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Computer Error Grounds Japanese Flights
zephiros writes "Mainichi Daily News reports that a "computer glitch" in Tokyo air traffic control systems resulted in the cancellation of 203 flights this weekend. At 7am Saturday, the error "caused the names of airlines and flight numbers to disappear from radar screens." A Japan Times article suggests the problem may be related to upgrades on a system which exchanges flight plans with the Defense Agency. Makes one wonder about the integration and maintenance risks of systems like CAPPS II."
Why even bring up CAPPSII, is has nothing to do with air control, only with passenger data.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Does that seem like flaimbait to anyone else? Computers crash all the time, granted steps can be taken to ensure redundancy, but this is nothing new. This problem has nothing to do with the CAPPS II system other than the fact that they are both computerized systems, I'm not trying to defend CAPPS II, I just don't think that it is any way related to this this tokyo airlines problem. Computers crash, it's a fact of life, the real question here, is why weren't there multiple redundancies in place for such a mission critical application.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
"Computers are just no good," said one 51-year-old company manager leaving for Sapporo. "I'm sure they're helpful, but they're just too fragile."
Lol. Depends how they're set up. I'd say you can get them fairly robust. Clustered, load balanced, hot-swap, failover, etc.
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Am I the only one wondering why there was no redundancy. As in effective. One would think something as important as airtraffic control should have several layers of complete redundancy. As in if a control tower has say a catastrophic failure there is another a.) civilian b.) military control center able to hand off instructions. which would include all flight information. including passengers, cargo flight log, flight plan everything.
Anyone see the other news on this site?!
Police recover rock climber's body after fatal fall
Motorcyclist dies after being hit by a truck
61-year-old jobless man fatally abuses senile mother
Dad dies of shock after son's repeated beatings
Comic questioned over hitting woman in restaurant
Death row inmate dies in prison cell
Can someone in Japan please confirm that this is a freaky, awful day, and that Japan isn't normally this bad?
Although that last one is quite ironic.
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Was it computer that failed some operation or lousy programmer who made a mistake in the program?
I am sick of people complaining abour "computer errors" when they are at fault.
"Whose bright idea was it to do a "systems upgrade" while there were large, flying metal objects carrying many people still in the air?!?!"
Actually, there are planes in the air most hours of the day. There is no time when planes aren't flying.
The best time (when there are fewest planes) may be at night. But that's just the time when the people actually doing the upgrade are going to be half asleep.
"Wouldn't you do a test run, install it on a backup system, or one that's not systems-critical?"
I'm sure they did. But the live system is bound to be different in some small way
- maybe a different (more powerful) system, which might cause different timing issues;
- maybe a different disk configuration, perhaps with a file system running out of space (e.g. more online logs);
- maybe the live database (if any) is different to that on the backup system.
These things can easily go wrong. In my experience, it's vital to ensure you have a way of getting some sort of system operational if you do screw up. Maybe ensure a backup system is capable of running live first, then attempt the update of the live system, and if it goes wrong, you have a backup system capable of operating until you can correct the screw-up.
No, computers shouldnt crash. But they will eventualy fail, just like everything else will.
Working in the software industry here in Japan for the last two years I have had my eyes opened to the true state of affairs. Most 'westerners' have an idealogical view of the high-tech world of Japan. This is far from reality. The fact is that software development here is at best poorly done, little design, short timelines (okay that one is universal), and lack of quality assurance. I can't say why this is the case, but shoddy products are in abundance. It may be trying to shove a relatively new industry into an old style organization, or the lack of individualism, I'm guessing at these. This story does not surprise me. All I know is I am looking forward to returning to the industry in Canada.
Redundancy started to suffer when the bean counters took over. Air Traffic Control is no longer an exercise in absolute safety but one of "risk management". This means that when the system designer says "I want a fully redundant hot standby system in a separate building powered from a different grid feed and on its own battery backup" the bean-counters say "you can have a warm standby (because we wouldn't want to have to pay for two software licenses) in a separate rack in the same computer room (have you looked at the cost of raised flooring lately?)". Instead of asking "what can we do to avoid a failure?" they tend to ask "how long will each failure last and how much will that cost us in lost revenue?"
If it had been open source, this problem would have never happened. With millions of eyeballs detailing the code, we'd have found and corrected this bug before it ever occurred. Whats more, if the flaw did get thru, the operator could have jumped in and fixed the problem real time.
OMG... man are you brainwashed. First, as impossible as it may seem (gasp), open source software has bugs in it too. Second, even if it were open source, what million eyes would be looking at the code? I bet there isn't any source in the OSS archives that a "million eyes" have looked through. Third, you assume that the operator is an a) programmer, and b) at all familiar with the code enough to debug it and understand just what in the hell the code is doing anyway. Keep repeating your mantras fan boy, may they always give you a warm tingly feeling as you say them.