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Technology

Scotch Tape Storage 203

Posted by Hemos from the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction dept.
Hoss Man writes "It seems like a few techno-heads out there have figured out how to make a 10Gig harddrive out of a roll of Scotch Tape. It would be cooler if it was Duct Tape, but I guess we can't really complain. " Alright, I'm not sure whether I believe it or not, but it looks pretty darn cool.
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Scotch Tape Storage More

Scotch Tape Storage

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  • This is great.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now only if they could make a 3D accelerator out of toliet paper rolls, I'd be set.

  • Re:one roll of tape.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One hermetically sealed clean room.. $750,000

    One teleporter to get the equipment (and yourself) in.. $?

  • Re:It CAN be done.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The use of actual sticky tape is just goofing around I'm certain. Much like the joll-o laser (and the competing vodka laser from the USSR)

    Oh, yeah! When you get bored you can drink the vodka from this drives laser and tape yourself to the wall!

  • Thank god for this (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    BECAUSE MRBILL ATE MY HARD DRIVE. THANK GOD WE HAVE THE PREDATOR FORT(TM) TO PROTECT US FROM EATING US!

  • Okay.. (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    Double points to the first person to get it working with the i-opener [slashdot.org].
  • It doesn't say when the other guy submitted the story... only when it was posted to the main page. So it's entirely possible that you didn't submit it first....
  • We like these kinds of stories because, hey, it's cool. :^) Who cares if it's practical or not.

    Lighten up, willya? :^)
  • Pardon me for being a little crybaby...waahhh-waahhh...but I don't even know why you guys (being the Slashdot story acceptors/decliners) even attach someones name to a story. This is one of many times that I have posted a story (as seen below):

    2000-03-18 07:00:17 10 GB of Data Storeage on Clear Adhesive Tape (articles,news) (declined)

    Only to have someone else given the credit. Pardon me for saying so, but that sucks. Why give credit at all, if it's not the correct credit. Granted the other person submitted the story as well, but I submitted it much earlier (7 a.m. CST). Oh crap! I'm gonna lose some karma now. Damn, and just when I was about to reach 60 points! Oh well, moderate me down, down, down....

    Guess I'll just have to start getting all of my news that really matters from Kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org] Have you checked it out yet? Very cool site. It's like the Slashdot of old when it was good (meaning now it's not so good).
  • *sigh* another troll, another week of Slimfast..
  • I submit stories that no one else does, and they still get declined. :)
  • First heard of it around April 1st, eh?
  • Gives a new meaing to taping one's mouth shut

    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • I know this is a troll, but I have to say this.
    I have been a moderator (and probably so have you if you actually have an account) and Andover's stock price was definitely not on my mind.
    The problem with your theory is that moderation is done by USERS, not /. staff. So basically you're dead in the water.

    Whatever...
  • Good god, I had no idea that story submissions could be so important to someone's sense of self-worth, or security, or whateverthehellitis that makes it so traumatizing for you.

    Perhaps you'd be better off if you didn't bother submitting stories any more. It appears that, for you, the costs far outweigh any advantage.

    --
  • I also wonder if it would be ROM or if it would be rewritable

    Well if you read the article you would see it is read-only. You'd also see it is not about unrolling the tape and rolling it back up, etc., so it does NOT involve advanced media decay, stretching from heat, or other problems non-readers-of-the-article are postulating. In fact, it has potentially much less risk than a hard disk, because you keep the roll of tape fixed and only rotate a laser-bouncing mirror in the center of the roll's donut space, as opposed to a hard disk where the whole platter spins and the drive head remains relatively stationary. This means fewer balance problems, and potentially much higher speeds.

    In short, for those of you who can't be bothered to read the article, it's not about using scotch tape as a tape-backup medium. It's about using scotch tape (not the 3M brand, but similar) in a roll, using the fact that a laser can penetrate to any given layer in the roll at once. This also has holographic storage implications. In short, read the article.

  • Ah yes it will be able to be quite cheep, but you know companies. They will just have to come out with "Data Safe Packing Tape" then charge an arm and a leg for it.

  • Minor detail, very minor... :}
  • Two rolls of tape for her to use to hang up
    decorations for her senior prom.....
    AOL 6.0
    and
    Microshaft Windows 2010.
  • Nope. Didn't you read the website? The most specifically don't /want/ to unroll it.

    There's a laser that sits in the hole in the middle (where the spindle goes) and reads it from the inside out.

    --
    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
    - Sean
  • Hmmm... mind I don;t know anything about this, so I could be off my rocker.

    But wouldn't the thickness of the roll start to get in the way at some point? I mean, after looking through several inches of tape to get to the last layers, what you see is gonna be pretty murky -- I don't care how "clear" the tape is.

    If your roll's only 2" then it's not a big issue, especially since if you look from the inside, that's less that 1" to look through at any given time.

    But when you get up towards your 10" size, I suspect that you will only be able to "look" so deep. Either that, or your storage compression (ie: bytes per inch) is gonna go downhill pretty fast.

    Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that a simple comparaison of the respective lengths of a 2" and a 10" roll probably won't give you a terribly good idea of how much you can store on said 10" roll.

    --
    It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
    - Sean
  • If this ever actualy happens, you better keep an extra close eye on your "hard drive" come christmas time or you could end up wiht all your data in small pieces under you tree.
  • ....1PB sugar cubes
    --
  • Read the article before posting next time. It's a write once medium.
  • What if you forgot and left it in the sun? Gooey!


    -jpowers
  • There are newsgroups for this. Look up the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy and stop abusing this public forum. You're making the rest of us Mac users look bad. If you don't have a news server and news client to browse with, use DejaNews and similar web sites.
  • ...than having to constantly deal with assholes like yourself day in and day out. Oh, I suppose I could BE one of those assholes.

    Get a life and move on.
  • A girl from germany left some tesa tape at my house and its a small clear ring with the tesa lable i was using the ring to hold an emu egg now i know it can hold more then that but yet it still holds more then that
  • Raindeer wrote: "People assume that because it has been done in a lab it is therefore possible to do it anytime, any place, anywhere. Fact is, you can't. Most inventions are only proof of concept and need alot of work before they can be used by you or me. Now next time you see a cool invention, understand that it takes at least 2 to 3 years t end up on your desktop."

    It's a good point that research can take a long time to reach the guy on the street -- on the while, though, I think the reaction here on slashdot is actually pretty reasonable.

    It's natural to be excited about new technologies, and for them to suggest possibilities that might not be immediately feasable -- even when the new technology is itself sort of quixotic.

    I'm all for tape-storage; I just want it to be on elephant tape so it never breaks.

    timothy

  • Now I can get a 10 GB Scotch HD.

    Now the question is... Can I get it with a SCSI interface?

  • Maybe, but things'll change after a while It'd be a lot easier just to subcutaneously inject a chip into your hand. Then, of course, there are gonna be the people who are proud of that, and get it injected into their forehead. Then they'll become mandatory, and that'll be how you buy stuff. Of course, right before this chip comes into the market, a billion, maybe more people will get "abducted by aliens" or some similar hogwash. Read Revelation, it's all in there. (In forms more easily deciphered by the ancient Romans, but it's there nevertheless) -=Canar=-
  • ...that the slash quote at the bottom of my page is: "You will lose an important tape file."

    Coincidence? Hmmmm....
    --
    '...let the rabbits wear glasses...'
    Y2038 consulting
  • Well, the label on your 10" should say how long the roll is, and then you need to know how long a 2" roll is, and your set!
  • Don't they need to unroll it to use it?
  • >The required laser power of a less than 1mW is comparable with that of a laser pointer.

    So probably not, because no matter how fast you spin it, it's still only generating 1 J of heat every 1000 seconds in the tape. I would think the majority of the heat from hard disks and cd-roms comes from the motors spining those massive things so fast and consistantly. If all you have to spin is a light-weight mirror (the tape remains stationary), then the heat would be significantly reduced. Heat might arise from the "energy release" when writing, but not from rapid reading
  • Have they tested this long term?

    I wouldn't be at all surprised if the adhesive clouded due to exposure to the read light.

    -
  • > The use of actual sticky tape is just goofing around I'm certain.

    Don't scoff at the wonkyness of the medium too quickly. It certainly has merit, where else can you find 10 Gigs of mass storage that cheap? Just the right size for storing those deeveedee pir8 copies. And its alternative use as an adhesive prevents the MPAA from taxing it heavily. Or will we see "denaturated" scotch tape, just as we have "denaturated" alcool (for non-drinking usage) now?

  • ... the sticky mess that some undorderly Sysop could make out of this media (just think "patch closet that resembles more a plate of Pasta Bolognese than anything else...").
  • Scotch tape? mmm.. Yeah right, sounds like an early april fool to me. Think a bit, the laser focuses on the layer within the roll? Ha ha, ever seen a roll of cellotape? the things bulge etc. You can't guarantee the thickness of the adhesive so how do you propose to focus the bloody laser einstein? P.S. My hardrive wobbled, so I'm booting my linux system from an old Smiths C15 data cassette coupled to my soundcard.
  • After playing with a few office supplies, I've found 2" to be pretty much undistorted (high grade 3M tape). I can't find anything bigger than 2", but I'm guessing the manufacturer is an even bigger factor than the size of the roll. Depending on what dyes they use and so forth. Note that in the article they didn't use 3M tape. I'm not sure this was due to advanced research on clarity or if it's just what they had in their cubicles. I can see 3M jumping on this and making a lower distortion tape so you could have up to a 5" roll (or larger). Using the volume of a cylinder, we see that:

    capacity == pi * (r^2) * h

    assuming the roll is standard (or roughly standard) 2" wide and 7" in diameter, (2" tape and 3" center)

    10 GB == (pi * (7^2) * 2) - (pi * (3^2) *2)
    or (98 * pi) - (18 * pi) == (80 * pi) == 10GB

    (pi * (13^2) * 2) - (18 * pi) == (320 * pi), or 4 times the data area. A 5" roll would give you 40 GB.

    That's a breakthrough IMHO because your materials cost goes up about 2 dollars per drive for a larger roll of tape, using the same hologram/laser assembly. You could also look into getting a 10" wide, 5" deep roll of tape and extending the mirror assembly, again probably about $10 additional hardware cost for several hundred GB of storage capacity.

    (pi * (13^2) * 10) - (90* pi) == (1600 * pi), or 200 GB storage space. Yes, I realize that these numbers aren't truly accurate but they're somewhat close.

    Factor in the cost of designing a lower distortion tape, and you're looking at the difference between a 10 GB drive and a 200 GB drive to be about $30/drive. If someone working in the R&D area at 3M is reading this, I suggest looking into a lower distortion tape. You may spawn a breakthrough in cheap drive manufacturing.
  • Yes, "Kristallklar" is swedish for "Crystal Clear"

    /your average swedish guy.

  • The subject is the message.

    -Steve
  • Extactly. Every once in a while somebody pops up with with Holographic-Storage-Shit. Nobody yet solved the Problem of writing on more than say 5 Layers. There are Projekts for crystal storage but there still remains the unsolved Problem of changing the deeper Parts without deytroying the surface Information. Why do you think DVD has only 2 Layers and then needs to be turned around ? And this is only reading and not writing. Wake up.
  • Rumors have it that the drive's jumpers are just a few staples

    Mike Roberto
    - roberto@soul.apk.net
    -- AOL IM: MicroBerto
  • toilet paper out of scotch tape as well. Doesn't mean that I would (think how much it would hurt)

  • Keep in mind that DVD (similar technology) costs about that much when commercially pressed.

  • I have been backing up regularly on TOILET PAPER!
  • Hmmm..
    If 10 GB = 2 inch roll, I got a couple 10 inch rolls laying around.
    How much data can I put on each of them?
  • Tape worm. noun 1. The 10GB storage unit that canbe invisibly stuck to anything. 2. Nasty parasite that invades small children, and lives in their intestines, eating the child's food before it can fully digest it.

  • Well, I didn't actually see anything about tubular design on the page, maybe I missed it, but if they were actually using a Scotch tape dispenser, wouldn't that lead to alarmingly poor performance on non-sequential reads? You'd have to move the strip forwards and backwards... of course this is a problem with conventional tape drives.

    Just make sure you de-frag your tape roll once in a while and everything'll be alright.

    Nicholas
  • The category for this device would fall under tape-worm. :)
  • Now if only I could debug source code with Post-It(tm) Notes then I'll be extremely happy with the guys at 3M. Just a note of curiousity, how would this new wacky medium cope with "multi-roll" spanning archives? Someone better work out how to perfectly link up one end of tape to the start of another roll during untarring or else I'll never have enough room to store all the BSD vs. Linux flame wars on Slashdot! Better still, I could use the tape to shut some lame flamers up and bring some relief to us all.

  • post-it floppy! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    need some kind of removable storage.
  • Now if some agency thinks you have secretly stored some data on your computer, you do not only have to hand over any secret keys, but also tear off any Scotch tape your used anywhere in your home ;-)

  • What could you put over the write protect hole to make it writable again?

  • Maybe 3M will come out with wider rolls of tape

    How about double sided, double density too.

    Also, what happens when the adhesive on the tape becomes weak?

    You can check the stickyness of the tape by checking if the sticky bit is set to TRUE.
  • I can see what would happen already....Picture it:

    You do a full system backup on a roll of tape. Then you put your tape roll on the desk.

    Now, someone who lives with you is just going to *NEED* a piece of tape. They go searching around the house, and viola! There's a NICE FRESH ROLL OF TAPE sitting right there on the computer desk!

    Rrrrrrrrrrrip........Snap! (500 MB)

    When they're done, they put it back. Then comes the point when you want to restore from backup...


    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • If you could easily swap out rolls of the tape like cylinders that would be very cheap and very cool.

    Disposible harddrives? Use em to wrap your Christmas gifts when your HD goes bad? Recycling takes on new meanings here.
  • ``Now the question is... Can I get it with a SCSI interface?''

    Sure. Although the disks are only purchasable in a single interface (ST506), the scotch tape disk drives turn SCSI after a period of time... just like regular scotch tape.
    --

  • It's ROM. They state in the article you can only write once. Apparently, the thing works because there is extra energy stored in the tape from the manufacturing process, and when the tape is heated, it loses this energy, so when it cools, it has a different refraction index. Just like your good ol' CD-ROMs. TAPE-R's might be possible, but you'd have to make the tape differently.. (now where have I seen taper before... oh yeah, a backup utility).

    Oh yeah, and hallelujah for the rant. It is a cool idea though.. think of the use in a James Bond flick... ;)

    Jeff

  • In the late 1970's I read a paper that described the theory behind this. It's cool to see that someone has actually done it. I cannot recall where I read that paper, unfortunately. I was a wild and crazy college student so things like where it was published weren't important to me. I don't think it was in an academic journal, though.

    The way this paper did describe the practical potential was in terms of unwound tape. They suggested using the backing medium from magnetic tape, but without the magnetic coating. The proposed mechanism would be to roll the tape past the heads like any tape device, but the heads would be a laser with a high speed rotating mirror that would cause a transversal scanning of the tape. I suspect this thinking was from video tape technology (2 inch quadraplex video tape recording was still common in TV broadcast at that time, EIAJ was getting cheaper, and Beta/VHS was emerging).

    There were two interesting aspects of that paper. One was that they suggested a 1/4 inch by 2400 foot reel of tape could eventually hold 10 TERAbits of data (I think DVD has passed this level already, in terms of bits per square mm). The other was that they suggested certain chemical doping of the medium could allow a finite (they suggested 100 times) amount of erasing and rewriting (they didn't detail how that would be done).

  • I know it is not the same idea, but it reminded me of that episode of "The Secret Life of Machines" where they showed how a tape recorder works by recording their voices on a piece of magic tape with rust sprinkled on it.

  • Does this mean that if my tape media goes bad I can still use it to tape posters on my wall?

  • Click here [mplex.cx]

    This is off an idle T1, I just opened the link in composer and saved it so it's just that page.

  • Think back to CDR's, before they first came out. First we had ity technology allowing us to write to a disk, still in the development stage. Shortly thereafter, we saw CDR drives on the market. Then a little while later, we had the immergance of CDRW's.

    If this technology takes off, I'd say it's fairly likely that we'd see Tape-RW within several years due to special coating on the disks, or different poly types.

    I personally don't see tape storage as making a comeback too extensively - unless we could have say, a 10gb tape and a 100gb tape (that would be one BIG roll!), and use them in the same drive. The possibility of someone packaging something up with it seems too high to me, and even the amount of space that such disks would take up compared to heftier CD-type disks. I think that DVD-RW is more likely to become mainstream, with probable higher densities as time goes on.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • This may change the balance of the seemingly interminable war between Scotch Tape and Duct Tape.

    Chris Hagar
  • "Try to think outside the box" ?
  • If the tape goes bad, you can even use it to wrap up the drive and mail it back for repair :-)
  • I notice that the page was last modified on 24th of May 1999, but when I last did a search [google.com] on Google [google.com] I couldn't find anyone selling these.

    Perhaps they found that the tape was kinda like those Postit notes, and they couldn't get data to stick permanently

    "Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"

  • When word of this gets out IBM, Maxtor, and all those other damn hard drive companies will start marketing 10 gig rolls of scotch tape for about $300, and the deluxe duct tape SCSI models will be pushing the $1000 mark. *Groan*

  • Sorry, couldn't resist :)

    Seriously, though, this thing could be a very fast WORM system.Assuming they're smart (I think that's reasonable to assume), they will create a system whereby the laser is wide enough to read the entire width of the tape simultaneously. This will effectively make it a "drum", and will eliminate seek time latency, resulting in very fast access times.

    It's the same as if your hard drive had a separate head for each cylinder -- there's no arm which has to travel back and forth, so then you only have to worry about rotational latency and normal i/o slowing you down.

    However, by the time this thing would ever come to market, if that's even likely, 10GB will probably not be impressive for removable storage, and humans will have evolved far beyond the need for Scotch tape.

  • This technique is not unlike a 3-D optical storage technology in development by University of Toronto chemist, Eugenia Kumacheva.

    In her current research, 1000 GB of data has been sucessfully stored on 1 cm^3 of a special polymer, using a laser to write binary material to the storage medium.

    Read more about it here. [globetechnology.com]

  • LoL duct tape is like Linux, Suited well for some things.. Duct tape does things such as hold sub-sonic aircraft together. Scotch tape on the other hand is suited well to hold gift wrap on a package toghether. See where this is going? Anyways you can use duct Tape for things like holding Radio stations toghether.. ( low budget bastards :p ) You see how this works.. Duct Tape RULES! Scotch tape is for sissies lol.

  • [root@has_way_too_much_free_time /]# mount /dev/other_kind_of_tape /mnt/scotch -t scotchtfs

    mount: fs type scotchtfs not supported by kernel

    Aha! Then it must be bogus!

    --

  • Of course you'd have to invent a time machine as well to jump back to the year 1991 when the USSR still existed.
  • Hey moron, I will give it up after Mattel behaves and morons like you have a real understanding of the issues.

  • > I'm gonna find you, and KILL you. Why don't you identify yourself, COWARD?

  • Ok, so, uhm. I've got a question about this RSI thing and how it relates to slashdot. I'm assuming you still have rsi. And if so, isn't it bad to be hanging out on the internet, presumably using a mouse and keyboard all the time?
    Is there something you do to manage it. Alternative input devices, exercises or something?
    Good points. Someone has been paying attention. :)
    The whole point of the original lawsuit was that I needed the time for treatment and to to recover so that I could get back to work. Now it has become an issue of free speech.

    As with managing it, I have been working in software development since June 1997. I have been stretching, icing, and taking breaks regularly. I will experience some limits and pain for the next several years, because of the delay in getting the treatment.

    As to what this has to do with Slashdot, is that this is something that most slashdot readers are subject too, more than the regular population.

    The reason that I posted this information on the site was not to embarass Mattel. Mattel has done a good job of that on their own as you can see from the last few days of news. I have done this to inform others of the condition so they may learn about it without learning about it first hand. That people can learn of their rights and assert them earlier in the process. And, if other companies see what has happended with me, they may learn what not to do. And maybe help their employees with the problem, not tell them to stop playing with themselves.

  • Ignore the other one, i forgot break tags. Here it is again, properly:

    Drive "3M" is not ready:
    Abort, retry, Unroll?
    Can't access drive; Unable to find beginning of roll!
    Don't become unglued!
    Invalid media, insert single-sided tape only!
    And the number one user complaint of the future:
    "I inserted double-sided tape, and it stuck! I thought I could get twice the storage..."
  • Maybe 3M will come out with wider rolls of tape to fuel the new tape drive market. Also, what happens when the adhesive on the tape becomes weak? Do you lose your data? Can you make your own Scotch Tape HD out of recycled tape? The mind boggles...
  • Nobody seems to have picked up on the real significance of this form of storage. All conventional forms of storage are limited to only using 2 dimensions for storing data. This new technology is essentially a form of 3 dimensional storage, even though I realize that the roll of tape itself is made from a bunch of "2-D" layers. Even if the tape-drive isn't feasable, then something using the same principles will be. With a bit of research I'm sure manufactures can produce even thiner tapes, and that researches can figure out how to put even more data on each roll. We live in a 3 dimensional world, why not use them all?

  • Re:It CAN be done.... (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @12:53PM (#1193606) Homepage Journal

    I also wonder if it would be ROM or if it would be rewritable and

    They state that it's WORM.

    RANT>The problem with these stories is that many people read them and don't see that it is only a scientist goofing around.

    The use of actual sticky tape is just goofing around I'm certain. Much like the joll-o laser (and the competing vodka laser from the USSR)

    Perhaps in a few years, the operating principle can be applied to a usefully stable medium to come up with a really cheap high density WORM. R/W seems unlikely, since the technique seems to involve relaxing of the stress in the backing. I'm not sure if they mean the simple tension from rolling the tape (where the adhesive holds the tension), or the stress on the polymer chains from stretching the backing (probably the latter).

  • t-rom... (Score:3)

    by Bryan Andersen ( 16514 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:39AM (#1193607) Homepage

    Packing tape as a medium. Want to send some secret files to your friend back in the USSR, write them on packing tape, and use it to wrap the package. He just uses the package reader version to pull the files off the now unrolled tape, but watch out for streaching.

    What I like about it is the shear audacity of it. Here is a common product tape and they go and make it into a storage media. Oh, wait it already was a type of storage media. I guess it gives new meaning to binding the bits.

  • ObUnixJoke (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @11:03AM (#1193608)
    Gives new meaning to "setting the sticky bit"...
    --

  • Re:Error message: (Score:3)

    by extagboy ( 60672 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @04:26PM (#1193609) Homepage
    If we could only figure out a way to use fishing line to network the things we would be set!

  • Not Exactly, But Close... (Score:3)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @11:36AM (#1193610) Homepage
    As shown by this [citde.net] shop selling both Scotch Tape (9th listed) and Tesa Kristallklar (2nd listed)...The Tesa is about 3 times more expensive, but still pretty darned cheap (1.95 DM is about US$0.96) per roll.

    I'm guessing Kristallklar probably translates as "Crystal Clear"?

  • Heat is not that big a problem. (Score:3)

    by hariya ( 88607 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @11:12AM (#1193611)

    Heat generation during read/write operations is hardly the biggest problem. Lower the entire thing in a vat of liquid ethane.

    Adhesive tapes are made by extruding/casting a liqud layer which is dried to make the polymer film. There are so many problems with getting an uniform film using this technique. Inbuilt stresses during drying, edge effects, etc. etc.

    This is one reason LCDs are so expensive. If only they can be made like polymer films...

  • not scotch tape (Score:3)

    by Kwikymart ( 90332 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:32AM (#1193612)
    the brand of tape is "tesa Multi-Film, kristallklar" or some shit like that. IT IS NOT SCOTCH TAPE

  • Creative means of DeCSS code distribution? (Score:3)

    by kcarnold ( 99900 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @05:20PM (#1193613)

    Encode about a hundred thousand copies of css-auth.tar.gz and DeCSS.zip on a roll of tape, then use that roll of tape for your letters, promotions, etc. There's guaranteed to be at least one copy on each section if you write it right, and there are likely hundreds more in case of accidental data loss (read, ripping off and throwing in garbage can).

    And better yet, it would be way to expensive for whatever agency was trying to destroy all copies to find which pieces of tape actually contained the code. Of course, the MPAA could just destroy all tape they found, but is that not some kind of criminal act? [evil snicker]

  • Small nitpick... It's not in fact a hard-drive, it's a write-once medium. Still pretty darn cool, though.

  • Heat and plastic Tape (Score:3)

    by MerkuryZ ( 140661 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:33AM (#1193615)

    Wouldn't the heat caused by rapid reads and writes actually change the data. also, depending on how colse the tape was to other tape, It could easily expand and contract. I noticed in the article, that the tape they were using was on a slide, preventing it from moving. Although the idea is good, I don't see this ever being used in a real world situation.

  • Next Big Thing - No Joke (Score:4)

    by Skip666Kent ( 4128 ) on Sunday March 19, 2000 @08:06AM (#1193616)
    All joking aside, this, in my opinion, is a classic breakthrough in which a 'silly' idea or thought-experiment leads to a minor or perhaps major revolution. The idea of wide, rolled surface for data storage is phenominal. The amount of surface area is MUCH larger than that of a cd-rom or any other flat spining surface, and the amount of movement necessary for a given read is greatly lessened. The idea of three dimensional storage is a tad beyond me, but I can see the potential and it's very exciting.

    Before you laugh this off as funny ("it's tape! Huh huh! That's stoopid!") read the page and check out what they're doing. This is big stuff!

    With some very sticky implications...

    DOH!

  • Do: mount -o fingernail -t ext2 /dev/scotch /mnt (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:38AM (#1193617)
    That ought to fix things right up!

  • one roll of tape.. (Score:5)

    by IronDragon ( 74186 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @11:11AM (#1193618) Homepage
    One hermetically sealed clean room.. $750,000
    One pen laser $20
    One roll of Scotch Tape $3
    One more way to piss of the MPAA Priceless

  • Transition... (Score:5)

    by Datafage ( 75835 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:29AM (#1193619) Homepage
    From tape to 5.25"to 3.5" to CD to DVD to... tape? I guess history does repeat itself.

    -----------------------

  • It CAN be done.... (Score:5)

    by Raindeer ( 104129 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @11:03AM (#1193620) Homepage Journal
    This story has been doing the rounds for a couple of months allready. Though it is a theoretical possibillity to store data on Scotch tape, it would not be of alot of practical use. There was an Ask Slashdot on Data Obsolescence and Media Decay. Well, Scotch tape would definitely run large risks of media decay. I also wonder if it would be ROM or if it would be rewritable and how often it would be rewritable.

    (RANT>The problem with these stories is that many people read them and don't see that it is only a scientist goofing around. It is amazing to see here on Slashdot the reaction research results. People assume that because it has been done in a lab it is therefore possible to do it anytime, any place, anywhere. Fact is, you can't. Most inventions are only proof of concept and need alot of work before they can be used by you or me. Now next time you see a cool invention, understand that it takes at least 2 to 3 years t end up on your desktop.

  • Error message: (Score:5)

    by GriffX ( 130554 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:25AM (#1193621) Homepage
    ...Unable to mount volume "3M", couldn't find damn beginning of roll...

  • Forget duct tape storage (Score:5)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:34AM (#1193622) Homepage
    You'd lose your whole OS if you need to fix the printer.

    You'd be faced with a dilema, fix the printer and lose your 3rd backup of Win95.

    Have a paper clip, I need it to make a helicopter.

  • Possible Error Messages: (Score:5)

    by eric434 ( 161022 ) on Saturday March 18, 2000 @10:39AM (#1193623) Homepage
    Drive "3M" is not ready: Abort, retry, Unroll? Can't access drive; Unable to find beginning of roll! Don't become unglued! Invalid media, insert single-sided tape only! And the number one user complaint of the future: "I inserted double-sided tape, and it stuck! I thought I could get twice the storage..."

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