this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
493 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
68187 readers
3906 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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..
where I live (not Japan), trams are updated with a suitcase worth of floppy disks (and these are the more modern trams here)
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...
10 to one they weren't, look how oddly this article is phrased. I'd guess there was a rule government offices had to accept floppy discs, have the equipment to read them, but the clients weren't actually submitting that way anymore.
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.
Yeah so I read the whole article and it's all phrased like it wants to convince you of that.
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. :)
Is there another way to express it except : ?
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.