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posted by on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that's ever been published. Books still in print you'd have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You'd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you'd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.

It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. "The universal library has been talked about for millennia," Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, has said. "It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution." In the spring of 2011, it seemed we'd amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.

"This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life," one eager observer wrote at the time.

On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century's worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an "international catastrophe." When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who'd had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:31PM (8 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:31PM (#500402) Journal

    Even harddrives is not sufficient in this case. A better option is a femtolaser hitting a fused quartz disc which gives a capacity of 360 TB. Which will make it possible to fit it ALL on one disc.

    Image that, all that is in several major libraries in one disc with a diameter of circa 5 cm with room to spare.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:16PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:16PM (#500411) Journal

    If you are referring to this [petapixel.com], that's a theoretical capacity, not anything available on the market. Getting new technologies to market can be very difficult. We were supposed to have 1 TB Blu-ray discs and 6 TB holographic discs by now. Instead, we went from 25 GB Blu-ray to 100-128 GB Blu-ray.

    What we do have coming pretty soon are 32-100 TB SSDs [zdnet.com]. Even a 3.5" sized one could fit into some very baggy pants pockets. A 250 TB drive capable of fitting the purported 227 TB sized library is not far behind... it would probably require a future generation of 3D QLC NAND [tomshardware.com]. For example, 128-144 layer 3D QLC NAND. Endurance isn't an issue since you would write once for this particular application. Demand for NAND is downright insatiable, and these capacities will be reached at some point in the next 5 years.

    If your pants pockets could fit a 3.5" drive, you would not need to wait for the 128+ layer 3D QLC NAND, since Toshiba/etc. (the NAND/electronics division of Toshiba is likely to be sold to Western Digital or Broadcom) could probably create a 250 TB 3.5" SSD with 64-layer 3D QLC NAND and TSV die stacking.

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    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:05AM (1 child)

      by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:05AM (#500467) Journal

      > Endurance isn't an issue since you would write once for this particular application.

      Flash memory is subject to data loss from " "charge de-trapping" (leakage), which can be counteracted by having the controller rewrite the data ("flash correct and refresh"). Even when the user isn't explicitly doing writes, they may still be happening.

      https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-data-retention_hpca15.pdf [cmu.edu]

      Write hot and store cold?

      http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2899473/ssd-issues.html [tomshardware.co.uk]

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:24AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:24AM (#500516) Journal

        Fair point, but should still be enough endurance to smuggle data out of Google or whatever the dumb scenario is, and maybe actively seed a torrent for a few years. The large capacity 3D NAND drives can easily implement overprovisioning so the controller can maintain the data longer.

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    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @11:54AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @11:54AM (#500609) Journal

      I know the 360 TB drive isn't on the market and will likely not be for a long time. The point is however it can be done and there are people that can build these kinds of tools. Have a look at this trailer [youtube.com] at position 1:32 to get what kind of situation you may need to handle. No 3,5" drives, that's for sure.

      Seems this optical disc technology uses position, size and orientation besides the standard on-off. Any idea how the "orientation" is done? polarization? I'll assume the laser is more a on-off thing.

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday April 27 2017, @08:33AM (3 children)

    by Aiwendil (531) on Thursday April 27 2017, @08:33AM (#500576) Journal

    And tapes (Toshiba, Fujifilm/IBM) has had protypes up to 220TB (uncompressed) per cartridge since 2015.

    Curious about how the patent dispute (tape) will pan out.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:55PM (2 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:55PM (#500645) Journal

      Which patent dispute on tapes?

      • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:37PM (1 child)

        by Aiwendil (531) on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:37PM (#500734) Journal

        https://www.google.se/search?q=fujifilm+tape+patent [google.se]

        Sorry for dumping a google link, but it seemed like the best way to get multiple sources

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:01PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:01PM (#500746) Journal

          Seems like a complicated lawsuit.

          These US patents seems to be what the dispute is about per 2017-01-16 [ipwatchdog.com]:
          7016137, Tape Drive Apparatus, Recording and/or Reproducing Method, and Recording Medium. It claims a tape drive apparatus with a means for detecting inconsistencies in read/write operations which can identify potential tampering.
          6345779, titled Data Storage Cartridge Having a Retainer for a Leader Pin. It protects a data storage cartridge with a new leader pin configuration which prevents the pin from becoming dislodged if the cartridge is dropped.
          6896959, entitled Magnetic Recording Medium Having Narrow Pulse Width Characteristics. This discloses a dual-layer magnetic recording medium using magnetic pigments in one of the magnetic layers.
          7115331, same title as ‘959 patent. It also claims a dual-layer magnetic recording medium which utilizes the characteristics of metallic pigments.

          Looks like a corporate cat fight ;)
          Given Sonys stance on Linux on PlayStation. I'll guess I'm more sympathetic to Fujifilm.