The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023) • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by Fatnino » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

You can get packs of very very cheap microSD cards. Just good enough to put data on once to give to someone and then forget about. No performance or whatever. Trash tier.

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

#222

Post by rightbyte » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #146

jmclnx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved The only thing is writing to a CD/DVD can be a PITA. To me diskettes were very easy when it came to read and write to physical media. >Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was Thi…

Not only that, but it's hard to buy small flash drives. The smallest I can find in retail stores around me are in the 16-32GB range, which feels like a total waste when all I need is a few hundred MB (i.e. just beyond the email attachment limit). Smaller flash drives are available online, in bulk, of course, but they're not much cheaper. I guess the cost of flash becomes a negligible part of the total price at the si…

At some point small memory sticks were used for like ads and brochures at conferances. They were quite neat and I guess they were bought in bulk.

But I can't seem to find any big packs of cheap small sticks either...

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

#223

Post by shiroiushi » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 1:32 AM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #214

shiroiushi wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 anythin…

> Back in the old days, we would have used PKZIP or RAR to split the file into smaller pieces. Back then there were far fewer non-technical people using email anyway. In my experience people like office admins wouldn't do anything with split archives they would get the local computer person to do it for them (and the same would happen at the receiving end). They were generally aware of zip files, but might get a loca…

>And not just secretaries: higher paid managers & such too.

No, the managers were lazy and insisted on having secretaries print everything out for them, and refused to touch a keyboard.

>In fact them more so (as they would drop the task on a secretary, who would then enlist the office kid who knew some tech).

In my experience in a college, the secretaries could handle their computer-based duties by themselves just fine. They only called for help when they ran into a problem they hadn't encountered yet. But doing basic file management at the MS-DOS command line (this was before Windows) was within their ability.

>The issue with that was (still is) that they will need telling each time.

Yeah, so what? ryandrake above said "I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a very large file, and encountered this", so that's why I countered with this in response to his claim that "ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy". It doesn't matter if it isn't natural or familiar; all you have to do is cut-and-paste some simple commands. If you can't do that, you're hopelessly stupid I think. You don't even have to understand the commands! That's my whole point with the utility of a command-line interface in situations like this: you can give someone some explicit commands, and they should be able to follow them exactly, simply by cutting-and-pasting or typing them in. It's not like a GUI interface where you have to try to tell them (perhaps over the phone) exactly where to click, which isn't reliable since you may not be able to exactly duplicate their environment or they might be using a different program or even OS. If you're somehow smart enough to use a computer with a GUI for years (and likely multiple computers: smartphone + PC), but you're too stupid to open a terminal window and cut-and-paste a one-line command, this sounds to me like "willful ignorance".

Anyway, the point is that this is fine for a rare occurrence like this. It doesn't sound like ryandrake has to deal with this problem with this same person on a daily basis.

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

#224

Post by _carbyau_ » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 4:11 AM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #216

_carbyau_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerdy but - last Xmas 3M got hundreds of dollars of my family money. I got speed tape, ruby tape, silicone fiberglass hi-low temp tape. I don't really need them, I admire the engineering and I'm kinda afraid to use these tapes given how much they cost. But yeah, the 3M brand = adhesives in my household.

My favorite is their nuclear duct tape: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-17542R/3M-Duct-Cloth-...

Oh! Who doesn't want to answer:

"Duct tape, sure... I got nuclear duct tape in the drawer over there."

3M getting more of my money for my next birthday I guess.

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

#225

Post by hnlmorg » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 7:52 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #208

hnlmorg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vinyl sales have been growing year on year in west too

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

#226

Post by creatonez » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

hypercube33 wrote: post #215

creatonez wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I think they spun off their media business to imation who kept making CDs and floppies

The article points out how Imation was eventually bought out just for the trademark, so it sounds like they gave up on the manufacturing / material science and just became like any other floppy disk.

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

#227

Post by mensetmanusman » Sun, Apr 07, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

shmeeed wrote: post #220

mensetmanusman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An area of huge counterfeit is companies purchasing low cost legit adhesive with a 3M logo on the liner, and then coating a different adhesive on it that looks like it would work but doesn't and selling for profit.

Is that really a thing? I always imagined they would just counterfeit the liner too.

The liners can e quite complex with built in anti-counterfeiting technology.

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

#228

Post by selestify » Tue, Apr 16, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

yxwvut wrote: post #169

afavour wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The total outflows to creators is higher Is that actually true, though? I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that bands only really make money from touring these days and that streaming money is basically a rounding error.

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…

This data appears to disagree, with revenue peaking in 2000:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Do you have a source for your numbers?