Quote from: Diesel on August 20, 2011, 10:47:25 AM
Ah, so that would make me an incomplete, complete Idiot. I have worked hard to accomplish complete status, must try harder.

I'm going to join you Diesel in that incomplete Idiots room  

If we work hard we should make complete Idiots soon enough  

I'm not really that well keyed up on the fundamentals of what makes a computer work but give me some of this new technology and I will soon work out what not to do with it and pass that information on to others.

The latest I've found on memristors. From RSS feeds here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18103772#

Not a working technology yet but getting there.

Flash still has the market but memristors will hopefully be snapping at their heels later this year.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/03/memristor_and_photonics/

Can you believe it, this thread was started almost 5 years ago  where did the time go ?

Time for a small refresher and a little update.

Here is a video that explains what a memristor is in plain talk, it's made by Snowman and was originally posted on Ai Dreams.



And a link to http://www.memristor.org/ which seems to home the latest buzz.

I got only halfway through before I had to stop watching. Another second or so and I would have damaged my monitor.

"slows the electrons down" Seriously? Electrons DO NOT slow down! The speed of an electron is constant. ALWAYS! The volume may change, but the velocity does not!

{sigh!} some people's kids.

OK I admit "Slow down" was an unfortunate term to use but the video was meant to be in "plain talk" and does explain the basics of the Memristor to those who have no idea.

I guess he should have said "reduce the flow" or "reduce the volume" of electrons ?

I'm glad you are here Dave to pick us up on these errors

lol sorry about the rant. I'll "borrow" a valium from somewhere and watch the video again at some point.

My impression was that this video was not about electrons.  Talking about electrons may get tricky.  For example, electrons don't flow or download like a river.   Just sayin' ...   But, who cares about that right now?   I want to solder some circuits together.  The video is about an introduction to electronic components.  Personally, I enjoyed it.  

For the sake of discussion, what's the easiest circuit to build?  Well,  a short circuit of course!   Despite the fact it may heat up or explode the power source, it is still a circuit.  While it may be dumb to intentionally build a short circuit, the  fundamentals are  the same for other circuits once you add components.

So, that's a good enough reason as any to learn about these electronic components, so you got something in the middle there preventing a short circuit.  Good luck, wear eye protection, get a small fan to blow the solder smoke away, and happy circuit building to you.

Been looking for info and found this from late last year.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/10/hp-and-sandisk-join-forces-to-finally-bring-memristor-like-tech-to-market/

  Seems I never put this info in, ages ago Raython coupled a light source with a photo resistor (Not sure if that is the name) a light sensitive resistance,  I liked the device and used it in audio work to control volume,  also used it control the gate of a triac for turning ac on and off.
  Guess I'm much more interested in a tri state computer, a + state, o state and a - state.  I'm not even sure if it would make things quicker, I'm probably used to using 2 power supplies for the plus and minus or on a battery use a voltage divider for a ground and you have the plus and minus.
With 3 states you would transfer less digits and the transfer is what takes time.
Carl2

Star Trek canon hints that by the time of the Enterprise D (Next Generation), computers used some sort of "trinary" (base 3) logic, but it's never actually said outright, nor are the mechanics of it explained. the electronics involved to utilize trinary computing would be at least an order of magnitude more complex than what we have currently, I believe. It would be interesting to see, though.

I do believe FLASH RAM does this a bit already. Wiki.

  We were initially taught that you can have a number system to whatever power you would like, you just have to assign symbols to the numbering system.   As an example here is one I've heard of hexadecimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal
Carl2

Being not only a computer tech, but also a web developer and general programmer, I'm quite familiar with hex, as well as binary and (though not often) octal (base 8 ). There was once a time when I could recite my (then) current age in any of those number systems, right off the top of my head. Sadly, this is no longer true.

  Since I'm retired I sometimes don't know what day of the week it is but I've got my SS number and military number down pat.  Really bad that Radio Shack is gone.
Carl2