Submitting a review for consideration is easy; please first read Slashdot's book review guidelines. Updated: 2008114 by samzenpus
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Funny)
Are we talking in units of man hands or lady hands?
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Funny)
Mama was apparently wrong about nailbyting.
Parent
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:4, Funny)
The Trim Command works much better as it doesn't fragment the file system as badly as nailbyting does. So no, mama wasn't wrong
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
C:\>head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com
'head' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
WTF?! It's not working. I tried rebooting, but I got the same problem. Not even running as Administrator helped.
Can you please give me head? You can email me at AnonymousCoward@aol.com.
Also, I'd like to know how you know so much about me, and why you're using my name, and give me some Photoshop tips while you're at it.
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Funny)
I asked a female co-worker to help me compare, and she obliged......by flipping me off. At least I got a good look at her nail. The things we nerds endure for science.
Parent
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Funny)
That reminds me of a true story.
A few years ago I received my first PDA phone. It was HTC through AT&T and it did have a camera. I went through the office asking people for a picture for my phone. Explaining that when they dialed me, I could see their picture instead of the phone number. I went through about 20 offices and cubicles on my break to get those pictures.
They ALL GAVE ME THE FINGER. Every single one of those comical bastards. No prompting, No hesitation. It was, "Can I get a picture of you for my phone?". They all turned around and flipped me off. Women as well as men.
Even the owner of the company was there that day. He flipped me off too.
Could it have been me? Nah.
Parent
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Funny)
It was memories of the Vista you installed on all PC's.
Parent
Re:Finger nail-sized chip? (Score:5, Insightful)
Men have short wide fingernails on large hands. And women have long dainty fingernails on small hands. I wonder if statistically the area works out to be about the same.
Parent
Dang it! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I just bleach my shaded albums.
damn (Score:2, Funny)
that is tiny. :D
If that had been available earlier this year, I wouldv had it implanted
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Implanted? Just like that? Are you one of these people [xkcd.com]? ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Signed:
Time Traveler from 2030
What is the ETA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds promising, but how many months/years/decades before we can reasonably expect to see this used on a wide scale?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry, all flying cars will have at least one. Further, the next version of Duke Nukem will ship on such a chip.
The good news (Score:5, Funny)
It will be commercially available by January. The bad news is, this is a write only memory device.
Parent
Re:The good news (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The good news (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
There is no chip. (Score:5, Informative)
They have made a material which could if you designed a suitable chip and associated circuitry, and figured out how to manufacture it at large scale, would let you store a terabyte of data on a fingernail sized chip.
The whoever wrote the article title should be embarrassed, as should timothy for propagating it.
Re: (Score:2)
Two words: Page hits.
Re:There is no chip. (Score:5, Funny)
Two better words: Huge tits.
I even re-used a lot of your letters...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:There is no chip. (Score:5, Informative)
Each base of DNA can be AGT or C, so that's 2 bits worth of data per base pair.
A terabyte = 1.1259E+15 bits, so a terabyte of DNA is 5.6295E+14 base pairs.
For mass, [5.6295E+14 base pairs] x [660 daltons per base pair] = [3.71547E+17 daltons] = 6.169686786411827E-7 grams =
That's smaller than my fingernail by a pretty good margin. In fact, my actual fingernail already contains maybe a petabyte of storage.
Unlike their new super material, I've already developed (well, OK, discovered. Well, no, read about other people discovering) techniques for reading, writing, and copying data with this storage medium.
However, like them, I haven't worked out any computer interface yet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The resulting storage of 1,000,000 people typing away on slashdot will eventually encode a monkey.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, A only pairs with T, and G only pairs with C. T paired with A is not the same as A paired with T. The cell only reads one strand of the DNA (at a time), so you really don't have to worry about what it's paired with. Since there are 4 possibilities, AGCT, that's 2 bits.
Re:There is no chip. (Score:4, Interesting)
Years ago I worked a product that had an IC feature that could be manufactured reliably 99.99% of the time. For a real device with millions of such features that averages to almost zero yield, and this problem was not overcome. For some technologies the manufacturing yield hurdle can be overcome, for others it can't be. So although seeing a small number of memory cells work correctly is interesting and worthwhile, by itself that doesn't tell us whether we will ever see this technology in an actual product.
Parent
Re:There is no chip. (Score:5, Interesting)
These days the quality of memory is crap though. Just look at NAND flash: there are hundreds of failed blocks on most chips, and these days sectors with a bad bit or two are used and just error corrected. Same with hard disks. You work around this by shoving large amounts of error detection, correction, and relocation logic into the controller.
Let's say each individual bit (!) can be manufactured reliably 99.99% of the time. For a 2048-byte sector (typical for NAND flash), using sector-granularity remapping, there's a ~20% chance of a sector being good. That's not very good, but it still gives you 19% usable capacity. At a terabyte per chip, that's still 190GB of storage. If you add single-bit error correction, you'd get 500GB of storage. At 2-bit correction, 750GB. Current generation Flash memory already uses multiple-bit ECC for MLC level flash memory (where typically 2 bits will fail at once), and sectors with one bad bit(pair) are considered "good enough" and corrected away. If you can manufacture this 1TB storage chip at 99.99% per bit, and especially if most of the failures will happen at manufacture time and not develop later during use, I'll gladly take it given a reasonable amount of error correction wrapping it. It's not like we don't already rely on ECC for our day-to-day storage.
Yield issues affect mainly things like CPUs with no redundancy. With memory, you just lose the damaged parts. Even RAM these days is manufactured with spare blocks that can replace blocks that came out wrong, to increase yield (though it's usually only a few and the remapping is burned in at the factory).
Parent
Moore's Law meets Bohr's Atom (Score:2)
Is this a real writable chip? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just a demonstration of an artificial structure with resolution / density that'd permit 1 TB in whatever their size is?
I didn't see anything in the article that leads me to believe it's an actual storage device. Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's even necessarily a "fingernail-sized" chip they made, just that if you scaled their research to that size it'd hold 1 TB.
Any information other than this incredibly vague article? (I swear, more and more frequently we're seeing useless articles that say even less than the press release they're drawn from. And aren't the press releases often DESIGNED to be vague and over-promising, possibly to attract more research dollars?) Be nice if we'd just see their actual research, or a rough draft of a paper, or even just a frank interview with the geeks involved.
Re:Is this a real writable chip? (Score:5, Informative)
The actual press release does not claim that they "made a chip". That's a fabrication of the ComputerWorld reporter.
Parent
"A man with a tape recorder up his nose" . . . (Score:2)
. . . so now I know how the Monty Python crew pulled off that trick . . . this music was stored on his fingernail!
Performance? (Score:4, Insightful)
nanotech on its way (Score:5, Interesting)
While they are light on details, the article implies this is a long term storage system (IE a flash chip replacement)
One would think creating RAM with a similar density would be possible as well.
I've used a super computer that had 74 TB of main memory, but clearly is something one can not afford nor fit in the home, to put it mildly. In a few years, will we have 1tb dimms at home? That would be sweet.
Even lacking that, a 1tb flash-like chip (not as in technology, but as in purpose/use) is still a huge improvement.
Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of the 100tb optical discs that are 'going into production within a year' for the last 10 years.
On a happier note, just imagine the reactions the RIAA/MPAA lawyers would have to such a thing existing!
"Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"
Wait!!! (Score:5, Funny)
can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text
Wait, how many Libraries of Congress is that??? Now I'm totally confused, you keep switching the units on me!
On second thoughts, it can probably store 1 copy of Windows 8.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which puts this device at around 5.351x10^5 libraries of congress per football field.
Can someone explain to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
how we go from the below scientific journal abstract to the Slashdot headline: "NCSU's Fingernail-Size Chip Can Hold 1TB"?
We have investigated the magnetic properties of the Ni-MgO system with an Ni concentration of 0.5 at.%. In as-grown crystals, Ni ions occupy substitutional Mg sites. Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet. By using a controlled annealing treatment in a reducing atmosphere, we were able to induce clustering and form pure Ni precipitates in the nanometer size range. The size distribution of precipitates or nanodots is varied by changing annealing time and temperature. Magnetic properties of specimens ranging from perfect paramagnetic to ferromagnetic characteristics have been studied systematically to establish structure-property correlations. The spontaneous magnetization data for the samples, where Ni was precipitated randomly in MgO host, fits well to Bloch's T3/2-law and has been explained within the framework of spin wave theory predictions.
Seriously, do you see anything about a chip in there? Anyone? Bueller?
LoC? (Score:4, Interesting)
Harnessing energy from an electron's spin??!!! (Score:5, Informative)
"Most energy used today is harnessed through the movement of current and is limited by the amount of heat that it produces, but the energy created by the spinning of electrons produces no heat," the university state in a press release.
Anyone who knows anything at all about quantum mechanics knows that the spin of an electron is quantized and cannot change.
The Wikipedia article has this to say about spintronics:
Electrons are spin-1/2 fermions and therefore constitute a two-state system with spin "up" and spin "down". To make a spintronic device, the primary requirements are to have a system that can generate a current of spin polarized electrons comprising more of one spin species—up or down—than the other (called a spin injector), and a separate system that is sensitive to the spin polarization of the electrons (spin detector). Manipulation of the electron spin during transport between injector and detector (especially in semiconductors) via spin precession can be accomplished using real external magnetic fields or effective fields caused by spin-orbit interaction.
This makes MUCH more sense! Reporters are always notorious for getting the science wrong.
The Abstract. (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is the paper's abstract:
Now, my question is, how do you store information in that? If the material is paramagnetic [wikipedia.org], that implies it isn't stored like a disk (read/write using a magnetic field)? How are they planning on storing information in a clump of nickel atoms? (Note: I know absolutely nothing about this stuff)
Another bogus materials-science article (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another of those articles where somebody did something vaguely promising in materials science [harvard.edu], and it's immediately being touted as if it were a product.
They're not talking about a "chip" at all. The material they've produced sounds more like something that might work as a disk surface. "Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet." It's not clear what you'd use as a read/write head, even if they can create a surface of "nanodots".
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A trillion bytes is a terabyte? You best be trollin', summary.
Uh, yeah! [wikipedia.org]
Just say no to wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia is wrong, as usual. A terabit, terabyte or teraword is 40 address lines. You can say it's 10e12 when they go back to making decade logic. If you want to get punched in the face then say tebi.
Re:Trollin'. (Score:5, Informative)
TB:1,000,000,000,000
TiB:1,099,511,627,776
Different notations as to whats a Terabyte, the second one being the binary notation.
But more importantly, the summary* doesn't say which notation they're using, but because they say trillion we can assume the former. Why is that important? Look at the numbers.Thats 99 Gigs of difference.
*(Because I wouldn't read the full article)
Parent
Re:Trollin'. (Score:5, Informative)
There are two naming conventions in general use, short-scale, and long-scale. In the short-scale countries such as the US, UK, etc, Trillion = 10^12, but in the long-scale countries, Trillion = 10^18. Obviously, if you are in a long-scale country, a Trillion (10^18) bytes is a (10^6) times more than a Terabyte (10^12 bytes). You can see this article for more on short and long scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Trollin'. (Score:4, Informative)
It's safe to say now that "trillion", as an English word, means 10^12 in English-speaking places.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Having 2^(x+3) bits has not a lot to do with the fact that you then have 2^(2^(x+3)) combinations of them... (except for certain integer math operations which are for implementation reasons faster if done on a power-of-2 number of bits, like cryptography. But this is not a fundamental matter.)
Also, "quantum logical units" made me vomit in my mouth.
Re:Trollin'. (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's a B, b, or a reference to bits or bytes, then it's in powers of 2.
Not for bandwidth. Base-2 units have never been used to describe bandwidth. (If you have a 1MB per second connection, that's exactly 1,000,000 bytes per second.)
Not for hard drive capacity at any time later than ancient history.
Not for floppy disks, which were always in ridiculous mixed units of 1024*1000.
Not for optical media, which come in sizes like 4,700,000,000 bytes.
Not for file sizes reported in any non-braindead application.
In fact, not for anything other than solid state RAM.
So your assertion that "there is no confusion" is 100% false. The explicit distinction between TB and TiB should be strictly enforced in all contexts due to the historical abuse of SI terminology by people like you.
It is IMPERATIVE to measure bits in (base 2) exponential terms because bits are quantum logical units. We count them, and we are concerned with possible comibnations in a given number of bits.
This statement makes zero sense. You're confusing the number of permutations that "n" bits can denote with the number "n" itself. Just because the number of permutations of n bits happens to be 2**n, that property in no way constrains us to denote measurements of the number n itself in some strange hybrid derivative of base 2 and base 10. (Which is only slightly more convenient to do arithmetic with than Roman numerals. Quick: how many 100 MiB files fit onto a 4.377 GiB DVD?)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Since we are talking about digital computers based on the binary numerical system, using base 2 makes a lot more sense than using base 10.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, 1.1. 1 kib = 1.024 kb, 1 mib = 1.048 mb, i gib = 1.074 gb, 1 tib = 1.100 tb.