Dell Dropping The Floppy 1515
adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
Well that takes me back (Score:5, Funny)
Back before there was dirt, and a computer weighed 6,000 tons!
And we programmed with ones and with zeros - and sometimes we ran out of ones!
'bout time. (Score:5, Funny)
-1; Redundant (Score:5, Funny)
The "back in the day" jokes are older than an 8088.
Well Pick it up stupid! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:5, Funny)
dropping? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, you mean... I see.
"At some point, you've got to draw the line." (Score:3, Funny)
How can they be proud? (Score:2, Funny)
I see why this has been posted under the "nuts" topic...
6 months from now.. (Score:2, Funny)
As a joke... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
Floppy = No profits (Score:2, Funny)
"They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
1. Stop selling floppy drives
2. Start selling pen drives
3. PROFIT!!
Re:-1; Redundant (Score:3, Funny)
Back in the day, "back in the day" jokes were older than the Model T.
Re:oh yeah... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Well that takes me back (Score:3, Funny)
we programmed with ones and with zeros
You had zeroes? We had to use the letter "O".
(Yeah, I stole this from Dilbert)
Re:I really need them a lot! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:5, Funny)
Two hundredths of a percent of the population is 60,000 people in the USA alone. I think you're overestimating by a few orders of magnitude. If you can find me six people in the USA who are using dumb terminals on their home PC's, I'll give you a cookie.
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
My old man would wake me up at 2:00 in the morning and make me format floppy disks untill 5:00 the following morning and I liked it! I loved it! I used to store the entire ecyclopedia britannica on only 245,037,072 disks and it suited me just fine!
Tell that to them kids today and they won't believe ya.
The most useful reason to keep a floppy drive (Score:3, Funny)
"Sure"
dd if=/redhat/linux/8.0/en/os/i386/images/bootnet.im
"Here, lemme give you a hand with that."
HP to discontinue printers (Score:5, Funny)
There seems to be some industry rule, that anything that works must be improved til it doesn't work any more!
Wot??!! (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like my Mac.
Ditching the Dell Dude.... (Score:2, Funny)
The marketing synergies with Viagra are awe inspiring...
Re:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:5, Funny)
Is that 900MB Canadian or 900MB U.S.? If it's Canadian then that comes out to about 700MB U.S. right? I wasn't aware they sold 900MB Canadian discs.. must be a perk of paying that music industry tax on recordable media.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3, Funny)
What will become of the BSA? (Score:5, Funny)
If this goes down, the Business Software Alliance will have to change their catch-phrase!
I have to admit, "Don't Copy That USB Keychain Flash Media Device" doesn't have the same ring as "Don't Copy That Floppy"...
Floppies and Vinyl records - it's a conspiracy !!! (Score:2, Funny)
It's like vinyl records. Far superior in sound quality than CD provided a) you have a good quality vinyl, and b) you have an amazing player/stylus. But as they were fazing out records for mainstream albums, they produced crappy quality records. I mean I had an album purchased in 1980 which has not crackles and hisses, whereas an album produced in the early nineties was all static.
I can see the ads now... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:2, Funny)
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, so maybe that's a smart idea for the office- (Score:2, Funny)
Outside of my office, right now, some 80 students are banging away at the public access machines. They're doing research, writing papers, (probably surfing porn), and doing other tasks that they need to preserve the results of.
These machines are not assigned to them - it's pick-as-you-please. The students do not have network accounts, so there's no server for them to upload to.
They *need* floppies.
"Why not just make them purchase CD-RWs? They're just as cheap!" -- do all students have CD-RW's at home? Do they all know how to use burning software? Do I *really* want to have to train them in it? All 3000+ of them on campus? Do I have to explain the virtues of ISO9600 over Joliet over UDF over... You have to KNOW that shit to burn a CD that will work the way to expect it to.
Ditto with USB pen drives, zip drives, holo-cubes and direct brain-plugs.
Floppies are a standard everyone can agree on. Take the floppies away and they're left with a hodge-podge menagerie of devices in which the support staff must support *all* of them, or tell the student "too bad you didn't buy the $200 porto-wafer storage solution that we recommend" when they panic because they can't bring up the final project they finished 5 minutes ago and are about to lose.
Everyone knows floppies. Floppies are nice. Floppies are available everywhere. Floppies don't need updated drivers, and you don't have to plug a floppy in and hope that USB doesn't crash. Unless you buy a USB floppy drive, in which case, you get what you deserve.
When it's just your office machine and your home machine, it's easy to keep the two connected. When it's your home machine (if you have one) and whatever machine is free at the moment, you need to keep it simple.
Keep the floppy.
GMFTatsujin
Re:About Time. (Score:2, Funny)
Wintel? (Score:5, Funny)
There is no such thing as "building a wintel pc", you build a PC, if you make the mistake of installing windows on it, well then you have a wintel pc, but it term does not refer to commodity hardware. Its just PC, thank you. We do not need to start changing names of our hardware because of the OS installed. Then I would have to call my machine a LinAMD machine, and then next thing you know RMS would send me an e-mail and tell me to call my pc GNU/LinAMD.
Re:About Time. (Score:2, Funny)
I have two words for you (Score:3, Funny)
Ditching the floppy is a dumb idea.
Re:About Time. (Score:2, Funny)
hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Where am I going to put my computer lint then?
My floppy drive is full of it, I believe it brings luck. Also acts as a good firestarter for when the feds break in.
Re:About Time. (Score:1, Funny)
Then I suppose I can remove the memory chips from
my computer now.
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
We had to write on crushed glass, with our eyeballs! And we liked it!
Pfft, fingers...
The Difference (Score:2, Funny)
Dell: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Dells in 6 months, plus shipping time, by phone.
Re:About Time. (Score:2, Funny)
"Oh!" says the Dell guy, "You can use a USB memory pen for only 12x the cost of a floppy [b]drive[b]."
Buttheads!
Re:About Time. (Score:2, Funny)
We had to chop down trees using the bones sticking out of our chopped off hands and lay out logs in the shapes of letters, randomly over and over again until we had reproduced the complete works of Shakespeare with improvements to no fewer than seven soliloquies. And we had to do this in no more than six picoseconds or we wouldn't get our heads sewn back on in time for dinner which consisted of wet kleenex that had rotted away three weeks before.
Welcome to Dell Hell (Score:2, Funny)
I will not kowtow to Dell Hell.
Floppy disks I do adore,
Though I do not use them as much as before.
Twelve hundred K a floppy takes,
Plus a little extra space.
I buy 'em in boxes of thirty or so,
for the latest kernel or my new batch of code.
Don't get me wrong, CD's are good;
I've a CD-RW under the hood,
Plus a Zip and floppy, and two massive hard drives;
Smart shoppers build their own box and shuck all your jive!
Re:dropping? (Score:2, Funny)