The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk

Sony has said it will stop making floppy disks, after nearly three decades of manufacture. Yet millions of them are still being bought every year. But who is actually buying them?
Stack of floppy disks (Eyewire)
That's about one snap on a brand new digital camera
The floppy disk is the very symbol of storage; when you want to save a file, you go looking for that little icon that looks like a floppy.
Every year another computer manufacturer stops putting floppy drives in its machines, or a retailer stops selling the disks. Each time the cry goes up that the death knell has been sounded for the floppy disk.
However, Verbatim, a UK manufacturer which makes more than a quarter of the floppies sold in the UK, says it sells hundreds of thousands of them a month. It sells millions more in Europe.


 Read more here.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8646699.stm

Popular posts from this blog

Export to Excel with spreadsheet gem

While using the spreadsheet gem to export data to a Microsoft Excel file I encountered various problems and lack of proper documentation forced me to dig pretty deep. So here are a few tips you might find useful. The gem works with a workbook object and worksheets in this workbook. To get started: workbook = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new sheet1 = workbook.create_worksheet name: worksheetname To write a row of data as usually is done in reports you can use: sheet1.row(1).replace [ 'col1', 'col2', 'col3'] Rows and Columns are 0 based, so col1 would be printed on A2 (Excel coords). Now to the beauty of it all, formatting, first of all, create a format: bold = Spreadsheet::Format.new :weight => :bold bold20 = Spreadsheet::Format.new :weight => :bold, size: 20 nobold20 = Spreadsheet::Format.new size: 20 bold_grey_bg = Spreadsheet::Format.new pattern_bg_color: :cyan, weight: :bold, pattern: 1, pattern_fg_color: :black Use :weight to set bold,...
Read more

Ubuntu Studio 9.04

Image
Let Your Creativity Fly... Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional. We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your only limitation is your imagination. Source: ubuntustudio.org
Read more

Keep sidekiq running using monit

Image
As an application grows it starts taking care of more and more work. At some point the first task comes that needs to be processed in background and one of the usual suspects for ruby is sidekiq. Now, did it ever happen to you that you get it all up and running on the server and next thing you know it's down and you get error reports that stuff ain't working? Meet monit, a tool that'll let you get ahead of trouble. It automatically restarts programs when down and can even send emails upon failures. Install monit Depending on your package manager this may differ: apt-get install monit yum install monit brew install monit Configure monit Edit  /etc/monit.conf or  /etc/monitrc Uncomment(or add) these lines: set httpd port 2812 and use address localhost allow localhost Add sidekiq entry Create the file /etc/monit.d/sidekiq.monitrc with: check process sidekiq_application_production0 with pidfile /path/to/shared/tmp/pids/side...
Read more