[HN Gopher] SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city f...
___________________________________________________________________
SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears
'catastrophic failure'
Author : sidlls
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-04-07 03:20 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (abc7news.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (abc7news.com)
| abeppu wrote:
| Frustratingly, though the article goes into how
| replacing/upgrading the whole control system will be an big,
| expensive project, they don't attempt to say why they can't just
| update the "read from floppy" part of the system to read the same
| info from a modern component.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Floppies aren't the problem, the main problem is lack of
| support. The MTA moved off of OS/2 back in 2008. Yeah, halfway
| into its intended lifespan Alcatel/Thales basically stopped
| supporting the whole mess. If I had to guess they're using an
| equally unsupported version of Windows now.
| sevenseventen wrote:
| Can someone just ask Foone or lcamtuf to help them get it running
| off an internet-connected toothbrush or something? It seems like
| there are so many people doing complex reverse-engineering of
| ancient stuff _just for kicks_ that this floppy-disk issue just
| shouldn't require a massive project.
|
| yes, I know safety-critical systems are different. I also expect
| that the floppy-disk issue is just the easiest problem to explain
| of a long chain of terrible legacy lock-ins. However, if they're
| literally holding their breath every morning when it's time to
| IPL the system off a floppy...that part sounds solvable.
| gojomo wrote:
| The hypercompetence of tech enthusiasts and the mind-numbing
| idiocy & dishonesty of politial governance don't mix, so cities
| have to spend tens of millions with parasitic contractors for
| what a few clever hackers could do as a side-project.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| >Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge
| technology when they installed their automatic train control
| system.
|
| > "We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this particular
| technology but it was from an era that computers didn't have a
| hard drive so you have to load the software from floppy disks on
| to the computer,"
|
| In 1998, most personal computers already had hard drives [0].
| From Wikipedia "The IBM PC/XT in 1983 included an internal 10 MB
| HDD, and soon thereafter, internal HDDs proliferated on personal
| computers."
|
| The 3.5" floppy is from the mid 80's, again from Wiki [1] "In the
| early 1980s, many manufacturers introduced smaller floppy drives
| and media in various formats. A consortium of 21 companies
| eventually settled on a 31/2-inch design..."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
|
| Why do I have to do this research instead of the "journalist"?
| abeppu wrote:
| Given that the agency seems not to be able to cope with change
| at a reasonable pace, I wonder if 1998 was just when the
| control system project finished, having been planned and
| started several years prior.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > I wonder if 1998 was just when the control system project
| finished, having been planned and started several years
| prior.
|
| Probably this. Probably they got the plans worked up in 1990,
| but didn't finish everything until 1998.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'd say they must have started closer to 1980. By the time
| we had the 286, most PCs came with a hard drive, and 1990
| was the era of the 486.
| compuguy wrote:
| I have this feeling that they meant _1988_ instead of
| _1998_....but I could be wrong?
|
| Edit: Even the news article hints at 5 inch floppy
| disks...which makes 1998 make absolutely no sense to me at
| least.
|
| https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-train-system-has-been-
| run....
| deathanatos wrote:
| I'm not sure moving it back a whole decade saves them?
|
| My family's first PC in 1987 had a hard disk. The Wikipedia
| quote they provide lines up with that, and provides a more
| authoritative point of when it was introduced.
|
| And yeah, the "5 inch floppy" quote paired with a photo of a
| diskette. God only knows what actual hardware the system
| uses. But point being ... the journalist doesn't seem to have
| found out.
| gsk22 wrote:
| There's a big difference when choosing technologies for a
| home computer versus a safety-critical system that will run
| for decades. Seems reasonable they would've chosen a
| proven, if slightly outdated, tech over a newer one that
| had less data to back up its long-term reliability.
|
| And of course we can get into the discussion of cost:
| floppies are way cheaper than hard drives, especially for
| the presumably-small amounts of data that are needed for
| such a control system. A 500MB hard drive was probably
| overkill.
|
| I am of course speculating, but I don't know why we should
| assume that the engineers working on the project originally
| made a silly decision. They almost certainly weighed the
| available options to deliver the project within the defined
| constraints of the system.
| JoyousAbandon wrote:
| Hard drives weren't new in 1998. I don't even know where
| you'd have gotten a computer that lacked one by then; and
| most would also have had a CD-ROM drive.
| prewett wrote:
| The Mac SE had a 20 MB hard disk in 1987! And there was
| no way Windows 95--which everyone had by 1998--was
| fitting on a floppy of any size.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Why do I have to do this research instead of the "journalist"?
|
| Ratchet the snark back. The journalist was referring to the
| train control system not home computers in someone's basement.
| And, yes, twenty five years ago SelTrac was cutting edge.
| Moving block systems were basically unheard of back then.
| JoyousAbandon wrote:
| The only snark here is yours. What are you talking about with
| "computers in someone's basement?"
|
| He pointed out glaring factual errors in the story, which
| should not have made it through any kind of editorial review.
| For example: 25 years ago pretty much every computer had a
| hard drive. And the disk depicted in the article is obviously
| a 3.5", not a "five-inch floppy."
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Whether the computer in your basement had a hard drive or
| not has no bearing on whether or not SelTrac was cutting
| edge at the time (it was). That there were even computers
| with microprocessors put SelTrac decades ahead of what was
| in use elsewhere at the time.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Why would a hard drive be better? If the floppy fails just grab
| another off the shelf and try it (surely they have more than
| one copy). Downtime measured in seconds.
|
| The other good thing about the floppy is it can't hold very
| much code. So the system has a tight upper bound on how bloated
| and complex it can get. Simpler systems are more maintainable.
|
| These things seem like great assets for maintaining critical
| infrastructure.
|
| EDIT: Another great thing is such a system will be stateless.
| No disks, no filesystems, no databases. Sign me up.
| deathanatos wrote:
| While nothing you've said is wrong, that's not their point.
|
| (These days, you could also replace the floppy with a USB
| drive: they make adapters/emulators.)
| JoyousAbandon wrote:
| He never said it was better. He's pointing out glaring
| factual errors in the story.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Where is the factual error? This passage is the one we're
| taking about right?
|
| > Turns out that in 1998, SFMTA had the latest cutting edge
| technology when they installed their automatic train
| control system.
|
| > "We were the first agency in the U.S. to adopt this
| particular technology but it was from an era that computers
| didn't have a hard drive so you have to load the software
| from floppy disks on to the computer,"
|
| The fact of when hard drives became commonplace in personal
| computers (EDIT: or when 3.5" floppies were introduced) has
| no bearing whatsoever on whether this transit control
| system was cutting edge in 1998. This statement is not, at
| least not _obviously_ , factually incorrect. So if you're
| going to claim that, show your work.
| t1c wrote:
| "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" definitely has its practical
| limits
| nvahalik wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry
| PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-
| to-SD card adapters.
|
| Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most
| concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily
| achievable in a few months?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Speaking naively (I have no insight into the situation), I
| would guess that this is probably the result of the officials
| in charge not having technical understanding and contracting it
| all out. Contractors aren't going to be choosing the quick or
| cost-effective option, because that'd undercut their profits.
| deweller wrote:
| Also, it is difficult to sell a solution of "well - we aren't
| really modernizing the system, we are just putting a fix in
| place that pretends like it is a floppy drive."
|
| I would guess higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-
| aid without really fixing the problem.
| krallja wrote:
| > higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid
| without really fixing the problem
|
| I have literally never had this problem in my career.
| Higher-ups LOVE to push the problem off to after the next
| budget cycle.
| jdblair wrote:
| You are correct that this would be much simpler if the only
| goal was to replace the floppy disk part of the system.
|
| The floppy disk angle is there to make a good headline. The
| article makes it clear this is a much bigger project than just
| replacing the floppy disks. "The detail[ed]
| project schedule will be finalized once we have a contractor
| onboard. This is effectively a multi-phase decade long project
| that starts with pieces of market street subway and pieces in
| the surface. Ultimately our goal is to have a single train
| control system for the entire rail system," said Tumlin.
| renewiltord wrote:
| SF has to make everything a big bang project because every
| project has equal large fixed cost. So whether you do a small
| thing or a big thing you do a big fixed cost thing first.
|
| So SF always does the big thing because otherwise the
| overhead dominates.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I think the government is involved which means the task must
| primarily be an effort to funnel large amounts of money around
| to just the right people while facilitating all the best
| changes to whatever they can find within N degrees of
| separation from the project itself, (where N approaches
| infinity.)
| lepus wrote:
| There are other concerns that need to be addressed where a hack
| wouldn't help:
|
| >The transportation body says the train control system was
| built to last for just 20 to 25 years, meaning it surpassed its
| expected lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability
| Working Group, said to be composed of local and national
| transit experts, recommended replacing the transit control
| system within five to seven years. [...] "We have to maintain
| programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the
| '90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a
| technical debt that stretches back many decades," Tumlin told
| San Francisco's KQED in February 2023.
| ammo1662 wrote:
| It is not a technical problem. Who will be responsible for this
| migration?
|
| Clearly no one wants to do that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > However, budget challenges put the project's timeline into
| question. The SFMTA's train upgrade project isn't just a
| migration off of floppy disks but also a "complete overhaul of
| the current train control system and all its components,
| including the onboard computers, central and local servers, and
| communications infrastructure," Roccaforte said.
|
| > Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the
| system's loop cable, which transmits data between the central
| servers and the trains and, according to Roccaforte, "has less
| bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem."
|
| Also, they're already late as hell, what's 5 more years? 5 1/4
| isn't going to become more obsolete than it is at this point.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| You don't need more "bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem"
| for train control. What Roccaforte left out is that the MTA
| spent over a decade trying to keep the trains from slicing up
| the inductive loop. No idea how the new trains are working
| out, but I'm pretty sure they never found a permanent fix for
| the old ones.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Playing video games on an old Apple II via a floppy emulator
| has a different set of requirements than a safety-critical
| application.
|
| Lawyers will probably spend a year wrangling liability
| concerns.
|
| I could probably replace a floppy drive on any system within a
| couple of weeks. I would not accept legal or financial
| liability for any such solution without an extremely thorough
| and slow review of all aspects of the project. edit: and an
| astronomically high paycheck.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I don't think that is actually a concern. The article is
| written in a way to imply that it is, but I doubt the people
| who are running the system actually think that is the risk.
|
| I am sure they have copies of the floppy disk, and likely have
| images on other machines that can be used to create a new
| floppy even if all the copies are lost.
|
| I feel like the SFMTA is mainly using the existence of the
| floppy disks as a marketing point for their desire to get
| funding to update the system. It is something that the average
| person will be able to look at and know it is out of date in a
| visceral way.
|
| The reporter seems to read this as if we are one bad floppy
| away from failure, but that is not the actual case.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Didn't it used to be that they broke often when you would keep
| them in the sun, even for a little?
| nerdjon wrote:
| Well... I feel slightly better about Boston constantly pushing
| back being able to use our phones as tickets after seeing the
| timeline for the transition and how just that they are still
| doing this.
|
| What is it about public transit in the US that it is so... bad?
| Inadequate funding seems to be the easy one, but the MBTA
| (Boston) doesn't even handle the funds it has well. Yeah it needs
| more funding but there is also just a core issue to how it's run.
|
| It is sad to see the state of public transit in this country,
| particularly in dense urban areas where we should be discouraging
| Car use as much as possible.
|
| I am very curious what other countries are doing that we are not.
| asdff wrote:
| I think about this all the time every time I see an lcd screen
| in my local train stations. If people who designed them
| actually used transit, maybe they'd have the signs you can only
| see as you walk out of the station say something about the bus
| lines you'd transfer to, instead of when the train behind you
| that just departed from is set to arrive. At some stations the
| screens they installed don't display anything useful at all,
| not when the next train will come, just the date and time as if
| everyone doesn't have that in their pocket, and this needs to
| be displayed every 25 feet on the platform.
|
| A lot of transit could be fixed by just taking a regular
| routine user, empowering them to become a dictator for a week
| and point out all the friction points they hit actually using
| the system. But then that would make the entire bureaucratic
| system that is the transit agency look like idiots who don't
| understand their own jobs, so it will unfortunately never be
| done.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Well and lots that don't even take the transit they manage.
| It's just so infuriating.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I feel like almost every screen I just ignore, either it was
| just put there for ads or it is wrong/broken.
|
| It is now a fairly regular occurrence to have a train show up
| that the screen had no reference too existing a minute or two
| before.
|
| But yeah it feels like they were not designed or setup by
| people that actually use the trains and were setup by a
| comity thinking they know best.
|
| Maybe that is the big difference, in other countries the
| people using it are also the ones managing it?
| rtkwe wrote:
| The big issue is putting those screens in isn't just a
| simple task, you need the entire support and switching
| network to be able to track individual trains which is a
| relatively new thing in terms of the age of many of the
| subway swtiching and train tacking (where those even exist)
| systems in the US.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. I think a lot of this is just about how heavy the
| planning cycles are. A lot of stuff like that is developed
| through big, waterfall planning efforts and large outsourcing
| contracts. Most of the choices were made before they had
| their first user, and once it's all installed any revision
| would be a) expensive, and b) a black eye for the people in
| charge.
|
| And in some ways I don't blame people for doing this, because
| you need really supportive stakeholders to work in an
| iterative fashion. Otherwise you get a ton of nitpicking that
| amounts to a lot of "why didn't you guess 100 perfectly
| everything up front" and "how can we start if you can't give
| me a full plan and a firm price?" In a blame-hungry
| environment, waterfall is the safest choice for the people
| doing the project.
| roody15 wrote:
| I am an elected official (12 years and elected six times in
| Illinois) unfortunately seeing this process work over 12 years
| is discouraging. For example President Obama allocated 8
| billion dollars for high sped passenger rail service
| improvements. By 2017 almost 2 billion of this money had been
| spent on railroad improvements / railroad crossings and line
| inspections. Fast forward to 2024 no high speed rails have
| actually been built. For example Chicago Illinois was to get a
| line from Iowa City to Quad Cities to Chicago (straight line).
| This project was fully funded at one point but Iowa and
| Illinois had (still have) a disagreement on bridge repairs
| connecting the states.
|
| Now Governor Pritzer has authorized a new high speed rail
| commission to try and get this project going again.
|
| In a nutshell .. Rail project between Iowa City and Chicago was
| fully funded as of 2016... all that actually happened is some
| rail road crossing were improved.. lines were inspected and no
| actual new lines constructed. Instead 1 out of the 2 billion
| was spend on "engineering" costs and compliance paperwork ...
| which now has expired and need to be redone if the project is
| to be completed.
|
| The amount of money spent on compliance paperwork and
| "engineering" is staggering. Many six figure salaries depend on
| slightly altering existing engineered projects to meet
| compliance requirements for projects that are never built. From
| waste treatment upgrades, water treatment, road improvement,
| traffic studies, on and on. The amount of money spent on
| services that are not finished or lead to an actual project is
| absolutely staggering ... entire industries depend on this
| inefficiency and lobby effectively to keep things "obtuse".
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Wasting money on favored constituents is the point of these
| projects.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Wasting money on special interests would be more accurate.
| nerdjon wrote:
| 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 to the wrong places
| like you said.
|
| I would probably argue that we still need more funding even
| if we fixed how we used the money, but we need to fix how we
| use it first.
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| simfree wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| I would claim that the problem is that they're doing it
| for government, which is what makes the chain of
| accountability lead to nowhere.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| From someone who's seen the other side... every time the
| engineer has to quabble over email with the permitting
| departments over matters such as "you sent it to the wrong
| bureaucrat so I'm ignoring instead of forwarding it" or "the
| permit admin wrote the wrong 1 of 50 Comcast subsidiaries on
| the paperwork so now I have to get a skip-manager's signoff"
| it's billed at $400/hr.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| > What is it about public transit in the US that it is so...
| bad?
|
| Massive money and entrenched behind preserving a car-based
| life.
|
| Car companies, auto workers unions, railroads can siphon off
| funds from promised improvements to cover deferred maintenance
| and give themselves bonuses for being so clever... Hell, AAA
| which one might expect to spend its income on serving its
| members instead diverts money to proactively lobbying against
| improvements in public transit in an ongoing display of cynical
| self-preservation
|
| It's basically hopeless.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Nonsense. There is working transit in the US and a huge
| appetite for more. But it takes decades to do this stuff.
| "China did massive infrastructure project in two years" --
| China is also a communist dictatorship (for some value of
| those words), and we can't do that here. We could streamline
| things a bit more, of course, but it's never going to be
| cheap and easy in the US.
|
| If you want to help, vote. Or even run for something on a
| pro-transit, YIMBY platform.
| rangestransform wrote:
| other countries don't treat public transit as a jobs program
|
| other cities (in the east, with the best public transit) don't
| let unions grab the entire city by the balls
|
| government employees in other cities aren't as hellbent on
| extracting their pound of flesh from the taxpayer
| xxpor wrote:
| NYC is grabbed by the balls plenty. They still don't have
| OPTO for example.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think there are a bunch of things causing this problem. Off
| the top of my head, some factors:
|
| - chronic underfunding - we all know how problems build up when
| maintenance is deferred
|
| - waterfall planning - Mary Poppendieck has a nice talk on how
| much trouble this causes:
| https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/
|
| - political point-scoring - blame-oriented cultures discourage
| experimentation and incremental improvement
|
| - political polarization - one-party areas can more easily
| slide into cronyism, and fighting between parties makes it hard
| to compromise even on things like fixing infrastructure
|
| - classism - in a lot of places, transit is for the poors
|
| - racism - many don't want transit bringing Those People around
|
| - manager culture, not engineer culture - as we see with
| Boeing, standard MBA thinking doesn't work well for long-term
| safety and reliability; the focus on short term metrics, mostly
| financial ones, leads to underinvestment and decay of
| infrastructure
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I'm a liberal democrat, but it's clear that one party
| politics is not tenable. There has to be an option to the
| status quo that you can vote for to incentivize competency in
| government. But with the state of national politics it would
| be almost impossible for a republican to win in most of urban
| America. So that leaves just primary challengers from within
| the Democratic Party which is very difficult. So urban
| political machines have become absolutely rotten with
| complacency and now the richest zip codes on the planet have
| trains running on floppy disks.
|
| One option is ranked choice voting.
| wpietri wrote:
| I totally agree we need more actual competition, and also
| agree that national polarization plus a first-past-the-post
| system makes that unlikely in the near term.
|
| I would also love to see widespread use of RCV, but as a
| San Franciscan I don't think it has done tons to fix the
| problem of complacent political machines here, so we're
| going to have to do more.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Upgrade to 3.5 inch ones!
| yonran wrote:
| They do use 3.5 inch disks; this is a misstatement: "SFMTA's
| train control system relies every morning on 5 inch floppy
| disks." The SFMTA Board presentation justifying the >$600M
| upgrade shows a photo of the real 3.5 inch floppy disks in use
| that were written in 2021.
| https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That seems to be common in US infrastructure projects. If it
| isn't a megaproject, is it even worth attempting? /s
| rtkwe wrote:
| I get it though, it's a nightmare getting a project through
| approvals so by the time you have an issue big enough to push
| an overhaul through it's a major project and you want to pile
| as many things onto it as possible because it might be a
| decade before you get another decent funding injection to do
| what should be regular maintenance.
| maxvt wrote:
| 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.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Floppy disks seems common in the us. Just since 2019, they don't
| use 8" floppys for the nuclear rockets.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931800/usa-nuclear-8-i...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Hardly specific to the US. Lots of stodgy old institutions
| across the world still run on elderly hardware. If it works, it
| works.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| If it works don't fix it
| FpUser wrote:
| >""The system is currently working just fine, but we know that
| with each increasing year, risk of data degradation on the floppy
| disks increases and that at some point there will be a
| catastrophic failure," Tumlin told ABC7."
|
| Do they know that floppy can be backed up?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Japan is doing away with 3 1/2 floppies .
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/floppy-disk-requirem...
| wongarsu wrote:
| German high speed trains used 3.5" floppies to update seat
| reservations until ~2016.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The article picture is of a 3.5" floppy, but the article says
| they are using 5.25"
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > 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 enough here.
|
| Edit: It was last updated in 1998, so it's due now not a decade
| from now.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| kion wrote:
| I looked into this last year, a significant part of the cost
| is in new hardware, both on the vehicles, but also sensors
| spread through the system. They all need commercial grade RF
| systems that allow for 2 way signaling communication and
| integration into the vehicles control systems.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| also they need to be rated for the operating environment.
| you can't stick any random part from newegg in there.
|
| Tesla used non-automotive grade touchscreens in some cars
| and so they died early:
| https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-
| shows...
|
| Automotive grade has very high requirements:
|
| > Grade 0: High Temperature Operating Life (HTOL): +175C
| for 408 hours. High Temperature Storage Life (HTSL): +175C
| for 1,000 hours. Temperature Cycling: -65C tp +175C for 500
| cycles
|
| And generally speaking transit agencies aspire to buy
| higher-reliability, longer-lasting equipment than your
| average consumer car.
| krallja wrote:
| I've noticed that my car's touchscreen operates at a very
| high temperature at all times - almost hot enough to burn
| skin, which seems like a weird choice for something
| designed to be touched by skin.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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?
| strangattractor wrote:
| The cost is distribute across all the PowerPoint, Word, and
| Excel spreadsheets created to give the illusion that people
| are doing actual work. Go read a couple of the SFMTA PDF's
| linked to by a commenter. They are totally enlightening
| justifications like - reduced congestion blah - better
| monitoring blah. No meat whatsoever. No analysis backing
| anything up - just pretty pictures.
|
| I rode Muni for 10 years almost every working day. Do you
| want to know what reduced congestion the most. Buying new
| muni cars because the old muni cars door mechanism had been
| repaired so much they did not open or close %50 of the time
| and people had to use other doors to get on and off a train
| on a daily basis.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Still, when you have a 20-25 year replacement cycle being 10
| years behind is pretty significant. And that's assuming their
| estimate of needing another decade is correct. Which seems
| doubtful considering they don't have a contractor, they don't
| have the money, and the previous system probably took a decade
| to develop considering their choice of 5.25" floppies (3.5"
| floppies overtook 5.25" floppies in sales in 1988).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Right, if they think it will take 10 years, 15-20 is probably
| more realistic, which means you need to start the upgrade
| process 5-10 years after buying your system: seems very
| expensive.
| bdamm wrote:
| Nah.
|
| What's really happening is going to be: Emerging new use-cases
| and rising costs from specialized vendors for replacement parts
| that match the existing system are driving a desire for the
| agency to replace the control system. The floppy system bit can
| 100% be replaced with a solution that isn't a floppy, but that
| wouldn't help them with the rest of what they want.
|
| "because life cycles" is a lazy description.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that 5.25" floppies were
| already well out their way out in 1998, already.
| Aloha wrote:
| I dont really see the issue?
|
| The technology works, there is a replacement outlined, there is
| no shortage of floppy disks - even 5 1/4 ones.
| perihelions wrote:
| Yeah, the article reads as if the real problem is a lack of a
| tested system of backups. Or I don't know how else to parse
| this line:
|
| - _" It's a question of risk. The system is currently working
| just fine but we know that with each increasing year risk of
| data degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some
| point there will be a catastrophic failure."_
|
| "Data degradation on the floppies" should not, by itself, cause
| any sort of "catastrophic failure" in a sound system. If one
| software disk fails, you should have five identical copies in a
| drawer, five more in a different room, ten more off-site, plus
| a disk image on cloud storage that you can write fresh floppy
| disks from.
|
| I mean, it's probably a good idea to change the storage medium
| too--but that's not the root problem.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| checksums are a whole thing
| shrubble wrote:
| Does no one at the organization know what a GoTek FlashFloppy is?
|
| Sounds like they are using the floppy as an excuse to push for an
| upgrade that has nothing to do with the floppy drives.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The entire system has reached the end of it's design life and
| the floppy is just the shocking bite to get people to click
| through. Really this is the regular replacement of an old
| system with a newer control system that will make the trains
| run better and more reliably.
| nelsondev wrote:
| Why will a new system make the trains run better? It could
| also make it run worse, if they don't cover all the current
| cases.
|
| I've ridden Muni in SF for years, drivers control most of the
| decision making.
|
| There's a handful of single track tunnels/sensors/necessary
| software-based coordination, but as another commenter pointed
| out, the doors cause more issues than signal problems.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| I've ridden Muni in SF for years, drivers control most of
| the decision making.
|
| All of the tunnels are under automatic operation, and the
| majority of the switches (street or tunnel) are computer
| controlled. the doors cause more issues
| than signal problems.
|
| While doors are a real common failure/abuse point, I'd want
| to see some actual numbers on that. Train control failure
| may not always be self-evident to a rider, especially if
| the remedy is to run things manually (such that things
| aren't ever stopped completely).
|
| Historically the cab signaling system would glitch in wet
| or damp weather. Transponders for the switches had a near
| 100% failure rate. Trains chewed up the inductive loops,
| forcing emergency braking. That was common enough that they
| had to dial back the emergency deceleration. Twenty years
| on they've mostly worked out the kinks but it hasn't always
| been that way.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > "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. Maybe EEPROMs would
| have been better.
|
| > Luz Pena: "How dire is it to change the system to upgrade it
| from a floppy disk to a wireless system?"
|
| I agree that floppies aren't the peak of reliability, but "a
| wireless system" also sounds like a disaster. I don't want
| critical urban infrastructure running on extremely hackable OTA
| updates. For the love of god, SF, you can avoid pretty much all
| potential cybersecurity problems by just _not putting your trains
| online_.
|
| I feel like neither the interviewer nor the interviewee really
| had the technical expertise to speak to this. This entire piece
| is just, "oooooo, floppies are old. Old bad! Why not new yet? New
| good."
| JTbane wrote:
| Couldn't the city set up a private WAN for the trains, avoiding
| the security issues of being connected to the internet?
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The reporter waving around a 3.5" floppy because most viewers
| wouldn't even know what the 5.25" was
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| The 8" are reserved for the ICBM targeting systems and
| financial institutions.
| sitkack wrote:
| So, replace the floppies with a high reliability flash device
| that emulates a floppy drive, should have happened years ago.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > "Wow. I mean I thought we were moving on to AI. So why are we
| doing floppy disk," said Katie Guillen, SFMTA passenger.
|
| This naivety is _not_ Katie 's fault. We who work in tech are to
| blame for constantly pushing our half-baked experimental garbage
| as if it was "engineering" on par with civil or aeronautical
| systems. We can't blame people for occasionally believing the
| lies.
|
| The tech-washed version of this quote might go something like
| "wow I thought everything was moving to the multi-cloud
| serverless kooberneetus now, why is it still running on a
| computer?"
|
| > It is easy to run a secure computer system. You merely have to
| disconnect all dial-up connections and permit only direct-wired
| terminals, put the machine and its terminals in a shielded room,
| and post a guard at the door[1].
|
| This is the kind of thing I want running the trains. Give it ECC
| RAM too, please.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer...
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I 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.
| boringg wrote:
| Protected from hackers though!
| jmb99 wrote:
| Unless said hacker has a big magnet.
| Hrnrurj wrote:
| Here is 2017 article from NY to get an idea.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-mta-subway-delay-2017-6
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Let me guess, you also think public servants are lazy,
| overpaid and unskilled? Comments like this belie how many
| people form opinions of public agencies without having any
| real experience with government.
|
| The problem is the public and the politicians - transit
| employees largely do the best they can with the resources and
| constraints they are given. In order to succeed transit needs
| municipalities and states to: pay more taxes; accept that
| transit won't generate a profit, but does generate non-
| monetary public value; and gather their resolve to deal with
| NIMBYs.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Let me guess, you also think public servants are lazy,
| overpaid and unskilled?
|
| Do you not see this article as evidence of this fact? If
| you walked into any other business reliant on "floppy
| disks" just to take your money, would you praise their
| practices and efficiency?
|
| > Comments like this belie how many people form opinions of
| public agencies without having any real experience with
| government.
|
| I form opinions because I try to use their services and am
| disappointed and often disgusted. Do you really think
| "experience with public transport" is particularly hard to
| come by? That this is all too esoteric for the "common man"
| to opine on? Please...
|
| > transit employees largely do the best they can with the
| resources and constraints they are given
|
| Perhaps they should earn those resources competitively
| instead of being given them? Otherwise, this seems like a
| perennial chicken and the egg problem that swallows tax
| dollars with no worthwhile result.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I don't think the article is a reflection on efficacy of
| the public agency. If their budget for new software is
| $0, how exactly are they supposed to upgrade it? It's
| certainly possible that the agency has been utter shit
| for 25 years, but this article doesn't give the
| information to conclude that.
|
| > Perhaps they should earn those resources competitively
| instead of being given them?
|
| How? They're a public agency. There is no profit motive -
| if the public wants nicer stuff, they need to pay for it.
| That includes both the software costs and the higher
| salary costs to hire people capable of those types of
| projects.
|
| Again, you come off as someone running their mouth with
| no actual experience interacting with public agencies.
| It's very frustrating to know how to fix a problem
| without being given the resources or permission to do so,
| which is often the case in transit. Add to that most
| transit agencies have a tiny budget for IT, and I'm not
| sure how you expect this to get solved without a big
| public push.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Transit employees are not the same people as, nor have the
| same motivations as the politicians who manage transport
| agencies.
|
| Of course the employees work hard. It's the vocation
| they've chosen. I'm always amazed by the diligence of TFL
| and rail employees in the U.K., for instance.
|
| No, the guiding principle for the folks at the top is "so,
| how can I make money for myself out of this before I fail
| upwards?".
|
| I'd wager the SF situation is just the same old looting by
| the Very Important People who run the show, leaving
| employees and actual managers with a shoestring and two
| peanuts to make it all work, while the head honchos bathe
| in gravy.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > No, the guiding principle for the folks at the top is
| "so, how can I make money for myself out of this before I
| fail upwards?".
|
| Who are "the folks at the top"? Transit agency executives
| in California make less than software engineers (though
| if you put in your time, you get a nice pension to make
| up for it) - how are these people getting rich? If you
| mean the politicians, sure, I've already said they're
| half the problem.
| bhawks wrote:
| They make money by exploiting their position not through
| their salary.
|
| These people are around in SF - see Mohammed Nuru,
| Rodrigo Santos and so on.
| stackskipton wrote:
| There is always stable "Go work as consultant at company
| that does a ton of business with former agency. This
| position is in no way related to any agency work they
| did. :wink:"
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Nah, Jeffrey Tumlin (current SFMTA head) makes about
| $500k total comp.
| skrbjc wrote:
| >Let me guess, you also think public servants are lazy,
| overpaid and unskilled? Comments like this belie how many
| people form opinions of public agencies without having any
| real experience with government.
|
| I've worked in the public sector for several years, and
| there are definitely a decently-sized group of people in
| many different positions that are riding out their time
| until retirement trying to fly under the radar and do as
| little as possible. Not to say there aren't people that
| aren't competent, but as a competent person you have to
| work around the people that don't care and often actively
| don't want to see more work come their way to get anything
| done. It becomes tiring and eventually the private sector
| is too enticing and the competent people leave.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| or they're not immune to the same urge all SW devs have to
| rewrite - it's a lot easier to start from scratch than (a)
| figure out how an existing system works, (b) figure out how
| to upgrade or modernize
| whyenot wrote:
| It reads like you are conflating newer with better.
|
| It was more than a few years ago, but I remember the posts on
| Slashdot where tech people were wringing their hands over the
| fact that election offices were not adopting touchscreen
| ballots fast enough. Some posters were also promoting things
| like internet voting. How did that work out?
|
| Sometimes it actually is better to move slowly instead of
| adopting something new just because it is new. With old
| equipment and older technology, we know the failure modes, we
| have the procedures in place for addressing them. Whether
| it's floppy disks, paper ballots, (or human beings,) older
| does not necessarily mean worse.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The problem is "lower my taxes" single issue voters. People
| vote for whomever lowers taxes and then complain about
| potholes. It's always the same people. GOVERNMENT IS
| INCOMPETENT BLAH BLAH. Yeah, cause you refuse to fund it and
| everything goes to shit, then is 10x more expensive to fix it
| compared to properly funding maintenance. You end up paying
| more in the end because these people can't see past the
| couple hundred dollars they saved on their property taxes and
| wonder why everything is turning to shit.
| aorloff wrote:
| You have some evidence that government is not incompetent ?
| afavour wrote:
| It's weird that people have this notion about government
| and _only_ government. There are things governments do
| well and things they do badly. You could say the exact
| same thing about private business: businesses go bankrupt
| every day, wasting time and resources. But no one argues
| that the very concept of business is "incompetent".
| asveikau wrote:
| The US government created the network you used to write
| that comment.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Same thought I had immediately when I read the story. Worth
| fixing that failure point at least.
| jandrese wrote:
| This was my thought. Floppy emulators are a dime a dozen thanks
| to the retrocomputing community. Emulators for the custom
| boards full of discrete logic, opaque ROM chips, PLAs, and so
| on from long dead companies are going to be a much bigger
| challenge.
|
| If they had good schematics for all of the parts it might be
| possible to keep the the system running for a long time with a
| couple of smart EEs who are comfortable with the scope and
| soldering iron, but eventually they're going to run out of some
| obscure part and be up a creek.
|
| Or maybe they could replace entire boards with home designed
| versions condense all of the old logic down to one chip and a
| handful of support components and start in-place upgrading
| without a total system revamp. Still an expensive process, and
| one that requires some hard to find engineers on staff, but
| theoretically spreads out the upgrade process over many years.
| It also loses out on functional improvement opportunities while
| your system is made up of a hodgepodge of old and new hardware.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| SelTrac was designed to use commercial off the shelf (COTS)
| parts so there shouldn't be much in terms of needing custom
| chips, etc. The problem is that Alcatel (now Thales)
| basically doesn't support any of this (and hasn't for a long
| time).
|
| The computers in question are, I believe, just thin clients.
| andbberger wrote:
| the state-of-good-repair grift will continue until the morale
| improves! SelTrac is fine. and if it ever actually breaks
| (dubious) they can fall back to block signaling which
| comfortably handles more trains than muni is capable of
| running. the MBTA does just fine with it on the green line, and
| when the MBTA is making you look incompetent you've got to
| question where it all went wrong.
|
| this is the agency that brought you the central fucking subway,
| a $300M sewer project masquerading as some red paint on van
| ness, that picked the already-mostly-grade-separated M Ocean
| over the N Judah to subway-ify and that is incapable of
| flicking the traffic preemption switch on the rest of the T to
| the on position without a decades long pedestrian detection
| LIDAR project for the unique in the world needs of san
| francisco.
| fdr wrote:
| A once a generation refresh seems okay in my book. The Breda
| trains that came in 1996 were being phased out about twenty
| years into their tenure, most generally seem to think that is
| about reasonable a time to do something like that. I don't see
| software related regimes as inherently that different.
|
| Since I experienced 5.25 inch floppy disk era...and even the
| occasional bernoulli disk...we could simply say: the system had
| its run, replacement is reasonable. A lot of stuff had changed
| since then, and not just in storage media.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Wait, you're suggesting replacing trains because the
| computers inside them are old?
| asveikau wrote:
| I think they're just saying parts should be periodically
| replaced across the board on that timeframe, and using the
| fact that the trains are being swapped out as an example.
| The Breda trains are still running some percentage of the
| fleet however. I rode in one today.
| fdr wrote:
| That's right. System refreshes are a fact of life,
| especially if one is parsimonious in using what works
| until obsolescence. There are downsides of doing things
| that way, but I don't see it inherently more defective
| than other approaches, such as some kind of continuous
| refresh that has a conceit of keeping a system "modern"
| in perpetuity.
| thsksbd wrote:
| But twenty years for a train seems very low. My daily
| driver is 12 years old, I thrash it every morning and
| never gives me problems. I live in the snowbelt.
|
| By comparison a train is vastly over-engineered and has
| an electric drive train. Sure stuff will need replacing
| but a train should last 40 years at least
| jcgrillo wrote:
| https://www.wbur.org/morningedition/2016/03/07/mbta-
| signal-m...
| SllX wrote:
| What are they still running OS/2?
|
| (they probably are...)
| kazinator wrote:
| > _like this at every layer_
|
| It may feel emotionally like this at every layer, but the
| layers that are not floppy discs are completely different from
| floppy discs.
|
| Other than electrolytics caps (easy replacement items), old
| electronics is reliable.
|
| Moving parts need service; that's life.
|
| > _needs replacement_
|
| Not believable without detailed justification.
|
| In the present article, someone is literally quoted as
| everything working just fine.
| yonran wrote:
| The real scope of the project is a mind-boggling $600 million
| to track the light rail trains inside and outside the tunnels
| and to control the trains inside the tunnels. Divided by the
| 250 light rail vehicles (apparently does not include historic
| streetcars), it works out to $2.6 million per car. Plus $36M
| for consulting (2023-11-07 board presentation from the
| documents that I linked earlier
| https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-
| docume...).
| gojomo wrote:
| Remember when, less than 3 years ago, SF projected a $108M
| _surplus_ for the next two years?
|
| Woulda been a nice time to clean up some of this technical debt!
|
| Or how about the SF Emergency Sirens, taken offline in late 2019
| for a "2 year" upgrade plan that officeholders implied was
| already in place?
|
| In August 2023, with _no_ progress whatsover, with the Maui fire
| disaster fresh on their minds, Mayor Breed & Supervisors
| President Peskin touted they'd finally funded a plan to return
| them to service soon: https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-and-
| board-president-pesk...
|
| In that same August 2023 timeframe, Peskin said the plan would
| bring this "need to have" system "up and running" & to "state of
| the art" by end of 2024, for $5.5M:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-city...
|
| Of course, this was just more blatant self-exonerating bullshit
| from our local political machines immune from any real
| accountability for incompetence in basic public functions.
|
| A mere 6 months later in February 2024, nothing's been started,
| Peskin admitted "we don't even have a plan", the department is
| still waiting until "funding is identified", and the cost
| estimate has ballooned to $20.5m: https://abc7news.com/san-
| francisco-sirens-emergency-911-aler...
|
| That works out to $170K+ for each of 119 units - units that each
| could probably just be a weatherized consumer-grade handheld
| device with multiple mobile/packet/sat radios, & a simple
| authenticated-playback app, mounted on existing poles that
| presumably already have power and even loudspeakers.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Sirens don't even need to be that complicated. A motor, a noise
| generator wheel (basically just a big spinning squirrelcage
| fan), and a horn. You could toggle them on/off with a simple
| relay/contactor.
| gojomo wrote:
| These "sirens" actually need to be able to play spoken
| announcements - something they did easily since about 2005,
| before the fumbled 2019-2024 shutdown/upgrade.
|
| More history, through January 2022, via JWZ's blog:
|
| https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/the-reason-the-tuesday-
| noon...
| paradox460 wrote:
| Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing the spoken
| message every Tuesday.
|
| Still, a big loudspeaker is even simpler than a classical
| motorized siren. No moving parts!
| pastureofplenty wrote:
| JWZ doesn't like HN and doesn't want his site being linked
| to on here so your URL redirects to a crude image.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My 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 there is basically just
| one engineer we have (and probably the only one on Earth) who
| knows how to work on these things. He's getting old, and
| obviously none of the younger engineers really have an interest
| in learning ancient forgotten systems.
| strangattractor wrote:
| LOL:) this story seems to resurface every couple of years. My
| favorite part of the article:
|
| "Jeffrey Tumlin: "It's a question of risk. The system is
| currently working just fine but we know that with each
| increasing year risk of data degradation on the floppy disks
| increases and that at some point there will be a catastrophic
| failure."
|
| This seems to imply they have been using the exact same disk
| for the past 20 years (absurd), they have absolutely no idea
| what is written on the disk and how it can be safely backed up
| or restored. This would be a problem regardless of the medium
| used.
|
| Although I hold the line at using paper tape there is nothing
| wrong with using floppies other than it seems antiquated. It
| certainly is reliable and cheap. Maybe the only thing that
| needs replacing is the people running the Muni.
| asveikau wrote:
| You make a good point. However, even with the disks backed up
| to a better storage medium, detecting data loss on the floppy
| and getting a replacement written and deployed to the correct
| location might take a while. During that time the system may
| face unacceptable transit delays.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Wait, what? If this thing boots from a floppy, and that
| floppy has a checksum on it, and the boot sequence involves
| loading the checksum and the rest of the floppy contents
| into RAM and computing the checksum, corruption detection
| would be near instantaneous and the remediation would be as
| quick as it takes to eject the corrupted floppy, grab
| another floppy copy from the bin, plug it in, and flip the
| on switch. So the delay would be (roughly) zero.
| asveikau wrote:
| Let's say it's not just booting from it, but constantly
| reading.
|
| Let's say no one implemented the checksum. Edit: I forgot
| that floppies have a crc check, my bad.
|
| Let's say the machine that can write the new disk is
| physically far away from the machines that read them. (Or
| the guy with a stack of new disks -- which are harder to
| find every year -- his office is some distance from the
| control machine).
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I guess I assumed it was only reading from the floppy,
| not also writing to it.. that doesn't seem like it would
| last very long at all without encountering errors (at
| least based on my memories of reusing floppies until they
| were completely worn out)
| nneonneo wrote:
| Every sizable manufacturer of floppy disks has exited the
| market. There are no more (major) suppliers for the tech.
| They've likely been depending on a dwindling supply of
| functional disks; if at some point they find themselves
| without enough working disks to operate the system, they will
| indeed be screwed.
|
| There's also the chance that they take a disk that's on the
| verge of failure, plug it into the system, and some corrupted
| commands get loaded into the system. That could easily result
| in a "catastrophic failure".
|
| Floppy disks are not reliable or cheap. They physically
| degrade over time, and at this point are nowhere near cheap
| for "new" disks.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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.
| culopatin wrote:
| Are you hiring young engineers who want to learn the old stuff?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Where are you going to find a young engineer who wants to
| build a dead-end career? I'm sure that if you pay them
| enough, someone will show up, but most people would rather
| build skills that will continue to be useful rather than
| skills that will be useless once an inevitable, sorely needed
| refresh happens.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think you overestimate how much working on obsolete tech
| is a dead end career. Skills are still transferable.
| Someone who can sling 8086 assembly can figure out your
| dumb web app.
| culopatin wrote:
| I'd do it. I'd like to be the expert that can help them
| choose or maybe build the replacement.
| gopher_space wrote:
| One of my older jobs relied on ancient hardware, and the life
| of the company was measured by parts in the warehouse and
| vendors who still cared. From their perspective they'd have a
| modern system as long as your company delivers.
|
| > hey haven't shown any interest in updating the system.
|
| So expensive to update that there's a calculated end-of-life to
| the system. They'd _love_ to know about your engineer
| situation. That 'd trigger plans put in place a while ago.
|
| Your company could do a last big batch for the city and send
| the old guy out with a nice bonus.
| throwaway74432 wrote:
| >SFMTA's train control system relies every morning on 5 inch
| floppy disks.
|
| That's not the 3.5" floppy disk in the video. This is the _old_
| floppy disks[1]
|
| 1. https://www.digitaltreasures.ca/img/level2_floppy_525.jpg
| prewett wrote:
| And floppy floppies wasn't "cutting edge technology [in 1998]",
| either.
|
| The OG floppy disks were 8 inches, though, 5 inch floppies were
| the small ones (hence why 3.5" disks were "microfloppies"):
|
| https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/12/floppy_di...
| yonran wrote:
| I believe that the article is about this RFP for "Contract No.
| SFMTA-2022-40 FTA" to upgrade the Communications-Based Train
| Control System (CBTC) or Advanced Train Control System (ATCS).
| The resolution to create the RFP for the supplier was approved
| 2023-01-17 (https://www.sfmta.com/reports/1-17-23-mtab-
| item-14-communica...), and a $36M resolution to create an RFP for
| a consultant was approved 2023-11-07
| (https://www.sfmta.com/reports/11-7-23-mtab-item-11-train-
| con...). I'm not sure where the actual RFPs are pubished though.
| time4tea wrote:
| Raspberry pi controller $30, couple of people to make it work -
| let's say $500k. Sure... there are loads of things that probably
| need attention, but maybe you don't need to fix them all at once?
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| Smoosh wrote:
| That assessment can probably be scaled up to the USA as a
| whole.
| aluminum96 wrote:
| SF 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...
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| Probably just a ploy to privatize the whole thing. Nothing to see
| here, move along.
| JoyousAbandon wrote:
| Absurd errors in this article. Starting with:
|
| "it was from an era that computers didn't have a hard drive"
|
| Absolute BS. Pretty much every computer had a hard drive in 1998,
| and most had CD-ROM.
|
| Then they referred to the 3.5" disk as a "5-inch floppy."
|
| <sigh>
| asveikau wrote:
| Just a few short hours ago I was hearing some Muni workers at
| West Portal station talk about this story. One said to the other,
| "young people don't know what a floppy disk is anymore".
| ornornor wrote:
| > SFMTA's train control system relies every morning on 5 inch
| floppy disks.
|
| And in the video, she says "on 3x 5 inch floppy disks like this
| one <shows a 3.5 inch floppy>"
| kazinator wrote:
| > _It 's a question of risk. The system is currently working just
| fine but we know that with each increasing year risk of data
| degradation on the floppy disks increases and that at some point
| there will be a catastrophic failure._
|
| The key words in the sentence are: "it's working just fine".
|
| Data degradation of floppy discs is easy: just copy them to fresh
| ones, and verify that you have a good copy. The images should be
| safely backed up so they can be regenerated. (Plus there are
| emulators; a topic covered elsewhere under this submission.)
|
| I mean, are they really using the same 30 year old floppy discs
| over and over again until they degrade?
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