Korean Air Mission Critical Systems Moved to Linux

securitas writes "ZDNet is reporting that Korean Air has decided to move its flight-crew scheduling and daily accounting systems to Linux running on an IBM mainframe, and 5000 users will access this information through their browsers starting in September. "

Comments

More SLOT MACHINES running linux too!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not reported much because gaming manufacturing is a small industry, but most regulators such as the Nevada Gaming Control Board, require full source code of any gaming device submitted for approvel. This pretty much leaves anything Microsoft out in the cold as there's no way to prove that a closed black box like windows isn't capable of cheating or skewing the odds, or able to be manipulated by the player somehow to cheat.

Until recently, this requirement has kept code in gaming devices to at most a few hundred kilobytes of custom written code. Since the rise of Linux, gaming devices have finally been able to CHEAPLY gain much more functionality. And the regulatory bodies love the stability and open nature of Linux.

I should know. I write code for slots/poker/keno/etc. machines here in Las Vegas which are shipped worldwide. If you've ever gambled here or anywhere (indian casino, cruise ship, etc.), you've probably used my code, not knowing that it was Linux under there!

Re:More SLOT MACHINES running linux too!

[Anonymous Coward]

if you are posting as AC, you could at least give us a juicy tidbit on how to win money with those things. like hold this button and then pull the lever at such and such a rate and then you'll get lucky sevens more often. sheesh, the quality of ac info nowadays is goin down the drain...

Everyone says this. But as I'm sure you know that doing anything STUPID like puting in s3cr33t c0d3z can get you busted and fuck up your life for the next 20 years (and actually longer since you will be banned for life from working in the gaming industry ever again), I'm certainly not going to risk that.

The games are truly random... well, as random as the random number generator, which does have to meet certain statistical requirements laid out by the control board. rand() will not cut it. They even worry about things like rand() % 10 favoring 0 thru 7 slightly more than 8 and 9 (assuming rand() returns 0-32767). The approved RNG is really fucking complicated, and relies on many unpredictable realtime events, such as network events, the time in microseconds when coins drop or when buttons are pressed.

And while a slot machine may not be a "mission critical" system, it certainly is considered a "financially critical" one by the people who buy our machines. Which is why Linux is ganing favor here.

Slot machine Trivia! Many people say they don't like slot machines with "virtual reels" displayed on a computer screen because "that computer thing can cheat". They say they prefer the "mechanical" slot machines with real spinning reels. Well, guess what? Computers run all slot machines just the same and have since the 1970s (analog logic back then). The only difference is the ones with reels, are controlled by stepper motors and told to stop on the sybbols picked when the compuer finished playing that game a few seconds ago. The added randomized "spin time" and non-uniform stopping of the reels is just to please the player. The reels stop exactly where told to by the CPU.

Re:Flight crew scheduling = "Mission critical" ?

[Marillion]

I work for a large, US regional carrier. Our flight scheduling system is a 24x7 mission critical system. We have a zero downtime service level agreement with our flight operations department for their critical system. All of them use a brand name version of UNIX.
Sure the planed schedule is done weeks in advance, but that's only half the story. A pilot will fly six flights a day. If that pilot get fogged in Boston and can't do the 11:00am Boston to Cincinnati flight just before he was supposed to do your 1:30pm Cincinnati to Toronto flight, a last minute replacement must be found or your flight gets fouled up. Flight crews a typically scheduled close to the contractual and legal limits. The flight scheduling systems must ensure that during the day, a crew member doesn't exceed those limits due to delays or re-routes.