Toshiba has announced a storage breakthrough that it will demonstrate today at a conference in San Diego. By using a technique called bit-pattern recording, the prototype to be shown boasts an areal density of 2.5Tb per square inch. That's about five times more than the company's existing products, meaning three-platter 10TB hard drives are entirely plausible, and Toshiba is working on doubling that density to 5Tb per square inch.
Today's drives have a uniform magnetic coating that makes up the recording surface and each bit of data is stored in hundreds of grains across the disk. Bit-pattern media is more efficient. It breaks that recording surface up into numerous magnetic "bits" consisting of a few magnetic grains. Each "bit" holds one bit of data and they are organized into rows. The gaps between those rows act as markers, allowing data to be located quickly. Toshiba expects the technology to appear in hard drives as early as 2013.
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Facebook enables location services called "Places"
Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook has annouced that it's brand new location service goes live tonight, dubbed "Facebook Places." The new service is similar to that of Foursquare, and allows users to check in, as well as geotag photos to a location.
Facebook says that the rollout begins tonight with the iPhone app, as well as the "Facebook Touch" website. Mark Zuckerberg says the service has three purposes: "[To] help you share where you are. Help you see who's around you. And see what's going on nearby."
The service will allow you to tag people in photos and status updates at the location, and allows you to check in people who might not have an advanced phone with GPS, so that friends are included. Once your friend tags you in, you click "Allow" on the normal Facebook Mobile website and it's as if you checked in yourself. The company also goes on to point out that you can only check your friends in with you when you arrive, and that you can't tag people if you aren't friends with them.
It seems that Facebook is trying to avoid the previous privacy fiasco's they've encountered, and have heavily emphasised the fact that the service will be friends-only from the very beginning, and you will be able to remove any checkin from your profile easily. In addition to this, the user is able to specify who can and can't see the checkins.
Third party applications will be able to utilise the technology, with the read-only API becoming available tomorrow, and the Write and Search API's in closed beta.
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