TNPC Newsletter
by Dan Butler
17 January 2007
Hello
It’s cold!. Winter has poured out her fury on many parts of the country. There are many without power in various places. Two of my clients on opposite ends of the country have been without power for some period of time. We have power here, but it is cold. 26 degree to be exact this morning. While that may not be cold to some of you in other places, it rarely reaches that low here in North Central Texas.
This issue Al Gordon chimes in with some thoughts on the state of data storage.
The power outages reminded me of Photon Micro-Lights. For years we have sold the miniature lights through the TNPC Store. They aren’t the cheapest but they are the best. I keep several around for use at any time. When the power goes out I immediately pass out the lights. Each child has one in the color of their choice - red, yellow, or orange. So we have veritable rainbow of lights around the house when there is a problem. The red, yellow, and orange lights run for about 120 hours, almost five days, on a battery so I don’t worry about them leaving the light on.
My favorite light now is the Photon Freedom. This has a small computer chip that lets you easily select how bright you want your light. Very useful when you go to the symphony. I still use the little trick in the original article to tell them apart quickly. My favorites are the red and turquoise.
Read the original article here:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/articles/v03/16/0316-06.html
If you want to order the new Freedom lights go to the TNPC Store:
http://www.tnpcstore.com/pfl/photon3.html
My recent interview with Dick Ainsworth was very popular. We covered a wide variety of topics. If you are new subscriber or missed it go listen here:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/interviews/dick-ainsworth.html
If you missed Al Gordon’s piece on HTML vs. Text read and comment on it here:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/
Next issue: Details on this months drawing for free stuff. Watch your inbox for that.
First go read last week’s issue at the blog:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/category/newsletters/tnpc/
Wow that was a lot of links. More than normal. Enjoy Al’s article.
~ Dan
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Remembering the Floppy Disk
by Al Gordon
A major computing milestone passed by not too long ago and no one noted it: the effective end of the floppy disk.
As computer devices go, the 1.44 MB, 3.5″, double-sided floppy was a veritable Methuselah. It came into widespread use in around 1990 (when IBM adopted it for its latest PCs; Apple much earlier had adopted a 720 KB, one-sided variety for the Macintosh), and it remained an industry standard for roughly 15 years.
Curiously, the 3.5″ floppy kept the “floppy” nomenclature even though it encased its magnetic media in a hard plastic case. The old 5.25″ disks used in the original IBM PCs actually were floppy.
In any case, the disks were all-in-all a pretty handy medium. A PC could be booted from one. It could hold a fairly large number of word processing documents and spreadsheets. Long before users set up home networks, file transfer via “sneaker net” – copying from one PC to floppy and then copying from the floppy to another PC – was a well-established practice.
Ultimately, of course, multimedia and escalating file sizes did the floppy in. CD drives and flash memory sticks with the capacity of scores of floppies are now the favored medium for physically transferring files. At some point – I would guess it was some time in the last two or three years – the number of computers sold without floppies exceeded the number sold with them, and that effectively marked the end of the floppy as a standard.
Aside from marking the end of an era, the end of the floppy also marks a particular computing problem: what to do with the data on your old floppies. Remember, once your last PC with a floppy drive is gone, those disks are effectively unreadable. So now is the time to take your floppies and burn them on a CD.
Which in itself is a lesson: One CD will take the place of about 485 floppies.
Comments on this article can be posted at the blog:
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2007/01/17/remembering-the-floppy-disk/
(c) 2007 Al Gordon.
In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com.
+++————- Recommended Resources ———————–+++
I’ve been reading through a nifty book gearing up for the after Christmas sales and garage sales. It was updated recently. I like it a lot. You will too. Go check it out now:
http://zcat.com/qpp/x.php?adminid=8&tid=34
BANABU is 11 simple principles you can start using immediately and easily share with others. I started applying these principles earlier this year with myself and my family. We’ve really enjoyed this and think you will to. Highly recommended.
Find out what BANABU stands for and discover more here:
http://zcat.com/qpp/x.php?adminid=8&tid=35
My favorite way to look up personal information about myself and others. I have used it for years.
http://zcat.com/qpp/x.php?adminid=8&tid=9
It’s a new year. Why not stay on task the easy and productive way. These recordings helped me gently start to get more done. Highly recommended:
http://zcat.com/qpp/x.php?adminid=8&tid=28
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Copyright 2007 Dan Butler
All Rights Reserved.
ISSN: 1522-4422
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