The 100MB+ formats were never really ubiquitous enough to fit into the same class as floppies. You couldn't, for instance, take a zip disk to a stranger and be confident that he will have a drive to read it in.
This is one of the reasons floppy disks were so ubiquitous for so long; even though they only held 1.4MB, everyone had one. If flash media weren't so varied, maybe it would be ubiquitous now too.
I remember those "word processor" machines used their own weird floppies, but that's about it.
I don't seem to remember anything other than 5.25" and 3.5" floppies in the mainstream computing world. I know there were some weird formats, but weren't they all used by niche players? (Apple Lisa, those silly word processors, etc.)
I actually feel that FAT (the msdos filesystem) is a great filesystem for small removeable media.
It's simple, and unlikely to get seriously corrupted when media is rudely removed.
It's universal; every OS seems to support it.
It supports enough features to make it useful. Long filenames, directory trees, etc.
It's efficient; it doesn't waste a lot of space on very small media.
It may have come from Microsoft, but it's an extremely stable and robust filesystem that is very well understood, and will probably be the de-facto standard for many years.
As for Mac and PC format floppies, this is not really the issue I was getting it. Macs and PC's used different filesystems on floppies, but the media itself was exactly the same. This is not the case with the multitude of flash memory formats out there.
Uggh. This is why I hate the state of the mobile device industry right there. There are four major kinds of flash media, all incompatible with each other. Rather than come up with innovative devices that all use the same media (compactflash would have been a good choice since it was the first, and arguably the most open), the companies decided to all come up with their own formats and compete in this space.
Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other? Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right? Well, that's what's happening in the industry right now with flash media. SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, this is not only inconvenient but it's probably confusing as heck to the non-computer literate.
My entire PowerBook G4, hard drive and all, consumes around that much. You obviously mean full size 3.5" hard drives... Have you considered laptop drives?
Not sure how standard it is, but many Cisco switches support Inline Power, which is used by their Voice-Over-IP Phones. We deal with this constantly where I work.
It can be annoying because if you want to run several phones on one drop, they need power supplies if you don't want to use an expensive inline power capable switch.
The big problem is that some movie studios (*cough* Disney *cough*) might find it profitable to ONLY offer their movies in this crappy expiring format, and not allow people to buy permanent copies of them. This would lead to a reduction in the availability of real DVD's, and hardcore fans of certain movies may not be able to obtain them in a permanent format.
When DIVX (pay per view video system) was being developed, a few companies, Disney included, were going to offer "DIVX exclusive" movies. Who says they're not going to try the same thing again with this format?
Let's just hope this doesn't catch on. At least if it does, we can still copy the discs, but it will be annoying to live in a world where you have to be a pirate to have a permanent working copy of your favorite flick.
I periodically read a few usenet groups and there is still a large usenet community that regularly uses it. In fact, some of the groups I read have so much traffic (NOT spam) that I have trouble keeping up with them.
Try actually looking on usenet instead of spouting off false statements like that.
Thank you. I was waiting for someone to say this. I've found countless songs by looking for lyric snippets. I don't see how people posting lyrics online hurts the MPAA in anyway.
They're just a bunch of troublecausing greedy bastards. I don't think I'm ever going to buy a CD again.
There's a character in the Suburban Jungle comic strip named Dover that speaks in code. It's pretty funny, though you have to go back into the archives to see him as he hasn't appeared much lately.
What's funny is way back in elementary school I tried doing it for a bit in computer class. The other kids didn't find it funny for some reason! }:)
Knowing where all fifty states are is not knowledge that you need in everyday life, hence most people won't remember it for long after the test they were given on it back in high school.
It's silly to expect people to memorize information they don't use on a daily basis.
I'm proud of Bellsouth. They actually encourage NAT to the point that:
Their router supports NAT out of the box
They mention in the documentation that comes with the self setup package that you can connect up to four machines.
If other ISP's were as clued in as Bellsouth seems to be, the world would be a happier place.
Also, Bellsouth uses PPPoE, but their DSL modems have a built in PPPoE client so that the end machines don't have to deal with it! How's that for convenience?
Not to plug them, but I'm just surprised some ISP's are being such assholes when a big telco like Bellsouth is being so open and flexible.
Speaking of The Lion King, I saw this in IMAX, and it was mind blowingly beautiful. Luckily, all the animation in that movie was in Disney's vector-based computer animation format, so all they had to do was scale it up and clean it a little.
Also, it was shown in its proper aspect ratio; you could see "black bars" at the top and bottom of the huge IMAX screen. Of course, they're a lot less noticeable than black bars in a letterboxed DVD, since the image is already so huge it still fills your field of view.
Hopefully whatever process they use to blow up the Matrix movies to IMAX will look good, because they don't have vector-based drawings they can just render bigger. }:)
A normal telephone call, at least in the united states, is carried on a 64Kbps channel. IE, the sound is sampled, converted into a 64Kbps bit stream that is sent through the network to the other end, where it is converted back into an analog stream.
This makes it impossible to cram more than 64Kbps into a phone call. Sure, you can compress the data, but once data is already compressed (as images, movies, and other things people usually want fat bandwidth for), it can't be compressed anymore.
Unless they dramatically change the analog phone network, which won't happen, this is a pipe dream. Sorry guys.
I for one happen to love X11's method of copy & paste. It's so much faster and more convenient than under windows. I like being able to simply select something in one window, then middle-click it into another window without having to enter additional keystrokes or menu commands.
Whenever I'm on a windows box, I groan at having to manually copy after selecting, and not being able to paste with one mouse click.
Remember one person's UI annoyance is another person's UI bliss. }:) That's why we'll never agree!
Much lighter, so you don't need a really strong desk for a 21" display
Pretty much the only downside to flatpanels are their slow response time and limited view angle, but that has improved so considerably lately that it's not really a problem anymore.
Here's what annoys me.. Finding laptops with screens 15-16" or so that do 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 is trivial, but it's almost impossible to find a desktop flat panel that does 1600x1200 at much larger screen sizes!
Who needs 1920x1200 on a 15" screen? yet we have to put up with 1280x1024 on 19" screens on the desktop...
Where I work, nearly all the grad students mispell "drive" as "driver". Frequently we see trouble tickets like:
My floppy driver isn't working Need CD-ROM driver
It's such a common typo, it hardly stands out anymore. I guess when someone types "driver" very often, after typing "drive" the finger tends to move over to where the R is, subconsciously...
I feel I must mention this because it's something a lot of people forget...
Make sure your binoculars have a tripod mount! It's rather frustrating to aim binoculars up at the sky by hand. A lot of binoculars don't have tripod mounts, so check them before you spend your money.
Not only is the browser detection horribly broken, but they charge $20 for a single *DAY* for access! And $200 for a month! At those rates, you'd think they can hire a webmaster that has a clue.
Kind of sad that the company doesn't offer the people who buy their product (at an already premium site) free access to technical information about their vehicle.
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Wow, that's actually before my time. My heyday was late 80's, early 90's. I don't remember these formats; maybe I'm just forgetful.
And the 3.5" standard was championed by Apple; it was the disk format used by the Macintosh and the later Apple II systems.
The 100MB+ formats were never really ubiquitous enough to fit into the same class as floppies. You couldn't, for instance, take a zip disk to a stranger and be confident that he will have a drive to read it in.
This is one of the reasons floppy disks were so ubiquitous for so long; even though they only held 1.4MB, everyone had one. If flash media weren't so varied, maybe it would be ubiquitous now too.
I remember those "word processor" machines used their own weird floppies, but that's about it.
I don't seem to remember anything other than 5.25" and 3.5" floppies in the mainstream computing world. I know there were some weird formats, but weren't they all used by niche players? (Apple Lisa, those silly word processors, etc.)
It may have come from Microsoft, but it's an extremely stable and robust filesystem that is very well understood, and will probably be the de-facto standard for many years.
As for Mac and PC format floppies, this is not really the issue I was getting it. Macs and PC's used different filesystems on floppies, but the media itself was exactly the same. This is not the case with the multitude of flash memory formats out there.
Uggh. This is why I hate the state of the mobile device industry right there. There are four major kinds of flash media, all incompatible with each other. Rather than come up with innovative devices that all use the same media (compactflash would have been a good choice since it was the first, and arguably the most open), the companies decided to all come up with their own formats and compete in this space.
Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other? Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right? Well, that's what's happening in the industry right now with flash media. SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, this is not only inconvenient but it's probably confusing as heck to the non-computer literate.
Anyone who is a gamer on a Mac has long since unplugged the one button mouse and connected a mouse with three or more buttons and a scroll wheel.
This is a rather silly reason not to port a game to MacOS X...
My entire PowerBook G4, hard drive and all, consumes around that much. You obviously mean full size 3.5" hard drives... Have you considered laptop drives?
Not sure how standard it is, but many Cisco switches support Inline Power, which is used by their Voice-Over-IP Phones. We deal with this constantly where I work.
It can be annoying because if you want to run several phones on one drop, they need power supplies if you don't want to use an expensive inline power capable switch.
When DIVX (pay per view video system) was being developed, a few companies, Disney included, were going to offer "DIVX exclusive" movies. Who says they're not going to try the same thing again with this format?
Let's just hope this doesn't catch on. At least if it does, we can still copy the discs, but it will be annoying to live in a world where you have to be a pirate to have a permanent working copy of your favorite flick.
I periodically read a few usenet groups and there is still a large usenet community that regularly uses it. In fact, some of the groups I read have so much traffic (NOT spam) that I have trouble keeping up with them.
Try actually looking on usenet instead of spouting off false statements like that.
Awww jeez, that's just a permutation of the old joke:
"Why did Intel rename the 586 to Pentium?"
"Because they added 100 to 486 and got 585.999999878787775555"
Thank you. I was waiting for someone to say this. I've found countless songs by looking for lyric snippets. I don't see how people posting lyrics online hurts the MPAA in anyway.
They're just a bunch of troublecausing greedy bastards. I don't think I'm ever going to buy a CD again.
There's a character in the Suburban Jungle comic strip named Dover that speaks in code. It's pretty funny, though you have to go back into the archives to see him as he hasn't appeared much lately.
What's funny is way back in elementary school I tried doing it for a bit in computer class. The other kids didn't find it funny for some reason! }:)
Knowing where all fifty states are is not knowledge that you need in everyday life, hence most people won't remember it for long after the test they were given on it back in high school.
It's silly to expect people to memorize information they don't use on a daily basis.
If other ISP's were as clued in as Bellsouth seems to be, the world would be a happier place.
Also, Bellsouth uses PPPoE, but their DSL modems have a built in PPPoE client so that the end machines don't have to deal with it! How's that for convenience?
Not to plug them, but I'm just surprised some ISP's are being such assholes when a big telco like Bellsouth is being so open and flexible.
Speaking of The Lion King, I saw this in IMAX, and it was mind blowingly beautiful. Luckily, all the animation in that movie was in Disney's vector-based computer animation format, so all they had to do was scale it up and clean it a little.
Also, it was shown in its proper aspect ratio; you could see "black bars" at the top and bottom of the huge IMAX screen. Of course, they're a lot less noticeable than black bars in a letterboxed DVD, since the image is already so huge it still fills your field of view.
Hopefully whatever process they use to blow up the Matrix movies to IMAX will look good, because they don't have vector-based drawings they can just render bigger. }:)
This makes it impossible to cram more than 64Kbps into a phone call. Sure, you can compress the data, but once data is already compressed (as images, movies, and other things people usually want fat bandwidth for), it can't be compressed anymore.
Unless they dramatically change the analog phone network, which won't happen, this is a pipe dream. Sorry guys.
I for one happen to love X11's method of copy & paste. It's so much faster and more convenient than under windows. I like being able to simply select something in one window, then middle-click it into another window without having to enter additional keystrokes or menu commands.
Whenever I'm on a windows box, I groan at having to manually copy after selecting, and not being able to paste with one mouse click.
Remember one person's UI annoyance is another person's UI bliss. }:) That's why we'll never agree!
That's unusual; didn't the designers of DVI realize that we'd someday be using higher resolutions? Why limit it so much from the start?
Pretty much the only downside to flatpanels are their slow response time and limited view angle, but that has improved so considerably lately that it's not really a problem anymore.
Here's what annoys me.. Finding laptops with screens 15-16" or so that do 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 is trivial, but it's almost impossible to find a desktop flat panel that does 1600x1200 at much larger screen sizes!
Who needs 1920x1200 on a 15" screen? yet we have to put up with 1280x1024 on 19" screens on the desktop...
Where I work, nearly all the grad students mispell "drive" as "driver". Frequently we see trouble tickets like:
My floppy driver isn't working
Need CD-ROM driver
It's such a common typo, it hardly stands out anymore. I guess when someone types "driver" very often, after typing "drive" the finger tends to move over to where the R is, subconsciously...
Grabbed it, compiled it, installed it...
Mozilla's links are suddenly not underlined, and some of the truetype fonts don't render quite right.
Anyone else run into this? I haven't been able to find any information either in Mozilla Bugzilla or in mailing lists.
Curious.
I feel I must mention this because it's something a lot of people forget...
Make sure your binoculars have a tripod mount! It's rather frustrating to aim binoculars up at the sky by hand. A lot of binoculars don't have tripod mounts, so check them before you spend your money.
Not only is the browser detection horribly broken, but they charge $20 for a single *DAY* for access! And $200 for a month! At those rates, you'd think they can hire a webmaster that has a clue.
Kind of sad that the company doesn't offer the people who buy their product (at an already premium site) free access to technical information about their vehicle.
Makes me want to avoid BMW in the future...