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by digler999 3379 days ago
Makes perfect sense to me. Why upgrade some critical piece of infrastructure if upgrading can only hurt you, but can never help you ? Assuming they didn't have ongoing problems such as bit-rot with floppies, why upgrade to USB ? There have been at least a few major attacks using either auto-run , auto-mount, or even infections in USB firmware over the years.

If you dont need the extra capacity or speed that USB or optical offers you, don't upgrade. I mean this specifically for infrastructure-size projects where the "thing" / entity that is controlled costs multiple orders of magnitude more than the computer system controlling it. Say I have a hydro-electric dam, or any kind of power plant (not just nuke), or train switch controller, submarine, aircraft carrier, etc. Stuff that can't break. Its just cheaper and safer to keep using the same tech, keep replacing known-working parts, than it is to risk updating the system to "stay current", and risk a costly outage (or some kind of catastrophe, even if theres only a 10^-7 chance of it happening). I dont blame them one bit.
1 comments
Piskvorrr 3379 days ago
You assume too much. Bit rot was the driver towards anything-not-floppy, if I recall the 90s correctly. "Can't break" and "floppies" is an oxymoron - oh God, now I have that horrible sound of a floppy read error (yes, you could actually hear most types of read errors) stuck in my head. (Perhaps the 8-inch floppies are still in use as their lower density gives higher resilience?)
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digler999 3379 days ago
What I meant was if you expect them to die, and discard them on some regimented schedule instead of expecting them to last forever. Flash-based USB storage (and even platter-based HDDs ) suffer degradation and/or bitrot, just at different rates/probabilities. Even optical media only has a few years of expected lifetime.
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Piskvorrr 3379 days ago
Of course there's bit rot everywhere, just that floppies were notoriously unreliable because of it.

OTOH, the only way to actually preserve data is to keep rolling them forward to new physical media as the old ones die off (this is of course abstracted away in cloud solutions).

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