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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)

#181

Post by hnlmorg »

robjan wrote: post #133
hnlmorg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a grossly unfair comparison: 1. For starters you’re comparing TV production to YouTube content. The two aren’t even close to being equal in terms of budget. 2. Most popular content on YouTube still have at least professionals DSLRs and paid crew beyond just the influencers. Even if it’s just an editor or two. 3. I think the GP was talking about music rather then video content 4. Even with music, previously you…

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 literally nothing.

The meme of a guitarist sleeping on their friends couch is as old as the internet is.

Fact is, most artists don’t make money. Just like most footballers don’t. And most sports car racers don’t. There isn’t ever going to be a way to pay every budding musician, painter, nor sports enthusiast for their time. However if one of these personalities do succeed enough to go professional, ie that being their primary income, they should at least be paid fairly.

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

#182

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #148
everfrustrated wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android builtin as Share -> Quick Share/Nearby share Available since Android 6 (c.2015)

Have you tried it? It's horribly slow.

I use it all the time. I guess I'm just patient :-)

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

#183

Post by hinkley »

sema4hacker wrote: post #161
yxwvut wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000 copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have millions of listeners online but still not cover the production costs.

How many times have you listened to your favorite album? Some of my CDs would have worn out in the 00’s if I hadn’t ripped them. In fact I had to use a disc doctor on a few to get a clean scan.

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

#184

Post by hinkley »

mark_undoio wrote: post #107
pilaf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iomega Zip Drives Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than Iomega? I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't happen in the West. 1: h…

It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point. I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either). Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3], which were just so small and cute. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3…

There was a predecessor to the Zip Drive that could do 120 MB. I’m blanking on what it’s called. My friend who was into MD data was into those first, then Iomega killed them.

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

#185

Post by maxglute »

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…

MiniDiscs for peak portable storage aesthetic. I'm still holding out hope that maybe someday we'll go back to visible mini platters on portable devices.

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

#186

Post by devilbunny »

mark_undoio wrote: post #101
aidenn0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.

I was excited about the LS-120 but I never quite convinced myself to stump up the money to pay for it. My recollection was that it was: - Slightly larger than the contemporary Zip disks. - Cheaper than a Zip drive. - Could just replace your existing floppy drive, since it was backwards-compatible. I don't know if it was as fast or robust as a Zip disk - it definitely didn't have the same mind share, though.

I wish that MiniDisc Data had been more widespread and faster - great size and amazing robustness. Unfortunately, AFAICT they topped out at 600 kB/s speed.

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

#188

Post by crtasm »

ssl-3 wrote: post #44
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…

I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quota…

Have you tried this?

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

There's also various webapps that work similarly: set up the connection then have you transfer data directly to the peer.

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

#189

Post by vikingerik »

hinkley wrote: post #184
mark_undoio wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point. I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either). Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3], which were just so small and cute. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3…

There was a predecessor to the Zip Drive that could do 120 MB. I’m blanking on what it’s called. My friend who was into MD data was into those first, then Iomega killed them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk was 120 MB, but it came after the Zip drive, not before.

The ones that came before the Zip were the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical , and various flavors of magneto-optical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

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

#190

Post by mrob »

nradov wrote: post #135
mrWiz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it generally works IME is that if I want someone's data I better have my own thumb drive to get it, and if somebody wants mine they better have their own.

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.

It's easier to exploit somebody's computer using a USB drive, because it can do things like pretend to be a keyboard and spoof your inputs, and because the attack surface is "every USB driver", but we have to assume a skilled attacker can do just as much damage with a DVD+R. AFAIK, no kernel filesystem driver is designed to be robust against maliciously crafted filesystems, and FUSE is not designed to be a security boundary. If you're taking security seriously you have to take the same precautions with each, e.g. disabling automount, and only mounting them in a disposable VM and accessing the files over the network.

And even this might not be enough. Is your OS's partition table code robust against malicious input? I don't think there's any way to disable reading the partition table in Linux when a new block device is detected. In this case even copying a single file to/from the raw device with dd might not be secure.

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