This is a WHAT?!

his great pic really brings home just how things have changed....Check out the pic.  Like the article asked - is it a:

• A toaster? Farm equipment? Part of an engine? Wreckage from a destroyed tank?

Nope - amazingly it is a 4k memory module from an early computer.  Like the author said, since the pic is 600+ kbytes, if you wanted to carry this photo around it would take 172 more of these memory modules and a tractor trailer to transport the pic around. 

HP wants to phase out flash memory and SSDs by 2013

According to this Dvice article HP's new technology may well make DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015. flash memory in a year and a half, and they're planning on rendering. The computer giant plans on having new technology ready in a year and a half.

From the Dvice article:

• This new technology that HP is betting on is called the memristor. Memristors are wires made of titanium dioxide a mere 150 atoms wide.
  
• Like conventional solid state memory, memristors can store data without using any power. Memristors are also relatively easy to manufacture using existing technology.
  
• The advantages of memristors are that their read times are about 10 nanoseconds, with write and erase times of 0.1 nanosecond. Data stored in memristors lasts years, and you can read and write them about 1,000,000,000,000 times (HP is still counting) without data loss.
• HP says that it should have a version of what they're calling ReRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory) on the market by 2013 ...and over the next few years, they'll be rolling out memristor-based versions of both DRAM and SRAM, which ought to speed up computers immensely.

New storage research could mean data lifespan of 1 billion years!

By any stretch of the imagination, today's data densities are amazing! Today it is possible to store 10 to 100 gigabits of data per square inch on today's memory cards. That is a huge amount of data by any standard. Of course this technology comes at a price. Because of it's density today's data has an estimated life expectancy of only 10 to 30 years. What is even more cause for concern is the fact that even higher storage densities are needed for future electronic devices. That should frighten even the most stalwart of digital storage devotees.

But now researchers are reporting that they are working on a computer memory device that can store thousands of times more data than conventional silicon chips with an estimated lifetime of more than one billion years! This according to an article in ScienceDaily.

The researchers describe development of a memory device consisting of an iron nanoparticle enclosed in a hollow carbon nanotube. In the presence of electricity, the nanoparticle can be shuttled back and forth with great precision. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back. Plus researchers showed that the device had a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch (a trillion bits of information) and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years.

read more in the ScienceDaily article