Let’s Get Physical
In a world filled with seemingly endless network bandwidth, ultra-thin computers, and with the recent banishing to history of the floppy disc, is there really a need for physical media any more? Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore what physical media means for us, the digital divide, and whether we need those physical discs any more.
We are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Do we still need physical media? Do you still use floppies, zip drives, or tapes? Do you use USB pendrives? Do you think getting rid of physical media will increase the physical divide? Would we ever look back in anger? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
57 Comments to “Let’s Get Physical”
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(NB I haven’t listened yet.) Surely you can’t assume that everything is networked. A lot of technology is wrapped up either off the network or on networks that are isolated. There must be a mechanism for moving data between. Um, duh!
Okay, will listen now.
PS First post! ;oP
LoL I used a floppy disk this morning! It was to load some raid drivers onto a fresh install of Windows Server 2003… Comedy…
By “Physical media” I assume you mean “Removable media”.
I removable media for music in my car (I plug my ogg player into the stereo), I also use a removable hard drive to transfer videos between my desktop and my Wii so I can watch them on the telly. I do have the obligatory spindle of CD-Rs in my office. I use them mainly for burning live linux CDs for system recovery, and install CDs. Mainly becuase it’s easier than using flash media. The last CD I burned was a copy of C&C Red Alert, as I couldn’t get Crossover Games to get past the copy protection with a mounted ISO (don’t worry, it was all legally downloaded from Westwood
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I’d like to say I dont need a USB stick/SD card to carry data around on, and the I just stick everything in cloud storage. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy and reliable cloud storage solution, and can’t rely on there being an available and reliable net connection wherever I am.
I just used a CD-ROM to install Ubuntu on a new laptop then a USB stick to transfer the wireless driver onto it. No other way of doing it(?). Hopefully that’s it. Now my parents even have broadband so I can send them pictures that way without having to burn discs. I really should listen as well…
In some working environments (e.g Government, military) the IT is so locked down that you can’t access cloud storage AND you can’t attach USB storage devices, either. Burning data to a CD to make a local backup is your only option.
Why don’t ubuntu sell ubuntu branded USB sticks with the distribution on them. It solves the problem of it being harder for people to install on laptops without cd drives, it gives you publicity because people will be carrying around things with the ubuntu logo on them, the user gets a nice usb stick and to show that they’re supporting the OS, and ubuntu would make some money!
I’d be amazed if there wasn’t at least a small market for them.
I’d pay for a Ubuntu-branded USB stick, especially if I could easily upgrade it with new releases. That’d be sweet.
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Having now listened to the podcast I think I agree with most of the comments. Although pervasive networking is nice, it’s not available everywhere, whether it’s due to lack of facilities or security policies. Write-only media is required as well as RW in some circumstances. Sure, we can ditch floppies, Zip disks, and other for USB storage, but DVDs still provide a useful write-once medium.
I carry at least one USB stick around with me at all times, but I find that I use it less and less. All the machines I interact with regularly run Ubuntu so it’s far more convenient for me to just throw a file in my Ubuntu One directory and trust it will be there when I need it on another box.
I do have some CD-Rs laying about, but I only use them for music in my car since I apparently have the last car ever made that doesn’t include a line-in jack for a music player.
As for floppy discs, as a coworker of mine recenly said, “If you have to use a floppy disc to do that, you’ve already failed.”
Unfortunately, the dictionary app in GNOME requires an Internet connection. I don’t know what the point of it is.
Being able to boot from arbitrary remote servers on the internet would be fantastic.
http://boot.kernel.org actually offers this, but you still need a little stub program to get the ball rolling, since that functionality isn’t built into the BIOS. No reason it couldn’t be, though.
Yep. Talking to BIOS manufacturers would make this be brilliant. It’s unlikely it’ll happen, though, since the people with the biggest voices on this are MS, who have no intention of allowing you to boot an OS over the internet.
BIOSes already know how to boot over the network, though. Why can’t we just TFTP, or similar, to boot.ubuntu.com?
Being able to boot OS’s from the internet would be extremely useful and dispense with the last genuine use for physical media. Though I cannot help thinking that it would only be feasible to boot an extremely minimalistic distro. The Ubuntu CD ISO takes about an hour and a half to download here. Who wants to wate that long to get an OS booted?
There is the “netboot” image, which loads just enough to know how to fetch the rest of the CD, and downloads very quickly. I’ve used the netboot image a number of times.
I used to carry usb stick around all the time, but i came to the conclusion that they brake up too easily and got few SD cards. Now carrying SD cards around, one has ubuntu to boot from is my system brakes and other has some of my more needed data. Music can be gone for few days if i’m not at home as i have my music collection on 3 pc’s and one server.
I do not remember when i have last time used CD or flobby disks. DVD’s i use to backup mom’s 40GB of images.
You forgot one thing! What in today’s world would u put on a 3.5 inch disk with it 1.44MB’s? And what USB’s are great for is portable apps like the portable openoffice, if system ur using doesn’t have it u can quickly load without having to install!
How about the bios update for the raid controller that I updated this morning that must be installed off a floppy.
That’s an interesting one; people who make flashable hardware will have to start making updates installable through some technique other than floppies, as the amount of floppies in the world decreases. I wonder how they’ll do it. USB?
I use a USB stick to carry around portable apps and occasionally to transfer files I download when using other computers, particularly if their upload is slow.
I seem to recall floppy disks were rated 1.44MB but could only really store 1.38MB. Oh the days of splitting files over multiple disks to move them, how I don’t miss them at all.
I haven’t used any kind of physical media at all, besides a USB drive for anything besides installing OS’s. Physical media like CD’s and DVD’s just take up far to much space. As all my data is in a Subversion repository, I just use that for moving it around.
The USB drive mainly holds a few portable applications.
A few weeks ago I wanted to move a 1.5GB video file between two laptops at my house. Both computers were on the local wireless network, so it was several times quicker to put the file on my USB stick and move it over. On my Comcast connection, if I wanted to send the same file to a friend who lives an hour away, it might be somewhat quicker to drive the file to them. If we both had gigabit fiber to the home, that might change, but it would still be faster to carry larger amounts of data.
For the minority of us living in the land of plentiful bandwidth, we will always be less dependent upon physical media than people in other parts of the world (or those of us living in rural towns). However, I think storage capacity will always be a lot more plentiful and cheaper than bandwidth. For $239.88 USD I can purchase 100GB from dropbox, and that only lasts for a year. For the same price I can buy 2TB of storage, and I don’t have to pay for it again the next year. Cloud storage can compete on convenience, but not on capacity or price.
Well, yeah, but you can also buy 7TB of storage if you spend that money on blank DVDs. So hard drives can’t compete on capacity or price either. They can compete on convenience, though.
I use CD’s almost completely for linux distros
(you also sometimes need to be a burn a disc of other software if you have.. misplaced your main copy)
There’s also the rare case where you need to pass something off to someone and will only see them briefly or can’t (due to lack of time or tech) copy off your usb to their device. So you burn it to a disc (or discs) and hand it off. This only happens a few times a year though, and I still have a few hundred CD’s…
I’m in a production company so we do actually press and replicate DVD’s for delivery to clients, but this isn’t a typical use case.
Bringing it full circle, I recently had a minor flood that lead me to discover several hundred floppies and CD’s with cryptic things like “backup 4/27″ written on them (or more likely no label of any kind). I may go treasure hunting through them some day but I also shudder to consider the far-gone time of “insert next disk to continue” messages :p
This reminds me of when I recently went through my cassette tape collection. I managed to cull about half, but can’t find anyone to give them to, and never play the ones that I want to keep. I really don’t want to throw them out (don’t have such compulsions about floppies though).
Anyone interested in about 90 blank tapes for taping over? They’re still usable.
Ooh, yes and no. Yes, but perhaps not that many!
I recovered a few at a Freecycle fair – it’s quite fun in that one of the tapes contained some odd electronica none of us recognized (and MusicBrainz wasn’t sure either) then silence. The silence was interrupted three times by a man saying “Test 1, 2nd of April 1998″ at irregular intervals.
The fun thing being that it was created before social media became popular – I’ve no way of finding out who the voice belongs to. On a digital recording I could trace it to a source and ask around, with this I’ll never know.
A pointless mystery, maybe, but a mystery nonetheless.
CD and DVD will be around for a while. USB keys are just another form of temp storage. By by in 20 years.
Storage types everyone. USB keys nuke floppies that where upset by real world issues.
Tape for how undependable it is somehow is staying in the game.
At home I only ever use the DVD drive for ripping music/movies to electrnic format. However I would be lost without the use of CDs, DVDs and USB pens at my place of work: a school.
The filters and firewalls really are locked tightly down so that almost no information can be taken in via the web. I am unable to access my cloud, send or receive attachments and all social networking pages are blocked. So when a homework task may be to find some pictures for a project (yes Google images is blocked) the only way the pupils are able to take them in is via CD, DVD or pen stick. I feel that we are not able to dump these yet, as it would make data transfer in an environment like a school very difficult. This is not exclusive to my current school, I have worked in a variety of schools in Scotland and the ICT policies are all very similar.
The other place were they are essential is still some rural parts of Scotland. I currently live 10 miles south of Stornoway (Isle of Lewis) and achieve speeds up to 6M. However those living in Barvas, 13 miles west of Stornoway, a much bigger settlement with more ammenities etc, do not get broadband at all. A service has been set up round the island with the constant theme of ’support local’ for a great £19.99 a month (internet only, no phone rental or calls) you get a whopping 120K speed which does not run at night. You are able to stream radio, but these users are not even able to watch youtube. For these users, removeable media is still very mich part of their pc life.
I agree that removeable media are on the way out, but like India still purchasing floppies, there is still a place for these in our modern society.
That’s interesting. It sort of plays into the “digital divide” point we were making, except that in companies and schools which block external access, that digital divide is deliberately imposed.
I believe that councils play a major role in hindering open source in the UK. I’ve requested a variety of open source apps, but have been met with stiff competition. I must use IE for browsing, I must use ms office. I have been able to get the GIMP and Inkscape installed, but in one room only. I’m pushing for Blender but so far have only been able to get it on one machine.
Imagine the money that could be saved by dumping ms office and going for OpenOffice nationwide (I know this is not everyone’s favourite), now that’s a saving without major cuts.
I felt that way too, when I was in school.
Given the level of things that were taught, there was no sensible reason to shell out for the latest MS Office whenever it came along.
The most inefficient way of using current technology for data transfer was demonstrated recently. I was told over the phone by a fellow professional in Glasgow that he had something for me and that it would be sent up. A CD arrived two days later in the post with …. wait for it…. two jpeg files.
Could that not have been emailed, people talk about saving money and yet practises like this are not uncommon. This was delivered in this form to over 130 schools (aaaaargggghhhh!!!!!)
Wow. Surely this sort of waste should be regulated in some way?
It came from a private company so I suppose that they can spend it as they wish. I would hate to see a government funded buisness operate in this way.
I really don’t like these kinds of wasteful practices. It makes me think of people who will only read their email if it’s printed out.
I’m sure some of those must still exist out there. shudders
Lots of ‘em. Lawyers do this a lot, for example.
Really? That is amazing. And yeah printing emails, what is up with that? Why would anyone do that besides some sort of archiving.
But as WE all know, that can be done in a digital format anyway.
I really like the idea of a paperless society.
Down here in Romania you still need floppy disks for any governmental software. If you have to do taxes(for a company) or anything like that they expect you to give them a floppy with it. And that’s because of the horrible software they had custom made: it will only allow you to save the data to the A: drive so people that are not very tech savvy end up using a floppy. I actually know someone that had to buy an external floppy drive for their laptop in order to do the taxes.
I have like 4 or 5 usb sticks and I almost never use any of them. I kept buying new ones because I regularly misplace them. And it would be nice to be able to put the new version of ubuntu on a stick easyer. Maybe have a little app that will download whatever version you want straight on a stick and make it ready to boot.
At least this will force the government to get better programs, eventually disks will run out if they are stopping manufacture. This may not be ideal, but it may give those in power in Romania a wake up call that they need a more up to date system.
I have memories of using CP/M computers with a pair of 5.25″ floppies. Generally you would boot the OS from one and have data on the other.
Many years later most of my computer have no floppy drive and I’ve not used those for a long time. My main use of optical drives has been to burn audio CDs, but I have been known to make backups to DVD.
I use various memory cards for phones and cameras. My phone has 8GB, which is enough for plenty of music and other assorted data. I don’t have a contract and so large amounts of mobile data usage would be expensive.
Online storage is great, but upload speeds lag way behind download. I currently have 20Mb/1Mb.
I wonder if this means that the icon for saving will finally change to something other than a floppy disk? The next generation of users simply will never have had the connection between a floppy disk and saving work.
The save icon hasn’t been a floppy disc for years in all the apps I use?
Meh, depends on the platform you’re using. MS Office (which would cover quite a few users, still) still uses the lovely blue floppy disc for its “Save” toolbar button. Linux and MacOSX are much more progressive. (Hmm, mind you, that’s Office 2003, which what we still have at work – perhaps we’re the ones who aren’t progressing!)
Blimey, you’re right, too. http://classic-menu-for-office-2007.smartcode.com/images/sshots/classic_menu_for_office_2007_20188.gif shows the blue floppy.
Just doing a quick poll of the applications I have open, everything using GTK (including Firefox and OOo) uses a floppy disk, Konqueror (using Qt) uses a floppy disk, MS Office and IE use a floppy disk, in fact the only programs I can find that don’t are the ones which don’t have an icon for Save. Granted, I’m running Ubuntu Jaunty, but that’s hardly ancient.
You talk about cloud storage and such, but here even in the US we have a digital divide between rural and urban areas. Many Urban areas have many choices for Broadband, but in a rural area, that is not that far from an urban area, like where I live. We just got a broadband connection as of November 2009. Before that I was on a dial up connection. Because of that it was easier for me to use a usb key to download things on a fast internet connection, and take them home. I would also save the programs there for a later time, in case I needed to reinstall. The other good use for physical media is to store things such as a resume or such, that you need to archive, and not worry about it not being there in the future. The cloud may work at a later time, but right now it may be hard to gain access to this files on all computers.
Upload bandwidth is a serious issue. I wish ISPs would provide a cost-effective option for those of us who want faster upload speeds.
I would probably use my cloud storage a lot more if uploading things of any substantial size didn’t take so long.
The problem is that there aren’t many people who actually want faster upload speeds enough to pay for it, so there’s no market working to drive the price down…
I think you are in a much “desktop mind”.
I can think of various, expensive machines, in my university that requires floppy disks, for example, to take data in and out.
floppy disks rather than USB or CDs? Really? I suspect these machines may be rather old — even big iron these days has something higher-capacity than floppies, surely?
There are not just “servers” in the world. I am an engineer in a Engineer school, so image all kinds of machines.
And even if you say that they are old (some of them are, actually) there is no reasonable reason to replace them.
I seem to recall my flatmate telling me that some of the analysis machines he works with for his chemistry degree can only use floppies.
Personally I want to see floppies gone as I always remember losing data. If memory serves their reliability levels are abysmal.
Ah, I’m not suggesting that those machines get replaced. The point is that eventually they’ll die and be replaced, and if the main requirement for floppies is because there are still people around who have machines that only have floppy physical media capabilities, then there’s not much need for floppy manufacturers, but one small firm could probably own the whole niche market. In the same way, there aren’t that many people driving 1967 Ford Zephyrs around, but there are probably enough that you could make a living if you were the only firm making parts for them.
Apparently Slashdot are fans of Shot of Jaq http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/28/140210/The-Mystery-of-the-Mega-selling-Floppy-Disk
Anyone remember using a holepunch to “modify” 720k floppies into 1.44MB ones?
Gerv
I remember hearing about stuff like this, but I never did it
I think sometimes people in the tech community are so forward looking and innovative that they are sometimes oblivious to the constant uses of older technology. On the subject of floppy disks, I can give one example of an industry that is going to be using floppies for decades to come: the manufacturing industry. I am a CNC machinist and I work with CNC machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of these machines are still manufactured with floppy drives on them. We are finally starting to see them go away favoring USB drives to floppies, but almost all manufacturers still offer models with floppy drives. The drives are used for coping small text files (our programs) to the machine so we can manufacture a product. Another reason these won’t just go away is the fact that these machines are several thousand dollars, and in many cases several hundred thousand dollars. When companies buy one of these precision manufacturing machines, they buy them with the intention that they will be using them for a good 20 years or more.
Floppy disks
I used them 4 times exactly lol.