The article also says:
"These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology
fulfills the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as
much as today's highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years."
Amazing! I assume that means 1 or 2 TB of nonvolatile RAM. That will
spell the demise of the hard disk industry. Too bad. No technology
lasts forever.
Now if they could just make a version of Microsoft Word that runs for
a full day without crashing . . . I sense an imbalance in the
progress of computers. So much improvement in hardware, and so little
in software. That is an opportunity for someone who can figure out
how to make reliable yet powerful software.
Software has to be powerful and full featured because even though
most people only use a small subset of all available features, each
of us uses a different subset. For example, there are probably only a
few thousand English native speakers who often use Japanese input and
dictionary features, but those of us who use them would be upset if
Microsoft removed them. If Microsoft removed this feature we would
immediately go to another operating system and word processor --
presumably the Mac. I would go out and buy a top-of-the-line Mac the
very day that happens. Microsoft realizes that. They are as much a
prisoner of their own overblown feature-itus as the rest of us are,
just as IBM became a prisoner of the 360 architecture and could not
replace it long after it become obsolete.
- Jed
