[H]ardNews 4th Edition - Storage Edition

Frankenstorage:

Imagine if you can a petabyte of data, one thousand terabytes, what would you possibly do with all that space? Well not that long ago people said that about terabytes didnt they? Cnet covers the opensource license Capricorn Technologies has released to build affordable and massive storage arrays.

In June, Capricorn shipped a petabyte worth of PetaBoxes to the Internet Archive. The petabyte system occupies about 16 racks and contains a few thousand hard drives. The Internet Archive submits all of its intellectual property to the open-source community. Since the storage system was designed on a commission from the organization, the organization owns the designs to the system and hence opened them to the public.

DVR Monster:

At the OpenTech Conference last weekend Promise TV impressed the crowd with a DVR that can record an entire week's worth of UK digital TV, Tivo on steroids and no preselections required. And you thought the story above couldn't possibly have any applications to you. Again Cnet covers the story.

To Doctorow, an editor of the popular culture blog BoingBoing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's European outreach coordinator, Promise TV has broken impressive new ground with its DVR, which it plans to unveil next month. "There wasn't a jaw in the room that wasn't scraping the floor during (the) demo," he said. "It was genuinely futuristic."

Fox Backs Blu-Ray:

Cnet reports that Twentieth Century Fox has thrown their weight behind the Blu-Ray format against HD DVD, joining Sony Pictures Entertainment and Disney. In the other corner we have Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures.

At stake are billions of dollars in royalties to owners of patents covering which technology comes to dominate the industry. Movie studio support is critical because consumer electronics makers plan to sell new DVD players this holiday season, and they need new DVDs for consumers to play.