161–170 of 180 posts
There's still no cheap easy way to just physically hand someone data the way you could a floppy. It's a shame.
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I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them r…
I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device.
Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.
That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.
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If they are releasing on floppy, then the quality can't be up to much - that's going to be a pretty low bitrate MP3 to fit in that space!
Sometimes they'll be modtracker files (a handful of short samples + playback information) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file
One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy? Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on h…
There were 2.88" floppy disks, not mainstream. From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over. We had CD burners…
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Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked. I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on…
You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well. I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the…
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Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
You have a working 486? If I had one, I'd spin up Civ1 just for old times!
I use it mostly for Borland C++, but also Solitaire in Windows 3.1.
I also have an 8088, a 286 and a 386...
Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61
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Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later. I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilitie…
> but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible Not in my experience. Mine all failed.
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sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB c…
> > sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. > Yeah, what the hell is with that? Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was…
I expect it might be solved in a few years, as long as no Apple products are involved, but for now we're still stuck taking pictures of each other's screens if we need something fast.