How should we judge a government?

In Malaysia, if you don't watch television or read newspapers, you are uninformed; but if you do, you are misinformed!

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience - Mark Twain

Why we should be against censorship in a court of law: Publicity is the very soul of justice … it keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. - Jeremy Bentham

"Our government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no
responsibility at the other. " - Ronald Reagan

Government fed by the people

Government fed by the people

Career options

Career options
I suggest government... because nobody has ever been caught.

Corruption so prevalent it affects English language?

Corruption so prevalent it affects English language?
Corruption is so prevalent it affects English language?

When there's too much dirt...

When there's too much dirt...
We need better tools... to cover up mega corruptions.

Prevent bullying now!

Prevent bullying now!
If you're not going to speak up, how is the world supposed to know you exist? “Orang boleh pandai setinggi langit, tapi selama ia tidak menulis, ia akan hilang di dalam masyarakat dan dari sejarah.” - Ananta Prameodya Toer (Your intellect may soar to the sky but if you do not write, you will be lost from society and to history.)

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The next frontier in hard drive technology?

As a comparison in terms of size: this is a picture of an ant carrying a micro-chip:
(For the record, I find the picture funny when I read the Malay Mail headline in Mycen: 'Four held over Rm2.7 million chip heist'!)

This is what my friend forwarded, excerpts from a report by Matthew Humphries:

The quest to squeeze more and more data into ever smaller spaces continues, but current materials and techniques have their limits. One day in the not too distant future we will reach the limits of current hard drive technology.

So where do we look for the next storage breakthrough? If you ask researchers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong they’d say we need to look for a living solution, more specifically bacteria. In fact, they’ve already achieved it, managing to store 90GB of data in 1 gram of cells.

The team has developed a massively parallel bacterial storage system that also achieves data encryption through DNA shuffling. An encoding system takes the original data, turns it into a quaternary number, and then encodes it as a DNA sequence. Encryption is achieved through DNA sequence shuffling. That process also involves compressing the data to allow for more storage within the same sequence.


As an example of what can be achieved, the team managed to get the 8,074 character Declaration of Independence stored in 18 cells of bacteria. The 90GB claim comes from the fact that 1 gram of cells consists of 10 million cells showing you the potential for huge storage capabilities in hardly any space or weight.

Testing is ongoing, but the team has already proven they can convert data and store it as DNA and then get the data back out without any loss of information. They also believe any data can be stored using this method including text, images, music, and video.

The next step is to start inserting bar codes into synthetic organisms as a way of distinguishing synthetic and natural organisms from each other.

Matthew’s Opinion

Although the PDF presentation goes over the details of what is being done here, there’s little information on how reliable and long term a data store like this is. How quickly do the cells breakdown? What happens if there’s a mutation? In order for this to work as a storage solution such questions need to be answered and the cells controlled.

If living cells do become a viable storage method, then there are a number of clear advantages over current systems. The first is the potential for massive gains in storage in the equivalent space of today’s hard drives. If you can get 90GB in a gram, and this scales easily, we don’t need to worry about increasing storage in the future. It will become a matter of weight rather than how much data we can cram into the same space.

Other advantages include bacteria being more resilient to drops and bumps, as well as not being rigid meaning we could have storage devices of all different shapes and sizes.

This is an exciting development, but one that needs a lot more R&D time before anyone takes it seriously.

(One day, we might find the expression, 'One man's bacteria is another man's backup'!)

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