Criminal incompetence at the FAA

Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.

Microsoft delenda est.

No Such User wrote:
Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.


Everyone seems fixated on the Microsoft portion of this problem,
but so far no one has mentioned the words that have appeared in
every article I've read about the incident: "The backup system
also failed." What is the backup system, and WHY did it fail?


"The SUV rolled over due to failure of the tires. The airbag
also failed."

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:51:53 GMT, (No Such User)
wrote:

Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.

Microsoft delenda est.

Now I'm scared! Microsoft shouldn't be making systems for critical
applications. I agree whoever made the purchase should be in jail,
but only after a public flogging by every rated pilot and controller.

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.

z

Shows the damage that can be done when people who don't understand the
system try to read about it in the paper. I write software to manage
telecommunications infrastructure and I've never seen software that
can run forever without maintenance. We talk in term of the number of
"9's". 2 "9"s is 99% up time, 3 "9s" is 99.9%, etc. Usually 4 "9s" is
the best you can do. When my software fails, new telephone services
(new DSL, call waiting ,etc) do not get activated, wireless companies
cannot detect a tower outage, etc. Even in that environment 4 "9s" is
consider exceptional. The solution is to have backup systems. The
FAA's system in question was the backup system.

-Robert


(No Such User) wrote in message ...
Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.

Microsoft delenda est.

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.

I suspect it is not a microsoft problem at all, rather the vendor who wrote
stuff for the OS is at fault.

If you have more specific information about this i would love to hear about
it.


"zatatime" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 17:51:53 GMT, (No Such User)
wrote:

Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.

Microsoft delenda est.

Now I'm scared! Microsoft shouldn't be making systems for critical
applications. I agree whoever made the purchase should be in jail,
but only after a public flogging by every rated pilot and controller.

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.

z

"Richard Hertz" wrote in message
t...
[...]
I suspect it is not a microsoft problem at all, rather the vendor who
wrote
stuff for the OS is at fault.

Indeed, even the blatantly anti-Microsoft website reporting the "news"
points out that it's the FAA who will fix the problem. Last I checked, they
had nothing to do with writing any of Microsoft's software. Since they are
going to fix things, obviously it's not anything Microsoft actually
published that was at fault here.

Still, sure is fun to see all the anti-Microsoft religious fanatics fall all
over themselves trying to turn this into a "it's Microsoft's fault" thing.

Pete

Funnily enough, I've also worked on telecom infrastructure, mostly for
keeping international traffic flowing around the world. UNIX is what
is used for those machines. We also strive for 99.99% up time and
know Microsoft can't give it to us through stress testing. Now I'm
talking about tracking 100 million plus phone calls a day so I'll
admit the scale is something out of the ordinary. Its my opinion that
real time systems should be cautiously reviewed.

As far as my "facts" on Microsoft; the only thing I can offer is
directly from a friend who was one of the leads on building the NT 4.0
kernel. He very candidly told me that everyone within Microsoft's NT
architecture group knew the proclaimed 127 year up time would never be
achieved, and the it was a purely theoretical number. You have
experienced some of the reasons it can't be proven i.e electrical
failure. What the designers worked toward was having a machine that
could run for 30 days without a re-boot. We have also spoken about
real time applications from a medicinal use point of view, and his
take was that it would be a few generations down the road before the
Microsoft OS was ready for such a thing. I'm sure you can easily
discount this if you chose, but I'm speaking from a personal source
who spent at least a half day a week with Mr. Bill himself working
through all that was required to build the NT platform. For me that's
alot better than was I read in any computing rag (especially knowing
how thorough he is).

Now I don't know how ATC applications compare with real time medicinal
computing, but I have to think they are just as critical as each other
and should be treated with an overly adequate computing platform in
both the OS and the program design. I don't see the OS or programming
tools available (with the exception of C) ready to do that for apps
requiring significant up time for real time data analysis. Please
don't misunderstand me, I am not against Microsoft. They have
afforded me to make a good living for many years, but I don't think
their place is in real time computing......yet.

z
On 22 Sep 2004 18:13:30 -0700, (Robert M. Gary)
wrote:

Shows the damage that can be done when people who don't understand the
system try to read about it in the paper. I write software to manage
telecommunications infrastructure and I've never seen software that
can run forever without maintenance. We talk in term of the number of
"9's". 2 "9"s is 99% up time, 3 "9s" is 99.9%, etc. Usually 4 "9s" is
the best you can do. When my software fails, new telephone services
(new DSL, call waiting ,etc) do not get activated, wireless companies
cannot detect a tower outage, etc. Even in that environment 4 "9s" is
consider exceptional. The solution is to have backup systems. The
FAA's system in question was the backup system.

-Robert


(No Such User) wrote in message ...
Whoever made this purchase should be in jail:

http://software.silicon.com/applicat...9124122,00.htm

It's shameful that they would trust people's lives to a computer
system that had to be "reset every thirty days" just to keep from
crashing.

Microsoft delenda est.

zatatime wrote:

Funnily enough, I've also worked on telecom infrastructure, mostly for
keeping international traffic flowing around the world. UNIX is what
is used for those machines. We also strive for 99.99% up time and
know Microsoft can't give it to us through stress testing.

And I wrote system requirements for telecom software that had the same (or worse)
uptime requirements. We found the MS servers to be quite capable of delivering what
we needed.

George Patterson
If a man gets into a fight 3,000 miles away from home, he *had* to have
been looking for it.

"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...

zatatime wrote in message . ..
Funnily enough, I've also worked on telecom infrastructure, mostly for
keeping international traffic flowing around the world. UNIX is what
is used for those machines.

All of our customers run their servers on Solaris or HPUX. However,
clients are almost always run on PCs (usually Win 2K). Our customers
are most of the cell phone companies and all the long distance
companies. Sometimes we manage faults, sometimes activation, etc so we
don't necessarily do the same thing for each co. However, if you call
your phone company an order DSL service anywhere in the U.S. I can
almost guarantee you that its my code that's actually connecting to
the switch to turn on the service.

-Robert