Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam  The real problem comes from a limitation in the Flash chips. When you write to a memory register, that register starts to go bad... For a good, high-end Flash chip, it can be written to about 100,000 times before these bad sectors start destroying information... The unfortunate thing about capitalism is that we rarely see high-end goods. |
Hate going off topic but I just had to reply to this.
Yes, flash has a limited number of write-erase cycles per block. However, 100,000 is a very low end estimate.
According to Wikipedia, most commercial products are rated at 1 million write-erase cycles. Moreover, a good controller will keep track of how much each block has been used, and will spread the wear over all the blocks evenly. And I'm really surprised that you're knocking capitalism. With capitalism you get
exactly what you pay for. If you want to get a 2 gig flash drive for $20, you can't expect it to last for 10 years.
Going back on topic though, I have no intention of ever using Vista for anything other than testing my software. I've just built a new PC dual booting Ubuntu Linux with Windows XP, and will be using Ubuntu most of the time. I mainly need Windows for two things -- software development (making Windows binaries, although I can probably learn to cross-compile from Linux) and playing games, since most games don't support Linux yet. There's absolutely nothing else Windows has that you can't get from Linux these days.
Linux even gives you a choice of many file systems, and some are a lot faster than FAT32/NTFS (the only ones Windows can use). I'm using ReiserFS for instance which is optimized for handling lots of small files quickly. And perhaps the most refreshing thing about using Linux is not having to install an anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, anti-trojan.... It's shocking that Windows users seem to think it's perfectly normal for an OS to be so vulnerable to attack from every possible direction. And no, Linux is
not less vulnerable due to smaller market share. It's just a better designed OS.