The End of a Floppy Era 786
An anonymous reader writes This article is an editorial on the end of the floppy and the rise of more portable, more efficient data storage." Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!
Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
pshaw! (Score:4, Funny)
Pottery? LUXURY! (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory... (Score:2, Funny)
long live my USB memory stick (Score:4, Funny)
Taco... (Score:2, Funny)
Poor Taco. He must feel so overwhelmed by the technology of slash. Maybe that's why there are so many dups.
Live Fast, Die Floppy (Score:1, Funny)
Are PC manufacturers still selling machines with floppies?
That strikes me as a bit bonkers, if so.
I *heart* my SuperDrive.
Martin
Whoa... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I want my 5 minutes back (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New Format (Score:3, Funny)
Actually I'll be glad when floppies are completely gone, it drives me batshit when people refer to 3.5" floppies as "hard disks". Argh!
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Funny)
The 'Don't Copy That Floppy' [fpux.com] (17MB) campaign had its first bust -- and now this!
Re:long live my USB memory stick (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Not gone... (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, I hate to be the slashdot spelling nazi, but you mispelled the word "yet".
HTH!
Seriously, I built myself a new PC last year and although I put a floppy drive in, I've not ever needed it. But it's really nice to know that it's there for emergencies. Now the standard response at this point is: but there're perfectly good alternatives - USB drives, DVD-ROMs, etc. All true, but it's a lot quicker to make a bootable floppy in an emergency.
Re:Keep the floppy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:pshaw! (Score:2, Funny)
you think you've got it bad? in my day, we had to sing songs and create culture to keep our data alive, and if anyone went out of key, its abort, retry, fail time again
Re:New Format (Score:3, Funny)
It sort of makes sense, but it gave me a huge amount of amusement when I was there.
Not as funny as the American who used to phone up our office (in England) and announce his name by saying "Hello, I'm Randy", until it was gently explained to him why it was sending the secretary into a fit of giggles every time he called.
I remember... (Score:5, Funny)
I stole it.
Re:Pottery? LUXURY! (Score:3, Funny)
Unless this was some sort of ice age factory farm, where they fed even herbivores with the remains of other animals...?
You know, this is not common knowledge, but that's how the Mad Mastadon epidemic started way back when.
They had to cull the herd, but didn't realize how extensive the disease had spread. Turns out every Mastadon they had had contracted Mad Mastadon disease. Hence they were all killed. This is why Mastadons are extinct.
Too bad.. Mastadon burgers were amazing.
Re:hardly surprising, but... (Score:2, Funny)
We soon started getting calls about the built in modem not working.
Turned out the modem was set to find a US dial tone and couldn't on a UK phone line.
We contacted Apple head office UK to get a resolution.
Their resolution, tell customers to download a fix from the internet...
via the non-functioning modem.
"No problem we will send the fix via snailmail on floppy disk"
Small problem iMacs do not come with floppy disks...
The floppy is already dead (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No logical replacement, though (Score:1, Funny)
The arguments and stats are all totally bogus.
It should be modded "crap"
What a more appropriate time to say... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not gone... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Not gone... (Score:3, Funny)
In a crisis situation, a moment's distraction is frequently all that's needed for someone to jump a dangerous person from behind (assuming someone else on the plane is coherent enough to do that) or trip the attacker as he/she stomps his/her way through the cabin to point a gun at the person who threw the floppy disk.
Also, I recently built a floppy boot disk with FreeDOS, a SCSI driver, and a firmware flasher to update the firmware on a SCSI tape drive so that it would recognize newer models of cleaning tape so that the drive would actually let me use it.... Saved my backside.
Bottom line: sure, I'm paranoid, but in a pinch, a 3.5" floppy disk can be a real lifesaver... in more ways than one. :-D
Floppys would dead except for Ignorant users (Score:2, Funny)
(note this isn't flamebait as a general statement toward PC users. Its just that people like this could never install Linux and Mac users have had no floppies for so long theve forgotten they existed)
You know who I'm talking about the ones that call copying to a floppy or installing a program "downloading". The ones that don't seem to know you can save word files to the hard drive and use a new disk for every memo. The ones who come into a store and ask for a 5MB floppy because there 5MB file wont fit on their floppy or who while staring at the IBM compatible disc's ask if you have any HP discs for there computer. The one that don't know you can attach files other than pictures to an Email.
Note I've personally met all these people
As long as these people are around and uneducated we will still have the lingering technologies such as floppies, serial ports, PS2 ports, joystick ports and parallel ports
From the last "end of the floppy" article. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not gone... (Score:3, Funny)
Well you never know when 10 bucks will come in handy either.
Re:New Format (Score:3, Funny)
I walked into the dining room of one of (imho) the nicer old pubs just behind Princes street (on Rose Street, I think?) and asked the matronly hostess to be put on the waiting list for a table. Without thinking, I said "Randy" when asked for my name. I recall looking down at the list for a few moments and noting that her pen was poised over the page but not moving, and then looking up into this poor woman's face to see that all color had left her features. It dawned on me, in that frightening moment of clarity, that I "wasn't in Kansas anymore". I corrected myself and gave my proper name, but she eyed me very harshly from across the room for the entire time I was there.
The problem with going by a name that you don't use much is that when addressed by it, there's this funny little moment where you look around for this other fellow until it dawns on you that, yes, you are the person they're talking to.