141–150 of 252 posts
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Are you hiring young engineers who want to learn the old stuff?
Where are you going to find a young engineer who wants to build a dead-end career? I'm sure that if you pay them enough, someone will show up, but most people would rather build skills that will continue to be useful rather than skills that will be useless once an inevitable, sorely needed refresh happens.
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The problem is "lower my taxes" single issue voters. People vote for whomever lowers taxes and then complain about potholes. It's always the same people. GOVERNMENT IS INCOMPETENT BLAH BLAH. Yeah, cause you refuse to fund it and everything goes to shit, then is 10x more expensive to fix it compared to properly funding maintenance. You end up paying more in the end because these people can't see past the couple hundre…
You have some evidence that government is not incompetent ?
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LOL:) this story seems to resurface every couple of years. My favorite part of the article: "Jeffrey Tumlin: "It's a question of risk. The system is currently working just fine but we know that with each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." This seems to imply they have been using the exact same disk for the past 20 years…
You make a good point. However, even with the disks backed up to a better storage medium, detecting data loss on the floppy and getting a replacement written and deployed to the correct location might take a while. During that time the system may face unacceptable transit delays.
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A once a generation refresh seems okay in my book. The Breda trains that came in 1996 were being phased out about twenty years into their tenure, most generally seem to think that is about reasonable a time to do something like that. I don’t see software related regimes as inherently that different. Since I experienced 5.25 inch floppy disk era...and even the occasional bernoulli disk...we could simply say: the syste…
Wait, you’re suggesting replacing trains because the computers inside them are old?
And in the video, she says “on 3x 5 inch floppy disks like this one ”
My company provides new compute modules for another major global city's infrastructure that still relies on Intel CPU's from the early 80's. That is, we are building them brand new boards populated with chips that are over 40 years old. They haven't shown any interest in updating the system. It works, they can get service, and get "new" replacements for things that go bad. What they might not know though is that ther…
LOL:) this story seems to resurface every couple of years. My favorite part of the article: "Jeffrey Tumlin: "It's a question of risk. The system is currently working just fine but we know that with each increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic failure." This seems to imply they have been using the exact same disk for the past 20 years…
There’s also the chance that they take a disk that’s on the verge of failure, plug it into the system, and some corrupted commands get loaded into the system. That could easily result in a “catastrophic failure”.
Floppy disks are not reliable or cheap. They physically degrade over time, and at this point are nowhere near cheap for “new” disks.
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The problem is "lower my taxes" single issue voters. People vote for whomever lowers taxes and then complain about potholes. It's always the same people. GOVERNMENT IS INCOMPETENT BLAH BLAH. Yeah, cause you refuse to fund it and everything goes to shit, then is 10x more expensive to fix it compared to properly funding maintenance. You end up paying more in the end because these people can't see past the couple hundre…
You have some evidence that government is not incompetent ?
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Sirens don't even need to be that complicated. A motor, a noise generator wheel (basically just a big spinning squirrelcage fan), and a horn. You could toggle them on/off with a simple relay/contactor.
These "sirens" actually need to be able to play spoken announcements - something they did easily since about 2005, before the fumbled 2019-2024 shutdown/upgrade. More history, through January 2022, via JWZ's blog: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/the-reason-the-tuesday-noon...
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You make a good point. However, even with the disks backed up to a better storage medium, detecting data loss on the floppy and getting a replacement written and deployed to the correct location might take a while. During that time the system may face unacceptable transit delays.
Wait, what? If this thing boots from a floppy, and that floppy has a checksum on it, and the boot sequence involves loading the checksum and the rest of the floppy contents into RAM and computing the checksum, corruption detection would be near instantaneous and the remediation would be as quick as it takes to eject the corrupted floppy, grab another floppy copy from the bin, plug it in, and flip the on switch. So th…
Let's say no one implemented the checksum. Edit: I forgot that floppies have a crc check, my bad.
Let's say the machine that can write the new disk is physically far away from the machines that read them. (Or the guy with a stack of new disks -- which are harder to find every year -- his office is some distance from the control machine).
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> it needs replacing they say. It sounds like they let this problem fester until it has reached this existential end. They clamor for new technology, which they get, then they use the most risk adverse management strategy and never upgrade or change it, until it reaches this problem state. They either need significant third party help deploying and managing this system, or they should go back a few generations of tec…
> I guess the people who work on public transit aren't interested in having the best public transit system available. They're only interested in keeping it running for as long as possible with zero changes or responsibility. Let me guess, you also think public servants are lazy, overpaid and unskilled? Comments like this belie how many people form opinions of public agencies without having any real experience with go…
I've worked in the public sector for several years, and there are definitely a decently-sized group of people in many different positions that are riding out their time until retirement trying to fly under the radar and do as little as possible. Not to say there aren't people that aren't competent, but as a competent person you have to work around the people that don't care and often actively don't want to see more work come their way to get anything done. It becomes tiring and eventually the private sector is too enticing and the competent people leave.