Posts by Nigel 11 3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I don't like the idea of a bomb on the tube with an internet presence. Just as much a bad idea as enabllng mobile phones down there. There is a more restricted supply of suicide bombers than the other sort.
They'll spend a fortune on rolling this out, and then they'll have to turn it off. Please, spend the money on sorting out the trains and signals instead, so we can get to our destinations more reliably and with less chance of being blown to pieces by a madman.
Firstly, lunar gravity is 1/6 of the Earth's, so there's less downforce trying to flatten out a lunar mountain.
Secondly, the moon is a lot less hot inside than the Earth. Here, solid rock gives way to stuff with the consistency of toffee a few tens of miles down. Mountains melt from the bottom up over geological time (like icebergs, but slower). On the moon it's hard rock a lot further down (all the way? )
If they'd found that the Earth was wrinklier than the Moon, it would have been interesting.
Another subtlety is whether gravitational mass (commonly known as weight) is the same as inertial mass. It's been shown to very high accuracy that the two are equivalent for everyday forms of matter. But is the inertial mass of a kilogramme of electrons the same as that of a kilogramme of protons or a kilogramme of neutrons?
Isn't the Pound (1 lb) odd enough, considered along with its siblings: grains, ounces, stones, hundredweights, tons, and you really don't want to know about its cousins. Oh, you do? Well google "Imperial Units of weight"
The centihundredweight (or cCwt?) might be amusing: cancelling, you get exactly one weight. (1 wt.)
In passing, why do the French use tonnes, when clearly they ought to use megagrammes?
If they aren't careful they'll create the situation where anyone who is in one minority group will always lose out to someone who is in two. So black males will lose out to black females, gays will lose out to disabled gays, and so on. Not so much out of prejudice, but because few organisations have anyone working in HR who understands how to do multivariate statistics properly!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The second time I ran into Vilified by Visa, I applied for a Mastercard. When I got it I chopped up the Visa card.
Since then Mastercard has gone some distance down the same dead end, but at least their equally pointless system "works" and is at least as fast as the sites I am ordering from.
You can't require that.
What you can permit or require is for the customer to clear up the mess once he is made aware of it, and to permit disconnecting him until he does.
Just like MoT testing cars. It's not an offense to drive a car that will fail its MoT in to a testing station. But when it fails, there is an obligation on its owner to get it repaired and re-tested (or scrapped)
Cutting off someone whose computer is being used as a host by virii and criminal third parties isn't treating the owner as a criminal. It's just forcing him to do what he ought to want to do if he's a responsible adult who is made aware of the problem with his system.
The obvious precedent is the MoT test for cars. You are not allowed to drive around in an untested vehicle, or in one that has tested unsafe. That's because it's not just yourself that you are putting at risk, it's also everyone else on the roads and pavements. Likewise, unsafe computers on the information superhighway.
The thing that worries me is who sets the standards. I'm quite certain that Microsoft is planning to sneak something in, which the open source community cannot comply with. "Must have working X", where X is proprietary Microsoft technology. A car equivalent might be requiring all cars to have a working petrol-vapour recovery system ... including diesel, LPG and electric ones!
You'll notice that one thing the UK isn't cutting is its submarine fleet. I'm sure that any warmongers in Argentina have taken note, and don't have an answer.
Personally, I'm not convinced that warships are viable in today's world. Too vulnerable to attack by missile from above, and by torpedo from below.
In the UK there was a lawsuit which established the right to manufacture replacement exhaust pipes which appeared to be exact copies of the manufacturer's original. The ruling was that if the shape of the car body dictated the shape of the exhaust pipe leaving no free choices, then the "copy" did not breach copyright. Minor differences such as the position of welded joints and the internal structure of the baffles proved that it was not a copy, just a re-implemetation.
However, exhaust pipe connectors are not patented. Maybe it's different for a patented electrical connector - the owner of the patent has a monopoly on its manufacture, and is not obliged to sell the connector to anyone else at a reasonable price or even at any price? That obligation or lack thereof would be addressed under monopoly regulation.
Personally I'd have thought a magnetic electrical connector trivial, and therefore unpatentable. But you'd have to pay so much to lawyers to bust the patent, it wouldn't be worth trying. There's a market opportunity here for a small start-up limited company. Just sell the things and pay yourself and your workers a salary. (Preferably, by mail order from, say, China). If Apple sue and you go bust, you've lost nothing much. Let them play whack-a-mole!
Surely you want the SSD on the inside of the PC, to hold the O/S and software for rapid booting and loading? If one needs to store many gigabytes, they can go on a USB or (E)SATA disk drive inside or outside the PC, with an external HDD for backup.
Of course, Win 7 is so excessively bloated, that an internal SSD has to be rather large and therefore still rather expensive. Sigh.
There seems to be a developing trend for manufacturers to sell their latest drives in consumer USB disk packages before shipping them as internal drives. Might this be a sort of post-beta testing, on people who are much less likely to sue if the bleeding-edge tech proves less than perfectly reliable?
Anyway, my warning is that "random" USB drives are not a good choice for backing up important data. Build your own using a marketed internal SATA drive with a 3 or 5 year warranty and a USB enclosure. Better still don't risk your data through a cheap "random" SATA to USB chip. Use E-SATA, or a SATA drive in a swappable caddy.
You could say that about the pedals and big wheel that we all use to control our cars. But no-one would seriously *dream* of changing that interface. There would be fatal consequences if they did.
After one has used an interface lots, it gets patterned into the non-conscious parts of our brains, so that conscious thoughts can concentrate on *what* I am creating, and the unconscious deals with the details of formatting etc. This is why I loathe and detest Microsoft's continuous and gratuitous invention of new interfaces, without even offering a "classic interface" option. Openoffice has so far left the interface alone, and I sincerely hope that they continue to do so.
In my book, the only interface that ever needs changes that are not backwards-compatible, is the one that is immediately hated by new users, and which continues to be hated after climbing its learning curve. Menus are an extremely good way of making it possible to insert new features without confusing the heck out of experienced users of the old features.
I really wish that they'd ship one of these beasties, or something like it, with SVGA graphics and a decent chunk of RAM. Then as well as being a home fileserver, it could be an always-on web-access point, meaning that a lot of the time you'd not need to boot the "real" computer at all.
And/or give it an ADSL port or a second Ethernet port, because Linux is quite capable of being your router. Or the other way around, add USB2 ports and VGA to a Linux-based wireless router so no-one needs a PogoPlug.
The one thing about global warming that is established beyond reasonable doubt, and which can be confirmed using completely controlled laboratory physics experiments in quantitative detail, is the physics. Greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, not to forget H2O) DO trap solar radiation within the Earth's atmosphere. Indeed, the Earth would be almost uninhabitable were it not for this effect - its black-body equilibrium temperature is only marginally above freezing, the greenhouse effect is the reason it is comfortable.
What is happening or might happen to the Earth's climate as a result of the human race adding more CO2 and CH4 on top of the natural levels is still very open to debate, but it's also not physics.
Given the lack of alternative Earths for us to live on should this global experiment go badly, I believe that it' s only sensible to err on the side of caution! Which sadly, we aren't.
If you can't find out what OS it's running, you can't *begin* to tell whether it crashed because of hardware failing underneath it, or the application code that you interface to failing (leaving a perfectly functioning O/S lacking any input device to tell it to abort the application).
If it's displaying BSOD or Linux oops screens, you can rule out the app, but faulty hardware may well be to blame.If you've got two of them with identical firmware and only one is unreliable, it almost certainly is the hardware at fault.
Still, there are a lot of routers, PVRs and suchlike running LInux. If there is any router that runs embedded Windoze, I've never heard of it (and frankly, if I had heard of it, that would be a reason I wouldn't buy it! ). Why would anyone pay good money to Microsoft for an inefficient, bloated, x86-only, closed-source, programmer-hostile O/S, when you can have Linux for free?
The chap we are discussing "refused" to provide his password. I'm assuming that meant he said "No" rather than "I've forgotten it". The latter would have been a smarter answer and I'd hope it would lead to an acquittal - how can the prosecution possibly prove beyond reasonable doubt that this is not the truth? If it really is illegal to forget, I'd expect a jury nullification, or a successful appeal to the EU court of himan rights.
I agree that the whole concept is stupid. Anyone competent with something to hide will combine steganography and plausible deniability (multiple encrypted volumes in one hidden container, one or two innocuous volumes that you're happy to reveal if they can work out where they are hiding, using software that always creates large amounts of random padding so they can't hope to prove that you're concealing more than you've shown them).
I'm not sure that there should be an absolute right to hide behind unbreakable encryption. One doesn't have a similar right with respect to paper documents. Provided the police have obtained a search warrant, they can legally break any physical lock if you won't provide them with the key. (There's no such thing as an unbreakable lock or safe).
Do the police have to obtain a search warrant for your computer, before they can order you to decrypt? If so, that appears to be an appropriate safeguard, and an exact analogue to what has been the case for paperwork for many years.
If they don't have to obtain a search warrant, then they should be required to.
There should probably also be a provision that evidence obtained by requiring one to decrypt should be admissible only if it confirms the suspicions that led to the warrant being granted. In other words, if they are investigating money-laundering and they find only porn, they should not be able to charge one with posession thereof, because the grounds for the warrant have been proved false.
There are at least two better ways to build a non-electronic computer using principles that were understood in the middle 1800s. It's a huge shame that Babbage never encountered them.
The first is electromagnetism. Use relays. I don't think they'd been invented, but I'm sure if you'd asked a young Faraday how to turn an electric current on or off using another electric current, he'd have invented the relay in minutes. Anything binary that can be done with a transistor can be done with a relay. Don't know if a stored-program computer has ever been built out of relays, but complicated logic often still is. That's because relays have quite enormous noise immunity and can be designed to fail safe. Good characteristics for (say) safety interlock systems in a nuclear power station.
The second is fluidics/ pneumatic logic. Logic gates and binary storage can both be created out of streams of compressed air (or water), rather than streams of electrons. For a fun application, look up the water computer that someone built at MIT. I believe that a compressed air computer has actually been used inside a jet engine (probably in the days of Germanium transistors which couldn't hack hot places).
Note: a clock rate of many kilohertz should be achievable. Practical note: one could give such a beast keyboard input (like an organ, but with more complex pipework). Aesthetic note: a factor of two is an octave, threes give perfect fifths, fives give major thirds. Some algorithms might sound quite pleasant as they crunched. Anyone fancy writing a simulator including audio?
London transport is BIGGER than any other European city transport system! Even if you amputated the bits outside Zone 6, it's still something like 30 miles diameter.
And in any case it would be nice to have the system rolled out further afield rather than hamstrung by a fixed fare. Don't they have things like Oyster in the Netherlands that are valid anywhere in the country for travel to anywhere else?
There's a software problem for internal drives bigger than 2Tb, in that the classic partition table can't describe a drive bigger than 2Tb. I expect this will seriously hold back the availability of monster internal drives, because the manufacturers and distributors will be scared of a vast number of product returns from Joes who don't understand this issue or what to do about it.
(Sigh) Why didn't they migrate to an extended partition table format as soon as drives were big enough that losing a few kilobytes wasn't a significant loss? By now it would have become the default for everything, and there would be no problem at all.
(Suggestion) they could hard-partition the drive into two sub-2Tb zones, using two SATA LUNs, as a jumper-selected option. Linux would grok that without any difficulty. Windows ?... couldn't care less.
Cheap printers all use the Gillette model - sell the printer at or below cost, make the profit on the consumables. Also be warned that some manufacturers deliberately "churn" their models, so that as soon as there's a new model on the market that takes a different design of toner, the price of toner for the old model can be increased without upsetting any product reviewers.
Be very sure how many pages you are going to print. In general it's better to spend more on a printer with a lower running cost. Unless you *really* want a tiny increase in B&W print quality, I wouldn't buy any of these. I'd buy an HP Officejet Pro 8000 for about the same after cashback, with colour printing, duplex ability, and a lower cost per page from XL ink cartridges.
Stelios can't trademark "Easy", but it doesn't stop him setting his lawyers on anyone who dares to trade as Easy anything. Not even if they were trading before EasyJet existed.
It costs money to defend a trademark against an infringement accusation. Money that a free project either doesn't have, or can better spend on other things.
It says in the article, it's a temporary name.
"Office Libre" would be better, but perhaps vulnerable to a lawsuit from Microsoft. Which is probably the key. Now the project is out from under the corporate lawyer-shelter that was provided by Sun, it will have to tread much more carefully.
My guess is that the placeholder may have to be replaced by something not containing "Office" at all.
I'll start the suggestions ball rolling with "FreeDoc". At least it trips off the tongue OK.
Might it be something to do with the widespread use of recreational psychoactive drugs? Maybe one or more of the common "recreational" drugs are to one's long-term mental health, what asbestos is to one's long-term lung health.
Or even medicaly prescribed psychoactives? I read somewhere once, that one in three of the USA middle classes are on some form of psychoactive medication. I found that quite scary (if true).
Beer - tried and tested for millennia, safe for most of us. (Moderate drinking raises life expectancy).
There is a club that you can join only if you have survived exiting from an aeroplane in flight without a working parachute. There are surprisingly many members.
From memory, the record is falling about 40,000 feet. It's what you land on that matters. The side of a pine tree and thence into a deep snowdrift is a good recipe.
Then there's the Czech woman who jumped off the top of her tower block when she found out that her husband was having an affair. Guess who she landed on? She survived. He didn't.
"Not easy once you try doing a file transfer via rsync through an ssh tunnel, like your suggesting, but the destination server isn't running an ssh server....let alone use / as a path convention."
Well, if the target system is running LInux, then turn on its sshd service!
If it's running Windoze ... well, borrow another PC, boot an appropriate Linux live CD, mount the MS Shared folder as CIFS, start the ssh daemon, and rsync through the temporary Linux system to the MS system.
Linux: the system that provides answers and encourages creativity.
Windoze: the system that erects obstacles and encourages stupidity.
You mean, like everyone running Linux ran out and purchased a SCO license? Not.
They'd have to say what it is that they claim a patent on. (SCO tried not to, basically because they were bluffing, and the FUD didn't work). Then it's extremely likely that someone will show the prior art, or the community will have replaced the patented bit with some other sort of wheel in the next release.
Six IS standard, isn't it? At least in the chipsets ... some cheapo motherboards save money by connecing up less of them.
I've never tried them, but I've read about SATA LUN boards. It's a little board that fans out one SATA cable to four or eight disks. No bus interface. SATA is logically like the old SCSI bus, and can support many disks on a single port, if your O/S understands what it's seeing. I read about building a Linux system with 48 SATA disks connected to a standard motherboard once.
I've done a RAID-5 reconstruct on a Linux software MD raid array of six SATA drives (on an AMD motherboard chipset). All the drives maxed out at about 150Mb/s (reading from 5, writing XOR to the 6th, with the checksum data write rotating around all the disks in the usual way). That was on a system with a 45W Athlon II AM2+ CPU, and it had plenty of CPU cycles to spare while this was going on.
Kind of puts that 3Ware card in perspective.
On most workloads it's academic anyway. The disks spend most of their time seeking. The I/O data rate is nowhere near the maximim sustainable rate. Reconstruct (on an otherwise idle system) is the most I/O and checksum-calculation it'll ever do. BTW Linux reconstruct is smart, it'll throttle the reconstruction IO rate if the system gets busy, rather than slow the real work down unacceptably.
A 3Ware horror story from long ago. I used to use them, back in the days when hardware RAID really was faster. One day an engineer connected the wrong cables to the drives and the controller trashed the array. Shouldn't have happened. But I do know for sure, on Linux you don't have to bother labelling the cables, because Linux reads the disks to ID the array components. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the disks have been shuffled between shutdown and startup.
BTW Yes, it'll boot off shuffled disks, as long as /boot is a 6-way mirror partition and you've remembered to duplicate the MBR onto all 6 disks.
This isn't news to anyone that runs Linux. Software RAID has been trouncing RAID controllers for several years. The overhead is negligible and you get lots of nice features like dynamic resizing and re-shaping of arrays (powerfail-safe ... not an experiment I've tried!) It's only Windoze that needs the band-aids of hardware RAID or FakeRAID, because it's crap.
In fact the CPU overhead has been unimportant since Pentium-4 days. The penalty was having to do two reads and a write per RAID-write along a PCI bus, compared to just one write for a hardware RAID controller. That penalty went away with modern multi-SATA chipsets and PCI-express. You can max out six HDDs on an intel ICHx doing a RAID rebuild, the disks are the bottleneck.
The future trend will be to remove RAID from the disk block driver or controller, and embed it into the filesystem, along with data-checksumming so that the filesystem can detect (and possibly repair) various sorts of higher-level errors. It also becomes possible to decide on a per-file basis whether to use no RAID, mirror-RAID, RAID-5 or -6. BTRFS is coming. (Agreed, ZFS was there first, shame about the licensing).
I've seen what slightly faulty RAM can do to a filesystem, and it wasn't pretty. The same on RAID-5 could be far worse, if a disk failed and you tried to reconstruct through failing RAM.
So any RAID-5 system should use ECC RAM. This ought to be a selling point for hardware RAID controller manufacturers ... but I'm not aware of any of the low-end ones (4-8 disk) that actually use ECC!
Intel don't support ECC on any "desktop" boards and CPUs, you have to buy an expensive server board and Xeon. If you want to do it at home, build your own system with an AMD CPU, ECC RAM, and a motherboard that supports ECC (Most, not all, ASUS ones do). The 45 Watt TDP low-end CPUs are plenty fast enough for a fileserver box, and run cooler and quieter.
Intel - if you are serious about Atom servers in the datacentre, they need ECC support!!
"Torvalds stands on the shoulders of giants."
Newton said of himself, that if he had seen further than other men, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. It's true of virtualy all progress, probably ever since someone first mastered fire or manufactured a stone tool.
I very much doubt Linus would deny it. Nevertheless, it was Linus started this ball rolling, and it's turned out to be a pretty darned important ball.
Linus has published his own justifications for GPL V2 vs V3. They're well argued. There's the pragmatic one, that it would be just too hard to track down every contributor and get them to agree to re-license under GPL V3. Or, to re-write all the code that couldn't be reassigned. And the philosophical one. Linus doesn't agree with the GPL V3, he prefers BSD-type licenses.
It's *possible* that your attacker doesn't have access to anything except the Samba (CIFS, Windows) ports, because the system is a fileserver for windows and any other access is being blocked by the system's firewall except from a few physically secure management systems.
Not very likely, though. In general if an attacker has your root password, you've lost.
I was under the impression that a panic attack referred to an involuntary condition affecting the autonomic nervous system which can be mistaken for a heart attack. The victim starts hyperventilating, sweating, heart races, victim thinks he/she can't breathe, is scared he/she is about to die. I wasn't aware that it had any effect at all on voluntary acts, beyond (understandably) requesting emergency medical attention and/or a priest.
Or maybe a last beer?
I was about to mention the DC10, whose "engineers" disregarded fail-safe engineering principles with the surely inevitable consequences of having faulty doors blow open at altitude with catastrophic consequences. I made a point of asking what sort of jet my long-haul flight would be before booking, and if it was a DC10, telling the airline that was why I'd be flying with someone else.
Didn't know that Boeing had ever embraced that same stupidity.
The other reasons for never flying on a DC10 were being stuck in the middle of 2-5-2 seating arrangements (*why* not 3-3-3? ), and having ridiculously thin overhead luggage compartments that a standard-sized cabin bag would not fit into. Horrible, horrible airliner.
Just think of the consequences of a locked door failing to auto-unlock because of, say, mechanical damage, after a survivable on-the-ground collision that starts a small fire ... actually you do regularly see reports of this disaster having happened in a dodgy nightclub or hotel somewhere or other.
Thinking about it I'm surprised that same disaster never befell a DC10, which did have doors that bolted shut to stop them blowing open at altitude (mostly ). Or did it?
Unfortunately with two different CPU architectures you can't hand over the O/S from one CPU to another in milliseconds (maybe even microseconds)
It would be much nicer if there was one O/S context within which both CPUs operated. When the fast CPU found itself idling most of the time it would hand over to the slow low-wattage one and power down. When the slow one found itself overloaded, it would re-power the fast CPU and hand over.
Intel's Nehalem architecture does this to some extent internally, but using a two-chip set (different silicon process needed for really low wattage?) one could go a lot further towards low power consumption in undemanding usage, but real performance within milliseconds of requesting it.
Obviously it depends on how good the on-chip GPU is.
However, an on-chip GPU is connected to the rest of the chip with "wires" millimeters at most in length. Speed-of-light latency: a few picoseconds. A GPU that's separated off on PCI-express is at a remove of several centimeters. Latency: at least twenty times worse. Bandwidth: much harder to maintain. Latency is the speed of light at work, it can't be finessed by any sort of engineering.
There's a biological analogue. Our eyes are as close to our brains as nature can arrange. Nerves are quite slow and bulky: there's a penalty for eyes on stalks, or for putting the brain in a safer location deep inside the torso. Which is why brains are perilously exposed on the end of necks: better visual bandwidth.
Beagle board ... UD$ 149 ... no DIMM socket, only 128Mb RAM, no SATA, No Ethernet that I can spot! Disk only via USB2 ... slow, and my experience with USB hard drives is that they always crap out. My Atom board cost about that with 4Gb DIMM, Gb Ethernet, SATA..
Old Acorn - won't be fast enough. ARM is just getting into useful desktop territory today.
I have a home system based on an Atom D510 ITX motherboard with a huge convection-cooled heatsink but no fan, in an Aopen S135 mini-ITX case. It's as close to silent as any PC with a hard disk can be. It runs Linux. It's not quite fast enough when watching some video clips, but will do for now.
Looking to the future, I'd like it to (a) use less watts and (b) use a SSD. (b) is just a matter of time, they're too expensive for me at present. An ARM CPU would solve (a).
When is someone going to market an ARM-powered motherboard in mATX or ITX form, with all the usual ports and connectors that one finds on a PC at a price no greater than an Intel Atom-powered equivalent? (SATA, USB, onboard video controller capable of supporting web browsers, office apps, etc).
If someone already does, please tell me. I'm starting to smell an Intel comspiracy.
One thing that they could change compared to PC boards is to dump that 24 pin ATX PSU connector. Give it a 12V input via a back-panel insert and a power brick, and onboard DC-DC conversion for 5V and 3.3V needs.
An ARM-powered Netbook would also be nice.
Pro cameras should be equipped with two media sockets, so that one is mirrored on the other. The police could request one, leaving the photographer with the other. It would also be a good idea if cameras digitally watermarked their media, so that any subsequent editing would be obvious.
Another possibility would be cameras that upload via mobile broadband if a "panic button" is pressed. Uploading everything that the police officer was saying would be an added bonus!
The employer's helpline gave some of the dumbest advice I've ever heard.
Even if she'd got 100% recompense from her insurer that doesn't get the employer off the hook. An insurer can insist that you take legal action (at its expense - you just sign things on request) so that it can reclaim some or all of the payout from any third party it thinks is responsible.
The employer can in turn sue the laptop or battery supplier. They can in turn sue the manufacturers. AFAIK it is impossible to directly sue the manufacturer of a product, even if it is clearly defective (unless it's a direct sale by the manufacturer). You have to sue the supplier, the supplier has to sue his distrubutor, the distributor can sue the manufacturer if thats where he bought the product from. The chain can be collapsed at an early point in legal proceedings, if it's clear that everyone believes that the manufacturer is to blame. Much more complex if there are multiple blameworthy parties and none can agree on which and to what extent.
He who takes what isn't his'n
Pays for it or goes to prison.
The moral is surely not to plagiarise other people's copy. You can always pay a hack to rewrite the same sentiments in different words (which turns it from an illegal act into the "sincerest form of flattery"). These days it may even be possible to program a computer to do the rewording (and when someone writes that program, I forsee a very interesting lawsuit a la SCO with respect to natural language rather than code).
But this is a plain old boring lawsuit. Plagiarism is actionable - and should be, or no-one could writre for a living! Get over it.
Because the SSD is coming and will soon be eating the market for HDDs, starting with the small ones and working upwards. Certainly it'll be quite a while before you can buy a Terabyte SSD for £50, but there again, do most office PCs actually need 330Gb HDs? Personally I doubt that they need more than 80Gb, even with Windows bloatware, and they get 330Gb just because a 330Gb HD costs very little more than an 80Gb HD, and is faster than a smaller HD.
I wonder whether IBM had seen this coming when they sold the business to Hitachi? In any case, that day is now a lot closer. Why pay a lot for a technology that will be in decline , probably terminal, starting two or three years from now, if SSD technology continues to advance as predicted by Moore's law.
I'd add, that there are at least two radically new solid-state storage technologies waiting in the wings to obsolete flash memory, and maybe put Moore's law applied to storage on steroids. Memristors, and something using bistable properties of Silicon dioxide films that I don't recall the name of. I very much doubt that HP are interested in HDs, they invented the Memristor technology and presumably have patents.
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