The readers have spoken—and I shall heed your call! Based on the flurry of responses from a Grouse column last month (in which I bemoaned the snake oil sales tactics of the overpriced cable market), there’s clearly a hunger out there for clarity when it comes to parsing the jargon-filled nonsense that’s used to market consumer electronics. Hype is always to be expected when it comes to sales, but unfortunately sometimes conventional wisdom gets swept up in the hubbub and eventually we find ourselves believing in techie urban legends. Great for sellers, not so much for consumers. So taking my own advice, I’m following the Gadgetry Golden Rule and passing on a five choice bits of somewhat counter-intuitive wisdom I’ve had need for and which may inform your next purchase. Pay it forward—hit the comments section with your own, and spread the word.

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Like a traditional hard drive, a flash-based drive stores information in the computer-readable language of 0s and 1s. But instead of writing data by flipping magnetic poles on a spinning disk, flash memory just shuttles electrons around on a stamp-size microchip.

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