Category Archives: “Technology”

Straightening Copper Wire

I had a long length of copper ground wire that was still in good condition other than the many kinks and folds caused by the way the wire had been stored. I carefully straightened the wire against a flat board using pliers, but it took a long time and I wasn’t very pleased with the results.

The other day, I stumbled across a different technique that I had never heard of to straighten copper wire. All you need to do is draw the wire, under tension, back and forth repeatedly against a rounded surface. (This only works for solid copper wire, not stranded wire.)

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What Apple Wants From P.A. Semi

Much has been made of the recent purchase by Apple of semiconductor design company P.A. Semi. That move has puzzled many Apple observers and many theories have been spun to explain it.

P.A Semi is a fabless semiconductor company, meaning that they design chips but don’t manufacture them. They have recently been focused on developing the PWRficient family of processors. The processors are Power PC compatible, 64-bit, multicore, very fast, but very low-power. When you consider that Apple previously used Power PC processors in the Macintosh and switched to Intel largely because they needed faster, low power chips, then one potential explanation is obvious.

Most of the theories regarding the acquisition seems to concern one of these five ideas:

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The Mythical Memristor

In a previous post, I mused about how new types of computer memory might change the future of computers. The future I envisioned might arrive sooner than I thought. An article in EE Times describes the creation at HP of working memristors. Leon Chua postulated the existence of the memristor in 1971 as the fourth passive circuit element after the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. It has remained hypothetical ever since, until now.

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Computers in the Future

Recently, I have seen many articles about a new type of computer memory. Actually, the stories resemble an IBM press release but they have appeared all over the news services. The new type of memory (called “racetrack” memory) will combine the best attributes of flash memory and hard drives. It will be non-volatile, large-capacity, inexpensive, and it won’t wear out. It will be years before memory of this type is produced but the idea sounds promising. I tend to doubt promises of future technology, but I think it plausible that racetrack memory or some other promising technology could yield memory capacities of multiple terabytes in the future.

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