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With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

businessweek.com

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Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#141

Post by valarauca1 »

TkTech wrote: post #51
viraptor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving…

Sensor data is one I would guess. Modern cell phones have an incredible number of sensors in them, but usually don't log the data when it's quickly sampled (accelerometers, background mic), or sample it rarely/slowly (GPS, barometer, ambient lighting) when it is logged. I would personally love to have days, weeks, or months of raw data sampled frequently. Edit: I'd imagine this is due both to a limited amount of stor…

Sensor data is dirt cheap to store. Even at 100 data points per second. It takes 10 seconds to store a kilobyte of data (1000) data points). At 64 bits per point.

1GB/s of streaming data is 10,737,418 channels of 100 point per second 64bit floats.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#142

Post by biot »

Touche wrote: post #119
valarauca1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the trade off? Harder to parse files for less human readability?

What was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?

  "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far
   exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but
   XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his
   first murder before he had sex, which was rape." -- Erik Naggum
GML is from the late 1960s and is, arguably, easier to read. SGML from the 1980s expanded upon this. XML is essentially just an offshoot of SGML and much less readable than SGML is. For example, here is a valid SGML document:

  
    
      The SICK ROSE
      
        O Rose thou art sick.
        The invisible worm, 
        That flies in the night
        In the howling storm:
      
        Has found out thy bed
        Of crimson joy:
        And his dark secret love 
        Does thy life destroy.
Aside from XML's lineage, there is no shortage of markup languages available with varying levels of readability.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#143

Post by thom »

sp332 wrote: post #100
fchollet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of Wikipedia (English) already fits on a smartphone with a 64GB SD card.

With no history and no pictures. It's useful, but it's not really "wikipedia" anymore :)

Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#144

Post by binarycrusader »

mitchty wrote: post #78
squigs25 wrote: post #40

Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right? HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.

Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap. And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again. It is... a very different view of computing. E…

An operating system can retain its memory between reboots using only RAM, as long as the reboots are not "cold" reboots (that is, machine powered off and then back on, or reset through hardware instead of software).

It of course depends on hardware support, but it can be done even today on select platforms.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#145

Post by jacquesm »

jawns wrote: post #33

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors: "A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electr…

Interesting tidbit: a while ago, I was talking about memristors with a physics trained person. And he told me something that really stuck:

It is impossible to make an inductor (coil) without resistance and without capacitance. It is impossible to make a capacitor without some inductance and a little bit of leakage. It is impossible to create a resistor that does not have self-inductance or a bit of capacitance.

If you followed all that and you agree with it (because you've done some electronics) or you've heard of 'parasitic capacitors' and such, then you can see that it must somehow follow that parasitic mem-resistance must have been with us all along, but is such a small effect that we simply failed to notice it. No resistors, capacitors or coils that we normally use exhibits this effect in such a way that we adapt our designs to it to minimize it.

That's in part the reason why it took so long to manifest in a usable form, if the effect would be as devastating as resistance on powerlines, as capacitance on wiring, as induction on large capacitors then we'd have exploited it long ago.

So it's going to be something exceedingly subtle when and if it comes to market.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#146

Post by hatu »

sp332 wrote: post #100
fchollet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of Wikipedia (English) already fits on a smartphone with a 64GB SD card.

With no history and no pictures. It's useful, but it's not really "wikipedia" anymore :)

I'm sure you could batch process the pictures to a reasonable size and store all those on a big flash drive today already.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#147

Post by scott_karana »

eropple wrote: post #125
groby_b wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to derail the topic - but maps already does that. Search for your area. Pull up info sheet for it. Click "Save map to use offline". (Although I've got no idea if it checks for changes)

Didn't that disappear in some recent version? I had to use some special keyword search term to make that happen in the newest Maps.

It did disappear. And fortunately, they've added it back again, in yet another UX interaction.

https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273567?hl=en

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#148

Post by hatu »

LaikaF wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need the network connectivity anyway just to stay 'in sync'. But in off-line mode life would be a lot easier.

It could reduce the amount of data a smartphone needs. I'd like to keep a copy of my local area in my google map and then have it check in once a week to look for changes.

This is starting to sound like a Version Control type solution where you just update your Wikipedia every now and then and it merges the new info.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#149

Post by walshemj »

mitchty wrote: post #78
squigs25 wrote: post #40

Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right? HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.

Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap. And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again. It is... a very different view of computing. E…

the first computer I worked on a PDP11/40 with core memory retained state when powered off :-)

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#150

Post by VikingCoder »

marvin wrote: post #121

In case there's anyone in here who knows: Why does the Wikipedia page for memristors say that this 4th circuit element is proven to be impossible to create in physical reality, due tp the laws of thermodynamics? Either HP must be lying, physics must be wrong or whomever figured out this "proof" must have screwed up.

I think there's STILL debate about whether you can actually make a REAL memristor, or whether you can merely make something that behaves exactly as a memristor would.

So, in theory you can't make one, but in practice you can. Something like that.

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