Re: Floppies

[Ed Eastman <noone@nowhere.net>]

Greg Andrzejewski wrote:
> This isn't a bad thing, I think. There are much better ways now to store and 
> transport files (usb sticks, cd burners, network file storage). 

I agree... wait for it...

> What kinda irks me though is the anti-floppy propaganda, or "flopaganda" ;-) that's 
> been circulating around campus. If used with care, the odds of a floppy disk 
> losing your term paper are relatively small. 

Oh so close...  But totally incorrect with the vast majority of users.

> But perhaps this is the best
> way to get through to people who bring a floppy to the computer lab and 
> expect there to be equipment to read it.

Personally I have a bias against USERS using floppy disks in multiple 
places.  Users do not seem to understand that floppy disks can only 
stand to be written to from one drive, others tend to cause 'alignment' 
problems and trash the disk.  Maybe not today, but tomorrow for sure, 
%100 guaranteed.

So from my experience with students and probably anyone who have used 
multiple floppy drives themselves will tell you the same.  Back up 
often, that floppy disk will trash your data!

Don't even get me started about MS products making one or several cache 
versions of the file on the original media instead of the temp folder... 
 That buggers disks so fast it's not funny.

Thankx,
Ed