http://www.physorg.com/news66555256.html

The words of your article were not stored in a file in your computer"s RAM, it"s just "there". The words are written to your "persistent memory" (your hard drive) in a "file" when you save.

Looks like Japanese University Tohoku has been working with ferroelectrics for many many years and they will BLOW the DOORS of this press articles 1.5 nm cell and 100,000 Terabits cu.cm

Tohoku says their target 4 Petabits sq. in or 375,000 Terabits cu. cm. with .4 nm cell size !

http://www.d-nanodev.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/res...al/index-e.html

The words of your article were not stored in a file in your computer"s RAM, it"s just "there". The words are written to your "persistent memory" (your hard drive) in a "file" when you save.



The words are in ram UNTIL you save them to a hard drive. This is why you can type 10 pages in MS word, turn off the computer without saving and not expect to ever see those 10 pages again. They were in RAM and they are lost unless you put them on a hard drive (or some other storage.) It's also why it takes 30 seconds or more to load an operating system, MBs of stuff has to be loaded into ram in order to run.

Don't believe me? Use ctrl-c-v to paste pages and pages and pages of text into word, look at how much memory that uses. 30,000 pages of text in word will use more than 400MB of ram (it's actually more, but windows pages much of it out to the page file.) Exit word, 400MB of ram is now free and those 30,000 pages of text are now gone.

Ferroelectric, or iron core memory as it was known by back in the 1960's has always been the best choice for RAM because it is persistant. However it has lagged behind as other computer components have gotten smaller and faster. Every few years I hear something about advances in this field, but advances in current RAM always leave it a step behind.
This is but one of the many technologies left behind in the rush to miniaturize electronics and computers. Many old ideas are making a comeback. The first version of a universal serial bus came out in the 70's, but has only become commonplace in the last few years. Of course current engineers who developed the USB probably think that it was a new idea. What was old is new again.

your system needs at least 30 seconds to boot? thats a century. i have winxp pro, nicely tuned and when i hit the power button it takes 14 seconds max. (with login), without just 12. in sleep mode it feels like instant as soon i hit a button or move the mouse.

I heard that biological harddrives already do exist. But we won't see those not for another 10 years. 1 we don't need it yet and 2 they wouldn't sell it yet either even if they could. What sense would it do when you would have the chance to buy a super pc. u wouldn't need another one ever again, unless it breaks or gets stolen.
And a company cannot rely on those factors for survival.

At one time you turned a computer off, you lost everything. They were left on all the time so maybe RAM will end up having to be deleted instead of just disappearing?

I use Microsoft word. I have had power cuts, etc and when I have rebooted my computer and reopened word, the original document has been saved, with the option of actually saving it as a file.

In Word, that is the automatic recovery system that you are noticing. Word automatically saves a backup copy of documents if you have it set to (it's default) and when Word unexpectedly exits, it restarts with a menu asking if you want to restore that file. Of course if you exit normally it will delete the file.

This technology looks very interesting and promising, but of course we have not been informed about the potential downsides of it. (Everything has a downside...) Stability, for one. How likely is it that FE memory will lose/corrupt its data?

Yea I'm 18 years old from south wales this technology if fully implemented correctly would allow endless possibilities but i agree with the previous post if you had this hard drive you would never need a new one unless broken or stolen and computer companies would go out of business very quickly but can you imagine the possibilities i personally love music so i can only imagine the ipod with a 1.2 PB drive in it would allow 357,000,000,000 or more songs
Thank You