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Super fast storage access from IBM
Several people wrote with the news burst from
IBM annoucing a "storage breakthrough". Details are still forthcoming, but the advance will says it will be possible for computers to "store data 1,000 faster then they can now", however the actual usage of the product is some years out.
duh. Just go to the library and browse their copy for free. I haven't seen a library yet that doesn't carry Science.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Is it that far behind in R&D? I'd think not, since they have it, and it works, etc.. but, if they're claiming that much time to make it commercially available (how long does it really take to mass produce them?).. I wonder....
Remember that the announcment of the technology and the announcement of the application of the technology are not the same thing. For all we know based on the released material the working technology demonstrator might be the size of a buick to hold all the supporting gear and require a supply of 10Kv @ 400GHz or something. Now they know they can do it, the challenge is to figure out how to put it on your desktop.
Having said that, and IBM being who we are, I some how doubt if the researchers were allowed to even submit their paper to Science without having a very good start on turning this into a deliverable technology. (just imagine what they get to put in the "W" accomplishment section of their PBCs now.... :)
I'm getting tired of this hype.
1,000,000 times more capacity!, 1,000,000 faster!,more robost than anything else!,.
Oh...and it wont be availble for a couple of years. (i.e 7-9)
Although you're correct about the french usage of the word. Whenever you hear people in america (who know what they're saying and not speaking in some ego-maniacal, pseudo-intellectual, intimidation attempt) use the word it is in a negative reference to the middle class. But yeah if were talking in terms of french your right.
Bah, this technoloty taht will only come years into the future, ahs been stated that it will take a while to become cheap enough for the consumer to consider purchasing is a ploy by IBM to scare the consumer away from buying a HD today and wait 15 years for this faster system to come along.
Someone had to say it.
Evry time i read this I am amazed at the glaringly false assumptions you make about communism, the scientific community, competion, and capitalism. Maybe you should shoot yourself in the head lest you infect some weak mind with your baseless and ignorant views on these topics. Or better yet find some intelligent source to feed off of that could possibly enhance your confused views on these matters.
death to micro$~1!!!!!!
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Perhaps he intended the Randian definition of a Communist: Both taking and giving according to desires proclaimed as "needed for the common good". An accurate description of some scientists, who do not recognize the need for justifying the benefit of their research to garner high levels of public funding, and disdain private research because the source of the funding benefits.
Of course, ScienceMag is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It's a non-profit group.
What annoys me is that you have to join the AAAS and subscribe to the dead tree edition - which means both killing trees and supporting their lobbying efforts, some of which I object to.
There's nothing wrong with paying money for a service (most of us would starve otherwise), but the reality is worse than the original poster felt. You have to hand over your ideology to gain access to the information - which defeats the purpose of getting information in the first place.
They're inexpensive compared to the 10 meg hard disk I got for my IBM XT many years back..
Do you compile all of your code with, at least, gcc -pedantic -ansi -Wall?
Actually, I do. It makes porting stuff easier and you never know when that quick hack will become the core of a larger system.
$.02
Actually, I saw this first on Anchordesk and came here becuase I figured I'd find more info than the little "news burst".
/. (like a ling to Science article?)
I don't mind minor flatulence from ZD, but I would have expected the whole BM from
Oh well, it's years away anyway.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Bursts for Nerds. Bombast & blather." Oh, don't get me wrong, I love my /., and I think Hemos, et al usually do a great job. But this is an unusually lame post. Guess we'll get the details when that Science issue comes out.
the zd article was written before the information was released in sciencemag. but I still think I found the right stuff.
If I read one more gee-whiz story about some groundbreaking computer technology that's going to revolutionize everything in 3-5 years, I'm going to unplug my PC, move into the woods, and live on nothing but berries and 5.25" disks. If even half these announcements turned out to be accurate, we'd all be driving fusion-powered personal blimps and computing with superconductors and data crystals...
Chances are, by the time IBM is actually bringing any of this stuff to market, some yet-to-be-invented startup company will already have rendered it obsolete.
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
"will says will says it will" ... "store data 1000 faster" ...
1000 what faster? if "times", why didn't you just say so? Or were you waiting for Will to say it?
--Corey (j/k)
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
Um, you may not realize it, but Science is a real paper magazine also, and it costs money to print magazines. Even if it were only an online service, the people who maintain it have to make money somehow. If you don't pay people to keep the site up, what you will get is a crappy online magazine updated by random people in their spare time. I'd much rather have a high quality site that I have to pay for. In fact, I'd much rather just keep getting the paper version (which is much easier to read and doesn't crash) and ignore the web site.
A nit -- he certainly used bourgeois wrong, but I don't think that your gloss works, either. Petit bourgeois is closer to what we'd mean by middle class, and it really refers to small shopkeepers or industrialists. Bourgeois would be closer to what we'd mean by wealthy: people whose primary income arises from the exploitation of the unearned increment on the labor of others, particularly investors, speculators, and/or bankers. There's no Marxist homologue to the modern professional class, which includes scientists.
Apparantly you have the impression that publishing
material, on the web or in print, is free.
That would be false.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
This article on SiliconValley gives a tad more information, though it's still lacking any real content.
LouZiffer
This would then be precisely the same effect as GMR in reverse. A spin dependent tunneling junction could act as a memory. How is the current being applied then. My guess would be through an AFM/STM. IBm spent a _lot_ of time and money on spin polarised tunneling, and then it diappeared. A single read write head with an integrated SPSTM and MFM or GMR read head would work. This would integrate well with their work on large scal AFM integration.
t ml
Sorry about all of the acronyms. Too use to preaching to the choir. AFM is Atomic Force Microscopy--see http://www.di.com/products/ScanMethods/ScanMain.h
STM is scanning tunneling microscopy. see
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/ if you want to see some marvelous examples. IBM did invent the STM.
Finally, if this supposition is correct, then this isn't anything new. MRAMs are based on exactly this principle. I think it has been demonstrated with CMR (colossal magneto-resistive) materials, as well as with spin valves. An INSPEC search finds many of them
minor nit:
:-) :-)
If the scientists are communist, that would mean they would be taking according to their needs (building upon the work of others) and giving according to their abilities (publishing the results).
The scientific comminity is, perhaps, no longer "communist", but rather is transforming itself into an elite club of money grubbing capitalist bourgeois.
:-)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually, this is what ZDNet was talking about. Note that three authors are from IBM: Science Aug 6 1999: 864-867
Minimum Field Strength in Precessional Magnetization Reversal
C. H. Back, 1* R. Allenspach, 2 W. Weber, 1 S. S. P. Parkin, 3 D. Weller, 3 E. L. Garwin, 4 H. C. Siegmann 1
1 Laboratorium für Festkörperphysik, ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
2 IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory, CH-8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland.
3 IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA.
4 Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Ultrafast magnetic field pulses as short as 2 picoseconds are able to reverse the magnetization in thin, in-plane, magnetized cobalt films. The field pulses are applied in the plane of the film, and their direction encompasses all angles with the magnetization. At a right angle to the magnetization, maximum torque is exerted on the spins. In this geometry, a precessional magnetization reversal can be triggered by fields as small as 184 kiloamperes per meter. Applications in future ultrafast magnetic recording schemes can be foreseen.
If you don't like the postings on /., make your own damn site. Personally, I was intrigued by the possibilities of THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE improvement in storage speed (drool, drool), and appreciate the comments posted by other readers.
I love this comment:
At this stage, no one expects these findings to trigger commercial products any time soon. Dieter Weller of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., another researcher on the team, jokes that the write head used in the experiment--a 2-mile-long linear accelerator--"is a bit clumsy." Kinda pits it all in perspective don't it?
Sometime in the future. May be a few years. :-) Darn it, don't *do* this sort of thing. It causes heart attacks. "Cool thing A available"!!! (In a few years...) I'd say that 1000 times is pretty par for the course. 20 gig drives now. A decade or so ago, 20 meg hard drives were selling. So?
Better yet..halve his salary! :-)
You're all fucking idiots
WTF, Hemos? There's absolutely zero information in the link. This has to be one of the lamest /. posts yet.
Where did that article about deep-linking movie-trailers that was posted a couple of hours ago go?
so where are the specs??? I wanna see one.
Show me show me!!!
Cynic??? Who's a cynic??
--"Cynical?? Who's cynical???" -k-
Not again Mr.Hemos, "will says will says it will"? What sick construction is this? Besides, as another reader has already pointed out, the link is low low low entrophy. Somebody fire Hemos, thanks.
If this is the correct item, then it is what would have made either the ZD posting or the /. posting into something worthy of web space.
Fluff is pervasive, and in the end, is directly analogous to spam.
--- Bill
News alert! This just in from our correspondant in the field: "Technology to advance in the future! More details as they are made available...."
[i think this is the what zdnet was talking about]
Magnetic Switching with Current Pulses
The switching of magnetic memories usually requires application of external magnetic fields. Two reports show how electric current pulses within small devices can be used to
switch magnetic states. The rate at which magnetic data can be stored is limited by the time taken to reverse the magnetization orientation. In conventional methods, the reversal
field is applied antiparallel to the out-of-plane magnetization, and the switching speeds are limited to the nanoseconds. Back et al. (p. 864) show that this limitation may be
overcome by switching the magnetization of thin, in-plane orientated ferromagnetic films using ultrafast focused current pulses from an accelerator. Although the magnetic fields
generated were no greater than those of conventional recording heads, reversal times faster than 5 picoseconds were demonstrated. The electrical resistance of stacked layers of
magnetic (ferromagnetic) and nonmagnetic materials depends greatly on the orientation of the magnetic moments in adjacent magnetic layers--if the moments are aligned, the
resistance is low. Myers et al. (p. 867) show that the magnetic orientation in a single layer can be switched to be aligned or misaligned to a second magnetic layer by controlling the
direction of an applied spin-polarized current pulse. Such switching may find application in fast, nonvolatile magnetic memories.
This site has a little more information/details.
What are you talking about? How is it not yet news? Just because they aren't shipping them doesn't mean it isn't news. I guess if scientists said that a comet was going to destroy Earth in two months, that wouldn't be news either. It'd only be news after the comet had hit.
Access speed for storage is very important, and is quickly becoming the bottleneck w/ new computers. If IBM found a way to totally eliminate that bottleneck, I consider that to be big new indeed.
C'mon, guys. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." This thing is not yet news, and is not real enough to be "stuff" at all, much less "stuff that matters".
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
You're all fucking idiots
As the article in today's Slashdot demonstrates, we may be idiots, but we sure as hell ain't fucking.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Touche! :)
So I browsed out to Science magazine, and after the third degree to sign up for a "limited membership" they dont really give you access to useful info.
What is science coming to when we have to pay to read what new discoveries are out there? what kind of sick and twisted corporation puts a price on knowledge??? So much for freedom of information....
The scientific community is turning into a bunch of money grubbing communists...
Cynic??? Who's a cynic?
--"Cynical?? Who's cynical???" -k-
So far only smart... worthy comments for the next 100 posts to come... please avoid: -- cool... when do i get to use it? -- does it work with linux? -- 50th POST!!!!! WO HOO!!! -- linux rulez!!!! -- *bsd rulez!!!! -- never missing the guy who's birthday is today... or month from now... or a was a month ago... -- someone bought the latest version of "x" distro. of linux and just felt like telling whole world. Somtimes i think i just small time prograganda from the companies... uhhmm -- ok thats it ... if u don't have much to say... don't... i know i broke the rule but oh well
This is news.
The thing is, I wonder why it will be so long before it's commercially available, and yet they're posting news briefs about it, they have a paper out about it, etc.
Is it that far behind in R&D? I'd think not, since they have it, and it works, etc.. but, if they're claiming that much time to make it commercially available (how long does it really take to mass produce them?).. I wonder....
Insert mind here.
What ever happened to putting more read/write
head/armatures on hard drives?
I mean.. duh. two head opposite sides of the platter- one writes the other verifys, - single
platter spin.
I remeber seeing one hudge drive opened up
at DiskDrive Depo on day.
Even if the drive sizes go back up to 5.25
form factor, I'd be happy (member bigfoots?).