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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.
f- coming soon
coming soon should be only be able to be used if it in on shelves in 90 days or less.
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...
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
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.
Perhaps they were looking at single layer DVD
4.7GB * 250 = 1.175TB
1.175 * 8 = 9.400 Terabits
Since, the summary points out it's 10 terabits per square inch, not terabytes as you seem to be using.
better yet, using a display that operates in multiples of 24 (72Hz and 120Hz work quite well)
It's an LCD monitor. There's no particular reason it needs to refresh at 60htz or faster.
My LCD TV is perfectly happy operating at 24hz when that's the media it's presented. I imagine that, given the right hardware and programming, the thing would be perfectly happy refreshing at any given interval between 1 and 60hz, only limited by whatever scheme is telling it the resolution and refresh rates it's supposed to be displaying.
Still - I think it'd be best for movie makers to switch from filming in 24fps to 60 or even 72fps. There's not many movie theaters left with actual film projectors; even if you have to run off some reels of film, it's easy enough to downsample 60/72 fps to 24.
Hmmm... One thing I'm thinking of is quality - while I am very annoyed by 'mere' 60hz on a crt, I've never really had a problem with televisions, and have to really concentrate to see any jumping with film. Remember, each cell in 24fps film is displayed *twice*, so you get 48 flashes a second, 24 cells. Increasing the number of frames by a factor of 3, while with any decent compression alogorithm it wouldn't increase the size of the video by a factor of 3, is still increasing the quality of video by an almost imperceptible amount, for a very real increase in size. How much, I don't really know. There's a LOT of variables.
Now I almost want to conduct some tests... Find some 'true' 120fps video, reencode at 24fps and 60fps, see how much the file size ends up. You'd want Low motion and High motion test sections as well.
I don't read AC A human right
Sapphire can be created artificially
Compared to the cost of silicon wafers of sufficient quality the price isn't even that bad.
I don't read AC A human right
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})"
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.
But of course... This is why we now have 32GB+ USB keys... Because the RIAA/MPAA would never allow devices with this kind of capacity and read/write access to fall into our hands! Seriously... Why don't you take off that tinfoil hat?
The reason we're not seeing any of those insanely dense holographic storage technologies and other forms of vaporware is because right now, it doesn't work. The huge claims in this article are either the result of journalists not understanding what's going on, or researchers trying to get funding.
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.
I can fit my entire porn collection on just 4 discs
Pfft, amateur.
No, no; I think he meant the professional videos, too, not just the amateur stuff.
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
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
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.