IBM's Racetrack memory

I like IBM for its old fashioned steady slogging ways. Not for it the glamorous proxy wars, wasting tons of money to buy dying assets. Let Microsoft waste its time and energy to buyout an indecisive Yahoo, forgetting its own enterprise software expertise and in the process ceding some precious market share as well.

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IBM has its priorities cut out - like new tech research. This is ultimate digital storage revolution. Imagine how expensive data storage used to be just a few short decades ago? In a few years, the volume of digital entertainment we'll carry in our pocket will start taxing our capability to consume it. But that's the promise of a new digital storage technology - "racetrack" memory - being developed by IBM. It uses the spin of electrons to store data in a system that's much faster, cheaper, consumes far less power and more reliable than today's flash memory. An iPod or similar device powered by racetrack memory would likely hold a half-million songs or 3,500 feature-length films, while holding charge for over a week.

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"The promise of racetrack memory -- for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket -- could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet," said Stuart Parkin, the IBM fellow who led the research. IBM says the technology should be out in about 10 years, so start assembling that monster media collection :-)

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IBM reveals its ugly underbelly

Back in 2006, IBM had responded to a lawsuit accusing it of withholding overtime (OT) of its employees by agreeing to pay them $65 million. Now it wants to make that up by shaving off 15% base pay of those employees.

It’s a constant outcry from clients that Indian IT outsourcing vendors charge very high margins even as IBM and others make do with far less. If this is how they do it, it’s pretty ugly.

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