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Comment by enneff | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea, because there's something to almost ideal to me about the 3.5" floppy disk format. I wish I had some reason to use them today, and so I really want this to work. However the audio quality is just terrible; it may be intelligible, but it is unlistenable IMO.

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3.5mm floppies combined a lot of factors that appealed to me. They were cheap enough you could give one to someone without wanting it back, they were contained entirely within the computer so no danger of breaking it off if you leave it in there too long. Unlike CDs they were rewritable and unlike CDRWs they worked properly no matter what PC I was writing or reading from. Not to mention the thoroughly satisfying "chunk" sound when popped into a drive. Network file transfers will never have that "shove the data right into the computer, bam!" feeling.

"3.5mm"

Careful with your units there.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

Drat. Uh, I was referencing it by, uh, its thickness dimension. Yeah, that's what I was doing, yes sir.

Ah yes, I forgot it was a Euro American joint venture, thus measurements are equally split between metric and imperial.

Fun fact, the spring rate for the slidy thing (technical term) is measured in lb m/in cm!

There was also the tactile feeling of flipping through a stack of floppies looking for one specific disk. Now that everything is so high capacity, you almost never have to physically search for data. Of course the modern way is superior in almost every way, except it was a kind of wonderful sensation holding a disk box full of your stuff.

Not so much fun when you where doing an Oracle Forms client side app, I recall having to use 13 or 14 floppy's in the correct order before I could even install that actual client side application.

Floppies had richer, warmer bits, man. The bits coming off USB drives are cold, tinny, and mechanical by comparison.

Plus the warm sentiment of relief when you managed to read the data off the disk when you were lucky enough it wasn't corrupted!

Surprisingly, unlike the pennies-per-diskette garbage of the late 90s, Sony 3.5 disks from the 80s were stiffer, heavier, and massively more reliable. I have some 800k Mac disks that still read perfectly well. Probably other brands as well, but I was always impressed with Sony media from that era.

USB flash drives are the modern floppies really. You can get one with a few GBs for literally pennies to the point where you can even get some "promotional" flash drives for free, similar to how in the past people gave out "promotional" (writing) pens for free. On the high end side you can have flash drives with as high as 2TB of storage (though the only one i've found is a bit bulky and the more regular sized one has "only" 1TB of storage).

No satisfying chunk sound though :-P.

No sound, but you get USB superposition in exchange. In 50 years, people will gather in nursing homes and reminisce about how bad type-A was.

I'm curious what causes that strange phenomenon. You had a 50-50 chance to get it right, but it's the wrong way almost every time.

Bad angle or not enough force, based on how many times it worked the third time.

That's why the Oculus VR intro with the floppy's is also so nice, it has a nice haptic/tactile feel to it.

After a year and a half of owning an Oculus Touch, replaying that intro is still more fun than any other experience I've had on it.

Oh for sure. It's garbage.

But opus still sounds pretty good until you get down to around 10kbps (this, iirc, is 6 or 7.)

If you really wanted to crunch the size you could store the podcast as a text file and run it through text to speech when you want to listen to it.

that might be the next AI level of compression of just about everything. Very lossy, but very small.

It would be.. spooky. Just like the lady who voiced Siri just had to record sounds (letters and combinations of letters) that can be combined for text-to-speech, one could do that for podcasters...

But then it means you can make your podcaster say anything you want.

like an audio PDF or something.

Combined with a good text compressor you could get > 100 hours of speech on it. http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

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