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Poll
Watch this space for an Emily Dickinson poem.
100%

Votes: 5

 The Artist...

 Author:  Topic:  Posted:
Feb 06, 2002
 Comments:
...known as elenchos steps into the computer science lab. The time is 12:03 pm.

elenchos: You know, I just realized what a mistake it is for niave parents to get their bright-eyed young child one of those iMacs to go off to college with.

Mac Zealot: What! They'll have nothing but problems with a cheap Dell or EMachine!

elenchos: But look how often the network it down. How will they move files from home with no floppy drive?

Mac Zealot: The nework wouldn't go down all the time without all those crappy Win2K boxen hooked up to it.

Mac Fault Threshhold Reached! Time: 85 seconds!

Elenchos goes for bonus points...

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elenchos: Most of the time you can use the network, but not your files or your email because the server isn't working. If you just used a floppy disk, would't you just be free from having to worry about any of that?

Mac Zealot: Ha! If the sever ran BSD instead of Lunix it wouldn't be down six times a month! Floppies are a thing of the past.

Ding! Ding! Double Mac Fault Threshhold with a BSD kicker! Time: 100 seconds.

Thank you. Thankyouverymuch.

       
Tweet

Floppies. (5.00 / 1) (#1)
by tkatchev on Wed Feb 6th, 2002 at 01:29:13 PM PST
Floppies are truly useless and horrible creations.

Get yourself a normal CD-RW, and dump the floppy forever. There is no excuse for a floppy drive in 2002!


--
Peace and much love...

Never underestimate (none / 0) (#2)
by Anonymous Reader on Wed Feb 6th, 2002 at 10:39:56 PM PST
the bandwidth of a shipping container of floppies.

Re: (none / 0) (#3)
by tkatchev on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 12:44:27 AM PST
If you print it out using three-point type, the bandwidth will be even bigger.


--
Peace and much love...

 
you what? (none / 0) (#4)
by PotatoError on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 05:19:01 AM PST
the bandwidth of my car is 12.
<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

 
So... (none / 0) (#8)
by elenchos on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 02:16:54 PM PST
...I'm working on a paper at home, and then burn a whole CD just to bring a copy to school, where I work on it some more. But what then? Do the computers at the library all come with CD burners? No. But they have floppy drives (except for the Macs, of course). So I can either put it on a floppy and carry it home, or, if the Lunix server is up and the network isn't choked with mp3 downloads, I can email or ftp it to myself.

Floppies still win. They are reliable enough and are compatible with all standard computers. People who insist on exotic media and hardware from boutique outfits like Apple or Lunix are unhappy, but the rest of the world is fine with it.


I do, I do, I do
--Bikini Kill

 
why not buy a floppy drive for your IMac (none / 0) (#5)
by PotatoError on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 05:26:17 AM PST
isnt that easier?

Floppys have a shite capacity anyway and a tendancy to get damaged easily. Getting a 100mb zip drive instead is a lot better. I got a USB one so that when im going round someones house who doesnt have a zip drive I can take it with me and plug it into theirs - the drivers are on CD not floppy :)

I wouldnt buy an IMac though, not so much value for money as value for pretty colors.
<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

Normal students... (none / 0) (#7)
by elenchos on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 02:10:52 PM PST
Can fit a year's worth of term papers on one floppy. But then it all might get damaged or lost. So have one disk per class. Or one disk per assignment. They only cost 25 cents, and they are universally compatible with standard computers.

As far as having to buy a floppy drive, that just makes your iMac all the more expensive, and defeats the whole point of a computer that is easy and simple to use. If you just get a non-exotic computer and non-exotic portable media (not Zips or CDs) then you have no problem to begin with, and don't have to go looking for add-ons and kludges to fix it.


I do, I do, I do
--Bikini Kill

huh (none / 0) (#9)
by PotatoError on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 07:11:32 PM PST
a years worth of term papers on one floppy?

How exotic are CDs though? Any stuff you get from magasines now or even drivers usually now come on CDs. I use a CD writer to burn all my stuff as backup. I only use the zip disks for temporary storage. Floppy drives are useless because their capacity is so poor. If you are going to transport something on floppy you might as well just email it.


<<JUMP! POGO POGO POGO BOUNCE! POGO POGO POGO>>

 
explain (none / 0) (#13)
by Anonymous Reader on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 10:48:39 PM PST
They only cost 25 cents, and they are universally compatible with standard computers.

What exactly is a standard computer? A server is a computer. A PDA is a computer. Hell a calculator is a computer. Do they have floppy drives?

It really depends on what you mean by standard. It's not the computer that's stndard. It's the interfaces. USB, CDROM, IDE, PCI, etc. Those are all standard interfaces. There is no standard which mandates that if I build a computer that it has to be exactly like the others.

Are you referring to the standard that mandates IBM compatible machines maybe? The Apple is not an IBM compatible machine. So it doesn't have to conform to that standard. Any company manfacturing an IBM based machine could drop the floppy at any time. There has been talk for quite some time about dropping it from these machines. Along with parallel, serial, game and PS/2 ports. One of the companies pushing this is Intel.

There are many reasons why this has not been done. One is from printer manufacturers unwillingness to manufacturer USB only printers or printers that include a USB port at all. Then there is the fact that there is no standard for various tools for partitioning and otherwise preparing a hard drive to store data. Microsoft is a little behind linux in that respect.

Your standards argument has the same (if not more) number of holes as your "what a computer was designed for" rant.

 
Normal Students? (none / 0) (#16)
by Anonymous Reader on Fri Feb 8th, 2002 at 08:02:23 AM PST
In Zipped up standard text, I can fit the complete works of Shakespeare on three or four floppys. Just how much do you English majors write in a year?

--Anonymous Reader #24601

 
Floppy disks are useless in today's society (none / 0) (#6)
by Anonymous Reader on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 05:47:11 AM PST
What is needed is a high-capacity portable storage solution. Zip drives are also passé. My personal choice would be a USB LS-120 drive, if you already have floppy disks and still need to use them, or a USB portable hard-drive. They're so nice! You just plug them into the other USB socket on the keyboard. I'm sure they can also be used on the more expensive PCs, too.

 
huh? (none / 0) (#10)
by gNinja on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 09:48:02 PM PST
I don't get what's so funny.

If they run windows of course the network is going to be down because Microsoft is stupid.

They should use Apple OSX which is based on the BSD version of the Linus kernel. It's 100% open source software so that means it's really stable and doesn't crash.

No offense elenchos, you are a great writer and all that, but you don't know anything about technology.




Move along. (none / 0) (#11)
by Anonymous Reader on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 09:55:42 PM PST
Go back to the minor leagues and practice your trolling some more. You technique is not yet adequate.

Jesus Fucking Christ (none / 0) (#14)
by Anonymous Reader on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 11:34:59 PM PST
Except for NAWL, of course. My dog could troll NAWL. Trolling NAWL is easier than fishing with dynamite. And about as subtle.

It's precisely because NAWL encourages the incompetent that his account was disabled, but he's still here, drawn like a moth to the flame, boldly identifying himself every time.

Next thing you know, NAWL will be insisting that the world isn't flat. What a complete biter.

Grudge match: Flat earthers vs Greek scholars (none / 0) (#15)
by Anonymous Reader on Fri Feb 8th, 2002 at 02:49:48 AM PST
Next thing you know, NAWL will be insisting that the world isn't flat.

Talking of which, did I mention how fantastic the Java/HTML version of Euclid's elements of geometry is? Cheers for the link, Nathan.
An unreformed Aristotlean.

 
oh dear, not another one (none / 0) (#12)
by Anonymous Reader on Thu Feb 7th, 2002 at 10:33:28 PM PST
If they run windows of course the network is going to be down because Microsoft is stupid.

They should use Apple OSX which is based on the BSD version of the Linus kernel. It's 100% open source software so that means it's really stable and doesn't crash.

FreeBSD (including OSX), OpenBSD, and NetBSD are based on BSD4 (Berkeley Systems Distribution). They are not based on linux. BSD4 is the variant of the original Unix code licensed freely to UCBerkeley from the Bell Labs. Check your timeline dummy.

Good resource

 
You Forgot (5.00 / 1) (#17)
by doofus on Fri Feb 8th, 2002 at 01:33:54 PM PST
the new window manager that comes with Mac OS X: Quark.

Quark (none / 0) (#18)
by Anonymous Reader on Fri Feb 8th, 2002 at 01:50:40 PM PST
Quark, the company, has already mentioned that it's current products are not compatible with OSX.

Quark is a company. Which particular little piece of software are you referring to as Aqua is the window manager (GUI) for MacOSX.

Sir... (5.00 / 1) (#19)
by doofus on Fri Feb 8th, 2002 at 04:04:31 PM PST
Thank you for your attempt at clarifying my statement. I realize now I was incomplete in my initial response.

To wit: "Agua" is the Apple OS X GUI - it contains the "widgets" that create the "user experience." A "widget" is a button, window frame or other element that the window manager uses to draw the GUI item.

"Quark" is the "compositing engine" that drives the "Agua" interface. It is vector PDF-based and runs on top of the BSD/Linux kernel in the operating system "stack."

I should have made that clear in the inital post. Again, thank you for pointing that out.

clear up (none / 0) (#20)
by Anonymous Reader on Sat Feb 9th, 2002 at 06:44:27 PM PST
It's AQUA not AGUA

 

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