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Comment by nullindividual | Hacker News Reader

The author could use a bit of humility.

ISO isn’t useful in the author’s use-case. That’s fine, it is their project to do as they will. ISOs may still have uses elsewhere, such as PXE boot or just a near universally mountable read only container.

The author’s point to the age of the original ISO standard is irrelevant. Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.

Author’s project, author’s will. But that was difficult to read due to their attitude and beyond the author’s use case, didn’t provide a reason for universally retiring ISO.

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I personally wouldn’t recommend ISOs for PXE booting longer. It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.

These days I tend to just run a local mirror of NetBoot.xyz for personal use. Not needed to use PXE booting professionally for around 10 years but I’m sure others out there might still be using it.

I do agree with you that universally retiring ISO is a bit dramatic. However I do think their usefulness is greatly diminished these days.

> It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.

I'm not sure it does require loading the entire image. Servers (Dell/HP) that allow remote mounting iso images will use HTTP-Range requests to be able to 'seek' the disk. I _thought_ (but honestly don't remember) iPXE was capable of range requests too.

In fairness, last time I used ISO with PXE was on BIOS systems. More recent iPXE kernels (if that’s even the right word) might support seek.

I wouldn’t use PXE at all! But I’ve been out of the computer imaging business for a long time, now. The folks that do that where I work simply activate Windows with Intune on first boot from the manufacturer, similar to how Macs are activated.

But how do you get Windows installed on the computer, for example if the disk is replaced?

Back to the manufacture it goes! Not a big deal in a medium to large business. I'm unsure how a small business would deal with it, but the smaller you go, the less likely you'd have a standardized image.

PXE is still useful when you want to setup ~200 servers which are freshly installed in your racks and they have no OS on board, or when they need to be reinstalled in ~10 minutes, so you can revive another cattle in short order.

In my former industry, and my former line of work, we would never trust the integrity of an OS image on an SSD delivered from the manufacturer by standard courier (not e2e receipted CoC) without some means of verifying it on the receiving end e.g. checksum. Easy to do with network hardware, harder with PCs. Much simpler to just PXE-blast all the devices when they arrive.

It's quite a different world with Windows Autopilot pre-provisioning from the OEM. These images are customized to your specs, there's no Candy Crush shipping on pre-provisioned devices.

Windows Autopilot uses a PXE boot, where appropriate.

I think you probably skimmed my comment because I said personal use.

Having PXE has been helpful getting Linux on newer laptops. Saves messing around with usb sticks.

A good example of old and reliable technology is MIDI. They have been trying to replace it by buggy and overly complex standards for decades. Yet, the old 5-PIN MIDI cable (and associated protocol) keeps rocking.

I think I read the article s bit differently. The headline is a bit click-bate, but in the article they never state that the format has to die in general, but that this distribution has killed it of, with explanations on why that is.

I agree, the author appears to conflate file and format. From a complete reading of this post and the author’s previous post on this topic, I read it as discontinuation of distribution of the ISO file, but in both posts they use the wording “ISO format” almost interchangeably.

> I maintain that the ISO format has "had it's day" and needs to be retired.

Replace “format” with “file <for booting computers>” and most rebuttals would go away. There will always be edge cases, but this is again the author’s project, so their word is god.

Right, the expanded title would be ".iso format" not "ISO 9660 format".

>Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.

This can also be a justfticaion to hold back technological progress on better formats, so it's a double edged sword. I won't speak for ISOs, but there's many widely adopted and highly unreliable file formats that make me wish they were dropped as hard as Flash was.

There never was a good reason to drop Flash.

Adobe ownership is a perfectly good reason

It was a binary plugin with supported platform at the whims of Adobe, it often had security bugs and sandbox escapes, it had bad performance and killed mobile battery.

For the the web standards have replaced the use cases have improved the situation

You're probably remembering flash games fondly. Flash as an enabler of creative teenagers. But back then flash was used for a lot more; it was pretty common for entire websites of businesses to be built as terrible flash apps. Want to look up a local business's hours, menu, phone number? You had to have flash installed, had to navigate whatever harebrained animated UI the owner's nephew had created, and hope it didn't crash your browser. Never accessible, never performant unless you had a very powerful computer, and it would always spin up your fans. Less savvy users wouldn't be able to identify the problem and would leave flash pages open in the background, then conclude they had to buy a new computer just to get work done again.

You are right, but I think the other reply is basically saying we should not try to fix solved problems. If we have a working and reliable solution that isn't the property of one specific entity or domain, there's not a compelling reason to call for change.

While the original ISO standard may still have its use cases, your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. Your false belief that its long life in a group of other standards - is rather a coincidence that is in correlation to its long life and not a cause of it.

Had the USB stick and related softwares for formatting been around sooner .img may have easily won the battle between standards. Unfortunately, CD-ROM was released 1985 and USB flash drives only started really showing up in the early 2000s. We have no way of knowing the counterfactual.

> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior.

That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start.

Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.

The potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant.

There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.

For example, the inherent unsafety of many C operations and a long list of undefined behaviors in the language, which was meant to improve compile times on long forgotten processors whose performance would no longer suffice to manage a LED lightbulb.

At least we can slowly displace C with other languages, but those limitations were already obsolete in the early 1990s, and we are still wading through countless CVEs caused by them.

Didn't say superior, useful. The rest of your comment in quintessential angry performative hn.

I would read

> Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.

not as arguing that the tech is inherently better in itself, but that being popular for a long time carries benefits, mostly of the form "everything can use this" - consider FAT32, which I think we can all agree is... a product of its time (that seems like a nice way of putting it?), but which remains invaluable because (virtually) everything can read/write it.

I said “may”, not “must”. Please don’t put words in my mouth — you have no idea what my beliefs are behind your keyboard. Thanks.

Ubiquitous adoption is an advantage for a given class of technology. This isn’t survivorship bias, it’s simply consumers finding a given technology useful to them and continuing to use it. Survivorship bias would have required ISO or img to fail and neither have failed (survivorship bias requires a non-survivor).

I can port an ISO between OSes from the early 90s through today. I can’t reliably do that with img as it may not use a universally accepted file system.

(And I did happen to burn a NetBSD ISO for a G4 last month from my M2 Air)

When discussing whether something should be killed, survivorship isn't a bias — it is evidence. Otherwise the whole process of evolution by natural selection would just be ongoing "survivorship bias".

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