People often wonder where new ideas come from. It has been my experience that new ideas come from everywhere. One source is watching what people do with existing products. There is nowhere that this is more true than in the tech community. Just watch how people use, abuse and rearrange existing products can give you ideas for new products and applications. This morning on the web I found a person who used four iPod Shuffles to make a RAID. RAID is an acronym that stands for Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. It is normally used in computer servers to make large disks out of smaller disks and to add some degree of data protection by storing the data simltaniously more than one disk. If done right you can have one drive fail completely and not loose any data...
So why make a RAID out of iPod Shuttles? Well the basic reason is because you can. Is there a practical application for this device? Not that I know of. But it was something to try and that is what innovation is about, trying lots of things. Then you keep what works and put aside what doesn't. Not throw away, but put aside. Because you never know when you will need an RAID made from 4 iPod Shuttles. Who knows it could be the next big thing!