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Apr 11, 08 - 09:45 am Comment from: Buster

Well this is a new 'spin' on storage capacity.

Apr 11, 08 - 09:47 am Comment from: ron

I'll probably be six feet under or dust on my favorite beach.

Buster, glad to see IBM is charging ahead with this research.

Apr 11, 08 - 09:50 am Comment from: dd

IBM is more vaporware than MS. I'll believe it when its' actually here.

IBM- The ultimate vaporware company. Touting possibilities, never any real products that amount to anything in the market. How's that POWER processor workin' for ya?

Apr 11, 08 - 09:51 am Comment from: John Gee

Dang. I can't wait `til 2022.

Apr 11, 08 - 09:56 am Comment from: DLMeyer

12.5X in ten years?
2x2x2x2= ... 16? It will be too little, too late. Well, maybe the battery bonus will be the bonus. The 2X of "Moore's Law" doesn't take changes in battery tech into consideration - which is good, because I'm not sure if we've seen a 2X jump in battery output (by size, rated by time) in two decades, much less two years.
Still ... interesting.

Heard it before. New types of storage are always popping up in science magazines. I remember one on holographic storage that held a few terabytes from 1996 or there abouts. From experience, it is best to simply ignore these until someone says they actually have a product.

Apr 11, 08 - 09:59 am Comment from: DLMeyer

An IBM system can process 1,760 points of Folding@Home work units in a day, my G5 Dualie just barely manages 1/10th of that even if that's ALL it does. Let's not be too hard on the Big Iron guys, OK?

Hey whats with this terrible attempted mobile MDN site? It looks and feels unfinished.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:04 am Comment from: HMCIV

MacBook Airs w/ RaceTrack drives anyone?

Apr 11, 08 - 10:06 am Comment from: Snapper

Ah "DL" the G5 is an IBM product

Can me and my partner Zune Tang get that in our Zunes?

I'm just asking.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:21 am Comment from: 7over

"IBM- The ultimate vaporware company. Touting possibilities, never any real products that amount to anything in the market. How's that POWER processor workin' for ya?"

Not totally vaporware though:
The Microdrive was developed and launched in 1999 by IBM with a capacity of 170 MB, which was expanded to 8 GB by 2006. They weigh about 16 g (~1/2 oz), with dimensions of 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in). These were the smallest hard drives in the world at the time.

Seems that we've all received some benefit from this IBM Vaporware!

Apr 11, 08 - 10:21 am Comment from: IKON

I see the release of the iPod life soundtrack:

all the music you can listen to in a lifetime on an iPod Shuffle.

Lifetime warranty of course.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:22 am Comment from: 7over

forgot to give credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

What's the point of this information?

If you're IBM, wouldn't you keep your mouths shut? It's not like this "new" method is going to result in a bump in their stock price or anything. I don't see the benefit of telling every other tech company in the world that you're 10 years away from a concept.

I mean, why would you give anyone a chance to catch up? In my view, you patent it if you can and then don't talk about it until you're a bit closer to a real product.

People accuse Apple of secrecy. However, the over-promise and under-deliver ways of every other tech company seems much more asinine to me.

Do they still make those?

Nice although I'm happy with my Classic 160GB for the time being.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:39 am Comment from: Macromancer

iPod circa 2001: 1000 Songs in Your Pocket
iPod circe 2012: Every Song in Your Pocket

Apr 11, 08 - 10:47 am Comment from: Ampar

To Buster and bjh:

It sounds like they're on track to head up this sector in the mean time between other product failures and server a victory on a platter to the arms of those willing to jumper on board.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:51 am Comment from: LateRegistrant

I'd like to implant some of that newfangled memory technology into my little head.

I forget why I'm writing this.

"store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films..."

Why?
Let´s see to watch 3,500 films and you watch 1 per day then it would take about 10 years to watch them all....
500,000 songs at 4 minutes each = 2,000,000 minutes. If one listened for 1 hour per day it would take you 33,333 days to listen to them all...
Not counting all the time to download, collect, organize etc this huge library.

Apr 11, 08 - 10:52 am Comment from: MrScrith

Reading on the same subject from Slashdot, 4 years ago they patented the technology, and now they've gotten a working prototype. Currently it only stores 3 bits of information on a loop, but it's more a proof of concept at this point. From here it looks like just a case of improving it to the point where it's actually usable.

The one thing I'd wonder about is if it needs to be powered at all times to retain memory...

Apr 11, 08 - 10:54 am Comment from: shen

wow, i am impressed by the "vaporware" comments.

maybe some of you need to have a look at IBMs patent portfolio.

look, i know they screwed up the whole G5 and future PPC stuff, but they could shut down the entire company except for a few book keepers and make billions a year off of what they have already invented. this is a company that makes new things. don't let anger and ignorance make you look like an ass.....

Apr 11, 08 - 11:00 am Comment from: 7over

"store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films..."

"Why?
Let´s see to watch 3,500 films and you watch 1 per day then it would take about 10 years to watch them all...."

Sounds a lot like what people said when the first 5MB hard drive came out "5MB!?! What are we ever gonna use all that space for?"

Lots can and will change in the next 10 years. (Windoze 7 might be out by then and it could take 10GB in storage just by itself!)

The calculations about how many songs and movies are computed at current data densities for those media. In ten years we're likely to have even higher def video and audio than we have now... maybe even holo-video?

Storage that can handle that much more data means, among other things, a much richer computing and entertainment experience.

Apr 11, 08 - 11:06 am Comment from: Buster

@Ampar....uncle!

Zune Tang is that you using my name at 10:13? C'mon, are things getting that bad? Its that bad english that makes me uncertain...

I think Apple just found something to spend it's cash on...

"Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology,"

"IBM said the technology was still "exploratory" at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within ten years,"

Since when is 10 years considered "soon"?

Apr 11, 08 - 11:28 am Comment from: DLMeyer

Snapper, yes ... the G5 is (was?) an "IBM product". But the Dualie was not. Would you say the eight-core MacPro is an Intel product simply because it contains two (or more) chips from that company? No, it's an Apple! End of discussion.
However, the G5 (unlike its successor) is also proof that IBM is not a vaporware vendor. Although, the successor chips are the basis for the Wii, XBox and PS, so that is even further proof. Sort of. And that's just the chip side of the company.

But I havent got 500,000 songs.....

Apr 11, 08 - 12:35 pm Comment from: effwerd

Here is the article's abstract (the full text is behind a pay wall).

Hello...uhm, questions...first, what is this ambiguous "IBM system" you speak of? and is it 100% IBM (you called out the Intel Mac's as Apples not Intel machines...)? 2nd, what chipset did your "Dualie" contain?...a G5 is a G5 (PowerPC) no? and 3rd, as far as the number crunchin' ability of the 2 systems (IBM vs. G5 Dualie in folding at home computation) - are they both running the same version and build of the folding client? Just curious.

Apr 11, 08 - 12:40 pm Comment from: DogGone

@ MidWestMac

They've already put in the patent application. They can publish the data and be covered.

10 years is a long way off for technology.

Interesting... so because they're saying it "uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data", does that mean we're starting to venture into quantum computer territory? I wonder what quantum effects they'd have to deal with in storing data this way - presumably there's no uncertainty-related issues if they're talking about it replacing conventional hard drives or flash memory storage solutions. Will have to look into the tech behind this more closely!

Apr 11, 08 - 12:58 pm Comment from: Crabs

I heard about this years ago, and kinda forgot about it. Sounds like an awesome technology to me. Can't wait till becomes commercially viable

IBM invented the hard drive. It was code-named Winchester, so for a while computers had Winchester drives. They were on mainframes first, because personal computers weren't quite out of the hobbyist stage yet.

My first hard drive cost $1,000 and held 10MB. I couldn't imagine how in the world I'd fill up all that space.

My point is that they have a history of inventing new storage technologies and that there is little cause to suspect vaporware.

Boy, capacity sure is my top priority...my 30 gig iPod, which I use all the time for both movies, a few TV shows, and my favorite songs, has never even hit the 15 gig mark. What abunch of trash talk...in ten years, I will probably have a variety of hologram wives stored and able to display from my iPod. Mobile hologram massage, anytime I want it.

IBM always has sci-fi stuff in their labs. Very innovate company.

C'mon guys... Let them backwards engineer alien technology in peace.

The question is: Who can afford to buy half a million songs? Not before the cost will drop to 1c or 2c each.

By the way: 500.000 songs won't play for weeks - it will take almost 3 years to play them all, not counting the time to download an sync them all.

A little overkill for a portable player, imho.

7over:

No, we're not going to get "higher def" audio. Raw encoding at 16bits/sample and 44khz is pretty much the limit of human hearing. We might move to a few more bits (18/24 bit systems already exist), but going any further would be pretty much pointless, as nobody could see it. Encoding mechanisms like FLAC (and Apple Lossless) can compress this without introducing any compression artefacts. Put simply, there's no point in making bigger audio files much bigger than we have right now, we wouldn't be able to hear the difference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_recording).

There is an upper limit to our visual resolution too that we'll hit one day (http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html ~= 576 megapixels). We're a fair way from that at the moment (HD video ~= 2 megapixels), but if we increase our storage capacity by a factor of 280, we're there and there is little point in going past that). If we double our storage capacity every 2 years, we'll be there in 16 years (assuming that HD video is our upper limit now).

Apr 11, 08 - 10:48 pm Comment from: TheConfuzed1

I think this could make Apple Lossless a bit more useful.

Crabs wrote, "I heard about this years ago, and kinda forgot about it. Sounds like an awesome technology to me. Can't wait till becomes commercially viable."

Actually, Crabs, you will have to wait, "ten years" in fact, according to the author. I wonder, Crabs, if you "heard about this (awesome technology) years ago" why hasn't this technology become "commercially viable" yet? What are the barriers to this "awesome technology" becoming available? Seems that this "awesome technology" is more hype than hope since it has failed to mature for "years". How old are you, Crabs?

Apr 12, 08 - 05:43 pm Comment from: twilightmoon

critic: "Since when is 10 years considered "soon"?"

It's all about context. If the sun was going to nova in 10 years and wipe out all life on earth, I'd consider that "soon"

Apr 14, 08 - 12:53 pm Comment from: Crabs

You know, I don't know why it isn't commercially viable yet. I didn't hear about it coming out of IBM, or as the Racetrack technology. I simply heard, three years ago, actually, sorry if "years" was too broad, that there was a way to store digital memory based on the spinning of electrons, which is how this technology works.

I'm a nerd. That's how I heard of it. I think there was an article on Popular Science that talked about it. They never mentioned IBM, they just said that it was discovered that you could record memory based on the spinning of electrons. Taking three years from discovery to concept is not that bad. The ten year waiting period from concept to product is a little lengthy, but maybe IBM has its reasons. This is new, uncharted territory in memory, because it's completely different than any other form of memory out there. Maybe they want to make sure that there aren't any unseen problems before they release it to the public.

Lay off. Why do you attack everything I write.

And how old am I? I'm 19. Bet you're gonna go all kinds of crazy on that, now aren't you? But 19-year-olds have done a lot for the world, in terms of bringing new things to it. Look at what Mozart had done by the time he was 19. Age is not determinative of...well...anything, really, except physical attributes.

How about you, how old are you? Are you a 44 year old, stuck in a dead end job, and that's why you spend all of your day on MDN?

Apr 14, 08 - 12:56 pm Comment from: Crabs

Oh, I didn't even notice this, either.

From MrScrith:

"Reading on the same subject from Slashdot, 4 years ago they patented the technology, and now they've gotten a working prototype. Currently it only stores 3 bits of information on a loop, but it's more a proof of concept at this point. From here it looks like just a case of improving it to the point where it's actually usable."

Look at that. Patented 4 years ago. So me hearing about it 3 years ago isn't that strange, now is it?