I don’t know why, but I am always impressed with the latest new milestone reached or breakthrough achieved with magnetic storage devices (you know, the hard drive in your computer). Maybe it’s because I also recall these stories alternating with stories that some finite limit or other has been reached and nobody will ever make anything that can store more data. They seem to go in cycles, and I suppose it’s more about the lack of any real understanding on the part of “technology” writers who are satisfied with rewriting PR releases than it is about the actual R&D.

The author at Next Big Future, who does actually seem to know what the hell he’s writing about, had a post earlier this week about the imminent arrival of magneto-optical storage devices that can squeeze 6 petabits of data into a 5-inch disk (to reframe “6 petabits” into a unit you probably recognize, that’s the equivalent of 786,432 gigabytes). But even more impressive than the raw size of the storage is that the mechanism of the drive can read and write data 30 times faster than your garden-variety hard drive, which is vital to making such a massive amount of storage usable in a practical way.

But I have to admit that the pull quote he used from the journal article that describes the technology that makes this all possible was next-to-incomprehensible to me. Here you have a go at it:

The technique uses so-called time-resolved polar Kerr spectroscopy combined with an alternating magnetic field strong enough to re-initialize the magnetization state of gadolinium-iron-cobalt (GdFeCo) thin films. Tianshu Lai and colleagues showed that the magnetization reversal could occur in a sub-nanosecond time scale, which implies that next- generation magneto-optical storage devices can not only realize higher recording densities but also ultrafast data writing of up to a gigahertz. Such speed is at least thirty times faster than that of present hard disks in computers.

Laser-assisted magnetic recording was demonstrated on a sub-picosecond time scale under a saturated external magnetic field. “We found that the rate of magnetization reversal is proportional to the external magnetic field,” says Lai, “and the genuine thermo-magnetic recording should happen within several tens to hundreds of picoseconds when we apply a smaller magnetic field than the coercivity of the recording films.

Ultrafast dynamics of genuine magneto-optical recording across ferrimagnetic compensation points is demonstrated in GdFeCo films using time-resolved polar Kerr spectroscopy combined with a laser-synchronized sinusoidal alternating magnetic field which can reinitialize irreversible initial magnetization state to laser radiating. The external field dependence of magnetization reversal dynamics is measured and shows that reversal rate accelerates with increasing external fields. Analysis of the magnetization reversal dynamics with Bloch equation shows the magnetization reversal rate is linearly dependent on the external fields within experimental errors, which supports quantitatively that the mechanism of magneto-optical recording in rare earth-transition metal ferromagnetic films is related to the formation and growth of the reversed domains. It is also shown that nucleation field is obviously larger than hot coercivity shown in the anomalous hysteresis loop.

If you say so, dude, but someone’s going to max that out with porn and mp3s in, like, two weeks.

Here are just a few of the ones I’ve encountered recently:

• The TSA — No argument from me here. The Theatrical Security Agency is a gazillion-dollar waste of taxpayer money that does next to nothing in the way of making air travel more secure, inconveniences tens of thousands of travelers every single day, and only serves the political goal of making body searches, inept authoritarian thuggery, and unnecessary panic-mongering palatable to the breadth and width of American society. Americans should be both shamed and outraged that this is the domestic manifestation of fighting “The War Against Terror”.
• Second Life — not one, but two articles that come to basically the same conclusion: stick a fork in it, it’s done. It’s not that people won’t join in on virtual worlds, it’s that they need a reason to do so. MMORPGs draw tens of thousands of users who come first for the game and then secondarily for the fuzzier goal of interaction. When there’s no clear “macguffin” to hang on to, people don’t stick around, and meanwhile idle hands become the devil’s workshop in the form of giant flying penises and other “griefer” tricks. It has soured the marketeers, who are still not sure what to do about virtual communities, and that may be the last hurrah. Try again in 2020, kids.
• Consumer-level Recycling — one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the general public for the last 30 years is that somehow we could save the world by recycling our newspapers, cans and bottles. My blog-buddy GLS had a pretty decent rant about this not too long ago. Part of his argument, and one that I wholehearted agree with, is that consumer-level recycling would be virtually unnecessary if the upstream producers of the waste — that is, virtually every single manufacturer of consumer goods in the world — didn’t create so much packaging in the first place. But instead of Big Business taking a baby step or two towards responsible packaging, they shoved the burden of disposal down to the end-user, which allowed them to continue their merry capitalistic profiteering with as much cardboard, cellophane and styrofoam as they wanted. The market for “post-consumer” recyclable material is next to worthless. In Britain, three out of four communities now simply dump their collected recyclables in the landfills because there’s nothing else to do with them, and the storage of unwanted recyclable newsprint alone is costing the British government millions of pounds.
• Offshored Technical Support Call Centers — Even Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming from a mile away. Yes, first-level tech support is, was, and always will be grunt work that mainly consists of reading answers out of a support manual and/or passing along the phone call to someone who actually knows what the hell they’re talking about, but giving that grunt work to people with a poor command of spoken English and/or an utterly unintelligible accent was inevitably going to backfire. Giving Indian call center employees fake “American” names or trying to hide their accents by making your support only available through a web chat window wasn’t fooling or helping anybody. The typical person calling tech support is already either a) extremely frustrated or 2) unimaginably stupid or iii) both, and making them wait on hold only to speak with a person who can’t really help them in the first place and can’t make themselves understood to the average American is insulting and hostile.
• Platter-and-Head Hard Disk Drives — this post from a techblogger is one of a number I’ve seen lately that makes the argument that the end is in sight for Ye Olde Fashioned Hardde Drive. The Age Of Solid-State Drives is upon us at last. The number of write/erase cycles that flash memory can sustain has been increased by “two orders of magnitude”, which in turn should make it entirely feasible to put vast quantities of flash-based storage into servers, thus further compacting the size and power requirements of data center server hardware, and also rendering the need for SAN devices and other attached storage unnecessary. At the consumer level, flash memory is already available in laptops, but Toshiba’s announcement of a 256GB SSD laptop drive back in September means that mechanical drives are certain to be gone within 18-24 months.
• Movies on VHS — in truth, the end for widespread availability of movies on VHS in the United States ended when Wal-Mart decided to stop selling them in 2006, but the once-and-for-all end apparently came in October, when the last wholesaler of VHS movies shipped their last truckload. I worked in a video store through college, back when home video and video rental stores were the newest, hottest concept in entertainment, and it was a little bittersweet to learn that a part of that time of my life was a part of history. Of course, a lot of people in this country still have VCRs and collections of videotapes, and then there’s the large chunk of the planet which ends up using our castoff toys long after we’ve moved on to newer, shinier ones, so the total extinction is still probably 10 years away, but that’s truly another nail in the coffin.
• Wind Chill Factors — this Slate article tells us what I’ve suspected all along. The whole “feels like minus twenty” thing is crap shoveled up in big scoops to an audience that can’t seem to get enough panic-thrills out of the 11:00 weather report. The original wind chill factor scale was badly miscalculated and based on several erroneous assumptions, and the revised scale developed in 2001, while less extreme in its assertions, is still deceptive and unreliable as a predictor because of variance in wind speeds, humidity levels, and the effects of solar radiation. But, boy oh boy, don’t the weathermonkeys love it when they can scare the bejeesus out of us by telling us it’s going to “feel like” an Antarctic nightmare, when it’s really just plain cold.
• The Federal Communications Commission — I don’t see this happening, even with the Second Coming…er, I mean Obama’s inauguration…but legal scholar and occasional Internet superstar Larry Lessig wrote this piece for Newsweek which says it’s time to get rid of the FCC as it currently exists because it has outlived its original mission, and more importantly, because it threatens the innovation space for new and developing communications technologies with its obsolescence. In its place, Lessig says, create an “iEPA”, which he says stands for “Innovation Environment Protection Agency” (eeugh!) to work primarily to keep monopolizing media businesses and meddling politicians equally out of the realm of developing technology. Of course, that’s 180 degrees opposite of the way American government works in the first place, so I’d say the chance of this coming to pass is nil.

Take a look at your next laptop’s 80GB hard drive. Yes, I said hard drive. Intel has just announced their solid-state hard drive product line beginning with this drive, called the X25-M. You can’t quite tell from this photo, but the form factor is designed around the 2.5-inch width that current laptop arm-and-platter disk drives use. However, it’s only as thick and as heavy as a typical chip-bearing circuit board, which is to say significantly less than traditional disk drives. This model has 80GB of storage, but Intel’s roadmap has 160GB models in the marketplace by early 2009, and smaller models available even sooner. The throughput performance of this drive is better than most current shipping 80GB laptop drives, and Intel claims that the lifespan of the drive should be five years (a complaint about flash-based drives to date has been the relatively small number of read-write cycles, but they claim to have worked around that). Because they are so efficient on I/O, solid-state drives are likely to be very quickly adopted for use in servers, enabling server hardware to shrink even more and reducing the likelihood of server downtime due to mechanical failures.

Now that the XM-Sirius merger is a done deal, the next thing to think about with regard to satellite radio is interoperability. In other words, making it possible for XM radios to receive Sirius signals and vice versa without making all their customers go out and buy new hardware. The FCC has already ruled that any new satellite radio receivers must be interoperable, but now they’ve put out a Notice Of Inquiry to decide whether or not satellite radios must also be interoperable with terrestrial HD radio. Ibiquity, Clear Channel, and NPR have all lobbied the FCC to mandate including HD Radio interoperability, but the FCC would only go so far as to launch the NOI, which starts a somewhat lengthy review process. This is not unlike the deliberations in the 1970s to compel radio makers to include the FM band on every radio; FM radio was the bald-headed stepchild of radio for decades because no one had FM receivers. Once FM popped up alongside AM on car radios, FM stations finally caught on, eventually pushing AM radio into obsolescence. A lesson no doubt everyone involved in this melodrama remembers all too well.

The idea of using bar-code technology with your hand-held communication device has been around for a while, but has only just now turned into an actual service of some kind. USA Today reports that Air France will start letting passengers travelling from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam opt to receive their boarding passes as bar-code images or as text messages on their smartphones. Quite honestly, I don’t think this is such a great idea for airline boarding passes because of the ENORMOUS security risks it poses. Far better that this had been introduced as a service for something with a lot less inherent risk like movie tickets or supermarket deli waiting line numbers. It’s somewhat telling that Air France is only testing it on one route rather than their entire system, and I suspect that this will be slow to roll out, particularly with U.S. air carriers.

DSL Reports says that the number of consumers signing up for DSL service continues to free fall into nothingness. “DSL is the new dial-up” is the catchphrase du-jour in the broadband business as Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optical service has pushed cable companies to be more aggressive with their speed enhancements, leaving pokey ol’ DSL in the dust. According to that linked story, Verizon and AT&T together had a net LOSS of about 120,000 DSL customers in the second fiscal quarter. Anything that keeps the broadband market in the U.S. aiming toward the 100Mbps speed that’s standard in Korea and Japan is okay with me.

I’m not holding my breath, but this story from MuniWireless.com says that Boston is one of the cities where Sprint expects to rollout WiMax as municipal wireless service maybe even before the end of 2008. The rollout is underway right now in Baltimore, with over 1000 wireless access points in the city. Chicago and Washington DC are expected to be launched before the end of the year, and then the next tier of cities includes Philadelphia, Dallas, and The Hub Of The Universe itself. Seems they’ve figured out how to speed up the process of getting the WAPs out into the field so that they can place up to 25 per day, making the rollouts go much faster than originally projected.

ZDNet reports that SanDisk has officially launched their 32GB flash drive for use in laptops just in time for the big CES show next week in Las Vegas. Though they won’t name names, SanDisk claims that laptops with flash drives will be appearing in the first half of 2007.

Meanwhile, for those of you who just can’t get enough disk space…you know, like Microsoft Office users…CNet reports that Hitachi has just announced their first 3.5-inch 1-terabyte hard drive, with an MSRP of $399 (which means the street price will probably be $30-$50 less).

Note that neither of these announcements involves the so-called “hybrid hard drive” technology announced by Samsung in mid-2006. Some of those will be on display at CES next week, too. Hybrid hard drives use a combination of flash and platters to speed up disk access and lower power consumption, but they aren’t necessarily intended for boosting storage capacity per se. The terabyte magnetic drives make use of another recent innovation: perpendicular storage, allowing the drive makers to squeeze more storage out of existing magnetic platters and form factors.