There’s much to be sad about so early in the year.  CES is over.  There’s war, pestilence, and the price of citrus fruit is about to skyrocket.

Yet there’s hope.

The price of LCD monitors is headed down, and screen real estate is on its way up.  That 17-inch screen that cost $300 a year ago is now $190 and measures out to 20-inches.  Monitor manufacturing has become an efficient process, researchers say, and there are fewer desktops holding up the massive CRT displays of old. 

Of course, the dot pitchers remind us that higher resolution still comes at a higher price.  Even higher resolution displays are dropping in price. But those high resolution monitors are made for AutoCAD projects and fifth dimension science projects. Most monitors display far more mundane ventures like watching the State of the Union Address or the latest supermodel video. 

With the money you save you can make a down-payment on of those high definition Plasma screens you saw at CES.

Posted by Barbara.

When CES began in 1967,   a hard disk drive was about as common as vacuum tubes are today.  Hard drives were about the size of a small trade show booth and had more mechanical moving parts than a Las Vegas slot machine.  At best, a hard drive could deliver about five megabytes of data storage to a mainframe computer that required more sensitivity care than a newborn baby.

This year, the hard drive for tiny desktop systems has crossed the terabyte barrier and brings with it enough reliability to be carried across a battlefield. 

Apparently, even that is not enough.

SanDisk, which gadget enthusiasts know for memory cards in digital cameras, joined other flash memory producers such as Samsung, in introducing  a high capacity advanced flash drive in a tiny card that holds 32 gigabytes.  Unlike the ordinary hard drive, flash memory has no moving parts — such as read-write heads that can be scraped against a platter.  Solid State disk technology grew out of high-end computing environments — such as military and aerospace computers.  Among the benefits is a read-rate that makes modern-day hard drives look like that old five-megabyte mainframe in comparison.

Now, the flash memory cards with unprecedented reliability are ready to store thousands of  I-Tunes and grandma’s photo album.  Of course that assumes that grandma has $600 available for her online photo album. 

Like every other storage option in the last five decades, however, the price of flash memory will drop quite a bit further.  Best of all, even if it smashes against the ground, flash memory will still be as good as new.

Posted by Barbara.

Decades ago,  at the first-ever CD-ROM conference that joined manufacturers and IT professionals curious about the shiny new platters that could hold more than half a gigabyte of data,  an executive familiar with security issues noted that “the ability to run off with 560 megabytes of company data could prove a security  nightmare.” 

Today, that platter that holds 560 megabytes can barely hold our I-Tunes.  The desktop spiral that began with an eight-inch floppy drive in the early 80s, has broken across a new barrier — a terabyte or 1,000 gigabytes.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies says it will ship its 3.5-inch Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive for personal computers in March.  The new drive will hold one-fortieth of the entire Library of Congress on your desktop. 

In the half-century since hard drive technology began  at  IBM with a five megabyte drive in a huge box weighing more than a ton,  the industry’s proficiency has reached a point where you can get a terabyte on a mere four platters within a very small space. 

Do you really need that amount of space on your hard drive?  Given the trend of video and music downloads, chances are you will.

But imagine what a criminal mind with a screwdriver can do with a terabyte of data. 

Posted by Barbara.