So Paul’s going through Fallout 3 again, and just found a paperweight in a box, and I kind of laughed because ‘hey, here’s something you can carry just to take away from your carrying capacity!’ and so on. But then I realised…

…we all know what a paperweight is. But I’ve never used a paperweight as a paperweight. In fact, has anyone here ever used a paperweight as a paperweight?

Hell, has I know anyone ever used a paperweight as office equipment at all?

hmmmmmmmmmm

Intel have announced inventing a new type of memory technology, the first in decades. They claim it has 10 times the density of existing SSD memory; they are starting fabrication at 128Gb per dye. Intel’s press release says it is three orders of magnitude more durable as well, and three orders of magnitude faster.

This is a huge deal. With this, terabytes are the new K (or new M, if you prefer). But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

That speed means that this new RAM is faster than current system RAM, by about an order of magnitude. Which means there will no longer be an important difference between system RAM and long-term storage. The whole idea of long-term (disc: large, but slow) vs. short-term (RAM: fast, but small) storage becomes completely artificial. It’s all large, it’s all non-volatile (meaning stays when powered off), it’s all fast.

This changes everything about software development. If – and it is a huge if, like, this huge:

…what they’re announcing is true, there hasn’t been a breakthrough like this in the field in decades. This isn’t “better USB drives.” This is a new universe.

I mean, what do you compare this to? The hard drive, maybe? It kind of undoes the hard drive as a separate device, but I don’t think that goes far enough. It resets so many basic ideas about software and hardware development that you may in fact have to go all the way to the very concept of interactive computing to get something bigger. (Interactive, as opposed to batch, where you submitted code and waited for printed output to see what happened.)

No, Really, It Actually Was Like This

And this is just the first generation. At 10 times current storage density, that’s a big skip ahead in Moore’s Law (doubling every two years? Nah, let’s double three times next year alone, instead), and is getting close to “all the storage you want forever.”

You’re also seeing a massive elimination of fragility. That has tremendous value in and of itself. People think of the internet as forever, but that’s not true – that’s only for things that enough people care about to store individually that the resulting redundancy makes up for the intrinsic fragility of previous computer storage systems. 1000 times more durable than existing SSD puts it far, far past the lifespans of magnetic media – it gets you into paper range.

I have archive drives. They are about to be utterly obsolete. The whole concept of ‘delete’ is now pointless, except organisationally.

This changes the way file systems are written. This changes the way processors are made. They’ve got a bus that can handle the RAM bandwidth internally, so presumably – hopefully! – that extends out to a motherboard system bus. Think about that. The first products are going to be PCIe storage expansion, but that’s just because PCIe is the fastest interface out there now. It’s far behind what this new memory type can deliver.

I mean, once you’re designing for this kind of storage, do CPU caches have a point anymore? I don’t even know. (And as an aside: VMs become hilarious. SURE HAVE SOME WHY NOT) If the RAM bus that will go with this is moving at the speed of the RAM – which is, again, faster than anything we have now – then the only savings in the end is raw distance and speed of electron travel. That’s certainly not zero, so may make it worthwhile. I don’t know.

In my head I’m seeing processors basically treating all of storage as on-chip cache, and doing it with as many processors as you want. Hell, do new types of processors optimised for this storage paradigm even need registers anymore? I imagine so, but it’s a question worth asking.

So, yeah. If they deliver, you can short Seagate, short Western Digital, short Hitachi – or, as Fishy said, “short Thailand.” In this environment, what even is magnetic media lol other than “It’s been fun, guys; you are now niche players.”

Test quantities this year to developers. Product next year. PREPARE FOR REBOOT!

For all those who are considering going to the World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting (as I suggested might be necessary regarding the Hugo awards), Kevin Standlee has produced this ten minute video on business meeting procedures. It is dry, as such things tend to be, but please do give it your time. This is how the meeting is run, full stop, and you need to know.

There is far more sitting than I am comfortable with doing. Such is life. I didn’t know about that, so really, if you’re going to the meeting, watch the video.

Almost every Android phone can be p0wned by sending it a text. Many of them can be p0wned completely silently, and in most cases, you don’t have to interact with it – as soon as you look at the text, your phone is theirs.

This goes back to Android 2.2, inclusive. It’s a whole set of disastrous security holes, all in one platform. That whole Windows thing I posted about earlier is nothing compared to this. Nothing. This is an unmitigated disaster.

I mean, I’m looking at this from a security environment and just… how do you even fix this? Aside from the fact – fact – that Android phone manufacturers are absolutely infamous for never rolling out OS updates, much less security updates, the sheer number of pending p0wned devices – around one billion – kind of boggles the mind.

The only good thing about it is that battery lives and screen breakage will retire most of these devices sometime over the next three years. That’s how long this will echo around, because we can reasonably well assume the patch rate will be negligible.

So, yeah, Windows 10, looking pretty decent, has some issues, but Cortana looks pretty fun and I’ll want to try that, and there’s games testing about to happen that will be relevant, but whatever.

And then I see this.

What the hell, Microsoft? What the hell. Even if – okay, I’m sure this is true – corporate machines can or will have this turned off by default by administrators, this is still a mind-bogglingly bad decision. Even laying aside the whole ‘people don’t want to automatically share their home network passwords to EVERYONE THEY’VE EVER MET EVER’ thing, people use personal machines at work.

I’d add commentary about people using phones at work too, but then I remembered it’s Windows Phone, so nevermind. But the laptop thing? Oh yeah.

On the Hugo Awards voting page, I thought you had to save your Hugo ballot categories individually. After a while, I noticed you didn’t, that any save was save all, but since we have greylisting going on our mail server, I ended up getting the, um, 7? confirmation mails all at once. (Once per save!)

Here’s DS Moen’s slightly-out-of-date Puppy-free voting guide – don’t forget that The Three-Body Problem was elevated to the ballot after a Puppy nominee withdrew. Read the notes included with the Hugo Voter Packet, they are useful.

Since I may go back and change a couple of my voting stacks, I’m not posting my ballot yet. That’ll give me something to talk about on Monday, anyway. Deadline is the 31st.

Remember, you can vote now and still change your vote later, up to the deadline, when there will be a rush. So you may as well get that done. Vote!

Minion Paul: Oh yeah, take that, you super mutant. <BLAM> <Critical Strike> <dies>
Minion Paul: I’m gonna take your mole rat meat.
Solarbird: Doo dah, doo dah
Minion Paul, singing: I’m gonna take your mole rat meat!
Solarbird, joining in: All the doo dah day!

Another aquatic lair, courtesy James on Facebook! On the surface, this one’s a fair bit less awful than the previous one, but the name they gave it is kind of horrible and means you’d still want to steal it to own it ethically, just because of that. (Unless you’re a white supremacist, in which case, please buy it and leave a paper trail so I can solve your fucking problem through violence.)

But that’s not the ship’s fault, and hey, it’s a submarine! That’s cool. Mashable talks about it here, with some pictures.

One of the people bidding for some work at the Lair called back and told me they had tried to email me some things, but it wasn’t working. Keep in mind I had hit the “contact by phone” box on their webform, and had most specifically not checked “contact by email.”

So I had them read the error to me. Which they dutifully did, including reading the email address I gave their form:

do-not-email@nowhere.net

Even that didn’t register until I said it back to them. And this is why I don’t trust companies with real email addresses.