[heisetax]

For most people flash memory serves a different purpose than CDs & DVDs. LIke long term storage. Which would you bet your vauable, very hard to replace data files on for say a 20-30 year time period? Would you trust a fairly stable piece of plastic that has a 20-50-100 year lifespan or something electronic that may have a fairly long average lifespan or that could go bad before it is read the first time. As another person brought up, how long will it take for the costs to be equal. HIs 50 cents per disk I'm sure is high by many standards now & the 4.7 GB per disk will not stay the same I'm sure. The same goes for hard drives. At low amounts of storage, flash media may even win out, but how about the 1 TB drives. Imagine how long it will be before flash drives come down far enough to even be thought of as a possible alternative to the hard drive. By then how big will the hard drive be? I believe that the flsh memory, CD/DVD didk, & hard drives serve a different part of the file storage market. Personally I now have all 3 & figure that I'll have all 3 for the forseeable future.
Bill the TaxMan

[Luke_Macwalker]

In reply to:

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Would you trust a fairly stable piece of plastic that has a 20-50-100 year lifespan

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I guess you're talking about the CD and DVD that you buy already recorded. Otherwise, I'm afraid you may be just waiting for bad surprises...
As far as I'm concerned, I already lost a few files on CD properly stored, no brand CD as well as reputable brand CD. I think you could generally expect 5 years of lifespan, and probably 10 in most cases. After 10 years, if you really care about the contents, I think it could be a good idea to make a new copy. Moreover, you would get new media, probably of higher capacity (so you can save a little shelf space) and be sure your data can be read on new computers or devices, maybe translate it for them.
Anyway, my point is: "don't trust the recordable optic media currently available to be reliable for 20 years or more".
(Now, I won't comment on the reliability of the memory chips or about the capability of machines to read them in 20 years or more!)

[Arne]

The difference between 5GB and 4GB for 1000 songs would be the new codec, AAC. When the original iPod came out, 1000 songs would have been encoded in MP3, now they talk about AAC.

[Bryan]

"Samsungs 16Gb NAND flash memory chip, which is slated to enter commercial production during the second half of next year, will be manufactured using a 50-nanometer production process, the company said. The new chip will allow memory-card makers to design cards with a capacity of 32GB by putting 16 of these chips into a single card, it said."
Huh? 16 x 16 = 256, not 32. What am I missing here?

[jdb8167]

In reply to:

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I wince every time the MP3 player manufacturers (Apple included) claim their devices can hold "up to 1000 songs" or some such nonsense.

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Many people won't have much of an idea how much 2 GB, 4 GB or 60 GB is unless you give them a reasonable standard to measure against. If you are really interested in how Apple arrives at the figure, it is documented at the bottom of their website:

1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less. Song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; photo capacity is based on iPod nano-viewable photos transferred from iTunes.
[/list]
They have to do something like this and they are consistent within the iPod product line. There is no recognized standard between manufacturers so there is little anyone can do about that. Apple has a very reasonable standard and is completely up-front about it. There is nothing wrong with this.
Compare to Sony that uses 48-Kbps ATRAC3 to quote capacity.

[Peter Cohen]

In reply to:

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What am I missing here?

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The difference between gigabits (Gb) and gigabytes (GB).

[Tau_Myx]

In reply to:

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The 4GB iPod nano, for example, can hold 1000 songs according to Apple's marketing; so could the original 5GB iPod. So, a 20% decrease in space doesn't result in any decrease in songs?

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The original 5GB iPod was measured with .mp3s running at 160 kpbs. But the more recent AAC codec can deliver better sound with just 120 kbps. Songs and sound quality are what are really important to an iPod buyer, not gigabytes, so it DOES make sense to measure the iPods with a unit based on what the listener is actually buying the device for.

[Tau_Myx]

In reply to:

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The difference between gigabits (Gb) and gigabytes (GB).

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This is a major problem with reading tech specs these days. When we learned to read as kids, we were taught that there was no difference between B and b, and we were supposed to freely swap one for the other when needed, such as at the beginning of a sentence. The idea that the same letter could mean something different based on if it is upper case or lower case goes against how we were all taught that language works.
While it is possible to change the rules, I don't think this upper/lower case business was ever formalized by any linguistic body. So it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of people, including non-technical magazine editors, don't realize that Gb and GB refer to different things and might randomly "correct" one to the other for aesthetic preferences. I would never assume that Time magazine, for example, would get this right. I'd always look for clarification elsewhere - it's a real pain.
I once had a college english professor insist that VHS had to be spelled with periods like this: V.H.S. I told him that I'd never seen any tech publication do it that way and he didn't care. These guys are not going to let some tech change how capitalization works just so they can type three fewer letters! Gbit and Gbyte are better.
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Edit:
Note that intercaps such as iPod and NeXT do not cause the same problems that GB/Gb do. If I read about an "Ipod" somewhere, while it looks wrong, there is no confusion as to what is meant. No one could ever call their product Ipod or ipod, because trademark law recognizes that people will assume that this means the same as Apple's iPod.

[Luke_Macwalker]

Actually, in many roman languages, uppercase cannot be freely substituted by lowercase. The sentences must start with an uppercase character. In German, nouns must start with a capital. French has a rather precise way to use lowercase ans uppercase characters to spell titles for example.
But in science, the case has always been important and has never been allowed to be substituted for another. For example, m means"milli" and M means mega. You cannot substitute one for the other for aesthetically pleasing reasons! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
This is the same for b (bits) and B (Bytes) even though you're right that many people are bound to make this very mistake...