The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, June 27, 2008

A sea of memory

So what exactly prompted me to create a 15M linkable list of words?

The potential of memristors.

If memristors pan out (and I hope they do) then that means we'll get general purpose fully solid state computers without any disks whatsoever. With densities greater than harddrives and speeds that rival conventional RAM, why even bother with a file system anymore? Why not just have everything mapped into memory?

It's not like this is a new idea either.

Back in college the workstation I used had an incredible 1G harddrive. Fifteen years later it's common for home computers to have more than 1G of RAM and it's weird to think that I could basically store everything I had on that machine totally in memory and still have memory left over to run programs.

PDAs also have no concept of disks or files. Everything in a PDA is just there in memory.

Such thoughts have been in my mind recently, and I figured I might as well play around with the notion that everything is just there, in memory, and how would that affect programming.

Heck, in reading over the novel ideas of Multics I'm beginning to think that Multics was way ahead of its time.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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