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90-Gigabyte Solid-State "Hard Drive?"
CrtxReavr
writes "American Computer Company: "Described as a "Poker
Chip Sized" solid state disk drive, the new semiconductor could
be seen in service by the end of 1999 or early in the year 2000.
The device can store over 90 billion characters of information..."
This sounds like it's too good to be true and the article excludes
a lot of important information that would be necessary for
verification purposes, for what they claim is security reasons.
It prolly is worth scrutinizing though. "
Want some scrutiny? Conor Walsh
sent us a good list of problems:
- They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
- They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
- If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
- Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
- '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
- 'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)
Ok if I'm proven wrong by this company I'm all in favor of slapping one of these (or how about 4!) in my poor pathetic K6-2 Linux box. BUT there's a few very simple reasons this can't be true.
.02 cents on the whole deal. But if i'm proven wrong, I'll buy an aDSL connection, a quad K7 m-board and 4 of these and do my best to fill them by the end of 2001!!!!!! (and in imho that ain't going to happen, but there's always dreams ehh?)
.exe, you've got to stop it I don't want my computer to explode!!!!!!!!!!!"
1) How would some pathetic little no money (just look at their webpage, I've seen better personal webpages done by 2 year olds) develop a technology capable of some very large claims
2) Why haven't companies like ohhh say SEAGATE, WESTERN DIGITAL, MAXTOR been able to come up with this with the R&D departments they have? This kind of technology would make anyone of those companies filthy rich. The amount of R&D money that they would have to spend would be a drop in the bucket compared to the gains they would have. And if they haven't spent the money on this (which I assume for this kinda deal would be serious amounts of cash!) where did this acc people get it?
3) They don't know who found the technology? What's up with that, that's fishy in and of it's self. that and the fact all these companies are "anonymous for secutiry reasons" who are they afraid of? what are they afraid of? Do they think Seagate's going to blow up their sole prototype?
4) "Yet, compared to what the Army allegedly discovered 50 years ago, our rendering is probably rather
primitive," Ok I'm a military BRAT, and I've never even heard rumors about anything this cool being in some governments secret Area 51 kinda computer. Honestly the military wouldn't be able to do this even today given their lack of budget, and the fact all of the people that matter in the military have their heads up their rear ends.
5) Doubt in your own ability: "TCAP's success hinges upon how reliable our ability to produce such a technology is," most companies wouldn't doubt their own success with such a product if it was for real
Anyway that's me
"Customer for pkzip on a tech support call: Help you've got to save my computer from exploding
"What fools these mortals be"
I thought those redmondians looked suspicious ;)
Now we know why the "crash" at roswell occured!
Folks,
/. effect can be used for any purpose. What can be a better advertisement for online computer shop than a few thousand 'impressions' in one day.
/. for some technical buzzwords that seem to interest people most of all.
/. as a 'leaked' info (leaked part is optional but will definitely add some plausibility).
/.
You have to remember that
So, for all you guys who want to boost their web site but have no money to spend on adds, here is
'Marketing_Made_Easy-HOWTO':
1. Search
2. Write a pseudo technical announcement of the breakthrough your company has achieved with this product.
3. Post it on
4. Try to keep up with the orders pouring in on your real products.
P. S. I'm very much afraid of the 'tyranny of the majority' myself, but maybe there should be moderation for the articles implemented on
This article was posted well over a year ago, possibly even two. Only then the article didnt have a picture of a pentium II at the top. It only had the pipe screen looking thing at the bottom.
Nick
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Perhaps the icon for this story should be changed to The Foot.
--
The terrahertz internal speeds they are claiming are enough to alert me to a probable hoax.
I would dearly love to have such a technology available to man but... it's just TOO much to swallow on a Monday morning.
If such speeds WERE available, they'd use it for high-end machines first anyway. IBM would want it for their Mainframes, PPC Multiprocessor Servers and Server Arrays. SGI would want to use it for the CRAY line AT FULL INTERNAL SPEED - not at PCI speeds.
Like I said, "It sounds like Cold Fusion to me!"
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Posted by Largo_3:
I've seen this ad/website for almost 2 years, it changes every now and then it once had a pic of a Pii chip with a obviously fake superimposed label over the intel sticker and claimed 'this' was the product.
this site is bogus, and I'm amazed slashdot was fooled by this really lame site.
Posted by viperx2:
/ end0501.ram
http://www.audionet.com/shows/endoftheline/9805
I got through 20 minutes of it. My ears started to fill with bullshit, and I might not be able to hear for a while.
Viper-X
Posted by MadSci:
/. needs a humor section... this certainly doesn't belong in 'news'.
Be sure to check out http://accpc.com/roswell00.htm. Apparently, Bell labs never actually developed anything on their own, they just stole it from the aliens.
C'mon, ACC is a computer retailer, not an R&D firm! They didn't even do a good job of faking a press release. Their grammar and punctuation is worse than CmdrTaco's, and the 'press release' quotes one of their own people when 'reached for comment.' Why would the company need to reach their own people for comment on a press release?
Maybe
Posted by peter_j:
Does this mean we'll be paying royalties to arnold?
Anyone see Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century?
I think this was the disk that everyone was after. Anyone have a vid-cap of it?
Have you read my journal today?
Everyone was making fun of these screwups just a couple of days ago on the hard drive speed discussion. It's a hoax. Look:
3 234&cid=34
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/06/25/15
I can't believe slashdot has posted about this AGAIN! American Computer Company is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever seen in my life, and for some reason it always makes its way through the bullshit filter. Please, rob- don't post anything more about these idiots! This link has been around for over a year, and hasn't changed at all... come on people, who is gonna believe you can fit 90gb in the space of a slot 1 carrier? When did memory technologies all of a sudden get so good?
Here's a previous posting about the same thing:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00000381_F.shtml
Why donate cycles? Just step forward and say "Hi!". -> ETI found, so S terminated. ;-)
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--
--
Well, this could be an antigravity machine. Or it could be a hot-air balloon, or a cheap ion engine. It's actually pretty easy to get forces around high-voltage equipment, just caused by ionization of the air. See http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/lecdem/el10.htm for a simple lab demonstration of this effect.
(If you could make the antigravity device perform in a vacuum, it would be slightly more interesting).
>4) Solar Powered Flashlights
Hey, I have one of those (NiCd battery + photovoltaic cells).
The alcohol-powered fuel cell is (or will be) real as well. Hasn't anyone seen Futurama? This will be the power source for robotics in the future!
(You could probably make a decent glass hammer as well if you really tried. Glass can be surprisingly tough if it's tempered, then the surface is chemically etched to remove microscopic cracks).
If I remember correctly, an alkane is any single-chain hydrocarbon containing only single bonds (methane, ethane, propane, butane, ...).
Throw in a few spelling errors, write some poetry about it, paste in your high school yearbook photo, and I'll BELIEVE!!!
--------
Of course, we also know:
1) Cats always land on their feet
2) Toast always lands butter-side down
Therefore, a cat with a piece of buttered toast taped to its back MUST levitate when dropped!
[not original, but I don't remember where I first heard it]
Come on. There are enough cries of 'conspiracy!' and 'censorship!' when a Slashdot article disappears for technical reasons. You'd never hear the end of it if this one got yanked. :-)
(We do need a 'crackpot' icon for the front page, though).
#(3) I think is real. I saw several main stream articles on a spin-off from Los Alamos National Labs, which promised this capability very soon.
It is based upon a roll up polymer sheet with the "right" electrical properties.
I don't know if it is actually going to be available, as there are some real issues. The user needs to refill the battery with alcohol.
But it is not a scam like (1) and (2). This one should not be in the list with the others.
rm -rf microsoft*
2 years ago the webpage mentioned the pentium II?
Wow.
i'm a bit dubious after scanning a previous /. story today, breaking the computer bottleneck ...but for arguments sake let suppose that the technology behind this *cough* breakthrough technology is mature enough to release to market...where's the production and distribution?
Look at the problems AMD has with getting 'ground breaking' chip technology to market. It's not just the technology but the production, distribution etc, that's dubious....I'm not so sure they could ever release version 1.0 technology at version n prices!
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Given the large number of important articles that have not been posted and the increasing quantity of junk that have shown up here, I think I'm taking my eyeballs elsewhere. It's really sad that this got posted. Time to go back to actual content sites, like news.com.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Must be a fruit break or something.
All those links! They all point to the same Pokey story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and it doesn't even make sense and the Gimp will not find my PNG library and it's all going horribly WRONG and my Wankel engine has died.
Bah.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
I looked at their website a year ago and they were claiming this thing was going to come out with-in the next year.
The website claimed that they got this technology from the Roswell crash (is it still saying that?) and that a lot of AT&T-Bell Labs innovations of the late 60's early 70's (i.e. transistors) were given to AT&T by the government researchers that "recovered the UFO."
Of course Lucent Technologies (formerly Bell Labs) denies all of it.
One thing's for sure, if they said last year that they would release the thing within a year (they said they couldn't figure out how to link the thing to the CPU and bus), they must be following the MS pattern for bringing a product to market.
One other possibility. Can you call hardware vaporware too?
Actually, I think I saw this in either the Wall Street Journal or ZDNet AnchorDesk about a year ago.
Not saying it's true, I'd actually have to see the thing work.
Just Because it's in Print doesn't mean it's true either, no matter what the source (granted, some are much more reliable than others).
bash# echo "90 10 9 ^ * 1024 3 ^ / p" | dc
83
bash#
90 billion bytes is 83 gigs, kiddies.
(And reverse Polish is your friend)
It didn't come along today.. That page is WAY OLD! It was written December 96.. Oh, and the date IS correct. I saw that page more than two years ago..
Amiga - Back for the future!
See the July '99 (just came out) edition of Scientific American for more than several pages about fuel cells, including how small ones, recharged with methanol capsules, could replace batteries in many handheld devices.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The article does state that this is 90gb storage, plus error correction, but gives no details. Note that modern hard drives would be useless without all sorts of error correction going on internally -- the native media error rates are already high enough to render them unusable in a "raw" state. The question ask about any high-density storage is: How much storage is left after applying error correction sufficient to the intended application?
Hey, my web site says that I invented the damn transistor, and *I* say that their claims are false. You gotta believe me... I mean, I invented the TRANSISTOR! And if that's not enough for you, I invented solder! Heck, I even invented electrons! :)
I'm amazed that people are giving this ANY credibility... I guess I should collect all yer email addresses for the IPO of my anti-gravity-engine company....
I really feel sorry for the poor little green men (tm) on Mars. Imagine being stuck with "embedded Windows NT" on every single 90GB hard disk!
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
If you look around at that site, you will find some quad motherboards. I do recall a discussion here about the availability of those...
pronoblem
Roswell was mentioned... on their home page
pronoblem
If you look through the web site some more, you will see several mentions of a "consortium" to "study" this new "technology" and it says that YOU can join, and I have no doubt that it is for a very large fee! I have some ocean front property in Arizona at a special rate for people who join the consortium.
------- Assumption is the mother of all f$#@ ups.
Someone's been on the pipe again, methinks.
Read the last paragraph first ---
We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from. They were extremely complex but not that detailed, we had to fill in the gaps. Obviously, very deep studies were performed, and IBM and Western Electric (Bell Labs) were involved in the 1947-1955 analysis of this technology, but from WHERE did it come? [...]
If you believe anything else after reading that last paragraph, send me money and I will get back to you.
--
Infuriate left and right
I'm not going to believe it until the Wall Street Journal picks it up and prints it as gospel on Monday.
Just like that killer security product that could destroy hardware over the internet. Remember that?
:)
A search on Google brought up lots of interesting stuff, notably this.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
"We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from."
Obviously, very deep studies were performed, and IBM and Western Electric (Bell Labs) were involved in the 1947-1955 analysis of this technology, but from WHERE did it come?'
Average Humanity must be, on the intelligence scale, the equivalent of a "low grade moron" compared with wherever this device's design came from.
Gimme a break. These people are probably starving for attention, and rightfully so. Their webpage/dedign looks like it's for a back woods computer store, not some highly advanced lab mucking around with alien technology. If you think about it, these are probably the same people who camp out in lawn chairs looking for UFO's, and say "the God Damn Twister sounded like a Freight Train!"
P.S.: They probably got a cheap thrill from seeing their (shitty) logo on a PII cartridge. God, they're lame.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Earn Full Time Income on a Part Time Basis, and spend your vacations on the BEAUTIFUL beaches of Jupiter!
New storage devices which store thousands of times more than conventional hard drives are a smashing success on Earth! Recovered from one of our crashed scout ships over 50 Earth-years ago, the human race actually believes this crappy technology is USEFUL! What does this mean for YOU, the alien Enterpreneuer? MONEY!
Now for the first time these machines are being hyped. The earth market will grow to thousands of machines within the next 12-18 months according to industry experts. We are seeking qualified individuals who are looking
to take advantage of a virtually untapped market opportunity in their area. There are retail locations across the country waiting !
Timing is Everything !! We should have had this crap out decades ago!
For a Free Business Package at No Obligation:
CALL TODAY AT:
1-54345-462352562-762357-000-2346123-1
(Headquartered on Mars. Long-Distance charges apply.)
Please refer to Code X615 when you call.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Hey, this kind of claims reminds me of cold fusion - you really wish was actually true. The major difference is that this is probably nothing more than words on a web page while in those cold fusion cells something was actually happening, although probably not fusion.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Will this work with my Elbrus E2K chip/mobo??? If it will, sign me up!
After some digging around on their site I came across the following link. It talks a (little) bit more about the technology behind TCAP.
http://www.byamerican.com/alsi/
Macka
We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from.
Bwahaha. Right.
This sig is false.
Did you use your credit card to get access? No? Fine, shut up. These are busy folks. They print what sounds interesting and unless you plan on paying them, they don't have time to read every article. Get over it.
"embedded Windows NT operating system"
It's Bill Gates, I tell you!!
8Complex
They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
'...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)
This is most definitely a joke... but one that probably fooled a few. I really don't think that it deserves to be on Slashdot... The people who wrote this hoax obviously don't know the first thing about silicon or electronics in general.
CC: CmdrTaco
Conor
Programmer, Consultant, Geek, CTYer.
Wow, they weren't even trying to make this believable. If this is a real company, it must be run by some pretty kooky people.
Average Humanity must be, on the intelligence scale, the equivalent of a "low grade moron" compared with wherever this device's design came from.
Yeah, and you'd have to be a "low grade moron" to believe any of this crap. I especially like the picture of the wafer - it's just a coin with the face doctored in a paint program. Not to mention the relabelled PII.
But come to think of it, wih the recent rush of "vapor" products from Silicon Valley, if these guys held an IPO I'd be willing to bet that some idiot with a pile of cash would be drooling to climb on board...
12 TeraHertz!?!?!?! Wonder if I need to upgrade from my Pentium-2000, 50 GigaHertz, Advanced Dynamic Holographic Overdriven Computer (ADHOC) Brain Implant?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
He looks like one of the Beasties in the Sabotage video :o)
He looks like one of the Beasties in the Sabotage video :o)
Nice threads though !
That was the worst bullshit I've ever seen. I mean...
the least that could've been done is that it should
have been labeled as humor (as many people have said),
and it really shouldn't have made "News" at all. If that
was news, then I suppose I should announce my VaporWare Pro v2.0
coming out in August '99. I mean, it's just as newsworthy
as this, right?
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
Hey, I think this is one of the most effective devices I've seen - this week 8).
It's gotten a bunch of us to check out there web site - that's a very powerful device!
I guess it's our humour spot for the day.
I find it pathetic that such crap has made it through /. filtering. Things like this wouldn't even be funny at Segfault.
My feeling is that /. has been becoming less and less reliable those last three months. When I first came here 10 months ago, it seems that articles and reactions were much less childish and much more dependable. What's happening?
-- Fast, Cheap, Well. Pick two.
Don't be so quick to dismiss this technology. It looks real to me.
I'm not going to use it when it's realeased. of course. The aliens which provided this to ACC, also provided Intel with their chip numbering system.
All of your purchases will be logged by aliens, and within hours of using the device, spam from across the universe will flood your inbox.
Still, it's a pretty sweet design.
Either its intentionaly presented poorly so as to confuse everyone. Our it's a teen prank. Or they
have booksmart savants of alien intelligence, but have never seen a real web page, or product announcement, making the web page now that the VHDL is done.
A pentium picture? A section of a wafer with a lame circular smoothed edge? No interconnects?
No patent refs?
IMHO totaly bogus.
Sheesh.... Whats next?
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
I haven't been able to find any mention of this periodical anywhere. Anyone ever actually hear about it, let alone see it?
æeee!
Anyone care to check a couple of claims? I remember seeing this a while back and discounted it as a hoax, but I just found some other info on their site that, if true, may add some credibility to their claim. Of course, these claims are so broad I'm a little incredulous.
1) Claims to have been around since the 60's
2) Claim to have developed the Router and SMP
3) Claims to have invented RAID.
4) Claims to have developed part of X.25
And quite a few more. You can view their claims here. I don't have time to check them myself, but I'd be interested to see what anyone else could dig up. If this resume is correct, I might not be so quick to discount them.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
I spke with a representative from ACC through the e-mail... here is what he said to my question about availability to purchase and cost. etc...
.5 Msec Average Access time.
"snip"Yes it is.
But its only sold with our El Dorado Storage Centers, as we've adapted it
as a Front Side Cache for Mechanical Hard Drives as a first application.
It turns up to 2 Terabytes of RAID (normally 8Msec Access Times) into a
drive store that runs at
John
*snip"
I herd about this from a friend of mine about 6 months ago and emediatly posted it to slashdot... guess I got ignored. (I'm used to that as I come from a family of three older sisters)
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
Last time we saw this the consensus was that
it was a hoax. I expect it still is.
To say that the article excludes a lot of technological information is an understatement. The article claims that they don't know where the technology came from! Either their command of the English language is absolutely terrible, or this is a perfect candidate for Joe Firmage's new company to fund.
The web site looks like more of an April Fools' joke...they slapped their logo on a Pentium II cartridge with some paint program, took a stock photo of a silicon wafer and somehow came up with this "unknown" technology that they aren't going to sell to the monopolizing computer companies.
Does anyone REALLY believe this? Remember, just because it's on the web doesn't mean that it's true!
=h=
What do they mean by a "low power drain of 1 ma/hr"
is that 1 milli ampere/hr? 'cause that unit makes absolutely no sense
an ampere is a unit of current, not power.
mutiply current(amperes) with the voltage at which it works
(lets say 5 volts), and we get the power consumtion of the device
in "WATTS" so they could say the power consumtion
is x watts, or x milliwatts, or x mw. but that "/hr" bit is
ridiculous, proves that the pages been written by
someone who doesn't know 2 bits of basic EE.
Sigura Non Grata
Unless these guys have come up with some way to circumvent the whole pesky speed-of-light thing, it is absolutely physically impossible to have any circuit at wafer-scale size clocked in the terahertz range.
.001 ns - about the amount of time it takes light to travel 200 microns (I may be _way_ off here - I'm using Admiral Hopper's demostration of 1 ns being about .2 m - someone please correct my calculations). Wafer scale ICs are about 10 cm (100,000 microns) across - the clock signal couldn't even propogate across 1/500th of the chip before it repeated.
A 1THz clock has a period of
Most likely, this is a third rate tech company trying to throw around terminology that Joe Wintel knows about (Hertz - clock speed - and as we all know clock speed is the ultimate metric of computer performance, right?) to impress people and rack up more hits for their site. Sad, really.
I hear the same guys who found this technology also found a skeletal metal arm along with it...
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Let's see..
"We stronly suspect aliens made these plans and military looted them from alien's spaceship in '40s. IBM was trying to figure them out back then but couldn't, but now we got a really bright scientist and we did it.. this thing is great, its 90gig, its 14 Teraherz, transfer rates in terabits per second. ATAPI interface included. We'll start at $800/pop but soon it'll be $20 a dozen."
Is it me, or shouldn't this have been posted?
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
The development team, underneath Phillip Huang, has visualized PC's with "no RAM memory needed" in a future implementation which might mate one or more of the INTEL Pentium II Processor(s) with the "90b8" device, along with an "embedded Windows NT operating system".
True or not, this line is a scary thought...
But! I spent some time reading their "forum" section. This is a truly frightening place; there seem to be three or four posts daily asking for corroborative links, which are responded to by "avatars" flaming the bejeezus out of the querant. I'm bothered by this; I'm so used to /.'s freewheeling, the-ones-that-know-tell-everyone-else-what-the-rea l-deal-is nature of slashdot forums. The conscensus of this /. forum is to dismiss it; this is a joke or publicity stunt. In fact it isn't. These guys take themselves very seriously, and are openly hostile to any and all references to actual (peer-reviewed) research.
Ask Ed Gehrman what he's experienced with this site. He's posted several comments on their site, but then gets childishly (and publicly) ridiculed by the maintainers of the forum, not on the merit of his posts, but the size of his genitalia, literacy, family, etc. This from the supposed CS/EE's, makers of Tommorow's Tommorrow's Technology who can't even spell "teraherz" or "dialectrics" (sic).
I sent Ed a link to Third Voice, and did a touch of debunking myself. If we all went to the site & tore apart their claims, perhaps we can rescue the idiots who're listening to their claims (and sending $$ and equipment to further research, believe it or not. I saw the posts on the forum today).
Anyway, that's my perfect scenario, now that this snake oil operation as once again resurfaced on /.: what if 1000's of /.ers descend on their little party armed with facts and reason... "what a wonderful world it would be..."
So go forth, my fellow Knights of Reason and Heroines of Truth (or vice/versa :) ). Take up your expertise, your passion, your wit, and take these goons to task! Yield no quarter, take no prisoners, kick ass, forget names, and have fun with it!
jaz 'guevera'
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
Well well color me confused.
all about the tcap: seems to be fairly valid, and its on bell labs site. So this might accually be alien technology. ARG. I don't know weither to be amazed or critical. For right now, I'm very critical
NEVERMIND they are not belllabs.. wow I feel stupider and stupider each minute today.
Oh yes, they are very credible, they also claim that aliens helped them invent the transistor.
sure I believe them.
read the page:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCa naveral/Hangar/9587/
--------------
Brooks138
Yesterday's "Ask Slashdot" had a lot of focus on solid-state mass storage. Now, today, this thing comes along, with that remarked P2 cartridge? It's got to be a hoax.
What if you made whole wafer chips out of a large number of connected components, then cut the wafers up the way you would a normal one.
you could then "reassemble" the wafer from the working componints. I think this would work well for RAM type applications, and parrallel chips, etc. I don't know how posible it would be to "reassemble" the chips though...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Can I run them on my Lýnux box? Are there Lýnux kernel drývers ýn the 2.3 tree?
I'd just like to use this next to my Sirius-made holographic display that has a nice SVGA port, APM & PnP support, also complies with those low radiation standards...
--exa--
http://slashdot.org/articles/00000381.s html
Mainly cos he keeps forgetting that he's run these stories!
Sheesh Rob,.. get out the memory enhancing drugs will ya?
Must be all the Jolt....
Is that the same pink guy who keeps trying to steal my cellphone?
Watch out.. He's sneaky...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
If there is one single thing I regret, it is that I did not buy shares in Opticom a couple of years ago.
-segfault
I have a about 25 servers with 4GB+ of ECC memory. Guess what? Every month or two, one of them needs a DIMM replaced due to persistent ECC memory errors. Memory is not absolutely perfect. In especially high quantities (50+ gb), there are going to be flaws on the chips.
So you've got a ~90gb solid state drive on a single chip. What's going to be my bit error rate? And it seems rather expensive to replace a single $900 chip when it goes bad.
Yet another reason why this article is bogus. (That, and it may have low access times... but one a single chip, what's going to be my throughput in mb/sec?)
That is quite funny. I want to know what moron with no life took the time to write all of this up. Who do they think they are fooling? Or is this just some big joke site? The world may never know...
------------------------
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
--- Mohandas Gandhi
Rob, should this one be marked with a "foot" instead? Come on....
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Checking with Network Solutions on a WHOIS gets "nicolai_tesla@MSN.COM" as both the administrative and billing contact.
Yeah, right. This person needs a life.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would label this as another pipe dream whipped up to attract interest)
from the public... at least until I've seen some real progress in wafer
scale integration in the commercial area. The idea in it self to use
whole wafers of memory, processors or combinations of them is in no way
new (I even have a vague recollection of Sir Clive of ZX fame funding some
project way back). After doing a little bit of digging around on the net
I found an interesting article in EE Times at
http://www.eet.com/news/98/1001news/switch.html
The company mentioned in the article seems still to be alive (and can be
found at http://www.hyperchip.com) and seems to be intent to develop a
peta-bit router. Still no sight of a real product though.
Here are a couple of points with wafer scale integration that the article
spreads some light on. The larger the circuit the less yield you will get
from the process. To get around this you add circuits to detect and work
around these errors - but these corrective circuits are also marred by the
same amount of errors as the rest of the wafer. And adding even more
redundant circuits eats up more and more of the wafer. And in the end the
yields were to low to make it commercially viable.
And Richard Norman from Hyperchip says "The only commercial wafer-scale
product I have heard of was a 2-Mbit, 3-inch SRAM wafer back in the days of
64-kbit SRAM chips"
Neat idea though... but until you show me the silicon I will not show you
my money. But do read the article in EE Times - it's a nice piece.
Jari
On http://accpc.com/founders.html, they claim that
they created a multi-processing system based on the 8088 in 1975/1976. Now let's see, my copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" tells me that the 8086 was released in 1978 and the 8088 didn't come out until 1979.
Interesting how they were able to use a processor 4 YEARS before it was released.
*****************************************
$ whois accpc.com
Registrant:
accpc (ACCPC-DOM)
c/o American Computer Company
6 Commerce Dr.
Cranford, NJ 07016
US
Domain Name: ACCPC.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Sysop, Java (JS5587) nicolai_tesla@MSN.COM
908-272-3330 (FAX) 908-272-6297
Billing Contact:
Sysop, Java (JS5587) nicolai_tesla@MSN.COM
908-272-3330 (FAX) 908-272-6297
Record last updated on 12-Dec-97.
Record created on 12-Dec-97.
Database last updated on 26-Jun-99 09:01:24 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.SYSTEMV.COM 206.214.38.13
SYSV1.SYSTEMV.COM 199.35.37.2
You agree that you will not reproduce, sell, transfer, or
modify any of the data presented in response to your search request, or
use of any such data for commercial purpose, without the prior
express written permission of Network Solutions.
********************************************
Hmm... Mr. Java Sysop... interesting...
Before reading the article (and even halfway down it), I was almost gulled into thinking 'cool'
except that the claims were a bit too good to be true.
As soon as the article stated mumbling about terahertz speeds (now isn't any electromagnetic wave at frequency somewhere in the
far infrared range?) and the origins of the complex designs for this technology being totally
unknown(roswell! roswell!)- I remembered seeing these guys (American Computers) put up similarly preposterous claims previously.
What I can't work out is:
a) does American Computer want to be taken seriously on this?
b) is it some sort of (very silly) con or scam.
c) some sort of method of getting extra site hits from gullible people (hey I visited the site...).
d) Some sort of gag/humor site/parody. It did kind of make me smile. If it's a gag, they've certainly made it very deadpan.
e) do these people really have this product (tinfoil hat time methinks)
All I know about this site is that it's been around for a while and that they've made similar claims before. I just forgot about them.
At least the blurb warned us that the information might be rather unreliable....
Sadly, I have to agree... it is an amateurish hoax designed to trick the naive into visiting their web site. After reading the "specs" one would conclude that they have a fully developed, productional product. SCSI, ATAPI interfaces, 128-pin PGA, a snippit of a description of their power and control buses, encrypted media serial number, etc. My favorite part is that they refer you to to their *sales* office for further information, heheh.
I also like the fact that they photographed "it" in a Pentium II casing as if there was a product that it would just plug into that uses a slot 1 bus. Presumably, it's a slot 1 SCSI or ATAPI bus, the two protocols they claim it supports.
Yep, this is a hoax alright, but it's working!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
This thing would obsolete disk drives *and* conventional memory. Based on the performance claims, it would probably obsolete cache memory also. It's not entirely clear, based on the claims, that it won't be faster than CPU registers!
Naturally, I'm a little skeptical based only on those performance claims. I might remain hopeful, however, except that the way they try to frame the performance claims in terms that sound impressive to the unsophisticated user: "...100,000's of times faster than the fastest mainframe hard drives ever made by IBM." *cough*
They go on to claim that it will be released "next year" in a document that claims to be the 1st revistion dated November, 1997. (the copyright dates, however, do include 1999).
I'll wait for independent benchmarking of the samples, thank you.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Hoax, drips of it, from the first words on the page. Relies on a time tested technique, you throw some complicated terms at them, hope they don't see through it, and if they don't... bam, putty in your hands. TransCapacitor.. I'm positive they don't know a farad from a ferret.
Nice molestation of the Pentium casing. I've seen better jobs done. Can Intel sue? Perhaps. Check their licenses! Fraud latent claims are abound.
Silver Alkane? Let me see.. is that an element.. or even an alloy? Besides, we all know, Gallium Arsenide is *much* better than Silicon, or even "Silver Alkane" (isn't sliver a traditional conductor?)
Impressive operating voltage levels. Throw a baby that swings faster between "1.8 to 6.0 Volt"s as they put it, in your computer, you're bound to have problems.
Basic principle, RAM. But it's been molested and abused in strange ways. RAM is capacitors, each one is a junction that retains charge with a given refresh rate. Transistors retaining charge? Sounds like an elaborate flip-flop. That draws way too much current regardless.
Embedded NT? excuse me while I laugh. Let's spell hertz right please. TeraHertz? Sounds like the FCC would have a field day with such a high frequency, and obviously EMF latent device.
An electron trap. Hmm. Interesting traditional idea. Even though conventional semiconductor technology relies on more of an.. "electron linebacker" prinicple (the base in a transistor). I'm humoring them.
I'm sure you could apply physics somewhere. Switching at rates of 12 Thz, Silver alloy, drawing what.. 1ma? 6.0volts... Unless you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, you're bound to generate buko heat (I beleve it's said, a running PII could cook a steak on it's surface)
Good laugh for a monday morning.
And, what a horrible website, ugh, HTML crimes.
I disagree and hold myself in contempt, what blashphemy!
But what if aliens made it, and what if aliens are manufacturing it. I bet if you bought it, it would flash message at you commanding you to be their slaves. Yea, that's it.
Since there is a complete and total lack of any technical details about the technology,
there is no way to verify any of their claims.
But the tip off to me is that the technical details of power usage
they do give are totally bullshit. They don't
understand how power consumption works - it
requires an easily calculated amount of power to
drive the *io pins*, and the data rates, they are talking about, even if they used only 100 millivolt (!) IO signaling levels, instead of 3V, it would still require at least 6 watts to
just drive the I/O pins at 6 Gbit/sec.
If they use 1 v signalling levels, it would require 600 watts (1/2 C V^2, y'know).
So, if their EE calculations are that divorced
from reality on just the I/O, I think it is safe
to say the rest is a complete hoax.
would still require about
this is even sillier than last week's story about the pc with 60,000 times the power of a PII 300....
/.
i think Commander Taco gets REALLY bored on Sundays, which happen to be the only fast day for news on
I remember zdnet had an article about these guys 2 years ago. This page hasn't changed much since then either.
I know this is a hoax, a sloppy one at that, but how many of you actually looked around their site and discovered it was an online store? I can only imagine the increases in sales they have made (or maybe just hits.)
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my sister's dog.
I heard about this about a year and a half ago whn they first announced it.
I first read this 3 years ago, I hadn't been able to find the site again until today...
Of course, back in '96 they were reporting that it would be out "late 1997 or Q1 1998"...
It's dated 1997.
Don't forget:
4) Solar Powered Flashlights
5) Glass Hammers
6) High-Strength Muffler Belts
:)
It should be pointed out that redundant circuitry is a viable method of dramatically increasing yield - often by several orders of magnitude - depending on the architecture of the circuit. Of course, wafer scale yields without redundancy are generally negligible in the first place (because the chance of having no critical defects in a very large circuit is very small), so several orders of magnitude might not be enough. I should know a little about it, as my PhD was in that area.
Using redundant circuitry, you have some capacity to fix defects in the wafer. This is more useful for regular architectures composed of small functional components, or at least those composed of several instances of each functional component.
If one ignores both power consumption and the possibility of errors in the portions of the wafer containing redundant circuits, redundancy looks like a panacea - simply add as much as you like until you can almost always fix the defects that will occur.
It's never that simple. Those redundant circuits are also likely to contain some defects of their own. You can partly mitigate this by reducing the amount of extra circuitry by moving the detection functionality off the wafer (for manufacturing at least). Since this only has to be done once, there's no point wasting silicon on that. This idea helps, but doesn't solve the problem.
The next step might be to use cleverly designed redundant circuits can tolerate some defects without malfunction, but there is still an associated portion where any defect of sufficient size will break the entire wafer. The more redundancy you add, the more likely there is to be such a defect.
In the end (to a very simple first approximation), it's a tradeoff between redundancy improving the yield of the original circuitry, and decreasing yield due to the possibility of fatal defects in the redundant circuitry - but you're much better off using redundancy than not.
The other point is that most of the algorithms designed to detect and correct defects for most architectures are NP-complete or computationally infeasible (i.e. exponential time complexity or worse). That means they are really hard problems, but also that advances in heuristics might also bring about incremental yield gains.
Cheers, DrMazz.
I thought /. was for Stuff that Matters? Otherwise I think it would be a perfect forum to announce my v1.2 Warp Drive. (available only if you can prove you own a late model '98 trans galatic spaceship and are over 18) Please contact sales for information....
-- John Detch (detch@detch.com)
I can't believe this made it here, the date on the web page referenced is from 1997 itself. For those that care, "Americian Computer Company", aka ACC, is run by a single individual named Jack Shulman. There was a story about him on page 10 of Info Systems Executive (a good article for those that get the magazine) listing him as a fraud, and talking about his claims against the US Air Force, Lucent, IBM, AT&T and Bell Labs about stealing the alien technology and hiding the facts about what "really" happened in 1947 in Roswell. He also claims that his company was founded in 1970 but it was really incorporated in 1995 in Delaware.
:-)
He also sells PC's from his home page, if you want one you might also be interested in a bridge I'm looking to unload...
Forgot to mention the month of the article, it was on page 10 of the July 1998 issue of Info Systems Executive.
I don't remember that one ;) But they also mentioned that the transistor technology was "stolen" from the crashed UFO at Roswell ...
It's just a big laugh to me..
"1 Hour Data Retention with no power"
Nah! Now this couldn't be true, could it? I mean, I happen to know a little about Physics and some about hardware design as well, but STILL. This cannot be. They are comparing this drive to RAM and it seems kind of like a teeny tiny drive that acts like SRAM. In other words, it retains data when the machine is off, but the rest of this stuff is so infeasible anyway...even SRAM runs on batteries...those little bits would fly right off when the machine is off...
This is just spam of a different flavor. Creating false products, registering lots of domains simular to real sites, etc. But it works... Made it on to slashdot.
BTW, I've got this perpetual motion UPS system that this pink guy gave me.
Xerx
This seems to fall into the same catagory as :
(1) cold fusion
(2) desktop computer capable of 12 teraflops and runs on house current.
(3) fuel cell powered cell phone that runs on alcohol. (This one may be true but I can't verify it).
I have heard that source of most of these rumors and stories of miraculous theories and devices can be traced back to Utah, the home of the greatest technology scams.
The interest in Transistor IC-based storage has been in the works for a good decade! Sure, this product does seem to go way overboard on the processing speed (in terahertz? come on!) for these little buggers, but the technology itself is NOT that hard to create! All it really takes is an electromagnetically-sensitive substance that conducts electricity in one state of matter and not the other.
This particular article does not seem valid to me, but not due to the large disk size or the high speed bus. The only thing out of the ordinary from the limitations in diametric storage methods is the clock speed of the internal processing.
Basically, my opinion here is that although this particular article is most likely invalid, rest assured that the REAL thing WILL be on the market within two years. Guaranteed.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Some maths: viewing at their specs, they claim to have 50 Bits parallel I/O. Somewhere in their article they claim to achieve transfer rates of one million bytes per 10 ns. When clocking this at 12 THz, you will get 1 million bytes in 13 ns - well, not much difference.
They also say that this chip will produce "almost no heat". They want to do this by using voltages in the micro volt range. This would be necessary because of the high clock rate.
At 12 THz, one clock cycle is 0,8 ps (pico seconds, i.e. 1*E-12 seconds) of length, light will travel only 25 micro meters in this time.
Electrical impulses reach speeds of about light speed, so you would have to reach are really HUGE integration depth so that the size your logical units that need to be in sync will not come even close to that distance. You could build linear units "along the clock line", but then a line could not "go back" more than perhaps 1.3 micro meters (most probably less) without getting serious problems.
You will have to decentralize address decoding so that the decoder units are close to the area where the data is actually stored. But then, the signals travelling to different decoder units will have a hugely different run time, and so the data gets not in and out in order, but probably a few thousand clocks out of synch.
You could object that you could build in some "wait cycles" of the data lines. Difficult, but perhaps possible. This again would increase the capacity of the lines to each other in a way that the chip would even heat in microvolt ranges, I think.
Well, for short - I dont believe...
No, I haven't seen this journal anywhere, but I have a copy of an article from the National Examiner (Vol. 35, No. 52, December 1998) above my desk titled "Company Uses Blueprints from Crashed UFO to Make Supercomputer." It talks about this "TCAP" and how the guy that found it (Jack Shulman of American Computer Co.) is trying to sell it to General Electric.
So, unless the National Examiner is a respected computer journal....
Mobius
You're all hypocrites and cowards! You are simply afraid of change!
You will be left behind by the forthcoming Next Wave, and the accompanying Revolution!
Look upon this man for soon you will be groveling at his feet!
- www.american-computer.com - Sells PCs/Laptops/Servers - Check out the bottom nav bar
- www.nwcg.com - American Computer Scientists Association - This one is a good read
- www.pcmaker.com - PC Sales and has a mention of Roswell
- www.servepapers.com - Legal paper delivery service
Looks like a diverse group! Decide on your own if you belive themSee what other domains they have at AskReggie
The Nerd Intelligence Agency http://www.thenia.com
The ACC and TCAP are complete fooz. Check out the URL below - seems at least one individual more patient than myself has been monitoring ACC's BS meter for awhile. Sorry if someone else has already posted the same - its just incredible the heights to which the Internet can soar as an information medium (slashdot.org as one example) and the low point to which some can drag it ... silver alkane ... I think I wiped some of that off my butt last night.
7 /
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/958
Frequency = Light Speed/Wavelength
or
Wavelength = Light Speed/Frequency
Depending on how you look at it.
~Gawyn~
Would someone please remove this whole article tree? Someone might come along and actually believe this [excrement]. /. to contribute to the fundage of a spammer.
I'd hate for
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo