No Windows Allowed On Ex-Battleship Cruise Liner

uucee writes "Wired has a story on an ex-warship cum cruise ship. Owner of the ship, Doug Humphrey, on why no Windows aboard his ship: 'We didn't want to have viruses blowing up systems that we depend on for navigation and monitoring engines and other systems. And since nothing seems to be able to stop all of these Windows viruses, the best way to win is to just stop using Windows.' However, it's not clear why Mac programmers can be trusted more than Windows programmers to keep a ship running: USS Yorktown was brought to a halt not by a virus but by bad coding: divide-by-zero. As Windows viruses don't travel through 'the ether,' it's also unclear how mission-critical systems, properly cut off from the outside world, would become infected in the first place."

Comments

Pre-infected

[aminorex]

> it's also unclear how mission-critical systems,
> properly cut off from the outside world, would
> become infected in the first place."

They come pre-infected from the vendor. Infected
with backdoors. E.g. the proliferating IIS
vulnerabilities, just one of which allowed
Code Red and Nimda to own the Internet for
over a year now. E.g. the NSA backdoor Kerberos
keys. E.g. SP3 and Media Player auto-install
"features". Infected also with DOS modes. E.g.
Media Player DRM.

Who needs viruses to make the platform unstable
and unreliable? The vendor does a good enough
job, in this case.

Oh, and then there's the issue of real-time
mission-critical response. What is the peak
interrupt latency of a Windoes 2000 Adv Server
system? What is it for an up-to-date Mach or
Linux system? Clue: With Windows it is effectively
unlimited. With Linux, it is measured in
microseconds. With Mach it is measured in
milliseconds.