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 storage options.
They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.
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 avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.
40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.
Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.
I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.
He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.
A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.
(The missing file was one of the source files to Empire for the PDP-11, which I have now backed up on https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )
Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.
This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.
The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?
Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).
I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.
These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.
I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.
I do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)
It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.
More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.
When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.
Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.
In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.
I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)
Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.
And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.
Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!?
This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade.
It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527
It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.
You're conflating two entirely different things. US nukes were not hacked, that's a massive exaggeration.
"Shaylyn Hynes, a DOE spokesperson, said that an ongoing investigation into the hack has found that the perpetrators did not get into critical defense systems."
"They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-hack...
This is Japan, no pretending needed. They're waaaay backwards, internet there tends to be 20 years behind the times for starters ... Thought this was common knowledge.
Some things are futuristic and obvious improvements (e.g. Suica and ApplePay NFC support in 2016/2017) and others are stubbornly in the past (e.g. cash only, physical media, place and structure of society).
Japan has a great culture of precision engineering and quality (although software is a bit of a different story). On the other hand decision making is very conservative and change is often blocked by vested interests.
Also they invested heavily in a lot of cutting edge infrastructure during the bubble, but now have been slow to replace it.
The most likely answer as to why the MPD still use floppy disks is there is no funding for a total system upgrade. The most likely reason there is no funding is a combination of conservative decision making combined with a politically well connected vendor that makes big bucks of supporting the existing infrastructure.
The Japan you and I know from personal experience isn't anything at all like the imagined futuristic cyberpunk image that the chattering internet has created.
And I don't see anything wrong with floppies, besides them and drives no longer being produced. USB sticks are too expensive, and optical media are too delicate, often single-use and an overkill for this purpose.
/s
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 20s earlier than scheduled. Source: https://www.mir.co.jp/assets_rti/pdf/2017.11.14.pdf
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.
Pretty awesome watching the train you've been waiting for just sort of keep going :D. (The magic of newtown Wales!)
The worst is tho running and rushing and then finally making it into train car that turns out to be going completely wrong direction.
And yes, Japanese trains are crazily accurate. Not only are they (almost) always perfectly on time, they also stop exactly at the position that is indicated on the platform, so you can line up and wait right in front of the train door.
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.
Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
Computer control is more of a safety issue than a reliability enhancer. Computers are pretty good at stopping trains before they crash into another train or rocket off of a curve some idiot took at 80mph, but not so good at driving the train at its safe limits. Ever ride BART? It's been fully automatic since its inception (in normal operation, drivers have an e-stop button and make announcements) and it isn't setting records for on-time performance.
I think the fascination with Japan's on-time record is a little overblown. I went to high school in Tokyo and I was late plenty of times due to train problems. Snow? Schedule is fucked for the entire day; trains canceled, trains late. Someone falls in front of a train? You're not going anywhere for an hour. As a rider of the New York subway system during the "meltdown", I can tell you that you can absolutely do worse than Japan. But the MTA was still happy to hand out vouchers explaining why I was late to work.
I don't know if they do this, but I'd imagine if they built in buffers and then controlled the train speed based on arrival/departure times they could get pretty accurate. If a run's maximum average speed (mouthful) is 120 km/h then plan on 100 km/h which gives you +20 buffer to play with in order to make sure the time is right. A computer would allow that +20 to be evenly spread so passengers aren't aware of it.
That, of course, has much less to do with computers and more to do with planning and eliminating and accounting for unknowns as much as possible.
It can, if the door slam shuts instead of attempting to reopen and close.
The high punctuality isn't necessarily without its faults; it creates a high-stress environment to adhere to schedule. 106 people died in a train crash that is hypothesized to have happened because the train was 60 seconds late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
LOL. If that was true the Swedish train companies would have been bankrupt decades ago. Swedish trains are extremely unreliable. As someone who used to take the Stockholm-Gothenburg train a lot for work I was happy every time I arrived less than an hour late.
For intercity routes you get 25% off the ticket after 1h delay and 50% after 2h delay.
Yes, if they screw you over you might get a taxi ride. But most probably you'd just have to wait for several hours and get up to 50% of the ticket price as a voucher for the next trip.
Trains are one of the most embarrassing part of Sweden. And we are probably going to spend and absolute fortune on new tracks and new slow trains (slow because costs have already spun out of control).
Unless it's an umbrella. For some magical reason, umbrellas are excempt from this rule and can be taken from wherever by anyone. I lost a cheap umbrella like this during a trip, and read about it and apparently it's the one item it's definitely not safe to leave unattended in Japan. Go figure!
I imagine this practice has probably been fervently deprecated due to covid19.
I also love that they seem to be taking this seriously, even when it's just 38 people, while all over the world, governments (cough Turkey cough) don't even apologize when they leak the personal details of ALL of their citizens. Well.