The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk 558
osullish writes "People have been proclaiming the death of the floppy for years, yet millions are bought around the world. Who is buying them?"
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The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk
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Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
I know (Score:5, Funny)
Cowboy Neil buys them all and archives inane Slashdot comments, like this one.
Re:I know (Score:5, Funny)
Cowboy Neil buys them all and archives inane Slashdot comments, like this one.
20 stories a day. .25 per disk
400 posts per story.
99% are inane.
Average post size? 850 characters (thanks to gnaa c&p trolls)
---
6.4 megabytes per day
1.4 megabytes per disk
---
4.5 disks per day
365 days in a year
---
1642 disks per year
100 disks for $25 =
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~$411 per year on backups
Max write speed: 1000 kilobits / second (7.7 megabytes per minute)
Time to fill storage:
314 minutes + 1 minute to toss each disk in an unsorted box (hey, they're using low paid interns of course) ~ 2000 minutes
---
33 hours
$8.00 an hour
---
$264 per year
Grand Total: $675.00, or about 3.375 hours with a decent, geeky prostitute
Seems economical.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Until they try to restore the backup.
Re:I know (Score:4, Funny)
It's what we tell all our relatives to do, but don't do ourselves.
We need standards, good ones too. For Linux, too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We need standards, good ones too. For Linux, to (Score:5, Interesting)
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network.
Mobile phones? Pre-GSM ones don't work in the UK (and presumably other countries), they turned off the old network.
Landline phones? The ones that only do pulse dialling don't work with most "Press 5 to do X" systems.
Cars work with today's gas and roads.
No they don't -- many old cars required petrol with added lead.
Old televisions work with today's services and electricity.
Many countries have switched to digital TV.
Old stuff often only works if some parts are upgraded. Your old TV works (with a digital converter box) and your old car works (if you add a special chemical to the petrol).
Old Linux binaries can be made to work (I assume you're referring to problems with shared libraries?). It probably helps to know what system they're supposed to work with. It might require some technical knowledge.
If old closed-source stuff doesn't work, good luck fixing it.
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Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
in the lab:
oscilloscopes, network analysers, pulse generators etc.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
These systems are less then 5 years old as well !!!!
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Funny)
Seth
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
Last time this came up on slashdot, someone brought up this handy little device that looks and acts like a floppy drive (to the controller) but lets you use usb sticks instead:
http://www.floppytousb.com/ [floppytousb.com]
This should work on all the synths, CNC machines, sewing machines, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1.It may not be using the standard floppy disk controler interface and may not be able to support that particular gizmo
2.Are YOU going to be the one to tell the boss that the really really expensive piece of equipment has failed and that they cant get warranty service for it because of an unauthorized third party modification just so you dont need to keep floppy disks around?
3.What do you do about things that actually come on floppy disk (for example the manufacturer may ship new firmware on floppy that you
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Insightful)
(Side note: This is why I read Slashdot. You have to wade through the muck but there're still nuggets of pure gold here and there.) Sorry ... on topic now:
1.It may not be using the standard floppy disk controler interface and may not be able to support that particular gizmo
Well, if you RTFL (I know, I know ....) then you'd have seen this:
The device connects to your existing power and data (ribbon) cables.
The soundless drive emulates your existing floppy drive to act as if the floppy drive was never removed. This drive will replace most any existing 720k/1.44MB capacity IBM format floppy drive or your money back. Do away with the painfully slow and obsolete floppy disks. Not only will this device work in PCs but, it will also work in machinery or devices that still use floppy drives. This device completely replaces the universal floppy drive of computerized system. If you are not certain this device will work in your equipment, then just ask! 1 Year Warranty. This device also emulates NON IBM type drives (TEAC, etc) and can also be setup as a DRIVE 0, DRIVE 1 configuration
Back to your points:
2.Are YOU going to be the one to tell the boss that the really really expensive piece of equipment has failed and that they cant get warranty service for it because of an unauthorized third party modification just so you dont need to keep floppy disks around?
I agree this is a good thing to consider. It may not always be a good idea even if it works. Definitely a YMMV solution.
3.What do you do about things that actually come on floppy disk (for example the manufacturer may ship new firmware on floppy that you insert and have the machine read). Yes you could reinstall the disk drive for those rare occasions (or find a way to make the floppytousb device work with a USB floppy so you can read the disk you need to) but that's a lot of work.
I wonder if one of the USB floppies would work. While it most likely wouldn't, I sort of like the Goldbergian aspect of running a floppy controller -> USB converter -> USB floppy drive emulator when needed. Hehe. In reality, I'd probably go with a floppy cable that supports 2 drives [amazon.com] and run the floppy drive on one and the FloppytoUSB device on the other, just in case.
Nonetheless, this is quite an interesting device. I'll probably pick one up just to fiddle with. I'd love to have the option of USB sticks being available in such odd DOS environment for some clients.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
What about something like this?
http://www.memorysuppliers.com/smartdisk-flashpath-smartmedia.html?CAWELAID=327820619 [memorysuppliers.com]
Stick a SD card into a floppy shaped device that your drive can read like it's a real floppy. The drive can still read floppies, and there's no evidence for the warranty people.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
i wonder, how much space do the drive see?
do it only see the first 1.44MB of the SD card?
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:4, Insightful)
I also use floppies to hand-out resumes,
Wouldn't it be smarter to hand them out on CDs? They're just as cheap (and since you're not getting it back, single write isn't a probleM), and you're far more likely for the person you're handing it to to actually be able to read it.
I can honestly say that if you gave our HR Department a resume on floppy they'd have to scramble to find a machine that could read it. My guess is it's more likely your app/resume would simply not make it to the next round of consideration.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
in the theatre:
Lighting control desks normally use them for letting you save lighting plots (most also have hard-drives for normal use). Lighting plots are a tiny amount of data that easily fit on a floppy.
Most are just DOS PCs with a digital desk and DMX connections to the dimmer packs and other gear.
I would like to be able to use a USB key, but that's more because I don't have a floppy drive for my laptop so can't get the data onto it to edit.
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So despite all of our lab tools, we did not contribute a cent to this
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No reason not to use it.
Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures.
Bigger != Better
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures."
Probably not. Cellphone cams have tiny sensors and tiny low-quality lenses that don't correct for sencond- or third-order aberrations. The resulting image is usually a low contrast, distorted image image with color fringing, coma and veiling glare. That 640x480 image, taken through a relatively high-quality optical system, most likely looks much better than your typical cellphone image, no matter what the relative resolution is on paper.
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Sony Mavica.
640x400 pixel resolution. No EXIF data. And we liked it.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice back in the day, but grainy as hell now.
(Yeah, we have one too.)
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The Sony Mavica used to be the bee's knees for this reason. This was before most computers had USB or media readers, so a standard digital camera would plug into your serial port and you'd run through a set of batteries trying to download the pictures to your hard drive. So, for a while, the floppy was the "easiest" way to get pictures off a camera.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, these were made in the late 90's early 2000s. Floppy disks were CHEAP, a box of 10 would run you $10 if not less on sale. A meager 16MB card would cost $100+ easily. So you could go with a camera that required $100+ memory cards to use, or went wit
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
I modified all my synths. I found that most have a IDE header inside and you can slap a hard drive on it (was made for a ZIP drive) so instead of having 80,000 floppies that fail the 3rd time you use them all my maps and samples are on the hard drive..
I love older E-mu gear, at least they were smart and made them hackable.
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I use them for my music keyboard and some firmware updates (mostly from Dell) which still require them.
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That's exactly why I have 3.5" double-sided double-density floppies - an Ensoniq Mirage, and Ensoniq EPS and a Cheetah SX16. Of that three only the EPS has SCSI - and still needs to boot from floppy to format a new SCSI disk.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:4, Informative)
Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we buy them at my lab-they are necessary for controlling the software of our scintillation counter. That thing (no joke) is running DOS 2.0 under the hood! I'm sure there's lots of industrial equipment in small/noncompetitive markets that has never felt pressured to update. It's the same reason why we have so much $500,000 equipment running unbelievably crappy software.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually there are some good reasons to use DOS for something like that.
Modern OSs are great and have all sorts of functionality that a lot of devices just don't need. They also have a lot of code and services which can cause you issues.
DOS is great for any device where you need a realtime single tasking OS.
You can do all you development on a PC and use PC debugging tools that you are used to using.
You see lots of CNC machines and such that use DOS for that reason.
Or look at it this way. Does the device you use work? Does it do what you need it to do?
If so then the software isn't crappy. Nothing sucks more than you replace a piece of software that works but isn't pretty with pretty bug ridden software.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Informative)
Sinple.
1. DOS is REAL-TIME. If you need to precise timeing and access to the hardware DOS gives that to you.
2. Scripting? Filesystem? who cares on a small devise. You may not do anything with the filesystem at all. You may just write the data out to the serial port on some devices.
Development Tools? DJGPP works fine. Borlands old tools are available for free. No problem and actually not complex.
"Why not run a stripped-down Linux or BSD with restricted userspace tools?"
Can you find me one that will.
Run in 256k of ram.
On an 8086.
and support Real-time data acquisition?
You can get 8086 embedded controlers for dirt cheap.
And the nice thing about DOS is that it is completely known.
Re:Floppies (Score:4, Insightful)
We are talking about software here not religion.
But there is FreeDOS which is probably what a good number of these DOS like embedded systems are running. Frankly that is why I didn't say MS-DOS. A lot of people use FreeDOS for this kind of work now. Some use DR-DOS and still others used MS-DOS. Frankly I would use FreeDOS myself unless there is some good reason not to but that is just me.
Please at this point you are just being silly. Linux is overkill for something like a CNC controller or radiation counter.
Plus for many of these applications it just will not work. Educate yourself just a little and you might actually stop wasting peoples time.
BTW if you need something that has a bit more capability than DOS does but still lighter than Linux there are options.
RTEMS will work for realtime systems but it is a lot more complex to set up than DOS but it runs on more CPUs and is general more flexible.
Another option is Contiki http://www.sics.se/contiki/about-contiki.html [www.sics.se]
But again the thing about DOS is simply so many people know everything there is to know about it. It is super well documented and the Development tools are everywhere and well known.
If you don't like DJCPP or the free Borland toolset you still have a ton of options left open including http://www.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]
Linux is a great embedded tool when you need it. The thing is for a lot of tasks it is overkill and frankly just will not do the job as reliably and as cheaply as good old DOS will.
So go read up and and stop treating FOSS as a religion and start using it as a tool. And stop being a tool.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
...crappy software.
Would you really rather have that $500,000 piece of equipment running DOS 2.0 move to Windows Vista?
When was the last time your DOS 2.0 machine needed a security patch, or rebooted itself randomly, to for that matter did anything unexpected?
Simple... yes
Outdated... yes
Crappy... not so much.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Interesting)
I wrote a real-time data acquisition system about 10 years ago. It was written to run on DOS. Why? One, and only one reason: under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware. Total, utter control. There's no OS that's going to interrupt with housekeeping, respond to network packets, check to see if there's another thread that wants a slice, or other crap. Only one thread executes at a time (unless you work really really hard to allow that to happen). For instrumentation that cannot tolerate a 20, 50 or even 100 ms pause every now and then, this is vital. DOS, crappy though parts of it are, has a lot of support in the embedded / instrumentation market. It isn't a lack of pressure to update so much as the ability to do exactly what you want, no questions asked, with the hardware. Worked great. As far as I know, that system is still in operation.
More recently, I've written a different real-time data acquisition system, under Windows 98. Almost as much control of the hardware, but not quite. There were gremlins I never figured out that were stealing segments of time every now and then.
And just this year, I ported that second system to Windows XP. Holy crap. Still haven't had time to chase down all of the HUGE number of timing problems now. If W98 drivers were available for the fast modern hardware required for the current project, I'd have stuck with the older OS.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That $500k may have been the price when it was new in 1992.
But if you try to sell it now you might get 79 cents a pound for it.
Old proceedures (Score:2)
There are probably old procedures at companies that still are written to call for using them as backups or storage of application software and the politics at such companies are that they don't easily allow those procedures to be updated.
One possible explanation... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My Amiga 500 didn't come with a hard drive. And yes it is strictly used for gaming, so everything's booted off floppy.
You got me. (Score:2)
It's me. I don't have a DVD or CD burner, so I've been trying to get my pirated material onto other medias.
I just can't figure out why people don't want the latest Star Trek movie on a simple, small, and affordable 720 three and a half inch floppies collectors set!
XP Users (Score:5, Interesting)
There are about a million XP SP2 users who have SATA disks and keep finding their driver floppy doesn't work when they try their yearly reinstall.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Mod this guy up. There are lots of issues like this that keep me using a usb floppy drive. Some software still use floppies for license disks.
Re: (Score:2)
Google Keyword: "slipstream"
I would think that anyone smart enough to know about reinstalling XP constantly for performance would know about this. I make unattended install disks for my parents so I don't have to mess with it. Just pop the CD in, boot, format the drive and tell XP to start installing. Then walk away. Almost as nice as installing Linux. :)
Re:XP Users (Score:4, Insightful)
Of 10,000,000 XP users less than 100 of them knows what slipstream is or has the skills to even do that. It will not happen, you can barely get a windows user to not click on every popup, you think you can get them to slipstream SP3 into their XP install Disc?
sneakernet (Score:2)
Lighting Consoles (Score:4, Informative)
Oscilloscope (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I could also replace the scope. Newer ones can connect to a host PC via USB, or offload to a thumb drive, or be network-attached. The specs on newer ones are, obviously, a lot better, too. But, really, why spend many thousands of dollars on new equipment just to get around using a floppy drive?
Re:Oscilloscope (Score:4, Funny)
Couldn't you write a real quick program to "pretend" to be a parallel printer, hook a PC up via parallel to it, and then when you "export to printer" from the scope, the PC saves the file directly?
So, the electrical engineer and the civil engineer walk into the bar, and the EE says... Anyway the CE solution would be to place the in-basket for the scanner directly underneath the slightly modified out-tray of the printer. Because if there's one thing CEs (and plumbers) know, its sh*t flows downhill. I'm sure there's a ME solution in there somewhere involving a medieval catapult.
I have a lot on 3.5" (Score:2)
Re:I have a lot on 3.5" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have a lot on 3.5" (Score:5, Informative)
Tax returns dating back to the 80's.. WHY???
It's a personal liability to have any records that are older than 7 years. Burn those things in a fire or at least run them through a strong shredder.
I use them every day! (Score:5, Funny)
I have AOL and Windows 3.1 disks all over my desk, always ready for use as a coaster under my coffee.
Can't remember the last time I bought one, though. But if anyone needs a coaster, I am happy to sell you some.
I still have to use them on rare occasion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the former was easier, that's what I did.
Re:I still have to use them on rare occasion... (Score:4, Informative)
DriverPacks are your friend: http://driverpacks.net/ [driverpacks.net]
They have a very nice tool that slipstreams (among others) mass storage and network drivers into Windows installation media. I've used it for XP and 2003 and have found that DriverPacked install media will pretty much find your storage controller even on recent machines.
XP install needs then (Score:2, Informative)
Hah (Score:2)
Ugh.. (Score:3, Funny)
The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness about it. However, its smaller successor held 15 times as much data.
1) so, what is the proper term for this then? "hard disk"? ARGHHH
2) 15 times as much data in a 3.5"? ARGHHHHH
ok, fine, i didn't stop reading. i only continued reading, but irritatedly.
Re: (Score:2)
Ya obviously TFA-author has never taken apart a 3.5".. they are still floppies to me because of the internal media isn't rigid, at least last I checked.
As for use, I've used them in the last couple years to:
- Install drivers on a Win box during install.. (WHY does VMware need a WINDOWS vCenter box?! Why can't it just be a thin-OS like ESX is?! it makes no sense!)
- Update BIOS firmware drivers on some older servers (at the time it was easier then doing it via CD, although it did take me a short wihle to find
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
2.88 MB? That's like.... mythical. That's a Bigfoot riding on the back of a unicorn.
But assuming they were using the...mythical... 2.88MB format, then, yes, 1/15th is approximately the capacity of any number of single-sided single-density 5.25" formats.
But 2.88MB? That wasn't even the same media as the classical 3.5" DSHD diskette. Special drive, special medium, special BIOS or driver support. Hell, by that standard, the 21 MB Floptical [wikipedia.org] falls into the same category.
If TFA was seriously thinking about the 2.
older hardware / software (Score:2)
Lots of older motherboards can only boot of floppies, not of USB sticks. They need floppies with FreeDOS to boot for the occasional BIOS update, firmware flash and other similar maintenance. Memtest86+ is another popular stuff to boot on a floppy. And some antique mother boards can't even reliabily boot CD-ROMs requiring a floppy boot-loader.
Installer of older versions of Windows XP can't use drivers on anything but floppies. Vista's installer is the first able to use other media.
As long as such older machi
Disk-based Tape Delay (Score:2)
Machine tools? (Score:5, Informative)
Brand new computer controlled machine tools being sold today, using floppy drives:
http://www.americanmachinetools.com/cnc_milling.htm [americanmachinetools.com]
Just ask google... "Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 for Floppy CNC mill. (0.29 seconds)"
G-Code is kind of a CLI for machine tools. Remember Logo in the 80s? Well, theres only so many ways to design a language to do Cartesian stuff. Being vaguely text like, you can figure ten bytes per line. Figure maybe twice as many non-cutting operations as cutting operations. Gaze upon a machined part, perhaps a hard drive case, whatever, and contemplate most jobs will have a couple hundred cutting operations. So, you're going to need hundreds of cuts times about 3 to account for non-cutting lines (config, comments, etc), times about ten bytes per line of G-code, figure 15K file per part. An easy fit on a floppy drive.
Now something really complicated, like a turbine or fancy rims for a ghetto car, that might fill a floppy disk.
It is a floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
Right from the article.
The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start.
Really come, it's been around long enough everyone should have peeked behind that little window and seen the disk actually is a floppy little piece of plastic.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So that alone shows that the article was written by an idiot.
OK, I admit it. (Score:5, Funny)
It's me. I've been buying those millions of floppy disks. No. I don't know why. I just like them. You got a problem with that?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I am just imagining a stack of 34,000 floppies... used to back up 1 blu-ray disc.
At an eighth-inch a piece (rough estimate) that would be a stack more than 350ft tall!
Airplanes (Score:5, Interesting)
Floppies are like tribbles (Score:4, Funny)
Some people at work seem to adopt them. I say there can't possibly be any data of significant value in 1.4mb, but these floppy analogs to cat ladies just can't bear to get rid of the disks.
I can't wait till a Klingon warbird shows up and we can simply beam the lot of them to their storage holds.
City of Los Angeles Still Uses Floppies (Score:5, Interesting)
Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:5, Informative)
While you're mourning the loss of the floppy, I'm waiting for the death of the CD/DVD. They're big, they scratch, they're not optimal for read/write. More and more of our devices are mobile and CD readers are both large and heavy.
Digital distribution and flash media replace the necessity for the CD. Of the 3 CD/DVDs I've bought since 2005, two were Apple OS upgrades and one was a video game. The video game is now available on Steam. The OS upgrades could be easily transferred and sold on flash media, or sold online and transferred by the user either to DVD or flash media, as to their preference.
Right now, the CD/DVD format is enjoying the same obsolesce, yet pervasiveness, the floppy enjoyed circa 1999. They'll be (practically) dead soon enough...
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Quite often the write-once nature of optical disks is a positive. Burn an OS install disc once, finalize the disc, and run a verification on a separate computer. You can be reasonably certain the install is "clean", and it can't really be tampered with. But if you instead put that installer on flash media, what's to keep compromised software from later rewriting the bootloader or modifying the installer in some way?
Systems do get rooted, and sometimes reinstalls from known clean media are necessary. If y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash dies. So do magnetic media. Optical might suck but it's hardy, and it's cheap too! Costs pennies to press out and volume is negotiable. If you need 10k units? Do able. Need 1m units? Do able. I don't think magnetic media has that kind of flexibility.
Medical equipment (Score:4, Interesting)
Who is buying them? Anyone who hasn't heard(of)HxC (Score:3, Interesting)
Painstakingly hand-made in small numbers [atari.plof.pl] for now, if that's not a project to be spread from high-volume automated production lines by the likes of Seeed [seeedstudio.com], then what is?
Re: (Score:2)
Source would have been good: http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/industry-news/3989/sony-will-stop-manufacturing-floppy-disks-in-2011.html [mobile-com...news.co.uk]
Re:Sony (Score:5, Informative)
Sony announced this week they are stopping floppy production soon. Never made /. *sigh*
You mean this article that never made /.? http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/25/0635218/The-End-of-the-35-inch-Floppy-Continues [slashdot.org]
You almost read /. less then the moderators.
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Less than the mods, even
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People are supposed to read stuff on /.? I thought this was just a running contest to accrue first posts and make jokes about bad car analogies, Soviet Russia, new overlords, Natalie Portman, ??? and PROFIT!
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Been a while since we heard anything about Natalie Portman, thanks.
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You mean the article that was supplied as a link to this article. D'oh.
I guess I have settled in to /. too well.
Rule 1 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
Rule 2 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
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If you read through the comments the article will be pasted all through it because of all the questions from people who did not RTFA. So as long as you are not first, it is cool :)
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Sony announced this week they are stopping floppy production soon. Never made /. *sigh*
Except for the one story [slashdot.org] posted about Sony announcing the end of floppy drive production.
Not According to the Article (Score:5, Informative)
People in 3rd world countries, I'd imagine.
If you read the article:
But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold? Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.
Instead the article argues that some people are satisfied with using 1.44 MB of storage since they don't do music and photography. They also point out the long life high quality machines like oscilloscopes and data-loggers that use these diskettes. As well as the theater industry and musicians that use them for synths and timing MIDI events. That's their explanation but I doubt that people accepting second hand computers are going to be paying money for obsolete diskettes in third world countries. More likely they're looking for someone giving away old stores of the diskettes with drivers on them and reformatting those.
Personally, half a year ago I wanted to add my own hard drive to my XBox 360 Arcade and discovered that no matter how I tried to make a DOS boot compact disc it would not work exactly like a 3.5" floppy DOS boot diskette. I luckily had an old keyboard driver on a floppy that I was able to format and use although I may have had to purchase one if I didn't. Although with the increasing ability of flashing my system's BIOS from the OS, my needs for 3.5" floppies are dwindling.
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If only you'd read the article before posting that....
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People in 3rd world countries, I'd imagine.
From the article:
But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold?
Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.
Re: (Score:2)
VHS tapes are still used en masse in security systems. But I really am struggling to think of any reason to buy floppies en masse. Even poor countries would be better off buying flash storage because of how expensive floppies are for what you get.
Re:3rd world countries (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I have to use them actually. It is the only way to pay multilateral income taxes in Argentina. You have to stand in line at an actual bank for an hour and present the teller with some printed forms and a diskette with the form file (and the money of course). And no, you can't use a flashdrive, electronic transfer or anything else. You have to use a freaking 3.5 inch dikette. It's like going back to the last century. Of course the damned things keep failing every other month so I have to buy more and more.
It doesn't help that the software to make those forms is the old DOS version with some library changes to make it work on windows. UAC sure loves it... (not)
Re:Not so legacy hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly, many machines that _should_ boot off CD when selected in BIOS don't want to cooperate with (properly burned at slowest speed/good media, yadda yadda) CD/DVD booting.
I keep a Smart Boot Manager
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html [sourceforge.net]
floppy for those, and they'll often boot from CD/DVD when selected in the Smart Boot Manager (which can also be loaded to hard disk) menu.
Why? Beats the shit out of me, but it has worked on many machines over the years.
Re: (Score:2)
In Server 2008 (maybe only R2), you can now use a flash drive, so that use is gone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
and in response: our government lab banned the use of flash drives for networked PCs a couple years ago. now, if I want to move data from a lab PC (or piece of equipment like an oscilloscope) to a networked PC, I use floppy. Sure, PC to PC could be done by burning a CD. But then I start to collect a nice pile of coasters. Most data consists of text files that zip nicely, and disk spanning still works like it used to. 7zip even makes a nice command line executable for running off the scopes. CD burning is a