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US air traffic control enters the 21st century, starts to abandon floppy disks (www.theregister.com)
submitted 23 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 64 points 22 hours ago (27 children)

Old tech is solid and reliable. Do you really want the modern tech ethos of "move fast and break stuff" to apply to Air Traffic Control? I wouldn't trust the big tech companies to write software for red-lights without killing people.

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  • [–] 54 points 22 hours ago

    Old tech still requires maintenance and replacement parts. This tech is so old that they can't effectively provide either. I 100% agree with you that you don't want to "move fast and break things" but there does need to be a program to upgrade over time to deal with the maintenance and replacement problems, as well as improve capabilities and safety. The fact that some ATC systems completely crashed in recent months, leaving air traffic in a very dangerous state, is evidence of this problem.

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  • [–] 14 points 21 hours ago

    It's not so much that new tech is bad ... new tech could be made to be ten times safer than what we have now.

    The problem is that the new tech is controlled by psychopaths who want to squeeze as much profit out of everything imaginable ... imagine all that new tech controlling air traffic but its all locked up by proprietary software that would hold entire airports, agencies and governments hostage, or be made available to the highest bidder and even for international opponents or enemies ... and all of it up for grabs for profit and regardless of morals, ethics or human decency.

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  • [–] 12 points 21 hours ago (9 children)

    Floppy discs reliable? I remember mine not working if I transported them in my backpack when it was cold outside. They came back to life when "thawed", but I'd prefer airliners use something better!

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  • [–] 11 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

    Clay slates have rather modest data density, but reliability is top.

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  • [–] 4 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

    These don't get transported like that. We're talking climate control and backups and so on. It's reliable because the failure rates and causes are known and accounted for.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago (4 children)

    You don't understand what I mean, floppy discs lose memory easily. It's not a safe storage medium. Everyone who has used them knows this. Use the paper with holes in instead 😁 can't be that hard to push some kilobytes onto it 😂

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago* (3 children)

    Lol.

    Everyone who has used them knows this.

    I started out on 8" floppy disk back in the day when disks were actually floppy. Switch to 5.25" and then 3.5" before going to CD-ROMs.

    Back then people were storing them in paper sleeves (or cardboard) and your average kid was handling them with dirty hands and ignoring pretty much anything and everything that caused them to degrade including touching the interior film. I fondly remember using the spring loaded shutter or a 3.5" as a fidget toy.

    I'm well aware of the failures these things have and the way they are required to be kept to account for that including backups, and care instructions.

    The point isn't that they fail. They have known failure rates and known failure causes. Protocols can be put in place to account for literally all of that and this is what makes the medium reliable and cost effective for this use case.

    You're talking to someone who was loading navigation data and software updates onto planes with 3.5" floppy until fairly recently in their career.

    This is as much about the hardware in use as it is about the storage medium. Upgrading depends on some things.

    Cost

    Upgradability path availability over full on replacement and the downtime of doing so.

    The ability to make what you are upgrading to stable, secure, and backwards compatible to a degree.

    All of those things have to be taken into consideration and accounted for.

    https://vger.to/infosec.pub/comment/24545251

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  • [–] 0 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

    Lol I'm a senior software engineer and I used 5" floppies I mean it was in my post if you read it or maybe it's your memory that has run its course 😱 (BTW people ruined floppies putting their thumb on the read area, or ruined them by fidgeting with the 3"5 ones, what's your point about that?) no need to come to the rescue of an ancient crap organisation (computer wise) or is it yours or something 😂

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    One of us works in this industry and understands what's going on and the other of us is currently trying to throw their weight around because they didn't like an anecdote and didn't read the article.

    If we're going to start throwing around ageism, I'm done with this conversation. You have a nice day.

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  • [–] 16 points 22 hours ago (9 children)

    The floppy disk is 60 years old. In which universe is migrating away from 60-year-old technology "moving fast and breaking stuff"?!

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  • [–] 13 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

    What are they moving to? Because that's what the comment is referencing. The new tech they are moving to, not the old tech.

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  • [–] 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (4 children)

    I know it’s a rethorical question but from what I’ve seen they updated their "information display".

    In my country our equivalent is an in-house Java software running on Linux thin clients. The software basically shows meteorological information, runways status, airspace status and stuff like that, so it is connected to a network in order to receive those informations.

    So I’m wondering why FAA used the floppy disks? Was it to update the information? MET is updated every 30 minutes, day and night. That’s a handful of manual updates to do…

    PS: Their brand new "Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS)” is what we do in Europe since, uhh, 30 years ?

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  • [–] 2 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

    Why do the banks use COBOL? Why does NASA use FORTRAN?

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    Because they didn't upgrade their systems in time while deep knowledge of these systems were intact and would have made upgrading seamlessly much easier. Now they have black boxes that no one truly understands anymore, so they're paralyzed by fear and that's what's keeping them trapped in these old systems.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    No, because when infrastructure is sophisticated, critical, and expensive enough, you don't just go around replacing it.

    I bring up Legacy Code for a reason. as one of the few organizations in the world that can spend so many millions of dollars on code that they can virtually guarantee that it's bug free.

    And as for the cobalt code in the banking industry, the entire world could shut down if things went wrong by replacing it.

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