Macs A Key Part Of Controversial Anti-Bush Ads (some mac users all tingly about socialism)

The Mac Observer ^ | February 4th, 2004 | Brad Gibson

[discostu]

There wasn't a suitable alternative, but that doesn't mean they weren't a piece of crap. Remember how easy it was to corrupt a 5 1/4, had to treat them like they wre nitro. They were state of the art, but there was no doubt that they had to be replaced as soon as the state of the art allowed.

Floppies are still popular right here in the software industry. Getting them is easy, I've got a couple dozen spares right here on my desk. If they went away I'd either need 16 more computers or 1 more engineer.

[discostu]

More insults from you. Uninterested in anything you have to say if you can't say it politely. Your rudeness proves you are not worth my time. Rewrite it without the insults. Or better yet just go away. You came in here immediately being insulting and I don't need people like you in my life, there's the door, goodbye, good luck, good ridance.

[discostu]

Sorry it is true, has been true and continues to be true. Want me to ask someone with a CS degree? Sure:
Hey DiscoStu what are the stability numbers like for modern Windows machines?
Thanks for asking Disc, actually they're pretty solid. Can run for years on end without need of reboot and without crashing. A lot of people who don't use Windows think MS hasn't progressed at all since the days of Win3.1 and NT3.51 when the OS was clearly an unstable piece of crap. Luckily those days are long gone.

Forty years worth of Unix development is nice. BTW would you happen to know who was the first company to port Unix to the desktop? The company that stole a lot of ideas from Unix and VMS (and actually a lot of developers from Vax now that you mention it) to put into their first network enabled? Hint: you're saying their product is less stable than it is.

Been using Windows for over a decade, and I'm the kind of guy that's supposed to be a total virus victim. I don't run scanning software, I download from dangerous places on the internet, and I turn off automatic updating and am incredibly lazy about updating. And yet I go through life virus free. This is a "threat" that has been seriously overblown by the virus scanning industry.

[discostu]

" All computer technology is obsolete; it's just a matter of how much time it has before it is taken over by the next technology." No technology is obsolete until it's actually being replaced. All computer technology WILL be obsolete, but if the next tech isn't there it isn't obsolete yet (unless it totally blows like 5 1/4 did).

3 1/2s are more reliable than re-writable CDs, which right now would be the only thing that can replace them. It's not that I want floppies to last forever, but right now they irreplacable for a major chunk of the industry. The thing I see in the pipeline that might be able to take out floppies is virtual machines, but right now VMs aren't flawless replications of a computer and tend to err towards stability which makes them unacceptable as a testbed.

[antiRepublicrat]

You keep saying a self-evident truth, that floppies are good for your niche. But it is an ever-shrinking niche because of the floppy's small capacity, slow speed and lack of reliability (I've thrown away trashcans full of bad floppies, a few CD-RWs and no flash keys).

[discostu]

My "niche" is the software engineers. QA needs them constantly, development needs them when they do unit testing (so they should use them more than they do), support needs them when they replicate customer problems. This is the same group that keeps the DOS prompt around even though MS marketing keeps saying the next version of Windows will get rid of it. It's a pretty big niche, and it's a pretty important one.

[antiRepublicrat]

Inside the software industry floppies are an absolute necessity, allows us to serious cut down on the number of machines we have for testing purposes and configuration time

We had a big lab of computers running dual-boot Linux/Windows. If a computer was trashed in testing or use (all the time) we'd just pop in a CD which would boot and grab the new image we wanted from the server. No floppy needed.

We then sent copies of the lab hardware/software all over the place to be run by the computer illiterate locals with simple instructions: if it dies while being hacked on by students, insert the CD, reboot and follow instructions pull a new image.

[discostu]

That's great if you have ONE image. I'm in the middle of updating my images right now (the calm between releases), I have between 8 and 12 images per computer, I run 8 computers in my testing. I don't want to have to keep track of 80 CDs, and when it's time to apply the latest patches I don't want to have to throw out 80 CDs, and at least half of my images wouldn't fit on a single CD anyway. 1 floppy, partitioned disks, and some network storage space gives me ready access to all those images in a way that simply can't be duplicated by anything else currently in the market.

And I'm not the only one that does this. I know folks that scoff at how few images I have.

[antiRepublicrat]

Can run for years on end without need of reboot and without crashing.

You're funny! I've only seen that in rare cases where the machine was running minimum services and never messed with -- plus the machines were so far back on security updates that they were downright dangerous to run. Unless they do a major rewrite, Windows uptime will never be close to *NIX uptime.

A lot of people who don't use Windows think MS hasn't progressed at all since the days of Win3.1

I started using it with Windows 286, on up to XP and a bit of 2003. Massive improvement, but still a long way to go before they are as stable or secure as *NIX.

The company that stole a lot of ideas from Unix and VMS (and actually a lot of developers from Vax now that you mention it) to put into their first network enabled?

They took a lot of ideas, but they didn't use it itself. OS X actually runs on a BSD variant.

[antiRepublicrat]

This is the same group that keeps the DOS prompt around even though MS marketing keeps saying the next version of Windows will get rid of it. It's a pretty big niche, and it's a pretty important one.

Exactly where couldn't a floppy be replaced by something better? Where would not having floppy drives hurt your work? We do software here too, on Dell laptops and servers, and there's not a floppy to be seen.

This is the same group that keeps the DOS prompt around

Glad to know I'm not alone.

[discostu]

I see it all the time. The machine I'm typing this on right now has only been shutdown because of power outages (we really need to move to a better building). Most of my desktop machines run and run no problems.

As for updates... yeah I'm lazy.

Didn't say it's as good as Nix. Just said it's a lot better than people are giving it credit for. Most users, who don't leave their computers on 24/7, can use their machine for years without a problem. That's the modern age. For desktop use Windows is now as stable as Mac. It's not up to going toe to toe with Unix as a server, for one thing Windows doesn't even run on big iron and if your key servers aren't big iron you're making a mistake (yes I'm thinking of our own IT department right now... I hate them).

Good for OSX.

[antiRepublicrat]

1 floppy, partitioned disks, and some network storage space gives me ready access to all those images in a way that simply can't be duplicated by anything else currently in the market.

You and I are doing the same thing, only we were using CDs to boot instead of floppies, and this was several years ago.

[antiRepublicrat]

Most of my desktop machines run and run no problems.

For years? You must be way behind on updates.

For desktop use Windows is now as stable as Mac.

Actually, I'd say for a while it was more stable than Mac, after 2K SP1 to when they worked the kinks out of OS X. Still, rebooting every once in a while when the OS gets unstable in 2K/XP is much better than the four times a day I had to do with 98.

if your key servers aren't big iron you're making a mistake (yes I'm thinking of our own IT department right now... I hate them).

Jealous much? :^)

Go partway to big iron and get a Mac -- you'll at least be using a POWER4 derivative (I know, just kidding, they changed a lot of what made the POWER4 good for big iron in making the PPC 970).

[discostu]

I told you where it would hurt my work. CDRWs aren't as durable and would frankly be a waste of space since there's no way I'd store all my images on CD, all I need is a meg for DOS, I've got the images on the harddrive. For booting from something other than the OS I'm trying to replace here are my options: floppy which works great, CD which is an unnecessary size and not as easily tweaked, and dual boot which is a waste of harddrive space and frankly not something Windows is good at and we don't support anything else so there's no reason to add linux partitions I can better use for storing images. Basically the floppies are a 3 1/2 inch dual boot system.

The continued existence of DOS is something to thank MS developers for. They keep having to shift it around and hide it from the marketing dweebs, but because they use it constantly they refuse to get rid of it.

[antiRepublicrat]

I've got the images on the harddrive. For booting from something other than the OS I'm trying to replace here are my options: floppy which works great,

I hope you get the point though; it works fine for you in your market, but in corporate and consumer they aren't needed much anymore, and thus their coming demise.

and dual boot which is a waste of harddrive space and frankly not something Windows is good at and we don't support anything else so there's no reason to add linux partitions

That was our particular case, labs for students to do work in either Windows or Linux. All images were on a Linux server in the lab.

[discostu]

Floppies are better for base level booting, rewritable, durable, small, and you can leave them half in the machine so you never lose them. On most of my test machines you might as well get rid of the CDRom, I only use it when an MS patch demands to see the CD and if we were properly using our network architecture I wouldn't need them then either.

[discostu]

On my desktop machine I'm waaaaaaaaay behind on updates usually. Sometimes I do the update and refuse to reboot, especially in this building where I can trust a powerspike will reboot for me in a few months.

If I was running XP for my desktop at work i'd probably have to reboot a lot, i've found XP doesn't clean up the virtual memory well. At home I can only get a week or so before I decide it's time to kick it in the pants. But it's pretty rare for me to leave my home machine on that long anyway, vacations are about it.

I hate our IT department. The good news is they didn't set my account up right and I don't have SMS spying on me. The bad news is... everything else. Our network is constant proof of MS's limitations.

A bunch of old DECs would run our network better.

[discostu]

Sure outside the Windows platform software industry floppies might not be necessary (though I still insist on them at home and consider a computer without one incomplete... and I've got spares to make sure I'm floppy enabled for a long time), but that's a big niche market and they still have a useful life outside that market that's worth the price of the hardware (because it's dirt cheap, not worth more than like $20). And the first iMac was way too early to start getting rid of them. I'll stand by that till I die, Steve blew the call... of course it is Macs we're talking about and Macs always made the floppy annoying anyway (what was up with no manual eject button, God help you when a floppy got old and didn't eject right and you had to straighten a paperclip and start poking around in that stupid hole trying to find the magic switch... there's a whole R rated parable in the tale of the Mac floppy). So maybe it wasn't too soon for Macs because Mac floppies were never as useful as PC floppies in the first place.

Oh yeah, if we were a multi-platform company things would be completely different. But most Windows shops aren't multi-platform. And like I said, if they get the virtual machine stuff working accurately (probably when not if) then we'll all flee from full sized disk images and the floppy will be well and truly dead.

[HAL9000]

There wasn't a suitable alternative, but that doesn't mean they weren't a piece of crap. Remember how easy it was to corrupt a 5 1/4, had to treat them like they wre nitro.

Back then, the alternative was cassette tape. Now that was an easily corrupted format. Using cassette tape was like transporting six cases of old leaky dynamite in an run-down truck across 208 miles of muddy jungle mountain roads and ramshackle rope bridges in a howling storm.

[discostu]

Uuuugh, don't remind of using cassettes as "storage". A friend of mine had a C64, I swear you could hear his tape drive chugging a block away.

But again, that doesn't mean 5 1/4s were good, just the best we could get. I distinctly remember using 5 1/4s and thinking that if something better didn't come a long the industry would never grow beyond the dweeb niche. Thankfully we got 3 1/2s and the real savior of the industry: harddrives.