Words and memories

[unixronin]

MRAM and nanotubes:  MRAM is expected to start hitting the market in quantity Any Time Now, from Motorola among others.  It's fast, non-volatile and radiation-hard, which will make it attractive for instant-on computing and for space and military applications.  Several different companies are also bringing to market holographic storage aimed at replacing DVDs, with up to 50 times the capacity of a DVD, and Nantero of Woburn, MA is pushing to market with NRAM.  Based on carbon nanotubes, NRAM is fast, high-density, non-volatile, low-power, and radiation-hard; Nantero demonstrated a functioning 10GB NRAM array this year.  Other upcoming memory technologies include ovonic memory (thin-film storage, described as non-volatile, high-density, cheap and "reasonably fast", being backed by Intel and British Aerospace among others), molecular memory being developed by Zettacore in Denver, and IBM's Millipede MEMS memory.  NanoMarkets projects these and similar technologies will have 40% of the combined memory and disk market by 2011.

Speaking of IBM, Big Blue just followed up its open-sourcing and donation to the Apache Foundation of the Cloudscape database engine by open-sourcing (and donating to Apache) of their Reusable Dialog Components, building blocks for speech recognition.  IBM is also donating speech markup editors to the Eclipse Foundation.

Comments

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

This has nothing to do with what you posted - but how's the foot doing?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's sort of in a steady state. I think I mentioned I had surgery on two of the toes about six weeks ago. The big toe finally seems to have stopped abscessing, and the surgery does seem to have stopped the little toe from trying to curl under my foot, but that toe's been very painful since the surgery and I've lost a lot of ground as far as how far I can walk and how long I can stand to keep a shoe on.

I've stopped taking any of the pain medications because they no longer appear to be achieving any pain reduction. But the pain level is tolerable anyway, unless I have a shoe on that foot too long, so it's just not worth the trouble of taking them.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

So, big toe good, little toe not so much ... I suppose that's batting .500, but I would really like to see more improvement for you. Do you have the little toe padded at all? When I broke mine, it was enormously reactive to any kind of pressure for a long time, which doesn't matter much if you're padding around barefoot at home mostly, but became a more serious matter when I had to put shoes on and go out.

ISTM that if you have to stay on painkillers for any length of time, they seem less and less effective as your body gets used to them. Maybe since you aren't taking them regularly, it might help to take somethingorother with you if you have to be out and about, shod, so that it could perhaps at least dull the edge?

Do you feel that some progress is being made, however slowly? or is this expletive deleted thing going to continue to drive you batty for the foreseeable future?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The podiatrist seems to feel that we've done pretty much everything that can be done, short of cloning technology advancing to the point of being able to grow me a new foot (or a whole new leg from the knee down, really).

Just one more way in which my life has gone to shit.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear that - this particular bad patch has just gone on way too long for you.