Slashdot Mirror
Dell Dropping The Floppy
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."
I remember when they ADDED the new-fangled 3 1/4 inch floppy drive to machines.
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!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
The "back in the day" jokes are older than an 8088.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
sorry, mod me down
love is just extroverted narcissism
Hopefully they get rid of all of the "extra" stupid buttons on the mouse too...
usually dropping floppies isn't something that's desired. I remember the days before CDs, carrying all 27 floppies needed to install WIndows 95, you drop the stack, and, well, you'll never install off that set again.
Oh, you mean... I see.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Or, have Apple draw it for you.
Where I'm from "dropping the floppy" in public will get you fined. Possibly chased away by a mob. Dell should not be allowed to do this just because he is a celebrity.
I see why this has been posted under the "nuts" topic...
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I just built a new machine. 3.06Ghz Intel, Radeon 9700 Pro, the works. As a joke, I put a dual 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 drive in it that I got off ebay. None of my friends "got it." They aren't geeks. Sigh.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Actually I made it my business to get a 5 1/4" installed in my Athlon, just in case, you know, I want to run WordStar.
"They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
1. Stop selling floppy drives
2. Start selling pen drives
3. PROFIT!!
If they educate all of their customers about computers they will never sell another unit.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
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.
I write in my journal
That's nothing. Why, when I was a young lad my parents used to make me wear floppy disks as clothing!
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.
There seems to be some industry rule, that anything that works must be improved til it doesn't work any more!
The marketing synergies with Viagra are awe inspiring...
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.
Oh, you were the one storming out of the Apple Store ;)
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"...
re: bad quality floppy media
It's like vinyl records. Far superior in sound quality than CD provided a) you have a good quality vinyl, and b) you have an amazing player/stylus. But as they were fazing out records for mainstream albums, they produced crappy quality records. I mean I had an album purchased in 1980 which has not crackles and hisses, whereas an album produced in the early nineties was all static.
"Dude, You're not getting a floppy!"
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
Leave it to Michael Dell to be at the cutting edge of innovation (as long as Apple was there first;-)
Luxury! When I was a kid kid we used to DREAM of floppies! We had to store the encyclopaedia same as you, only we did it on perforated computer paper. That's right, paper! But it wasn't in plain text, as you might expect. No sir, it was done in huge ASCII poster print, one letter per page. Now and then the old man would wake from his drunken nap and holler for us to fetch him some obscure reference, and we younger ones had to run out back and haul in a wheel barrow full of paper. But that was only the index!
Evil is the money of root.
But to people who *don't* always use the same computer, dropping the floppy is like condemning them to death.
Outside of my office, right now, some 80 students are banging away at the public access machines. They're doing research, writing papers, (probably surfing porn), and doing other tasks that they need to preserve the results of.
These machines are not assigned to them - it's pick-as-you-please. The students do not have network accounts, so there's no server for them to upload to.
They *need* floppies.
"Why not just make them purchase CD-RWs? They're just as cheap!" -- do all students have CD-RW's at home? Do they all know how to use burning software? Do I *really* want to have to train them in it? All 3000+ of them on campus? Do I have to explain the virtues of ISO9600 over Joliet over UDF over... You have to KNOW that shit to burn a CD that will work the way to expect it to.
Ditto with USB pen drives, zip drives, holo-cubes and direct brain-plugs.
Floppies are a standard everyone can agree on. Take the floppies away and they're left with a hodge-podge menagerie of devices in which the support staff must support *all* of them, or tell the student "too bad you didn't buy the $200 porto-wafer storage solution that we recommend" when they panic because they can't bring up the final project they finished 5 minutes ago and are about to lose.
Everyone knows floppies. Floppies are nice. Floppies are available everywhere. Floppies don't need updated drivers, and you don't have to plug a floppy in and hope that USB doesn't crash. Unless you buy a USB floppy drive, in which case, you get what you deserve.
When it's just your office machine and your home machine, it's easy to keep the two connected. When it's your home machine (if you have one) and whatever machine is free at the moment, you need to keep it simple.
Keep the floppy.
GMFTatsujin
You had paper?! I once saw a paper, it was truly amazing. We had to write everything down in the sand on the ground using a stick, and every time the weather got a bit windy everything was erased and we had to start all over agan.
Martin
Did you ever bet your friend 12 floppy disks you could get some sophomore chick's underpants? (Don't worry, you'll end up with the prom queen by the end of the night)
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
NT4.0 Server.
Ditching the floppy is a dumb idea.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
WHAT? Y'all had sticks? All we had were the fingers that weren't ripped off my the huge machines at work, and we used those fingers to PRETEND like we had sticks. We didn't even have real sand. We just had the dust on the cupboard shelves where there was no food to write on.
--Forest C. Adcock--
Where am I going to put my computer lint then?
My floppy drive is full of it, I believe it brings luck. Also acts as a good firestarter for when the feds break in.
whee -Me
"Nostalgia has no place in the IT industry."?
Then I suppose I can remove the memory chips from
my computer now.
You had fingers and a cupboard?
We had to write on crushed glass, with our eyeballs! And we liked it!
Pfft, fingers...
Apple: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Macs tomorrow online.
Dell: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Dells in 6 months, plus shipping time, by phone.
NerfOnline - Because Nerf Guns aren't just for kids -
Like I'm gonna burn a goddamned CD just to bring a Word file back and forth to work.
"Oh!" says the Dell guy, "You can use a USB memory pen for only 12x the cost of a floppy [b]drive[b]."
Buttheads!
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
A bunch of Little Lord Fauntleroys, are we?
We had to chop down trees using the bones sticking out of our chopped off hands and lay out logs in the shapes of letters, randomly over and over again until we had reproduced the complete works of Shakespeare with improvements to no fewer than seven soliloquies. And we had to do this in no more than six picoseconds or we wouldn't get our heads sewn back on in time for dinner which consisted of wet kleenex that had rotted away three weeks before.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart