Note: Unfortunately the research paper linked in the article is a dead/broken/wrong link. Perhaps the author will update it later.
From the limited coverage, it doesn’t sound like there’s an actual optical drive that utilizes this yet and that it’s just theoretical based on the properties of the material the researchers developed.
I’m not holding my breath, but I would absolutely love to be able to back up my storage system to a single optical disc (even if tens of TBs go unused).
If they could make a R/W version of that, holy crap.
I agree with what you said, and its imo why the discussion of a factor of 1000 and 1024 will always rage on. Im a developer, and do embedded stuff in my free time. Everything around me is factor 1024 because of it, and i hate the factor 1000. But from a generic user standpoint, i agree its a lot more user friendly, as they are used to the metric system of a factor of 10