John Fox from Hitachi Storage kicked off his presentation here by contrasting the price of storage when hard drives first appeared with the costs now.

The first hard drive in 1956 was the IBM 305 RAMAC, and cost $10,000 per MB – it had a capacity of 5MB.

But now the cost, Fox said, is something under 10 cents per MB and that he said, is a retail figure, including tax.

He said that the 3.5-inch drive factor is decreasing, and the real growth is in the 2.5-inch notebook. The car and the handheld consumer electronic markets are the additional spice, he said, that will help grow the market. Automotive vendors are adding hard drives and flat panel screens into the car.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This latest Vaio from Sony is, without a shadow of a doubt, the coolest notebook computer ever. It's that simple. This is the kind of product that just stops people in their tracks when they see it. Pull this out of your bag in an aiport departure lounge, and your fellow passengers will turn green with envy, and shamefully hide their own big and heavy notebooks under the nearest chair, writes Riyad Emeran.

At it's shallowest point the X505VP is only 1.1cm high when closed, while at the other end it's still a svelte 2.1cm high. But it's not just the height that's impressive, the full dimensions are 25.6 x 20.8 x 1.1-2.1cm and the weight is an unbelievable 822g. In reality, the Vaio X505VP is smaller and lighter than, well, than a notebook. And when I say notebook I mean a pad with pages of paper in it. I never thought it would be possible, but you can now carry a notebook computer around with you that is actually more convenient than a pad of paper and a pen. Of course the pad of paper won't run out of battery power, but you'd be hard pushed to pick up your emails with it.

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.

Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content producers to lock down media files with biometric security. This week Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and MPAA.

iVue has been developed in partnership with Swedish design house Thinking Materials. Since Veritouch already supplies security authentication systems up to Homeland Defense standards (in partnership with an Israeli defense contractor), we do forsee exciting synergies ahead, should budget cuts force the War on Terror and the War on Piracy to be consolidated into just the one unwinnable "war".

A paper disc that can hold up to five times more data than current DVDs has been developed by Sony and another Japanese company.

The disc is 51% paper and could offer foolproof security, said officials.

"Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc," said Hideaki Kawai of Toppan, which worked with Sony.

According to Sony, researchers were able to make a paper disc as Blu-ray technology does not require laser light to travel through a key layer of a disc called the substrate.

Both Sony and Toppan said they were looking at practical uses for the paper discs, but that no decision had been made on when they would be in the shops.

Hardware costs will fall sharply within a decade to the point where widespread computing with speech and handwriting won't be limited by expensive technology, Bill Gates said Monday.

"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Microsoft's chairman said.

The world's largest software maker is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for computers to interact with people using speech and that computers which can recognize handwriting will become as ubiquitous as Microsoft's Windows operating system, which runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.

Gates also said advances in programming will allow software developers to create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programing code.

Envy News has picked up on a meowing sound that is a characteristic feature of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 hard drive.

According to Hitachi, the meowing sound is the result of a relatively new feature which verifies the performance and reliability of the drive. But up to this time, the drive manufacturer has not been able to suppress the noise.

There is a thread on this issue, and one drive owner has provided a sound link of the meowing. The noise apparently repeats itself about once every ten minutes, or six times every hour. One drive owner finds the sound "totally horrible", and has asked for a fix from Hitachi to remove it. Others are clearly intolerant of it.

"All of our 7K250 drives, as well as any future product releases will have this feature. At this time, there is no way to disable it. Anti-vibration materials will not eliminate the noise, but it may help to minimize actually hearing the noise."