Posted by Kyle James on Sun, Sep 06, 2009
A while back I wrote about the differences between living in the country and the city. I think it’s time to start expanding on some of those changes living in the city represents. The first change is the availability of FiOS high speed internet.
My apartment is wired with the ability to use FiOS internet, which means lightning quick 20Mbps. Needless to say it is much faster than anything I’ve had before! With this extreme speed there are a lot of things I can do with my internet connection. For example, I have the ability to watch high quality streaming video. Hulu, MLB.TV, ESPN360 and YouTube have all been great to watch through the internet connection, but the most enjoyable by far has been Netflix!
Netflix has multiple subscriptions but their basic package is right at $9/month. With this you can have one movie checked out at a time, AND you can stream as many movies through their online servers as you would like. So basically for $9/month you can watch all the movies you want from Netflix streaming collection of 10,000+ movies and television shows, as well as having new releases shipped to you one at a time. How can you beat that!? Of course the catch is you need a high speed internet and you have to watch the movies on your computer. Wait a minute. Maybe you don’t…
The Xbox 360 with Xbox Live is another one of those exciting entertainment toys. Besides all the great games, they also have a Netflix add-on for Xbox Live. So this means that all those great streaming movies from Netflix can be watched through the Xbox on my plasma TV! Netflix even has some movies and shows that stream in HD. Double win!
With Netflix through the Xbox 360 and being able to stream the rest of streaming online video through a laptop to the television adapter, who needs cable or satellite? Ok, so six months after moving to Boston I did finally give in to cable, but it wasn’t by choice.
Save the money...buy a high speed internet connection and watch streaming online video. You will thank me in the long run because THIS IS THE FUTURE.
Posted by Kyle James on Sun, Feb 01, 2009
Move over resistors, inductors, and capacitors a fourth circuit component has finally been introduced. The memristor has been theorized since UC Berkeley Leon Chua brainstormed the idea back in 1971, but until recently it's only been theory. Hewlett-Packard has finally built one and the future of electronics will be unquestionably changed by this discovery.
So what is a memristor?
A memristor is a circuit that remembers how much current has passed through it. Why is this important, well let me tell you. A memristor can save its electronic state even when there is no current flowing through it, aka it's turned off. It can also remember a current flow so it's a little bit more than just a binary one or zero which in electronics is denoted by on or off. Getting any ideas of why this is revolutionary yet?
Why this is a Gamechanger
A circuit that can remember more than one state allows for much more complicated computations first of all. Instead of something on a binary level processing a one or a zero the computational power of having more options provides exponential more options. As we reach the limit of decreasing computation pieces footprints and multicores continue to increase this offers a whole new direction for keeping Moore's Law moving and computational power increasing.
Also memristors make an excellent replacement to flash memory. Think about the advantages of flash memory. You can take it anywhere and quickly access it. Also memristors could be used by computers for instant boot times. No more waiting for a computer to boot up while it reads all the instructions of where it shut down from the hard drive. Everything could be stored in a memristor RAM stat and instantly turned back on exactly where it was turned off. Also they use less power than todays flash memory.
The Future
Right now HP has a shorter goal of 2012 for memristors to start replacing flash memory. After that we are probably looking at 2014-2016 window of memristors begin to replace DRAM and hard disks all together.
Additional Readings about Memristors