Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 299 posts

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

#201

Post by jacquesm »

swimfar wrote: post #181
frik wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.

That reminds me of the missing mechanical equivalent of the capacitor, the inerter, which McLaren secretly began using on their formula one cars in 2005. But does this mean there's potentially another missing suspension component? http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.... edit: Assuming a Force-Current, Velocity-Voltage equivalence, I get the mechanical memristor behavior to be: dx=M.F.dt, with…

v = M.F => that's regular inertia isn't it? In the case of the inerter presumably constrained by the stroke of the device. It's like a 'two stroke flywheel' in a nice package.

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

#202

Post by pilsetnieks »

zevyoura wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps. That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity. It's the google way of doing things.

Actually, Google Maps allow you to cache portions of maps for offline use: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/2650377?hl=en There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

Nokia somehow manages to do offline maps just fine - you can download maps of the countries/cities you need separately and they take up no more than about a hundred MBs each.

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

#203

Post by andrewcooke »

frik wrote: post #129
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…

Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.

what an awful diagram. it implies there's some kind of symmetry that relates all four, but when you look at the details there are asymmetries. if you think it was helpful look at it again and explain why di appears in two quarants but dq and dv appear once each.

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
valarauca1 wrote: post #13

A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The important part of memristors is that they can be arranged to form a crossbar latch, which acts like a transistor. This crossbar latches are very very small, and very low power. HP plans on achieving data density of 100GB/cm^2 [1] with read write speeds approximately 100x faster then flash memory while using 1% o…

> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by jacquesm »

frik wrote: post #129
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…

Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.

I can't help but notice that the region occupied by the memristor is what would be best described as a 'flux-capacitor'. You really can't make this stuff up.

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

#206

Post by marincounty »

HP need to show up at my door with a check for $599.00 plus tax for a laptop that I used 5 times and died on the day of 366! Nerds remember. I don't think this Podunk company realizes once you lose a customer, you lose them for a long time. The reverse is true; once a male buys a product he likes--you have a customer for life. It's taught in every business school? Men just want the dam thing to work? Oh, and hire a CEO who knows a little bit about engineering? That last sentence goes to all hardware companies.

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

#207

Post by rbanffy »

frik wrote: post #129
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…

Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.

It's great material for a T-shirt.

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

#208

Post by jahewson »

Arjuna wrote: post #82

Dr. Leon Ong Chua [1] wrote this paper [2] in 1971 entitled, Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element , where he first outlined the theory of the memristor . Admittedly, this is not my field, so my fascination may appear to be quite naive to the well-initiated, but I find it simply intriguing that the memristor was first theorized to exist; that is, it is somewhat analogous to the Higgs boson, in that the mathematics…

Indeed, electromagnetic waves were theorized by James Clark Maxwell and later shown to exist five years later by Heinrich Hertz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_...

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

#209

Post by gdewilde »

Arjuna wrote: post #82

Dr. Leon Ong Chua [1] wrote this paper [2] in 1971 entitled, Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element , where he first outlined the theory of the memristor . Admittedly, this is not my field, so my fascination may appear to be quite naive to the well-initiated, but I find it simply intriguing that the memristor was first theorized to exist; that is, it is somewhat analogous to the Higgs boson, in that the mathematics…

The theory was revolutionary of course but the properties had already been observed in "unusable" semiconductor materials. They had the pinched hysteresis loops in the 70's.

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

#210

Post by maxerickson »

babuskov wrote: post #185
zentiggr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out MapsWithMe - OpenStreetMap packaged as a basic mapping app, paid pro package for more than basic mapping/location pointing. The OSM db is segmented by country/province/US state so you can tailor the size / coverage as desired. Haven't looked at the pro pricing or feature list, just having maps that my off-network, GPS equipped old brick can use near home is sweet enough.

I tried MapsWithMe, but those are only maps, no navigation. If you use Android, check out OsmAnd. It uses the same OSM maps, has navigation (with voice pack too) and it's free for up to 8 countries IIRC. I have been using it for about three months and it works pretty good. The only problem I found is that city names for some countries are in local language, so if you go to Greece for example, you would have to type i…

There is setting for the names (but I think there have been people on the OSMand mailing list having issues with it). The English names would also have to be present in the OSM data (not for any particular technical reason, just as far as I'm aware that is the only source of names the devs use for the maps).

Also, the free version allows for 10 downloads, where updating a previously downloaded map (which might only be a region of a country) counts as one of them. But the paid version is only $8.

Post reply on HN