Endless Shuffle
Posted by TestOut Staff on
There's an informal rule of thumb in the microchip realm of information technology known as Moore's Law. First proposed by tech trailblazer Gordon Moore, cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Moore's Law initially suggested, in 1965, that the advance of human knowledge would double the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit every year. In 1975, Moore revised his standard to every two years.
In recent years, observers have judged that the clock may be running out on Moore's Law as it becomes physically impossible that transistors can continue to be made smaller than before and still function properly. There are other frontiers, however, of getting more (or Moore?) from less, as noted in a report from the University of Alberta that appeared last week in the research digest ScienceDaily.
The new frontier of condensation (not the moisture kind), it would seem, is increasing the capacity of data storage media. Along those lines, the University of Alberta guys have created a solid-state memory module so dense that it has the capacity to store the entire iTunes library — 45 million songs, if you can believe that — on a device the size of a quarter.
That's a lot of music: Assuming an average song length of 3.5 minutes, or 210 seconds, you could listen on shuffle for 157,500,000 minutes without repeating a song. That's 2,625,000 hours, which is equivalent to 109,375 days, or almost 300 years. We can't even recycle the famous Roy-Scheider-from-Jaws reference, because that's the whole point: We're actually not going to need a bigger iPod.
Someday soon, it might even be possible to store TestOut Continuing Education's entire Library Suite of IT training courses on a data drive the size of a gumball. The cool thing about that, however, is that users don't even need a gumball-sized device. We store everything for you, and you can log on any time and pick up right where you left off. We already offer around-the-clock convenience and portability.
Not only that, but you can get your hands on all of that IT training goodness for one low price: just $79 per month. That's tough to beat whether you're a corporation that needs to train 600 new hires, or just a guy (or gal) contemplating a career switch and looking for a way to bring yourself up to speed on the skills and knowledge needed to make the leap. Check us out! You'll like what we have to offer.