Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Data Storage Technology

New Technique For Optical Storage Claims 1 Petabyte On a Single DVD 182

melios writes "Using a two-light-beam method a company claims to have overcome Abbe's Law to dramatically increase the storage density for optical media, to the 9 nm scale. From the article: 'The technique is also cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are used, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

New Technique For Optical Storage Claims 1 Petabyte On a Single DVD

Comments Filter:
  • Good! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:38AM (#44068571)

    I was wondering where my pron collection would fit...

    • Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)

      by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:42AM (#44068597)

      And you can copy such a disk in just under a week.

    • Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RicktheBrick ( 588466 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @11:04AM (#44070351)
      Put a male and a female rat in a cage and they will have sex until the male grows tired of the female. Take the female out and replace her with another female and the male will find new energy to have sex. It is the same with porn. There is no need to save it since after viewing them a couple of times one will grow tired of them and they will not have the same effect as the first time. This is why there will always be a market for new porn with a new fresh legal young girl. Its in our dna and their is nothing one can do about it.
      • This is known as the Coolidge Effect [wikipedia.org], after a joke that went around about President Calvin Coolidge:

        The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, "Dozens of times each day." Mrs. Coolidge said, "Tell that to the President when he comes by." Upon being told, President asked, "Same hen every time?" The reply was, "Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time." President: "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

        It is also the reason why high availability of internet porn may be having negative consequences on the male mind - in nature we wouldn't have an unlimited supply of different females to get it on with and our brain doesn't differentiate between the excitement generated from porn and the real thing. See the TED talk on "The Great Porn Experiment" [youtube.com] and Your Brain on Porn. [yourbrainonporn.com]

      • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        So all you need is a small "fixed" set of porn that goes stale at the rate that the male forgets about the first, or ages. One set until you circle around again, or die. Then nobody would ever need new porn again, unless they were somehow alternative. And we know different is bad.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        You never get nostalgic for porn? No, me neither.

  • by OliWarner ( 1529079 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:43AM (#44068605) Homepage

    Supersnore. It's another year and another story about 1000-sublayer thick DVDs using multispectral lasers to fit ALL the DVDs on it. But how many of those make it to market? How robust is it? How much does that media cost?

    I've been reading stories like this for 20 years and I still get little-girl-meets-Bieber excited when I think about being able to back up to just one disk... But it never happens. Spinning rust remains the cheapest and most convenient mass-storage device.

    • by Crookdotter ( 1297179 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:46AM (#44068613)
      If I've RTFA correctly, this is one layer. they are circumventing Abbe's law by superimposing 2 beams where an effective write only occurs at the overlap, allowing a writing beam of 9nm.
    • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:54AM (#44068807) Journal

      This man needs +6, seriously.
      I've been reading these stories almost once a year since I first got on the internet in 1996.

      Seriously, they shouldnt' even be linked to at this point.

      • Why not? We've had DVD, HD-DVD, and blu-ray.. no reason to believe that we won't have more iterations in commonly available optical storage devices.. thought I doubt we'll be using them for anything other than backups.. or should I say I hope we won't be needing them for anything else..

        • by msauve ( 701917 )
          CD: 650 MB
          DVD: 4.7-8.5 GB (7-13x CD)
          Blu-Ray: 25-50 GB (6x DVD)

          1 PB is 20,000x Blu-Ray.

          One of these things is not like the others.
          • by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21, 2013 @08:54AM (#44069309)

            CD: 650 MB
            DVD: 4.7-8.5 GB (7-13x CD)
            Blu-Ray: 25-50 GB (6x DVD)

            1 PB is 20,000x Blu-Ray.

            One of these things is not like the others.

            Yup, and it's Blu-Ray. Almost as many letters as the other three combined, plus it uses vowels!

          • no reason to believe that we won't have more iterations in commonly available optical storage devices.. thought I doubt we'll be using them for anything other than backups

            With even home Internet providers enforcing monthly caps, how will you fit your 3D 4K movies across a home Internet connection without having to take a week off surfing after streaming a single movie? (4K, or quad HD, is the next step beyond high-definition video. The consumer version has roughly 3840x2160 pixels.)

            • With even home Internet providers enforcing monthly caps, how will you fit your 3D 4K movies across a home Internet connection without having to take a week off surfing after streaming a single movie?

              With this new technique, Netflix can just actually send you 1 disc with *all* the movies on it...

              • by kesuki ( 321456 )

                the license for renting movies out is not that simple.

                i have seen highly compressed discs that fit 4 movies a single layer dvd in theory a dual layer bluray can do better by 9x or 36 movies if this new disc is 1 petabyte is equal to 20,971.52 dual layer bluray or 754,974.72 high compression movies per disc. full hd obviously isn't nearly as many movies from tfa 50,000. for 4k, 300gb is a normal encode size for a 90 minute movie so 3,500 movies per petabyte. still not bad. but lets face it, this technology w

            • Simple. Just compress the heck out of it. As long as the resolution is still 3840x2160, it doesn't matter what the compression artifacts are -- the service can still advertise 4K QHD.

              Actually, that brings up an interesting question -- for video, for a given bit stream size, are you better off with higher resolution and higher compression, or lower resolution and lower compression?

              • by tepples ( 727027 )

                for video, for a given bit stream size, are you better off with higher resolution and higher compression, or lower resolution and lower compression?

                That depends. Downscaling and compressing at lower resolution is in theory equivalent to running a blur filter over the whole high-resolution picture and then compressing the blurred high-resolution picture. But in practice, video codecs prefer to handle features of a given size. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 use 8x8 pixel cosine transform blocks, as do H.263-style codecs such as Spark, ASP (DivX), and Theora. H.264 and VP8 use variable transform block size to efficiently handle both flat areas and detailed areas in th

        • of course we'll see more iterations of optical media formats and sizes.
          regrdless if we've had DVD, HD-DVD, blu-ray or any other combination of formats, my point stands, in the time I've been on the internet, we see nearly an article, per year outlining some outlandishly huge optical density which will revoloutionise the future of optical media storage.

          Yet the reality is, besides the original CD (over FDD and HDD at the time) *ALL* the iterations have been on a very normal size curve, no mind boggingly large

      • I remember reading breathless news articles about holographic memory in magazines like Scientific American and Omni back in 1987. Maybe I've become an old cynic but I'll believe it when I see it. Sure would be cool if it was true though. I'm tired of having to buy three hard drives to store one hard drives worth of data. (one on-site and one off-site backup)
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      I've been reading stories like this for 20 years and I still get little-girl-meets-Bieber excited when I think about being able to back up to just one disk...

      Could have been worse. What if you got Bieber-meets-little-girl excited?

    • Slashdot would be better if we could see the mods who give points to factually incorrect emotional rants. Mods: fine, don't read TFA but save the points for the next story.

  • by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:50AM (#44068621) Homepage

    I have been looking forward to this for a long, long time... I

    As screw the build up. I just wanted to say "peta-file" It's a funny word.

  • by etash ( 1907284 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @05:52AM (#44068629)
    it will take about 1million seconds to fill it or about 11.5 days
    • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:21AM (#44068717) Journal

      If I had an optical disk that had that kind of write speed and sufficiently cheap media, I'd use it with a log-structured filesystem. The real data would be on some other media, and the optical disk would record every transaction. When the disk filled up, I'd pop a new one in, have it write a complete snapshot (about 40 minutes for a 2TB NAS, and I could probably buffer any changes in that period to disk / flash) and then go back to log mode. Each disk would then be a backup that would be able to restore my filesystem to any point in the period. Actually, given my average disk writes, one of these disks would store everything I write to disk for about 200 years, so it would probably want more regular snapshots or the restore time of playing back the entire journal would be too long. Effectively, the append-only storage system becomes your authoritative data store and the hard disks and flash just become caches for better random access.

      The problem, of course, is the 'sufficiently cheap media' part. When CDs were introduced, I had a 40MB hard drive and the 650MB hard disk was enough for every conceivable backup. When CD-Rs were cheap, I had a 5GB hard drive and a CD was just about big enough for my home directory, if I trimmed it a bit. When DVDs were introduced, I had a 20GB hard drive and a 4.5GB layer was just about enough for my home directory. When DVD-Rs were cheap, I had an 80GB hard drive in my laptop, and 4.5GB was nowhere near enough. Now, the 25GB on an affordable BD-R is under 10% of my laptop's flash and laughable compared to the 4TB in my NAS.

      If they can get it to market when personal storage is still in the tens of TBs range, then it's interesting.

      • I know what you mean, if the media is cheap. I would buy one. My first floppy drive on my C64, disks cost me 2 bucks each, it was 2 buck when I got a 3.5 inch drive, it was 2 bucks a blank when I got my CD burner the first time, it was just under 2 bux a disk when I got my DVD burner and I will wait and see what the price for blanks when they sell this drive, if they ever do that is.
      • by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @09:30AM (#44069573)

        Another idea: At such high density, who needs a 5.25" disc anyway? A postage stamp would be plenty, and could enable some interesting mobile applications, for just one example.

        • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          If you can get the storage media down to postage stamp size, would it even be necessary to rotate it? It seems an S-shaped or raster scanning path becomes reasonable at that point, lowering power consumption and/or latency when accessed after a period of non-use. It doesn't really matter whether the medium moves or the scan head does, or some combination of both. For example, it could scan in a manner similar to a laser printer -- the medium moves on one axis, the scan path moves on the other. We already mo

          • I agree, it's all relative. I don't know the answer, but I reckon this question has been "solved" in various ways for various purposes over the years. The real question is what application you want to address. Your project parameters will be the determining factor in whether or not this new tech is useful.

      • I remember using packet-formatted CD-RWs as one form of backup in the late 90's-early 2000's, your post reminded me of that. The problem is the discs would go bad without warning--I could still read from a bad disc with no problems but any new writes would fail and the disc would be ruined after that. Optical media is too damn unstable for backup purposes even if hard drives were still small enough for it to be practical.

        The only way to do backup is rsyncing between several external discs on a regular basi

        • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

          CD-RW was always less reliable than CD-R, and unless you were moving files in BOTH directions between you and another party (making them a big, short-term floppy replacement), they didn't make a lot of sense economically either. WORM media is quite a bit more robust, provided the hardware doesn't try to write to the same place twice.

          The real problem I see is that optical standards stagnate. It's a necessary thing if you expect the media to ever be cheap and ubiquitous, but it means it's only bleeding edge f

      • So who says we have to stay with 120mm disks. I'm thinking 40TB on a 25mm disk is a sweet spot. Those monster trays have never been well suited to laptops, and they've been nonstarters for tablets. Time we moved on.
      • "When CDs were introduced, I had a 40MB hard drive and the 650MB hard disk was enough for every conceivable backup"

        When CDs were first "introduced", a 10MB hard drive was in the $1000 range. Or did you mean user writeable CDs? I'm not trying to troll here, I just did not know which you meant. You implied the former but the latter makes more sense.

      • by kesuki ( 321456 )

        50 gb bluray are affordable. i have a 10 spindle of them they cost $36 or $3.6 per blank http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817607055 [newegg.com]

    • 1million seconds ... or about 11.5 days

      Well, which is it?! Don't leave me hangin', bro!

    • by cdrudge ( 68377 )

      Have 2 laser heads. Or 4. Or 8. or X many as you can fit inside the housing. I thought there was a CD-RW (or maybe DVD-RW) drive that already did something like this with 3 laser heads.

      Or combine the above with the disc precisely balanced and mounted in a case similar to a hard drive so that the disc can be spun faster than a conventional optical disc. You lose the portability, but you're still far ahead of magnetic storage density.

  • Wonderful (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:11AM (#44068687)
    Now our politicians and bankers can leave even more customer information on a train.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • OOooh! You must be from the UK :D

      (Only place I've ever heard of that happening)

    • Pff! Think "Hollywood":

      "It means we can now pack even more non-fast-forwardable features to the start of a film. Just imagine, we could sell a week of 24x7 advertising on every film - we'd make more money than even we ever dreamed of!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Offtopic)

        by L4t3r4lu5 ( 1216702 )
        Want to skip non-fast-forwardable content? Start the DVD as normal, then press Stop. You'll be returned to your DVD players boot screen. Press Stop again, then press Play. The DVD feature will start immediately.

        You can thank me with a +1 Informative mod.
  • by dutchwhizzman ( 817898 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:24AM (#44068731)
    Sure, it's pedantic, but a DVD holds only about 9GB on a dual layer disc. It may be a disc with the same form factor, but it's not a DVD. You could just as well say "holds one Petabyte on a single CD", which also wouldn't be true.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21, 2013 @06:41AM (#44068765)

    This is great news for ASICS. Maskless direct write is the holy grail for this. Most of the cost of IC making now lies in the mask set and cost 10's of millions of dollars for a top line chip. There are ways to 'double up' mask steps into one reticule to save money on medium volume ICs and small volume has to be done on MultiProjectWafers.
    Direct write is slow but with a multiple beam setup that can be speeded up. I'm thinking what Mapper Technology is trying to do with e-beam.

  • Well if this ever comes to market it will be fun. Teenagers of the (hopefully not too distant) future will be able to swap a single disk containing a library of the entire worlds recorded music, maybe even encoded in FLAC to boot !

    I can just see all the MAFIAA lawyers having fits of apoplexy now :)

    • by Chrisq ( 894406 )

      Well if this ever comes to market it will be fun. Teenagers of the (hopefully not too distant) future will be able to swap a single disk containing a library of the entire worlds recorded music, maybe even encoded in FLAC to boot !

      I can just see all the MAFIAA lawyers having fits of apoplexy now :)

      They'll add a $100,000,000 charge to fund the artists to each blank disk

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      With any luck at all, they'll blow an artery and we can enter a new golden age.

  • by RedBear ( 207369 ) <redbear@@@redbearnet...com> on Friday June 21, 2013 @07:30AM (#44068905) Homepage

    I've just about had it with all optical media in general. I've had numerous CDs and DVDs over the years that just stopped being readable without even having any visible damage. Both self-written and factory discs. I'm only halfway through re-watching a retail set of Stargate SG-1 DVDs I purchased at Costco for $179.99 just 3-4 years ago, and I've already encountered a handful of discs with serious defects. Learned my lesson not to buy physical media anymore. Once I finish torrenting a good pirated version of the series I'll probably never try to watch the DVDs again. The box is nice though.

    Bottom line is even if one of these amazingly high density optical media schemes finally pans out, the media will need to be composed of pure diamond or something else incredibly durable, and have a filesystem with incredible levels of error correction and redundancy or it will be pointless to put even a terabyte of data on such a disc, much less a petabyte. And that's not even bringing up read/write speeds and other issues that have already made this type of media useless for many purposes.

    • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @07:58AM (#44069001)

      It's not deterioration of the plastic which causes CDs/DVDs to be unreliable, it's de-lamination of the reflective layer and deterioration of the organic dye for the recordable ones. The first is just causes by poor manufacturing, the second is a little more serious but the method in this article doesn't use dyes, it uses photopolymerization ... which would not necessarily be as failure prone.

    • How the fuck this comment is tagged Insightful? This is probably one of the biggest displays of ignorance I've seen in a long time. Do you even know how large data centers perform back ups. Using ****ing magnetic tapes(5TB by Fujitu being the biggest I've heard of). Tapes are big, slow as hell and one of the unreliable. A CD sized disk capable of 1PB is a god send. Life is much more than buying shitty DVDs at Costco. And that is only one of the obvious applications for this tech that comes to my mind.
      • by RedBear ( 207369 )

        How the fuck this comment is tagged Insightful? This is probably one of the biggest displays of ignorance I've seen in a long time. Do you even know how large data centers perform back ups. Using ****ing magnetic tapes(5TB by Fujitu being the biggest I've heard of). Tapes are big, slow as hell and one of the unreliable. A CD sized disk capable of 1PB is a god send. Life is much more than buying shitty DVDs at Costco. And that is only one of the obvious applications for this tech that comes to my mind.

        The frothing at the mouth is uncalled for. My comment contains nothing that would disagree with that proposed usage. IF the media can remain readable for more than a couple of years and IF the read/write speed can be made reasonable, it would by all means be a great replacement for tapes.

        But if these are "shitty" DVDs then all retail DVDs are "shitty", thus reinforcing my original point. Optical media sucks.

        • I apologize for the cursing. Nothing personal, sorry. Optical media may suck for some mainstream applications, 480p movies from retail stores being one of them. But the way you wrote your post made me believe the only reason disks are good for movies. Also not all optical disks are created equal. Blu-ray disks are considerably more scratch resistant than CDs and DVDs. Even between DVDs themselves, depending on the materials and burning methods you can have different reliability.
      • This is probably one of the biggest displays of ignorance I've seen in a long time. Do you even know how large data centers perform back ups. Using ****ing magnetic tapes(5TB by Fujitu being the biggest I've heard of). Tapes are big, slow as hell and one of the unreliable.

        Speaking of ignorance, you do understand that LTO 3/4/5/6, released in 2005/2007/2010/2012 respectively, transfer data faster than hard drives, right? It's just the initial seek time that is slow. Once a given block is located on an LTO

        • Thanks bro, but I think you should also educated yourself about something called CONTEXT. I know very well that tapes are pretty good media for long term storage and back up for today demands. But compared to a optical disk capable of 1PB storage, they'll lose in pretty much all aspects.

          Nice job isolating a single sentence out of my entire post just bring up completely offtopic information just to make a fool of yourself. Congratulations.

    • Good thing I bought a chinese knockoff of the stargate boxed set. I also got defective discs, but I didn't get robbed.

      Optical media is use-once, maybe twice if you're cautious.

      If you're having discs you burned go tits up on you when stored in a cool, dark place, then you should probably start researching the media a little more carefully. Or just buy whatever Verbatim wants the most money for. They made some of the best floppies, and guess what? They make the best optical media.

      • by Dins ( 2538550 )

        Optical media is use-once, maybe twice if you're cautious.

        Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never had any optical media fail - either pressed or burned - unless it was from excessive scratch damage. Granted I've never used it extensively for backup or in a commercial setting, but I've been using various forms of optical media since 1987.

        • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          I too seem to be lucky. I'm reprocessing a couple of disks from my collection right now to get the subtitles off of them. They gave me no trouble despite having sat around in my own collection for 5 years.

          My 20 year old CDs don't seem to be imploding either.

          Generally when I see a disk that's gone bad it came that way from the factory or couldn't make it home due to shoddy packaging.

          Although I could see constant handling of optical media being a problem. Don't do that myself though.

      • by RedBear ( 207369 )

        Good thing I bought a chinese knockoff of the stargate boxed set. I also got defective discs, but I didn't get robbed.

        Optical media is use-once, maybe twice if you're cautious.

        If you're having discs you burned go tits up on you when stored in a cool, dark place, then you should probably start researching the media a little more carefully. Or just buy whatever Verbatim wants the most money for. They made some of the best floppies, and guess what? They make the best optical media.

        The few times that I have actually used writable CDs and DVDs to archive important things I have made sure to use gold archival quality media (with a theoretical 100-year lifetime), and burn two copies, and store them nicely away from light and heat. I know all about the limited lifetime of the less durable cheap optical media. The writable discs I have lost data on were either unimportant or were burned years ago before the gold archival media was even on the market.

        But when I pay good money for factory pr

    • This is aboit the tech. Making an actual product involves looking at those issues... which are at least approachable.

    • My first DVD player was an Apex, back when it was a big deal to reflash it with region-free/no macrovision firmware (circa 2000?). At some point I ran into issues with this player when MPEG2 bitrates went over some threshold (5 Mbps?) -- the player just didn't have the horsepower to handle that data rate.

      Eventually that player died and I went through a series of inexpensive Chinese players. Some failed outright after six months, but those that didn't die would often choke on some discs, freezing in the mi

    • I have developed a way to store data on a CD/DVD such that if scratching causes data loss, all the files (including the readable portions of the damaged files) can be copied off to hard disk, the damaged files can be restored, and a new original CD/DVD can be created. Each data set recorded (for a full DVD) takes about 4 hours to calculate on a fairly decent dual core computer running Ubuntu, using about 15% redundancy. Actually burning the DVD takes 6 minutes.

      I mastered a DVD movie for a client (he had a
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      If they really could do a petabyte I'd settle for 10x redundancy and 100TB, that should probably work fine and be very useful all the other issues notwithstanding. Because the main reason they're not very useful is capacity, you've got 4TB HDDs for bulk storage and cheap 32-64GB memory sticks for transfers so what good is optical media? A BluRay is probably fine to get a 50GB movie to people who don't have a fast Internet connection, but I haven't burned a CD/DVD in ages, it never seems like the best tool f

  • by sirwired ( 27582 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @07:36AM (#44068933)

    Those clowns at InPhase ("Holographic Discs") were like the Duke Nukem Forever of storage; well over a decade, and no shipping product.

    For now, I put this in the same pile as the Windows Database File System and Laptop Fuel Cells.

  • http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing [web.cern.ch]
    [...]
    Approximately 600 million times per second, particles collide within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Each collision generates particles that often decay in complex ways into even more particles. Electronic circuits record the passage of each particle through a detector as a series of electronic signals, and send the data to the CERN Data Centre (DC) for digital reconstruction. The digitized summary is recorded as a "collision event". Physicists must sift through

  • Yay, an optical disk with 1000x the density of DVD! That means that when it gets scratched, you'll lose 1000x the information that you would on a DVD!

    Let's all sing along now: Tape sucks, Optical sucks. Rotational drives are here to stay.

    • if physical contact with the media is so dangerous, have these disks mounted inside a traditional enclosure, like an old floppy disk.
      Preventing accidental contact with surfaces scratching is a well solved problem ...
    • Let's all sing along now: Tape sucks, Optical sucks. Rotational drives are here to stay.

      Depends on the cost. If these discs are under $20, I can back up my home storage array with substantial FEC for 10% of the cost of the array. Twenty times even before breakeven.

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Plus you can have 5 copies each of which are much more portable than an array and will take up less space in the offsite backup storage location of your choosing.

        1 spinny drive is relatively light.

        8 spinny drives and their enclosure are not so light.

  • Wow, it's been YEARS since there's been any kind of usable backup media solution. 1PB seems like a good starting point, IF the speeds are reasonable (i.e. able to write 1pb in a few hours). Even most home users have at LEAST a TB these days. Datacenters?
  • by oojah ( 113006 ) on Friday June 21, 2013 @10:42AM (#44070159) Homepage

    The "one beam going through a doughnut beam" technique is well known through STED microscopy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STED_microscopy [wikipedia.org]

    STED is a superresolution technique for imaging when using fluorophores.

    This is a very nice idea using the technique in a different way for a different application.

  • Well, here's how that went last time:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies [wikipedia.org]
    Yeah, it sunk because the CEO was the biggest asshole on the planet but keep in mind that it was also because they launched the product before it was technically ready for market. So if this dual laser tech comes out in the next 3 years, it'll probably be a similar disaster.
  • How long till the next Microsoft Office document format requires this much space to save your 500 word resume?
  • yes, yes, yes!...but when will we have this tech???

    I remember hearing about this great new way of condensing 1 terabyte of info on a single piece of white paper, based on this new technology someone built....
    and we have never seen it hit the light of day to help us with our storage problems..... why would this be any different...

    actually only tell us once it hits the stores and we can buy it!

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Working...