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."
Blasphemy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Next thing you know, they're going to take away our serial ports and PS/2 ports. Bastards.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, these features are old technology. But they're also mature technology - they work fine, now leave them alone!
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3)
Hey, we'll almost all be there at some point.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Insightful)
They've been around for many a year, and imho, many people would be reluctant to see them go - three months ago I wired my mum's computer onto Tim-Net (my home network and information control system) and she still believes in sneakernet as opposed to drag and drop through shared directories.
Yes, the floppy drive is obsolete, however - it's not ready to give up the ghost yet simply because there is no replacement for it yet. (Boot disk when the system fails, transferring files to and from work/college).
Just my thoughts,
Tim
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about that, I have found that floppy disks these days tend to be a lot less reliable than they used to be, prolly cause they have got so cheap. Optical media is a better because once its burned you don't have to worry so much about the quality of the disk and the data degrading.
There is nothing you can do with a floppy disk that you can't theoretically do with a cd, it's just a case of getting mobo manafacturers to to add the support.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
WinTEL PCs have always puzzled me in this respect. Being a long time Mac user (7.5.x->10.2), I've never understood why someone NEEDS a floppy. I remember many years ago (about the 7.6 days) a friend called me up late at night on a weekend and asked me "how do you make a boot floppy for MacOS?". I had no idea what he was talking about. I told him just insert the boot CD that came with the machine and hold down the "C" key. You can do a reinstall then update extensions either 1. By hand (drag from old folder) or 2. by reinstalling all apps. MacOS has come a long way since those days, but in terms of doing restore operations, Macs in the old System 7.X days were still ahead of what most PCs can do now (I'm not talking about businesses that have drive cloning and the like, I'm talking about the PCs home users purchase).
Then I built a WinTEL PC. On the surface, it was quite a simple thing to do. Put the stuff in the case, the connectors obviously fit in only one place, power up, install Windows. Little did I know I had to update the BIOS to make the second, non-boot, hard drive work (too large at the time) and that was done with, a floppy. I was stunned. On MacOS, Firmware upgrades can be done straight from the OS.
Where I work now, we have a few Linux machines as workstations (and a Beowolf cluster). Our programmer, who assembles and maintains them, uses floppies all the time to boot them when they die. In his world, floppies are a necissary item for PC maintainance. I don't understand, since as far as I knew, PCs have gone a long way since the days I made my 300Mhz machine.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right though...PC's don't need floppies nowadays.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
This really bugs me. The assumption in most cases is that as a PC owner you have access to Win9x or lower. Seeing as all I've has possession of is Win NT4/2K or Linux since about 1996, this has been a problem for me. Win2K gained a recovery console, but I have no idea if the BIOS can be flashed from it - many of them try to detect the environment and refuse to run from within Windows.
Where I work now, we have a few Linux machines as workstations (and a Beowolf cluster). Our programmer, who assembles and maintains them, uses floppies all the time to boot them when they die. In his world, floppies are a necissary item for PC maintainance. I don't understand, since as far as I knew, PCs have gone a long way since the days I made my 300Mhz machine.
I guess boot floppies are easy to make and are guaranteed to contain the necessary kernel modules to access the filesystem. Personally, I've never had a problem with the CD that I installed from when I've lost the ability to boot in to Linux (last time was after a kernel upgrade which didn't load the ReiserFS module on boot).
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because he's stubborn.
http://lbt.linuxcare.com/
a linux rescue CD like that one is far more useful than any boot floppy. It even fits on one of those creditcard CDRs.. making it smaller than a boot floppy.
Back in the day? (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean both years since then? Wow, dude, that was a long time. :)
No, not trolling, just pointing how with every passing year, "the good old days" of computing get closer and closer to the present. Think about it, this comment makes sense. :)
Re:BIOS update from OS scares me (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use Windows.
This does not bode well for the altOS community.
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:Mac's suck and so do you (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but you're insulting someone over a topic you clearly have no experience with. Here's how you update Open Firmware under the Mac OS:
You run a little program (usually downloaded from Apple) that loads the new firmware into a small buffer of NVRAM and then reboots the machine. As soon as the machine powers up, you hold down the "programmer" button until you hear a long beep which indicates that it's done flashing the firmware. In that time period, Open Firmware reads the little buffer in NVRAM and replaces appropriate parts of itself. You let go of the button, and the computer reboots itself as normal with the new firmware in place. That's it. It's just that simple.
(What's this "connected to the Internet" nonsense you're going on about anyway?)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Servers, however, are different. Console ports are pretty important. I suppose they could use USB, but it hasn't become as reliable as serial/console yet. And the idea of USB on a server just makes me nervous (:
But again, I see no problem with this at the desktop level. Really all a desktop needs is USB, some kind of video (DVI?), and a network jack. Everything else, even optical, is worthless as far as I'm concerned. The network is where everything belongs.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI has been shipping USB console ports on their servers for a long time now, ever since the Origin 3000 and Origin 300 came out. Works fine. The machines also have a DB-9 RS-232 port for legacy applications, but the primary console port is the USB port. I've had no problems with them whatsoever.
Pretty much the only disadvantage I can think of, and this is really just a matter of early adoption, is that it's not as easy to build USB cables, or USB-to-RJ-45 adapters, as it is to build DB-9 cables and adapters. So wiring up the data center is slightly more trouble, but it's no big deal. And not having to carry around a USB-to-DB-9 adapter for your laptop is a nice plus as well.
Really all a desktop needs is USB, some kind of video (DVI?), and a network jack.
Don't forget FireWire. USB is too slow for bulk data operations like external hard drives, CD/DVD writers, and video gear, and USB 2.0 is too flaky. I don't think a personal computer, desktop or laptop, really needs any ports other than USB (low-speed data), FireWire (high-speed data), gigabit Ethernet (or whatever the current state of the art is), and a power plug. And once we get wireless electricity sorted out, we can drop the power plug.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Interesting)
Just to be perfectly clear-- I should have been more specific about this in my first post-- the USB console ports on SGI servers aren't just regular serial ports. Every SGI server comes with an embedded computer called the system controller; it controls things like the fans and the power supplies, but it's completely unrelated to the CPU's and whatnot. The USB (and legacy RS-232) console port talks directly to the system controller. So you can, for example, send commands directly to the power supplies via the console connection, to power up or down any part of the system. I'm not sure if Dell's servers have that same level of integration or not. I just wanted to clarify.
Firewire is irrelevant when you have a large network connection.
Oh, god, no. FireWire is isochronous, meaning you can use it for guaranteed-rate real-time operations, like video playback. You can't do that reliably with something like TCP/IP. Not everybody needs that capability, but I think it'll become more and more common as desktop video evolves in the same way that desktop publishing did back in the 80's.
Perhaps we'll have a 'computer' with power in and video out and nothing else, as far as external connectors go.
Well, you can kind of do that now, with Bluetooth and AirPort. The computer chassis itself is connected only to the wall socket and the monitor; everything else is wireless. And while that's neat and all, I'm a little skeptical of the much-lauded wireless revolution. For example, my computer is wired up like this: the mouse is plugged into the keyboard via USB. The keyboard is plugged into the monitor via USB. The monitor is plugged into the computer via ADC. The computer is plugged into the wall for power. That's is; there are no more cables. The monitor gets digital video, power, and USB from the computer over the ADC cable, and feeds the keyboard and mouse and whatever else I decide to plug into it via USB. This arrangement accomplishes the same ends as wireless desktop peripherals, but with less cost and complexity, and greater reliability.
Bluetooth is great for some things. Wireless cell-phone headsets are just about the coolest things going right now. But for keyboards and mice... I'm just not sure it's that big a deal.
I really need them a lot! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do I suddenly smell the appearance of a lucrative market for used floppy drives and manuals on DIY hardware mods?
Nobody would dream of using hardware from 15 years ago, eh? Tell that to my fiance, who has a closet full of 286 mobos and a PDP-8 in the basement!
Re:I really need them a lot! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Informative)
Imac users use them and its pc compatible and yes bootable if you have an updated bios from the last 2 years.
I have a broken floppy drive that i have not bothered to replace for years. I have a cd-rw and a dvd-rw as well as a second hard drive for my storage needs.
The only downside is I can not boot Linux on my Windows2k box with NTFS without a floppy drive. I would like to be able to "dd" my bzImage and store it on my ntfs partition but the kernel does not support ntfs and I need it since I do apache development.
Microsoft loves ntfs because it prevents people like myself from using Linux or FreeBSD without a second system. I have my old pentium -III that I plan to vnc into if I ever have the time to install BSD on it. WIth kde being more vnc friendly I might just use it.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not so much that you need a floppy drive, as you need something STANDARD with relatively inexpensive media.
One more interesting quote:
It's not so much an emotional attachment as a practical one. A floppy drive is flexible and integrated. The floppy disk can be used over and over -- I think more so than a CD (somebody correct me if I'm wrong). The floppy disk was the perfect size for carrying a few documents from one computer to another, whereas a CD seems to be sized more for archiving. Most importantly, a floppy disk would pretty much work on any PC. The same cannot be said for CD-RW. If you want to replace the floppy, you need a STANDARD device that you can boot off of, has cheap, reasonably reliable "perfect size" media, and can be found on most modern computers.The USB Flash devices sound like a great idea, and if they are small enough could eliminate the need to have one on every computer, provided you can carry the "drive" in your pocket. If they can get 16MB cards down to about $5, I see it as the perfect replacement. Furthermore, if they build the device so it can handle much larger flash cards (archival size), they'll really take the industry by storm.
The most useful reason to keep a floppy drive (Score:3, Funny)
"Sure"
dd if=/redhat/linux/8.0/en/os/i386/images/bootnet.im
"Here, lemme give you a hand with that."
Wot??!! (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like my Mac.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you go to your local public library, you won't be able to bring a copy of a web page home with you... you won't have a floppy drive, and they won't have a cd burner.
I will grant that it's a stretch to think you have a computer but not an internet connection, but not everything you get at a public terminal is available online. Plenty of libraries subscribe to online journals that can only be accessed from within the library itself.
Don't have a cd or usb disk, but need to transfer something, and you say I should use ftp? Sorry, I'm a generally clueless user who barely knows how to check my email and save things in M$ word... file transfer via a network connection is WAY over my head.
And if course there is the boot disk issue, but do the advantages of that really need discussing?
If dell is dropping floppies and NOT including a cd burner for 20$, then dude, who the heck wants a dell?
My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:3, Insightful)
Parallel Port: I'd like to keep using my older printers and my old parallel Zip Drive. It's slow, but handy sometimes.
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Seriously, there's no reason to drop these devices. Why not include them with the newer stuff.
Besides, USB is not to be trusted.
Re:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:5, Informative)
PS/2 <-> USB converter.
Get a print server for your old printers (two-ports can be had for under $100, and networking them is a snap), and buy a CD-RW drive. ZIP drives are slow, kludgy, low-capacity, and have a tendency to click your media (and drive) to death at a seemingly random time (usually disk 13 of 26 is the victim). Moreover, probably 95% or more of home and office computers have CD-ROM drives of some form or another, which makes CD-R/RW discs far more portable than the very, very slim market share of ZIP drives. CD-RW drives can be had brand-new for about $75CDN and can burn 900MB worth of data to a disc in approximately 1 minute 30 seconds. 900MB discs can be had for about $0.50CDN, 800MB CD-RW discs can be had for about $3CDN or less. How much does a 100 or 250MB ZIP disk cost, again?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.
I'll assume you've got some figures to support this otherwise baseless claim?
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:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people need to configure a piece of network gear?
How many people have needed to get to the serial consone on their unix box?
How many people have rack mount gear that the only console is serial?
Serial won't die any time soon.
(if dell tries to take away serial ports, the admins who run dell.com will probably hold the site hostage until they change their mind.
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:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My Reasons for Wanting Those Ports (Score:3, Interesting)
You should probably consider preparing for the future. If one of your ZIP drives starts failing (in any of the ways in which they fail, including "My drive won't read this disk, but that one will", which is what caused a friend of mine to switch to CD-R at a time when the least expensive drive was ~$350), you're screwed. Besides, CD-R drives have so much more utility than ZIP drives. When I want to transport, ie, Windows 2000 SP3 to my parents' house, along with updated 30MB printer drivers, a Word Perfect Office service pack (@~80MB), along with about 200MB worth of additional drivers and updates, I hauled out a single 650MB CD-RW disk and burned the files in 5 minutes. I didn't have to pack an external ZIP disk, a floppy with drivers, and two-three ZIP disks to do it, either. Same goes for any of my customers' locations; they all have CD-ROM drives, but barely 1% of them have ZIP drives.
For the cost of a single ZIP drive, you could purchase two CD burners and a box of 5 CD-RWs
It's not that their send-to-device speed is slow, it's that the entire bus is slow. They require special host bridges to keep them from bogging the entire system down. That costs lots of resources to implement, and at this point in time with the present market saturation of USB devices and converters, there's no need to fumble with kludges anymore.
Why have you never cared for it? What on Earth is wrong with it? One plug type for ten thousand peripheral types, all with a unified interface reducing code overhead, physical space and confusion. Not to mention the need for stores to have a plethora of male-female, male-male, or female-female cables of a thousand different types on hand with customer service help required to figure out what cable you need to do what, often resulting in two adapters and a cable just to connect a device to a PC. When I'm working in the field, I frequently find myself having to run back to one of my suppliers to pick up a legacy cable that I seldom use, which costs time, gas money, and wear on my vehicle. Instead, I could carry a box of five or ten cables and be guaranteed that one of them will work with the peripherals they have on site. Otherwise, I could just borrow a cable from another of their USB/FireWire devices until I could get them a new cable.
You want choice? Do you still demand that software be ported to the Commodore 64 because it's such a tried and tested hardware platform? Do you want to go back to the days of an incompetent bus where you had to take half the cards out of your system and write down a map of IRQs and I/O addresses, then tweak half of them in order to install a sound card?
Back to floppy drives; I keep them in my systems because I need to support the lowest common denominator in my line of work, so I'll keep a floppy drive and disks around until less than 5% of my client base still have them. They're slow and unreliable, their bytes/square-inch ratio is horrible, and the media is far too succeptable to outside forces (moisture, sun/heat, magnetic forces, etc.) to make them a practical storage solution. One client recently got the idea in her head to back up their accounting workstation - on 800 floppy disks. It would have taken two (2) CD-Rs and perhaps an hour. She spent two days backing everything up. The lost wages alone would have covered the cost of a CD-RW drive, a field installation of same, and a spindle of CD-R discs. Then there's the lost productivity of having an employee and the accounting machine out of service for a day. Then there's the fact that if any of those disks fried, most of the backup would be useless (100MB+ datafiles spread across ~80 floppies = bad news).
When I need to use rescue tools on a workstation or server, sure, I could boot floppy disks. The first disk boots the system, the second disk contains mouse and additional low-level drivers, the third contains a partition management software package (stripped down to its bare essentials), the fourth package contains a (stripped down) copy of Ghost; a filesystem replication and backup utility, the fifth contains a small subset of hardware diagnostic tools, the sixth contains ...
Instead, I carry a single CD-R disc labelled "rescue" with all that and more, including some 200MB of the more common hardware drivers I require in the field. It boots in less than 1/10th the time it would take a floppy to boot, and I can be instantly productive. Not in the case with floppy disks. Swap disks, wait, wait, run program, wait, wait, use program, close program, swap disks, wait, wait, etc. ad nauseum (and believe me, sitting staring at a blinking cursor for 60% of the time it takes me to complete an otherwise 15 minute operation is nauseating). I also have to keep second copies of each of my disks, which means carring around two disk boxes with me - just in case one of their floppy drives is damaged, won't read my first disk, or eats my first disk. So now with twice the space of a single 24-CD wallet, I've got less than 5% of the capacity of a single CD-R disc.
Back to USB; a unified interface for peripherals that can operate at high speeds is the way of the future, and I for one am glad to see legacy devices going out the window. There's no technical or practical reason for the industry not to take the step forward. Quite frankly, the people who want to use legacy hardware probably shouldn't be concerned with this anyways, since they're obviously more concerned with keeping their 386s up and running than with purchasing modern hardware anyways.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, daisy chaining. I do the same thing with my KVM, but thats not an option for everyone. Not having PS/2 ports is not an advantage, so I'll just ignore that one.
Disadvantages? Stupid implementations of USB means that your usb keyboard will cut the bandwidth to your devices that actually need it, like your camera and MP3 player and DSL modem. Thats something that can be fixed, but again, it's waiting for more robust USB implementations. Next, any motherboard thats going to remove PS/2 needs to have USB support in the BIOS as well as support flashing from a CD-ROM - and you'll need a boot CD-ROM, too, not just those recovery things, because your keyboard won't work in dos. Ever try to get a machine with a borked MBR back up and running on a machine without PS/2?
These are not unsurmountable, but I'm not trading in my PS/2 peripherals until the solutions are all in place. On top of that, since the only advantage is a (potential, and minor) decrease in the number of cables, I don't see this as an urgent issue. It's not like PS/2 is preventing Firewire and USB 2.0 and all that other jazz from being developed. It's not "holding us back" from better technologies - there's no group of geeks out there ranting about how they have this great new keyboard design but it needs more bandwidth than PS/2 provides.
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn, they'd better leave them on the server class boxes. I want my serial console!
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee... isn't that was the fruits in cupertino did nearly 5 years ago?
Re:Blasphemy! (Score:3, Interesting)
the programming applications for HVAC (heating, ventilation and A/C) systems are often still DOS, and when they do have windows version they're half bugged and don't support nearly all the functionalities of the DOS ones. i've bought a few laptops for contracts, and had to return them due to no serial port!
say no to usb
Woo - Hoo (Score:3, Insightful)
I say good riddance to the floppy. I've had more of them go bad on me than I care to count.
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a Mac and a PC. I have an Apple mouse (1-button) and a Logitech USB mouse (6-button if you count the wheel as three (up, down, click)).
As the Mac is my primary machine, my first instinct was the Logitech on the Mac and the Apple on the PC. Hated it. It's a pain in the butt to use Windows with only one button. So many things scream at you to be right-clicked on, not out of necessity, but out of efficiency.
Want to get to network preferences? You can go through the amazing jouney of Start -> Settings -> Control Panels -> Network -> Local Area Network 1 -> Properties -> TCP/IP -> Properties, or you can go the comparatively easy route of Network Neighborhood -> Properties -> Local Area Connection 1 ->
On my Mac I click on System Preferences -> Network and I'm there. No need for a right-click. It would barely save me anything.
This is true of most actions on PC's vs Mac's. So, I've switched. Apple mouse on the Mac, and Logitech on the PC. My PC thanks me for giving it the right-mouse button it craves, and my Mac barely notices.
Once a day or so I'll realize I only have one-button, chuckle, and then move along with my life, happy in the knowledge that one is enough for OS X. I do wish it had a wheel though; I miss that sometimes. I'm sure I'll spring for an extra Logitech at somepoint.
BTW, the Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical is the best mouse I've ever used. Accuracy is great. Batteries last forever. And the mouse just feels so good in my hand. It's amazingly ergonomic (unless you're a lefty).
Justin Dubs
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow 3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to bring down costs (much like the PC industry had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed them, and they stopped allowing this practice (well, very tightly clamped down on it) only a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and what makes one can break the other.
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is one company, controlling both hardware and software. Of course, they can change course whenever they like and impose whatever corporate strategy they want. That's both a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, we have a choice: an all-Apple world would be just as horrible as an all-PC world.
Re:Woo - Hoo (Score:4, Informative)
It hasn't been until recently that CD-R / RW was streamlined enough for the 'common user', and the prices were affordable. I like the idea of USB "keychain storage", but those devices are still rather expensive.
Everything I do is on CD or on a network share these days anyway. I believe there will soon come a time that removable media is irrelivant. I would like to see hardware manufacturers and distributers put together a system where the bios gives you options for a TCP/IP stack and netbooting and there are Internet based boot servers. From there you could do anything you needed across a network.
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!
-1; Redundant (Score:5, Funny)
The "back in the day" jokes are older than an 8088.
Re:-1; Redundant (Score:3, Funny)
Back in the day, "back in the day" jokes were older than the Model T.
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)
'bout time. (Score:5, Funny)
OK with me (Score:5, Insightful)
And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).
Re:OK with me (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though CDs are cheap, I don't think that the technology is as affordable as it needs to be for most people to adopt it yet.
Re:OK with me (Score:3, Informative)
They're not exactly easily accessible as they are at an angle (dunno why) and slightly recessed, but they are there. If you stuff your PC under the desk, I suggest keeping a USB extension cable plugged into one of the ports and plugging your USB key into the cable.
they may be old... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:they may be old... (Score:3, Informative)
Cheapest 50 pack of 3.5" floppies on pricewatch: $11 shipped.
Cheapest 50 pack of CD-Rs on pricewatch: $11 shipped.
What exactly are you wasting? "It just seems wrong somehow"?
Re:they may be old... (Score:3, Insightful)
CD-Rs are not.
CD-RWs are just as "reliable" as Floppy Disks. Can only burn so many times.
USB pen drives (Score:4, Interesting)
What would be neat is booting off a bootable CD-R/W, and being able to use it in R/W mode. *That's* a floppy replacement.
Now if you could just put it in a square black plastic sleeve, you could boot it "old school"!
Sure, noone uses them... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless one of them is a Mac.
Not everyone has a CDRW, and not everyone has USB key-drives. But ALL PCs have floppies.
dropping? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, you mean... I see.
Floppy uses (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I can't use USB drives at the machines at work (due to security risks of removing sensitive data). Sure, you can remove data on a floppy, but try doing that with a 50+ MB compressed file.
Re:Floppy uses (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup.
And what about all of those install disks I still get?
What install disks?
Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
Those programs are only used for ancient bioses.. the bios in Dells "floppy-less" PC won't require the use of hard drive bootloaders. I haven't needed one in nearly 10 years.
Boo-Hoo (Score:3, Informative)
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
Re:Floppy uses (Score:4, Insightful)
"At some point, you've got to draw the line." (Score:3, Funny)
"You wouldn't think of using a processor..." (Score:5, Insightful)
And why not? If it does the job, why should I care when the processor was made? Dell's trying hard to sell new products, and that's understandable, but it's ridiculous to think that everybody buys stuff just because it's "new". Heck, I'm still using hardware from the early 90's (10 years old), and it works fine. I'm not gonna blow money on something just because it's "new".
And as far as alternative technologies, they're still not good enough. I've never heard of a "USB Pen", and I'm sure as hell not going to waste money on some cutting edge technology that nobody's using yet. CD-R's are either very slow, one time burns, or very slow, very incompatible CD-RW's. Neither is good if I need to sneakernet a bit of data.
But then again, I'm not a Dell customer. I use a computer until it literally falls apart, and then I buy a closeout or used computer at great prices when I need a "new" one. No point in spending top dollar for a computer these days unless you're into games, or you have some big server needs.
Re:"You wouldn't think of using a processor..." (Score:5, Insightful)
It's rough, but it's the case. Where would the world be in companies had to take into account the needs of the people who love to criticise but never have any plans on purchasing their products?
USB Key Drives? (Score:3, Insightful)
CDRs on the other hand have been around a lot longer and work on more platforms. Now that new CD burners don't make coasters nearly as often, just give us small cheap 80mm CDRs with thin jewelboxes to carry them in and you have a great floppy replacement.
And how do you flash a BIOS without a floppy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And how do you flash a BIOS without a floppy? (Score:4, Informative)
Device drivers and rescue disks (Score:3, Interesting)
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
Re:Device drivers and rescue disks (Score:3, Interesting)
You've got it backwards. CDs are much cheaper than floppies... making it stupid to spend more money for 1M versus less money for 650M. Who cares if you only use 1% of the CD, it's still cheaper.
Secondly, floppies are still perfect rescue disk media:
Wrong. They're horrible rescue media because they're LESS reliable than harddrives. How many people have corrupted rescue disks? I bet most of the people here. Why not get a rescue CD instead? It even has room for tons of rescue tools.
Re:Device drivers and rescue disks (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. It's much cheaper to press the CD.
You realize, don't you, that you can't press a floppy, right? You have to actually encode the data into it, which means actually inserting the floppy into a drive, writing to it, and removing it. Even done by machine this takes more time than pressing a CD. CD pressing costs are around $.20 in volume, and it doesn't matter if you have 1 byte or 700 MB on the disk - it's the same amount of time (although obviously defect rates can go up with more data).
Besides, if I'm supplying a driver, then nowadays I'll probably do things like supply the documentation electronically as well. And a viewer for the doc unless it's HTML or text.
Rescue disks can be put on CD nearly as easily as on floppy - and you can put more stuff on the disk for disaster recovery.
And yes, it's only $10 for the floppy hardware. But cut that out, along with the labor in attaching it and testing it, and you may save $15-30 total. When you're selling a $500 PC, upping your profit by 3-6% isn't a bad proposition.
Re:Device drivers and rescue disks (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but a rescue CD is better, because you can fit more diagnostic software and whatnot on it.
and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD.
You can get 50 CD-Rs for $30, and that's already expensive. A manufactured rescue CD would cost less than $1.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures.
Yes, but a CD-R or USB keychain or iPod is better, because they can also transfer bigger stuff like MP3s.
Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom
A CD-ROM drive upgrade for those 8-year old PCs is only slightly more expensive, but vastly more useful, than a floppy drive.
there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
But it's redundant now, even if it costs only $10. Redundancy is not a good thing on commodity products.
Support Hates Floppies (Score:5, Informative)
low level utilities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Academic Enivronment (Score:3, Informative)
Each student has 25megs of space on a NetApp file server and it is automapped when they login to a workstation in any of our computer labs. They can also access it via FTP or SSH/SCP.
But alas, most students go clueless when you tell them how they can use networked resources and even email to send stuff back and forth between home and campus (or even store files using webmail inboxes).
It think that the only group of students that consistently do not use floppy disks are the Art dept students who work on huge graphics and movie files that they are forced to use DVD-R, CDR, or zip disks to transport stuff around.
CompSci and engineering students understand the bane of floppy disks and actually know how to use the alternatives.
I've seen a few students use USB disks in our computer labs. The number of laptop users is starting to increase slowly but steadily (our campus does not require the ownership of a computer, much less a laptop; I'd like to see this changed, though since our facilities are being maxed out by the influx of students every year).
I think floppy disks will be around for awhile. For the average user (non-slashdot type people), floppy disks offer the cheapest, simplest, and most convenient method of storing small files on the go.
15 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironic that Apple introduced the drive to the consumer masses and then was the first to abandon it with the iMac, [everymac.com] (about 5 years ago as others have noted). Probably speaks more to the inertia of the masses w.r.t. personal computers than any particular sophistication on Apple's part.
Even when I was still stuck using Windows PCs at work, I bailed from floppies around 5 years ago as well. We had a cabinet with raw laser-Doppler velocimeter data "backed up" to about 1000 floppies and it took a student the better part of a month (he didn't work that hard) to copy them over. All the data we could recover fit on one CD-R -- we could only get about half of it.
Money makes the world go around ... Ka-Ching ... (Score:3, Interesting)
They do have a downside apparently - they don't provide a big markup on a new system, and apparently, the providers would rather use a slot or port for a much more expensive device, and start migration away from these. I'm all for USB-pen drives to carry around powerpoint presentations, but I see memory sticks / usb memory sticks / pen drives as supplemental, and NOT for replacing the floppy drives.
Just my
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
This damn well better be supported in the BIOS (Score:5, Insightful)
If I want/need to run some low level hardware diagnostics (IBM's Drive Fitness Test tool anyone?) or flash to a new BIOS revision or update the firmware on a SCSI controller - a floppy is basically the only way to go - especially with downloadable updates that REQUIRE you to create a floppy from them.
If the only way I can update these parts is by disassembling the now crippled machines & putting their components into a machine that does have a floppy to update them, then replace (x 250 machines...) - Dell can count on number of enterprise customers nixing them from the list of potential hardware vendors. Don't limit my options - period.
But that's just my opinion.
A USB Pen Drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is the main point of a floppy these days isn't it? A backup boot method... Sure you can use bootable CD-roms, but what if your CD-writer is on the machine that got toasted?
Floppies and the drives that run them are simple, cheap, abundant, and effective for what they do. Until there is a replacement that is standard on all PC's, these should always be available.
Replacements? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the best cheap, boot-time writeable, removable, non-floppy media out there on the market anyway? A bonus if it's common, since that would make it easier to get.
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!
The cost of floppies in a 40 user network. (Score:5, Insightful)
Floppies retail cost anywhere from 15-20 bucks. So you're looking at about an extra $800 bucks in parts for all your PC's.
For $800 these days you can add a nice bit of hard disk space to your 40 clients. Prices have dropped around a dollar a gigabyte. You can also buy a decent backup system for around that price too to back them all up. Hell you can even get a pretty decent networked laserjet for that price.
Personally, I would much rather have more hard disk space or backup for the network than a floppy. I agree with Dell %100 on this issue.
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"...
It'll never work, nobody will buy these! (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason most people use floppy drives is A) because a driver or something comes on floppy, or B) an emergency boot disk for when the OS is hosed, C) making one of the above to be used in another machine, or D) transporting small files (Word documents) between computers.
A) is easily solved: the companies who currently ship floppies need to ship CDs instead. CDs are pretty cheap; this is not unreasonable. But, there's no motivation to do it as long as everyone has a floppy drive. Dell removing floppies (and others following suit) is a good motivator.
B) isn't an issue on new versions of Windows since it won't boot from a floppy anyway. PC users tend to forget that OS CDs are bootable!
C) is an issue for those of us with a 486 in the corner. Yes, I need a floppy drive in that machine, since it won't boot from CD. That's my only floppy drive, though.
D) can be done just as well (better!) with a USB keychain. Bigger capacity, and they work on nearly any computer. As far as I know, they're even bootable.
We know what's going to happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither happened. Life went on, because the floppy really was archaic and outdated; alternatives really did exist.
Now, granted, these were Macs, which have just about always had much better hardware/software integration than five years previous. As a Mac user myself, this argument of "but what about machines which don't boot off of USB or Firewire?" looks utterly absurd, because, well, why the hell aren't these machines capable of booting off of it? Or this bit about "How can the average user make bootable CD's?"; why the hell should making bootable CD's be so difficult that the average user can't do it?
Maybe it's just that I come from a Mac background, where things Just Work. But honestly, it sounds like the only reasons to keep the floppy around on the PC would be dealing with fundamental flaws in the PC's architecture. Then again, it's rather ironic that Dell uses a "you wouldn't use a processor that was 15 years old" when they use an outdated architecture that's even older, so maybe there's something to that. A blind insistence on pack-ratting old technologies, maybe, at the expense of advancement?
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Informative)
That's an artifact of your OS.
Back in the early 90's OS/2 had no problems multitasking floopy I/O - I recall formating a few hundred floppies while doing other stuff, with absolutely no degredation in performance of other tasks.
I've only formatted a floppy once under XP, so I don't recall how it handled it. Win9x did not handle it well though, which is an artifact of still being built off of DOS.
I don't believe Linux or other Unix-based systems have issues multitasking the floppy.
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Funny)
We had to write on crushed glass, with our eyeballs! And we liked it!
Pfft, fingers...
Re:About Time. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) I wanted to make a bootable CD. CD Creator and Nero both told me to put the disk I wanted to use as the source in the A: drive....so i hadda have a floppy
2) I wanted to flash the BIOS on my PC. The program (.exe for windows) that I downloaded wanted to write the files directly to the floopy and make it bootable.
2) I wanted to flash the BIOS on my video card. The program worked the same way that the system BIOS did.
Now before people start pasting ways around these I know them. Point being many people who buy dell computer's may not. What will dell say when customer X calls because they can't flash the bios on their video card? I think that getting rid of the drives is a good idea, i just hope that hardware vendors are really ready for it.
Re:Two words (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, so the last time I had to reinstall XP due to file corruption, I had the CD, but the Dell machine would not recognize the CD, so I had to make about 8 boot floppies to get things up and running so the system would see the CD drive. Now, whose fault is that? Apple has been making bootable CD drives for well over a decade now and yet, the Wintel industry is still making machines I have to make boot floppies for.
Re:Someone has to be first (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No More Floppies???? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I want my floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
You didn't read the article, did ya?
You can still order a floppy drive on a Dell Dimension, but it's a special order and an additional cost.
Frankly, I rather agree with Dell... the floppy is nearly useless. And yes, I still use mine at home upon occasion, but it's a damn rare occasion.
All the cases where people are whining about still needing one are easily circumventable using CD's, USB devices, or networking. The number of computers that don't have one or more of the above is rapidly diminishing. There will always be special needs, but, guess what? They're special, and will be treated as such.
Re:I want my floppy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nnnooooooooo (Score:3, Insightful)
Good intentions don't make money for Ma Bell.
Of course this has nothing to do with the floppy drive as the payphone revenue stream has nothing in common with computer hardware. But the notion is the same.