Interesting parallel here to the floppy disk icon being used for "save". It's quite possible that icon is ubiquitous enough that, without a push to change it, it sticks around for 100 years as well.
Actual “floppy” disks (8” and later 5.25”) were flexible and needed a slightly more rigid sleeve to make them easy to handle. The 3.5” ones needed the sleeve to protect the medium (the actual disk).
There are some games that for past some radar like the "Buddy" series - it seems innocuous but it's all about dismemberment of the buddy character. It's "funny" in the way "Happy Tree Friends" is funny. Less so to the plastic developing psyche of a toddler.
Cartoons and games like Super Mario are episodic. There is finality to completing the episode/level. Most modern games are explicitly designed to be addictive, so they eschew levels and opt for open-world or continuous play formats.
For passive content, they have a similar response (though not quite as pronounced) to turning off the TV in the middle of a movie. I don't blame them, though. It's really shitty to have to stop a movie in the middle. But continuous-play games have no middle or end, so there is no chance for a graceful exit.
So the Nintendo 2DS was an experiment to test the aformentioned theory of episodic content. It worked. I can let the kids play the games for an hour and at the end of the hour there isn't any wailing or gnashing of teeth.
We're not super-strict about screen time, but we're also not lassaiz-faire about it. We try to model appropriate consumption habits: 1-hour max on a "school night" (and almost never on consequitive nights), frequently a movie on Friday nights, sometimes Saturday morning cartoon binge if we don't already have plans for the day.
We let our kids watch TV to let them enjoy the programs they are watching. I'm not going to deny them a pleasure that I also enjoy. I'm also relatively strict on myself concerning media consumption. We're are just not using TV to park them so we can work.
In any case, Portuguese checking in. We also said "diskette", though some people might spell it "disquete" (ew)
"Chinaman" is considered racist now, but I suspect "Frenchman" is still good.
Man the good ol days. I remember when the movie Hackers came out we all loved it for its bullshit, the way it made the scene 'cool' and not just for us dweebs. But but we also hated it as hacking could definitely be some of the most boring time until something happens.
The floppy conversations always make me think of Johnny Lee Miller throwing a floppy in the trash yelling 'they're trashing our rights!' or Angelina Jolie pretending to pee in the men's bathroom to get the one hidden there.
It even made floppys seem cool somehow.
When in reality even installing Eye of The Beholder was 20+ disks and several hours. And God help you if you lost/damaged/rewrote one!
I had to look it up; I can't believe I have never heard of this movie, I should have been interested back then. Wargames (1983) was the film that my computer friends and I associated with our activities, and I was disappointed for years after that nothing came close to it, maybe Sneakers (1992), and 3 Days of the Condor (1975), though that is more of a spy intrigue genre, but it included a fascinating introduction to phreaking. More recently, I enjoyed Blackhat (2015) and Mr. Robot also scratched that itch. I'm going to look for Hackers (1985). Thanks for mentioning.
Condor and Blackhat are actually new to me so watching that first!
Mr Roboto was good to me, I love BD Wong so hard- I don't know if anyone out there has seen Focus (Will Smith movie) but he is Fantastic and steals the movie though he's only in it for 10 minutes.
One can use rough cut lumber for building but it throws off everything a half inch at a time, so your final wall may not fit or be attached.
I'm in my early 20s, and know what a 3.5" floppy looks like, but I know others who don't.
Also, of those of us who do there's probably a 50% chance that we'd say "3D printed save icon" as a joke!
Someone managed to insert a 5.25" floppy in the gap between the covers for the (empty) 5.25" bays just over the 3.5" drive slot.
It makes some strange impression to me to talk of floppies in the past and to think that many people never actually saw one (let alone use it).
A:las poor floppy, I knew you well. [0]
Perhaps this was during my early college days and I could only afford the cheap ones.
Only if the concept of manual save sticks around that long.
For the most part the intent is to memorialize a snapshot of the work, a task the floppy icon has been fulfilling all along.
Call me old-fashioned but please give me a save button and a file picker ;)
I'm sure I've seen it in other web contexts.
You can see it in the top right corner here: https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_au/photo/g/google-docs-2010-old...
...and when the autosave inevitably fails, deception like that only serves to anger your users more.
I’ve lost enough work prior to auto-save being common that I never want to deal with an app that doesn’t somehow save my work pretty frequently.
However, Cmd-S is so engrained into the muscle memory, that it's almost instinctual to hit it after every press of a semi-colon.
For certain programs this would be overkill of course, but for others it would be quite cool.
VSCode has an autosave that's triggered when you change a file.
> Too bad they can't steal more sane ideas from JetBrains' IDEs, I might actually consider switching ;)
Not being an IDE is what I like about it, my experiences with JetBrain's IDEs weren't good.
And you didn’t develop the habit of compulsive Ctrl-S every five seconds? ;)
Experienced users will use a keyboard shortcut, others will rely on autosave or find the File > Save menu. Alas, I suspect the floppy disk icon is doomed.
However, this would not work for binary type files like MOV, PSD, etc.
Relevant HN thread: https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/yestercode.html
Changes should be saved with deliberation, not "whenever".
What icon would you use? it's not an easy question.
the alternative seems to be pictures of folders and clouds with arrows going in and out of them, when the extremely distinctive floppy disk icon unambiguously means whatever form of 'save' is most intuitive and useful
Also, Apple famously used the OP's bomb icon whenever Mac OS plunged forward into a crash.
GP's point is quite interesting because there is a generation or two that hasn't seen a real floppy disk beside on those icons. they probably have no clue what it is.
i wonder what other icon images are like that.
Oracle used to have logos for some products that looked like that (or, come to think of it, like a stack of button-cell batteries):
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fvtcholdin...
And I've always wondered if they based their HQ building on those logos, or if it was the other way around:
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Flive.stat...
Thinking about it further, this is true of OS X too. Even though it made toolbars more ubiquitous, it was still unusual for "standard" actions to be placed there.
I would think that a longtime Mac user probably associates "save" with the key shortcut ⌘-S more strongly than any kind of icon.