Inside CNET Labs Podcast

Going to a retail store for consumer electronics purchases can be both exciting and frustrating. After working at Best Buy for two years, I have a few opinions to share that you might want to consider before your next shopping trip.

1. We have no formal training in the field of consumer electronics.
Upon transferring to the computer department from home theater, I expressed concern to the manager: "Will there be time for someone to train me on laptops/desktops? What do these specifications mean?" His reply was simple: "Just do your best. A good salesperson can just read the labels and compare specs." Ouch.

Salespeople are not necessarily experts in the products sold in their departments, even if they are expert salespeople. Though many express a strong interest in the products they sell, your time spent at a retail store fishing for information about a future TV purchase could be better spent online researching the products yourself (I heard CNET has pretty great reviews).

"You need those HDMI cables, you know you do."

(Credit: Amazon)

2. We make little off the big-ticket items, so we smother you with accessories.
Remember the story "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"? Well, if you tell a salesman you're going to buy a TV, he's going to want to sell you a DVD player to go with it. Once he sells you the DVD player, he's going to want to get you to buy an HDMI cable, too.

Managers at Best Buy (and possibly all retailers) tell employees that the store profits surprisingly little from video game consoles and computers. Cables, accessories, mice, and other components, however, have a huge profit margin-- stores can make about $120 from a $150 Monster HDMI cable. Angry yet? The point is, we're going to work really hard to convince you to purchase that big item, but once you've said "OK" you've opened Pandora's Box.

Here's my advice: Grab the big item, and run. Purchase all accessories online, including memory cards, cables, traveling cases, and so on. Amazon, Monoprice, and Newegg are all reputable discount Web sites. You'll find what you need at a much lower price.

Map the Fallen loaded in Google Earth

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

Each Memorial Day we honor the men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom we enjoy. Traditionally, this is the day many people visit cemeteries and memorials, especially the Arlington National Cemetery. But not all of us can do that. This year there's an alternative.

Sean Askay, a Google engineer, released on Sunday a Google Earth layer, called Map the Fallen, that contains detailed information of more than 5,700 service members who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This is an interactive tool that lets you see photos, learn about how each service member died, visit memorial Web sites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.

Askay has no military affiliation or background and developed the project on his personal time. He said on his Map the Fallen blog that he came up with the idea when he was still a student and ran across icasualties.org, a public database of soldiers who have died since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to Askay's blog, the Map the Fallen layer contains information collected from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, The Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com.

The layer requires Google Earth 5.0 or later. Once the software is installed, you just need to download the Map the Fallen layer layer and choose to open it. After a few seconds, the layer will be loaded and you can learn much about honorable men and women who you might otherwise not know about at all.

Personally, seeing the sheer number of human figures closely shown on the surface of the Earth is enough to leave me feeling somber and humbled.

What Askay did shows the true meaning of Memorial Day, and for a lot of us it offers an easy and convenient way to frequently remember and honor those we are often too distracted to do that for.

While computers continue to get smaller, they're constantly being pushed to do more. Whether they're doubling as a phone, a camera, or an MP3 player, there seems to be no end to the tasks we expect them to carry out. And as always, we say we want them to "do all that stuff and be smaller."

(Credit: IBM)

A limitation of the miniaturization process is that the more computers are asked to do, the more memory they require. One of the computer's basic elements, the transistor, could soon reach its miniaturization limit. The smaller we make transistors, the more susceptible they are to quantum phenomena like electrons tunneling through the barriers between wires. Which, while ticklish for the barrier, can just be really annoying.

This has apparently annoyed researchers at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, as well, albeit for different reasons. This transistor dilemma has led them to look into the viability of carbon nanotubes to help create fast, cheap, and compact memory that uses little power.

This USB drive is made of solid gold, but its golden age is over.

(Credit: Super Talent Technology)

With all the buzz about solid-state drives that Intel, Super Talent Technology, and other companies have been making, I am a little surprised to learn that the NAND flash-memory market--once one of the fastest-growing segments of the global semiconductor industry--is actually facing a historic downturn.

According to a forecast released on Friday by iSuppi, a technology research and advisory-services provider, the NAND-type flash-memory market has been stricken by weakening consumer spending, causing revenue to decline in 2008. Revenue is expected to decline in 2009, also.

In 2007, total worldwide revenue of the market was $13.9 billion; in 2008, this number is estimated to be about $12 billion--down by 14 percent. The forecast predicts that in 2009 the revenue will decline by another 15 percent.

The NAND market is being impacted by several factors. The biggest challenge is the sale of products that use NAND flash memory, inducing personal media players, flash-memory storage cards and USB flash drives. These products account for almost 80 percent of total NAND chip demand and are sold mostly in retail stores, where prices are continuously slashed because of the downturn in the global economy.

The second is the change in consumers' demand. As the storage capacity of flash-memory devices continues to increase, consumers don't need to upgrade their products as often and are not as sensitive to price declines as they used to be.

While this sounds depressing, it's actually good news for consumers, all in all, especially with the holidays coming up. Still, if you are looking to wait for the price of the solid-gold USB drive to go down, you might have to wait for a very long time.

If recent blog posts about the increase in capacity of CompactFlash cards and small-size hard drives make you wonder what's in store for your mobile phones, then I have some good news.

(Credit: ScanDisk)

On Monday, SanDisk announced its new microSD high-capacity (microSDHC) card that offers up to 16GB in storage space. While 16GB doesn't sound like a huge deal compared with other media that offer hundreds of gigabytes, this is actually very significant for two reasons. First, microSD cards are by far the smallest in size among consumer storage devices--about the size of your little finger's nail. Second, it's also the most popular media for smartphones and PDAs, and it is becoming more popular thanks to its tiny size.

The introduction of the new size lets cell phone and PDA owners really use their devices for storage-intensive purposes, including music and video playback, high-definition digital camera functions, gaming, and GPS applications. The new card also works with other devices that have a microSDHC reader, such as digital cameras, GPS receivers, or MP3 players.

Together with the new microSDHC, SanDisk also introduced its new 16GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) mobile memory, which is the micro version of Sony's Memory Stick card.

SanDisk's new 16GB microSDHC and M2 cards will be available in October and cost about $100 and $130, respectively. They will also be available in 4GB and 8GB versions. The new microSDHC might not be compatible with all devices that support the legacy microSD cards (that caps at 2GB). Make sure to check your devices' compatibility or update them to newer and supporting firmware before purchasing.