Hasta La Ideas

pBig difference between family and business: Parents should never outlive their children, but corporations routinely outlive their product offspring. A HREF=”http://www.examiner.com/x-16352-Japan-Headlines-Examiner~y2010m4d24-Sony-to-discontinue-35-inch-floppy-disk-in-Japan” Sony has just announced/A the 3.5 inch floppy disk they pioneered is going the way of all things, and their factories will stop cranking the little obsolete squares out./p

pAs A HREF=”http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/sony-announces-the-death-of-the-floppy-disk/” IWired/I points out/A, it’s not at all surprising that floppies are going away, it’s amazing that it’s taken this long for them to die. It’s been over a decade since Apple stopped supporting them, and other PC makers followed suit shortly thereafter; yet Japan has somehow seen floppy sales of 12 million in 2009. As for me, I can’t remember the last time I touched one that hadn’t been turned into some ironic craft project./p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/04/0byebyemedia01.jpg” width=”468″ height=”227″ alt=”0byebyemedia01.jpg”//div

pSimilarly I’ve got a stack of blank CDs and DVDs sitting in a drawer that I used to use to burn files for clients and friends, but with the ubiquity of flash drives they’ve remained untouched. I’ve also got three Netflix discs I’ve had for a few months as I mostly watch their On-Demand service. Physical media really is going away./p

pIn a bid to shed paper, I purchased an iPad so I could read the magazines I have a subscription to in bed, and stop receiving the print versions that tend to stack up on my desk. So far the electronic magazine-reading experience does not quite compare, I’ll have an entry up on it shortly./p

pOver the weekend I came upon A HREF=”http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/24/tonight-on-fox31-georgia-tv-station-buys-ipads-for-news-anchors/” this surprising piece of news/A: WFXL, a Fox network affiliate station in Georgia, is buying iPads for its news anchors–not as job perks, but simply to save paper! Apparently printing out their daily news scripts produces a mountain of expensive dead tree pulp each year. They estimate that the six iPads they’re buying will pay for themselves in four months, saving the station some $9,600 per year by converting all of the scripts to PDFs./p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2010/04/0byebyemedia02.jpg” width=”468″ height=”318″ alt=”0byebyemedia02.jpg”//div

pAs for the floppy disks, I guess we can expect to see a lot of Japanese-influenced craft projects starting next year, when Sony factories will produce their final production runs. br /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/less_stuff_the_death_of_the_floppy_ipads_replacing_paper_16450.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3i379gxzEoroogJn8Ig-O0fDRaM/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3i379gxzEoroogJn8Ig-O0fDRaM/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3i379gxzEoroogJn8Ig-O0fDRaM/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3i379gxzEoroogJn8Ig-O0fDRaM/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p