Weird Windows Dream

[ffutures]

Had a weird dream about the next version of Windows - for some reason we were trying to install it onto all the PCs at work without any backup, and it was doing horrible things like taking five or ten minutes to open a program, wiping files, etc. and I couldn't recover any data. Of course that could never happen in real life... yeah, right...

More seriously, one weird little thing in the dream got me wondering - at some point I was trying to get a small amount of data from a floppy disk, and Windows let me do it but did something to the floppy that made it impossible to read afterwards - I think it was something like updating the file access record on the floppy and saving it as a file bigger than the floppy could hold. It sounds absurd, but it occurs to me to wonder if anyone has actually tested to see if it works OK with floppies - there are plenty of computers that don't have the drives any more.

No idea why I had this dream, I'm wondering if I've read something in the last few days that triggered it. Any horrible techy news about the new Windows out there?

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

That is such a bizarre concept to me, that PCs don't always have floppy drives anymore.

Too much time spent back in the days of DOS messing around with various assorted boot discs for different types of memory I guess.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Took a floppy to give my nephew some freeware stuff a few days ago, turned out his new PC (Packard Bell) has eight USB sockets but no floppy disk. Ditto my iBook and most other recent Macs. They seem to be assuming that everyone has a memory stick, CD writer, or both. Can't honestly disagree, floppies are pretty much obsolete.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I was about to make some sort of case pro-floppy, but then I remembered the amount of data I have lost over the years to bad sectors, and now I figure, good riddance to the damn things.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The other thing is that they are now much more expensive than CDs - SVP, the guys I buy my CD-Rs from, charge £6.99 for 50 floppies, about 14p a disk, whereas CD-Rs cost £3.98, about 8p a disk. Up the quantities a little and they're even cheaper. And floppies will never come down because factories are gradually going over to other products so the price per disk to make them is actually rising.

[vincentursus.livejournal.com]

A couple weeks ago I needed to flash my bios which required having a floppy disk to use a boot disk.

And I discovered that I didn't have any floppy disks. So I immediately ran out to buy some. The local small business computer store said that he didn't sell them, they were a dead technology after all, but he had a couple old ones laying around that I could format.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

I had a dream once, a decade or two ago, in which I did a Rip van Winkle, and woke up in a future where everything ran MS-DOS.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Not much chance of that, thank Cthulhu. Too many Linux fans out there (OK, and Mac users I suppose).

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

Freedos on Linux then. It's like a poor-man's Matrix...

[rachelmap.livejournal.com]

Any horrible techy news about the new Windows out there?

It will be out late, which in itself is good news because they didn't tear down the code and rebuild it like they said they would, but instead merely kluged around with the same old code again. If I were you, I would see how other people get along with it before committing to it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh, I won't be unless I buy a PC that has it installed - but work probably will sooner or later because new machines will eventually come with it, and since we're a school our IT bods will want the PCs to run something vaguely like the current standard.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Well, Apple just announced software that will let you dual-boot the new Intel Macs. (Another sign of the Apocalypse, I'm afraid.) It's an add-on for 10.4, but is supposed to be integrated into 10.5, when it comes out.

[saranjeuhal.livejournal.com]

The drivers for floppy control are part of the core OS IIRC, so there'll be support there even in Vista. That'll fall under MS's legacy integration, which is part of the complaints about MS and why Windows is allegedly so slow (although the same argument regarding legacy support on Apple and Linux doesn't seem to apply).

This current laptop is the last one that will have Windows on it for me as the core OS I think. I've still got another 5-7 years of use out of it, but any future purchases will most likely end up running Linux or OS X.