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[–] 51 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

For critical systems, reliability, predictability, consistency, and long-term performance data are more important than modernization. It makes perfect sense that a system like this would lag the leading edge of technology significantly. It is ok if the technology has problems, even if it has high failure rates, as long as the failure rates are predictable - then you can write procedures around them. Floppy disks don't exactly offer bulletproof reliability, but they are well understood - and also you can generally just toss them on a desk or in a drawer without worrying too much about incidental damage.

You want this kind of technology to be so simple and dependable that you don't have to think about it, it just works as expected. It also massively simplifies staff training and procedure documentation if the relevant bits of technology don't change very often - until of course those bits become so outdated that the procedures for getting them to interface with newer systems becomes its own mess.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    I wholeheartedly agree... but floppy disks?!?

    They havnt been remotely rubust or reliable next to various flash memory systems for 20 years. A little magnetic field or dust and that 1.2Meg is corrupt. Usb flash drives can go through the laundry and get run over by a car and give you your files back.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah agreed. There's a point made elsewhere in this thread, but the FAA is 100% architected around the idea of understanding and managing risk profiles, and it really works for aircraft. For IT the approach is less sane I'm afraid.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    It will be just as sane for IT once venture capital dries out, and the signs of that eventually happening started arriving as early as in 2000s when companies like Google and Apple would intentionally try to inflate the so-called "startup culture" by buying some startups (mostly to stop what they were doing) and advertising that as success.

    This continues, for now, because the available space is not yet all occupied.

    The cryptocurrencies, despite many of them being scams, were one big breakthrough in it, for IT to be applied to movement of values for consumers, P2P and not B2B. That largely has happened, there are systems that you can use and they work, the scam danger doesn't negate that fact.

    The AI, or what's being called that, is another big breakthrough. Universal helper bots are, honestly, what many people always wanted from having a PC.

    These are both sort of terrain dominants that were not settled until they were. Colonization targets if you will.

    One thing remains of what I can see, a common information medium as good as PSTN and radio. They built that in the 90s, then some rich jerks have made their fake committee "alternative" to W3C that has led the Web away from its central purpose. It's very interesting how all W3C standards are still good and clean, they've just stopped making them because of that hijacking of authority.

    I mean, OK, looking at C++ standards, mechanisms similar to existing elsewhere still somehow work like that in IT.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 days ago

    Yeah, I'd guess most of these systems have single purpose computers with a screen that updates every second. There's not much need to replace 100, 1MHz, computers with a server sending data to 100 ipads, updating every second with pretty colors. Plus I'd say familiarity for the controller is 1000x more important than anything else.

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