TechnoBabble - Sun Mar 11, 2007

iPod or Megapod?
Remember those little rectangles of plastic on the original Star Trek TV series? They were storage devices barely bigger than a few sticks of gum. Now, you probably already know that the biggest current iPod is the 80Gb video iPod. But thin film advances might bring us devices that contain 155 Gb per square centimeter. That’s nearly 1Tb (Terabyte) per square inch. Imagine how much information could be stored in consumer electronics devices in the future.

Going Wireless?
DailyWireless has a list of the most connected cities around the world, focusing mostly municipal wireless networks.

Bacterial Storage Banks?
Imagine: you have important data that needs to last a long time. Current data storage only retains information for about 100 years. But Japanese researchers have come up with a way to store data in bacterial DNA, potentially for a million years. The only draw back is that retrieval time for the process is currently three days. Maybe this is something the IRS wants to look into?