Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density 279
Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.
Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
oblig. gargoyles reference (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Other specs? (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's why I love you.
[he said "Wiener" filter, heh-heh]
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From TFA. Wouldn't this imply that they think its mean time to failure is pretty long? Of course, they didn't say anything about speed or durability. But nanoscale changes should happen pretty fast, right?
Re:Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
But that doesn't mean I have high hopes;
How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once to (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
Re:Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus InPhase only sells the 300GB version now. Your claim to be able to call up and get the 1.6TB discs must have been made 3 to 4 years in the future since that is when their website says they will make the 3rd generation disks that are 1.6TB.
Plus one of those drives costs $18,000! (and the 300GB disks costs $180). I could build a RAID and replace hard drives every few years and still come out ahead price-wise.
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I also get your point. RAID 1 is fault tolerance, not backup solution.
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This article on inPhase [macworld.com] from a few months back says "InPhase plans a second-generation 800GB optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MB/sec., with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010." (emphasis mine) So unless by "today," you mean "3 years from today," th
And it will be released in 5 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And it will be released in 5 years (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And it will be released in 5 years (Score:5, Funny)
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Now I'll have to buy the White Album again. (Score:2)
Re:And it will be released in 5 years (Score:5, Informative)
Looking around the web, I see a lot of stuff from around the year 2000 about how the paperless office is a myth and paper use increased for the previous 20 years, but more recently we seem to have turned a corner [telberg.com]. Not that we'll be truly paperless, but the growth in demand for paper is less than GDP growth and usage per worker is actually falling. There's even a quote from a paper company in there.
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Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
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There's this neat camera technique called "not zooming in so much". Although more detail in a shot framed the same way is nice, being able to see more context along with extra detail is awesome. This is actually one of the points that's *more* obvious when you think of porn, but it's just as true for conventional movies and TV shows - with higher resolution you can have a scene with someone talking without zooming right up on their face.
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Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
O
-|- - You
/ \
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
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I just use int rand() { return 4;
(Credit: Randall Munroe at xkcd.com for part of this joke or the xkcd followers will flame me until I am but a charred husk of a person.)
Vaporware. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No discussion or comments found for this request. To create your own discussion, please use journals.
Kind of an odd error to get when it seems like something along the lines of "Post too large" would be more appropriate. A possible bug?
For the record, it was the first 1,509,949 digits of pi and I was quite proud of it.
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While I understand where you're coming from, the GP simply said "how much 1.44MB is". I was going on the basic idea of a megabyte as 1 byte * 1024 bytes in a KB * 1024 KB in a MB. I know the real formatted capacity of a floppy varies by filesystem.
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fry: "That clover helped by rat fink brother steal my dream of going into space! Now I'll never get there
Leela: "You went there this morning for donuts."
I mean, take for example flight. It's one helluva achievement isn't it, to fly like a bird. Ever since the dawn of man we've dreamt of it, like the legend of Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci's attempts at a flying machine and so on until finally some daredevils like the Wright brothers actually did it. I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture, disgusted by the food and spent most of my time reading a book waiting for time to pass.
Or this little magic thingie I have that lets me speak to anyone in the whole world, through thin air (not all the way, but I'll skip the details). I mean, would you believe it? Instead I'm mostly annoyed on how it can't always get through walls, that I have to recharge it every so often and that it's part of the "always on" stress of modern life.
For that matter, that I can post this comment on a website halfway around the globe is a wonder of technology itself. That doesn't stop me (or everyone else, it seems) from complaining about their ISP and prices, support etc. or some shortcoming of the applications or protocols or whatever.
I think the point is that if you went around like "oh wow" appriciating common things that much, you'd never do anything but get dazzled all day long. Then again, it probably wouldn't hurt to enjoy what we have a little more, but still... and "how much 1.44 MB is" is rather far down on my list.
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I've been a systems analyst since 1962 and have watched the computers go from large as a room to something that is portable and yet more powerful.
The first Hard drive was huge and the heads moved by hydraulics. It had storage of 360KB or so as i recall.
It is really incredible what mankind has dreamed and have subsequently produced with no slowing down in sight. If anything
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I think 1.44 is special to me, because that used to be a back up routing I did as an intern. At the end of th
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Well, youngin, many of us remember... (Score:2)
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Al Shugart created Seagate Technology company and then lost control of it and thus created the shugart drive.
I heard that Al Shugart died a few months ago. A great mind and one of the inventors of the very first disk drive while at IBM
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Almost Infiniate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to know the exact number of cycles this will take, plus or minus a few million times.
The technology looks like it would eventual deplete the material used for the interconnect. But than again I am not a physicist.
Sounds like "whiskers". (Score:5, Interesting)
These little puppies were first discovered by accident back when AT&T was "The Phone Company". If I've got this right: Bell Labs had come up with a new alloy for terminal blocks that they thought would have some advantages. Western Electric made some up and the Bell Systems deployed them.
Some time later they started running into trouble. Linemen would try to turn the nut and it wouldn't turn. So they cut some out and sent 'em in for analysis.
These long, thin, crystals of metal had grown through the boundary of the thread, welding the nuts onto the bolts. They were extremely pure and very strong - in the general neighborhood of the theoretical strength of the material, when things fabricated by normal processes fell short by a "factor of many" (more than one power of ten).
They cristened them "whiskers". I'm not aware of anything that came of that at the time.
But when the early satellites were going up (back when the very early printed circuits were the cutting edge of hi-tech), whiskers showed up again - growing between the lines of the printed circuit board exposed to vacuum and zero g, shorting things out. This is why early US satellites (heavily miniaturized to go on the small boosters) tended to flake out while early Russian stuff (big discrete components on terminal strips lifted by their big boosters) kept working - and why that reversed later, when the US had the problem solved and the Russians started miniaturizing and had to go through the same learning curve.
Once they figured out what was happening and came up with an alloy that didn't whisker, they played around for a bit with self-healing printed circuit boards. These had conductors of a whiskering alloy with a plating of non-whiskering stuff. Idea was that if a trace broke due to vibration during launch, the exposed core would whisker across the gap and make things run again (until it whiskered over to another wire and shorted things out.) During that time they also played with self-healing aluminized mylar capacitors, designed so that if the mylar developed a hole the cap would discharge through the hole, vaporize the aluminum around the hole, and things would then go back to normal operation.
I'm not sure that any of this actually worked out.
If these ARE whiskers-on-demand as storage elements, it's nice to see whiskers actually do something useful. B-)
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Good news (Score:2)
Screw consumers - think of the reviewers!
That should give fresh momentum to the "how much is too much?" [slashdot.org] swag topic taco seems to love so much...heaven forbid we should walk too close to the edge on that one.
In other news - Boston wins series. Yawn...
Ah... disruptive technology... (Score:2)
Cost vs. Price (Score:3, Insightful)
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When tech is new, it's always more expensive. That's why it costs so damn much to be on the cutting edge. But the prices curve down in decent time, as new super-expensive tech is invented and replaces it.
It's simple economics.
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For this, however, there is no similar mechanism. To most consumers it will just l
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It's interesting to think about the implications for space travel and the physical aspect of the media this offers. It'll be interesting to see if this tech plays out as well as we're imagining
Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.
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Did you even read the article? It talked about the technology being 1000 times more energy efficient than what's currently in use. This isn't actually that hard to believe. The statement from the article t
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1 TB (Score:2, Funny)
It would be great if they made it look just like a floppy. I would pull up a command prompt and format it everyday, just so I look like a smarty computer guy to all my coworkers.
And what a great excuse, "Sorry sir, I will get that report to you as soon as this thing formats. Oh, look at the time. See you in the morning."
Read/write (especially WRITE) speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
But how come nobody's concerned aobut the the IO speed? I wouldn't be too concerned about reading, but if writing/rewriting requires real-time rebuilding of gates, wouldn't it be snail-slow?
The IO of even regular hard drives already becomes a significant factors as drives grow exponentially larger and speed stays the same as always. If this is even slower, it'd become a serious deterrent.
Re:Read/write (especially WRITE) speed? (Score:5, Informative)
"Key Benefits
PMCm has a number of unique attributes that make it a highly attractive component for future systems on silicon:
Operation at low voltages ( 0.3 V)
High speed write and erase operations
( 30 ns)
Low energy to change state ( 1 pJ)
Physical scalability to tens of nm
Easy integration with IC logic circuitry
Operation as a low refresh-rate DRAM or as a true non-volatile memory with high endurance (based on the programming mode).
These features define a class of devices that are essential for projected electronics systems and which will be difficult to realize using developed versions of today's circuits. "
Hope that answers some of your questions
Energy efficiency not meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. (Score:2)
All you have to do is thread it. You can't do this with normal hard drives, short of RAID. But, like a well-designed flash array, you can pretty much parallize any write you want.
Of course, it means that the filesystem would have to know to do this, but I don't see it really having any serious implications on performance. If it functions as a solid-state device, then I'd assume it could theoretically perform better, actually.
I'd like to believe it but.... (Score:2)
Realism....redux (Score:2)
Lots of cool stuff promised by lots of people (some of whom are cool).
Wake me when I can buy it.
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1. Yield, what are the production hazards, just because it's smaller than NAND flash doesn't mean it's cheaper.
2. Wear. How many re-writes can it suffer?
3. What temperatures can it run at, etc, etc, etc
Tom
A politically incorrect question (Score:2, Insightful)
I know that type of arrangement may be common place today but I sure would like to follow the money trail.
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Stability? (Score:2)
Will this be stable in the field? I mean, EMF should be able to elicit those kinds of potentials fairly easily.
Writing Time for 1TB via USB? (Score:2)
Some Numbers...
1TB = 1024^4 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte [wikipedia.org]
USB 2.0 Transfer Rate = 480 Mbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_2.0 [wikipedia.org]
USB 3.0 Transfer Rate = 4.8 Gbit/s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB2#USB_3.0 [wikipedia.org]
1 megabit = 10^6 = 1,000,000 bits which is equal to 125,000 bytes or 125 kilobytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit [wikipedia.org]
1 gigabit = 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bits (which is equal to 125 decim
Ummm, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you are, well that's a hell of a lot faster and more convenient than burning 233 standard DVD-R's (about what it would take with non dual-sided discs) or writing the equivilent tape or network-based backup method. Heck, that beats out most disk-to-disk transfers.
Hey, Stick to The Rules (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, stick to The Rules. No new, paradigm-changing technologies are allowed to be announced as arriving in less than 5 years.
For that matter, they can't be more than 5 years out either!
New Game Delivery System (Score:4, Insightful)
That, and they'd be able to shrink down the size of game boxes again, from dvd size to, dare I say it, cigarette pack sized. Your next video game could be dispensed by a vending machine.
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* how to secure it
Your newness is blinding - try Leopard's Time Machine [apple.com]...
Mac Time Machine - rsync for dummies (Score:2)
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rsync makes incremental backups?
-:sigma.SB
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I can not remember where the web page is located that had the info I used. Google return several pages, but only touch on "link-dest" for a short paragraph. Rsync docs are your best bet for farther info.
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My bad - I forgot that OS X doesn't offer anything whatsoever in terms of security...sorry.
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Re:This is only part of the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Buy two, they're small.
how to secure it
Best way is to build in a Bluetooth interface with encryption, then swallow the memory module. (small grappling hooks will secure it to the lining of your small intestine). That way if the bad guys want your private information, they'll have to (quite literally) go through you to get it.
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Re:This is only part of the problem (Score:5, Funny)
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That's not an engineering problem. (Score:2)
Assuming this is cheap, you just buy another one to back it up on. (And if it's not cheap, you probably can't afford the first one, anyway.)
The bigger problem is a social engineering one. Someone is going to forget to backup, and someone is going to get their data stolen. But you can't solve these with technology any more than you can cause them with technology.
Re:This is only part of the problem (Score:5, Funny)
For backup, well, I have the same files in my gmail account, on 2 online harddisk services, on the 3 other computers I own, some of the files are printed and archived in a neat pile in the corner of my room (sorted from oldest to newest) and I sure my uncle Steve has a few of those files as well. The rest I can redownload if I ever need them and remember ever having them in the first place.
As for the real mission critical files, I use Kazaa: I put them in a zipfile, add an intresting movie or mp3, then share it. Most of these files are backed up on 125,400 computers, all spread out across the globe. Now who can say that about his backup policy? (other than the RIAA and the MPAA) The files are secure too, since I rename them to "My views on the political situation of flower gardens" and remove the extension.
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Re:The problem with this memory.... (Score:5, Informative)
Um... there ARE other uses for lots of storage, you know? Say, backing up in the field after spending a week shooting a couple thousand images per day with a digital camera that writes 50mb files?
Video?
Multi-track digital audio?
It isn't always about Linux distros, you know?
Good news for pirates (Score:3, Interesting)
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I can think of a traditional solution, used for games back when I was a kid...
Sneakernet. Hard to beat that bandwidth.
Of course, they're starting to offer 100mbit and even gigabit lines to the house, there was an article claiming that a scientist could get 100x the bandwidth out of copper a couple weeks ago*.
Worst case, netflix and it's competitors.
*Of course, I'll be surprised if his solution gave more than 2X, but it's out there.
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Well, things sadly do tend to move at somewhat the same rate. Linux distributions are bigger than they ever were -- to be fair, they include more than they ever did.
But as for coding, unless RAM
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Re:A new age! (Score:4, Funny)