They’re welcoming the superior speed and capacity afforded by the Zipdisk
Normally, I would support this. But under the Trump Regime? At they very least they will fuck things up unintentionally, and odds are, they would try to bundle malware with the upgrades. Just because.
That would be funny if the upgrades were just Gotek drives in the same PCs. Government Goteks at $400,000 a piece instead of $40.
Gonna be a lot more plane crashes in the next few years.
our CC stopped using floppies in late 2000s surprisingly enough, and CDs were just too inconvenient to use. only when flash drives became the norm when everything was easy, until cloud was introduced a few years later.
Floppy disks sounds like old tech, but remember the metric system is almost 200 years older.
They have now upgraded to zip drives.
Literal “click of death”?
I bought one, experienced glitches and errors, and never used them again.
I remember there was a small period in time in which we really believed they were a replacement.
100Mb capacity and re-writable? I thought they were great until CD burning became so economical
LOL! The 5 (5.25?) or 3.5 inch floppies? Where did find the disk drives if one failed?
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documentation if the relevant bits of technology don’t change very often - until of course those bits become so outdated that the procedures for getting them to interface with newer systems becomes its own mess.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.
“If it ain’t broke, we’ll break it”
- Windows updates, probably
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.
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.
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.
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.
This guy ITs.
This is at least as disturbing as it is reassuring.
Or, should we be worried? The stupidest kakistocracy in history in charge of replacing a very important, highly complex, mission critical system? These people don’t think you and I deserve any human rights at all. Look at the pool man!
FAA information display systems to be floppy-free at 435 sites by end of 2028.
not so fast!
Be more disturbed that the Minuteman III missiles, one leg of the nuclear triad, rely on the big 8 inch floppies in their launch control systems.
The replacement missiles will not enter service until the “early 2030s.”
If it’s still using floppies in 2026, there’s likely a damn good reason. Nobody is keeping around something vulnerable to antiCMOS.b for no reason.
It is intentional. It solves a problem. And we’re going to regret this fuckery.
It’s actually likely a very outdated and integral system that no one knows how to or wants to update. This is the government we’re talking about.
It was never updated because the modern replacements have weak points that are not acceptable in this application.
Failure rates and avenues that are predictable and can be operationally regulated around. That’s a form of reliability that they want in that system. That’s it. Plus it costs money to update things like that.
FAA: "Now introducing… The FACSIMILE (fax) machine!!"
Everyone: confused applause 🤔
Let me get a 5.25” drive
Not the Onion… huh
