Criminal incompetence at the FAA

In article , "Richard Hertz"
writes:

Um, I have run MS Oses successfully for months without failure - actually, I
never got to test it fully as power outages crashed it. It is not the OS
many times, rather the poor software developers who write for the OS. If
they write drivers or other kernel stuff the OS is compromised.

Well, I've run non-MS Oses for YEARS without failure. The only threat these
systems usually face is power starvation.

I recently laughed at an arrangement made between Fiat and Microsoft, for an
operating system to run their automobiles; an auto world renown for poor
quality and reliability run by an operating system known for the same; truly a
marriage made in hell. Considering the expensive overkill in reliability that
the FAA demands in so many of the components that we use in aviation, why
they'd tolerate a Windows based system is beyond me.

I vividly recall the debate that took place in the mid-80s about the future of
computing when the world had finally been convinced that microcomputers really
were capable of more than tinkering and games. What the world needed was an OS
that offered the stability, security, and multi-tasking ability of mainframes,
but without the resource & performance consuming bloat that existed within the
older and larger systems. Microsoft was in a position to offer the world an OS
that was tightly optimized for the future of personal computers.

What did we end up with? A PC operating system that is literally the worst of
both worlds; hideously bloated, and far more insecure and stable than the
systems it was designed to replace!

It's truly an irony that so many power users today look at Linux, a Unix
derivative, as the future. In the '80s, we rejected Unix as representative of
the bloated mainframe past we wished to escape. Today, geeks run Linux servers
with 99.9%+ reliability on hardware that Windows will barely boot on.

John