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A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive? 431

Posted by CowboyNeal from the peta-unavailable-for-comment dept.
Angry_Admin writes "Rather than spend millions of dollars for an array of hard drives when you can have all that storage on just one drive? A story at P2P.net US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn ultimately result in the creation of 3.5-inch discs with a million times the capacity of any hard drive - 1.2 petabytes of storage, to be exact. According to the article, In the past, data storage has only been able to orient the direction a field of electrons as they move around a molecule, Thomas said. "But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule," he says. He expects a finished product to be on the market in about four to five years, adding the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each."
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A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive? More

A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

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  • Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:42PM (#14739482)
    "Rather than spend millions of dollars for an array of hard drives when you can have all that storage on just one drive?"

    1. That sentence didn't make any sense.
    2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Trejkaz ( 615352 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:18AM (#14739612) Homepage
      You could always have a RAID-6 array of petabyte-sized hard drives, couldn't you?

    • If 2. did occur (Score:5, Funny)

      by nightsweat ( 604367 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:32AM (#14739687)
      Would you then have a peta- cemetary for your data?
    • "...orient the direction a field of electrons as they move.." doesn't make much sense either. I think there is an "of" missing?

      Come to think of it - most of the article does not make sense to me, but would welcome 3 of these things in RAID.

    • Re:Eh? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by iMySti ( 863056 )
      If I owned some giant company needing hundreds of terabytes of storage, I'd use these as economical backup storage. If you're storing terabytes, you can afford to throw away a few 750 dollar drives.

      • Re:Eh? (Score:3, Funny)

        by leonmergen ( 807379 )

        If I owned some giant company needing hundreds of terabytes of storage, I'd use these as economical backup storage. If you're storing terabytes, you can afford to throw away a few 750 dollar drives.

        I don't think the warez kiddo's are that wealthy... :-)

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, 2006 @01:47AM (#14740035)
      2. So my PETABYTES of data don't all go down the tube at once.


      At first I was thinking about all the pron I could store on it and the agony of it all being lost at once. Then I realized it might be a bad idea to have porn on a petabyte storage device. They would have to be stored in files and they might be called petafiles. This would suck! All my pron is over 18 (as thier sites say) but i'm not sure if some bible thumping do gooder would belive me if I associated with known petafiles.

    • Re:Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lurker412 ( 706164 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @11:23AM (#14742232)
      The most amazing thing is that by the time this device makes it to market it still won't be enough disk space.

  • Just A Second (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:43PM (#14739483)
    I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

  • no thanx! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 )
    I'd rather have the current flash technology improved as compared to that mechanical technology. I thought that's where we were heading. I guess I was wrong.
    • Yeah, flash is cool for portable and smaller storage stuff; but just think about a RAID with these guys in place of the standard HDs.

      Yummy.

      • Re:no thanx! (Score:5, Informative)

        by GuyverDH ( 232921 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:19AM (#14739622)
        I don't think the poster was referring to the simple/slow flash technology of our usb fobs.

        There's a whole other side to flash technology where large scale, ultra high-speed drives are being made of some very cool flash technology.

        Enhancing that so that storage capacities approximate today's largest hard drives, with the speeds that these bad ass flash components can provide, would be great.

    • Solidisks (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Friday February 17, 2006 @01:02AM (#14739827) Homepage Journal
      Solid-state "disks" (such as the 1980's "solidisk" system) may be the future, but they're also very much the past too. Genuinely non-volatile solid-state memory date back to the earliest "core" memories, but have taken many forms (eeproms, bubble memory - there are even forms of static RAM that can hold data for significant periods of time with no power).


      I would also question the usefulness of the proposed system. I am not confident you could change the spin of anything at that scale for any useful length of time. Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to change a property, it needs to be a property that can "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no trivial way of unlatching itself without significant input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.


      There are two ways to "store" data - permanently or erasably. Permanent storage is much simpler, in that there need not be any way of reversing the process. It's better to do this in a mechanical form, because you can have a much higher density. Erasable storage is better as solid-state, because erasable mechanical storage will wear out rapidly, which means it's not particularly reliable or trustable over meaningful periods of time.


      Permanent storage that is high density is relatively simple. You could have a mix of two molecules which are highly stable but, when energy is delivered, react to form something different. Since different molecules absorb energy at different wavelengths, the absorption pattern would give you your 1s and 0s. Molecules are extremely small, compared to magnetic fields or even to the "blisters" formed on CDROMs to store data. You can also look at multiple bits at the same time, with this method. Unlike conventional magnetic media, a read-head need not be serially streaming data but could read as much in parallel as you liked. This WOULD be permanent, though, so would only be useful as a means of replacing CDROMs or DVDs, but would be far more expensive per byte of data and would only offer an advantage where you needed such a system to be considerably faster and vastly more durable.


      Erasable non-volatile storage is a tougher problem, as you need something that can be altered by an electric current in both directions and where the change could be read through some alteration in an electric current. This can get to be a problem, if you want extremely high densities of storage, as all the supporting electronics will take space and will likely take space for each and every single bit of data. (Pun intended.) Usually, there is some magnetic component to such systems (magnets are good at holding states) OR a battery backup, as transistors won't hold a state when there is no power to them. There are many ways of building such an arrangement, with different methods having different speeds for read and write and different densities of storage.


      I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.

      • Re:Solidisks (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @01:10AM (#14739865) Homepage

        I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.

        If I recall from engineering school, this is how flash memories work; a charge is "trapped" in the gate oxide of a MOSFET (thereby making the MOSFET conduct or not when the data is read), and with current technologies can stay there for several years. The issue (besides write speed, caused by parasitic gate capacitance) is the relatively low number of write cycles before the gate oxide begins to fail. I forget the exact mechanism, but I assume it does have to do with electromigration (as opposed to electron migration) causing the trapping layer in the gate oxide to eventually puncture through to the substrate.

      • Re:Solidisks (Score:2, Informative)

        by RecycledElectrons ( 695206 )
        > I would also question the usefulness of the proposed
        > system. I am not confident you could change the spin of
        > anything at that scale for any useful length of time.
        > Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to
        > change a property, it needs to be a property that can
        > "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no
        > trivial way of unlatching itself without significant
        > input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.

        I completely agree - DRAM is absurd. We should h

        • Re:Solidisks (Score:5, Informative)

          by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Friday February 17, 2006 @02:00AM (#14740097) Homepage Journal
          I was talking strictly non-volatile. If you want to talk about volatile RAM, like DRAM, where you are going to refresh the contents every few nanoseconds, degradation of contents - provided it is slower than your refresh rate - is completely unimportant. In fact, degradation of content is precisely WHY you have to refresh the content. In fact, fast degradation is a GOOD thing for volatile RAM. It means you can change the contents extremely quickly. Completely the opposite requirement of non-volatile storage, where retention is the key consideration.


          Volatile RAM also has to remain powered at all times. Again, this is a GOOD thing. Old-fashioned "core" memories could retain data for a hundred years plus, which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal registers used "core" memory or any other form of non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very drunk.


          On the other hand, if you wanted to replace a hard drive, DRAM is next to useless. Sure, you can have a stack of NiCad batteries in parallel to keep the memory going, provided you remember to replace/recharge them as needed. Wouldn't help you, though, if you had a short. For mass storage, where the contents absolutely needs to be retained for a long period of time, you absolutely do NOT want to use DRAM.


          When you get right down to it, though, if the CPU had a gig or four of register-speed RAM on board, you wouldn't really want DRAM for anything. Main memory is only useful because it's substantially cheaper than register-speed RAM and it wouldn't be trivial to build a processor big enough to hold that much memory. Main memory, for a long time now, has been treated as little more than a cache for virtual memory, where all the real storage is on disk, and as a dumping ground for what memory the processor does have. If CPUs held enough, and/or mass storage was fast enough, main memory would go the way of the dodo. It's a relic that persists only because the alternatives are too limited right now.

      • While all you wrote is indeed insightful and true and very relevant, one doesn't even have to go that far to see why his "invention" is just bogus crap. The reason it won't work is quantum mechanics. Some basic knowledge of chemistry also helps, in that it's just applied quantum mechanics.

        I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the e

        • I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.

          May I "flip out" (good one) if you're just plain wrong?

          If what you've written were correct, ordinary magnetic materials could not exist. We would not see Zeeman splitting of spectral lines.

          To bring it down to plain chemistry terms, think about molecular ni

  • Of pron... or maybe mp3's. Hell, I can afford to store both now.
    • MP3s?

      At that point, one has to ask why bother with compression?

  • Blast from the past (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:44PM (#14739492) Journal
    Sounds kinda like American Computer Company [slashdot.org]

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:44PM (#14739493)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • So get two and do raid1. You should be doing it anyway, today's drives are more than big enough to be seriously painful to lose.
    • For $750 (which can get you about 1.5TB at today's rates), having a spare around is a small price to pay for that peace of mind. Though how 500GB x 1M becomes 1.2PB is well beyond my scope of reasoning. If the guy can't do the math that puts it about 2500x [google.com] the storage capacity of current drives, not the million stated in the summary, I'd be quite worried about him having anything to do with the design that ends up in the final project, even if his only part was coining the term 'petabyte' (unless by "any"

      • Re:Backups, anybody? (Score:4, Funny)

        by jpatters ( 883 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @02:15AM (#14740162)
        I really can't imagine filling a drive that's a thousand times the size of what I want until we have full-resolution movies for our 108" plasma screens that have the same pixel pitch as computer LCDs (so.. what... about 10800p?), encoded at something more or less equivalent to 45.1ch WAV audio and video as bitmaps reading at 60fps.

        1.2 Petabytes is enough for only 1.89 hours of 25,380 x 10,800 (2.35:1) video, at 16 bits per color channel, 120 frames per second (as long as we are being ridiculous, lets have an even multiple of 24 please), and with 400 separate languages each with 50 channels of CD quality audio. Uncompressed of course. That would be about 199 GB per second. Note that the audio here is less than 1 percent of the total.
    • Don't worry - I've already backed up my petabyte porn collection - on a device called the Internet.

  • Star Trek? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 77Punker ( 673758 ) <spencr04 @ h i g h p o i n t.edu> on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:45PM (#14739495)
    "But now there's a way to rotate or spin the individual electrons that make up, or surround, the molecule"

    Yeah, they do the stuff with the electrons using Heisenberg compensators.

    • Re:Star Trek? (Score:5, Funny)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:24AM (#14739649) Homepage
      Looks legitamate [colossalstorage.net] to me.

      It is a simple question of getting your entangled particle encryption to spin your atomic holographic optical nanostorage drive in an accredited OLED Display_n_Store handheld device reader, thus creating standing quantum waves in the ferroelectric perovskite molecules. With sufficient surface conduction, why, you could induce resonant absorption excitation via plasmon photonic bandgap crystals. Just think of high-k dipole dielectric material that can then be made reversible with non-dissipative power, all thanks to the Einstein / Plank theorem of Energy Quantum!

      This unique nanotechnology will set the stage for the 5 exabytes of new data generated every year world wide and growing through molecular dissociation.

      This assumes, of course, that you have a capacitor of sufficient size to handle 1.21 jigawatts of flux.

  • A million times? (Score:5, Informative)

    by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:45PM (#14739497) Homepage
    Um... 1.2 PB is definitely *not* "a million times the capacity of any hard drive", unless you're still stuck with 1.2 GB hard drives.

  • Yikes! (Score:3, Funny)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @11:47PM (#14739513) Homepage
    Can you imagine what happens when this thing crashes? That is going to be one long restore...

  • To answer the question (Score:5, Funny)

    by harmonica ( 29841 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:06AM (#14739530)
    A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?

    No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.

  • Vaporwate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rminsk ( 831757 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:06AM (#14739537)
    http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,028,835.WKU.&OS=PN/6,028,835&RS =PN/6,028,835 [uspto.gov] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,046,973.WKU.&OS=PN/6,046,973&RS =PN/6,046,973 [uspto.gov] Inventions by Michael E. Thomas under U.S. Patents, # 6,028,835 2/22/00 and # 6,046,973 4/4/00 concepts in this home page are for laboratory discussion and possible licensing and sale only. I call BS.

  • Believe it when it ships (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <jmorris&beau,org> on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:11AM (#14739569)
    Seems every few months we get a story about a wonder just a few years down the road. Most never get here, and none on the original optimistic schedule.

    Where are the holographics DVDs? A few years out, which is where they were a few years ago.

    OLEDs are finally showing up on small displays but remember it was only a few years ago we were promised they would supplant Plasma and LCD in 'just a couple of years?' They might do it someday, but not this year.

    And so on.

    • Re:Believe it when it ships (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > where are the holographic DVDs?

      Here:

      http://newtech.aurum3.com/content/view/58/18/ [aurum3.com]
      • Woo, thanks AC, most interesting. I'm not too awfully excited by the Blue-ray or that other HD-DVD stuff, but this hologram disk looks like it could be the item.

        I'll definitely be watching for this.

        Thanks again.

    • Sorry. The hovertruck broke-down on the way to the shop.

      All that stuff'll be there tomorrow.

  • Predictions of "4-5 years away" never are (Score:5, Insightful)

    by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:14AM (#14739585)
    Christ, how many times are we promised phenomenal increases in storage, processing power, batteries, etc that are only "4-5 years away"? IF the technology ever materializes, it's usually a shadow of its former self, offering the standard increases we're used to (Moore's Law or thereabouts, depending on the tech). This isn't news until prototype units are done and working, as far as I'm concerned.

    Meanwhile, how would you access the data? What bus would be fast enough for storage of that magnitude? How do you back it up, except to other drives of its type? What's the reliability predicted to be like (especially on such a new technology)?

    Lots of questions, few answers.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Obligatory Jokes: (Score:4, Funny)

    by thomble ( 642879 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:18AM (#14739603) Homepage
    "Finally, I don't need to trim down my porn collection!"
    "Finally, I can cache the internet!"
    "The hard drive racket will never let this see the light of day!"
    "RAI(E)D: Redundant Array of Insanely Expensive Disks."
    "Now, if he was talking about RAM, I'd be impressed."

    "B-B-B-But Moore said!...."

  • Price (Score:5, Funny)

    by professorfalcon ( 713985 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:19AM (#14739615)
    the cost would probably be in the range of $750 each

    Is that before or after rebate?


  • All your eggs... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:19AM (#14739624) Homepage Journal
    ...in one basket.

    No. Thank you.

    • I keep seeing these comments, but even if this thing did happen (hahaha), @ 750 a pop, what you are saying is your company would be too cheap to run more than one for redundancy?
  • Laser Holography will allow parallel read/write operations.
  • When they ship, I'll order 2 of them. They'll be perfect to make a backup of that /dev/random file.
  • Yikes, how many DVD-Rs would it take to back that up? Hmmmm...let's see what Google says:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=1.2+petabytes+%2F+4 .7+gigabytes [google.com]

    Only about 268,000 DVD-Rs. Cut that in half if you're using dual-layer DVD-Rs.

  • 1.2 Petabyte equals (Score:5, Interesting)

    by binkzz ( 779594 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:23AM (#14739640) Journal
    1,351,079,888,211,149 bytes

    1/74th of Data's full storage capacity on Star Trek

    1/45th of all the files shared on Kazaa

    1/3rd of Google's total storage capacity

    Half a Vista installation

    938,249,922 Floppy disks

    208 KB of storage for each person on this planet.
  • Finally cheap storage for all of us.
    We can now put all our data into 1 folder and run a p2p app.

    In capitalist west you backup 1.2 Petabyte of data.
    In Soviet Union KGB have same 1.2 Petabyte of your data.

  • Basic Quantum Mechanics (Score:5, Informative)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @12:32AM (#14739684)
    Spin is quantized, either 1/2 up or down. Electrons also can't have all 4 quantum numbers the same, so electron pairs have one +1/2 spin and one -1/2 spin. You can't change that so long as electrons are Fermions.

    This guy is trying to tell people he can control electron spin? That would be quite a trick.

  • would I want to replace an array of redundant drives by a single point of failure bottleneck?

    An array of peta-drives makes much more sense.

  • "Can you imagine world without data compression?"

    Can you imagine world where it takes 12 hours to download all the images of the latest cyber girl of the month?

  • Storage has to be the first element of computers to increase by 1000x and get to the point where we don't care anymore.

    It's frikkin dots! Of course we're going to be able to fit more than a few billion dots in 200 cm^3

    We've all seen the size of a 1 gig micro sd card and these are all rewrittable technologies.

    If you could release a 10 terabyte drive tommorow do you think anyone would care if you couldn't delete anything from it?
  • As data densities have increased, physically moving the storage devices has become faster than broad band transmission of data between storage devices.
    ie shipping hard drives rather than using fiber. (or for that matter using carrier pigeons and FlashRam. [slashdot.org])
    How long will it be before we have a coast to coast pneumatic tube system to ship data?

    Or even better, an evacuated ballistic subway for delivering harddrives..

    Come to think of it, how about a continuous loop of "data tape" which encircles the g
  • At least we'll have enough space to store it!
  • Seems a hard drive crash can cause a small explosion. Only 10 kilotons so it's nothing to be alarmed about but the military has taken an interest in the new technology.

  • Yeah but after (Score:3, Funny)

    by hobotron ( 891379 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @01:05AM (#14739842)

    1.2 PB is all well and good until you format it and the fucker only has 300 Gigs.
    (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#.22Market ing.22_capacity_versus_true_capacity/ [wikipedia.org])
  • Apparently Mr. Thomas forgot that there are classifications above Peta. How about Exa- or Zetta- or Yotta-bytes? Wouldn't those have more impact for your story/invention?
  • Wake me up when^H^H^H^H *if* this ever comes to pass. If I had a gigabyte for every claim I've heard that the next mammoth-sized storage technology (usually optical-based) was just around the corner, I'd already *have* my 1.2 petabytess
  • ... but since I've seen Mac on Intel, I'll believe anything...

  • You've got to be kidding me! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by birge ( 866103 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @01:36AM (#14739973) Homepage
    Do the editors here have ANY self-respect left? This guy is so clearly a kook and charlatan that I can't believe there is anybody who fell for his psuedo-scientific babble. There's absolutely nothing credible about the website, and none of the "science" makes much sense. You can't get electron spins to stay in a pure state in a molecule. If you could, quantum computing wouldn't be so hard. There's really no point in addressing why it won't work, since it doesn't make any sense, anyway. It's just a bunch of gibberish, talk about "Bohr Atomic Postulate" (whatever that is) and how optically excited electrons will stay in place until readout by another light (not true), blah blah blah. The guy is fucking insane.

    This place is starting to have the editorial standards of the National Enquirer...

  • Arthur C. Clarke on Petabytes... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by edashofy ( 265252 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @02:10AM (#14740142)
    If I recall correctly, in 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserts that a petabyte is enough to store the information comprising a single human (mind, body, etc.) You could store the art and the artist, as he put it.

  • It would match with historical data (Score:3, Interesting)

    by christophe ( 36267 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @04:36AM (#14740606) Journal
    "Historical data" is of course the limited sample of the hard drives I've bought with typical desktop computers :-) from 200 Mb in 1994 to 300 Gb this year.

    Convert into logarithmic scale, make a linear regression, and you see that a 1.2 Pb drive is only slightly above the curve, hence believable if you suppose that progress in this industry will continue at the same rate. I have no idea if the technology of the article makes sense though.

    Caveat: Of course, blindly extrapolating current trends into the far future is the best way to make big mistakes...

  • Just brushing aside the complete bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by goldcd ( 587052 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @06:09AM (#14740869) Homepage
    for a moment. We don't just use massive storage arrays to allow us to 'access a load of data' they also provide many other benefits. Drive mirroring/parity allows you to integrate backup into your system - one physical device fails and no data is lost.
    The main issue is access speed. Most data centres are continuously supplying small amounts of data to a huge number of clients. With a single unit and with a single head that's going to be a massive problem - array can simultaneously read and supply data from the different drives at the same time.

  • Larger storage devices are not the answer... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ingolfke ( 515826 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @07:37AM (#14741045) Journal
    I've been working on perfecting my algorithm for 1-bit compression and should have it ready to go in the next 3 to 5 years. Once released you'll be able to encrypt and compress all of your data down to a single bit. The algorithm will run effectively on processors found in most cell phones; it's not processor intensive. This will eliminate the need for big storage devices and high bandwidth connections.

  • the quality of Snake Oil is really taking a dive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ancient_Hacker ( 751168 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @08:20AM (#14741149)
    This article is pure balderdash. Even lowly me, with just one semester of quantum mechanics can see it's all pure hokum. Ah, for the days when you could get past the first sentence without realizing it was all fairy dust!

    The basic problem is: you can't identify individual electrons. No way. Not ever. When they're circling an atom they're not discernible particles per se- they're an anonymous and homogenous cloud of probability. You can apply some energy and peel one electron off, but it's not like you're picking a particular electron. It's not like a bag of marbles and you're picking a particular one of a particular color. It's more like a jar of molasses and you're scooping out a spoonful.

    Also electron spin isnt something that's latched to any one electron. Electrons exchange virtual photons many millions of million of times per second, which scrambles their properties.

    So to beat this dead horse again: there's absolutely nothing to this story.

  • Phantom? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cspring007 ( 705809 ) on Friday February 17, 2006 @09:28AM (#14741406) Homepage Journal
    I hear the makers of the phantom gaming system are going to use this in their product.

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