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The Death of the Floppy Disk
vook writes "Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
And sum up the top three posts to appear in this article:
1. Duh!
2. Nuh-uh!
3. So what?
Cheap USB flash drives are the true successors to floppies. Before their emergence, the only options people had were CD-R and CD-RWs. But the technology still wasn't yet as cheap as floppies, but they could hold vastly more and not everyone had the hardware. By the time they became somewhat cheap enough and plentiful enough, USB drives started appearing.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and one thing that has hastened the death of floppies is rise of larger file formats. When floppies were popular, most people transported documents, spreadsheets, and some data around. These days people need to share mp3s, mpegs, and very large files. Computer programs also have grown in size. Remember when Windows installations could be measured in MBs instead of GBs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
This is true, but only because Micrsoft's programmers are lazy or didn't know what they were doing. I've run into this problem with installing one of our servers. Had to use the silly floppy drive. The setup program for Windows XP itself is severly FLAWED. It actually says load drivers in drive A: and gives you absoletly no choice. Maybe there was a work around, I'd have to search through Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
If I buy a piece of hardware and it comes with a driver disket I'll just throw it in the trash and immediatly go to the manufactures website and get new drivers.