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New Technology Boosts Hard Drive Capacity – Yahoo! News:
Since the first hard drive was introduced 1956, bits have been arranged in a flat, horizontal fashion on the spinning platters. To boost capacity, engineers reduced the size of the particles whose magnetic state is what actually remembers data.
But with some drives now topping out at 500 gigabytes, the miniaturization is nearly at its limit. Made any smaller, the particles can begin to interfere with the magnetism of their neighbors. The result is disastrous for data.
By storing bits in a vertical, or perpendicular, arrangement, engineers are able to boost capacity by taking advantage of the real estate that is freed up.

Chinese Tattoos are all the craze for some “exotic” reason. Pity those getting them are clueless, or the “artists” are sadistic pranksters, or both.

Pictured to the right is a Chinese idiom (in a lovely font) that might be transliterated as “spilled water difficult collect” (Pronunciation: fu shui nan shou) that would be better translated as No use crying over spilled milk, meaning what’s done is done and cannot be undone, an appropriate sentiment for a tattoo. If you saw a Chinese tough in Hong Kong with “spilled water difficult collect” (in English) on his arm, you might understand the meaning, but it would definitely seem odd. Countless examples of mangled English can be found on products and in advertising in the Far East. (e.g. All your base are belong to us.) Sometimes this is the result of non-native speakers transliterating phrases into English. More often, the English is created by non-native English speakers for non-native English speakers. In this case, the actual meaning of the English to an English speaker is not at all important. Instead, English is used by marketing departments to sell products to a population that probably speaks a little English, but not much. Simple words that convey broad concepts, like “friend” or “love,” are more important than proper English. And English is chosen because it is hip, cool and foreign. Sound familiar?

iTunes Signature Maker:

iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.

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Why?

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTSM to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words.

iTSM selects a small number of your “favorite” tracks based on some simple selection criteria, such as the number of times you have played them or the rating you have assigned them. Then it analyzes the audio content of these files, combining a small bit of each of them to create the signature.