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Also I'm tired of hearing about all of these revolutionary things and never seeing them become commercialized. I mean whatever happened to memristors? They were supposed to be easy to produce with existing fabrication processes. Why don't we have any yet?

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Having run a science news blog for a few years in the early naughties, I can safely say that most science news is speculative sensationalism, in which embargoed news items are rarely more than press releases from various universities and national or corporate labs.

By the time it's commercialized you've forgotten the original announcement (and the terminology may have changed). Wasn't the memristor announcement less than five years ago?

All that new stuff that never goes anywhere. e-ink, new lithium-polymer batteries, OLED displays, pocket size projectors, multiple cores, GPGPU and OpenCL, ethernet-over-power and power-over-ethernet, fibre-to-the-home, ADSL2+, VoIP, motion sensitive controllers...

Lots of stuff hasn't appeared yet, but lots of stuff has.

[memristors] were supposed to be easy to produce with existing fabrication processes. Why don't we have any yet?

To do what? Where are you feeling the lack of memristors most?

Memrisistors (theoretically) can make SSDs that are faster than RAM and denser than magnetic hard disks. You can also build crossbar latches which function as smaller/faster transistors for a lot of purposes.

Sure, today, you can have one for (say) 10 million dollars. In 18 months, it will only be five million. At an exponential decreasing rate, it'll take over a decade to be under $1,000.

Maybe when the patents expire and we get some competition.

The creation of the first memristor was announced last year on April 30, 2008, although they were hypothesized a few decades ago.

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