floppies?
yeah, i'm getting a PB in a matter of weeks and i plan on getting an external USB floppy drive. anyways, last time i really used a Mac was when there was very little compatibility between Mac and PCs so floppies could be used between the two platforms, but needed to be formatted. do floppies still need to be formatted between the two platforms today? for example if i typed up a paper on the Mac, could i save it on a floppy, then put the floppy in a PC and open the file? or, if i had floppy drive i used with PC, but was blank, could i use it directly in a Mac with no formatting?
p.s. and if you feel like lecturing me about how floppies are a thing of the past, please don't. i'm old fashioned in certain regards, and floppies are one of them
p.s. and if you feel like lecturing me about how floppies are a thing of the past, please don't. i'm old fashioned in certain regards, and floppies are one of them
Comments
Heck, a USB 2.0 card for PC is less than $10.
EDIT: Sorry, didn't read your "PS:"
1) email it
2) file share it
3) USB flash drive it
Originally posted by Performa636CD
...p.s. and if you feel like lecturing me about how floppies are a thing of the past, please don't. i'm old fashioned in certain regards, and floppies are one of them
no lecture, but advice:
1: floppies are a pain in the ass
2: sloppys are unstable, and unsecure
3: for the price of the drive you could get a thumb drive and vwala, 128 diskettes on your keychain, the thing is smaller than a bluetooth dongle and priced under 50$.
4: a cheap firewire hdd and a card for the pc (sorta pricey but way better than disks)
Thats all for now, gotta go sort my 8-track collection and find that kenny loggins tape so see ya later
Originally posted by Paul
mac formatted floppys still wont work in PCs... save yourself the trouble and get a USB flash drive...
Agreed, but also be aware that while PCs aren't capable of reading Mac formatted floppies, Macs *CAN* read PC formatted floppies.
Stupid PCs...
Originally posted by Performa636CD
lemme ask you this, let's say i do get one of those pocket USB drives. ok, so i'm writing a paper or making a power point presentation, blah blah, and i want to go save. can i save it to the thumb drive as if i were to save it on the HD or floppy? just go to file, save as...etc? if the answer is yes, let's say that i wanna transfer that paper to my PC computer...should be directly compatible, right?
yes sir: in windows it usualy mounts as the f-drive, and on mac, well i dont know. but is dhould do anything a flopy can do (exept byte the dust each minut) and faster and hold a hell of a lot more.
I know if the drivers are compiled into the kernal all inux will see them automaticly and they are all osx/unix compiant
Originally posted by Performa636CD
yeah, i'm getting a PB in a matter of weeks and i plan on getting an external USB floppy drive.
I thought I would need one too. I even wasted an Apple sticker on it.
anyhoo, any recommendation on a USB flash drive? i know that Verbatim is recommended for blank recordable disk media, but does that reputation apply to USB drives? if not, what company should i buy from? i'm serious here, i do not want cheap crap, for example if memorex has a reliability rate of 99.23% over 10 years while Verbatim has a reliabilty rate of 99.55%, i'll pay more...hence why i'm getting an Apple
It's actually just a caddy, but it takes three different types of Flash memory,
Memory Stick, SD, and/or MMC, up to 512Mb, but most importantly, the cards are swappable,
so I could yank the Flash and swap in another half-gig while others would need to empty their card
I could have got a keydrive or FlashPen, but you're stuck with the capacity you buy.
only downsides to this model?
too bulky for convenient use in some iMac USB ports (keyboard USB cable interferes with insertion)
"insufficient power to chain through this device" if attempted into USB ports on KB itself
a few of the office guys have 'naked' flash cards (no chassis or protective cover)
while seemingly less robust or survivable, they seem to run fine in the KB USB ports (no power issue) and fit easier
http://www.usbflashdrive.org/ has some info and profiles some 'alliance member' products
I would highly recommend a USB thumb drive. Format it on a windows box and it should be readable just about anywhere. They are solid state, meaning no moving parts. It'll be more durable, store many times more data, and will be at least 100x faster.
Originally posted by jwri004
Does anyone know what I can do with the 600 floppies I have cluttering up my place?
Coasters? Target practice?
Originally posted by jwri004 Does anyone know what I can do with the 600 floppies I have cluttering up my place?
Do you know someone with a USB floppy drive you can use for a few hours? 600 floppies would roughly equal about ONE CD, so I'd copy everything from them to my desktop (into folders, organized and easy to track things down) then burn all that stuff to a single (maybe a second, depending) CD.
I did that a few years ago...had a bunch of old Illustrator stuff and writings and old Quicken records on a bunch of old floppies. Brought home a USB floppy drive from work for one night, got all the floppy contents to my iMac, organized everything (kept some of the Illustrator stuff on my iMac to have access to again), then burned a CD.
My life has gone from about 30-something floppies and 6 or so 100MB Zip disks to about 4 master back-up CDs, basically containing just about everything I've ever written, drawn, etc. on the Mac for over a decade.
HAVE YOU SEEN A NEON GREEN FLOPPY DISK? It has the only copy of my senior thesis paper on it. If you've seen it please call 555-5555
I was dumbfounded. Why you would keep only one copy of something as important as your senior thesis is beyond me. And to keep it on a floppy drive is simply retarded. When I have do my senior project (a work of fiction...I love being a writing major) I will probably have it on 3 different hard drives (internal, external, iPod) and printed out every few pages. That is not something you want to lose.
Then, just the other, one of my friends came to me asking if I could help her. She had written 5 pages of an already late paper and now the floppy it was on said it was "unreadable." I just can't understand it. Transferring small files between computers is what my Yahoo! mail account is for, well that and keeping SPAM out of my real mail accounts. But man... relying on floppies... Blows my mind...
Originally posted by SledgeHammer
I bought a USB floppy drive when I got my TiBook a few years ago. The only time I ever use it is when a PC using friend brings me something to print for them or something like that. The only time I ever use it personally is to transfer files (old games I've downloaded) to an old SE I have in my room at home. It blows my mind how many people on campus still rely on floppies. There were signs posted around campus a few weeks ago: I was dumbfounded. Why you would keep only one copy of something as important as your senior thesis is beyond me. And to keep it on a floppy drive is simply retarded. When I have do my senior project (a work of fiction...I love being a writing major) I will probably have it on 3 different hard drives (internal, external, iPod) and printed out every few pages. That is not something you want to lose.
Then, just the other, one of my friends came to me asking if I could help her. She had written 5 pages of an already late paper and now the floppy it was on said it was "unreadable." I just can't understand it. Transferring small files between computers is what my Yahoo! mail account is for, well that and keeping SPAM out of my real mail accounts. But man... relying on floppies... Blows my mind...
you're telling me. i got a call 2 am this morning from this guy who's computer won't boot up and his only copy of his senior thesis is on the computer; the thesis is due on monday. yeah, apparently he has no hardcopy, no back up, nothing. he's not the only one. i'm surprised that students don't back up their data. hell, i've seen so many failures, i'm willing to spend the money to back up my computer...that's right i'm gonna have to laptops for school. normally, when i have important information on a computer, i print out a harcopy, save it to HD, and save it to floppy...and if it's REALLY REALLY critical, i even mail it to myself to the yahoo and school servers
It boggles the mind that something like a senior thesis (or hell, even just a run-of-the-mill term paper or book report) would be kept in ONE place...AND on a floppy disk, no less.
That's just stupid. It's short-sighted, "not gonna happen to me" idiocy on the part of the student.
We ALL get burned at one point or another...it's just gonna happen. But it'll suck MUCH less if I can grab that important freelance project off my iPod, my .Mac account and/or one of two CDs I've burned it to.
Overkill? Maybe. But guess who isn't up until 4:35am, sweating bullets and trying to recreate - in three hours - what took me days or weeks to create initially. That's right...ME.
Unbelievable people don't take this stuff a bit more seriously and realize its importance.
as for me, all of my source is on my local hdd at home, my network hdd at school, a local workstation at school, and my thumb drive, and sometimes my moms hdd, short of a nuke, no one is going to ruine my data.