Day: February 26, 2007

InPhase’s Holographic Storage Ships

InPhase has apparently finally shipped its long-promised holographic storage technology. InPhase’s holographic drives can store 300gb on a single DVD-sized disc. Of course that disc will cost you $180 just for the media (300gb worth of DVD+-R runs less than about $25 these days). Unfortunately, this is likely to remain a niche product for the forseeable future so the price is not likely to drop sharply anytime soon.

Will Amount of Data Worldwide Double Every 11 Hours?

IBM has an interesting report (PDF) claiming that by 2010 the amount of data in the world may double every 11 hours.

How is that possible? The thing is that every so often some new processor or hard drive is released and some idiot like John Dvorak comes along and says, “no one will ever really need a processor this fast or a hard drive that large.”

What the idiots miss is that ever larger hard drives and faster processors change what can be measured and captured. As the IBM paper notes, whereas once an aerospace company might have been happy with a simulation that generated megabytes of data, once it becomes affordable to do so the same company will quickly move to more sophisticated methods that generate terabytes of data.

And this effects even non-scientific areas according to the IBM report,

Typical of the data challenge facing the financial services industry is
the practice of quantitative analysis – mathematical modelling of how
a particular security, a complex trade, or an entire market will behave
in the future. A key input is the historic price of an asset, and it is not
uncommon to use 20 years’ worth of such information. Originally the
analysts looked at daily data sets – opening and closing prices plus daily
volumes – running to several gigabytes in size. Now they need to work
with the price and volume for each and every trade of a particular stock
over a number of years, and the data sets have reached the terabytes.

Another recent report claim that 11 percent of Americans have more than 10,000 digital photos. Digital photography is a great example of the way that technology moves the chains. I remember the days when I would visit my in-laws over Christmas and be happy to bring 10 rolls of 36-shot film for an entire week. This past Christmas holiday, I was taking that many pictures per day.

Once upon a time, I was amazed that I could buy a 250mb hard drive. Today, I have about 20 terabytes worth of personal data archived on DVDs in my basement, with that increasing about 1 terabyte a month.

The IBM report, however, veers off into considering this acceleration of data collection to be a negative thing, portraying organizations that are already drowning in excess data (and the difficult decision of which data to retain, especially in light of legal requirements for data retention). And, not surprisingly, for a price IBM has the solution in the form of what it calls “information lifecycle management” (lifecycles? Like Tron?)

That part seemed to be overblown and almost pure marketing bullshit. Yes, the amount of data collected is increasing exponentially, but so is the hardware and software solutions to deal with such increasingly large volumes of data. IBM almost entirely ignores the possibility that more refined and larger data sets combined with more sophisticated ways of looking at that data may result in process and other improvements that outweigh the collection and storage costs.

Call of Cthulhu Movie

I finally got around to watching the Howard Philip Lovecraft Society’s filmed version of Call of Cthulhu and I was blown away — I immediately watched it again just for good measure.

On its website for the film, the HPLHS says,

Using the “Mythoscope” process — a mix of modern and vintage techniques, the HPLHS has worked to create the most authentic and faithful screen adaptation of a Lovecraft story yet attempted.

I’d say they succeeded far beyond what I had imagined was possible with HPL’s stories. They did a stellar job of capturing the general weirdness of HPL (which is quite a compliment given that must attempts to adapt HPL are pretty much unwatchable).

The HPLHS web site notes their in pre-production on The Whisperer In Darkness. Hopefully there will be a long string of similar adaptations.

The Joyce Hatto Scandal

By now the scandal surrounding the late English pianist Joyce Hatto is all over the net, but the fascinating thing to me is not the role that technology played in exposing the Hatto hoax but rather the obscurantist fetish of so many music critics.

Hatto died in June 2006, and had been heralded by many critics, including those at Gramophone. Part of the appeal of Hatto for critics was that her recordings were so hard to obtain; released on a very small label, finding Hatto’s CDs was apparently fairly difficult. If you enjoyed Hatto, you were by definition in a small elite who had actually been able to find one of her CDs. As Gramophone noted in its mea culpa article,

To love Hatto recordings was to be in the know, a true piano aficionado who didn’t need the hype of a major label’s marketing spend to recognise a good, a great, thing when they heard it.

Of course it turns out that the reason Hatto was so accomplished on such a diverse body of work was that very few, if any, of the recordings sold under her name were actually her music. Rather, they were other people’s performances with occasional small tricks like slight compression of the music to try to fool those who might compare the Hatto recording with the original.

The hoax was finally undone when a Gramophone critic went to play CD of Hatto playing Liszt and noticed that his computer’s music player identified it as another pianists recording of Liszt. The critic then compared the two and noticed that Hatto’s recording was identical to the other artists, and soon it became apparent that pretty much everything recorded under Hatto’s name was, in fact, someone else’s music.

Yeah, thank goodness those critics don’t fall for the lame hype of record companies.