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Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

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Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#91
post #40
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.

And SpaceX did blow up a spaceship for human flight where they didn’t expect it to.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you "just" don't use those services. It's not rocket science ...ok sometimes it literally is... but part of reliability engineering is knowing where your weak points are and preventing them from causing problems before it happens. Since the default state is building it yourself, not being able to buy an offline version of the service is no less reliable than the alternative.

Default state is never building it yourself. When you approach new problem, you don't go "ok, let's first start a fire, then melt some silicon to build me some transistors". You always start based on something. And as more stuff is moving to be cloud based services, you'll need to build more and more of that stuff yourself. Taking it to the extreme - will CPUs in 30 years be cloud connected and require my service pro…

Changing your assumption of "default state" doesn't change what I said.

The point is that systems like this go through various analyses before being built. Reliance on outside services/components is one of those analyses.

Let's say that a critical component is an online service. Someone will do the analysis of what happens when that service goes away. If the outcome is that you can expect to failover to something else with acceptable degradation of performance, then the service might be used. If not, then the choice is find a more reliable service, build it yourself or do without the feature. And those last two choices will themselves be subject to another analysis.

One of the nice things about capitalism is that if there's a profitable gap in products/services, that gap will eventually be filled. All new CPUs need to cloud connected and require a service provider, but there's a big industry that can't deal with that? I guarantee that someone will corner that market and start building CPUs that don't need to be cloud connected and require a service provider. Either that, or sufficiently reliable cloud services, tailored to that market, will appear.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#93
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? I'm not doubting you, but I'm surprised. I only used them up until I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, but I still vividly remember often having to go through a couple of floppies from my drawer to find one that was working. And yelling at my little brother for putting a bad one back in the drawer. Are they really that robust? Was I just storing them stupidly maybe? Or maybe it was because all the ones we had wer…

Anecdotally, the last time I looked at any of my 30+ year old 3.5" floppies, they all worked fine.

Of course, back then I knew enough to spend a bit more on the good quality ones, so that could have something to do with it.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Some code I wrote in a drunken haze has been running continuously for 7 years with zero downtime - it was only meant to be temporary!

It has zero comments, the code was inefficient, the variable names are things like "theThing" (it's the best I could do at the time) and "database" is just a series of text files carefully read/written to on the disk.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#96
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 wrote a piece of software that still handles all engineering project management for one of the larger communications companies in North America (>2.5 million customers). I developed it in 1997 and it is still in place today, chugging away for ~400 daily users and getting minor updates a couple times a year. I didn't remotely think it would last on this timescale and I have paid the price for some poor design decisions many times over. Still, as much as I cringe at some of the older sections of code, it has been nice to see it keep going.

The client has started internal projects to replace it 3x over and each has been cancelled; sum total spent on the cancelled projects easily exceeds what I charged by an order of magnitude. In retrospect I didn't charge nearly enough back then! If only I could have used a SAAS model.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#97
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.

A slightly different spin has been working on some 20+ year old C/C++ code that is relatively nicely written, such that you can still expand on it today.

I had a lot of joy recently reading the Voyager 1 image decompression routines and some X11 window manager sources.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

In my first job we did project/information management systems. Initially for civil engineering projects, later more generally for governments and enterprises.

In some cases we had to have contingency plans for the software and data in case the company goes out of business within the coming 15 years.

Next I worked in advertisement, where clients spent similar sums as the above for cross media campaigns lasting maybe 14 days

That was quite the interesting contrast work wise :)

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#99
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

plus CD-Rs might not last a decade!

Wouldn't matter, we're discussing the storage medium used to perform the software update, not the format used to store the software in the aircraft.

Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in my 30s, I've been a primarily web developer for 15 years, and I know there is software I wrote in 2008 that is still running today for processing the rent of 1000s of residents. It has been updated a few times, adding a console argument to automate the process more. It was originally a Bob-O-Matic process. At midnight on the first of the month, this old-timer Bob would launch the application, click one button…

Sounds like a nice, no-frills tool that does its job!
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