Millipede!

Could IBM's Millipede mean the end of dedicated PDAs and MP3 players for good? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Years and years ago, I read an article in some engineering magazine about a scientist who was predicting that by 2010, we'd have low-power or no-power terrabyte memory the size of a credit card.

Well, it looks like he was fairly accurate, especially with the dates involved. But, he got the size all wrong. Our terrabytes will come on silicon significantly smaller than a credit card (more like a postage stamp).

Think of what this implies. A terrabyte of flashable memory on your computer means no more disk drives (why have them?). It means things like being able to instantly turn your computer on and off, even in the middle of applications. Why? Since there is no longer any latency (in fact any difference) between long-term, large-storage but slow memory (the disk drive) and short-term, high-speed memory (RAM), the concept of "safely shutting down" the computer (which really just means "write everything in memory out to disk") goes out the window.

It's just cool.