[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Shannon]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 10:45:39PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 06:58:23PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > I have wanted floppies replaced too, but I found Zip to be unreliable,
> > and LS-120 was horribly slow.
> 
> I've heard that about LS-120 from just about everyone who's used them.
> Not really that surprising, when you consider writing a 120MB diskette
> at pretty much 2MB-diskette speeds.

What I can't figure out is why the floppy interface is still so
slow.  There is no reason for it.

I thought there was for awhile, until a friend of mine showed me the
SCSI floppy on his MV147 VMEbus system. It was several times faster than
any PC floppy I've seen.

If you listened to the drive heads moving across tracks, it compared
to a PC drive about like this:

PC	tick           tick           tick           tick           tick
SCSI	tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick

I remember my old Atari, and reprogramming the floppy controller
to format and copy floppies several times faster than the standard
interface speed.

Why can't a modern PC do that?

> Yeah, Zip100 was pretty bad.  I've been lucky with mine, it's only
> failed once.  I'm told reliability of the Zip250 drives was a lot
> better, but I haven't ever personally used one.

I thought about moving to them, because I believe they are also
faster.

The media is still expensive though.

My current Zip drive, knock on wood, has been in place for 2 years now.

> > I don't really like CD-R/RW because you have to "burn" them, and the
> > packet writing stuff never seems to work well, and isn't really
> > available for UNIX systems.
> 
> Right.  Plus their rewriteability seems to be much less than advertised,
> and adding data to a RW disc often seems to just fail for no apparent
> reason.

I have a lot of trouble moving CD-RW to other systems. Often the disks
just will not read in another CD. CD-R seems to be fine most of the
time.

> Frankly, I think flash memory could fill the bill very nicely -- if they
> could just AGREE ON ONE FORMAT, DAMMIT! instead of the proliferation of
> SmartMedia and CompactFlash and Memory Stick and Secure Digital and ....

...and without any DRM.

Same for DVD... let's have one UNRESTRICTED format, please.


-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon at widomaker.com