[HN Gopher] Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (20...
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       Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (2022) [pdf]
        
       Author : a022311
       Score  : 79 points
       Date   : 2024-08-05 08:10 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tom7.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tom7.org)
        
       | alexwasserman wrote:
       | There's a fantastic associated YouTube video that talks through
       | these too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio
       | 
       | It's a rabbit hole that had be fascinated for quite a while.
        
       | e1gen-v wrote:
       | Tom7 is the goat. Love his videos.
        
       | ivanjermakov wrote:
       | Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30974165
       | 
       | Tom7 content deserves being posted every day though.
        
         | lesuorac wrote:
         | Wish Lorem Epsum became a real phrase as well.
        
           | ffhhj wrote:
           | Epsum didn't lorem self.
        
       | fragmede wrote:
       | Google calendar fs, using Google calendar to store data in
       | events, was inspired by this. Any others?
        
         | quantumish wrote:
         | it's not directly inspired by tom7, but there's pifs:
         | https://github.com/philipl/pifs
        
       | baliex wrote:
       | Figure 1 is somehow beautiful in it's chaotic dis/organised
       | structure, a representation of the whole internet _, something
       | which us humans now so heavily rely on
       | 
       | _ ipv6 yadda yadda yadda
        
       | MostlyStable wrote:
       | I think this is a candidate for best two sentence combo ever
       | written:
       | 
       | So we have 1 million chainsaws per second, for 335.36 hours,
       | which is 1.215 x 10^12, a configuration known as tera-wield. This
       | requires expert juggling skills.
        
         | trey-jones wrote:
         | The straightfaced and unhinged nature of the chainsaw section
         | reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and probably
         | some Kurt Vonnegut stuff. I love this style of writing.
        
         | nextaccountic wrote:
         | I would nominate this one
         | 
         | > Tetris is an inventory-management survival-horror game with
         | 19 principal characters, each with its own story arc
        
       | jdietrich wrote:
       | For those who might not be aware, early computer memory relied on
       | essentially the same principle:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
        
         | IIAOPSW wrote:
         | I have a crazy idea. The round trip travel time of light to the
         | moon and back is about 3 seconds, and we did leave a mirror up
         | there. At modern modulation rates and with multiple frequencies
         | of light in use at the same time (aka different color lasers),
         | a lot of data can fit into that 3 second window.
         | 
         | A memory made of the vacuum of space. The lightest hard drive
         | ever.
        
           | Animats wrote:
           | Sure. You can also do radio moonbounce, which radio hams
           | routinely do.[1] About 2.5 secs of lag. It takes a sizable
           | antenna. You could probably use that as a delay line. Noisy,
           | so error correction will be necessary.
           | 
           | Laser moonbounce is harder to do than radio.[2] Early systems
           | used so much laser power that they had to be equipped with
           | radars to turn the system off if aircraft were in the area.
           | Later systems with safer lasers could detect single photons
           | with a 40cm telescope and transmit a 2KHz signal.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93
           | Ear...
           | 
           | [2] file:///home/john/Downloads/SLR2000_Eyesafe_and_autonomou
           | s_single_photoelectro.pdf
        
             | IIAOPSW wrote:
             | This seems more like the airplanes problem than my
             | problem...
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | The judge is unlikely to agree with you.
        
             | LegionMammal978 wrote:
             | Would you have a working link to that second PDF?
        
               | Animats wrote:
               | Here are some SLR2000 papers that are more easily
               | accessible.[1][2]
               | 
               | Doing this with low-power lasers requires rather good
               | receiving optics.
               | 
               | There has been a major breakthrough in laser data
               | transmission - the first cat video has been sent by laser
               | to and from a spacecraft. "At the time, Psyche was
               | traveling 19 million miles (31 kilometers) from Earth,
               | about 80 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
               | Traveling at the speed of light, the video signal took
               | 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum
               | bit rate of 267 megabits per second."[3]
               | 
               | [1] https://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/lw15/docs/papers/SLR2000,%
               | 20The%2...
               | 
               | [2] https://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/lw13/docs/presentations/ad
               | v_degna...
               | 
               | [3] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/a-cat-video-
               | highlighte...
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Being the moon is not geostationary this doesn't seem very
           | useful.
           | 
           | Also between atmospheric distortion and dust/micro meteorites
           | you'll going to need to be very careful on your error
           | encoding choices.
        
         | wffurr wrote:
         | "The same principle" as the first of the harder drives. There
         | are several drives presented.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-09 23:00 UTC)