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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)

#91

Post by ponector »

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...

Not everything can be streamed. Streaming platform are applying censorship. Not everyone is signing in to provide their music to streaming. Also they usually stream not original tracks, but a remaster.

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

#92

Post by ssl-3 »

bandrami wrote: post #86
ssl-3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard from DJ friends that there are plugins that let Spotify play on [say] two DDJs at once, perhaps through Rekordbox. Perhaps even on a pocket computer. (I an not an expert on DJ fare -- I just hang out with these guys and help make it happen.)

And I'm sure that Spotify works usually, and I'm sure it's against the Spotify ToS, but I'm also sure that this level of reliance on end-to-end Internet connectivity is bound for inescapable failure.

Eventually.

(For our "little" pop-up off-grid DJ rig, which was not actually particularly small: I made sure we had redundancy for everything we felt we needed: Power, amps, sources, speakers, and the rest of the works -- except Internet. We assumed, going in, that the Internet would be useless and thus none of our actual-plans relied on it, and we also knew that we were pretty far from any civilization that could garner us replacement parts.)

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

#93

Post by MikusR »

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…

>most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world

In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator count has increased by orders of magnitude.

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

#94

Post by prmoustache »

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…

As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.

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

#95

Post by ssl-3 »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #80
yaomtc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said BD-R. Blu-ray. Not many computers have Blu-ray drives compared to DVD.

Oh right, my bad. Though around the 2010s IIRC many laptops even on the budget end were being sold with BD reader combo drives.

I held a portable USB3 Blu-Ray reader in my hand once.

I could have used it, too, but I could not think of anything I wanted to do with it by that time in 2017 -- seven years ago -- despite my proclivity for making backups of films.

BD on a PC has never been common in my world of computing, and by 2017 optical drives in general were becoming very uncommon in everyone's world.

It never broadly caught on.

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

#96

Post by throwaway71271 »

I bought a usb floppy drive, and some old 1.44 floppies, and I thought its just nostalgia, but tbh its just super cool.

I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool computer kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that are pretty fast

There is also a floppy disk music demoscene, and of course the retro computing scene, but I think 'constrained' programming is one of the best ways to learn and it is underused in pedagogy and androgogy. The floppy disk will raise again.

PS: I am working on adding UFI support, it is using CBI to the esp32 mass storage which support only BOT, but its going quite slowly because I am trying to use cheap 4$ logic analyzer to debug and its losing samples :(

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

#97

Post by bandrami »

ssl-3 wrote: post #92
bandrami wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard from DJ friends that there are plugins that let Spotify play on [say] two DDJs at once, perhaps through Rekordbox. Perhaps even on a pocket computer. (I an not an expert on DJ fare -- I just hang out with these guys and help make it happen.) And I'm sure that Spotify works usually, and I'm sure it's against the Spotify ToS, but I'm also sure that this level of reliance on end-to-end Internet connectivity i…

That sounds right; Serato has something similar. (I keep meaning to write something for Mixxx to be able to do that with Jamendo...)

What's really jaw-dropping for me is the deezer-based live stem extraction, where you can press a button and just be playing the vocals or the drums. (This is, weirdly, fundamentally the same tech that makes those pictures, which still astounds me.) I still get annoyed with the "sync" button because it doesn't let me do a half-beat lead-in. I will probably always be a dinosaur in this field, which is fine. But I would at least try to pass on the hard-earned knowledge that you have to assume in a live performance any given system will fail at some point.

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

#98

Post by ssl-3 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #89
ssl-3 wrote: 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…

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.)

I think I like you.

But is your program actually P2P? (If it were, then: The sender would know when the recipient has completed the download, because the sender was finished sending it and the recipient has stated that they are done receiving it. And there would be no need for gymnastics.)

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

#99

Post by martinpw »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #76
reporterexchang wrote: post #21

Search by floppy disk over time. Google trends. About as expected... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&tz=420&dat...

What is the spike in November 2020 about? Is there a way to "see what they saw"? Maybe the results of then could tell me why people cared about a 20 year old media format.

Quick search shows that there was was quest in Call of Duty that involved decrypting a floppy disk, and there is a walkthrough here from ... November 2020

https://www.ign.com/wikis/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-war/Ho...

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

#100

Post by actionfromafar »

ssl-3 wrote: post #98
actionfromafar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I think I like you. But is your program actually P2P? (If it were, then: The sender would know when the recipient has completed the download, because the sender was finished sending it and the recipient has stated that they are done receiving it. And there would be no need for gymnastics.)

Exactly like that. My program is half-way there to doing NAT hole-punching, a bunch of other stuff is missing and I'm deep into yak-shaving right now the likes of you wouldn't even believe, but I have had good progress the last few months. (Been tinkering for years, finally decided to do a serious effort. The commit log goes back years but for long periods very silent.)
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