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Close analogy, but PCs won't cause you a crippling injury or physical pain when you poochscrew it as opposed to falling off Microsoft Bicycle 2001.

Dude, I was referring to the Yorktown discussion thread. I never said it BSOD'ed. I said crashed. There's a difference.

Here's the article about the Yorktown.

I used to work for a defense contractor, so I know how these things should be tested. You don't just test on good inputs, you test with bad ones. That's why I said that the app crashing was unacceptable. However, nothing should ever cause an OS to crash, especially in a military environment.

It doesn't have to be a BSOD, it could be some other failure mode, which is what appeared to happen to the Yorktown.

We simply cannot have peoples lives being dependant on software that can crash. In a business context, we can get used to crashes, after all it is only data, and it is only the livelyhood of the bussiness at stake. It is only maybe millions of dollars. In space, it is lives.

Which OS would you be willing to literally bet your life on?

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Actually, check out this page for a nifty logo that Be should adopt.

USS Yorktown Dead in Water After Divide By Zero

The Navy's Smart Ship technology is being considered a success, because it has resulted in reduced manpower, workloads, maintenance and costs for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown. However, in September 1997, the Yorktown suffered a systems failure during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, VA., apparently as a result of the failure to prevent a divide by zero in a Windows NT application. The zero seems to have been an erroneous data item that was manually entered. Atlantic Fleet officials said the ship was dead in the water for about 2 hours and 45 minutes. A previous loss of propulsion occurred on 2 May 1997, also due to software. Other system collapses are also indicated. [Source: Gregory Slabodkin, Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water, Government Computer News, 13 Jul 1998, PGN Stark Abstracting from http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/July13/cov2.html]

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.

from Government Computer News, the horse's mouth.

So a database divide-by-zero took down the whole network, including all the machines on it. Sounds like an OS failure to me - why should a database failure or even a database crash of another machine on the LAN take down every other machine? Even if it caused the custom application to fail on every other machine, the machines should still be up.

So while NT may not have been the initial failure, due to its poor error handling or stability problems it converted a localized problem into a network-wide problem. If that's not a failure of the OS, what is it? A feature? :)

A few years back the US Navy decided that instead of using UNIX based systems it wanted to use NT. So it spent several million dollars outfitting a battleship with NT servers and software. When the ship was finally completed it set sail for a week long trial run. A mile from port one of the NT servers "blue-screened" and froze up the entire ship. In fact, they had to send out a couple tug boats and tow the ship back to port.

Ah yes, that would be the infamous Navy Smart Ship Yorktown. See

Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water

This is a must-read article, if only for the hilarious explanation of how computers, NT and your calculator handle division by zero. One hopes none of these people have anything to do with the Navy's budget, although now that I think of it, it would explain a lot if it turned out they did.

The link is here

And here is the correct link to the article...
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*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc

Yeah, ok, guess I should shut the servers on board the ship down, we'd never run linux. :) On the contrary, there are quite a few navy ships with linux installed, and even more shore commands. Heck, check this out http://www.navy.mil They run Open source and don't even know it. :) Most the time it's a matter of that budget thing, and once it's in, it works so well, it tends to stick around. Spawar guys don't show up at our LUG meetings for nothing. Not to mention looking at the mail headers from any navy ship, and it's sendmail once it leaves the ship. The NOC's aren't stupid, they have a job to do. I know for a fact they have BSD and Linux running, not to mention a few HPUX boxes. The Navy is running some pretty big squid caches as well. Anyway, it's there, but the desktop is still owned by M$, the server room is dominated by Unix, and that's where it counts. I don't know about you, but stuff like this is looking promising for open source.

Please mention the "Navy Ship Dead In The Water" stuff earlier in your comment, so those of us who know about that little canard can stop reading your uninformed BS right away and not be halfway through your little tome before we discover you're merely another zealot parroting folklore.

"Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water"

Read this article for yourself from the Government Computer News archives and decide the "folklore value" for yourself!

;-)

Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.

Here they use them in Bosnia.
Here they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers.
Here's the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity.
Here is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph.
Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers."

It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.


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My god that was a scary article. "Future SmartShips will have systems redundancy to ensure ships can continue to operate." Duuuh! Redundancy's only the very very first principle in building a reliable system! Did none of these go to school!?!? "Although Unix is more reliable, NT may become more reliable with time." So explain why the hell you invest in a system which may become reliable rather than one which already is???? "It wasn't as bad as all that, propulsion was only out for 2 hr 45 min" (paraphrase). Almighty, the Titanic and the Bismark were holed and sunk in far less time than that. What grade of clinical idiot do you have to be to think this is any way to run a navy?!?!?

See this article about WinNT crashing the USS Yorktown.

If that's not a mission critical system failure, what is?

:-only kona in my cup-:
:-robert taylor-:

The only reason a car manufactorer would get sued would be because they would have injured or killed a person through their own negligence. I know Windows is bad, but it isn't that bad.

Really? &nbsp Ask the Navy about that possibility! &nbsp ;-)

You want http://www.gcn.com/archives/gc n/1998/july13/cov2.htm

Anyone for a ride on a warship running linux? I sure wouldn't. I'd want its own OS, and i'm sure its builders would too.

I would prefer it to have its own OS too but if I had to choose between a warship running Linux and one running NT I definitely would took the one running Linux, I would fear less to remain dead in the water.

Yeah, if they are so damn far ahead of the general public, what's up with this big move to NT powered military hardware? Somebody better clue 'em in!

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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16

SMCS managers are now aware of the problem of entering zero into database fields and are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem were to occur again, Sweigard said.

"Now that we know what can happen, we've realized how to bring the system back quickly," Petty Officer 1st Class Phillip Cramer said. "All we have to do is change the zero to any number, and everything comes right back up."

SMCS managers are now aware of the problem of entering zero into database fields and are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem were to occur again, Sweigard said.

"Now that we know what can happen, we've realized how to bring the system back quickly," Petty Officer 1st Class Phillip Cramer said. "All we have to do is change the zero to any number, and everything comes right back up."

Yes. The article was on /. in July of last year.
I`ve found the original story in the GCN archives. Interestingly, it`s only a month after the Navy first started the move from Unix to NT..

Yes. The article was on /. in July of last year.
I`ve found the original story in the GCN archives. Interestingly, it`s only a month after the Navy first started the move from Unix to NT..

I found the 'divide by zero' excuse really amusing, and the response that a $2.95 calculator cannot be crashed in this manner is priceless!

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"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison

I found the 'divide by zero' excuse really amusing, and the response that a $2.95 calculator cannot be crashed in this manner is priceless!

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"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison

Here's the original story: http://www.gcn.com/archives/gc n/1998/july13/cov2.htm

and a quote:

"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.

Beleive it or not, there are those who are already testing those waters - er, no pun intended - see Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water.

Utterly unbeleivable, some of the statements made in that article. An "engineering local area network casualty" indeed!

but i say that we have to certify software, not people!