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Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density
Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.
Who on earth would ever need more than a terabyte?
The game.
Are you kidding me? putting 1.44 Mb on a 3 & 1/2 inch disk still blows my mind. If there is a nuclear holocaust, and I'm the smartest person left alive, I'd consider myself a genius if I could get to that stage. Or I suppose, as the smartest person alive, I could just invent a clay tablet and They'd worship me as a god. yeah, that seems easier. But still, man 1.44 mb! un-freaking-believable.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
ah, just in time for the Year of the Linux desktop, you mean. I look forward to using them in the Paperless Office we'll all have.
I went to the website http://www.axontc.com/ . and found following description;
"Key Benefits
PMCm has a number of unique attributes that make it a highly attractive component for future systems on silicon:
Operation at low voltages ( 0.3 V)
High speed write and erase operations
( 30 ns)
Low energy to change state ( 1 pJ)
Physical scalability to tens of nm
Easy integration with IC logic circuitry
Operation as a low refresh-rate DRAM or as a true non-volatile memory with high endurance (based on the programming mode).
These features define a class of devices that are essential for projected electronics systems and which will be difficult to realize using developed versions of today's circuits. "
Hope that answers some of your questions
It's a shame that all that extra productivity will be completely negated when everybody gets addicted to Duke Nukem Forever.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It reminds me of an episode from Futurama: ..."
Fry: "That clover helped by rat fink brother steal my dream of going into space! Now I'll never get there
Leela: "You went there this morning for donuts."
I mean, take for example flight. It's one helluva achievement isn't it, to fly like a bird. Ever since the dawn of man we've dreamt of it, like the legend of Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci's attempts at a flying machine and so on until finally some daredevils like the Wright brothers actually did it. I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture, disgusted by the food and spent most of my time reading a book waiting for time to pass.
Or this little magic thingie I have that lets me speak to anyone in the whole world, through thin air (not all the way, but I'll skip the details). I mean, would you believe it? Instead I'm mostly annoyed on how it can't always get through walls, that I have to recharge it every so often and that it's part of the "always on" stress of modern life.
For that matter, that I can post this comment on a website halfway around the globe is a wonder of technology itself. That doesn't stop me (or everyone else, it seems) from complaining about their ISP and prices, support etc. or some shortcoming of the applications or protocols or whatever.
I think the point is that if you went around like "oh wow" appriciating common things that much, you'd never do anything but get dazzled all day long. Then again, it probably wouldn't hurt to enjoy what we have a little more, but still... and "how much 1.44 MB is" is rather far down on my list.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This sounds suspiciously like "whiskers".
These little puppies were first discovered by accident back when AT&T was "The Phone Company". If I've got this right: Bell Labs had come up with a new alloy for terminal blocks that they thought would have some advantages. Western Electric made some up and the Bell Systems deployed them.
Some time later they started running into trouble. Linemen would try to turn the nut and it wouldn't turn. So they cut some out and sent 'em in for analysis.
These long, thin, crystals of metal had grown through the boundary of the thread, welding the nuts onto the bolts. They were extremely pure and very strong - in the general neighborhood of the theoretical strength of the material, when things fabricated by normal processes fell short by a "factor of many" (more than one power of ten).
They cristened them "whiskers". I'm not aware of anything that came of that at the time.
But when the early satellites were going up (back when the very early printed circuits were the cutting edge of hi-tech), whiskers showed up again - growing between the lines of the printed circuit board exposed to vacuum and zero g, shorting things out. This is why early US satellites (heavily miniaturized to go on the small boosters) tended to flake out while early Russian stuff (big discrete components on terminal strips lifted by their big boosters) kept working - and why that reversed later, when the US had the problem solved and the Russians started miniaturizing and had to go through the same learning curve.
Once they figured out what was happening and came up with an alloy that didn't whisker, they played around for a bit with self-healing printed circuit boards. These had conductors of a whiskering alloy with a plating of non-whiskering stuff. Idea was that if a trace broke due to vibration during launch, the exposed core would whisker across the gap and make things run again (until it whiskered over to another wire and shorted things out.) During that time they also played with self-healing aluminized mylar capacitors, designed so that if the mylar developed a hole the cap would discharge through the hole, vaporize the aluminum around the hole, and things would then go back to normal operation.
I'm not sure that any of this actually worked out.
If these ARE whiskers-on-demand as storage elements, it's nice to see whiskers actually do something useful. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I use security through clutter. I keep everything in one map. Every file has a cryptic name which only I can decyper, well, most of the time at least, just not on monday mornings. The map contains 10 files that are secret and about 25,000 intresting files I can't do without, I do intent to one day actualy look at them, if I can decyper their filenames at that particular day.
For backup, well, I have the same files in my gmail account, on 2 online harddisk services, on the 3 other computers I own, some of the files are printed and archived in a neat pile in the corner of my room (sorted from oldest to newest) and I sure my uncle Steve has a few of those files as well. The rest I can redownload if I ever need them and remember ever having them in the first place.
As for the real mission critical files, I use Kazaa: I put them in a zipfile, add an intresting movie or mp3, then share it. Most of these files are backed up on 125,400 computers, all spread out across the globe. Now who can say that about his backup policy? (other than the RIAA and the MPAA) The files are secure too, since I rename them to "My views on the political situation of flower gardens" and remove the extension.