Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Apple and Flash memory

Several blog postings have suggested that the flash memory based iPod Nano is the tip of the iceberg and that computers, most likely laptops, will soon ditch their hard disks for flash memory. I must confess that I'm not ready to go there just yet. Setting aside the cost, two objections come to mind:

1) In this era of rich (and storage intensive) media, how many customers will settle for only 32 or 40 GB of storage space on a full-service computer?

2) The limited number of writes possible on a flash memory module don't mesh well with the large swap files and /tmp directories that are an inescapable part of today's OS's with modern memory management.

That said, I believe advocates of the flash based laptop have merely picked the wrong iceberg. Instead of a flash based laptop, how about a flash based mobile internet appliance as the next revolutionary 'thin client'? I'm thinking of a successor to the Nokia 7700 here. Give it lots of RAM so it doesn't have to use the flash memory for every last swap out, customize the browser code to minimize access of the flash storage, and count on web 2.0 apps like GMail, Backpack and Writely to minimize the need for onboard storage. Think of a tablet PC the thickness of a clipboard designed only to browse the web. I'd buy one in a second. Would you?

Who decides what's "Research Safe"

Will Richardson wrote yesterday about blogs and credibility. :

Here's the problem. If we are going to help teachers see blogs as "research safe," we're going to have to give them some tools by which to assess those blogs.

This is reasonable question, but one that has behind it a significant presupposition, that is, that some educational authority must declare blogs in general, or a blog in particular, to have official imprimatur. I realize that some of this may be inevitable in a K-12 environment, but when you transfer the idea to post-secondary ed, it's downright disconcerting.

Eventually, students will be sent into the wide world, with only their own brains to tell them what is "research safe". Therefore, as soon as is practical, we need to make students do the assessing rather than teachers. Practice makes perfect, after all.

A thornier issue may be convincing faculty, particularly those who are "digital immigrants" (Paul Chenoweth's term) that a resouce which does not have a paper form and the peer review of which was neither blind nor formal (blogs, after all, have peer review, at least when the comments are on) can have academic value.

Sign # 247,862 of the end of civilization

Burning Man has spawned its own alternative art festival. (from Wired)

Wooden Tablets Forks

In an effort to let readers avoid RSS enclosures if they don't want them, I am moving the podcast portion of Wooden Tablets to its own site at woodentablets-podcast.blogspot.com. It will be a few days before content is posted there.