11 ms·

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 ol

by ir77 6y ago

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, so unless these are obsoleted these are to last 20-30+ years. the costs associated of porting all tools from win 7 to a newer system and re-verifying 50K+ test cases to do a similarity analysis run into astronomical in terms of $ and months (years) of work. no one really wants to poke that bear so you have situations like these.

Nokinside 6y ago
MS is extending extending free Windows 7 security updates to voting systems so that the US can get trough 2020 elections. There is still Itanium hardware running on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Same Kernel as Win 7) and it's supported until at least 2025. Safety critical and big enterprise software contracts are often written to keep the system running and updated with minimal changes and cost "Until the iron gets tired".
fennecfoxen 6y ago
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?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Arguably the 737 Max disaster was caused by an attempt to side step the regulatory process and get a new plane certified when it shouldn’t have. If the FAA hadn’t been so captured by Boeing, those two planes wouldn’t have crashed. All in all I can’t understand how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed. Except for the MAX 8, phenomenal gains in airline safety have been gained over this time period, throwing all that away so that it’s easier to upgrade some old hardware seems incredibly foolish.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    > how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed Less regulation = rich founder kids gets lambos + utter destruction of society = good :thumbsup:
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > 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_revenue_passenger_kilometre_in_air_transport_since_1970.png 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 to an aircraft issue. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380)
  - virtue3 6y ago
    just want to call out - The engine literally exploded, and they made it home via the rest of the plane OK (minus the unfortunate passenger). In the past this would have cut hydrolics (this happened with a DC10 rear engine exploding) and then losing control. Major props to the pilots and boeing (all SW planes are 737s I believe).
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Yes, Southwest only flies 737s in order to simplify their maintenance logistics and to ensure that every pilot they have can fly every plane.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    The 737 Max grounding cost about $18 billion so far (according tot he Google infobox which knows everything and is never wrong.) The high-end estimates of the value of a statistical human life tend to run about $4-8 million, depending who you ask. The FAA grounding of the Max has 2250 has thus cost enough money to save 2,250-4,500 statistical lives, had the money been spent more wisely elsewhere. How does your "better" passenger-deaths-per-km measure account for these deaths? (And what is it superior to, exactly?)
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      You can't point to the grounding of the 737 Max 8 as a reliable indicator of the cost of regulation because: 1. Arguably this is the cost of regulations not being followed properly 2. This is an extra-ordinary circumstance that is costing much more than a regular plane would cost to get certified and fly (see point 1) 3. You are drastically underestimating the cost to the industry both in terms of reduced customer confidence, hull losses (~$100mil an airplane), and increased insurance premiums if we were to continue flying the Max 8. But honestly, I'm having a really hard time understanding what your point is. Are you asserting that we should just fly the Max 8 and not worry about it? Are you asserting that airplanes aren't safer now? What are you getting at?
- virtue3 6y ago
  You are severely underestimating how few air disasters we've had lately. The DC10 had an abysmal track record. 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 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.
wim 6y ago
Perhaps people are surprised sometimes by how amazing maintenance and reliability engineering in the field really is. A small example like having these machines use a medium which some of the younger crew haven't even heard of is a nice reminder of this. Sure maintaining backwards-compatibility has a cost, but so does constantly rewriting everything that already works.
justapassenger 6y ago
I worry how companies will be able to provide similar services in the future, as more and more stuff is running as services in the cloud. It’ll most likely become more and more costly, as you won’t be able to buy offline version of some complement, and keep it working on your support device for 30 years. You’ll need to build all of them yourself. And that will also most likely mean it’ll be less reliable.
- est31 6y ago
  People will just build new airplanes every 6 weeks when a new rustc is released. Economic growth has to come from somewhere...
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Lol. Aircraft software running "in the cloud". Damb right it will. It will also work "in the rain" and "in the snow".
  - james_s_tayler 6y ago
    Is "Snow computing" when everything freezes up?
  - samus 6y ago
    The maintenance and logistics software for the F35 is supposedly implemented with a cloud architecture. Though the project is probably old enough that the cloud hasn't found its way into the flight systems yet...
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago
hindsightbias 6y ago
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.
- knodi 6y ago
  Yes, because most people on HN's context is shipping nodejs code.
- ISL 6y ago
  The best-practices we teach our experimental physics students, whether they know it or not, are generally designed to yield experimental apparatus that can last a decade or more with minimal maintenance. After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs doing.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    But how would you place that on range between a Sovjet solution and a homemade Minimal Viable Product?
  - RhysU 6y ago
    Do you have any materials that you can share about these practices?
- arethuza 6y ago
  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!
  - virtue3 6y ago
cordite 6y ago
Google could never maintain an airplane.
- quacked 6y ago
  Definitely not, but they could probably convince the public that the reason their airplanes kept crashing was one of their competitors.
- numpad0 6y ago
  And SpaceX did blow up a spaceship for human flight where they didn’t expect it to.
- bserge 6y ago
  The teams they buy could!
- taldo 6y ago
  There's probably a few very widely depended-on libraries in google3 (internal monorepo) that have been in 'maintenance mode' for 10y or more. And pretty major pieces that get replaced with nothing breaking noticeably. A better analogy would be like swapping the engines for electric drive props mid-flight, while other team is replacing most of the wings, but keeping the control surfaces in place. Now, the cargo service would've been killed, and you'd have 3 mostly equivalent screens to choose from to watch movies during your flight.
tantalor 6y ago
Why not just virtualize it and use whatever hardware you want?
- blahyawnblah 6y ago
  The hardware itself may be the issue. Even com ports over usb don't work a good amount of the time
  - sheepybloke 6y ago
    Yes. I do some DoD Aerospace work, and we have expensive PCI cards that only work on Windows 7 or XP that are used to talk MIL-1553B to our hardware. So, we've got to have a piece of hardware that can handle both of requirements which can be a pain.
- recursive 6y ago
  The hardware probably has to be tested just the same. I don't think that gets you anything, except more complexity and more testing.
bluedino 6y ago
>> we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 I guess I was thinking laptops running DOS, like the ones used to interface with the Mclaren F1 (supercar) computer.
smoe 6y ago
Wouldn't modernizing things here and there not also mean that at some point the entire airplane has to go trough the approval processes again because it is now no longer considered a 747 which in turn also means all personnel need to be certified for the new type? I once heard, that is the reason why many airplanes still have a "no smoking" light switch in the cockpit although it does not do anything anymore.
mad182 6y ago
> we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts Maybe I misunderstood something, but do you really need some specific, old hardware to run win 7? I thought you are going to say DOS or something older than win 98.
jjav 6y ago
> i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. While I'm not surprised per se (seen it enough here and in the industry), it does make me sad and worried about the industry. This short-term thinking is starting to break everything. How many things sold today depend on some smartphone app? What is the chance that said app will be available or able to run in ten years? Thirty years? I'll bet big money on zero percent chance.
nick_kline 6y ago
Why don't you run your old system in a vm running in a new system? That is standard practice at some places. Was there special hardware, not just say usb ports?

by ir77 6y ago

Nokinside 6y ago

MS is extending extending free Windows 7 security updates to voting systems so that the US can get trough 2020 elections. There is still Itanium hardware running on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Same Kernel as Win 7) and it's supported until at least 2025. Safety critical and big enterprise software contracts are often written to keep the system running and updated with minimal changes and cost "Until the iron gets tired".

fennecfoxen 6y ago

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?

ashtonkem 6y ago
Arguably the 737 Max disaster was caused by an attempt to side step the regulatory process and get a new plane certified when it shouldn’t have. If the FAA hadn’t been so captured by Boeing, those two planes wouldn’t have crashed. All in all I can’t understand how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed. Except for the MAX 8, phenomenal gains in airline safety have been gained over this time period, throwing all that away so that it’s easier to upgrade some old hardware seems incredibly foolish.
- numpad0 6y ago
  > how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed Less regulation = rich founder kids gets lambos + utter destruction of society = good :thumbsup:
ceejayoz 6y ago
> 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_revenue_passenger_kilometre_in_air_transport_since_1970.png 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 to an aircraft issue. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380)
- virtue3 6y ago
  just want to call out - The engine literally exploded, and they made it home via the rest of the plane OK (minus the unfortunate passenger). In the past this would have cut hydrolics (this happened with a DC10 rear engine exploding) and then losing control. Major props to the pilots and boeing (all SW planes are 737s I believe).
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Yes, Southwest only flies 737s in order to simplify their maintenance logistics and to ensure that every pilot they have can fly every plane.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  The 737 Max grounding cost about $18 billion so far (according tot he Google infobox which knows everything and is never wrong.) The high-end estimates of the value of a statistical human life tend to run about $4-8 million, depending who you ask. The FAA grounding of the Max has 2250 has thus cost enough money to save 2,250-4,500 statistical lives, had the money been spent more wisely elsewhere. How does your "better" passenger-deaths-per-km measure account for these deaths? (And what is it superior to, exactly?)
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    You can't point to the grounding of the 737 Max 8 as a reliable indicator of the cost of regulation because: 1. Arguably this is the cost of regulations not being followed properly 2. This is an extra-ordinary circumstance that is costing much more than a regular plane would cost to get certified and fly (see point 1) 3. You are drastically underestimating the cost to the industry both in terms of reduced customer confidence, hull losses (~$100mil an airplane), and increased insurance premiums if we were to continue flying the Max 8. But honestly, I'm having a really hard time understanding what your point is. Are you asserting that we should just fly the Max 8 and not worry about it? Are you asserting that airplanes aren't safer now? What are you getting at?
virtue3 6y ago
You are severely underestimating how few air disasters we've had lately. The DC10 had an abysmal track record. 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 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.

wim 6y ago

Perhaps people are surprised sometimes by how amazing maintenance and reliability engineering in the field really is. A small example like having these machines use a medium which some of the younger crew haven't even heard of is a nice reminder of this. Sure maintaining backwards-compatibility has a cost, but so does constantly rewriting everything that already works.

justapassenger 6y ago

I worry how companies will be able to provide similar services in the future, as more and more stuff is running as services in the cloud. It’ll most likely become more and more costly, as you won’t be able to buy offline version of some complement, and keep it working on your support device for 30 years. You’ll need to build all of them yourself. And that will also most likely mean it’ll be less reliable.

est31 6y ago
People will just build new airplanes every 6 weeks when a new rustc is released. Economic growth has to come from somewhere...
sandworm101 6y ago
Lol. Aircraft software running "in the cloud". Damb right it will. It will also work "in the rain" and "in the snow".
- james_s_tayler 6y ago
  Is "Snow computing" when everything freezes up?
- samus 6y ago
  The maintenance and logistics software for the F35 is supposedly implemented with a cloud architecture. Though the project is probably old enough that the cloud hasn't found its way into the flight systems yet...
HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
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.
- 6y ago

hindsightbias 6y ago

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.

knodi 6y ago
Yes, because most people on HN's context is shipping nodejs code.
ISL 6y ago
The best-practices we teach our experimental physics students, whether they know it or not, are generally designed to yield experimental apparatus that can last a decade or more with minimal maintenance. After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs doing.
- lowdose 6y ago
  But how would you place that on range between a Sovjet solution and a homemade Minimal Viable Product?
- RhysU 6y ago
  Do you have any materials that you can share about these practices?
arethuza 6y ago
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!
- virtue3 6y ago

cordite 6y ago

Google could never maintain an airplane.

quacked 6y ago
Definitely not, but they could probably convince the public that the reason their airplanes kept crashing was one of their competitors.
numpad0 6y ago
And SpaceX did blow up a spaceship for human flight where they didn’t expect it to.
bserge 6y ago
The teams they buy could!
taldo 6y ago
There's probably a few very widely depended-on libraries in google3 (internal monorepo) that have been in 'maintenance mode' for 10y or more. And pretty major pieces that get replaced with nothing breaking noticeably. A better analogy would be like swapping the engines for electric drive props mid-flight, while other team is replacing most of the wings, but keeping the control surfaces in place. Now, the cargo service would've been killed, and you'd have 3 mostly equivalent screens to choose from to watch movies during your flight.

tantalor 6y ago

Why not just virtualize it and use whatever hardware you want?

blahyawnblah 6y ago
The hardware itself may be the issue. Even com ports over usb don't work a good amount of the time
- sheepybloke 6y ago
  Yes. I do some DoD Aerospace work, and we have expensive PCI cards that only work on Windows 7 or XP that are used to talk MIL-1553B to our hardware. So, we've got to have a piece of hardware that can handle both of requirements which can be a pain.
recursive 6y ago
The hardware probably has to be tested just the same. I don't think that gets you anything, except more complexity and more testing.

bluedino 6y ago

>> we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 I guess I was thinking laptops running DOS, like the ones used to interface with the Mclaren F1 (supercar) computer.

smoe 6y ago

Wouldn't modernizing things here and there not also mean that at some point the entire airplane has to go trough the approval processes again because it is now no longer considered a 747 which in turn also means all personnel need to be certified for the new type? I once heard, that is the reason why many airplanes still have a "no smoking" light switch in the cockpit although it does not do anything anymore.

mad182 6y ago

> we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts Maybe I misunderstood something, but do you really need some specific, old hardware to run win 7? I thought you are going to say DOS or something older than win 98.

jjav 6y ago

> i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. While I'm not surprised per se (seen it enough here and in the industry), it does make me sad and worried about the industry. This short-term thinking is starting to break everything. How many things sold today depend on some smartphone app? What is the chance that said app will be available or able to run in ten years? Thirty years? I'll bet big money on zero percent chance.

nick_kline 6y ago

Why don't you run your old system in a vm running in a new system? That is standard practice at some places. Was there special hardware, not just say usb ports?