geekosystem

In the interest of technology getting more intimidating the older you get, your future computer is going to be weird. Its processor will switch electrons between quantum states at blazing speeds, and the hard drive might well be biological, storing your family photos, music collection, and Diablo III saves on strands of DNA. A team at Harvard has come one step closer to making DNA storage a practical reality, encoding 11 JPEG images, a Javascript program, and a full book by team leader George Church on a segment of DNA.

At the moment, your hard drives are all painstakingly manufactured, a process which is highly centralized. That's why things like natural disasters can drive up hard drive prices for years. In the future, however, this might not be the case.  A breakthrough by researchers at University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology might lead to growable hard drives through the use of bacteria that eat iron and turn it into magnetite.

Just to remind you about how far we've come technologically, this is a 5 MB hard disc from 1956. It weighs over a ton. The hard disc was originally part of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer to feature a hard disc at all. Amazingly, it was not rendered obsolete until 1962 and stayed on the market until 1969. The cost of storing data on this monster was $3,200 per month, which is over $160,000 in today's dollars. Now, remember how you can get many times that storage space for free on DropBox.

Alex Yumashev passes along a funny story about a mysterious hard drive that someone brought into his Russian friend's computer repair shop. A customer brought in a broken 500 GB USB drive, purchased "in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price": What was especially odd about the drive is that it successfully stored some data, but 'forgot' all that had come before it: Try to save a movie file on the drive and it would only be able to play the last five minutes of the movie. Above, you can see what they found when they opened it up:

It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive. The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.

This is also apparently a pretty common type of scam on eBay, although usually not executed so cunningly. (Alex Yumashev via HN)