Click Here!

Welcome to Slashdot America Online Graphics Unix News PalmPilot
 faq
 code
 awards
 privacy
 slashNET
 older stuff
 rob's page
 preferences
 andover.net
 submit story
 advertising
 supporters
 past polls
 topics
 about
 jobs
 hof

Sections
4/24
apache
4/25 (8)
askslashdot
1/27
awards
4/25
books
4/25
bsd
4/25
features
4/24
interviews
4/19
radio
4/23
science
4/25 (3)
yro
Andover.Net
Ask Reggie
DaveCentral
Freshmeat
Question
 Exchange

MediaBuilder

400 Gigabits Per Square Inch
Technology Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 10, @09:43AM
from the now-thats-what-I'm-talking-about dept.
NWprobe writes "Some scientists at Naval Research Laboratory have developed a new super disk. Nando Times has an article about it. I want a storage device like this, but will we ever see them come into production... " "We anticipate we can put 400 gigabits in a square inch," said solid state physicist Gary Prinz of the Naval Research Laboratory, which has just contracted with a pioneering Minnesota firm to move the technology from the lab to the production line. "

Report From The Mozilla Developer Meeting | FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions  >

 

Slashdot Login
Nickname:

Password:

Don't have an account yet? Go Create One. A user account will allow you to customize all these nutty little boxes, tailor the stories you see, as well as remember your comment viewing preferences.

Related Links
  • NWprobe
  • Naval Research Laboratory
  • Nando Times
  • article
  • More on Technology
  • Also by CmdrTaco
  • This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
    Amazing (Score:1, Offtopic)
    by LafinJack (lafinjack@yourbidding.com) on Monday April 10, @09:44AM EST (#2)
    (User Info) www.idontcare.com
    I think it's amazing what these people are doing with storage these days. More room for my MP3s. :)

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack

    "Look into my nipples of the future..." -Really Really Big Man
    Re:Amazing (Score:1)
    by Ranger Bob on Monday April 10, @09:47AM EST (#4)
    (User Info)
    An "instant-on" MP3 playing PC!!! Oh, they've got something already. Sorry.
    /./.#!*
    Re:Amazing (Score:1)
    by laursen on Monday April 10, @09:52AM EST (#10)
    (User Info) http://www.mip.sdu.dk/~laursen/
    A quick look at my disks shows that the most of the space is occupied by something called .jpg ;-)
    hehe (Score:1)
    by crayz on Monday April 10, @04:08PM EST (#164)
    (User Info)
    .jpg and .mpg

    wonder why?

    Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: read it

    Ugh! Horrible frames! (Score:2)
    by Tau Zero (spherethis@youknownottoincludethis.yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @10:58AM EST (#87)
    (User Info)
    For just the frame with the story in it, click here.
    --
    Why do I have to get the kind of government they deserve?
    Re:Ugh! Horrible frames! (Score:1)
    by NWprobe (lars.spam@snart.com) on Monday April 10, @04:42PM EST (#168)
    (User Info) http://www.snart.com/
    lynx friendly :)
    #find /dev/brain find: no such file or directory
    more space? (Score:1)
    by _anomaly_ (novioSP@Mbellsouth.net) on Monday April 10, @12:40PM EST (#129)
    (User Info)
    i'm sorry if this is covered in the story, but i'm too busy at the moment to read the story *and* write this little comment...

    what about speed? i'm sorry, but in my humble opinion, the speed of today's hard disks are what's lacking, not the amount of space..
    there are ways to get around space (disk arrays e.g. raid), but there isn't anything you can do about the slow (relatively, of course) speeds of today's disks...

    Re:more space? (Score:1)
    by bugg on Monday April 10, @02:18PM EST (#148)
    (User Info)
    If you didn't have time for both, you shouldn't have posted and instead went and read the article to get the answer. Nobody here was hired to summarize articles for you.
    -bugg
    Thing come full circle (again!) (Score:4, Funny)
    by kmcardle (kmcardleATsssnetDOTcom) on Monday April 10, @09:50AM EST (#6)
    (User Info)
    Talk about computing coming full cicle. This sounds like nano-scale magnetic core memory.

    What's next? 0.6 micron punch cards?

    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
    Re:Thing come full circle (again!) (Score:1, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, @10:07AM EST (#38)
    This is starting to feel like a bad visit back to the 60s. What ever happened to holographic storage - I thought that was looking promising. At least that seemed like a somewhat fresh & undeveloped idea. Mag core memory went out about when they figured out they could use something smaller than ferrite beads to store data.
    Holo storage was *last* week on /. (Score:1)
    by mattr on Tuesday April 11, @04:55AM EST (#199)
    (User Info) http://telebody.com
    The guys who made a drive out of a roll of scotch tape figure they can write to all the layers of scotch tape at once, for a holographic memory or multichannel movie.

    Just remember wherever you go,.. there you are.
    Re:Thing come full circle (again!) (Score:2, Insightful)
    by Tau Zero (spherethis@youknownottoincludethis.yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @11:01AM EST (#90)
    (User Info)
    What's next? 0.6 micron punch cards?
    If I recall the story correctly, what's next is going to be more like nano-scale Edison wax cylinders.  It was on Slashdot a while ago.
    --
    Why do I have to get the kind of government they deserve?
    Re:Thing come full circle (again!) (Score:3, Insightful)
    by warlock (warlock@webdaemon.net) on Monday April 10, @11:31AM EST (#108)
    (User Info) http://webdaemon.net/warlock
    Heh.. I recall reading on New Scientist about using really small pins dragged around a wax disk or cylinder or something. You could heat it up to make a pit, and if it hit a pit it would heat up slightly due to friction while getting out of it and you could detect that. Those pits could be really damn small.

    I tried a search on their website, but couldn't come up with a link, could be its only in their print version (and I'm not searching THAT!) or I just wasn't lucky.

    -W
    Re:Thing come full circle (again!) (Score:1)
    by omnifrog on Monday April 10, @07:40PM EST (#184)
    (User Info)
    The work was done by a grad student, Benjamin W. Chui, at Stanford with a grant from IBM. His thesis was published last month (which is rare for a thesis). Essentially he used a micromachined silicon cantilever with piezorestive elements. The tip was higly resistive as well. To make a pit, the device would be heated by resistance as it was dragged along the surface. To read the pit, the divece had a piezoelectric or resistive element that would sense the tip bending into the pit.

    If you are very interested in this sort of thing, (Fatbrain doesn't have this book yet) go here:
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0792383583/102-1637548-3888018

    Forget hard drives... (Score:1, Redundant)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @09:53AM EST (#13)
    (User Info)
    "The device is so small, and requires so little power, that it should be possible to combine it with a computer's central processing unit, according to Max Yoder, director of electronics operations at the Office of Naval Research."

    Super sized cache!!!
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    It wasn't redundant at the time I posted it. (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:45AM EST (#72)
    (User Info)
    But I guess it is now. Oh well, so long as I don't get moderated down below 1 by some over-zealous moderator, I can accept the rating.
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Fun with math... (Score:3, Informative)
    by SgtPepper (sgtpepper@spam^H^H^H^Hprokrams.com) on Monday April 10, @09:57AM EST (#22)
    (User Info) http://www.prokrams.com
    let's see 400/8 = 50 gigabytes per square inch...given that platters for a 3.5 inch drive are...~4 inches....pir^2 = 50 square inches in area....50 * 50 = 2500 gigabytes...times 2 sides... 5000 gigabytes per platter...times 2 platters a hard drive....10000 gigabytes on your standard harddrive....no?

    someone please double check that :)
    Re:Fun with math... (Score:2, Informative)
    by WiseWeasel (wiseweaselATmacDOTcom) on Monday April 10, @10:34AM EST (#65)
    (User Info)
    Actually, If the platters are about 3.5" in diameter (1.75" in radius), and there's about 1" in diameter lost in the middle, or .5" in radius, the area on this disk would be *(1.75^2) - *(.5^2) = 8.835 in^2 * 50 = 441.75 * (2*2) = 1767 or 1.767 TB
    * * * I LIKE CHICKEN STRIPS * * *
    Re:Fun with math... (Score:2, Informative)
    by 2b (2b@caboteria.org.nospam) on Monday April 10, @03:42PM EST (#161)
    (User Info) http://www.caboteria.org/
    No.

    This is solid-state storage, not a new type of hard disk, so it's square inch of silicon rather than square inch of disk surface.

    This appears to be the latest in a long line of "hard disk killers". Remember bubble memory? E2PROM? FLASH? Who knows, maybe this one will be more successful than those. I'm not holding my breath...

    "gigabit"? Come on.. (Score:1, Funny)
    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, @09:58AM EST (#23)
    When are we going to stop using this retarded-ass unit of measure? Measuring data in gigabits makes about as much sense as going to the store to buy a nanohogshead of milk.

    BYTES, people. BYTES. Its there! Use it!
    Re:"gigabit"? Come on.. (Score:4, Informative)
    by mindstrm (moctodemohtamrtsdnim) on Monday April 10, @10:03AM EST (#34)
    (User Info)
    Because, dimwit, from the engineering side, it's ALWAYS bits.
    Memory chips are measured in BITS. We put a bunch of them together (a couple 4x128mbit's ) to make one megaBYTE, for you, the consumer who wouldn't understand bits.

    Bits are more accurate. More quantifiable.

    Traditionally, Kilobyte refers to 1000 bytes when dealing with data transmission, and 1024 bytes when dealing with memory.
    Now, when dealing with software written by those who don't know this, it could be either.

    But a kilobit is always a kilobit. 1000 bits.

    Ethernet is 100 MegaBIT because it's channel usage is measured in bits Things go on and off it a bit at a time. and NOT always in even increments of 8. Same for gigabit.

    The SAME FOR THE WAY hard drives encode data! What is actually stored on the drive has little directly to do with what you think is stored there. All kinds of encoding is used. Each bit may be comprised of three bits on the platter....


    Re:"gigabit"? Come on.. (Score:5, Informative)
    by orpheus on Monday April 10, @11:40AM EST (#113)
    (User Info)
    It's been almost 6-10 mos since the adoption of the 'binary' prefixes: kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi

    I really thought the whining would stop, but instead both users and the industry have chosen to ignore the new prefixes (summarized below to emphasize the triviality of quibbling) I did not expect everyone to start doing instant conversions, but I did expect them to start using the units as a ballpark indicator of which sort of 'mega' they were using.

    True, the difference between terabit and tebibit is only 10%, but if you're going to whine about that 10% (or the 5% megabit gap), presumably you should be using the new standards.


    kibi (Ki) = 1,024
    mebi (Mi) = 1,048,576
    gibi (Gi) = 1,073,741,824
    tebi (Ti) = 1,099,511,627,776
    pebi (Pi) = 1.125899906843 e+15
    exbi (Ei) = 1.152921504607 e+18

    __________
    Suddenly, my whole life made sense: Omigawd... I am Schroedinger's Cat

    References for kibibit, mebibit etc. (Score:1)
    by nealmcb on Tuesday April 11, @07:54PM EST (#204)
    (User Info) http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
    Indeed! Thanks orpheus. I just discovered this independently and found your comment while searching to see if slashdot had covered it yet.

    For more details on this IEC/IEEE/CIPM standard, adopted December 1998, see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

    Note that the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding SI prefix, and that the second syllable should be pronounced as "bee."

    --Neal
    Go IETF! Go CPSR!

    Re:"gigabit"? Come on.. (Score:1)
    by teeleton on Wednesday April 12, @12:14PM EST (#205)
    (User Info)
    yes, but if i used these terms, i would come off sounding like bubblemouth from Fat Albert.

    Selling! Selling! Very good, very good... (Score:1)
    by LafinJack (lafinjack@yourbidding.com) on Monday April 10, @10:21AM EST (#56)
    (User Info) www.idontcare.com
    The reason they advertise in gigabits is because you can say gigabits in larger quantities, and it's still the same thing. i.e. 400 > 50, yet 400Gb == 50GB. It's all about the marketing, baby...

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack

    "Look into my nipples of the future..." -Really Really Big Man
    Re:"gigabit"? Come on.. (Score:1)
    by Detritus (jlimpert@acm.org) on Tuesday April 11, @07:26AM EST (#202)
    (User Info)
    At the risk of being pedantic, it's octets, not bytes. A byte is usually 8 bits, but it can be other sizes.
    Woohoo This means.... (Score:1)
    by luckykaa (squigly@maxmail.co.uk) on Monday April 10, @09:59AM EST (#25)
    (User Info)
    Solid state digital video recorders with 2" cassettes and uncompressed video are just around the corner.

    But the question is how much are these things going to cost?
    Re:Woohoo This means.... (Score:1)
    by Stonehand (lw2j@cs.cmu.edu) on Monday April 10, @10:23AM EST (#58)
    (User Info) http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~lw2j
    Perhaps just as interesting, and maybe more disturbing...

    Consider the fact that various groups (such as a newly announced alliance of US tech companies) are pushing for networking over power lines and accessible via power outlets, might a creative engineer eventually be able to build, say, a network-capable bug inside a power cable? Or one of those ubiquitous power adapters?

    You'd have the capability to have a decent amount of code with miniature electronics; it could archive a/v recordings for a while and then xmit in bursts at hours when the owner is less likely to be awake and using the network... hrmmm.

    Could be interesting, no?
    -- the silly student / he writes really bad haiku / readers all go mad
    This had to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
    by Uruk (s2mdalle@titan.vcu.edu) on Monday April 10, @10:01AM EST (#29)
    (User Info) http://opop.nols.com/index.shtml
    It really did have to happen, but it still kicks ass. They talk in the article about how the entire system is digital - i.e. you don't have a spinning disk or any mechanical pieces. You take out the mechanical pieces, and you've eliminated most of the reason drives fail. Not only that, but the whole reason hard drives are so slow as compared to say, processor registers or RAM is that they're rotational - they're mechanical and not digital.

    Of course, ideally, you could have a mass storage unit that was several gigabytes of the same stuff that processor registers are made of, but I wouldn't even care to know how much one of those drives would cost. :) They say that the two characteristics of storage, speed and price, are roughly proportional - the less you pay the slower it is.

    I'm just wondering how long it will take to get one of these to market. I wish Moore's law also applied to time-to-market.


    There are three types of people in the world; those who can count, and those who can't. http://opop.nols.com/index.shtml
    Re:This had to happen-slightly OT (Score:1)
    by TurkishGeek (petaflops@NOSPAM.yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @05:30PM EST (#175)
    (User Info)
    talk in the article about how the entire system is digital - i.e. you don't have a spinning disk or any mechanical pieces.

      Sorry for being a nit-picker, but "digital" does not mean "without mechanical pieces". I assume you mean solid-state, or completely electronic in some other way.

      One can always devise a digital device which is entirely mechanical.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
    Close but not touching (Score:2, Insightful)
    by aav on Monday April 10, @10:02AM EST (#30)
    (User Info) http://paul.rutgers.edu/~angheles
    I couldn't say I wasn't impressed about this. Especially because I know the hype 20 years ago when the first hdd appeared. It had about 5Mb and everyone was wondering who could ever fill this huge space.
    Yet, let's not be too enthusiastic because for the moment this technology has some possible problems (at least in what concerns the military - which seem to be the first interested in it). Being a magnetic storage device a magnetic field can destabilize the data on it, thus making the computer unusable (or unreliable). Hypothetically speaking, it would be quite easy to attack a ship with some sort of radiation that will make it vulnerable to another attack that may destroy it
    On the other hand, civilian users are quite protected against this, since there aren't many important secrets to be destroyed (I'm not speaking about corporate users). Then again, who will ever use 400Gb (or more) at home ? (ok I may sound silly and repeating the sentence I mentioned in the beginning). There are some limits in one's ability to gather information and one of them is the time.
    Although, if I were to speak frankly, I imagine Windows 2010 taking 70% of this space (with a 25Gb Solitaire). Hopefully there will be no windows any more in 2010
    Re:Close but not touching (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:14AM EST (#47)
    (User Info)
    This is intended to replace current hard drives, which are just as vulnerable to that kind of attack, and which the military is using.


    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Re:Close but not touching (Score:1)
    by Devil Ducky (gjr117@NOSPAM.psu.edu) on Monday April 10, @10:42AM EST (#70)
    (User Info)
    does the military have some sort of anti-magnetic field protection? I know the technology exists, They use it for supercomputers.

    I'm wondering if there is some sort of protection the military uses for their computers in the field? Do any coroporations use these technologies?


    Immune to the forces of Duct Tape.
    Re:Close but not touching (Score:1)
    by TurkishGeek (petaflops@NOSPAM.yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @05:26PM EST (#174)
    (User Info)
    The military is more concerned with TEMPEST than they are with "anti-magnetic field" protection. The electromagnetic shielding on military comms and computing gear is a) protection against EMP, or electromagnetic pulse; b) protection against remote eavesdropping.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
    Re:Close but not touching (Score:1)
    by pugugly on Monday April 10, @05:24PM EST (#173)
    (User Info)
    And won't that be a problem - Imagine, being stuck with windows and unable to reboot!!! You have a machine like this, you *better* be running Linux - snicker

    Pug

    Warning - this .signature is libelous. Any moderation up will allow me to sue you.

    Is this really new? (Score:3, Interesting)
    by CodeShark (listener@kcinter.net) on Monday April 10, @10:02AM EST (#31)
    (User Info)
    I'm wondering how this technology differs from the so-called "bubble" memory that was being researched in the mid '80s, other than the higher density.

    IIRC those chips were made out of a thin layer of garnet, and the description of the individual memory cells being shaped like "tiny doughnuts" rings a bell. At the time I think the biggest one they had was about 500K, but considering how much smaller the current electronic paths are in state of the art semi-conductors compared to what was available in 1986), I find myself wondering how this "new" technology is different from the older one. Is anyone out there in /. land familiar with both enough to fill in the details?

    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always better than the alternative...

    Vague Memories of Bubble Memory (Score:2, Informative)
    by Dhericean on Monday April 10, @10:29AM EST (#64)
    (User Info)
    My memory is that bubble memory involved the creation of bubble of charge within the substrate by the application of a magnetic field. These bubbles could be polarised in some way to indicate 0 or 1. The size of these bubbles depended upon the strength of the magnetic field with very small bubbles requiring very strong fields (just what you want in a computer).

    Also I think that it was a linear storage medium where the bubbles were moved in a loop around the chip by placing voltages on T shaped elements. This would probably mean that the speed of retrieval is not very great, as the bubbles are led past a read-out area.

    It probably was just a technology that did not offer any advantage over easier or already existing devices. One advantage was meant to be non-volatility (with a battery backup). Now we have Flash memory.

    Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
    Re:Vague Memories of Bubble Memory (Score:2, Insightful)
    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, @11:54AM EST (#120)
    Back in the days of 80 ns memory chips, the best bubble memory chips were something like 400 ns (.4 ms) as I recall. This would make them about 10x faster than the best discs today. The problem was with the magnetic domain and RLC resonances frequencies--with the "on insulator" type of tricks that are going on today, a real speed-up might be possible. Unfortunately, all this seems to have been tied up in small companies with only one customer (the US military), and there probably isn't the money to push their performance with heavy duty development efforts. There may have been some minimum size problems with the technology, so you couldn't get the densities you really would like without a lot of bucks on that too.
    They were L's (Score:1)
    by mattr on Tuesday April 11, @05:10AM EST (#200)
    (User Info) http://telebody.com
    I seem to remember micrograph photos of the garnet based bubble memory showing units shaped like the letter "L", which sequestered small magnetic domains that could be moved. Donuts were the old iron ferrite core memories. Which you access by wires.

    The new stuff sounds like charge is neither moved nor accessed by wires, though the donut shape seems to be very good at holding a magnetic charge, or maybe they just shoot the charge through donut holes to reach the bottom one.. a little vague in the story.
    Re:Is this really new? (Score:2, Interesting)
    by borzwazie (borzwazie@hotmail.com) on Monday April 10, @01:22PM EST (#140)
    (User Info)
    Interestingly enough, I recall working on electronics repair training equipment in the Navy in the late 80's that used this kind of memory. This memory was part of a computer (based on the Z80 I think, it's been a long time ) If you looked at it under a powerful magnifier of some sort you could actually see little round ferrite cores wrapped in extraordinarily fine copper wire. I always wondered how anybody managed to wrap that in a production environment.

    Everbody jumps to the juggalow sound!

    Processor speeds, memory lagging (Score:3, Interesting)
    by zavyman (zavyman@yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @10:03AM EST (#33)
    (User Info) http://www.xlr8yourmac.com
    The device is so small, and requires so little power, that it should be possible to combine it with a computer's central processing unit, according to Max Yoder, director of electronics operations at the Office of Naval Research. That would eliminate the long wires needed to connect the memory to the control unit, "so the whole computer operation itself will be significantly speeded up," Yoder said.

    I think the key to this technology really is the size. The problem with PC's now is that even though the processor is getting faster, the rest of the system is lagging behind. With faster and smaller memory, and the ability to put the memory right on the CPU, we could really see the speed boost we are looking for.

    A major advantage of the new technology is that the memory system is nonvolatile

    Kiss your slow hard drives goodbye, and now almost all of the computer can fit on one card. All the case is needed for now it the expansion slots. Too bad it is too early in development, though...

    Re:Processor speeds, memory lagging (Score:3, Informative)
    by ddstreet (ddstreet@ieee.org) on Monday April 10, @11:13AM EST (#101)
    (User Info)
    That would eliminate the long wires needed to connect the memory to the control unit, "so the whole computer operation itself will be significantly speeded up," Yoder said.

    Long wires are not the only thing that makes data storage slow; they gave no numbers on the read/write speeds here, and I'm not convinced that this is going to be fast. There is already an abundance of NVRAM (Non-Volatile RAM) available (eg. SanDisk), but it's VERY expensive (eg. 16MB = $75.00). The read is fast for Flash RAM, but writes are real slow. This, however, isn't Flash...

    The real issue I see there is they're trying to say that this will be the normal RAM for a system, and that it won't be erased on reboot - think about this - if you crash WinDoze, you want the memory to be rebooted! You don't want the pooter to be in the same state upon reboot!!! If they're trying to use this as some kind of ROM that gets copied into the RAM on startup, well, that's already around. The only thing I see this doing is replacing NVRAM (eg, Flash, CMOS, etc), which will replace hard drives when it gets cheap (and fast) enough.
    Should be plenty fast. (Score:1)
    by Tau Zero (spherethis@youknownottoincludethis.yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @12:14PM EST (#126)
    (User Info)
    ...; they gave no numbers on the read/write speeds here, and I'm not convinced that this is going to be fast.
    I doubt that speed is going to be an issue.  What you're doing is changing the large-scale organization of magnetic domains in the material (at this scale, it is a single domain I'm sure).  You're swapping the spins of a few millions of electrons; how much time can that take?  Even the old-style magnetic cores weren't all that slow for their size, and these things should be about as much faster as they are smaller.
    --
    Why do I have to get the kind of government they deserve?
    Re:Should be plenty fast. (Score:2)
    by ddstreet (ddstreet@ieee.org) on Monday April 10, @01:55PM EST (#145)
    (User Info)
    I doubt that speed is going to be an issue.

    Cool.
    If speed isn't an issue, then price is. If this is faster or as fast as SDRAM, it will replace SDRAM.
    However, I don't think these will ever compete with traditional magnetic harddrives. These will be VERY expensive in comparison, and only people who are willing to spend lots of money for (physical) stability (it's Solid State, ie. no moving parts) and possibly faster access time. So maybe big servers could use this, but, only if it's less expensive than RAID (but RAID has redundancy...) or if the server is located inside a paint mixing machine... ;-)

    SO, sure, this will replace/compete with NVRAM.
    And depending (a lot!) on price, it may replace SDRAM.
    But I doubt if it will replace physical (platter) hard drives (which, I should add, they are not claiming in the article...).
    I will say, though, that if they can get the price down to anywhere near traditional drives (now, about $10 per GB or less) then this will replace hard drives!
    Mixed feelings about this. (Score:1)
    by Count Spatula (f_springer@nospam.hotmail.com) on Monday April 10, @10:03AM EST (#35)
    (User Info)
    I don't know if I could find a use for this at home, or even at work. At least, not until it's affordable. How *many* mp3s do I need, anyhow? The normal 20gb SCSI drive is just about all I'll need ever, that is, until Linux gets so bloated that it requires a minimum ~1gb install (read: SuSE...).

    OTOH, imagine the storage space! One could conceivably store every American novel ever written, all the Beatles songs (including outtakes and bootlegs), all Pink Floyd songs and bootlegs, and still have room to slap a Win2K partition on there, and have room for q3a. And then you might have to worry about lowering that swap file down to, say, ~20gb.

    I still can't decide whether I want one or not...
    -- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "Fear my barbeque tongs, mortal!"
    Sensitivity (Score:1)
    by Dhericean on Monday April 10, @10:09AM EST (#43)
    (User Info)
    Reading the article I'm just a little concerned about how sensitive anything that small and magnetised will be to stray magnetic fields. I mean if its magnetism can be affected by what can be placed through a very thin wire then what about the stray magnetic fields from a normal mains cable.

    I guess you could shield it but you would probably have to keep it from being too close to the rest of the electronics. They could also use duplicate storage with a 'voting' system to resolve any inconsistancies and/or a RAID style strategy. Drat that's less than 200 Gigabits effective storage - I guess its not worth the effort now.

    Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
    On-die storage? (Score:2)
    by Rupert on Monday April 10, @10:18AM EST (#50)
    (User Info)
    Was it me, or did he imply that some of this stuff could be dumped on an area of a CPU, essentially giving you an on-die disk? Seek times measured in clock cycles? Yum.
    MPEG's the MP3's of the future. (Score:1)
    by Garak (garak@moo.ca) on Monday April 10, @10:19AM EST (#51)
    (User Info) http://stephenville.dyndns.org
    I think people will have no problems filling a storage device of that size with movies and music videos and stuff. Most videos I download today are around 50 megs for like 4 min and it looks like crap.
    If people start storeing dvd's on there HD like they do with audio cd's today it won't take long to fill a few TB.
    think about defraging a 2T hard drive... (Score:2, Funny)
    by Tsiros (gtsiros@yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @10:20AM EST (#55)
    (User Info) http://users.hol.gr/~hp48gx
    *thinking*If i start defrag today...will it be finished till i return from vacation?
    a signature
    Re:think about defraging a 2T hard drive... (Score:2, Informative)
    by KFury (kfox@slashdot.fury.com) on Monday April 10, @11:56AM EST (#122)
    (User Info) http://www.fury.com/
    Thankfully, defragging happens in O(n) time, meaning that if you triple the hard drive space, you triple the time it takes to defrag. It's not like sorting O(n log(n)), which would get monstorous.

    Factoring in access and write speed, it's actually O(n/s) where s is the read/write/access speed.

    Basically, if you have a 2Tb drive that's 100 times as fast as your 20Gb drive, it'll take exactly the same amount of time to defrag, though if you wanted to sort it at the same time, it would take 7 times longer (ln 100 ~= 7.5).

    Kevin Fox
    fury.com
    Re:think about defraging a 2T hard drive... (Score:1)
    by TheZork (gzorko@earthlink.net) on Monday April 10, @12:25PM EST (#127)
    (User Info)
    Backing up and restoring is even more fun.
    Re:think about defraging a 2T hard drive... (Score:2)
    by dodobh (d o d o b h @ v s n l . c o m) on Monday April 10, @01:23PM EST (#142)
    (User Info)
    What about fsck()?
    Tired of GPFs? Take a look at www.gpf-comics.com
    In further news... (Score:5, Funny)
    by jd on Monday April 10, @10:34AM EST (#66)
    (User Info)
    Microsoft announced that it was now able to ship beta copies of Windows 2002 on a single, 8" hard drive unit. Under further questioning, the spokesperson admitted that they had attempted to use the latest AI compression algorithms to remove redundancy, but that the program had simply wiped the disks clean. The spokesperson later said that, as yet, it had not been determined if this had been a bug in the AI.
    Lots of useful applications (Score:5, Insightful)
    by Tassach (tassach@DONTSPAMME.excite.com) on Monday April 10, @10:48AM EST (#75)
    (User Info)
    According to the article, this is very fast, nano-sized core memory. While the bit density is very impressive, that is not the most important characteristic. What is really important is the fact that it's non-volitile and has no moving parts. With storage technology like this, you could easily have things like:
    • a full RAID-5 array inside a standard 3.5" (or 2.5"!) drive housing
    • a Palmtop with a 20Gb of storage
    • a portable MP3 player that could hold your entire CD collection
    • a digital cameras that can hold thousands of images
      • The possiblities for mobile & imbedded applications are staggering!

        More importantly, because there are no moving parts, you'd have incredible levels of reliability and very low latency. This is sorely needed -- while hard drive capacity has been advancing rapidly, hard drive speed has only made modest improvements. In many applications (databases, for example) the biggest performance bottleneck is physical I/O. Even with the fastest hard drives, you still have latency measured in milliseconds (10^-3) -- because you have to wait while you wait for the platter to spin around to the byte you need (on a 10k RPM drive, you have to wait an average of 12ms to [physically] read an arbitrary sector). Conventional RAM, with nanosecond (10^-9) level latency, is 6 orders of magnitude faster -- that's roughly 1 million times faster, for the math-challenged. Getting rid of this disparity has enormous significance for I/O intensive computing.

        The real implication here isn't having a multi-terabyte hard drive on your desktop, but having hard drives that actually keep up with the rest of the computer.


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
    is currently under review by the Axiom Review Board" -- Terry Prachett, "Men At Arms"
    Re:Lots of useful applications (Score:1)
    by GossG (gossg@mindlink.com) on Monday April 10, @01:22PM EST (#139)
    (User Info)
    a full RAID-5 array inside a standard 3.5" (or 2.5"!) drive housing You don't want your RAID inside one housing. If one unit fails, you hotswap the dead drive and it reformats/reloads on the fly. If everything is inside a single housing, it ain't RAID, it's ECC
    Re:Lots of useful applications (Score:4, Informative)
    by Tassach (tassach@DONTSPAMME.excite.com) on Monday April 10, @02:53PM EST (#151)
    (User Info)
    Let's say you have a 3.5" drive chassis with an integrated RAID controller and N nano-core chips on it, with data striped between the chips as specified by the RAID-5 standard. It's still going to be RAID-5 regardless of if the individual chips are socketed or soldered -- in this usage, RAID-5 is refering to the striping algorithm. Regardless of if the individual drives are (hot-)swappable, it's still a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, by definition. Using the RAID-5 technique instead of simple parity (Like in ECC RAM) gives you performance advantages as well as redundancy of data, hence the need to distinguish between the different methods

    If the per-chip cost is low enough, it would probably be more cost effective to surface-mount the components and chuck the whole unit when one went bad than it would be to have a socketed board and replace an individual chip. For a consumer product, this approach would probably work well -- when one chip died, the whole unit would keep working, giving the user time to buy a new unit and back up his data onto the new one. Considering that the MTBF on solid-state electronics is pretty high, by the time one chip died the whole unit would be effectively obsolete anyway. For a server, you'd want it to be hot-swappable; but for a consumer product a sealed unit would be fine.


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
    is currently under review by the Axiom Review Board" -- Terry Prachett, "Men At Arms"

    It's the return of Core Memory! (Score:1)
    by Burz on Monday April 10, @10:53AM EST (#80)
    (User Info)
    "time to make the donuts"
    Access times? Latency? (Score:2)
    by costas (costas@nospam.malamas.com) on Monday April 10, @10:55AM EST (#84)
    (User Info) http://malamas.com/
    Any specs on those? I mean, the technology sounds great, but how *fast* is MRAM/VRAM?



    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
    AegeanTimes: Greek and Turkish News
    Yeah, so? (Score:2)
    by jrs (jsmook@NOmb.sympatico.caSPAM) on Monday April 10, @11:00AM EST (#88)
    (User Info)
    We all keep reading articles on new, cheap, large storage, but when will we all actually get to buy them?
    It's Seagate (Score:2)
    by Signal 11 (signal11@mediaone.net?Subject=Slashdot comment) on Monday April 10, @11:00AM EST (#89)
    (User Info) http://www.malign.net/~bojay/
    The mystery company is almost doubtlessly Seagate, who's headquarters is based right next door to where I work.

    -o Stop anonymity now! (we can't blame if we don't have names) o-

    Re: don't be so sure, you forget about 3M... (Score:2, Insightful)
    by solace on Monday April 10, @11:12AM EST (#100)
    (User Info) http://www.solacedesigns.com
    yes Seagate has a big campus here, like 6 buildings or so, but its actually headquartered in California. 3M on the other hand is headquartered over in St. Paul, and their Imation division has broken off from the parent company, and has been doing vast amounts of research on storage devices. my guess would be 3M and Imation over Seagate. but i could totally be wrong.
    Re: don't be so sure, you forget about 3M... (Score:1)
    by solace on Monday April 10, @06:16PM EST (#178)
    (User Info) http://www.solacedesigns.com
    i WOULD have read the article if it hadn't been slashdotted. i couldn't access it all day.
    Re:It's Nonvolatile Electronics Inc. (Score:2, Insightful)
    by 2b (2b@caboteria.org.nospam) on Monday April 10, @03:51PM EST (#162)
    (User Info) http://www.caboteria.org/
    Sorry, no cigar! The article sez:

    The Navy has contracted with the small Minnesota firm of Nonvolatile Electronics Inc. to develop the technology to produce the devices on a commercial scale. The company was founded in 1989 by James Daughton, who pioneered the field with Honeywell, and it has already carved out a sizable market for magnetic sensors and other devices based on similar technology.
    (emphasis mine)
    Questions the article didn't answer (Score:2, Interesting)
    by chainsaw1 on Monday April 10, @11:09AM EST (#97)
    (User Info)
    I am curious what the state change rate is (how fast it can be changed from a 1 to a 0) and if I can change any of the bit storage locations on the device simoultaneously or one at a time...

    The rate is important, for instance memory can chage 100*10^9 bits per second (theoretically) for PC100 RAM (100 MHz). Hard disks can change 66*10^9 bits per second (ATA66), but only the bit the hard disk head is over at that time.

    This is very oversimplified (all throughputs are absolute theoretical maximums), and I probably mesed up the exponents, and someone more knowledgable can refine my question...but hopefully I got enough of a point across for someone to understand my question--is this tech really feasible as a memory replacement, and where is there more hard data about it?
    Re:Questions the article didn't answer (Score:1, Informative)
    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, @03:00PM EST (#153)
     
    According to MVE's MRAM white paper, MRAM has been demo'd with 50ns read latency and 10ns write latency (20MHz and 100MHz, respectively). From the information in the white paper, it appears to have much the same organization as DRAM, so you could have a fairly wide bus that read/writes 64 bits or 128 bits at a time. So 20MHz @ 128 bits = 3.2GB/s throughput reading, 16GB/s throughput writing.
     
    -- Guges
     

    the real issue with memory (Score:3, Interesting)
    by jacoplane (jacoplane@SPAMpostmark.net) on Monday April 10, @11:45AM EST (#115)
    (User Info)
    The thing that matters is the balance between size, speed, and price. The article doesn't seem to touch upon this point very much.

    There are many very promising technologies out there. The real problem with memory right now does not seem to be the size at all. For example, hard disk density (size) doubles every year. However, the access time (speed) only decreases about 30% every 10 years.

    I think these figures are correct. If not please correct me.
    And Now The Bad News (Score:3, Insightful)
    by unitron (unitron@tacc.net) on Monday April 10, @11:53AM EST (#118)
    (User Info)
    It seems as though this could be built right into the cpu or into the package holding the cpu die, which would lead to getting your hard drive, ram, and cpu all in one unit.
    So what happens when that package, with a certain company's operating system permanently installed and hardwired in, is available cheaper than the same hardware without any os, or with a certain "free" os pre-installed?
    If this thing is "instant-on", then either os will be right there, ready to go as soon as you hit the switch, but one certain company will be able to subsidise the purchase, whereas the other os, even though free, won't have a financial behemoth behind it (unless it's AOL, and you have to be a subscriber of theirs to get the discount, or maybe even for the hardware to work at all).

    Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

    perfect for portable MP3 players... (Score:1)
    by DrEldarion (hwoarang29@yahoo.spamisevil.com) on Monday April 10, @11:55AM EST (#121)
    (User Info)
    This is great. You'd be able to fit all the MP3s you could ever want onto something the size of a sugar cube... and, unlike regular hard drives, it won't get screwed up if you jostle it.

    Compact and reliable... but is it cheap enough? If it is, all we have to worry about is the RIAA nixing it's use in the players...

    -- Dr. Eldarion --
    It's not what it is, it's something else.
    Company website and white paper (Score:3, Funny)
    by Dodja on Monday April 10, @12:08PM EST (#125)
    (User Info) http://www.centropy.com
    For Nonvolatile Electronics, Inc.'s site, go to http://www.nve.com. They have some white papers on Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). Unlike that "alien technology" we've seen posted before, this looks to promise truly massive nonvolatile storage.

    10,000 GIGABITS IN A SUGAR CUBE (Score:3, Interesting)
    by roman_mir on Monday April 10, @12:48PM EST (#133)
    (User Info)
    10,000 Gigabits in a volume size of a sugar cube storage device made at the University of Toronto by Dr. Eugenia Kumacheva working at UofT and sponsored by XEROX.

    http://www.geocities.com/roman_mi r.geo/NoFCFS.gif

    and this is what I have to say about that.
    Re:10,000 GIGABITS IN A SUGAR CUBE (Score:1)
    by beable (beable@my-deja.com.beable.beable.beable) on Monday April 10, @07:56PM EST (#185)
    (User Info) http://members.xoom.com/_______/index.html
    10000 Gigabits in a sugar cube! Zowie! Let me be the first to say:
    TEN THOUSAND GIGABITS SHOULD BE ENOUGH FOR ANYBODY!

    And you can quote me on that.

    cheers
    Beable van Polasm

    Re:10,000 GIGABITS IN A SUGAR CUBE (Score:1)
    by peter (root@127.0.0.1) on Monday April 10, @10:10PM EST (#191)
    (User Info) http://is2.dal.ca/~dups/
    10 000Gb is "only" 1.25 terabytes. You can buy RAID arrays with more than that on them. Maybe it should be enough, but for various reasons it isn't. Some of the reasons are actually logical, like experimental data or satellite images. (as opposed to wasteful users on a big file server)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
    Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
    400 Gigabits! GREAT SCOTT! (Score:2)
    by Pfhreakaz0id (joeblow47@THISWORDOPTIONALhotmail.com) on Monday April 10, @01:06PM EST (#137)
    (User Info)
    Where am I gonna get that kind of power Tom?!
    ---
    "There's a short list of people whose opinions of me I give a rat's ass about, and guess what? You're not on it!"
    I'm tired of this. (Score:3, Insightful)
    by bmetz on Monday April 10, @01:11PM EST (#138)
    (User Info)
    Doesn't this sound a little old? I think I've heard the "500 billion trillion gigabytes per square millimeter cube" thing one too many times. Has one of these technologies ever seen the light of day? What makes everyone so certain this will, either?

    Anyway, back in reality, I'll stick to getting excited about actual product shipments.

    Re:I'm tired of this. (Score:1)
    by bigbadbuccidaddy on Monday April 10, @07:26PM EST (#183)
    (User Info)
    Yeah, the good 'ol vacuum tube is all you'll ever need.
    Forgotten about the Crusoe? (Score:1)
    by KlTheKiten on Monday April 10, @01:22PM EST (#141)
    (User Info)
    I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned of mating this "harddrive" with the Crusoe...

    High speed data access, low energy requirements, tack on the DVD drive on the back, and 5-1/4" square color LCD screen...

    High density PDA!


    ...some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant...
    thoughts (Score:1)
    by Yablo (fordb (@) flatirons.org) on Monday April 10, @01:54PM EST (#144)
    (User Info) http://fordb.flatirons.org
    yeah, but at what cost is this storage space available? its prolly gotta be really damn expensive. still, i wouldnt mind the military to just -give- me one... :)

    //Yablo | http://fordb.flatirons.org
    Doughnuts (Score:1)
    by UniverseIsADoughnut on Monday April 10, @01:59PM EST (#146)
    (User Info)
    Ah Doughnuts, What can't they do!
    way to go to reach Star Trek (Score:1)
    by peter303 on Monday April 10, @02:30PM EST (#149)
    (User Info)
    The unit of memory is a "kilo-quad"- a thousand quadrillion bytes or memory- or 10E18 bytes on device about the size of a business card.


    ***original Homebrew Computer Club member***
    Re:way to go to reach Star Trek (Score:1)
    by peter (root@127.0.0.1) on Monday April 10, @10:14PM EST (#192)
    (User Info) http://is2.dal.ca/~dups/
    Big deal, there's already a company that sells Exabyte tapes. Oh wait... maybe we should complain about the false advertizing. :(
    #define X(x,y) x##y
    Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
    No more MP3 (Score:2, Interesting)
    by geekoid on Monday April 10, @02:59PM EST (#152)
    (User Info)
    People have commented more room for there .mp3's.
    I will hope I longer to need a compresion format for my music. I prefer Quality.

    "do or do not, there is no try" Yoda, Jedi Muppet

    Re:No more MP3 (Score:1)
    by peter (root@127.0.0.1) on Monday April 10, @10:19PM EST (#193)
    (User Info) http://is2.dal.ca/~dups/
    Well, you can wait 10 times longer for them to download! Available network bandwidth is a very real limit on many things. Of course, you can save CPU time by decompressing once and saving the PCM audio data for future playback, like a cat page vs. a man page.
    #define X(x,y) x##y
    Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
    Re:No more MP3 (Score:1)
    by geekoid on Monday April 10, @10:25PM EST (#194)
    (User Info)
    But with solidstate, storage will become even cheaper, longerlasting.
    I have a 20 gig harddrive in my system. It is the firstime that I have been able to have a hd longer then a year without needing to buying a new one. The pace of hardrive growth is starting to outstrip software size. I think this is happening because many features that people wanted in software 10-15 years ago are there. That 89KB calculator now has all the nice features you need.

    "do or do not, there is no try" Yoda, Jedi Muppet

    seen this before? (Score:1)
    by doctah-e on Monday April 10, @03:00PM EST (#154)
    (User Info) http://www.atomicwaves.com
    i didn't see any other posts about this, so...

    this article seems very familiar. i remember seeing something just like this, some sort of 3-D ram that a company in europe (or at least the article was from a european site) had developed, that was capable of gigabit storage capacities.

    anyone else remember seeing this url?
    They must have lots to work out yet! (Score:2, Insightful)
    by Neutropia_1 on Monday April 10, @03:01PM EST (#155)
    (User Info)
    Well if I remember back to my digital classes, there are going to have to be ALOT of address lines to access each individual bit, which means more metal, which means more heat! Especially if they say they are going to try and stack them (like poker chips). Also, I can see why the manufacturing process would be cheaper. As the article says, there are NO transistors. If anyone has taken a VLSI class they know how many steps are involved in the fabrication process of transistors....Its a wonder how intel and amd can sell their chips for so little!
    *Ahem* Read/Write time? (Score:1)
    by Bladetooth on Monday April 10, @04:25PM EST (#166)
    (User Info)
    Now excuse me for being totally ignorant about the topic of Read/Write times, ESPECIALLY for this newfangled thingie (I always wanted to say that! :P), but what are the Read/Write times for this sort of thing, huh? What if they are so completely useless that it’s not worth the effort?
            Not entirely likely (mostly playing Devil’s advocate here), but seriously; what kind of Read/Write times would a thing like this have? They don’t address that. It is all well and good to have lots of memory, but if you can’t access it at significant speed, then what good is it? Now the thing may turn on fine, but how fast does it actually take to read some data? Probably the usual, considering the “Oohs” and “Ahs” The millitary is giving it, but I’d just like to know (because we might just need faster busses to handle it, ya know).
    Re:*Ahem* Read/Write time? (Score:1)
    by Valar (nospamyalusers.kungfoo@linuxstart.com) on Monday April 10, @04:44PM EST (#169)
    (User Info)
    To give you an idea, the way they have it set up would hold more resimblance to RAM access times than hardrive access times, because it is a truly magnetic storage device with no mechanical parts.
    "Karma 0 (mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments)/Valar has posted 17 comments (this only counts the last few weeks)--That is quite sad."
    Nice. There goes RDRAM down the drain... (Score:1)
    by Valar (nospamyalusers.kungfoo@linuxstart.com) on Monday April 10, @04:41PM EST (#167)
    (User Info)
    This has lots of potential, if the funding survives well into a production cycle. We probably won't see it outside of a lab for another couple of year though. But think, the best application wouldn't be in 3.5" drives and personal computers, it would be in very small devices, where little or no power and infastructure could be placed. I'm thinking in terms of brain-chip type nanotechnology. An entire career or martial art or even programed expirences(trully interactive movies!!!) could be programed on a tiny chip and feed through the nervous system. Of course this would require much more advanced technology (like identifying electrical charges headed for the brain), but now we have the storage capability and the other technology can't be more than 20 years away.
    "Karma 0 (mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments)/Valar has posted 17 comments (this only counts the last few weeks)--That is quite sad."
    Interesting possibilities... (Score:2)
    by UncleRoger (Roger@Sinasohn.Com) on Monday April 10, @07:06PM EST (#181)
    (User Info) http://www.sinasohn.com/uncroger.htm
    Among all the Bazillion-petabytes-on-the-head-of-a-pin stories, I rather like the 10GB roll of scotch tape, myself.

    But, what I find interesting about this particular miracle is the possibility of putting a few gigs of storage on the same chip as the CPU. Probably not very practical for general-purpose computers (wanna reload your data just so you can have a faster CPU?), but there are other uses...

    Hook a wee bit of this to the equivalent of a 386 or 486, put it in an affordable package, and you could have:

    • hyper-intelligent watch/notetaker
    • key-fob sized MP3 player
    • standard-sized 5x7 picture frame that changes pictures every hour to show a different image of the wife and kids
    • electronic books
    • those flying balls inspired by the thing from Star Wars
    • smart appliances (oh no, not again!)
    and so on...

    Of course, it all depends on the final cost.


    Uncle Roger Roger@Sinasohn.com

    problems with higher areal density (Score:1)
    by peter (root@127.0.0.1) on Monday April 10, @09:59PM EST (#190)
    (User Info) http://is2.dal.ca/~dups/
    This technology is even higher density than current hard drives, which are _much_ denser than hard drives several years ago. Things like this keep making good old fashioned hacking harder. I mean, how is anyone supposed to get started on one of these with just an ordinary magnet! Sheesh...

    I can't wait to have a CPU with mass storage inside the case. They didn't say whether this stuff is as fast as RAM, but I'd assume it isn't, since IIRC magnetizing something is usually a lot slower than flipping the charge on a capacitor. Read performance should be impressive, though, and in any case reads and writes should be orders of magnitude better than hard disk seek times. (HDs have decent sequential access performance, but are miserable for random access.)
    #define X(x,y) x##y
    Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)

    datastorage in two dimensions??? (Score:1)
    by searleb (elwin@cyberspace.org) on Tuesday April 11, @12:23AM EST (#196)
    (User Info) http://members.xoom.com/dust_to_dust/
    400 Gigabits Per Square Inch

    except that it's fifty inches deep!!!111
    Look into the future.. (Score:1)
    by mattr on Tuesday April 11, @06:10AM EST (#201)
    (User Info) http://telebody.com
    That's not really a lot of memory since it still uses terms we can pronounce to describe it.

    Figure instead that this is a crystal ball and find out what year it is to be available with serious transfer rates.

    At that time,

    - All AOL's forums are digital video only viewable from Netscape 16 (forked away from Mozilla)
    - RIAA distributes DVD quality music videos of the top 100 singles weekly in throwaway chips like those AOL CD's people get in the mail these days ("a great loss leader") with 2048 bit SDMI encoded in the hardware controller.
    - Sony's Playstation V, having broken another sales record, is issued a recall since someone found a secret password for the test screen which renders SDMI useless! Oh Shit!
    - Tons of encrypted software comes with tons more of free interactive ads and spam is a fond memory.
    - Transmeta slates, which allow you to plug these memory chips into thin little bays inset all around the edges, will directly connect to fiber in public spaces (spread spectrum that can handle the bandwidth will fry your zygotes in a flash)
    - Micro$oft still sux but who gives a shit. Bill sez "the consumer is happier now than every before" etc.
    - You set the deSDMI chip emulator in your slate to the public key signature of the viral FiL3Z band which infects the omnipresent fiber net, dial up your favorite virtual file system (not FreeNet since they all got arrested in early 2001) and download today's news plus the latest RIAA password. Andover has been bought out by CNet and the original Slashdot crew (fired though some were coopted by the new owners) run (virtually) for the data havens where they can broadcast Geeks in Space in peace.
    - As an afterthought you turn over extra computing power to the daily RIAA decryption effort. Having seen it was finished hours ago (someone in the quantum chip labs in Switzerland have been playing around over coffee break) you turn it to the distributed Seti project, having the last year of raw observatory data in an auxiliary bay. There are a couple inexplicable Wow events on the charts but more processing is needed..
    - Hackers and mainstream couch potatoes incredibly unite against AOL and steal the keys to the data stream. Artists get rich from direct payments from advertisers, and with TimeWarner going down the tubes AOL is looking for an exit strategy.
    - Programmers are working feverishly within the GPL liscense to support the latest quantum computing hardware (for the first time Linux may support this hardware before any OS). The only problem is when the chip delves into other universes during a computation the subjectivity breaks; it keeps finding references to OS's by Linus' parallel twin sister Eunice (who makes her own wild Mozilla skins) and strangely enough.. hot grits?
    - World domination at last. Who won? Doh.

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:2)
    by Jeffrey Baker (jwb@ireallydontwantspam.acm.org) on Monday April 10, @09:59AM EST (#24)
    (User Info)
    Smaller is always a selling story for computers. My current hard disks are big, loud, and hot. I don't like them. Stacking 1 TB of 3.5" rotating disks into the colocation center costs a fortune in space, power, and cooling.

    Smaller, cooler, more efficient. I'll take some.

    List of uses. -i.e. did you think through your re? (Score:2, Insightful)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:00AM EST (#27)
    (User Info)
    This is not a question of increasing the storage capacity of regular size devices (mostly). It is a case of being able to store the same amount of information in an incredibly smaller area using much less power.
    Applications:
    digital cameras
    wearables
    smart appliances
    CPU cache! (mentioned in article)
    laptops

    I'm sure people could think of more...

    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Re:List of uses. -i.e. did you think through your (Score:2, Interesting)
    by TheShadow on Monday April 10, @11:04AM EST (#92)
    (User Info) http://legiontech.com
    Well, imagine if this stuff was as fast as (or even faster than) memory is now. This stuff could be the "memory" and the "hard drive" and the "CPU cache"... or maybe there wouldn't be a difference anymore. Having a CPU attached to a square inch of that stuff means you have a CPU with memory and nonvolitle storage that equals 40GB... that would pave the way for more lower cost PCs.

    Besides... saying that this technology wouldn't be useful and no one would care is just like saying that no one will ever need more that 640k RAM.
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by ClickWir on Monday April 10, @10:02AM EST (#32)
    (User Info)
    well you have to also look at the fact that programs grow in size, also database files grow.

    It's not all pr0n and mp3's and illegal software.

    hell, at this rate Windows 2002 will need 1gb just for the OS.

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:51AM EST (#77)
    (User Info)
    What a strange coincidence.
    Those three happen to all be large binaries.
    One 3MB MP3 would then equal 1024 3k and insightful web pages.
    Not that it matters, since we're questioning your limited imagination in this product's usefulness.

    BTW, how did you calculate your figure of 195 Terabytes of data on a palm top using this technology? Unless this is some obscure marketing math, that would equal 500 square inches using the researcher's projected "400GB per square inch".
    That's 2 square feet!
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Slight correction. (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:55AM EST (#83)
    (User Info)
    200,000 GB = 1,600,000 Gb (researcher's unit of measurement)
    That's 5 square feet.
    Yeah. DMG is sooooo appropriate.
    I thank the supreme trickster that I work in SysAdmin.
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    640K is more than enough memory for anybody! (Score:2, Insightful)
    by Dman33 (dtisher@nospam.umich.edu) on Monday April 10, @10:07AM EST (#39)
    (User Info)
    That is what Bill Gates was quoted back in the 80's. I am running 256MB ram right now. My point? I am sure that 50000GB seems quite insane right now, it may be the minimum reqs for Windows 2005.

    In fact, you make very little sense. For a PalmTop application, this technology would yield a sufficient storage space in a very small footprint. Gee, isn't that what we want?

    I do not see how you think that this would be disaster in the marketplace. (What would you have thought of a 10GB drive back in the 80's?)
    A new record, ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
    by FascDot Killed My Pr on Monday April 10, @10:08AM EST (#41)
    (User Info)
    Yes, a (not-so-) longstanding has been broken today: Dumbest post ever. I can only assume that this is a troll. However, for those about to be sucked in:

    The reason I wouldn't buy a 900lb hamburger for $.10 is not "because I'd never eat it all". It's because that's a waste. There's too much cost (in environmental terms) for the value (a couple of meals at most before it goes bad). Similarly for the movie: The cost ($7.95 + 3 years of my life) is too high for the value (a movie). As an example, what if the 900lb hamburger was guaranteed to never go bad and it was easy to store at your house? The economics start to look a little more attractive, don't they?

    But big harddrives don't have a cost the same way. Given a choice between a Palm with 8MB of memory for $150 and a Palm with 400GB of memory for the same price, I'd choose the later in an instant and so would every sane person. What reason would there be to NOT do it?
    --
    As an addition to Slashdot Stats, I'd like to see some Karma Percentile ratings...
    Re:A new record, ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
    by Tardigrade (roevans--at--linknet.kitsap.lib.wa.us) on Monday April 10, @10:24AM EST (#60)
    (User Info)
    I'd be more than happy to pay $7.95 for a 3 year movie. When I had something else to do, I'd merely leave the theater and use my ticket to get back in a week later.
    Re:A new record, ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
    by dolanh (dhalbrook@hotmail.com) on Monday April 10, @10:42AM EST (#69)
    (User Info) http://people.we.mediaone.net/dolanh
    Given your career, perhaps you can also tell us why people seem obsessed about buying 5000lb SUVs that get 12mpg.

    I have a hard time believing that very many of the full-size SUV buyers "use it all", and yet there are a lot of buyers out there.

    The interesting point of this article (did you read it?) isn't that the price of storage
    is going down -- I agree, BFD -- but that we might have access to "instant-on" memory. *That* would be a very big deal indeed.
    //open source comes from people who are rich enough from closed source to exercise their altruism
    Re:buying 5000lb SUVs that get 12mpg. (Score:1)
    by CodeShark (listener@kcinter.net) on Monday April 10, @11:29AM EST (#107)
    (User Info)
    Don't have an SUV myself but I can answer that question in one easy physics lesson:

    --Crash!!--

    Your 5,000 lb. SUV just hit my little ole Saturn SL-1. I'm dead, you're not.

    Of course, if my little ole' Saturn were a wee bit taller (gripe gripe), I mighta had a chance of seeing ya and getting outta da way. As it is, RIP.

    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always better than the alternative...

    more and more offtopic :) (Score:1)
    by dolanh (dhalbrook@hotmail.com) on Monday April 10, @04:15PM EST (#165)
    (User Info) http://people.we.mediaone.net/dolanh
    Unfortunately, with that logic we should all be driving '71 Cadillacs and city buses...

    It just pisses me off that more and more people are buying huge vehicles to mask their terrible driving skills, not to mention road manners, consequently making the roads more dangerous for those of us who drive responsible cars.

    BTW, I'm even more RIP in my Miata :)

    //open source comes from people who are rich enough from closed source to exercise their altruism
    Re:A new record, ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
    by Blackknight on Monday April 10, @10:53AM EST (#79)
    (User Info) http://www.angelfire.com/az2/blackknight
    Speak for yourself. Maybe YOU don't want 400 GB or storage. But I'm sure there's plenty of people that do. Myself, I would buy one in an instant. You could say the same thing about Cable TV. Oh, nobody wants 150 channels, they would never watch them all. Yet there's still plenty of buyers out there.
    TROLL TROLL TROLL (Score:1)
    by FascDot Killed My Pr on Monday April 10, @11:07AM EST (#95)
    (User Info)
    Yes, that's right, I'm still labelling you a troll. I'm even more sure of it now. You make claims with no proof (or even examples) to back yourself up. Your participation in the flamewars you start serves only to lengthen the argument--not shorten it.

    In particular: "would you buy a 900lb burger ? No of course you wouldn't, because it makes no sense. "

    Specifically HOW doesn't it make sense? Remember that I've posited the existence of an easy way to cart the thing home AND that it won't spoil. So you've got a big slab of meat (plus some extras) for $.20. How is that a bad thing?
    --
    As an addition to Slashdot Stats, I'd like to see some Karma Percentile ratings...
    Re:TROLL TROLL TROLL (Score:1)
    by dr190 on Monday April 10, @11:52AM EST (#117)
    (User Info)
    Specifically HOW doesn't it make sense? Remember that I've posited the existence of an easy way to cart the thing home AND that it won't spoil. So you've got a big slab of meat (plus some extras) for $.20. How is that a bad thing?

    Hell, I'd just cart the thing a few blocks from the restaurant, and start selling that beef for .10$ a pound. Don't need to worry about it spoiling or having to use it all yourself.

    He's not called DumbMarketingGuy for nothing, you know... ;)

    Re:A new record, ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
    by B'Trey (ddjonesATspeakeasy.org) on Monday April 10, @11:35AM EST (#109)
    (User Info)
    Right now, I have 42 gigs of hard drive storage in my system. Ten years ago, I had 20 megs. In ten years, my storage capacity has increased by a factor of over 2000. 400GB is only a ten fold increase of what I have right now. That's hardly an earth-shaking increase.
    Never assume malice where incompetence suffices.
    Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
    by WiseWeasel (wiseweaselATmacDOTcom) on Monday April 10, @10:12AM EST (#44)
    (User Info)
    First of all, the technology promises 400 gigabits/in^2, which translates to 50 GB. Don't even bother to translate how much it would be if you made a hard drive out of it, because this technology will push us far beyond hard drives. Imagine something like Sony's memory sticks with 50 GB on it. You could throw about 10 DVDs on it. Buisiness cards, with 100 GB of storage on it. Little MP3 players with years of listening time. Hell, we could probably just have portable WAV players. This will be particularly interesting when compact computer parts like monitors become viable. If I could have a pair of glasses with a display, and a tiny DVD player the size of a pager, with piles of DVDs stored on tiny memory sticks, this would be ideal, and not too far off. You then unplug you display glasses from the DVD player and plug it in your wearable computer, and have access to a huge amount of pawer and data in a very small size. This brings us much closer to wearable and micro-portable electronics.
    * * * I LIKE CHICKEN STRIPS * * *
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by jayhawk88 (rockchalk88[AT]yahoo.com) on Monday April 10, @10:13AM EST (#46)
    (User Info)
    Has history taught us nothing? I guarantee that Microsoft is already working on their new and improved, 5 Gig install of Office 2005. To say nothing about the 10 Gigs needed for Windows 2001 (due out 1st quarter 2006).

    Every time I see an article talking about "All the storage space/processor speed/RAM you'll ever need, I think back to the 20 meg drive in my first 386 computer and laugh. Hard drive manufacturers make bigger drives because they can, or to keep up with the demands of bloated software. Software manufacturers see all these huge drive, and figure they can use all that space to throw in a bunch of cool new features. Granted this is a not as much a problem in the Linux world, but I'll bet that in 5 years, we'll all wonder how we managed to live with less than 100Gig, and will be eagerly looking forward to the new terrabyte drives just around the corner.
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:2, Informative)
    by Dave-V (lowkey@kmfms.com) on Monday April 10, @10:25AM EST (#61)
    (User Info)
    dmg,

    Let me guess, you're a home user. No you won't have use for this large a storage device in the near future but many network admins work with much larger storage devices already. And while I can't speak for others, this certainly has me interested. I've had to manage as much as 240 GBs of data when 10 GB hard drives were the biggest we could get out hands on. It would have made my life a lot easier to have all that data on one drive rather than spread out on 24 (more when you count the 'lost' drives in the RAIDs).

    Additionally, you have to remember this is a SOLID STATE drive. No moving parts, the tranfer times will be almost as fast as your RAM or cache. While this may not seem like that big a deal to a home user, this type of speed will allow developers (Web and other) to do more processing on their own systems and then transfer just the results to your computer. Which means better content can be delievered to the customer. Do I see a immersive 3D Slashdot environment in our future?......maybe.......lol

    Dave


    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by Bork on Monday April 10, @11:22AM EST (#105)
    (User Info)
    To add to the thread.. Working on installing server #14 this month. This new one has 14Tb of storage. It has racks of 50G diskdrives.

    What is used in the real world does not make sence to some people who do not work were there are large data systems. The concept of multi-Terra servers are beyond some people grasp.

    "Why do you need so much?" Because we need it.


    sig -> 5 billion years and it will all be one big ice ball.
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @10:42AM EST (#71)
    (User Info)
    I think people objected to your post because it was stupid, not controversial.
    There are only so many ways to moderate down, however.
    You'll note you got moderated back up by someone who thought you were funny.

    If I wasn't replying in this area, I'd have moderated you down too.
    A way to vastly increase storage density with less power and faster access times?
    And all you can think of is to increase HD capacity? It indicates you didn't read the article which listed many other uses.
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by unitron (unitron@tacc.net) on Monday April 10, @11:17AM EST (#103)
    (User Info)
    I wouldn't have moderated him up, but why waste points moderating him down when there are so many other *much* more deserving candidates?

    Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by Derek Pomery on Monday April 10, @12:48PM EST (#132)
    (User Info)
    Yeah, if he hadn't been moderated up I probably wouldn't have bothered. But I'd feel a duty to at least knock him down to 1 again in order to maintain whatever small amount of respect slashdot moderating still has.
    -- perl -e 'print pack"H*",""'64706f6d657279406375632e6564750a687474703a2f2f7777772e63732e6375632e6564752f7e 64706f6d6572790a"' Good luck, spam bots!
    Re:Forget Troll (Score:1)
    by semis (semis@semisphere.org) on Monday April 10, @10:52AM EST (#78)
    (User Info) http://semisphere.org
    slashdot community?

    haha. There is no such thing. There /used/ to be - but in the last 12 months slashdot has turned into nothing more than a forum for celery overclocking linux kiddies who roll new kernels as if it was 0-day warez.

    pfft.
    Re:wtf (Score:3, Funny)
    by unitron (unitron@tacc.net) on Monday April 10, @11:02AM EST (#91)
    (User Info)
    Nando Times is a spin-off of the Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper "The News and Observer". The N&O (n and o, nando, get it?) got into the ISP business several years ago with, IIRC, Nando.net, which I think still exists, but the actual subscriber base got sold off to Mindspring a few years back.
    If linking like that becomes illegal, won't that pretty much be the end of the internet as we know it?
    As to whether or not Slashdot can or should provide content, I don't think that's what it's really here for. We the Slashdot audience provide the content. Unfortunately the content is sometimes of the quality of posts like yours.

    Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

    nando == Raleigh's News and Observer (Score:1)
    by ddstreet (ddstreet@ieee.org) on Monday April 10, @01:34PM EST (#143)
    (User Info)
    Although Nando's website looks different than the News and Observer's website, the content is basically the same, except for local news (Raleigh). The N&O has been a HIGHLY conservative newspaper for a long time and I never read it.
    Re:nando == Raleigh's News and Observer (Score:1)
    by unitron (unitron@tacc.net) on Monday April 10, @09:28PM EST (#188)
    (User Info)
    "The N&O has been a HIGHLY conservative newspaper for a long time and I never read it."
    Yeah, that's just what Jesse Helms always says :-)
    They should have left me at "insightful" and given you the point for "funny".

    Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by paulydavis on Monday April 10, @11:05AM EST (#93)
    (User Info)
    In economic terms You are talking about a products "utility" comparing the utility of hamburgers to direct access diskdrive is not quite thoughout eithier...if the products were substitutes for each other maybe.
    Re:This could be revolutionary (Score:1)
    by HiThere (I.am..charleshixson@earthling.net) on Monday April 10, @11:05AM EST (#94)
    (User Info)
    However, it's good to have multiple different approaches to the "my next drive" problem. One of them will be best, and several may not pan out. By having several parallel development paths, we increase the likelihood that at least one of them will actually work.


    Never attribute to malice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence -- N. Bonaparte
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10, @11:08AM EST (#96)
    Of course they have thought it through. Hard drives are holding back the whole speed of the computer, its a big bottleneck. When you boot up the computer, its waiting for the hard drive to read all the programs on the computer. CPU time isn't really being used all that much- its just sitting there to get some data to process.

    But, if you had one of these new toys, you don't need to read any data and put it in memory - its already there! and at 50GB per square inch, thats pretty good. You could (like they said in the article) have it built into the CPU, and have your OS loaded on it. Turn on the computer - Boom! It's perfect.

    As soon as you request the map in Quake3, the time to load the program would be *nothing* compared to the hard drives being used today.

    I hate waiting for programs to load, and I hate waiting for my computer to boot up. And I *HATE* having to delete more MP3s to get more hard drive space.

    Imagine your Palm Pilot (or other PDA of choice) with 50GB of memory on it. Or how about laptops, or portable MP3 players, or a digital camera being able to store 700 pictures at a time at high resolution. The list goes on.

    Disaster in the marketplace? Only if they sell for $1000's, instead of $100's


    --Brandon

    "WASSSSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPP?"
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by plague3106 (ajj3085@rit.edu.no.spam) on Monday April 10, @11:11AM EST (#98)
    (User Info)
    Ya, yoiu probably think 640K was enough memory for everyone too...keep in mind, the size of software keeps growing too. Also, maybe joe average won't want it, but i know a company that already has 200gb of data...they might be intrested.
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by Mononoke (kyosukeATaolDOTcomDOTcomDOTcomDOTcom) on Monday April 10, @11:15AM EST (#102)
    (User Info)
    Shhhhhh...

    They're building a new RAID storage system for Echelon.

    Mum's the word...


    --
    Accept risk. Accept responsibility. Put a lawyer out of business.

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by dazedNconfuzed on Monday April 10, @11:18AM EST (#104)
    (User Info)
    Your analogies don't work, because of the large weight/volume aspects.

    Try this:
    For $1000, you could put the entire contents of your local video store onto a credit card, with periodic updates. Watch what you want, where you want, in HDTV via a eyeglass-mounted display. Methinks most people would jump at that chance.

    Compare: An uncompressed feature film at full resolution uses about 2TB.

    Doesn't matter how much storage space you give me, I WILL fill it within 30 days.
    This ID created purely to suppress JonKatz's articles.

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by testy on Monday April 10, @11:27AM EST (#106)
    (User Info)
    I suppose I should expect it by now. Post a controversion opinion (ie one that the slashdot zealots disagree with) get modded down as Troll (whatever that is) or Flamebait.

    The word is controversial. I thought that marketing types were supposed to be skilled linguists.

    You were moderated down because the article (which you obviously didn't read) focused on the speed of the technology and the decreased power usage it provides. Storage capacity was barely mentioned.

    One thing that was mentioned, though, was the potential applications for consumer electronics. Tech like this would pave the way for TVs with built-in digital recorders, business cards with interactive product demonstrations, and credit cards with the kind of security that financial service companies drool over.

    I think I just "told" your "story," and I'm not even a marketing guy.

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by atopian (atopian@nospam.rangernet.dhs.org) on Monday April 10, @11:37AM EST (#110)
    (User Info)
    Actually No.... Where the use of harddrive space comes in is applications. Particually games. For instance, I bought Bauldurs Gate, which wants 2 gigs for ya to run it without swapping CD's every hour or so. Ultima 9 took like a gig to run at all. And Office 2k is huge, I dont even know how much.
    Hrm loving these .sigs :P
    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by uglyduckling (uglyduckling@flashmail.com) on Monday April 10, @11:38AM EST (#112)
    (User Info) http://usit.shef.ac.uk/~cao98lpc
    I my office we do desktop video editing. Our main edit machine as two 40 gig hard drives. That's 80 gigs. These drives are only offering five times more that our current spec. I'm sure in five years' time we'll be wanting that.

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

    Down with categorical imperatives!

    Re:Have they really thought it through ? (Score:1)
    by jejones on Monday April 10, @12:42PM EST (#130)
    (User Info)
    Sigh. Very bogus analogy. Surely it's a good enough "story" to say "We can use this to create mass storage devices that are very small and don't need to be rotated by large energy-eating, not to mention noisy, and prone to mechanical failure--motors."

    As for "nobody will ever need that much space" line--data, like work, expands to fill the space available. Parents and grandparents would, I expect, love to be able to store every image, sound recording, etc. made of their offspring, or scanned images of their offspring's scrawled drawings. Genealogists probably wouldn't mind having portable versions of large databases that they could consult, or update on their laptops or PDAs they take with them to cemetaries or offices in small towns. Musicians would love to be able to keep large sample/patch libraries at hand, or store a lot of their work.

    Re:400GB per square inch of MY COCK (Score:1)
    by Redundant() on Monday April 10, @07:19PM EST (#182)
    (User Info)
    Home of Minnesota Fats obviously. The man was a legend. He could sizeup and run a pool table faster than any person on earth. He would just walk around the table and the balls would start dropping..
    Who moderates this stuff? (Score:1)
    by nlvp (nlvp (at) yahoo (dot) com) on Thursday April 13, @10:51AM EST (#206)
    (User Info)
    I don't agree with you, because I think this solution is for corporations or people who intend to record months worth of multi-channel television on hard disks.

    But I can't believe you got moderated down 3 times as flamebait, one as a troll, and moderated up 3 times for being funny. It was none of these. Your post was well-reasoned and insightful, contentious and challengingly phrased, and I'm bitter and disappointed that morons decided to moderate you down.

    I've spent a few posts arguing in favour of moderation because I tend to put some effort into it. I've defended the moderators because I believed them to be better than people make out. The moderation some of your posts seriously challenge my point of view that moderators tend to be Ok. You sometimes push the envelope a little too far in my opinion, but this consistent bashing of your posts is blatant censorship (and I don't care if people can read at -1, that means they have to sift through piles of real trolls to find the argumentative posts moderated down by jerks who would rather moderate you down when they disagree with you than argue against you because they lack the intellectual horsepower to make their point convincingly).

    Moderate this down as offtopic if you are a letter-of-the-law type of person, but this stuff needs to get said and we haven't got a forum.

    Slashdot needs to pick it's moderators better.

      The PILLSBURY DOUGHBOY is CRYING for an END to BURT REYNOLDS movies!!  
    All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net.
    [ home | awards | supporters | rob's homepage | contribute story | older articles | Andover.Net | advertising | past polls | about | faq ]