This is really less of a problem than it's made out to be since device drivers are no longer shipped on floppy disks.

Most device drivers, even small ones, are now shipped on CD-ROM. Floppy drives are being phased out of modern computers, as most files nowadays exceed a floppy's modest (1.44MB) disk space. For example, when Microsoft released Windows 95, it came either on a CD-ROM, a set of 15 3.5" disks, or a set of 30 5.25" disks. In 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP on CD-ROM only, because it would take approximately 1000 3.5" disks to contain it all. Which would use choose? Future operating systems would require several inconveniently large buildings to contain the number of floppy disks they'd require.

Additionally, most operating systems now ship with a wide variety of vendor-specific drivers, rendering the old-style driver floppies obsolete. The operating system may have an older version of the driver, but it should work nevertheless. If it doesn't, a generic driver can usually be used. I installed Windows XP on this box, which lacks a floppy drive, without a hiccup, and I have a fairly esoteric network device (an Alcatel SpeedTouch DSL modem), which was autodetected and assigned a generic driver.

Overclockers and other geeks, like me, are usually a few steps ahead of the average computer user, at least as far as hardware goes. I haven't had a floppy drive in my computer for over a year and I've never had cause to put it back in. Apart from taking up a drive bay, floppy drives are also one of the most power-hungry devices; they're slow; floppy disks can no longer hold much practical data due to growing file sizes; the disks are fantastically easy to break; and what's more, finding custom-painted floppy drive bezels to match your case is getting much harder. About the only thing floppy disks are still good for is making boot disks for network installations of Linux or *BSD, and for flashing a device's BIOS, though even BIOS flash utilites are now sometimes put on USB keys for the small number of new motherboards that support USB-on-boot.

As devices become more advanced, they will most likely have the newest version of their own driver coded into the device's firmware, completely rendering driver disks/CDs useless. While this will force upgrades, I welcome it. Who wants to use old hardware, other than Amiga hobbyists and Kraftwerk?

LS-120/LS-240 and ZIP floppies are still viable, though even they are becoming obsolete. Plus, when was the last time you saw any software shipped on an LS-120, LS-240, or ZIP disk? Eventually, USB disks and memory cards will replace CDs as the most common form of manufacturer-to-consumer driver distribution. The most common method of distribution, however, is via download, and it is likely that it will stay that way for the forseeable future.

I will be glad to see them go, floppies, ZIPs, all of 'em.