Technology

Toshiba will detail a breakthrough in data storage later Wednesday that it says paves the way for hard drives with vastly higher capacity than today.

The breakthrough has been made in the research of bit-patterned media, a magnetic storage technology that is being developed for future hard disk drives. In today's drives, magnetic material is spread across the surface of the disk and bits of data are stored across several hundred magnetic grains, but the technology is reaching its limit.

We are living in a geek's paradise. We are so spoiled by our gadgets and the Internet that we expect everything to be automated, digitized, and customized, not to mention responsive to the swipe of a finger.

Technology has rewired our brains, altered our expectations, and, frankly, turned us all into cranks. How do you know if this has happened to you? Look for the following 21 warning signs. You know you've been spoiled rotten by technology when....

There are many reasons people fall for each other: Personality, looks, humor -- sax-playing ability. But a new class of GPS-enabled smartphone apps is trying to bring dating back to the pure, data-driven basics.

Latitude and longitude. In this new era of app-driven love, location is most important.

Take, for example, the story of Scott Kutcher and Amanda Segal. They started dating in March when, during a Jay-Z concert at Madison Square Garden, Scott pulled out his iPhone, opened an app called Skout and scanned a list of near-by women.

E-mail and knowledge-management are just a couple of ways federal agencies are using cloud computing to create more efficiency in their IT environments.

Current and planned cloud deployments among agencies vary from a new online database from the Social Security Administration to answer U.S. citizens' frequently asked questions, to the migration of more than 15,000 e-mail boxes to the cloud at the General Services Administration (GSA).

As the technology industry prepares for the adoption of USB 3.0 (in anticipation of the increased speeds), Intel has been hard at work on technology that will be far faster. In fact, it is capable of transferring the entire printed catalog of material within the Library of Congress in only a minute and a half. The technology makes use of silicon and light to achieve this incredible feat.

Researchers at the University of Southern California have tipped our friend Graphene as the best material for electrodes in a new design for a flexible organic solar cell. The new design could lead to photovoltaics so flexible they could one day be made into fabric, the researchers say.

Researcher Gomez de Arco speculates: "They could be hung as curtains in homes or even made into fabric and be worn as power generating clothing. I can imagine people powering their cellular phone ... while jogging in the sun.”

The former leaders of IBM's Visual Communications Lab have been hard at work on a "summer project" -- desktop software that will display large amounts of information in a number of visual formats.

LG is making a huge bet on 3D laptops over the next year, predicting that sales of these new mobile computers will be boosted by 30 per cent in 2011. LG is one of the first brands to market with 3D notebooks, alongside other manufacturers such as Asus, Acer and Toshiba.

Spyrus announced it has received a U.S. patent and "Ctrix Ready" certification for a Windows Embedded Standard 2009-based security device it released earlier this year. The Secure Pocket Drive lets users access their data and browse the Internet safely via computers that would otherwise be untrustworthy, the company says.

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a connector that everybody needs. We use it every day for connecting printers, modems and speakers, but most importantly we all use it for USB memory keys, the replacement for the humble floppy disk. Every notebook on the market today sports one or more USB 2.0 ports, but the new kid on the block, USB3.0, is starting to show up but is it worth the price premium?