September 13th, 2004
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.
SPAM FROM: "Research I. Absently" <inject@shit-4-brains.com>
I just almost killed my primary machine.
I'd opened up the case to look up the serial number on my tape drive, since the in-silicon serial number that the diagnostic tool reports is of no use in determining whether the drive is still in warranty or not. While moving cables to see the serial number, I managed to short a power cable down to the case of the tape drive. There was a big fat blue spark, and all the sounds of happy computer slowed down and stopped.
"Oh, fuck," I thought. I noticed the power LED was still on. I hit the front-panel power switch. Nothing happened. I switched off the power supply. Nothing happened. I physically unplugged the power cord. Nothing happened.
Finally, after about a minute, all the remaining LEDs went out. I waited another thirty seconds, then plugged the power cable back in, switched the power supply back on, and pushed the power button, expecting nothing but an accusing silence. To my incredible relief, the machine proceeded to execute a perfectly normal cold start, apparently none the worse for wear, with no signs of anything wrong except for all the disk mirrors churning away in resync.