The comment section is wild. So many people thinking that the Japanese government is somehow late to the floppy free party. Clearly they have no idea how dire the IT infrastructure situation is for the most critical systems of the world’s major super powers
If you think the US government is floppy free, let alone capable of going floppy free in the next 5 years, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya
US gov isn’t even tape free
Tape makes an excellent, dirt cheap, large scale backup solution. You can get a 30 TB tape for 45 bucks.
Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.
Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.
The tape drives I found were really expensive. But as others mentioned, it’s not really suitable for media anyway. Only cold storage backup.
I drew a floppy disk as part of a workplace online Pictionary game, only to find somebody I work with has never seen one.
We work in IT.
The rest of us tried to explain what they were and he was like “did you use them in a GameCube?” and “was it like a USB stick?”
I mean it was a bit like a USB stick. Just nobody made the comparison back then because USB didn’t exist. But yes it is removable storage that is read/writable.
GameCube though…
Yeah, I’m starting to doubt he’d ever seen a GameCube either.
there’s no victory here - in the article it states that at least one still law requirse floppy disks must continue to be used.
The past persists in that regard lol
Great job!
Although, using floppy disks has the advantage that everyone has to make sure their file sizes are small enough to fit on them. Which makes for much easier handling for those who don’t use floppy disks.
Unzipping archive. Please insert disk 34/2365
File read error on disk #2209.
If it works well for the job that it’s tasked to perform, why change it? It’s got the added benefit of being an unintentional security feature now too, as very few others will even have a drive for reading them. Sort of like how manual transmissions are much less likely to be stolen now.
On the other hand, if you use an old technology that isn’t being mass produced anymore, it can reach a point where it will become a big liability for a mission-critical piece of equipment.
Yah this is bad I run a cnc plasma table, big table 10 feet x 20 feet. It uses floppy disks. Pain in the ass to find a new drive and pain in the ass to find new disks because constant write re write emf and metal dust kills them. But despite that it’s still cheaper and easier than a $15k retro fit to a more modern controler.
If it works well for the job
Your example is one where it clearly isn’t a great fit for the job. If you wanted to transfer sensitive data discretely, a floppy could be significantly better than a wired network where you’ve got to worry about America/Russia/China/Israel/Iran and who knows who else peeping on the transfer, or a USB drive which is already known to be compromised by stuxnet derivatives.
They still have a love affair with faxes though. Thank God you can fax from 7 Eleven. You can do pretty much anything from 7 Eleven.
You… can fax from 7-11? I need to know more about this!
Convenience stores in Japan are much more than the cigarettes and lottery tickets of North America. They have lots of ready-to-eat food, snacks, drinks as well as some banking services, bill payments, faxing and more.
Ours have that too, but it’s old hot dogs and ATM’s with fees up your ass.
