memory

Observing Memorial Day: How to celebrate the fallen online

Next Monday is Memorial Day. During the federal holiday, most U.S.-based workers will take the time to be with family, pay their respects to fallen soldiers and family members and celebrate the unofficial beginning of summer.

Last year , Edward Rothstein suggested in the New York Times that on Memorial Day, consider turning off the computer and firing up the barbecue.

Unfortunately for sysops, network admins, webmasters and anyone else tasked with maintaining mission-critical systems or guaranteeing 99.99% uptime for an online service or ebusiness, the Internet won’t pause to pay its respects.

[Image Credit: NASA, via FlipSideShow.com]

If you’re stuck in the server room or need to catch up on help desk tickets, here’s a short list of places to pay your respects.

You can find more information about official observation of the holiday at USMemorialDay.org.

The History Channel’s Memorial Day website features videos, battle maps and a forum for veterans. According to this article from K.C. Jones, the interactive site “includes information about conflicts ranging from the American Revolution to the current war in Iraq, a span of time in which an estimated 1.4 million U.S. soldiers have lost their lives.”

If you’re an teacher or parent interested in educating your students more about the holiday, Education-World.com has a list of 5 Lessons for Teaching About Memorial Day.

USVets.tv will have a live webcast of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. speaking at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at 1 PM EST.

What is the missing link of integrated circuitry? The memristor!

The discovery of Thursday’s Word of the Day, memristor, has been theorized about since 1971, when the possibility for a fourth fundamental passive circuit element was first described. The invention, fully described in a Nature article on memristance, The Missing Memristor Found, has thrown the science of integrated circuitry into a bit of…. flux.

[Image Credit: IEEE's Spectrum]

Ok, terrible electrical engineering joke. Leon Chua (the scientist who first hypothesized about the memristor back in the seventies), as quoted by Margaret Rouse in Overheard in the Blogosphere:

“Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. “

Read HP’s Memristor FAQ for more information.

NPR’s Science Friday recorded a terrific show on May 9th on the discovery. From the shownotes:

Introductory classes in electronics are big on circuit diagrams involving different combinations of resistors, capacitors and inductors. Now, researchers say that they have discovered a fourth fundamental passive circuit element, one that complements those well-known three and fills in a gap in the basic equations that describe the relationships between voltage, current, and magnetic flux. The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the ‘memristor,’ was first described in 1971, but until now no one has found a device with the properties of that missing element. A group of scientists at HP Labs found that in nanoscale materials, however, the ‘memristance’ property becomes easier to see.

The find could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. We’ll talk with one of the discoverers of the modern memristor about the find and its potential applications.

Listen to the memristor show on at ScienceFriday. com or download the MP3 directly to your hard drive. You can subscribe to the Science Friday podcast there as well.

Videos: The world’s first holographic storage system and how it works

In the first video, Liz Murphy, marketing VP of InPhase Technologies, describes the world’s first commercial holographic storage system at NAB.

We define a holographic disk drive, the practical implementation of the technology, as “a holographic storage device that uses a laser to store data to optical media in three dimensions, maximizing storage capacity by using the media’s depth. Most optical media, such as CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray only offer bit-at-a-time surface or dual-layer writing capacity. A holographic versatile disk is just slightly larger than a DVD and can store 30 times as much data.”

If you want a blast from the past, watch the video below to see Liz Murphy in June of 2007 explaining how HD holographic storage (will) work. She’s interviewed by Scott Jacobs for Futurepeak. (Click ahead to :30 to avoid some shaky handheld camera work.)  There’s a good explanation for how the technology works and some historical perspective on its development later in the video.

Video: Phase Change Memory (PCM) animation

This animation was presented at IEDM 2006 to show how phase change memory (PCM) devices switch between amorphous and crystalline states.