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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 do.
The noise!
The fury!
The whining!
It'll never sell, they said. What will people do without their floppy drive!
Hell, I hardly even use the Zip drive on my G4 for anything anymore.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
I'd like to see the serial port, parallel port, PS/2 mouse & keyboard port all go away.
Firewire and USB can replace that and more. IDE and SCSI could also go away and be replaced by a Firewire or USB 2.0 bus.
Worst comes to worst, use and adaptor for the USB port to make that must-have serial/parallel device work.
For an interim, an IDE superfloppy, like the LS-120 is a nice way to wean off.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would be VERY happy if they would replace the floppy with a compact flash receptical.
:)
Same idea as floppy... Probably same lifespan...
Easy.. small.. not as fragile (in my experience)
Yes.. compact flash should be the replacement.
(and how about booting off of USB 2.0 hard drives and cdroms)
As has been said before, real security comes from when your access to something comes from two of the three:
1. Something you know
2. Something you have
3. Something you are
For example, passwords can be brute forced relatively easy, but if your password has to be accompanied by a retina scan, then your password protected data is significantly more secure.
By the same token, if you have a password, but your PGP key is on your HDD, then your data is only as secure as your password to someone who has your PC. If, however, you keep your PGP on an external disk of some kind, then you go quite a bit further towards making your data secure to someone who has stolen or confiscated your PC. A floppy is pretty good for this purpose for the following reasons:
It's fairly portable. You can reasonably carry a floppy disk in your wallet and pull it out when you need it without fear of destroying it.
It's small enough and durable enough to manipulate. You can hide a floppy in a safe deposit box or ship it overseas if need be.
Despite it's relative durability, it's also easily destroyed. CD's need to be dissolved in acid to be truly unrecoverable and Zip disks are relatively difficult to break into. Floppies, on the other hand, can be broken into and once you've eaten the plastic disk, you're data is forever encrypted.
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CD-RW won't replace the floppy until it is unecessary to use a 3rd party utility to write and delete from it.
Maybe it's changed in Windows XP or MacOS X. But for Windows 2000 and Redhat Linux 7.2 I have to install and run a separate program and laboriously pick out which files I want to burn and finally say "go".
I don't care if it's the OS writer's fault, the BIOS writer's fault, or whose fault it is. It's ludicrous that I can't simply type "copy foo.txt d:" the way I can type "copy foo.txt a:"! CD-RW drives have been out for years, get your shit together people.
I've been trying to convert my company over to strictly CD-RW since we've had several disastors where the only copy of important data was on a floppy. (I know, I know, but users are users.) It's been completely unsuccesful because the burning programs aren't integrated with the OS the way floppy drivers are. Don't get me started on the burning program's horrible interfaces if you have anything else you want to do today.
Until I can pop in my cd-rw, click-and-drag my files onto it, and pop it out to be used anywhere a cd can be -- without having to go through a 3rd program -- I and everyone else will still have a use for floppies.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Nah, it was too soon when Steve did it at NeXT with the NeXT cube.
As for misreprenting the issue. This is 1998 we're talking about. CD-R maybe, CD-RW? Not on many of the PCs I saw. Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
That said, Apple were late to the party shipping CDRW in a machine, something Steve said on stage. You can pull him on all sorts of bullshit, but that's not one of them.
Arguably they were busy being early(ish) to the party with DVD as standard. Choice would have been nice though...
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
... a universally accepted, cross-platform, dirt-cheap, pocket-sized, rewritable storage medium? Beats me.
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to /mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.