The iPhone uses Nand flash memory to store photos, video clips, and most of its software. The market price of this component is about half what it was a year ago, according to InSpectrum Tech data. But Apple isn’t passing the savings on to consumers: The 78¢-per-gig charge hasn’t budged since last year. Of course, Apple uses contracts to lock in the price of such components as Nand flash, so it may not be benefiting yet from recent price declines. So far, though, storage costs customers more on an iPhone than on, say, a Samsung Note 9. Samsung Electronics Co. charges 65¢ a gig to move from the 128GB Note 9 phone to the 512GB model.
Ponying up for extra storage could lead iPhone users to spend more in other ways, too. People who’ve become accustomed to having what seems like a bottomless pit in their phones are likelier to cram the devices with more music, apps, movies, and subscriptions, boosting Apple’s services revenue. And Apple is charging anyone who wants an iCloud plan to back up their entire 512GB phone an extra $9.99 a month for 2 terabytes (2,000GB) of remote storage.
WHEN physicists switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), between three and six gigabytes of data spew out of it every second. That is, admittedly, an extreme example. But the flow of data from smaller sources than CERN, the European particle-research organisation outside Geneva that runs the LHC, is also growing inexorably. At the moment it is doubling every two years. These data need to be stored. The need for mass storage is reviving a technology which, only a few years ago, seemed destined for the scrapheap: magnetic tape.
Tape is the oldest computer storage medium still in use. It was first put to work on a UNIVAC computer in 1951. But although tape sales have been falling since 2008 and dropped by 14% in 2012, according to the Santa Clara Consulting Group, tape’s decline has now gone into reverse: sales grew by 1% in the last quarter of 2012 and a 3% rise is expected this year.
The M-disc team has done digital civilization a real service by building a reliable digital archive medium that is cheap - M-discs are available online for just over $2 each in bulk - tough, and widely usable with current technology.
I've been scanning hundreds of family photos and am putting together archive discs of those and other documents for my family. Until the M-disc I wouldn't have bothered because there was no trustworthy media to put them on. Now I believe there is.
Is the M-disc technology perfect? No. Only about a dozen LG burners are certified to write M-discs, although other burners may be able to. Another catch: M-discs may not be readable by every DVD player. I didn't find it to be a problem with my Apple Superdrive or LG Blu-ray player, but Millenniata engineers noted that it could happen. But given the ubiquity of DVD and Blu-ray readers I don't think that is much of a problem: if one doesn't work, try another.
Megapixel cameras (like those from Arecont Vision in video below) are already at work around the world in large and small applications in every vertical market. Some examples include
Business Solutions Magazine (sub required)
The growing video feeds are also pushing new paths in storage and analytics as this article from the same issue details
Now that many organizations have experience with deploying and managing large numbers of cameras, Caswell says they are beginning to investigate how video data can be used for more than just forensic purposes (e.g. using video as evidence or for prosecution purposes). The next step in the evolution of surveillance systems includes using video to provide a realtime indication of what is happening. "This involves video analytics," Caswell says. "If you have a camera on a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) line at an airport, for example, you can predict that all of the pixels should be moving the same way. If you see pixels going the other way or in an unusual arrangement, you can analyze those and send alerts. You look at the aberrations."
A CEO gushing about his own product does not impress, but some of the figures tied to Dropbox’s growth do. Each day, Dropbox customers store 1 billion files. The company more or less has to help duplicate a digital version of the Library of Congress every day. By comparison, Twitter has about 140 million people issuing 500 million or so tweets on a daily basis. “But at Dropbox, it’s not 140-character snippets,” says Houston. “It’s your tax returns and your most important stuff.”
The video below goes into the impressive architecture that has allowed Dropbox to scale.
The vial on left is a book. Seriously.
“DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).
The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.
Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence—almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book.
In that form—a viscous liquid or solid salt—a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube and, under normal conditions, last for centuries, the researchers said”
WSJ thanks to Frank Scavo for spotting
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