Flash memory, Alfred Hitchcock and the digital living room

There is a lot of interesting tech news to report. First of all, what’s the deal with flash memory? Here is a definition from
eweek.com: “Flash, the memory chip technology that retains data when powered down, has been grappling for an opportunity to take over the data storage duties from hard drives in music players and, increasingly, computers.” Read the eweek news article to see how flash memory is going to be used in computers in the near future.

Many of you may have those small, portable flash drives that plug into the USB port on your computer. Since computers now come without floppy disc drives and you probably don’t want to mess with storing data on CDs you want to make sure you back up your data. Flash drives back up and store data.

Data storage and back up is evolving like all aspects of technology. My new Palm TX handheld has “non-volatile” memory which means I’m not supposed to lose data if the battery drains.

Apple Computer used flash memory in the iPod Nano. It is small and sleek and you can get 2GB or 4GB of flash memory to store music and data. Read the eweek article for more information.

In my blog entry for November 2, I mentioned that iTunes is selling episodes of tv shows to download to the new iPod. I also said that more networks would soon jump on the bandwagon. About a month later the
Washington Post announced that NBC will be selling several shows on iTunes. Some of the shows they will be selling go back to the ‘50s like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dragnet.

The last item I want to bring up is something David Pogue, tech guru of the NYT, wrote about a few days ago. Remember all of the talk about Internet on your tv and stereo? It failed miserably. Pogue discusses this topic and gives his reasons as to why it failed. It is a very interesting article. Check it out. You may have to register with the NYT if you cannot access the article but registration is free.

There is a lot more to report but it will have to wait!