Slashdot Mirror
Penny-size 180 Gigabits CDROMs
Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.
This is only one of many possible high-density storage technologies on the horizon. The article itself contains a link to many others; read them, and see what other interesting things are going on.
Now, on to more serious matters... I saw an article a few months back in Popular Science about this same discovery / researcher. PopSci's website is completely blank on searching for info, and I don't have read access to my archives at the moment. (Sorry.)
I'd like to know what kind of transfer rate this device would be capable of... Transfer rates are turning into the limitation that we need to address, instead of raw storage...
Anyone remember Men in Black? Agent K standing in their 'alien tech museum' and saying "This little thing is gonna replace CDs in a few years... Looks like I'm going to have to buy the 'White' album again!"
My, how fast fiction is becoming reality these days!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
divide 70 by percent growth and you get the doubling period. which is currently about 1.2 years. 6 years is then 32 times increase, 9.6 years is 256. But that is the rate for hard drives. Anyway, these sort or dries aren't writeable--ever. And with desktop terrabyte hard drives, why will you care for a non rewritable easily lost CD-ROM?
Maybe I'm messing up on the decimal place, but I get only 0.5 bits/per dust particle.
However, the initial assumption of a dust particle diameter of 0.0001 mm (0.1 microns) is very conservative. Dust particles of up to 100 microns (the diameter of a human hair) are not uncommon. In the U.S. the EPA monitors the levels of particles with diameters below 10 microns, but most particles are actually larger than this. The larger particles aren't monitored because they're not a health threat, since the body can filter them out.
How about the smaller version of CD's. I believe they have a diameter of 3.5". Those are common in Japan, but never caught on here in the U.S. Those CD are small enough to fit in your pockets, yet still big enough that you won't easily lose them.
Even it if it is only 5 bits.....which I doubt.....that's 5 bits of unrecoverable data. That could be 5 bits on my brand-spankin new BEOS v.8.0 SSCD..right in the middle of somethign really important=a total loss to the SSCD.
--Ben
"AOL, CIA, NSA, whatever, they all collect information, and they are all out to screw the american public"
Even it if it is only 5 bits.....which I doubt.....that's 5 bits of unrecoverable data. That could be 5 bits on my brand-spankin new BEOS v.8.0 SSCD..right in the middle of somethign really important=a total loss to the SSCD.
"AOL, CIA, NSA, whatever, they all collect information, and they are all out to screw the american public"
A lot of languages in this world uses a lot more characters than that. It would be good to have a standardized character set that includes all the characters from every language, or at least the most commonly spoken language, in this world.
A character set like that would probably require over 16-bits since unicode is 16-bits. So the next logical step is 32-bits. 2^32 is 2 billion something, so that should be enough. Of course all the text documents will quadruple in size. But with the storage capacity we have these days, that shouldn't be much of a problem.
Having a character set like that and an OS that supports it would help unify the world somewhat.
At least those in the foreign countries won't have to wait any longer than anyone in the U.S. for a new OS release. And there won't be any more stupid problems trying to read those double byte characters.
With something this sensitive to shock, penny-sized is probably pretty close to as big as you get. Somebody else mentioned that bigger disks wobble more. Definitely a problem. I would guess that if you want bigger, it will have to be some kind of disk array, like a bunch of pennies laid out next to each other on the table. Maybe like a caddy system that holds 18 disks instead of 1, and then it would be big enough to not lose. And maybe even big enough to hold Windows 2008 :)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I don't think the size of the disc is critical or something mandatory. It can be easily increased to a size of a normal CD.
I think the reason for choosing a penny was to make it sound dramatic: "Look we can put 180Gb of stuff on a disc the size of a penny!"
He could've easily picked a dime, a nickel, or anything else...
Does it matter? Increase the surface area of the disc by eight... don't know how much increase in diameter, but you will have a 180Gigabyte on a disc still smaller than a CD-Rom. Good enough for me.
Yeah, transfer rate is not the limit. It's the cost. How much are you willing to pay for a faster drive or disk array.
We all know that the cost goes up exponentially with linear increase in transfer rate. (just my BS)
Who decided on the 8 bit "standard?" Is there an ISO or other standards organization document that you can point to?
Delivered in a really big box, where you REALLY have to search hard for that tiny box containing the CD. Finally, you find the cd, try to put your thumb on the thing in the middle so you can get it out (the special tool made for this purpose you lost during the first week you just got the drive), but the thumb's too big.
After a few minutes you get it out (managing to drop it on the floor first of course). "Now if I could just find that eject button, it's supposed to be here somewhere...". A while later, you give up and eject it using the OS (Windows 2007?).
Then you're greeted with the install screen, after lots of tiring, pointless texts you don't want to read, you're asked to input the 192-digit serial number, found on the back of the CD cover. Luckily, you're a nerd, so you do have a microscope, but it isn't easy to read it. After about half an hour of trying, you get it right and reach the "real" install screen.
Recommended install: 100 GB
Full install: 140 GB
Uh oh, time to free up some diskspace...
And so on.
Transfer rate isn't limiting. It is possible (and IBM has done it) to make arays of 1000's of AFM read heads, with integrated electronics. These are lithographically patterned and etched, so don't present terrible difficulties. It is even possible to pattern a LED or laser onto the reader, and then couple an output fibre to that. Rates can be amazing.
assuming that the unusable portion at the center of a CD has a radius of 1.25 inches, i get:
((5.25/2)^2*pi - (1.25)^2*pi) * 400 / 8
(21.6475 - 4.9087) * 50
~837 GigaBYTES per CD.
Just as soon as I get done posting this deep and intensely researched post, TacoBoy goes and makes the point moot by changing the subject line! =P
Whyyoulittle...!
For the record, this story's original topic was "Penny-size 180 GB CDROMs"
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
That is, a 400 Gig disk in your wristwatch won't do you much good if you don't have the processing power to make it useful (the example of making voice recordings seems to neglect how the expensive process of encoding voice for transfer to disk might be handled).
As well, I'm sure there will be the usual irresistable pressures from existing CD makers to postpone implementing such technology until they can figure out how to make money off it...
The article also said there were several groups of researchers developing inexpensive atomic force microscopes on chips. I speculate the media would most probably be contained in a protective housing which also contains the read head (atomic force microscope) and other support circuitry.
:) But seriously, I think the low-cost AFM may open up more posibilities of allowing the homebrew hacker to "crack" tamper resistant ICs and such. But, I degress.
I think CDs are too large. I would rather have a disk/housing about 3 inches in diameter.
Since atomic force microscopes can also move atoms one at a time, the possibility may be there for a writable device some time in the future.
Personally, I'm more psyched about the atomic force microscope on a chip. I've always wanted to write my name in xenon atoms.
:-)
If people ever design an interface to allow people to implant "skill chips" or anything along those lines -- a chip/neural interface, or "jack" in certain parlance -- they're going to need to store lots of read-only data in whatever chip or cartridge that's used. Or, as it turns out, really tiny CD. Unless, of course, people would plug external drives into themselves...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Personally, I'd like to see something along the 3.5 inch size. Small enough to be stiff and stable enough that the spinning disk doesn't wipe out your AFM read heads, and large enough to hold all the info that you'll ever need for your whole life! (Yeah, right! Give me one, I guarantee that I can fill it up!)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
This may be hard to do. AFM's can only read so fast. The larger
your outside diameter, the larger the velocity at the edges,
the harder it is to read. Personally, I am not so sure this tech is
feasible: dip it in hard water once and the residue will mess up
your data, touch it and your fat will screw up AFM force calibration,
and don't even think about scratching it in any way. This may only
be feasible for sealed systems, like a wristwatch.
Unicode uses 16 bits and is supposed to be the new standard. It supports 65536 characters. Chinese and various other languages are fully supported.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
I beleive a wrist watch type thing would be very nice to accompany the micro disk. As for the interface I would love somthing like on the TV show Earth: Final Conflict, you know a holographic user interface type thing? That would solve the interface problem. Or even like a Global, a little pocket sized thing with a slide out screen.
:)
:/ Well how about we let the technology for thoes catch up to us.
Why not make a normal sized CD that holds obsecene amounts of data? Now *that* I would like.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
There used to be mini-sized audio CDs, maybe 3" in diameter. Have no idea whether they work for CD-ROMs
They do. I once got a demo of some game on one. If you look in your cd drive, you'll see a small indentation, which they fit in.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
America Online gives out their software now on these miniature CD-ROMs.
..................................@ @
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
that's what i like about cd's ... they are small enough to be portable but big enough that i don't lose them so much ... don't make them the size of a penny! ... i'll never find them ... a penny? ... cripes ... i lose that in the sofa ... those fall out of the wholes in my pockets ... that sounds awfull
-
if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
I just picked up a slew of this kind of 3.5 inch CD media. It really kicks ass! I'm selling singles of one of my friend's track's on them. They're actually pretty cheap if you manage to find them (or a CD-R that will burn them). Damn cool. I remember seeing a fly-by-night teeny-bopper band putting out singles on this kind of media.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
This sounds really neat, but... It should be ready in 5-10 years, and it can store 800 times the data. Hmm. Gee, this sounds like what we can expect from normal exponential growth, eh?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are two problems with having 32bits/byte.
One is that your neo-ascii table would need, let's
see...2^32 ~= 4e9 characters, 40 chars/column,
3columns/page, 500pgs/book, 25books/encyclopedia
set, 2encyclopedia sets/shelf, 6shelves/book shelf
.... about 200 large book shelves to hold it. 16
bit/byte would "only" take a 500 page book. While
i suppose 16 bit is still reasonable considering
the benifits of supporting chinese and such, 32 is
just rediculous. And either way, it is much more unweildy than a 4 page ascii table. The second problem: i dont want to quadruple the size of my text files. In fact, if it were reasonable to use 6bit bytes for 64 characters, i'd be happy to use the 25% compression. Our hard drives have not progressed to the point where we can just throw space away yet, i have some 8meg text files that i would rather were 6megs and really dont want to be 32megs.
I'm too lazy to read the actual article... was that size quoted for a CAV encoding or CLV?
Currently a CD holds 650 MB of data
... ???
650MB * 800 = 520000 MB or 520 GB
My standard (POS) ruler measured a 2 3/8" radius disc and a 7/8" radius 'unuseable' center.
Math (Area of a circle = pi*radius^2):
pi * 2.375^2 = 17.721 sq.in.
pi * 0.875^2 = 2.405 sq.in.
17.721 - 2.405 = 15.316 sq.in. ('useable' area on a CD)
650MB / 15.316 sq/in = 42.44MB sq.in.
So, a typical 650MB CD holds 42.44MB/sq.in.
800x's this is 270 gigabits/sq.in.
(42.22 * 800 = 33776 MB/sq.in = 33.776GB/sq.in * 8 bits/byte = 270 gigabits/sq.in.)
400 gigabits/sq.in. / 8 bits/byte = 50 gigabytes/sq.in.
That would make 765.8GB CD sized disc (245.8GB LARGER that 800x a CD)
So 800 times translates into 270.208 gigabits a square inch. (~130 gigbits/sq.in. SMALLER than 400)
Conclusion(s):
400 gigabits a square inch is ~1178 times, or
800 times is ~270 gigabits a square inch.
a) my math is wrong (most likely)
b)
c) all of the above
d) none of the above
Disclaimers: I know this is an old post but I was reading through and thought I'd try the math. Also, please excuse the scatterbrained and redundant presentation.
180 GB in a wristwatch sounds great, but what about the physical shock factor? IANANTS (I Am Not A NanoTech Specialist), but what are the chances of a "head crash" on a device this size?
________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
We will be able to use lasers to read the data off of these structures after all:
Light Microscopy: Resolution beyond the lightwave barrier
Hopefully this will quell the reliability issues raised elsewhere regarding these devices.
It will be practical to use these devices in very small ruggedized devices by use of an array of solid state lasers. This will allow very fast, highly parallelized reading.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Think about it... 180 gigabits = 22.5 giga bytes.. an mp3 player that could hold enough music to play continuously for like a year of non stop music.
Lets say that a grain of sand is about
0.0001 mm in diameter, and for the purposes of this examination it is round and close enough top be flat. Therefore it will cover
pi* D^2/4 = 0.00000000785 mm^2 of the disc (Asuming the AFM doesn't push it out of the way.)
400gbits/645 mm^2 (1 inch = 25.4 mm, in^2 = 25.4^2 mm^2) ~= 62015503 bits per mm^2
therefore 1 partical of dust would destroy about
..
Oh hell with it. Alot. These things would need clean room conditions (probably better) to be any good. Which tends to suggest putting them in vacuum sealed containers. But that means the AFM would have to be packaged in there too. Somehow I don't see these being in stores anytime in the next like 10 years anyways.
More Caffeine. NOW
...with a cd this small, i could get a boxed-set worth of the backstreet boys and literally shove it up their asses, seeing as how that's where their music came from.
*cough* i apologize for that outburst, but i am just sick of their annoying voices on the radio.
seriously though, i for one would like a storage space that small. a normal sized cd would never fit into a pilot sized computer. with the penny-sized media we can finally make the desktops and the palmtops closer in accessiblity. plus, didn't that russian E2K processor supposedly would provide a desktop-power chip for a pocket-sized computer? (i seem to remember reading that in russian on a page at www.el2000.ru). normal cd's are a little too big. minidiscs are almost the perfect size to carry around, but still they are too big for palmtops. perhaps they could half that size without making the discs too easy to lose.
also, if we make normal sized CD's with fast read (/write?) access, then we will give all the more reason for microsloth to bloat, bloat, bloat, and bloat some more.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
This would be cool. It'll make good use of all those piggy banks. Just replace those pennies with little mini-disks and instead of 5 dollars in pennies I have 87 Terabits of storage :)
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
Well... if you expand the disc a bit and put in a hole, you can put it into a type of caddy system.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I think the 3.5" floppy is the best size, or maybe just a little smaller... 3" or 2.8"?
After reading the article, I got the feeling that the technology to read these penny cds is sort of far off from the mainstream consumer. I mean if scientists are using the technology now to push around atoms (which conjures up images of guys in labcoats in a room full of equipment), is it reasonable to expect that same technology to not only get cheap enough to mass produce, but also fit into a watch?
Did anyone check the date? This was posted to discover's site a year ago.
This was posted 7/27/98 ...1998..I imagine, a year has passed, and that we could maybe even store more now. =] I agree with the previous post of losing the CDs in the couch though. Hah. Though, I would still fear the cost of such a drive to read (Or write? Eek) to such medium. Anyone figure about how much we could store if the platter was the size of a standard CD? Or how much could be stored in a nice washer-sized disk array? *grins* ..
Finally, when people call and ask how to download the internet, we can say "Go buy this nifty nano-CDR"
I thought 50x was the king: Asus 50x review.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
> Who decided on the 8 bit "standard?" Is there an ISO or other standards organization document that you can point to? How about ISO 8859-1 (though 8859-10) also known as Latin 1, and which differs from DEC MCS by 4 characters. I belive ISO 646 is the old 7-bit ASCII standard.
I don't know how i feel about a wrist watch size computer, but it would make a really kick ass radio/cd player type thing. You could easily fit a headphone jack into a wrist watch. Or just put the player into the headphones and drop the disc into the side. It would be very cool indeed.
Also, wrt the mechanical components supposedly IBM is working on a read for one of these that is the size of a computer chip, so that really isn't an issue. Also, w/ something this small the power requirements would be very low. The really scarey part, is it kinda looks realistic.
-matt
What the hell does this have to do with Elvis?
For typical consumer use, you'd just try to scale this up to a mini-disc or CD size. As several people have pointed out, it's a good tradeoff of portable vs. large enough to not lose easily.
However, I can see penny-sized (or smaller) disks in embedded applications as a very nice thing indeed, assuming that the drive can be made small, too...
But with data storage space this plentiful, actually losing one of these cds would amount to losing about a penny's worth of data. Just make sure you keep backups of anything more important than a penny. Of course, you could point out that you would have to have a burner for this to hold true, but since we are speculating five to ten years down the road, let's just assume we can all afford read/writables by then.
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson
It's easier to accurately and smoothly rotate a penny sized object than it is to rotate a 5" platter. Remember 8" floppies? If more area meant more storage and the bit density on 3.5" zip disks were used over the whole 8", then whi do we not have 520MB 8" zip disks? The answer is that the large diameter media can't be rotated in a stable manner to maintain bit density on the outer tracks.
That's why slot-loading CD/DVD drives are your friend. Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Second of all, imagine the horrible skip protection on these!!! The "needle" is floating a few micrometers off the surface of the disc - If you kicked the table it was sitting on then KA-CHUNGG, you'd have a big fat dent in your SSCD (SuperSubCompactDisc) and a bent player head (I bent my Wookie). At least with current CD technology the laser has a few mm's of clearance from the disc surface.
Cool story, and it's a sure thing that this electron-beam imprinting will be used in future storage. Keep on working, boys!
Wah!
Nah, the Kenwood? TrueX 52x is a little faster. Moreover, it's better because instead of spinning much faster it reads multiple tracks(?) in parallel, so the drive isn't as noisy as many other fast drives. Combine the multi-read tech with faster rates and 100-200x shouldn't be out of reach.
Note that with a smaller disk, higher RPMs should be practical, with current CDs rotational imbalances are a problem with going faster. I just hope that if they do an incompatible size, they finally put them in cases a la 3 1/2" floppies so we can write on them, put stickers on them, avoid scratching them, etc.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Of course, then someone will think it's a toaster slot...
If toast was that small to start with.....
Insert mind here.
with LP's you could play two at once. but the top one had to be sufficiently thin and elastic (back in the day when they made them on magazine covers and other paper think materials), and the bottom one was prefereably hard and thick. that way you could get the interference of the two. the hardness of the lower provided an easy way of distinguishing which one is which. bacically the sound of the top one faded (vibrated sortof) very noticably because it would lay slightly unevenly but the sound of the lower one sound be strong but deader than usual. kind of like listening someone talk through a cloth. i never tried it with three or more records.
i realize this is offtopic but perhaps the AFM head could pick up two layers with appropriate decoding wavelet employed. although there would still be a huge step to go from analog to digital. i don't know anything else about the subject. not a physicist. 8)
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
All this talk about tiny CD's being easy to lose and stuff aside, imagine using a laptop to serve 16 penny sized cd's to a LAN. That would be killer. Also imagine how much data (although static) you could fit in a mega-tower server with daisy-chained SCSI penny CD drives. Penny CD's would probably find a good market with laptop folks though, you could fit a lot more nifty stuff in there without the huge tray and everything...
-- My neighbors dog has a four inch clit.
I'm not quite sure about some of these mass data storage devices- having 50 megs of data the size of the dust landing on your storage medium would be catastrophic.
Granted, this is a hard drive and operates in a sealed environment, but still, corruption would be so much more absolute, pending there was a failure at all.
I think that had more to do with athetics then anything else. would *you* like to haul around an 8" zip disk? I wouldn't. I mean look at lazer disks, no one ever got into them, dispite the wonderfull video quality. they were just *to* large. I personaly would like to see 2.5inch disks myself, like Sony MDs. who knows why he chose a penny, maybe he just thought it would be a good size, and that 180gb was plenty....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
why couldn't it zoom across the whole surface? Think of it essentially like the laser of any CD ROM drive, only replace "laser" with "needle". It works pretty much the same way, at least for all practical purposes.
and 3 years ago...1 GB was huge!
and 7 years ago...1 MB was huge!
and 10years ago...1 KB was huge!
Wouldn't imperfections on the data side have a greater effect if there's such incredibly increased data density? I mean, a small scratch, dust particle, fingerprint is no big deal on a regular CD, but you'd think something like this would be much more suscepible to it.
I don't know about you, but I'm fairly reckless with my CDs, and sometimes just plain clumsy. I'd hate to ruin a $100 piece of software because I drop it on the floor, resulting in a small scratch. (or fingerprint picking it back up)
What is the current method of error correction (for lack of a better term...I'm not an optics expert) for CDs and could it be applied to something with a much greater density of data?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
"...uses penny-sized storage media"
as "...uses pennies AS storage media".......
"Hello, tech support. How may I help you?"
"Hi...uh, I just tried to save my English project on a penny, but the little slot I put it into started spewing smoke..."
"YOU DID WHAT?"
As long as the dust doesn't do anything more serious than garble a bunch of bits, you can just store redundant info. Shrink that 180Gb down to 90Gb (11GB), and it's still pretty impressive. Someone said a CD-sized one would be 800GB, well, doubling up the data would only cut it down to 400GB.
I agree that minidisc size is about right for consumer use. But I think we're confining our thinking too much. For REALLY integrated devices, why not make the damn things SMALLER than pennies? I mean, you don't need 22.5 gigs for most integrated electronics...heck, you don't need 22.5 gigs for ANYTHING except full video stuff. So we could have CDs with a diameter the size of a pen, put it INTO a pen, and be able to record hours and hours of conversation or personal notes without a bulky recorder, just a common everyday writing untensil...then we put in voice recognition software that allows you to use commands to locate any point in the conversation and play it back through a tiny speaker in the side of the pen...add a port on the end of the pen to jack it into your computer... mind blowing stuff, and this is just off the top of my head...
Blue semiconductor lasers are just coming out. When they become cheap we will see them in DVD and CD-rom players. In a few years we will probably se e blue DVD that can hold several times as much data as a normal DVD player. There may even be blue DVD burners. This is the technology I would bet on! Smaller wavelength = smaller pits!
1T"5 L1K3 MY G1RLFR13ND 4LW4Y5 54Y5...
'B1FF U 5TUD!!!1 51Z3 15N"T 3V3RYTH1N6,
1T"S H0W U Y00Z 1T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1'
------ ------ ------
:WQ
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
------ ------ -
as is, you would think the seek rates would be horrible at best... pick up the needle, track to the right spot, wait , wait, drop....
Granted, it doesn't actually "touch" the surface, but I'm sure you probably couldn't just zoom this across the whole surface... ???
Karnal
Mom: "Junior, I just found this right next to the remote. I loaded it up and it was 'Cheerleader Orgy Fest 2004'. What do you have to say about it?"
Junior: "It's not mine! One of the guys lost it here when we were watching HDTV! I swear!"
-Chris
Ok, assuming that these little suckers come out in 10 years. What would it be good for besides whatever movie formats the future holds (3D/Holographic/etc). Even at the rate M$ is going, I doubt even they will be able to produce bloated software that would not waste any space on these things. Maybe it'd be useful if we could write to them but how long till that's possible (20 years?!??!).
It'd be a waste of money to make them the size of a CD/DVD because almost no one would be able fill even a penny sized one. What do yuo think?
***But could you imagine all episodes of every Star-Trek ever made on 1 disk?
-capt.
well, I've got 1.03 gigabytes of MP3s on my computer, and I've "only" got a 31hour playlist (although not all of them are on the playlist) you would have about 16days worth of music without repeat.
:)
Of couse *any* mp3 player could go "nonstop"
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Yet Another Technology That's Ten Years Away
I don't understand part of your calculations. I did the last operation at the point where you said, "Oh hell with it," and I only got an answer of one grain of sand destroying a little under 5 bits of information. 5 bits is NOT that big of a deal, in my opinion, especially considering that these things ought to be in some sort of casing, much like mini-discs, which would further reduce the chances of sand/dust even touching the disc. btw, did you mean a grain of sand, or a particle of dust? you switched at some point...
That would be great if these were writable like CD-R, but they aren't. They must be pressed, according to the article. They aren't read/written by laser, so you can't "burn" them.
One way to characterize software is to think of it as a compression of the near-infinite into a finite space. You have at every point in the use of a program a good number of parallel paths you could choose. Some of these paths could arguably be unrolled and stored on a disk this big, instead of determining the value at run time.
For some calculations, it's very speed sensitive, so slow drive access would potentially eliminate this sort of size-speed tradeoff.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
Tech Support: May I help you?
Customer: Yah. My computer won't turn on
TS: Is it plugged in?
C: Of course! And I fed it two quarters --TWO!-- and it still won't start up!
--
--
Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
Nope, the slot-loading ones are no good. A few weeks ago I was helping a coworker set up Linux on a box with a slot-loading CD drive. We were making a boot disk, and he reached down to put the disk in. Accidentally missed the floppy drive and stuck it in the CD drive instead. Then we got to spend the next half hour trying to get the floppy back out without ruining anything. :)
I believe that 3 inch CDs should be the new storage standard. Why?
1. Work in existing CD-ROM Drives (well, most)
2. Small enough drives for 3.5 inch drive bays (if needed)
3. Small enough medai to fit in pocket easily
4. A format that can be evolved easily (recordable, high density, etc)
5. Media will not break easy like a Zip or floppy design.
6. Many more I am sure.
Also, how come nobody has made a DVD drive that is also a CD-RW? Not DVD-ROM, I mean CD-RW. That is what I would buy.
EC
EverCode
How long ago was it that CD's were pressed, so you couldn't write them because they just didn't work that way? I dobut that this technology would take long to become writable, if I remember right one of the companies was working on making ones of these that use AFM's to write it in the first place. The only reason this guy's were better was because he could make a bunch of them faster.
-Ted
fingerprints??? Wouldnt that destroy the ability of the atomic tip to read the CD electrostatically? I know what you're thinking--just put it in a case that the drive can open to read it---but then its still susceptible to dust and foreign particles in the air, which are HUGE in scale compared to the data on the disc. So, the only application I see for these devices is in sealed hard drives :-(
VFV
Time is honies
Didn't Batman have one in the Batcave?
Adjust accordingly.
Tech Support: Thank you for calling, how may I help you?
Customer: Yeah, this computer you sold me is crap.
TS: What seems to be the problem?
C: The cupholder is too @#$% small. What do you think I am, a #$%^ midget. How am I supposed to fit a Grande Tiazzi on one of these? Are you stupid or something?
pick one up, all day long you'll have 180 gigs..
Seriously though, I agree with the consensus that it needs to be larger sized, penny sized for the most part is pointlessly small for everyday use.. Only becomes harder to keep track of.. CDs and DVDs are just about the right balance of portable/easy to keep track of..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
where are you going to put your coffee cup when they shrink the drawer on the reader?
Well, probly not. Electron beams are very, very slow. For making templates and lithography masks, they are fine--for anything else, they are way too slow
Mmmm, toast. Melba?
"Dang, I left my GNU sources in my pocket and they went through the wash again!"
The stuff they are working on is already little..
It's not 180 GB, or even 18 GB. It's 180 Gigabits, which is 22.5 Gigaytes. 8 bits in a byte, remember? Not base ten...although it ought to be...
Of course, then the cable connecting the drive to the mobo becomes the bottleneck...I don't think chained IDE drives could handle that very well, maybe SCSI can...
-Skeptic
Great, megahigh density storage, right, but how quickly can you get the data from the platter through the nanoscale atomic force microscope "needle"?
Normal CDs are too bulky though. Wouldn't you just *love* to have CDs you could carry in your pocket? No more busted jewel cases, no more huge CD folders...plus, it's more stylish; anyone remember the minidisc-like storage media they used on SeaQuest DSV? The hacker's dream media!
Well, if she had a nano-tech immune system booster...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I could ask you the same thing now: With desktop 20 gigabyte drives, what do you want with floppies that hold a mere 1.44 megs? or even super floppies or Zip disks? It's portability, my friend, and it's the name of the game from here on out. I don't care if my computer at home (which might as well be cemented into the floor) has a terrabyte drive; I can't take it anywhere!
um, no, it should not be base ten, computers are binary, therefore the bases it uses only make sense if they are a power of 2. Granted we _could_ use 10 bit bytes, but it would make things more messy and it would be a waste of space. 8 was chosen as the standard because there are 26 letters, two cases (52) and 50 or so special characters (~102). To store these characters at one character/byte, you only need 7 bit bytes, but no one wants to use a prime number when you could use a power of two, plus you want to leave room for expansion, so they settled on 8. 10 would make avaliable 1024 characters, more than anyone needs, and consequently, most of them wouldn't be used, wasting the extra 2 bits.
sure, Chou's method would be writeable
only at the factory,
but the article also mentioned IBM is working
on something similar, which would write the bits one by one...
It sounds to me like the technologies are equivalent, and that you could read both by the same method...
the Chou's method for mass production,
IBM's method as the heart of a personal CDR...
though I don't see (easily) how you could get
CDRW with these...except maybe by using as a material some polymer which flattened back out under a given electrical charge...hmmm.
This would be more interesting if it were in the commercial stages already. I think by the time it comes out in say 7 years that we'll have such better memory and communications technology that it is likely to be irrelevant to ordinary consumers. Maybe big distributed data servers could use them to store hundreds of terabytes of data... but you see if you've got a chunk of space on a huge server somewhere and you've got unlimited connectivity, there's very little advantage to having "much" local storage, and there are some pretty significant disadvantages. The advantages of moving away from mechanical storage (you have to spin the disc and move the needle still!) like this are also pretty great. I would almost expect a breakthrough in memory technology where we end up with cheap multi-GB flashcards would pretty much kill this product in consumer markets.
Yet another technology that gets smaller, but takes longer to get to us when we really need it...
Anybody ever watch TekWar? I wasn't wild about the show, but they used discs about the size of a CD single.
I'd prefer something that size...something I can palm, or even drop in a shirt pocket.
:wq
Rather than shipping small disks, it would be more appropriate IMHO, to recognize the need for large file storage (video, for example), and to stay with the current CD form factor.
Hopefully, the increased density will also lead to increased data transfer rates. The slow transfer from present day technology is really limiting in the context of video applications. And yes, 32X is still rather slow. Good quality MPEG-2 is in the neighborhood of 1MByte/Sec, and to be really useful, any mass storage for video must be capable of significantly greater than play-speed transfers, in both read and write.
--- Bill
Did anyone else notice that the sizes quoted are Gigabits, not GigaBytes - simple arithmetic will give you the real figure...Don't get me wrong, I don't wish to belittle the great work these guys are doing, just put it in perspective.
I agree with many of the posters here: a penny size disk is too small.
But, I wouldn't complain about having disks smaller than current CDs/DVDs. Minidisk size seems just about right, to me. Small enough to fit in a pocket (with a case, prob., for these things), and large enough not to lose easily, and to be written on (sorta).
---
END OF LINE
So when are they finally going to perfect the technology that will make pennies the size of CDROMs?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
There used to be mini-sized audio CDs, maybe 3" in
//Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net
diameter. Have no idea whether they work for CD-ROMs.
Btw, why does just about everybody misspell "lose"?
"Loose" is a verb, but it means such things as to
undo the moooring lines of a boat as it leaves
the pier, or to release some horrible horde of
nasty insects, as in "A plague of locusts was loosed
upon the poor farmers' crops". "Loose" = unfasten. Rhymes with "goose".
"Lose" rhymes with "use".
You could argue that it would be nice to have 1024 characters. There are a lot of math symbols, greek letters, multinational characters, wingdings and other types of symbols that are not included in the current 256 character ANSI specification.
However, don't forget there are definite cost and manufacturing advantages to making a byte (or whatever you want to call the basic grouping of bits) contain a number of bits that is a power of two. Therefore, the next logical choice after 8 bits, is 16 bits. But if a byte were 16 bits that would allow 65536 characters, which although possibly needed for Chinese, is way more characters than anyone would want to keep track of.
Yeah, that's a good size. Any smaller, and you'd lose it.
Also, of course, on TV they keep the disks naked just to make it look more "high-tech". As mentioned above, keeping it clean and undamaged would become more of an issue as the density increases, so it would probably be better to seal it inside a cartridge. It would probably help to have the entire drive mechanism sealed in with it, since the positioning, etc., has to be so precise.
Actually, just make it the same size and shape as a flash card or IBM microdrive, so it would fit all the same devices. That's a lot of mp3s for a portable player with the right slot.
no, wait! Too small! I want it to look like those orange "tapes" in Star Trek.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
This is so great that technology is coming out with this much storage possibility. I mean this new cdrom makes DVD storage capacity look pretty lame. However, how much of a good thing is this actually? It seems everytime consumers get a great product [i.e. DVD], another new product suprises it from behind a month later, scaring any possible customers from buying DVD [for example]. This penny-sized cdrom is a big deal, I suppose. But, how much money and how much time would it take to deploy to the rest of the world? Anyways, this is a cool invention. I hope to see it [or a similar type] in the near future.
Rajiv Varma
Poorly written show with lots of cool special effects and "toys." I found I coudn't take some of the technical absurdities ("she was killed by that computer virus"), but those meter wide transparent flatscreens would sure be nice ...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Would that be a real computer or just a storage system that is inside that watch? I don't think I could type on something that small easily.
.mp3's are that much more portable.
No, but with an Active Display, it would make wristwatch computers a lot more interesting. The problem would be the other mechanical components that this would use. (It is still an optical disc, correct?)
By the same token (Subway-token sized = Token Drives?), Palm computers would get ramped up in a much bigger way. Suddenly all those
Now all we need is a color display (yes, I am aware of WinCE), and one could fit the entire suze archives in the palm of your hand.
{homer}Mmmmmm....miniature pr0n....{/homer}
--sugarman--
That can't be done. The resonant frequency is a function of the electrostatics of the surface. There isn't (to my knowledge) anyway of making a non-contact AFM work on multiple layers like that.
With an optical reader, that is possible, but not with a mechanical. This really is just like a needle on an old record player--you don't get to play the record stacked 5 layers below the top one.