Big difference between family and business: Parents should never outlive their children, but corporations routinely outlive their product offspring. Sony has just announced the 3.5 inch floppy disk they pioneered is going the way of all things, and their factories will stop cranking the little obsolete squares out.

As Wired points out, it's not at all surprising that floppies are going away, it's amazing that it's taken this long for them to die. It's been over a decade since Apple stopped supporting them, and other PC makers followed suit shortly thereafter; yet Japan has somehow seen floppy sales of 12 million in 2009. As for me, I can't remember the last time I touched one that hadn't been turned into some ironic craft project.

Similarly I've got a stack of blank CDs and DVDs sitting in a drawer that I used to use to burn files for clients and friends, but with the ubiquity of flash drives they've remained untouched. I've also got three Netflix discs I've had for a few months as I mostly watch their On-Demand service. Physical media really is going away.

In a bid to shed paper, I purchased an iPad so I could read the magazines I have a subscription to in bed, and stop receiving the print versions that tend to stack up on my desk. So far the electronic magazine-reading experience does not quite compare, I'll have an entry up on it shortly.

Over the weekend I came upon this surprising piece of news: WFXL, a Fox network affiliate station in Georgia, is buying iPads for its news anchors--not as job perks, but simply to save paper! Apparently printing out their daily news scripts produces a mountain of expensive dead tree pulp each year. They estimate that the six iPads they're buying will pay for themselves in four months, saving the station some $9,600 per year by converting all of the scripts to PDFs.

As for the floppy disks, I guess we can expect to see a lot of Japanese-influenced craft projects starting next year, when Sony factories will produce their final production runs.