January 04, 2007
A Solid State of Being
SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive.
The article comments how solid-state memory is faster and possibly more durable than regular disk drives, including a link to an interesting story about a science project that successfully recovers data from some SD cards after a potentially disasterous crash.
I have certainly noticed how many flash cards have entered my life over the last two years. Between our three digital cameras and various USB keys, I must have 20 or so flash drives. In fact, every time I go to Seoul, I make it a point to pick up a few more 2GB USB keys.
On the downside, a 32GB hard drive is very limiting. My fricken IPod is 60GB. I'm not sure who's in the market for a laptop with 32GB storage, I don't care how lightweight it is...but of course hope is on the way. There are industrial flash devices that have capacities in excess of 256GB.
So the obvious question is, when can I get USB ports installed in the back of my head? :)
Posted by SunSword at 01:29 PM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
See what all this extra time has done to me?
I was sifting through the blogosphere, having dropped Blog Bridge as my RSS aggregator of choice, and instead giving Google's new Reader a trial run, I came across this gorgeous beast:
It was linked from Bad Astronomy's top 10 images of the year.
If you're up for the download, you should really checkout the hi-res images from the Original Article.
The top 10 images article has a few duds in it, but overall worth reading and checking out why the author feels they're all top 10 worthy.
Posted by SunSword at 03:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2004
A new human species is discovered...
From the New York Times
Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.Strangest of all, this is no fable. Skeletons of these miniature people have been excavated from a limestone cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali, by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists. Reporting their find in today's issue of Nature, they assign the people to a new human species, Homo floresiensis.
The new finding is "among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology for half a century," say two anthropologists not associated with the study, Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge, in a written commentary in the same issue.
The little Floresians lived on the island until at least 13,000 years ago, and possibly to historic times. But they were not a pygmy form of modern humans. They were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe, who disappeared 33,000 years ago. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people, survived far longer into recent times than was previously supposed.
Been a while since I've come across natural science news worth sharing (maybe I'm not paying attention anymore?).
Posted by SunSword at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)