Death to the Floppy! Hurrah!

[Asher]

Intel said they'd try to kill off the floppy in new computers in 2003, and it looks like Dell agrees.

No more floppies on Dell Dimension PCs starting in a couple months.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/030205/tech_1.html

The first Mac user to mention what I know they're going to mention gets a preemptive smack upside the head.

[Drake Tungsten]

Thanks for the preemptive smack, *******.

[Ari Rahikkala]

/me is not a Mac user *

Macintoshes haven't had floppy drives for a long time .

There .

[Asher]

It's a lot easier to be heavy handed when you're the only supplier in town.

[Boris Godunov]

But Macs stopped having floppy drives when they were still useful. Now, with the increased proliferation of CD recording, they are really outdated and need to be phased out.

Mac's move was inconvenient, Dell's is rightly-timed.

[DinoDoc]

Do they have re-recordable CD's?
/me shows how non-tech savvy he is

[KrazyHorse]

I don't understand this. How much do floppy drives cost? 5$? 15$?

The inconvenience of a user having to deal with a single problem this will cause is enough to make this move a bad idea.

[KrazyHorse]

For the record, I have a CD-RW drive, and yet I've used floppies a dozen times in the past month.

[KrazyHorse]

Mainly for transferring Excel/Word documents from one machine to another. Floppies are admittedly useless for archiving purposes...

[Provost Harrison]

I must confess I absolutely detest floppy disks ever since I can remember...you can hardly fit anything on them, they invariably go wrong amd fill with errors...good riddance, I would certainly dance on their grave

[Asher]

Why oh why would you use a floppy? Not only are they slow and limited on storage, but they're larger than USB storage devices and are FAR more likely to corrupt/lose data.

Dino: Yes, CD-RWs have existed for many years now.

[Asher]

Frogger: For transferring files between computers, there's a nice little thing called the internet.

Of course not all computers are on the internet, in which case a CD-RW or a USB storage device would be used.

[JohnT]

Asher: You got a 56k MS Word document that you need to take from the office to work at home so you can get it ready for the presentation tomorrow. You can't email it because your idiot IT guy just loves firewalls, and any outgoing email with attachments gets thrown out*. Who-hoo, Dell and Intel just f*cked ya. Hope you enjoyed it!

Now do you see why?

*Typically, offices like the above aren't too thrilled with the idea of giving employees CD-burners. And they sure as hell ain't going to give you nice, little, easy-to-steal USB periphrials (sp?), nor will they allow you to hook yours up.

[KrazyHorse]

a) It's faster to write to a floppy than it is to email myself
b) Floppy drives are in the front of my computer, USB ports are in the back
c) For shared-access computers, it is often difficult to get permission to install programs like the driver for a USB device (they do require a driver, right?)
d) If I lose a floppy I'm out .30$ If I lose a USB storage thingy I'm out 30$

[Asher]

Originally posted by JohnT
Asher: You got a 56k MS Word document that you need to take from the office to work at home so you can get it ready for the presentation tomorrow. You can't email it because your idiot IT guy just loves firewalls, and any outgoing email with attachments gets thrown out*. Who-hoo, Dell and Intel just f*cked ya. Hope you enjoyed it!

Now do you see why?

Um. No, I don't.
I have a very hard time believing your work computers don't have a USB slot or a CD-ROM drive.