Oxygen... fading...

If more symphonies were thus conducted - with minotaurs set alight by a flock of burning crows - I imagine that interest in the medium would skyrocket.
- Tycho Brahe (II)


Our modem is pooched, so expect my updates to be sporadic for the next week or so. Given that I'm currently posting from work, I'll keep this brief.

From the "gimme gimme" files:

Can you imagine world without data compression? And where you never have to back anything up?

US inventor Michael Thomas, owner of Colossal Storage, hopes to achieve exactly that. He says he's the first person to solve non-contact optical spintronics which will in turn utlimately 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.

To put that into perspective, mega is 1,024 times kilo, giga is 1,024 times mega, tera is 1,024 times giga and peta is 1,024 times tera.

Complete article is yonder.

Faced with this story, Pacanukeha responded:

I wonder if

a) that guy
or
b) IBM

were lying when they said they invented the idea of using spintronics for storage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics

After re-reading the piece and digging a bit, I think it's a case of sloppy journalism and/or hasty editing of the article, instead of out-and-out mendacity. Regardless, the Wikipedia entry is a good read.