flash

Nanochip promises cheaper, denser flash memory replacement

PALO ALTO, Calif.--A number of companies have been toiling away for years on a replacement for flash memory.

Nanochip, a relatively small company that has received VC funds from Intel, among others, says it will come out with a device in 2010 that will hold eight times as much data as flash. Additionally, the device's cost per gigabyte will be two to four times less, says Nanochip CEO Gordon Knight.

Many solutions have been proposed for replacing flash--phase change memory, spintronics, silicon nanocrystals--and so far no clear winner has emerged. Phase change memory, which involves heating microscopic points … Read more

Online sequencing with Splice

Splice Music, a Flash-based online sequencing tool, opened to the broad Internet public about a year ago. It's free, although registration is required, and filled with thousands of sound samples and remixable songs, all licensed under various Creative Commons licenses, meaning that they're available for you to recombine. It's a fun place to start for old-school analog musicians who've never played with a sequencing program before. (And who don't have a Mac with Garage Band preinstalled.)

Remixing other users' songs is one way to learn how the tool works, but if you're like me … Read more

Panasonic's dynamic camcorder duo for fall '07

With the HDC-SD1 barely out of diapers--it was only released in February--and the ink on my review barely dry, Panasonic already plans to ship its replacement in September. Given some of the issues I had with the SD1 I won't be sorry to see it go, but it's not clear that the SD5 addresses some of the problems.

On one hand, it's smaller--always a plus--and Panasonic adds an upsweep toward the back of the unit to improve its grippability over the tube-shaped SD1. I got a chance to shoot with the SD5 at the press briefing, and … Read more

Sharks on a browser

I have to hand it to the Discovery Channel. They're one of the few TV networks out there whose sweeps week involves one animal, and an absolute onslaught of programming about it. I'm speaking of course about Shark Week, an annual TV event that's been around since the late '80s.

One of the more amusing marketing tools I've run into this week is their Shark Week video remixer, which is a somewhat stripped-down version of Adobe's Flash video-editing tool containing various clips of sharks swimming, attacking, and messing about with divers. Users can string together … Read more

Eye candy for photographing children

Finally, a camera accessory that won't be doomed to rapid obsolescence: the Pez candy dispenser.

Federico Sartorio recommends some basic modifications to the candy dispenser that will let it slip into the hot shoe atop your camera that otherwise would be used for attaching a flash. Use it to grab the attention of children you're trying to photograph--as long as you have plenty of available light.

Be warned that trimming the dispenser's "feet" could reduce its resale value on eBay.

(Via The Online Photographer.)

Flash alternatives blessed by Google

Flash has long been a stumbling block in getting found in the search engines. Googlebot just doesn't cope well with content and links embedded within Flash. And if the following e-mail that I received from a Google engineer last year is any indication, Google isn't likely to make significant improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon:

"re: Flash, I can tell you, based upon philosophies here, that we aren't likely to do any kind of mapping of Flash to non-Flash URLs. While our spidering practices may change in the future, we … Read more

Ducati takes memory for a spin

Maybe it's just us, but we never really thought digital storage products would ever be considered sexy enough to merit the attention from the likes of Ducati. But the motorcycling legend must see something we don't, because it's lent its famous name to SanDisk to stamp on a USB flash drive and memory cards, according to Fareastgizmos.

The marketing link is speed, as in data transfer rates, which we think will be lost on most true Ducati fans. The items do at least bear the company's signature red-and-black glossy color scheme, however, and the USB drive … Read more

Photos: Cowon iAudio 7 review

Our review is up, and the results are in--Cowon's latest player, the iAudio 7, snagged a CNET Editors' Choice award. This little guy has just about every feature you'd want in an ultracompact MP3 player, plus a rechargeable battery life rated at an incredible 60 hours. You'll have to read the CNET review to get all the details.

Or, if you don't care about details and just want some eye candy, then take a gander at our official Cowon iAudio 7 slide show. If you want a slightly less polished tour, then here's a slide show … Read more

Apple to use 25 percent of the world's flash memory

Flash memory chips bound for Apple's iPods and iPhones will account for 25 percent of the world's total flash output in the third quarter.

So says DRAMeXchange, a market research company out of Taiwan that tracks the memory industry. It's referring to a specific kind of flash memory known as NAND, which is the flash technology of choice for modern cell phones and MP3 players. Flash memory can store data without an electrical charge and without any moving parts, which makes it ideal for mobile devices and increasingly for notebook PCs.

Apple's share of the MP3 … Read more

Soundwave import-only MP3 player

You may have heard that Transformers director Michael Bay, in his infinite wisdom, decided to exclude the beloved Soundwave character from his film (the poor guy took the news pretty hard). I guess the kids today don't care about portable cassette players, even ones that turn into gigantic robots capable of blowing your head off with a sonic concussion cannon. As a side effect, the film's merchandising machine is not cranking out any affordable Soundwave toys for us to clutter our cubicles. I even resorted to buying this cheap piece of crap. Japan, as usual, has the solution. … Read more