A Hang In The Linux Kernel Can Happen If Trying To Read A Broken Floppy Then Ejecting It

[M@GOid]

A case of floppy disks, the trigger to my decision to spend the moneys on CD-RW. After a 45min bus trip to a friend's house to bring back a box full of game ROMs, on the good old 56k modem days, I was happily decompressing the file when a disk in the middle failed... I must have look like Scarlett O'Hara, with my fist in the air, swearing things...

[yump]

Floppy disks are like Jesus- they died to become the icon of saving.

schmidtbag A hand with a pen is mostly used to "edit" (or change) something, not saving the changes. So I think that chance is lost.

In the golden future time of effectively infinite disk space (or potentially the golden present time for us programmers and office drones), "saving" will be replaced by the action of creating a named checkpoint in the undo tree. The metaphor git uses for that is tagging, and IMO the march of history is probably not going to erase the concept of labeling otherwise interchangeable physical objects with little cards with text on them. Not any time soon, anyhow.

[tildearrow]

We could just update the icon...

micro-sd-card-icon-01-.jpg?1459754397&s=091ea08e6a9874933cd6f7b79ea7c73c.jpg

Or tell kids that a the floppy icon is a first gen SD card and see how long it takes them to figure out we're all lying.

Erm... no thanks. I am so used to the floppy disk icon.

[CommunityMember]

After a 45min bus trip to a friend's house to bring back a box full of game ROMs ...

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

[Developer12]

It will be interesting to see ultimately how long the floppy disk driver remains within the mainline kernel. Floppies are still used within some industrial equipment still but such systems don't tend to see new major kernel versions.

What Michael doesn't understand is that the industrial equipment isn't what's receiving the new kernel updates. It's the modern computers used to support it. They get updates just like the rest of a company's IT.

But guess what that modern computer needs in order to talk to the old equipment? A floppy drive.

[Vorpal]

We could just update the icon...

micro-sd-card-icon-01-.jpg?1459754397&s=091ea08e6a9874933cd6f7b79ea7c73c.jpg

Or tell kids that a the floppy icon is a first gen SD card and see how long it takes them to figure out we're all lying.

But who actually uses the buttons in the toolbars for saving? You use, Ctrl-S, Cmd-S, C-x C-s, :w, C-O or whatever your software uses.

Even my parents know some basic shortcuts. That includes saving (with the more "normal" Cmd-S/Ctrl-S). And the pieces of software that use something more unusual than that (emacs, nano, vi, ...) usually don't have the toolbar buttons anyway (not that most "normal" users would interact with it anyway). So arguably the image (and button) is completely redundant.

[uxmkt]

Floppies will never disappear ! They are now known to everyone as the standard symbol for "save", even though no one saves anything on a floppy today and lots of young people never actually used one (Oh no ! I'm old !).

The same fate has already befallen hard disks and their icon. The icon of a 3.5" metal case with a slight circular bulge/depression is still used in things like the gtk3 file chooser widget, despite that tech already in the doorframe on its way out...
Did I mention the Windows 9x/2x Explorer network share icon? Besides the hard disk icon part, it depicts a _T connector known from coax networks_. In contemporary Windows, the hard disk was replaced by a screen already, but the T connector stayed. Unforgivable! (1994 wants its 10BASE2 back)

[uxmkt]

But who actually uses the buttons in the toolbars for saving?

But who actually uses graphical editors? :-D

[F.Ultra]

Floppies will never disappear ! They are now known to everyone as the standard symbol for "save", even though no one saves anything on a floppy today and lots of young people never actually used one (Oh no ! I'm old !).

The save icon needs to go completely. There is no reason in 2021 to have to manually save anything. Every single document or file we edit should come with unlimited undo without user interaction. Type a word and turn off your computer and on the next boot that word should be in the loaded document.

[Etherman]

Benchmark of different floppy drive brands?

No! Different kernels of course. 2.0, 2,2, 2,4, 3, 4, and 5!