5 ms·

I know of several military systems that still use floppy disks, that comforts me for a few reason: * Their maintenance is well understood - every fault that is

by bArray 7y ago

I know of several military systems that still use floppy disks, that comforts me for a few reason: * Their maintenance is well understood - every fault that is likely to happen has happened and has been recovered/repaired from. It's very unlikely there will be new surprised down the road. * Their degradation is well understood - it's been around long enough that parts have failed and have been repaired. * Isn't easily communicated with through modern tech - no USB ports, no network access - people aren't picking up floppy disks in the car park and plugging them in. * Robustness to electromagnetic interference - the bits are so big that a few electrons being knocked out of the way won't cause an issue. * Software well understood and tested over time - the only way to _really_ trust software is by having it work without failure. * Simple implementation - because there's no computational space or power, it only does the minimal it needs to. It's not rendering a GUI, it's not running some complicated neural network. Old hardware isn't sexy, but it does work. I still use an oscilloscope with a phosphor display and a programmable power supply with instructions on a floppy disk. Floppy disks occasionally fail, but there's no substitute for making good backups over several mediums/locations.

dmos62 7y ago
This could be a sign that a new generation of technologies are reaching a similar level of reliability.
- BostonFern 7y ago
  This could be wishful thinking.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    I'm asking myself what does it look like when the baseline tech is superseded, though I'm not arguing one way or another. I think that this kind of trend switch would be a gradual movement with ups and downs, where people would often be asking themselves "is this a serious trend", "is this wishful thinking", etc. None of these things prove that a meaningful long-term transition is happening, but I think that they're there when it does. Actually, I'm not even thinking about floppy disks vs X. Rather about qualitative changes as a whole.
PietdeVries 7y ago
And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardware.() Then again, armies are known to prepare for the previous war. In WW-1 they used trenches and then came the machine-gun and the gas. In WW-2 all soldiers were prepared against gas, the French dug the Maginot line and the Germans just skipped around. Now we have amazing tanks but the next war is online... () I have to correct myself: NASA was looking for 8086 chips in 2001 - not 286 chips a few years ago. https://www.geek.com/chips/nasa-needs-8086-chips-549867/ https://www.geek.com/chips/nasa-needs-8086-chips-549867/
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
  Older technology is probably much simpler though. It might actually be possible to train someone, or for that someone to learn from a manual.
  - gugagore 7y ago
    Whenever I want to be depressed about the loss of human knowledge, I think about how no one will know how to build a VCR, or all the "hacks" and things that were needed to get it working. I'm sure they'll understand the concepts very well. It will be "simple" physics because it was discovered first (Like how a HDD uses earlier physics than a SSD). But then I think of all the amazing people (that are on youtube) who restore old technology, and build replicas, etc, and I feel okay again about human knowledge. But I think it is possible that as time goes on, knowledge about these systems can get lost, even if they're simpler to understand.
    - dinodub 7y ago
      I imagine there's more than one way to build a "VCR" or a thing that replicates its purpose: to read magnetic tape. As long as there's engineers, there will be hope ;)
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Absolutely. When you have a system that absolutely must not fail ever, you want it to be set up so that all the code involved--not just the application but the system it runs on--can be manually reviewed in a practical timeframe. If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one, that's millions of lines of code that you're just hoping don't have any weird, undiscovered edge case interactions with your program. On the other hand. Based on the article, it sounds like maintaining the nuclear launch system frequently involves working with soldering irons and microscopes, manually replacing individual wires, and it takes years of training to reach an acceptable skill level. That has the potential to be nearly as dangerous as unreliable code.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  absolutely must not fail ever I know I'm being pedantic, but no such system exists. The best you can do is reduce the probability of failure to an acceptable limit. Especially since this was a military system, some team, somewhere, estimated the Mean Time To Failure for this system and was satisfied with the answer.
- kelnos 7y ago
  > If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one I suspect here you're thinking about mainstream OSes, like Linux, one of the BSDs, etc. But there are quite a few very small, well-tested (RT)OSes that are actively maintained and suitable for the "absolutely must not fail ever"[0] use case. [0] Which is, of course, impossible, but you'll get a lot closer with a modern realtime OS written to purpose vs. a Linux-type deal.

by bArray 7y ago

dmos62 7y ago

This could be a sign that a new generation of technologies are reaching a similar level of reliability.

BostonFern 7y ago
This could be wishful thinking.
- dmos62 7y ago
  I'm asking myself what does it look like when the baseline tech is superseded, though I'm not arguing one way or another. I think that this kind of trend switch would be a gradual movement with ups and downs, where people would often be asking themselves "is this a serious trend", "is this wishful thinking", etc. None of these things prove that a meaningful long-term transition is happening, but I think that they're there when it does. Actually, I'm not even thinking about floppy disks vs X. Rather about qualitative changes as a whole.

PietdeVries 7y ago

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardware.() Then again, armies are known to prepare for the previous war. In WW-1 they used trenches and then came the machine-gun and the gas. In WW-2 all soldiers were prepared against gas, the French dug the Maginot line and the Germans just skipped around. Now we have amazing tanks but the next war is online... () I have to correct myself: NASA was looking for 8086 chips in 2001 - not 286 chips a few years ago. https://www.geek.com/chips/nasa-needs-8086-chips-549867/ https://www.geek.com/chips/nasa-needs-8086-chips-549867/

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
Older technology is probably much simpler though. It might actually be possible to train someone, or for that someone to learn from a manual.
- gugagore 7y ago
  Whenever I want to be depressed about the loss of human knowledge, I think about how no one will know how to build a VCR, or all the "hacks" and things that were needed to get it working. I'm sure they'll understand the concepts very well. It will be "simple" physics because it was discovered first (Like how a HDD uses earlier physics than a SSD). But then I think of all the amazing people (that are on youtube) who restore old technology, and build replicas, etc, and I feel okay again about human knowledge. But I think it is possible that as time goes on, knowledge about these systems can get lost, even if they're simpler to understand.
  - dinodub 7y ago
    I imagine there's more than one way to build a "VCR" or a thing that replicates its purpose: to read magnetic tape. As long as there's engineers, there will be hope ;)

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

Absolutely. When you have a system that absolutely must not fail ever, you want it to be set up so that all the code involved--not just the application but the system it runs on--can be manually reviewed in a practical timeframe. If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one, that's millions of lines of code that you're just hoping don't have any weird, undiscovered edge case interactions with your program. On the other hand. Based on the article, it sounds like maintaining the nuclear launch system frequently involves working with soldering irons and microscopes, manually replacing individual wires, and it takes years of training to reach an acceptable skill level. That has the potential to be nearly as dangerous as unreliable code.

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
absolutely must not fail ever I know I'm being pedantic, but no such system exists. The best you can do is reduce the probability of failure to an acceptable limit. Especially since this was a military system, some team, somewhere, estimated the Mean Time To Failure for this system and was satisfied with the answer.
kelnos 7y ago
> If you're running on any modern OS, even a really good, stable one I suspect here you're thinking about mainstream OSes, like Linux, one of the BSDs, etc. But there are quite a few very small, well-tested (RT)OSes that are actively maintained and suitable for the "absolutely must not fail ever"[0] use case. [0] Which is, of course, impossible, but you'll get a lot closer with a modern realtime OS written to purpose vs. a Linux-type deal.