Memory Sticks

Flash drive.

Anything else is a specific trademark and will get the Trademark Marshals (TM) to knock on your door or is just plain wrong and will get the Wrong Jargon Police (not TM) to not knock on your door!

So get it right!
 
lionking said:
The USB's the socket the stick goes into isn't it?
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The socket the stick goes into is merely a USB socket.

USB is the Universal Serial Bus, a suite of physical, electrical, and logical standards for connecting electronics stuff to communicate with each other. I'm no EE guru, but it seems to be pretty complete (specifying connectors, cabling, and handshakes in detail as well as signal voltage levels and timing) with plenty good enough performance (480 Mbps) to do lots of useful things.

Design your device to a use good standard and you don't have to design or support every device it communicates with. Judging from the number of affordable consumer devices that use USB with hardly any difficulty, it's a pretty good standard.

I'm sure lots of folks here remember RS-232 and all the fun to be had aligning roles, pinouts, bitrates, parity, planets and weather... to swap a few thousand bits per second on a good day.
 
BenBurch said:
I thought ZIP drives were awesome, but each and every one of them died and destroyed my data.
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I was told this adage when I first started messing with computers.

"There are two kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data ... and those who are going to."

The first time I learned this the hard way was when I spent hours doing a marathon session of coding in GW BASIC for my very first programming class. It was in a room full of PCs plugged into floor outlets under the tables, and just before I remembered to do a save (no 'auto-save' back then) the guy at the machine next to me kicked both our plugs out of the sockets. :(

I've had reason to be reminded of it since then, too.

The one time a Zip drive was involved I'd used it for back-up.

:mad:
 
OK, here's the list of names so far:

Memory Stick
Flash Drive
Thumb Drive
Pen Drive
Key Drive
USB Stick
USB Drive
Memory Thingy
USBs
Memory Pen
Minnepinne
USB Flash Drive
Dongle
USB Thingie
USB Memory Thingie
USB Keychain Drive
Thumbnail Drive
Newfangled Floppy Disk
Floppy
Geek Stick
Jump Drive
Doovelackie
Mules
Data Mules
Throatwobbler Mangrove
Sticks
Goddamn Data Thingy
Flash Key


While it seems Flash Drive is the most popular term, I think it's too boring, and implies that the doovelackie must only be loaded with Homestarrunner clips. (Not that I don't love H*R.)

I think we need to come up with a purely JREF term.

Is there one amongst these that we can all agree on? Should I start a poll?

Let's have some even more creative suggestions. I'll start:

Memory Doovrie.
Geek Whatsit.
 
quadraginta said:
To expand on this ...

"You know, those key-chain thingys that you stick in the side of your laptop."

:p
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Ah! That answers a question I was going to ask when I'd got to the end of this topic - Do laptops have a place where I could plug it in? I have a Dolphin 'PEN' - which has a copy of my Supernova 12 software on it, so if my computer is out of action again (as it was for three weeks last autumn because of a local telephone exchange broken link), I can take it to someone else's computer and be able to use it. I tried it on my son's computer at Christmas, and he had to download something first, but then it was really good.

ETA I've been just wondering whether to buy a small laptop.
 
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SusanB-M1 said:
Ah! That answers a question I was going to ask when I'd got to the end of this topic - Do laptops have a place where I could plug it in? I have a Dolphin 'PEN' - which has a copy of my Supernova 12 software on it, so if my computer is out of action again (as it was for three weeks last autumn because of a local telephone exchange broken link), I can take it to someone else's computer and be able to use it. I tried it on my son's computer at Christmas, and he had to download something first, but then it was really good.
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You bring up several different issues. I'm going to try and separate them out, so be patient with me if I seem to go over things you already know.

USB (aka Universal Serial Bus) is a connection standard developed for the purpose of attaching different kinds of devices to computers. From your point of view it's a place to plug stuff in. These devices include (but are not limited to) various kinds of data storage media.

Any computer that is much less than a decade old, laptop or desktop, should have one or more USB ports. The standard has changed since it was first implemented, but in general the older devices should work just fine in the newer computers, if perhaps somewhat slower.

A USB flash drive (or "thingie" :p) is a solid state storage device which plugs into a USB port in a computer and looks like any other data storage drive to the computer's operating system.

Many programs are taking advantage of the portability of flash drives to allow people to carry personalized versions of the software around with them, so, for example, your web browser will still have all of your preference settings even if you change machines.

Sometimes, in addition to carrying data the flash drive can also serve as a copy protection device which insures that only the legitimate owners of a proprietary (You gotta pay to use it.) program are allowed to use it.


ETA: (I hit the "Submit" button by mistake. :blush:)

Your Dolphin software is doing both of the above. The Pen is a portable version of the accessability software Dolphin sells (kinda pricey, too) installed on a flash drive thingie. Your son downloaded an adjunct program provided by Dolphin called "Interceptor" which Dolphin offers for free to allow a host machine to use the software on the flash drive.

Here is a link to the download page for Interceptor. You'll have to make sure which version is right for your Dolphin Pen.

You could download a copy of the Interceptor software and carry it around as well, which would let you use your Dolphin Pen on machines which aren't connected to the internet. You might be able to store it on the Pen itself, but I didn't look hard enough to determine that. You can certainly store it on a separate flash drive ... thingie.


ETA I've been just wondering whether to buy a small laptop.
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Sure. If you go with a used one the prices are insanely low. Much less than the license fee for your Dolphin software.
 
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I have a question about these flash drives/thumb drives. It's my understanding they have a limited number of write cycles.

My question is this: How do they compare to magnetic and optical media for data storage over time if they're used as a read-only device? I have a 16 GB flash drive with software that I have to install onto computers over and over, but I never write to the flash drive anymore.

Stated another way, how do they fare as long-turn archive media?

Hope that made sense.
 
Ian Osborne said:
I used to work for a Commodore 64 magazine back in the day. I know all about their tape drives. :-(
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I had a 1541 floppy drive on my Commodore 64. There was this spreadsheet called Microsoft Multiplan (yes, I'm that old) that took 30 minutes to load, if memory serves me.
 
John Jones said:
I have a question about these flash drives/thumb drives. It's my understanding they have a limited number of write cycles.

My question is this: How do they compare to magnetic and optical media for data storage over time if they're used as a read-only device? I have a 16 GB flash drive with software that I have to install onto computers over and over, but I never write to the flash drive anymore.

Stated another way, how do they fare as long-turn archive media?

Hope that made sense.
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In your case the durability of the plug itself may be more important than the number of write cycles the drive will survive. This article suggests that you can expect to be able to 'stick your thingie' into stuff about 1,500 times before it is likely to fail you. Not bad for an old-timer. :p

Considering how cheap they are now the simplest thing would be to copy everything onto a spare to tote around with you, as well as on your home machine. Elsewhere I've read that the expected shelf life averages at least ten years, but it isn't certain how much longer the gizmos could hold up. You'll probably be changing media before then the way things have been going.
 
quadraginta said:
In your case the durability of the plug itself may be more important than the number of write cycles the drive will survive. This article suggests that you can expect to be able to 'stick your thingie' into stuff about 1,500 times before it is likely to fail you. Not bad for an old-timer. :p

Considering how cheap they are now the simplest thing would be to copy everything onto a spare to tote around with you, as well as on your home machine. Elsewhere I've read that the expected shelf life averages at least ten years, but it isn't certain how much longer the gizmos could hold up. You'll probably be changing media before then the way things have been going.
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Thanks. That article also introduces another term for flash drives: UFD -- a hyper-acronym for USB Flash Drive
 
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quadraginta said:
You bring up several different issues. I'm going to try and separate them out, so be patient with me if I seem to go over things you already know.
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Thank you very much for that interesting reply. I've copied it and put it in my Dolphin folder of information. I would never have thought of taking a copy of the interceptor software too! I'll get that done as soon as I can.

Yes, the Dolphin PEN was expensive, but definitely an asset for me.

I'll look into the second-hand PCs - or more likely get my son to do it.
 
John Jones said:
Thanks. That article also introduces another term for flash drives: UFD -- a hyper-acronym for USB Flash Drive
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"Flash drive" is only two syllables, rather than "UFD" which is three. I'll stick with "flash drive" unless we go all Norwegian on "UFD" and pronounce it "Uff da!"
 
The Wikipedia article is USB flash drive.

The name is a bit unwieldy, but it's reasonably accurate:
USB - the device plugs in to a Universal Serial Bus port
Flash - the device uses flash storage as opposed to rotating media such as an external disc drive
Drive - in computers, "drive" has become a common term for "random access mass storage device" ("random access" means you can read any memory location without having to go though the prior locations first. Tape is serial access: to read block 1337 you have to read or skip past the first 1336 blocks.)
 
Blue Mountain said:
The Wikipedia article is USB flash drive.
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I can't believe nobody thought of checking Wikipedia.

:rolleyes:

The name is a bit unwieldy, but it's reasonably accurate:
USB - the device plugs in to a Universal Serial Bus port
Flash - the device uses flash storage as opposed to rotating media such as an external disc drive
Drive - in computers, "drive" has become a common term for "random access mass storage device" ("random access" means you can read any memory location without having to go though the prior locations first. Tape is serial access: to read block 1337 you have to read or skip past the first 1336 blocks.)
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Sun and IBM are going to be devastated to learn this. They're gonna have to quit calling their archival storage systems "tape drives". Maybe they could call 'em "tape thingies". Although that sounds a bit tacky for a $30,000 gadget. :)

Oh, yeah. Just in case.

Tape driveWP
 
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