On: The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRM

[c22]

I don't miss the slowness, low capacity, or durability of floppy disks but they had features I do miss, like:

Physical write protect switches

Large space for writing a label

Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

Cheap enough not to care about

Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

[brokenmachine → c22]

You're really reaching for advantages there...

I'll give you the write protect one, but...

> Small enough to fit in your pocket but large enough not to get lost from your pocket

You can get keyring flash drives, I'd rather that than something larger. Anyway a floppy barely fit in a pocket.

> Cheap enough not to care about

Flash drives are cheap enough not to care about... but my data isnt!

I would definitely give a flash drive to someone if they needed it. They're like $4 each or something. And on a $/Gb comparison they obviously blow away a floppy.

> Disk could be ejected but still sitting in the drive not sticking out far enough to be a bother

You can safely remove a flash drive and leave it plugged in if you like.