technology

Chris Knight's avatar

Imagine a few years from now having a smartphone or an iPad equipped with extremely nonvolatile memory, retaining information for decades, is ultra-fast, can be made cheap with already-existing manufacturing technology, and holding a terabyte of data.

Your reaction is probably gonna be the same as mine: “Shut up and take my money!!”

A Crossbar RRAM chip sitting atop a CMOS

A little company called Crossbar came out roaring yesterday with its announcement about developing what it’s calling resistive RAM (RRAM).  And as The Register is reporting, this could be the “flash killer” that makes NAND memory – which is fast approaching the upper limit for feasibility – obsolete.

From the article:

“With our working Crossbar array, we have achieved all the major
technical milestones that prove our RRAM technology is easy to
manufacture and ready for commercialization,” said Crossbar CEO George Minassian when announcing his company’s new

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

Remember that stunt Jeff Gordon pulled on an unsuspecting car salesman a few months ago?  The one where Gordon was disguised as any off-the-street Joe Shmoe and took a car for a test drive and terrified the crap out of that poor guy?

This is scarier…




Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek – two top-rate hackers out of Indiana -went into the guts of a Toyota Prius, jimmied-around with thirty-something on-board computer units and were able to take charge of dang nearly every function of the car.  Using a wireless laptop they can steer, put on the brakes, honk the horn, fake the speedometer reading, switch on the headlights and even tighten and loosen the seatbelts.

My dad has long proclaimed that “Cars only need gas, air and electricity to work: they don’t need a computer!”  After watching this video, it’s hard to argue with that.

Crash here to read more...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Unless you’re reading this on a mobile device (and even that owes a lot to him) you’re enjoying this blog and practically everything else on the Internet because of this man: Douglas Engelbart.

Douglas Engelbart, computers, mouse, technology, Internet

While working at SRI in the 1960s, Engelbart was struck with the idea of humans interacting with computers by manipulating on the screen with an intuitive interface.  He called his invention the “x-y position indicator”.  The first model was carved from a block of wood with wheels, a push-button and a connecting cord.

Douglas Engelbart had created the mouse.  And he didn’t stop there.  By the time he left SRI in 1977, he had helped develop such now-common technologies as “display editing, online processing, linking and in-file object
addressing, use of multiple windows, hypermedia, and context-sensitive
help”.

The sad word is coming out of Atherton, California tonight that Douglas Engelbart – pioneering engineer and visionary whose ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This is easily the technology that I’m keenly following more than any other right now.  And for plenty of good reasons…

3D printing is now capable of producing replacement bones using living cells.

Desktop-produced firearms continues to be developed and refined, beyond the control of any government.

Laser-guided 3D printing can now produce metal objects with high precision.  You will soon be taking your car into a garage and have a new custom part created in-house.

High-capacity lithium-ion batteries smaller than the size of a grain of sand have been created in the laboratory and it’s thought that they could eventually be used to power ridiculously tiny gadgets, including next-generation medical devices like pacemakers.

And then there’s this: 4D printing!  Objects which are manufactured in 3D “folded-up”, then are allowed to self-assemble themselves.  One possible use mentioned is being able to buy furniture packed-flat from ...

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Chris Knight's avatar
Liberator, Defense Distributed, 3D printing, gun, firearms, Second Amendment, First Amendment
The Liberator: Coming soon to
a desktop near you!

Defense Distributed has made a lot of headlines lately about the Liberator: a firearm which is completely fabricated by “3D printing”, apart from the firing pin.  I think the success of this gun already is that it’s got politicians like Charles Schumer and Steve Israel all steamed-up about it.  Schumer wants 3D printed guns to be outlawed completely.

The thing is, politicos like Schumer can’t figure out how to pull that off.  3D printing will soon be a household implement and if it can be drawn up on a computer, anyone will be able to produce a fully-functioning model right on their desktop.  The computer doesn’t care if it’s a replacement part for a kitchen appliance or an action figure or a real working handgun.  The barn door has been thrown wide open and there’s no getting that horse back ...

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“Liquid breathing” from The Abyss.
Do not try this at home.

Remember in James Cameron’s movie The Abyss, where Ed Harris’ character was put into that funky diving suit which got filled with “breathing fluid” and he had to respirate through the liquid in order to survive a deep, deep dive?

(Incidentally, that was in 1989 and at the time it wasn’t far from reality.  The mouse from the earlier scene that the fluid is demonstrated on?  That was not a special effect folks!  The mouse was actually breathing with that stuff!)

How about one better than that?  Say… put a needle in your arm and shoot yourself up with breathable oxygen?

Research scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital have come up with a neat trick and it could revolutionize much of modern medicine: a nanoparticle which can be injected into a person and provide enough oxygen to maintain ...

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Incest is a terrible thing.  But when you’re one person among a population of 300 thousand, your odds of contributing to genetic bottleneck go substantially up.  That’s the problem in Iceland, where just about everyone is related to everyone else and some downright… creepy… marital relations have inadvertently come about.

(I’m assuming those were inadvertent anyway…)

Enter App of Icelanders, a new app for Android-based devices.  Utilizing a database called Book of Icelanders that has data on 95% of the country’s native population going back 300 years, smartphone users can find information about their family with the touch of a finger.  But the real gimmick is what the developers have named the “Incest Prevention Alarm”: by merely touching your Android smartphone with another also loaded with App of Icelanders, the software automatically determines if you and the other person are cousins.  Or brothers.  Or sisters.  Or parent and child…...

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Before I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater (yeah I was that young: it was a weird weird childhood) and got hooked on archaeology, the Shroud of Turin had grasped my fascination.  All I knew at the time was that it might have been the cloth that Jesus was wrapped in after His death and that somehow, His picture got transferred into the material.  I’ve been reading every serious article and journal paper about the Shroud for most of my life and my curiosity about it has grown more and more.  Especially at this time of year.

What do I think of the Shroud of Turin?  Well, despite many attempts to reproduce it, those have always failed.  And then there is the forensic analysis: just this week scientists announced that the Shroud is almost certainly a product of the First Century.  When you figure in that ...

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SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, missiles, nuclear weapons, antiballistic

It was thirty years ago this week that President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech proposing, for the first time, a space-based anti-ballistic missile system for the United States.  The plan, once developed, would utilize ground and space-based weaponry to blast apart incoming nuclear missiles.  The basic premise was an array of missile-launching satellites around the Earth.  A far more radical design called for the deployment of platforms in orbit: either carrying anti-missile lasers or particle beams, or as part of an adaptive-optics system which would focus a surface-generated laser onto a moving target anywhere around the world (see illustration).

The official name for the concept was Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.  But for reasons apparent to everyone it was quickly labeled “Star Wars” by the mainstream press and the name stuck.

SDI gained notoriety overnight, as much from many people in the United States as from the government ...

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DEFCAD, 3D printing, 3D prototyping, 22 pistolIn two months’ time DEFCAD has garnered more than three thousand visits an hour and nearly a quarter-million downloads.  What makes up the bulk of that traffic?

Guns, guns, guns.  Parts for guns.  Accessories like suppressors.  Ammo casings for NATO and Warsaw Pact small arms and rifles.  Even combat munitions like hand grenades.

And they all work too.

Provided you’ve a 3D printer, the right materials and a few other items that can be bought at most any hardware store, you or anybody else can spend a nice relaxing evening or weekend putting together a small arsenal in your home office.

Sorta brings whole new meaning to desktop publishing a magazine, huh?

I just downloaded a .22 single-shot pistol from DEFCAD, designed by a user named “caboose”.  The entire ZIPped-up file was over half a megabyte.  I don’t possess a 3D printing setup but in the future, that will ...

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