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Morning Lineup – February 14

6 comments

Looking at the calendar, I guess this is a long weekend for the Gummint workers.  In 1971 Congress, in its perpetual stupidity, moved Washington’s Birthday from Feb. 22 over to the third Monday, which this year is almost a complete week before the true date.  A lot of people think that when they did that, they also changed the name of the holiday to Presidents’ Day.  But that isn’t really the case.  About ten years later a large number of retailers and advertisers began calling it Presidents’ Day to make it more convenient for their promotions.  And the American people, lemmings that they are, fell right in with it.

Speaking of the calendar, yesterday I mentioned that we would have two successive months with Fridays the 13th.  I should have added that we will also have a total of three  months in  this same year with the lucky date.  November is the other one.  This is important!

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It’s downright amazing how fast all this electronic gadgetry is advancing.  It was 12 years ago that I got my first home computer.  My brother, who was already pretty computer-savvy, was mightily impressed with the fact that my new Packard-Bell had a 2-Gigabyte hard drive (and a whopping 32 Mb of memory!).  Up until then the standard was 1.0 and 1.5 Gb drives.  Now they’re what, 300 and 500 GB drives on the basic models?

But here’s what gets me.  Looking in the Sunday ads this week I see these little USB flash drives, you know, those things the size of a stick of gum, that are now on sale with 40 GB of memory.   Of course, that’s just a storage device that doesn’t do any computing.  But still, 40 GB!  What are all those 1′s and 0′s stored on?  A tiny chip of some kind or is it a button-size disk?  If you know what’s in there, please tell me.  Inquiring minds want to know.  Maybe we can find one in somebody’s locker who’s on C shift and bust it open for a look. 

We’d better get the equipment checked out first, though.  I’ll go make some more coffee.

buckle-up-texas1

Posted by on February 14, 2009 • Filed under: morning lineup
  • Kim

    It’s a very small hard drive in the 40 Gb USB memory sticks.

  • Kim

    It’s a very small hard drive in the 40 Gb USB memory sticks.

  • Dal90

    Nope, no “hard drive.”

    It’s a special type of RAM called Flash or NAND memory. It’s a chip. Plus someother chips and circuits to let it talk through the USB port.

    All solid state, nothing spinning like a hard drive.

    The comparable disadvantage is while hard drive lifetimes are calculated in (hundreds of) thousands of hours, Flash is by write cycles…and those numbers are relatively modest.

    That’s why you don’t see solid state main storage yet on the mass market…if you’re constantly writing to it you run out of the finite number of times you can re-write a part of the chip before it wears out. Internet caching and cookies, for example, would be horribly suited to flash memory. Storing pictures once that you’ll hardly if ever overwrite? Just fine.

    So while hard drives primarily fail mechanically the magnetic media on the platters has an indefinite lifetime for all practical purposes, while flash eventually dies due to an inherintent problem with the media itself.

    Once they make a flash memory that can sustain unlimited or very high rewrite cycles, you’ll see it rapidly displace hard drives because it’s inherintly more stable, faster, and use less power.

  • Dal90

    Nope, no “hard drive.”

    It’s a special type of RAM called Flash or NAND memory. It’s a chip. Plus someother chips and circuits to let it talk through the USB port.

    All solid state, nothing spinning like a hard drive.

    The comparable disadvantage is while hard drive lifetimes are calculated in (hundreds of) thousands of hours, Flash is by write cycles…and those numbers are relatively modest.

    That’s why you don’t see solid state main storage yet on the mass market…if you’re constantly writing to it you run out of the finite number of times you can re-write a part of the chip before it wears out. Internet caching and cookies, for example, would be horribly suited to flash memory. Storing pictures once that you’ll hardly if ever overwrite? Just fine.

    So while hard drives primarily fail mechanically the magnetic media on the platters has an indefinite lifetime for all practical purposes, while flash eventually dies due to an inherintent problem with the media itself.

    Once they make a flash memory that can sustain unlimited or very high rewrite cycles, you’ll see it rapidly displace hard drives because it’s inherintly more stable, faster, and use less power.

  • Mistymountainjeeper

    My first was the old TRS-80 (Trash 80) way back when the ‘disk drive’ was a tape recorder. Despite the nasty monicker, it was still running when I gave it away when I got my first PC way back when they came out.

  • Mistymountainjeeper

    My first was the old TRS-80 (Trash 80) way back when the ‘disk drive’ was a tape recorder. Despite the nasty monicker, it was still running when I gave it away when I got my first PC way back when they came out.