Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Oct 22, 2018

choi

(1) Bruce Einhorn and Doug Lyu, Space: China's Final Frontier.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... musk-and-jeff-bezos

Quote:

"The [Chinese space] startups are receiving funding from China-based venture capitalists and private equity investors trying to tap into an $8 billion national space budget—second only to the U.S., according to the Space Foundation in Colorado Springs.

"The number of satellites in space increased 50 percent from 2013 to 2017, to 1,738, according to the Satellite Industry Association.

"One lucrative payload for the Chinese could be miniature satellites * * *

"Several mainland companies have succeeded with suborbital launches and are vying to be the first in China to place satellites into orbit around the Earth. Founded in 2015, Landspace had raised 500 million yuan ($72 million) from local investors by April 2018 and employs 170 rocketeers and other engineers, almost all veterans of the national space program, Zhang ['Changwu 张昌武 (a banker formerly with HSBC and Spain's Banco Santander (based in City of Santander, hence the bank name)), chief executive officer of Beijing-based Landspace Technology Corp 北京蓝箭空间科技有限公司（蓝箭航天; 2015- ）] says.

"Xi [Jinping] opened the space market to private-sector investment in 2014 to help China's technology sector shift focus from commodity smartphones and televisions to sophisticated semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and reusable rockets.

"Another startup, Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Co[, Ltd] 星际荣耀_北京星际荣耀空间科技有限公司, in September sent three test satellites into space aboard a solid-fuel rocket. The company, founded in 2016 and also known as i-Space, has raised 600 million yuan from investors such as Shunwei Capital 顺为资本, whose chairman, Lei Jun, is co-founder of smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp.

"One Space Technology Co in Beijing 北京零壹空间科技有限公司, which has raised about 800 million yuan since its founding in 2015, has launched two suborbital rockets this year

"Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting 軌道門戶諮詢有限責任公司 in Hong Kong, says most Chinese rocketeers have a long way to go because their rockets aren't reusable and can't handle heavier payloads.

My comment:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: It's building a commercial industry focused on sending small payloads into orbit
(ii) Print and the online versions are the same.
(b) The article is about civilian, rather than government's, development of space technology in China. I do not recommend reading the article (but do view the bar chart whose heading is "Orbital launch attempts, 2017" for space powers), because China does not have civilian development, and funding it has received (hundred of millions in dollars in total so far) are a pittance (Jeff Bezos annually gives his personal wealth of $1 billion to Blue Origin).

choi

(2) Susan Decker, This Is the Backup Cloud.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... ds-on-magnetic-tape

Quote:

"the cloud's backup plan: untold hundreds of millions of magnetic tapes. * * * data management at Iron Mountain Inc, which has stored more than 85 million inch-thick, four-and-a-half-inch square tapes across a worldwide network of roughly 210 warehouses and old mines.

"the century-old technology * * * magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data [to hard drives] * * * {Digital data] collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created.

"Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two—Sony Corp. and Fujifilm Holdings Corp.—and each seems to think that’s still one too many.  [Though] The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned

"Magnetic tape for recording was first developed in the 1920s in Germany’s Weimar Republic. * * * Tapes stored at a temperature in the 50F range can last as long as 30 years, far longer than disks, and upgrades developed by the old-line storage makers have increased their capacity exponentially, from 100 gigabytes (100 billion bytes) in 1997 to as much as 30 terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) in the new standard released last year.  A physical form disconnected from the internet also provides relative safety from hackers.

"IBM's [Mark] Lantz[, manager for advanced tape technologies at IBM Research Zurich,] says he's always searching for better storage technologies, with little to show for it so far. [not] Optical storage[, not DNA]

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: A brutal legal battle between Sony and FujiFilm has IBM, HPE, and others worried about magnetic tapes supply and cost
(ii) Print and the online versions are identical.
(b) Iron Mountain (company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company)
(Headquarters Boston; section 1 History)
(c) Magnetic tapes, by "recording a magnetic signal on a conductive medium[,] was first thought of by American Oberlin Smith in 1888 [which was published in British journal Electrical World] * * * In 1928 Fritz Pfleumer developed, and in 1929 patented a magnetic recording tape using oxide bonded to a strip of paper or film."  from Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW).