Data Storage Pioneer Wins Millennium Technology Prize 40
jones_supa (887896) writes "The British scientist Stuart Parkin, whose work made it possible for hard disks to radically expand in size, has been awarded the Millennium Technology Prize (Millennium-teknologiapalkinto). Professor Parkin's discoveries rely on magneto-resistive thin-film structures and the development of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) spin-valve read head. These advances allow more information to be stored on each disk platter. Technology Academy Finland — the foundation behind the award — justifies the prize by saying that Parkin's innovations allow us to store large volumes of data in cloud services."
He is currently working on Racetrack memory, which would obsolete flash and hard disks (and probably even RAM).
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Yeah but they have ass breath and rotting, discolored teeth.
Only because our leaders keep taking advice from the Americans about how to run a health service (and for some reason, dentistry has taken a far worse hit than other services: even if you can find a national health service dentist you still have to pay non-trivial sums for treatment if you're not a child or OAP - c.f. Doctors where the worst case is max ~£10/month for prescriptions. I guess not enough babies die from toothache to motivate the opposition).
Anyway, once they all rot and fall out you can
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Instead, you've decided to go with the long drawn out process of having them be sensitive about their appearance for the rest of their lives.
Why settle for just a few years of humiliation, when you can have a lifetime's worth?
Suddenly all those stories about British schools make much more sense. ;-)
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I know, don't feed... but you're wrong :)
http://www.economist.com/node/... [economist.com]
Brits have some of the healthiest teeth in the world, but it's a different culture here than in the US. In the US, if you're poor, you don't get your teeth done because it's expensive. Here it's free-for-all due to the NHS, but the NHS budget is such that it would be considered a waste to spend taxpayers money on the cosmetic treatments such as the capping and polishing and whitening that are so common in the states. Straightening is
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IT's funny how fast you get used to them. White teeth sued t stand out. Now when watching a show an on character has, what woud have been normal yellow teeth a decade ago, it stand out as dingy.
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Well, one of them...
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Re:Wow, 16GB? (Score:4, Interesting)
I still remember the first computer I encountered with a 1GB hard drive back in 1995.
At the time, with Windows installed the HD was so overwhelmingly empty as to have an echo.
People used to go over and sit at the machine just to bring up a file browser and see the listed free space and go "oooh .... pretty".
Fast forward a few decades, and you can buy and 8GB USB stick in the express checkout at Wal Mart next to the bubble gum (literally).
Every now and then I need to remind people that their smart phone is a computer which is at least a million times faster and with at least a million times more capacity that the first ones I got to use. Because storage was measured in KB, and processor speed was in KHz.
I once joked to a university professor that 1GB of iron core memory would alter Earth's magnetic field beyond belief. Now I can't find many people who know what I mean by iron core memory.
Of course, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style in those days ...
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bah. In my day, we were envious of the system whose tape spindle had faster spin response.
Radical expansion (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA:
The first use of spin-valve sensors in hard disk drive read heads was in the IBM ® Deskstar 16GP Titan, which was released in late 1997 with 16.8 GB of storage.
1997. That's why I was scratching my head and wondering what radical expansion. In my view, HDDs have expanded on a steady exponential curve in size since ... forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg [wikipedia.org]
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A cuple of time on there they were hitting dead ends, then some smart person invent a new way!
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And they get to offset that cost by running a more efficient operation thanks to higher density disks. Ultimately that also means less hard drives than if they were all using 6.4 GB driver, and less staff to chase them down when they flake out. Not to mention what they save on their power bill. Also, sometime in the last year cloud storage and services stopped being a buzzword and entered reality.
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Without this their main expense wouldn't be bandwidth.
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Yeah, they'd be electricity and property taxes for the acres of space you'd need for all those drives.
I remember some of the components which used to be hooked up to the VAXen at my school ... the MBytes/unit volume ratio wasn't exactly favorable. :-P
Is racetrack memory even persistent? (Score:2)
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I understand how it might be a viable substitute for ram, but I'm not sure if it's persistent like flash storage. Which would make it an abysmal substitute for hard drives.
The first line in the linked wikipedia page says its non-volatile, so it should be persistent.
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The first line of the linked wikipedia article:
Racetrack memory (or domain-wall memory (DWM)) is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin
So yes, it's persistent. How persistent is a separate question. Flash memory for example is also classified as non-volatile, but while data won't be immediately lost when power is removed there's a definite unpowered data-retention life - after all those billions of tiny capacitors all have leakage currents - leave them unrefreshed long enough and bye-bye data.
Facepalm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, storing vast quantities of stuff on disk was a good starting point, and worthy of recognition.
And then they had to go and mention the cloud and spoil it.
This is why we can't have nice things, because you can't talk about anything without reverting to the latest buzz words.
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Well, it is the future. Most people just aren't interested in having their entertainment in files they schlepp around from device to device. Having it all "in the cloud" so that it's available from the mobile-device-of-the-moment is what most people actually want.
Wanting to manage your own files is a weird, geeky thing. Always has been, really.
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Well, the media companies like it too.
Since they're largely also ISPs, they can charge you for the media, charge you for the bandwidth to access your media every time you use it, and make your media go away any time they decide the license terms have changed. You'll pay through the nose, and then pay again and again until they take it away.
And this is precisely why I won't buy any Blu
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Does that happen anywhere?
My cloud storage is free, and doesn't impact my ISP bill at all. Nor doe sit impact my phone bill.
Don't confuse controlling you media with make crap up and just being grumpy..You could rip your Blu-Ray disk as well and not worry about it.
Really that is the Nerd thing to do. SInce you aren't going about it smartly, then yes, you are being a geek.
ZING!
Yes, Blu-Ray implementation of HD drives me up a wall as well.
I still say it one becasue it's packaging was Blue instead of Red.
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Specifically It's a neologism.
That said, what's wrong with buzzwords? The take an idea and let you express it easily.
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..yeah exactly more so because without this invention there would be much much more demand for shared cloud storage and cloud streaming services. .but really, thanks to this now you could store several years worth of music on your desktop quite easy.
Expand in size? (Score:2)
Its been years since I've even seen a 24", 50 platter hard drive. They seem to get smaller every year.
Professor Parkin (Score:1)
Professor Parkin work dealt mainly with spinning disks for data storage.
Parkin's son's work deals mostly with shaking.
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Millennium? (Score:2)
Millennium award? That sounds either 13 years late or way, way too early.
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It's called the becasue its a statue of a Corellian YT-1300.
FYI: to get the most out of your YT-1300 I recommend some personal modifications.
Stupid Americans... (Score:1)
"which would obsolete flash and hard disks"
I think you're missing a VERB there... 'Obsolete' is not a verb... Neither is 'leverage', by the way, dickhead 'business types'...