this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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What in the hell are they using them for? They hold so little data I don’t see how they can even be practical at this point.
where I live (not Japan), trams are updated with a suitcase worth of floppy disks (and these are the more modern trams here)
Older Boeing's use floppies to update their flight computer data even today
And Boeing is obviously trustworthy when it comes to maintenance.
ones with floppies are alright, beware modern ones.
if it aint broke dont fix it. That door plug on the other hand
I remember using floppies and they broke a lot. Probably more than USB drives
That's weird, I've always thought of floppies as pretty durable. The 3.5" ones anyway; the older larger ones were flimsier. On the 3.5" ones the little metal cover would get bent sometimes, or occasionally crushed if someone put one in a back pocket and forgot before they sat down; but in my career I've had a lot more thumbdrives broken off in the port than bent/crushed floppies. How did you find most of yours broke? Maybe I had an abundance of clumsy colleagues... or maybe I joined the IT workforce too late to have witnessed the tsunami of broken floppies!
Thumbdrives broken off in the port?? That's some degenerate levels of sexual frustration coming to light, brother..
Work in IT as long as I have and if you don't learn not to judge, you at least learn not to bother judging 😋
Preach it, person. Sysadmin here, the job fades you to humanity.
Bent and crushed floppies were less of a problem than simple failures of reading and writing them, which in my memory happened much more often than they do to USB drives now. I don't see people breaking usb sticks in half that often either.
One thing came to mind, Irreplaceable infrastructure computer systems from decades ago.
There are powerplants and oil rigs that use computer from decades ago which is irreplaceable (either due to technical or cost effective).
Mainly due to proprietary hardware+software solutions which cannot be ported now and remaking them with new hardware will require redoing the same processes as before (probably with additional stuff added by later laws) all over again.
If you try to replace just the hardware, you get fun solutions like a modern computer with a VM running Dosbox on critical infrastructure. Hey, if it works and your boss is willing to sign off on it...
Hehe, a similar thingy happened in one of my previous companies. The CPU was easily spoofed using
qemubut in that case the whole OS was almost immutable with hardcoded bus configs for the video card (some old pre ATI card), which I was unable to pass through, causing the project to be taken out of my hands. I feel like it didn't go forward after that.Like, the first paragraph explains.
Not "the government had to accept them", but "businesses were required to submit them".
It's not a hypothetical problem, there was even news a few years ago about how businesses were complaining they had to send in a dozen+ disks at a time because of file formats.
The laws were written at the dawn of the digital age, in the 70s and 80s, stipulating specific storage media, and just never got updated because the government didn't view it as a problem.
You're welcome to do your own research, then. Or just make a call based off your read of their vibes, doesn't matter to me.
Upvoted because proper'ish use of 10 and one. :)
10 to 1. Many style guides require numbers lower than 10 to be spelt out. Many people think that what style guides say is "correct"
I will never accept spelt nor smelt, unless we're talking about grains and ore refining, respectively.
That's fine. Spelled vs spelt is different regionally in the UK. I was taught "spelled", I say it as spelled, but more often than not I type it spelt because it's easier on a glass keyboard
Hahaha I can respect that. I do have a pretty big chip on my shoulder when it comes to language, semantics, syntax, whatever, but I will always let it slide if the counter argument is based around instrumental favorability.
Their government agencies still used a lot of them.