Dell: It's Time Floppy Drives Go Way Of The Dodo

[Calum]

cds are not more environmentally friendly. cds are disposable and usually single use.

and you most of you miss the point: floppies do not make any difference to your life if you don't like them. just don't use them. Making them redundant will cause all sorts of ag for those of us who do use them however, especially as there is no viable replacement that does the same job.

i really feel as though i am repeating myself here. if i am not making myself clear by now then there's no point trying.

[Pantso]

quote:Originally posted by Calum: Member # 81:
..especially as there is no viable replacement that does the same job.

How about Zip drives and disks? I believe it's a viable replacement of floppies, especially 100 MBs ones.   :rolleyes:

[pkd_lives]

Calum - I would really like to understand. I do not wish to throw out the ability to use floppy drives, and Linux distros should still offer the capability to boot from a floppy drive. But there is no need for them, they were a bastard solution to a problem in the first place.

1 disposable 640MB CD = 400 floppy disks
1 rewritable 640MB CD = 4000 floppy disks minimum.

I really cannot see why you need a floppy disk, except as a boot medium on old computers.

And to dispute the environmental aspect, well the numbers above speak for themselves. However it is actually possible (although not done anywhere on the planet to my knowledge) to recycle CDs - you cannot recyle a floppy disk (only the outer casing), and the metal spindle inside. And it is rather toxic when incinerated.

If you want it it should still be available for use - that I grant without reserve or we will be following a tactic used by M$, but there is really no need to have it shipped as standard - if you want one you can buy it yourself.

[Fett101]

quote:Originally posted by Linux Frank:
The Floppy disk is the single most unreliable storage system I have ever used.

Oh yeah. That too. I have lotsa floppies from less then a year old. about 0% of them work.

[Master of Reality]

Well... i see absolutely no reason for CDROMs. I havent put a CD in my desktop computer in at least a month... i might have once to burn a CD so i could play it on my discman when i went somewhere. I dont see any reason at all to ever have a CDROM, all the little files i need to transfer can easily fit on a floppy, and anything bigger i send over the ether/internet. I only need one floppy to boot most *NIXes and then dl all the packages and do a net installation. There is no need for these mammoth beasts in our computers, and they just generate more heat in our computers.

[Pissed_Macman]

Floppies are great for using with old computers. I'm just saying that the newer computers don't need them. Do you just want them to keep using floppies until we colonize Europa? The longer people include them the more dependant people are on them. We need to ween ourselves off of floppies!

[cahult]

Nothing I do involves documents smaller than 1 MB, not even images, unless I save them for web use.

When I had use for floppys, I used to be frustrated because the lack of room on the disc. Thank all the gods for CD-R and CD-RW! Now I can exchange lots of images at a time instead of flooding my target audience with stupid floppys.

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by Linux Frank:
If you want it it should still be available for use - that I grant without reserve or we will be following a tactic used by M$, but there is really no need to have it shipped as standard - if you want one you can buy it yourself.

this is not the point i am making. what i'm saying is that if floppies no longer are found on most PCs it will not be feasible to download stuff to floppies in, for example, a web cafe, or at somebody's house, and then take the stuff home. I simply do not believe that web cafes will equip every PC with a cd writer or a zip drive, plus none of these is standard in the way floppies are. Say i save to a zip in a web cafe (that'll be the day!) then i take it home, but OOPS! it's a zip250 disk and i only have a zip100 drive! well shit, huh? or i save to a zip100 drive, go round to mate X's house and he's got a CDROM and a fucking 'mountain backup device'! useless! not only that but if web cafes et c did have CDRWs on their machines i bet they'd all have some crap proprietary software on them, like Ahead inCD, which is great so long as you have Ahead's software installed on all the windows computers you will ever use the disk in, but if you stick stuff on the CDRW using InCD (currently quite a standard in CDRW i understand), then pop over to your linux machine, you won't be able to recover the data from it, i tried last week.

There's no universal replacement, and there's nothing that's even come close to being as inexpensive, therefore there's no reason to actively phase them out. If demand truly is dropping then that's another story, but i do not believe that is the case. Ask a non computer type, who uses floppies for word documents and saving webpages and emails et c, he/she'll be horrified if you say that you're taking away their floppy drive and they'll have to get/learn about a whole new rash of stuff just to do the same job (actually, they might not be too bothered, now microsoft have groomed people to expect this sort of thing).

No, there's no good reason to get rid of floppies. this sort of heavy handed decision from on high that we are supposed to believe is for everyone's greater good just do not convince me.

[preacher]

I agree whole heartedly with Calum and Master of Reality. Maybe its my linux background speaking, or the fact that Im an old school kind of guy and run old ass computers, but I still use the floppy a lot. By the way why do you have huge images that are over 1 mb cahult? Maybe my web design side does this, but I prefer to keep images as small as possible, preferably under 100k.

[xyle_one]

my images & graphics range from 1mb - 300mb. unless its for web. but i do not do a lot of web graphics, most of my stuff goes to print. cdrw is my freind in this case. when i have to transport several 50mb images to the print house, or to the clients office. i cant use a floppy for this. but i see no reason to get rid of them completely.

[cahult]

quote:Originally posted by ThePreacher:
By the way why do you have huge images that are over 1 mb cahult? Maybe my web design side does this, but I prefer to keep images as small as possible, preferably under 100k.

My web images aren

[lazygamer]

When I weigh the arguments, I have to agree with the pro-floppy category.  

Still there is something to consider. How long does it take to burn 1mb of data to a rewriteable? How long does it take to transfer 1mb of data to a floppy disk? Floppies are slow little bitches!

Floppies are these little failsafe things. They are the manual override when the big machine won't work normally! Isn't a floppy drive always more reliable detection wise then a CD?

There is no good argument to keep these around, but there is no good argument to get rid of them either. Why not invent a high capacity floppy disk that is totally compatible with old floppy drives(and has better access times)? Or you could make new floppy disks that work in modern disk drives that are totally compatible with the old floppies. Assuming any of this is possible!  

[psyjax]

quote:Originally posted by lazygamer:
There is no good argument to keep these around, but there is no good argument to get rid of them either. Why not invent a high capacity floppy disk that is totally compatible with old floppy drives(and has better access times)? Or you could make new floppy disks that work in modern disk drives that are totally compatible with the old floppies. Assuming any of this is possible!    

I remember when the first iMacs came out, there was a company that made these ORB drives that booted both regular floppy's and ORB 100MB disks. The problem was that ORB disks just aren't popular.

I think the Zip disk should be standerdized but I guess IOmega is greedy.

[Calum]

yes they are. IBM already tried a stunt where some of their floppy drives were capable of using quadruple density 2.88 MB floppies as well as normal ones, but their 2.88MB size floppies don't work in other disk drives so nobody gave a shit. plus, 2.88MB, who cares, compared with 1.44?

[Kintaro]

quote:Originally posted by Calum: Member # 81:
I LOVE FLOPPIES! why should we be denied them? i think the current situation is fine as it is. floppies are cheap, so are floppy drives, nobody needs to use them if they don't want to, but i do. i use them for a shitload of stuff, and so does my girlfirend. and if floppy drives start going out of fashion, a lot of the point of floppies will be lost for us, since we won't be able to save to floppies on one machine and transfer to another because most computers won't have a floppy drive). I think this is very sad. floppy drives weren't harming anybody and some of us will be lost without them. what's the proposed alternative to them? as far as i know nothing is as cheap that will do as good a job, and certainly nothing is as standard as floppies.

Im with Calum, sure i could use UDF rewritables, but there not going to go in my Mac Classic are they?