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The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 6:57:04 PM   
TheHeretic


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From: California, USA
Status: offline 		       So, I'm at this lunch thing, and there are the little promotional goodie bags from a certain nameless commercial organization.  The speeches are dry and predictable, so I'm opening up the little boxes, all with "China" stickers on them, and I find a nifty little thumb drive in a cheap leather case.  I'm trying to think who I can scratch off the Christmas shopping list with this thing, when I notice that the clasp on it is a magnet.

      I'm not a 'puter person, so check me if I'm wrong, but isn't a magnet right on top of a data storage device going to be a problem?  I asked a friend who's better with those questions, and got a bunch of gobbly-gook about shielding, and yadda-yadda, but I doubt it.  It's a cheap piece of crap, and worse than useless.

      Why would a manufacturer even put such an item on the market?  And why would a corporation be so inept in what they buy to pass out as a promotional item with their logo stamped on it?

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 7:12:46 PM   
MasterHermes


Posts: 136
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Status: offline 		As an old communist country now they are hitting the world using the rules of capitalism.. "Everything is ok for the sake of profit" ..

Of course its going to get broken and of course the world will keep buying it... Thats the whole point..

Hermes

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 8:44:01 PM   
Vendaval


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Status: offline 		Because the target market for a "Happy Meal" is usually a bit less sophisticated?

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 9:32:02 PM   
abcbsex


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Status: offline 		According to my in-house expert, you're confusing the way a hard drive works with the way a thumb drive works. The hard drive in a computer is a magnetic disk drive. A thumb drive is a microchip. Apparently they work differently, and we just tested it (for curiosity's sake) with a large 16-ohm speaker that has a large magnet on the back. Porn on the thumb drive stayed intact despite our best efforts with the magnet.

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but it needed to be at least.... four times bigger.


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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 9:49:37 PM   
TheHeretic


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From: California, USA
Status: offline 		         Hmmmm.  You might have just taken care of a college student's stocking stuffer then.

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/13/2008 10:13:54 PM   
philosophy


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...can anyone give me a reasonably understandable idea of how these flash drives work? How long can they hold data? i must admit to being fascinated by this technology......i can't think of many electronic data storage media without moving parts, or even a battery........

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 3:57:53 AM   
Evility


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Status: offline 		They derive power from the USB port. 

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 4:00:28 AM   
thishereboi


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quote:

ORIGINAL: MasterHermes

As an old communist country now they are hitting the world using the rules of capitalism.. "Everything is ok for the sake of profit" ..

Of course its going to get broken and of course the world will keep buying it... Thats the whole point..

Hermes


The OP was talking about a give away promotion product. I doubt they are making a huge profit on it.

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 5:57:51 AM   
MasterHermes


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quote:

ORIGINAL: thishereboi

The OP was talking about a give away promotion product. I doubt they are making a huge profit on it.


You can give it away, but the factory in China doesnt. Otherwise China's foreign exchange reserves wouldnt be increasing over 1 trillion dollars in 2006. China is the country holding the largest money reserves in the world. That give away product can work correctly or get broken in six months. That individual case is hardly the point. The subject says "The US and China- Somebody is doomed" .

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 7:09:17 AM   
Termyn8or


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Status: offline 		Those thumb drives, or flash drives, whatever you want to call them are strictly electronic. There is no disk, no magnetic heads or anything of the sort, just an IC. It's the same with ipods and Zoom players.

Even with a regular harddrive it takes a heck of alot of magnetism to affect it. And it won't erase it, but it might cause a head crash. I was told by someone on SER that even an EMP might not screw up a harddrive, unless it was quite strong. That is because the magnetism used to write the data is so strong. It's not like it pulls a hundred amps, but it is very concentrated because the tracks are so small. To illustrate the point, remember record players ? I read that the "modern" hypereliptical stylus running at say one gram exerts something like 25,000 pound per square inch at the tip. No wonder albums wore out.

Moving along (almost a pun), now they have 80 gig ipods. It is concievable that they could build a computer with no harddrive at all, just non-volatile memory. This would be great for laptops, you could bang them around while they are running without risking a HD crash.

So magnets are not quite the "kryptonite" they used to be in the days of floppy disks and such. So much for today's technology newsletter, I'm sure plenty of additional info is available at howstuffworks.com. However, they changed the site a while back and it seems hard to search, so let Google do it for you.

As far as being doomed, I have known that for a long time. I am still waiting.

T

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 9:11:19 AM   
philosophy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Evility

They derive power from the USB port. 


..true, but only while plugged in. i wonder how long the data stays on the drive without plugging in.......

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 2:41:50 PM   
shallowdeep


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quote:

ORIGINAL: philosophy
Can anyone give me a reasonably understandable idea of how these flash drives work? How long can they hold data?

Here's a stab...

A flash memory cell is similar to a regular MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor). These transistors work by using a strip of metal as a "gate" to control current flow from the source to the drain. Depending on the voltage applied to the gate, current will or won't pass through the transistor. Flash memory turns the transistor into a memory device by adding a second gate to the transistor, called a "floating gate". Under normal operating voltages, this floating gate is completely electrically insulated from the rest of the circuit by a thin layer of dielectric, hence the "floating" name. However if high voltages are briefly applied to the cell, some electrons can pass through the thin insulating dielectric and charge can accumulate on or leave the floating gate. Once the high voltage is turned off, the floating gate is again insulated and the charge is stuck in place. Charge stuck on the floating gate increases the voltage required on the main control gate to turn the transistor on. By checking if the transistor turns on when the control gate gets an applied voltage (or, in the case of multilevel cells, when it turns on) you can determine what state the floating gate is in.

Because the floating gate is normally completely insulated, any charge on it will stay put, even when the device is powered off. In practice no capacitor is perfect and the charge will eventually leak off, but it is ordinarily a very slow process for flash cells - on the order of years, maybe even decades. One issue with flash memory is that the repeated applications of high voltage used to flash the cells eventually break down the thin dielectric and the floating gates stop being electrically insulated, resulting in cell failures; however, modern cells can withstand many write/erase cycles and flash drives have a reliability at least comparable to hard drives.

Since data is stored as an electrical charge and requires an electric field far stronger than anything an ordinary magnet can induce to change, a magnet isn't really a problem for flash memory - as others have already pointed out and discovered.

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 8:00:55 PM   
philosophy


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Status: offline 		...thanks for that

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RE: The US and China - Somebody is doomed - 8/14/2008 8:18:14 PM   
NumberSix


Posts: 1378
Joined: 12/30/2006
Status: offline 		Kinda like sticking your finger in one of them old vacuum tube and box tvs's

My daddy used to to that, know what I mean vern?

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

longer than the typical latency resonance of the brain. It's good enough.

Ron

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