Weekly Tech Links

Here's a quick round up of some of last weeks tech news.

Storage:
Samsung announced they'll be making their 32 GB flash hard drive available to consumers (Link). These drives consume only 5% of the power used by traditional hard disks. While these will be super expensive early on, the future looks good for laptop battery life.

PS3:
The Game Developers Conference went down in San Diego, where Sony released a lot of information regarding the PS3 during their key-note presentation (Link). First, they're planning on a "world-wide" launch in November of this year. Also they spent time outlining their online "Playstation Network Platform" which will offer a lot of x-box live functionality such as voice chat, video chat, email, micro-payments, general web-browsing, and downloadable content including old PS1 games (probably movies and music as well). They also threw out a vague statement... "it will run linux". Who knows, maybe the home-brew software community and or china will end up designing weapons-systems with the new cell processor. (note: I think the PS2 was banned from china for a while cause it got labeled as a "dual-use" technology).

Networking:
Finally a group of German and Japanese scientists freaked and tweaked their fiber optic network to crush the previous record for transmitting data (Link). They maxed out their speed at 2.56 terabits per second over 100miles. That's equivalent to downloading 60 DVDs in the blink of an eye. Imagine opening up kaza/limewire/generic file-sharing app and downloading every Soprano's box set or every movie you missed in the last two years... crazy.