Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

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Floppy disks, optical disks, ethernet were all replaced by unencumbered standards and they all lead to a superior experience (well, maybe not ethernet, but there are definitly advantages to wireless). If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.

Any time you introduce two way communication, you introduce the possibility of DRM, but that does not guarantee it. I can still use my HDMI with my linux PC. DRM is exclusive of the technology and I see no reason to hold back the technology because we are worried about DRM.

There are lots of compelling reasons to dislike this change. Among them the fact that I have a large investment in traditional headphones and devices that work well with them (my iPod, my HTC Phone, my stereo, TV, piano, guitar amp, etc etc etc), a decrease in quality, convenience and weight of wireless headsets (how long do they work? How much do they weigh? Can I swim or workout with them?). But DRM is not automatic.

>If you're old enough to have used a floppy disk drive you do not miss them.

I am, and I do. Floppies were ubiquitous, durable, reusable, and cheap enough to give away. There's no replacement today - flash drives are the closest thing but when was the last time someone handed you one with no expectation of getting it back? Or bought a box of 50?

Sneakernet became much less vibrant with the death of the floppy.

I'll give you 3 of those points, but definitely not durable. Some of them lasted a long time, and some of them stopped working before I could finish writing to them. And since writing to them was painfully slow, something frequently went wrong.

Of course with flash drives we can wait the short time it typically takes someone to copy the contents off to get it back. And since they can hold significantly more data, they are also far more reusable.

> flash drives are ...

Much more dangerous than an infected boot sector. See the BlackHat talk on a malware program can replace the firmware on a USB device.

Flash drives cost almost nothing. I'm not going to lose any sleep over a $4 flash drive being given to someone and never getting it back. In terms of inflation that's cheaper than giving someone a floppy that cost $1.

Floppy disks were always terrible. Slow, unreliable, prone to failure at the worst possible time. A simple magnet could trash them beyond repair. A bit of water could render them unreadable. Leave it loose in your bag and it gets bent? The thing was toast.

In the dying days of the floppy disk, around the time Apple introduced the iMac with no floppy drive, they were already obsolete. 1.44MB could barely hold anything useful at that time, most people doing any serious exchange had already moved on to Zip drives because they held a more reasonable 100MB, or CD-R since you could burn six times more than that onto them. If you had tiny WordPerfect files then floppies were adequate, barely, but what kind of a market is that?

So long floppy. You won't be missed.

You can buy USB flash drives for $2. People don't refrain from handing over flash drives because they're expensive, they do it because they have a reasonable expectation that you're able to immediately copy the data, or that you can receive it over a network.

The death of the floppy didn't kill sneakernet, the rise of portable networked computing did.

Floppies were NOT durable, and I just bought a box of 10 8GB USB sticks for under $20 - that's similar to the cost of the 1.44MB floppies we used to buy.

I don't miss the slowness, low capacity, or durability of floppy disks but they had features I do miss, like:

Physical write protect switches

Large space for writing a label

Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

Cheap enough not to care about

Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

You're really reaching for advantages there...

I'll give you the write protect one, but...

> Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

You can get keyring flash drives, I'd rather that than something larger. Anyway a floppy barely fit in a pocket.

> Cheap enough not to care about

Flash drives are cheap enough not to care about... but my data isnt!

I would definitely give a flash drive to someone if they needed it. They're like $4 each or something. And on a $/Gb comparison they obviously blow away a floppy.

> Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

You can safely remove a flash drive and leave it plugged in if you like.

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