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Ask Soylent: Which Iconograpy Represents 'Save' in the Modern World?

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-floppy-drive-still-works dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:45AM (#444143)

    The "write new data stream, drop old data and swap names" is not what seems to be done by many coders. How do I know? Any fucked program that tries to save, fails for whatever reason (disk quota, process crash, hw powerdown)... and now you have no valid data at all, new or old. The filesystem may not overwrite, but from user space the data is gone/damaged and will require some luck and special tools to recover.

    So no, too many coders don't even know how to properly replace file contents, even if the method was in computing litetature at least since early 80s. Every 5-10 years all the data dance with fseek, fsync, etc will hit the news but coders will quickly forget again, or even go silly like hitting fsync over and over ("I heard this keeps the data, DO IT!") instead of plan correctly how to balance integrity and speed.