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USB Thumb Drives as ... Fashion Statement?
The Fun Guy writes "The New York Times has discovered USB thumb drives: "In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches [DNA must be on file to read] to lend them a personal identity." Apparently, the most important thing about thumb drives is not that they are cheap, fast, durable, easy to use or hold a lot of data, but that wearing one around your neck identifies you as one of the techno-congniscenti, especially if you personalize it with stickers."
Depending on where you live it could be like hanging a clove of garlic around your neck or a piece of rare meat.
Even though I'm a geek if I saw a blinged out geektoy I'd still point and laugh. Since when did we want to be mainstream?
Somehow this reminds me of elementary school, when all the girls you knew had these real popular pink stickers with horses and unicorns and stars and hearts all over them, and they would put them all over EVERYTHING they owned. Maybe some of these people are regressing.
What is it?
I use flash drive, like the NY Times article. The Fun Guy likes thumb drive. However, I think that is a trademark. Same for jump drive. A lot of people where I work call them a memory stick--that's very confusing and a Sony trademark. USB drive can refer to hard drives also. Hmmm.......
Let's settle this (or maybe not). What do you think they should be called?
That depends if you're standing in line for the Sailor Moon film festival, or whether you're using it to store your collection of emo music while you mope at the mall.
Which are the bigger losers? I've always found that the "in crowd" are lamer than the people too lame to be in the "in crowd", if you know what I'm saying.
Remember when preppy was "cool"? Everyone was running around in Polo and Vuarnet shirts? Then "urban" became cool and everyone started wearing their pants around their knees with their underpants showing?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So far my best idea has been to encrypt all the files with AES or something similar and keep the encryption tool as the only non-encrypted file. This way I can access all my files anywhere but at the same time I won't worry if it's lost since the data is protected.
After hunting around TrueCrypt seems like the best option.
So, does anyone have any suggestions or experiences to share?
Thanks
I read this: "flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones" and it occured to me: has anyone integrated a USB flash drive into a cellphone yet? That'd make sharing contacts and address books and schedules and such pretty damn easy...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Remember when preppy was "cool"? Everyone was running around in Polo and Vuarnet shirts? Then "urban" became cool and everyone started wearing their pants around their knees with their underpants showing?
Irony of ironies; as far as hip-hop, the ultimate "urban" music is concerned, the current fashionable look *is* "preppy".
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I got a JetFlash 512mb as a gift last year and used it to death, but ran out of space storing service apps and soforth on it. It was also physically large, which was a minus. I recently replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer mini 1gb, and love it. It's very small and fits into USB ports even when they're stuffed up in a "port cave" on the back of a computer. The JetFlash was so wide and thick that it often was blocked by the other device plugged into the adjacent (to the side OR top) usb port.
There is one disadvantage to today's larger capacity drives - they're ("high speed") USB 2.0. Now this SOUNDS like an advantage, but unfortunately this also means they "register" on the USB bus as requiring power, and as such they cannot be plugged into unpowered hubs such as those on keyboards. (macs mainly) You have to plug them into a powered hub or directly into the computer. The speed increase you get is not necessarily worth it, as flash memory is still quite slow and you only realize maybe a 2x speed increase at the added inconvenience of having to climb under the desk to plug it in.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
One of the new murphy's laws... If you can blame the iPod and don't, someone else will.
The cost for memory has been headed down since the first new-generation mp3 player came out. Then USB storage drives got popular, and they use flash memory. Memory cards were already in use in most technology (dvd cameras, PDAs, etc), and the only real difference between SD, MMC or CF, next to flash memory is how the same media is used. More or data pathways, in relation, with higher or lower transfer speed; they're nominally the same. Some have proprietary software on each card (Sony's Memory Stick), and others are open books.
This saturation of the market has allowed all sorts of things that a specialised market does not. You can get USB drives that have been silk-screened for a company logo, with or without optional built-in flash-based mp3 player, and every other peripheral you could want.
Personally, I'm waiting on a self-contained USB drive with built-in wifi fileserver mode that you can plug a USB power supply onto (the self-sustained kind) and treat the drive like a hotspot fileserver. That way I can upgrade the portable storage for my PDA exponentially.
All of these things lower the price. The -sudden- drop hit around the time that demand for flashdrives slowed down, and the companies that make them kept pumping out drives at full speed. That was when the massive boom happened, saturating the market with usb-mp3-players recently. This also led to massive surplus of some memory types... And since some companies make USB drives out of off-the-shelf parts (small Compact Flash drives, SD drives, whathaveyou) and new USB drives have come out that act as adapters for CF and SD cards... Well, this has led to bulk shipments of low-end memory becoming cheap, and high end memory simply getting cheaper. Now you are paying for the encasement more than the memory.
Personally, I have a 512mb Cruzer Titanium Sandisk, which can take an unbelievable beating.. I'm really rather fond of it.