51–60 of 165 posts
I assume they don't have to go through certification for the loading device(the floppy drive), just the process of loading data instead (through the emulator)
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'm also curious about the work/personal split here. I have a small handful of things at home I first wrote around 10-12 years ago that I still use and tweak, but have only been working professionally for about 9 years (and have worked on things in that time I personally fully expect to hit 20-30 years).
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,…
That says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
Airplane engines literally flying off the plane during takeoff because the airlines got to do whatever they wanted for servicing it instead of the recommended method because maintenance time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
Boeing and Airbus and CRJ/Bombadier/NowAirbus have done a -really- friggin good job in the past 2 decades.
Why the hell would they need to upgrade something as non-essential as a floppy system? To What? Why does it matter if it works? Introducing uncertainty to a system to just make it "new" is spoken like a web dev and not like an aerospace engineer (and I'm a web dev).
In node land you get blasted if you don't stay current (because something will rely on something newer and you'll get upgrade hell'd at once instead of piecemeal).
There are no new versions of GQL that people need to upgrade to. Nor is their version of node going off LTS in 2 years.
Did it work? Yes. Was it secure? Yes. So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense. If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can still buy new, still shrinkwrapped, recent production floppy disks and new drives. I'd imagine if you're supplying parts for these, a warehouse with a stack of known-to-work floppy disk drives isn't much of an expense and certainly not difficult. Even if it became a problem, you reasonably have the margins to ask a manufacturer to setup an assembly line and run a new batch just for you - the only downside is…
While this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
> Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect? A better measure is passenger deaths per kilometer. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fatalities_per_reven... It's been on a steady, large decline since the 1970s. Even with the 737 MAX crashes, it's an incredibly safe way to travel. In the last ten years, one passenger has died on a US carrier due…
The engine literally exploded, and they made it home via the rest of the plane OK (minus the unfortunate passenger).
Did it work? Yes. Was it secure? Yes. So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense. If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.
Frankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.
> "Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."
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…