I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.
I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.
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At least 70644 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.
Hitachi really made a splash with their "Hard Drive is the New Bling" promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word "bling" forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.
The pitch wasn't really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, "We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives." I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi -- who don't seem to make flash memory devices.
A 2GB CF card is now cheaper than a 2GB microdrive in CF form and the gap is narrowing at the 4GB level as well. The iPod mini and its hard drive storage are out; the iPod nano and its flash memory storage are in. Samsung has announced a 32GB flash memory chip that will enter production next year, and is aiming to start replacing notebook hard drives with flash memory as well. Meanwhile, Hitachi's making jewelry.
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by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media