The whole semiconductor industry is backlogged because everyone ramped down their production and laid off people during the financial crash. Now we can't make stuff fast enough despite desperately ramping up and everyone wants to refill their inventory at once.
Slashdot submitters, if your summary includes the phrase "controversial solid-state physicist", then your article is bunk. Click the cancel button and go back to whatever you were doing.
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations.
Unfortunately, what PowerPoint slides (and presentations) are being used for is a substitute for every other form of communication. Instead of specs, essays, helpful diagrams, and properly organized data, we have slides, slides, slides, and slides. Usually the slides are explained once in one meeting or conference call and then passed around, giving the illusion that information is written down in a usable form. In reality, if you really want to know what's going on you have to call the author (if they even bother to write their name), wasting your time and theirs.
You're right that PowerPoint doesn't force people to communicate poorly, and poor communication has many causes. But PowerPoint does make poor communication easier, and 80-90% of people are using it wrong. The argument of Tufte et al boils down to this: regardless of whether it's a good tool or a bad tool, PowerPoint is not the *right* tool.
Magnetic disks store an absolutely mind-boggling amount of data. As far back as I remember, semiconductor memories have always been 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller. Imagine trying to scale DRAM up to 500 gigs. Flash isn't much different. The transistors need high-voltage connections for program/erase, they can't shrink too fast or you lose data retention ability, etc. I'm not an expert in magnetic storage, but I'd imagine it's a lot easier to make a chunk of mostly homogeneous material.
I wasn't bothered much when the special editions first came out, but I recently watched laserdisc rips of the original versions and I think the critics have a point. Comparing ANH and ESB to ROTJ, the biggest difference was that ROTJ became more of a creature/effects show and the movie suffered because of it. In particular, note the overly-long opening section in Jabba's palace, most of which does little to help the plot or pacing. The prequels were even worse, with writing and characterization taking a backseat to computer animation.
It was surprising to realize that Star Wars (ANH) is actually a *good movie*. I can understand people being unhappy with changes that have only made it worse. Think about it -- what in the special editions actually made the movie itself better?
A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.
I take it you haven't taken any university level classes in the US in the past decade. The classes are worse than high school, the professors are generally unmotivated, the tests are pure regurgitation, there is little free discussion, etc.
All of them? How many universities have you attended in the past decade? For that matter, how many professors have you had even within a single university? You'd have to have five or six majors to even start getting a representative sample. How can you possibly make such a sweeping statement about thousands of different schools? I guess you must have gone to a bad one because you certainly didn't learn anything about how little you really know.
For the record, I went to college from 2000-2006 (RIT in upstate New York) and thought the classes were just fine.
No thanks. PS/2 is superior to USB for keyboards (USB can't tell what order the keys were pressed in), and a nice CRT still beats the pants off of laggy low-contrast LCDs. Electronics hobbyists like having simple parallel and serial ports. Does having extra ports on the back of your computer hurt you in some way?
Many of the people on Slashdot are self-taught IT folks who can actually compare themselves to people with IT or Comp Sci degrees and come out on top. A lot of them assume the same applies everywhere, ignoring the differences between that and a Ph.D in a physical science. It's why all of the science stories here are filled with comments like "Why didn't these researchers consider [obvious objection which they did, in fact, consider]?" or "I'm not a physics expert, but here's my interpretation of this physics story based on ten minutes of reading Stephen Hawking one time while I was drunk".
No, a degree doesn't necessarily equal in-depth knowledge, but it's at least a hint. Figuring out whether someone really knows what they're talking about is not always easy, especially if it's not your field. I've seen plenty of comments here that were 100% wrong, yet were modded +5 Insightful and had lots of equally ignorant responses following along. The only way I could tell the difference was because they were about something I worked on. This has made me develop a personal BS detection "kit":
1. What is the poster's claim to expertise? Is the subject their day job (present or past)? Do they have serious experience or education, or are they getting their info from pop science books?
2. Does the poster give specific examples beyond what one would find in an intro-level overview? Or is there a lot of hand-waving and extrapolation from basic principles?
3. Is the poster still overawed with the counterintuitive but basic parts of the field (e.g. quantum indeterminacy or e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0), or are they more interested in intermediate or advanced-level concepts?
4. Is the poster trying to inform me by providing new information? Or are they trying to impress me by showing off their shallow knowledge? Okay, to be fair, everyone shows off sometimes.:-)
5. Is the poster more interested in the information itself, or do they quickly move on to sweeping (yet questionable) implications?
It's not perfect, but it helps. It would be interesting to do a study on a Slashdot story covering an obscure and/or high-level field and see how many of the commenters actually know what they're talking about. I'm guessing definitely less than 10%, probably less than 5%.
It should have been titled "Glorified Wikipedia Link". Seriously, there's nothing else in the blog entry but a link to the Kindle versions of Beatrix Potter stories, which makes this a slashvertisement.
If you're a large corporation that needs a thousand cars, you buy the 20k model because your upper management says you need to cut costs. Your salespeople then take on the extra risk and delays, but those are intangible costs that are much harder to measure. Measurable costs and benefits are almost always prioritized over intangibles, probably because they're more predictable.
I am working on flash write/erase cycling right now in my day job and I can tell you that this is not a very good test. Temperature affects cycling endurance (and this is reflected in the spec), so if your SSD is 20-30C higher than room temp it's going to make a difference. Fowler-Nordheim tunneling (which NAND flash uses for program and erase) is hardest at cold temperatures, so the first operation after powerup might be the worst case in a PC. (Yes, I know they're not using an SSD here, but they are doing their cycling at room temp.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that continuous cycling is not realistic. The wear-out mechanism here is charge trap-up, where electrons get stuck in the floating gate oxide and repel other electrons, slowing down program and erase. Over time, thermal energy lets the electrons detrap. So irregular usage in a hot PC should actually be nicer environment for endurance.
A final factor is process variation, which can only be covered by using a large sample size (>100) and/or using units from separate lots with known characteristics, none of which an end user will likely have access to. Even that doesn't tell you anything about the defect rate.
There are really two types of tests that people are talking about here. The first is a spec compliance test, which uses the extreme conditions I mentioned above to guarantee that all units will have the spec endurance under all spec conditions. This should be done by the manufacturer. The second is a real world usage test, which will only give realistic results if done under actual use conditions. The number you get from the article's test probably won't tell you much.
[Disclaimer: I work on embedded NOR flash, not NAND, but the bits are the same and the article's talking about EEPROM so I figure I can butt in.]
Tunneling is what does the damage (the electrons have more energy). I don't work on NAND flash but I suspect the greater endurance comes from having less margin for data retention. NOR flash is used in embedded applications, often under extreme conditions, and the data has to last for a long time.
Your description is a bit backwards, at least for the NOR flash I work on. When the floating gate has charge (electrons), it turns the transistor off. The negative charge on the FG cancels out the positive voltage on the control gate. The bit is read via a current sense -- no current is a zero, lots of current is a one.
The main failure mechanism (that I know of) is oxide damage due to high energy electrons. Program and erase (technically, Fowler-Nordheim tunneling) take high voltages, which gives electrons enough energy to scatter into the oxide and get trapped. This repels other electrons. So what happens is that it takes longer and longer to program and erase until eventually you exceed the set limit, at which point it shows up as a fail. The bit will be in an indeterminate state. It may read correctly but won't have enough margin to guarantee data retention.
I guess this story was really about whether Steve Jobs is a controlling asshole or not (didn't we establish that in the other four hundred Apple stories this month?), but I'm more interested in the claims that the PC is dying. Personally, I don't see it. All these portable devices are very convenient, but the usability is horrible. Touchscreens are a joke if you're typing anything longer than a Twitter post (especially if you're a good typist), small screens are bad for viewing more than one document at once or even viewing lots of a single document (especially if you have poor eyesight), and audio quality is horrible unless you use good headphones (which keeps other people from hearing) or dock it with speakers (which removes the portability advantage). Maybe laptop-style docking bays would help with all this? Or maybe the pad computing thing is just a fad propped up by tech journalists who don't do any real work on computers outside of three-paragraph articles and Tweets.
I just don't understand why they would take up the left side of the screen with something I'll never use. I guess it looks like every other web site now, but I always appreciated Google's cleanness and simplicity.
Nah, just sick of unrealistic CNN-style shock and outrage at the realities of human behavior. I think that lack of self-awareness is at the heart of much bigger problems than climate change.
This seems to be the opposite approach to what these scientists are taking: they are happy when people who disagree with them die.
For the same reason evolutionary biologists don't like creationists. If I had a bunch of denialists on a crusade to pick apart my work in my area of expertise, I wouldn't like them very much either. That's hardly a proof of a "very real" and corrupting agenda.
The presentation to the general public is different than the presentation to scientists. When they publish in peer reviewed publications, they are careful to qualify their statements and not make unsupported conjectures (at least according to the review mentioned here, which I have no reason to doubt).
Of course the presentation to experts is different from the presentation to laypeople. This is good communication. For the most part, the general public doesn't do science, so how are they supposed to interpret qualifications correctly? You've read the science articles that get linked to here; you know how bad science journalism is.
You're asking for a standard of purity that simply doesn't exist in human communications. I work in a totally uncontroversial corporate job and I see these same things all the time. If someone causes us grief and/or accuses us of incompetence, we make unpleasant comments (in private). If a manager wants some information, we don't give them every tiny concern that goes with it (to avoid triggering an unjustified CYA reflex). My girlfriend regularly texts me to say she "wants to kill" customers she hates. The only difference here is that the emails got dragged out into the light of day. I guarantee you that any collection of emails from almost any organization is going to have the same sort of stuff. This is just how people work.
The article is frustratingly light on details. There's nothing about what type of flash transistor they're using (there are several variants on the basic stacked-gate NMOS design as well as more wild types). They don't say whether they're actually shrinking the bits (which you don't have to do) or just the support circuitry. All it says is that Toshiba is making NAND flash in a new process node, probably 22nm.
My day job is working with embedded NOR flash. I'm not really a process or solid state physics guy, but I think I know enough to comment, unlike a lot of the people running their mouths. (Seriously, folks, if you don't know what you're talking about, *shut up*. Misinforming people with wild guesses is not helpful, no matter how much it strokes your ego.)
First off, the flash transistor itself is not 22nm long. It's probably at least ten times longer, if not more (obviously Toshiba's not giving exact numbers). When you go to a new process node you don't necessarily shrink every feature by 50%. The limiting factor in flash size isn't lithography (manufacturing), it's leakage.
Flash works by storing electrons on an isolated (floating) material sandwiched inside an NMOS transistor. If extra electrons are present, the transistor is forced off (0). If they aren't, the transistor can turn on (1). The problem is that over time the electrons leak out of the floating gate, eventually causing bits to flip. If you shrink the circuit enough you hit a point where you can't keep electrons in the gate for a reasonable amount of time. At that point, we'll need a new memory technology -- maybe FRAM, maybe something else. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's been researched already -- a lot of the major research papers for flash memory are 25+ years old.
Also, I said this elsewhere, but NAND flash is called NAND because the flash transistors (bits) are in series, like the NMOS transistors in a NAND gate. It isn't made out of logic gates or anything like that. Flash memory is analog, like DRAM -- you need special analog circuitry to read it and output a digital signal.
No, it has little to do with the NAND digital logic gate -- the other person who responded to you is totally wrong. NAND flash is a circuit topology where the flash transistors (bits) are arranged in long series chains, like this:
which is similar to the pull-down side of a NAND gate. NAND flash is very high-density but is read in blocks (you turn on the whole chain and then check one bit at a time). The other type of flash is NOR flash, which uses transistors in parallel:
This means you can read any bit individually without having to turn the others on. NOR flash is commonly used for program memory in microcontrollers, where you need fast random access to any bit. NAND flash is used when you need high capacity, as in memory cards or SSDs.
Seconded. The graphics of console ports will catch up as soon as the next generation of consoles rolls around. Controls are a much bigger problem. Console FPSs are laden with quick time events and usually don't allow me to interact with the environment. Compare the recent Aliens vs. Predator with the five year old Half-Life 2, for instance. I haven't played RTSs in a while but I've heard the same sorts of complaints. You just can't use a tiny joystick for fast and precise targeting and a gamepad makes it hard to move, turn, and press buttons at the same time, so any game that needs that is going to suffer.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole semiconductor industry is backlogged because everyone ramped down their production and laid off people during the financial crash. Now we can't make stuff fast enough despite desperately ramping up and everyone wants to refill their inventory at once.
Okay, stop. Right there.
Slashdot submitters, if your summary includes the phrase "controversial solid-state physicist", then your article is bunk. Click the cancel button and go back to whatever you were doing.
Do you want your calculator to have the battery life of a cell phone? Go ahead and put a fast CPU and a fancy backlit display on and see what happens.
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations.
Unfortunately, what PowerPoint slides (and presentations) are being used for is a substitute for every other form of communication. Instead of specs, essays, helpful diagrams, and properly organized data, we have slides, slides, slides, and slides. Usually the slides are explained once in one meeting or conference call and then passed around, giving the illusion that information is written down in a usable form. In reality, if you really want to know what's going on you have to call the author (if they even bother to write their name), wasting your time and theirs.
You're right that PowerPoint doesn't force people to communicate poorly, and poor communication has many causes. But PowerPoint does make poor communication easier, and 80-90% of people are using it wrong. The argument of Tufte et al boils down to this: regardless of whether it's a good tool or a bad tool, PowerPoint is not the *right* tool.
It's a reference to the subculture embodied by this Make.
Magnetic disks store an absolutely mind-boggling amount of data. As far back as I remember, semiconductor memories have always been 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller. Imagine trying to scale DRAM up to 500 gigs. Flash isn't much different. The transistors need high-voltage connections for program/erase, they can't shrink too fast or you lose data retention ability, etc. I'm not an expert in magnetic storage, but I'd imagine it's a lot easier to make a chunk of mostly homogeneous material.
I wasn't bothered much when the special editions first came out, but I recently watched laserdisc rips of the original versions and I think the critics have a point. Comparing ANH and ESB to ROTJ, the biggest difference was that ROTJ became more of a creature/effects show and the movie suffered because of it. In particular, note the overly-long opening section in Jabba's palace, most of which does little to help the plot or pacing. The prequels were even worse, with writing and characterization taking a backseat to computer animation.
It was surprising to realize that Star Wars (ANH) is actually a *good movie*. I can understand people being unhappy with changes that have only made it worse. Think about it -- what in the special editions actually made the movie itself better?
A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.
I take it you haven't taken any university level classes in the US in the past decade. The classes are worse than high school, the professors are generally unmotivated, the tests are pure regurgitation, there is little free discussion, etc.
All of them? How many universities have you attended in the past decade? For that matter, how many professors have you had even within a single university? You'd have to have five or six majors to even start getting a representative sample. How can you possibly make such a sweeping statement about thousands of different schools? I guess you must have gone to a bad one because you certainly didn't learn anything about how little you really know.
For the record, I went to college from 2000-2006 (RIT in upstate New York) and thought the classes were just fine.
Sure, laptops I understand. Laptops are all about portability and convenience, anyway.
No thanks. PS/2 is superior to USB for keyboards (USB can't tell what order the keys were pressed in), and a nice CRT still beats the pants off of laggy low-contrast LCDs. Electronics hobbyists like having simple parallel and serial ports. Does having extra ports on the back of your computer hurt you in some way?
Many of the people on Slashdot are self-taught IT folks who can actually compare themselves to people with IT or Comp Sci degrees and come out on top. A lot of them assume the same applies everywhere, ignoring the differences between that and a Ph.D in a physical science. It's why all of the science stories here are filled with comments like "Why didn't these researchers consider [obvious objection which they did, in fact, consider]?" or "I'm not a physics expert, but here's my interpretation of this physics story based on ten minutes of reading Stephen Hawking one time while I was drunk".
No, a degree doesn't necessarily equal in-depth knowledge, but it's at least a hint. Figuring out whether someone really knows what they're talking about is not always easy, especially if it's not your field. I've seen plenty of comments here that were 100% wrong, yet were modded +5 Insightful and had lots of equally ignorant responses following along. The only way I could tell the difference was because they were about something I worked on. This has made me develop a personal BS detection "kit":
1. What is the poster's claim to expertise? Is the subject their day job (present or past)? Do they have serious experience or education, or are they getting their info from pop science books?
2. Does the poster give specific examples beyond what one would find in an intro-level overview? Or is there a lot of hand-waving and extrapolation from basic principles?
3. Is the poster still overawed with the counterintuitive but basic parts of the field (e.g. quantum indeterminacy or e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0), or are they more interested in intermediate or advanced-level concepts?
4. Is the poster trying to inform me by providing new information? Or are they trying to impress me by showing off their shallow knowledge? Okay, to be fair, everyone shows off sometimes. :-)
5. Is the poster more interested in the information itself, or do they quickly move on to sweeping (yet questionable) implications?
It's not perfect, but it helps. It would be interesting to do a study on a Slashdot story covering an obscure and/or high-level field and see how many of the commenters actually know what they're talking about. I'm guessing definitely less than 10%, probably less than 5%.
It should have been titled "Glorified Wikipedia Link". Seriously, there's nothing else in the blog entry but a link to the Kindle versions of Beatrix Potter stories, which makes this a slashvertisement.
If you're a large corporation that needs a thousand cars, you buy the 20k model because your upper management says you need to cut costs. Your salespeople then take on the extra risk and delays, but those are intangible costs that are much harder to measure. Measurable costs and benefits are almost always prioritized over intangibles, probably because they're more predictable.
I am working on flash write/erase cycling right now in my day job and I can tell you that this is not a very good test. Temperature affects cycling endurance (and this is reflected in the spec), so if your SSD is 20-30C higher than room temp it's going to make a difference. Fowler-Nordheim tunneling (which NAND flash uses for program and erase) is hardest at cold temperatures, so the first operation after powerup might be the worst case in a PC. (Yes, I know they're not using an SSD here, but they are doing their cycling at room temp.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that continuous cycling is not realistic. The wear-out mechanism here is charge trap-up, where electrons get stuck in the floating gate oxide and repel other electrons, slowing down program and erase. Over time, thermal energy lets the electrons detrap. So irregular usage in a hot PC should actually be nicer environment for endurance.
A final factor is process variation, which can only be covered by using a large sample size (>100) and/or using units from separate lots with known characteristics, none of which an end user will likely have access to. Even that doesn't tell you anything about the defect rate.
There are really two types of tests that people are talking about here. The first is a spec compliance test, which uses the extreme conditions I mentioned above to guarantee that all units will have the spec endurance under all spec conditions. This should be done by the manufacturer. The second is a real world usage test, which will only give realistic results if done under actual use conditions. The number you get from the article's test probably won't tell you much.
[Disclaimer: I work on embedded NOR flash, not NAND, but the bits are the same and the article's talking about EEPROM so I figure I can butt in.]
Tunneling is what does the damage (the electrons have more energy). I don't work on NAND flash but I suspect the greater endurance comes from having less margin for data retention. NOR flash is used in embedded applications, often under extreme conditions, and the data has to last for a long time.
Your description is a bit backwards, at least for the NOR flash I work on. When the floating gate has charge (electrons), it turns the transistor off. The negative charge on the FG cancels out the positive voltage on the control gate. The bit is read via a current sense -- no current is a zero, lots of current is a one.
The main failure mechanism (that I know of) is oxide damage due to high energy electrons. Program and erase (technically, Fowler-Nordheim tunneling) take high voltages, which gives electrons enough energy to scatter into the oxide and get trapped. This repels other electrons. So what happens is that it takes longer and longer to program and erase until eventually you exceed the set limit, at which point it shows up as a fail. The bit will be in an indeterminate state. It may read correctly but won't have enough margin to guarantee data retention.
I guess this story was really about whether Steve Jobs is a controlling asshole or not (didn't we establish that in the other four hundred Apple stories this month?), but I'm more interested in the claims that the PC is dying. Personally, I don't see it. All these portable devices are very convenient, but the usability is horrible. Touchscreens are a joke if you're typing anything longer than a Twitter post (especially if you're a good typist), small screens are bad for viewing more than one document at once or even viewing lots of a single document (especially if you have poor eyesight), and audio quality is horrible unless you use good headphones (which keeps other people from hearing) or dock it with speakers (which removes the portability advantage). Maybe laptop-style docking bays would help with all this? Or maybe the pad computing thing is just a fad propped up by tech journalists who don't do any real work on computers outside of three-paragraph articles and Tweets.
I just don't understand why they would take up the left side of the screen with something I'll never use. I guess it looks like every other web site now, but I always appreciated Google's cleanness and simplicity.
Nah, just sick of unrealistic CNN-style shock and outrage at the realities of human behavior. I think that lack of self-awareness is at the heart of much bigger problems than climate change.
This seems to be the opposite approach to what these scientists are taking: they are happy when people who disagree with them die.
For the same reason evolutionary biologists don't like creationists. If I had a bunch of denialists on a crusade to pick apart my work in my area of expertise, I wouldn't like them very much either. That's hardly a proof of a "very real" and corrupting agenda.
The presentation to the general public is different than the presentation to scientists. When they publish in peer reviewed publications, they are careful to qualify their statements and not make unsupported conjectures (at least according to the review mentioned here, which I have no reason to doubt).
Of course the presentation to experts is different from the presentation to laypeople. This is good communication. For the most part, the general public doesn't do science, so how are they supposed to interpret qualifications correctly? You've read the science articles that get linked to here; you know how bad science journalism is.
You're asking for a standard of purity that simply doesn't exist in human communications. I work in a totally uncontroversial corporate job and I see these same things all the time. If someone causes us grief and/or accuses us of incompetence, we make unpleasant comments (in private). If a manager wants some information, we don't give them every tiny concern that goes with it (to avoid triggering an unjustified CYA reflex). My girlfriend regularly texts me to say she "wants to kill" customers she hates. The only difference here is that the emails got dragged out into the light of day. I guarantee you that any collection of emails from almost any organization is going to have the same sort of stuff. This is just how people work.
Where do you get good CRTs these days? I'm looking to replace mine and I don't want to buy a laggy, ugly-at-low-resolution, no-real-black-having LCD.
The article is frustratingly light on details. There's nothing about what type of flash transistor they're using (there are several variants on the basic stacked-gate NMOS design as well as more wild types). They don't say whether they're actually shrinking the bits (which you don't have to do) or just the support circuitry. All it says is that Toshiba is making NAND flash in a new process node, probably 22nm.
My day job is working with embedded NOR flash. I'm not really a process or solid state physics guy, but I think I know enough to comment, unlike a lot of the people running their mouths. (Seriously, folks, if you don't know what you're talking about, *shut up*. Misinforming people with wild guesses is not helpful, no matter how much it strokes your ego.)
First off, the flash transistor itself is not 22nm long. It's probably at least ten times longer, if not more (obviously Toshiba's not giving exact numbers). When you go to a new process node you don't necessarily shrink every feature by 50%. The limiting factor in flash size isn't lithography (manufacturing), it's leakage.
Flash works by storing electrons on an isolated (floating) material sandwiched inside an NMOS transistor. If extra electrons are present, the transistor is forced off (0). If they aren't, the transistor can turn on (1). The problem is that over time the electrons leak out of the floating gate, eventually causing bits to flip. If you shrink the circuit enough you hit a point where you can't keep electrons in the gate for a reasonable amount of time. At that point, we'll need a new memory technology -- maybe FRAM, maybe something else. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's been researched already -- a lot of the major research papers for flash memory are 25+ years old.
Also, I said this elsewhere, but NAND flash is called NAND because the flash transistors (bits) are in series, like the NMOS transistors in a NAND gate. It isn't made out of logic gates or anything like that. Flash memory is analog, like DRAM -- you need special analog circuitry to read it and output a digital signal.
No, it has little to do with the NAND digital logic gate -- the other person who responded to you is totally wrong. NAND flash is a circuit topology where the flash transistors (bits) are arranged in long series chains, like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nand_flash_structure.svg
which is similar to the pull-down side of a NAND gate. NAND flash is very high-density but is read in blocks (you turn on the whole chain and then check one bit at a time). The other type of flash is NOR flash, which uses transistors in parallel:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NOR_flash_layout.svg
This means you can read any bit individually without having to turn the others on. NOR flash is commonly used for program memory in microcontrollers, where you need fast random access to any bit. NAND flash is used when you need high capacity, as in memory cards or SSDs.
Seconded. The graphics of console ports will catch up as soon as the next generation of consoles rolls around. Controls are a much bigger problem. Console FPSs are laden with quick time events and usually don't allow me to interact with the environment. Compare the recent Aliens vs. Predator with the five year old Half-Life 2, for instance. I haven't played RTSs in a while but I've heard the same sorts of complaints. You just can't use a tiny joystick for fast and precise targeting and a gamepad makes it hard to move, turn, and press buttons at the same time, so any game that needs that is going to suffer.