Intel wants to lose the FDD and other things.

Post #11,847 by static 10/4/01 10:15:51 PM Reply	Intel wants to lose the FDD and other things. Article on The Register. [link\|http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/22034.html\|Intel to kill floppy drives, serial ports next year] Intel is finally inciting the death of the floppy drive and is calling on PC manufacturers big and small to stop supplying the once-capacious 1.44MB removable drive in the latter half of 2002. ... PC types seem to hang on to their outdated technologies with rather more passion than their Mac counterparts, which is the only way of explaining why there are so few 'legacy-free' PCs out there and why the ones that are tend not to sell as well as their port-packed alternatives. Vendors tend to see that as a sign that people want serial, PS/2, parallel etc. and not use USB and 1394. But unless you force people to change, as Apple did, it's impossible to say whether demand for older ports is intent or inertia. I have to say that my laptop lacks a conventional FDD and onboard serial and parallel ports. OTOH, it came with a USB FDD which would have been a most frustrating omission. A serial port and a parallel port are similarly provided with a port expander which is a good idea if you don't use them much. I used to test a dial-in connection for someone shortly after I got the laptop, but not since and I've not used the parallel port at all. The arrangement seems to work, but I'm not sure I would want to try making a USB modem work on a Linux machine... Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #11,857 by Andrew Grygus 10/4/01 10:40:59 PM Reply	Floppys to stay on Bizness computers Most pure home users don't have a clue how to write to a floppy disk anyway, but you'd be surprised how many home/work users write all their Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to floppy. USB floppy drives are going to be a hot item. No date for removing parallel port yet. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #11,875 by pwhysall 10/5/01 1:32:50 AM Reply	I'm waiting with anticipation The first Dell Optiplex we get through the door without an FDD, I'm going to dance a little happy dance around it. The 3.5 inch floppy only looks useful; it isn't, really. I find that the happy duo of my W2K professional CD (bootable to recovery console for bringing back W2K boxen) and my Red Hat Linux 7.1 install CD (bootable to recovery mode for all sorts of goodness) cover me in a multiplicity of ways. Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #11,881 by Meerkat 10/5/01 2:50:08 AM Reply	Well I guess I cheat... ...by owning an iBook :) My main PC however was floppy-less for ages and ages, until I needed one to create a boot floppy for a Linux box without an autobooting CDROM. But apart from that, don't miss the floppy drive at all. Nor serial ports come to think of it. I've actually used my floppy drive on my Optiplex at work once - when a colleague actually wanted something transferred via sneakernet rather than by email. never did figure out why. On and on and on and on, and on and on and on goes John.
Post #11,887 by static 10/5/01 4:06:20 AM Reply	I generally agree. On all my PCs, I almost never use it. But I do use it often enough that it's Nice To Have. So a USB FDD is the perfect solution. Especially on a laptop. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #11,897 by hnick 10/5/01 8:26:11 AM Reply	I can probably live without a floppy, but the serial ports? I still use floppies for moving small amounts of data around a number of machines, but I could probably live without it. I would like to see an alternative to Adaptec (now a spin-off) DirectCD software before I have to rely exclusively on it. It's quirky and they are saying that future releases will have built in copy protection. And I don't like having to depend on one company. I am really loath to give up my serial ports. I only use external modems (ok, I like to see the little lights blinking, so what?) I like to be able to hook two machines together without installing a NIC or putting a foreign machine on the network. I am seriously unconvinced that having serial ports go away is a good thing. Intel gains a few pennies per mother board and the end user looses a lot of functionality (which Intel says we really don't need anyway. When they say it really for the children, I'm going to throw up...) Bah Humbug, Hugh (Christmas spirit, the year 'round)
Post #11,919 by Yendor 10/5/01 11:34:55 AM Reply	nog that noise! I am really loath to give up my serial ports. I only use external modems (ok, I like to see the little lights blinking, so what?) Amen, brutha! I've had the same external modem since the 16.8 days. Sure, it's been upgraded, but I'm not giving up my external modem until I give up dial-up (which will be precisely when Naperville allows Focal to build a few "ugly" buildings in town.) But then at that point, I'm not gonna be potentially paying per-minute charges to some phone company in K18stan a la the scam of a few years ago. -YendorMike "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by the skeptics or the cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need people who dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
Post #11,933 by boxley 10/5/01 12:25:42 PM Reply	fer sure, the first time the net goes down because the router cacked try to hook up the usb to the console port. thanx, bill What is a user? You mean userid isnt the same as uid?, gid? whats that? I dont understand "ask the requestor to send a non formal email request for ftp access? whaddya mean dean? Halp Iam drowning in Bovine Fecal Matter!!!! Bill
Post #11,890 by Ashton 10/5/01 5:34:49 AM Reply	Huh? Izzat true? So for the many sans CDRW - how do they er 'backup' anything? Yeah I know they don't really backup much, since with Windoze you can't * - but I thought they were sorta taught to put their immortal prose and those important recipes - on something removable? So are you saying that your recent experience is: home users just.. write to HD, do defrag when someone nags them and - that's it? * I'd imagine Ghost (either to an image on another partition or via CDRW) -- to be beyond a basic home user's capabilities (?) S/he'd have to learn PMagic to make that partition, for one thing.. (Now you can tell us from your considerable experience: how many biz folk, those who sorta get the idea of 'backup' - have ever actually loaded that backup (of three made, to be really paranoid) ??) Ashton who likes the incremental CD-as-floppy, as world's cheapest, fast SYA: 30+ MB of all-mail costs 2\ufffd, all of 5 keystrokes..
Post #11,938 by Andrew Grygus 10/5/01 12:37:01 PM Reply	Home users? Hell . . In September I had 5 cases of total data loss brought to me (total of 6 hard disks). Four were businesses (including a CPA firm), and one was a student who lost all his school work. Every time I'm faced with a recovery job, the instruction is the same, "Please, my whole life is on that disk". No most people do not back up at all. Many think they're backing up but never verify. When the crunch comes - no data. Then I have one client, "Stupid Stew" as he often calls himself, who checks the tape backup log first thing every morning, takes critical data home on Zip disk, and has a backup server automatically updated every evening just before the tape run. According to "Stupid Stew", "I'd be screwed without my data". He doesn't like downtime either (costs about $60/minute). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #11,975 by kmself 10/5/01 3:21:27 PM Reply	I need to recover my data...Load your backup tapes... I have no sympathy for these people. I could, but I don't. The first rule of data recovery is "restore from recent, and verified, backups". I've been doing same on my systems every 2-4 days, with a multi-tape rotation. I publish my own [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/backups.html\|backup recommendations], and it's one of the more popular documents on my site. It might almost be better if consumer drives were of sufficiently low quality that the realities of data loss and recovery were driven home more often. The sad truth is that for most people it's a "friend of a friend" problem, that hasn't directly effected them. And few consumer devices ship with a suitable archival system (though CD-R/DVD-R is changing this, somewhat). I still like tape. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #11,980 by Andrew Grygus 10/5/01 3:37:53 PM Reply	Situations can get bad enough that . . . . . Drive Savers, one of the leading data recovery houses, employs Niki Stange (a former suicide hot line councilor) to handle the more distraught customers. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #11,995 by Ashton 10/5/01 5:08:39 PM Reply	!!! - words fail..
Post #12,010 by kmself 10/5/01 7:45:29 PM Reply	Ounce of prevention I can believe it. I still don't have to sympathize. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #12,103 by dmarker2 10/6/01 9:34:44 PM Reply	Re: Backups are a PITB - but ... Having been part of corporate business for the best part of 30 years & having once had the job of teaching, setting up & testing CICS back-up & recovery systems. I find backups on PCs a PITB. My answer is to have 4 computers each with massive disk capacity divided into 5 logical disks. Each disk H: has copies of old files etc:, each disk G has copies of new software etc: the others have installed pgms & data. I have 2 rw cdroms & hate them both - they are so damn erratic. I know I should buy a good SCSI disk & rwCDROM but just haven't got round to it. But I still do periodic writes to CDs as well. I have tried r/w CDs but find them irritatingly slow. So use them as periodical back up like I do with W CDs. I have lost 3 disks in the past 12 months but have been able to recover each one except for one bit of 4 weeks incoming mail items. It is so much easier to copy stuff to a fast server. Cheers Doug Marker
Post #12,110 by kmself 10/6/01 10:55:07 PM Reply	Filesystem structure The GNU/Linux (or Unix) filesystem hierarchy makes backups so much easier. The utter lack of architecture under Windows is what makes backups so difficult. Under GNU/Linux, a user wants their personal stuff backed up? `$HOME`. As a sysadmin the local installation stuff? `/usr/local`. A decent systemwide backup? `/etc, /root, /boot, /var/stuff, /home, /usr/local`, plus a list of currently installed packages and/or versions. You're 100% at that point. Over-the-net backups -- that's an option. It's convenient, but it's not a full solution, and the expense (particularly for multiple versions or historic backups) are prohibitive. MS Windows backups are a PITA? Blame the [link\|http://www.microsoft.com/\|fucking vendor]. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #12,117 by static 10/7/01 1:35:27 AM Reply	Others by implication. ArcServe is horrible. Over-engineered, over-priced rubbish. Oh it backs-up okay, but I wish they'd spend all their millions on a cadre of decent UI designers. The thing is a real pain-in-the-arse to configure. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #12,121 by pwhysall 10/7/01 3:36:29 AM Reply	Arcserve has one terrible, terrible feature It makes Backup Exec look good. And that, believe me, is a BAD thing. Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #11,939 by inthane-chan 10/5/01 12:47:06 PM Reply	Woop! About damn time. Now, if only they had something in place to really replace it. I like the idea of CDRW taking it's place, but Iomega (PTUI! That bunch of CRAP!) will probably win with their proprietary Zip drives... "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #11,942 by Another Scott 10/5/01 1:20:14 PM Reply	Zip drives won't win, IMO. Too bulky, cartridges too expensive with too little capacity. For the near term, USB drives will be a "must have" option. As combo CD-RW/DVD drives become cheaper, they'll become standard. I see that (rather slow and expensive) CD-RW/DVD-RW drives are avaiable now... Cheers, Scott.
Post #11,948 by inthane-chan 10/5/01 1:49:36 PM Reply	The problem is, once again, the installed base. Had this problem when I was working at the EPA. People wanted to back up their documents to hardcopy, and to do so, they wanted to use ZIP drives, not CDRW. Why? Because ZIP is everywhere. No rational reason, it's just cooler. Even though it costs more, is bulkier, has reliability issues, and has only a single source... I made those arguments many times, and nobody there listened to me. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #11,954 by Andrew Grygus 10/5/01 2:05:03 PM Reply	From what I understand of DVD-RWs . . . . is they can't write a real DVD, so the disks can only be read in a compatible DVD-RW drive. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #11,971 by inthane-chan 10/5/01 3:12:10 PM Reply	True of some. The DVD-RAM drives wrote their own proprietary format. However, (and I might be getting this backwards - DVD-RAM might be the actual format) DVD-RW DOES write DVD-readable formatted disks that all DVD players can read. However, all the public DVD burners are "crippled" - they can only write reduced-capacity disks, to prevent the public from copying DVDs. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #12,019 by Meerkat 10/5/01 8:31:16 PM Reply	Maybe not crippled, but single-layered From what I've learnt of the 'Superdrive' in the PowerMacs, it'll only store an hour of video because the discs are single-layered, and the DVD encoding software uses the maximum bitrate all the time, meaning you can only get about an hour of video on to each DVD. On and on and on and on, and on and on and on goes John.
Post #12,209 by dmarker2 10/8/01 10:01:28 AM Reply	Re: I have dumped zip in favour of 2.5 in USB disks Fit in my pocket - use just a USB cable for data & power - work on all USB computers. My model doen't even require a driver to be installed it just works. I pay $US 30 for the disk case then add in a 2.5 in drive - paid 110 $ US for a 20GB IBM 2.5 in drive - this is a great way to transport data. I bought 2 more cases & now use my older 2.5 in disks (3.1GB & 6.2GB) for same purpose. These piss on the old ZIPs for cost & simplicity. Cheers Doug Marker (PS Shops here are full of them now - typically $US 50-60)
Post #12,241 by inthane-chan 10/8/01 12:31:00 PM Reply	That's crippled in my book. Apparently, the DVD consortium, in an attempt to avoid the CD burner debacle, specified that only the single-layer burners would be released to the average consumer - in order to guarantee that "we the peepul" would not be able to copy Hollywood releases. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #12,014 by wharris2 10/5/01 7:58:56 PM Reply	Re: Intel wants to lose the FDD and other things. Killing serial ports over my dead body. Winmodems are NOT acceptable. Who knows how empty the sky is In the place of a fallen tower. Who knows how quiet it is in the home Where a son has not returned. -- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

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