Japan Declares 'War' on the Humble Floppy Disk in New Digitization Push (bloomberg.com) 85
Japan's digital minister, who's vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared "war" on a technology many haven't seen for decades -- the floppy disk. From a report: The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1,900 government procedures and must go, digital minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday. "We will be reviewing these practices swiftly," Kono said in a press conference Tuesday, who added that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has offered his full support. "Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?" Japan isn't the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology -- the US Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it has ended the use of floppy disks, which were first developed in the 1960s, in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. Sony Group stopped making the disks in 2011 and many young people would struggle to describe how to use one or even identify one in the modern workplace.
Next... (Score:3)
...they'll go after 8-tracks!
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...they'll go after 8-tracks!
If they really want to impress me, they can take their Samurai swords and go after our vinyl record hipsters.
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A bit surprised to see that the Hanko Stamp is on the extinction list. I think that's a piece of cultural history to be preserved.
But I can agree that media has evolved so fast these days that it's hard to keep up on media types. The important thing is after all the data format, not the media carrying the data.
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"A bit surprised to see that the Hanko Stamp is on the extinction list."
Same reason they want to get rid of the western equivalent of signing in ink. It doesn't integrate well into an all-digital document flow (in fact, it does so less well than signing, since you *can* use a touch interface to sign something).
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>since you *can* use a touch interface to sign something
Not nearly as well as someone with experience using a pen. Digital signatures can be more easiliy faked.
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It may be inferior, but it is doable, and is being done everywhere. Hanko stamps, not so much.
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Don't you just need a picture of the stamp? You could make a little slot with a camera where people insert the stamp to validate. You could even have the stamps keep their physical form, and add an RF tag to the stamp for a more fancy id if they were so inclined.
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Forget 8-tracks (Score:2)
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I just told a customer to fax some info. They tried to send it by one if those "secure" email things, but as usual it didn't work. Fax is old but it works, and for some reason it's more trusted than email.
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Fax is old but it works, and for some reason it's more trusted than email.
IIRC the logic behind it being more trusted than email is that, by default, a fax is (should?) never be stored on a server. Never mind that the fax system our organization uses just takes the document and makes it a (non-password protected) PDF and emails it...
So much more secure than simple email that way!
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No, indeed, nevermind that. Because by then it's inside the organisation and it's on them to deal with the information properly. If they fuck that up, it's on them. The important part is where the message travels between organisations, through public carrier territory. Because you have very little influence there, so that's your Achilles heel.
Fax travels, well, used to travel, over dedicated voice circuit lines that in many jurisdictions have specific legal protection. Moreover, you'd get acknowledgement f
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Theoretically doesn't get stored, and theoretically the phone number is tied to a bill payer and unlikely to go stale and be taken over by someone else.
Re: Next... (Score:2)
Don't worry, the hipsters will bring it back just like vinyl. They'll insist that MIDI files sound better when played from a floppy disk.
Japan is a crazy place (Score:1)
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In some places top of the line cutting edge systems. Immediately right next to it on same desk, a x286 with 5inch floppies. And they are wired together with an RS232 cable
So... like the US military, then?
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In some places top of the line cutting edge systems. Immediately right next to it on same desk, a x286 with 5inch floppies. And they are wired together with an RS232 cable
So... like the US military, then?
Or any lab with an expensive piece of test equipment that works, is old, but still expensive to buy and is controlled with some dos program via RS232.
Re: Japan is a crazy place (Score:3)
As a scientist that uses many laboratory instruments (and builds them), the difference between old and new instruments is that the old ones have a DB9 port for RS232 comms, while the new ones have a USB port with a USB-to-RS232 converter built in. Either way, your data acquisition computer is receiving an RS232 data stream.
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while the new ones have a USB port with a USB-to-RS232 converter built in. Either way, your data acquisition computer is receiving an RS232 data stream.
And many of the three contact unpopulated pads on modern motherboards, PCIe cards, server backplanes, and similar devices are in fact 3.3v serial debug TTY ports that just need a 3.3v tolerant USB serial adapter to talk to...
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I often run into GPIB. I keep a USB-GPIB adaptor on hand for such occasions.
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Welcome to Slashdot, where we're lucky of people finish reading the headline before deciding what to post in their comments. ... even when they're not copypasta spammers.
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That's a very common arrangement in many labs, control rooms, factories or any facility related to infrastructure. I would wager that every factory I've been in has at least one DOS-era x86 PC somewhere on site running an air compressor, boiler, CNC machine or some other kind of industrial thing you can't really tell what it does but looks very expensive and heavy.
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I would very much like to go to that place, or see pictures of that kind of technology being used for useful work. Like this Commodore 64C that's been balancing tires for 25 years https://hothardware.com/news/b... [hothardware.com]
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Can you find a single example? For the most part Japan is low tech.
They're getting rid of the save button? (Score:2)
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It's prominently featured in the upper left corner of the latest version of Microsoft Word; a depiction of a 3.5" floppy; complete with the sliding metal window and label area. Thing is for all the machinations of UI experts and their incessant icon redesigns nothing has emerged to represent the concept of "saving" better than a floppy disc icon.
Re:They're getting rid of the save button? (Score:5, Funny)
nothing has emerged to represent the concept of "saving" better than a floppy disc icon
Soon, it will be replaced by a little cloud icon.
Oddly enough, the "delete" button will use the same icon.
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nothing has emerged to represent the concept of "saving" better than a floppy disc icon.
How about a life preserver? Or a piggy bank?
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nothing has emerged to represent the concept of "saving" better than a floppy disc icon.
How about a life preserver? Or a piggy bank?
How about user-skinnable apps? There are a hundred million humans who would probably like to have that button's icon be a crucifix.
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Floppy == save. Turtle == slow. Rabbit == fast. All the icons in your car. A zillion emoji that do not depict emotion.
Prediction: in 100-200 years, most writing will be iconographic since it's spoken-language independent. Seems to have worked for China.
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A zillion emoji that do not depict emotion.
Just so you know, "emoji" comes from the Japanese for "picture character", and, unlike the term "emoticon", is etymologically unrelated to the English word "emotion".
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It's not a save button. It's a vending machine with a beverage dispensed [uxdesign.cc].
Young people say (Score:5, Funny)
Cool! You 3D-printed the Save button!
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Then they'll never feel the pain of getting a copy of Windows 95....I want them to feel that pain.
Why would you ever wish that on anyone.
Not worth it to replace for older systems (Score:3)
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Several three-level agencies still get equipment upgrades via removable media. One could replace the use of floppies or CD's with newer form of removable media, but that might be cost-prohibitive.
Floppy disk drive emulators (Score:2)
There are drop-in replacement with identical IDE connector that accept USB sticks instead of floppies. Informal price on a forum is 240 euros, which is less expensive than a pack of salvaged floppy disks right now. Interestingly, the company that manufactures them has its page in English, French and... Japanese. https://www.datex-dsm.com/ [datex-dsm.com]
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Then you have to keep people from plugging in their phones, thinking its a charging port.
I think whatever you go with, you need something other than USB for something as mision critical as navigation computers.
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Not IDE. Floppy is a Shugart interface. It's an even older standard that at one time a modified version existed for hard drives.
And there are plenty of alternatives like G
Japan has a lot of low hanging fruit (Score:2)
Japan has a culture of overwork, but you can't really work that hard as a person. They can force the blue collar guys to do it (since it's easy to measure moment to moment work there) but it's harder to squeeze that extra productivity out of the white collar guys. The goal
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that's why they make the news. e.g. they've got large businesses sending docs by floppy disk instead of just using a secure email service.
The floppy is simpler, provided both parties have drives and floppies. Which, since they're still in use, is the case in Japan.
For "secure email" isn't. My idea of "secure email" is to run the message through GPG then email the result. I've seen various clients manage to fuck this up in varous interesting ways, including well-known and widely-used ones. If they could do it at all. Lots of interesting failure modes there, too.
So instead you get third parties that "securely" sit on your email for you. And y
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Updating anything critical straight from a floppy is crazy, they're not very reliable. After ruining a motherboard or two trying to update the BIOS from bad floppies I learned to create a boot drive with the BIOS on it that copied the update files to a RAM drive and updated the BIOS from that. I used to have to update the BIOS on motherboards a lot in the late 90s early 00s.
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All this for an aircraft that is no longer being manufactured and is slowly being phased out...
...of one country's inventory...directly into another.
"Slowly" tends to take a while when you consider a planet full of aviation demand.
Nothing more reliable than the floppy disk (Score:2)
Meanwhile, there are already solutions developed for old machines that allow users to plug in a memory card to a device that acts like a floppy drive to the computer so it can read and write to it just fine.
There's just no profit motive to do the right thing so they pretend they need to keep using unreliable ancient tech.
Not old systems (Score:2)
The thing is you're speaking as someone with a western view. For you the idea of a fax or floppy equates to older out of production archaic systems. But the reality is in Japan we're talking about current systems, newly installed, used for daily business, and not just some archaic old edge case like an out of production aircraft.
Buncha amateurs (Score:3)
We still have working laboratory instruments here that save to 8" floppy disks...beat that!
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I beat you... My Final Year Project required to set-up a working magnetic tape reader on a IBM PC Intel 80386 and go through 80 magnetic tapes just for a single project... ...and some of them weren't even from that tape reader but from a high density one.
Also, I'm referring not to the "modern" magnetic tapes so fancy that you can place in your pocket. I' referring to those magnetic tapes so big that if they fall on your foot it will break...
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I wouldn't be surprised if there's a punched tape system somewhere.
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Well I've written computer programs to consumer-grade cassette tapes before. Fiddly little volume control on the tape player and it only worked properly about 20% of the time.
Pretty sure that has you beat. I also have some punch cards sitting around and a few old programming magazines I still refer to now and then.
I can beat that! (Score:2)
...oh yeah, they own a monument company that makes headstones for cemeteries.
Stick to the ink... (Score:1)
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They should be making sure they can read any format their citizens care to offer them to read,
I demand that the IRS take my Form 1040 chiseled into stone tablets.
It's the IRS, so ... Re:Stupid is as stupid does (Score:1)
... they probably would take it, as long as it's properly filled out, legible, and signed.
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I think what the Digital Minister in Japan tackling is not floppy disks, if you read his exact text. He also listed CD and MD.
He is combating the outdated procedure that one must send a physical media to contain and deliver a digital file to government. His solution is probably about creating one or more online systems such that people can upload files there through the internet instead.
Just to clarify... (Score:2)
When we say "the US Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it has ended the use of floppy disks", are we talking 3.5", 5.25" or 8" disks? IIRC, the 8" ones were still used in ICBM silos as of a decade ago. But maybe I'm just making things up.
Seems a silly question but so was using 8" floppies in the oughties.
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8" floppies are the most reliable floppies. If you're going to use floppies for some reason (seems dumb, but let's just assume it makes sense somehow) and you don't need a lot of data, they have the least dense sectors... especially if you use one of the least dense formats. 5.25" floppies are a close second. Writing ~720kB to a HD 3.5" floppy is pretty good too, but IME most 3.5" drives are fragile.
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Can't they emulate it? (Score:2)
Is there no plug in solid state solution? I mean I can put Nintendo Famicom Disk system on my MISTeR FPGA.
The problem with floppies was they weren't very reliable even in their day. I used them in high school for school papers and they had us make a backup. I'd use AOL floppies until they started sending out CDs. Just had to tape over the read-only missing tab iirc.
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GoTek disk drives are quite popular for that kind of thing. Very handy for vintage samplers, workstations and similar keyboards from the 90s. Korg in particular store most of the preset sounds in RAM on machines like the Triton and Trinity, which means you have to reload them from disk when the internal battery is replaced.
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Is there no plug in solid state solution?
USB Flash drives. They can be found anywhere. Lying on the sidewalk, for example. Just pick one up and plug it in.
Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days? (Score:2)
A quick search on Amazon turned up a few listings at about $2 per disk. So they are still being made and sold. You can also still buy new IDE floppy drives for about $100. Some people are so lazy they can't run a quick search and just ask questions that are easily answered.
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8" SSSD hard-sector disks... just in case (Score:1)
I keep a box of 8" SSSD hard-sector disks around... just in case the one in my IBM 3600 POS (Point of Sale, but I'm OK with Piece of Sh*t) system were to fail.
3600 had an interesting networking wiring... and pre-dated token ring. It worked on a serial 'ring' using stereo-style 1/4" headphone jacks as the connector. The wire was this special dual-channel shielded stuff. Up to 8 devices on a ring, up to 4 rings on a controller, with a 9600 bps modem back-hauling it to the MF. On more than one occasion I h
Nothing inherently wrong with floppies (Score:2)
Granted, for 99+% of the uses they once had, they are no longer the right tool for the job.
But for certain situations it's better to "stick with what you've got that you know works" than try to change things.
For example, I still use late-18th-centry technology [blogs.bl.uk] to record information to a data-storage technology older than electronics [afandpa.org] for certain types of information, and it works out just fine. Both the recording device and storage media are widely available from multiple vendors at a reasonable price. Whe
The US Army got rid of them in 2014 (Score:2)
The 8 inch floppies hat is.
Re: Fax ! (Score:2)
I think that's still common in much of the world (eg for large electronic payments) due to it being perceived as more secure than email/cloud. I don't know if that perception is based in reality. I'm sure someone here knows more about this than me. I just know my company needs to maintain a fax number because we still have customers and financial institutions that require us to transfer certain documents by fax. Probably a few times per month.
Remember Flow chart printer? (Score:2)
Totally useless, no one can actually follow anything or understand it. Asked my prof about it and he laughed. Apparently military contracts specified a flow chart of the code must be delivered as the completed project.
Hah! (Score:2)
Floppy data is superior to SSD data (Score:3)
Data retrieved from floppy disks is organic and has a unique timbre to it, it is far superior to data retrieved from SSDs which are synthetic. Floppies are typically made from organic plastic that is retrieved from natural hydrocarbon springs deep underground. SSDs are made from silicon and various metallics. Metals have been known to present health risks.
When governments mandate technologies (Score:2)
In 20 years time, I wonder if the EU will declare war on the obsolete USB-C connector, that it mandated back in the 2020's.
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No, why would they? Their mandate included a regular technology assessment to change the connector if a more appropriate solution comes along.
You're not as clever as you think. But you do seem to be as ignorant as you appear.
FAX machines (Score:2)
Maybe floppy discs aren't the only problem.
Japan is (I'm told) awash with fax machines.
Due to the intricacies of their writing (Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana), it's hard to type things. So everyone uses faxes.