[HN Gopher] The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 154 points
Date : 2024-04-03 04:05 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| CharlesW wrote:
| This article implies multiple times that 3M invented the floppy
| disk. They did not.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20161222064003/http://www-03.ibm...
| charrondev wrote:
| Did you read the article? This is a few pages in:
|
| > Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage--that
| was done by Austro-German engineer Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He
| created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad
| strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and
| eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help
| from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF.
| At first, the innovation didn't spread outside of Germany
| because of World War II.
| CharlesW wrote:
| My friend, I didn't say "magnetic storage".
|
| The title says "3M's Floppy Disk", which implies that 3M
| created the floppy disk.
|
| The subtitle calls 3M, "the high-profile creator of magnetic
| media", only later making it clear that this is _also_
| incorrect.
|
| This also implies that 3M invented the floppy: "...3M started
| with the raw materials and the manufacturing processes, and
| combined those into computing's greatest commodity item, the
| floppy disk."
|
| Finally, the article notes that the only medium that 3M did
| have a hand in creating, the Floptical disk, flopped.
|
| Assuming that the author even realizes that they're being
| ambiguous, I would've preferred that they didn't misrepresent
| 3M's role.
| robbiep wrote:
| Not op but
|
| _> The title says "3M's Floppy Disk", which implies that
| 3M created the floppy disk_
|
| If I put up a blog post about Robbiep's spaghetti
| bolognaise, or Robbiep's quadcopter, I don't think anyone
| would misinterpret me as having invented those things. It's
| an apostrophe of ownership, not an apostrophe of
| authourship.
|
| Despite what it says elsewhere in the article
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk
| back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives.
|
| And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the
| BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte
| wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks.
|
| Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns
| their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed
| from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get
| paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.
|
| At least we still have thumbsticks...
| sebastianavina wrote:
| you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store
| them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in
| your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother
| yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any
| platform...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >why bother
|
| You don't need an internet connection and don't have to worry
| about data caps or terrible jetliner satellite internet right
| then and there?
| defrost wrote:
| Your experience may vary, in my experience:
|
| * things I've liked don't always stay on youtube or appear on
| spotify, and
|
| * streaming|internet isn't always available (remote area
| FiFo, underground, etc.)
| derwiki wrote:
| Because it might go away? My Youtube saved lists are littered
| with removed videos.
|
| And I _do_ use a USB flash drive in my car of curated* music;
| it's an always available radio station without and phone
| fiddling.
|
| *curated= just Grateful Dead recordings
| autoexec wrote:
| Because when you have your own copy of something nobody is
| keeping track of what the date and time is when you
| watch/listen to that media along with how often you do it or
| what parts you view/hear more often or pause at most often,
| or where you are and what other things you are doing when you
| saw/heard it etc. You can enjoy your media entirely offline
| which is something you'll really want if you find yourself
| without internet access for some reason. In addition, you
| don't have to worry about that content suddenly going away
| without notice, or it being censored or modified at some
| later date. You also get the ability to play that media in
| your software of choice and can even re-encode the media to
| play on other devices using other formats. You can make your
| own edits. You can share your collection with others without
| forcing them to create an account and hand money/data to a
| third party. You can include things in your own collection
| that those third party streaming services might not approve
| of.
|
| When you give up on owning things you give up a lot more than
| just the item you would have had sitting on a shelf or the
| file that would have taken up space on your hard drive. There
| are lots of freedoms and opportunities you gain that wouldn't
| be possible otherwise.
| ponector wrote:
| Not everything can be streamed. Streaming platform are
| applying censorship. Not everyone is signing in to provide
| their music to streaming. Also they usually stream not
| original tracks, but a remaster.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| m4a*. Or Opus.
| Kluggy wrote:
| some of us hold onto the past. I still have a Zip disk and
| drive (and a bunch of old media, all the way back to a 8 inch
| floppy) and I have a fairly large collection of 4k blurays
| inhumantsar wrote:
| I am listening to some of my minidiscs at this very moment
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| I have vinyls
| OJFord wrote:
| Real Programmers gyrate the needle by hand
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better
| than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do
| neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Really? On a regular disk? I thought the upper limit was
| ~2.7M
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yes, their LS-120 drives could store ~120MB on a special
| disk, or allegedly 32MB on a regular 3.5" high-density
| disk[1]. It used SMR recording just like the modern spinny-
| rust hard drives of late that none of us particularly like
| to accomplish the latter trick.
|
| (I owned an ATAPI variant of this drive for time, but I
| sadly only ever used it for reading and writing normal
| disks of normal formatting.)
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
| mgk123 wrote:
| The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the
| last drives which could also use 240MB disks.
|
| Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been
| physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not
| support it.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I appreciate the correction.
|
| Eventually, right here, we'll all collectively remember
| the whole truth about the mysteries of this conglomerated
| and seldom-used removable media format.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Ah SuperDisk, I only know about it because there was a
| drive for the PowerBook G3.
| mark_undoio wrote:
| I was excited about the LS-120 but I never quite convinced
| myself to stump up the money to pay for it.
|
| My recollection was that it was: - Slightly larger than the
| contemporary Zip disks. - Cheaper than a Zip drive. - Could
| just replace your existing floppy drive, since it was
| backwards-compatible.
|
| I don't know if it was as fast or robust as a Zip disk - it
| definitely didn't have the same mind share, though.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Robustness was "fine"; anything was more robust than a lot
| of the cheap floppies that were around in the mid-to-late
| 90s (though Zip drives manufactured around 2000 had a
| reputation for failing more often).
| devilbunny wrote:
| I wish that MiniDisc Data had been more widespread and
| faster - great size and amazing robustness. Unfortunately,
| AFAICT they topped out at 600 kB/s speed.
| hackernewds wrote:
| > and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to
| what they did in the old world.
|
| fairly per the effort I'd say. previously content required a
| camera crew and helicopters. now a smartphone among the
| limitless content creators
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's a grossly unfair comparison:
|
| 1. For starters you're comparing TV production to YouTube
| content. The two aren't even close to being equal in terms of
| budget.
|
| 2. Most popular content on YouTube still have at least
| professionals DSLRs and paid crew beyond just the
| influencers. Even if it's just an editor or two.
|
| 3. I think the GP was talking about music rather then video
| content
|
| 4. Even with music, previously you'd have the record label
| pay for the studio costs, etc. What's happening these days is
| that artists are generally getting paid less _after_
| deductions. Not before. That's the unfair part.
| robjan wrote:
| In the past long tail musicians got nothing, now they get a
| handful of shrapnel from Spotify plays.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| In the past, those musicians got CD sales at local gigs.
| Does anyone buy CDs any more?
|
| Before then it was cassettes. Same format though: you'd
| see them at a pub and buy a CD / tape if you liked their
| stuff.
|
| The long tail of musicians have always been worse off
| though. Organisations like PRS would distribute
| subscriptions to the household names leaving smaller
| bands with next to nothing and the long tail with
| literally nothing.
|
| The meme of a guitarist sleeping on their friends couch
| is as old as the internet is.
|
| Fact is, most artists don't make money. Just like most
| footballers don't. And most sports car racers don't.
| There isn't ever going to be a way to pay every budding
| musician, painter, nor sports enthusiast for their time.
| However if one of these personalities do succeed enough
| to go professional, ie that being their primary income,
| they should at least be paid fairly.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In the past 15 years, what's kept me from keeping a collection
| of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It's nothing
| compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it's still
| substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes
| moving that much more of a pain.
|
| Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get
| frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because
| there's not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make
| sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify
| right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops.
|
| It'd be cool if a physical medium that's sized similarly to
| regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of
| albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case,
| or a full-on _library_ in something similar to an early 2000s
| portable CD flip case.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| there was also writable media. so...
|
| how about one blu-ray of MP3s?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Would technically work, but if I'm keeping physical media
| around I'd want archival quality (original CD audio or at
| least FLAC). A Blu-ray would fit a lot of FLACs too though,
| if not nearly as many as it could MP3s.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >It'd be cool if a physical medium that's sized similarly to
| regular SD cards caught on.
|
| What's wrong with SD cards?
| ballooney wrote:
| Agreed! For anyone else who, like me, didnt really pay
| attention to SD cards for a few years, it's quite amazing
| how cheap they are for their capacity now. 256GB from
| reputable people like sandisk for low tens of dollars. Used
| one as a good travel backup drive on a recent work trip.
| camtarn wrote:
| They have a limited lifetime. It's a fairly long limited
| lifetime, sure, but unless you're reading and rewriting the
| data on the cards regularly, you can't rely on them to all
| still be intact a decade down the line.
|
| Which is a shame, because I kinda love the idea of my music
| collection being stored in a little cube that unfolds to
| reveal a hundred or so micro SD cards.
| bombcar wrote:
| Maybe not SD cards but something similar - Nintendo
| Switch cartridges are a few GB and seem quite durable.
| camtarn wrote:
| Huh, those are neat! The largest ones seem to use
| Macronix HybridFlash technology, and:
|
| "HybridFlash provides a very stable medium to contents
| and OS, enabling storage as long as 20 years at 85
| degrees centigrade and it also works normally from 40
| degrees below zero to 85 degrees centigrade."
|
| So, not forever, but definitely longer than regular flash
| memory. Cool.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has made SD cards with mask-
| programmed ROM or even traditional write-once PROM.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's called a Nintendo DS game card. I don't know if the
| Switch game cards are flash or mask-ROM.
| monocasa wrote:
| Mask ROM.
| TapamN wrote:
| I don't have a source, but I think I remember reading
| somewhere that Switch games are some kind of archival
| flash, designed for 50+ year retention.
| throwawat84i52 wrote:
| Sadly, I still need to buy occasional physical media.
|
| For some reason, none of the streaming services has recent
| seasons of Doctor Who in my European country. I have to buy
| Blu-rays from Amazon long after the shows were streamed in
| the UK.
|
| I just don't understand how the system can be so shitty for
| consumers. The cost of streaming an additional show is
| minimal, so there must be some business decisions to not
| buy/sell the show to all markets. Instead I see lots of
| "filler" shows that I'm sure will not get the same audience
|
| Is BBC too greedy, or is the purchase process broken?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Distribution rights for content can get pretty complicated.
| Unnecessarily complicated.
|
| There are so many examples of this, like how impossible it
| is to watch some UK football (soccer) matches online if you
| live within the UK. If you live outside the UK, then it's
| very easy.
|
| In the case of those sports matches, it's because clubs
| don't want to risk seeing a drop in ticket sales at the
| stadium.
|
| What might happen with Doctor Who in your country is that
| someone ones the rights to the original series but someone
| else owns the rights to the new modern era.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| SD cards would be nice. Opus at 128 kbps is perfectly
| listenable (transparent for me) and 9 times smaller than PCM
| audio, so if you only need PC compatibility, you can burn
| data disks full of Opus.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition.
| At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage
| because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a
| nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip
| drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the
| company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned
| 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely
| undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales
| and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of
| BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from
| their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's
| investment club _lost_ on IOMG because they got in late and
| sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been
| patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market
| appreciated excellent sales, they would 've realized
| significant gains rather than losses.
|
| PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over
| floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable
| even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but
| you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing
| you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy
| protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs
| would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first
| installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original
| media would go bad.
| holoduke wrote:
| In the old world there were hardly any digital content
| creators. Nowadays you have more millionaires on Youtube than
| total content creators back in the days.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to
| give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead
| (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught
| up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much
| about.
|
| And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full
| of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to
| not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have
| never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although
| transfer rates have.)
|
| But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even
| if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough.
|
| And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're
| universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about,
| but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as
| forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of
| the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them
| keep it was.
|
| Sure, I can attempt to _lend_ another person a thumb drive, but
| that 's a much more complicated thing than _giving them_ a
| throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it 's an active computer device --
| there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive
| that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable
| media.)
|
| So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get
| to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or
| Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get
| to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that
| they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it).
|
| Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to
| anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the
| same room.
|
| But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and
| actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a
| CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing
| a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if
| that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the
| end recipient directly.)
|
| As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily
| sending data, _over the Internet_ , to a fellow peer?
| Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles
| ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking
| years ago.
|
| (No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)
| francescovv wrote:
| > What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the
| Internet
|
| And for mobile phones - without internet is similar,
| unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends,
| and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot
| with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can
| send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and
| miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of
| "security". So I had to wait for cell signal to come back and
| send the file via whatsapp. To someone standing right in
| front of me.
| Varriount wrote:
| Huh, I wonder what the problem was. I semi-regularly send
| files between my Windows laptop and my Android phone. I do
| recall never being able to get that functionality working
| properly with a Mac though.
| francescovv wrote:
| That was between two Android phones, with receiving phone
| being "oppo" or some such, with stock firmware. Receiving
| phone would see incoming file request, ask user to
| accept, then error out with "unknown file", and no way to
| actually save it. I've sent files via bluetooth from
| lineageos to lineageos, no problem.
| Varriount wrote:
| I could totally see it being something stupid in how
| Android manages file associations or something. The
| default file managers tend to be fairly crippled and only
| actually show a subset of files present.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Perfect irony would be if the receiving Android attempts
| to check the incoming file against some kind of Internet
| service.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| It also possible it just dropped it silently in the
| Downloads directory.
|
| Otherwise ironical that all of this behaves like the 90s
| PalmOS which could not store a file unless a program
| would accept it.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Pretty easy with iPhone+AirDrop. Just bring your iPhones
| together - it asks if you want to airdrop something, select
| file, done.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| On Android builtin as Share -> Quick Share/Nearby share
|
| Available since Android 6 (c.2015)
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| Have you tried it? It's horribly slow.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I use it all the time. I guess I'm just patient :-)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've tried it.
|
| I've had it be horribly slow, wickedly fast, and also
| absolutely fail to work at all.
|
| The wickedly fast method seems to involve the two devices
| forming an ad-hoc WiFi network -- just for themselves.
| 802.11ac/ax is pretty darned fast when there's no
| competition, on a network with exactly two nodes, and
| when those two nodes are separated by only a couple of
| feet.
|
| IIRC, this is not the default mode of operation.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Sometimes, I work with bi-directional amplifiers and
| distributed antenna systems that are intended to improve
| cellular coverage inside of a building where there may be
| little or none of that.
|
| I have a fairly expensive meter at my disposal to use for
| planning things like this, which analyzes different
| cellular carriers by frequency, and can output (messy, and
| with unescaped commas for notes, but eventually-fucking-
| usable) CSV files of the results -- with GPS coordinates of
| the measurement location.
|
| This sounds amazing for a person like me in this line of
| work. But it is not amazing for a person like me in this
| line of work.
|
| (As a preface for the rest of this, remember: This meter is
| a tool that is meant to be used in areas of limited or zero
| cellular coverage -- places where outside RF is problematic
| for whatever reason.)
|
| 1. The meter has a Bluetooth interface that connects to an
| app on a pocket computer. (This part works fine, usually,
| except the app often doesn't background properly and
| silently dies if the user uses their pocket computer to do
| some other task, which might be fine if the problem was
| ever reported. [Haha!])
|
| 2. The meter expects the pocket computer to have an
| Internet connection, so it can use that to upload its
| findings to The Clown. (This part often cannot work,
| because the whole fucking reason any of this is happening
| is because cellular coverage is shit inside of a random
| building.)
|
| 3. The meter expects that the pocket computer will provide
| GPS coordinates, even though it is intended to be able to
| be used indoors -- without network connectivity, or perhaps
| even in a Faraday cage. And while modern pocket computers
| are very good at providing _some_ location data by various
| means as long as there is internet connectivity or GPS-
| esque data, all of them fail at this when there is neither
| Internet nor GPS available. It produces an error [Haha!]
| when there is no location information available.
|
| 4. It does not provide useful errors. It provides errors,
| but they aren't specific at all and do not promote
| productive troubleshooting or workflow. ("Oh, there was a
| problem with your measurement! [Haha!]" is the singular
| error.)
|
| 5. Sometimes, it will even produce an error [Haha!] but
| record the measurement anyway -- and without recording the
| error.
|
| 6. It stores nothing locally. When an error happens [Haha!
| Good luck!], it is impossible to quickly see if anything
| was stored at all, so the only clear path is to repeat
| measurements that result in an error [Haha!]. This often
| results in redundant measurements being actually-recorded,
| but who would know that at the time of measurement. (These
| measurements often take about 4 minutes each, so these
| errors [Haha!] and repeated measurements can consume
| significant portions of an expensive workday.)
|
| 7. (Your main point): Exporting a CSV file of [whatever-
| the-hell was collected] is possible, as long as I want to
| send it to Google Drive or some other Clown-based service.
| The CSV is only a few tiny kilobytes at very most, but it
| won't let me copy the CSV to my pocket-computer's
| clipboard, or send it in an email, or save it locally on
| the pocket computer, or send it with Bluetooth to my
| laptop. It _has to be_ exported to a Clown-based service,
| and then it can be read from that Clown-based service by
| some other device. There are no other options presented,
| unlike in so many other apps in my pocket computer.
|
| 8. Continued: While the maker of this meter device has
| their own Clown, and this Clown is clearly extent on the
| Internet, this Clown is completely inaccessible outside of
| their pocket-computer app. I cannot bypass Step 7 by any
| official means no matter how deep my desktop computing
| prowess may be.
|
| It is completely shit, and it appears to be the best thing
| available on the market in this space. (And it isn't even
| Chinese shit: The company that produces this meter is in
| Utah.)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There are many ways of sending files between phones, none
| of them good.
|
| Bluetooth can work, but it is slow as hell, and Apple
| doesn't support it.
|
| Cloud services are convenient, but you not only you need
| some signal, but you also uses up your data plan.
|
| If you have USB OTG support, you can simply use a thumb
| drive, like with your PC, but it is cumbersome and you need
| the hardware.
|
| There are some somewhat proprietary systems like QuickShare
| and AirDrop, which are supposed are great when you have
| support which is not always the case.
|
| Other options include having one phone act as a WiFi AP and
| host a local HTTP server, there are apps for that (ex:
| MiXplorer). A bit uncommon, but the advantage is that only
| one phone needs to do weird stuff, for the other, it is
| just downloading from a URL.
|
| There are also apps like SyncThing based on P2P networks.
|
| Generally, phones are pretty terrible at dealing with
| files. Their OS is designed around apps controlling their
| data rather than around interchangeable files like
| traditional desktop OSes. The way they want you to work is
| not by exchanging .gpx files but instead by using some
| built-in "share" feature of your hiking app. It may be .gpx
| under the hood, but they don't want the end user to see a
| file.
| clan wrote:
| I agree and get your point.
|
| But localsend has worked well for me. Yes, it requires an
| app but if we could get vendors to bundle that rather
| than a boatload of bloatware.
|
| I know that it would be to optimistic to hope for Google.
|
| See https://localsend.org/
|
| Spread the word.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Bluetooth can work, but it is slow as hell, and Apple
| doesn't support it._
|
| Wait, seriously? iPhones still don't support Bluetooth
| file transfers? I knew this was the case with the first
| iPhone but I just accepted that's a limitation from the
| OS being still an early release of a brand new product
| with limited functionality, I wouldn't have expect this
| to be the case after 15 years.
|
| Anyway, I'm still baffled we never got a standardized Wi-
| Fi file transfer protocol, like with Bluetooth but at wi-
| fi speeds.
|
| Oh right, nevermind, Apple wouldn't have supported anyway
| versus their own proprietary one that only works on Apple
| devices.
| dockd wrote:
| You first have to get a file from your iOS app. Good luck
| with that.
| samatman wrote:
| Hit the share button and select "Save to Files". Dead
| easy.
| gedy wrote:
| Airdrop? I'm pretty sure it's works without wifi or
| cellular.
|
| (If you're talking iphone to Android, nvm)
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Yeah, I meant cross platform file sharing, since that's
| what Bluetooth enabled originally, you could send files
| between whatever brand of phone and whatever brand of PC.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I use https://github.com/marcosdiez/shareviahttp all the
| time, to share with other phones or with my ereader or
| PC.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a
| very large file, and encountered this. There really is no
| good universal way to do this, even here in 2024! File is
| too big for E-mail, ftp is too big a technical hurdle for
| the guy. Dropbox requires accounts and sharing and all
| sorts of access shit for him to figure out. I ended up
| enabling WebDAV on an existing web server I have admin
| access to, and luckily he's on MacOS which makes it
| relatively straightforward to write a file to WebDAV. If he
| were on Windows I have no idea what I'd ask him to do,
| since I tried for 20 minutes to figure out how to actually
| connect to a WebDAV folder in read-write mode and Microsoft
| thwarted me at every turn.
|
| It's pretty shocking that we don't have a dead-simple
| cross-platform "send a file to someone over the Internet"
| solution that doesn't involve cloud servers and accounts
| and downloading apps.
| anthk wrote:
| Briar can send files over Bluetooth.
| dylan604 wrote:
| To me, this seems like a feature the app you're using with
| the GPX should add to its social settings with a Share With
| Friend(s) button. Specifically knowing that being in an
| environment where cell coverage might not be available, it
| can form adhoc wifi, and push across. Of course, they will
| want you to allow access to Contacts to know who your
| friends are. But you've probably already been requested for
| any of the permissions needed for this feature, because
| $REASONS
| xgkickt wrote:
| Phones are able to capture MiBs per frame via their
| cameras, so I wonder if you could make an app that has both
| playback and recording of data, like displaying an animated
| QR-like code on one phone and recording it on another.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So
| even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough._
|
| I beg to differ. In the 2000s and part of 2010s everyone had
| optical media readers at home or in the office. In my EU
| country, radiology offices still use DVDs to share or hand
| you over your X-ray/CT/MRI images that you can then share
| with your dentist/GP/specialist for diagnosis.
|
| Yeah, a national cloud system for radiology image storing and
| sharing part of the national healthcare system the would be
| much better, but computers and on-line services are still a
| new confusing thing to the government, so this is what we got
| now. So every medical practice still has functioning optical
| readers.
| yaomtc wrote:
| They said BD-R. Blu-ray. Not many computers have Blu-ray
| drives compared to DVD.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Oh right, my bad. Though around the 2010s IIRC many
| laptops even on the budget end were being sold with BD
| reader combo drives.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I held a portable USB3 Blu-Ray reader in my hand once.
|
| I could have used it, too, but I could not think of
| anything I wanted to do with it by that time in 2017 --
| seven years ago -- despite my proclivity for making
| backups of films.
|
| BD on a PC has never been common in my world of
| computing, and by 2017 optical drives in general were
| becoming very uncommon in everyone's world.
|
| It never broadly caught on.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just at the time Blu-ray would have made sense for
| computers everything went to downloads. I bought many
| games that came on CD or DVD but the only ones that ever
| came on Blu-ray were for console.
|
| And even those are mostly download now.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The GP was on about writable Blu-ray Discs specifically.
| Writable CDs and DVDs were common place.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Yes, not having physical media sucks. Physical objects just
| work better on a human scale, we know where we put them
| (well..) and how to trade them.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Note to self - add "drop off once to friend" feature to my
| p2p program. (I.e. it makes sure a copy exists locally until
| your friend has downloaded the entire transfer, then it can
| be deleted from your local.)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I think I like you.
|
| But is your program actually P2P? (If it were, then: The
| sender would know when the recipient has completed the
| download, because the sender was finished sending it and
| the recipient has stated that they are done receiving it.
| And there would be no need for gymnastics.)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Exactly like that. My program is half-way there to doing
| NAT hole-punching, a bunch of other stuff is missing and
| I'm deep into yak-shaving right now the likes of you
| wouldn't even believe, but I have had good progress the
| last few months. (Been tinkering for years, finally
| decided to do a serious effort. The commit log goes back
| years but for long periods very silent.)
| jmclnx wrote:
| > I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that
| data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always
| a third party involved
|
| The only thing is writing to a CD/DVD can be a PITA. To me
| diskettes were very easy when it came to read and write to
| physical media.
|
| >Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive,
| but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a
| throwaway DVD-R was
|
| This I agree with, I have a tough time giving flash drives
| away for some reason. If one could buy a pack of 10 1gig
| flash drives for the same price as a box of Diskettes, it
| would be easier. Right now you can only buy flash drives 1 at
| a time.
| kijin wrote:
| Not only that, but it's hard to buy small flash drives. The
| smallest I can find in retail stores around me are in the
| 16-32GB range, which feels like a total waste when all I
| need is a few hundred MB (i.e. just beyond the email
| attachment limit).
|
| Smaller flash drives are available online, in bulk, of
| course, but they're not much cheaper. I guess the cost of
| flash becomes a negligible part of the total price at the
| single-digit GB range these days.
| 8A51C wrote:
| 3.5 floppies were the peak of media for me. Built in case,
| small enough to fit in a pocket, small and light enough to
| carry a handful around all the time, cheap enough to share
| freely, tactile. Nostalgia alert, I recall this from my
| school days, jacket pocket with all my discs in, we would
| roam around the school looking for empty rooms with
| computers, then bang; in goes the floppy and I have all my
| files. Share something with someone? No issue, copy it on a
| spare and hand it over... CDs didn't fit in a pocket and had
| an annoying case, though you needed much fewer of them.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Fellow pocket disk pirate here, loved reading this. We used
| to spray paint our discs with makeshift stencils to get a
| camo look (a bit like that one laptop prep scene in Hackers
| '95). Mostly used to collect / trade our .BAS files and the
| odd bit of saucy content from BBS.
| mrWiz wrote:
| The way it generally works IME is that if I want someone's
| data I better have my own thumb drive to get it, and if
| somebody wants mine they better have their own.
| nradov wrote:
| You've got to be kidding. There's no way I'm going to plug
| someone else's thumb drive into my computer. Who knows what
| kind of malware it could be carrying, like having
| unprotected sex with a random stranger.
| kijin wrote:
| Is it any different when you receive a zip file by email?
| It could very well have been crafted to exploit a
| backdoor in your compression program.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It is different.
|
| A USB key can be _anything_ , or even complex
| combinations of things. It can be a storage device and an
| HID keyboard input and an optical drive that autoruns
| software on the PC it is connected to, with all of this
| being intentionally supported by the host operating
| system.
|
| No back door is required: This can happen right at the
| front door, as the operating system does what it is
| intended to do when it detects new hardware.
|
| And as a parting shot: It can even deliberately
| physically destroy the host computer's hardware. (Try
| _that_ with a crafty ZIP file.)
| mrWiz wrote:
| The USB drive I keep on my keychain is named STUXNET,
| so...
| mrob wrote:
| It's easier to exploit somebody's computer using a USB
| drive, because it can do things like pretend to be a
| keyboard and spoof your inputs, and because the attack
| surface is "every USB driver", but we have to assume a
| skilled attacker can do just as much damage with a DVD+R.
| AFAIK, no kernel filesystem driver is designed to be
| robust against maliciously crafted filesystems, and FUSE
| is not designed to be a security boundary. If you're
| taking security seriously you have to take the same
| precautions with each, e.g. disabling automount, and only
| mounting them in a disposable VM and accessing the files
| over the network.
|
| And even this might not be enough. Is your OS's partition
| table code robust against malicious input? I don't think
| there's any way to disable reading the partition table in
| Linux when a new block device is detected. In this case
| even copying a single file to/from the raw device with dd
| might not be secure.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > cheap enough to not care about
|
| You can get a ten pack of 16gb drives for $25, which after
| inflation is in the ballpark of what I remember floppies
| costing 30 years ago.
| crtasm wrote:
| Have you tried this?
|
| https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
|
| There's also various webapps that work similarly: set up the
| connection then have you transfer data directly to the peer.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| With Telegram, you can send ulimited amount of data. Transfer
| is not always gast, and file size is limited to 2gb, but it
| works. Including to yourself, so you can use as a free cloud
| storage. Don't how they pull that off, costwise.
| xarope wrote:
| ah yes, Iomega zip drives, back in the days when you could
| stores 10's of 1000s of files and images in 100mb.
|
| Nowadays, that would be like, what, 10 smartphone camera
| pictures?
| irjustin wrote:
| > Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns
| their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed
| from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get
| paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.
|
| As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with
| music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over
| time, but never really batted an eye after I've seen them. I
| enjoy rewatching clips that are mostly on youtube and rarely
| care for the whole movie.... I'm just one guy though.
|
| When I lost it with music, THEN i really cared. Caused me to
| seek physical media when I really like sometime, which sadly
| isn't always possible with all artists.
| bandrami wrote:
| I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40
| seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their
| entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird
| and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait
| til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at
| a race a few weeks ago.
|
| We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people
| (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival
| environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought
| with us would make them happy, but that was all of the
| planning we did on that end.
|
| I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and
| working very well all week (without using Starlink, which
| it seems isn't _quite_ easily-rentable yet), which was a
| big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth
| dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of
| spectators broadly showed up for the main race.
|
| And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant
| drunks loved singing.
|
| Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-
| requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for
| everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network
| available to let this happen.
|
| We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there
| wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for
| regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and
| FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not
| anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is
| obviously a very different world from mixing jungle).
|
| But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke
| because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to
| get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that
| existed on physical media that we could actually-touch.
|
| I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music
| at all, and just trusting that the greater network would
| behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to
| happen.
|
| That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet
| sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when
| there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is
| unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-
| enough network connection to keep people moving in a place
| where there is a large crowd.
|
| (But yet: People actually do that?)
| bandrami wrote:
| I have a residency at a nightclub and the rotating
| younger DJs who open literally just come in with their
| phone and hook up the controller to it and run spotify
| through some app that speaks Rekordbox (it's probably
| actually the Rekordbox app, come to think of it). Without
| even having checked what the signal in the club is like
| beforehand (luckily it's pretty good). I asked one if he
| had any tracks actually downloaded to his phone and he
| looked at me like I was a stegosaurus.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've heard from DJ friends that there are plugins that
| let Spotify play on [say] two DDJs at once, perhaps
| through Rekordbox. Perhaps even on a pocket computer. (I
| an not an expert on DJ fare -- I just hang out with these
| guys and help make it happen.)
|
| And I'm sure that Spotify works usually, and I'm sure
| it's against the Spotify ToS, but I'm also sure that this
| level of reliance on end-to-end Internet connectivity is
| bound for inescapable failure.
|
| Eventually.
|
| (For our "little" pop-up off-grid DJ rig, which was not
| actually particularly small: I made sure we had
| redundancy for everything we felt we needed: Power, amps,
| sources, speakers, and the rest of the works -- except
| Internet. We assumed, going in, that the Internet would
| be useless and thus none of our actual-plans relied on
| it, and we also knew that we were pretty far from any
| civilization that could garner us replacement parts.)
| bandrami wrote:
| That sounds right; Serato has something similar. (I keep
| meaning to write something for Mixxx to be able to do
| that with Jamendo...)
|
| What's really jaw-dropping for me is the deezer-based
| live stem extraction, where you can press a button and
| just be playing the vocals or the drums. (This is,
| weirdly, fundamentally the same tech that makes those
| pictures, which still astounds me.) I still get annoyed
| with the "sync" button because it doesn't let me do a
| half-beat lead-in. I will probably always be a dinosaur
| in this field, which is fine. But I would at least try to
| pass on the hard-earned knowledge that you have to assume
| in a live performance any given system will fail at some
| point.
| froddd wrote:
| Do you own a USB-C thumb drive?
|
| ...
|
| Me neither :-/
| bombcar wrote:
| I have a thumb drive with usb a on one side and c on the
| other.
|
| Insanely surprising how useful it is even at places with more
| networking than the NSA.
| akaij wrote:
| I bought a Transcend ESD310C specifically because of this.
| Really performant, too!
| pantulis wrote:
| > Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns
| their movie or music libraries anymore...
|
| This is a proper definition of disruption.
| pilaf wrote:
| > Iomega Zip Drives
|
| Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than
| Iomega?
|
| I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I
| find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the
| winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks
| and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much
| like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't
| happen in the West.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
| mark_undoio wrote:
| It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with
| existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point.
|
| I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I
| vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either).
|
| Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3],
| which were just so small and cute.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay
| hinkley wrote:
| There was a predecessor to the Zip Drive that could do 120
| MB. I'm blanking on what it's called. My friend who was
| into MD data was into those first, then Iomega killed them.
| vikingerik wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk was 120 MB, but
| it came after the Zip drive, not before.
|
| The ones that came before the Zip were the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_Box ,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical , and various
| flavors of magneto-optical:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
| hinkley wrote:
| Interestingly that article says Iomega was working in
| these five fore the Zip drive and abandoned the idea for
| Zip, others picked it up and ran with it.
|
| But the article asserts they came out in 1997 - with no
| citation, and my friend had moved by 1996 so I think that
| date is off by a year or so. Though given where he worked
| it's theoretically possible someone have him a prerelease
| version as a developer prototype.
|
| Edit: PC Mag claims 1996
| https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/ls-120
|
| And the NYT says March 1996:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/11/business/3m-chases-
| the-dr...
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns
| their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed
| from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get
| paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.
|
| I torrent and spinning rust is cheap. So I do have media
| collection.
| MikusR wrote:
| >most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what
| they did in the old world
|
| In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator
| count has increased by orders of magnitude.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Creator count probably hasn't gone up per capita. It's just
| that that one band I liked from my high school can put all
| their music on SoundCloud, have an Instagram page and a
| TikTok and be discoverable to people worldwide instead of
| selling cds they burned and applied inkjet labels to and
| selling them to other kids at the same school.
|
| I suspect it's more a matter of everyone being more visible,
| a helping of Dunning-Kruger, and a dusting of narcissism to
| choose to be visible to everyone because everyone cares.
| prmoustache wrote:
| As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to
| people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social
| medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some
| still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same
| way we did.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| For some recent holiday I had my girlfriend burn me a CD of
| an album I liked. (Legally bought DRM-free)
|
| I'd make her a mix CD, but there isn't much music we've
| listened to together.
|
| In fact, when I talk to anyone about music, the result is
| often a mutual "Hm, never heard of them" followed by non-
| interest.
|
| Music discovery is done independently and I don't usually
| want to get into other people's bands. I guess it used to be
| more social. I'm a late millennial, almost Gen Z. For me
| music is personal and not social. I listen to a lot of video
| game soundtracks.
| digging wrote:
| This reflects a lot of my experience. Music has become more
| and more personal over the years.
|
| I have one friend whom I introduced to _a lot_ of music and
| we used to share often (links to songs etc). Over time,
| that friend began having their own vast personal world of
| music and we rarely share anymore.
|
| One of my favorite things to do with music is to create a
| curated playlist and imagine sharing it. Sometimes I
| actually will share it with that friend or my partner, and
| that's been well received at times, as a rule it usually
| feels like asking anyone else to listen to something I like
| is just burdening/boring them.
|
| Possibly worse, when you actually do connect with someone
| new about shared music taste... suddenly you open the
| floodgates and actually there's _way too much_ music out
| there in your individual spheres so that sharing becomes
| exhausting.
| foobarian wrote:
| Kids these days seem to screenrecord youtube videos, and then
| stitch them together in iMovie/cabcut/other.
| ljf wrote:
| Not a teenager here - but I still make Spotify playlists for
| my friends, and I come across shared/curated playlists that
| people post all the time. Pre-spotify I used to make youtube
| playlists of music I loved - so pretty sure teenagers are
| doing the same now.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I remember being hyped running my first game on a 3.5inch disc
| on an Atari STE.
|
| I was like, I've arrived. This is the f'ing future!
|
| Even hearing "Iomeda Zip Drive" brings back incredible
| nostalgia!
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what
| they did in the old world
|
| My local 1-hour photo lab clerk has been struggling as well
| bena wrote:
| I thought the next thing after CD/DVD would have been
| essentially thumbsticks. Or something more akin to Switch
| cartridges. Data access is data access, it seemed we could get
| more data in less space by moving to basically SSDs.
|
| But yeah, on demand(ish), always available(ish) content kind of
| changed the game.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Also along that line, as a competitor, were the Syquest Sparq
| and SyJet cartridge hard drives. Syquest was eventual acquired
| by... Iomega.
|
| For a while, I used a SyJet on a SCSI controller as a secondary
| hard drive for dual booting. Back in that era, I had to patch
| the Linux kernel to add my Adaptec SCSI card's ID to the list
| of PCI IDs it recognized, but the driver worked fine once that
| was done, and the official sources soon caught up.
|
| It worked well, but I rapidly outgrew it, and the cartridges
| were expensive and hard to find.
| yxwvut wrote:
| I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid
| a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total
| outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is
| massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live
| on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution
| where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues
| consuming at the current rate.
| selestify wrote:
| Do you have any sources I can use to dispel this myth the
| next time I see it?
| sema4hacker wrote:
| I recently caught part of a radio interview where a musician
| bemoaned the fact that he used to be able to sell 10,000
| copies of a CD and make a living, whereas now he can have
| millions of listeners online but still not cover the
| production costs.
| hinkley wrote:
| How many times have you listened to your favorite album?
| Some of my CDs would have worn out in the 00's if I hadn't
| ripped them. In fact I had to use a disc doctor on a few to
| get a clean scan.
| afavour wrote:
| > The total outflows to creators is higher
|
| Is that actually true, though? I've lost count of the number
| of times I've heard that bands only really make money from
| touring these days and that streaming money is basically a
| rounding error.
| yxwvut wrote:
| The total pie has absolutely grown. There were a little
| under 1 billion US album sales in 2000 (the peak of CDs).
| Spotify alone paid around $3.5B in royalties in the US last
| year (with similar #s for apple music and a bit less for YT
| music).
|
| I suspect the disconnect comes from a) a big increase in
| the # of artists b) artists trying to compare apples to
| oranges #s as though every stream would've been an
| album/MP3 sale c) the timeline of revenues: an album sale
| is a big cash flow shortly after the album release, but
| streaming revenue is a slow trickle as users gradually
| discover the album, listen, re-listen, etc
| da_chicken wrote:
| Well, we just saw Hollywood unions have a 4-month long
| strike over the portion of residuals they were receiving
| under streaming. I'm willing to bet that their complaints
| about not getting what they used to under prior contracts
| and models are entirely accurate.
|
| We're also in a situation now where the media owners are
| building silos for their own content instead of licensing
| it and letting independent platforms compete on platform
| services and quality. That's not good for the people
| buying those services, either.
|
| The pie might be bigger, but the same old middlemen are
| claiming the difference.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I suspect it's true, but that also a bigger share of that
| pie is going to fewer labels and artists. It works out to a
| net gain for a minority and a net loss for everyone one.
| TheGRS wrote:
| The industry has shifted greatly for creatives. Musicians
| especially. In the 90s which was peak old industry music,
| the labels would take chances on various artists and those
| artists would have a shot at something big for little
| while. The label paid for the studio time.
|
| These days with creative tools so accessible and
| widespread, and the ability to publish so cheap, artists
| need to produce their own music and find their own
| following before the label takes them on. Instead of the
| label paying for studio time the artist does. I think
| that's why these discussions concentrate on the whole
| "fewer artists making more of the share" part. It IS
| different, but its not the whole story.
|
| And I'd probably argue in favor of making creative
| endeavors more widespread instead of being in the lap of a
| few label executive taste-makers, but you definitely have
| fewer artists who can just concentrate on making great
| music and getting nice royalties. Now you have to do
| everything for a smaller pay day.
| alt227 wrote:
| >The label paid for the studio time.
|
| I am sorry but this is completely false. All artist
| contracts in the 90s stated the label would pay upfront,
| but all costs would be recouped from future album sales
| and touring profits before the artist saw a dime. The
| labels didnt take a chance on anything, they heavily
| covered their asses by monumental contracts which were
| very famously difficult to get out of once signed.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| If the label contracts were structured as loans that had
| to be repaid, I agree with "completely false".
|
| But if, as I suspect, most contracts were structured as
| advances, then _if_ the musician was successful, you
| could look at it as the musician just having gotten a
| loan.
|
| But, famously, most musicians aren't very successful, and
| they aren't in general asked to pay back their studio
| time.
|
| So I don't think "completely false" is a reasonable
| response to "the label paid for studio time".
| whycome wrote:
| > At least we still have thumbsticks...
|
| Except for the drift issues!!
|
| /s
|
| But even gaming has gone to the model you describe. There's no
| more "holding" of something.
| gloosx wrote:
| Dunno, "no one" is a bit exaggerated, vinyl records market is
| growing every year. Of course, due to really cheap and bulky
| storage devices available today people all around are
| collecting movies and music , maintaining their collections in
| meticulous order. I mean, it is obvious not everyone will
| accept not owning their movies or music, loosing all access to
| it the moment they stop to pay in exchange for questionable
| amount of convenience, so the streaming services are of no
| interest to them. In fact, some people even see that as caring
| and giving attention to what they watch or listen.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Creators hardly got paid anything back in the CD era either!
| Especially new bands that had no experience with the sharks at
| the record company.
|
| I remember back in the 90s one of the radio countdown shows did
| a bit on Madonna. They said because she was her own producer,
| director, manager, etc she cut out all the middlemen and thus
| earned a much larger share of each album sale.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Y-yeah streaming sure has killed ownership of media...
|
| * glances nervously at the Ethernet leading into the NAS in the
| closet, overflowing with music and videos and books and games
| maxglute wrote:
| MiniDiscs for peak portable storage aesthetic. I'm still
| holding out hope that maybe someday we'll go back to visible
| mini platters on portable devices.
| ecliptik wrote:
| Not only am I holding out too, but I'm just swerving hard
| back to physical media for music and buying new MDs while
| Sony is still selling them.
|
| Be the future you want to see.
| fdr wrote:
| > If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds
| are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp,
| they might say that the company makes floppy disks.
|
| I think that's an interesting perception of the public. I think
| of 3M making all sorts of things, generally, I admire the
| company...in spite of some rather grotesque blunders and bad
| behavior. But the first thing that comes to mind is adhesive tape
| (also mentioned in the article)
| dhosek wrote:
| They bought a former employer of mine which was responsible for
| a universal file opening program (most famously incorporated
| into Lotus Notes). When I started there, they were Intranet
| Solutions, and then became Innosoft and Stellant before
| becoming a division of 3M.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Totally. My house walls are plastered with M3 Velcro tape that
| holds everything from hooks to artwork. Really, a marvel of
| chemical engineering. Those hold quite a load and then you pull
| down the strip and the adhesive comes off the wall like nothing
| was ever there.
| hackernewds wrote:
| That has almost never been true for me. Every time I take
| something off paint chips
| adrianN wrote:
| Clearly you need some 3M paint on your walls.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I immediately think of their products I use on a regular basis.
| There are so many. - micropore tape for
| mycelium and tissue cultures - reusable respirators and
| cartridges - net sanding disks - double sided tape
| for so many things - foam ear plugs and earmuffs -
| scouring pads for shop/kitchen/aquarium - HEPA air
| filters for work and home - command strips for all kinds
| of hanging and affixing needs - adhesive spray, mostly
| for wood working or working with templates - stripping
| pads
|
| The list goes on. There are alternatives from other brands, but
| a few of these are hard to compromise on and 3M does an
| incredible job. Their cubitron mesh/net sanding discs for
| example. I also like their respirator equipment too much to
| switch out another brand. Then finally it might seem
| insignificant but their double sided tapes are really good.
| When you find a bad one you never forget it, and similarly, you
| remember the good ones. 3M has been my favourite so far.
| franze wrote:
| just saying, the buggy sticky/fading/back-again header
| implementation makes this really hard to read.
|
| please make it sticky or even better just don't.
| autoexec wrote:
| images don't load with JS disabled, but the text is clear and
| there's no annoying header to worry about.
| dhosek wrote:
| Man seeing some of those disk manufacturers names brings me back
| to when I used to order bulk purchases of 5.25" floppies from a
| catalog and sell them at a profit out of my high school locker.
| And then of course, there was the trick of using a hole punch to
| add a second write-enable hole to the left side of the disk so
| you could flip it over and use the back for an extra 140K of
| storage.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >when I used to order bulk purchases of 5.25" floppies from a
| catalog
|
| Imsai!
| dhosek wrote:
| That's the one! Thanks for coming up with the name.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Stuff like this makes me think, but with a different view
| looking back than when I lived through it.
|
| For example, the hole punch thing. 10 year old me would have
| never pondered this, but... was there someone at Stedmans' HQ,
| wondering why there was an 18% uptick in hole-punch sales? Some
| old, crusty and cantankerous beatnik squirreled away, staring
| at sales charts and projections, perplexed as to why?
|
| How many households had no hole-punch, but did once the floppy
| appeared in home?
| oarsinsync wrote:
| A lot of houses used paper records and folders to store them
| in. The folders would often use ring binds that required the
| papers to be hole punched.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Sure, agree completely, although I wonder why you believe I
| may not know that? Yet lots of houses bought pre-punched
| paper, or just didn't use ring binders.
|
| The 18% is just a throw out number, and the concept is a
| joke, yet... I'm sure there was some increase in hole punch
| purchases.
|
| Because...
|
| I bought one as a kid, after getting tired of cutting a
| ragged hole with scissors.
| dhosek wrote:
| The only pre-punched paper we had when I was a kid was
| the notebook paper that was a required purchase on the
| school supply list. I remember using that as a template
| for punching holes in paper with a hole punch (since the
| fancy three-hole punch was something that only existed in
| the admin wing of our high school).
| ikari_pl wrote:
| I've been thinking for a few months about a similar write-up
| about Maxell - I own their cassette tapes, 5.25", 3.5" and 3"
| floppies, CDs, DVDs, and blu-rays. What a company!
| nodesocket wrote:
| And the rise and fall of Iomega 100mb zip drives. As a kid in
| high school I coveted those so dearly.
| classichasclass wrote:
| I was always a Memorex connoisseur myself in the 5.25" era, with
| the classic brown ruled sleeves.
| reporterexchang wrote:
| Search by floppy disk over time. Google trends.
|
| About as expected...
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&tz=420&dat...
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| What is the spike in November 2020 about?
|
| Is there a way to "see what they saw"? Maybe the results of
| then could tell me why people cared about a 20 year old media
| format.
| martinpw wrote:
| Quick search shows that there was was quest in Call of Duty
| that involved decrypting a floppy disk, and there is a
| walkthrough here from ... November 2020
|
| https://www.ign.com/wikis/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-
| war/Ho...
| xyst wrote:
| 3M is a company that does not deserve any praise. The handling of
| contaminated water supplies with PFAS has forever ruined many
| lives.
| xbar wrote:
| I am sorry to see you being downvoted.
|
| I feel completely betrayed by 3M. All of the fondness I had for
| the brand from floppy disks to early post-it notes, painter's
| tape, and scotch taping gifts with my mom.... all of them are
| tained with the horror of 3M's complete disregard for
| everything and everyone for all time.
| juitpykyk wrote:
| Article says 3M exited floppies because it was retail oriented
| very low margin business.
|
| But how is Scotch Tape not that too?
| returnzero wrote:
| I imagine the difference is that Scotch tape is much better
| aligned with the R&D that goes into their other products in the
| adhesives and films categories compared to magnetic tape. If
| they didn't intend to go further into developing products in
| the computing space then selling it while it still had value
| was probably a wise call.
| system2 wrote:
| Shipping businesses grew and still growing. I think they are
| making so much money from it despite its margin.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Scale and complexity. Floppies were dying. And it might be that
| so was some equipment for making them. Tape is steady state
| demand with likely small but clear margin and demand also in
| future. So quite different future and production scenario.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| > If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds
| are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp,
| they might say that the company makes floppy disks.
|
| That's crazy, I wouldn't think anyone would first and foremost
| associate 3M with floppies instead of adhesives, even those with
| a few grays like myself.
|
| They make _post-its_ for chrissake, and we 're gonna pretend
| they're most known for floppies?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I would have said adhesive tape. And then maybe magnetic tape.
|
| Followed shortly by "industrial chemicals".
| esafak wrote:
| I have no idea why they shoehorned 3M into the article.
| Floppies rose and fell independently of 3M.
| OJFord wrote:
| If I picture a floppy it definitely has a 3M logo either on
| the paper label or stamped into the plastic.
|
| But I'm with the sibling commenter to you who says 'adhesive
| tape' as the first thing '3M' brings to mind. People talk
| about '3M-backed X' to mean basically 'self-adhesive X' (and
| maybe express a preference for adhesive brand, but it's
| common enough the knock-offs use it as an SEO keyword too).
| skissane wrote:
| > If I picture a floppy it definitely has a 3M logo either
| on the paper label or stamped into the plastic.
|
| I do remember seeing 3M floppies, but in my memory Verbatim
| were more common. And, in the 5.25 inch era, Nashua
| saurik wrote:
| I feel like in recent years people--not just relevant trade
| professionals but a ton of normal people--have also come to
| recognize them for making protective gear including, very
| specifically, N95 masks.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Nerdy but - last Xmas 3M got hundreds of dollars of my family
| money.
|
| I got speed tape, ruby tape, silicone fiberglass hi-low temp
| tape. I don't really need them, I admire the engineering and
| I'm kinda afraid to use these tapes given how much they cost.
|
| But yeah, the 3M brand = adhesives in my household.
| jll29 wrote:
| > They make post-its for chrissake
|
| Wikipedia to the rescue:
|
| "3M Company (originally the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing
| Company) is an American multinational conglomerate operating in
| the fields of industry, worker safety, healthcare, and consumer
| goods. The company produces over 60,000 products under several
| brands, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire
| protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint
| protection films, dental and orthodontic products, electrical
| and electronic connecting and insulating materials, medical
| products, car-care products electronic circuits, healthcare
| software, and optical films. It is based in Maplewood, a suburb
| of Saint Paul, Minnesota."
|
| Although recently not doing so well due to one lawsuit, they
| have a wonderful rule that nudges management to add new
| products to its portfolio sooner and more aggresively than
| other companies, so I associate them with innovation.
|
| The now-famous "Post-It notes" were such a disruptive new
| innovation, made from scrap paper that was left over when
| cutting larger pages: literally rubbish/garbage turned into a
| new revenue stream.
| redblacktree wrote:
| > Although recently not doing so well due to one lawsuit,
| they have a wonderful rule that nudges management to add new
| products to its portfolio sooner and more aggresively than
| other companies, so I associate them with innovation.
|
| What rule is that?
| ijijijjij wrote:
| I associate 3M with the production of chemicals
| nine_k wrote:
| I used a ton of floppies since mid-1980s and until early 2000s.
| The names I actively associate with floppies in my visual
| memory are BASF, TDK, Maxell, and Sony. I did have the
| occasional 3M floppy, but these were somehow rare.
|
| OTOH 3M easily evokes images of all things adhesive.
| tristor wrote:
| I mostly associate 3M with film products, because that's what
| they're most known for in the car world. If you want high-
| quality paint protection film or tint film at a commercial
| scale, it's usually from 3M (although they have some
| competitors like Xpel). When I think about adhesives, I think
| about Permatex, but I didn't realize Scotch and Duck tape were
| 3M products, so I have probably used way more 3M adhesives than
| I realized.
|
| When I think about floppy disks, especially 3.5" floppy disks,
| I mostly think of Sony and Toshiba. Both made floppy disks, but
| Sony invented them, Toshiba was the first to put a 3.5" floppy
| disk drive in a laptop, and Sony made one of the first consumer
| digital cameras which stored photos on a floppy disk (Sony
| Mavica). I don't even remotely think of 3M. I would associate
| the brand name "Fellows" more with floppies than 3M, because
| they were the company that made the 50 and 100 floppy storage
| trays you could buy at any office store. When I moved in 2022,
| I threw out nearly 600 floppy disks I still had in a closet for
| some reason, including a copy of the Windows 3.11 installer
| set.
| skissane wrote:
| > They make post-its for chrissake, and we're gonna pretend
| they're most known for floppies?
|
| How many people actually remember that post-its is a 3M
| product? Maybe buried deep in my memory, but not at the top of
| it
|
| If you'd asked me to name a 3M product, the first thing that
| would pop into my head is Fluorinert-range of electrically
| inert cooling chemicals, used to cool electronics, e.g. in the
| 1980s Cray 2 supercomputer: stuff many overclockers daydream
| about but very few ever use (primarily due to how extremely
| expensive it is, although environmental and safety issues are
| also a factor). Never seen the stuff in person, but the idea of
| it is cool
| jsz0 wrote:
| I'm not sure I ever actually bought a box of blank floppy disks.
| Instead I would call up software companies and ask for free demos
| instead. I did it so often the postal service warned may parents
| they would stop delivering mail to the house.
| russellpekala wrote:
| I heard that this business unit turned into 3Ms healthcare data
| analytics business partially because healthcare customers kept
| buying floppy disks after everyone else stopped.
| https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/health-information-systems-us/dr...
| szundi wrote:
| At the late stage Sony floppies were better quality and they had
| better data retention. No bad sectors ever.
| neglesaks wrote:
| Back in those days, getting your hands on a foil-wrapped 10-pack
| of 3M (DS) HD floppy disks was the true feeling of happiness...
| :D
|
| Heck, even five would be pretty nice.
| fsiefken wrote:
| o wow, i totally forgot about the feeling, yes that was nice.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I bought a usb floppy drive, and some old 1.44 floppies, and I
| thought its just nostalgia, but tbh its just super cool.
|
| I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool computer
| kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that are pretty
| fast
|
| There is also a floppy disk music demoscene, and of course the
| retro computing scene, but I think 'constrained' programming is
| one of the best ways to learn and it is underused in pedagogy and
| androgogy. The floppy disk will raise again.
|
| PS: I am working on adding UFI support, it is using CBI to the
| esp32 mass storage which support only BOT, but its going quite
| slowly because I am trying to use cheap 4$ logic analyzer to
| debug and its losing samples :(
| bArray wrote:
| > I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool
| computer kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that
| are pretty fast
|
| Not sure there is much interest from younger people these days
| outside of a small niche. Checkout any kind of OS/computer
| architecture classes on a University campus.
|
| Could be super cool to build a 'mobile phone' that runs on
| floppy disks.
|
| > PS: I am working on adding UFI support, it is using CBI to
| the esp32 mass storage which support only BOT, but its going
| quite slowly because I am trying to use cheap 4$ logic analyzer
| to debug and its losing samples :(
|
| Have you documented this somewhere?
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > Could be super cool to build a 'mobile phone' that runs on
| floppy disks.
|
| that would be beyond cool!
|
| > Have you documented this somewhere?
|
| not yet, sending the proper commands the endpoints always go
| stale so I am trying to debug the usb packets send from my pc
| vs the esp32, but usbpcap is not enough because the thing I
| send is the same (as far as I can see) as linux/windows, so I
| am trying to debug it on the wire
| rob74 wrote:
| > _But you might be wondering, how did 3M make the leap from
| reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It feels like just as strange a
| leap as a masking tape company developing reel-to-reel audio
| tape._
|
| Er... no, it doesn't? If you have experience with one kind of
| magnetic media, it sounds pretty reasonable that you could
| leverage that experience to make other kinds of magnetic media
| too. Actually, "fellow thick-Helvetica enthusiast" BASF did
| exactly the same: they were very big players in the reel-to-reel
| tape market too. And, while 3M spun out its magnetic media
| business as Imation, BASF did the same with EMTEC
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMTEC)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2023)
|
| Discussion on the original Tedium post then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534227
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Albums released on floppy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRm2_Uy_7bk
|
| Sony invented the 3.5" floppy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djsyVgTGaRk
|
| I recently went through my large box of old 3.5" disks and
| discovered that most of them are failing. The older 5 1/4" disks
| seem better, maybe because the density is lower.
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| The folks at CD Projekt Red certainly haven't forgotten about
| them for their "very special" edition of CP 2077:
| https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/50098/introducing-a-limite...
| jaclaz wrote:
| The best (IMHO) ode/obituary for floppy disks:
|
| A:las poor floppy, I knew you well.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| What a strange article. The premise seems to be that 3M floppies
| were better formulated than others, but the author never actually
| discusses their quality directly, or anything close.
|
| 3M floppies were pretty rare in my experience.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-03 23:01 UTC)