This sort of thing is why I dislike legislation that mandates the use of something very specific. Things change and it is better to create laws that don’t become outdated as fast as tech tends to.
That’s a Japan thing and a legislative failure.
What normally happens in most countries is the law would say something vague like “digital means or devices such as floppy disks or equivalent”.
Then the Executive makes and maintains the rules of application of that law according to the Hierarchy of Norms (things probably are organized differently in Common Law countries so I don’t know the English term but the principle is the same), which dictates in more detail how the law is to be applied (“please use a web form, or a USB keys for legacy processes”).Sometimes the executive lags behind a bit but typically it’s just a ministry making decisions within the margin of the law, so it’s not too bad.
Without it we get a different iPhone charger every year that no other device is allowing to use
It’s just a brick with a USB socket. I still have 5W usb chargers from iPhones a decade ago that work with anything USB.
They didn’t change connectors on the cables frequently either. The old big one, lightning, and USB C are the only connectors iPhone used.
They also switched ten years ago saying it would be “the connector for the next decade” and now the newer phones are getting USB-C.
Anti-apple people are such pants-pissers.
So they held their word. A decade is ten years.
Exactly
The law doesn’t even force USBC it just forces whatever the international standards working group recommends, if they change the recommendation it will change the port.
So we’re actually having our cake and eating it.
Also stuff like USB 5.0 specifications are designed to work on USBC port so again no actual upgrade will be required.
It’s an argument of centralization vs. decentralization and there are pros and cons to each approach.
Hey, hey - you’re going to have to hotten up that take there, Bubba.
“I have no executive function, so I need the executive branch of the government to function for me.”
Is that hot enough?
🔥
Guess what the EU just did with USB-C?
The EU regulation doesn’t say “USB-C”, but “industry standard charging port” or something. What’s industry standard is an executive decision of the EU commission, unless the USB-IF does something tremendously stupid the commission is just going to rubber-stamp any new standard they come up with.
The EU didn’t event want to legislate in the first place and would’ve preferred for manufacturers to get together and just be sensible, but, well, Apple. The only hold-out.
That’s not quite accurate. The EU doesn’t want anything, but the people involved in this decision absolutely wanted to regulate this. It’s been an issue for decades at this point.
It’s also not because of “well, Apple”. This law doesn’t apply to phones alone, it’s pretty much any mobile device.
It also, and this is one of the big and important parts, requires manufacturers to offer the option to NOT have chargers included. The goal here is to reduce the MASSIVE amount of e waste generated by tablets, phones, cameras, and even (especially in my mind, as these are often not compatible even amongst single manufacturers) laptop chargers. That’s an awesome part of the rule, even if it has a larger compliance window.
Lastly, while the law itself doesn’t require USB C, the legal annex absolutely and quite explicitly DOES state that manufacturers must use USB C. There is a provision that reports must be made every 5 years or so, and consideration will be made concerning the required standards (wireless is mentioned as not being able to effectively be regulated in this way as of yet).
This is a huge win in terms of the reduction in e waste, and the option to not receive a charger is, in my opinion, one of the best parts. I have way too many USB C cables that I can’t find a place to use them all, and I’ve got them in every room.
The EU doesn’t want anything, but the people involved in this decision absolutely wanted to regulate this.
I don’t know what kind of distinction you want to drive at, here. Yes, of course, EU regulations are passed by the parliament. The commission also wanted it in some form. Generally speaking there was no real stiff opposition as pretty much everyone in politics can get something out of it, Greens get their environmentalism, the rest of the parliament and the commission get positive publicity.
It’s also not because of “well, Apple”. This law doesn’t apply to phones alone, it’s pretty much any mobile device.
Apple was the one not switching their phones over, thus the EU (as in “it’s amorphous collective blob of decision-making”) came to see that they’d indeed needed to pass legislation, asking wasn’t enough.
It also, and this is one of the big and important parts, requires manufacturers to offer the option to NOT have chargers included.
Indeed.
Lastly, while the law itself doesn’t require USB C, the legal annex absolutely and quite explicitly DOES state that manufacturers must use USB C.
Yes that’s the starting point. It’s been a while since I looked at the text but the commission is empowered to update that part. That’s why it’s in an annex and not the legal text proper.
The distinction there is just that your statement about the eu NOT wanting to regulate this is incorrect. This is something the members of the eu have wanted regulation on for some time. And not because of Apple, but because of most major manufacturers.
Again, no. It’s not because Apple didn’t change their plug for their mobile devices. It’s because of every device using different chargers. Again, laptops are much worse than a single cable that hasn’t changed in a decade.
By blaming one corporation alone, you are giving every single bad actor a pass. This is how they get away with shit like this.
I’d argue notebook chargers are even MORE awful at this because they’re usually at least $50 for an off-brand and significantly more from the manufacturer.
The EU doesn’t want anything?
Nope. The members of the parliament and council want things. And unlike what the previous commenter said, the vast majority of them did want to regulate this, have wanted to regulate this, and desire regulation independent of Apple’s stubborn refusal to join the 2020s (and late 2010s truthfully).
This was my point. The EU isn’t an amorphous blob, and the individuals involved with this decision do and have wanted this.
That is kind of bordering on metaphysics. The will of the EU is what they agree upon. What they agree upon is decided by vote of its members.
Saying the EU doesn’t want something because technically it’s made of people is not saying much at all, imo. I could just as well claim that there is no free will at all, and we’d be stuck arguing it for 2000 years.
My Americanism got in the way I guess. My politicians are doing their best to not enact a law that went in the ballot as a citizen led initiative and received a majority vote. So saying “America thinks this thing because some politicians did a fucked up thing” would be disingenuous.
My point was that I won’t speak for everyone in the eu, but the members of the European Parliament involved in this directed do want, have wanted, and continue to want this regulation. Saying the “eu” didn’t want this, but “well Apple” is just ridiculous, and the directive I would argue affects other products significantly more simply because of all the laptops switching to usb c. If we just go around pretending the “eu” had their hand forced by one company’s cellphone business (large or not), then we are pretending the other massive corporations are *not committing an infraction against humanity with the large amount of ewaste they are producing.
So I could have worded “the eu doesn’t want anything) better. I just didn’t want an already long post to be even longer. I wrote a book here before I had to erase it and trim it down and I still feel like it’s too long and maybe doesn’t even effectively explain my position l, so maybe I just suck at communicating.
When needed, they can change it faster than Japan did.
you’re incorrect. It doesn’t restrict itself to the USB-C
Luckily usb-c is probably gonna stick around for a while and it’s just a form factor. The standard itself has room to grow, and the EU left the rules open to change.
But I understand the concern, legislating tech sucks. On the other hand, when companies care almost exclusively about profit, not customers or the future of our planet, and won’t improve things themselves… not a lot of other options.
If the 1.44MB DS/HD floppies are too modern for your gear, 720MB DS/DD media is also available (for a premium).
they probably meant 720KB there
I hear data in Japan is smaller and efficiently organized.
Are you snubbing 8" floppies just because they don’t fit in your pocket?
Is that a floppie in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Ah man the translucent colourful floppies… that takes me back
It was a happier time, I miss my atomic purple floppies.
—
I rewrote that several times because I have the mind of a child, but atomic purple 3.5” was even worse so I give up and you get to enjoy both.
I miss 8" floppies, where you could double their capacity with a pair of scissors.
I still have some somewhere. One even says “DOOM” on it, of course.
Lol. I think I still have a bunch of the old Slackware floppies somewhere.
What in the hell are they using them for? They hold so little data I don’t see how they can even be practical at this point.
where I live (not Japan), trams are updated with a suitcase worth of floppy disks (and these are the more modern trams here)
Older Boeing’s use floppies to update their flight computer data even today
And Boeing is obviously trustworthy when it comes to maintenance.
ones with floppies are alright, beware modern ones.
if it aint broke dont fix it. That door plug on the other hand
I remember using floppies and they broke a lot. Probably more than USB drives
That’s weird, I’ve always thought of floppies as pretty durable. The 3.5" ones anyway; the older larger ones were flimsier. On the 3.5" ones the little metal cover would get bent sometimes, or occasionally crushed if someone put one in a back pocket and forgot before they sat down; but in my career I’ve had a lot more thumbdrives broken off in the port than bent/crushed floppies. How did you find most of yours broke? Maybe I had an abundance of clumsy colleagues… or maybe I joined the IT workforce too late to have witnessed the tsunami of broken floppies!
Thumbdrives broken off in the port?? That’s some degenerate levels of sexual frustration coming to light, brother…
Work in IT as long as I have and if you don’t learn not to judge, you at least learn not to bother judging 😋
Preach it, person. Sysadmin here, the job fades you to humanity.
Bent and crushed floppies were less of a problem than simple failures of reading and writing them, which in my memory happened much more often than they do to USB drives now. I don’t see people breaking usb sticks in half that often either.
One thing came to mind, Irreplaceable infrastructure computer systems from decades ago.
There are powerplants and oil rigs that use computer from decades ago which is irreplaceable (either due to technical or cost effective).
either due to technical or cost effective
Mainly due to proprietary hardware+software solutions which cannot be ported now and remaking them with new hardware will require redoing the same processes as before (probably with additional stuff added by later laws) all over again.
If you try to replace just the hardware, you get fun solutions like a modern computer with a VM running Dosbox on critical infrastructure. Hey, if it works and your boss is willing to sign off on it…
Hehe, a similar thingy happened in one of my previous companies. The CPU was easily spoofed using
qemubut in that case the whole OS was almost immutable with hardcoded bus configs for the video card (some old pre ATI card), which I was unable to pass through, causing the project to be taken out of my hands. I feel like it didn’t go forward after that.
10 to one they weren’t, look how oddly this article is phrased. I’d guess there was a rule government offices had to accept floppy discs, have the equipment to read them, but the clients weren’t actually submitting that way anymore.
Like, the first paragraph explains.
Until last week there were about 1,900 official governmental application procedures that stipulated businesses must submit floppies or CD-ROMs (specifically) containing supplementary data.
Not “the government had to accept them”, but “businesses were required to submit them”.
It’s not a hypothetical problem, there was even news a few years ago about how businesses were complaining they had to send in a dozen+ disks at a time because of file formats.
The laws were written at the dawn of the digital age, in the 70s and 80s, stipulating specific storage media, and just never got updated because the government didn’t view it as a problem.
Yeah so I read the whole article and it’s all phrased like it wants to convince you of that.
You’re welcome to do your own research, then. Or just make a call based off your read of their vibes, doesn’t matter to me.
Upvoted because proper’ish use of 10 and one. :)
Is there another way to express it except : ?
10 to 1. Many style guides require numbers lower than 10 to be spelt out. Many people think that what style guides say is “correct”
Oh. Yeah I’ve never read a style guide.
I will never accept spelt nor smelt, unless we’re talking about grains and ore refining, respectively.
That’s fine. Spelled vs spelt is different regionally in the UK. I was taught “spelled”, I say it as spelled, but more often than not I type it spelt because it’s easier on a glass keyboard
Hahaha I can respect that. I do have a pretty big chip on my shoulder when it comes to language, semantics, syntax, whatever, but I will always let it slide if the counter argument is based around instrumental favorability.
Their government agencies still used a lot of them.
Yes, but can I still submit using a fax machine?
Sure, that’s never going. Why would we want to lose our technological connection to Abraham Lincoln and samurai?
I love that this is literally accurate.
Had to go check, damn.
Christ!
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical-mechanical fax-type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received British patent 9745 on May 27, 1843, for his “Electric Printing Telegraph”.
In 1880, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the scanning phototelegraph that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing.
What samurai?
Samurai (侍、さむらい) were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in the late 1870s during the Meiji era.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Samurai (侍、さむらい) were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in the late 1870s during the Meiji era. They were the well-paid retainers of the daimyo, the great feudal landholders. They had high prestige and special privileges. Following the passing of a law in 1629, samurai on official duty were required to practice daishō (wear two swords). Samurai were granted kiri-sute gomen: the right to kill anyone of a lower class in certain situations.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document is scanned with a fax machine (or a telecopier), which processes the contents (text or images) as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone system in the form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the image, printing a paper copy. Early systems used direct conversions of image darkness to audio tone in a continuous or analog manner. Since the 1980s, most machines transmit an audio-encoded digital representation of the page, using data compression to more quickly transmit areas that are all-white or all-black.
Healthcare worker, chiming in:
Yes please.
Ah yes, just how sensitive information should be sent. In clear text over the internet.
It’s not in clear text, you have to use a decent OCR
Or you can just read it directly. Just need some light.
It’s actually better than plain text stored on a Hard Drive/ CD/ Floppy et c., which requires corresponding reading devices, format parsing systems, a display to show it and an appropriate power source, after which you can consider using a human to use the data (or remove the monitor and convert data into other data, in which case, you need another output device/network).
Needing a human in the loop kills automation.
I’d rather not automate convicting random people.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blockedBesides, what I said earlier would be more of a concern for preservation of information in case of civilisation level disasters.
No, we’re automating HIPAA violations for nefarious purposes. Do try to keep up.
You can encrypt emails, we’ve been doing it for decades. It’s easier to compromise faxes than encrypted emails
The message I was responding to uses fax.
In principle none of that data should leave the phone line. Dunno whether carriers encrypt VoIP but in any case it shouldn’t leak into the internet. Back in the days it was considered secure because in practice it’s indeed similarly secure as a letter: In organisational terms, yes, in computer science terms, hell no.
What year is this, 2015?
Who’s Fred? Also, perhaps related, what’s kerning?
No, only on paper with hanko stamp that you left at home.
Japan has been living in the year 2000 for 40 years
How do you force someone to use them?
FTA:
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has abolished any requirement for applicants to use this ancient clicking and buzzing magnetic media when filing official documents. Until last week there were about 1,900 official governmental application procedures that stipulated businesses must submit floppies or CD-ROMs (specifically) containing supplementary data.
Oh, just government.
Open and close the metal shutter on the disk in their general direction to assert dominance
You tie them to the desk and withhold food and water until they reformat an entire box of Mac floppies for use in Windows.
Fuckin’ dumbfuck 3rd grade teacher having us all do class assignments in a lab full of Macs, saving our work on Mac formatted disks, and then expecting us to also work on it at home on our parent’s Compaqs/IBMs.
Sorry, just had a core memory unlocked.
Here are your twin blades. You know what to do.
Wait… I could use Mac floppies in windows since, 95, I think? Maybe even back in Win3.1 days, IIRC (I seem to recall seeing the “. Resource Fork” folder back then). But my memory is fuzzy.
I think you had to reformat to make them Bootable though?
Not in the 3.1 or 95 days if I recall correctly. That wasn’t fully unlocked until windows 98.
Around 2002-3 Mac dropped support for floppies even on machines with a floppy drive installed.
Which led to some pretty fun times when I needed to transfer files from a non-networked stand alone apple machine that my idiot coworker had upgraded the OS on without checking the specs.
I wonder if this will affect the vintage computer enthusiasts?
They’re not banning floppies lol, they’re just not required for submitting things to the government anymore.
I imagine such a huge drop in demand would probably lead to any still standing manufacturers to cease production though.
The last manufacturers stopped making them 10 years ago. There’s basically just one guy “making” floppies these days, and he doesn’t actually manufacture them, he just buys used ones for pennies on the dollar, formats and tests them, and sells them on. Not one company has made new floppies in a decade. A shocking number of industries are dependant on just like, this one random dude.
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Noooo!
I just like them.
I think they are neat
I use them as coasters and as a source of filters for making IR only cameras.
