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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

snellman.net

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#151
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the control tower of an international airport as recently as 4 years ago, and can confirm that at least some of the systems were still built on 1960's technology - the radar scopes were basically pre-CRT technology. On the other hand, for something as fault-intolerant as air traffic control there's a huge amount of value in reliable, well understood systems.

Pre-CRT? You mean like John Logie-Baird type stuff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television

I worked in an ATC tower with the Marines, and we used the AN/FPN-63 as our precision approach radar. It came into existence around 1958, I believe. The scopes looked something like this, but even more primitive: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/PAR_Scop...

It was maintained with duct tape, gummi bears, and black magic, as the suppliers for said parts had long, long since gone out of business.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly embarrassing state of affairs is the train traffic control system used by the NYC subway system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA

Wow. Their end-goal upgrade, the one that they've installed on one line, and are installing on everything else looks so antiquated. My city's subway/elevated train system will be 30 years old this December. Train control is fully automated ; there are no drivers on trains, and in normal operation there is no remote (human) operator either. It's been automated for 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vanc…

Some less technology minded people would actually be freaked out by automated trains. The airport where I live has automated trains to go between gates and the cars very closely resemble the public trains cars without the seats.

Most likely its not a technical challenge its a bureaucratic problem. Not to mention the unions aren't going to let the transit authority obsolete their jobs.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly embarrassing state of affairs is the train traffic control system used by the NYC subway system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA

Wow. Their end-goal upgrade, the one that they've installed on one line, and are installing on everything else looks so antiquated. My city's subway/elevated train system will be 30 years old this December. Train control is fully automated ; there are no drivers on trains, and in normal operation there is no remote (human) operator either. It's been automated for 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vanc…

Another thing about the NYC subway is that it runs 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Not many metros around the world can make that claim.

Living in New York, the amazing thing about the subway system is how they keep it running. It's old and ridiculously complex, and despite what natives say, the MTA by and large does a good job running it. There's no political will to fix it right now. It's going to take trains becoming unsafe or costing so much to keep safe that people eventually notice and start making noise about it, I think.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#154

How ancient this all seems . . . until you realize people are doing the exact same thing by shipping "golden" VM/container images around instead of doing proper package and configuration management.

As a engineer I do not have time to get into this new VM/container thing. I fail to see how it leads to anything productive ( no offence ). Call me a simpleton but I am happy with better package management and config systems.

Containers are pretty flexible (unfortunately?). They can be used as a stop-gap to everyone jumping ship to Nix (we can only pray to god) somewhere down the line in that they let you get some decent isolation properties out of existing package management.

Since you can pretty much use any config management system you like with containers, they also play nice with that too.

There is one other ancillary benefit in that they enforce a little bit tighter process isolation than you might get if you just installed a bunch of stuff on a given server. So that lets you do things like overcommit available resources (put more on the server than it can run at one time, but stochastically, it can probably handle) and it helps ensure you have "livestock" and not "pets" (servers configured automatically, repeatably, and with no concern with their demise rather than servers you need to baby).

They're pretty much just a (mostly) handy abstraction for a bunch of things that you probably want to be doing but is exceptionally frustrating to set up piece by piece.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#155
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.

Overengineeing doesn't take nearly as much skill as you'd think. It would be pretty easy for any of us to design a wall that, if left alone, would last for thousands of years.

You would think, but often things fail in unexpected ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest is destroying thousands of die-cast zinc-alloy toys from the 1930s to 1950s. Zinc alloys are pretty corrosion-resistant, so this was a surprise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a... is destroying a lot of historically important documents in libraries that were laminated in acetate during the 1930s to 1950s in order to preserve them.

But this kind of thing sometimes happens to architectural materials, too.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminosis is destroying a lot of buildings in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. I've seen a similar process underway in buildings built during the same period in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I don't know if it's from the same cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite#Serpentinite_reac... will destroy stone walls pretty quickly if you build them out of olivine-rich rock.

Reinforced concrete, especially in chloride-rich environments, will eventually spall from oxidation of the reinforcing minerals. Some kinds of aggregate, like dolomite, although resistant to weathering themselves, also have a tendency to slowly destroy concrete.

You can definitely build a wall that will last thousands of years in the absence of earthquakes, war, gray goo, or acid rain, if you make the wall out of quartz-rich or otherwise slow-weathering, low-TCE rocks like granite, cement it with lime cement instead of Portland cement, don't try to reinforce it, and don't make it too long, thin, and straight, in order to reduce thermal-cycling stresses.

Most of us would never think of most of those issues when we tried to overengineer.

The Roman aqueducts have some other interesting virtues, though: due to the arch, they used very little material. We could probably do better with stainless steel today, but they did pretty darn well with masonry. I don't know if you've ever tried building a masonry arch, but there are some nonobvious considerations, and a mistake can kill you.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#156

I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations. First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough. Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is signif…

A couple of other things this inspires in me:

1. Your systems can last longer if they're based on free software, so you don't have to worry about a dependency going away and you not being able to fix it. (And of course effective copy protection here is the kiss of death.)

2. Your systems can last longer if they have less dependencies. (I tried to compile a six-months-old Guix from six months ago from source for several days. This was difficult because it depends on so many things.)

3. Your systems can last longer if the dependencies they have are more popular. Installing DOSBOX today is a lot easier than installing an emulator that will emulate the Tandy 1000 version of MS-DOS. (I think Lotus 1-2-3 had a Tandy version, right?) This is synergistic with the previous two: your free-software dependencies are still going to be a pain to handle if nobody else uses them.

4. Your systems can last longer if they're internally simpler, so that you can fix them when they do fail.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#157
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still may not be too late. Plus other employees who were screwed but unaware of their rights may automatically get checks.

You're suggesting legally chasing a few weeks salary after nearly 20 years? That's quite a grudge you're encouraging, and likely to cost much more than it would gain, even if it could be proven.

In Washington State, the state will pursue them with glee and vigor free of charge (to you). I think 20 years is a little outside how old a debt they would track, though.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#158
I won't say it was my worst job ever, at all, but I can empathize. I joined a consulting company a few years back and ended up doing performance optimization on a legacy point of sale system written twenty years before, in C, for a large home improvement supplies company. Some of it actually proved interesting, but in terms of career moves it wasn't the best.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you do RAC on AWS without shared storage?

Thanks, fixed in edit. I was mistaken, it was dataguard and better snapshots using archive log mode.

I wasn't totally skeptical - we did RAC on AWS in tests back in the day using a third node as an iSCSI target, but it was a) sketchy as hell, b) not at all redundant, c) not something I thought Palm would go for.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this article from Wired earlier this year: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/air-traffic-control/ It doesn't specificaly mention vacuum tubes, but it does explain why it's entirely plausible that they're still around: >This technology is complicated and novel, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that NextGen is a project of the FAA. The agency is primarily a regulatory body, responsible for keeping the nati…

I'm skeptical that the culprit is mainly to be found in specific features of the FAA, and the article doesn't seem to provide much causal evidence of that (though I recognize that it's hard to prove that kind of causality). Major upgrades/replacements/migrations either failing or coming in a decade late and billions over budget is the norm in Fortune 500 companies, too, which leads to a hypothesis that it's a more ge…

And it's also happened a lot with the IRS, for whom IT is a core competency.
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