And to be fair, my Lexar jump drive works flawlessly on two very different Linux-only machines. (In fact, it has an ext2 filesystem on it now.) But my larger point was that the suggestion that either USB or Firewire could obsolete RS232 is laughable.
And to take a completely different tack, there are multiple floppy-based ‘rescue’ Linux distros that can be booted on otherwise unbootable machines and rescue data before a new OS is installed. tomsrtbt and R.I.P. (Recovery Is Possible) come to mind.
(You can put those on CDs, but floppies are cheaper and less likely to get scratched up.)
Not cheaper where I am. They might be more reliable, though, but I’ve gotten into some bad batches of CD-Rs just like I’ve gotten into some bad batches of floppies.
ticker: Well, I learn something new every day.
Reply: No, for the average PC maker they have. PC users still have a use for them, hence the market for USB-to-serial converters. Myself, I’d rather go with the more reliable option and get a real serial port.
“FireWire”? No. IEEE 1394? Yes, plenty. I have it on all of my PC’s.
I’m not completely hip to the distinction, other than that FireWire is a trade name and 1394 is a standard for roughly the same thing. One grew from the other, and as far as I know, it all interoperates.
Your confusing multiple serial channels with parrallel. The difference is a parrallel channel sends bits in order, ie: the first 8 bits, then the 2nd, then the 3rd etc. wheras multiple serial channels send bits as fast as each serial channel can handle. This is fine when you don’t especially care what order the bits arrive but if you need a specfic ordering, then the synchronization and inteference issues from parrallel can cause it to slow down dramatically. Take ATA for example which was a parrallel interface which was clearly on it’s last legs. You simply couldn’t make cables denser than they were because of mutual inteference.
Huh? Floppy drives were already very hard to find when XP came out, and now they’re virtually nonexistant. So how does one install XP nowadays?
And while FireWire is less than ubitquitous, everything made nowadays for the home user (computers, periphreals, and standalone devices that can talk to the computer) has USB. It is accurate to say that FireWire and USB have replaced serial ports, but only because it’s also accurate to say that USB by itself has replaced them.
That’s not true. I found two places that sell them from a quick search: Maplin and PC World
Floppy drive/card reader combos are very poppular today. (A small tip: disconnect the card reader from the motherboard when installing Windows and re-connect it when the installation finishes. USB drives take precedence over IDE and SATA, so you’ll end up with the card reader taking up letters C and D and the hard drive will take letter E!)
You can boot from the XP CD and install from it directly. You only need a floppy if you use certain RAID/SATA drives that require drivers. Not sure what you’d do if you don’t have a floppy drive in that case… maybe load the drivers from a USB drive or copy them onto the Windows CD itself?
XP Cds have a floppy build utility on them. You can also get that utility from M$ directly. It creates 4 cds which contain all the info it needs (generally) to recoginze a cd-rom/dvd drive, and allow you to get started on installing the XP Operating system.
Most new machines have the ability to boot from CD, but there are drives out there that won’t boot directly from the CD.
On the RS-232 front, there are THOUSANDS of devices that still use this interface, and it’s a shame that such a reliable interface is being phased out. (Examples: GPS, medical monitoring equipment, modems, Palm Pilots (and I’d assume other PDAs), multimeters, and a whole host of other things.) The nice part is that you can easily see the raw data coming from the device, and it’s up to the software you’re using to interpret it for you.
I worked on a product that tied all of the anesthesia devices in an OR into a computer, this allowed monitoring of the read-outs by computer, rather than the anesthesiologist needing to take hand written notes. Better patient care, due to less burden of paperwork/recording. (If the company was only better, I’d still be working there, but that’s a different rant).
Do you have a cite for that? I don’t really believe it. It’s true that floppy drives are becoming rarer, and I’d be willing to bet that most XP boxes sold in the past 24 hours don’t have one, but I’m not buying that “most XP boxes” (total) don’t have floppy drives unless I see a cite.
I have 4 XP boxes at home and 6 at work, and all but one of them has a floppy drive. But I suspect the majority of machines I get in the future won’t have them.
Well, it comes down to what you ask your IT supplier for, doesn’t it? Most cases still have 3.5" bays in them, cos it’s not just 3.5" floppy drives that use those bays. That means, someone has to choose if a given machine has a 3.5" floppy drive in it, or not.
If you buy systems from Dell or Gateway or whatever, you’re going to generally go with their standard systems, which would NOT have a floppy as standard any more - but they can add one in for a price.
Any other company is going to rely on you to ask if you want one specifically. I buy around 20 PC’s a year from various manufacturers, and I have never once been asked if I wanted a 3.5" drive in the last two years.
Umm… actually, yeah, I’ve seen Firewire connections on low-end factory HP’s and Dell’s as early as 5 years back and I’m staring at a firewire connection on the side of my low-end Sotec laptop. That is, if IEEE1394 still means “firewire.” It’s out there, not sure what would lead someone to say that it isn’t.
I was at the computer store a week ago, and I noticed that most of the motherboards do not have IEEE 1394 ports. It looks like only the high-end ones do. For that matter, many of the aftermarket cases do not have front-panel firewire ports in them, while almost every single one has a pair of USB ports on the front.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if this were the case, but I think you’re mistaken. I just tried this on the Dell site, via the following:
-> Dell main page
-> click on Small Business
-> recommended solutions / Dimension (the cheaper option)
-> click on cheapest machine ($598 this morning)
-> click on Select for Dimension 3000 (cheapest)
-> click on More Options to see what was installed by default.
Which gets me this box: the Dell default-config small business desktop du jour.
The default config includes a floppy drive. You can remove the floppy on the Options page, but the default config includes it.
I left the floppy disk out of the last three computers I bought and/or built. Everything I have these days uses USB, but I do also have a FireWire port through my Creative Audigy soundcard. That port is most useful for connecting Digital Video Cameras, DVD recorders and such. Only used it once though. But the FireWire (a.k.a. iLink) port on my PS2 has gotten considerable more use, I even bought a firewire hub for that.
Now that the PS2 is moving towards UTP for interconnectivity though, I’m secretly kinda hoping that we get more devices supporting firewire. Although USB currently clearly rules the market and that’s fine, FireWire has a guaranteed stable datarate, and that’s what makes it better than USB for for instance video applications.
What bugs me most about USB is that those USB devices that actually need a driver installed for them then are only recognised on that same port. What’s up with that?
I’m still disappointed that there never was a replacement for the floppy disk that was superior in every way. Floppies were ubiquitous, cheap and re-writable.
USB thumb drives are ubiquitous and re-writable and not cheap (meaning your not going to loan someone your thumb drive and not particularly care if they give it back or not)
CD-RW is ubiquitious and cheap but not re-writeable (meaning that you can’t give someone a word doc to revise and then get them to send it back)
Zip disks were (relatively) cheap and re-writable but not ubiquitious
I left the floppy disk out of the last three computers I bought and/or built. Everything I have these days uses USB, but I do also have a FireWire port through my Creative Audigy soundcard. That port is most useful for connecting Digital Video Cameras, DVD recorders and such. Only used it once though. But the FireWire (a.k.a. iLink) port on my PS2 has gotten considerable more use, I even bought a firewire hub for that.
