Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese government has finally rid itself of floppy disks.
"We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" digital minister Taro Kono told Reuters on Wednesday.
Kono pledged in 2022 to eliminate law requiring floppy disks and CD-ROMs when sending data to the Japanese government. However, the decommissioning of the relic took another year and a half to be announced.
As of a few weeks ago, Japan's Digital Agency had removed 1,034 regulations that governed their use, leaving only one that was related to vehicle recycling.
Although it may seem futuristic in some respects, Japan still has a penchant for old tech, and not just floppy disks. Items like cash payments and fax machines complicate its reputation as well as its desires to lead in the tech sphere.
[...] Kono declaring victory over the retro squares comes as rumors swirl that he fancies himself the next president, who will be starting in September after the country's leadership election.
[...] A YouGov study conducted in 2018 when Kono was Foreign Minister found that two-thirds of British children aged six to 18 didn't even know what a floppy disk is.
A video filmed around that time shows children speculating that they might be from outer space, or perhaps a Victorian artifact.
Related Stories
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board has agreed to spend $212 million to get its Muni Metro light rail off floppy disks.
The Muni Metro's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) has required 5ΒΌ-inch floppy disks since 1998, when it was installed at San Francisco's Market Street subway station. The system uses three floppy disks for loading DOS software that controls the system's central servers.
[...]
After starting initial planning in 2018, the SFMTA originally expected to move to a floppy-disk-free train control system by 2028. But with COVID-19 preventing work for 18 months, the estimated completion date was delayed.On October 15, the SFMTA moved closer to ditching floppies when its board approved a contract with Hitachi Rail for implementing a new train control system that doesn't use floppy disks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
[...]
Further illustrating the light rail's dated tech, the current ATCS was designed to last 20 to 25 years, meaning its expected expiration date was in 2023. The system still works fine, but the risk of floppy disk data degradation and challenges in maintaining expertise in 1990s programming languages have further encouraged the SFMTA to seek upgrades.
[...]
The SFMTA plans to spend $700 million (including the $212 million Hitachi contract) to overhaul the light rail's control system. This includes replacing the loop cable system for sending data across the servers and trains. The cables are said to be a more pressing concern than the use of floppy disks. The aging cables are fragile, with "less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem," Roccaforte previously told Ars.
[...]
The SFMTA's website says that the current estimated completion date for the complete overhaul is "2033/2034."
[...]
Various other organizations have also been slow to ditch the dated storage format, including Japan, which only stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems in June, and the German navy, which is still trying to figure out a replacement for 8-inch floppies.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday July 08 2024, @01:19AM (2 children)
As a floppy disk warrior, I assure you this is just a setback. :P
[loading the rest of the comment, please wait... tick, tick, tick, whiir, whiiir, tick, tick]
What really blows my mind is that some defined procedure made floppy disk the ONLY allowed way to do something. Why not a paper form? Why not e-mail? Why not a USB flash drive?
Have we learned a lesson? No. 50 years from now these same sorts of idiots will hopefully be declaring victory over smart phones, because new procedure will almost certainly mandate the usage of smart phone "apps", with no exceptions for anything else. I still don't own a damn smart phone.
[whir whir whir whir whir]
Error reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Fail?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday July 08 2024, @01:43AM
That always made my heart skip when it was supposed to read something important. :/
I just hope they start getting rid of katanas: i'll take some.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 08 2024, @08:25PM
My extensive experience in government and corporate is this isn't "doing" it's describing a demarcation point and that demarcation point involves handing over a floppy as the definition of handing over responsibility.
Once the physical floppy is in the possession of person/group/team Y it's no longer X's responsibility. In the old days they just physically handed paper from team to team. When I hand this floppy to the archives its now their responsibility to store the data not mine.
I certainly can imagine something like the "paperless office" defining a bid as submitted via the delivery of physical floppy. Or you've closed out a case once you've made an archival copy of the file on a floppy that is logged as stored physically in a cabinet somewhere.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 08 2024, @08:20PM (2 children)
Although I'm thankfully not British I have kids in that range and they were utilitarian about vinyl when they were little, like in the 00s (not recently)
If music comes out of CDs, then if music comes out of big CDs (known to boomers as LP vinyl) then those big plastic disks will be named "Big CDs"
The age range in the article would be elementary age when the iPhone was first sold, so I would theorize that really little kids in 2024 might call disk based music media "round phones" or something like that.
One major cognitive difference between kids in the 19xx and kids in the 20xx is my kids seem utterly mystified at the concept of "broadcast". What do you mean there once existed a form of media that can't be streamed on demand or rewind/pause on demand? Like if you tell them you can't rewind live radio music in a car or something they get pissed off like Dad is just refusing to tell them how the pause button works for broadcast radio. How do you decide what to stream over an antique "radio" using a single number like 620 or 101.7?
Maybe kids would call a floppy disk a "plastic cloud storage"
Another dead tech to modern teenage kids is flash drives. WTF Dad, you can put a google drive on a little plastic thing that plugs into old fashioned desktops, how does that work? Everything at school is/was cloud storage, of course. They don't actually use physical media. Probably 3-d printed more things in HS than they printed on paper, weird to think about. Teachers don't accept printed assignments except for art class, maybe.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 09 2024, @07:05AM
FTFY
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday July 09 2024, @09:40AM
I've taken pains to make sure my kids watch some broadcast TV (albeit a kids' channel) in the mornings, to make sure they get familiar with that style of broadcasting.
Having said that, the combination of few all-purpose channels replaced with a multitude of specialised ones, plus on-demand streaming means that my kids are exposed to a far narrower range of programming than I was: it's only the programs or genres that we actively choose to put on. In my youth, with only four broadcast channels to choose from, I stumbled across all sorts of sports (tennis, skiing, golf, bowls, cricket, football, rugby, athletics, etc) just because it was on, along with all sorts of programs that would normally be aimed at adults rather than kids (politics, gardening, arts, all genres of daytime TV).
On the radio (which is on in the kitchen over breakfast), the kids have finally learned that the songs are someone else's choice / playlist, and that I can't choose what's on next.