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Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

theregister.com

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Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#31

Post by est31 »

justapassenger wrote: post #28
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

I worry how companies will be able to provide similar services in the future, as more and more stuff is running as services in the cloud. It’ll most likely become more and more costly, as you won’t be able to buy offline version of some complement, and keep it working on your support device for 30 years. You’ll need to build all of them yourself. And that will also most likely mean it’ll be less reliable.

People will just build new airplanes every 6 weeks when a new rustc is released. Economic growth has to come from somewhere...

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#32

Post by code4tee »

Not surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works.

More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#34

Post by hindsightbias »

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span?

Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#35

Post by tomashubelbauer »

code4tee wrote: post #32

Not surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works. More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.

I get why prefer old but works over new and fancy, but what about new and works? They could trial new technology for five or ten years in parallel with the old before switching gaining both the stability of old and proven and the future-proof-ness of "new and we think it will stick but it might not". The reason why it isn't done this way is probably cost, but at what point will the difficulty of sourcing the old tech and people who know how to use it become the more expensive option?

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#36

Post by knodi »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

Yes, because most people on HN's context is shipping nodejs code.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#37

Post by Nokinside »

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

MS is extending extending free Windows 7 security updates to voting systems so that the US can get trough 2020 elections.

There is still Itanium hardware running on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Same Kernel as Win 7) and it's supported until at least 2025.

Safety critical and big enterprise software contracts are often written to keep the system running and updated with minimal changes and cost "Until the iron gets tired".

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#38

Post by ISL »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

The best-practices we teach our experimental physics students, whether they know it or not, are generally designed to yield experimental apparatus that can last a decade or more with minimal maintenance.

After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs doing.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#39

Post by arethuza »

hindsightbias wrote: post #34
ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.

I have built applications that have been around for 10 to 15 years.

The only thing that would have been good is to know in advance which ones will last that long - one was a temporary proof of concept!

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#40

Post by cordite »

ir77 wrote: post #12

i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…

Google could never maintain an airplane.
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