As long as they can still get floppies to replace them as they go bad I don’t see a problem. They’re still being made for things like old geological and industrial equipment and will continue being made for a while.
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ShepherdPie@midwest.social 5 months ago
If the system is working, what’s the big deal? Is not like this needs to be running on windows 11 with the ability to send out tweets and Instagram posts. Relying on floppies may seem archaic but it’s better than spending $10B and years of ‘project delays’ just to wind up with a functionally similar system using modern hardware.
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 5 months ago
bjorney@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
They aren’t being made anymore - people are just reselling old hoarded stock
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ohhh, good info! I didn’t realize. Well, that’s gonna suck for a lot of people in a lot of industries sometime soon.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
That’s demand. Maybe somebody’s going to start making them again. Like with vinyl.
drawerair@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There’ll probably be no more diskette makers in the future, so the train operator should stop using diskettes. I did a quick googling.
In January 2024, Japan announced it will no longer require floppy-disk copies of government submissions.
I searched amazon.com. You can buy diskettes there.
I’m assuming the folks doing the upgrade know what they’re doing. Train operation is key, so to be sure, they may need to slowly move away from diskettes and slowly integrate ssds or whatever the replacement will be.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
How is going to integrate with copilot in this state tho?
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 5 months ago
That’s probably the real driver here behind the push to upgrade and the article. Some grubby, underqualified company wants a giant contract with little responsibility to deliver a working product.
DrunkEngineer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It is actually much worse than that. The problem they are having is that street-running LRT trains get stuck in traffic, causing bunching and other scheduling issues. The obvious solution is to get cars completely out of the way of the trains. But despite an official “transit first” policy, the SFMTA won’t do that. So instead they will spend >$100 million on a new signal system, which will map train locations in real-time simply to tell dispatchers what they already know – that the trains are stuck in traffic.