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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:41PM (#7879291)
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% of the energy. Also with lower energy costs, expected data density is 1 Petabyte per cm^3 (due to 3D stacked circuitry)

Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage.

[1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by toomuchtodo on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:48PM (#7879325)
> 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.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:50PM (#7879342)
This means we might be able to make a literal version of the hitchhikers guide. All of human knowledge in your hand, no network connectivity needed.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by politician on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:56PM (#7879385)
> I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices [of copyright attorneys and trade industry groups] suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by pavement on Thursday June 12, 2014 @01:27AM (#7881934)
Guess again. All that storage represents a virtually limitless crypto-space within which intellectual property rights holders can create one-time-pads, and disenfranchise future consumers with.

When combined with ubiquitous 4G coverage, all they'll ever need to stream are the limitless persistent auth tokens, as locking and unlocking assets as frequently as bandwidth will allow, while remaining profitable.

I bet some of the greediest and most tyrranical IP controllers will have 1:1 authentication ratios, with each and every text character, audio sample and pixel per video frame, such that they'll never reduce bandwidth, and even create backlogs of access history, for billing purposes, when network connectivity returns.

Yes, because you accessed five seconds of full motion video, and witnessed content in which Lady Gaga's eyes moved five pixels to the left, while she pronounced a fricative syllable in the third verse of her top 40 hit single, you now owe Viacom 1/20th of one cent. NOTE: Costs do not include third-party fees covering closed-captioning for the hearing impared.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by pistle on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:15PM (#7879876)
You dropped your phone on the corner?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by fchollet on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:02PM (#7879422)
All of Wikipedia (English) already fits on a smartphone with a 64GB SD card.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:59PM (#7879774)
With no history and no pictures. It's useful, but it's not really "wikipedia" anymore :)
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by thom on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:46PM (#7880038)
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 Co... by rodgerd on Thursday June 12, 2014 @03:45AM (#7882246)
History and talk pages can be very important.

When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.

If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:30PM (#7880250)
Yeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @10:32PM (#7881534)
Isn't most the math just latex? So it could be rendered client side?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Thursday June 12, 2014 @08:30AM (#7882985)
I mean the formulas are not very good at explaining the concepts. Sometimes it's helpful to have a picture.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sixothree on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:31PM (#7880258)
I find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by gyom on Thursday June 12, 2014 @10:19AM (#7883533)
I've never considered this, but the history of Wikipedia over the next 100 years might be an insanely valuable source of insight about culture.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Keyframe on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @07:36PM (#7881052)
I remember reading about Xowa and there was stated that English wikipedia requires 25GB and images additional ~80GB which you can all download and access offline with Xowa. Considering there are 128GB SD and micro SDXC cards readily available for ~$100... that's actually amazing.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by darkmighty on Thursday June 12, 2014 @01:45AM (#7881970)
I suspect if you selected 5% of the most "useful" articles you'd miss out almost nothing and be able to pack in a very small size actually.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by hatu on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:49PM (#7880051)
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 Co... by sitkack on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @10:07PM (#7881468)
All of the textual wikipedia is about 10GB compressed, even with the garbage pages. I'd say a good chunk of the history and the images could fit in the remainder.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by comex on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:57PM (#7880671)
You could also just strap a portable terabyte hard drive to your phone. Not as cool as this, but it does fit in your hand.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:01PM (#7879417)
You'd need the network connectivity anyway just to stay 'in sync'. But in off-line mode life would be a lot easier.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by LaikaF on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:31PM (#7879599)
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.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:34PM (#7879615)
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.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by zevyoura on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:40PM (#7879657)
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.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by pilsetnieks on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:27PM (#7880548)
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 Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:41PM (#7879665)
Since when is caching a substitute for integration?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by zevyoura on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:49PM (#7879700)
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:55PM (#7879744)
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 was a desirable thing.

All of the US is 1GB. See here: (dutch):

http://www.laptopshop.nl/vragen/29528/115735/tomtom-navigato...

Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by krisgee on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:06PM (#7880446)
>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 what turn the should take occasionally.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:24PM (#7880523)
If they paid $3 for that 7GB they'd be fine with it. It's not like you have to store that stuff in RAM.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by yellowapple on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:42PM (#7880021)
And this is all especially true if we start seeing memristor arrays replacing flash chips in mobile devices; at that point, the few GB it would take to store a worldwide transportation map would be pocket change.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Someone on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:00PM (#7879780)
StreetView is a useful, if expensive to implement, addition to maps, and doesn't fit on a phone (yet)
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:04PM (#7879810)
StreetView is overkill to me, basic navigation is pretty much a must, even if you have no dataplan. But of course that's not the way smartphones are being marketed.

I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along.

I don't like having services forced upon me when a single download would suffice.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by zentiggr on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:37PM (#7879999)
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.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by babuskov on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:02PM (#7880428)
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 in the names in Greek letters. It they fixed this, it would be perfect.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by maxerickson on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:55PM (#7880654)
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.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jacquesm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:41PM (#7880016)
Thank you, I will!
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by groby_b on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:12PM (#7879856)
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)

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by eropple on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:32PM (#7879968)
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.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by scott_karana on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:49PM (#7880053)
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 Co... by magicalist on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:25PM (#7880221)
that's the interaction groby_b just described
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by mjcohen on Thursday June 12, 2014 @01:11AM (#7881906)
However "You can move and zoom in or out on your saved map, but you can’t search or get directions on it."

Reduced the utility considerably imho.

Both Navigon and Co-Pilot (on Android) can store the entire U.S. in about 1.5 GB.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Rebelgecko on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:45PM (#7880879)
Google maps does check for changes, but in a sort of braindead way. Every 30 days it'll check for map updates, and if it can't (e.g. no internet connection) it'll just delete your locally saved maps.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by hatu on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:49PM (#7880055)
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 Co... by XorNot on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:00PM (#7881130)
I ended up looking into this a little while back as an emergency kit type thing. Wikipedia is useful - and tells me how to do a lot of things. In a disaster, I probably don't have internet. So it would be a good idea to have local wikipedia.

Zim reader was the best I could do, and still is the best at the moment. But I would be totally fine with dedicating a few terabytes to keeping much more complete local archives on my file-server if the update process was reasonably automatic (something like bittorrent would be great).

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by XorNot on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @10:22PM (#7881504)
Urgh not Zim - Kiwix. Kiwix is the best I could do.

Zim is a desktop wiki app.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sliverstorm on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:00PM (#7879410)
Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate.

Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by viraptor on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:09PM (#7879466)
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 their eyes...

Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise.

What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by JoshTriplett on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:57PM (#7879760)
> Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound.

Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones.

> 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 their eyes...

> Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise.

1) High color depth, allowing bright and dim objects to coexist in the same picture without loss of fidelity, and allowing dynamic lighting.

2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes.

3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by jerf on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:18PM (#7879892)
"Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones."

Still covers only a small arbitrary constant factor of data that is already very small by modern standards.

Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo.

And your video points 1 and 2 are also still at most only small constant factors of increase over what we already have, with 3 potentially being a compression technique.

Video is nearing its apex; sound is pretty much already there.

There's actually a maximum rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains; any use of data beyond that rate is literally impossible and anything carried beyond that is wasted. Even a full sensorium just isn't that much larger than what we already have. We are, after all, talking about technologies that are in the same ballpark as the maximum theoretical data density that human brains can have, and in practice the memristor storage is going to be much higher. It should not be surprising that it's very difficult to truly "use" all that storage.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by viraptor on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @09:01PM (#7881296)
> Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo.

Even stereo is also not twice the size of mono. (using joint-stereo encoding)

Agree with all the other points too.

> 2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes.

This does extend the natural sense range, but is also already possible/done.

> 3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.

That should actually take less space than the final scene in many cases...

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by maxerickson on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:00PM (#7880105)
Isn't having a computer process some data and zoom in on a portion of it 'using of data beyond the rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains'?

I guess you are talking about the utility of media at higher and higher fidelity and I am just snagging on how you have phrased it.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by hderms on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:26PM (#7880799)
It's a good point, though. He is mainly speaking to the data rates for media involving 'guided' experiences. Interactive experiences would benefit much more linearly with the amount of data able to be stored (google maps on your phone analogy).
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by TkTech on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:27PM (#7879573)
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 storage, a limited number of writes to current sold-state mediums, and energy usage, all of which this technology appears to solve.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by DelwinAmber on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:33PM (#7879612)
Energy usage is the huge one - if this is applied to computing and not just storage then maybe.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:46PM (#7880036)
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 Co... by noobermin on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:38PM (#7879638)
I think my argument is that we will find new things to store on our PC's similar to how we found new stuff to store on our PC's from the 90s till now.

I guess it is hard to imagine, but let's dream a bit...one ridiculous possibility that I've thought about is consider something like google glass. Imagine recording every moment of your day from your smart phone, and not just when you wake up. Why would you do this? Well, may be there for little things like having a meeting with someone and you want to remember details without writing it down. Why take the time to record it manually when you have the ability to do it in HD, for cheap?

Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? As things things have changed, so have social norms...I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just stating an observation.

So, I happen to not have any HD vids on my laptop at the moment, but I have a normal video on my laptop that is 10 minutes long that is 70 MB. For something like recording video for 10 hours say, that's 6 * 70 * 10~4GB. So, yeah that's about 250 days (little less than a year) on your smart phone at 1 TB ignoring all other things (full seasons of vids of shows, as another commenter mentioned, stuff like raw gps data that could be added to the video, other things), so may be it isn't quite reaching the limit but it's a good example for how as we have more space for stuff, it is possible to imagine finding more things to fill your smartphone's new TB of storage with.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:27PM (#7879946)
Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s?

Much easier than the example you give, yes. Considering things like Xanadu were already theorized in the '60s, Facebook and Twitter wouldn't be that huge of a stretch. What's more, Usenet and BBSes already existed in the '80s, so there was a text-based glimpse of the future in some way.

Of course, imagining the scale, deep technical details and the heavy use of graphics back then was likely difficult. But the general concept? Hardly. Especially not something as simplistic as Twitter, the idea of it was most certainly not alien back then.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by noobermin on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:40PM (#7880011)
I wasn't referring to technical aspects, I was referring to social aspects. I'll admit I wasn't born in the 80's, but even when I was a kid in the 90's, I couldn't imagine sharing my day-to-day interactions with 100's of people.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by dman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:41PM (#7879661)
Retaining program traces for every program executed on the system.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by frik on Thursday June 12, 2014 @03:17AM (#7882191)
Holographic movies require a high bandwidth and a lot of storage space (recorded/pre-rendered).

Current holographic displays require a movie-source for every few-point. And to make it convincing for a small POV (e.g. 19" 4:3 holographic monitor) you need at least 8 few-points, for a 360° next-gen holographic display you would many terrabytes of data for one movie (and a high bandwidth to stream the data to the display). Depending on the holographic technology you need additonally a very high resolution in contrast to the visual output. If you use a common HD resolution the current visible pixel range is about 640x480 - at least some expensive research displays I used in 2011.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by frik on Thursday June 12, 2014 @07:23AM (#7882781)
*view-point
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by swalsh on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:32PM (#7879604)
Think about the oculus rift, movies/media might become a lot more complicated as VR or VR like technology comes of age. Or if its not VR there might be some other technology.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by regularfry on Thursday June 12, 2014 @05:26AM (#7882517)
Caches for streaming the media. The BBC has this problem every now and again, with big events or popular shows: the pipes to the cabinets in the streets aren't big enough to unicast to everyone simultaneously. A CDN node in every cabinet is probably not too far off.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by aragot on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:10PM (#7879477)
> Software grows to match the hardware.

You mean XML for instance?

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by swalsh on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:33PM (#7879611)
Not sure why he was downvoted, xml is a trade off for developer convenience. A trade off we were willing to make because we had disposable bits.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:54PM (#7879741)
What was the trade off? Harder to parse files for less human readability?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Touche on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:25PM (#7879932)
What was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by biot on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:46PM (#7880037)

  "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:

  <anthology>
    <poem>
      <title>The SICK ROSE
      <stanza>
        <line>O Rose thou art sick.
        <line>The invisible worm, 
        <line>That flies in the night
        <line>In the howling storm:
      <stanza>
        <line>Has found out thy bed
        <line>Of crimson joy:
        <line>And his dark secret love 
        <line>Does thy life destroy.
    <poem> 
      <!-- more poems go here    -->
  </anthology>
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 Co... by Touche on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:00PM (#7880107)
I'm confused, why does anthology have a closing tag but the other elements do not?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by __david__ on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:14PM (#7880169)
The same reason <ul> has a closing tag but <li> does not: HTML is SGML where certain tags can be made optional. XML specifically did away with this and made all close tags mandatory (even on contentless tags, which is why xhtml requires you to do <img />).
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Touche on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:23PM (#7880212)
Just to be clear, are some closing tags optional or are all closing tags optional? If the former, how do you know which?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Tuna-Fish on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:43PM (#7881242)
In this case, the schema probably disallows any other tags inside <line>, which makes </line> superfluous and it can thus be omitted. If <stanza>s are not recursive and poems cannot contain <line>s outside <stanza>s, </stanza> can also be omitted. Etc etc.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by justincormack on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:45PM (#7880337)
You work it out from the schema - if it is not ambiguous you can omit it.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by meepmorp on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:28PM (#7880240)
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.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:24PM (#7880525)
I don't know much about him except from his essays about time and XML, both of which I think are spot on, despite the fiery language.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:39PM (#7880297)
S-expressions.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by dtech on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:04PM (#7880122)
CSV
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by MichaelGG on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:32PM (#7880261)
XML's only real problem is the dumb idea of requiring closing tags to have the tag name. Otherwise it'd be just as fine as, say, JSON:

  <a>b</>
  "A":"B"
And maybe one can get upset about the entity encoding and other extra aspects. But those aren't really why XML feels so large.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by 7952 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:34PM (#7879976)
Bandwidth won't grow and IMHO that is now the chief constraint in computing. For low usage it is cheaper to store data on S3 for a month than buying the bandwidth to transfer it once!
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by grinich on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:01PM (#7879416)
We'll think about media in a completely different way when this happens.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by angersock on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:37PM (#7879634)
No, we'll just use the same shitty car and theft and property analogies.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by figglesonrails on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:41PM (#7879659)
Can't wait to see it: You wouldn't steal a Library of Congress...
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:53PM (#7879732)
The bigger problem is telecoms won't sell any bandwidth. So everything will have to shared via sneaker net.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by noobermin on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:23PM (#7879916)
As in shuffing around our terabytes of "illicit" storage by hiding terabyte thumbdrives in our sneakers?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:37PM (#7879998)
Well if we're still capped at say broadband speeds, just driving down the street with your 50TB cellphone doesn't seem like much of a loss.

Maybe we should allow net neutrality to fall, increase socialization as a result :-) lol.

:.:.:

Also no, sneaker net means a network transported by feet not wires. But I do like the joke, or I pray its a joke not a prophesy.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Houshalter on Sunday June 15, 2014 @06:05AM (#7894915)
This is already somewhat feasible and someone is actually working on it: http://memkite.com/blog/2014/04/01/technical-feasibility-of-...
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by grrowl on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @11:02PM (#7881593)
Of course, it'll all be in hyper-HD 8K video and with 3D map fidelity down to the centimetre
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by radicalbyte on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:27PM (#7879944)
So storage is 1x10^6 larger, and read/write speeds are 1x10^2 faster.

So it'll take 1x10^4 times as long to copy the capacity.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by cmaggard on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:17PM (#7880186)
It will take 1e4 times as long to completely fill that device proportionally to an older one, yes, but that's still two orders of magnitude faster than it would be to fill that equivalent amount of space with the older write speed.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by runeks on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @03:19PM (#7946181)
If you can figure out how to put enough memristors in parallel, the transfer speed is essentially unlimited. It's the access time (latency) that is crucial, and makes all the difference, because it is inherent to the technology, and cannot be changed regardless of how many elements you string together.

This explains it well: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html?HN_...

Several new non-volatile memory technologies have achieved latency down to 100 picoseconds. This is an order of magnitude faster than the L1 cache on a CPU (SRAM).

CPU power will again becomes the bottleneck, instead of storage. We will have to build completely new CPU architectures to make us of this though.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by hoprocker on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:26PM (#7880233)
If you're making comparisons based on physical displacement, sure. But it's probably more helpful to think about how fast it will copy an equivalent number of bits, and from this perspective it actually will, indeed, take 1x10^-2 the time of flash storage.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:17PM (#7880185)
I'll take that tradeoff in exchange for 10^6 larger capacity, any day.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Synaesthesia on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:07PM (#7879446)
Not only that but it has the potential to change our entire model of computing, and simplify it tremendously. The unification of storage and computing.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by figglesonrails on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:48PM (#7879699)
Unification of storage and computing...what does that even mean? I get that having nearly unlimited, fast, persistent storage would be awesome, but that's not a conceptual merging of storage and computing -- but I definitely agree about the simplification.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by JohnBooty on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:33PM (#7880270)
Because processors are now so many orders of magnitude faster than main memory a huge percentage of their transistors and complexity are allocated to things like caching, prefetch, and branch prediction.

Those features that are the only things saving modern processors from spending nearly all of their time doing nothing useful while they're waiting for data to be retrieved from main memory.

Look at a Core i7 CPU die, with the L1/L2/L3 cache circled. Understand that many of the remaining transistors are doing things like branch prediction, managing cache coherency, and prefetch and so forth.

  http://i.stack.imgur.com/4Z1nU.png
Now imagine that all of those resources could be doing actual processing instead of simply caching gobs of data that already resides in main memory.

That would be awesome.

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by mcintyre1994 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @07:37PM (#7881054)
Would this really be fast enough to do away with cache completely? A 100x speedup from main memory to L1 cache sounds pretty low, although I don't have any figures to back that up. If this is slower than L1 will there not be a major performance drop to the point we'd have to use at least some cache still?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by JohnBooty on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @09:09PM (#7881317)
Without knowing any of the details I'd guess that the processor would still benefit from some small amount of cache.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Synaesthesia on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:52PM (#7879726)
Well only one pool of data, no more registers, cache, hard drives etc. The storage will live next to the logic. What's more, memristors can act was logic units as well as storage, and do it interchangeably.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by tbrownaw on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:10PM (#7880460)
Well only one pool of data, no more registers, cache, hard drives etc. The storage will live next to the logic.

Even if all storage uses the same underlying persistence technology, access times will still depend on the distance between the data and the logic. If there are ALUs intertwingled with the storage, access times will still depend on how close the various pieces of data being worked on together are.

Parallel algorithms tend to lose performance as they get chattier and as node speed is lost to increase node count.

Storage living next to logic is effectively a miniaturized version of the "datacenter as a computer" or "warehouse-scale computer" setup that some places are using already. I seem to recall seeing whole books written on the additional complexities of writing software to take advantage of such an environment.

There will never be "only one pool of data". At a minimum, there will be "data in the physical thing that stays on the desk", "data in the physical thing that goes in my pocket", "data on such-and-such private network", and "data available over the Internet".

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:25PM (#7879935)
So, the program doesn't just run on the silicon it modifies the processor, you can increase buffers, add registers, modify the arithmetic units to use different algos and such like using a FPGA that can be adapted on the fly? You could execute a program by running it in place rather than streaming commands to a processing unit?!
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Synaesthesia on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:45PM (#7880028)
In theory, yes, in addition it can also simulate neural networks natively. All kinds of new possibilities.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by DelwinAmber on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:34PM (#7879614)
CPU's may end up looking more like GPU's with thousands of registers.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by oh_teh_meows on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:20PM (#7879903)
Compiler optimizations that are currently impeded because of register pressure can be enabled to its fullest extent, thereby increasing program speed even more. Compiler writers also get more breathing room to design better optimizations.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by mzs on Thursday June 12, 2014 @11:37AM (#7884000)
or with very few registers per thread on die with the rest in storage ala TMS9900

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9900

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by aidenn0 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:08PM (#7880140)
Note that other companies had been working on switched resistance crossbar latches with metal oxides before HP, they just didn't have a fancy name for it.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by aaronblohowiak on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:52PM (#7880906)
The name comes from the 1971 paper from Leon Chua.. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=108333...
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by aidenn0 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @07:18PM (#7880999)
Yes, but referring to varying resistance metal-oxides as memristors is much more recent (2008ish I think) and is still somewhat controversioal.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by higherpurpose on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:50PM (#7879340)
I assume the initial prices will also be 10x more per GB than what we have now, too, much like SSDs and flash storage in the beginning (it's still the case actually) - compared to flash storage that is - so 100x more per GB than HDD storage.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:52PM (#7879355)
It'll come down. Demand will be massive (if it lives up to the hype). This could potentially unify the RAM and Hard disks in computers.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by DelwinAmber on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:35PM (#7879620)
There will always be a place for yet faster memory. Does this compete with the registers and L1/L2 cache in terms of speed?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by avmich on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:50PM (#7879712)
But at least caches are often transparent to software, thus don't affect software as much.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @05:03PM (#7880431)
Likely my basic understanding of memristors they require a certain ramp time. So I don't think it'll replace cache.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by leishulang on Thursday June 12, 2014 @10:58AM (#7883742)
it doesn't need to. If it's faster than the whole 'caching' procedure, than it is faster regardless.
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by panabee on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:14PM (#7879497)
how many years away until you expect the technology to hit markets?
Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by Synaesthesia on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:45PM (#7880033)
Impossible to predict, but it seems we are getting the fabrication down.