Japanese Giant Builds Computer Memory With Light

[Brandon]

A piece of the future internet has surfaced in a lab in Japan: a memory chip that stores bits of light.

Researchers at Japanese telecom giant NTT have built an optical random access memory (o-RAM) chip — a conceptual cousin to the electronic memory in your computer. The goal is not to make a light-speed replacement for DRAM. That’s out of the realm of possibilities for the foreseeable future. Rather, the idea is to make fast, efficient storage buffers for internet routers and the communications switches that connect thousands of servers in data centers.

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More info at wired
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/ntt-optical-memory/

 

[Monster]

Sounds good!

Together with other optical stuff it can simplify things for switches and routers that deal with optical lines.

Purely optical systems do not achieve the density of electronic chips yet, but still, fully optical computers (incl. power supplies operated on trapped photons) could be an interesting thing, they could do away with electricity in computing altogether. You could have computers that are truly solid state like a crystal and consume only sunlight (or artificial light if no sunlight is available).

 

[bluediamond]

It has been confirmed that on Wednesday's Windows Azure outage that left a few customers in the dark for more than 12 hours was the result of a software bug triggered by the February 29 leap-year date that prevented systems from calculating the correct time.

 

[Monster]

It has been confirmed that on Wednesday's Windows Azure outage that left a few customers in the dark for more than 12 hours was the result of a software bug triggered by the February 29 leap-year date that prevented systems from calculating the correct time.

lol ... leap year calculations are not everybody's pair of shoes ... often times, programmers would write their own instead of using functions that already exist.

Microsoft has a horrible quality assurance (though it has become better over the years), but the example you mentioned shows again that Microsoft software is full of bugs.

btw, you copied this sentence from Ars Technica.
please always mention (and link to) the source when you're doing that.

Also, your post has nothing to do with this thread.

 

[bluediamond]

Oops forgot it, sorry.