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?

Slate PC and iPad

We just talked about the Slate PC (http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/186247/hp_slate_lowers_the_bar_for_apples_tablet_pc.html) on Tuesday, and one day later Apple announced its iPad (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10443138-260.html). And guess what: it's only $499. Do you want to get one?

From Hardware to Software and to Hardware

There are two interesting trends for the past 10 years for some big IT companies. On one side, led by IBM, many traditional hardware companies have been transforming themselves from hardware companies to software or service companies. Take the example of IBM. IBM was once one of the largest maker for PC hardware, laptop, monitor, hard drive, etc. Now it has sold almost all of its PC business and becomes one of the largest software and service providers. On the other side, traditional pure software companies like Microsoft and Google are moving into the lower margin hardware area. Isn't it interesting?

Microsoft has already had Zune, XBOX, Surface, Keyboard/Mouse, Webcam, etc. And Google just pushed its Nexus One (http://www.google.com/phone). People are talking when Google is going to have its own Netbook or Smartbook (we will talk about them this week) based on Chrome OS or Android OS (http://infoworld.com/d/mobilize/building-google-smartbook-dream-machine-877). It seems Google is trying to build a platform and challenge Microsoft's Windows. What do you think about Google's move?

More about Chrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_OS