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Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
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mansaxel:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 30, 2022, 12:30:16 am ---

It's really difficult to write a shopping list or a quick schematic on the back of a floppy disk.  ::)

--- End quote ---

I've been known to repurpose unused diskette labels for other marking uses. But as convenient as card stock, no.
mansaxel:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 30, 2022, 12:45:32 am ---
--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 10:45:01 pm ---FTP killed the ZIP drive in its only successful industry, printing. I'm not crying.

--- End quote ---

Not before Syquest drives had already done for them.

--- End quote ---

The Syquest was first and then killed by Zip here -- their market share mainly was in the 44MB drives, and they are much earlier than the Zip drives; when the Zip came, it had a brief sejour, after which FTP took over.
BU508A:

--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 08:53:31 pm ---Still have  CD driver in my computer, always will, need it to read all my old CDs and DVD, and every time I want to burn an ISO file to install a newer version of Linux.

--- End quote ---

One example of several tutorials:

And we've discussed this "how to make a bootable USB stick" thing before.
It is not the fault of the USB stick, if the OS doesn't boot from it.


--- Quote ---USB sticks suck. My ex company gave me one when I signed up, containing some documents for me to read. Brand new key, there was a virus on it already. Tried to format it, didn't work. Tried to delete the partition, start from scratch, make a new partition, format that etc... a clean sheet. Didn't work, the partitioning utility failed to erase the existing partition, no explanation. Eventually I threw the stick in the garbage bin and that solved the problem. Low tech, but worked very well.

Never had that much problems with floppies back in the day, no more than I do with SD cards or USB sticks.

--- End quote ---

That is also nót the fault of the USB stick.
As an example: Sony had distributed a root-kit over CDs/DVDs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Robert763:

--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 09:14:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 09:02:44 pm ---
No, I still maintain floppies are much better.

--- End quote ---

That is because you are not comparing them to the state of the art. What people should do is to have their files on a networked drive.  Compared to a networked file system the floppy drive and its media are slow, unreliable, insecure, and have puny capacity.

(of course, if you don't mind Someone Else reading that file (and I'm not talking about GENERAL ERROR  :-DD ) you can outsource that part. Flipping the RO tab on a 3,5" diskette will take longer time than copying a 1,4MiB file over most networks built the last 20 years, so speed is not an issue. )

And yes, I'm jumping around with first comparing to punch cards, then networked file systems. Point is, that floppy drives and media are an all-time low in medium reliability, only underbid by the practice of storing files to compact cassettes as was popular on several home computers.

--- End quote ---

Well we don't all have our own servers, FTP site or whatever so when we want to transfer a small file it's either a 3rd party site or email which is not as secure as handing over physical media. With Microsoft trying to kill off CD's & DVDs if I want to transfer more than a few tens of megabytes e.g provide a manual with a bit of TE, it means buying several Gb of USB stick.  And unless they are "branded" they are no more reliable than a quality CDR.
Maybe I'm just a luddite, but I don't like the idea of relying on my data (and if MS have their way software) being on someone elses hardware.
bd139:

--- Quote from: Robert763 on June 30, 2022, 07:13:02 am ---
--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 09:14:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 09:02:44 pm ---
No, I still maintain floppies are much better.

--- End quote ---

That is because you are not comparing them to the state of the art. What people should do is to have their files on a networked drive.  Compared to a networked file system the floppy drive and its media are slow, unreliable, insecure, and have puny capacity.

(of course, if you don't mind Someone Else reading that file (and I'm not talking about GENERAL ERROR  :-DD ) you can outsource that part. Flipping the RO tab on a 3,5" diskette will take longer time than copying a 1,4MiB file over most networks built the last 20 years, so speed is not an issue. )

And yes, I'm jumping around with first comparing to punch cards, then networked file systems. Point is, that floppy drives and media are an all-time low in medium reliability, only underbid by the practice of storing files to compact cassettes as was popular on several home computers.

--- End quote ---

Well we don't all have our own servers, FTP site or whatever so when we want to transfer a small file it's either a 3rd party site or email which is not as secure as handing over physical media. With Microsoft trying to kill off CD's & DVDs if I want to transfer more than a few tens of megabytes e.g provide a manual with a bit of TE, it means buying several Gb of USB stick.  And unless they are "branded" they are no more reliable than a quality CDR.
Maybe I'm just a luddite, but I don't like the idea of relying on my data (and if MS have their way software) being on someone elses hardware.


--- End quote ---

Yep. I've got two AWS snowballs to deal with soon. They are basically 100TB storage appliances for shipping data on. Network is not fast enough and too expensive.

As for your data being on someone else's hardware, it depends on where it is and what custodial contract is in place and how much you care versus convenience. I mirror my data onto Amazon S3 and iCloud. iCloud for convenience, S3 as backup. I also have local copy on an SSD and on laptop of course.
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