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The military still use bolts! And screws! And I bet if you look really hard you can find a copper wire! Some of these things are hundreds of years old! If it
by toufka 13y ago
The military still use bolts! And screws! And I bet if you look really hard you can find a copper wire! Some of these things are hundreds of years old!
If it works, why change it? So long as they can find a supplier of new floppy disks for the data, it seems pretty reasonable to me (and given they're nuclear missiles, a few dozen grand per disc really doesn't seem that bad). Now if there are no more suppliers of those disks at all, and no way to read/write to them (at all), then we should start being a bit more concerned.
- hayksaakian 13y agoI suppose the main contention is that copper, bolts, and screws last much longer than vinyl/magnetic strips.
- SnakeDoc 13y agoI agree. There's a lot that can go wrong with a Floppy, as well as it's reader. Also the quote about the analog phones being "unreliable" seems suspect...
- josephkern 13y agoThe longevity and ease of destruction is probably a primary concern for this media.
- Cowen 13y agoIf there's one situation where you definitely want to apply the rule "if it's not broke, don't fix it", it's probably nuclear missile silos.
- Oculus 13y agoI'm wondering if it works better then current technology. If the old tech is more stable and easier to upkeep than upgrading to a modern system, then power to them. I suspect it's more of a priorities thing where the DoD rather throw money at drones or a cyber unit then on nuclear weapon systems since those are more relevant to today's world.
- bashinator 13y agoI don't think there are many people who live through that time, who would describe a floppy disk as "stable" and "easy to upkeep".
- bradgessler 13y agoI just gave a talk at RailsConf and demoed a web app running on a floppy disk. http://tech.pollev.com/articles/html5-app-on-a-floppy/ http://tech.pollev.com/articles/html5-app-on-a-floppy/ You can buy a USB floppy drive off Amazon for $15 and a 10 pack of floppies for $10. Surprisingly the disk drive is recognized on Mac OS X and ticks away like a champ.
- stephenhuey 13y agoI saw that talk! A bit slow at starting up, but really not any worse than a few seconds of high network latency, and then your web app basically worked like a champ.
- bradgessler 13y ago45 seconds of "latency" to be exact!
- barbs 13y agoThat's hardly an appropriate comparison. The reason it's strange that they're still using floppy disks is that much better alternatives exist today. That said, I agree that, so long as it does the job, there's no real reason to change.