I wouldn't go so far as 10 years back. Maybe 5 years ago. 10 years ago you're including Windows 2000, which is arguably the best operating system they have ever made (and probably ever will). You're also including Office 97 and Office 2000, which most users saw some real improvements over Office 95 (as opposed to the improvements in Office for the past few years which do little for most users). Ditto for the XBox and features for it like XBox Live.
I live in Minnesota too, and "needing" a 4x4 SUV or truck is a big misconception around here. Virtually all of my winter driving in inclement weather is not on snow covered roads, it's roads covered with packed snow or ice. There is no denying that a 4x4 is unbeatable in deep snow, but most of the time the plows have been busy, and fellow drivers have managed to keep the snow from piling up on the road (if not, chances are my destination is closed anyway!). On a slick surface, I would much rather have my FWD car than a 4x4 truck. Why? On a slick surface, the poorer handling of the large vehicle means you're more likely to get into trouble, the added mass means it'll take you longer to stop it and makes it harder to steer it, and the higher center of gravity means that once you get into trouble, it's more likely you'll end up on your side or roof. Combine this with the false sense of security that the SUV gives most people, and you have a recipe for disaster. It's no mystery to me why I'm always seeing SUVs and trucks wiped out on the side of the road anytime the weather gets too nasty. If you ask me, the absolute best vehicle for winter driving around here is an AWD car like a Subaru.
The Corvette gets better mileage than you might think. It's very aerodynamic, and due to its fiberglass construction, it's also fairly light. The big ass V8 engine barely has to do any work when cruising at highway speeds, thus it actually gets pretty good mileage. Drive it like an old granny, and it'll do decently in the city too.
The real problem is not the V8 engines in most American cars. It's just that most American cars are oversized and heavy, and most SUVs and trucks have pretty poor aerodynamics, hence the poor fuel consumption (and the reason why many people feel that a big engine is a must).
Huh? Where did you come up with that? The gasoline tax punishes the people with the vehicles that burn the most fuel per mile driven - the SUV drivers. If anyone wants to change it over to a per mile basis instead of a per gallon of fuel basis, it's the people who drive the trucks and SUVs* that want to shift some of the burden of the taxes onto those with fuel efficient vehicles. Hardly what I consider a "liberal" idea.
*Most SUV drivers I know, like everyone else, opposes this retarded idea. The only proponents seem to be the government, law enforcement, and insurance companies - and purely for the tracking ability and little else.
No, he means that light trucks get taxed differently from cars - they get taxed less and they have to comply with less strict regulations. This means that cars and light trucks do not compete on an even playing field, the light trucks are artificially cheaper than they should be (that's why the large cars like the family station wagon from decades past don't exist anymore - they couldn't compete). I'm all for repealing the tax concessions for light trucks - let them compete on their own merits, and if you still want one you can pay the real price.
I have never had to actually buy extra batteries for my MP3 player, 4 fully charged NiMH AA batteries can run it for a very long time. Just mentioning that I could do it if needed.
Funny you should mention the environmental effects anyway. Given the Shuffle's and Nano's designs, it's pretty clear that Apple intends most people to throw the entire MP3 player away with the battery when it finally gives out. Most people aren't going to try to take apart a device that clearly wasn't meant to be taken apart, and solder a new battery in place. Also, NiMH batteries have a much lower environmental impact than LiOn (and Nicad).
she knows nothing about the social engineering hazards out there -- email scams, phishing scams, the vast cornucopia of malware...
You'd better teach her, because a Mac is going to do NOTHING for her in terms of email scams or phishing. And you'd better teach her about malware too, because the Mac's day could come at any time. A paranoid Windows user knows what to look for, a naive Mac user won't.
After all of that, you might as well set her up with Windows. My mother has no problem with Windows, equipped with Firefox and a Linksys nat/firewall box and automatic updates. Spybot and AVG running in the background as a second layer of defense (and so far, unneeded). Best part about going this route you could likely get the hardware for free, so if it doesn't work it out it's not going to cost much money.
10.2 is fairly old, and 10.3 only requires a machine with built-in Firewire so all of the machines that can't run it are considered obsolete and are no longer supported by Apple anyway- you can't get parts or support, and the serial numbers are no longer even in GCRM (Apple's internal support database.)
Depends on how you define "fairly old". Windows 2000 is fairly old - it predates 10.2 by over 2 years, yet will continue to recieve security updates until 2010. Windows 98 is really old, and only got cut off this year.
Apple is about to release 10.5, the THIRD major release since 10.2. Anyone using 10.2 needs to upgrade anyway. Or were YOU going to pay the development costs for the 10.2 users out there?
You would think that with the large Apple tax that they have to pay just get a machine to run OSX, that the users have already paid for the support.
On Amazon you can get a NiMH charger and 4 AA batteries for $15. And I didn't even look that hard. Granted, the charger in my case was "free" in the sense that I just use the same one I already had for my old digital camera, which also takes NiMH batteries.
And I don't have to worry about finding a place to charge my MP3 player when I'm on the road either. I can easily carry enough batteries to run my MP3 player continously for a solid week in my pocket, and even if I run out, I can buy another solid week's worth of power for a few bucks any place AA batteries are sold. On trips, I don't even bother to pack the charger.
Internet Explorer started slow. The first release was in 1995. You probably didn't notice it then. The second release was in late 1995. You probably missed that one too, as the early versions were primarily distributed in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, though I think IE2 was also buried somewhere in the Windows 95 CD if you poked around enough. Then they released Internet Explorer 3.0, which is the first version that most people probably ever saw, as that version was distribut with Windows 95 OSR2 and came preinstalled on OEM computers that ran OSR2. However, that version did little to convince people to switch from Netscape. Then Microsoft released IE4 in 1997, and bundled it with Windows 98 in 1998. That was the first version that was argueably any better than Netscape, though the "explosion" probably happened more because it came bundled with Windows 98 (and the final OEM versions of Windows 95) more than anything else.
AA batteries are cheap enough. I think I paid $12 for 4 NiMH AA batteries. Considering one AA goes for well over a week, and I get to cycle between 4 of them, they'll probably last the life of the player. A supply of NiMH batteries plus a charger is going to run you less than a replacement LiOn battery.
As for the design, that's the trade-off. I'd rather have my slightly larger than a AA battery flash player and be able to swap the batteries out. It's not like extra size difference when compared to something like a Shuffle is going to kill me.
Even my last Socket A motherboard from Asus (A7V600) ships with a northbridge that draws about 40W, and yet has a tiny fanless heatsink, and operates very near 100C degrees even in cold weather... There's no way it can possibly last long, even in ideal conditions, and certainly not a month in warm weather, with less than perfect case airflow...
Maybe that's why I just trashed yet another A7V600 board that was dead. I've pretty much sworn off Asus now - not that they are any less reliable, but if the cheap 2nd-tier boards last just as long, then why pay for a top brand?
Depends on how you use it. If you need it to be continiously available and powered (office environment), you may get hit with the energy costs. If you turn it on once every few days, print, then turn it back off, the additional energy costs are probably nil.
Cheap and easy would be the AA batteries that can be swapped out on my flash player in about 15 seconds. As MP3 players go, the iPod's are one of the harder to replace the batteries, especially the models where the battery leads are soldered in place.
If those components were the only ones at risk - you'd have a point.
Well, my list would be pretty much everything but the harddrives - my data is much harder to replace than any other random component in the computer that might die.
The funny part about this is - the most vulnerable part to startup/shutdown transients, next to the power supply... Is the hard drive, from both mechanical stresses to the mechanical systems and thermal stresses to the circuit card.
Even so, I've found that one startup per day and 6-8 hours of use beats leaving the computer on 24/7 in terms of the life of my hard drives - not to mention the rest of the computer. I've not lost a hard drive in a very long time (the fact that I keep them well cooled certainly helps). The manufacturers seem to base their lifetimes on people only running their hard drives a few hours a day. If you run high end SCSI drives, I would guess that things may be different.
Also.... this is probably a stupid question, but should I be worried about the decomposition of the old parts we have lying about the house?
The main threat from dumping electronics is the toxic chemicals that leech out of them and into the ground water. So old computers stored in your house, so long as they are kept dry, should be harmless.
Which is great for protecting things like the CPU, chipset, video cards, and ram. However, if one of those fail I'll just replace it (and other than cheap ass motherboards, I have found those components to be very reliable no matter how you choose to use the computer). The components I'm most worried about are the harddrives, and harddrives are primarily mechanical devices. Very simply - the more they are used, the quicker they wear out. For that reason, I'm willing to sacrafice a bit of the life of the other components to prolong the life of the harddrives*. Even with backups, I still consider the harddrive more important, because restoring from backup is a much bigger pain in the ass than simply swapping in a new video card or stick of ram.
And then there are the other benefits of turning the computer off. Less electricity use for one, and the computer will collect a lot less dust too prolonging the life of the fans, optical drives, and floppy drives. And I don't have to worry about a fan failing when I'm away and the computer suffering a slow heat death (a very valid concern when you still run a Socket A system!).
*Anecdotal evidence I have seen seems to suggest that contrary to what you have said, the power supplies/motherboards in computers that are turned off when not needed last a lot longer than those that are left on 24/7. I think this may have to do more with cheap capacitors with a finite lifespan going out on an always-on system before the thermal stress kills the components on the powered on/off system.
My friends who leave their computers on 24/7 pretty much have the same experience you have. The computer will be on for weeks/months, then when it has to be turned off there's a pretty decent chance it won't start back up. Funny thing is, I turn my computers off when I don't need them, and despite my computers being built from pretty much the same parts, they far outlast my friend's computers.
Of course, starting the computer is the most stressful time on the components, and when something does go out it almost always is when I turn it on. But it is nice to catch something when it is still marginal (like a harddrive that spins up slow but is otherwise ok), as opposed to failed but unnoticed until the next power cycle.
As far as I'm concerned, leaving the computer on 24/7 for no reason is doing nothing but wearing it out faster and driving up the electric bill too.
Most importantly, in 50 or 60 years when the copyrights actually expire, will you still even want your 128kbps mp3? Of course not. The public domain file will be provided in a superior format from a master recording.
Who says? Sure, it'll be true for something like the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, but what about things like small artists that distribute mainly through iTMS? It's very possible that in 50-60 years, their only legacy may be a few defunct DRM'd files that someone managed to save. It's only been a few years, and I've already got MP3 files that I would be hard pressed to replace if I ever lost them, from places like the old mp3.com site. It's possible that an old 128kbps file is all we'll have, much in the same way you hear stories today of people who have data trapped on archaic storage mediums that were obsolete 20 years ago.
When water freezes at zero and boils at 100deg, that makes sense.
While the metric system makes sense for the most part, I've never gotten Celcius. To a chemist, that line might make sense - but most people in the sciences seem to prefer a more useful scale where zero is the coldest temperature, instead of some arbitrary point. If you are going make a temperature scale for general use, you might as well set 0 and 100 degrees to some value that a common person might relate to, instead of the properties of pure water at a certain pressure. Like setting the coldest outdoor temperature that most people will ever experience at 0 degress, and the hottest outdoor temperature most people well ever experience at 100 degrees, which is pretty much the Fahrenhiet scale.
To be fair, the Mac has it's fair share of inconsistencies. A lot of the Apple programs like iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, etc. seem to have their own unique look and feel, which are all a bit different from each other. The Dock and Finder are an inconsistent mess. I find the Home and End keys are pretty inconsistent - depending on the program they may work like they do on on every other computer I've ever used, in others they work in the infuriating Mac specific manner. It's all a matter of learning (and constantly relearning) the quirks of the system you want to use.
The other half of the challenge, of course, is to get the data onto a modern machine. Sure, your 8086 can read the files, but if it can't write to a 3.5" floppy disk, the data is kind of stuck on it. You might think you're clever, and try to transmit the data over the serial port - until you find that while you can download an old DOS terminal program off the internet, you have no way to get it onto the old PC. This even becomes a worse problem with machines like old Commodores, and even more with exotic stuff.
You're assuming far too much. Remember, there are entire written langauges from 2000+ years ago that we barely know how to read. And we have the context of what they were written on, formatting, what the characters look like and things like that. Now, in 2000 years, if someone came upon your harddrive, or flash memory card, or whatever - assuming they could even read it, they aren't going to be able to pop it into a computer and see c:\My Music\ and C:\Documents and Settings\, and the only challenge left is to figure out what the hell an OGG file is. They aren't going to see files. They are going to see 1's and 0's. Lots of them - billions on a memory card and trillions on a harddrive. They won't have a clue know how to interpet the file system, even for something relatively simple like FAT16. They may not even know that a byte is 8 bits. They won't have context, they will be baffled by the fact that most every OS writes files in fragments all over the drive. They likely won't even be tell areas that were marked as deleted but not wiped from the actual data, let along figure out what the swap file is. I seriously doubt that someone in the future, given a working harddisk but nothing else to go on, would be able to pull anything meaningful from the drive. Heck, look at modern day examples - how long did it take Linux to be able to read and write to NTFS, given the number of very smart people working on it who already had a pretty good idea how it functioned?
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I wouldn't go so far as 10 years back. Maybe 5 years ago. 10 years ago you're including Windows 2000, which is arguably the best operating system they have ever made (and probably ever will). You're also including Office 97 and Office 2000, which most users saw some real improvements over Office 95 (as opposed to the improvements in Office for the past few years which do little for most users). Ditto for the XBox and features for it like XBox Live.
I live in Minnesota too, and "needing" a 4x4 SUV or truck is a big misconception around here. Virtually all of my winter driving in inclement weather is not on snow covered roads, it's roads covered with packed snow or ice. There is no denying that a 4x4 is unbeatable in deep snow, but most of the time the plows have been busy, and fellow drivers have managed to keep the snow from piling up on the road (if not, chances are my destination is closed anyway!). On a slick surface, I would much rather have my FWD car than a 4x4 truck. Why? On a slick surface, the poorer handling of the large vehicle means you're more likely to get into trouble, the added mass means it'll take you longer to stop it and makes it harder to steer it, and the higher center of gravity means that once you get into trouble, it's more likely you'll end up on your side or roof. Combine this with the false sense of security that the SUV gives most people, and you have a recipe for disaster. It's no mystery to me why I'm always seeing SUVs and trucks wiped out on the side of the road anytime the weather gets too nasty. If you ask me, the absolute best vehicle for winter driving around here is an AWD car like a Subaru.
The Corvette gets better mileage than you might think. It's very aerodynamic, and due to its fiberglass construction, it's also fairly light. The big ass V8 engine barely has to do any work when cruising at highway speeds, thus it actually gets pretty good mileage. Drive it like an old granny, and it'll do decently in the city too.
The real problem is not the V8 engines in most American cars. It's just that most American cars are oversized and heavy, and most SUVs and trucks have pretty poor aerodynamics, hence the poor fuel consumption (and the reason why many people feel that a big engine is a must).
Ummmm... gas prices DID suddenly triple!
Not really, it's just that a dollar now buys roughly 1/3 the oil it used to. I wonder why?
Huh? Where did you come up with that? The gasoline tax punishes the people with the vehicles that burn the most fuel per mile driven - the SUV drivers. If anyone wants to change it over to a per mile basis instead of a per gallon of fuel basis, it's the people who drive the trucks and SUVs* that want to shift some of the burden of the taxes onto those with fuel efficient vehicles. Hardly what I consider a "liberal" idea.
*Most SUV drivers I know, like everyone else, opposes this retarded idea. The only proponents seem to be the government, law enforcement, and insurance companies - and purely for the tracking ability and little else.
No, he means that light trucks get taxed differently from cars - they get taxed less and they have to comply with less strict regulations. This means that cars and light trucks do not compete on an even playing field, the light trucks are artificially cheaper than they should be (that's why the large cars like the family station wagon from decades past don't exist anymore - they couldn't compete). I'm all for repealing the tax concessions for light trucks - let them compete on their own merits, and if you still want one you can pay the real price.
I have never had to actually buy extra batteries for my MP3 player, 4 fully charged NiMH AA batteries can run it for a very long time. Just mentioning that I could do it if needed.
Funny you should mention the environmental effects anyway. Given the Shuffle's and Nano's designs, it's pretty clear that Apple intends most people to throw the entire MP3 player away with the battery when it finally gives out. Most people aren't going to try to take apart a device that clearly wasn't meant to be taken apart, and solder a new battery in place. Also, NiMH batteries have a much lower environmental impact than LiOn (and Nicad).
she knows nothing about the social engineering hazards out there -- email scams, phishing scams, the vast cornucopia of malware...
You'd better teach her, because a Mac is going to do NOTHING for her in terms of email scams or phishing. And you'd better teach her about malware too, because the Mac's day could come at any time. A paranoid Windows user knows what to look for, a naive Mac user won't.
After all of that, you might as well set her up with Windows. My mother has no problem with Windows, equipped with Firefox and a Linksys nat/firewall box and automatic updates. Spybot and AVG running in the background as a second layer of defense (and so far, unneeded). Best part about going this route you could likely get the hardware for free, so if it doesn't work it out it's not going to cost much money.
10.2 is fairly old, and 10.3 only requires a machine with built-in Firewire so all of the machines that can't run it are considered obsolete and are no longer supported by Apple anyway- you can't get parts or support, and the serial numbers are no longer even in GCRM (Apple's internal support database.)
Depends on how you define "fairly old". Windows 2000 is fairly old - it predates 10.2 by over 2 years, yet will continue to recieve security updates until 2010. Windows 98 is really old, and only got cut off this year.
Apple is about to release 10.5, the THIRD major release since 10.2. Anyone using 10.2 needs to upgrade anyway. Or were YOU going to pay the development costs for the 10.2 users out there?
You would think that with the large Apple tax that they have to pay just get a machine to run OSX, that the users have already paid for the support.
I shouldn't have said that. But I wasn't programmed with a backspace option.
Me too^H^H^Hneither.
On Amazon you can get a NiMH charger and 4 AA batteries for $15. And I didn't even look that hard. Granted, the charger in my case was "free" in the sense that I just use the same one I already had for my old digital camera, which also takes NiMH batteries.
And I don't have to worry about finding a place to charge my MP3 player when I'm on the road either. I can easily carry enough batteries to run my MP3 player continously for a solid week in my pocket, and even if I run out, I can buy another solid week's worth of power for a few bucks any place AA batteries are sold. On trips, I don't even bother to pack the charger.
Internet Explorer started slow. The first release was in 1995. You probably didn't notice it then. The second release was in late 1995. You probably missed that one too, as the early versions were primarily distributed in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, though I think IE2 was also buried somewhere in the Windows 95 CD if you poked around enough. Then they released Internet Explorer 3.0, which is the first version that most people probably ever saw, as that version was distribut with Windows 95 OSR2 and came preinstalled on OEM computers that ran OSR2. However, that version did little to convince people to switch from Netscape. Then Microsoft released IE4 in 1997, and bundled it with Windows 98 in 1998. That was the first version that was argueably any better than Netscape, though the "explosion" probably happened more because it came bundled with Windows 98 (and the final OEM versions of Windows 95) more than anything else.
AA batteries are cheap enough. I think I paid $12 for 4 NiMH AA batteries. Considering one AA goes for well over a week, and I get to cycle between 4 of them, they'll probably last the life of the player. A supply of NiMH batteries plus a charger is going to run you less than a replacement LiOn battery.
As for the design, that's the trade-off. I'd rather have my slightly larger than a AA battery flash player and be able to swap the batteries out. It's not like extra size difference when compared to something like a Shuffle is going to kill me.
Even my last Socket A motherboard from Asus (A7V600) ships with a northbridge that draws about 40W, and yet has a tiny fanless heatsink, and operates very near 100C degrees even in cold weather... There's no way it can possibly last long, even in ideal conditions, and certainly not a month in warm weather, with less than perfect case airflow...
Maybe that's why I just trashed yet another A7V600 board that was dead. I've pretty much sworn off Asus now - not that they are any less reliable, but if the cheap 2nd-tier boards last just as long, then why pay for a top brand?
Depends on how you use it. If you need it to be continiously available and powered (office environment), you may get hit with the energy costs. If you turn it on once every few days, print, then turn it back off, the additional energy costs are probably nil.
Cheap and easy would be the AA batteries that can be swapped out on my flash player in about 15 seconds. As MP3 players go, the iPod's are one of the harder to replace the batteries, especially the models where the battery leads are soldered in place.
If those components were the only ones at risk - you'd have a point.
Well, my list would be pretty much everything but the harddrives - my data is much harder to replace than any other random component in the computer that might die.
The funny part about this is - the most vulnerable part to startup/shutdown transients, next to the power supply... Is the hard drive, from both mechanical stresses to the mechanical systems and thermal stresses to the circuit card.
Even so, I've found that one startup per day and 6-8 hours of use beats leaving the computer on 24/7 in terms of the life of my hard drives - not to mention the rest of the computer. I've not lost a hard drive in a very long time (the fact that I keep them well cooled certainly helps). The manufacturers seem to base their lifetimes on people only running their hard drives a few hours a day. If you run high end SCSI drives, I would guess that things may be different.
Also.... this is probably a stupid question, but should I be worried about the decomposition of the old parts we have lying about the house?
The main threat from dumping electronics is the toxic chemicals that leech out of them and into the ground water. So old computers stored in your house, so long as they are kept dry, should be harmless.
Which is great for protecting things like the CPU, chipset, video cards, and ram. However, if one of those fail I'll just replace it (and other than cheap ass motherboards, I have found those components to be very reliable no matter how you choose to use the computer). The components I'm most worried about are the harddrives, and harddrives are primarily mechanical devices. Very simply - the more they are used, the quicker they wear out. For that reason, I'm willing to sacrafice a bit of the life of the other components to prolong the life of the harddrives*. Even with backups, I still consider the harddrive more important, because restoring from backup is a much bigger pain in the ass than simply swapping in a new video card or stick of ram.
And then there are the other benefits of turning the computer off. Less electricity use for one, and the computer will collect a lot less dust too prolonging the life of the fans, optical drives, and floppy drives. And I don't have to worry about a fan failing when I'm away and the computer suffering a slow heat death (a very valid concern when you still run a Socket A system!).
*Anecdotal evidence I have seen seems to suggest that contrary to what you have said, the power supplies/motherboards in computers that are turned off when not needed last a lot longer than those that are left on 24/7. I think this may have to do more with cheap capacitors with a finite lifespan going out on an always-on system before the thermal stress kills the components on the powered on/off system.
My friends who leave their computers on 24/7 pretty much have the same experience you have. The computer will be on for weeks/months, then when it has to be turned off there's a pretty decent chance it won't start back up. Funny thing is, I turn my computers off when I don't need them, and despite my computers being built from pretty much the same parts, they far outlast my friend's computers.
Of course, starting the computer is the most stressful time on the components, and when something does go out it almost always is when I turn it on. But it is nice to catch something when it is still marginal (like a harddrive that spins up slow but is otherwise ok), as opposed to failed but unnoticed until the next power cycle.
As far as I'm concerned, leaving the computer on 24/7 for no reason is doing nothing but wearing it out faster and driving up the electric bill too.
Most importantly, in 50 or 60 years when the copyrights actually expire, will you still even want your 128kbps mp3? Of course not. The public domain file will be provided in a superior format from a master recording.
Who says? Sure, it'll be true for something like the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, but what about things like small artists that distribute mainly through iTMS? It's very possible that in 50-60 years, their only legacy may be a few defunct DRM'd files that someone managed to save. It's only been a few years, and I've already got MP3 files that I would be hard pressed to replace if I ever lost them, from places like the old mp3.com site. It's possible that an old 128kbps file is all we'll have, much in the same way you hear stories today of people who have data trapped on archaic storage mediums that were obsolete 20 years ago.
When water freezes at zero and boils at 100deg, that makes sense.
While the metric system makes sense for the most part, I've never gotten Celcius. To a chemist, that line might make sense - but most people in the sciences seem to prefer a more useful scale where zero is the coldest temperature, instead of some arbitrary point. If you are going make a temperature scale for general use, you might as well set 0 and 100 degrees to some value that a common person might relate to, instead of the properties of pure water at a certain pressure. Like setting the coldest outdoor temperature that most people will ever experience at 0 degress, and the hottest outdoor temperature most people well ever experience at 100 degrees, which is pretty much the Fahrenhiet scale.
To be fair, the Mac has it's fair share of inconsistencies. A lot of the Apple programs like iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, etc. seem to have their own unique look and feel, which are all a bit different from each other. The Dock and Finder are an inconsistent mess. I find the Home and End keys are pretty inconsistent - depending on the program they may work like they do on on every other computer I've ever used, in others they work in the infuriating Mac specific manner. It's all a matter of learning (and constantly relearning) the quirks of the system you want to use.
The other half of the challenge, of course, is to get the data onto a modern machine. Sure, your 8086 can read the files, but if it can't write to a 3.5" floppy disk, the data is kind of stuck on it. You might think you're clever, and try to transmit the data over the serial port - until you find that while you can download an old DOS terminal program off the internet, you have no way to get it onto the old PC. This even becomes a worse problem with machines like old Commodores, and even more with exotic stuff.
You're assuming far too much. Remember, there are entire written langauges from 2000+ years ago that we barely know how to read. And we have the context of what they were written on, formatting, what the characters look like and things like that. Now, in 2000 years, if someone came upon your harddrive, or flash memory card, or whatever - assuming they could even read it, they aren't going to be able to pop it into a computer and see c:\My Music\ and C:\Documents and Settings\, and the only challenge left is to figure out what the hell an OGG file is. They aren't going to see files. They are going to see 1's and 0's. Lots of them - billions on a memory card and trillions on a harddrive. They won't have a clue know how to interpet the file system, even for something relatively simple like FAT16. They may not even know that a byte is 8 bits. They won't have context, they will be baffled by the fact that most every OS writes files in fragments all over the drive. They likely won't even be tell areas that were marked as deleted but not wiped from the actual data, let along figure out what the swap file is. I seriously doubt that someone in the future, given a working harddisk but nothing else to go on, would be able to pull anything meaningful from the drive. Heck, look at modern day examples - how long did it take Linux to be able to read and write to NTFS, given the number of very smart people working on it who already had a pretty good idea how it functioned?