SF is a joke. 20 years of being one of the richest cities in the world (probably in the history of human beings) and it comes out worse than it was before.
SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
91–100 of 252 posts
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#92Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The current engineering ecosystem is largely private, and it's poorly functioning, costing us way more money than just hiring engineers as public employees rather than paying a contracting firm to do initial and final design on each rail system segment.
Just go look at the RFPs and responses each municipality has four expansion of their current system. It is all outsource to private industry, at great cost compared to doing it inside government.
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#94SF Voters rejected Proposition A in 2022 [1], which would have included funding to upgrade Muni's control systems (among many other projects). We'll eventually have to find the money somewhere else when the system fails.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-voters-narrowly-r...
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#95> 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.
It’s probably not overt corruption. It’s probably because in this kind of large system, there is a strong demand for validation and assurance at all levels, which is usually achieved by hiring experts* to write reviews, recommendations, and reports that hold up in court.
* They must be experts, otherwise how could they get away with charging so much, right?
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#96I 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.
> it needs replacing they say.
It sounds like they let this problem fester until it has reached this existential end. They clamor for new technology, which they get, then they use the most risk adverse management strategy and never upgrade or change it, until it reaches this problem state.
They either need significant third party help deploying and managing this system, or they should go back a few generations of technology and use the simplest possible system that meets their needs. Pen and paper should be considered if it can be made more efficient.
I guess the people who work on public transit aren't interested in having the best public transit system available. They're only interested in keeping it running for as long as possible with zero changes or responsibility.
This is why I'm strongly doubtful on public transportation in the US. Our bureaucracy can't handle it.
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#97> "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. Mayb…
Couldn't the city set up a private WAN for the trains, avoiding the security issues of being connected to the internet?
That doesn't avoid security issues inherent in wireless, but at least you have to be somewhat near the train instead of the other side of the planet.
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#98They haven't even settled on a contractor yet? Maybe the problem here is that they're trying to write one check to fix all their problems at once instead of taking an incremental approach.
This takes deep expertise and a system oriented, long term view with a very precise eye towards the details of what's technically possible at every individual step.
This kind of knowledge and experience doesn't come cheap, and we all know how much US city governments pay. I was at one point, very briefly, motivated to apply to a city job before I learned the pay is approximately 1/3 to 1/4 of what the private sector pays. The USDS routinely posts on "who wants to get hired" and the comments on that and other thread also mention a 66% to 75% salary reduction from baseline.
This is even before we get to legal liability and political risk shifting that can happen when there is a fully responsible contracted company involved.
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#99I 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.
Same thought I had immediately when I read the story. Worth fixing that failure point at least.
Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'
#100My company provides new compute modules for another major global city's infrastructure that still relies on Intel CPU's from the early 80's. That is, we are building them brand new boards populated with chips that are over 40 years old. They haven't shown any interest in updating the system. It works, they can get service, and get "new" replacements for things that go bad. What they might not know though is that ther…
Nah getting you fee engineer interested isn't that hard, there's always a fun challenge in mastering something. You just have to give them time to figure it out.
At my workplace, we still ship devices with AMD 8086 processors to the military. And AMD still makes us 8086 processors on special order.
We got a few guys under 40 that work on that project once in a blue moon when a change is required.