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Death to the 3.5" Floppy?

Posted by michael on from the ad-te-omnis-caro-veniet dept.

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?"

4 of 1,126 comments (clear)

  1. Remember slashdot when the iMac first came out? by lordpixel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. Compact Flash by Yohahn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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) :)

  3. CD-RW too hard to use by foo+fighter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Nice for small, ultra-secret data like gpg keys by ry4an · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.