this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
104 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
59454 readers
4857 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I see this sort of thing all the time.
There's a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won't run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there's nothing wrong with it.
Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we've seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.
For those like me who don't know
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service
Also it's pretty ridiculous to have fire alarm systems be dependent on electricity and Internet...
It's difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you'd have them on a battery backup.
Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They're pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.