Big data

Microsoft and Warner Bros. have crammed the 1978 movie Superman onto a silica glass slide the size of a drink coaster. This tough new medium is designed to last centuries, surviving punishment that would ruin film or magnetic drives.

To handle the number-crunching that Big Data will need in the future, hard drive read and write speeds need to keep up with capacity gains. To that end, Seagate has now unveiled Multi Actuator technology, which will allow two sets of data to be written or read from the same drive at the same time.

This latest instalment in our series looking at the impact of digital technologies on the art world focuses on the ways artists are taking the torrent of big data being produced and transforming it into works of art.

​Uber has aggregated over six years of trip data into a new website called Movement, which analyzes travel times and traffic across cities the ride-sharing company has been operating in.

IBM’s cognitive supercomputer Watson will be available to more end users than before, with an announcement today that puts Watson in the cloud. Through an API, application developers can access Watson’s skill at distilling big data into human meaning.

Almost 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within two decades according to a study that attempts to gauge the impact of computers on the job market. It isn't only manual labor jobs affected: The study reveals a trend of computers taking over cognitive tasks thanks to big data.

A breakthrough technology in optical disk density makes possible DVD-size platters that can each hold a thousand terabytes of information.