New PowerMacs released!

I myself would really appreciate 3 drive bays or more. The fact is, people (at least me) still use zips and even floppies, and it would be GREAT if they were all centralized, not scattered around in a spider of USB cables. Room for 4 hard drives? Phffff… I'm only on my second HD.
 
I'm all for pushing new technology, but not as fast as Apple pushes (maybe). Illustration: Somebody just might have the nerve to give you an important file, and they gave it to you on a zip disk. <gasp>!!! What are you going to do? Tell them to burn it? Tell them to email it to you? Maybe, maybe not. Do-able, maybe not so do-able.

The point is, it's nice to be able to just get work done once in a while. Zips aren't all that obseleted yet.
 
McAllister - i'll admit to the higher theft risk. you've got a good point for your setting. but i'll stick by my assertion that burning cd's would be a better way to go.

but i'll reitterate that i think your point about making better expandability is one that apple should listen to. and they should sell lots of stuff to meet the desires of folks who want to fill everything up.
 
Your comment appears to sound that the professors are all using college-provided Macs at their homes.

Not true. I am referring to the countless professors who have home computers (mac or otherwise) without CD-Burners.

Yes, I have a burner on my home machine and I use that instead of zips. But most professors do not have burners on their home computers. Contrary to popular myth they are not rich. In fact, most of the faculty I've talked to with Macs in their homes are using old beige G3s or performas.

In fact, most of the college-owned machines purchased before last fall do NOT have burners. So the professors are caught in a catch-22.

Zips are WIDELY used in the educational arena and stating that "professors need to get with it" dramatically ignores the current educational institution environment.

We are not a large "money tree" and do not have tons of $$ to provide computers for faculty at their homes.

To get a good assessment of educational IT needs you have to look at the complete environment, not just what the college owns computer-wise.
 
burning a cd isnt nearly as effecient... trust me ive tried, also many times when i send something to a printer i send it on a zip disk so its easier for them to deal with all the files and the links etc

zip disks are used well in the class rooms, and i use them professionally, holding 250mb isnt half bad for a disk that is fairly quick and easily re-writable...

to me and a few others apple made a mistake, just because you have no use for them and dont see a use for them doesnt make it a good idea or for that matter an obselete technology
 
no, i'm operating on the assumption that most lab materials are paid for thru grants. getting the appropriate equipment is normally part of the grant proposal. If you are talking about a general campus computer lab, rather than a research lab, then i see your point. of course i also think that the state of most universities' computer provisions are pathetic for whatever reason. Universities have money to spend. They are doing pretty good business these days. How they choose to spend it is often as misguided as the US govt. but that's a whole different discussion. :D
 
Staring with this last February's Apple orders I have been on my own private campaign to get all new macs equipped with CD burners.

I have also been lecturing ("laying down the line?") to incoming freshman that we will not be supporting floppy disks and that they need to buy zip disk/zip drives for their personal computers. I told them that floppies are BAD and the labs will gradually be moving to zips only for removeable media.

Many of the projects they will be required to do will not fit onto a floppy. In addition, everyday we get a student coming to our office in tears because their "important project" on a floppy is unreadable.

Zips are much more reliale than floppies. I wish I could push the envelope to tell them to mandate their personal machines had CD burners, but for many students (and their parents) it is out out of their budget at this timel.

So, I am pushing zip drives at this time. Perhaps next year prices will have dropped even farther that I will be preaching to them to have CD burners. But I have to reach the lowest common denominator at this point.

Having said that, our labs next month will have apple superdrives. This is my incremental step into eradiicating external magnetic media on our campus.

I agree with what everyone says about getting everyone to get with the "bandwagon" and use CDR dics, I just don't think the students and faculty are at that financial point yet where we can ban those obsolete media. I wish I could (less problems), but it isn't feasible at this time.
 
cdrw's would be fine, but cd-r's would be a friggen waste of time and money to use as removable storage
 
We just received a grant to convert one of our labs to a full multi-media lab. The "mac addicts" in charge of the project wanted to order the new iMacs to save a few bucks.

I laid down the law that IT will not support the system if they insist on iMacs. I've seen the tech support problems with integrated computers at my last employer (Gateway systems) and with the iMacs we currently have.

Integrated computers are nothing but trouble when it comes to reliability, tech support and expansion. I told the two professors that they should order G4s quicksilvers if they want reliable support from IT. Yes, they're "cute", but they suck from a tech support standpoint.

Yes, they have backtracked and are now ordering G4 towers. Tell all those bean counters out there that they need to consider tech supporrt costs in their formulas, not just the initial procurement costs.

NO IMACS/EMACS ON OUR CAMPUS! If you are going to provide them equipment give them professional equipment and give them G4 towers.........
 
CD or zips, make sure you have backups of each. In college i lost 2 major projects, one was on a zip, and backed up on another zip, 3 words, Click of Death. So that was that. Another project was on a CD, it was my fault I admit, lets just say i got some tape on the label, and I went to pull it off, and the foil came right along with it. I'm older, and i learned the hard way, now i buy high quality CD-RWs for class projects, which i keep multiple copies, from my hard drives to zips as well. Our school is phasing out the use of zips, and orbs were short lived.
 
click of death is an OLD problem that i have only seen happen on the original drives installed in beige powermac models PRE g3

i havent seen a click of death in years and i spent the last two years half running a mac lab full of G4's with zip100 drives... click of death is as old as... well something old!

orbs are slow 2gb(i think?) zip-esque drives... mostly worthless for everday file usage.. but good for big backups of older systems IMO
 
i don't even remember how many iomega zip drives i have owned over the years and all of them died with the clik of death and took a disc or 2 with them. it wasn't until i bought a vst firewire zip that i got one to last longer than the one year replacement warrenty that i learned to buy along with the iomega. i have gotten at least 4 new zip drives thru that process. paying $20 beats buying a new one any day. and who knows, if i still used my zip drive like i used to, maybe this one would have died by now too.

but i cannot imagine an iomega product that wouldn't eventually die with the click of death. maybe it has happened, but i don't trust one guy's word for it after my years of experience.

mcallister - sounds like you get the idea and i understand being the constraints of the real world hindrences you are talking about. this makes a much better argument to me than that profs can't afford a cd drive. i am sure they could all manage a cd reader which costs less than a zip drive these days. in fact, how can they even get new software without one? like it or not, poor profs have to keep up too. but the student angle i can appreciate, at least until the school provides the tools so that they wouldn't have to buy their own if they didn't want to.
 
Although I have not experienced the extreme problems that Ed has, I cannot count the number of zip disks that have died on me, their final breath always being the "click of death". I have an internal zip drive in my G4 Tower (Graphite), but I have only used it a few times the past year. But when someone gives me a file on zip, I am glad I have it.
 
like i said i have only seen click of death on older zip drives, not newer ones... im not saying it didnt happen :p
 
any chance to bash iomega and I'll gladly jump at it... I've seen click of death in at least a dozen macs, and as recently as a few months ago with a 6-month-old-retail-purchased-external-USB-zip.

their products still blow.

optical media or solid state ram is the future.

no longer will we be afraid to set our media atop a TV, or too near a monitor - speaker magnets be damned, we have cheap, small-sized but large-capacity optical media!
 
It's not so much the drives that die on me it's been the disks are just plain weak. CD for Me-me!;)
 
Quick note on the Orb drive: mine is still running (wow), it's not terribly slow with SCSI, and 2.2GB per disk isn't bad, even in these DV-soaked times. The only problem is that nobody gives a hoot about it anymore, so it is purely for backup and 'geewhiz, look at that weird thing' purposes.

And that's important to me.

eshine#eshine
 
The backsides of these PowerMacs have that 'we've been shot 50 times already, so we're ready for war' look to them.

Beyond that, this stuff is pretty cool. But then, I always say that. I mean, these are Macs. C'mon.

eshine
 
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