"Jose" wrote in message
m...
How much of a hit would I take changing instructors this far in?

I haven't seen any. I've seen cheap ones though. (ten dollars or so for
64 meg).

Uh...I think your clipboard got messed up.

In any case, $10 is cheap enough to be effectively free for a device that is
for all practical purposes, infinitely reusable. Beyond that, just look at
the Sunday flyers. If you live in any decent sized city, you've got the
usual chain stores, and they often run promotions in which a USB flash drive
is given away with something you have to buy anyway.

There are other ways to get them free, but the real point is that the cost
of the USB drive is negligible. At least as negligible as using a floppy
drive.

And floppies aren't free...they cost on the order of 50 cents each or
more.

My last set of floppies was free. I got five hundred.

If you can point me to a vendor that one can reliably get 500 floppies at no
charge, fine. Otherwise, I fail to see what your unique situation has to do
with it.

A computer that has a USB controller but does not have USB drivers
installed makes no sense whatsoever.

Meet Windows 98. I'm not completely being fair - I have used my camera as
a thumb drive, and it requires drivers to be downloaded and installed on
Windows 98 machines.

You aren't understanding. I know that Windows 98 doesn't come with USB
drivers. But a computer that has a USB device *does* come with USB drivers,
and to not install those drivers is silly. Once those drivers are
installed, you don't need additional drives specific to the make or model of
USB flash drive.

Your camera may indeed have its own unique, custom drivers that you can
install on Windows 98. But if it complies with the standard USB disk
controller specifications, the default USB drivers are sufficient.

However, it is stupid to generalize that to a claim that
a floppy drive is always (or even often) a useful thing to have on a
brand-new computer.

I'm not. However I've found that obsolete devices come in handy at the
oddest times, and for those times I'm really glad I have them.

I have found that obsolete devices only come in handy when dealing with
other obsolete devices. And as I've said, if one can actually anticipate
having to do so, that's fine. But that has nothing to do with whether Jay's
new PC needs a floppy drive, which is what's being discussed here.

frankly when most people want to move an email message from one computer
to another, they EMAIL it.

That was Apple's solution some years back. It was dumb then, it's dumb
now. It requires the internet. Floppies don't.

Huh? Apple has always had networking built in. Connect up the Appletalk
cable and you're good to go. Still, my point is that if you got the email,
you *have* the Internet. The fact that moving that email requires the
Internet is no big deal, since it's assured to be present.

On the receiving end, perhaps that's not the case, but just how important
could it be to move email from a PC with an email account to one without.
More significantly, how often would you really need to do this? If
infrequently, then use a CD. If often, then that PC really needs a network
connection.

Not only do I not move anything among our four computers using a floppy, I
have never felt that using our LAN was in any way an inconvenience, even for
the smallest of files (I think the smallest file I've ever moved was
probably only 200 bytes or so). More importantly, if someone is not in a
situation where they necessarily need to deal with obsolete hardware, then
there's no reason to buy obsolete hardware to go with their new PC.

Pete