Could you call it a "drive", since its primary storage medium is being driven by SOMEthing?
So... you're doing a "close enough" yourself on that one. At least you're admitting it's a fudge now. I'd love to see you explain to an end user where the "drive" part of the flash memory is, given it derives from the motor. Easy with a hard disk drive. Not so easy when the reason for calling it a drive is simply a holdover from disk drive nomenclature.
Still, feel free to perpetuate that holdover if you like, as I said, people are still going to call them flash disks and flash drives and all other manner of incorrect terms.
If you're as offended by common use technical misnomers as you are with racial slurs, perhaps you need to pause a moment and evaluate your perspective on life. The two are wholly different degrees of misuse of language, in much the same way that doubleparking and genocide are both crimes but wildly different in scope.
Flash drives don't have disks to spin, which was the whole point. They DO have drive circuits, h'wever. Do catch up, dear boy...
Unsurprisingly, you seem to have missed the point of my previous post entirely. While flash memory may have drive circuits, that isn't why they are called "drives". Please refer to my earlier posts for an explanation. It's because they are named after "disk drives", despite them not containing either disks, or drive motors. Thus either the term "drive" or "disk" to refer to these devices is inappropriate. Nonetheless, you seem to take offense at the term "disk" but not "drive", despite both of them being technically incorrect terms, both deriving from elements of motor driven rotational magnetic storage.
Evidently there's at LEAST one, as a search on "flash disk" there redirects you to "flash drive".
Or quite possibly just an editor who knows that a lot of people apart from wiki editors call them disks...
they're smart enough to know the Sheeple might call it a disk
My point exactly... people are going to call them disks... it's not so hard to accept that, even if it isn't correct, it's going to happen anyway. Like the most heavily practiced oxymoron I can think of, "American English". Like it or not, it's wrong, and it's in widespread use.
Ya want positive or negative drive?
You're doing it wrong. Try electric motors, the things they use, to, you know, spin the disks. Making them "disk drives". While another use of the word might seem convenient, it most certainly isn't where the term originated, which is well known to be first fro m the motor driver in the electronic hard disk, to the appearance of that disk drive in the computer, to the term "drive" staying, much in the same way as the equally inappropriate "disk" also remains (as you've demonstrated both via Wiki and various crawlers).
Do you think most people out there called the things "flash disks" are also editors on Wikipedia? Probably none.
How many vendors? Probably none.
How many people on the street? A lot more than you think. And surprisingly, if you own one, it doesn't automatically make you a "geek". They're ubiquitous devices now. Almost reliable enough that people don't consider them to be "technology".
Also... it's not a "drive". The drive component refers to the motors that spin the disks... which don't exist. If you want to get picky about it.
Let's just say I'll be happy to concede the point when you can show me the motor that "drives" the "flash drive".
A gaming executive telling the booming games industry that it's overpricing games?
Ha ha!
This is a trap. He's up to something.
I believe the current pricing for games is accurate... you can compare it with movies, I think it's a very just analogy when you pick out the differences. The cost to develop some games is about the same as for some movies. Give or take, I've been told that before so of course correct me if I'm wrong. The sale price for a game is much higher than the ticket price for a movie, or a DVD sale. So we should probably assume that a movie will get more DVD sales/ticket sales than a game will... a pretty good assumption, despite the booming games industry, lots of people buy DVD's and go to the cinema. Some heavy assumptions, yes, but we can see how it probably all fits together.
So, why is the EA guy saying games cost too much? He is seeking to commoditise them. Of course the flagship games from EA are generally very little in terms of new cost...incremental updates to the same engine with different datafiles in the case of most of the sports titles. Imagine if you could do that with movies! Well, apart from George Lucas anyway. I can't wait for the next Star Wars re-release to see who shoots first. Perhaps EA is hunting for a price war with competitors, being the big fish in the pond, perhaps they want to loss lead some titles to gutpunch the competition before christmas.
Perhaps they're just horribly envious of Blizzard's cash cow.
Perhaps they want to make cash gouging schemes like in game ads seem more legitimate... going for the free-to-air TV model instead of the home DVD sales model.
Who knows what it could be that he's really planning? One thing is for sure, it's a trap!
KC should sue them in court. They should use the same legal practices as the RIAA (no evidence required etc). The suspected value for one tune should be, well, approximately 4 billion dollars. Now, multiply that by the number of times that song could have been downloaded...
Any device made out of nanotechnology that serves the same function will be called a "disk drive" even if there's no disk in it.
USB connected flash memory is called a flash disk even today... etc.
I really hate articles where they say "plastic will replace cars" or "prefab concrete will replace houses". They're incompatible nouns. Try "Cars will be made from plastic" or "Houses will be made from prefab concrete" or "Disk drives will be made using nanotechnology".
That was a monopoly approach to a commodity rather than treating it like a utility...
You don't have water companies trying to connect you to their pipes, right?
You don't have power companies trying to connect you to their cables, right?
But you have phone companies trying to connect you to their phone networks...
Can you differentiate voice chat so much more than you could differentiate water or power? Which set of rules does internet fall under, and is that really the right approach?
A lot of RPG's justify the sheer unrealism of a "hitpoints" system where you can shoot some guy 500 times, and he's fine, but the 501st bullet kills him stone dead.
The way they do it is explaining hitpoints as a kind of toughness-morale system where you fight until you are worn down, bullets hitting really close and ricocheting nearby, then the last hit is the real finishing blow.
The only other way to do it is with a cumbersome wound effect system that takes ages to deal with.
Yoda was wiser, Windu was more powerful. Windu defeated Palpatine and was only killed because he was betrayed by Anakin when Anakin saw that Windu was going to execute Palpatine and seize power over the Republic.
I know, the prequels sucked, but they're also canon. Deal with it.
Also, Luke used the Force to destroy the Death Star, which in turn had the power to destroy a planet. So perhaps more practical than theoretical after all?
Heyy well... isn't like both a particle and a wave? And therefore a particular configuration of mass and energy? And likewise we are also a particular combination of mass and energy?
So technically in a wacky way that's kind of true... but of no use to anyone whatsoever (although I suppose if you burned me, the fuel that makes up my body would combust and the following chemical reactions would release heat and light...)
So yes people are made of light and if anyone insists on that you should set them aflame immediately to demonstrate how it works.
Sure, you can use a GPS to indicate you weren't speeding... but the GPS can also be used to prove guilt in such a violation.
Don't think it sounds so far fetched - I used to work for the local police here. Some of our field services guys would have to drive around in really remote stretches of the country to get to the regional stations. At one station, one of the guys pulls up and walks into the station, where the cops give him a ticket.
The reason? The cops at the station he left radio'd through his departure time. They know exactly how long it takes at the speed limit to get from one station to the next. Our guy had come in significantly under that time. A little time with a calculator and you get his average speed...
Certainly despicable behavior from any software or hardware vendor. Third party app bundling is a sin. And yes even google does it! I hate installing an app where google toolbar tries to slip itself in as well. This is why we don't always click nextnextnext.
Either way, I can hardly see how Apple is at fault.
Well, this is slashdot... if Microsoft Windows suffered the same fate because Logitech installed, say, bonzi buddy when you install your MX1000 drivers, it would be Microsoft's fault... why is there a different set of rules for Apple?
I think you're missing the point, it was a rhetorical question.
The parent wanted to get rid of PS/2 ports because USB ports can do the same function. The same argument holds true for Firewire. USB can do the same thing. Therefore, firewire should be ditched by the parents logic.
Only got a PS/2 mouse? Too bad. Camcorder only does firewire? Too bad.
If you check the tone of my post, you'll see those legacy devices are actually needed for a lot of pretty good reasons.
No... in Windows, almost all do, only ridiculous and despised software doesn't. And nobody uses the software that doesn't support it. In Linux, it's all over the place, and really hard to guess which apps will support what.
You, can, for example, use the clipboard to copy images from a web site viewed in Konqueror to Kword. You can't copy the same image from the same web site viewed in Firefox
Copying images from firefox and pasting them anywhere in other Windows apps seems to work just fine. It seems you have discovered another inconsistency in the Linux end user experience... possibly not the message you were trying to convey?
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports, analog audio output ports, analog video output ports, and all of that other legacy crutf?
The latest Shuttle PC's don't have serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse (PS/2) ports. The video card had DVI ports. Windows XP doesn't support loading device drivers from anything but floppy, which makes building these a fascinating experience. While Vista installs as easily as Linux, we have a long wait until they "fix" it, so we will require some legacy devices for a long time coming.
analog audio output ports
Analog audio is in use simply because while the technology barely exists, very very few cards will do live realtime encoding to 5.1 or greater digital output. The entry level for such cards is probably about $100USD because of the processing power required. I presume if we just increased the price of every single PC and laptop by $100 to include that card, you'd also complain. If we didn't include encoding, you'd complain that everything but DVD playback is in stereo. Some people are never happy with what they have right now. Also, most computer speaker setups, especially cheap ones, have analog inputs, not digital ones.
USB2/Firewire
Why do we need both USB2 and Firewire?
Such a board would be cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry, and less complex than today's boards.
Again, given you seem to want live digital encoding, the power requirements should increase proportional to the processing demands of realtime audio encoding. Likewise costs will increase. Likewise complexity will increase. Likewise size will increase. Likewise costs will increase for all users replacing analog speaker setups with digital ones.
Yeah, and with a research reactor, it's not like they should have even close to a critical mass worth of uranium or, you know, weapons grade plutonium kicking around.
I guess if one of them screwed up badly it might be a little more dangerous than being x-rayed a few times, but don't quote me on that, I'm so not a nuclear physicist.
Speaking of sci fi, I was reading an Arthur C Clarke novel the other day and Arthur mentions one of his characters has a uranium paperweight... huh.
Nah that was Theta radiation dude. Whatever that is. Go brush up on your particle of the month. Some people here wouldn't know a chronatron from a tribble.
Also, when do we get the stories of the police using weaponised versions of the antimatter gun on students?
Say MS buys out SugarCRM. Microsoft then "terminates" the project, i.e., changes the license as has been mentioned elsewhere, tells the devs to stop working on it, stops people from using the trademarks belonging to SugarCRM. Microsoft will have to then sack the devs, or employ them elsewhere in MS, or pay them to sit around eating icecream or something. Some of them will quit anyway.
Then what? The source is out there and can't be revoked. The sacked/quit devs are free to pick up the code and do what they want with it. They can't use SugarCRM trademarks, so they can call it LOLCRM or something. Assuming it's GPL type source they can develop a product based on the code, or extend the code directly, so long as they make their code available etc etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a stupid idea. Will the filter filter itself?
The big reason I play WoW is because those dailies are there... and I never did one of them once. I could if I wanted to. Or I could PvP.
I just do what I want to do, level an alt, chat with the guildies, play the AH for cash, tradeskill. Wander around STV ganking. Explore.
WoW is successful because there are so many different activities you can do. If you don't like doing dailies, don't do them.
"Yeah, that's close enough."
Could you call it a "drive", since its primary storage medium is being driven by SOMEthing?
So... you're doing a "close enough" yourself on that one. At least you're admitting it's a fudge now. I'd love to see you explain to an end user where the "drive" part of the flash memory is, given it derives from the motor. Easy with a hard disk drive. Not so easy when the reason for calling it a drive is simply a holdover from disk drive nomenclature.
Still, feel free to perpetuate that holdover if you like, as I said, people are still going to call them flash disks and flash drives and all other manner of incorrect terms.
If you're as offended by common use technical misnomers as you are with racial slurs, perhaps you need to pause a moment and evaluate your perspective on life. The two are wholly different degrees of misuse of language, in much the same way that doubleparking and genocide are both crimes but wildly different in scope.
Flash drives don't have disks to spin, which was the whole point. They DO have drive circuits, h'wever. Do catch up, dear boy...
Unsurprisingly, you seem to have missed the point of my previous post entirely. While flash memory may have drive circuits, that isn't why they are called "drives". Please refer to my earlier posts for an explanation. It's because they are named after "disk drives", despite them not containing either disks, or drive motors. Thus either the term "drive" or "disk" to refer to these devices is inappropriate. Nonetheless, you seem to take offense at the term "disk" but not "drive", despite both of them being technically incorrect terms, both deriving from elements of motor driven rotational magnetic storage.
Evidently there's at LEAST one, as a search on "flash disk" there redirects you to "flash drive".
Or quite possibly just an editor who knows that a lot of people apart from wiki editors call them disks...
they're smart enough to know the Sheeple might call it a disk
My point exactly... people are going to call them disks... it's not so hard to accept that, even if it isn't correct, it's going to happen anyway. Like the most heavily practiced oxymoron I can think of, "American English". Like it or not, it's wrong, and it's in widespread use.
Ya want positive or negative drive?
You're doing it wrong. Try electric motors, the things they use, to, you know, spin the disks. Making them "disk drives". While another use of the word might seem convenient, it most certainly isn't where the term originated, which is well known to be first fro m the motor driver in the electronic hard disk, to the appearance of that disk drive in the computer, to the term "drive" staying, much in the same way as the equally inappropriate "disk" also remains (as you've demonstrated both via Wiki and various crawlers).
Do you think most people out there called the things "flash disks" are also editors on Wikipedia? Probably none.
How many vendors? Probably none.
How many people on the street? A lot more than you think. And surprisingly, if you own one, it doesn't automatically make you a "geek". They're ubiquitous devices now. Almost reliable enough that people don't consider them to be "technology".
Also... it's not a "drive". The drive component refers to the motors that spin the disks... which don't exist. If you want to get picky about it.
Let's just say I'll be happy to concede the point when you can show me the motor that "drives" the "flash drive".
A gaming executive telling the booming games industry that it's overpricing games?
Ha ha!
This is a trap. He's up to something.
I believe the current pricing for games is accurate... you can compare it with movies, I think it's a very just analogy when you pick out the differences. The cost to develop some games is about the same as for some movies. Give or take, I've been told that before so of course correct me if I'm wrong. The sale price for a game is much higher than the ticket price for a movie, or a DVD sale. So we should probably assume that a movie will get more DVD sales/ticket sales than a game will... a pretty good assumption, despite the booming games industry, lots of people buy DVD's and go to the cinema. Some heavy assumptions, yes, but we can see how it probably all fits together.
So, why is the EA guy saying games cost too much? He is seeking to commoditise them. Of course the flagship games from EA are generally very little in terms of new cost...incremental updates to the same engine with different datafiles in the case of most of the sports titles. Imagine if you could do that with movies! Well, apart from George Lucas anyway. I can't wait for the next Star Wars re-release to see who shoots first. Perhaps EA is hunting for a price war with competitors, being the big fish in the pond, perhaps they want to loss lead some titles to gutpunch the competition before christmas.
Perhaps they're just horribly envious of Blizzard's cash cow.
Perhaps they want to make cash gouging schemes like in game ads seem more legitimate... going for the free-to-air TV model instead of the home DVD sales model.
Who knows what it could be that he's really planning? One thing is for sure, it's a trap!
KC should sue them in court. They should use the same legal practices as the RIAA (no evidence required etc). The suspected value for one tune should be, well, approximately 4 billion dollars. Now, multiply that by the number of times that song could have been downloaded...
Any device made out of nanotechnology that serves the same function will be called a "disk drive" even if there's no disk in it.
USB connected flash memory is called a flash disk even today... etc.
I really hate articles where they say "plastic will replace cars" or "prefab concrete will replace houses". They're incompatible nouns. Try "Cars will be made from plastic" or "Houses will be made from prefab concrete" or "Disk drives will be made using nanotechnology".
That was a monopoly approach to a commodity rather than treating it like a utility...
You don't have water companies trying to connect you to their pipes, right?
You don't have power companies trying to connect you to their cables, right?
But you have phone companies trying to connect you to their phone networks...
Can you differentiate voice chat so much more than you could differentiate water or power? Which set of rules does internet fall under, and is that really the right approach?
A lot of RPG's justify the sheer unrealism of a "hitpoints" system where you can shoot some guy 500 times, and he's fine, but the 501st bullet kills him stone dead.
The way they do it is explaining hitpoints as a kind of toughness-morale system where you fight until you are worn down, bullets hitting really close and ricocheting nearby, then the last hit is the real finishing blow.
The only other way to do it is with a cumbersome wound effect system that takes ages to deal with.
Yoda was wiser, Windu was more powerful. Windu defeated Palpatine and was only killed because he was betrayed by Anakin when Anakin saw that Windu was going to execute Palpatine and seize power over the Republic.
I know, the prequels sucked, but they're also canon. Deal with it.
Also, Luke used the Force to destroy the Death Star, which in turn had the power to destroy a planet. So perhaps more practical than theoretical after all?
In KOTOR's era there were Jedi and Sith everywhere, armies of them in fact. So for story's sake it's much more conducive for the MMO style.
Of course if that made a KOTOR MMO, it would be rushed out but look complete and it will look awesome, except for one thing.
When you hit level 60 you'll suddenly be at level 85 wondering what the heck happened.
I say we scrap the whole thing and put up a webpage that says
"Mostly harmless."
Shouldn't this (wireless, internet, comms, all of it) be treated like a utility rather than a commodity?
Is it really efficient to have, say, 20 companies all sticking up cell masts and laying fibre?
Wouldn't one network with sufficient capacity be more cost efficient?
If you do have only one network, who gets to build it, and what stops them from abusing it monopolywise?
Free market. Sometimes it's not always the answer.
we're all made of light
Heyy well... isn't like both a particle and a wave? And therefore a particular configuration of mass and energy? And likewise we are also a particular combination of mass and energy?
So technically in a wacky way that's kind of true... but of no use to anyone whatsoever (although I suppose if you burned me, the fuel that makes up my body would combust and the following chemical reactions would release heat and light...)
So yes people are made of light and if anyone insists on that you should set them aflame immediately to demonstrate how it works.
Sure, you can use a GPS to indicate you weren't speeding... but the GPS can also be used to prove guilt in such a violation.
Don't think it sounds so far fetched - I used to work for the local police here. Some of our field services guys would have to drive around in really remote stretches of the country to get to the regional stations. At one station, one of the guys pulls up and walks into the station, where the cops give him a ticket.
The reason? The cops at the station he left radio'd through his departure time. They know exactly how long it takes at the speed limit to get from one station to the next. Our guy had come in significantly under that time. A little time with a calculator and you get his average speed...
Maths... gotta love it!
Certainly despicable behavior from any software or hardware vendor. Third party app bundling is a sin. And yes even google does it! I hate installing an app where google toolbar tries to slip itself in as well. This is why we don't always click nextnextnext.
Either way, I can hardly see how Apple is at fault.
Well, this is slashdot... if Microsoft Windows suffered the same fate because Logitech installed, say, bonzi buddy when you install your MX1000 drivers, it would be Microsoft's fault... why is there a different set of rules for Apple?
I think you're missing the point, it was a rhetorical question.
The parent wanted to get rid of PS/2 ports because USB ports can do the same function.
The same argument holds true for Firewire. USB can do the same thing. Therefore, firewire should be ditched by the parents logic.
Only got a PS/2 mouse? Too bad. Camcorder only does firewire? Too bad.
If you check the tone of my post, you'll see those legacy devices are actually needed for a lot of pretty good reasons.
Some do. Some Don't. Same is true for Windows.
No... in Windows, almost all do, only ridiculous and despised software doesn't. And nobody uses the software that doesn't support it. In Linux, it's all over the place, and really hard to guess which apps will support what.
You, can, for example, use the clipboard to copy images from a web site viewed in Konqueror to Kword. You can't copy the same image from the same web site viewed in Firefox
Copying images from firefox and pasting them anywhere in other Windows apps seems to work just fine. It seems you have discovered another inconsistency in the Linux end user experience... possibly not the message you were trying to convey?
When are we going to see motherboards which have NO serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse ports, floppy ports, IDE ports, analog audio output ports, analog video output ports, and all of that other legacy crutf?
The latest Shuttle PC's don't have serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard/mouse (PS/2) ports. The video card had DVI ports. Windows XP doesn't support loading device drivers from anything but floppy, which makes building these a fascinating experience. While Vista installs as easily as Linux, we have a long wait until they "fix" it, so we will require some legacy devices for a long time coming.
analog audio output ports
Analog audio is in use simply because while the technology barely exists, very very few cards will do live realtime encoding to 5.1 or greater digital output. The entry level for such cards is probably about $100USD because of the processing power required. I presume if we just increased the price of every single PC and laptop by $100 to include that card, you'd also complain. If we didn't include encoding, you'd complain that everything but DVD playback is in stereo. Some people are never happy with what they have right now. Also, most computer speaker setups, especially cheap ones, have analog inputs, not digital ones.
USB2/Firewire
Why do we need both USB2 and Firewire?
Such a board would be cheaper, faster, smaller, less power hungry, and less complex than today's boards.
Again, given you seem to want live digital encoding, the power requirements should increase proportional to the processing demands of realtime audio encoding. Likewise costs will increase. Likewise complexity will increase. Likewise size will increase. Likewise costs will increase for all users replacing analog speaker setups with digital ones.
Yeah, and with a research reactor, it's not like they should have even close to a critical mass worth of uranium or, you know, weapons grade plutonium kicking around.
I guess if one of them screwed up badly it might be a little more dangerous than being x-rayed a few times, but don't quote me on that, I'm so not a nuclear physicist.
Speaking of sci fi, I was reading an Arthur C Clarke novel the other day and Arthur mentions one of his characters has a uranium paperweight... huh.
Nah that was Theta radiation dude. Whatever that is. Go brush up on your particle of the month. Some people here wouldn't know a chronatron from a tribble.
Also, when do we get the stories of the police using weaponised versions of the antimatter gun on students?
"Don't positron me bro!"
How do you terminate the project?
Say MS buys out SugarCRM. Microsoft then "terminates" the project, i.e., changes the license as has been mentioned elsewhere, tells the devs to stop working on it, stops people from using the trademarks belonging to SugarCRM. Microsoft will have to then sack the devs, or employ them elsewhere in MS, or pay them to sit around eating icecream or something. Some of them will quit anyway.
Then what? The source is out there and can't be revoked. The sacked/quit devs are free to pick up the code and do what they want with it. They can't use SugarCRM trademarks, so they can call it LOLCRM or something. Assuming it's GPL type source they can develop a product based on the code, or extend the code directly, so long as they make their code available etc etc etc.
How has Microsoft terminated anything?