Your 32GB iPhone 3GS is pretty cool, but how does a 1TB iPhone grab you?  Well, it might not be as far-fetched as you think.

Researchers at North Carolina State University are working on a material that will significantly increase the capacity of memory chips, and have a prototype that can potentially hold fifty times more storage than current technology allows.

The new material relies on a process called selective doping, where an impurity is added to a material to change its properties.  In this case, nickel is added to magnesium oxide to form tiny clusters of nickel no more than 10 square nanometres in size.  This technique could allow for a storage density of 10 trillion bits per square inch, assuming that a 7 nanometre magnetic nanodot can store one bit of information.

The team at NC State has been working on the project for the last five years, and has recently overcome the problem it was having with aligning the nanodots using pulsed lasers.  “We need to be able to control the orientation of each nanodot,” said Professor Jagdish Narayan, a professor of materials science and engineering at NCSU, “because any information that you store in it has to be read quickly and exactly the same way.”

According to Professor Narayan the process would not be much more expensive than current methods, and that it could go into production in only a few years:  “We haven’t scaled up our prototype but we don’t think it should cost a lot more to do this commercially,” he said. “The key is to find someone to start on the large-scale manufacturing process.”

Source: Wired

Ebook readers have made reading fiction on bits of dead tree so very passé, but a decent reader might cost you a few hundred of your currency of choice, and not everyone has that kind of cash to spend.If you have an iPhone however, you might not need to shell out for a Kindle or the as-yet-mythical Apple Tablet, because the free app Stanza turns your phone into a capable – although not amazing – ebook reader.

Stanza’s interface is simplicity itself, being little more than a menu screen.  You library is just a tap of the screen away, and with just a couple more, you’re browsing the web in search of new titles.  There’s plenty of choice for you, and while you can buy new titles if you want, there’s also an enormous quantity of free books that have entered the public domain.

Being something of a cheapskate, I grabbed a couple of freebies – Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – and gave them quick read.  After I adjusted the font so that I was getting a bit more than three lines on the screen, reading the books on the iPhone was pretty good.

Stanza’s not going to take the place of a decent ebook reader, or even a real book, but if you just want something to read for a few minutes while waiting for a bus, or in a waiting room or something, you could do a lot worse.

Flightpattern from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.

Supa Electroboy by ~dawor on deviantART

Several large net-based US corporations have written a letter of support for the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality push.

Amongst the signatories to the letter are the chief executives of Google, EBay, Amazon, Sony Electronics and Facebook, adding their voices to the FCC’s opposition of the tiered internet structure proposed by some ISPs.

The letter makes the argument that an open internet allows sites to compete on content alone and reads:  “An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail.”

“This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest start-up to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity.”

ISPs and Telecommunications companies disagree with this assessment however, arguing that a tiered service is the only way that a reliable service can be assured for the future.

Obviosuly, as a company whose life blood is the internet, we’re vehemently against any form of preferential treatment for those with deeper pockets.  If the infrastructure of the net needs a little boost, as they seem to suggest it does, we’d rather they found some other way to fix it.

Source: BBC