Memristors will have a major impact on hardware architecture in the near to medium term. They promise permanent storage not just without the costs imposed by SS

Memristors will have a major impact on hardware architecture in the near to medium term. They promise permanent storage not just without the costs imposed by SSD (much slower performance than DRAM), but also random access without the costs imposed by hard drives (variable seek times depending on how data happens to be laid out on physical discs). IMHO the impact on software architecture is likely to be much less pronounced at first, because software ecosystems -- OS kernels, libraries, utilities, applications, etc. -- can evolve only gradually over a period of many years. Consider that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie reportedly created the /usr directory because they ran out of space on a 1.5MB hard disk (!) more than 40 years ago (!), yet we're still living with this directory ( see http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074... ).