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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)

#81
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

On Android builtin as Share -> Quick Share/Nearby share

Available since Android 6 (c.2015)

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

#82

> 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?

> They make post-its for chrissake

Wikipedia to the rescue:

"3M Company (originally the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) is an American multinational conglomerate operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, healthcare, and consumer goods. The company produces over 60,000 products under several brands, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint protection films, dental and orthodontic products, electrical and electronic connecting and insulating materials, medical products, car-care products electronic circuits, healthcare software, and optical films. It is based in Maplewood, a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota."

Although recently not doing so well due to one lawsuit, they have a wonderful rule that nudges management to add new products to its portfolio sooner and more aggresively than other companies, so I associate them with innovation.

The now-famous "Post-It notes" were such a disruptive new innovation, made from scrap paper that was left over when cutting larger pages: literally rubbish/garbage turned into a new revenue stream.

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

#83
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…

> and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. fairly per the effort I'd say. previously content required a camera crew and helicopters. now a smartphone among the limitless content creators

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’d have the record label pay for the studio costs, etc. What’s happening these days is that artists are generally getting paid less after deductions. Not before. That’s the unfair part.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain. Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often…

Sadly, I still need to buy occasional physical media. For some reason, none of the streaming services has recent seasons of Doctor Who in my European country. I have to buy Blu-rays from Amazon long after the shows were streamed in the UK. I just don't understand how the system can be so shitty for consumers. The cost of streaming an additional show is minimal, so there must be some business decisions to not buy/sell…

Distribution rights for content can get pretty complicated. Unnecessarily complicated.

There are so many examples of this, like how impossible it is to watch some UK football (soccer) matches online if you live within the UK. If you live outside the UK, then it’s very easy.

In the case of those sports matches, it’s because clubs don’t want to risk seeing a drop in ticket sales at the stadium.

What might happen with Doctor Who in your country is that someone ones the rights to the original series but someone else owns the rights to the new modern era.

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

#85
post #44
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…

Yes, not having physical media sucks. Physical objects just work better on a human scale, we know where we put them (well..) and how to trade them.

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

#86
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)

I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago. We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end. I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well al…

I have a residency at a nightclub and the rotating younger DJs who open literally just come in with their phone and hook up the controller to it and run spotify through some app that speaks Rekordbox (it's probably actually the Rekordbox app, come to think of it). Without even having checked what the signal in the club is like beforehand (luckily it's pretty good). I asked one if he had any tracks actually downloaded to his phone and he looked at me like I was a stegosaurus.

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

#87
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Sometimes, I work with bi-directional amplifiers and distributed antenna systems that are intended to improve cellular coverage inside of a building where there may be little or none of that.

I have a fairly expensive meter at my disposal to use for planning things like this, which analyzes different cellular carriers by frequency, and can output (messy, and with unescaped commas for notes, but eventually-fucking-usable) CSV files of the results -- with GPS coordinates of the measurement location.

This sounds amazing for a person like me in this line of work. But it is not amazing for a person like me in this line of work.

(As a preface for the rest of this, remember: This meter is a tool that is meant to be used in areas of limited or zero cellular coverage -- places where outside RF is problematic for whatever reason.)

1. The meter has a Bluetooth interface that connects to an app on a pocket computer. (This part works fine, usually, except the app often doesn't background properly and silently dies if the user uses their pocket computer to do some other task, which might be fine if the problem was ever reported. [Haha!])

2. The meter expects the pocket computer to have an Internet connection, so it can use that to upload its findings to The Clown. (This part often cannot work, because the whole fucking reason any of this is happening is because cellular coverage is shit inside of a random building.)

3. The meter expects that the pocket computer will provide GPS coordinates, even though it is intended to be able to be used indoors -- without network connectivity, or perhaps even in a Faraday cage. And while modern pocket computers are very good at providing some location data by various means as long as there is internet connectivity or GPS-esque data, all of them fail at this when there is neither Internet nor GPS available. It produces an error [Haha!] when there is no location information available.

4. It does not provide useful errors. It provides errors, but they aren't specific at all and do not promote productive troubleshooting or workflow. ("Oh, there was a problem with your measurement! [Haha!]" is the singular error.)

5. Sometimes, it will even produce an error [Haha!] but record the measurement anyway -- and without recording the error.

6. It stores nothing locally. When an error happens [Haha! Good luck!], it is impossible to quickly see if anything was stored at all, so the only clear path is to repeat measurements that result in an error [Haha!]. This often results in redundant measurements being actually-recorded, but who would know that at the time of measurement. (These measurements often take about 4 minutes each, so these errors [Haha!] and repeated measurements can consume significant portions of an expensive workday.)

7. (Your main point): Exporting a CSV file of [whatever-the-hell was collected] is possible, as long as I want to send it to Google Drive or some other Clown-based service. The CSV is only a few tiny kilobytes at very most, but it won't let me copy the CSV to my pocket-computer's clipboard, or send it in an email, or save it locally on the pocket computer, or send it with Bluetooth to my laptop. It has to be exported to a Clown-based service, and then it can be read from that Clown-based service by some other device. There are no other options presented, unlike in so many other apps in my pocket computer.

8. Continued: While the maker of this meter device has their own Clown, and this Clown is clearly extent on the Internet, this Clown is completely inaccessible outside of their pocket-computer app. I cannot bypass Step 7 by any official means no matter how deep my desktop computing prowess may be.

It is completely shit, and it appears to be the best thing available on the market in this space. (And it isn't even Chinese shit: The company that produces this meter is in Utah.)

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? This is a few pages in: > Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage—that was done by Austro-German engineer Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF. At first…

My friend, I didn't say "magnetic storage". The title says "3M's Floppy Disk", which implies that 3M created the floppy disk. The subtitle calls 3M, "the high-profile creator of magnetic media", only later making it clear that this is also incorrect. This also implies that 3M invented the floppy: "…3M started with the raw materials and the manufacturing processes, and combined those into computing’s greatest commodit…

Not op but

> The title says "3M's Floppy Disk", which implies that 3M created the floppy disk

If I put up a blog post about Robbiep’s spaghetti bolognaise, or Robbiep’s quadcopter, I don’t think anyone would misinterpret me as having invented those things. It’s an apostrophe of ownership, not an apostrophe of authourship.

Despite what it says elsewhere in the article

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

#89
post #44
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…

Note to self - add "drop off once to friend" feature to my p2p program. (I.e. it makes sure a copy exists locally until your friend has downloaded the entire transfer, then it can be deleted from your local.)

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was between two Android phones, with receiving phone being "oppo" or some such, with stock firmware. Receiving phone would see incoming file request, ask user to accept, then error out with "unknown file", and no way to actually save it. I've sent files via bluetooth from lineageos to lineageos, no problem.

I could totally see it being something stupid in how Android manages file associations or something. The default file managers tend to be fairly crippled and only actually show a subset of files present.

Perfect irony would be if the receiving Android attempts to check the incoming file against some kind of Internet service.
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