[CharlesS]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
No matter where I go, geeks can quickly recognize me.... well, that and my black t-shirt that says "There's no place like /~"...

Don't you mean ~/ ?

[Vader�s Pinch of Death]

Originally posted by olePigeon:
Didn't know they were still worth money.

Yup, I got over $60 US for the damn thing.

[Superchicken]

I had a zip 100 with my Rev D iMac... it was useful but horribly expensive and disks were very expensive... they really did drop the ball.

[Immortal K-Mart Employee]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Don't you mean ~/ ?

I think he was trying to look geek cool and say /. AKA Slashdot.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Adam Betts:

Originally posted by busket68:
Zip discs are pretty durable.

Yeah, they're so durable with click of death

IMHO, CDs/DVDs are more durable than ZIP. 70% of my ZIP disks are non-functional. I've only had two damaged CDs out of hundreds.

If 70% of your disks don't work, then either your drive is broken and telling you they're bad when they're not, or you bought a bad lot of disks (I've never seen that, but I suppose it's possible), or you stored your disks improperly (far more likely), or you had a broken drive which damaged the disks (the most likely scenario).

I agree with Ca$h -- the disks are extremely durable. I bought a Zip drive when they very first came out, and I have never had a disk fail on me, ever. I remember early tests, where a single drop onto a hard floor would ruin a SyQuest disk, while they literally ricocheted zips off the wall around the room without any damage at all. (Obviously, like any magnetic media, they are susceptible to strong magnetic fields and to humidity.)

I also don't agree that zip drives are failure-prone. They were considered extremely reliable until the Jaz drive came out, with its real-world lifetime of 5 months. IT suffered from the click of death, and people confused them, saying that zip was unreliable, which is utter nonsense. (My original 1994 drive still works fine. So does every zip drive I've bought since then.) Sure, some people will have had drives die, but unlike Jaz, it's not a common, everyday thing.

As for its latest product release, Iomega needs to realize that the age of the removable disk is gone. It had its day, but now storage belongs to hard drives and optical media.

tooki

[BoomStick]

I get zip disks in at least once a week, but I see almost all cd's now.

I used to get syquests in up to about 5 years ago.
My most recent wierd media to come in was an old MO disk, actually around a hundred of them to be transfered to cd's.


All in all I'd say iomega is as good as dead.

May they join syquest for their bad business practices.

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by tooki:
If 70% of your disks don't work, then either your drive is broken and telling you they're bad when they're not, or you bought a bad lot of disks (I've never seen that, but I suppose it's possible), or you stored your disks improperly (far more likely), or you had a broken drive which damaged the disks (the most likely scenario).

I own 7 different model of Zip Drives (in excellent condition and never was dropped, etc) and 6 of them are broken/damaged

At my University, 5% of their Zip drives broke every month and they have to order replacements. That's pretty bad considering the amount of Zip drives they have.

From what I've seen/heard, ZIP disk/drive is NOT durable. No way.

[chris v]

Hard drives have dropped below a dollar a gig. I hadn't added it up in a while, so I just went over it with the calculator. Between the machines at work, the machines at home, and all my back-up drives, I've got 800 GB of drive space. Unreal.

Zips are still a bit faster than burning a CD, and they are reusable, though I rarely get them out. I've got quite a few, and I've only had a couple of failures.

CV

[King Bob On The Cob]

I've got 5 perfectly working Zip 100s, 1 Zip 250, and around 12 Zip disks (All Fujifilm, ironically) no clicks of death ever. (Even on the original model we have)

[GoGoReggieXPowars]

Originally posted by Immortal K-Mart Employee:
I think he was trying to look geek cool and say /. AKA Slashdot.

No, if you open a Terminal and type cd /~ you go to your home directory.

[CharlesS]

I didn't even use Zip much, and even I managed to get the click of death once back in the day.

Iomega wanted Zip to be the 90's version of the floppy. Well, they succeeded with flying colors. The zip was a slow, unreliable POS, just like the floppy.

[torsoboy]

Originally posted by Immortal K-Mart Employee:
I think he was trying to look geek cool and say /. AKA Slashdot.

obviously you are not geek cool... "/~" means home. as in "there's no place like home".

[Immortal K-Mart Employee]

Originally posted by torsoboy:
obviously you are not geek cool... "/~" means home. as in "there's no place like home".

I am proud of the fact that I didn't know that

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
No, if you open a Terminal and type cd /~ you go to your home directory.

<IP>:/ <username>$ cd /~
-bash: cd: /~: No such file or directory
<IP>:/ <username> $ cd ~/
<IP>:~ <username> $

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Another product cancelled because nobody wanted it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/23/iomega_q2/

[the_glassman]

I remember purchasing a Superdisk drive from Imation when I purchased my first iMac, because I needed a floppy drive for school and needed bigger back up potential. It held 120 MB on a single disk. The worst purchase ever.
I had an iomega USB CD burner that would pretty good and had good luck using zip disk for school and work. With storage being so cheap and portable now (ipod, compact flash, etc...) iomega needs to move on.

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Originally posted by the_glassman:
With storage being so cheap and portable now (ipod, compact flash, etc...) iomega needs to move on.

They have been trying. The question is move on to what?

[the_glassman]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
They have been trying. The question is move on to what?

Pixie Dust�, Quantum computing. How about an affordable storage device that is based of the hard drive in the ipods, that could be connected to other devices (TV, stereo, camcorders, digital camera) and store all kinds of formats and files. It would be nice if you could use it to record information instead of using other forms of media.

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Well they are trying but are still charging like they have a monopoly.

http://www.iomega.com/na/products/pr...=1090904561624

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
They have been trying. The question is move on to what?

Heroin.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Well here goes 25% of their workforce.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09...hes_workforce/

[scadboy]

It just occurred to me that we actually do still use these suckers here at work. Every monday we copy our timesheets onto a Zip disk and take it to accounting. Which, really, is rather stupid because we're all networked, so we could just as easily put the 8kb file in the bookkeeper's drop box, or even email it, and do away with the zips altogether.

I do remember back when Zips were the ****. Of course, this was the period before CD-R became ubiquitous, and blank CD's became cheaper than kleenex.

WTF, A ten pack of 100mb zips is still $90?

You can probably buy over 500 CD-R's at the price, I mean, I just picked up 100 DVD-R's for $30.

The problem with Zip's is that I can't remember the last time I bought a brand-new Zip disk, once you've spent $10 a piece, you tend to hold on to them as long as you can, if just out of spite for having spent $10 on a little piece of plastic.

Yeah, the deathclock is ticking. I think Iomega will probably kick the bucket shortly before Gateway.

michael

[the_glassman]

Originally posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO:
Well here goes 25% of their workforce.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09...hes_workforce/

The beginning of the end!

Originally posted by GoGoReggieXPowars:
No, if you open a Terminal and type cd /~ you go to your home directory.

~/ is your home directory. /~ means nothing (might work if your home directory is at the root of your drive, not sure). Typing ~ works too.

~username/ is username's home directory.