From CNET News…

Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.

The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.

The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007. The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off hybrid hard drives, as well.

A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000 trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information, according to the report.

From Technology Review…

A few seconds of undersea quaking was all it took to cause massive telecommunications disruptions throughout tech-savvy Asia, where Internet services have been snapped or slowed, phone lines disabled and financial transactions crippled.

Analysts said the service disruption–caused by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday’s earthquake in Taiwan–highlights how crucial the cable and Internet infrastructure has become to the modern world.

A decade ago, telephones and faxes were essential to businesses and governments. Now, telephone lines often take second place, piggybacking on networks set up for Internet or mobile communication.

”Governments now recognize these industries as fundamental infrastructure, equal to electricity, water, sewage, roads,” said Markus Buchhorn, an information technology expert at Australian National University. ”So if you do have a major breakdown, people will move heaven and earth to fix it.”

Telecom companies scrambled to reroute connections after the break in the undersea cables. A Taiwanese officials said nearly all of Asia’s Internet service and 80 percent of its phone service was to be restored by noon (0400 GMT) Thursday.

In Hong Kong, a government statement said Thursday it would take at least five days to partially repair the damage to two undersea cables. A Hong Kong telecommunications official said all seven major cables serving the Chinese territory were affected, some severely.

In the meantime, telecommunications remained slow–and in some areas nonexistent–in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea.In Seoul, banks reported a slowdown in foreign exchange trading. Hong Kong’s Internet data capacity was reduced by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, some customers in China completely lost Internet access. Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and the Philippines reported slowdowns or access difficulties, mainly to foreign Web sites, including search engines and some e-mail programs. Thailand reported a disruption in international phone service.”

I haven’t experienced anything like this before,” said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities, one of many Hong Kong financial firms that were forced to conduct business by telephone on Wednesday.

”We’ve become too dependent on these optic fibers–a few of them get damaged, and everything collapses. Many lost the opportunity to make fast money.”

From today’s New York Times…

The controllers communicate with the Wii console, a $250 box no larger than a child’s lunchbox, with the wireless technology known as Bluetooth. It is the means commonly used to link cellphones with their wireless headsets. The Wii remote also uses infrared, the same technology that links television sets with their remote controllers, to track where the controller is pointed.

In this case, a sort of crude camera — an image sensor — in the forward tip of the remote (the primary controller) detects tiny light-emitting diodes in a “sensor bar” that must be set on or very near a television plugged into the Wii. This system helps players use the remote to point accurately at specific things on the screen, like the virtual buttons to begin or end a game, or aim a weapon in a game.

Actions like pressing the buttons on screen or firing a weapon are conveyed between Bluetooth chips in the remote and in the console. The remote also contains a rumble pack, a component that vibrates to varying intensities based on information the console draws from the game’s programming and then passes to the controller.

But the controller’s most-talked-about feature is the capacity to track its own relative motion. This enables players to do things like steer a car by twisting the remote in the air or moving a game character by tilting the remote down or up.“

This represents a fabulous example of the consumerization of MEMS,” the tiny devices known as micro-electro-mechanical systems, said Benedetto Vigna, general manager of the MEMS unit at STMicroelectronics, a leading maker of the accelerometers embedded in the controllers. (Nintendo itself declined to talk about the controllers’ inner workings.)

He said the motion sensors, using the technology that activates vehicle air bags, can accurately sense three axes of acceleration: up and down, left to right, and forward and backward.

This is mostly achieved within the MEMS, micron-size machines that depend on submicroscopic structures carved into the silicon. For example, one structure moves like a tiny diving board, stimulated by the actions of the game players.

The structures are enveloped in an electrical field, Mr. Vigna said. When the MEMS elements are moved, the electrical field changes and the MEMS chip is sensitive enough to detect the changes. These accelerometers are so sensitive, Mr. Vigna said, because electrons — those subatomic particles that whirl around the nucleus of atoms like a video game in the making — can sense the subtle atomic-level movement of the silicon structures.

What’s amazing about the Will controller, is the elegance with which all this complicated stuff has been implemented and packaged. No wonder people are queueing up to buy it.