At this level what matters is absolute cost to give away the odd floppy, not relative, and there's really no appreciable difference between 15p and 24p. But it does become relevant once you have to think about losing a few quid per USB key.
Of course, you could go for a Verbatim pack of 10 floppies at £1.40.
Knock a zero off that because there's a whopping great overhead of 13-20 MB per session
0. Everyone I work with has an internal or USB floppy drive. What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
1. How many hard drives have you spun up and read from successfully after 20+ years ("decades") of being powered off?
2. Agreed on 5.25" vs 3.5". But what were people with lab access doing as recently as 15 years ago keeping their only copy of data on floppy? It's obviously much less suitable as a day-to-day storage medium than even the cheap USB sticks, and I'd not claim otherwise. I'd anticpate the same sort of issues if people stored their data only on CD-RWs in their pockets.
3. Straight USB floppy BIOS support has IME been better than USB mass storage boot, i.e. copying a primary bootloader to the floppy etc. So I'll plug an external drive in if needed.
Agreed on the reason for the lack of predominant standard replacement - good summary. A good quality CD-R might cost about the same as a floppy disc today, although I can't stand the physical waste of using one (even with old magazine cover floppies people got to know which used good enough media to blank and repurpose). Perhaps I should see a CD-R as a floppy reusable about 400 times - if only all drives+operating systems did.
Wait, what? Unlike decent bus standards, and ignoring occasional "On-The-Go" support, USB still has a "one host, many devices" philosophy. Your phone usually isn't able to act as a USB host, even if the internal chipset has pins to support it. And even then, it probably doesn't have a type A socket. It may support SD, not to be confused with mini-SD, not to be confused with micro-SD, or some variant of some form factor or electrical standard which might just happen to coincide with what you have the equipment to write to, of course.
As for computers with floppy disk drives - yes, back at the office/wherever, pretty much. I give you something now to deal with when you're ready (a much more efficient way of living than expecting you to deal with it right now, fwiw).
Sure some may be readable but I'd say 8 out of 10 floppies i've formatted in the past 5 years have failed with read/write errors.
They might not make floppies like they used to, but your drive is probably bad. This is certainly going to happen if you have an unmaintained drive which you suddenly put into service after a decade of dust-gathering.
Now I've got CD-Rs from 1999 that are still readable. I've got about 300 CD-Rs from that period and only one has had issues and I was able to restore it eventually.
Then you are very lucky, especially if you're reading on a different drive. Although a good quality CD-R from that period is like a good quality early floppy, in that it's before manufacturers tried everything to cut corners, and it doesn't degrade like rewriteable optical media.
Yes, I use(d) DVD-RAM internally precisely for its "large floppy" rewriteability. But not all drives support it and the discs aren't cheap.
El Torito works absolutely fine if your burn is good enough for the drive and the unforgiving BIOS you're throwing the medium in, and if your burning tool, BIOS and bootloader are in agreement. You're better off with good +-R than +-RW for reliability, of course, but as well as waiting for the burn you have the physical wastage.
As the AC above implied, the full replacement will probably end up being small USB keys (although I wish SD slots had just become standard) at the price of a floppy. Eventually. Perhaps.
1. Give-away-able - if I want to give someone a file, I can hand them a floppy with it on. No, not every circumstance involves having Internet access and not every document should be sent across the tubes. Nor does everyone who I want to give something to necessarily have a computer on them for me to slot my USB key into.
2. Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable. Can't say the same for hard drives, and certainly not so for CDs/DVDs a few years old. IME a floppy is much likely to be readable in any floppy drive than a CD/DVD in a random CD/DVD drive, too.
3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
3. Everything boots from them. USB booting seems to be hit and miss on many motherboards, and software to support USB booting is more scarce.
Precisely. In fact, with Google for Domains etc., they know well how profitable this link spam is. Hell, 10 people employed 8 hours a day flagging sites would tackle the vast majority of repeated and obvious search engine spammers. But then Google would have to admit that they haven't refined interesting algorithms since the '90s, and might have to give actual work to the 2nd rate PhDs they hire to twiddle their thumbs.
That widget definitely a point for '95 over 3.1, and TBH straight '95 (or, similarly, NT 4) isn't bad and maybe I shouldn't have gone as far back as expressing preference for 3.1 (classic Mac OS, OTOH, <3). But, like all modern UIs, there's a lack of uniformity: why aren't all lists appearing in various forms in the UI headered and why can't I always sort by clicking the header?
There are people who use what works, and there are people who hawk tech for the sake of it. I don't bitch that my house is 100s of years old, or that the trees at the back of my garden are decades old, or that some of my furniture was built in Empire Asia, or that the workhorse car is a decade old, or that my landline telephone is 15 years old, or that my mouse is 8 years old, or that some of the medications in my cabinet were formulated half a century ago or that the general coverage receiver on my desk was built in the '80s... you know why?
They're all good shit which does the job and lasts.
And I couldn't give a fuck if you want to sell me some second rate mass market junk which will be shinier on the surface but be built to last a tenth as long and not do the actual job nearly as well.
BTW, have you actually tried to develop hardware for the Linux kernel? Something driven on OS/2 15 years ago works on OS/2 today. But Linux has this perpetual habit of changing the API with the excuse that someone will be available to update and recompile driver source. So, unless you're planning to hire some guy to maintain all custom hardware drivers, a Linux install will be quickly behind the state of the art in features and security.
The airspace belongs to the people. The airlines get to use the airspace with the permission of the people. The government represents the people. If you don't like it, establish a sovereign nation and treaties with international air travel authorities to do what you want as high as you like over your land.
If you think that being stuck in a safe first world country for a few days is problematic, you are far too sheltered. You took the risk to fly there for profit or pleasure, and no-one owes you a guaranteed safe passage anywhere. Notice that big blue expanse? Or those two parallel lines leading you out of Europe? If you wanted to take the initiative instead of bitching, you could have been anywhere on earth within a few days. But it's far easier to believe someone else is responsible and sit back while they fix your problem.
On the matter of 11/9, living in Britain near London I've survived the decades of pIRA attacks. We evacuated the area and returned within a few hours each time. The whole city was never closed for 3 days because we didn't have an irrational fear of potential unpredictable harm, whereas we know fairly well the action of ash in a jet engine and on cockpit glass.
Am I the only person in the world to prefer the UI of classic Mac OS and Windows 3.1 to the shiny of Windows 95 / Vista (bleugh) / OS X (arghgh) ? I like clean simplicity, not decorations which distract me from using and enjoying the machine. Oh, and there's nothing enjoyable about a textured close button.
1. One random web site claiming to be X is not necessarily representative of all people claiming to be X, or even one other person claiming to be X;
2. One random threat on the Internet is about as scary as any other;
3. But it makes great publicity for TP/MS/CC to pretend that (1) and (2) are false;
4. It makes even more sense for TP/MS to disclaim responsibility for the response to the threat (the Man's keeping us down, man!) - if they really weren't happy on principle, they wouldn't provide episodes, but I don't see them putting principle above contract fees;
And finally:
5. Strong free speech, the same sort of free speech which allows SP to libel and mock daily, includes the right to make threats, as long as those threats aren't carried out. What gives you the right to decide that the threat is any less parody than the libel, petty censor?
I did use the words “in many situations”, didn’t I?
Yes - but "many" comes down to "one", and it's not even about having to physically accept the money: you just can't otherwise enforce a debt if you've refused the debtor's offer to pay by legal tender.
But anyway, the nasty side of legal tender is that usually it’s the only thing accepted for paying taxes.
Indeed, you're not going to eliminate your tax burden, but it's your responsibility to creatively account your way to minimising the declared equivalent US currency value of your trades. People do this all the time when they exchange favours on every scale.
You do realise that you are welcome to trade only with currency that you consider valid, and to only trade with those who have the same opinion as you, yes?
once you have this authenticated external channel (e.g someone giving you data in person) then eavesdropping in the middle of the line becomes physically impossible.
Erm, part of the key quantum key setup process requires a classical channel after transmission in order to exchange information about the quantum bits which were just sent. This isn't just about some password being whispered in advance. If you're talking about some other algorithm, e.g. for general secured data transfer, could you give more specifics?
Regardless, classical crypto is about the strength of encryption, and cares little for people reading ciphertext. The quantum crypto promise is of a totally different flavour, promising physical obscurity. If its response is "well of course we can only guarantee that Eve is not intercepting once we have guaranteed that Eve is not intercepting!" then, etc.
If you distribute the one time pad securely over the quantum channel and then encrypt the secondary channel with the one time pad, then it is secure.
If you're not sure of the security of the initial send of the one time pad (and you need the classical channel to be sure of it, don't you?), you ought not to use the pad for encrypting further communication. And if you are sure of the security of the initial send, why haven't you gone straight to sending your message by this method?
(1) Neither of your scenarios covers the case where both the quantum and the secondary channel are created by Eve, not just the secondary channel;
(2) How is the relationship between quantum and classical channels informed to Bob by Alice?
(3) If your solution is to transport a one time pad at some earlier point "by some other means", then you're copping out twice over, as now we need another classical channel to transmit one time pads long enough for message exchanges.
The secondary classical channel verifies the integrity of the quantum channel. How are we assured of the integrity of the classical channel? We're back to the same weak point we had in the first place: the integrity of a classical channel. If that's insecure, then there's no hope of being assured that both quantum and classical channels aren't being created by Eve. Unless I'm missing something, but it hasn't been pointed out to me yet.
Your one-time pad distribution problem comes down to the same thing. Every practical implementation of quantum transmission lines relies on a classical transmission line in some way.
And howd'ja verify the integrity of your transmission? In a possibly equivalent formulation, Bob, how do you make sure Alice is the source of your channels, not Eve?
If you were to stretch your mind beyond the subject, you'd see I was actually complaining about a fundamental problem with setting up a practical quantum transmission line.
Slashdot Mirror
So CD-Rs are appreciably cheaper per disk
At this level what matters is absolute cost to give away the odd floppy, not relative, and there's really no appreciable difference between 15p and 24p. But it does become relevant once you have to think about losing a few quid per USB key.
Of course, you could go for a Verbatim pack of 10 floppies at £1.40.
Knock a zero off that because there's a whopping great overhead of 13-20 MB per session
With packet writing?
Or, it seems to indicate that Slashdot is full of Apple users.
0. Everyone I work with has an internal or USB floppy drive. What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
1. How many hard drives have you spun up and read from successfully after 20+ years ("decades") of being powered off?
2. Agreed on 5.25" vs 3.5". But what were people with lab access doing as recently as 15 years ago keeping their only copy of data on floppy? It's obviously much less suitable as a day-to-day storage medium than even the cheap USB sticks, and I'd not claim otherwise. I'd anticpate the same sort of issues if people stored their data only on CD-RWs in their pockets.
3. Straight USB floppy BIOS support has IME been better than USB mass storage boot, i.e. copying a primary bootloader to the floppy etc. So I'll plug an external drive in if needed.
Agreed on the reason for the lack of predominant standard replacement - good summary. A good quality CD-R might cost about the same as a floppy disc today, although I can't stand the physical waste of using one (even with old magazine cover floppies people got to know which used good enough media to blank and repurpose). Perhaps I should see a CD-R as a floppy reusable about 400 times - if only all drives+operating systems did.
Wait, what? Unlike decent bus standards, and ignoring occasional "On-The-Go" support, USB still has a "one host, many devices" philosophy. Your phone usually isn't able to act as a USB host, even if the internal chipset has pins to support it. And even then, it probably doesn't have a type A socket. It may support SD, not to be confused with mini-SD, not to be confused with micro-SD, or some variant of some form factor or electrical standard which might just happen to coincide with what you have the equipment to write to, of course.
As for computers with floppy disk drives - yes, back at the office/wherever, pretty much. I give you something now to deal with when you're ready (a much more efficient way of living than expecting you to deal with it right now, fwiw).
Sure some may be readable but I'd say 8 out of 10 floppies i've formatted in the past 5 years have failed with read/write errors.
They might not make floppies like they used to, but your drive is probably bad. This is certainly going to happen if you have an unmaintained drive which you suddenly put into service after a decade of dust-gathering.
Now I've got CD-Rs from 1999 that are still readable. I've got about 300 CD-Rs from that period and only one has had issues and I was able to restore it eventually.
Then you are very lucky, especially if you're reading on a different drive. Although a good quality CD-R from that period is like a good quality early floppy, in that it's before manufacturers tried everything to cut corners, and it doesn't degrade like rewriteable optical media.
Yes, I use(d) DVD-RAM internally precisely for its "large floppy" rewriteability. But not all drives support it and the discs aren't cheap.
El Torito works absolutely fine if your burn is good enough for the drive and the unforgiving BIOS you're throwing the medium in, and if your burning tool, BIOS and bootloader are in agreement. You're better off with good +-R than +-RW for reliability, of course, but as well as waiting for the burn you have the physical wastage.
As the AC above implied, the full replacement will probably end up being small USB keys (although I wish SD slots had just become standard) at the price of a floppy. Eventually. Perhaps.
In before, "They have 4s now, grandad."
Dammit.
Reasons I like floppies:
1. Give-away-able - if I want to give someone a file, I can hand them a floppy with it on. No, not every circumstance involves having Internet access and not every document should be sent across the tubes. Nor does everyone who I want to give something to necessarily have a computer on them for me to slot my USB key into.
2. Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable. Can't say the same for hard drives, and certainly not so for CDs/DVDs a few years old. IME a floppy is much likely to be readable in any floppy drive than a CD/DVD in a random CD/DVD drive, too.
3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
3. Everything boots from them. USB booting seems to be hit and miss on many motherboards, and software to support USB booting is more scarce.
Precisely. In fact, with Google for Domains etc., they know well how profitable this link spam is. Hell, 10 people employed 8 hours a day flagging sites would tackle the vast majority of repeated and obvious search engine spammers. But then Google would have to admit that they haven't refined interesting algorithms since the '90s, and might have to give actual work to the 2nd rate PhDs they hire to twiddle their thumbs.
That widget definitely a point for '95 over 3.1, and TBH straight '95 (or, similarly, NT 4) isn't bad and maybe I shouldn't have gone as far back as expressing preference for 3.1 (classic Mac OS, OTOH, <3). But, like all modern UIs, there's a lack of uniformity: why aren't all lists appearing in various forms in the UI headered and why can't I always sort by clicking the header?
There are people who use what works, and there are people who hawk tech for the sake of it. I don't bitch that my house is 100s of years old, or that the trees at the back of my garden are decades old, or that some of my furniture was built in Empire Asia, or that the workhorse car is a decade old, or that my landline telephone is 15 years old, or that my mouse is 8 years old, or that some of the medications in my cabinet were formulated half a century ago or that the general coverage receiver on my desk was built in the '80s... you know why?
They're all good shit which does the job and lasts.
And I couldn't give a fuck if you want to sell me some second rate mass market junk which will be shinier on the surface but be built to last a tenth as long and not do the actual job nearly as well.
BTW, have you actually tried to develop hardware for the Linux kernel? Something driven on OS/2 15 years ago works on OS/2 today. But Linux has this perpetual habit of changing the API with the excuse that someone will be available to update and recompile driver source. So, unless you're planning to hire some guy to maintain all custom hardware drivers, a Linux install will be quickly behind the state of the art in features and security.
The airspace belongs to the people. The airlines get to use the airspace with the permission of the people. The government represents the people. If you don't like it, establish a sovereign nation and treaties with international air travel authorities to do what you want as high as you like over your land.
If you think that being stuck in a safe first world country for a few days is problematic, you are far too sheltered. You took the risk to fly there for profit or pleasure, and no-one owes you a guaranteed safe passage anywhere. Notice that big blue expanse? Or those two parallel lines leading you out of Europe? If you wanted to take the initiative instead of bitching, you could have been anywhere on earth within a few days. But it's far easier to believe someone else is responsible and sit back while they fix your problem.
On the matter of 11/9, living in Britain near London I've survived the decades of pIRA attacks. We evacuated the area and returned within a few hours each time. The whole city was never closed for 3 days because we didn't have an irrational fear of potential unpredictable harm, whereas we know fairly well the action of ash in a jet engine and on cockpit glass.
Am I the only person in the world to prefer the UI of classic Mac OS and Windows 3.1 to the shiny of Windows 95 / Vista (bleugh) / OS X (arghgh) ? I like clean simplicity, not decorations which distract me from using and enjoying the machine. Oh, and there's nothing enjoyable about a textured close button.
1. One random web site claiming to be X is not necessarily representative of all people claiming to be X, or even one other person claiming to be X;
2. One random threat on the Internet is about as scary as any other;
3. But it makes great publicity for TP/MS/CC to pretend that (1) and (2) are false;
4. It makes even more sense for TP/MS to disclaim responsibility for the response to the threat (the Man's keeping us down, man!) - if they really weren't happy on principle, they wouldn't provide episodes, but I don't see them putting principle above contract fees;
And finally:
5. Strong free speech, the same sort of free speech which allows SP to libel and mock daily, includes the right to make threats, as long as those threats aren't carried out. What gives you the right to decide that the threat is any less parody than the libel, petty censor?
I did use the words “in many situations”, didn’t I?
Yes - but "many" comes down to "one", and it's not even about having to physically accept the money: you just can't otherwise enforce a debt if you've refused the debtor's offer to pay by legal tender.
But anyway, the nasty side of legal tender is that usually it’s the only thing accepted for paying taxes.
Indeed, you're not going to eliminate your tax burden, but it's your responsibility to creatively account your way to minimising the declared equivalent US currency value of your trades. People do this all the time when they exchange favours on every scale.
Um, no, unless you're talking about repayment of debt. Even then, it's not a problem if you only trade with those who agree with you.
I have a pen here. I'll give it to you if you give me your house. There's no way that means I have to accept the cash value of your house.
You do realise that you are welcome to trade only with currency that you consider valid, and to only trade with those who have the same opinion as you, yes?
once you have this authenticated external channel (e.g someone giving you data in person) then eavesdropping in the middle of the line becomes physically impossible.
Erm, part of the key quantum key setup process requires a classical channel after transmission in order to exchange information about the quantum bits which were just sent. This isn't just about some password being whispered in advance. If you're talking about some other algorithm, e.g. for general secured data transfer, could you give more specifics?
Regardless, classical crypto is about the strength of encryption, and cares little for people reading ciphertext. The quantum crypto promise is of a totally different flavour, promising physical obscurity. If its response is "well of course we can only guarantee that Eve is not intercepting once we have guaranteed that Eve is not intercepting!" then, etc.
If you distribute the one time pad securely over the quantum channel and then encrypt the secondary channel with the one time pad, then it is secure.
If you're not sure of the security of the initial send of the one time pad (and you need the classical channel to be sure of it, don't you?), you ought not to use the pad for encrypting further communication. And if you are sure of the security of the initial send, why haven't you gone straight to sending your message by this method?
(1) Neither of your scenarios covers the case where both the quantum and the secondary channel are created by Eve, not just the secondary channel;
(2) How is the relationship between quantum and classical channels informed to Bob by Alice?
(3) If your solution is to transport a one time pad at some earlier point "by some other means", then you're copping out twice over, as now we need another classical channel to transmit one time pads long enough for message exchanges.
The secondary classical channel verifies the integrity of the quantum channel. How are we assured of the integrity of the classical channel? We're back to the same weak point we had in the first place: the integrity of a classical channel. If that's insecure, then there's no hope of being assured that both quantum and classical channels aren't being created by Eve. Unless I'm missing something, but it hasn't been pointed out to me yet.
Your one-time pad distribution problem comes down to the same thing. Every practical implementation of quantum transmission lines relies on a classical transmission line in some way.
And howd'ja verify the integrity of your transmission? In a possibly equivalent formulation, Bob, how do you make sure Alice is the source of your channels, not Eve?
If you were to stretch your mind beyond the subject, you'd see I was actually complaining about a fundamental problem with setting up a practical quantum transmission line.
So, do we still need the magic secondary channel which everyone doing transfers over this "theoretically perfect" channel conveniently forgets?