On Sunday, July 6, 2003, at 02:12 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ok, since were all throwing in our 2�, Id figured Id express mine.
Floppies are like RAM, you can modify their contents all you want. CDs, on the
other hand, require that they be burned (unless the technology is built into the
OS now) by a seperate application.
Both OSX and Windows XP support CD burning right in the OS. Put in a blank cd, drag files to it, eject it and it's burned (in OSX, dunno about XP, but they copied it from Apple, so it's bound to have a few more mouse-clicks.)
Floppies are also relatively small and are
very light weight. Zips come close, but are bulkier. My thoughts are that
there never really was a decent replacement for the floppy, except for Zip,
which is not nearly as standard as a floppy.
Floppies are also unreliable as heck these days...like Evyn, I've had brand new, just unwrapped name brands fail on me.
I cannot *count* the number of times students have come to our door in a panic because a floppy broke, rending their only copy of a file unreadable.
1.44 MB also holds very little these days.
USB flash drives are what I'm seeing people use, more and more.
We're recommending that our students buy one instead of toting about floppies if they can, though truth be told, more and more are getting broadband access at home, it's a lot simpler for them to just log onto our network and work on their stuff that way rather than tote files back and forth.
Smaller and lighter than floppies, they hold a lot more, and they're coming down in price. My old boss at work ( a Toxicology professor, hardly the computerphile) says she goes to meetings now and people are passing those around to run presentations off of, share papers and proposals, etc.
She's gotten two of them, they hold as much (or more) than a zip disk, are reusable, have no moving parts, and the *big* ones are about the size of a pack of gum. Much lighter than lugging around her zip drive and disks.
That said, I got a box of 200 CDR's for $3.50 after rebate. At just under 2 cents per disk, I can afford to slap 35 k on one if I want, and still come out waaay ahead of a floppy disk.
Both windows and OSX (Though OSX requires a third party replacement for disk burner to do so) support multi-session cd's and you can get a lot of sessions on a disk.
(BTW, that works out to 0.0000265 cents per megabyte. I don't think it comes any cheaper.)
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