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7 minutes to format a floppy disk, a few seconds to copy a few text files and... drumroll... repeat it when the disk becomes impossible to read...
I still use a USB floppy drive from time to time to copy files from/to some old industrial controllers...
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Do you have a computer with 32-bit windows lying around?
DCF[^] is 42% faster than dos and it allows you to save images of your diskettes.
But it is a dos program.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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Those were the days when you could tweak the timing of your routines to save stuff on tape to be faster than a C64's floppy (which was extremely slow).
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Andrew Tanenbaum: Computer Networks (1981), Chapter 1, Problem 1:
Imagine that you have trained your St. Bernhard, Bernie, to carry a box of three floppy disks instead of a flask of brandy. (When your disk fills up, you consider that an emergency. These floppy disks each contain 250,000 bytes. The dog can travel to you side, where you may be, at 18 km/hour. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 300 bps telephone line?
Updated version: Bernie now has the flask replaced with box containing 8192 microSDXC memory cards, each holding 128 GByte of data. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 100 Mbps optical fiber?
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Ah, the days of compulsory "Friday afternoon backups".
The whole afternoon, just spent swapping floppies ... we even had a timesheet code for "backing up".
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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If we go way back, we find the original IBM PC came stock with a cassette tape interface and no floppy drives. That was thirty-eight years ago. I was still in gradual school then. All of the hardware we used was donated so we didn't have any PCs in the department when I left.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I never saw an IBM PC without a floppy station, and I am very surprised to find, searching the internet today, that no floppy was an option at all. It certainly was not the norm. Reviews from those days certainly assumed a floppy, preferably two.
The original PC did have a jack for a cassette tape interface, but it was not commonly in use. Some other machines had that only, no floppy option. Some also had interfaces to paper tape punches/readers (there was some discussion about the advantages of zig-zag folded paper tape versus on a roll). The inclusion of a floppy on the IBM PC was a significant factor in making it a success.
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Going back decades, my biggest fear when I saw storage capacity increasing at an alarming rate had always been, "how much data are you willing to risk losing all at once?"
Fortunately, prices have also come down at a reasonable rate, so the risk is kinda mitigated by doing multiple backups on multiple devices. Of course, the increase in transfer speed also comes into play...if we were still looking at floppy disk speeds...a system running backups 24/7 would never catch up.
So...yeah.
Somewhat related aside: I'm still somewhat impressed by today's MicroSD card storage capacity (and they ain't showing much signs of slowing down), given their physical dimensions. I'm much less impressed by the fact that I lost a 128GB one somewhere in the pile of junk on my desk...
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Chris Maunder wrote: with a max of about 500kbps, so about 296 days
Back in the time, files were not that big, which means that you are back about 25 years ago, when you indeed needed a couple of hours to copy a big data stock.
Which is exactly what you are doing. So in what are we better nowadays ? 
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“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I got Herself coal for Christmas, as I didn't think she'd mined it.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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You might start feeling some pressure and heat until it turns to diamonds.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Is that now dark humor by you professional english speaker?
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
Chemists have exactly one rule: there are only exceptions
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Pressure makes whine, not diamonds!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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If you keep the pressure up for about a million years, the whine turns into diamonds. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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She might scuttle your plans for the evening.
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That's humour in a miner key.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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To stoke the fires of passion? Things could get smutty... 
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Does it soot her?
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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You could also get her a Carbon, that is, a good Cajun vehicle. Her nic-name wouldn't be Newcastle, would it?
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Let's say you wanted to write a fast JSON parser.
You could do a pull parser that does well-formedness checking
Or you could do one that's significantly faster but skips well formedness checking during search/skip operations, which can lead to later error reporting or missed errors
You can't make an option to choose one or the other, but you can avoid using the skip/search functions that do this in the latter case.
Which do you do? Are you a stomp-the-pedal type or a defensive driver? (Seriously, this is more about getting a read of the room than anything - I want a feel for priorities)
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: Which do you do?
Use NewtonSoft's.
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Fortunately I'm not allowed to use third-party add-ins.
I am awaiting access to the JSON support built into .net 4.7 and newer to see whether or not it can do what I require.
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JSON.NET, along with a large number of OSS projects, has been given to the .NET Foundation Projects.
This might reduce your company's reluctance to use it, plus the fact that until recently, JSON.NET was the package that Microsoft was using in their OSS projects (.NET Core, ASP.NET Core, ...).
Also, System.Text.Json, the new MS JSON support, is a NuGet package, not part of the framework, and can be used as far back as .NET 4.6.1.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Yeah, no, we can't deploy any third-party stuff to the servers, it has to be either build-in .net or stuff we implement.
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