Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

abc7news.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 252 posts

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#41

Post by TheJoeMan »

roody15 wrote: post #32
nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

I am an elected official (12 years and elected six times in Illinois) unfortunately seeing this process work over 12 years is discouraging. For example President Obama allocated 8 billion dollars for high sped passenger rail service improvements. By 2017 almost 2 billion of this money had been spent on railroad improvements / railroad crossings and line inspections. Fast forward to 2024 no high speed rails have actua…

From someone who's seen the other side... every time the engineer has to quabble over email with the permitting departments over matters such as "you sent it to the wrong bureaucrat so I'm ignoring instead of forwarding it" or "the permit admin wrote the wrong 1 of 50 Comcast subsidiaries on the paperwork so now I have to get a skip-manager's signoff" it's billed at $400/hr.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#43

Post by electric_mayhem »

nerdjon wrote: post #10

Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the timeline for the transition and how just that they are still doing this. What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad? Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs more funding but there is also jus…

> What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad?

Massive money and entrenched behind preserving a car-based life.

Car companies, auto workers unions, railroads can siphon off funds from promised improvements to cover deferred maintenance and give themselves bonuses for being so clever… Hell, AAA which one might expect to spend its income on serving its members instead diverts money to proactively lobbying against improvements in public transit in an ongoing display of cynical self-preservation

It’s basically hopeless.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#44

Post by cortesoft »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

I don't think that is actually a concern. The article is written in a way to imply that it is, but I doubt the people who are running the system actually think that is the risk.

I am sure they have copies of the floppy disk, and likely have images on other machines that can be used to create a new floppy even if all the copies are lost.

I feel like the SFMTA is mainly using the existence of the floppy disks as a marketing point for their desire to get funding to update the system. It is something that the average person will be able to look at and know it is out of date in a visceral way.

The reporter seems to read this as if we are one bad floppy away from failure, but that is not the actual case.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#45

Post by markus_zhang »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #36

> This system was designed to last 20 to 25 years. SFMTA's director Jeffrey Tumlin said upgrading the system will take another decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the problem, not that they're using a floppy. This isn't web dev where you get to rewrite everything every 6 mos. Systems have to have decades long life cycles BUT THEY EVENTUALLY NEED TO BE REPLACED and that's not happening quickly eno…

I'd like to see a breakdown of that "hundreds of millions of dollars" and which companies provided the quotes, plus who owns the companies and who are their husbands/wives/uncles/nephews/nieces/etc.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#47

Post by ceejayoz »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #37
Solvency wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We spend more than any nation on public services and goods. We also give the most in foreign aid. Govt inefficiency/corruption squanders this money. E.g., https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-hasnt-been-tracking-hom...

> We spend more than any nation on public services and goods.

In part, because of the ideology the poster outlined. Penny wise, pound foolish.

As an example, our healthcare is 2-3x as expensive as the rest of the OECD. Our public spending is more than anyone else's total spending, and then we pile on top of that. (https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm) We saddle the poor with high-deductible plans they can't use, then eat the costs of their eventual last resort emergency treatment.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#48

Post by VyseofArcadia »

> "It's like if you lose your memory overnight, and every morning, somebody has to tell you hey 'this is who you are and what your purpose is what you have to do today,'" said Maguire.

Yeah, that's called a cold boot. Moving to not-floppies doesn't mean you can avoid this. Clearly it's off of floppies instead of ROM so you can more easily update the software, but I am wondering how often that ended up happening. Maybe EEPROMs would have been better.

> Luz Pena: "How dire is it to change the system to upgrade it from a floppy disk to a wireless system?"

I agree that floppies aren't the peak of reliability, but "a wireless system" also sounds like a disaster. I don't want critical urban infrastructure running on extremely hackable OTA updates. For the love of god, SF, you can avoid pretty much all potential cybersecurity problems by just not putting your trains online.

I feel like neither the interviewer nor the interviewee really had the technical expertise to speak to this. This entire piece is just, "oooooo, floppies are old. Old bad! Why not new yet? New good."

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#49

Post by perihelions »

Aloha wrote: post #38

I dont really see the issue? The technology works, there is a replacement outlined, there is no shortage of floppy disks - even 5 1/4 ones.

Yeah, the article reads as if the real problem is a lack of a tested system of backups. Or I don't know how else to parse this line:

- "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."

"Data degradation on the floppies" should not, by itself, cause any sort of "catastrophic failure" in a sound system. If one software disk fails, you should have five identical copies in a drawer, five more in a different room, ten more off-site, plus a disk image on cloud storage that you can write fresh floppy disks from.

I mean, it's probably a good idea to change the storage medium too—but that's not the root problem.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#50

Post by HumblyTossed »

abeppu wrote: post #5
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #4

>Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge technology when they installed their automatic train control system. > "We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular technology but it was from an era that computers didn't have a hard drive so you have to load the software from floppy disks on to the computer," In 1998, most personal computers already had hard drives [0]. From Wikipedia "The…

Given that the agency seems not to be able to cope with change at a reasonable pace, I wonder if 1998 was just when the control system project finished, having been planned and started several years prior.

> I wonder if 1998 was just when the control system project finished, having been planned and started several years prior.

Probably this. Probably they got the plans worked up in 1990, but didn't finish everything until 1998.

Post reply on HN