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Windows NT leaves US Navy ship dead in the water

SMS of Death

Bad coding is ubiquitous on all devices running any software. Remember that these are consumer end devices and not scrutinised in the same way as, say, military software is.

Oh, wait...

You don't think Windows for the Navy actually runs the mission critical systems like the reactor do you?

But runs something that can leave ship dead in the water. I think original poster was referring to USS Yorktown (CG-48) incident.

Windows NT leaves ship dead in the water

Perhaps the Navy isn't quite as smart as the USAF:

http://www.slothmud.org/~hayward/mic_humor/nt_navy.html

I'm hoping they've since given up using Windows for that sort of thing but I wouldn't lay money on it.

It's a great free online multiplayer rpg game.
Sloth

"For example we deal with ship control systems, which you may think are about as isolated as you can get"

Hopfully not this one ... please pause the war while we coldboot the warship and a lot of boxes running mutually interlocking RPC calls can't be that isolated.

was: Re:My view..

What could possibly be "flamebait" about that? For the history impaired, here's a link: "640 K ought to be enough for anybody."

Darned straight. I wrote the eqlist and maproom pages for the website of SlothMUD (my favorite destination for recreation), and did it entirely in Kate. These days I might open some of the files in EditPlus or something similar, but if I'm on a Linux box you and I'm coding PHP or c, you can guarantee I'm using Kate.

Darned straight. I wrote the eqlist and maproom pages for the website of SlothMUD (my favorite destination for recreation), and did it entirely in Kate. These days I might open some of the files in EditPlus or something similar, but if I'm on a Linux box you and I'm coding PHP or c, you can guarantee I'm using Kate.

> First, the ship did not need to be towed back into port, though it did sit dead in the water for a bit ..

"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."

"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

Curiously enough DiGiorgio later wrote a retraction and 'resigned` from the Navy as did Vice Adm. Henry Giffin.

"DiGiorgio denies reported statements"

"I did not say that the Yorktown was towed into Norfolk"

http://www.gcn.com/17_20/news/33292-1.html

"Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown."

"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."

"The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures" [Ron Redman - Aegis]

"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen," Vice Adm. Henry Giffin

> Second, the problem was in the software running on top of Windows

But the software made a call to Windows to divide by zero and Windows made a call to the fpu which did just that.

http://www.slothmud.org/~hayward/mic_humor/nt_navy .html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorkt own.html

Indeed, maybe now some problems could be avoided.

It's well known that Windows is not a virus (shamelessly copied from here)

1. Viruses are free.
2. Viruses can be gotten from any good bbs.
3. If detected soon enough, most viruses can be removed from your computer without a huge loss of data and time.
4. Viruses don't take up HUGE wads of disk space.
5. Viruses don't need 4meg of ram to run.
6. Viruses do something.
7. Viruses come in flavors, not just one-size-fits-all.
8. Viruses use the "cutting edge" programming skills to make themselves less noticable. (untill they are ready to be noticed)
9. Viruses don't have major bugs. (if they do, then they don't work, so they're not virus')
10. Viruses don't have three different sets of documentation that is all mixed up and wrong.
11. Viruses don't leak things to the press about the upcomming Jerusalem 95, to keep people from switching to Michelangelo/2 Warp or better yet, XJerusalem.
12. Viruses don't put out stupid two page adds in magazines centered around the march 6 "activate button".
13. Viruses arn't on every computer.
14. Viruses don't have stupid wizards.
15. Who cares if a virus is 16 bit, even though it is advertised as 32?
16. Viruses don't say that they are user "friendly", when they arn't.
17. Viruses can run on PCDOS without warnings.
18. Viruses when installing themselves don't try to send private info about your computer over the phone lines to microstoned-net.
19. Viruses install themselves.
20. Viruses don't try to push out all compitition. They just try to do their job.
21. Viruses maker's don't try to buy Intuit (makers of Quicken (wouldn't that be fun, America's biggest finacial software company owned by a virus maker))
22. Viruses don't invade and take over PC Magazine, filling it with 100% junk on Win95.
23. Viruses don't try to copy what Apple does.
24. There are programs you can buy, or get free to remove viruses.

Please, I know what an embedded system is, and I understand that an embedded system user can't reconfigure the system. Problem is, Win98 assumes the user might want to reconfigure, and needs a lot of hand-holding to get it done. Which is why you sometimes see billboards like this one.

OS always startup as it was brand new from factory

I guess it means more photos like this and this.

Seriously, why would someone use something so complicated as the basis for a limited-function embedded system? Can't anyone program in assembler anymore?

I've always thought "Microsoft" sounded like a brand of toilet paper. Their advertising would go along the lines of "our patented microfibre design delivers the softest tissue for maximum pleasure!"

1) Get satellite and a Bell ExpressVu PVR. I've had mine for almost a year now, and am very happy with it's performance. I've barely touched my VCR since then!

2) Get a PC with a video capture/playback card (like ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon), and some open source software and roll-yer-own PVR. You can get TV listings for Canada with the XMLTV project. The Linux VCR HOWTO will probably be helpful.

At least they aren't arresting people for distributing linux source code and "destroying intellectual property" - like Microsoft would like to have done here.
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Twivel
Microsoft Humor

I've sent this letter to cmgi's public relations address, I will document their replies at this URL as well. Here is the link

My previous company asked me for a quick firewall solution for their intranet to access the internet. So I dug up a 486 dx 33 w/340 meg hard drive to serve the purpose. It was plenty fast enough to saturate our T1 connection with 200-400 users on the internet at one time. If you get a heavily hit website, that might be a different story. But if all it does is route and masquerade, it will be enough to do the job.
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Twivel
Microsoft Humor