Boffins: Our memory film is like your girlfriend - transparent and cheap Boffins at Rice University have invented flexible see-through resistive memory that can replace flash drives and be attached to car windscreens or device displays. The memory, described in Nature, is made from a layer of silicon oxide (SiOx) sandwiched between two checkerboard arrays of graphene or indium tin oxide, which form …
Maybe the boffins have also discovered cheap girlfriends?
I've always found that girlfriends to be very expensive, (actually since I'm married girlfriends might be rather more than very expensive).
Perhaps if they could find a way to invent cheap ones it would be a great step forward ?
If you're storing the simple type of data you gave as examples, why do you need some kind of novel flexible memory? The amount of spare and usable volume in a car is enormous if you're looking for somewhere to place a memory device, and currently available 16GB flash chips are tiny.
When 1) the ignition key is removed and 2) the door is closed and locked and 3) a 90 second timer expires: all of the windows start displaying Google Ads for Stationary Vehicles. GASV ads change brightness to stay visible, but unlike the digital billboards on I-85 in Atlanta, they don't blind you at night.
Think of the possibilities. The personal anti-theft system that projects the image of an Rottweiller. The HOV lane system that projects the images of three additional passengers... the possibilities are endless.
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I ran into a bad case of WOM a couple months ago. A company called me in to figure out why they couldn't read their backups. Turns out that a temporary tech[1] had decided to send the backup info to /dev/null for testing purposes when re-writing the backup scripts, and the Boss liked the speed increase so much that he demanded that it stay that way! The Temp tried to explain why that wasn't a good idea, and was dismissed. When I explained this to the Boss he waived his hands in the air & said "Don't get technical with me, just fix it! I need that data!". I laughed & walked out.
Beer because ... Well some things just scream for beer.
[1] I called the Temporary Agency in question; the tech had documented what happened.
Whenever a display technology that can layer on glass is mentioned, the idea that it could be used for a head up display comes soon after. But it won't work. The key part of a head up display isn't the display technology - it is the optics that allow the display to appear in your field of view in focus. Try driving down the road whilst your eyes are focussed on a streak of grime on the windscreen. The road is out of focus. You can't focus on a display laid over the windscreen and also drive. A head up display uses a set of lenses to focus the image of the display device at infinity, so it appears in focus whilst your eyes focus on the road.
From the article I read, this is memory storage. So I don't see how it could be at all useful for displaying anything.
If you need to find a place to store data though, it could come in useful. Like in one of the digital picture frames, but I think storage like that is the least worrisome about space/where its going to be placed in most situations and more how cheap, how fast, and how long does it last.
A battery to power anything is going to be far bigger than the device you are putting the memory in. Maybe if you put it overtop a solar panel you can store your data with its own power generator.
How well does it last vs sun rays. My window is out in the sun a lot.
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