[A public service announcement by StarFlork Academy]: After 30 years of service German Navy retires Floppy Disks

I'm very happy to see the Navy running on old hardware. Do you really want the "move fast and break stuff" tech bros designing weapons!? Plus, this is the same week where businesses running Win3.1 dodged the biggest computer outage in history.

Yeah, I'm far past the point where I look forward to updates on applications I use anymore. Everything just keeps getting worse these days. Old thing that works perfectly is the way to go.
- Debian stable user spotted
- You're just getting old bro
I think you have excessive confidence in the cyber security of old institutions.

But also: Is this not NCD? I absolutely want tech-bros running the MIC. I want the next generation of supercarriers to be the Starship to Gerald R. Fords, SLS we are NATO, we can sacrafice a little bit of short-term military readiness in exchange for doing cool shit again.
Worked for Tony Stark.
- Which one? The Comic Alcoholic or Movie Playboy?

You might think this is a joke... But rest assured! IT IS NOT!

It makes sense. Updating the hardware is logical due to magnetic medium degradation. There’s no reason to run a current OS on a closed system. Features are irrelevant. It’s all about stability and security.
- If it still works, it means it's robust, and if it manages to do its work properly then there is no reason to replace it with something unproven.
- Please tell this to my employer who just "upgraded" the OS on our factory machines to windows 11.
I want to know if the us forces are now emulating floppy disks.
- If they are smart with their money yes, if not they would have had to replace everything.
- when we say “emulating floppy disks” are we just talking about… .img files?
- I can't say for certain, but I can say that at least a few upstream O&G companies and at least one downstream O&G company was as of 4 years ago.

I don't see the problem. The system that reads those floppies is probably very deeply integrated into the ship and does it's job very well. At the same time, being able to give it something like a USB instead will update the actually troublesome part (floppy drives) while keeping the part that does it's job correctly untouched.

I do think that USB would not be a good choice, considering how frequently they've been implicated in malicious actions. I mean, USB as the bus would be fine, but, it should use a more esoteric connector.
- Yeah, it's all fun and games until private Doug plugs his compromised phone into the fire control computer USB port to charge it.
  
  They could always use a USB pinout on a proprietary connector I guess.
- Be like Verizon with those in home cell signal devices and use the form factor of HDMI but with USB cords in it.

when we say “emulates floppy disks” are we just talking about .img files?

if so, that’s not nearly as impractical as the meme makes it sound. .img files are quite common for distributing software.

I took that to mean a peripheral that basically pretends to be a floppy disk drive to whatever OS (if any) they're running, maybe reading the data off flash memory or whatever
Probably a floppy disk hardware emulator, something that essentially plugs to the original system's floppy disk interface, has a drive for modern removable media (USB/SD card/whatever), and buttons/displays to support disk image swapping and unmount/eject.
- Those emulators could well have more processing power than the device they're connected to. Very cool tech.

And then got a celebratory fax from HQ.

That might not even be a joke, sadly.

What are they using? A gotek?

Zip drive.

But I'm getting ready for their NGD program (Next Gen Disk), and buying up all Jaz drives and disks left on eBay.

In 50 years when they release the next RFP, I'll be a lock.
- this Lemmite MICs

My disk drives pretend to be SCSI devices: /dev/sda and so on