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Flash Drives Go To Work
feminazi writes "USB drive capacity is outpacing Moore's Law by doubling every year, evolving from tchotchkes to devices capable of addressing corporate needs ranging from mobile computing platforms to files stores with encryption and biometrics protection. SanDisk and M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers launched a thumb drive with an intelligent U3 chip that can store and launch applications. Lexar's premium JumpDrive Lightning thumb drive has the fastest data-transfer rates at 18MB/sec write and 24MB/sec read. And some are strong on the outside, too. SanDisk touts a drive built to withstand 2,000 lbs. of pressure. Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle over the ruggedized thumb drive. While the drive's body came away with a few scratches, there were no dents, and not a single lost file."
Sure you can drive a Beetle over it, but so you know the bandwidth of a Beetle full of thumbdrives on the highway?
When I first saw these at Comdex 2000, I thought "These things will replace all removable media someday."
Looks like they'll do even more.
It's a great feature that SanDisk has a flash drive that can be driven over. However, I can't think of the number of times I have forgotten those little buggers in my pockets when they've gone in the wash and the number of time they've come out and still worked perfectly normally. I have got to say, in a day and age when things break if you look at them wrong, it's great that we have invented the 21st century's response to the swiss army knife.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
All of this thumb drives are USB-based, is that USB such a great-to-use (maybe easy-to-use) interface? Research makes the drives with more capacity, and possibilities, but it's not research to improve USB itself!
ciop ciop
Running the drive over with a car is at most going to be only 20-40 psi(pounds per square inche), the tire pressure. Maybe if the whole car was balanced on one wheel and then drove over it.
i'm still satisfied with 1000 5.25inch flexible floppy diskettes, totalling 1GB of storage!!!!
Aparently it is a "A trinket; a knickknack" according to dictionary.com, and is of Slavic origin. It is also spelt Tsatske.
Nitpicky I know, but pounds is not a unit of pressure. What you probably meant is pound-force.
A thumbdrive is nice, but the U3 software is one of the most godawful things in existence, and not uninstallable without an internal Best Buy program until recently. Ick.
Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle
Shit, I own a 4x4.
Guess I'll wait for a sturdier model...
Summation 2
Surely you've seen this?
Man, you really need that seminar!
I don't see why we can't use Firewire (IEEE 1394) for these types of products.
What I'd like to see next is a USB thumb drive with an RJ-45 connection with built in Wireless access point. Then we can have mini servers that I can move around offices. Sure, evil can come from it but instead of powering on my laptop I can just throw this device onto the network to retrieve files both quickly and securely without outside network access.
why on earth is the parent post at +5 ?
so if i ride over something on my bike (50psi in the tyres) I'll be exerting more pressure ?
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
Windows outpaces flashdrives!!
Otherwise, it would really be nice to boot up the OS from a quiet drive..
2,000 lbs. of pressure
2,000 lbs is not a pressure; there's no area. It's weight. This is basic high school physics...
Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle over the ruggedized thumb drive. While the drive's body came away with a few scratches, there were no dents, and not a single lost file."
A Neu VW beetle weighs about 3000lb. If the entire force applied against the road by one tire was applied to the device (for example, by putting a piece of thick metal on either side of the device and then running the car over the plate of metal), that's only 750LB. This is basic grade school math (3000/4.)
I'd guess your average thumb drive has perhaps 1-2 square inches of surface area. The amount of pressure between tire and road is exactly equal to the inflation pressure of the tire, which is often around 30-35 PSI (Pounds Per Square Inch.) So the thumb drive never had more than 60-70lb put on it...
Please help metamoderate.
This is from the 512MB model /dev/sdb1:
Timing cached reads: 2324 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1161.93 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 76 MB in 3.01 seconds = 25.26 MB/sec
Fast little thing
Ask for other benchmarks and I will run them.
Well, the news about encryption hasn't reached the Dutch military yet. They just managed to lose their THIRD unencrypted memory stick this year - this time in Afghanistan:
Military 'forgets' another memory stick
The Dutch has yet again lost a data storage device, this time at the military base in the Afghan province of Uruzgan. The commander reported a device was missing but no details have been released about the information it contained. Last month military chiefs advised their personnel not to use memory sticks until a secure encryption technique is available. Military and police personnel have lost several memory sticks with sensitive information in the last year.
For an article about the previous two sticks: Officer lost memory stick with details of Afghan mission
Could somebody pleas visit those army barracks with a very big clue stick ?
Ok, it can withstand 2,000 pounds of pressure, but can it withstand being dropped? Sheer casing strength doesn't necessarily mean that it can withstand the shock forces involved in being dropped or kicked.
Once again it's the attack of bad science! Not to mention a lack of regard for units.... Assuming all four wheels carry the same load (bad assumption) and the point of application of the load on the tire is constrained to a point (another horrible assumption), the pressure on the top face of the micro drive would be .25 * W_car (lbs) / A_disk (in^2). Note that this completely ignores St. Venant's principle, which is a nifty thing that explains how shear and normal stress is distributed along any given member. In reality, the stress wouldn't be uniform throughout the disk and would likely puncture the top of the drive before damaging the middle section.
Forgive me for the pedantry, but being a mechanical engineering student, I'm always irritated when people talk about pounds of pressure or use a kilogram as a measurement of weight. Argh!
Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future? Holy shit!
On some drives, like the ones my college bookstore carries, you can't access the writable portion of the drive until after the U3 software is loaded into Windows. Hell, I couldn't even get past it using my Linux laptop.
And the U3 software fails on virtually every computer on campus, because the computers are locked down in such a way that one cannot install device drivers using a normal student account.
The real kicker? They're replacing all the PCs in the campus labs with ones without floppy drives. So even those poor kids with only a few hundred KB of data will have to use a flash drive, and us student assistants will have to support them.
Already, I've had to tell too many students that yes, they can access their data from home with that flash drive. No, they won't be able to use that flash drive here. Yes, I realize their assignment is due in twenty minutes. No, there's nothing I can do about it; I don't have any greater a degree of access than they do.
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It's stupid to say that flash drive capacity is expanding faster than Moore's law since Moore's law has to do with technical limitations, not giving the market what it demands.
What I mean is that a few years ago, it was probably technically possible to build bigger flash drives, but the demand wasn't there, so nobody bothered.
This is just speculation of course...
resent = feel bitter or indignant about
resemble = be similar or bear a likeness to
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Is this really news? Flash drives have been around a while now, and I seem to remember hearing about cars being driven over them almost a year ago. Didn't Corsair do that already?
U3, huh. Why, when we have got Open Source goodness recompiled to run on flashdrives. ProtableApps.com. Fresh baked ClamWinAV Firefox OpenOffice Gimp Gaim and more.
Bless PortableApps.com
You can boot Linux from a thumbdrive, if you use a lightweight distribution such as Knoppix. We're using that to implement a portable system for psychological testing. The operating system, tests, and the data collected are stored on the thumbdrive (the data is encrypted, of course); the data is uploaded to the central server whenever you boot onto a system that has an internet connection.
If a unicycle tire is at 50 psi with 100 lbs on it then there has to be 2 square inches touching the road, assuming the tire is flexible. A rigid tire could have less area in contact, but tires are flexible.
If you still don't understand, try googling or take a look at how to weigh a car by measuring surface area here
Oh, and a 100 lb woman in stiletto heels can exert over 1000 psi if she balances on her heel. We're talking about weight per unit area. Even though it is counterintuitive, you will exert more force per unit area on your bike than a bigrig full of i-beams, assuming you have higher pressure tires.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Running the thing over with a car might not be 2000 pounds of pressure, but PSI in a tire is not equivilent to the pressure underneath the tire, it's the internal air-pressure inside the tire in terms of pounds/pressure per square inch of volume inside the tire.
You can test it by driving a car up on top of your toes... 30psi should be a piece of cake if your statement is correct.
Adopt SI units... Please!
Deleted
Thats a great idea for a movie!
ThumbDrives On a Plane!
That's what I'm talking about!
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Moore's famous "law", previously a handy rough predictor for the maximum obtainable complexity of ICs (integrated circuits, e.g. CPUs) is often unappropriately applied to fields which it has nothing to do with, e.g. the maximum capacity of HDDs. Does it apply in this case?
Here is Anandtech's last year USB Flash Drive Roundup: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2549&p=3
It seems to be still relevant almost a year later. No faster models have come out from any of the major brands that I am aware of.
Being able to smash a drive with a hammer is a feature when you hear "Open the door! FBI!"
nt
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
No word on how much compression was achieved by driving the Beetle over it? A rather inefficient method in any case.
BB had the 1 gig's on sale so I bought a few to add to my toolbox. I found reformatting didn't get rid of U3, then went to the sandisk website and downloaded the uninstaller. Must be hidden somewhere on the drive, but at least the uninstaller trashed U3 for good :)
On desktops anyway. No hard disk... Simply not required with 8Gb->32Gb USB drives available.
Deleted
It's sure nice to know there's plenty of stability in that direction, every flash drive I've ever broken or damaged has been along the join between the USB adapter and the body of the drive. One time I was sweeping, I picked my laptop up and put it on the couch, not noticing the flash drive was in it, and when I was puitting the laptop back on the floor I bumped the drive on the windowsill and bent the damn thing.
If they could make the link between the USB adapter and the drive itself a little more robust, that'd be great.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
In some environments that U3 popup every time you insert the drive isn't appropriate. See http://www./ u3.com/uninstall - I like mine much more now it's gone.
but you can buy them anywhere. Some even come with useful data on them already.y Id=5338506/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Moore's law is often stated regarding the decreasing cost of a single transistor, or (equivalently) about the number of transistors per device of a given cost. Since flash RAM is constructed using a particular form of transistors (with an additional isolated gate that will hold a charge or lack thereof), Moore's law seems to (roughly) apply. In any case, flash is much closer to an ordinary IC than a hard drive.
We have a research group here that does JPEG 2000 compression research. As you might guess, this generates staggering amounts of data. They don't transfer it over the network to other places, they FedEx harddrives. Turn out, with the amount of bandwidth the campus has and the slice they can easily get, 1TB is about the crossover point where FedEx overnight becomes faster. They usually FedEx a box with like 2-4TB worth of external harddrives in it, and get a similar box in return.
Sounds kinda silly, but really works out better overall. It's cheaper too, than it would cost to get the university to buy more bandwidth and dedicate it specially to them.
Nitpicky I know, but pound-force is not a unit of pressure. What you probably meant is "pound is not a unit of force".
"Fix it"
I'll run over a bed of nails and my tires will be just fine, because they always stay at 30 PSI.
Sweet. Now I can fix the flash drive (with their permission) rather than tell them to buy a different device. (I hated only having that option. Since I'm president of the computer club, and computer club sells non-broken flash drives as a fundraiser, it's a conflict of interest.)
Thanks.
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Here's one FireWire flash drive. Although the speeds might be faster, I like USB better just because *everything* has a USB port nowadays, but many computers (like my Dell desktop and Dell work laptop) lack FireWire ports.
The idea of a home server that doesn't need any computer per se is in its infancy: 160 GB HD, iTunes sharing, BitTorrent client, all self-contained so you can set it and take your laptop with you while your home connection continues to download all your favorite Creative Commons licensed Ogg Tarkin video files. I like it!
For more information, click here.
And I bet the only time you ever take it off-road is when you accidentally reverse it into your mom's flower garden.
But I'm sure you plan to go off-roading sometime soon, right? Or maybe up those difficult skifield access roads...right?
There needs to be a tough and rigorously enforced license endorsement for SUVs: to own one you should have to prove a genuine need.
I don't see why we can't use Firewire (IEEE 1394) for these types of products.
Firewire is both more complex on the electronics level and more expensive in licensing fees. Since the basic premise of these things is generally that they're small and cheap, USB is the more common choice. Plus, practically every machine has at least one USB port, whereas a lot of machines don't come with Firewire.
What I'd like to see next is a USB thumb drive with an RJ-45 connection with built in Wireless access point.
You'd need an external power supply to use it without it being connected to a computer, which would mean both a cord and the space for a power transformer. That probably wouldn't work out well.
Moore's law.
idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Software companies have to be eyeing USB drives as a medium to thwart piracy. Either flash prices drop and the whole software package goes onto the drive, or the DVD/CD distribution gets packaged with a USB-drive dongle. How can Adobe, for example, sit idly by when its entire library of titles can be found on every single Hotline server? (Just visit tracker-tracker.com) Knee-jerk response? Adobe benefits from piracy. Boardroom and shareholder response? Piracy hurts the bottom line and has to be stopped.
My first computer, a Power Mac, came with a 256 MB hard drive, for which I paid over 200 bucks. I was amazed at the time that hard drives were so cheap! Now I'm kooky with amazement that USB drives are so cheap. A 256 MB USB drive costs about 20 bucks at Wal-Mart--i.e., the 1993 dollar equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal.
Whether it's double Moore's Law or anything close, the falling cost of USB drives is reaching that critical kind of tension when things can snap and people start talking about paradigm shifts. Not that anyone remembers reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions--it came out on paper, after all.
http://http//www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/6b3b/ / There are so many ways these devices are being used. I find file storage a welcome addition to anything I keep on me. Now, where is that file... in my phone, my pen, my thumb drive, or my knife?
PS: That is what part of the alphabet would look like if the letters "Q" and "R" were removed.
I wonder if these military personnel were told not to use flash drives, but were not given any other way to accomplish the requirements of their duties. I.E. "You can't use that to do necessary task 1A" "But I have no other way of doing that task!" "too bad - you figure it out"
One thing this is annoying about that--they recognize that Mac and Linux users might want to get rid of U3 (their survey that asks why you are getting rid of it includes using Mac or Linux among the answers), but the software to remove U3 only runs on Windows.
It did not work under Parallels on my Mac. I had to really boot Windows to run the U3 remover.
STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE IF YOU ARE GOING TO KEEP ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT.
We purchased 3 of them for our IT staff in the local office. All 3 failed within 3 months of ordering, and 2 of the replacements failed after that (within a month of replacement). We had them switched out for some Cruzer Micro and Minis, and have been fine ever since (several months now).
My theory is the metal on the case. While strong, I think the metal in the case conducts static and shorts into the flash chips or USB controller inside. I don't even know if titanium conducts or not, and Sandisk denies there is a widespread issue with these drives, but go read the amazon.com forums on this product and you will be scared off.
It's a shame. They are a wonderful design, no caps to loose and the drive slides inside the case to protect the USB connector. But it's useless if you can't trust it. One of mine worked one second when I had it plugged into a laptop, then I dismounted it, walked 10 ft to my computer, plugged it in and it was DOA. I think it may have been the static from the carpet, I had it hanging around my neck. You're better off with a plastic one and just back it up periodically to protect against loss or damage.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Who can remember picking up a beetle with like 3 other people and moving it? They weigh nothing. Try going over it in like a Ford F350 dually and ill be more impressed......
At work we're seeing a larger number of motherboards where the USB suddenly fails. It only seems to happen to those using drives or palm sync devices.
If the enterprise uses flash drives more, will we end up replacing more motherboards as well?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Hmmm, storing and launching applications, I seem to remember something else capable of this... oh yeah, any operating system with any kind of disk storage! Does this chip do something to prevent launching applications? Would make sense as nowadays the digital "enhancements" are always just restrictions on what you can do.
Could somebody pleas visit those army barracks with a very big clue stick?
With their track record, you wouldn't get it back
Most of the "engineers" reading here are not the "engineers" you (or I) consider to be real engineers. People typing at a keyboard and causing a display to show something are not engineers. 'Architect' might be a better description.
No kidding. I once saw a puppy get rolled over by a jeep/SUV thing.
This pup was, unbeknowst to me, following me down the road. By the time I heard it, we were a considerable distance from its home. So I began to walk back, as the pup would not take a hint. After a few metres, I heard the sound of the oncoming jeep. So did the pup. He wasn't too bright, and, spooked and leashless, panicked and began tearing down the road as fast as possible, towards home and away from the jeep.
He just kept running, and the jeep just kept coming. The pup was zigzagging back and forth all over the single lane country road. The jeep continued onwards, straight and steady, not altering its course in the slightest. The driver must have been a grade-A asshole. Anyway, as I watched, the jeep finally caught up with the puppy. He was right in the middle of the road, but at the last second dived right just in time to be firmly rolled over the the jeeps right front tire. The jeep continued on its way, without altering speed.
As I watched, transfixed, the pup rolled to its feet, staggering and wobbling, its neck craned rather sickenly to its right, head pointing upwards. It let out these awful drawn yelps, over and over, its eyes looking right at me, head still craned upwards. It slowly began to stagger back towards me, neck still crooked, looking like the living dead.
Anyway, after a few seconds, it stopped yelping, turned its head back into a normal position, and padded back over to me, tail a little droopy, but wagging. I must have gawped at it for about ten minutes, fully expecting it to suddenly and theatrically resume its death agonies and loudly expire. It just sniffed at the ground.
Taking that dog back to its owner to tell them their puppy had just been run over was one of the most surreal expieriences of my life. True story.
May the Maths Be with you!
I can speak from experience on how rugged the SanDisk thumb drives are. I lost my first one in the parking lot at work for a few days and when a co-worker found it, it looked like it lost a fight to a few tires. But it still works like a charm.
The one I bought to replace it when I thought it was gone for good also found a way to escape me and was run over and sat out in the rain overnight (it rained all night) and again still works without any issues.
In short - the SanDisk Mini survived being run over and the SanDisk Micro survived being run over and sitting in the rain.
I hate to rain on their parade, but the beetle, regardless of its weight, will exert no more than the tire pressure per square inch on the thumb drive.
Assuming 32psi in the tires, and a thumb drive size of (say) 1 inch by 3 inches, the total weight born by the thumb drive would be no more than 96 pounds.
Far from the 2000 pounds claimed.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yup, a truck full of tapes (or disks, it you have *good* packaging) is still the standard way of doing high volume data vaulting. If you need to move multiple TB per day (nothing special for a large datacenter), you don't want to pay for that amount of bandwidth unless you absolutely have to, i.e. you need online access.
That's why tapes keep falling off the back of a truck and get lost every now and then. Bummer if there's credit card records on those tapes. That's why hardware encryption is getting a lot of attention recently.
TFA mentions encryption is passing; are there any standard USB drives with encryption yet? How is the password transmitted to the drive? I sometimes have a bad feeling carrying company data and sources around all the time. I keep the USB stick attached to the company badge so I won't lose is easily, but still...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
yeah
My wife backed our Jetta onto my foot once, and then stopped it there when I yelled at her. (She claims it was accidental :) It wasn't comfortable, but it didn't break my foot either.
> You'd need an external power supply to use it without it being connected to a computer, which would mean both a cord and the space for a power transformer. That probably wouldn't work out well.
You can get power over ethernet these days...
no taxation without representation!
Or something to that effect...
What could possibly go wrong?
It needs to take a lot of abuse, and getting squished by a few hundred pounds of stationary overhead pressure from a car tire doesn't qualify as a lot of abuse.
How does it hold up in the real world?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
It looks like flash is outpacing Moore's law, a perception reinforced by marketing and reality by the manufacturers of NAND, such as Samsung's roadmap images http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/NAND Flash/index.htm.
In fact, the densities of nand units has continually doubled for several years, but only loosely tied to Moore's law. Moore talked about the doubling of the transistor densities, but if you do some simple calculations of the gate width and silicon lithography nodes, it is not truly following a doubling -- at least not at the same size.
Traditional lithography nodes scaled in 72% increments, which in two dimensions, is 50% scaling. If you track the NAND lithography nodes, they're moving at smaller and smaller increments. 90/70/60/50/45... these are not 72% increments, and thus, though the density is growing, die size is continually increasing.
The SLC to MLC moves jumpstart this a step; however, don't expect this to go on much longer.
i accidently washed my SD card in washing machine and i dried in in air for two days.
After that, i was hoping it wont work at all. But to my surprise, it has all the data intact.
It's a JETTA... Why didn't you just pick the little thing up, and toss it around a little?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ha! That was our family car for a good two years after we had our third child. Small on the outside, big on the inside, and that goes for the trunk too. Less so for the newer, rounder body style though.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
welcome our new flash drive overlords.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
...that you submit an Ask Slashdot article?
Make sure to work on your formatting, though. Use the Preview button, and don't use the Submit button until it looks right.
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"Maybe if the whole car was balanced on one wheel and then drove over it."
I'd rather see them pull off this stunt with the car riding on the rims...
Because you need to pay Apple royalties for every Firewire interface you build.
I beg to differ.
I am a software engineer, not in the sense that I write software as a living, but in the sense that I have an actual engineering degree and the only thing between me and being a professional engineer is an ethics exam that I didn't bother taking. While the term "Software Engineer" has lost most of its meaning, there are actually software engineers out there that have real engineering training.
Be sure to tell the hundreds of millions of people that weight themselves in kilograms that they are morons.
Or realize that you are being incredibly inane, whatever works.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Sounds like what they need is a very big GLUE stick!
Sure you can drive a Beetle over it, but can it run linux?
The UK show, Brainiac, did a data storage test a few years ago. The show has now made it to the USA, but perhaps not this re-run.
From memory, they tested CDs, harddrives, flash drives and a few others. They fired them out of a blunderbust, dropped them, drove over them and I think they even cooked them in a pie.
After all this, the flash drive was the only one that still worked. IIRC the contacts were a bit flakey though.
In terms of data recovery, a mangled flash card is probably way ahead of other kinds of storage. Recovery of a harddrive requires a clean room and specialist equiptment. You could rejuvinate a physically broken flashcard by removing the actual eeprom and putting it on a new (compatible) card and it would be as good as new.
Well - to more companies than just Apple. $0.25 per end user system to the '1394 licensing authority', which includes Sony amongst others.
You might have to give apple a bit more money if you call it 'Firewire' - that's their mark.
Compare this with USB, who don't charge royalties but do charge for membership of the USB consortium ($4,000 per member per year) which is the only easy way to get access to all the specs.
My wife backed our Jetta onto my foot once, and then stopped it there when I yelled at her. (She claims it was accidental :) It wasn't comfortable, but it didn't break my foot either.
There's a large difference in teh weight on the front tires vs the weight on the rear tires of a front engine/front wheel drive vehicle. Assuming you care, you could find an old car magazine or road test, and itt'll list the weight balance, as well as the weight of the car. Being run over by the back wheels of a 80's econo-box (not saying that's what the Jetta is) is nothing.
On th eother hand, I have a heavy duty truck with tools, equipment, a utility bed and a Diesel engine. On DOT certified scales, theh front end (front wheels on the scale) weighs 4300 pound, while th erear wheels only put 3200 on the ground. Yup, each front tire is putting a ton onto the ground. That would hurt your foot.
Could I ask you to please elaborate on your statement "the U3 software is one of the most godawful things in existence" -- what exactly is so "godawful" about it? Honestly, we'd really like to know!
This sounds like sam fisher is at work...
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Hmmnn.. so Firewire is faster?...
From the Kangaru firewire flashdrive specs:
--- Data Transfer Rate --- 400Mb/Sec ---
Last time I looked, USB2 was 480 Mb/sec.
Of course there's a 800Mb firewire spec, but are there any flashdrives supporting it?
I'm more likely to get 400 Mb/sec from a Firewire drive than 480 Mb/sec from a USB2 drive.
What they are measuring in kilogrammes is really their mass {which is a property of an object which relates to how much matter it contains, and is measured in kilogrammes}, not their weight {which is a force exerted by an object due to gravitational attraction, and is directly dependent upon its mass, and is measured in Newtons}.
At least, if they were using a beam balance, they would really be measuring their mass {assuming that the value of g is the same for the person being weighed and the counterweight[s]}. If they were using a spring balance, then they would actually be measuring their weight {in Newtons} and dividing it by some assumed value for g to convert it to an approximate mass. g is about 10 ms-2 over most of the Earth's surface; and not too far off pi ** 2 for that matter, which is handy sometimes for quick pendulum calculations: T = As Near As Damn Is To Swearing 2 * sqrt(l).
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I actually do understand the difference, my point was more or less that it doesn't matter much, especially if you are staying inside the gravity well of a planet, something which most people tend to do.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
slashdot posting explaining why people don't like your software.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that the 40 psi in the tires is the same amount of pressure on the device. That, again, is a measure of the pressure of the air within the tire itself. It also applies to balloons, bike tires, etc. Having X psi in a car tire and the same psi on a party balloon doesn't mean the party balloon could support the car.
And yes, there is a minimum pressure the tires must be to hold the weight of the car, but 40psi in the tires does not mean 40 pounds of pressure per each square inch of the device's measurement... again, this is the in-tire pressure.
So, since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you must have 10 000 Newtons pressing upwards on the car through the air in the tyres
Here's partly where things go wrong, as ome of the air in the tire is helping exert the upward pressure on the vehicle, but the weight is also being born by the superstructure of the tire itself and other factors. You could have a 40psi tire or a 50psi tire, but that doesn't directly increase or decrease how much the items underneath are bearing by 10 psi (if you put a scale underneath, increasing or decreasing tire pressure does not make the scale show a different measurement. That's weight, which I think is where the article got a bit wrong using PSI instead of pounds). Again, the downward pressure is not a direct function of the internal psi, because the equalization of force up and down are not only absorbed by the air, but the rubber and others, but what you are measuring is just the pressure of the air against the outer walls (which in themselves must exert force back against the air in retaining shape).
"Lexar's premium JumpDrive Lightning thumb drive has the fastest data-transfer rates at 18MB/sec write and 24MB/sec read."
I had my heart set on a 2GB Jumpdrive Lightning, since it was one of the fastest USB thumb drives around and it looked really strong. I was going to order one, but could not find a place with stock, so I continued researching by looking at forums and user reviews. I was pretty quickly put off the Jumpdrive Lightning, since many people were complaining that not only the plastic inside the steel cap breaks, but also the plastic between the steel casing and PCB also breaks. Causing some people to find that when they pull their Lightning out of their computers, the steel case just slides off and the PCB and thus drive remains connected to the computer.
So much for the tough looking drive! So I decided to check out the forums for the SanDisk Titanium...
And some are strong on the outside, too. SanDisk touts a drive built to withstand 2,000 lbs. of pressure. Computerworld tested that claim by repeatedly driving a Volkswagen Beetle over the ruggedized thumb drive. While the drive's body came away with a few scratches, there were no dents, and not a single lost file."
Do a search for "SanDisk Titanium static". A LOT of people from different forums and review sites, have really bad things to say about the SanDisk Titaniums. Way, way, WAY too many people for there not to be a problem. Like the Lexar Lightning, but much worse. So a broken SanDisk thumb drive, killed by a single touch, can have its broken electronics protected from a pressure of up to 2,000lbs! Wow!
I ended up getting a rubber 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager. Which has a 10 year warrantee and although there are some people with failure complaints in the Corsair forums, it seems like a low number and as Corsair points out, they sell very many units and have few complaints. In forums where people are speaking badly of the Lexar Lightning and SanDisk Titanium, there is lots of praise for the Corsair Flash Voyager. When someone does complain about the Voyager, Corsair promptly requests the person fill out a form to have the drive replaced. The customers seem happy. I bought my 4GB Flash Voyager for cheaper than the 2GB Lexar or SanDisk models.
I have also seen some review where they drive over a Flash Voyager and it survives (just). They also boil it, and even bake it with their pizza! It survives the boiling, but fails after they rinse it under water after the pizza baking. But it then comes good once they remove the rubber and dry it. Personally, I don't plan on driving over it, boiling it, baking it or using it as the sole storage of anything important. Thumb drives should be used for moving data or backup and not relied upon.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Hi all - found this cool website that sells Mobile Broadband modems - http://www.usbmodem.alwaysbethere.com/ - Their price is low ($250 w/ activation) - Have anyone seen anywhere with a cheaper modem? My friend has one of these and he uses it a lot when he travels as neither of us have a PCMCIA slot in our computer... Any thought on where else to get these?