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Technology

Can Ten Billion Gigs Fit In A Test Tube? 158

Posted by timothy from the "about-two-thousand-dollars-an-ounce" dept.
Nipple writes: "Using Nanotechnology scientists ar Rice University have been able to store 10 billion gigabytes of data on physical storage small enough to fit into a small vial. The whole story appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and can be found here." No indication is given of which calculations for data density the tiny vial pictured would be able to hold that much, but the idea of all the books on my bookshelf (and yours, and yours, and yours ... in fact, all the books I ever want to read) stored inside the stylus of my 9-day-battery life, white-LED-backlit wireless anything box is pretty tantalizing.
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Ten Billion (Yes, Billion) Gigs In A Test Tube More

Ten Billion (Yes, Billion) Gigs In A Test Tube

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  • I think some /.er did an analysis last year of how many bits of data are transmitted in a "Loving Spoonful". The chemists may have a way to go yet.

    --
  • Suppose if we use this as an alternative to SDRAM we might just be able to run Windows 2000. hehe.
  • Hm. Looks nice, but what are its access times? How much will it cost in mass-production, how reliable is it and how soon will it be on the market?

    To compete in the portable sector (and I bet that such an invention will), it will have to be reasonably cheap, and appear before remote storage gets secure and cheap enough --- Why carry your bookshelf (however small or light) if it can be stolen at any time? Why not rely on somebody else to store your data in a secured disk(or vial)farm?
    --
    this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

  • Great. Yet another kernel fork. (Score:5)

    by Daffy Duck ( 17350 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:32PM (#829009) Homepage
    So all you need is two of these vials and you've exceeded 64 bits of address space.
  • The actual idea of molecular storage (and computing for that matter) has been argued before, and even though it might be theoritically possible. How do we protect ourselves from data degredation ? After all, these are biological storages devices, they grow old You know.
    Second: I don't believe it is as of yet (please correct me if i'm wrong) possible to effectively store and retrieve specific data in a vial of fluid, regardless of what they (the scientists at the lab in question) say...
    There must be a reason why this theory has been around for so long, and not having made it into our homes yet.

  • "We don't know yet how we will address, much less solve, the enormous problems of shielding these components from vibration and radiation, programming, communication, etc.," Smith said. "Even after the first assembler is developed, it will require years, perhaps decades, of lab testing before a commercial product could reach the shelves."

    So, don't get too excited about it. It could as well take 25 years before they get this to work, if ever. There have been more "groundbreaking things" like this, and most of them never make it. If they do make it it would be very cool of course.

  • Well, if it's that small, you could just implant it under your skin. Kinda hard to steal that, eh?
  • Um, nice bedtime story, but I've gotta know. . . what was in that vial? A urine sample? Imagine: your urine storing the library of congress! I bet you could store even more if you drank jolt the night before.

    I'm a big fan of molecular computing and the possibilities thereof. . .but god, ignore the sensationalism, folks. Its gonna be a while.

    -s

  • It seems like we really need to see either conventional RAM, CPU, or hard drives be replaced by some sort of new technology in the next 2 years for computing to jump to the next level; that and pervasive high speed networks. Can anyone really tell the difference between a 600Mhz Pentium, and a 1Ggz Pentium? Let's see the next level...

  • More interviews of Tour and Reed... (Score:5)

    by Schwarzchild ( 225794 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:35PM (#829016)
    Check some articles about this in Wired [wired.com] and Scientific American [sciam.com]. They are about Tour and Reed. It talks about their plan on developing molecular computers. Sounds like they are very close to coming up with transistors but have quite a ways to go to come up with wiring!
  • I don't dare to think about _where_ you would...

    must... suppress...
    This gives "diskspace dicksize war" a whole new name.
    aaargh! Now look what you've made me do!
    --
    this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

  • Indexing large storage arrays (Score:3)

    by kabir ( 35200 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:39PM (#829018)
    Hypothetical though it all is, this does bring up something of an interesting question: How the heck do you find anything in over a petabyte of storage? Heck, I lose files on my 9 Gig drive already...

    find / -name "lost.data" -ls

    yeah, right.

    I know that there are companies out there that are dealing with this sort of problem already (Zantaz [zantaz.com] archives email for a living... a lot of email) but I have no idea how much processing power it would take to find something is a reasonable time frame, or how it might be indexed.

    Are these legitimate concerns or is this just another version of the "indexing the internet" problem?
    --

  • ~10 exabytes (Score:4)

    by jafuser ( 112236 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:41PM (#829019)
    10,000,000,000 gigabytes is approximately 10 'exabytes'. 1,073,741,824 gigabytes = 1 exabyte, which is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 bits.

    There's more interesting information about the binary powers here [uiuc.edu]

    --

  • ...ain't no publically held corporation would even consider selling such a product for cheap. It won't matter if it costs 1 cent to produce a 100 million Gigabyte nano-drive - it's still gonna cost mucho grande and thus targeted at "high end servers". The markup for development costs will be stretched out for so many years that this kind of technology will not be sitting on my desk for decade(s). And that is if, and only if, it actually becomes a feasibly manufacturable product.

    "I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

  • Research Group Web Page (Score:5)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:44PM (#829021) Homepage
    The web page for the Tour Group at Rice University can be found here [rice.edu]. It has links to other articles on molecular computing. Beware, the page has a 500K picture on it, not very modem friendly.

  • Maybe this is where we'll find an everyday use for quantum computing - searching for files in this much data... since searching is one of the few things that a) we have an algorithm for and b) quantum computing does better than regular computers it could be used to search for data. Just a thought.

  • Imagining things (Score:5)

    by Ayon Rantz ( 210766 ) <qristus@hotmail.com> on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:46PM (#829023) Homepage
    "Using Nanotechnology scientists ar Rice University have been able to store Ten Billion Gigabytes of data on physical storage small enough to fit into a small vial."

    Actually, the article doesn't say that they've been able to store anything like that. The article says:

    Ten billion gigabytes of data can be stored in this vial, according to Molecular Electronics Corp.'s cofounder, Jim Tour.

    And they say that they've demonstrated the use of a molecular form of DRAM. Now these are pretty good advances already, and I believe nanotechnology will definitely change the way we look at computing, but please, Timothy: These guys don't have a secret RAM plant set up ready to conquer the world overnight.

    Not just yet, anyway.
    --

  • Re:Great! But "but"s remain (Score:3)

    by Ecyrd ( 51952 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:50PM (#829024)
    If they become as cheap as they claim in the article, you could have ten copies of your library. It wouldn't matter then if one was stolen.

    I am more interested in how small and cheap they can make these things: with IPv6 providing enough address space for every piece of clothing you will ever own, having a gig of storage in your tennis shoes might be rather interesting... You wouldn't really have to worry taking your PDA with you anymore, if your clothes would automatically talk to each other and keep all your data handy regardless of what you wear. And those into nudism could still wear jewellery... =)

    Since they are nanotechnology, would it be possible to inject them into your bloodstream? Then you would never lose your information - and you could exchange information with other people by exchanging bodily fluids. "File sharing" just wouldn't be the same anymore... ("Hi, can you get me the Smith file?" "Yeah, just lift up your skirt, will ya?")

    On a serious side, naturally having strong encryption becomes even more important when you have that much storage density.

    But, will Windows 2005 occupy five of these? *grin*
  • I don't think these are biological storage devices. From some of the examples, it looks like they are using organic chemistry, not biochemistry.
  • Well caffiene has been used as the molecule for simple quantum computers..... don't know where i read that. try NewScientist [newscientist.com]

  • Re:How many MP3's is that? (Score:3)

    by znu ( 31198 ) <znu.public@gmail.com> on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:54PM (#829027)
    10 billion gigs is good for about 20 million years of MP3s or a million years of DVD video.

    Provided I didn't misplace a zero there. There were lots of them.

    --
  • i dont think there saying its a liquid i think there saying its just so small that it would fit in a vial like that.

  • Re:forget about the contents of books.. (Score:3)

    by znu ( 31198 ) <znu.public@gmail.com> on Thursday August 24, 2000 @11:56PM (#829029)
    Big parts of the universe would compress pretty well, I bet.

    --
  • Well they'll have to put that on to stand a chance of making any money. If it doesn't run Windows, it's not a computer y'know.
  • ... And some other corporation will come along and sell a billion of 'em for $5 each. Isn't capitalism fun?

    --
  • From what nipple says it sounds like they've already done this but when I read the article unless im mistaken they talked about being able to do this they never actually said they had done it but instead that in the future they would be able to do this maybe i'm just missing something anyone care to point out what i'm missing?
  • Quantum computing can give you encryption that can't be broken without violating the laws of physics.

    --

  • Its not the 10 billion gigs in a test tube ... (Score:5)

    by bob_jordan ( 39836 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @12:05AM (#829034)
    I worry about, its needing a tape autochanger the size of a house to back it up on for when I lose it down the back of the sofa.

    Bob.
  • As I wronte in a earlier post, IBM has been messing around with (and having some limited success in a lab environment) with molecular computing.
    And that was YEARS ago. Problem is, it doesn't really do us much good if WE cannot make this into a fully functional, flawless prototype. Unfortunately (for IBM's molecular computing), the last thing I heard of it was that they were stuck in data delivery, as they could not be sure which molecule picked up the data (physics dicate that You cannot know BOTH the location AND the vector of an Ion), as they merely threw it into the fray, hoping the right molecule got it.
    If this is case with the storage tech, then I CERATAINLY hope they have a good errorcorrection.

  • But... (Score:1)

    by loik ( 95237 )
    how many angels can dance on it?
  • Looks like You're right on the chemestry bit... But I still need to see effective storage/retrieval in an affordable home appliance before I would believe that They've solved all the "minor" problems they claim to be able to lick

    "We're at a point where it's just a technology problem that will be solved by some smart graduate student or myself one of these days," Tour said. "This is not far out. This is going to happen."

    But with the recent failures of so many other comanies doing the same, would it not stand to reason that Tour's Ida of "not far out" would at the very least be 15-20 years if not more ? I certainly think so.

  • hmm... using nanotechnology, theroetically, we're one step closer to human/electronic integration... i would assume there's much less overhead in this than would be in getting silicon to talk directly to human cells/dna...

    assuming an implanted cybernetic interface, it should be possible to send data straight to the brain, but there's got to be some way of physically getting it there ... I wouldn't mind having a wireless ethernet connection to my head, (i'd probably be first to sign up; i'd do it myself now if i could find a cell modem small/cheap enough) but i think most people would have some privacy issues with that =P

    so here's my idea: Books on Pez
    Imagine the entire dune anthology, in the form of tasty cinnamon candies, with a sandworm head... you could read the series 20 times in an hour (plus get a hell of a sugar high)


    Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
    Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
  • Go distributed.net! :D
    --

  • While the idea sounds great and I'd love to have it working fine and dandy...

    If the technology works anything like actual tube lights, something to keep in mind is that to turn them on they require a high voltage spike.

    The second thing I noticed is that they said a glass tube.. have you noticed how careful people often are with glass tubes? Personally, I wouldn't want to drop a glass tube and say "oops, there goes my bookshelf, medical file, penguin, and, oh ya, my holographic house (it'll be a while).

    Hope they get this technology ready for mass market!

  • There was an old /. article about it here [slashdot.org].

  • what? digital paper. there's a story or two on slashdot about it, go search.

  • To protect from data degredation, you can store data in triplicate or more - its not as though you are lacking in space.

    Secondly, while you may not believe it, the article is basically saying that they have just proven it works (although I am sure many people didn't believe it when they invented the atomic bomb).

  • Reed solved the problem about measuring current on a single molecule in 1996 (I think), at least that was when I first read it.
    Problem is if he wants to do data storage by altering a "switch" on each molecule, he should still be able to isolate EACH molecule (data storage unit) or the tech is worthless.
    I know he's not gonna tell us HOW he does that (after all, that would be the trick of it wouldn't it?), but I've been unable to find anything that says that he even CAN do that.

    I would imagine that it's possible to assemble molecules of different "types", where the "type" is to be used as an identifier, but that would still cause a FEW problems as he would have to WAIT for that molecule to "drift" into his reader. Not exactly the "baudrate" we would want from this tech.

  • unfortunatly, they're all incorrect. in keeping with American tradition, the SI/metric system just HAD to be completely fucked up before the yanks could be happy with themselves.

    the correct definitions are here [nist.gov]. Until 1998, I fought to the death that a kilobyte = 1024 bytes, but now there are proper definitions for base 2, I will fight to the death kilobyte = 1000 bytes.
  • If it were secret, you wouldn't know about it, now would you?
  • If it were secret, you wouldn't know about it, now would you?

    Mr. Nixon, you of all people should know that's not true. :)
    --

  • You store it in triplicate, but how do you know which is the "right" one?
  • If you are about to steal data, what do you care about the laws of physics ;)
  • SO how about fighting for a capital M for MegaByte (Or Mi for MebiBytes). All too often I seen ads quoting millibytes of RAM.
  • Actually, the text says:

    Ten billion gigabytes of data can be stored in this vial, according to Molecular Electronics Corp.'s cofounder, Jim Tour.

    Operative word is CAN, not IS. Meaning that by "electrifying" the molecules (about 80*10^15 of those in the vial I would guess from the article), that's the POSSIBLE storage space available in that liquid, if they ever work out the kincks, like: Data degredation (Ok if ít's Organic chemestry, not Biochemestry, that's not an issue), storage, RETRIEVAL (Which I would believe to be a killer), addressing, Physical protection (from the environment, heat, radiation and other stuff that affect molecules), and more.
    I would still have to say that it's not possible with currently available tech. In 15-20 years You might see a working prototype that's capable of leaving the lab, but I doubt it will happen before then.

  • I would do it by using checksums and a vote (if two of them are the same, its probably that one).
  • Hmm... it's going to be a looong fsck if a system crashes on this. Then again, we could probably have a journaling file system for this gunk in a test tube.

  • Oh dear, this smells bad (Score:3)

    by mpeeters ( 58550 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @12:58AM (#829054) Homepage
    From the page: "It might lead to a computer processor thousands of times faster than today's Pentiums, or memory chips with millions of times more capacity than all the PCs Compaq Computer Corp. builds in a year. Tour said these components will use just a fraction of the electricity today's machines use, and will cost next to nothing to build - on a surface smaller than a dime. "

    And it will make a hot drink which is almost totally but not quite unlike tea...

    Oh please,

    Do these people even know what they are talking about? Hype hype hype, but not a sensible sentence to read. It reminds me of the optical processor debacle: computing at the speed of light! while they conveniently forgot that both electrical signals in todays chips and photon in the "computer of the future" go at exactly the same speed in semiconductor materials (about 1/3 of the speed of light in vacuum) and metals (about 2/3 of the speed of light in vacuum), as they are both form of electromagnetic radiation.

    Who would need such a hypothetical device, and what data would fill this black hole of a memory - and how would you index it - or transmit it, for that matter.

    It would take a lifetime to fill.

    Maxwell rules !

    Michael

  • This rant has been brought to you by the letter K and M :)
  • You can't beat hamsters - its illegal.
  • please tranlate this for me

    No indication is given of which calculations for data density the tiny vial pictured would be able to hold that much

    Or perhaps it would just be a good idea if articles were proofread before submission

    Rich

  • Well, I guess that The Jargon File [tuxedo.org] would have to be updated (-:
    --
    this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.
  • I can't imagine a home computer with such a huge data capacity.
    In fact, I think this can store more information than the human brain.
    You speak about storing all of your books in this but I even think you could store much more, like all the uncompressed music records, DVDs, software, etc...
    But why the Hell would somebody want to have ALL THE KNOWLEDGE EVER at home in such a small thing ?
    Knowledge is made for being shared so I just thing that using a few of these "disks" and simultaneously accessing these from remote computer would be just fine...

    Also, a small remark: the more powerful computers become, the stricter the ISO standard become. I guess so big a capacity would lead us to unthinkable levels of data certifications and historization... Imagine to which level somebody could be tracked :
    Keystroke strength or whatever leading to graphology-like studies aiming at demonstrating that most people are too stressed at work...
    Video records (remember, the .Net and its AI sequel [slashdot.org] that we discussed some weeks ago ?) of workers, etc.

    Finally, because of stellar exploration I only see one good usage of bigger storage capacity: Storing dates according to universal time (GMT, relativity, Doppler, cosmic coordinates, etc.).

    --
  • Yes, you could store every book you ever read (or could want to read), probably every movie you ever saw, every conversation you ever had, or Office 2010

  • And exactly HOW would that be done ? if You can get to the data legitimately, You can get to the data illegitimately.

  • Anyone remember the alien transpacitor acquired by American Computer a few years back? We were supposed to have 90GB poker chip sized transpacitor drives by now.
  • Yup! I think I worked out once that a standard novel with a jpg of the cover would be about a megabyte. Say on average it's a book a week. 52 books a year. 60 years reading life. That's 3120 MB. Compress that and you'll probably get it all on a 1.5 GB tape. Tapes these days have gotten better though.... 25 GB. But 20,000 million GB...!
    As Keanu says...
    Woah...
    (I can only squash a few chapters of the Illiad onto my Palm IIIse as I only have some 400Kb for docs)
  • Now how do we get it out again?

  • ...but the idea of all the books on my bookshelf (and yours, and yours, and yours ... in fact, all the books I ever want to read) stored inside the stylus of my 9-day-battery life, white-LED-backlit wireless anything box is pretty tantalizing.

    I can think of some many reasons this would be great for mankind and society... unfortunatly, I sincerly doubt the corporations that own these books would be willing to allow such a collection without you paying for each and every book... Such a sad state of affairs.
  • Who would need such a hypothetical device, and what data would fill this black hole of a memory - and how would you index it - or transmit it, for that matter.
    It would take a lifetime to fill.
    Yeah. Ten billion gigabytes ought to be enough for anyone...

  • Re:Why? (Score:5)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @02:15AM (#829068)

    This seems to be another example of the focus of the computing industry: create better and better hardware but use it to run software which hasn't really changed much in the last decade.

    People are always making this sort of claim, yet no-one ever provides any evidence to back it up. I thoroughly disagree with your assertion. I say that software has changed a lot in the last decade.

    Ten years ago, apps were small, slow, and lacked features. I couldn't do real-time video editing in software, heck I couldn't even playback video in software. Nothing as complex as a web browser existed ten years ago. I didn't have applications like Photoshop or Gimp that allow me to perform very sophisticated image manuipulation.

    Try running some 10 year old software on today's hardware. It runs faster, but it feels archaic, feature-less and flat compared with modern software.

    And that's just looking at the outside of the software. If you look at the code, its also changed radically, with the introduction of object-oriented programming and large-scale software engineering.

    Just seems to be another excuse to create sloppy programs/bloatware.

    What you call bloatware, other people refer to as fast, stable, feature-rich software. Of course there are bad applications out there, just as there were ten years ago or twenty years ago. But there are also whole classes of application that just weren't possible a decade ago, not just because the hardware has improved, but also because we understand how to build large-scale software like never before.

  • Cups of tea have been used for certain spaceship drives as well. Try this... [xcalibur.co.uk]

  • Re:Exabytes ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Knowledge is made for being shared so I just thing that using a few of these "disks" and simultaneously accessing these from remote computer would be just fine...

    Central storage of knowledge, especially in an easily-modifiable, digital format, is a Bad Thing.

    Imagine if all the books on [insert historical episode here] [yahoo.com] were stored in a central place. How easy would it be to rewrite history?

    Compare and contrast the thousands of encyclopaedias and reference books stored all over the world, which cannot be recalled and altered. This is one of the reasons I am uncomfortable with the idea of digital media replacing physical media - too easy to revise the past.

  • Someone mention the fact that MJ12 (or whatever label you wish to apply to the organization of politicos and capatalistic scum-fucks who rule this planet) that such technology will not be allowed to reach the consumer level as the magnitude of resutant societal change would be too great.

    We are not allowed to have technology that is extraordinary. Look at what happened to cold fusion -- it would have caused a true upheaval in culture and thus was stamped out.

  • 640Kb out to be enough for anyone (Score:3)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @02:31AM (#829072) Homepage Journal
    Anyway there isn't really a lot of point in saying look i have this much data if it isn't easily accessible.

    When I blow my nose each of the dna strands in each moleucule will contain about a gigabyte of data each but until it comes with a usb interface how am i supposed to use it?
  • 10 exabytes is enough to reproduce a small country worth of people electronically (10 terrabytes per person ... in the book 3001 - in the sources bit)

    Why am I thinking of having the world in my bathtub?
  • Its an excitng prospect. Being able to store the sum of human knowledge on a chip. It'd be cool being able to bring up any film, or any radio show in existance at the touch of a button. But it's also pretty scary. It'd change alot about the world.

    Already lots of people are relying on technology to do trivial things for them.. (Ask your boss to do a division sum.. watch him reach for the calculator). If people could instantly recall anything at the touch of a button they wouldn't bother remembering anything. Do people want to be able to do interesting tasks quicker, or do they simply want a machine to take over their brain processes..
  • uhhh, are you saying that recording the position of 1 atom takes less than 1 atom in the recording medium ? Otherwise you would need at least the whole universe to store the whole universe, now think about that
  • so here's my idea: Books on Pez

    Okay until you find yourself allergic to certain data formations in the spice....

  • If I had published "Acts of the Apostles" in this format I wouldn't have all those cases of books in my bedroom. On the other hand if I stubbed my toe at night on the vial instead of a cardboard box my entire inventory would soak into the carpet in an instant. NA.
  • Good luck getting your '9-day-battery life, white-LED-backlit wireless anything box' to address it all. ;)
    ---
  • I wonder if you could store a few in there...
  • Well, this is interesting, but I have to ask: how useful will it really be?

    We've 75GB IDE drives from IBM. You used to have to get a SCSI card for that.

    I use 3 GBs on my 10 GB harddrive. It's already slow. Can you imagine dealing with a FAT on a drive at one exabyte? It'll be slow. The other question: Is it needed? Well, no. Apart from givin Microsoft a new way to give meaning to the phrase 'code bloat', all you'll get out of these drives is wasted space. Like having a compact warehouse in the middle of a wasteland.

    I can forsee a new problem, too. We already have some information loss/byte rot on current harddrives-- if you squish the bytes too closely together, they're bound to lose their charge, right?
    Imagine this on an atomic level. They better be using some strong compound, because it would just suck if all my priceless data would be lost in a small bump.

    And how are you supposed to back up all that data?

    Just thinking.

    --Wormwood
  • Why do all of timothy's story intros use the word "tantalizing?"
  • The MPAA and RIAA must be apoplectic.
  • How is it that publicly funded tech always winds up in the hands of private hands?

    This is another case of universities prostituting themselves out for for future funding.

    Can anyone say cold fusion?
  • $300 / mg? That's downright cheap.
    One chemical I used (EGF) was $250/5 ug
  • "Stolen"? Hardly a problem: the problem is that the damn'd thing will break down a week after it comes out of warrantee. Probably taking your data with it. And you won't be able to get it repaired, but you will be able to "upgrade" by purchasing a "licence" for a new one. Which is incompatable with the old one.

    And I'm sure, somehow, pay-per-use and no-resale or review will be slipped in. Oh, the joy!

    There's no back-up quite like the dead tree copy. Particularily if it's _not_ code.

    The imminent death of the Book has been forecast more times in the last 30 years than I care to recount.
  • 10,000,000,000 * 1,000,000,000 bytes=
    1*10^19bytes * 8 bits/byte=
    8*10^19 bits / 192000bits/sec=
    4.17*10^14sec / 60 sec/min=
    6.94*10^12min / 60 min/hr=
    1.16*10^11hrs / 24hrs/day=
    4.82*10^9days / 365days/year=
    1.32*10^7 years

    I'd get to Alpha Centari before I had the chance to listen to my whole drive, or the restaurant at the end of the universe.

    Even the samurai
    have teddy bears,
    and even the teddy bears

  • ... from the Gutenberg e-texts. Everything else is copyrighted and will be hard fought by the publishers to keep them off your nanotech hairpin library.

    That's the only problem with the "all the books in the world" utopian stance. There's no way you'd get the rights to do it.

  • with 20 billion G, we could record the location of every atom in the universe. Think about it.

    General estimates on the number of elementary particles in the universe yield numbers on the order of 10^80. How could you record the entire universe in something smaller than itself?

    It's rather like the idea of predicting the future by building a computer to determine it based on computing the physics at the particle level; even without the Heisenberg uncertainty, the smallest computer that could do this is ... the universe itself.
  • 10 billion gigs is good for about 20 million years of MP3s or a million years of DVD video.

    Yeah, but I'd die before I could ever finish backing it up on floppies...
  • "Using Nanotechnology scientists..."

    Those tiny scientists really can work wonders...
  • But I still need to see effective storage / retrieval in an affordable home appliance before I would believe that They've solved all the "minor" problems they claim to be able to lick


    Just because you can't 'see' nor 'believe' it, has no impact on whether it will be possible. Do you really think that all the technology that we currently rely on will stay the same forever?

    I make no claims to know the future, except to say that I believe that nobody can understand the massive amounts of change that are going to occur, as technology continues on at this dizzying pace.

    Talk like this holds back those innovations and holds back innovators from doing what they do. They change the way we work, the way we live, our hobbies and passtimes. They change the food we eat, and that house we live in.

    Everybody should support those who research new ideas, some might call them 'radical', but i call them 'imaginative'. Why is it that people feel the need to constantly, argue against new thoughts and ideas? Why is it that everybody has to disbelieve every new and slightly different idea that somebody spends all of the time researching? Why can't everybody be more accepting?

    I challenge all who need proof, all who will not believe until they see, to go out there and find your proof. Whether it be proof that the idea might not be feasible, or you might find proof of its possibilities. At least you would be accomplishing something useful.
  • "Even after the first assembler is developed, it will require years, perhaps decades, of lab testing before a commercial product could reach the shelves."

    Well that's just great. Maybee if they weren't so concerned with their patents and secrets then they would collaborate with the scientific community and we could have this technology in our boxes a little sooner.
  • ...my dog drank my homework!

  • Re:Why? (Score:3)

    by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Friday August 25, 2000 @04:46AM (#829100) Homepage Journal

    Furthermore, their has been a massive infrastructure shift in the last few years that, while not blatantly visible, will probably radically change the way we program and use computers.

    Remember not so long ago when an application was a monolithic binary with a few config files? Now that same app is more likely to consist of a tiny frontend loader for multiple task-specific libraries, several of which may be used by multiple programs.

    Back in The Day, "late binding" was a neat idea, but horridly inefficient. Given a few years to work out some of the bugs, coupled with incredible hardware advances, we now have some pretty usable object systems.

    Think about Bonobo (sp?). Want online docs for your program? Throw together some HTML and call a globally-available browser. Noone really needs to write their own text editor anymore. The same holds for many other commonly-used functions.

    This move has been underway for quite a while. It's been quite some time since an app needed to implement its own network stack. However, only recently have such high-level constructs been available as linkable objects.

    This is part of what those CPU cycles and RAM bytes are used for. All of this linking, dynamic loading, and these powerful components take some horsepower. However, no coder in his right mind would go back to the old way without very specific reasons (embedded controllers, bare-metal recovery systems, etc.).

  • please tranlate this for me

    No indication is given of which calculations for data density the tiny vial pictured would be able to hold that much

    Certainly!

    En Français:
    On ne donne aucune indication dont les calculs pour la densité d'enregistrement de données la fiole minuscule décrite pourraient tenir cela beaucoup

    Auf Deutsch:
    Keine Anzeige wird gegeben, von der Berechnungen für Datendichte die kleine Phiole, die dargestellt wurde, können würden, das viel anzuhalten

    In italiano:
    Nessun' indicazione è data di cui le calcolazioni per densità di dati la fiala molto piccola descritta potrebbero tenere quello molto

    Em Português:
    Nenhuma indicação é dada de que os cálculos para a densidade de dados o vial minúsculo retratado poderiam prender muito isso

    En Español:
    No se da ninguna indicación de la cual los cálculos para la densidad de datos el frasco minúsculo representado podrían sostener eso mucho

    Have a nice day!
    --
  • Until 1998, I fought to the death that a kilobyte = 1024 bytes, but now there are proper definitions for base 2, I will fight to the death kilobyte = 1000 bytes.

    Your life must be pretty cheap, if you're willing to sacrifice it over definitions created by an ivory-tower committee with little regard to the real world, or real-word usages of the terms which have been in use for nearly as long as there have been binary computers.

    Myself, I'll fight to the death over something that matters, but not whether 2^10 Bytes is pronounced kilobytes (kB) or kibibytes (kiB). Of course, if they'd been smart, they would have made the abbreviated nomenclature more flexible, with k(sub)2B. Then, when we have trinary computers (Heinlein fans, anyone?), we could have units of 3^10 abbreviated as k(sub)3(/sub)whatevers. Comming up with nomenclature a little less asinine than "Kibi" is left as an excersize for the class (hint: randomly generated syllables would probably be an improvement).

  • the Ultimate library...would you really want it? (Score:3)

    by allykalea ( 213369 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @06:22AM (#829109)
    There's just something about books on the shelf, all lined up in rows. As I unpacked my books last week after moving back into the dorm, I lingered over some of my paperbacks from lit classes I had taken. They're like pillows--broken in and comfortable. Reading through the notes in the margins I can remember what I felt while delving into a particular text. These physical books are extensions of myself.

    Imagine replacing all of these volumes with a tiny vial on the bookshelf. Sterile, barren shelves. Sure, the world is now at your fingertips, but the whimsy is gone. It's just not the same.

  • All right, I don't really mean to respond to your post if it was just flamebait. But you're knocking technology that's not even developed yet. That cracks me up! It's going to be slow! You can't use FAT on anything that big! Okay, slow down here, guy. This technology doesn't exist yet, and according to the scientists, won't be in commercial use for at least ten years.

    Hopefully, by then, FAT will be obsolete. But regardless, I'm positive that the scientists involved here aren't going to bring to market an unusable technology. If it's too slow, it won't sell. They'll have to make it faster. End of story.

    You sound like someone asking about sending people to the moon... "You can't send people to the moon! There's no oxygen! They'll die!" No they won't, silly... we'll solve that problem long before we get there.

    In my opinion, the biggest problem with this technology is what several other insightful people have pointed out -- it's PRIVATEly held. That means there's an extremely finite amount of resources being put into it. If they'd share the science all around, we could have this stuff better, cheaper, and faster.

    Why does it all have to be about money these days? Doesn't anyone still care about progress?

  • Yeah, if you're using 8 bit bytes ... *duck*

    Aside: personally, I think we should be teaching kids how to count in binary from kindergarten on. How, you ask? Just think of your 10 fingers as a 10-bit register where straight/up=1 and folded/down=0 (if you want, just use 8 fingers if you want to think in 8-bit bytes, use your thumbs for sign or parity bits or something). This lets you count all the way from 0 up to 2^10-1 (1023) without getting unshod or naked! Of course, the numbers 4 and 128 would then have to be banned in school, since they're obscene gestures (in the U.S. at least, e.g. substitute 12 and 192 in U.K.).

    #include "disclaim.h"
    "All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak

  • Actually, it's WAY more than a petabyte. It's 10 exabytes, or 10,000 petabytes.
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • "Not invented here" is orthogonal to "invented by an ivory tower committee."

    You do understand what orthogonal means, right? Or are you too blinded by your anti-american bigotry to grasp the notion that rule by design by closed committee is one of the least competent way to develop anything (remember the 7-level OSI network model? Seen any implimentations around lately?)

    As an example of one of the most open and successful methods for developing standards, take a look at how the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) operates, and the standards they have created. (Hint: you're making use of a whole bunch of them everytime you read slashdot.)
  • I don't really like patents anyhow, but if someone wants to do the research and get a patent on it - they should atleast do it with private money. My tax money paid for that research and those patents, I should at least have right to use them as freely as anyone else (not that I would, but that's half the point - they are special enough in their field to make money even without a monopoly that locks out competition)

  • Hypothetical though it all is, this does bring up something of an interesting question: How the heck do you find anything in over a petabyte of storage? Heck, I lose files on my 9 Gig drive already...


    find / -name "lost.data" -ls

    yeah, right.

    I think you're supposed to use a modern filesystem instead of 70s legacy. Perhaps this could be a new niche for BeOS...? "BeOS: The media^U^U^U^U^Uwhere-the-hell-did-I-put-that-file OS."


    ---

  • There's just something about books on the shelf, all lined up in rows.
    [...]
    Imagine replacing all of these volumes with a tiny vial on the bookshelf. Sterile, barren shelves. Sure, the world is now at your fingertips, but the whimsy is gone. It's just not the same.

    I used to think just like you. Here's the reality, though:

    I have a lot of books. I mean, a *lot* of books. I've been a voracious reader since I was in 3rd or 4th grade, now, I've got well over a thousand books (I have no idea how many actually, nearly all sci-fi). My wife is also a big reader, but doesn't own nearly as many (fiction) books -- say 200-300. The nine-foot tall shelves in the living room are full, with books piled in front of and on top of other books. My home office has the 70-80 computer-related books I've used most recently, plus, of course, all of the software packages and manuals I've collected in the course of doing my job. My wife's home office has a few of her business books, plus a closet full of shelves filled with more fiction. The plant shelves in the guest room and in our master bedroom have books piled on top of them. We bought a china cabinet (finished it ourselves) for our breakfast nook just to hold cookbooks.

    It's an organizational nightmare. I've bought books at the bookstore that I'd forgotten I owned. It's been a long time since I even _tried_ to put 'em in any kind of order. I've spent half an hour looking for books I *know* I own -- but can't seem to locate the shelf they're on.

    Now, although my 300+ videotape collection is in similar shape (mainly because it's a pain to write down the titles to all six "Babylon 5" episodes on the spine of the tape), my 700+ CD collection is in good order, mainly because I can keep 'em all in one place, and they don't take up walls and walls of room.

    If all this was digitized, sure, I'd lose out on some interesting decorating. But I'd rather be able to find what I'm looking for without a lot of hassle, and put up some art in its place.

    I admit, my wife and I have more books than anyone else I know. But my wife is a professor at the local university. She's got a few hundred books in her office -- and she needs 'em all (she's a sociologist). So do all of the other faculty stuffed into their 8x10 offices. It's sad really, seeing these people literally wedged into their offices along with the information they need to do their research.

    Sure, physical books are neat. But there are some real disadvantages to having a lot of 'em. I'd rather have the world at my fingertips so I can spend more time using the information instead of trying to manage it.

  • I can think of some many reasons this would be great for mankind and society... unfortunatly, I sincerly doubt the corporations that own these books would be willing to allow such a collection without you paying for each and every book... Such a sad state of affairs.
    Even if it was merely restricted to the books no longer in copyright (and/or out of print) it would be a godsend - There are literally thousands of books that would be bought gladly by someone, if he could just find a bookshop with a second-hand copy, because they are out of print - and then there are all the schoolkids reading classics for their lessons; can you imagine what a relief it would be for parents to buy such a gadget ONCE, and have all the set books for their child's entire schooling?
    --

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