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Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
BawbBitchen writes "PC World in NZ is running this story
about PC makers struggling to try to kill the floppy as a standard PC part.
Gateway has started to take $10 off the price of a PC if you order the PC
without the floppy. Hum, well my Mac does not have a floppy and I do not
miss it & my Linux Server has one that I have never used. Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"
I use them to back up my 5.25" inch diskettes.
I using mine as an apache web server.
/. article :-)
I would post the link but I really think it deserves its own
Murphy's law of floppy drives-
Once you get rid of your floppy drive, within three days you will have dire need of it.
i know the parent was a long comment, and you probably missed this part:
This is particularly true since I still have to boot off a floppy to install Linux (something about autoboot and my scsi CD-ROM)...
which would suggest that he as trouble booting off of cd's and likes the alternative floppy disks give him.
-- john
That's a really high bitrate you're using for your mp3's. Don't you think that 39,320 kbit/sec is a little high? I mean even CDs use only approximately 1,200 kbits/sec.
My floppy died a couple years ago after an unfortunate incident involving my 2 year old son and his recent discovery of coins. The next week my VCR also suffered the same fate.
I thought I had lost a CD-drive after he discovered CDs and a slight opening above the closed CD tray that allowed him to cram 3 CDs into the top of the drive. Later on he discoved a small opening above a drive bay cover and managed to get about a dozen CDs into the inside of my case before he was caught.
BTW, you need to see an 8 incher to know why they were called floppy
too easy...
Heh. A friend of mine useta say: "I have a 5.25 floppy.. and a 12 inch hard drive!"
Although half the surprise of this comment came from his 'proudly' owning a Packard Bell...
This page is full of anecdotes of stupid things people did with their floppy drives.
Oh blah blah blah... Everybody is mentioned how you can override this with a bunch of custom assembler code.
:)
To hell with that, I'll just stick a piece of tape on your floppy and write on it all I want! Used to do this all the time to those AOL floppies.
But yes, that tab is useful for preventing accidental writing.
1. It makes you look so knowledgeable to end-lusers when you miraculously get their system to boot by ejecting the non-system boot floppy that was left in their drive.
2. When you want to boot a mini-Linux kernel on your Windoze system to see what a real operating systems can do
3. How in the world would I restore my multiple zip disk backup that I did in the 80's when it was all the rage?
4. When you want to upgrade your systems BIOS and it requires a Floppy to do it.
5. What in the world would I do with the +1200 AOL floppy disks that I have collected?
6. Making duplicate boot floppy for my dufus co-worker who, if I gave him my original, I would never see it again?
7. Microsoft's certificate authority which tells you to use a Floppy disk to store the key on? (now that is just whack!)
8. You take away the ability to recover your forgotten admin password easily!
9. When you want to send a pron image to your buddy and don't want that snoopy sysadmin telling the boss.
10. When you HDD goes kablouie you can still recover with a boot floppy and FDISK
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
What they don't know is that the floopy disk is stored in my safety deposit box at the bank, and the actual private key is on multiple encrypted loopback devices. Oops. I shouldn't have said that. Now I have to bury the disk behind the barn. I shouldn't have said that either.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein