OSNews

I realize as much as the next person that floppies are on their way out, but their end isn't comming as quickly here in my little corner of Canada.

Many of the brand new beige boxes (Windows + Intel/AMD) here still have floppy drives in them (I haven't seen one person here yet that uses Macs), in fact there are several people and organizations still using computers from before 2000 that don't have USB drives on the front, and only have two in the back. You can see the end of floppies in all the stores, right now there are boxes of 100 of the things going for $26 CAD, ($16 CAD on clearance) and the nifty binder sheets you could carry the things around in are all in the clearance bins now, but outside of the stores the story is very different.

At schools the things are still widely used, they are cheap and if they get lost it's no big deal. In fact the majority of computers I've seen in people's homes and businesses right now still only have two hard to reach USB plugs on the back. Adoption of USB drives here is slow, I'm one of three people I've seen at school that have one of the things.

I'm looking forward to when everyone's computers have easy to reach USB ports on the front, people who don't want to upgrade their computers just yet can achieve this by getting a simple USB hub that go for about CAD $35 in most stores' discount areas. USB disks are a lot more reliable than today's floppy disks, but I'll miss the flat, tall, wide shape of floppy disks that makes them harder to lose and makes them fit so much nicer into those special binder sheets.

If there's one things I hope gets worked out with those USB drives, it's where the lid goes when the thing is in use. I find it very annoying to have to keep track of a loose lid when I'm using my USB disks. Newer drives should have some sort of spring loaded lid like floppies had, except built better. Actually, do the things really need lids, because some of the newer ones I'm seeing don't have any?