Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcdonje | Hacker News Reader

1. Vinyl ridges are much larger than DVD lines. Kind of a silly comparison considering the article claims the density of this scheme would exceed what we currently have.

2. It appears to not be analog.

>An energy barrier is created at the points where the bridges meet the device contacts, and the height of this barrier can be controlled which changes the electrical resistance of the overall material. That in turn is what encodes the data.

That seems to indicate they can have a base-n encoding where n is what they can practically achieve with the barrier/bridge layering scheme.

View on HN

Where it gets interesteing is laserdisc, since that IS the same size (more or less) as a 12" lP, play time is roughly 30 minutes per side, and the video signal is full analog. The audio is analog + an optional PCM or Dolby Digital signal.

Both the audio and video are FM encoded.

(Yea, 30 minutes per side is long for an LP, more like 20-22 minutes is typical, but hey, it's analog. To a point you could increase playing time by deceasing volume.

The most extreme case of this I'm aware of is "90 minutes with Aurthur Felder and the Boston Pops", which what it says it is... the first side alone is a hair over 47 minutes).

Something that's continuous is analog. I would even say that the MLC/TLC/QLC use analog storage to represent multiple bits per site.

We would already have something similar with SSD and many more bits/levels per site if voltages were precise and stable over time and number of overwrites.

An interesting use would be for storing 1-dimensional data. In effect the errors would be minor and not randomized/scattered as it would be for digital encodings.

Wasn't optane a pretty noticeable leap in voltage stability? They could've eventually pivoted to high density packing if they hadn't given up.

Optane was never going to reach Flash levels of density. It was always in that awkward zone between DDR4 and Flash. Slower than DDR4 but faster than Flash. More dense than DDR4 but less dense than Flash.

It was a failure of marketing and building. Today's computers use a team of DRAM (like DDR5) and Flash. (GPU-ram like HBM or GDDR6 are still DRAM fundamentally).

What do you call Wifi, or cellular data, or ethernet, or DOCSIS?

They claim it’s continuous. If continuous values itself were that great then the vinyl records were great for data storage. The problem with continuous values is noise, durability and precision. You can made vinyl disks with incredibly high precision, but preventing damage and reading back those values is not practical. That’s why even the first analog laser medium had discrete pits and lands instead of a continuous signal.

It can be continuous but still have a limit to data due to noise. In vinyls case the more data you store the higher the error rate (at some point the differences in states is hidden in noise).

The data rate from a noisy channel or storage can be derived from Shannon-hartley theorem.

This is why the old analogue phones could only do 56k for example.

Yes, that’s why I hate their headline.

>This is why the old analogue phones could only do 56k for example.

And somehow, on analogue circuit switch phone call mode, still sounded better with less artifacts than most mobile phone calls!

There's a legitimate reason for that. Tom Scott did a video on it.[0] It basically boils down to telephone switches starting to compress the audio. Compress and decompress multiple times (by various companies) on the way to you, and the quality degrades very quick.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2A8q3XIhu0

It's been a long time since I've called anyone using a phone number. VoIP apps like Discord took over because they don't sound like crap

There are billions of calls made using a phone number still.

"Across the world, we make 13.5 billion phone calls every day, using mobile phones. The average person makes or receives around eight phone calls every day, meaning that the US deals with around 2.4 billion phone calls across the 300 million cell phone users" that's from 2023 source.

Here's a 2019 one about US:

On average, people make and receive a total of 178 calls per month Of those 178 total calls, 93 are calls received and 85 are calls made

Not just older people either:

"80% of Millennials and 84% of Gen Z-ers use their phones during 2020 for phone calls".

Robbed-bit signalling was largely responsible for why voice circuits had a 56Kbps limit. The FCC's regs regarding crosstalk further limited real-world throughput to roughly 53Kbps.

Leased point-to-point DS0 circuits could do a full 64KBps if the whole circuit was 8-bit clean.

There's a Japanese company that makes a laser turntable that can play a vinyl record without any physical contact. It's pretty cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com