Word: flash
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...clunky old CD players, joined the White Earbud Brigade to fit in. Now that so many kids have iPod nanos, the self-styled outsiders who may have previously chosen Apple for niche appeal are looking for an alternative MP3 player. SanDisk made news recently by introducing the highest-capacity flash player - the Sansa e280, with 8GB of internal storage. It's small enough, powerful enough and different enough to be the un-iPod of choice...
...Many competitors sell products that are similar in size to the iPod nano, with features the nano doesn't yet have including video playback, voice recording and an FM tuner. Nevertheless, the cost has been the same, or just slightly discounted. SanDisk is one of the largest manufacturers of flash memory - the solid-state storage chips found in MP3 players, digital cameras, cell phones and USB drives - so it can compete seriously on price, where Creative or iRiver just can't. The $250 that would buy you a 4GB iPod will get you an 8GB Sansa...
...shame that such a high-capacity flash player can't also be used as a storage drive - if I could dump out the contents of my camera into it, I'd be really impressed. Still, the Sansa has plenty of other talents, such as the voice recorder and FM radio, that the nano doesn't have. I think it would suit many as a dark-horse alternative to iPods. But if you want it just for the 8GB, bear in mind that it probably won't be long before there's an 8GB nano with video capabilities. You know...
...first of those hints comes from the universe-wide flash of light that followed nearly half a million years after the Big Bang. Before that flash occurred, according to the widely accepted "standard model" of cosmology, our entire cosmos had swelled from a space smaller than an atom to something 100 billion miles across. It was then a seething maelstrom of matter so hot that subatomic particles trying to form into atoms would have been blasted apart instantly and so dense that light couldn't have traveled more than a short distance before being absorbed. If you could somehow live...
That being the case, a light beam traveling through expanding space is stretched as well, its wavelength getting longer as it goes. Long-wavelength light is red; stretch it out longer and it becomes infrared light and then microwaves and, finally, long-wavelength radio waves. The flash that came from the Big Bang started out as visible light; by now, 13.7 billion years later, it's still streaming through space, but it has been stretched so much that astronomers have to use microwave antennas to detect it. The earliest galaxies came after the Big Bang, so their light...