By now you have heard your peers raving about flash storage. But perhaps you have not made the switch from your enterprise HDD storage solution yet, because of nagging questions you may have, about the cost of flash storage or its technical capabilities.

Across a wide range of consumer devices, from cameras to smartphones to laptops, flash storage has become the de facto standard for digital data storage.

The Flash Memory Summit recently wrapped up its conferences in Santa Clara, California, and only one type of Flash technology stole the show: NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeF). From the many presentations and company announcements, it was obvious NVMeF was the topic that most interested the attendees.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has voted not to install the non-free extras package by default during a standard Ubuntu Install. This an option that, if selected, installs proprietary software including hardware drivers, media codecs and the Flash player. It has been opt-in rather than opt out since its first appearance.

If you've experienced a lot of crashes when trying to access pages with Flash content recently, and you've been wondering why, take solace in that fact that it's not specifically a Linux problem. Windows users have had the same problem, and it's caused by the latest version of the Flash plugin. Fortunately, it's easy enough to work around.

We covered FlashVideoReplacer, a video add-on for Firefox, last year, but the new 2.x series offers several improvements. We look at what the new version offers and ask the developer a few questions.

FlashVideoReplacer is a Firefox add-on that strips out the Flash video on sites such as YouTube, automatically replacing it with a standard video file that is re-embedded on the page. In a nutshell, this means that a native player is used instead of the embedded Flash player.