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Nanotube Non-Volatile Memory Entering Production
hovermike writes "Nantero and LSI Logic are expected to announce that nanotube non-volatile memory will be going into production, at least as far as the NY Times is concerned. Nanotubes have been discussed previously, Nanotube Applications..., and Buckminsterfullerene..., but I'm certainly surprised something like this has moved into production this quickly. Could this be the ultimate 'bubble' memory?" Reader hovermike writes "The press release can be found at the Nantero website. I'm looking forward to only needing one memory card to store all the 5Mbit pictures that I'll take for the rest of my life."
True, but there is a great deal of difference between developing the material and developing the application. Just making the nanotubes doens't allow you to make a memory card out of them. I would be rather interested in how much research has been put into memory-holding, write/read times, memory density, interference and the like before deciding to switch over to NRAM.
Cheap, well-insulating, durable, and rather bad for construction workers and others who shred and inhale lots of it? I think how the hell is anyone gonna inhale it?! pretty much sums it up. Disposing of these little nanotubes should be easy enough if you can burn them, I would think. That leaves the question of how to disassemble the chips in an orderly fashion, but I figure that's pretty much the same problem you're faced with when recycling electronics today. Not that people don't just dump their old machines in the trash, but anyway.
I'd worry a lot more about the flame retardants and other goo that's still being used in enormous amounts in computers. There's a half-year old computer in my office, and ever since it got here I've had to open the window every morning, or the fumes from it make me cough. Not sure what exactly the computer is giving off, but whatever it is I don't think it's particularly good for me.
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From what I remember, the concern about nanotubes (as well as other nano-materials) is that we don't have a great deal of experience with them yet. Motor oil has been around for quite some time and isn't a truly "new" material, while nanotubes are. The unique properties of the material brings with it both benefits and possible problems. Given our history with cool, new stuff, it would be wise to see what possible issues might arise.
I'm no Luddite, but I don't think it's a bad idea to work through the lifecycle of this type of material. If it decays, how does it decay? What happens to it or its components when it does decay? Can we just just toss it into landfills or does it count as hazardous waste? Lots of questions, maybe they've been answered, but I don't recall there being a great deal of study on it.
That said though, it's a cool thing that we're gonna see this stuff in real life.
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
It says nothing about being ready to mass-produce the technology. In fact, the way I read the article, the partnership is so that they can try to create any sort of working process that is even remotely cost-effective and works reliably. This is a long way from commercial viability. Without this partnership, Nantero has no ability to fab this kind of technology at any volume on their own. It sounds as if they are using the joint partership to go hunting for funding. I don't even see a concrete product announcement
If you have space to take all your 5 Megapixels photos for the rest of your life, you'll start taking 50 Megapixels photos. If you still have more space, you'll start making videos.
Just bring the space, and we'll use it!
All smartass-ness aside though, this is a big problem with PDF's, is that alot of them don't use text inside, but rather scanned images of text. This makes PDF accessibility a huge issue.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
There's PDFs and there's PDFs. It's a convenient document format for many uses. It's great for distributing documents that have been generated on a word processor or typesetting program, and for documents like these, there should be no problem converting it to plain-text. PDFs have also been used a lot for scanned text. However, this is a totally different case than the former. There's an existing document on paper, and someone wants to digitize it so it can be distributed on the web. They could turn it into a big pile of GIFs, PNGs, or JPGs, or they could make it into one PDF. Do you have a way to screen-read scanned images? If not, then you have absolutely nothing to complain about, because in this case PDF is only serving as a convenient encapsulation method (it provides thumbnails, bookmarks, table of contents, etc.). So if those people didn't use PDF, they'd have to provide a zipfile of PNGs or something, which would totally suck.
Maybe you should try OCR software. What are you going to complain about next? That digital cameras and digital photos aren't accessible to blind people?