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.