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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."
Next thing you know, they're going to take away our serial ports and PS/2 ports. Bastards.
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I say good riddance to the floppy. I've had more of them go bad on me than I care to count.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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.
And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).
but they're handy when needed,why waste a cd for a file smaller than 1.44 megs?
The "back in the day" jokes are older than an 8088.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I love the idea of these things, but I wonder - can you boot off a USB device yet?
:)
What would be neat is booting off a bootable CD-R/W, and being able to use it in R/W mode. *That's* a floppy replacement.
Now if you could just put it in a square black plastic sleeve, you could boot it "old school"!
I've had my drives in every system, but they all go bad from dust exposure in a few months from lack of use. Not that I can find a 3 1/2" disk that works without buying a new box, anyway.
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
Unless one of them is a Mac.
Not everyone has a CDRW, and not everyone has USB key-drives. But ALL PCs have floppies.
Ñ'
My first reaction was "Yay Dell!". Then I thought what if I need to update the BIOS of my motherboard.
Does the average Joe User know how to make a bootable CD? Most PC BIOS are unable to boot from USB or Firewire yet, so it seems like creating a bootable CD to do firmware upgrades is the only option.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
Also, I can't use USB drives at the machines at work (due to security risks of removing sensitive data). Sure, you can remove data on a floppy, but try doing that with a 50+ MB compressed file.
pc floppies have one key quality - they are almost universally supported.
sure, they are old and a bit slow, but they are useful because of their omnipresence. for moving snippets of data from here to there under any condition, it is still hard to beat floppies.
usb key drives are nice - i have one - but they need to get a bit cheaper. then they would be a nice replacement for the "quick snippet" niche.
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!
"You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago."
And why not? If it does the job, why should I care when the processor was made? Dell's trying hard to sell new products, and that's understandable, but it's ridiculous to think that everybody buys stuff just because it's "new". Heck, I'm still using hardware from the early 90's (10 years old), and it works fine. I'm not gonna blow money on something just because it's "new".
And as far as alternative technologies, they're still not good enough. I've never heard of a "USB Pen", and I'm sure as hell not going to waste money on some cutting edge technology that nobody's using yet. CD-R's are either very slow, one time burns, or very slow, very incompatible CD-RW's. Neither is good if I need to sneakernet a bit of data.
But then again, I'm not a Dell customer. I use a computer until it literally falls apart, and then I buy a closeout or used computer at great prices when I need a "new" one. No point in spending top dollar for a computer these days unless you're into games, or you have some big server needs.
They're like phone booths: I never use them but I still want to have them around!
I just got a new thinkpad and my IT department thinks no one needs a floppy. Now I can not support current customers: that will not allow me to connect ot their network, and do not have cd-rom on thier machines, network loaded. And do not have USB turned on. But they do have floppies drives.
I have to customer software from time to time that the master key comes encrypted on a floppy. Realy great the most servers that I get to work on do not now have floppies.
Can some one tell DELL and hardware houses, that the customer right? We need equipment to meet customer needs not some point head pencil pusher.
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.
I hope that they will make CDRW drives standard at this point. Colin
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.
You're not kidding... I seems the quality of drives and media has gone down. I remember being in high school ('86-'90), I'd carry about floppies with me all year around (blistering heat of summer and bone chilling cold of winter in Chicago). I'd never have a problem with them, I'd hope from one computer to another with the media. Try that now days... The floppy will work in one drive but not the next... WTF?!
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I dunno, the USB key/pen/stick/whatever drives aren't anywhere near as convenient as floppies yet. There are still lots of old PCs out there that don't have USB. Lots more do have it, but the ports are in back and a pain to get to.
CDRs on the other hand have been around a lot longer and work on more platforms. Now that new CD burners don't make coasters nearly as often, just give us small cheap 80mm CDRs with thin jewelboxes to carry them in and you have a great floppy replacement.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Well, at least this avoids mistakes during flashing, as now you can no longer flash...
Say no to software patents.
Parallel Port: I'd like to keep using my older printers and my old parallel Zip Drive. It's slow, but handy sometimes.
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Seriously, there's no reason to drop these devices. Why not include them with the newer stuff.
Besides, USB is not to be trusted.
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Boot Disk?
Yeah, so the last time I had to reinstall XP due to file corruption, I had the CD, but the Dell machine would not recognize the CD, so I had to make about 8 boot floppies to get things up and running so the system would see the CD drive. Now, whose fault is that? Apple has been making bootable CD drives for well over a decade now and yet, the Wintel industry is still making machines I have to make boot floppies for.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
One of the main reasons for doing this is support: floppy drives result in people having broken machines and lost data. Back in 1996-7 when I helped support a high school's computers, 75% of the hardware problems on the Dells and 100% of the hardware problems on the Macs were with floppy drives, and most of the other problems we had to deal with were people who had lost their paper by trying to rewrite a floppy disc too many times (people still think a floppy disc can last for a whole semester!). The next year when Apple dropped the floppy disc, we never had a hardware problem with the new Macs; it's easy to see why Dell wants to do the same: you can instantly cut support costs drastically and increase customer satisfaction.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Will they allow things like BIOS flash updates to run from El Torito cdroms? I mean last time I checked most low level utilities will check to make sure they aren't running out of a virtual floppy because when the BIOS is being overwritten etc the virtualization tech might break and leave the system in an unrecoverable state.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Heck, why just they use those mini CDRW's of about 150MB? Just throw into the package a bunch of them! Label them as 'FREE' and you will se that people will start buying it!
Just a thought...
var sig = function() { sig(); }
"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!!
Someone was first, with an item called the "iMac" 4.5 years ago...
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
Terrible device? Like the PS/2 port or parallel printers? We just got away from the ISA bus. How about the i386 instruction set? That's the real problem with PCs: they're an awfully old foundation on which to build anything.
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
Now I'll be honest that I haven't looked into whether or not USB solid state storage is standard across the board, but if they're doing away with floppies then I had better be able to boot from my USB pen/key/dongle storage device if & when needed by simply changing the boot order.
//ct
If I want/need to run some low level hardware diagnostics (IBM's Drive Fitness Test tool anyone?) or flash to a new BIOS revision or update the firmware on a SCSI controller - a floppy is basically the only way to go - especially with downloadable updates that REQUIRE you to create a floppy from them.
If the only way I can update these parts is by disassembling the now crippled machines & putting their components into a machine that does have a floppy to update them, then replace (x 250 machines...) - Dell can count on number of enterprise customers nixing them from the list of potential hardware vendors. Don't limit my options - period.
But that's just my opinion.
Can you boot off a pen drive?
I think this is the main point of a floppy these days isn't it? A backup boot method... Sure you can use bootable CD-roms, but what if your CD-writer is on the machine that got toasted?
Floppies and the drives that run them are simple, cheap, abundant, and effective for what they do. Until there is a replacement that is standard on all PC's, these should always be available.
Then I need another fairly common media you can use to bootup an OS with in cases of catastrophic failures. The retail CD? Yeah, works good as long as it solves my problem. When I need a custom CD, I'll then need to burn a bootable CD-R (actually, preferrably a CD-RW for these purposes) in a special program made to burn CD's. And I can't even write on it at boot time if I'd need to, since the BIOS doesn't contain CD-RW drivers.
What's the best cheap, boot-time writeable, removable, non-floppy media out there on the market anyway? A bonus if it's common, since that would make it easier to get.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
like, how am I going to boot to a prompt to flash a BIOS? I know dell can do away with floppies cause they probably have some CD boot flash program, but not the rest of us who build our own PCs.
From what I understand, this is often a difference in the drives rather than the media itself. Using preformatted media reduces the problem, but if you format a floppy on one machine, the alignment of its heads can impact the ability of another machine to read it.
The big problem I have with floppies (really the only since I hardly ever use them) is the way they essentially tie up a computer. They bring your system to a grinding halt while they are accessing.
That's an artifact of your OS.
Back in the early 90's OS/2 had no problems multitasking floopy I/O - I recall formating a few hundred floppies while doing other stuff, with absolutely no degredation in performance of other tasks.
I've only formatted a floppy once under XP, so I don't recall how it handled it. Win9x did not handle it well though, which is an artifact of still being built off of DOS.
I don't believe Linux or other Unix-based systems have issues multitasking the floppy.
I have no problem with the idea of abandoning the floppy disk, but good luck getting manufacturers to supply all their drivers on CD. I bought a USB2 card for my PowerMac last week and the driver still came on a floppy! Luckily I was able to copy the file from my PC over the network.
But I wouldn't want a machine without a floppy. They're cheap, easy to replace, and versatile; I can transfer data to and from a 10 year old machine without a hassle. True, such a situation doesn't occur often, but when it does I'm glad to have the floppy's versatility. Much of my file movement involves relatively small text files, for which floppies are optimal.
I want the floppy available when I need it, rather than buying external drives or following around with USB devices.
Last time I tried to install XP without a floppy drive in the system it would hang during the hardware detection (the quick one at the very begging of every NT/XP boot up sequence). The odd thing was it would boot/detect just fine if I enabled floppy support in the bios without attaching the floppy drive.
This sig is worse than my last.
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.
I think some people are missing the point. Dell isn't going to include floppy drives as a "standard" features. I say, so what. If you really want a floppy drive, and some people do, then have it installed extra. If you use a floppy boot disc on occasion, keep an extra floppy drive around to use for those rare times. But in my experience (and I am sure in most peoples) I haven't used a floppy drive in about ten years.
There seems to be some industry rule, that anything that works must be improved til it doesn't work any more!
Think about it..
Floppies retail cost anywhere from 15-20 bucks. So you're looking at about an extra $800 bucks in parts for all your PC's.
For $800 these days you can add a nice bit of hard disk space to your 40 clients. Prices have dropped around a dollar a gigabyte. You can also buy a decent backup system for around that price too to back them all up. Hell you can even get a pretty decent networked laserjet for that price.
Personally, I would much rather have more hard disk space or backup for the network than a floppy. I agree with Dell %100 on this issue.
The marketing synergies with Viagra are awe inspiring...
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"...
For the record, NT, 2k and XP have no issues multitasking with a floppy either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
iMacs sucked 'cos they dropped the floppy. There's nothing more irritating than using an iMac, Sparc , and now a Dell, and not being about to save your document to a floppy in a matter of seconds. Floppies are more convenient than a cd burner for the small jobs.
I don't mind if they will let me boot from the USB pen drive.
Raj
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.
Good job Dell?
Sorry but although the chances of a home user needing to rebuild a system, or boot off floppy for any reason are minimal. The cost of such device is that, that I question what they are trying to achieve.
How many virus programs request to have "images" placed onto disk? Emergency boot disks for OS's?
"Dude, You're not getting a floppy!"
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
I just don't understand this mentality of "let's get rid of it because it's old". Come on people, the keyboard is much older technology than the floppy drive. I don't hear anyone bitching about how we need to scrap that "ancient" technology.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and sure as hell don't throw it away!
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
...or at least that's what everybody said about the iMac four and a half years ago.
The only reason most people use floppy drives is A) because a driver or something comes on floppy, or B) an emergency boot disk for when the OS is hosed, C) making one of the above to be used in another machine, or D) transporting small files (Word documents) between computers.
A) is easily solved: the companies who currently ship floppies need to ship CDs instead. CDs are pretty cheap; this is not unreasonable. But, there's no motivation to do it as long as everyone has a floppy drive. Dell removing floppies (and others following suit) is a good motivator.
B) isn't an issue on new versions of Windows since it won't boot from a floppy anyway. PC users tend to forget that OS CDs are bootable!
C) is an issue for those of us with a 486 in the corner. Yes, I need a floppy drive in that machine, since it won't boot from CD. That's my only floppy drive, though.
D) can be done just as well (better!) with a USB keychain. Bigger capacity, and they work on nearly any computer. As far as I know, they're even bootable.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
The floppy issue is not a PC problem -- it's specific to the Windows disk scheduling system, and will probably never be fixed.
I can use floppies in my Linux box quite happily. It's just like another hard drive.
(Pet Peeve: that goddamn mechanical eject button *sucks*. Apple was smart enough not to use it, but it was devised in an age that didn't have enough memory to do buffered disk I/O, and it's a royal pain for those of us with OSes that can buffer up writes -- you *can* manually eject the thing w/o umounting it).
Mechanical ejects should only be used as an emergency measure...
Haven't seen what things are like in OS X (heck, may be hard to find an OS X system with a floppy), but I doubt things are that different from BSD -- probably works just fine too.
May we never see th
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
NT4.0 Server.
Ditching the floppy is a dumb idea.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
They are:
- small
- getting cheaper
- fast enough
- already being used on PDAs, digital cameras and other gadgets
The only downside is there are at least 5 types of them! (SD, MMC, MS, CF, SM). However there are already plenty of card readers in the market that accept all of them. Some of these devices can be installed into the 3.5" enclosures that are being used for floppy drives for now. So I think it is a reasonable replacement for floppy drives. I've even seen floppy drive + 6in1 card reader combo.
The successor to UDF is called Mt Ranier. It is supported by Linux but not (yet) by Windows, although most drives 24x and faster can handle it. It is a good thing, for it makes CD-RWs suck less.
Ahead software also makes UDF software for windows, as do Sony and NTI.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
by ct
No, you boot from CD. If you need to build a recovery boot disk, you burn an El Torito CD-R. Learn about it here. There are some great web tutorials on how to take a floppy image and make a bootable CD-R from them using free (beer) software on either Windows or *nix. USB is for sneakernet purposes, though, not booting. USB and aftermarket floppies are always available. They're just not going to be standard any more.by afidel
Last I checked, Dell's do.by Masem
I pay ~$0.10 per CDR, or $1.00 for a CD-RW. How much are you paying for your floppies? And you say "most drivers can fit on to one floppy"... you can fit ALL your drivers on one CD if you burn at once, or burn one-at-a-time about a dozen times (1MB for the driver + 50MB overhead per session). And if you're using CD-RW, this is a total nonissue. Either way, I don't see why this is worse than a floppy.Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.
Do you have any idea what the margins are on a PC? OEMs like Dell literally agonize over pennies, I've watched it.by The Bungi
CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.
What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.
by Auckerman
Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).
by BWJones
The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).
--dan
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Anyone with an ASUS A7V-266 board knows how anoying it is to bootup especially if you're using ATA-1xx.
Could somebody explain to me why this has not been done?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Despite the continuous criticism of Apple and that they should just go away, once again Michael Dell follows in the "beleaguered" company's footsteps. When Apple did this, everyone called them crazy--Dell does it and the story is completely different.
Vote Quimby.
A Win9x trick.
Format the floppy in a DOS prompt, and you can still multitask fine.
There is nothing you can do with a floppy disk that you can't theoretically do with a cd
How about writing to them on the cheapest computers? The most inexpensive PCs still come with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
How about writing to them while listening to an audio disc? Most computers have only one CD drive.
How about booting from them on old computers? Many old computers' BIOS don't support booting from a CD-ROM drive.
How about making a bootable CD at all? When Roxio Easy CD Creator 4 makes an El Torito boot image, it does the equivalent of a 1440 KB 'dd' from drive A:. I don't know how other tools for Windows work because I haven't bought them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
1) It's the size stupid, when it's not large enough to hold the DOS help file!
2) Dell and other users finally realized that Microsoft is NOT going to let them make their own boot disk, have XP?, just try!
3) Dell needs the space to power Intels CPU, while Microsoft OS drains every milliamp of current with XP hard drive memory paging and other intersting OS background task.
My real comment is why it takes the PC world soooo long on things that are sooooo obvious. Next Dell will add slot load CD/DVD/RW/DVD-RW-R drives, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth connectivity, all without pulling your arm out of socket.......No really this story is silly.
Barry
.....Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even, Up The Ante.....
I hate floppies. I am responible for mataining over 300 PCs for one department at a university. Each semseter I have to replace 30 to 40 floppies because students shove their disks in without regard for the drive. The metal flap always falls off and damages the head. Or the student complains that their floppy works at home but here. Starting at the end of summer 2002 I removed the floppies from all department labs. I put in 250 MB zip drives. The students and faculty complained. I told them to use the zip drive, most were already using the zip drive because the assignments are too large to fit on floppies any more. I also suggested they purchase one of the mini usb drives (the diskonkey stuff works nice). They come in 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB models and they are cheaper than having to buy an expensive zip drive and expensive media. Plus all of our PCs have front mounted USB ports. I am planning on replacing 1 lab of PCs with Wyse thin clients, if Wyse ever gets around to releaseing a thin client that can support a zip drive. I hear Wyse is going to release a thin client this year that has front mounted usb ports. I am eagerly waiting for this. Now if only they would get rid of the serial and parallel ports I would happier.
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
Got to transfer a small file? email it
Transfer something bigger? Burn a CD
Or even use your LAN/WAN/WLAN, whatever.
Basically floppy disks are dead when it comes to file transfer.
What's this I hear about flashing your BIOS? Last time I did a firmware update on my iMac I dowloaded the file, ran the program, rebooted & held down the "programming" button on the side.
Quick easy and painless.
What the big problem with PC mobo makers that they can't get their head's around this?
If Dell ditch floppies then maybe they'll be forced to devise a better method.
Legacy technology in general:
Rather than tying up modern systems with legacy technology such as floppy drives and Serial, PS/2, and Parallel Ports, I think it's good that OEMs like DELL are making them non-standard. Odds are, if you need those ports/drives, you will buy the appropriate expansion card/drive to add the ports/drives to your system.
USB:
Modern commercial OSes like MacOS X and Windows XP have no problems with modern USB devices, thanks to better driver signing and more experience on the part of hardware makers with learning all the inner workings USB's specs (both 1.0 and 2.0). It took a while for USB to mature, and it will continue to do so.
Odds are, if you're experiencing a problem with USB, it's either the device or your OS is not modern enough.
Floppy Drives:
No Windows XP user needs a boot floppy when they can easily boot with their XP CD-ROM and run diagnostics, etc. from the Recovery Console.
Even the MacOS X CD has bootable recovery utilities on it.
All I use my floppy drive for is for the rare time I get paranoid enough to update my machine's ERD. But usually when my system volume goes bad, I just reinstall the OS from scratch.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
You had fingers and a cupboard?
We had to write on crushed glass, with our eyeballs! And we liked it!
Pfft, fingers...
If you use a RAID controller for connecting your harddisk(s) then you cannot install Win2000 or WinXP without a floppy containing the RAID drivers.
I've still got one running in my dads old win98 machine. He has no idea why its "different", he uses floppys all the time, while I use the 120meg disks to backup his work once and a while.
It WAS slow for large files, Imation released a firmware fix for this, which was only available if you bought new 120 disks for it, never did get them myself.
If only the drive was a little cheaper..... who knows.....
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 -
Apple dropped the floppy five years ago. The whole industry predicted that either it would kill Apple, or they'd have floppy drives back in the very next generation of machines.
Neither happened. Life went on, because the floppy really was archaic and outdated; alternatives really did exist.
Now, granted, these were Macs, which have just about always had much better hardware/software integration than five years previous. As a Mac user myself, this argument of "but what about machines which don't boot off of USB or Firewire?" looks utterly absurd, because, well, why the hell aren't these machines capable of booting off of it? Or this bit about "How can the average user make bootable CD's?"; why the hell should making bootable CD's be so difficult that the average user can't do it?
Maybe it's just that I come from a Mac background, where things Just Work. But honestly, it sounds like the only reasons to keep the floppy around on the PC would be dealing with fundamental flaws in the PC's architecture. Then again, it's rather ironic that Dell uses a "you wouldn't use a processor that was 15 years old" when they use an outdated architecture that's even older, so maybe there's something to that. A blind insistence on pack-ratting old technologies, maybe, at the expense of advancement?
Like in DOS/Windows:Buffered:I prefer the buffered variant. You still have to unmount it in any case, and when you do things like customizing floppy distributions being able to add/delete files, some of which might not fit, without a delay can be very nice.
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
The floppy drive is quite possibly the one component inside a computer that most users trust the most.
They've been around for many a year, and imho, many people would be reluctant to see them go - three months ago I wired my mum's computer onto Tim-Net (my home network and information control system) and she still believes in sneakernet as opposed to drag and drop through shared directories.
It's a real pity that LS-120 drives never caught on. These drives could read floppy disks (Unlike ZIP) in addition to their own 120 MB magneto-optical disks.
You know what I want? Cheap, reliable 8 MB disks. I don't need any more than that to carry my work and class documents on. Most of the hype today is on cramming as much information onto the smallest space possible and then charging $40+ *PER CARD*. Disks that pop in and out quickly, won't scratch, that will fit in a pocket and cost 50 cents to replace. It could be done and I believe that there is a large market for it. The people with the patents and the money to do it, however, don't seem to have the vision.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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
I don't want anybody accessing my floppy drive except me. You're talking crazy talk. You're crazy!
Of course, I wouldn't buy a Dell anyway. They are badly overpriced. At least once a year at work we get an offer for "a great deal from Dell, at the company rate," that's still way over market value for an equivalent machine, same components, from any other reputable manufacturer.
And I've heard the "but the support!" line, too - that doesn't wash. If you know nothing about computers and need help making it work at all, OK. Pay the money. But if you think you need to pay Dell prices in order to have hardware support, then the hardware had better fail a lot. In which case you should choose a different brand.
Here's a fine example: our (big, major, worldwide) company has a contract with Dell. Lots and lots of money for Dell. A 20 gig drive (where did they even find drives that small in 2002?) went bad within 6 months of installation; Dell didn't want to believe it, and our IT department (or at least Lt. Nimrod, the MSCE dingus) said "it's probably just a software problem." OK; so MSCE school teaches you that "no boot device" is a software problem. In an indirect way, I suppose; the hard disk failed, so the BIOS could not find the boot software; yep, that's sort of a software problem. Can't find the freakin' software! That's why I call him Nimrod. Couldn't even script his way out of a paper bag, and the bugger ain't smart enough to carry a knife either. Prepubescent scum.
So Dell and Nimrod insisted that we run ScanDisk. We did this several times over the span of one and a half weeks; every time it took hours, finding countless lost fragments and bad sectors. We lost over a thousand dollars of one man's work (in man-hours; data corrupted when the disk crashed without warning), we fell behind schedule - on a government contract, mind you - all for a measly 20 gig hard drive that must have been worth less than $50 US. Finally, Dell agreed to replace it, but only AFTER we sent the DEAD DRIVE to them!
At knifepoint, Nimrod agreed to take a new 40 gig drive from one of the dozens that had been sitting unused on pallets this whole time, and put it in my employee's machine so we could get on with supplying our government with the things it needs.
Oh, how I hate self-important Nimrods and the companies they let badger them. Obviously, I feel somewhat differently about being the badger. Rrrrr.
The nice thing about the Nimrods is, if you see them in person, there is the potential for intimidation. You can forget that with Dell Hell. This is not Nice Mike Dell in his dorm room anymore.
Oh yes, that service. Well worth the extra $$$$$.
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein
I'm a helpdesk worker at a small midwestern college, and all I can say is: Good.
A few weeks ago, a graduate student came up to me in tears because she was saving her portfolio - at least two year's work on a floppy disk, and all of a sudden it just refused to read it. The disk had gone bad, and she didn't have any backups. I know it was silly of her to not back something like that up, but not everyone is computer literate, and not everyone knows that floppies are one of the most unstable forms of storage media out there.
In fact, it seems every week someone comes or calls me to magically fix their disk which has their twenty page Shakespeare paper or their proof positive of cold fusion. All I can do is try to use it on the three computers here, and if that doesn't work, say "Sorry, you're out of luck. Use the handy network drive we provide you with next time."
It kills me every time I have to say that.
Not a whole lot of people at this college are computer literate, and many don't know how easily disks can go bad. That's not their fault... I'd say it's high time to ditch the floppy, given with how user friendly CD burners have become, especially in regards to how seamlessly they are integrated into XP.
Think about this. One CD has the capacity of 500 floppies. Now think about how much even a pack of 10 floppies costs when compared to that one CD.
It's high time that we give the floppy its death knell.