What is Digg?188 Comments
- chocobomog, on 10/12/2007, -1/+69Yea, fond memories like the one when the computer lab's A: drive ate (destroyed) my floppy disk containing a 10 page report due that day. Or that memory of the annoying clicking sound it made over and over before the drive finally died. Or the time before CDs when installing programs meant inserting 20+ disks in the correct order, only to realize you were missing the last disk. Or the memory of the annoyance when you left a disk in the drive when you restarted and having to remove it because DOS couldn't boot from the disk.
Ah yes, those were the days. - themastersb, on 10/12/2007, -4/+62Now how will I update the BIOS on my motherboard?
- benbread, on 10/12/2007, -0/+56Farewell floppy's - But the less said about PC World the better - Last time i went in there they were trying to sell 1m of Cat5e cable for £8.99!
- toast1226, on 10/12/2007, -4/+57now try saying "floppy finally flops" 10 times fast
- JeffH, on 10/12/2007, -0/+46They say they will stop selling when the inventory runs out?
So technically, floppies will be available forever, because nobody in their right mind buys them anymore. - etechonline2002, on 10/12/2007, -0/+452000 years from now there will still be aol floppies sitting around
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+44"and film camera"
bull ***** it's dead - Wonderkind, on 10/12/2007, -1/+42My coffee cup is sitting on one right now.
- joshpar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+40Songs on floppy just, you know, sound warmer. I can't stand the sound you get off of cds.
- sephiroth965, on 10/12/2007, -2/+40Yeah I NEED a floppy drive to install my RAID drivers so I can install XP.
- SonicRush, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35I'm still rockin a floppy drive. I used it to install my F6 RAID drivers and update my BIOS.
I agree they're generally useless anymore though. So long floppies! Thanks for all the fond memories (click... click... click) - jshapiro, on 10/12/2007, -6/+361 meter? £8.99? Brits!
- koniosis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+30Not as bad as the £14.99 USB printer cables that are on "Special Offer" in the printer section. You can get one for 50p on scan.co.uk... "Internet prices to take home today", which internet do they use?
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27Floppies stopped being useful when PC's learned to boot from USB connected flash memory.
That said, to make my USB stick bootable, I did have to use a floppy emulator to make a bootable disk image that I could extract the boot sector from and write to the USB stick.
When Windows allows you to "format" a flash stick as bootable, then floppies will really be dead. - Manhigh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25Fortunately one should still be able to find AOL floppys sitting around just about anywhere.
- DarthTurducken, on 10/12/2007, -3/+25"You forgot Beta Max"
My understanding is that Betamax was actually higher quality, but more expensive, so the porn industry went with VHS. - falcon1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24I agree. Film cameras are nowhere near being dead!
- simpleid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21I like how at work the older guys will show off their seniority by bragging about the out-dated technology they used to have to tolerate. I might only be 21, but now... I got my own!~ :D
"... 386? man I used to actually -use- floppies..."
The good ol' days. Good bye floppy, you little 1mb bitch! (I actually ripped that little p.o.s. out of my PC a year back, fan speed controllers make a nice replacement. :)
On the other hand, I really hope USB sticks don't go out soon, I like those. - meltingrobot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18Goodbye and good riddance. I wish I had a 20$ bill for everytime I had somebody bring me a floppy disk and ask if I could recover the data off of it for them. "But my college paper I worked on for 2 months was on that disk!" ARGH!!!
- LaughingMan11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Probably should have charged each of them $20 just to look at a floppy, huh? THEN you'd be rich? :D.
- gamerzworld, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17So, one store stops sells of Floppys and it's dead? Give me a break.
- DontSayFanboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16@simpleid
Honestly, give yourself 10 years and you'll be amazed. You'll be going on and on about how your hard drives weren't solid state and how excited you were to get your first 10,000k rpm disk. 5ms seek time? That's impossible!
Then you'll wax poetic about the time you lost everything due to a hard drive crash because your net connection wasn't fast enough to back up your measly 300GB hard drive to Google Backup (still in beta). - iduno871, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Hopefully Manufacturers will update their crap now...It's always a bitch to hook up a floppy drive just to reinstall WindowsXP because I need the Raid Drivers for my Hard drive to be seen by Windows.
- televisible, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14"Don't copy that floppy" campaign finally works out
- crawfishsoul, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15"HARTS"
Just, what the *****? Are you serious? - ArthurSucks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12"..and the film camera.."
Uh, what? Since when was the film camera scraped? I could have sworn there was a LONG line at Wallgreens the other day. - haooken, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Film camera? Excuse me? I say Nay Nay. Sure the pros don't use it as much (digital is faster and cheaper, pure and simple), but I doubt that film photography will ever truly go the way of the dodo, the VFS, or (eventually) Blu-Ray. It is a fading art, but I feel that it will be kept alive for many more years as a wonderful artist's medium.
/and a floppy drive, even an external one, is still a necessity. - TheWorm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10It was dead to me ten years ago.
- stealth658, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13Vista lets you use a USB key.
- willjc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Don't copy that floppy!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729 - bieber, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Just like daguerreotypes, right?
- thetaco82, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9themastersb:
I guess motherboard manufacturers will have to start supporting current technology. That said, the flash utility on my P5B-E board mounted my flash drive without any trouble. - CamoChris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8@koniosis: Well, some PC World stores still have free disks with AOL trials on, so I guess they use that internet.
PC World does suck though, their prices are usually twice as much as from online retailers, I only ever go in there to look at things then buy them online. - bieber, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Indeed. When a digital can give me the control and resolution of a large format view camera, I'll declare film dead. Until such time, kindly STFU about it being a dead medium.
- WiZZLa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Even as CD, DVD drives, and USB memory keys are bootable, a floppy drive & floppy bootdisc are still a resort when you need to get your computer running in dire times.
- rauz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Only 700million floppies were sold globally last year – down from 2billion in 1998"
Uh, what? So the sales has gone down only 65% in 9 years???
Anyway, my fondest memory has to be drilling holes in those 720k DD floppies in order to make them 1.4Mb HD ones :)
Yes, it works. - Double-Z, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Nothing in life has let me down as many times as floppy disks have. Good riddance.
- herrprof, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Is it me, or is the build quality of current floppys terrible? I have often seen as half a box of disks be unusable.. not all of my computers support boot from usb yet..
- stargatesteve, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10"But floppies hold only 1.44mb of data – now little more than a single song, one high resolution picture or a few dozen word-only documents."
What is their idea of a high-res pic?
Or a song size? - And0, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Tampons finally flop - since one retailer in the UK doesn't sell them.
- memoBug, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Say what you will, but the floppy nearly outlasted Sony's Universal Media Disc (UMD) format
- w33tz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Im sure there are enough floppys left in the world, I hate floppy disks anyways because I can't restrain myself from pulling them apart. The springy flap is just too tempting not to pull off.
- DontSayFanboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Oh man, I had one person call me because she was working on a NOVEL and had the only copy on a floppy disk. The disk got corrupted. She kept it loose in her backpack and was furious when I asked her if she kept a backup copy somewhere. Naturally, I was incompetent because I couldn't save her data.
I think the only other media that was more unreliable than a standard floppy was a Zip disk. Click of death, anyone? 100 floppies worth of data down the drain. - Rosco, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9"Farewell floppy's"??
More like "Good Riddance!" for me! I've had more floppy disc failures happen to me than I care to remember. - Rosco, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
"Germans?"
"Forget it, he's rolling." - bieber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's on its way out, just not as quickly as the floppy. 35mm film cameras still beat digitals a little in speed (10fps on the EOS 1v vs. 8.5fps on the EOS 1D MkII N), and just a tiny bit in resolution, but that'll be overcome soon and the 35mm cameras phased out. There's still medium and large format, though. The highest res digital medium formats give something like 30MP of resolution, but there's still more to be had in medium format film. And large format, hell, they don't even _have_ digital backs for that yet...
- esaks, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9I recently over heard an employee from a company down the hall from my office trying to convince his boss to buy a camera because it had floppy disks and everyone has floppy disks. His boss actually agreed. These guys are going to be screwed.
- SillyRabbits, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The author seemed to at least have some clue until the last line in the article when he compares the floppy to Beta-Max. The floppy was one of the most successful media formats ever! The reason is still hasn't completely died is because it is still useful in some applications. Beta-Max and floppy shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath.
It was an excellent early example of the power that standardized media could offer. - VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I'm surprised that you depend on floppies for something that demands reliability. I have floppies crap out on me all the time.
*puts a file on a floppy*
*brings it over to another computer, inserts it*
Computer: Hey, dude! This floppy isn't formatted! Want me to format it for you?
*NO*
Computer: Too bad! I just erased your disk! - TenebrousX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"– and 98 per cent of PCs no longer have an A-drive."
maybe new PCs, but definitely not all computers -
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