Whispers from the Wild

Just months after memristor technology finally moved from theory into existence, the potential applications are only just beginning to become apparent.  Hewlett Packard have created a memory block which can fit 100Gb of data into a square centimetre of space.  It’s non-volatile and it’s much faster than existing hard drives.

Folks – your hard drive just became obsolete.

Just imagine it for a moment.  A block of circuitry, the same size as an existing hard drive – 3.5 inches by five inches by one inch – with storage capacity rated in 100gb/square centimetre.  Never mind Tb (1024Gb) technology, you’re talking Petabit (1024Tb) or even Exabit (1024Pb) storage.  That’s quite a breakthrough.  And it’s non-volatile, with no moving parts, which means no boot time and no risk that a knock to the storage media will wreck it with a head crash.

I was reading a fascinating paper (on a subscription only site, sadly) that speculates on Nanite technology.  As Memristors are on a molecular level, this paper was discussing the potential for Memristor based medical nanite technology.  It’s not as Star Trekish as you might think.  Providing the Memristor nanite could be correctly programmed, it’s now fundamentally possible to achieve surgery without opening the patient up.

The paper’s speculation ran like this:  You would program your memristor nanite with the surgery it was to perform, and fit it with RFID receiver technology.  You’d then put the patient in a bed with a top to it (very like the Star Trek Next Generation beds) but the top would have three transmitters, which the surgeon would position over the surgery site, so that they triangulated a radio signal exactly where the surgery was required.  This would be based on the technology we currently use for GPS signals, except on a much more localised basis.  You then inject the nanites into the patient.  They travel around the body in the blood stream until they reach the point where they can pick up the triangulation signal – this tells them where the surgery is performed.  From then on it’s a simple routine to search for the specific damage or infection, and perform the programmed surgery.

When you think about it, that’s mind boggling.  Sure most people will only encounter Memristors in their household electrical goods, where computers will be able to start up with no boot time and PDAs will be able to store gigabytes of information – but Memristor technology, and HP already have the first prototype chip that’s fully working using the Memristor technology, could once again revolutionise computing.  The possibilities are astounding.

Now, if only Microsoft would catch up with an efficient operating system…

UPDATE: Technology review have an interview video with HP’s Memristor team leader, Stan Williams, where he discussed the potential that Memristors have.  It’s an interesting video clip.

I found it absolutely amazing to come across an article about Windows 7, that blamed everyone else for the bad sales of Vista.

They start of by blaming hardware manufacturers:

Microsoft has confirmed that there will be a widespread public beta of Windows 7 in early 2009, while urging device manufacturers to start immediate testing with its pre-beta release to avoid the widespread hardware compatibility problems that contributed so much to the negative perception of Vista.

Unbelievable!  Hardware vendors had to get to grips with new things like tilt bits, digital rights management, user account control restrictions etc etc imposed on them by the new operating system, and when problems arose which they inevitably would, Microsoft turns around and blames them!

Then they have a go at their old favourite, apple:

As part of that scheme, Microsoft plans to co-operate with hardware manufacturers to ensure they can get their own customers to participate in the beta. “We’re looking to make that super easy,” [Windows vice president Steven] Sinofsky said. It’s hard to imagine companies like Apple — whose lateness in releasing a Vista-compatible version of iTunes was widely viewed as an attempt to derail Vista at launch — co-operating on that front.

What we had with iTunes was conflicts between Microsoft’s DRM (which they wouldn’t tell anyone about, in the paranoia that someone might hack it) and Apple’s iTunes DRM which had a proprietory music format.  While Apple might shoulder a small portion of blame, the main blame is down to Microsoft, for their enforcement of paranoid DRM.

And as I wrote in the last article, there’s no guarantee anyone will want Windows 7 anyway.  XP still does all most people need.  By forcing games players to upgrade to Vista by making DirectX10 Vista only, they have unfortunately forced this demographic into upgrading whether or not they wanted to, but for everyone else there’s really very little motivation to spend hard earned currency on “pretties”.

Windows 7 is going to be more of the same.  Very little extra functionality, much of the time spent developing “pretties” such as tactile windows movement.  It’s all a lot of fun, but businesses – which make a large bulk of Windows users – don’t care about pretties.  They care about the bottom line, which is affected by having to upgrade hardware and software every few years.

So, who will Microsoft blame when Windows 7 flops?  It’s anyone’s guess.  Probably, as here, hardware manufacturers and Apple.  One thing’s for sure – at this rate, if you believe Microsoft, the only innocent party will be… Microsoft!

Way to get people on board!