Sony Doing Away With Floppies by Next Year

Remember the days of the 3.5” 1.44 MB floppy, that ironically some of us called a stiffy, which you would slip into your drive [the A: drive]? That little device is going out of business finally, as Sony, one of the companies that still makes them, is going to cease producing them in March of next year.

“Sony, one of just a few companies that still produce the archaic computer storage media, has announced plans to end production of floppies in March 2011.”

I still have a few of these lying around, but the bigger 5.25” floppies are rarer to come by. I still have an A: drive despite not using it that much at all, if ever [mostly never]. At school, years ago, we mainly used stiffies, or floppies, for distributing naughty things.

For the last few years most of us have been using flash drives, external hard drives, in addition to CDs and DVDS. And not to mention filehosting where a person can upload something to the internet for other people to have a look at.
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Source: The once ubiquitous floppy finally being axed by Sony [Ars Technica]

Sony Doing Away With Floppies by Next Year

Cracking Down on Piracy by Using Disk Sniffing Dogs

I watched something on the news the other day.

In Portugal or some place, they had a black Labrador going through bags as part of a demonstration for the cameras. Now this is a scene that you’ve likely seen before. When I was in high school, we were searched by cops and their drug-sniffing dogs at least two or three times. And all of a sudden when we were told that on that day it would be time for the search, several kids went pale and asked to go to the bathroom so they could hide their stash somewhere, probably.

But this time, on the news, it wasn’t drugs they were after. They were after pirated CDs, DVDs, and the like. The guy controlling the dog explained that the substance that they train the dog to look, or smell, for is polycarbonate, which is present in the disks. They say it takes several months to train the dogs to do this.

I was also just reading about a sniffer dog in Malaysia as well, after googling it.

Quite interesting.

Cracking Down on Piracy by Using Disk Sniffing Dogs