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Making Computer Memory From a Virus
An Ac writes, "By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have created a transistor with very fast switching speed. They say it could eventually be used to make memory chips for MP3 players and digital cameras. A device fitted with such a virus-chip would access data much more quickly than one using flash memory."
What if I drop the thing and cut myself on the memory? Will I get songs stuck in my head forever?
If you can't beat them, join them!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
Hi kids, Benedict XVI the Nazi Pope here. Remember to crush the Jews, Islamists, and homosexuals. Thank you and God bless.
I can't wait to see how quickly this tech is misunderstood by politicians and eco-warriors!
Meta will eat itself
The last time I had a virus, I ended up with less memory.
If you've got any illegal MP3's, your player kills you.
Judge, jury and executioner all in one!
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
The people assembling devices with this memory should not forget to install a slot to feed the viruses so they can replicate and expand memory as time goes on.
Soemthing that typically reads 128kbps doesn't exactly require heaps of bandwidth.
Why isn't this suitable for general purpose memory, or cache?
DNA on silicon has already been done. Why not use a virus as scaffolding for memory, while we're at it? Granted, the virus' surface proteins are a functional part of the transistor. Given that we can already attach complex proteins (well, acids such as DNA) to silicon, there shouldn't be much trouble finding a method for similar tricks here. In other words, this is more practiceable than it sounds at first. I do wonder whether the virii or silicon traces are more resistant to heat, vibration, and radiation, though.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
as I lunch some tenderloin with bacon and after, when I watch TV on my leather couch while drinking some beer. And cheese. :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I hear she's campaigning not to have have this technology used in any russian research vessels.
100 microsecond switch speed is very very slow for modern transistors (mentioned in article). What am I missing here? Is there a mistake in the article?
wot no sig
the "basic research == future product" meme. For fuck sake. I bet if you were to go back the last 5 years and collect up all these articles and do a little survey of whether or not ANY of these bullshit descriptions of future products have come to pass you would find that NONE of them have. Why? Because if you discover something that could be turned into a product, you don't tell the world; you go find a venture capitalist and make the damn product.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"you have a virus in memory"
"i know, my memory is made of viruses"
"no, i mean, there is a memory resident virus on your computer"
"no, the memory resides on the viruses"
"let me rephrase: your memory, made of viruses, has a virus"
"so you're telling me i have more viruses... so i have more memory? yeah!"
"no, this is a bad thing, you don't want viruses on your computer"
"you told me last week i want the most memory i can on my computer, and that's made of viruses"
"yes... i mean no, i mean..." (smacks forehead)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can't wait until designer prankster viruses come out. Imagine that instead of becoming sick, weird things happened to people. They might really! stink for a day, have their tongue turn numb, develop inappropriate laughter, only want to eat orange colored food, etc.
Might be kinda of fun - it would be like gold(?) kryptonite, but for people. Gold (I think) kryptonite had weird unpredictable effects of Superman. It might make the world a little more fun. Imagine going to some very stuffy conservative place, and everyone was burping all day long.
Abuse potential would be rampant though. Someone from here might want to design a strain to make reallllllly hot chicks want to have sex with smelly fat geeks.
..........FULL STOP.
will your mp3's start playing a few microseconds faster when you select play? or will we be able to play mp3's in huge bitrates we'll never ever use?
Agreed! Finally, someone else that sees through the bullshit. The science is great, but touting future uses, especially something as specific as an MP3 player, is ridiculous; leave the applications to the engineers.
I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic exoskeleton virus overlords
They don't talk about the timescale....
Steve (a veganist) won't have any of this. Living creatures serving as memory. Yuk!
If they're planning to use this to make memory chips, based on a living organism, it stands to reason that such a chip would have a "lifespan" associated with it.
In the United States of America your computer runs on a virus!
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
I think that Microsoft Zune will be the first device taking the benefit of this technology
If you've got any illegal MP3's, your player kills you.
Judge, jury and executioner all in one!
So what you are hypothesizing is that in a few years we will see a Microsoft Zune or iPods with Sony EbolaFlash® memory chip technology.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Not only does it run faster than conventional memory, it's an anti-smoking chip: if it catches you smoking at the computer it infects your cigar/cigarette with itself
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Now this gives a whole new meaning to biological warfare, chip-targeting bioweapons on the rise.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
What if it becomes sentient?
We would have:
No, wait, that last item already happened....
This is progress?
So is this the first analog computer virus?
Your search - "analog computer virus" - did not match any documents.
Looks like google agrees.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
...reminds me of an article I read a while ago of some researchers somewhere who had been able to connect a small chip to a cockroach! They were even able to manipulate the cockroach to an extent- move it's legs..etc passing some commands to the chip-effectively rendering the cockroach to become a robot...that was just amazing. Does anyone know of this? I'd love to know more details on this and how it turned out eventually... ..anyone with links to this?
That's like that physics article on quantum teleportation. maybe a few hundred people on the planet know anything about it to make heads nor tails from it. They fire up the academic BS generator, whip up an 84 page PDF with weird looking graphs, apply for more funding. Who's to know at the government ministry of spending cash any different?? Looks "academic" to them! Sounds important! Every six months, repeat, add in the new buzz words. Now anything with "security" in it, etc, will sell to the government."secure crypto predictive teleported analysis, now with improved nanoscale!" BS. Ya, right, *sure* it is! Then they go to conferences and once the doors are closed they have the hookers and booze sent in and laugh about stuff and think up the next cycle worth of BS.
If the virus starts replicating, are they commiting copyright violation?
How will the RIAA sue? I'm sure they will find a way.
I see two possible reasons to use the MP3 player in the abstract:
1- it is a non-volatile RAM. Flash is OK, but it has some drawbacks, in particular with the need to erase a full block to revert a 0 into a 1, which is quite long (several ms with the one I worked with). Of course, for a MP3 player, it's not a big problem since the data dosn't change that often.
2- the author can't tell the difference.
So I would tend to agree with you. Either way, MP3 player is very unlikely to be the initial target for any kind of new memory, in particular fast one since what they need is more on the line of something cheap with low power needs (the evolution I saw in telephones was the introduction of mirror bit technology: a slightly slower flash that had twice the capacity for the same price).
It will come pre-loaded with viral material saving you the time and effort of gathering it yourself.
...it's a feature! Although, doesn't Microsoft have a patent on calling a virus a product?
I hate printers.
Like imagine accidently killing the memory while cleaning. Or the overclockers feeding their memory stuff to help it clone itself.
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We have nothing to lose but our platinum nanoparticles
You mean smoking speed?
How perverse!
Well, if you did some basic research .. and it's novel .. but you can't convince venture capitalists. The only thing left is to announce it and hope someone else sees something you missed, is willing to fund you to do more, or at the very least gets some use out of it. I do agree they should avoid over hyping the damn things though .. cause that's detrimental.
Chemical name of Dahlemense Strain of Tobacco Mosaic Virus is 3rd longest in English language, apparently (not sure I'd want to have a conversation with anyone who thinks this is really a valid English word, but anyway):
y lserylglutaminyl-l tryptophylalanyl-g inylvalylcysteinyl-y lphenylalanyl-y lthreonylthreonyl-r ylglutaminylvalyl-s erylthreonylvalyl-y llysylvalyltyrosyl-l prolylleucylisoleucyl-n ylaspartylthreonyl-y lvalylglutamyl-l threonylalanylglutamyl-l valylaspartylaspartyl-n ylasparaginylisoleucyl-l ylarginylglycyl-s paraginylthreonyl-y lvalyltryptophyl-
acetylseryltyrosylserylisoleucylthreonylserylprol
phenylalanylvalylphenylalanylleucylserylserylvaly
aspartylprolylisoleucylglutamylleucylleucylaspara
threonylserylserylleucylglycylasparaginylglutamin
glutaminylthreonylglutaminylglutaminylalanylargin
glutaminylvalylglutaminylglutaminylphenylalanylse
tryptophyllysylprolylphenylalanylprolylglutaminyl
arginylphenylalanylprolylglycylaspartylvalyltyros
arginyltyrosylasparaginylalanylvalylleucylasparty
threonylalanylleucylleucylglycylthreonylphenylala
arginylasparaginylarginylisoleucylisoleucylglutam
asparaginylglutaminylglutaminylserylprolylthreony
threonylleucylaspartylalanylthreonylarginylarginy
alanylthreonylvalylalanylisoleucylarginylserylala
asparaginylleucylvalylasparaginylglutamylleucylva
threonylglycylleucyltyrosylasparaginylglutaminyla
phenylalanylglutamylserylmethionylserylglycylleuc
threonylserylalanylprolylalanylserine
i wonder how long it is before greenpeace make up some claim the virus is a living creature, and that this is cruelty to animals.
portfolio
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Do I go to the doctor and ask him for some anti-anti-viral medicine to fix my broken mp3 player?
And you have the next Crichton bestseller's title.
Well if we are believe what Apple says about viruses, they cant get them, so this wont work with the iPod. THIS is an iPod killer! Wow!
What will those crazy scientists bling next?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
As long as the virusses look like fish. Agreed? Steve?
Now, if we just harness this transistor's energy to the warp drive, we can produce a warp bubble 3 times the size. And with just a few modifications to the quad-polar phaser array the computer will be able to crash much faster! ...
But it will still be full of viruses.
-- You must be yay-high to rule the world.
From some security web site: "Some scanners claim to be able to disinfect viruses in memory, and they may even succeed in doing so, but it is generally highly recommended that you first make sure that there is no virus in memory before you attempt to clean your computer." Now that viruses can not only be in memory, but be memory itself, it's time to rewrite many books and web pages, before a lot of damage is done.
What were you thinking? Spraying Lysol around your computer! Are you nuts!?
Even virus RNA and cell wall can disintegrate at high temps. Will my memory melt if the cooling is not perfect?
So let me get this right... It's a virus meaning it lives.
How long is this going to live? - Do we need to feed it?
What happens if it mutates in your MP3 player? - I'm assuming the charts might become highly infectious.
Let me be the first to say: iPod Nano Platinum
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Viral DRM, that is. Ouch.
Talk about viral marketing!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
It's hard to imagine the Vorlons ever grooved to Ol' Dirty Bastard, but this could be one small step.
You SIR, have obviously never spent a SECOND in academia. -S
It's best to read right through to get the full effect ;-)
ROFLMAOHad to post it as ecode due to the lame lameness filter.
Ok, maybe there is an obvious fact I don't know, but how would they manage to keep the thing 'alive'?
Now that I know that viruses replicate, not grow: would it be sufficient to buy 1 KB of virus memory, feed it and wait until it becomes 1 TB? That would mean the end of memory makers, wouldn't it?
They would fit in rawther well on Slashdot, where it appears that few read the f* article ;-)
In a related note; a fifteen-year-old claimed he was Making a Computer Virus from Memory.
- Peder
The problem with all these new super technologies is they rarely catch up in cost-performance to silicon. I usually hear of an idea liek this every month, but maybe one or two such technologies become commercial per decade.
From the headline, I thought someone had found a way for a computer virus to "make more memory." In the physical sense, it doesn't work, but RAM doublers used to be quite common, and I'm sure there are other ways.
Wow dude, RIAA is gonna hire a hitman to take you down for the copyright infringement.
There is no way you can claim fairuse if you have a copy of songs etched in your neurons.
Besides, you wouldn't want that nasty old virus to infect tobacco plants, would you? Won't somebody think of the smoking children?
Till this memory comes into play in standard PC's so i can install virus protection software on it. Irony!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I work in a computer store in backwater Tennessee. I have enough trouble explaining stuff to people now, next I'm going to have to explain the difference between a virus and a virus? I spent 20 minutes the other day explaining the concept of the double-click. Please kill me now.
They found the missing "a" in Neil Armstrong's speech...
So they used tech to find "One Small Step for *a* man, One Giant Leap for Mankind"
Didn't Slashdot Loudly Yawn that one?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
no, you'd turn into one of the borg, a cyborg race of zombie-like drones that try to push DRM on people
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
Yeah, and what happens if people will reconsider that viruses might be living?
Next thing we know, PETA will be protesting against using the poor buggers in transistors.
Computer viruses don't work like they used to.
for christs sake, really, 100 microseconds switching time?
best you can get from that is 10kHz oscillator (at optimal circumstances...).
I think this experiment is interesting for other reasons than that it might one day replace non volatile memory types (which I highly doubt considering it s competitors to be FLASH, MRAM and others (somebody remembering millipede?)).
It's interesting because someone actually used protein-based semi-crystaline surfaces in a way that could be compared to a classical neuron- But the article is as informative as a picture of an unilluminated cave at night.
The second you run an antivirus program, your RAM is shot to hell.
The good news, is that as the virus spreads it doubles the memory every few hours...almost at the rate of keeping with Microsoft memory requirements.
You'd need to use all the memory the virus provides to store this semi-arbitrary name.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Petri dishes strewn all over, cell cultures growing in mountain dew cans from last month...
So when the malware-du-jour loads itself into memory, you have a virus with a virus?
*cool!!!*
By [doing somehing neato sounding] to [something mundane] using [some buzzy tech], researchers [somewhere], have created ["a mouse trap" with the -potential- to maybe, possibly, someday be harder/faster/stronger/more betterrer]. They say it could eventually be used to make [some pervasive commodity] for [some everyday domestic gadget AND military gadgets that will save US souls]. [Researchers will accept cash, cheque, visa and 10+ year extended research contracts]
What an excellent idea, to switch from making memory devices from one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust to one which is one of the least abundant, and is already doomed to "peak" soon like oil because of its commercial uses (can you say c-a-t-a-l-y-t-i-c c-o-n-v-e-r-t-e-r?), not to mention the frivolous ones. Yep, using platinum instead of boring old silicon should help drive down those pesky RAM prices, for sure.
Let's hope these viruses don't find a way to thrive on electricity. I don't want to see the buggers breaking free and reproducing to wreak havok on all tech.