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DataStorm V1.0, a Full-Auto Floppy Disk Cannon

Posted by kdawson on Sun May 11, 2008 11:46 PM
from the tres-bouchee dept.
It's funny. Laugh. Data Storage Technology
Bob Loblaw writes "I ran across a huge stash of floppies at our office, and after some discussion, it became clear that rather than throw them away, we should build a gun that fires floppies. I had just bought a welder so this was a challenging first project. After about a month of work in my garage at night the DataStorm was born. It was constructed of scrap metal, a kid's bike, a weed-eater motor, and an electric screwdriver. The most difficult task ended up being how to add spin to the disk without significantly reducing its velocity. After a week and a half of trying different options, a stack of zip ties was found to work best. Since we had so much time in it we elected to shoot an infomercial showcasing the device, and had to learn to shoot & edit video as we went. It was basically an office joke that spiraled out of control. My wife is not amused. At all. I hope you like it."
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Submission: Full Auto Floppy Disk Cannon - DataStorm V 1.0 by Anonymous Coward
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DataStorm V1.0, a Full-Auto Floppy Disk Cannon 50 Comments More /

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  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by amrik98 (1214484) on Sunday May 11 2008, @11:48PM (#23374576)
    Lock and load those Windows 95 floppies!
    • Granted, you won't get as many shots as Windows 95. But, you know, Datastorm is registered trademark. Launching Procomm should keep the lawyers at bay.

      I'm pretty I still have a unopened box for Procomm Plus for Windows 1.0 if you need it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by petermgreen (876956)
          I know at uni there are lots of old PCs controlling various bits of equipment. Often theese machines are running very old operating systems so USB mass storage is not an option (MS really only got USB mass storage right with ME/2K , with 98 you could use them but only with a manufacturer specific driver or some third party kludge, with 95 or NT4 you don't have much chance).

  • ...this could form really fun mash-up.

    Hmm...at the end of shortened old video, sequence of somebody walking in "Terminator 2 flower box"-style and shooting at the kids/Mac?

  • That's funny (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 11 2008, @11:57PM (#23374632)
    Whenever I come across large amounts of anything, my first thought is "I should build a gun to shoot x." This has led me to my pencil gun, paper gun, paperclip gun, staple gun (turns out this already existed), trash gun, concrete gun, and co-worker gun. I'm currently working on a car gun.

  • Drive gun (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Garridan (597129) on Sunday May 11 2008, @11:57PM (#23374634)
    In 1997, I had a number of floppy drives sitting around, so I stole the ejector springs from some, and made a floppy drive that would shoot a disk about 10 feet. Incredibly, it didn't harm the drive itself, so I installed this into my home computer. Scared the hell out of my friends the first time they'd retrieve their disk. The only giveaway was that it got difficult to push the disk in.
  • Good - Floppy warfare and all around destruction.
    Bad - Sure, you can buffer those floppies into a pile at 2.88MB/s, but can your drive read the data that fast? Methinks not.
    Ugly - Damn those evil girl scouts and their cookies. The spawn of satan they be! FIRE AT WILL!
    • Ugly - Damn those evil girl scouts and their cookies. The spawn of satan they be! FIRE AT WILL!

      How about the girl scout's mom who happened to be carying a loaded shotgun in the car?

      Funny video.

    • Re:Good, bad, and ugly (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SeekerDarksteel (896422) on Monday May 12 2008, @02:03AM (#23375166)
      Bad - Sure, you can buffer those floppies into a pile at 2.88MB/s, but can your drive read the data that fast? Methinks not.

      Sure it can. Just build a floppy drive raid [8k.com] and you're all set.

      • Re:Good, bad, and ugly (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bert64 (520050) <bert&slashdot,firenzee,com> on Monday May 12 2008, @03:12AM (#23375400) Homepage
        We did this on the Amiga years ago, but with only 4 drives...
        The floppy controller was fully DMA, so it worked quite wel with all 4 drives spinning at once, the built in floppy controller on most x86 machines is garbage but i guess the USB ones should be a bit better.

        • Re:Good, bad, and ugly (Score:4, Informative)

          by An Ominous Cow Erred (28892) on Monday May 12 2008, @05:43AM (#23375986)
          Well, that's not quite true. The Amiga's floppy bus did indeed support 4 devices (as opposed to 2 on the typical IBM/Intel controller), and it was DMA (as opposed to Intel PIO). In fact, it used the same DMA controller as the audio system. =) ...but it was only capable of transferring to/from one drive at a time. Traffic destined for other drives would be scheduled in a round-robin fashion. So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by drinkypoo (153816)

            So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.

            While this is true (the Amiga's floppy controller is not all that different in capability from a PC floppy controller, which can also handle 4 drives if you cable it correctly - it's just tied in with DMA on the Amiga) you can probably get one quarter the seek time in cases where the floppies are fragmented :)

  • I was just wondering (Score:5, Funny)

    by zappepcs (820751) on Sunday May 11 2008, @11:59PM (#23374646) Journal
    what to do with the box of floppy disks I found when cleaning the garage this weekend... hmmmmm

    There seems to be no video evidence of it's efficacy against marauding home invading Homeland Security driven police.. but it looks like it might be some sort of deterrent to unwanted guests who are unarmed.... hmmmm

    That long forgotten subscription to PC World and all the free disks will come in handy after all :-)

    Seriously, does anyone know of a website with plans for a gun like this that shoots tennis balls? My pit bull is waiting tirelessly for a machine to play fetch with. It seems the basic parts are similar here.

    Shame they offered no officially sanctioned Hasbro scoring method!

  • What the hell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0100010001010011 (652467) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:05AM (#23374666)
    What's up with Slashdot and the Videos lately? I was hoping to be taken to a page with drawings schematics, etc of a floppy gun. Instead it was a straight to video.

    The video was obviously shot directly for Fark, one big fark cliche (the B&W picture of the chick with White Teeth) 'Photoshopped' in.

    I like both sites and for different reasons. If I want stupid internet videos I'll get them on Fark.
    • At least put them in the "idle" category, which we know to avoid as the new Myspace/Digg bastard child.

      Also, where'd my d2 go? No more AJAX comments?
      • There have been intermittent problems with the server side components of D2 recently (parts of the template were not getting filled out properly by the Perl scripts). On Friday, D2 was dead for me, as was the related article function. It might that one of the servers has run out of space on a partition. Since multiple servers are probably used, that would explain why the problem is intermittent.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What's up with Slashdot and the Whiny Malcontents lately? I was hoping to read a comment with humorous anecdotes, etc of other crazy office jokes. Instead it went straight to the angst.

      The comment was obviously written directly for Slashdot, one big slashdot cliche (the value judgement of the Internet Video) 'Keyboarded' in.

      I like both the article and the comment for different reasons. If I want whinging blowhards, I'll get them in the comments.

      • Re:What the hell (Score:4, Insightful)

        by zwei2stein (782480) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:46AM (#23374870) Homepage
        Like whatever you want, videos directly linked from Slashdot (autoplaying, stupid and loud ones especially, not marked NSFW) are not amusing. Not at all.

        There are sites for people who like this stuff. On slashdot, something like this should never get through moderation and firehose.
        • Hey, come on now. No one RTFA anyways, so what difference does it make? They can link to a picture of goatse, and everyone would just be arguing about how great/bad of an idea it is.

        • Like whatever you want, videos directly linked from Slashdot (autoplaying, stupid and loud ones especially, not marked NSFW) are not amusing. Not at all.

          There are sites for people who like this stuff. On slashdot, something like this should never get through moderation and firehose.

          Why isn't it amusing? If a transcript of this video was created, and pictures demonstrated the device, it would be ok? Why? What if it had links to the demos and just had the "padding" as text? Would that be ok? So why not the entire thing? The article is entirely entertainment, and the video was not only funny but also presented the topic in an entertaining way. This /. article was actually written a lot better than most others. I really hate those stories that copy the first few paragraphs from the source. It shows no creativity and is borderline plagiarism. (One even had a dangling footnote still in the /. summary.)

          If you are angry because you got caught at work, well that sucks for you. But don't blame us. I have my browser set up not to autoplay flash unless I specifically allow it. This not only blocks spam, but also prevents this issue. You are already playing around. Why do you have your speakers on? Why do you not check the address first (which is not hidden - the domain is Revver.com aka a well-known video site). Why do you not take precautions when browsing /. at work? Especially for an article clearly marked for entertainment.

          You are at work. It is your responsibility to take precautions when you are doing non-work related stuff on your computer. You don't have to be an robot slaving away - I can understand browsing /. on your off time. But you should be smart about it and take precautions like using the mute button or using headphones at very least when at work. Personally, I am not amused by coworkers who keep their speakers on so everyone else can hear Windows startup, beep, alert, and shut down.

    • Great timing for Win2K8 server ad... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just when the guy's vomiting, the ad changes to Windows 2008 server! They should've used Vista instead!!

  • Datastorm 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)

    by wiredlogic (135348) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:07AM (#23374676)
    Don't lose hope. I'm sure you can find a way to amuse your wife with the second revision.

  • when i was in the army... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gandhi_2 (1108023) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:28AM (#23374792)
    ...it became clear that the ultimate weapon would project dead AA batteries a few thousand feet per second. We were never in short supply.

    But yeah, now that I work for a school district, it's quite clear that a microfloppy cannon is the way to go. For anti-armor purposes, maybee a zip-disk launcher.

  • Skip to the good bit (Score:5, Informative)

    by Thornae (53316) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:30AM (#23374810)
    If you're going to watch the video, let it load, then skip to about 3 minutes in, then stop watching once you've seen the machine do its thing.

    The rest is padding.
  • I love the Netflix Brick. BSG S1E1 - 383 floppies.

    Thank pasta storage technology has advanced.

  • Amazing Video (Score:5, Funny)

    by dunezone (899268) on Monday May 12 2008, @12:57AM (#23374918) Journal
    I never thought that a video about a weapon that fires floppies would start off talking about abortions.
  • My roommate has a box of over 500 AOL CDs that I will gladly donate. You may have to rechamber from 3.5" to 120mm, though :)

  • your wife was not amused? (Score:5, Funny)

    by the brown guy (1235418) on Monday May 12 2008, @01:41AM (#23375078) Journal

    It was constructed of scrap metal, a kid's bike...

    Your kid won't be amused either.

  • 6:46 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by catdevnull (531283) on Monday May 12 2008, @01:54AM (#23375128)
    6 minutes 46 seconds of my life I'm not getting back.

    Maybe next time somebody invents a office product canon, they'll just make a one-part video: the part that doesn't suck.

    Seriously, a highlight reel of this thing would have been so much easier to make (and so much more satisfying) than whatever that was. The thing about a "parody" movie is that don't have to have a working model of whatever you're featuring--people just assume it's special FX.

    A tech video of how to make it and showing it in use goes pretty far amongst the geekerati here at /.

    ps. Kudos to the girl for her righteous Ash impression, tho.
  • Your video editing is a little off. All of the sound was in the left channel. Otherwise, it was neat. I'd do somethign like that, but I'm somewhat banned from owning any weapons.

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