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Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

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Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#181

Post by mcguire »

dfxm12 wrote: post #94
kyleblarson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a 3 hour Shinkansen trip that was 2 minutes late and the staff profusely apologized when we arrived. I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.

It's easy to apologize profusely for something that is well within expectations. On the other end of that spectrum, I can also empathize a bit with an increasingly unhelpful crew of a 30 hour late train. Yeah, you don't have to be rude about it, but at some point, there's simply a decreasing amount of help that can be given.

And I'd imagine everyone on board was becoming rude and unhelpful.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#182

Post by np_tedious »

kahrl wrote: post #144
np_tedious wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 3MB of personal information? That's well under 1 byte per citizen how bad can it be? /s

If they are 5.25" 1.2MB high density floppies, that's a max of 64k per person. What the what?

I had used total city population as denominator. Oops

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#183

Post by KennyBlanken »

throwawayboise wrote: post #172
wodenokoto wrote: post #20

BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped making them" https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...

Around 1992 or so I was working at a large manufacturer that was still working to eliminate punch cards. Don't underestimate how long a technology can stay in use in organizations where technology is not the main business line.

Lot of these companies claim that implementing a modern system would cost too much.

They just haven't figured out opportunity cost due to poor capabilities, or how much lost productivity there is because of the old system.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#184

Post by zapdrive »

kube-system wrote: post #171

> According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men Looks like they leaked their sex a second time.

Haha. That's what I noticed. Looks like it's a translation error.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#185

Post by glandium »

tadfisher wrote: post #113
WalterBright wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB sticks are better in every respect.

Except security. Floppies can't do anything other than storage, but USB devices can be just about anything.

The story doesn't say much about what kind of computers are used, but the floppy drives could just as well be USB ones...

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#186

Post by throaway46546 »

kyleblarson wrote: post #44
qmarchi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese culture is very strict about being being precise and having high expectations of each other and of companies in general. Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders. The easiest one I could find was from 2017 where a train left the station 2…

I was on a 3 hour Shinkansen trip that was 2 minutes late and the staff profusely apologized when we arrived. I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.

Amtrak sucks so bad.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#187

Post by KennyBlanken »

hermitdev wrote: post #64
dehrmann wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The disks "almost never broke and lost data," Yoichi Ono, who is in charge of managing public funds for Meguro ward, told the Nikkei. This was not my experience.

Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted. Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed…

Likely the floppy was ejected too soon and/or had a corrupted filesystem. Or one of you had a floppy drive that needed to be cleaned, or was slightly out of spec and couldn't be read by the other.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#188

Post by KennyBlanken »

morganvachon wrote: post #173
hermitdev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted. Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed…

I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move. USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data…

Zip drives and cartridges were infamously unreliable, like literally every product iomega ever made. The old Bernoulli cartridges would fail all the time, too.

They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in.

Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#190

Post by incompleteCode »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #177
incompleteCode wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.

My husband is Japanese so all my information is second-hand, but if you want to learn about Japan in a non-anime-manga-etc based way, I can recommend the TV channel "NHK World", which is in English, and also English-language Japanese news sources like the Japan Times.

Thank you!
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