191–200 of 222 posts
Wouldn't it be interesting if the floppy disks lost were 2.88MB and also only commonly readable in japan, where that rare format of drive was very slightly more popular in the mid 1990s.
I heard they were superfamicom cartridges
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...
> 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.
Putting aside the "floppy disk" question, I have to say they seem a hella lot more polite and regretful for the lost data than the constant and more extreme breaches and loss of PII that seem to get stolen regularly here in the U.S. Equifax?
In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to floppy disks. They were using floppy disks only because an application that they were using to extract and convert data from their devices was designed to only copy files in chunks to floppy disks. One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the application that they were using to…
Hanko are the red stamps that people require for official paperwork. Fax machines are still in vogue, probably related to the fact that Hanko are needed to complete official paperwork.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-f...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storag…
They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find. Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avo…
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...