HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory ‘by 2014′

By the end of 2012, HP may introduce a new breed of electrical building-block: the memristor. Image: Luke Kilpatrick/Flickr

HP is two and half years away from offering hardware that stores data with memristors, a new breed of electrical building-block that could lead to servers and other devices that are far more efficient than today’s machines, according to report citing one of the technology’s inventors.

As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP’s Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest.

A company spokesman tells us that the company has not officially announced its plan for memristors. “HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products,” he said. “HP does have internal milestones that are subject to change, depending on shifting market, technology, and business conditions.”

But Williams’ remarks indicate that the introduction of the technology has been pushed back. Previously, Williams had said that memristor hardware would arrive in the summer of 2013.

“It’s sad to say, but the science and technology are the easy part,” Williams said at the recent conference. “Development costs at least 10 times as much as research, and commercialization costs 10 times as much as development. So in the end, research — which we think is the most important part — is only 1 percent of the effort.”

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How the Boy Next Door Accidentally Built a Syrian Spy Tool

Jean-Pierre Lesueur. Photo: Jean-Pierre Lesueur

Jean-Pierre Lesueur is in many ways a typical 22-year-old computer geek. He lives outside of Paris, coding Java by day for a European company that processes airline tickets. He likes playing the piano and reading Stephen Hawking. But he’s also the man who built Dark Comet — which was recently used by the Syrian government to steal information from the computers of activists fighting to overthrow it.

Dark Comet is a software application that gives you remote control over another computer, and Lesueur says he wrote it just to prove his programming cred. That meant sharing the thing with the rest of the world, and after the Syrian government grabbed the tool from the net, Lesueur found himself at the center of an international firestorm. He spoke with Wired Tuesday via online chat.

Sometimes, the boy next door can become a tool in a state-sponsored cyberespionage campaign. That’s the power of the internet.
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Why the GUI Will Never Kill the Sacred Command Line

Computing is heading for the future, but the command line, a relic of the past, is here to stay. Image: Jeffpro57/Flickr

He called himself “MSP,” and he appeared out of nowhere, launching a one-man flame war against a sacred cow of hardcore computing: the command line.

The venue was TuxRadar, a news and reviews site that shines a spotlight on the Linux operating system and other open source software. The site had just published a piece in praise of the command line — where you interact with a computer by passing it line after line of text, rather than using a graphical user interface, or GUI. “The command line isn’t a crusty, old-fashioned way to interact with a computer, made obsolete by GUIs, but rather a fantastically flexible and powerful way to perform tasks,” the site said.

Then MSP appeared with his flame thrower. “There seem to be a number of obvious errors in the introduction to this article,” he wrote. “The command line is a crusty, old-fashioned way to interact with a computer, made obsolete by GUIs, but a small hardcore of people who refuse to move on still use it.”

As he likely expected, the Linux-happy commenters at TuxRadar didn’t take kindly to his “corrections.” Dozens vehemently defended the command line, insisting it still has a very important place in the world of computing. And they’re right. Though the average computer user has no need for a command line, it’s still an essential tool for developers and system adminstrators who require access to guts of our machines — and it’s not going away anytime soon.

“People drive cars with steering wheels and gas pedals. Does that mean you don’t need wrenches?” says Rob Pike, who was part of the team at Bell Labs that developed the UNIX operating system and now works at Google, where he oversaw the creation of the Go programming language.

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Google Remakes Online Empire With ‘Colossus’

Google’s “Colossus” file system now underpins its entire empire. Photo:girolame/Flickr

More than a decade ago, Google built a new foundation for its search engine. It was called the Google File System — GFS, for short — and it ran across a sweeping army of computer servers, turning an entire data center into something that behaved a lot like a single machine. As Google crawled the world’s webpages, grabbing data for use in its search engine, it could spread this massive collection of data over all those servers, before using the chips on these machines to crunch everything into a single, searchable index.

GFS was so successful, it soon reinvented the rest of the web. After Google released research papers describing GFS and a sister software platform called MapReduce — the piece that crunches the data — Yahoo, Facebook, and others built their own version of the Google foundation. It was called Hadoop, and this open source platform is now driving a revolution across the world of business software as well.

But Google no longer uses GFS. Two years ago, the company moved its search to a new software foundation based on a revamped file system known as Colossus, and Urs Hölzle — the man who oversees Google’s worldwide network of data centers — tells Wired that Colossus now underpins virtually all of Google’s web services, from Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube to the Google Cloud Storage service the company offers to third-party developers.

Whereas GFS was built for batch operations — i.e., operations that happen in the background before they’re actually applied to a live website — Colossus is specifically built for “realtime” services, where the processing happens almost instantly. In the past, for instance, Google would use GFS and MapReduce to build a new search index every few days and — as the system matured — every few hours. But with Colossus and its new search infrastructure — known as Caffeine — Google needn’t rebuild the index from scratch. It can constantly update the existing index with new information in real time.

The move to Colossus foretells a similar move across the rest of the web — and beyond — as is so often the case with the hardware and software that underpins Google’s massively popular web services. Because its services are used by so many people — and it’s juggling so much data — Google is often forced to solve very large problems before the rest of the world, but then others will follow. Colossus is already echoed by recent changes to Hadoop, a platform now used by everyone from Facebook to Twitter and eBay.

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iPhone Coding Language Now World’s Third Most Popular

Backed by Apple, Objective-C is now the third most popular programming language on the planet.
Photo: BENM.AT Live Coverage/Flickr

Objective-C — the programming language used to build applications for the Apple iPhone and iPad — is now the third most popular language on Earth, according to a new study.

Moving into the third spot in the oft-cited TIOBE index, Objective-C has surpassed C++, another derivative of the venerable C programming language.

C itself is still at the top of the list, followed by Java.

Just a year ago, Objective-C was ranked 46th on TIOBE’s list, and its sudden rise is all about Apple. “This is less about Objective-C and more about the success of the Apple ecosystem,” says Nolan Wright, the technology chief at Appcelerator, an outfit offering a development tool that spans various languages and platforms. “Objective-C is enjoying that benefit. If it had been another language [on the Apple platform], it would have enjoyed that too.”

Programming language popularity (click to enlarge). Credit: TIOBE Software

Apple settled on Objective-C because it was the language of choice on the NeXTSTEP operating system, which was developed by Steve Jobs and his NeXT Inc. in the mid-1980s and later became the basis for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system as well as iOS, the operating system that drives the iPhone and the iPad.

Originally developed in early ’80s by two developers at a company called Stepstone — Brad Cox and Tom Love — Objective-C was barely on TIOBE’s radar in the summer of 2008. But then Apple launched the iPhone App Store.

Now, according to the TIOBE Index — which surveys engineers and crawls the web for code — Objective-C accounts for 9.3 percent of the world’s software, while C++ stands at 9.1 percent. And a second survey, the Transparent Language Index, puts Objective-C at 9.2 percent and C++ at 7.9 percent.

Though the Apple App Store is the main reason for the recent rise of the language, Eric Shapiro, technology chief of app developer ArcTouch, also argues that the language is easier to use than most. “Almost anybody can just pick up a book and learn [Objective C] basics,” he tells Wired. “That doesn’t make you an expert, but that does mean that so many more [developers] are familiar.”

There’s still a learning curve, says Appcelerator’s Nolan, but once you climb it, you benefit from, well, Apple. “Apple probably has the most developed developer ecosystem,” he says. “Once people get passed that learning curve, people tend to really enjoy the language.”

But Objective C is unlikely to surpass the popularity of Java anytime soon. Unlike Objective C — which is predominantly used build “front-end” software on devices such as the iPhone — Java is a mainstay on servers running “back-end” software that feed online services to phones, tablets, and PCs. Plus, it’s the language used to build applications on Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Despite the popularity of Apple’s mobile gadgets, Android is the most widely used mobile operating system — at least in the US.

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