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AnonTechie writes:
"Physicist proposes a new type of computing at SXSW (South-by-SouthWest Interactive), known as orbital computing. From the article:
A physicist from SLAC who spoke at SXSW interactive has proposed using the state changes in the orbits of electrons as a way to build faster computers. The demand for computing power is constantly rising, but we're heading to the edge of the cliff in terms of increasing performance - both in terms of the physics of cramming more transistors on a chip and in terms of the power consumption. We've covered plenty of different ways that researchers are trying to continue advancing Moore's Law - this idea that the number of transistors (and thus the performance) on a chip doubles every 18 months - especially the far out there efforts that take traditional computer science and electronics and dump them in favor of using magnetic spin, quantum states or probabilistic logic.
A new impossible that might become possible thanks to Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who has proposed using the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom as a new means to generate the binary states (the charge or lack of a charge that transistors use today to generate zeros and ones) we use in computing."
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @05:01PM
You can fix bad software with faster CPU and more memory. You can have fast, flexible and cheap software pick any two.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:53AM
Faster CPUs and more memory won't fix bad software, it'll just make it faster. Faster doesn't equal more reliable, and one huge problem I see with software these days is horrifically bad reliability. There's definitely some huge exceptions, such as the Linux kernel, but overall software has very poor quality. It's not helpful to have a faster CPU when all that does is make your program crash faster. Some reliable modules aren't all that useful when other modules are crap. My Android phone has a Linux kernel which I'm sure is very reliable, but the phone itself is crap because the software is so bad, with various crashes, freezes, pauses, etc., which I'm sure can be blamed on higher levels of software, or perhaps some lackluster closed-source device drivers (I'm thinking of the touchscreen driver here, many times it misses touches). Worse, rarely does anyone bother to go back and improve software because they want to move on to the next new thing; everyone wants to do new development, rather than bug-fixing, rigorous testing, comprehensive validation, etc. It's not just developers that are like this, companies are the same way: they want to sell some shiny new bug-ridden POS rather than fix the bugs in the POS they already sold you.