In theory, media companies that are already using the Flash format for their millions of video files will welcome the ability to put them directly onto users' hard drives.

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However, this will of course work only if they use the same flash card format that your camera supports.

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Its e-commerce site, vipshop.com, operates on a flash-sale format, which limits the products available for purchase, a tactic aimed at driving higher sales from consumers who don't want to miss out on deals.

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Indeed, it defies reason that consumer electronics companies invest millions in creating unifying industrial designs, proprietary protocols, and the flash memory card format du jour, while practically ignoring the lessons pioneered by Apple and perfected by Microsoft.

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The Lytro is an exciting and novel leap in digital photography, but because it still has some missing features, like flash and a file format that works in other software, buyers should consider it a second camera, at least for now.

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Dane-Elec has also cleverly includes both the Mac and PC reader software for its file format on the flash drive.

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Magnetic tape in professional recording has taken a nose dive while flash memory is the rising video storage format according the survey results.

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These PVRs differ from most, however, as they can record content from television or any other attached source (i.e. a camcorder), and transfer the video in MPEG4 format directly to an attached USB flash drive.

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Greystripe makes this possible by converting Flash ads (which the devices do not currently support) into the competing HTML5 format.

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