• Gizmodo editor raided by the police. I tell you about the structure of the courts.
  • Violent video games to be regulated.
  • Blackberry makes numerous announcements.
  • Hawking hates aliens.
  • Nexus One doomed to not work with Verizon.
  • iBook reader showdowns coming.
  • Sony ending the productions of the 3.5-inch floppy disk.
  • New death panel coming.
  • XP still worse than Vista and Win 7 insofar as security is concerned.

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  1. Father says:

    Nothing says computer like the sound of a floppy spinning in the drive

  2. bac says:

    One of my earliest computers didn’t have a hard drive. All programs and storage used the two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.

    Please insert disk in drive A:

  3. Buzz says:

    Anyone who wants a museum-quality artifact from the past: I’ll sell you a Genuine Floppy for $10.00 US, postage paid to the continental US.

  4. qb says:

    Microsoft still uses the floppy disk icon for “Save” in Office. Still rockin’ the floppy in Redmond.

  5. deowll says:

    #2 Count yourself lucky. My first computer had a tape drive. The next one had a five and quarter. I thought the 3.5 was a huge improvement. We are old. The younger generation mostly hasn’t even seen a floppy.

  6. Glenn E. says:

    Vista and Win 7 still worse than XP insofar as DRM is concerned. I’m willing to put up with the flaws, as long as the OS isn’t a rights Nazi about everything that’s digital media. Including things I create myself. XP was the last OS to be 99% free of this, that I know of. Did W7 mello out?

    I’m surprised the 3.5 disks lasted as long as they did. Mainly it was Microsoft that kept them alive. Still paranoid about users making bootable copies of Windows, on CDs. So 3.5″ disks were the alternative, boot up, stop gap. Hold just enough of DOS to get one going. But not enough of Windows to rob M$ of its profits.

    But every computer brand seem to have its own proprietary 3.5″ disk encoding scheme. Apple, Commodore, IBM, etc. All had incompatible ways of storing data on the things. I remember my old Amiga, was the only computer that could be finessed into reading Apple’s and IBM’s. Neither could read any other makers’ disks. Even some of the early CD formats were incompatible, across platforms. And don’t get me started on Harddrive formats. Only the Flash drives, are free of this bullheadedness.

  7. GregA says:

    #6

    Im four years on with vista and still have yet to see this DRM everyone is talking about…

    In fact, microsoft freely publishes one of the nicest screen capture utilities for copying the results of the analog hole. It is called, windows media encoder. I ripped a HD copy of Bevis and Butthead do America off of netflix just the other day. For the record, I downloaded the DRM encrusted video in Internet Explorer 8 using the Silverlight Plugin, I screen scraped it with Windows Media encoder, I trimmed the leader tape off with windows movie maker, and burned it with whatever that default dvd maker is that came with Vista.

    So come again, my entire process happened end to end with 100% microsoft software, where exactly is the DRM you are speaking of???

    And Oh your flash drives work so great everywhere because they utilize fat32 technology, any guesses who developed that???

    And Oh the last version of windows to ship with a dos boot kernel was windows 98se, so… 12 years ago??? (windows me shipped with a stripped down nt boot kernel)

    Im guessing you forgot a long time ago why you hate Microsoft…

  8. GregA says:

    #4,

    The picture of the floppy is iconic. It is so iconic, I didn’t even realize consciously what the icon was until you pointed it just now, and I had to go and look to be certain.

    Maybe we should change the alphabet to new symbols, because those are getting old as well.

    QB, and Cupertino, still rockin 500 year old typography based upon a 2500 year alphabet, they must be outa date.

  9. sargasso says:

    I love Windows 7 for it’s features, not it’s security. Security is over rated, it’s like admiring a woman for her personality, when it’s her features that you really want to get your sweaty hands on.

  10. qb says:

    GregA. Ask someone under 20 what the floppy icon is. It’s a good laugh. It also makes me wonder why they have an icon for save. When’s the last time you’ve used it?

    You should check Umberto Eco’s “A Theory of Semiotics” – it’s a good read.

  11. qb says:

    Wow, I just took a look at Google Docs and they use the floppy disk icon too. Maybe we should put rotary dialers on cell phones and use 8-track images for DVD’s.

  12. Jeff says:

    GlennA who questions:

    1). What is your source for Windows ME shipping with a stripped down NT boot kernel? Me was the same hybrid mess that 95/98 were. It did modify the DOS boat-loader, but this in no way made it somehow related to NT.

    2). Have you looked into DRM and XP? You might want to take a look at post Sp2 released and client updates for XP. Hell, the product had activation for the beginning, a mini form of DRM.

  13. Glenn E. says:

    From what I know… At least WMP10 lets one turn off all copy protection. But when I heard that WMP11 hid or removed this user feature. I decided not to update beyond SP2. WMP10 works well enough for me. And I couldn’t see the need to keep changing players on an old PC. And I haven’t progressed to IE8, because Firefox 3 is much safer.

    I was finally forced (by Youtube) to install the Adobe Flash player 10 plug-in. And naturally it has screwed up something. The video Download add-on’s buffer capture doesn’t work with Adobe Flash. Or the file it generate is incompatible with a stand alone player. I’m sure Google-Youtube messed up their site on purpose. Just to make using Adobe flash, unavoidable. And monkeys up Firefox.

    As far as Vista and W7 goes. A while ago I heard about all the rights revocation built into Vista. Even if it hasn’t been use, yet. As far as I know, W7 still has all that. Maybe Microsoft is still waiting for XP to die and be forgotten. Before it becomes the tool of the RIAA, and enforces media rights.

    I don’t see how FAT32 could work for Flash drives larger than 4gigs. Cause that was its limit. I know this because I once installed a 30GB hdrive in an older computer, that simulated the FAT32 structure. So I had to have a bunch of partitions to access all the drive space. Now that very hdrive is my C: drive, using NTFS. And a 120+GB hdrive handles pre-CDR storage.


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