Re: Floppies & OS X Was: Downsides and Outrage

[Evan MacBeth]

Floppies are also unreliable as heck these days...like Evyn, I've had
brand new, just unwrapped name brands fail on me.
However, good lords and floppy disks work in funny ways - I've got a set 
of system 6 disks that I made using verbatim 800 k disks some time in 
the late '80s, and they still work as good as new.  =]

I cannot *count* the number of times students have come to our door in
a panic because a floppy broke, rending their only copy of a file
unreadable.
1.44 MB also holds very little these days.

It's funny you should say that, my uni has just replaced all the windows 
PC's in the main student computer lab.  I was chatting to the IT guy 
(there's the inner nerd coming out again....he's always cramping my 
style), and he said he made a point of having CD burners put in all of 
them to take the place of the Zip drives.  They've left a few zip drives 
in, though.

Yea, also, 1.44 meg is the amazing shrinking relative size - 20 
illustrator PDF's for a recording studio design project don't fit on a 
1.44 meg disk any more.

USB flash drives are what I'm seeing people use, more and more.

Believe me, i've got one on my computer wants list, after the new hard 
drive, extra RAM, a monitor of my own...

CDs come in those 3" diameter size, 165 MB, but have never tried to buy
any, so I don't know if they're identical in every way to the 5" ones,
but I suspect so...

Yea, the only ones I've bought were unbranded, and I've only got a 4x cd 
drive - no coasters there, but they haven't given me any problems as 
yet.  Just one thing though - they're normally two to three times the 
price of a 5" one.

Both OSX and Windows XP support CD burning right in the OS. Put in a
blank cd, drag files to it, eject it and it's burned (in OSX, dunno
about XP, but they copied it from Apple, so it's bound to have a few
more mouse-clicks.

I don't know about windows XP (my celeron 333 loves '98 too much...), 
but I've had a wee problem with burning discs in OS X (10.1.5, mind you, 
I don't know if 10.2 fixed it). Using a G4 Quicksilver, Disc Burner 
(gasp) won't burn multi-session discs.  A bit annoying - it inspired me 
to boot to OS 9 and drag out my toast install disk.

Completely off topic, does anyone know if there's been a Carbon release 
of OpenOffice?

I'll get out of your way now, I'll see you later

Cheers,
Evan.


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