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The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

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Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#201

Post by ssl-3 »

kijin wrote: post #147
nradov wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding. There's no way I'm going to plug someone else's thumb drive into my computer. Who knows what kind of malware it could be carrying, like having unprotected sex with a random stranger.

Is it any different when you receive a zip file by email? It could very well have been crafted to exploit a backdoor in your compression program.

It is different.

A USB key can be anything, or even complex combinations of things. It can be a storage device and an HID keyboard input and an optical drive that autoruns software on the PC it is connected to, with all of this being intentionally supported by the host operating system.

No back door is required: This can happen right at the front door, as the operating system does what it is intended to do when it detects new hardware.

And as a parting shot: It can even deliberately physically destroy the host computer's hardware. (Try that with a crafty ZIP file.)

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#202

Post by ssl-3 »

clan wrote: post #122
GuB-42 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways of sending files between phones, none of them good. Bluetooth can work, but it is slow as hell, and Apple doesn't support it. Cloud services are convenient, but you not only you need some signal, but you also uses up your data plan. If you have USB OTG support, you can simply use a thumb drive, like with your PC, but it is cumbersome and you need the hardware. There are some somewhat proprietary s…

I agree and get your point. But localsend has worked well for me. Yes, it requires an app but if we could get vendors to bundle that rather than a boatload of bloatware. I know that it would be to optimistic to hope for Google. See https://localsend.org/ Spread the word.

Localsend looks neat, but they're absolutely pissing into the wind by saying that it is "Open-source Airdrop" in the title in the Play store.

That's a clearcut case of absolutely willful trademark infringement, and it will not go well for the authors when (not if) Apple happens to cast their gaze in that direction.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#203

Post by fomine3 »

fdr wrote: post #5

> If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. I think that's an interesting perception of the public. I think of 3M making all sorts of things, generally, I admire the company...in spite of some rather grotesque blunders and bad behavior. But the first thing that comes to mind is adhesive…

I suspect that Chinese also trusts 3M brand because random AliExpress products tend to have "3M" branded adhesive seal (perhaps fake).

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#204

Post by creatonez »

esafak wrote: post #49
0x0000000 wrote: post #32

> If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. That's crazy, I wouldn't think anyone would first and foremost associate 3M with floppies instead of adhesives, even those with a few grays like myself. They make post-its for chrissake, and we're gonna pretend they're most known for floppies?

I have no idea why they shoehorned 3M into the article. Floppies rose and fell independently of 3M.

3M is only interesting in retrospect. They were one of the first manufacturers to get out of the floppy business, but they also had some of the highest quality disks. So as soon as floppies started dying, the durability and quality fell off a cliff. But if you come across a 3M disk in the modern era (floppies are still used by textile equipment), it might actually store your data without breaking.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#205

Post by shiroiushi »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from som…

Yeah, things took a wrong turn somewhere, with people not valuing local storage and local control of data and just continually downloading the same thing over and over from some cloud provider, for a monthly fee.

It made sense with Netflix, because most people don't re-watch movies often: they usually watch it once and never again, or if it's a favorite, maybe a handful of times. Plus, you normally watch movies at home, where you have a fast and cap-free wired data connection. With music, it just doesn't make sense to me, because I don't want to listen to whatever crap someone wants to shovel to me, and I like hearing the same songs over and over (you can never get tired of Led Zeppelin IV), plus I frequently listen to music while away from home, but somehow people have been suckered into paying for 1) a monthly fee to listen to the music they already know they like, and 2) another big monthly fee for a cellular data plan that allows this wastefulness of mobile bandwidth.

Add to this the proliferation of SaaS, with people now running software from their web browser, and interacting with their data while it's on some remote server, instead of all local on their PC. Now, you can't do almost anything on a computer if you don't have an always-on internet connection.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#206

Post by shiroiushi »

ryandrake wrote: post #150
francescovv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the Internet And for mobile phones - without internet is similar, unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends, and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of "securi…

I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a very large file, and encountered this. There really is no good universal way to do this, even here in 2024! File is too big for E-mail, ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy. Dropbox requires accounts and sharing and all sorts of access shit for him to figure out. I ended up enabling WebDAV on an existing web server I have admin access to, and luckily he…

>File is too big for E-mail,

Back in the old days, we would have used PKZIP or RAR to split the file into smaller pieces.

>ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy

Back in the old days, even a secretary could figure out how to use the MS-DOS command line well enough to get her job done. I'm not sure what happened between then and now, but these days people just say "I'm non-technical" and refuse to learn anything that doesn't involve a GUI. FTP isn't hard, it's just a few commands, and it's much easier to tell someone how to send FTP than to use any GUI, since you can type out the exact commands to use:

1. ftp [ip address] 2. type username 3. type password 4. cd dir-to-drop-files 5. put filename 6. quit

These days, we'd use sftp anyway, but you could also use scp in a single command line which they could simply copy-and-paste from an email, after you have their temporary account set up.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#207

Post by throw10920 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from som…

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines[1], which state:

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Going off from a story about floppy disk production into the unrelated topics content ownership and creator pay is the very definition of a generic tangent, flamebait, and an internet trope. Please don't degrade the quality of HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#208

Post by shiroiushi »

hnlmorg wrote: post #181
robjan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past long tail musicians got nothing, now they get a handful of shrapnel from Spotify plays.

In the past, those musicians got CD sales at local gigs. Does anyone buy CDs any more? Before then it was cassettes. Same format though: you’d see them at a pub and buy a CD / tape if you liked their stuff. The long tail of musicians have always been worse off though. Organisations like PRS would distribute subscriptions to the household names leaving smaller bands with next to nothing and the long tail with literall…

>In the past, those musicians got CD sales at local gigs. Does anyone buy CDs any more?

Here in Japan, they do. Record shops like Tower Records are going strong, and used CD stores are fairly common. Disc Union in Tokyo is a big chain selling used CDs. There's also some little shops selling used vinyl.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#209

Post by eek04_ »

da_chicken wrote: post #180
yxwvut wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs). Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT music). I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to oranges #s as though every stream would've been an album/MP3 sale…

Well, we just saw Hollywood unions have a 4-month long strike over the portion of residuals they were receiving under streaming. I'm willing to bet that their complaints about not getting what they used to under prior contracts and models are entirely accurate. We're also in a situation now where the media owners are building silos for their own content instead of licensing it and letting independent platforms compet…

There's at least one bit that's missing here, even if the claim is entirely accurate:

Both the total pie and the total number of creators has increased. Hollywood feature film production is [estimated](hhttps://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-in-the-film-indus...) to be 3000-7000 people. There are [approximately 61.1 *million* YouTube creators](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/youtube-creator-stats), or approximately 10,000 times more. There could easily be 100x more money flowing to the total visual entertainment creator community and the old guard film creators could still get less than they used to.

I don't know exactly what to search for to get similar numbers for music production, but I suspect it is similar: There's a lot more creators and they get less each even though it's more in total, and this is especially hitting "old timers" that used to get the bulk of the old total and get less with the new setup.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#210

Post by shiroiushi »

sebastianavina wrote: post #7
LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from som…

you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any platform...

1. I don't have to pay a monthly fee

1a. I don't have to listen to annoying and offensive ads

2. I don't have to worry about something disappearing

3. I can listen to the version I want (remaster vs. original)

4. I can listen to music in the codec of my choice: 5. I don't need an expensive cellular plan to handle all that bandwidth

6. I can listen to my music on airplanes

It's amazing this stuff is so hard to understand for people these days.

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