Tech for Lunch!

There is no sure-fire way to shop for a key. You will need to decide on the capacity you need and think about some of the features you want, then try to find the best value for money and buy it!

Some useful info on USB keys…
Once you have chosen the capacity of your key (depending on what you want to put in it… Pictures? Word documents? Etc.), you only need to shop around and try to find the best “deal”.  There are tons of companies that manufacture them and they are found in a variety of stores.

However, here is some more useful information…
- Over the years, the smaller the keys get, they now offer keys with large storage capacity and the prices are dropping. Good news!

- Generally, the lifespan of data on a USB key is ensured for 10 years. On average, flash memory supports 1 million deletions.

- The main available capabilities are: 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB (very little).  After that we fall into hard drives. Prices range from $5 to just over $200.  Note: As these data change very quickly, this information may be quickly outdated… Note the date of this article!

- Prices vary depending on the capacity, brand, the level of security (with or without a password to access the contents) and the type of key (USB 2.0, USB 2.0 High Speed or U3).

- We are moving towards U3 keys that we see more and more of on the market. These keys not only contain various files, but also applications such as software and their parameters (bookmarks, e-mail account, etc.).. Can you imagine? This means we can now bring with us our office (almost) saved on our USB key! At the moment, several free and paid applications are compatible with U3 and it has only just begun. The offer will become more and more interesting… Check the U3 site to find out more and learn about the applications that are available.

You may want to consider the form factor of your USB key.  For instance, will you be carrying it in your pocket or elsewhere?  The shape and the way it opens and closes, the way it can be carried etc, all may have an impact on your decision.

Happy shopping!

Google may be praised for some of the services it provides and it may be denounced for others. This is the case with its “Google Street View” service, an option derived from Google Maps and Google Earth.

The Street View allows you to obtain 360 degrees images of locations in several important cities in the USA, France, Italy, Australia, Canada and Japan. Google hires motorists equipped with a special camera in the intent of taking pictures at regular intervals. These images are then placed in a database and, theoretically, within the next few years Google could offer to “see” any place on earth.

But complaints are becoming more numerous. Residents of California complained that photographers have rolled on private roads to take pictures of residences. Some have failed to comply with the signs and have brought pictures of residences located more than 350 meters from the last public road. An audit by the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat newspaper shows that photos were taken on over a hundred private roads.

The company underlines the fact that we are in an era of satellites and aerial imagery, real intimacy no longer really exists. In early summer, Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, who is now hired by Google to spread the good word (what some call a Google Evangelist), told a newspaper: “Intimacy, forget about that … that’s finished!” Then he gave some explanation on his blog. “I tried to explain simply that we are entering a period where fewer and fewer things are really private. Think of how easy it is to take pictures and videos, scan and make them available to the entire planet through the Internet, Youtube or equivalent services. “

Although the company reiterated that it respects the privacy, confidentiality and intimacy of people, complaints about this keep growing.

A few months ago, Google announced it had developed a technology to hide the faces of people on the street along with the numbers on licenses plates. That’s certainly a step in the right direction, at least to show that they really do care a little bit about privacy.

I may have been somewhat silent recently, but it was vacation time for everyone, and it doesn’t mean I wasn’t still looking around for new applications. A friend of mine spoke to me about this site and I went to take a look. It turns out that it is a very interesting site to know about if you are looking for and/or developing Adobe Air applications.

Refreshingapps.com was built primarily as a showcase and gallery that shows some of the fantastic Adobe AIR applications that are being developed today. So if you have seen a great AIR app, or you have built something cool go ahead and submit it to our showcase.

Everyone knows I love applications built with Adobe Flex/Air and this site is what it’s all about. You can find a bunch of applications described, reviewed and, best of all, divided into categories according to their purpose and application. The site also has some news articles about the RIA world and gives some useful links to different Resources for developers of all skill levels. Visitors can also rate the listed applications so you can view top applications as voted by actual users.

If you like Air applications, refreshingapps.com is certainly a bookmark to add to your list.

Everyone has at least one USB device or, at least, most people know what USB is for.  The USB standard has been around for many years already and it quickly became a standard in the industry because so many manufacturers decided to produce equipment that use it.  Now, Intel has released the specifications for the next iteration of the standard, USB 3.0.

USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, will have many significant improvements over it’s predecessors and peripherals that make use of the new standard should become available sometime late in 2009 or early 2010.  Here are some of the improvements that are described in the release:

• Higher transfer rates:  This is a given because that is basically what everyone is looking for, especially if you transfer large files to/from an external drive for instance. USB 3.0 should be able to transfer at a whooping 4.8Gbit/s (614MByte/s) making it 10 times faster than it’s little brother, USB 2.0.
• Simultaneous read/write:  USB 2.0 and 1.0 are only capable of doing one-way operations at a time, resulting in much slower transfers.  With USB 3.0, Not only is the raw transfer speed faster, but it also goes both ways at the same time so you can copy to AND from a hard drive at the same time.  The only problem will be that your USB 3.0 cable will be faster than the hardware it is connected to.
• Higher Power Output: Many devices get their power from the USB cable or simply use the cable to charge themselves.  With USB 3.0, the power output will go from 100 milliamps to 900 milliamps.  We should be able to charge our devices faster and connect bigger devices without having to use an external power adapter.
• Backwards Compatibility:  We should be able to use a USB 3.0 cable with older USB 2.0 devices.  Not only will it work, but some newer features like the power consumption control will kick-in.
• Power consumption: USB 2.0 used a polling method to verify if a device was sending data to the computer and if it needed power.  This means it was an “always-on” process and consumed more energy than was required.  USB 3.0 will us an Interrupt-driven protocol to ensure your devices get only what they need, when they need it.

The standard for USB 3.0 is not yet 100% complete and this article certainly does not cover everything that is new, but it is a pretty good summary of what most end-users will be looking for in USB 3.0.

I am very eager to see all my devices become USB 3.0, but that means I’ll have to get a bunch of new toys to play with!

As we have previously covered, Yahoo! Buzz is a service that allows you to submit stories that you find interesting and ranks them according to popularity.  Very often compared to Digg and the likes, Yahoo Buzz offers similar features and will publish the top stories for every category on the front page of the Yahoo! portal.  During the beta phase, many websites who landed stories on the first page received so much traffic that they simply went down.

Yahoo! Buzz is now open to the general public, meaning that anyone can submit stories and rate the ones that are already there.  We’ll have to see if the ratings on Buzz are relevant enough for users to keep coming, because ultimately, Yahoo keeps a hand on the editorials.. so it’s not 100% user-driven.  For now, the top pages seem to satisfy but that may have been because only a few selected sites were submitting content.  Time will tell.

In the mean time, why not just Buzz Up our stories and articles using the button at the bottom of our articles and give us a hand! :-)