nobody likes to think about?
It seems that you've committed both faux pas mentioned by Mr. Swann in the opening to one of his books:
I found an excerpt on a web forum a few months back. I wanted to send it to someone, and in the process of searching I found that someone had scanned their copy to a 41mb PDF. The PDF of Penetration floating around the torrent sites looks like it's been OCR'd, as there are typos that are not in my photocopied version...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com