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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

(RIP memristors. Those have similarly been on the cusp of revolutionizing everything for … I think over a decade now?)

The rumor I heard was that HP licensed all the rights to the tech away and development has stalled since no entity can put their hands on enough of the IP to do anything with. : / So development has pretty much stalled since the last time HP showed of The Machine with memristors.

The patents should be nearly expired by now.

A quick patent search shows that we still have a nontrivial amount of time on them.

Patents on fractal compression and related techniques are all expired now. There might still be people who remember how to use them. Do we see any use of it, now?

IMO compression was a lot more important when we had modems and disk sizes measured in megabytes or single digit gigabytes. Once you have "good enough" compression then you solve most issues and in many areas where there used to be compression they've been increasingly removing it. Compression causes latency after all and some of the biggest impediments to processing speed now is latency.

So unlike before, compression has stopped being a primary driving factor in the engineering of many types of devices and types of software.

Raw data compression was once an attractive application, but the method is more general. That said, streaming services still pay a great deal for bandwidth and storage in edge nodes. Cell- and keyframe-oriented video compression are reaching their limit.

We are still interested in feature extraction and scene composition, which both benefit from more compact representation.

To compete with hardware-assisted decoding in display hardware, fractal rendering would probably need to be coded to run in Vulkan.

fractal compression was always a scam.

Yup, I wrote about them from an HP conference in 2010 and remember being told about them for a roadmap item well before that: http://ewams.net/?date=2010/09/05&view=hptechforum2010

Another one of those "right around the corner" things that is always coming soon.

World is full of technologies that would be cool if you also had a Time Machine. But other tech outpaces is so if it is born behind it never takes off.

Some of it is pretty fun for playing what if with (enforced) pastoralism. Using primitive materials with a modern understanding of them, instead of limiting yourself to historically accurate processes.

I take the slightly more patient approach with this. LCD used very old discoveries, something need to mature through a few industrial cycles before it gets discarded I guess.

The renewed interest in them and the PR hoopla is closer to 14 years...

3D XPoint, used in Optane memory, used memristors.

It's funny that it's debatable what's a memristor and what's not: "Intel has stated that 3D XPoint does not use a phase-change or memristor technology, although this is disputed by independent reviewers." (Wikipedia)

In that case it seems the real problem is that the killer app hasn’t been found yet.

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