
Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks - dwynings
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
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salex89
Great. Now only left for Azure to remove the A: drive from their VMs.

I work in na multicloud SaaS, on Azure. Colleagues tease me. They actually
bought me a blue floppy disk labeled "Azure - important!". I even have a Jira
ticket somewhere, assigned to me "Uninstall floppy drive".

~~~
sterlind
I haven't seen A: on Azure VMs until pretty recently, when I let "az vm
create" pick the SKU for me. does it vary based on SKU? do some of the SKUs
use it? weird..

~~~
salex89
Good question. D1_v2, D2_v2 and NV6 have them, because I use them day-to-day.
I have some E4, I'll have to check.

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Animats
F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load targeting data. They have enough space,
they work fine, they're not too big, and they're not too small. You really
don't want to be trying to insert an SD card while wearing gloves in cold
weather.

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tomc1985
I always liked PCMCIA slots -- you could add a whole bunch of different
features to your machine in a fairly compact format. It's sad that laptops
ditched them so long ago

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fletchowns
I had an Orinico Gold WiFi card in my PCMCIA expansion pack for a Compaq Ipaq
PDA back in the early 2000s. It was awesome!

~~~
cnasc
I have a fond memory of my older brother buying an Orinoco card and putting it
in his laptop and then us cruising around town wardriving back in the day

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tomrod
What does wardriving mean?

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owenmarshall
Wardriving was driving around town with a laptop scanning for WiFi access
points without any encryption. Most wardrivers would have a GPS card and
software that’d build a map up as you drive of all SSIDs and locations, which
could be uploaded and contributed to by others.

This was back before ubiquitous open WiFi and encryption.

~~~
ethbro
Slight amendment.

The heyday of wardriving (IMHO) was before the industry got its shit together
with WPA.

Because before WPA, there was WEP. Which it turns out had multiple
vulnerabilities, given enough traffic.

[https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/understanding...](https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/understanding-
wep-weaknesses/)

Ergo, there was a period from ~1999-2004 whereby one could aim a Pringles
cantenna at a neighbor's AP and crack their WEP password in order-of-an-
evening (depending on how much traffic they were generating).

Not that I ever did such a thing, mind you.

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rinchik
> All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk?

Oh my! I feel sooo old now!

> replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-
> state digital storage solution

I thought SSDs are not very reliable, no? Especially for the crucial infras.
It looks like complexity and maintenance has also increased exponentially.

~~~
djohnston
Anecdotally, I'd estimate 10% of floppy disks I purchased were DOA, and about
0% for SSDs. Would be curious for more rigorous data

~~~
AdrianB1
Up to around 1995 I had about 0 defects. Later the quality decreased until
around 10-20% defects.

~~~
topspin
That was my experience. I used (and not gently) hundreds of 5.25" floppies in
the mid to late 1980s and had very few problems. Wore out drives, but the
disks lasted forever. At first 3.25" disks were very good as well; it was
normal to install a commercial software product that was distributed on a half
dozen or more 3.25" disks that would all work perfectly year after year. Later
quality dropped off and floppy media became rather unreliable.

I can only imagine how reliable a mil spec 8" drive with mil spec media must
be.

~~~
AdrianB1
The 5.25" disks were much more reliable than the 3.5". I had plenty of bad
3.5" after I used it a lot, but almost no bad 5.25" disk. Not sure if it was
related to the areal density, rotational speed, head distance - I've seen
scratched 3.5" disks quite often.

I still have a 8" disk in my desk's drawer, but I have no reader to check it.
It is probably still good more than 25 years after the last time it was
written (I have it since ~ 1992).

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40four
Different article source... but here's the discussion from the other thread
from a week ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287944)

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tzs
A silly floppy trick that can sometimes confuse people:

1\. Hold a floppy disk up by the edges.

2\. Stick your finger through the center hole, so that the side of your finger
is resting on the edge of the hole.

3\. Start moving your finger clockwise around the edge of the hole, which
should cause the disk to rotate within the sleeve.

4\. Watch the index hole in the sleeve. As your finger motion causes the disk
to rotate in the sleeve, you should eventually see the index hole in the disk
pass by the index hole in the sleeve.

5\. From the motion of the index hole, you will see that the disk is rotating
counterclockwise! But you are moving your finger clockwise--so what is going
on?

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hanniabu
There's some wiggle room in the floppy so when you move your finger around the
hole like that it's pushing the disk to the edges of the casing. So to help
see what's happening here, imagine the casing is 10x10in, the disk is 5x5in,
and the hole in the casing is 3in circle. If you're moving your finger
clockwise starting by pushing your finger up, the center of the disk is
centered with the casing. Move your finger to the right and the disk rolls on
the top edge for a bit (spinning counter-clockwise) before you start coming
around the inner circle and the disk comes off the top edge and to the side
edge.

As you are moving your finger clockwise, the disk is pressing against the
edges causing it to roll counter-clockwise.

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kregasaurusrex
The article isn't specific on what the floppy disks have been replaced with
other than "a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution". Would this
meet milspecs for reliability and redundancy in an event where either the
reader or storage medium are damaged, possibly to radioactive decay?

I'd been under the impression that magnetic storage was less sensitive to bit-
flips or data degradation more than modern storage technologies like flash
drives.

~~~
qiqitori
I guess you've never used floppies? They have _incredibly_ bad reliability.
Google for 'floppy disk reliability' if you can't take my word.

~~~
kregasaurusrex
What I had found showed less reliability over time because economics of scale
reduced manufacturing costs and thus price of 3.5" and 5.25" ones, where some
said that 8" disks were extremely reliable. My thoughts were that well-made
disks could have a lifetime comparable to that of LTO storage.

~~~
itomato
8 1/2" drives are reliable (fast, too) if you're comparing to 9-inch tape.

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mkiwala
> “This replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity
> and operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message
> receipt and processing.”

Glad to know operator response times have exponentially increased!

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sheeshkebab
It’s comforting to know that at least software will be up to date as we all go
to hell after these things fire.

Hopefully they encoded history of our stupid existence into the flash drives
or whatever they used this time.

~~~
rinchik
Y U SO PESSIMISTIC???

it's actually not that bad! I mean nowadays, what's going on right now. Media
has gotten better at emotional appeal but that's about it.

Nothing is gonna fire. And noones going to hell (trust me, I'm an engineer).
Politics are complicated and always were, nothing new.

My point is, we (humanity) got it! Tech and scientific progress didn't slow
down but accelerated.

Worry not!

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Rebelgecko
Is the headline accurate? Was this the only remaining system in the LCCs that
still used floppies?

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rtkwe
It was the only system the general public knew of. It being the only system
left is a bit of a question of how much you believe, it's not like people get
tours of modern launch control centers to check.

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apexkid
One question: How exactly did you test it works?

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DoctorOW
My guess would be without an actual nuke installed. Make sure the machinery
all does the right motions.

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Railsify
Can we block nytimes? they force you to sign in.

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jakemal
I wasn't forced to login. Not sure if there is an article limit or not.

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hannasanarion
There is a 5/month limit stored in your browser as a cookie and checked by
some javascript. If you haven't read 5 articles yet in that browser, or you
have scripts or cookies disabled, that'd be why.

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jakub_g
FYI in Europe it's one (!) article. I installed uMatrix precisely for NYTimes.

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faissaloo
Well it was nice knowing you guys

