"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, RAGE against the dying of the light..."

... would have definitely been the climax of tearful eulogy at the funeral of the 3.5-inch floppy disk: the technology that simply DID NOT KNOW WHEN TO DIE. Then again, the 3.5-inch floppy wouldn't have any loving descendants to speak on it's behalf, only bastard children like the Zip disk and Imation Superdisk, who themselves have long since had the grace to die without too much fuss or bother.

But the fucking 3.5-inch floppy just wouldn't die, until today. Sony, the last significant manufacturer has announced that it will finally stop making the damn things, putting an end to a painfully, ridiculously, unnecessarily long saga that began almost THREE DECADES AGO.

The 3.5-inch floppies we've come to hate were invented by Sony in the early 80s as a replacement for the larger, less-study, and lower capacity 5.25-inch floppy disks. Over time, 3.5-inch disk capacity increased to 400KB, 800KB, and finally the colossal 1.4MB "HD" models.

3.5-inch floppies dominated removable media for a solid 15 years. By the mid-nineties, their age was starting to show. Files several megabytes in size were common, yet there was no common method for transporting them. CD-ROMs were widespread, but there was still no solution for rewritable, portable media. Intermediate technologies like the Zip disk showed up to fill the void. In 1997, Apple decided that enough was enough, and made the bold move of shipping the very first iMac with no floppy drive, a first decisive blow that we should be forever kissing Steve Jobs' ass for.

Nonetheless, the battle was not easily won. Anyone who's ever needed to install Windows XP on a machine with a RAID controller knows that pain of being asked for a floppy-disk with the driver on it. Finally, USB keys became prevalent and affordable enough to make floppies completely irrelevant.

The floppy is dead; Please don't cry for it. PC World puts things in perspective nicely. Last year, Sony shipped 12 million floppy discs, which together can hold about 17GB of data. Just one single-sided, single-layer Blu-ray Disc (ie: the smallest capacity possible) holds 25GB.

Goodbye floppy. See you in silicon hell.

(from silicon heaven)

(P.S. - I'm not a robot, honest)

Posted at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

Although the original study was published last year, it's this week that the blogosphere is alight with the revelation that many soy-based fake meat products contain hexane.

Hexane is a by-product of petroleum refining and a known neurotoxin. So what's it doing in your veggie-burger?

Well, health-conscious consumers demand foods that are fat-free, which soy is not. So manufacturers submerge the soybeans in hexane to separate out the oils. Companies claim that cooking the products causes all the hexane to vaporize. But how thoroughly must they be cooked? Does any hexane remain in the food? Does hexane break down or react with other substances in the food when heated above its boiling point? What about uncooked products like soy milk?

What's worse, vegetable oils, margarine, and other plant-oil based products that don't say "expeller pressed" are likely processed with hexane too.

As conscientious consumers, it's incumbent upon us to demand action: either conclusive, comprehensive studies of hexane in foods, or a ban on its use.

The MotherJones article shows lists of soy-product producers who do and don't use hexane for oil extraction. They also produced this follow-up article of FAQs posed by their readers.

As someone who has a number of vegetarian friends close to me, I was compelled to bring this to people's attention. Thank you.

Posted at 03:02 PM

Prepare your eyes for the most awesome thing they will ingest today.

Posted at 08:40 AM | Comments (2)

Supposedly, it's a bad thing to leave someone "high and dry". Which sort of implies that it's much better to leave them low and wet.

...

I think I'd rather be high and dry.

Posted at 09:24 AM | Comments (6)

From the loveably twisted imagination of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of Amélie, comes a new film about a ragtag group of loveably twisted misfits: Micmacs.

Here's one about an affair between Igor Stravinsky and Coco Channel.

Posted at 08:18 PM | Comments (1)

Yet another April Fools Day has come and gone without me having the time to prank out my small readership. Sad times. As usual, there's a great roundup of April Foolery on teh interwebs:

Toshiba releases the Petbook K9: the first laptop designed for dogs.

YouTube has added ASCII video viewing mode.

ThinkGeek has their usual roundup of fake product launches, including: an iPad-powered, mini-arcade, I-wish-it-was-real game system, the iCade; the delightful 2001 Monolith action figure; canned unicorn meat; and the ostensibly creepy Tell Me Your Secrets Bear.

Taking a friendly jab at the town that offered to rename itself "Google", Google briefly renamed itself Topeka.

You may find that Google Street View is available in 3D. Lots of ardent discussion as to whether it actually works.

Webcomic XKCD released a command line interface. People are already demanding that the CLI stays for good. Try entering "make me a sandwich". Then try it as root.

Starbucks released two new cup sizes, the Plenta (128 fl oz) and Micra (2 fl oz).

Kodak invents aromatography

If I've missed anything, I'd love to hear about it!

Posted at 07:16 PM