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

"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.

Um, one of the jobs of an Operating System for the last 20-30 years
has been to protect the OS, and thus other processes, from poor or
even malicious software. Other OSs accomplish this quite well...but
not Windows.

(JohnMcGrew) writes:

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.

It's not just the FAA that makes this mistake. Anybody remember this?


GOVERNMENT NEWS
GCN July 13, 1998


Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
By Gregory Slabodkin
GCN Staff

The Navy's Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service
contends.

Although PCs have reduced workloads for sailors aboard the Aegis
missile cruiser USS Yorktown, software glitches resulted in system
failures and crippled ship operations, according to Navy officials.

Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in
reducing manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy began running
shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that fewer
sailors would be needed to control key ship functions.

But the Navy last fall learned a difficult lesson about automation:
The very information technology on which the ships depend also makes
them vulnerable. The Yorktown last September suffered a systems
failure when bad data was fed into its computers during maneuvers off
the coast of Cape Charles, Va.

The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because
a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to
Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet
Technical Support Center in Norfolk.

"We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain
and, when it fails, results in a critical failure," DiGiorgio said. It
took two days of pierside maintenance to fix the problem.

The Yorktown has been towed into port after other systems failures, he
said.

Bob Fry writes:

"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.

Um, one of the jobs of an Operating System for the last 20-30 years
has been to protect the OS, and thus other processes, from poor or
even malicious software. Other OSs accomplish this quite well...but
not Windows.

Well, stuff running in kernel mode will trump whatever mechanisms
the OS has to protect itself.

But that's OK, Windows is easily crashed with user mode stuff.

-jav

"Ron Natalie" wrote in message om...
"zatatime" wrote in message ...
].

I doubt it will happen, but I hpe they go back to using a real OS like
UNIX for this stuff, else progress will become an oxymoron.

Oh, like UNIX never crashes...

I guess it can. However, I can say that for the 10 years I've sat in
front of a Solaris workstation I have never once had it lock up do to
an OS issue. I have had it die and say a disk was bad or a memory SIMM
was bad, but it has never locked up or even hung for no reason. The
$4K Win XP Pro lap to they issued me is another story... Having
said that, I've long since given up being a UNIX bigot and spend most
of my time working in front of the Windows box. If Sun could ever
figure out a way to make an Ok Java engine for Solaris I might switch
back.

-Robert

On 23 Sep 2004 18:18:34 -0700, Bob Fry
wrote in
::

Anybody remember this?


GOVERNMENT NEWS
GCN July 13, 1998


Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water

I remember. I found the absence of the web content hosted on the
Yorktown to be significant loss.

However, the Yorktown wasn't running WinXP, which seems orders of
magnitude more stable than previous MS releases.

Regardless of the OS controlling the ZLA center communications, the
person who approved the intentional shutdown of all aviation
communications without any warning is truly guilty of the subject
offence, IMNSHO.

G.R. Patterson III wrote:
zatatime wrote:
Robert M. Gary wrote:

I write software to manage telecommunications infrastructure ...

Funnily enough, I've also worked on telecom infrastructure ...

And I wrote system requirements for telecom software ...

And there's a fair bit of my code out there, primarily in the UK's
PSTN.