Of course, when searching for man urandom you still found the old versions at the top of the search results for years and years afterwards. And the German Wikipedia page will probably never change.
Yeah requires a free Bluetooth radio and has a bit of setup, but in my opinion, it's well worth it to not be reliant on Android or iPhone, which has always given me problems.
If you charitable (like you should be), then a reasonable assumption is that they probably know what happens on a dairy farm, and that's actually their point.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Kubernetes is for and how it works, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
11 years of mandatory telemetry in Windows, and it still takes a huge amount of noise from users and journalists online over a long time for Microsoft to notice and finally make change. What good is the fucking telemetry then? Why can I still not turn it off?
You can disable the YouTube app's handler for YouTube URLs. In the app info, open by default. I haven't tried it, but presumably, all YouTube URLs will then open in your browser.
In all these nostalgic retrospectives, I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? There's one paragraph in Wikipedia that says the heads fly across the disk like a hard drive. OK, how did they manage that while the disk isn't sealed? Is that all it took?
Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?
> I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this?
Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994.
A “super high density” 20 MB floppy had already been attempted in 1990, and the LS-120, which had the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), launched in 1996, so it was not really exceptional at 6 doubling in 8 years from the 1.44MB floppy.
Also it was expensive, part of that was the lower scale and lack of competition but the increased production requirements were also a factor, Zip drives and media had tighter tolerances.
The click of death was because when the head got misaligned the drive would return it to the home position, if part of the drive had failed the head would never realign so the drive would keep trying, producing a characteristic clicking sound. HDDs can develop the same, but it’s less common than it was on Zip drives. The tighter tolerance were most likely a factor, it was more likely for a zip to age out of tolerance and develop terminal misalignment.
> Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks
Improvements in coatings improve the data per track, but no improvement was needed for increasing the amount of tracks. On a 1.44MB drive there are 100 000 bits per track, but only 80 tracks per side. Or, in other terms, the length of a single bit along the track (on the innermost track) was ~1.2µm, and the width of that same bit, sideways to the track, was ~200µm, for an aspect ratio of 166:1. As far as the media was concerned, roughly 10:1 aspect ratio would have been more than enough, or a normal 1.44MB floppy could have supported more than a 1000 tracks per side.
The limiting factor was that old floppies had no way for the head to follow the track, it was just indexed into a fixed position by the drive mechanism. This meant that the tracks had to be ridiculously wide to support all the possible misalignment on both the reader and the writer. To improve track density, what was needed was some mechanism to make the head locate the tracks and follow them as the disk rotated under them. Iomega solved this by etching shallow concentric circles for the tracks on the surface of the disc. These rings were essentially invisible for the magnetic head, but allowed a separate laser to pick the up and follow them.
The real click of death was when this was due to a catastrophic failure - say, one of the heads had become completely dislodged and was suddenly hanging loose. Then, every single cartridge you inserted into such a drive would be damaged. If you then took that cartridge and inserted it into a fully working drive, it had a good chance of subsequently destroying that drive.
Steve Gibson has a good site with historical information from the time when these drives were still marketed and sold: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.
Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.
3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s.
... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((
There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.
Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.
That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess.
In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.
Zip disks were much less floppy than floppies. They felt more similar to a single magnetic hard disk platen. Presumably the stiffness was what enabled the head to float above the medium, while also allowing tighter read/write timing because it wasn't subject to such variation. Having a single manufacturer of the disks (at least initially) probably also helped.
If I were an epileptic, I would appreciate seeing the warning before I buy the game, not once I've launched it. Which, by the way, invalidates Sony's return policy.
I drop and pick games back up after a long time very frequently, I'd certainly appreciate it if I were affected. Plus, what about borrowed/Steam family shared/whatever games?
