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Hardware

90-Gigabyte Solid-State "Hard Drive?" 212

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-only-its-true dept.
CrtxReavr writes "American Computer Company: "Described as a "Poker Chip Sized" solid state disk drive, the new semiconductor could be seen in service by the end of 1999 or early in the year 2000. The device can store over 90 billion characters of information..." This sounds like it's too good to be true and the article excludes a lot of important information that would be necessary for verification purposes, for what they claim is security reasons. It prolly is worth scrutinizing though. "
Want some scrutiny? Conor Walsh sent us a good list of problems:
  1. They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
  2. They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
  3. If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
  4. Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
  5. '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
  6. 'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)
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90-Gigabyte Solid-State "Hard Drive?" More

90-Gigabyte Solid-State "Hard Drive?"

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  • Simple reasons this can't be true (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok if I'm proven wrong by this company I'm all in favor of slapping one of these (or how about 4!) in my poor pathetic K6-2 Linux box. BUT there's a few very simple reasons this can't be true.

    1) How would some pathetic little no money (just look at their webpage, I've seen better personal webpages done by 2 year olds) develop a technology capable of some very large claims

    2) Why haven't companies like ohhh say SEAGATE, WESTERN DIGITAL, MAXTOR been able to come up with this with the R&D departments they have? This kind of technology would make anyone of those companies filthy rich. The amount of R&D money that they would have to spend would be a drop in the bucket compared to the gains they would have. And if they haven't spent the money on this (which I assume for this kinda deal would be serious amounts of cash!) where did this acc people get it?

    3) They don't know who found the technology? What's up with that, that's fishy in and of it's self. that and the fact all these companies are "anonymous for secutiry reasons" who are they afraid of? what are they afraid of? Do they think Seagate's going to blow up their sole prototype?

    4) "Yet, compared to what the Army allegedly discovered 50 years ago, our rendering is probably rather
    primitive," Ok I'm a military BRAT, and I've never even heard rumors about anything this cool being in some governments secret Area 51 kinda computer. Honestly the military wouldn't be able to do this even today given their lack of budget, and the fact all of the people that matter in the military have their heads up their rear ends.

    5) Doubt in your own ability: "TCAP's success hinges upon how reliable our ability to produce such a technology is," most companies wouldn't doubt their own success with such a product if it was for real

    Anyway that's me .02 cents on the whole deal. But if i'm proven wrong, I'll buy an aDSL connection, a quad K7 m-board and 4 of these and do my best to fill them by the end of 2001!!!!!! (and in imho that ain't going to happen, but there's always dreams ehh?)


    "Customer for pkzip on a tech support call: Help you've got to save my computer from exploding .exe, you've got to stop it I don't want my computer to explode!!!!!!!!!!!"

    "What fools these mortals be"

  • Re:scary - bill gates _is_ an alien! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought those redmondians looked suspicious ;)
    Now we know why the "crash" at roswell occured!
  • Folks,

    You have to remember that /. effect can be used for any purpose. What can be a better advertisement for online computer shop than a few thousand 'impressions' in one day.

    So, for all you guys who want to boost their web site but have no money to spend on adds, here is
    'Marketing_Made_Easy-HOWTO':


    1. Search /. for some technical buzzwords that seem to interest people most of all.

    2. Write a pseudo technical announcement of the breakthrough your company has achieved with this product.

    3. Post it on /. as a 'leaked' info (leaked part is optional but will definitely add some plausibility).

    4. Try to keep up with the orders pouring in on your real products.


    P. S. I'm very much afraid of the 'tyranny of the majority' myself, but maybe there should be moderation for the articles implemented on /.



  • This article was posted well over a year ago, possibly even two. Only then the article didnt have a picture of a pentium II at the top. It only had the pipe screen looking thing at the bottom.

    Nick
  • This isn't even a *good* photoshop job and it made it to slashdot! Come on, it looks like the guy just took it into Windows Paint and wrote "ACC" on it with the default font. This really calls the credibility of slashdot itself into question, when garbage like this makes it to the front page.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Perhaps the icon for this story should be changed to The Foot.



    --
  • The terrahertz internal speeds they are claiming are enough to alert me to a probable hoax.

    I would dearly love to have such a technology available to man but... it's just TOO much to swallow on a Monday morning.

    If such speeds WERE available, they'd use it for high-end machines first anyway. IBM would want it for their Mainframes, PPC Multiprocessor Servers and Server Arrays. SGI would want to use it for the CRAY line AT FULL INTERNAL SPEED - not at PCI speeds.

    Like I said, "It sounds like Cold Fusion to me!"
  • Posted by Largo_3:

    I've seen this ad/website for almost 2 years, it changes every now and then it once had a pic of a Pii chip with a obviously fake superimposed label over the intel sticker and claimed 'this' was the product.

    this site is bogus, and I'm amazed slashdot was fooled by this really lame site.

  • Posted by viperx2:

    http://www.audionet.com/shows/endoftheline/9805/ end0501.ram

    I got through 20 minutes of it. My ears started to fill with bullshit, and I might not be able to hear for a while.

    Viper-X
  • Posted by MadSci:

    Be sure to check out http://accpc.com/roswell00.htm. Apparently, Bell labs never actually developed anything on their own, they just stole it from the aliens.
    C'mon, ACC is a computer retailer, not an R&D firm! They didn't even do a good job of faking a press release. Their grammar and punctuation is worse than CmdrTaco's, and the 'press release' quotes one of their own people when 'reached for comment.' Why would the company need to reach their own people for comment on a press release?
    Maybe /. needs a humor section... this certainly doesn't belong in 'news'.
  • Posted by peter_j:

    Does this mean we'll be paying royalties to arnold?
  • Anyone see Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century [imdb.com]?

    I think this was the disk that everyone was after. Anyone have a vid-cap of it?
  • Everyone was making fun of these screwups just a couple of days ago on the hard drive speed discussion. It's a hoax. Look:

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/06/25/153 234&cid=34
  • I can't believe slashdot has posted about this AGAIN! American Computer Company is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever seen in my life, and for some reason it always makes its way through the bullshit filter. Please, rob- don't post anything more about these idiots! This link has been around for over a year, and hasn't changed at all... come on people, who is gonna believe you can fit 90gb in the space of a slot 1 carrier? When did memory technologies all of a sudden get so good?

    Here's a previous posting about the same thing:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/00000381_F.shtml

  • Will these aliens donate some of their idle CPU cyles to the SETI@HOME project?

    Why donate cycles? Just step forward and say "Hi!". -> ETI found, so S terminated. ;-)

  • This was a hoax last time it was on slashdot [slashdot.org], and I think it still is.

    --

  • PS (Score:1)

    by mattdm ( 1931 )
    Most people here seem to have no sense of humor. The part about the alien technology, and the way it's a Slot 1 device, and all the other junk in the article = funny. Not "a poorly done hoax". It's not meant to be believable. Jeesh.

    --

  • Well, this could be an antigravity machine. Or it could be a hot-air balloon, or a cheap ion engine. It's actually pretty easy to get forces around high-voltage equipment, just caused by ionization of the air. See http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/lecdem/el10.htm for a simple lab demonstration of this effect.

    (If you could make the antigravity device perform in a vacuum, it would be slightly more interesting).



  • >4) Solar Powered Flashlights

    Hey, I have one of those (NiCd battery + photovoltaic cells).

    The alcohol-powered fuel cell is (or will be) real as well. Hasn't anyone seen Futurama? This will be the power source for robotics in the future!

    (You could probably make a decent glass hammer as well if you really tried. Glass can be surprisingly tough if it's tempered, then the surface is chemically etched to remove microscopic cracks).

  • If I remember correctly, an alkane is any single-chain hydrocarbon containing only single bonds (methane, ethane, propane, butane, ...).
  • Throw in a few spelling errors, write some poetry about it, paste in your high school yearbook photo, and I'll BELIEVE!!!

    --------

    Of course, we also know:
    1) Cats always land on their feet
    2) Toast always lands butter-side down

    Therefore, a cat with a piece of buttered toast taped to its back MUST levitate when dropped!
    [not original, but I don't remember where I first heard it]

  • Come on. There are enough cries of 'conspiracy!' and 'censorship!' when a Slashdot article disappears for technical reasons. You'd never hear the end of it if this one got yanked. :-)

    (We do need a 'crackpot' icon for the front page, though).





  • #(3) I think is real. I saw several main stream articles on a spin-off from Los Alamos National Labs, which promised this capability very soon.

    It is based upon a roll up polymer sheet with the "right" electrical properties.

    I don't know if it is actually going to be available, as there are some real issues. The user needs to refill the battery with alcohol.

    But it is not a scam like (1) and (2). This one should not be in the list with the others.
  • 2 years ago the webpage mentioned the pentium II?
    Wow.
  • i'm a bit dubious after scanning a previous /. story today, breaking the computer bottleneck [slashdot.org] ...but for arguments sake let suppose that the technology behind this *cough* breakthrough technology is mature enough to release to market...where's the production and distribution?

    Look at the problems AMD has with getting 'ground breaking' chip technology to market. It's not just the technology but the production, distribution etc, that's dubious....I'm not so sure they could ever release version 1.0 technology at version n prices!
  • Given the large number of important articles that have not been posted and the increasing quantity of junk that have shown up here, I think I'm taking my eyeballs elsewhere. It's really sad that this got posted. Time to go back to actual content sites, like news.com.
    David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
  • Must be a fruit break or something.
    All those links! They all point to the same Pokey story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and it doesn't even make sense and the Gimp will not find my PNG library and it's all going horribly WRONG and my Wankel engine has died.

    Bah.
  • I looked at their website a year ago and they were claiming this thing was going to come out with-in the next year.

    The website claimed that they got this technology from the Roswell crash (is it still saying that?) and that a lot of AT&T-Bell Labs innovations of the late 60's early 70's (i.e. transistors) were given to AT&T by the government researchers that "recovered the UFO."

    Of course Lucent Technologies (formerly Bell Labs) denies all of it.

    One thing's for sure, if they said last year that they would release the thing within a year (they said they couldn't figure out how to link the thing to the CPU and bus), they must be following the MS pattern for bringing a product to market.

    One other possibility. Can you call hardware vaporware too?
  • Actually, I think I saw this in either the Wall Street Journal or ZDNet AnchorDesk about a year ago.

    Not saying it's true, I'd actually have to see the thing work.

    Just Because it's in Print doesn't mean it's true either, no matter what the source (granted, some are much more reliable than others).
  • bash# echo "90 10 9 ^ * 1024 3 ^ / p" | dc
    83
    bash#

    90 billion bytes is 83 gigs, kiddies.

    (And reverse Polish is your friend)
  • It didn't come along today.. That page is WAY OLD! It was written December 96.. Oh, and the date IS correct. I saw that page more than two years ago..
  • See the July '99 (just came out) edition of Scientific American for more than several pages about fuel cells, including how small ones, recharged with methanol capsules, could replace batteries in many handheld devices.

  • So you've got a ~90gb solid state drive on a single chip. What's going to be my bit error rate?

    The article does state that this is 90gb storage, plus error correction, but gives no details. Note that modern hard drives would be useless without all sorts of error correction going on internally -- the native media error rates are already high enough to render them unusable in a "raw" state. The question ask about any high-density storage is: How much storage is left after applying error correction sufficient to the intended application?

  • Damn, there are some wacked out people in the world. I like the rant about kasparov.com, in which they say that Jack Shulman correctly predicted Kasparov's defeat by Big Blue... (Jack Shulman is also the genius who invented the aforementioned TCAP device...) And check this from their web page! (just in case anyone thought all this might be for real...)
    The e4 staff recently learned that IBM DEEP BLUE may soon have a serious computational competitor: a newly designed supercomputer, "Debbi-1", is reportedly being readied by American Computer Company. Debbi-1 is said to be based on AMERICAN COMPUTER's "XB-70 Valkyrie" supercomputer, a design which uses the latest INTEL technology, reputed to be similar in nature to the largest supercomputer on earth -- which is presently located at Sandia National Laboratories.
    Go Debbi-1! :)
  • Hey, my web site says that I invented the damn transistor, and *I* say that their claims are false. You gotta believe me... I mean, I invented the TRANSISTOR! And if that's not enough for you, I invented solder! Heck, I even invented electrons! :)

    I'm amazed that people are giving this ANY credibility... I guess I should collect all yer email addresses for the IPO of my anti-gravity-engine company....
  • I really feel sorry for the poor little green men (tm) on Mars. Imagine being stuck with "embedded Windows NT" on every single 90GB hard disk!
  • If you look around at that site, you will find some quad motherboards. I do recall a discussion here about the availability of those...
  • Roswell was mentioned... on their home page
  • If you look through the web site some more, you will see several mentions of a "consortium" to "study" this new "technology" and it says that YOU can join, and I have no doubt that it is for a very large fee! I have some ocean front property in Arizona at a special rate for people who join the consortium.
  • 12THz? 266mhz I/F bus? Almost no heat? Low power consumption? Not to mention the whole article itself...built off of work some US Army egghead did in the 50s, eh? I'm surprised Roswell wasn't mentioned. I mean, this has just *got* to be Grey technology. I suppose that it does great curly fries too.

    Someone's been on the pipe again, methinks.

  • Read the last paragraph first ---

    We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from. They were extremely complex but not that detailed, we had to fill in the gaps. Obviously, very deep studies were performed, and IBM and Western Electric (Bell Labs) were involved in the 1947-1955 analysis of this technology, but from WHERE did it come? [...]

    If you believe anything else after reading that last paragraph, send me money and I will get back to you.

    --
  • Debbi does chess?
    Debbi does deep blue?
    Debbi does Kasparov?

    Hehe, it had to be said.
  • I'm not going to believe it until the Wall Street Journal picks it up and prints it as gospel on Monday.

    Just like that killer security product that could destroy hardware over the internet. Remember that?

    :)
  • A search on Google [google.com] brought up lots of interesting stuff, notably this [byamerican.com].
  • Seems like a classic case of vaporware to me. I'll DEFINITELY have to see this to believe it. And by see it, I mean I want to actually see one in use personally, or hear lots of testimonials to it's existance. I don't buy this yet.


    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I think this company is full of shit. Mainly because of the "HINT HINT, It's ALIEN TECHNOLOGY" crap they threw around in the article:


    "We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from."

    Obviously, very deep studies were performed, and IBM and Western Electric (Bell Labs) were involved in the 1947-1955 analysis of this technology, but from WHERE did it come?'

    Average Humanity must be, on the intelligence scale, the equivalent of a "low grade moron" compared with wherever this device's design came from.


    Gimme a break. These people are probably starving for attention, and rightfully so. Their webpage/dedign looks like it's for a back woods computer store, not some highly advanced lab mucking around with alien technology. If you think about it, these are probably the same people who camp out in lawn chairs looking for UFO's, and say "the God Damn Twister sounded like a Freight Train!"

    P.S.: They probably got a cheap thrill from seeing their (shitty) logo on a PII cartridge. God, they're lame.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • The Hottest Business Opportunity to Hit Earth this Year!

    Earn Full Time Income on a Part Time Basis, and spend your vacations on the BEAUTIFUL beaches of Jupiter!

    New storage devices which store thousands of times more than conventional hard drives are a smashing success on Earth! Recovered from one of our crashed scout ships over 50 Earth-years ago, the human race actually believes this crappy technology is USEFUL! What does this mean for YOU, the alien Enterpreneuer? MONEY!

    Now for the first time these machines are being hyped. The earth market will grow to thousands of machines within the next 12-18 months according to industry experts. We are seeking qualified individuals who are looking
    to take advantage of a virtually untapped market opportunity in their area. There are retail locations across the country waiting !

    Timing is Everything !! We should have had this crap out decades ago!

    For a Free Business Package at No Obligation:

    CALL TODAY AT:
    1-54345-462352562-762357-000-2346123-1

    (Headquartered on Mars. Long-Distance charges apply.)
    Please refer to Code X615 when you call.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Do you really have to ask?

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Hey, this kind of claims reminds me of cold fusion - you really wish was actually true. The major difference is that this is probably nothing more than words on a web page while in those cold fusion cells something was actually happening, although probably not fusion.
  • Will this work with my Elbrus E2K [slashdot.org] chip/mobo??? If it will, sign me up!

  • After some digging around on their site I came across the following link. It talks a (little) bit more about the technology behind TCAP.

    http://www.byamerican.com/alsi/

    Macka

  • In fact, if you follow the link from the picture to the URL:

    http://byamerican.com/abouttcap.htm

    You get a quite a lot of detail on how this technology is supposed to work. If you can screen out the eccentric babble about UFO's the rest of it makes very interesting reading.

    Macka

  • We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from.

    Bwahaha. Right.

  • Did you use your credit card to get access? No? Fine, shut up. These are busy folks. They print what sounds interesting and unless you plan on paying them, they don't have time to read every article. Get over it.
  • "embedded Windows NT operating system"

    It's Bill Gates, I tell you!!

    8Complex
  • Problems I have with this:

    They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.

    They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)

    If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?

    Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!

    '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!

    'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)

    This is most definitely a joke... but one that probably fooled a few. I really don't think that it deserves to be on Slashdot... The people who wrote this hoax obviously don't know the first thing about silicon or electronics in general.
    CC: CmdrTaco

  • Wow, they weren't even trying to make this believable. If this is a real company, it must be run by some pretty kooky people.

    Average Humanity must be, on the intelligence scale, the equivalent of a "low grade moron" compared with wherever this device's design came from.

    Yeah, and you'd have to be a "low grade moron" to believe any of this crap. I especially like the picture of the wafer - it's just a coin with the face doctored in a paint program. Not to mention the relabelled PII.

    But come to think of it, wih the recent rush of "vapor" products from Silicon Valley, if these guys held an IPO I'd be willing to bet that some idiot with a pile of cash would be drooling to climb on board...
  • 12 TeraHertz!?!?!?! Wonder if I need to upgrade from my Pentium-2000, 50 GigaHertz, Advanced Dynamic Holographic Overdriven Computer (ADHOC) Brain Implant?




  • http://accpc.com/Jack.jpg [accpc.com]

    He looks like one of the Beasties in the Sabotage video :o)

  • http://accpc.com/Jack.jpg [accpc.com]

    He looks like one of the Beasties in the Sabotage video :o)

    Nice threads though !

  • That was the worst bullshit I've ever seen. I mean...
    the least that could've been done is that it should
    have been labeled as humor (as many people have said),
    and it really shouldn't have made "News" at all. If that
    was news, then I suppose I should announce my VaporWare Pro v2.0
    coming out in August '99. I mean, it's just as newsworthy
    as this, right?
  • Hey, I think this is one of the most effective devices I've seen - this week 8).

    It's gotten a bunch of us to check out there web site - that's a very powerful device!

    I guess it's our humour spot for the day.

  • I find it pathetic that such crap has made it through /. filtering. Things like this wouldn't even be funny at Segfault [segfault.org].

    My feeling is that /. has been becoming less and less reliable those last three months. When I first came here 10 months ago, it seems that articles and reactions were much less childish and much more dependable. What's happening?

  • Don't be so quick to dismiss this technology. It looks real to me.

    I'm not going to use it when it's realeased. of course. The aliens which provided this to ACC, also provided Intel with their chip numbering system.

    All of your purchases will be logged by aliens, and within hours of using the device, spam from across the universe will flood your inbox.

    Still, it's a pretty sweet design.
  • Either its intentionaly presented poorly so as to confuse everyone. Our it's a teen prank. Or they
    have booksmart savants of alien intelligence, but have never seen a real web page, or product announcement, making the web page now that the VHDL is done.

    A pentium picture? A section of a wafer with a lame circular smoothed edge? No interconnects?
    No patent refs?
    IMHO totaly bogus.
    Sheesh.... Whats next?
  • I haven't been able to find any mention of this periodical anywhere. Anyone ever actually hear about it, let alone see it?
  • Anyone care to check a couple of claims? I remember seeing this a while back and discounted it as a hoax, but I just found some other info on their site that, if true, may add some credibility to their claim. Of course, these claims are so broad I'm a little incredulous.

    1) Claims to have been around since the 60's
    2) Claim to have developed the Router and SMP
    3) Claims to have invented RAID.
    4) Claims to have developed part of X.25

    And quite a few more. You can view their claims here [accpc.com]. I don't have time to check them myself, but I'd be interested to see what anyone else could dig up. If this resume is correct, I might not be so quick to discount them.
  • I spke with a representative from ACC through the e-mail... here is what he said to my question about availability to purchase and cost. etc...
    "snip"Yes it is.

    But its only sold with our El Dorado Storage Centers, as we've adapted it
    as a Front Side Cache for Mechanical Hard Drives as a first application.

    It turns up to 2 Terabytes of RAID (normally 8Msec Access Times) into a
    drive store that runs at .5 Msec Average Access time.

    John
    *snip"
    I herd about this from a friend of mine about 6 months ago and emediatly posted it to slashdot... guess I got ignored. (I'm used to that as I come from a family of three older sisters)
  • Last time we saw this [slashdot.org] the consensus was that
    it was a hoax. I expect it still is.

  • Technology a la Firmage (Score:3)

    by HardCase ( 14757 ) on Sunday June 27, 1999 @06:02AM (#1830351)
    To say that the article excludes a lot of technological information is an understatement. The article claims that they don't know where the technology came from! Either their command of the English language is absolutely terrible, or this is a perfect candidate for Joe Firmage's new company to fund.

    The web site looks like more of an April Fools' joke...they slapped their logo on a Pentium II cartridge with some paint program, took a stock photo of a silicon wafer and somehow came up with this "unknown" technology that they aren't going to sell to the monopolizing computer companies.

    Does anyone REALLY believe this? Remember, just because it's on the web doesn't mean that it's true!

    =h=
  • What do they mean by a "low power drain of 1 ma/hr"
    is that 1 milli ampere/hr? 'cause that unit makes absolutely no sense
    an ampere is a unit of current, not power.
    mutiply current(amperes) with the voltage at which it works
    (lets say 5 volts), and we get the power consumtion of the device
    in "WATTS" so they could say the power consumtion
    is x watts, or x milliwatts, or x mw. but that "/hr" bit is
    ridiculous, proves that the pages been written by
    someone who doesn't know 2 bits of basic EE.
  • Unless these guys have come up with some way to circumvent the whole pesky speed-of-light thing, it is absolutely physically impossible to have any circuit at wafer-scale size clocked in the terahertz range.

    A 1THz clock has a period of .001 ns - about the amount of time it takes light to travel 200 microns (I may be _way_ off here - I'm using Admiral Hopper's demostration of 1 ns being about .2 m - someone please correct my calculations). Wafer scale ICs are about 10 cm (100,000 microns) across - the clock signal couldn't even propogate across 1/500th of the chip before it repeated.

    Most likely, this is a third rate tech company trying to throw around terminology that Joe Wintel knows about (Hertz - clock speed - and as we all know clock speed is the ultimate metric of computer performance, right?) to impress people and rack up more hits for their site. Sad, really.
  • I hear the same guys who found this technology also found a skeletal metal arm along with it...
  • I think I read this in a web version of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy... I believe it was called Project Galactic Guide, but I don't remember the URL or the entry where this cat/buttered-toast theory was stated.

  • Let's see..
    "We stronly suspect aliens made these plans and military looted them from alien's spaceship in '40s. IBM was trying to figure them out back then but couldn't, but now we got a really bright scientist and we did it.. this thing is great, its 90gig, its 14 Teraherz, transfer rates in terabits per second. ATAPI interface included. We'll start at $800/pop but soon it'll be $20 a dozen."

    Is it me, or shouldn't this have been posted?
  • Is this the same force Yoda uses to get Luke's
    X-Wing out of the swamps of Dagobah?
  • The development team, underneath Phillip Huang, has visualized PC's with "no RAM memory needed" in a future implementation which might mate one or more of the INTEL Pentium II Processor(s) with the "90b8" device, along with an "embedded Windows NT operating system".

    True or not, this line is a scary thought...
  • That photo IS a silicon wafer. For those of you that don't know, that's what gets cut up in to squares to make CPU's. Also, the SEPP cartridge hasn't been edited very well.

    So while it's a good hoax, the average /.er will pick up the anomalies very quickly where as your "low-grade moron" might just go... "Ohhhh that's sooo cool!".

    Footnote, Some people make a lot of money as con artists.
  • Anti-Gravity has been around since the 50's (1950's as far as I know) The US Government (and possibly a few others) did some experiments, but couldn't come up with enough energy to get it to work sufficiently.

    It does work though, but the energy requirements are ridiculous

    Basic premise is you get an umberella, coat it in metal, and where the handle is, put a sphere, about 3" across (size may or may not be important)

    Then stick a ridiculous voltage potential between the sphere and the 'keeps the rain off your head' bit of the umberella. If you measure it, it will start to get 'lighter'

    Lotsa things actually work, just that you're not allowed to know about them.

    bibi

  • I was reading the mass-storage Ask Slashdot thread this morning; somone posted this link there. Apparently, someone submitted the link back in as a news article. Here's a link [uni-weimar.de] with good debunking material from that previous thread. So is that all well and good? We know now we won't be buying into their 90GiB chip, much less a new video card from these clowns, right?

    But! I spent some time reading their "forum" [byamerican.com] section. This is a truly frightening place; there seem to be three or four posts daily asking for corroborative links, which are responded to by "avatars" flaming the bejeezus out of the querant. I'm bothered by this; I'm so used to /.'s freewheeling, the-ones-that-know-tell-everyone-else-what-the-rea l-deal-is nature of slashdot forums. The conscensus of this /. forum is to dismiss it; this is a joke or publicity stunt. In fact it isn't. These guys take themselves very seriously, and are openly hostile to any and all references to actual (peer-reviewed) research.

    Ask Ed Gehrman [mailto] what he's experienced with this site. He's posted several comments on their site, but then gets childishly (and publicly) ridiculed by the maintainers of the forum, not on the merit of his posts, but the size of his genitalia, literacy, family, etc. This from the supposed CS/EE's, makers of Tommorow's Tommorrow's Technology who can't even spell "teraherz" or "dialectrics" (sic) [uni-weimar.de].

    I sent Ed a link to Third Voice [thirdvoice.com], and did a touch of debunking myself. If we all went to the site & tore apart their claims, perhaps we can rescue the idiots who're listening to their claims (and sending $$ and equipment to further research, believe it or not. I saw the posts on the forum today).

    Anyway, that's my perfect scenario, now that this snake oil operation as once again resurfaced on /.: what if 1000's of /.ers descend on their little party armed with facts and reason... "what a wonderful world it would be..."

    So go forth, my fellow Knights of Reason and Heroines of Truth (or vice/versa :) ). Take up your expertise, your passion, your wit, and take these goons to task! Yield no quarter, take no prisoners, kick ass, forget names, and have fun with it!

    jaz 'guevera'

  • Well well color me confused.
    [byamerican.com]
    all about the tcap: seems to be fairly valid, and its on bell labs site. So this might accually be alien technology. ARG. I don't know weither to be amazed or critical. For right now, I'm very critical
  • NEVERMIND they are not belllabs.. wow I feel stupider and stupider each minute today.

  • Roswell (Score:3)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Sunday June 27, 1999 @10:12AM (#1830365) Journal
    Oh yes, they are very credible, they also claim that aliens helped them invent the transistor. [accpc.com]

    sure I believe them.

  • read the page:
    http://www.geocities.com/CapeCa naveral/Hangar/9587/ [geocities.com]

    --------------
    Brooks138
  • Yesterday's "Ask Slashdot" had a lot of focus on solid-state mass storage. Now, today, this thing comes along, with that remarked P2 cartridge? It's got to be a hoax.
  • What if you made whole wafer chips out of a large number of connected components, then cut the wafers up the way you would a normal one.

    you could then "reassemble" the wafer from the working componints. I think this would work well for RAM type applications, and parrallel chips, etc. I don't know how posible it would be to "reassemble" the chips though...
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Can I run them on my Lýnux box? Are there Lýnux kernel drývers ýn the 2.3 tree?

    I'd just like to use this next to my Sirius-made holographic display that has a nice SVGA port, APM & PnP support, also complies with those low radiation standards...

  • Mainly cos he keeps forgetting that he's run these stories!

    Sheesh Rob,.. get out the memory enhancing drugs will ya?

    Must be all the Jolt....
  • OK, maybe they misspelled it, we should probably read 90 giga"bites" :P
  • Is that the same pink guy who keeps trying to steal my cellphone?

    Watch out.. He's sneaky...
  • A few questions about these aliens:
    • When will these aliens roll out their subspace frequency high bandwidth internet access so we can dispense with cable, ISDN, and ADSL?
    • Are they currently working on an awesome multithreaded IP stack for the kernel?
    • Will these aliens donate some of their idle CPU cyles to the SETI@HOME project?

    1. Save some money
    2. Buy shares in this company
    3. Sleep for a couple of years
    4. Sell the shares for about 100 times as much as I payed for them.
    5. Sit back and laugh while the complany goes down in flame as even the really stupid investors realizes it's a scam.

    If there is one single thing I regret, it is that I did not buy shares in Opticom a couple of years ago.

  • I have changed my mind, after realizing that this is a joke, not a scam. My new TODO-list is now:

    1. Save some money
    2. Use them to buy pizza,cola,new computers and cartoons
    3. GOTO 1
  • Agreed, its the pictures and phrases like

    'future "set top boxes" used in future film rental system'

    make me doubt it something feirce. Too bad, eh?
  • Oh, and did I forget to mention:

    "Power Bus - 13 Pin (four plus, four minus, 1 ground, 4 control (on, off, clear, init/test)"

    Not that I make stuff like this but I think I'd do better than 'plus' and 'minus'
  • I have a about 25 servers with 4GB+ of ECC memory. Guess what? Every month or two, one of them needs a DIMM replaced due to persistent ECC memory errors. Memory is not absolutely perfect. In especially high quantities (50+ gb), there are going to be flaws on the chips.

    So you've got a ~90gb solid state drive on a single chip. What's going to be my bit error rate? And it seems rather expensive to replace a single $900 chip when it goes bad.

    Yet another reason why this article is bogus. (That, and it may have low access times... but one a single chip, what's going to be my throughput in mb/sec?)
  • I would label this as another pipe dream whipped up to attract interest
    from the public... at least until I've seen some real progress in wafer
    scale integration in the commercial area. The idea in it self to use
    whole wafers of memory, processors or combinations of them is in no way
    new (I even have a vague recollection of Sir Clive of ZX fame funding some
    project way back). After doing a little bit of digging around on the net
    I found an interesting article in EE Times at
    http://www.eet.com/news/98/1001news/switch.html)

    The company mentioned in the article seems still to be alive (and can be
    found at http://www.hyperchip.com) and seems to be intent to develop a
    peta-bit router. Still no sight of a real product though.

    Here are a couple of points with wafer scale integration that the article
    spreads some light on. The larger the circuit the less yield you will get
    from the process. To get around this you add circuits to detect and work
    around these errors - but these corrective circuits are also marred by the
    same amount of errors as the rest of the wafer. And adding even more
    redundant circuits eats up more and more of the wafer. And in the end the
    yields were to low to make it commercially viable.

    And Richard Norman from Hyperchip says "The only commercial wafer-scale
    product I have heard of was a 2-Mbit, 3-inch SRAM wafer back in the days of
    64-kbit SRAM chips"

    Neat idea though... but until you show me the silicon I will not show you
    my money. But do read the article in EE Times - it's a nice piece.

    Jari

  • Oh dear, aren't these our 'alien tech' friends? (Score:3)

    by VonD ( 41066 ) on Sunday June 27, 1999 @06:28AM (#1830390)
    Before reading the article (and even halfway down it), I was almost gulled into thinking 'cool'
    except that the claims were a bit too good to be true.
    As soon as the article stated mumbling about terahertz speeds (now isn't any electromagnetic wave at frequency somewhere in the
    far infrared range?) and the origins of the complex designs for this technology being totally
    unknown(roswell! roswell!)- I remembered seeing these guys (American Computers) put up similarly preposterous claims previously.

    What I can't work out is:
    a) does American Computer want to be taken seriously on this?
    b) is it some sort of (very silly) con or scam.
    c) some sort of method of getting extra site hits from gullible people (hey I visited the site...).
    d) Some sort of gag/humor site/parody. It did kind of make me smile. If it's a gag, they've certainly made it very deadpan.
    e) do these people really have this product (tinfoil hat time methinks)

    All I know about this site is that it's been around for a while and that they've made similar claims before. I just forgot about them.

    At least the blurb warned us that the information might be rather unreliable....
  • This thing would obsolete disk drives *and* conventional memory. Based on the performance claims, it would probably obsolete cache memory also. It's not entirely clear, based on the claims, that it won't be faster than CPU registers!

    Naturally, I'm a little skeptical based only on those performance claims. I might remain hopeful, however, except that the way they try to frame the performance claims in terms that sound impressive to the unsophisticated user: "...100,000's of times faster than the fastest mainframe hard drives ever made by IBM." *cough*

    They go on to claim that it will be released "next year" in a document that claims to be the 1st revistion dated November, 1997. (the copyright dates, however, do include 1999).

    I'll wait for independent benchmarking of the samples, thank you.

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