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

61–70 of 252 posts

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

#61

Post by wongarsu »

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…

Still, when you have a 20-25 year replacement cycle being 10 years behind is pretty significant. And that's assuming their estimate of needing another decade is correct. Which seems doubtful considering they don't have a contractor, they don't have the money, and the previous system probably took a decade to develop considering their choice of 5.25" floppies (3.5" floppies overtook 5.25" floppies in sales in 1988).

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

#62

Post by jcgrillo »

> "Wow. I mean I thought we were moving on to AI. So why are we doing floppy disk," said Katie Guillen, SFMTA passenger.

This naivety is not Katie's fault. We who work in tech are to blame for constantly pushing our half-baked experimental garbage as if it was "engineering" on par with civil or aeronautical systems. We can't blame people for occasionally believing the lies.

The tech-washed version of this quote might go something like "wow I thought everything was moving to the multi-cloud serverless kooberneetus now, why is it still running on a computer?"

> It is easy to run a secure computer system. You merely have to disconnect all dial-up connections and permit only direct-wired terminals, put the machine and its terminals in a shielded room, and post a guard at the door[1].

This is the kind of thing I want running the trains. Give it ECC RAM too, please.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer...

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

#63

Post by iancmceachern »

I emailed them. I live I'm SF. This is the sake, solved, problem we have in the machine tool world (milling machines, lathes, etc). Similar to old keyboards, you can just buy and use a floppy emulator.

They emailed me back, they said that the floppy thing makes a good headline but is really just the tip of the iceberg. It's really the whole system that's like this at every layer, it needs replacing they say.

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

#64

Post by nomel »

nerdjon wrote: post #35
roody15 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like Boston has had similar, we have contracts with companies to complete a thing by a specific time, they don't but we are stuck paying them even more to complete a project so it ends up being over budget, late, and possibly not done well as is evident by our green line extension that opened last year that was shut down to redo it because the tracks are the wrong width. It just feels like the money is going t…

This is what happens when the repercussions for poor performance/failure is more money. Privatization, with some regulations, and reduction of monopolies, seems like a good idea. But, the system will never choose to harm itself.

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

#65

Post by compuguy »

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…

I have this feeling that they meant 1988 instead of 1998....but I could be wrong?

Edit: Even the news article hints at 5 inch floppy disks...which makes 1998 make absolutely no sense to me at least.

https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-run....

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

#66

Post by wpietri »

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 think there are a bunch of things causing this problem. Off the top of my head, some factors:

- chronic underfunding - we all know how problems build up when maintenance is deferred

- waterfall planning - Mary Poppendieck has a nice talk on how much trouble this causes: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

- political point-scoring - blame-oriented cultures discourage experimentation and incremental improvement

- political polarization - one-party areas can more easily slide into cronyism, and fighting between parties makes it hard to compromise even on things like fixing infrastructure

- classism - in a lot of places, transit is for the poors

- racism - many don't want transit bringing Those People around

- manager culture, not engineer culture - as we see with Boeing, standard MBA thinking doesn't work well for long-term safety and reliability; the focus on short term metrics, mostly financial ones, leads to underinvestment and decay of infrastructure

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

#68

Post by inferiorhuman »

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…

  Why do I have to do this research instead of the "journalist"?
Ratchet the snark back. The journalist was referring to the train control system not home computers in someone's basement. And, yes, twenty five years ago SelTrac was cutting edge. Moving block systems were basically unheard of back then.

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

#69

Post by wpietri »

asdff wrote: post #21
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 think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen in my local train stations. If people who designed them actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the screens they installed don't display anything use…

For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had their first user, and once it's all installed any revision would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in charge.

And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, because you need really supportive stakeholders to work in an iterative fashion. Otherwise you get a ton of nitpicking that amounts to a lot of "why didn't you guess 100 perfectly everything up front" and "how can we start if you can't give me a full plan and a firm price?" In a blame-hungry environment, waterfall is the safest choice for the people doing the project.

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

#70

Post by jayski »

Solvency wrote: post #22
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…

[flagged]

neither the American people or government have any money saved.
Post reply on HN