flash

Flash drives: faster, tougher but still in pursuit

The hard drive will not die. Let's get this on the record now, at the beginning of 2008, because readers may see a fair number of stories proclaiming its demise. Though Friday's Intel-Micron high-speed flash memory announcement points to increasing use of solid state drives (SSDs) in digital products, flash is chasing prey that has eluded imminent death for years. SSDs are gaining acceptance selectively not broadly. SSDs in standard notebooks? No. And even if you're, for instance, a PC vendor trying to compete in the ultra-thin notebook market, chances are you will still opt in most … Read more

SanDisk takes SDHC memory card to 32GB

Correction 10:00 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated the speed at which SanDisk's top-end Extreme Ducati cards can write data. It is 45MB/sec.

LAS VEGAS--SanDisk, one of the best known makers of flash memory cards, has started making the jump to 32GB capacity.

The company announced its 32GB Ultra II SDHC card Thursday at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here, a model designed with the needs of flash-based video cameras.

It will cost about $350 when it goes on sale in April, the company said. A $180 16GB Ultra II card will be available in … Read more

Sprout: Now that's a Flash builder

Sprout is a Flash authoring environment that puts the two Flash authoring environments I just covered to shame. Completely Flash based, it lets you put all your media into a Flash app that's easily pushed into widgets.

Spout widgets also let viewers subscribe to updates to a presentation via RSS, share them, and so on.

In the demo the CEO showed Spout's clear and capable authoring environment. Unfortunately I can't show you the authoring environment because it's not yet live on the site. There's a video of the authoring environment here. And here's a … Read more

Make your own Flash presentations with Flypaper and GoldMail

Flypaper, formerly FreshBrew, creates cool Flash presentations without requiring the user to actually know Flash.

The presentations are based on templates, which users can then put their own data in, including audio and video, if the template supports it. The authoring application is a clunky downloaded application, which is weird for a glitzy Flash content company, but it does give you more drag-and-drop capabilities than you would probably get with a pure Flash authoring application.

Still, the output that we saw here was good. The "stories" that Flypaper makes look like professional Flash presentations. Whether you actually want … Read more

Netdisaster adds Led Zeppelin and acid urine to any Web site

Editors note: To turn off the Flash ad, click the "remove disaster" button in the upper-left corner of the screen.

You know those highly intrusive Flash ads that you occasionally find while surfing? The kind that march all over the page and are impossible to ignore and sometimes get rid of? From that same technology comes an enjoyable service that lets you see your favorite sites in a whole new way. Netdisaster, which picked up an innovation award from Yahoo UK three years ago is still pretty innovative by letting you turn any Web site into a playground of destruction and/or defilement.

The service provides more than 30 ways to destroy a site, and a good majority of them manage to do it humorously. All you need to do is plug in a URL and pick the terror you wish it to befall. Certain options cause more damage than others, and many feature an "auto-repair" option that will seal up the holes caused from explosions, letting the mayhem continue into infinity. This is especially helpful if you're using the chainsaw tool or nuclear blast, as they tend to do some pretty serious damage.

The one thing I really enjoy about this service is that you can try out other disasters without having to jump back to the home page and plug in the URL all over again. You can tweak the options ad nauseam, and simply click one button to get the action going again. It's a nice touch, and really keeps you trying out everything that's there.

If you're a really big fan, you can also install the toolbar, which lets you call up a disaster on any site you're on without having to click off the page. Webmasters also have the option of adding disasters or the disaster selector toolbar to any of their pages with a few simple lines of JavaScript, which I've done after the break.

[found on DownloadSquad]

A heads-up on the Adobe Flash player

The free Flash player from Adobe is one of the most popular pieces of software on the planet. It's a web browser add-on that runs in Windows, Mac OS X and assorted versions of Linux and Unix. A large percentage of web pages include Flash-based content. It's all but guaranteed to be installed on the computer you are reading this on.

There are a few things you need to know about it.

The current version of the Flash player is 9.0.115.0. Older versions suffer from critical security problems, so if you are not using version … Read more

Whose Internet is it anyway?

This week we've seen two Internet events that are more alike than dissimilar. On Wednesday, an Estonian court convicted a 20-year Russian for his part in last spring's distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on that nation. On Thursday, word of mounting DDoS attacks on the Church of Scientology spread. Ultimately, both events could have larger repercussions.

The attack on the Estonian Web sites was prompted by an Estonian government plan to move a statue and grave sites honoring Russian-Estonians who died fighting the Nazis. Gadi Evron of Beyond Security said at last year's Black Hat USA that he … Read more

Canon's smart move to SD memory cards

Canon faced some modest compatibility risks when it chose to design its new EOS Rebel XSi camera with SD flash-memory cards rather than the CompactFlash cards it's used for all its SLR cameras until this point, but I think the move is smart overall.

It's a drag for consumers that there's such a profusion of flash card formats. Customers often must pay extra when moving from one camera maker to another just to replace flash cards. And indeed, owners of Canon's existing Rebel, Rebel XT, or XTi cameras will find their CompactFlash cards useless if they … Read more

PNY, Transcend flash cards move to 32GB

Correction January 27 7 p.m. PST: I messed up the photo-capacity math. A 32GB card can hold more than 10,000 3MB photos.

Jumping the Photo Marketing Association trade show gun by a few days, PNY Technologies announced several new 16GB and 32GB flash cards for cameras and video cameras on Thursday.

The 32GB SDHC card can keep up with high-definition video captured at 9 megabits per second, the company said. And the Optima Pro CompactFlash card, has a 266X transfer speed, or 40 megabits per second, using a UDMA interface.

Both cards will be available in the second … Read more

First conviction for Estonia's 'cyberwar'

A 20-year-old Russian has been convicted for organizing some of the attacks on Estonia's government sites during spring 2007, the Agence France-Presse reported on Thursday.

"Dmitri Galushkevich is the first hacker to be sentenced for organizing a massive cyberattack against an Estonian Web page," Gerrit Maesalu, spokesman for the regional prosecutor's office in northeast Estonia, told the AFP. Galushkevich was fined 17,500 krooni (about $1,600). He admitted his guilt, said Maesalu.

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which some security experts have alternatively called a flash mob or the first-ever cyberwar, was prompted … Read more