• Printing at about 100,000 dots per inch in full color has been achieved by researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. As a proof of principle, a test image of Lenna was formed on a silicon wafer covered with a nanoscale metal coating. [url]
• Amazon is starting to offer archival storage for just $0.01 per gigabyte per month. This Glacier storage service is aimed at replacing old tape archives and geographically distinct facilities, but retrieving the data isn't so convenient: data retrieval requests can take hours (hence the name Glacier) and there's also a retrieval fee after you've accessed more than 5% of your data vault in a month. [url]
• Geneticists in Boston have stored a 5.27-megabit book (containing 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program) on DNA. This is the highest density of non-biological data ever encoded by DNA, and a gram of material could store 455 exabytes of data. [url]

• Digitally-stored information about nuclear waste needs to be accessible many thousands of years from now. Engraving the info on sapphire discs with platinum is just one proposed solution that could work for future archaeologists -- but in what language should it be written? [url]
• If you thought your burned CDs/DVDs lasted forever, think again. But if you still want to store your data on plastic discs, there's a company (Millenniata) that sells an optical disc engraving technology for writing CDs/DVDs that work with standard CD/DVD readers -- and that claims to last for about 1,000 years (or at least hundreds of years). [url]
• Neanderthals were making cave paintings over 40,800 years ago in Spain. How much of our art will survive the next 40,000 years? [url]

No justification for such a huge jump was offered, but since one of the constituent members of ZPÜ is the German music collection society GEMA, which seems to have an unlimited sense of entitlement when it comes to demanding money from the public, that's hardly a surprise.

In particular, no rationale is given for including memory cards, which are used almost exclusively in cameras to record content produced by end-users -- so the idea that the levy is somehow justified as a way of compensating creators for revenue supposedly "lost" by piracy is manifestly absurd.

Basically, this outdated and insulting approach treats all Germans using digital storage as if they were pirates. Of course, arbitrarily imposing 2000% tax hikes on storage is probably the quickest way to turn them into something much more dangerous to GEMA and its friends: ardent supporters of the German Pirate Party....

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To see why, consider that the IBM PC XT had a 10 Mbyte hard drive when it was launched in 1983, which meant you couldn't even fit a single song on it. Similarly, the first widely-used modem, the 1981 Hayes Smartmodem, had a maximum speed of 300 baud: to transfer a digitized song using a dial-up connection would have taken around 500 hours.

With those kind of figures, it's easy to see why the recording industry underestimated the threat that file sharing would become once the Internet arrived: based on the past, it was almost inconceivable that people would ever swap music between computers. Of course, once that did start to happen, and the shape of the future became obvious to many, the industry nonetheless wilfully ignored the facts and the trends at every turn, when instead it should have taken the lead in re-inventing media for the Internet age.

That woeful history of refusing to accept the implications of rapidly-advancing technologies makes this prediction, found via Slashdot, even more fateful:

Technologies that will make it possible to expand disk density include heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which Seagate patented in 2006. Seagate has already said it will be able to produce a 60TB 3.5-in. hard drive by 2016.

Obviously, few people will choose to do that, but storing your favorite million songs will not only be realistic, it will be cheap -- and even portable. Provided the transfer rate to and from such disks also keeps up with the growth in capacities -- an indispensable technological requirement, otherwise they become impossible to use -- this means that people will be able to move around huge collections of music, without ever touching an Internet connection. That makes all those three-strikes plans moot, since you won't actually need your broadband line in order to swap files with friends. You'll just plug in your portable hard drives to a common computer and exchange stuff directly (as probably already happens with today's terabyte-sized portable disks.)

In an ideal world, we would also see a kind of constant scaling of the intelligence of the recording industry, such that by 2016 it would finally accept that trying to stop sharing -- whether online or off -- is simply pointless. Somehow, though, I think we'll just have to make do with the other variants of Moore's Law.

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When it comes to the future of music I've always consider myself an optimist.

For one I'm certain that musicians and music fans have a prosperous future ahead of them. That's because music is the single most important ingredient in the music business soup and music is of course a result of artists' creative minds. And it's when musicians interact with listeners that a window for business is opening. Not before, and not just because some A&R person, marketeer or CEO open their wallet. That the relationship between musicians and fans is the foundation to the business is the single most important piece of knowledge that we all have to submissively recognize. This is the key to the future for the middle men we call record labels – we have to encourage the interaction and realize that it will live without us.

We as middle men have to remember that we always need to convince our customers (musicians and fans) why they should engage with us. Music on plastic discs or plain mp3s just ain't enough anymore. Competition is hard and consumers don't take bullshit anymore. If they love something you don't offer, they'll go create it themselves.

In five years a hard drive available to ordinary consumers will carry 35 TB of data. Data = music. 35 TB = 2.5 million songs. Watch this development closely. It's easy to get blinded by Spotify, but imagine when file sharing on the street means transferring the entire music history. At least it is a wild card. Anyhow it seems that we will have to work on better ways of charging for music than 1 dollar a song. Don't you think?

What's really interesting about this is that browsers are starting to resemble operating systems in their own right. One of the most fundamental features of operating systems is to provide a consistent interface for data storage. OS developers call it a file system, rather than "local storage," but the concept is the same. And as websites come to increasingly resemble full-blown operating systems, I think browser vendors are increasingly going to have to solve the same kinds of problems that operating system vendors do.

For example, it has become increasingly common for my browser to slow to a crawl because one poorly-written, JavaScript-heavy website is sucking up all the CPU. Just as operating systems have preemptive multitasking to prevent one application from bringing the whole system to a crawl, browsers should have mechanisms to prevent one misbehaving website from bringing my browser grinding to a halt. Safari has an extremely primitive version of this - I'll sometimes get a dialog box informing me that a particular website's Javascript is creating problems and asking if I want to stop it - but there's a lot of room for improvement. The browser should automatically limit the amount of CPU one website can use when others are waiting. And I should be able to call up a "task manager" that shows me all the websites I've got open and gives their CPU and memory usage. When websites begin to resemble full-fledged applications, browsers are going to start behaving like full-fledged operating systems.

In a sense, this is the belated fulfillment of Netscape's "middleware" strategy to make the web browser the new operating system. As detailed in the Microsoft antitrust saga, Netscape's hope (and Microsoft's fear) was that the browser would supplant the operating system as the default platform for user applications. That's now starting to happen, although it didn't happen fast enough to save Netscape.