Some will argue that prisons shouldn’t have all the latest computer technologies available to inmates.
Who the fuck argues that? If they’re locked-up, the least you can do is give them the best possible computers, gyms, and therapists…
Plenty of people would rather we throw prisoners into a medieval dungeon because they’re obsessed with “punishment”.
Some negligible minority, sure.
Not negligible enough. You think it’s a coincidence that “tough on crime” is a consistently successful angle to push?
You think we live in a democracy?
It’s weasel words. Nobody is arguing “the latest”, just something from this century.
I do think we should give them the latest. They deserve it.
Alvarado’s lawyers send documents on flash drives, which must be decanted to (sometimes multiple) floppy disks
I remember having to juggle something like 6 floppy disks just to load Dune II on our family’s old, hand-me-down Amiga 2000 back in the early-to-mid 90s. How is this still a fucking things 30+ years later?!
For profit prisons. Bet they sell floppies for like 10 times what they should cost, which honestly should be free since it’s essentially trash nowadays.
Well unless you’re me and you have this idea for a giant wall art piece of old school pixelated graphics made from colored floppies connected together. Yes I’m a nerd. But if you have any old floppies you want rid of hit me up.
Surely it’d be cheaper for them to switch to a more common media like cheap, crappy flash drives than sourcing out floppy drives?
Good times, using pkzip to install Doom II from like 10 floppies I got from my friend. And then there’d be an error on disk 7 randomly, so you’d have to start over and hope nothing fucked up for no reason.
Imagine during your appeal process, they reach disk #18 of #20 and there’s a read error and now you will be in prison for five more years.
This is some Sierra Online bullshit.
there’s a read error and now you will be in prison for five more years.
Prisoners don’t have to be paid minimum wage, and there’s an entire industry around using prisoners as dirty cheap labor. Anything that makes it harder for them to get out of the system is additional revenue for private prisons, not something the people who have the power to change it want to see solved.
Yeah, we need prison reform.
US prisons are a business instead of a federal service. Not saying that government would do a better job but if its federal at least the basic policies can be fixed nationwide vs state by state.
You are right, we need a USA reform.
I think their biggest mistake is claiming to be a single country. Can’t lord over such a high population without repression, authoritatianism and fascism. Everyone would benefit if it didn’t exist and the place got balkanized.
I can’t imagine what computers they’re using that still have floppy drives. How do they even get tech support for them?
They make USB peripheral floppy drives now for like $15. Its like the shittiest thumb drive ever.
Fun fact: As of El Capitan from 10-ish years ago, Macs can no longer read floppies. They removed drivers from the kernel so some people upgraded and couldn’t read their disks anymore.
Wait, do the USB diskette drives not present as standard Mass Storage block devices??
I’m afraid that it’s been years so I don’t remember the details.
I got for for a 486SX project! They’re pretty sweet. push buttons on the front to switch between 99 virtual floppies. I had forgotten just how much you can’t do on 3.1, 95 and 98 without a standard floppy drive available.
There are USB and sata floppy drives. As for tech support? If it doesn’t work then warranty or replace, there isn’t much else you do with drives beyond that for modern drives either (unless I’ve missed something by not paying attention for years). I may be wrong on the last point, think some hard drives may be repairable but don’t think it was common for consumer level stuff. The worst case is probably a stuck disk that loses it’s protector then gets replaced, both the drive and the disk when copied over.
think some hard drives may be repairable
no not at all and all storage modules regardless of the medium will eventually lose the ability to read/write data until the total integrity of the drive is compromised resulting in total storage module failure
Hard drives used to be repairable, but back then it took two people just to lift one drive.
Oh I was thinking more about bad springs and arms than the platters themselves for that part (okay I’m not sure why or if I saw but I believe the old ones used springs in some function maybe the arms so quite old memory at this point don’t quote me), the moveable stuff that can wear out easier. A more specialized repair if possible, not the platters themselves though without losing the data.
If I remember right, I think what you are recalling are old skool hard drives where you had to park the heads! Some of them had inserts and things because there were indeed springs. I could be out to lunch but it feels like that’s what you’re remembering
Is that not all old ‘hard drives’ like before SSD ones or did I misrecall something? Like anything with a platter. Anything newer would be solid state right? Maybe I was more commercial drives, did have that in my background but it’s been a decade now heh.
It’s hard to say because I’m not sure of your age or familiarity with tech… But the generation of platter hard drives circa 80-90s had to have the heads “parked” for transport or shut down, etc. there was the DOS command PARK and some had physical inserts.
Technology improved and the read heads became more stable and less prone to error as the 90s got underway, and the need to park hard drive heads became a relic of the past.
This is all way before SSD came into the picture. It’s hard to imagine there was a time where if you did not tell the hard drive read heads to move away from the platters, they would physically touch it and crash the drive. Pretty nuts when you think about it!
I bet the Linux kernel still supports them
Every modern OS still supports it (excluding android, iOS and other toy OSes) and drives are still produced at scale.
Well I should buy one then. I have a bunch of old floppies. Wonder if I can still buy an 5-in
Shopped for an 8" several years ago on eBay. $200 was too rich for my blood, just to play around. Looks like 5 1/4" is still cheap enough, but you won’t know if it works until you install. Doesn’t look like anyone is guaranteeing.
In 2025?
Do we really want prison officials driving around looking for more floppy disks and a drive from 1985?
They should be GRATEFUL they get floppies. Until a few years ago all you got was a Turkey feather and some coal-black.
Wow I thought they’d upgrade to zip disks by now
I think route missing the point. They want them to suffer and not be able to use the computers
I know. It was a bad joke :/ (Zip disks are also very old tech)
CD-RW would be better.
Oh god, I was so excited for CD-RW and then I realized how horrible they are, having to wipe the whole ass disc to rewrite on it, and they didn’t read in some CD drives.
Funny, I can’t remember that. Even checked wikipedia and you’re right.
I remember being really impressed by CD-R and CD-RW when we got a new P3 desktop with a CD drive with CD-RW support. And I vividly remember even USB flash drives being relatively low capacity (32 MB) in the early 2000.
Maybe I only used them on my PC or perhaps the school had a computer lab refresh and the CD drives supported CD-RW media.
I know the flash drive ban is about being able to hide files or have a bootable alternative OS.
But floppy disks have a that metal slide cover that could easily be made into a shiv. Unless they can only have the kind with plastic slides.
You can’t boot Linux from 20 floppy disks?
You can boot it from one.
https://github.com/w84death/floppinux
Hasnt been updated in 4 years though
I mean… Yeah, you technically can. But it won’t be a particularly modern or useful OS.
If it lets you install Tor, it’s worth it
At least give them a zip or jazz drive!
Hey, I had to load software off of cassette tapes on my apple ii…
Damn, what were you in for?
8-bit crimes
Adolescence probably. It’s a lifelong sentence for some people.
Time to dust off PAR2. At least you’d be able to get a 20MB file after compression.
It feels like it been 15+ years since I’ve touched PAR.
Is it still a thing for newsgroup binaries?
dust off? I use par2 every day.
