Bye Floppy Disks and Drives

[04/25/2010] Sony delivers floppy disk's last rites

Sony announced last Friday it will end the domestic sales of floppy discs in March 2011. Considering that Apple iMac eliminated the floppy completely in 1998, Dell dropped the floppy as standard equipment on one of its Dimension desktops in 2003, and I have not purchased floppy drives for all my desktops since 2000, I am a little surprised at this news - I thought it's gone already!

If you have never seen or used floppy disks before, or you just want to recollect your memory, here is some information about floppy disk from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

Nonetheless, the news did make me think about the old days when using floppy disks. Here are some of the fun experience I can remember:

• The MS-DOS (and PC-DOS) operating system was on 2 or 3 floppy disks (about 4MB).
• I played this game called F-16 or something, which was on a single floppy disk. See it here on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pO88OZbxoA
• I used to collect student work via floppy disks; and that's a 300 student big class.

Did you use these floppy disks before? What alternatives have you used?

Google Docs and Office Discussion Summary

As usual, I summarized our discussion on Google Docs, Zoho Docs, and MS Office here:

• Most people (if not all) like the idea of web based document editing and management.
• Many people do realize that their pros and cons clearly.
• I roughly categorized and counted your opinions, as shown in the following chart. Of the people who prefer Google Docs, 19 of them specifically prefer Google Docs over Zoho Docs while others did not try Zoho.

Some selected student comments:

• Overall, all three applications are very god useful in many ways. I'm glad that i know about all 3 for any work i may have to do in the future.
• Overall I like google docs better than Microsoft office especially for group projects and I prefer Microsoft office when working independently.
• One of the drawbacks of Google Docs is that it does not provide as many editing options as Microsoft Office.
• I think I'll keep using the Office products and if I need to share the file with someone I will upload it to Google Docs, but I don't plan on creating documents in Google Docs directly.
• Clearly having the ability to access files from anywhere is a very attractive quality, especially to an irresponsible student like myself that habitually leaves disk drives in every computer I stick them into.
• Ms office will, in my opinion, be phased out if not by consumer demand for a google doc like application, but an evolution of office software itself to a more web based program.
• I compare using Google Docs to using a Mac for the first time after using a PC all your life.
• (Zoho) seems like it is google docs on steroids.
• Based on my experience (and i have been a Microsoft user for Years) I like Zoho a lot, i think Zoho is very straight forward, not complicated, and you can also work offline.
• Base on my brief yet precise summary of Zoho Docs it’s rather easy to come to the conclusion that Zoho Docs out muscle Google Docs in terms of features and options. Zoho Docs is the ultimate online office application. I would like to encourage everyone to take a look at Zoho Docs if you haven’t yet. I promise you will not regret it.

The Project Cartoon (updated)

I created my version of the project cartoon on http://www.projectcartoon.com/ (updated!)

System Development Life Cycle 101 (Office Live)

This set of pictures show basic SDLC phases in the "Tree Project Cartoon" way.

iPad Begins to Sell, and the future of the publishing and media business

[04/04/2010] The iPad arrived in Silicon Valley last Saturday, and an estimated 700,000 iPads bought on day one.

We have talked about slate PC and iPad (as computer hardware) earlier this semester. This week we are talking about e-commerce and m-commerce. This is where information technologies (like slate PC and iPad) have brought us many changes, and to some businesses, the change is huge. For example:

• The print publishing industry
• The media industry

Is this a big deal? Watch this:

Share some of your own experience and thoughts of the publishing and media businesses (such as newspaper, magazine, TV, movie, music, book, etc.). Where do you think these businesses will go in 5 or 10 years? Will they (or any particular company) disappear?