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The disk drive celebrates its 50th birthday

the first disk drives 50th birthdayThe disk drive celebrates its 50th birthday today. There has been a lot of progress since then, adding many, many GB's to its capacity, and shrinking it to a nice palm-sized design.

The first disk drive built by IBM, in what is now known as Silicon Valley, known as the RAMAC held 5 megabytes of data on 50 disks. The 24-inch diameter of the 305 RAMAC computer made this machine a little hard to move around when it was released on September 13th 1956. Compare that to the 1-inch micro-drives that hold 8GB's of data and fit in your shirt pocket. IBM recently took some time to look back at the technology they grew by watching an old black and white film of the first spinning disk getting a coat of magnetic slurry.

IBM's current research projects include flash memory, power and cooling, virtualization, and long term 100 year plus storage, and storage management's software.

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Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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