The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Valetudinarian — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:32:33 GMT

What surprises me most is that you do not fly privately, Dr. Mercola!

Have you ever thought about buying or chartering a private jet to save time and hassle? I know it can be expensive, but it is doable. It seems to me your time is valuable and you would be able to have more control of your time. If money is an issue (is it not for most) perhaps you could buy-in/ invest in a charter company or go in on an airplane with a few other investors that would like use of a private airplane or simply want to make an investment with you. My husband is a professional pilot and I can tell you the executives he flies around save loads of time and do not have to deal with the stress of commerical flying.

Just something to think about..

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

jw.mitchell — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:44:17 GMT

Imagine the above technology together with the 2 I just noted. ... WOW!

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

jw.mitchell — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:43:45 GMT

www.thenakedscientists.com/.../1579

New, Faster Graphene Transistors

Excerpts:

"Graphene is a sheet of graphite - the stuff in pencil leads - but only 1-2 atoms thick. This can behave as a semiconductor, like silicon, so you can make transistors from it, but crucially the speed of the electrons can be up to 100 times that of electrons in silicon so it is very promising for use in transistors."

"Graphene was only discovered in 2004 but researchers at IBM have already developed a transistor which will work at up to 26GHz. This was done with a relatively large, at 150nm, and unoptimised design so whilst it is significantly slower than the fastest silicon transistors, it is still an immense rate of progress. The researchers are predicting that within a few years they should be able to make transistors that work at terrahertz rates - that's 10,000,000,000,000 switches per second."

www.physorg.com/news156011642.html

Physicist develops battery using new source of energy

Researchers have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery," a battery that is "charged" by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). This could be a step towards the creation of computer hard drives with no moving parts, which would be much faster, less expensive and use less energy than current ones.

Excerpts:

"...the current delivered by the MTJ is spin-polarized; the electrons are predominately spinning in one direction. That's hot news for spintronics, which, together with graphene, has the most exciting potential for fundamentally new computational devices. Spin logic could work much faster at much lower power than even today's finest electronics, because it doesn't rely on currents flowing and the consequent unavoidable loss."

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

HilaryB — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:54:32 GMT

<b>The questions are:</b>

<ul><li>when will it be available to the general public</li>

<li>how much will it cost when it first comes out </li>

<li>how quickly will the price come down</li>

<li>and how many of my existing devices will be compatible</li></ul>

About 4 years ago I had a 256 kb usb drive (thumbdrive) that cost about $100 or more. Last month I bought a 2Gb one for less than $10. About 4000 times more space, 1/10 the cost and it's smaller than the 256 kb one was.

You can buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for a computer for about $100 now (platter style drive, not solid state) and only a year or two ago you were still paying about $1 per Gb and typically only found up to 200 Gb drives (then again I might be shopping places selling to people who build their own machines, when you buy prebuilt like Dell you're going to pay more.)

SDHC (SD High Capacity) with storage up to 16 Gb on a SD style chip currently sells for about $30 and 32 Gb for around $100.

If I recall correctly, when they initially released SDHC they wouldn't guarantee that they would work with many of the devices on the market because they met the SD 2.00 specifications instead of the SD 1.0 or 1.1 specs (in other words, it probably wasn't going to work with your existing PDA or Camera or whatever you bought last year that took regular SD cards.)

Sorry, I think I just geeked out there...

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

NAllan — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:14:28 GMT

Sorry to rain on the parade folks, but this is just a new specification, not a product. The old standard format was not designed to handle the large (32GB+) capacities of the latest FLASH technology, so a new standard was needed in order that future FLASH technologies will not be limited by the packaging. The first products in SDXS will be in the 32 and 64GB range. All that said, this is still exciting because at least the parties are agreeing of the next format rather than pulling the Sony proprietary trick. It is also exciting because based on the history of the technology field, it isn't likely to be long before this standard is the "old" standard and we really are carting around 2TB drives the size of a mint wafer. I just hope there is some room for "wisdom" in all that "data". ;-)

-Nate

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Running_Stick — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:37:10 GMT

One VGA quality picture (compressed) every 5 minutes for the rest of your life = 1 TB. What a way to make a biography and never touch a pencil.

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

konvo — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:18:24 GMT

It appears that we have exceeded the size and memory of those 'data blocks' that were used in the first STAR TREK television series. Do you remember those painted blocks of wood that they used to put into their computers when they had round table discussions? What makes me wonder is, if this kind of technology is available to you and me, what kind of technologies are still considered top secret by our government?

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Islander — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:53:55 GMT

It's not merely the degree of innovation, it's the RATE of change that is staggering.

I'm still using a 750-MB (I almost said Mg) Zip drive for backup. This weekend I will probably pick up a couple of cheap 2-MB flash drives - which will be obsolete by the time I get them home, right? It all makes my head spin!

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

ERB — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:43:34 GMT

it is not two lines to board a plane, but only two security lines!

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Jack in Nashville — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:27:01 GMT

When perfected, this will be the one tech invention that may absolutely, completely replace the tape cartridge in all video cameras. Couldn't have come sooner as far as my work is concerned. BRAVO!

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Mike _Eyrich — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:53:02 GMT

This is awesome news. One step closer to having solid state hard-drives that outperform in EVERY department.

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Lissa — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:40:36 GMT

I want one.

re: The Most Amazing Tech Improvement This Year

Heather Marsh — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:09:12 GMT

WOWw