Have you seen NASA’s crazy mission posters? Well, these aren’t them. But you know what? They aren’t all that far off. More »
We’ve all viewed our share of photography through a mirror, but I can almost promise that the entries in this week’s Shooting Challenge: Reflection in a Mirror have a few tricks you’ve never seen before. More »
We realize that the e-reader market is about as crowded (not to mention overwhelming) as a Walmart on Black Friday, but ever since the dual-screen Spring Design Alex surfaced and we mistook it as the Barnes & Noble Nook, we’ve been incredibly intrigued by it. Though its 6-inch E-Ink display and 3.5-inch Android LCD form factor may seem like a riff on the Nook, the Alex has quite a few more tricks up its sleeve, including a full Android browser and the ability to extend what appears on the LCD to the E-Ink screen. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the unorthodox extras baked into the $399 Alex. Still, games and gimmicks only get you so far, and you’re probably wondering if it has what it takes to pull up next to the majors like the Kindle or Nook and knock them from the top. We’ve got that answer and lots more details on what it’s like to use two screens rather than one just after the break in our full review. Join us, won’t you?
Gallery: Spring Design Alex review
Continue reading Spring Design Alex review
Spring Design Alex review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Memory is a fickle thing. As far as my brain is concerned, I didn’t exist before age three. Remembering four or five is easier, but there are holes. Thankfully, all it takes are some voyeuristic navigation tools to fill them.
Google Maps and Street View. These burrs in the side of privacy advocates and “get off my lawn” technology-distrusting geezers are what I’ve found most useful when it comes to rebuilding hazy memories from a life long past.
For me the tandem constitutes a full-fledged memory machine, filled to the brim with nostalgia and convenience. Because, you see, the world is too damn big, my schedule too packed with useless shit, for me to go traipsing back to my childhood jaunts on a whim. Physically, I mean, but there’s a web app for that.
I doubt I’ll ever go back to Burke, Virginia, the town where I grew up a scrappy, Big Wheels-riding kid in a planned neighborhood for Navy families. Nor will I physically reconnect with Clearwater, Florida, where I was born.
Virtually, I’ve been back to these places dozens of times over the past few years. I’ve camped out near that Burke neighborhood sidewalk in the same place I did as a 4-year-old kid, staring skyward, thinking of space.
Back then I would slam my Big Wheels (the M.A.S.K. model) to a screeching stop, the plastic wheels grinding and skidding against the concrete, and look up. Perhaps into space like I said, or into the deep blue so that those weird wispy things would dance at the edge of my vision, or—well, I don’t remember why, really, just that I did.
And then there’s my old house. Nestled neatly at the end of Park Woods Lane, it was a two-story, unremarkable affair with a porch, potted plant hangar and a short driveway that usually held dad’s parked Camaro (mom’s hatchback got the single car garage).
No one was home the day the satellite snapped that picture (the driveway was empty), so I took my time looking it over, remembering how my dad used to keep his electric lawnmower (it had a cord!) in the rust-colored shed at the side of the house, and how the steep hill in the back led down to a small brook in the woods. Beyond that lay the Burke Racquet Ball and Swim Club, where he would occasionally take me for a swim in the Olympic-sized pool and buy me glass-bottled Veryfine juice from the vending machine.
I made sure to check out that club too. It was still there, boxy and warehouse-looking as ever, but the surrounding woods are thinner now, long since developed with the rest of Burke into an expanse of strip malls and blacktop parking lots.
It’s bittersweet to say, and entirely geeky to admit, but before Maps came along and blanketed Burke with its satellite coverage, I would have never thought in any great detail about these specific memories ever again. In passing, maybe, or randomly—perhaps when my future kid, should I have one, opens up his shin and needs his first stitches, as I did up at Patrick’s house on the hill.
Recalling that particularly messy memory with my friend Patrick was easy, by the way. All I had to do was drag the map to the right, up the slight hill on the edge of the circle, and float like a specter over his old house to search out the brick wall in back where the accident took place. As I did it just now, just to keep things fresh, I caught myself subconsciously scratching at the two inch scar, still very visible today.
Zooming in on that memory was as simple as a scroll forward. This netted a remorseful pang as I noticed the wall was gone now—the unsurprising casualty of a landscaping project, perhaps—but the memory remained, fresh and renewed, all because I had been granted the “simple,” instantaneous act of peering down from a satellite hundreds of miles in orbit.
If I were telling this story ten years ago, instead of today, these tiny, inconsequential memories would have never been recalled. I doubt I’d ever really remember what that house in Virginia looked like, or the street it was on, or the way the wide cul de sac was ringed with white sidewalk and cookie cutter homes. I could have asked my parents about these memories, sure, but the “virtual physicality” of Google StreetView is what sells the service in the end, at least for me.
There are bad memories too, of course, but I search them out anyway—perhaps to heal, or to punish, but always to remind and link back up with that old, younger Jack from the past. In Waltham, MA, for instance, there’s this light purple, three-story Victorian house up near the West Newton border that I revisit from time-to-time. I get in my little virtual Google StreetView car, navigate the route I’d take home from work in Cambridge, and park out front on Fuller Street. I can even look up and zoom in on the second story, and think back on all the memories that were created there.
For more than two years I lived on that floor with my ex-girlfriend. They were the final two years of an amazing yet ultimately doomed six-year relationship, but in StreetView’s eyes our cars are still parked happily in the driveway under overcast skies.
I haven’t visited that house recently—virtually, physically or otherwise—but during the times that I did early last year, when the awkwardness and loneliness of the single life would take over, I’d often wonder what the two of us were doing when that StreetView picture was snapped by Google’s vagabond voyeur. Then I’d spin StreetView around 180 degrees and wonder what the neighbors were doing at that point in time too. Then I’d ask myself, as I did then, why we weren’t friendlier to them.
Depressing? Yeah, I suppose it is. But it’s who we were at the time, and revisiting those memories, via a 13-inch browser window in a new apartment, allows me to reflect on how much I’ve changed for the better.
If these memory jaunts, or “childhood walks” sound familiar to you, it could be because you’ve done them yourself already, or because you, like me, have heard of Ze Frank.
I admit, until I flew down to Austin last weekend, I hadn’t heard of him, but I have now. He is, in a word, creative.
During his keynote at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year, he featured many of his eccentric web-based projects from over the years, but one in particular seemed most fitting for memory week here at Gizmodo.
He called it A Childhood Walk, and it was basically users going into StreetView to find images of places where they took walks as children. The locations were simple: a trail, a storefront, a playground. Ze then asked that participants think about those walks—those memories—and write them down. Then he published them.
The examples he showed us at SXSW were both intimate and personal. I can’t remember any off hand at the moment (Irony!), but I do remember being moved, entertained and most of all inspired by them. Some involved loves, lost loves, even death. There was a Post Secret vibe to them, but the memories were more open, and tied tightly to physical locations that both the person and the rest of the Internet could experience together within StreetView.
As I said before, I don’t think you could have this dynamic 10 years ago, or even five years ago, let alone when the Baby Boomers were growing up by candlelight or whatever it was they used to see at night back then.
I think that’s kind of unfair in a way. Think of all the location-based memories that, in essence, were forgotten long before they should have been. All the stories, especially those from their childhood. People stamp their feet when they lose a Word document, myself included, but this kind of generational memory loss, to me, is far worse. Far more meaningful, which is ironic, given that I really didn’t give it much thought until I stumbled upon a map of my old house on Park Woods Lane. Now I can revisit that place, and others, again and again. Well, at least until Google updates or the neighborhood gets torn down, anyway, but as we’ve seen all week here at Gizmodo, saving images—even after death!—is pretty easy today.
So for this—for the good Maps memories and the bad, and all the bullshit in between—I’m entirely grateful. Grateful for this, my virtual, voyeuristic memory lane.
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
If you’ve been following the news about Microsoft’s reinvention of its mobile presence, Windows Phone 7 Series, chances are you heard about how the company’s developer-friendly emulator was… modified slightly by Dan Ardelean to expose a series of applications and hubs that you weren’t supposed to see yet. Microsoft was quite gracious about it, indicating it basically expected this would happen and simply reminded everyone that these newly discovered apps are far from complete. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the unlocked version of the OS, and we’ll spell out for you exactly how you can do the same to see it for yourself.
Continue reading Taking the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator for a test drive (video)
Taking the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator for a test drive (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Just a few years ago there were no virtual social networks, no synchronized address books, and no smartphones. But people had social networks and phones, and they had to memorize and organize thousands of contacts. Or have a Rolodex.
When I was a kid, my dad had a Rolodex. Actually, my dad still has a Rolodex. My dad is one of the least organized people I know. In his apartment, he is good at stacking things (like newspapers and bills and books) on top of other things (like pingpong tables and folded easels) on top of other things (like trunks and cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and bills and books). I was adult before I learned that you’re supposed to continue to replace the toothpaste cap on the tube after you use it.
However, Mr. Grossman is organized about one thing: correspondence. He has a log book in which he draws pictures, staples post cards, and keeps notes on every phone call he has. But his greatest feat of organization is his Rolodex. No residence or phone number in his life (or my life, or my siblings’ lives, or his ex’s lives) has ever gone undocumented. Sometimes he throws out useless cards, but mostly they live on stuck to the little wheel, reminding me of my uncle’s ex-wife’s parents’ phone number or my camp address from 1989 or my great aunt Betty who died last year. The cards are mostly white—or more precisely, they’re nicotine white, which is actually more of a kind of gold color. Some are pink, because apparently there was a period where the stationer tried to appeal to… people who like pink. Each one has a degree of soul and meaning that no entry in my Gmail address book will ever possess.
When I got my first job at a newspaper in 2001, I had a small Rolodex. I got it because everyone around me had one. What’s more, people talked about their Rolodexes. “I think I have her in my Rolodex,” they’d say. Or, “If he leaves, he’s going to take his Rolodex with him.” This, of course, meant that someone’s “contacts” were veeeeery important. Sometimes, people would take a card out of their Rolodex if I needed it, and I’d go copy the information and bring it back to them. There were people who stapled cards onto Rolodex pages and people who hand wrote all the information. Cards could be added or tossed or shared with ease. It was a genius, efficient and highly personal way of staying in touch.
I didn’t keep my Rolodex for very long. There were several reasons for this. For one, I’m actually pretty good at memorizing numbers. Like 19. And 34. And 5. 19 34 5. I just rewrote them without even looking! This is funny because my memory for everything else in life is so bad that I usually can’t remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I get to the end which is why I have no idea what this sentence is about. Another reason is that my dad taught me this nifty number memorization system [http://www.the-number-thesaurus.com/Rules.asp] when I was a kid. But the main reason is that I, like (almost) everyone else, eventually started keeping numbers and addresses on my computer and phone. Now I’m at the point where I hardly do that. I just search my Gmail or text people or Google around until I find the digits and street names I need.
But just because this is the more “modern” method of keeping numbers and such doesn’t mean that it’s a better system. Really, the Rolodex might be one of the more important memory systems ever created.
The Rolodex was the brainchild of Arnold Neustadter, a somewhat anal twentieth century inventor from Brooklyn. His daughter Jane Revasch, now in her sixties, clearly grew up putting the toothpaste cap back on the tube. “If I took a message for him, he wanted to know everything—first name, last name, where they were calling from , why, their number, the time…and I was just a little kid!” she told me.
Still, way back when, Neustadter’s address book presented a kind of mess that he couldn’t harness. Mid-century families were infamous peripatetic. Vaguely dissatisfied despite being well-clothed and fed and in possession of a nice station wagon and decent wet bar, they determined that the real American dream existed just two suburbs over: Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated 20 percent of all Americans moved each year. How was anyone supposed to keep track of all those new street names without having to rewrite their whole address book every few months? Plus, some people died! Pages cracked with layers of caked White-out. New phone numbers meant that, when there was no longer room under M, a coda symbol would have to indicate that those entries were being placed in W. The S’s were mostly residing on an inserted piece of paper clipped to the back cover and any completely new entries were just going to have to wait until you could find a replacement book. Sure you could just start a new book every few months, but who had the time!
This was pre-Google, so think of all the hours it took to do what I did just this morning: research what happened to the boy from ET, wonder whether or not Coca Cola used to actually contain cocaine, and figure out which president came before Grover Cleveland. (Interjection from Mr. Grossman: “The library was really far. Before the Internet, if I had questions like that, I just made up the answers.”)
Neustadter had combatted office disorder before. His Swivodex was a device that kept ink bottles from spilling. The Clipodex was a device that attached to the knees and helped stenographers keep pads from moving. The Punched made holes in papers. In the late 1940s, he and a designer came up with a way of dealing with the address book dilemma: a propped-up rotating wheels fitted with inexpensive removable cards. Some models had a cover equipped with a lock. (Each lock actually took the same key—but don’t tell!).
All in all, it was an elegant solution. The cards were removable so that the Q didn’t have to take up any space at all if it had no entries; the circular design allowed the more demanding letters to have more space when necessary.
When Neustadter first started selling the Rolodex in the 1950s, stationery shops were skeptical that anyone would want the spindly device on their desk. By the 1980s, however, the Rolodex had become such an icon that lawsuits were filed by companies who accused former employees of taking them with them when they left—having a Rolodex filled with important names meant everything. There were models selling for more than $200 and people often valued them at prices far higher than that. An entire 1986 episode of Moonlighting was devote to one stolen one being held ransom for $50,000. Hell, it was worth it! Those numbers didn’t exist in some kind of “cloud” or on a hard drive in the closet. And the library was really far.
Rolodexes were a testament to your relationships and your personal history. In 2008, Stanford University professors found that the average Facebook member aspires to have around three hundred friends, but that would’ve seemed a piddling number to the average Rolodex devotee, who often made it a point to use as many cards as the contraption could allow—and some held up to six-thousand. I remember an officemate who used to leave his Rolodex flipped open to important people. He didn’t realize this made him look like a douche. But I guess people do the same kind of thing on Facebook. Did I mention I’m friends with Wendy the Snapple Lady?
Mr. Neustadter, who died in 1996, never saw the way in which digital storage would affect his iconic invention. But his daughter insists he would’ve argued that his Rolo-baby was as relevant as ever. When I called to tell her that I was going to include the Rolodex in OBSOLETE, my book about objects that are fading from our lives, she got huffy. She spoke in a tone that requires exclamation points. “They still work! You just can’t carry them around! Places still sell them,” she said. I told her she was right—the book is about things that still exist, but just barely. She continued. “They aren’t obsolete! Give your book another title! You know, look at it this way: computers get viruses! But the Rolodex, it’s never taken a sick day in it’s life.”
Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
If you take the guts of a Blu-ray or DVD player, blow it up, and spread it across a work bench, it looks like this. So you might be surprised to know that you’re looking at the future of storage.
A laser beam whose wavelength is being monitored by this Soviet-looking machine is being bounced from mirror to mirror to mirror before it lands on a spinning disc the size of CD, but orange, and transparent. It’s reading the holograms that are embedded buried inside the disc, gigabytes of random test data.
This work table is deep inside the labyrinthine complex that is GE’s Global Research Lab, 550 acres of big machines and big brains, in the hinterlands of Niskayuna, New York. It’s where the company that brought us 30 Rock invents the future of energy, aviation, healthcare, and dozens of other mega-industries, including, as it turns out, data storage.
Hard drives, DVDs, USB sticks: This is where we store our digital lives. But while our data is timeless, our storage devices aren’t. So, what’s next? And then what?
Data storage is something most people don’t spend much time thinking about, and if we do, it’s in abstract terms. Laptops have a fixed amount of space; we pay for more, but accept less. DVDs hold a certain length of video, or a healthy chunk of a music collection; these are disposable. Flash drives move stuff from one place to another; we sense that they’re different than hard drives; but we’re not sure how.
What we know is that we need to store stuff, somewhere. And by we, I mean we: our network infrastructure won’t be ready for widespread cloud computing, or that fantasy of downloading everything you’ll ever watch in full HD, for a very, very long time, and until then—or for people with unease about that concept, even then—storage is something we need to think about.
In 2010, storage tech is in flux. Here’s how we—and the people and companies we’re slowly (but surely) handing our data over to, store stuff now, and more importantly, later.
Hard drives! You almost certainly own at least one of these, in you laptop, desktop, or even portable music player. The basic principle revolves (ha!) around the reading and writing of data onto a magnetized, metallic platter, which is assembled inside a hard drive’s case alongside a head, which is roughly analogous to the needle on a record player, except instead reading variations in a physical groove, this head floats above the platter, reading little tiny magnetic variations from a short distance.
If the immediate evocation of a record player didn’t tip you off, this technology has a long legacy (read: It’s old as hell): The first machine to utilize the concept was built in 1956; the first modern-looking, reasonably small hard drive (at 5MB, no less!) shipped in 1980, from Seagate.
The story since then has been surprisingly uncomplicated, with steady advances in data storage density, decreases in size and a drastic drops in price. The first 1GB hard drive, built in 1980, weighed over 500 pounds. Today, a 2 terabyte—that’s 2,000 times more capacious—hard drive is small enough to tuck into a loose jeans pocket, and can be had for under $140.
But surely this technology is reaching a breaking point, right? Not quite. With storage density approaching practical maximum’s, hard drive manufacturers resurrected an old theory somewhere around 2005: Perpendicular storage. Seagate senior vice president, Recording Media R & D and Operations Mark E. Re:
We use to use a recording method called longitudinal recording, which is called that because the magnetization and the storage layer on the disk or platter is a plane. It’s parallel to the surface. And when we moved to perpendicular [storage], we change the magnetization layer on the disk so now it aligns perpendicular to the surface
Why?
When you’re trying to get your bits closer and closer together with longitudinal storage, the magnetization didn’t want to say there. It wanted to spring apart, like if you’re putting two bar magnets together. But if align them perpendicular…they want to be closer together.
Translation: More data, less surface space.
Seagate saw longitudinal recording limiting their hard drives to somewhere around 100 gigabits (12.5 gigabytes) per square inch, and at the rate things were going, without perpendicular storage, hard drive makers would be up against a wall.
With perpendicular recording, though, they think they can eventually hit somewhere around 1 terabit (about 128 gigabytes) per square inch. Today, in 2010, they’re maxing out at about 400 gigabits per square inch in stuff you can buy off the shelf. There are quite a few years left of regular hard drives getting larger, faster and cheaper before the technology runs its course, and that’s not even counting the wilder hard drive research that’s going on. Heat assisted magnetic recording uses localized heating of disc surfaces, for ultra-dense data writing. Bit pattern media could reduce the space needed for a bit on a hard drive’s surface from 50 to 1 magnetic grains, by encoding the platter’s substrate with molecular patterns.
Seagate’s hazy prediction for what this actually means for hard drives: Upwards of 50 terabits (6.25 terabytes) per square inch, which companies be working towards, and making money from, for years. Hard drives aren’t going anywhere—at least, not for now.
So what about SSDs, or solid-state drives? They’re by far the buzziest of the storage options, and we’re constantly told that solid-state drives will replace hard drives, like, now. That’s not quite right. Solid-state drives, which have no moving parts and store data with electrical charge rather than magnetism, are taking over—just, not everything.
The basics, from our last Giz Explains on the subject:
What’s inside is a bunch of flash memory chips and a controller running the show. There are no moving parts, so an SSD doesn’t need to start spinning, doesn’t need to physically hunt data scattered across the drive and doesn’t make a whirrrrr. The result is that it’s crazy faster than a regular hard drive in nearly every way, so you have insanely quick boot times (an old video, but it stands), application launches, random writes and almost every other measure of drive performance (writing large files excepted).
So, they’re fast. They don’t catastrophically fail (though they do slowly degrade). They’re perfect for laptops! And you probably want one.
But the future of SSDs is a fairly narrow one, at least for now: Consumer applications range from notebooks to desktops to NAS storage, but they’re all just that: consumer solutions. While we’re going to have to wait a few more years for Flash storage to reach a truly reasonable price point for our new gaming PCs and notebooks, the enterprise world—where data needs are rapidly outpacing ours, and the scale of storage is so much larger—will have to wait much longer.
The fastest area of growth for solid-state storage isn’t even in HDD-like SSDs anyway—it’s in portable devices, like smartphones (and soon, tablets). This storage is of a different nature, though: speed isn’t terribly important in a mobile device, nor is capacity. People are going to be fine with their iPad’s low-mid-range chips of flash storage, because they’ll run apps, play movies and store magazines just fine. Meanwhile, Google will continue to buy hundreds of thousands of massive hard drives to keep up with demand, and the rest of us will gleefully shell out for the rapidly cheapening solid-state drives that will power our laptops. This will continue in parallel, for as far as the eye can see.
But what will the SSDs of the future be like? Research now is focused on eliminating their comparative weaknesses more than anything else. They’ll become more buyable, I guess? Cheaper? Longer-lived? (Current flash storage of the more affordable multi-level cell variety can only be written to about 10,000 before failure.) Yes, all of that. General Manager of SanDisk’s SSD group, Doron Myersdorf, from our SSD Giz Explains: “More granular algorithms with caching and prediction means there’s less unnecessary erasing and writing.” In simpler terms, companies are getting smarter about writing data to SSDs, with their limited lifespan in mind. And on the storage capacity/price issue:
There have been several walls in history of the [flash] industry—there was transition to MLC, then three bits per cell, then four—every time there is some physical wall, that physics doesn’t allow you to pass, there is always a new shift of paradigm as to how we make the next step on the performance curve.
SSDs as we know them today are still a young, and they’ve got a long way to go. And before the technology can completely take over the consumer space, we’re going to see more and more awkward hybrid products, like Samsung’s MH80 drive, which uses a small bank of flash memory for some tasks, and spins up the hard drive only when necessary. Progress!
Your next computer probably won’t have one. But the one after that? Sure. Meanwhile, cheap flash storage, like the stuff inside your crappy USB key, will only get cheaper. And when 64GB thumb drives are commonplace and cheap, you’ll probably stop caring about optical media, like Blu-ray discs, for file storage and sharing. Or not.
Optical media isn’t going anywhere, either. Put another way, Blu-ray isn’t going to be the last disc you buy—it’s just the last one where data will be stored only on the surface. Holographic storage, like GE is working on, and which we got to see up close at their Global Research labs, stores data down inside in many, many layers (GE’s demoed up to 75), encoding the data using thousands and thousands of tiny holograms throughout the entire disc. The secret sauce is the material the disc is made out of, and how it reacts to light. On a broader level, where GE’s holographic storage differs from the other major approach to holographic storage (called page-based), and what allows it to reach densities of 1TB per disc, is that it uses even tinier micro holograms that store less data per individual hologram, but more in aggregate.
While GE is mostly pitching the tech to archivists for now—like our friends at the Library of Congress, who wanna hold onto stuff for a real long time—since the discs, GE says, last for 30 years, what makes it viable as a storage tech you might get your hands on soon after it launches in 2012 is that it’s designed to fit in with the current optical media infrastructure, meaning it’ll be cheaper and easier to roll out than some radically different tech. That is, the discs are the same physical size and shape as CDs and DVDs, and they use a laser that’s very similar to Blu-ray’s, even using the same wavelength. On a hardware level, it just uses a slightly different optical element, but the rest basically comes down to software/firmware, meaning you might still be able to play your Blu-ray discs in a holographic storage drive. (This exploded view of a disc being read, that orange spinning thing, is what all readers look like in a laboratory, even Blu-ray drives—because it’s easier to tweak settings than in their actual product form.)
After SSDs and hard drives are reduced to hilarious relics, mentioned only to shock classrooms full of children to attention with a jolt of pure absurdity (“so you’re saying the spun? In circles?), how will we store data? A few of the nuttier possibilities:
Interest is growing in the use of metallofullerenes – carbon “cages” with embedded metallic compounds – as materials for miniature data storage devices. Researchers at Empa have discovered that metallofullerenes are capable of forming ordered supramolecular structures with different orientations. By specifically manipulating these orientations it might be possible to store and subsequently read out information.
Two of pop-science’s favorite buzz words, united.
What if, instead of carving transistors and other microelectronic devices out of chunks of silicon, you used organic molecules? Even large molecules are only a few nanometers in size; an integrated circuit using molecules could contain trillions of electronic devices-making possible tiny supercomputers or memories with a million times the storage density of today’s semiconductor chips.
A thumb drive larger than your entire NAS would actually have to be made arbitrarily larger, just so you wouldn’t lose it.
• Bacteria:
Trust your data with tiny bugs: Artificial DNA with encoded information can be added to the genome of common bacteria, thus preserving the data….
According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Scientists successfully encoded and attached the phrase “e=mc2 1905” to the DNA of bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacteria.
Your storage drive could literally be alive, one day.
• Quantum mechanics: Data encoded on an unfathomable scale:
In a quantum computer, a single bit of information is encoded into a property of a quantum mechanical system-the spin of an electron, for example. In most arrangements that rely on Nitrogen atoms in diamond to store data, reading the information also resets the qubit, which means there is only one opportunity to measure the state of the qubit.
Granted, research into this now is focused on storing tiny amounts of data for a matter of seconds, which is just long enough to allow a quantum computer to barely function, but still: potential!
Data: It’s everywhere. And one day, we’ll be able to take advantage of that.
[Bacteria pic via]
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about platters, disks, bits, bops, beeps or boops here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
Talking with Bill Nye the Science Guy is like meeting your favorite HS science teacher in a bar—the conversation might flail wildly, but you learn something at every twist. This week, I picked his brain about, well, brains.
Are there similarities between computer memory and human memory?
Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that’s still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can’t quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that’s happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there’s adaptive software and things, but it’s more literal.
So one of the significant differences between computers and people is the subconscious?
Yes. This business of “Drink Coke,” the thing they would do in movie theaters [in experiments back in the late 1950s]. On some level, that really works. Apparently it has to be an important image. The thing that gets the guys is, you show a naked woman for less than the time you can perceive it, so 1/16th of a second, or about 60 milliseconds. The next image a man is exposed to will be remembered better. If you’re a hunter or if you’re trying to make a decision when driving, you make that decision based on stuff that you can’t quite perceive. So the quality of a computer memory is only as good as the instruments that are feeding it.
So what’s special about how the human brain stores memory?
It’s not how big your brain is. The significant thing is how well the brain is connected. Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge. If you have a memory, “A burner is hot; do not touch burner,” you might store that in a few places to make sure you have it. It would be very strongly reinforced. Riding a bike is apparently very well fixed. But as the cerebellum degrades with age, so does the quality of those memories. The memories are there, but they’re not as good.
You did an episode of your show covering addiction. What were the key brain issues there?
There are two really striking things. First, whether it’s methamphetamines or alcohol or gambling where there’s no chemical involved or drug involved at all, all the researchers are studying dopamine. Dopamine is this brain chemical that gets to your dopamine receptors and makes you happy. You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don’t have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling—sidewaysers.
Are smartphones and Google going to take the place of our memory?
I don’t think so. If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you’re a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else, doesn’t it? Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.
So you’re saying that even before the iPhone and Google and everything, we were offloading information?
That’s what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies. If you put a blaze on a trail, a stripe of paint or ax chop on a tree, it shows other humans where the trail is. It’s storing information outside of your bodies. It’s the hallmark of being a human. I mean, dogs and other animals mark trees—and I’m all for that—but it isn’t quite the same.
So we’re not going to get stupider as a result of using computers?
Boy, I don’t think so. It’s different skills. For example, I’m so old—here you might say, “How old are you?”
How old are you?
I am so old, I entered engineering school with a slide rule. And I left engineering school with a calculator. I can still use a slide rule but it’s not a skill you especially need anymore. And you can go on and on about these kids today, they don’t know where the decimal point is, back in my day… Fine! But you don’t really need to learn the slide rule. It’s a cool thing, but a calculator is much better.
And now they have an iPhone instead of a TI-whatever.
So the first calculator that almost everybody could afford and had was the SR-50, Texas Instruments SR-50. Do you know what the SR meant? “Slide rule.” It was as good as a slide rule, an SR-50. It was that good. I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that’s because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.
In geographical terms, GPS has done that too, right? People don’t have to remember anymore.
The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don’t fool with that. Have you ever heard of the electro-magnetic pulse? The US Navy is very sensitive to this failure mode where people explode enough weapons high in the atmosphere and a significant fraction of the satellites are disabled. What are you going to do? You’re a ship at sea in a trackless ocean. Cadets from the Naval Academy know how to navigate by the stars.
It almost makes me think of the book Dune and the mentats, the human computers.
Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he’s a human calculator. He says it’s a skill he learned as a kid. Now he’s a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.
But is that skill less impressive to kids now because they have computers?
I don’t know, I think it’s pretty impressive. It might be more impressive because it might be that arithmetic is even further from a kid’s everyday experience. I mean, how can you do it as fast as a machine? And I meet so many people who are intimidated by arithmetic.
Thanks to Bill, the one and only Science Guy, for a lively discussion that also touched on global warming, the irresponsible behavior of Glenn Beck, why the internet may prevent another Hitler and how good salmon are at smelling. As always, you can catch his pearls of wisdom—and learn more about his war against ignorance—on his website.
Brain sketch by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator, used under Creative Commons license
Thanks to Don for his transcription services
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever. Read more on human memory here.
So, all this storage talk has gotten you excited about upgrading your laptop’s crappy old 120GB drive? It’s about time, dammit.
Traditional hard drive have never been cheaper, and the advent of flash-memory based SSDs—that’s solid-state drives—delivers a storage upgrade path that actually deliver solid, real-world benefits that you’ll notice every single day. SSD-equipped PCs boot faster and are quicker to load applications. In fact, the only bad thing about SSDs is their cost—a 128GB solid-state drive can cost upwards of $400.
So what’s the right storage solution for you? Read on, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.
SSDs sound pretty sexy, but you’re running an old machine—say an Athlon 64—and you’ve got an immediate problem. Your porn collection has filled your old 500GB drive. You need more space, stat, and there’s no reason to shell out more than your PC is worth for a 128GB SSD. Lucky for you, terabyte drives are cheap—$90 at Newegg for an awesome drive. There are a few key specs to watch out for when buying a hard drive for use as your system drive. The speed that the platters spin at has a direct correlation on the performance of the drive. Faster platters = faster data transfer. For an inexpensive, mainstream drive, that means you should be looking at 7200rpm exclusively. The number of platters is also relevant. The fewer platters there are in the drive, the faster the drive will be. For those reasons, I recommend Seagate’s 7200.12 series 1TB drive. At $90, it’s cheap, fast, and reliable.
Total Capacity: 1TB
Total Cost: $90
Today, the 128GB SSDs sit in the sweet spot for price to performance ratio. However, smaller SSDs don’t necessarily sacrifice anything in terms of performance, just capacity. (The brand of controller used and configuration of the memory are much more important to SSD performance.) So, if you want to scrimp, you can buy a smaller SSD for Windows and your applications, and pair it with a traditional hard drive where you store your large files—like your music and video files. If you want to get really tricky, you can even use symlinks—special links that are invisible to applications but are between files or directories—so that your applications don’t even realize your files are on different drives.
While Intel’s mainstream 160GB SSDs cost about $500, the 80GB retail version comes in right around $220, and even includes a mounting kit, so it will slide into your 3.5-inch drive bays (most SSDs are 2.5-inch drives, sized for laptops and servers). That’s not a ton of capacity, but it’s more than enough if you just want to install Windows and your applications. You’ll need to install games and store your media on a secondary drive, but for that you can use an inexpensive traditional drive, like the Seagate 7200.12 1TB. And, the quick boot and speedy application load times are more than worth the hassle. One caveat, when buying Intel SSDs, make sure you get the second generation drives (they’ll have G2 in the model number). The first-gen models don’t support TRIM, which is an important feature for maintaining the drive as you use it. We’ll talk about TRIM in a moment.
Total Capacity: 1.08TB
Total Cost: $310
While it’s definitely tempting to put a speedy SSD in your laptop—after all quick load times and a complete lack of moving parts does sound spiffy—if you use your portable machine like I do, you’d probably rather have some extra space. Lots of extra space. That’s why I recommend the Western Digital 640GB Scorpio Blue drive. It’s a 5400RPM drive, but its balance of price to space is excellent, and it shouldn’t eat through your battery too quickly. When you upgrade the hard drive in a notebook, you need to know what height drive your computer can accommodate. The easiest way to find out is to look in Device Manager (in Windows) or in System Information (in OSX) and see what model drive you have currently. Then Google that model number to find out thick your current drive is. Anything that size or smaller should fit. At 9.5mm, the Scorpio is a perfect upgrade for my MacBook Pro.
Total Capacity: 640GB
Total Cost: $99
What’s a truly nutty storage solution? How about a pair of 160GB SSDs paired with 2TB of the fastest traditional hard drive in the world? While there are some faster SSDs out there, they’re either based on untested controllers or have had problems in the past. When dealing with bleeding edge, we’ll take reliable and slightly slower in some situations over speedier with a chance to lose our data, which is why we recommend a pair of 160GB Intel’s X-25MG2’s running in RAID0, paired with a speedy and spacious 2TB Western Digital Black drive. This gives you 320GB of storage on the RAID, more than enough space for Windows and all your applications and games, plus an extra 2TB for your music, videos, and… yes… your porn collection. It’s the best of both worlds, but with a pair of $500 SSDs, it’ll cost you!
Total Capacity: 2.380TB
Total Cost: $1280
There are a few things you need to know about SSDs, before you shell out big bucks for one. First, because of the way flash memory works, either the operating system or a vendor-provided piece of software needs to do some occasional housekeeping to keep write speeds up. If your drive supports the TRIM command—as the second-generation Intel SSDs I recommended do—Windows 7 will take care of the scut work for you.
If you’re running XP or Vista, you’ll need to manually run the Intel SSD Optimizer every few weeks or months, whenever you notice write speeds slowing down. It’s part of the Intel SSD Toolbox. Unfortunately, the SSD Optimizer doesn’t run on RAID arrays, so it’s a bad idea to RAID your SSDs, unless you’re running Windows 7.
You should prevent defragmentation programs from running on SSDs—they’re not necessary and can actually degrade performance. Windows 7 will automatically disable defrag, but you’ll need to turn it off manually in XP or Vista.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to properly maintain an SSD on OSX today. OSX doesn’t support the TRIM command and there aren’t any OSX-native tools for Intel drives. The only way to restore like-new write speeds on a Mac is to backup your drive, format it, then restore from your TimeMachine backup. If you frequently write large files, you’ll definitely notice the performance hit. For that reason, it’s not a great idea to buy a SSD to upgrade your MacBook Pro today.
Will Smith is the Editor in Chief of Tested, a new site for people who love technology. Recently at Tested, he’s talked about Apple’s first netbook, shown you how to disassemble a Flip camera, and tested condoms to see if they make good waterproof cases for gear.
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
Bits don’t have expiration dates. But memories will only live forever if the media and file formats holding them remain intact and coherent. Time can be as deadly to data storage as it is to carbon-based life forms.
There are lots of ways data can die: YouTube can pull a video offline before anybody snags it, your hard drive can crash, taking ultra-rare Grateful Dead bootlegs that you never got a chance to upload to Usenet with it, or maybe you designed a brilliant piece of visual art a decade ago in some kooky file format that simply doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s no possible way to view the file without traveling to some creepy dude’s basement a thousand miles away.
What we’re talking about is digital rot—or data rot or bit decay or whatever you’d like to call it—systemic processes which can mean death to data. Kind of a problem when you’d like to keep it around forever. Let’s paint this in broad strokes: You can roughly break the major kinds of rot into hardware, software and network. That is, the hardware that breaks down, the formats that go extinct, and the online stuff that vanishes one way or another.
Everything’s gotta be stored on something. And guess what? All media age. (Except diamonds—bling bling, biatch.) Brain cells die, film degrades and hard drives break.
A sampling of common digital media and their life expectancies (assuming you take care of them):
• Floppy disk – This can theoretically survive between 3 and 10 million passes
• CD and DVDs – It depends heavily on the materials used in their construction (PDF), but you’re looking at anywhere between 2 and 10 and 25 years, in the best of circumstances
• Flash storage – Also depends on the type, letting you write between 10,000 cycles with multi-level flash memory, or 100,000 with single-cell flash
• Hard disk drives – Kind of a crapshoot—anecdotally, five years is a good average, though they can last shorter or longer, depending, again, on how they’re built
Google, with its millions of servers, is in the best position to test hard drives from every manufacturer, and conducted a massive study of HDD failure. Basically, if a drive makes it past the first six months, it’s pretty likely to make it through Year 4, but it is going to die at some point (and makes/models die in batches). As you probably don’t need to be told, hard drives can fail in any number of ways.
In other words, whatever you’re storing your precious data on, back it up, preferably with a mix of drives or media from different manufacturers/time periods.
But what if you’re, say, the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, charged with a mission “to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations,” and suddenly confronted—after 200 years of relatively tranquil existence—by an unending, ever-expanding digital deluge that must be archived and cataloged? On top of a copy of every piece of material that’s registered through the United States Copyright Office, and the two centuries of (oftentimes badly damaged) cultural history you’re already trying to preserve? How do you store stuff?
“DVDs and CDs aren’t even considered storage,” say Martha Anderson and Beth Dulaban, from the LoC’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. They need to transfer shiny-silver-disc content to something sturdier to meet their mission requirements. For digital content, the Library uses a mix of hard disks and tape, like Oracle’s StorageTek T10000B 1TB tape drives, rated for 30 years of archive life. At the Packard Campus, the main battle station for the LoC’s audio-visual preservation, they have 10,000 tapes providing 10 petabytes of capacity, Gregory Lukow, from the LoC’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division told me. In the video above, you can see a SAMMA robot hard at work. These do analog-to-digital conversion en masse, and the LoC has four of ’em.
The key, though, is that even though the LoC works with drive manufacturers on boosting reliability and meeting the Library’s technical specifications, is that they have a policy of redundancy and diversity—two to three copies, maybe spread across different states, and stored in different kinds of hardware running different kinds of software. The Packard Campus, which is where music and video are archived and preserved in crazy labs with robots, mirrors everything to a secret location via fiber optic cable. While you probably don’t have secret bunkers to stash your porn, it’s a good general guideline: More copies on more disks is more better.
It’s obvious, though, that storage media age and die. The more insidious problem, particularly with “born digital” content—stuff that started life as bits—is format obsolescence. That is, just ’cause a video wrapped up in MKV, or an Ogg Vorbis music file, or a DOCX file is readable on computers today doesn’t mean they will be 20 years from now. And if nothing can read what’s inside the file, the data inside is basically lost.
The way you might’ve already experienced this, in a way, is via DRM that’s been deactivated (like a bunch of digital music stores did after being crushed by iTunes), rendering your songs wrapped up in it completely useless. I suspect people who bought into ebooks early, before the emergence of EPUB, are going to be effed in the ay in a similar manner. And don’t even get us started on HD DVD and other failed video and audio physical formats—that’s potentially a double whammy of format death.
It’s important, then, to store your memories using formats that are legit standards that’ll be around for a longass time, if not quite forever. Growing recognition of the problem, particularly as it pertains to ephemeral web content, is part of what’s behind the push for open standards—proprietary standards, from a long-term survival standpoint, are not the best idea, ’cause once whoever makes them dies, the format may die too.
The Library of Congress has picked out seven points that’ll give you an idea of how sustainable a format is—that is, likely to outlast your current Lady Gaga obsession:
• Disclosure – how open the specs are
• Adoption – “an open format that nobody’s adopted isn’t too useful to us”
• Transparency – how readable it is on a technical level
• Self-documentation – decent metadata, which is in some ways the secret challenge, given that it becomes more valuable as the amount of data you have grows exponentially
• External dependencies – how much you need particular hardware to read it, for example
• Impact of patents
• Technical protection mechanisms – is DRM in the way?
Quality is also an issue. So, for instance, for master digital archives of video, the Library uses mtion JPEG-2000 in an MXF wrapper, because it’s mathematically lossless. It uses MPEG2 for sub-masters, which are the source material for MPEG-4 copies that patrons can access. Or, as another example, for a long time, “PDF was considered persona non-grata” because it was proprietary, but since Adobe’s opened it up, they’re now working with Adobe on an archivable form of PDF.
The advantage the Library has with analog-to-digital conversions is that they get to dictate the format and specs—that’s not so with most of the content out there. For instance, there’s not really an agreed upon web video standard—witness the H.264 vs. Ogg Theora codec war, though that’s lookin’ more and more like it’s going toward H.264—so web video is considered “highly at risk.” Despite the large amount of web video the Library has captured—after a year working out the process for doing so, Martha and Beth “don’t have real high hopes for them surviving.” YouTube provides one form of hope, though, in that there’s so many YouTube videos, and so many copies, “there’s bound to be some community interest in keeping them alive over time.”
There might be community interest in keeping the copies of Trolololo alive and playable for the next generation from a format standpoint, but what if Google suddenly pulls the plug on YouTube? How much of it what’s there would be lost forever? Or photos uploaded to Flickr and Facebook that have been wiped from hard drives, since they’re in the cloud. Consider, for instance, everything that would be lost if Wikipedia really did run out of money, and was shut down. Or Twitter.
This isn’t a patently “what if” scenario. Last year, Yahoo, who has a habit of closing services, killed GeoCities—you had a GeoCities page, right?—nuking not just people’s personal pages on an individual level, but really deleting a massive archive of web history. Yahoo paid more than $3.5 billion for GeoCities just over 10 years ago. So it could happen, even to popular services—especially ones that operate under the radar, legal or otherwise, like say, Oink.CD.
They’re fragile, yeah, but bits, unlike ink on paper or brain cells, can live forever, if they’re taken care of. As we’re awash in an ever-cresting tsunami of data, sometimes it’s easy to forget that can be a pretty big if.
Thanks to Beth, Martha and Greg at the Library of Congress, the friendliest government employees I’ve ever talked to! Still something you wanna know? Send questions about data, Data or Reading Rainbow here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
Original photo from RAMAC Restoration site
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
