Scientists working scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California have
developed a chip which can pack data at densities thousands of times greater than current technology. The chips use a "crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube". These chips can store a trillion bits of data per square inch and, due to the nanotubes' thermodynamic stability, can retain the data for a billion years. Now that's what you call persistent.
Apparently the technology could be on the market within the next two years. All
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Over on O'Reilly Timothy M. O'Brien reports on
the launch of Sun's Java App Store at their JavaOne conference. It seems the store will work
1 on the same principle as the iPhone App Store: Java developers upload their apps so that other people can download and pay for them. It's Sourceforge with a cash register. Only it's still in Beta and they haven't decided yet how best to actually collect the money. I can't help feeling that this is emblematic of Sun's general failure to monetize Java for themselves.
As O'Brien describes it the launch seems a maudlin affair,
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The
Oracle-Sun bandwagon rolls on and there are still more questions than answers. The Guardian
asks some of them: Will Oracle kill MySQL? Will it continue Sun's drive towards open source? Can Oracle cope with being a hardware company? Why is Larry still so driven?
Elsewhere Business Week
asks a similar set of questions plus some sharper ones for the individuals involved: How many Sun workers will lose their jobs? Is a culture clash coming? Or, as the Guardian's
Jack Schofield observes, Sun's customers may feel they have "gone from My Little Pony to Ming the Merciless".
Schofield
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There had been rumours but it is still a
surprising development. What does Oracle get for $7.9bn (a billion more than IBM was prepared to pay)?
1 Surely stomping on MySQL can't be worth that much? Certainly Oracle already has enough web servers in its portfolio without taking on
JBossGlassfish too. Perhaps what Larry really has bought is just the ultimate payback for all those cracks about Armani suits from Scott McNealy at OpenWorlds over the years.
More seriously, Oracle has staked a lot of its future on Applications. So having control of Java, the language of Fusion,
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From time to time radio programmes and newspapers come round to discussing the most important post-war English language novelist. To my mind there is only one candidate. Ballard was one of that select band of writers whose world view is so singular that it has become an adjective. We can describe a motorway flyover, shopping mall or stretch of industrial wasteland as
Ballardian and instinctively expect our audience to know what we mean.
Ballard was attracted to these alienating structures not because he hated people, precisely the opposite. Ballard was a very sociable man who loved life. What Ballard disliked
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