91–100 of 190 posts
If you go to some service that offers prints and use your usb drive there, Im like 100% sure you will get multiple viruses.
I dont understand why the operating systems dont seem to be able to defend themselves against it. Also in the past the drives had a "read only" mode, nowadays this is hard to find.
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Funny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop. 20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
Oh I remember the era of giving your thumb drives all possible viruses every time you needed to print. I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.
I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while, because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance. In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files,…
They've been popular around here for listening to music in your car for a very long time. Modern cars usually accept USB sticks as is, but there aren't many modern cars here since we're mostly using 10-15 year old leftovers from more developed countries. So people have been using cheap Chinese USB-to-AM-radio converters like this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771224597.html (first result on aliexpress,…
Or, some do as I do, and just play music straight from the phone speakers.
I am the proud owner of an 8MB IBM branded DiskOnKey flash drive. Plugging it into my linux system, it throws a lot of errors, but I do have a ext2 filesystem on it. I can mount it and find the little 'hello world' text file I put in there last June :)
I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while, because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance. In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files,…
I guess I just like redundancy, having control over my own physical storage, have a sort of backup routine (cloud for super frequent temporary storage, flash for less frequent more capacity, and SDD for even less frequent even higher capacity) and flash drives are super portable. I tend to buy them in the biggest fastest format I can, and pay extra for a brand name from a vendor I trust.
I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
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> Who is still buying ... SD cards? Photographers.
3D Printers
I get that 10 years ago, back when I was in this space, this was a consequence of DIY builds being Arduino-based - SD cards were the easiest form of durable storage to work with, and the alternative was streaming G-code over USB, which tended to cause unreliable prints (my favorite example was a 3D printer builder and a popularizer in our local Hackerspace, who figured out he can't leave a print job running and give the computer to his kid to play videogames on, because any larger load would slow G-code transmission rate, throw off timings, and completely ruin the print). But I would think these days the printers would be built with some on-board buffer storage and network connectivity. ESP32 is a thing.
It should also be noted that one of the reasons thumb drives took off when they did was not just due to USB.. as technically USB has been around for a few years and there were things like CF card readers coming on the market, and other flash storage readers a few years earlier.. so why did it take until later? Because Win 95 and Win 98 did not have plug and play drivers for USB mass storage devices, at all. I think i…
These were then backported to 98SE, and pretty much every vintagecomputing enthusiast with a 98 box is running this despite the anachronism, because authenticity is just such a massive PITA.
https://vetusware.com/download/Universal%20USB%20Mass%20Stor...
In case you're in the market for such a hack. :)
I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
I mean to add, the article says that thumb drives are still hot and the market will grow by billions a year more in a few years, but... I haven't used a thumb drive in years. The only time I actually went to look for one was to plug it into a shitty digital picture frame, and that one would also accept SD cards.
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> The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made them appear magic. Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it wherever I went.
When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.
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It's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them, except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them). If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
By the late 00's you were as likely to have a Zip drive for smaller (100mb) exchanges... if it weren't for the excessive licensing fees for the disks, the fate of the devices might have been a lot different. I really didn't consider thumb drives worth my time until they started getting over 256mb or so, I think it was also after USB3 was a thing, but it's a bit muddied in my memory.