Okay, we know, we should be used to this by now, but we just can't help it: it still really chaps our hinders when we see articles that make it look like Dell is doing anything the least bit innovative outside of its great strides in the field of Dumb-As-A-Post But Inexplicably Effective Pitchmen research. If you're a regular viewer to this little show, you might recall us going off the deep end a couple of years ago when CNET made a big thing about how Dell was the first to ship notebooks with "fully integrated wireless networking and internal antennas." Never mind that, at the time, Apple's entire product line included integrated antennas and could be ordered with AirPort cards pre-installed. Fume, fume...

Well, it's happened again, only this time it's perhaps less egregious from a factual perspective; the latest is more of a sin of omission on CNET's part, rather than out-and-out wrongness. Faithful viewer Kevin Marks notes a new CNET article which casts Dell as the different-thinking innovator making great strides in moving away from everyone's favorite antiquated storage device, the floppy drive. It seems that yesterday Dell started offering customers the option of forgoing a floppy drive in some of its laptops in exchange for a USB Memory Key-- you know, one of those doohickeys that stores data in flash RAM and mounts as a disk when plugged into a computer's USB port. Those things have been around for ages and are sold by a zillion different vendors, but CNET's article makes it sound like Dell just invented the device after years of toil in its R&D lab (assuming it has one, which we tend to doubt) desperately searching for a way to rid the world of the accursed floppy drive.

So there's Dell for you: it may be four years late to the party, but at least it's moving really slowly. But what's so flippin' galling about this article, of course, is the way in which Apple is never mentioned once. Considering that Apple a) was the first company daring enough to sign the floppy drive's death warrant four and a half years ago with the introduction of the original iMac, and b) hasn't had a single product in its lineup with a floppy drive as even an option since mid-1999, you'd think the company would rate at least a sentence or two near the end of any article about the industry's attempts to ditch that slow, noisy, error-prone medium.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard gets props from CNET for having "eliminated the floppy altogether on some of its newest Presario 900 notebooks," though it still "includes a coupon with these machines that will allow customers to mail in for the floppy if they desire one." Oooooo. Bold move, that. Fer cryin' out Pete's sake, aside from being the first PC manufacturer to purge all vestiges of the device from its products, Apple was the first company to ship a personal computer with a 3.5-inch floppy drive in the first place! Does this not warrant a mention? Where's the love? Answer: not at CNET. But then, we knew that.