floppy

The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to…

is an innovative country that leads the way on many technological fronts. But the wheels of bureaucracy often turn incredibly slowly there. So much so, that the government still requires businesses to provide information on floppy disks and CD-ROMs when they submit certain official documents.That's starting to change. Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. "Under the current…

Floppy crystals. Salts that contain water in their crystalline structure can become soft and floppy. Credit: UvAWhen it comes to crystals, we tend to imagine solid, rigid structures with distinct, repeating patterns, such as ice, salt, and quartz. However, new research conducted by Noushine Shahidzadeh, a physicist from the University of Amsterdam Institute of Physics, reveals a different reality: crystals can also be soft and pliable, lacking the recognizable facets that we typically associate with them.The results of…

Chuck E. Cheese announced in 2017 that it would be moving away from animatronic shows, in favor of video-based entertainment. Image: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)Two of the greatest memories of our childhoods—an adolescent casino and an antiquated data storage format—are still colliding to this very day. A Chuck E. Cheese employee gave his TikTok viewers the low-down on how the pizzeria/arcade combo still uses floppy disks to load its animatronic shows.Earlier this year, TikTok user showbizpizzaman—who goes by…

Fewer than 20 Boeing 747-200s remain in service worldwide, and only in cargo or military configurations. The US Air Force operates six, two of them as Air Force One. It’s unclear whether they still use floppy disks, too, but the US military employed the even-older 8-inch floppy disks in its nuclear arsenal until 2019.Several other types of commercial aircraft also use floppy disks, including newer variants of the 747 and the 767, older Airbus A320s, and some business jets such as Gulfstreams built until the 1990s. It is…

We’re not here to clutch our pearls at the mere thought of onscreen amorousness taking pride of place on a major streaming service, quite the opposite in fact. That being said, we’d have preferred if this week’s titillating title wasn’t quite so flaccid, even if Fatale has proven to be a great deal more popular with crowds than critics. In fact, audiences literally enjoyed it twice as much, with the film’s middling 44 percent Rotten Tomatoes score being dwarfed by its rock hard 88 percent user average. Fatale has been…

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Diglett grew a little taller? Pokémon Violet and Scarlet will answer that question with its latest monster, a taller and wigglier version of Diglett named Wiglett. The Pokémon Company and Nintendo released a three-and-a-half-minute video in Japan on Wednesday highlighting Diglett’s floppy form in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, as discovered by the Paldea region’s Pokémon World Ecological Society. Serebii, the world’s largest Pokémon fansite, shared the video with English…

The floppy disk business will be toast in four more years, reckons the self-described “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” However, Tom Persky, Owner of US-based floppydisk.com, a site dedicated to servicing the last pockets of demand for diskettes, says the end is in sight.Sony was the last diskette maker, ceasing production a decade ago, but Persky’s business has been ticking over on “a couple of million” floppy disks snapped up when production ended. Every now and then, Persky gets a chance to buy a few…

Japan has a high level of adoption when it comes to advanced technologies and is a world leader in various areas, such as robotics. However, it's also resistant to certain facets of modernization and tend to stick to old-fashioned solutions — fax machines, for instance, are still widely used. And apparently, so are floppy disks. The country's newly appointed Minister of Digital Affairs, Taro Kono, has tweeted that he's declaring "a war on floppy disks." Apparently, there are still around 1,900 government procedures in…

Japan may well be a leader in innovation and technology, but this week a prominent government figure revealed how it sometimes likes to hold on to old technologies, too. Days after taking up his role as the nation’s Minister of Digital Affairs, Taro Kono tweeted: “Digital Minister declares a war on floppy discs.” That’s right, floppy disks, those data-holding plastic objects that our great grandparents used to stick into computers. Though in Japan, some folks still do. Kono said there are “about 1900 government…