191–200 of 299 posts
Sounds really neat, but "2017 - next decade" is the engineering estimate version of "sometime, maybe never".
Yup. They lost me at "The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice to see confirmation of that theory from that high up. It seemed extremely logical to me when I heard it the first time and like everything else, in retrospect it is blindingly obvious. I'd hate to see a memristor dropped into a circuit design and being handed the task of 'fixing' spice to produce the correct output. But by the looks of it the usefulness of individual memristors will be quite limited.
Can't reply to your other comment yet, so I'll do it here. I think that this is a "duck typing" memristor: You can use it as a memristor, but it's not what was predicted. Anyway, if you're interested, watch the video I linked (thanks to @achille): It really explains what this is all about. If you have some basic understanding of semiconductors physics I think you'll enjoy it :)
Just like a battery can look like a capacitor under some conditions it really isn't a capacitor.
Capacitors and batteries can be described using the same basic laws, even though the fundamental mode of operation is completely different.
They have the same basic properties:
- internal resistance
- a certain capacity
- a breakdown voltage
- you can charge them
- you can discharge them by connecting the terminals (hopefully through some suitable load)
- both exhibit self-discharge
- have a certain amount of inductance
And yet the one is a real capacitor whereas the other one is an electro-chemical device, only when you open one up or when you charge/discharge it a large number of times can you see that there is a real difference between the two, superficially they are interchangeable for some applications.
Does that get it right?
Another way of putting this: because of patents, we're in a privileged position of being the only people who are allowed to work on this problem.
So instead of the whole world rushing to make something interesting with this new tech, we get a group of people working in an ivory tower trying to come up with the perfect thing.
If we're lucky, they'll execute well and deliver a compelling product that they have monopoly power over for 10 years, or however long the patents last.
If we're not lucky, they'll bumble around like cable providers trying to develop "valuable add-ons", and the only reason they'll have any success is because no one is allowed to compete with them.
Sorry if that's overly pessimistic, but that's how this article came off to me. I guess patents do have the benefit that we are getting to hear about this development at all instead of it being a tightly-controlled trade secret. And this kind of payoff is what funds the R&D gamble to begin with. I just hope that they actually deliver reusable parts that other people can build into bigger innovations instead of trying to control the innovations themselves.
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…
Totally bought ten shares of HPQ after learning about that. Who knows, their plan might actually work. Go HP!
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.
Alan Turing would say there is no difference.
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…
Always thought water increases its speed when you shrink the pipe, not the other way around
At a bottleneck, the water that gets through is moving faster, but the total volume of water going through is lower.
It's a classic EE analogy, so people tend to shorthand it. One good and thorough explanation of the full bit is here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/questi...
What happens if you increase the pressure in the tank? You probably can guess that this makes more water come out of the hose. The same is true of an electrical system: Increasing the voltage will make more current flow.
Let's say you increase the diameter of the hose and all of the fittings to the tank. You probably guessed that this also makes more water come out of the hose. This is like decreasing the resistance in an electrical system, which increases the current flow.
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…
Always thought water increases its speed when you shrink the pipe, not the other way around
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades. Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this wa…
>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default . If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
I think it's funny to see people quoting Erik Naggum, though perhaps that's just because my context for him is largely his rather prolific and fiery output on usenet.