Be Excellent To Each Other

So it appears you can now buy a 128GB SD card.

128GB.

http://www.dabs.com/products/lexar-128g ... 24X&src=14

How? Seriously, fucking how? IT'S SMALLER THAN A TWO PENCE PIECE!

How do they store much that stuff? Are there like, squillions of transistors in there?

I generally think of myself as a bit of techno geek, but even so, sometimes I'm just like, 'Woah!'

(Same sort of thing when you see the transistor count for a modern GPU, and there's more than FOUR BILLION of the fuckers on a single GPU die.)



(I'm looking for a new 'proper' camera and have set my eyes upon this lovely thing. (I don't mean 'proper' as in a proper Digital SLR costing ££££££££, but something better than your average high-end smartphone sports these days.)

http://www.dabs.com/products/panasonic- ... Z30&src=16

Which is a stunningly nice camera for the money, but obviously one needs a fair wedge of storage for a camera that can shoot 1080p video at 50FPS (needs a sustained data rate of 28Mbps)).

In a world where you can purchase a low orbit spaceplane ride for less that a two bedroomed flat; you can use your cellphone to pay for stuff by waving it around; you can send you thoughts to over two million people in under 150 keypresses and Sheffield Wednesday are only three years away from Champions league glory, I'd suggest it isn't that bigger deal.

They're all basically a result of the same process that I expressed wonderment at above though, miniaturisation. So all part of the same ZOMG effect.

Apart from the Sheffield Wednesday thing, which is a result of delusion.

Last time it happened to me was when I received the North American maps for my satnav - a whole continent on a teeny mini-SD card.

Recently I found it quite challenging trying to explain to a friend who's seven years younger than me quite how big 64k back in the day (we were watching an episode of 'Mystery Science Theatre' and the power of a C64 was central to the film's plot).

Truly, living in the Twenty-First Century is wondrous.

I like I can control my Xbox from my iPhone

I see it as very small expensive things for me to lose

Two million, eh? It will be awesome when Twitter actually catches on.

According to the advertising*, the Braun Series 7 electric razor contains more computing power than Apollo 11.



*So it must be true.

To be fair though, it needs more computing power, have you tried shaving with Apollo 11? Hopeless.

So how come it's impossible to get a shave as good as a traditional razor with any electric razor on the planet?

Clearly we all need to be using sharpened moon rocks for shaving. That's my conclusion anyway.

what app?

But Apollo 11 has more Buzz

Downloaded it.

Clicked sign in on the first page of the app. Got an error. Very poor.

Mine works

The app itself has been around for a while and it just gave you friends details and other fluff , however the last update (yesterday) with the latest dashboard update allows you some remote control of the Xbox , not that useful for games but very useful for iplayer and other 'app' stuff.

It could just be slow at responding as loads of people are trying it out - but I can see this as the first step to the 'smartglass' stuff they talked about at E3

Bit more experimentation and I'm in.

Looks like the 'you put the wrong password in, stupid' is the page that isn't available on mobile.

That type of card (SDXC) is used in the Samsung phones, they come with 32GB onboard maybe even 64 in the newer ones

So you can have 160-192GB of storage on a phone!

ObXkcd:

I am 100% serious when I say that anyone buying not-a-DSLR should buy a Sony NEX 5N or whatever the new NEX 3 is called, because anything else isn't worth the money. Truly astonishing what we've got out of them over the last fortnight, though we do have most of the additional lenses. Proper voodoo stuff. Same goes for anyone buying a DSLR 'because compacts are rubbish'.

I bought a Lumix bridge last year and was disappointed from day one. I've thanked myself I couldn't resist the NEX every time I press the button, especially in low light. It's incredible.

I got a 64GB micro SD card to play with at work a few weeks ago - that sixty-four gigabytes that I could accidentally inhale!

As a bonus, pretty much all SD cards (standard size and micro) have a full 32-bit ARM processor in them acting as the controller on a separate chip to the flash arrays. So not only do they have more storage than your vintage PC, they've got more processing power as well.

Good grief! Really? I had no idea.

Come again?

There's a fucking CPU on these things now?

Finally, me and DocG agree on something!

Hah! I'm not surprised it has a microcontroller; all flash based memory needs that for wear levelling and whatnot. I'm surprised it's as sophisticated as a 32 bit ARM chip though.

Although thinking on, it has to be a 32 bit processor, once the flash exceeded 4 GB.

Probably more information than you really want, but includes an analysis of why it's cost-effective to stuff a decent micro in a memory card (find ARM7TDMI in the text):

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

It's worth at least scrolling down to the clickable piccy of the samples where he's melted the plastic off with nitric acid to show the insides. When they manufacture the cards they polish the backs of the two chips to make them really thin and then connect them up with loads of microscopic gold wires. Amazing stuff!

I've just taken delivery of a class 10 16gb microsd card. They really are quite magical.