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In-Flight Reboot?
steelem writes "The Washington Post is running a story about how the F-22 Raptor's software requires in-flight reboots. Apparently the 2 million line software project is 93% done. Knowing most projects I've been on, it'll stay that way for another few years."
Welcome to Microsoft Airlines, your Stewardess today will be Steve Ballmer.
This is an ideal application for LinuxBIOS. The article says an average of 14 minutes per flight were spent rebooting computers. Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board.
Nasa has an interesting project called FlightLinux specifically geared for this sort of application. Unfortunately, they have yet to release code (export restrictions), but they supposedly use LinuxBIOS for their system.
Of course, having software that never crashes (no pun intended) would be best, but it never hurts to have a system that can boot up in just a couple seconds anyway.
will they be able to get a tow back to port as well? I just hope that autodestruct is not in the same system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
when the contracting agency can't acocunt for $1 trillion? That's more than the rest of the world spent on their military last year. With that kind of accountability, I'm amazed any project gets over 80% done.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
damn, my job is so boring. I wish I was on the 'let's go kill people' software dev team.
The first hit on Google was this interesting take on the story.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Jeez, one would think that there would be built in redundancy so that if one system went down, it could be rebooted while the other system automatically takes over. Perhaps this is the way things are working, but the thought of rebooting during ACM makes me really nervous.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Hi there soldier! You seem to have lost power to both engines secondary to a software malfunction, over hostile territory. Would you like me to help you reboot Windows?
Would it be too trollish to say this brings a whole new meaning to "The Blue Screen of Death"? Yeah, I thought so too.
Software like this should be able to reboot midflight without a hitch.
Flight control software has been rebootable on the fly since the earliest days of the space program.
Decimal is well known for screwing up binary floating point. I'm wondering if much of the problem is using decimal where binary or hexadecimal should be used. Do you really want to have complicated decimalbinary floating point routines slowing down your aircraft?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Quick, someone send them a copy of bash!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If you're the test pilot you really got to hope they finished the code on the ejection seat at least, at 1,200 mph even a few seconds of reboot time is enough to turn you into part of the scenery at the test range.
Teaching pilots to fly the airplane, Pearson said, really involves teaching them how to use all the data flowing into the cockpit. "It's an extraordinarily easy airplane to fly," Pearson said.
Sure, when all you need to know is which machine to reboot.
"Now, admittedly, it's critical software. This is the 'let's go kill people' software."
Man, I need to get a new job.
this is a sig.
This is a work in progress (and the article was the about the Raptor program itself; it's not an article about buggy software), the software isn't finished.
....
I am not a programmer -- is it necessarily telling when an unfinished piece of software crashes repeatedly? I know this will not be acceptable for a finished product, but does it really mean anything for the software to be unstable at this point?
Maybe the only surprising thing is that they're flying with critical software (critical only during combat maybe?) that doesn't quite work
I've said it a hundred times and I will say it again. Software is getting way to complex for human management in developing bug-free code.
Life is not for the lazy.
But what really sets the F/A-22 apart is its ability to process data on air and ground targets using its own onboard radars and sensors, as well as those on other aircraft.
Ooh.
2 million lines of code for 'lets go kill people' software. If they can do that, I wonder if I can get them to 'sponser' a new 'lets go eat some cheetos and then kill people' couch for my apartmet.
Control: Destroy that incoming cruise missile. ETA 35 seconds.
Pilot: Got Radar Lock
Pilot: Hang on - just got to reboot. Will be ready in 36 seconds...
Am I the only programmer here that has a problem with writing software that powers "the most awesome killing machine"? I apologise to all the yeehaw types but I personally find that distasteful, to say the least.
Question to physicists/biologists/chemists: Would you have a problem creating and refining nuclear/biological/chemical weapons?
(Posted anon. to avoid the right wing moderators killing my account.)
From the article:
"...the F/A-22 is the absolute most-awesome killing machine I have ever, ever flown."
"This is the 'let's go kill people' software."
"...use the information you have in the cockpit to go and kill somebody..."
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for having a great military and defending freedom and whatnot... But is it any wonder that other countries see Americans as barbaric imperialist bringers of doom?
for flight systems to reboot 'on the fly' but I consider that unacceptable for mission critical systems.
It's the mentality that feels that 'good enough' is good enough that brings us this type of warm and comfy software.
Good enough isn't. Stable code can be written. It merely takes talented engineers, design time to conceptualize and architech the product up front before coding it and giving QA what they need to test and committment to FIXING the issues that QA identifies. It's not the cheapest or fastest way to deliver a product, but if I want cheap and fast I'll go to Taco Bell, not a jet fighter.
Given how expensive these planes are, does it make sense to go cheap on the software and risk crashing not only the software but the multi million/billion dollar plane too?
"From the start in peacekeeping," West said, "Maj. Gen. James Mattis and Brig. Gen. John Kelly, commanders of the 1st Marine Division, wanted the Marines out of the vehicles. That established: a. You are not lording it over anyone else, and b. You are the toughest mother in the valley and not afraid to move among the people. The rules of engagement were clear: If they are fired at, they attack back to kill, not to spray the area. If they are not fired at, all is cool."
What's that? Not afraid to take a bullet (or an RPG) while moving among the people, you say? Seems to me the reason armored vehicles are armored is to protect the military personnel they're transporting. Otherwise, we could have our boys (and girls) going in on camelback and in Jeeps; be a lot cheaper that way, and just as safe as having them "walk among the people". Wouldn't you want to "lord it over" someone if you're trying to secure an area? Wouldn't the "toughest mother" be the one rumbling around inside the bullet-proof turtle shell with the 50 mm popgun sticking out of it?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Please consider having Slashdot do a quick search, esp in the last 2-3 weeks. Even if this is done at the submittor level, then they could avoid this. I have no doubt that most submittors would prefer to avoid this. /., but more indicative of the problem that stories keep getting retold on the same news. Sad really.
Likewise, when viewing for submission, check the same search, so that you can see what the use saw
BTW, this is not really a problem with just
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BSOD = Blue Skies Of Death
"...such as those processing data from onboard radar."
oops, IFF locked up. oops, missiles fired. run for cover.
i doubt the -22 has a terrain-following program, but if it does...try not to use it. keep some distance between you and the ground. you need at least 36 seconds of freefall's worth of altitude to survive.
See the other (allbeit slightly different, but now much) story here:
h tm l?tid=126
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/22/0615221.s
Slashdot rehashing old stories to have some cheap "does it run linux?" story? Never...
Glad to see my tax money is squandered on useless plans to line the coffers of corporate america. meanwhile money for schools is nowhere to be found. fuck bush.
from like a year ago? i think it was a pop. mech. link or something. i'll leave it to the reader to find the dupe. but i could be wrong.
to late, you sick bastard
What's funny is I always thought the guys writing this sort of software were uber-coders, and never had this sort of problem. Throw those few extra hundred million dollars at the coding effort, and I just thought this sort of problem went away. It's worrying though - isn't code which ever needed to be rebooted fundamentally flawed? Can you ever really fix that sort of code, or are we just waiting for the day whenever another edge test case comes along mid-flight, and an F-22 falls out of the sky? Even one of this sort of error seems like impending doom to me.
The software required to run the Raptor is insanely complicated. The plane itself was ambitious, but the contorl systems are the real innovation. Give these guys a break. The fact that the thing flies at all is amazing. The fact that it does everything it was designed to do is unbelievable. So there are a few bugs to work out. That's how it goes. We're not talking about "normal" programming problems here- this is Real Life stuff.
Programers debug comments? I thought they were for confusing the guy they hired to replace you.
IANALBIPOOGL (I am not a Lawyer, but I play one on GrokLaw.)
In a sick, sick, way I find it humorous on how they actually brag or boast about how they decreased the reboot time of the computer.
Sounds sort of scary to me the such a critical component needs to be rebooted at all, boy, I'm glad I'm not a test-pilot.
---
Mike
I'm going to kick the next person that I see with their karma rating in their sig.
does this f22 make you proud, dork ? do you feel that you know what does the "disturbing talk" really mean ? do you feel that your country has a right to do what it does now ? check yer dow & nasdaq shit and come back later saying - you haven't served yer country bro.
Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, explained this approach to peacekeeping during a May 30 Pentagon briefing: "As Marines, we go about that tasking in a no-nonsense manner. What we tell the Iraqis is that we're here to do a job. Don't get in our way, and nobody will get hurt; indeed, you will like the results. Interfere with our efforts or threaten our forces in any way, and there will be consequences."
The Iraqis should understand language like that.. They've been listening to Saddan Hussein say it for years.
Second, I have seen this coming for about 10 years now. In the 70s and 80s I worked with digital control systems. Not avionics, but similar. In those days the systems were expected to work right, every time, for years at a time. 2 years between system restarts was considered "acceptable". If a system did fail, the manufacturer was expected to get its collective butt out to the site, figure out why, and issue a (solid!) fix pronto.
In the last 5 years, I have repeatedly been on brand-new airplanes at the gate when the pilot comes on and says "we are having a little problem with the system - don't be alarmed if the lights go off" followed by what is clearly a "reboot" of the airplane! When the fsk did it become acceptable to fix problems in avionics by rebooting the airplane?
And if the system designers really think the Microsoft Rebooting Disease is an acceptable way to handle system faults, how long before one of those faults occurs in the air?
I guess I am just old and crusty, expecting life-critical systems to work to spec 100.0% of the time.
sPh
and that's why you're still flipping burgers for a living.
What is the big deal here? Show me a single application (or suite whatever) that has 2 millions lines of code, is 97% done and DOESNT crash.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Haven't read the article (typically of slashdot), but I do remember that the Apollo 11 computer nearly caused the first lunar landing to fail because it kept rebooting in-flight. Due to a configuration error that occurred shortly before flight, the computer repeatedly ran out of memory, but the software was designed so that the computer could reboot without catastrophe.
You can read more here.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
The article reads like something from The Onion, not The Washington Post!
Lines like "$200-million-per-copy stealth fighter", "the F/A-22 is the absolute most-awesome killing machine I have ever, ever flown", "any other free world fighter", "14 minutes per flight rebooting mission critical computer systems", "the 'let's go kill people' software", and "kill somebody and stay alive and execute your mission" were cracking me up.
Are you sure this article isn't really from The Onion? They have some pretty imaginative writers.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
Hope it isn't completely "fly by wire".
I do not at all agree with any of what was done and am saddened by the fact that it will keep on happening. However the will of those who would dominate others is something that humans cannot seem to shake, even Americans. The only thing Bin Laden succeeded in doing was to give justification for the American military industrial complex.
Perhaps the so called age of Aquarius has come and passed we are now going to reap the whirl wind because we did not learn to love. I am an old hippie and I can afford these thoughts as I will be dead soon anyway.
geeze it's so simple- 3 words: alt, ctrl, delete. It should shave about 4 minutes off the reboot time for those poor test pilots...
During WWI, pilots would signal the enemy if their machine guns jammed. Then it was considered the gentlemanly thing to do for the opponent to wait until the pilot had cleared the jam before resuming the dogfight.
I wonder if modern day pilots are going to need a way to signal their opponent that their computers are rebooting?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
I don't know if I have one coherent point, and this is pretty much all opinion with little basis in tangible evidence, mostly just gut feelings.
Thank you for summarizing my rebuttal! Seriously, I'm not an "OO" purist by all means (I moved from procedural to OO 2.5years ago) but I find that OO combined with a high level "OO centric" language like Java or C# to be far easier to debug and maintain.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
You made coke come out my nose. thank you
Nothing new here.
:>
Every military system has glitches (that kill). Specially when they're new and relatively untested.
The F-(5?,14?,16?) once had something that went negative when it crossed the equator - so it flipped upside-down.
The F-(111?) "Thunderchief"(?) was "affectionately" known as the "widowmaker", until the day the Luftwaffe retired the last of them.
The glitch that would have told the first moon lander that the moon's gravity was positive, was only fixed ten minutes before launch.
Its probably the very old, very tried-and-true engineering technique of "destructive testing", applied by the same kind of people and *new!*, *new!* "software engineers". The "lets go kill" project mentality is very undiscriminating and open-ended. And has always been.
Move along now. Go get into a car, or bus, or even on a motorcycle, and go somewhere.
The backend is running a "light" version of the Micro$haft "Jet" database which apparently is 93% complete.
It is interesting that the Micro$haft "Jet" database that ships with Windoze has 4 million lines of code and is 93% incomplete...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Peace brother. May your hair remain clean and free of cheese.
I submitted this story more than 13 frigging months ago: Ya know, if you don't have an in-house search engine, you can always go to Google:
How about giving a whole new meaning to the term "three finger salute"?
Please help metamoderate.
MiG 1.42 MFI
Told to me by a pilot, I can't verify via a quick google.
this sig deleted by another sig
Did anyone else read 'In-Flight Robot'? I was thinking R2D2.
<checks eyes>
Quack, quack.
[_] Take off
[*] Land
[ok](cancel)
You must reboot your computer for the new settings to take effect...
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish your cigarettes, we're going to reboot the plane"
F-22 software is written in ADA, by people with experience in designing these types of systems. It is a different breed of software engineering. There are a ton of issues coordinating all the software and hardware subsystems.
Software of this scale is the single most complicated project humanity has ever undertaken.
Go build me a pyramid. Without any modern machines. In the middle of the desert.
This has been going on for a while. The software which controls the digital flight control system is not affected. As mentioned, it only affects the sensor fusion software.
I can already imagine the cockpit layout of a Raptor... Altimeter, speedometer, non-functional IFF indicator, roll indicator, yaw indicator, pitch indicator, three displays for tactical data, fuel indicator, HUD, control, alt, delete...
At least Windows would be fitting on an aircraft... It's easier to move a mouse cursor around with a joystick then to type "shutdown -r now" with it!
Hate me!
Will the pilots have to download security updates and delete mountains of spam as they fly, softly cursing script kiddies under their breaths? Will they get distracted by offers of remarkable penis enlargement and bomb friendly troops? And what happens when a remote attacker gets administrative priveledges to an F-22? Will he use it to serve pr0n, forward spam, or launch a bombing run on the evil Phrench? Ah the possibilities...
It was 25 April 1992 when the F-22 oscillated it's way into the ground - due to (ahem!) pilot induced oscillation.
_ F22_Raptor_EN.exe">http://www.lockheedmartin.com/d ownloads/Q000001_F22_Raptor_EN.exe</A>
<B>Lockheed Martin Knowledge Base Article - Q000001</B>
<B>INFO:</B> F-22 impacts with the surface of the earth.
The information in this article applies to:
- F-22 Raptor for USAF
<B>SYMPTOMS</B>
When you slowly fly above the runway with full fuel, hit the afterburners and wiggle the stick the plane will go up...then down...then up...then down until the non-earth area is exhausted.
<B>RESOLUTION</B>
A supportad fix is now available from Lockheed Martin, but is only intended to correct the problem described in this article. Apply it only to aircraft which are experiencing this specific problem.
<A HREF ="http://www.lockheedmartin.com/downloads/Q000001
<B>WORKAROUND</B>
Avoid taking off.
STATUS
Lockheed Martin has confirmed this is a problem with in the military hardware products that are listed at the beginning of this article.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
I've just re-re-read the article, and I can't find any mention that the software on board was Windows based.
Yes, you're all very droll, but the Microsoft bashing seems a little knee-jerk. It's insanely complicated to write software like this (as a few other posters have said, and I'm posting only because I have no mod points for them).
I doubt these errors are OS-based at all. Real-time systems like this are built on top of extremely well-tested embedded OSes. They reboot because they're writing pretty close to the bare metal, and mistakes are punished hard. Best practices are applied (interminable code reviews, fascist levels of regression testing, ungodly coding style standards), but not always followed, and even best practices don't always work.
I'd like to see a gradual shift to languages which enforce best practices (i.e. not C and assembly). Meantime, these pilots are pretty damn brave. But it's probably not Microsoft's fault, this time.
Are you aware if there's any way to deal with the potential problem of faulty specifications being a new single point of failure?
Offhand I can't remember where, but I'm sure I've heard of cases in the past where this has been an issue. (Perhaps someone else could elaborate.) If the specs are broken then all the programming teams and paradigms in the world are at risk of creating identically faulty software.
Welcome to F22 Raptor version 3.1 (C)1990-2003 Microsoft Corp. Start Microsoft MiddleEast Explorer...Please Wait Target: Hussein, Saddam Located Would you like to: Copy/Delete/Return? Delete? Yes/Cancel Before you delete Hussein, Saddam, would you like to sign up for Microsoft .NET?
Brings a whole new meaning to the term "Fatal Exception".
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2003/ar
does this f22 make you proud, dork ? do you feel that you know what does the "disturbing talk" really mean ? do you feel that your country has a right to do what it does now ? check yer dow & nasdaq shit and come back later saying - you haven't served yer country bro.
Someone set us up the bomb
Synergy is your friend
Only 93%! The last 5% take about the same amount of time the first 95% did. I wonder if they have some ex-M$ employese working there, you would think that stability/reliablity was one of the first issues. "It can beat all other fighters in the air but has a 'self failure' rate of 30% per mission" "Well take it!"
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
I work on fly-by-wire military aircraft (rotary wing, not fixed wing, but I presume the computer architectures are similar).
There are typically 2 (sets of) computers on board these aircraft.
The "flight control computers" actually fly the airplane. They are very reliable and are triply or quad redundant. They constantly monitor themselves for problems (such as bits changing in the onboard ROM chips). They reboot themselves if needed (which seldom happens). The "operating system" is just another piece of custom code. They are often compartmentalized so that a problem in one area of the computer (hardware or software) will not affect (or will have limited impact) on other more critical components.
The "mission computers" are not designed to the same standard and may have none of the aforementioned features. They try to do complex things like target identification etc. When they fail, they can take out other connected systems, like the radios or displays - but you can still fly the airplane. In one of the machines I worked on, they had to install a button in the cockpit so the test pilots could reboot the mission computer!
I don't know why we as an industry tolerate this situation (OK, I do - to save money). Test pilots are (understandably) very unhappy with the lack of reliability in these systems. As I'm sure most people reading this will realize, its a lot harder to fix a complex bit of code than it is to design in reliability in the first place.
And BTW, it was mentioned above but not everyone read it: it doesn't take 36 seconds to reboot the computer. The article meant that over the course of a 1 - 2 hour flight, 36 seconds were spent rebooting the computer
Trying to get a girlfriend to read /. is the most complicated endeavour undertaken by mankind.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
i would love to hear bush say:
we have to delay our war with "randomly inserted country" due a update for our airplanes that keeps them from randomly crashing into skyscrapers
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
Pilot: (Dialing microsoft support services while cruising at mach 50,000) Come on, pick up, pick up.
Pre-recorder message: We're sorry, all circuitys are busy now. Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line until an operator is availible.
Pilot: (Over enemy territory and ready to drop payload, toggling switches like a madman) Damnit, pick up.
Tech Support Person: Hi, This is Candice, how are you today. Pilot: (Engine failure light flashing) Can you can the chatter, I'm cruising over Eastern Kreblenkistan about to die at Mach 40,000.
Candice: There's no need to be rude sir. First I'll need to confirm that you're not using a pirated copy of our software, so will you please refer to the key sticker located on your computer. Pilot: (Frustrated, going down) I can't do that, I'm sort of in a plane right now, can you just tell me how to reboot the thing.
Candice: I'm sorry sir, but we can't be responsible for the failures of pirated software... (transmission ends, big fiery explosion)
One would think that a system for any kind of airplane would get tested by a big bunch of beta testers, etc. before it's allowed to be used in anything that flys.
Remember the cars that suddenly zoomed forward when the Brake Pedal was pushed? They tried to blame that on the car computer for a while until they realized that the nut behind the wheel was at fault.
That was a great way to give the arrogant bitch a taste of his own medicine!
I'm an advocate for a strong defense, and always have been. And advanced weapons programs always have major bugs. I'm a veteran, and I follow defense issure pretty closely. With that said, now I say kill the F-22 program.
Why? It's a problem program. It's been plagued with an abundance of serious unforseen engineering problems from the very beginning. This is just the latest one made public. Past problems have included repeated instances of various parts of the fuesalage (especially some wing and tailparts) cracking. Cost overruns have become endemic. When the ATF program (Advanced Tactical Fighter) was first launched in the mid-80's to find a successor to the legendary F-15 Eagle, the Air Force set a goal of a flyaway cost of no more than 35 million per copy. The cost is now up 200 million a copy, and before it goes into production, the F-22 might cost a quarter of a billion dollars FOR A SINGLE FIGHTER. No matter how rich a nation is, no Air Force in the world can afford to buy such fighters in effective quantities. Not even other Stealth projects have spiraled this far out of control. The F-117 NightHawk stealth fighter (really more of a small bomber), with a small inefficient production run of 64 aircraft, topped out at 61 million per copy.
Granted, not all of the cost overrun problems are the fault of the Air Force or of Lockheed Martin. Congress keeps screwing around with the production schedule, and reducing the total buy, which drives up the cost per aircraft. But Congress has done so in large part for three main reasons:
1- They ask "Do we really need this, or can upgraded F-15's do the job?" This is a valid question as no other nation, friend or foe, has an aircraft that equals the Eagle, save for Russia's SU-27 series of fighters. These have been produced in such small quantities that Congress still debates the need for an Eagle replacement.
2- The number and seriousness of technical problems has made Congress reluctant to commit to the project fully. This crosses party lines, as in the past few years, several powerful Republicans have tried to kill the program on the grounds that the Raptor is a lemon. Democrats seeking money for non-defense programs have joined them.
3- There are serious doubts emerging that the Raptor's massive complexity can ever truly be managed in an efficient manner. There are concerns that, even if the aircraft becomes operational and initial bugs are worked out, the aircraft will be unreliable, becoming what the Air Force calls a "Hangar Queen"; it looks pretty on the floor, but if it can't go up in the air regularly, how good is it? The Air Force has had aircraft before that they REALLY wanted, but turned out to be so expensive and maintenance intensive that they had to be retired early. And excellent example is the B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber, which had impressive performance...when it wasn't broken down. It was retired after only 10 years of frontline service.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
outmaneuver any other fighter that it will face as a threat, and any other free world fighter that will be built for years to come
Translation: It is not the most maneuverable fighter on our side, and the enemy may build something more maneuverable soon, if they haven't already.
It would be interesting to hear what the software is written in and what it runs on. A mix of Ada/C on Windows NT/Embedded maybe? Or something else?
Come on, where are the people who brag about those "billion dollar projects implemented with 'our' tools"? Please step forward--we'd like to know.
You can bet your sweet booty that Locheed Martin would have a hell of a time getting test pilots if they ejection seat was on the computer!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Teaching pilots to fly the airplane, Pearson said, really involves teaching them how to use all the data flowing into the cockpit. "It's an extraordinarily easy airplane to fly," Pearson said. "They learn very quickly to fly it, and we are teaching them how - and they are teaching themselves - how to employ it, and that's different. How do you use the information you have in the cockpit to go and kill somebody and stay alive and execute your mission."
Instructor: The F-22 is so simple a child could pilot it. *points to FLY, and NO FLY buttons*
Primate Programming Inc: The Evolution of Java and .NET Training
Java F22: Pilot: Firing on target... Computer: "Starting Garbage Collector. Please Wait." Gentoo F22: Pilot: Firing on target... Computer: "Compiling Sidewinder Missile..." FreeBSD F22: Pilot: Firing on target... Computer: "Sidewinder Missile is dying..."
The vast majority of downed pilots, 80+% ?, never saw the attack coming. They were taken by surprise. The most successful aces avoided dogfights, they would try to surprise someone, if not they would disengage and look for someone else. Your account sounds like some romanticised story or an aberration that occurred in the earliest days of the war. WW1 pilots looked at battle the same way pilots do today. Give the other guy a chance and you may die, your wife a widow, your children fatherless.
By the time this thing ever gets into the air the only probable foes that it will ever face will be either SU-27 derivates or Mig-29 derivates, both of which cost far less than the F-22.
In pure features the Su-27 is an amazing plane. Anyone who has ever seen the Su-27 do the cobra manouver or the thrust vectored Su-30MKI or Su-35 do the 360 degree Kulbit manouver can attest to what these planes can do in close air combat. These are extreme manouvers that western planes cannot do for the simple reason that the engines in western planes receive no air at such high angles of attack and therefore often flame-out or stall. Not only this but the newer radars on the Su-30s and missiles are longer ranging than just about anything the west has with the exception of the F-14's AIM-54 Phoenix. As for stealth, newer Su-30's are coated with radar absorbant paint which reduce the advantages that a dedicated stealth fighter such as the F-22 would have in BVR combat.
In the hands of a good pilot I very much doubt that the Su-30 would automatically lose in combat. That however is the crux of the matter: Pilot training.
This has always been something that has been much better in the west with advanced simulators, top gun style combat training and long hours of aircraft experience. It is and has been a fallacy to believe that more modern high tech will always win the battle. It is almost always the quality of the pilots that decided the battle.
There is a good example of an air combat situation atht happened in the first gulf war. The only western plane to be shot down in air combat was an F-18 on an attack mission that was intercepted by an obviously experienced Iraqi Mig-25 pilot. The Mig-25 was already obsolete then in terms of technology but the sheer speed of the plane (Mach 2.8+) is unmatched by any other fighter. The Mig-25 went on after shooting down the F-18 to buzz an EF-111 raven that was providing ECM for the mission causing the raven to have to manouver to avoid the incoming missiles and drop back from the attack mission which was then unprotected by ECM and subsequently another F-18 was shot down by a SAM. No less than two F-15's and two F-16's all attempted to intercept the Mig-25, two of them firing missiles, but the Mig-25 used it's tremendous speed advantage to easily avoid the interceptors and reach its base.
This shows what a good plane , not necesserally the utterly most modern, can do in the hands of a good pilot. IMO the F-22 is an overexpensive white elephant.
Rather than the monolithic system which we all secretly love (which allegedly produces Blue Screens of Death when things go squiffy, although my own XP Home system has been thundering on with nary a problem for quite a while now), you build systems which can tolerate components restarting themselves. I don't care if you're RMS writing the purest code with GNU/Ada for the EFF Air Force, you're not going to write something that will never fail. Better to design and build an overall system which can tolerate minor interruptions, especially if you are going to be flying into a war zone.
In any case (I worked on some of the stuff on the fringes of the F22 program a long long time ago), there are a bunch of computers in the air vehicle; it's an airborne network. Saying "oh my god, I can't believe the plane is rebooting" is dissingenuous.(aside from the many Windows jokes). It's akin to "I had to power-cycle the printer twice today -- I can't believe the network stayed up for the 35 seconds it took the Lexmark to come back to life!".
Rebooting a subsystem computer works quite well in robotics too, which further leads into the concept of many small robots rather than one large beast screaming "Danger Will Robinson".
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
... so here's a cookie.
You've confused the terms "most advanced" with "best." The F-16 may not be the best fighter, but it is certainly the most advanced one in production.
An in-flight reboot during the *testing* phase is not acceptable? Anyone with a brain realizes you've just shot your logic in the face. You lose. Try again.
If the foe is watching closely enough, he should see the pilot making a "T" with his hands.
Who would ignore an internationally-recognized symbol such as that?
I would imagine they have the fighter equipped with a loudspeaker as well, so the pilot can should "game on!" when he's back online.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
They didn't "reboot", not the way you think of it because there was no OS.
THey ran a program. If the program crashed, you'd just restart the program. Its that easy. Think of Apple II or TRS-80, and you have a computer with 100 times the ability.
These things were a lot simpler than you're thinking.
Schwa? F-16's have had IFF capabilities going back to 1986 for some models. BAE just received a contract to provide AIFF for USAF F-16C aircraft as well. The basic technology is present in my Piper Cherokee, for that matter.
How long until inflight reboots will be implemented in whatever replaces the 747?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
You and your people (and your country) have never accomplished anything that will be remembered in history.
If the united states fell tomorrow, history would still record our nation as the one who (1) Landed on the moon (2) Invented atomic weaponry (3) Popularized the automobile (4) Invented Jazz (5) Invented the internet (6) Invented the Personal Computer
Cripes you could go on and on. What will they say about your country.... "They used socialized medicine to bankrupt the country..."?
People are mocking MS, because their systems aren't known for stability. Therefore when you hear about a computer crashing, you make MS jokes.
/.'s problem, its Microsoft's problem, because they do have problems writing stable code.
Sad, but true.
THat isn't
It's all turned into shit? MERDE! LORT! SCHEISSE!
I don't know why these computers need to reboot so much, but I can guaran-double-damn-tee you they would have to reboot a lot more if they were using C or C++ instead of Ada. When something really must work, you need Ada. If you're a programmer and you don't know that, you should educate yourself.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Sounds like another platform for NetBSD
when I was working on it, and that was about 2 years ago... Guess things haven't changed much since I left.
I think that you must be thinking of Quantum Gate: The Saga Begins... by HyperBole Studios. Essentially it boils down to Stargate SG-1 gone really bad. You go through this "quantum gate" to gather a mineral required to rescusitate Earth's ecology after... blah, blah... hostile aliens... blah, blah... we turn out to be the bad guys. If you're really interested in the story, there's actually a novelization available.
The "sequel that never happened" happened around 1995 and was called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II, it continued your adventures on the other side of the quantum gate. They actually released a soundtrack to this one.
Carthago delenda est!
Even 36 seconds per reboot is too much, and would be totally unacceptable if it were say, a navigation computer on a 737 with a hundred civilians on-board
Guess again - A320's get rebooted all the time. My brother-in-law flies them, and sometimes rebooting is the solution when the systems gets locked into a mode. Early A320's had problems landing - that is, the plane didn't want land. At the last minute of the descent the plane would take off again. The pilots had to call Paris for tech support to get instructions.
Wrong. My father actually lead the design team for the navigation box. He was one of three seperate COMPANIES doing this. (Box has 4 CPUs in it...all running at *exactly* the same time, regardless of difference in clock speed)
Besides, I'd love to see three sets of hardware (all totally different) run the *same* software. Without any modification.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Osprey? Harrier? And how many others?
-cp- (My .sig is rebooting)
"I'm sure the F/A-22 will be a good plane, but this "most advance in the world" kind of thing is somewhat naive. Anyway, since up to now the best planes were russian (oh! the blasphemy), I guess a "wait and see" attitude is advisable."
Russian aircraft haven't faired too well in real world testing. The certainly make some good air frames, but a combat aircraft is more than it's airframe. Example, Russian aircraft are notorious for unreliable engines with a very short operational lifespan. Another example: most Russian aircraft have very short ranges, relative to their Western, and especially American counterparts.
Oh, and the F-22 IS the most advanced air-to-air combat fighter in the world. There isn't anything that comes close in it's capabilities that isn't still a fantasy in some Russian engineer's head (ie, 10-15 years away from being produced).
Northrop Grumman made a rival plane, the YF-23, which outperformed the F-22 in nearly every test, but had a slightly higher price per plane. So why is it that the F-22 was chosen over the YF-23 (I mean now that the price problem was shifted) as the flagship of the military?
This was 1980.
It got fixed.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
I'm not trolling, but there is plenty of time to work things out. The first Raptor squadron is scheduled to be operational in 2005. On a side note, I live in Atlanta, GA USA and watch these bad boys fly into the Lockheed-Martin/Dobbins Air Force complex every now and then. They are usually flanked by a couple of F-18's and the F-22 seems much larger than the F-18's. Very cool to watch, and very cool to think about how dominant they will be in the skies.
or NT,2000 or XP for those mission critical applications.
But what OS and language are they written in?
It is great having defined a problem. So, how do you propose to fix this problem?
I suppose then that you are taking a position similar to the phyicists in the late 1950's who said bumblebees can't fly because their wingspan was insufficient to support the mass of their bodies? (Bumblebes, not understanding physics, fly anyway.)
How else to you explain the SR-71 Blackbird that's been flown for at least 30 years at Mach 3?
I like at how they arribed at the 93% number. It sounds so precise. It sure sounds like they know what they're doing.
I hope that is not true. Look at what we are using this for... I think humanity needs some new priorities if this is the case.
We kill them because not killing them would be even worse. And yes, we should treat them with as much tact as we can while we kill them. Because it is the proper thing to do.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The one place that I wouldn't want to see a BSOD would be inverted at 20,000 ft while flying at mach 2.
... and they are all very nice and everything, is that Scientific American is not a scientific journal. It is a political journal with a scientific slant, and it's major effort is political.
When the Democrats had control of House and WhiteHouse in the first Clinton years, one of their big pushes was to scale back weapons. Just in time for that, Scientific American did a magazine-wide series of articles on the origins and destinations of the world's assault weapons.
Very interesting, really, and I doubt it was wrong -- but it wasn't science.
That said, an article in Sci Am about "more robust failure tolerant systems" could have been placed just to support a company or group of companies that can't fix their bugs, but still want to sell their product. Ouch.
Now, I'm all for fault-tolerant design, if by fault-tolerant design you mean WDTs, no input being such that you can't deal with it, systems in triplicate, and such.
But if, by fault-tolerant design, you mean "the pilot of the airbus I'm on just had to cycle power for the entire human-environment-controls system, or even the entire airplane, at once, then I'd say that someone has some more work to do.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Commercial airliners don't have ejection seats.
paintball
Why have the Marines there at all?
paintball
How do you make an ejection seat that's NOT effective at 0 altitude and 0 speed?
Put dynamite in it or something?
paintball
Especially since I've been spouting the same stuff out it's become a semi-troll. Anyway, I'm thinking along the lines of the NASA flights to Mars that failed due to unit conversion. Radix conversion is simple but still more complicated than unit conversion. If not on floating point, then maybe even integer, especially with the display interfaces. Anyway, I've come up with a very useful set of sixteen new glyph's I'm going to advertise on /. soon. The hexadecimal revolution is coming.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Welcome to Raytheon Airlines...prepare to reboot.
Am I the only one who thought the article said "in-flight robots" ? I was imagining things like a robot stewardess serving drinks "Would you like some pretzels?" or perhaps a small army of spider sized robots for hull repair or something. No wonder its taking so long for this project!
Why have the Marines there at all?
I'll bite, troll. :)
First, I'm not responding to what I think you're actually trying to say. :)
The Marines mission is to hold the beachfront (or whatever) while the regular forces land safely to invade (or whatever). Then, they are required to do the same while the army leaves. That's why they are "First in, last out." And that's why they're still there.
Like what I said? You might like my music
I am for an effective military. Dump this $200m+ turkey, might salvage some technolgy for our UAVs. Foreign UAVs (unmanned planes) of the not-too-distant future will badly obsolete this plane, worse than wooden hull ships against steel Monitors. Relatively cheap expendable UAVs, less than $1m construction cost, will be a great threat. With no pilot, pull 20+g's no sweat. Smaller everything, harder to observe, single redundant hardware, lower output engine. Electronic pkg small can even be mostly in a single shot missle with expendable wings launcher for loitering. Even at a 100:1 kill ration we would lose. With a formidable tactician I would not be surprised if the results could approach or beat 1:1! Adversarys? Think fused Israeli technology with Chinese resources and our off-the-shelf electronics of 2010. Highly concentrated cost per vehicle here is a big, unaffordable mistake - militarily and financially. Bush beats everyone - he's an incredible spendaholic.
COMMAND: Red 1, you've turned off your targeting computer? Is everything all right?
Luke: Use the Force! Read the Source!
along the same lines, i just heard the history channel say we've spent over $800 Billion developing our nuclear submarine fleet throughout the cold war up to the present day
;P
i wonder if even half that had gone into feeding the poor, sheltering homeless and educating and taking care of people how much better off we'd be now from all those people becoming productive and fulfilled...
or maybe i'm just tired as it is 4:20 am
f22 by the way use qnx as an operating system, not microsft's windows qnx is used for majority of military stuff for the pentagon. and if you look at the us military and cia record on disinformation you might change you look on things
software project is 93% done
Great. The first 93% is done. Now they can start worknig on the other 93%.
What do we actually need from this aircraft? What's the opponent going to be?
Do we need a fast interceptor? Why? Against what? Airliners? Heck, F-4's (yes 4, not 14) could fill that role. Enemy fighters or bombers? What war are we going to be in where we're having to intercept incoming aircraft? Do we think China is planning to invade us? Why do we need the Raptor and a nukular deterrent?
Do we need a bomber? Sure, and we've already got one. It's called the B52, and for all the masturbation over F117s and B2s, it's still by far the most useful weapon we have at pounding the crap out of the evil oil hoarding sand niggers that will be our opponents for the next half century. It's not stealthy, but how many got shot down over Iraq? Can you guess why that is?
It's because the USA isn't dumb enough to pick fights that it won't win. We can pulverise any opponent to our own schedule. Who's going to stop us? Do we all remember USKA aircraft bombing the crap out of ground-to-ground targets for weeks before we declared a start to hostilities in 1993? All while the Eurotrash and UN dithered and wrung their hands and asked if war was necessary, while everyone (us, them, the sand niggers) knew that it had already started.
Air superiority then, to gain that overwhelming advantage. Well, sure, but it's missiles that kill planes, not vectored thrust engines. What's the Raptor's agility going to be used against? And more to the point, why? What's a quarter of a billion dollar (plus the rest) machine doing taking on ten million dollar MiGs? Better to use unmanned drones, effectively sabot for AAM. Using Raptors is an an insane proposition, you simply can't afford to lose an aircraft under circumstances like that.
And that's what it comes down to, really. The Raptor is designed to be unkillable (as usual). It's the ultimate machine (until the next one). It's the weapon to end all wars (again). It's the weapon that the military want, not the tool that they need.
The Raptor is just the latest step in the project to make wars bloodless in every way that counts, i.e. zero US casualties. Who cares how many sand niggers we kill off camera, as long as not one American serviceman buys the farm. Hey, dollars are just tax money, but dead air grunts mean lower approval ratings.
What's all this got to do with the software? Well, I believe that what we're seeing is the result of the military being allowed to run wild. Hell, it doesn't matter if it don't work, because they don't need it. Just throw another billion dollars at it, and wait another few years. What's the hurry? All it's going to do is to fly around at airshows and send a message to all the uppity sand niggers that we'll pay whatever we need to kill as many of them as we need to to get their oil.
If we needed the Raptor, it would have been in service years ago. As it stands, it's too expensive to kill, and it'll never be used, so what on earth is the incentive to complete it? We've told the R&D guys that they can take as long as they want, but when they're done, they're out of a job. Nice plan.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Strange, my keyboard only has F1 through F12...
There isn't any need for the F-22? Build something more complicated and the reliability falls through the floor.
Absolutely. The stability of the plane is in large part to do with the angle the wings make with the fuselage. Upward pointing dihedral wings are far more stable, but offer less maneuvrability. Anhedral wings, on the other hand, make the plane aerodynamically unstable, thus allowing it to turn far faster. It's pretty intuitive really. A dihedral (upward sweeping) wing, is lengthened horizontally when the plane turns (because it's tipped towards the horizontal) therefore generating more lift and righting the plane. An anhedral wing, on the other hand, is shortened when the plane banks, further reducing the lift on the banking side, and accelerating the turn. Anhedral winged planes are essentially impossible to control without computer aid. Hence they are restriced to fighter planes and such...
The pilot finally gave up and we had to stop moving for about 10-15 minutes to allow it to sync itself from a GPS fix.
Nothing like doing donuts in a 767 on the ramp at LAX...
"The State Dept. would like to report that it is doing its best to retrieve Lt. Col. John Bowers from enemy territory right now. Lt. Col. Bowers due to system failure, was forced to Ctrl-Alt-Del out over southern Liberia earlier this week."
Joseph Heller's 1961 classic book "Catch-22" included a character named Major Major Major, who joined the army and was prompty promoted to the rank of Major, for reasons obvious to everyone around him. He was then and for ever after, "Major Major Major Major."
-Mark
F22 HUD Display:
Critical System Error
Rebooting During Combat
This Action Will
Bring Certain, Fiery DEATH
+----+
| OK |
+----+
Would providing Windoze to the military in a time of war constitute giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
Well, "aid" certainly, but "comfort" is a more subjective judgement...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Gotta love that Major
Arbitrary sig
In combat operations, taking into account in flight reboots and incomplete code, will the F-22 be more effective than the F-15 it is set to replace? If so, big deal it has some problems, more effective is still more effective.
"Violence is always the last resort of the incompetent." ~ I. Asimov
Shallow people like you frighten me more than all the evil (broken) people in the entire world. Killing begets only more killing. Violence simply guarantees more violence. Your beliefs are as brutal as your language, which probably speaks volumes for your methods.
Unfortunately, you don't seem to have the depth necessary in order to appreciate the issues you've involved yourself in. As such, I suspect that this reply will be totally lost on you.
However, it was a perfect example of the awesome power of human stupidity, and for that I thank you.
If Americian's don't understand America, what hope do they have in helping others to?
Words to men, as air to birds.
I've never seen a Boeing plane falling apart.
"Because our technology sector has a fairly large interest in seeing Taiwan remain free from the mainland"
ROTFL. Taiwan is more likely to peacefully reunite with the mainland than it is to be invaded. The Chinese government know a good thing when they see one, and Taiwanese investment in China and the huge trade imbalance between China and America are good things for them that they're not going to screw up. They're probably real glad, in fact, to see the US government wasting vast sums of money on pointless weapons while they're busy working to beat America economically, not militarily.
What you probably really mean is that our technology sector has a large interest in sucking huge wads of dollar bills from the government pork-trough, and building hugely complex and expensive fighters is a good way to justify doing that. The F-22 is corporate welfare to the defence contractors, nothing more, nothing less.
See this article by the software lead. They develop on VAX/VMS in Ada 83, because that's what you could get in 1991. They had planned to migrate to the DEC Alpha (remember?) but that didn't work out. They're looking at migrating to Ada 95.
Were this not a government fighter project, I would agree that it will remain 93% complete for two years. But I would imagine (hope!) that a software project like this would require a more structured software development cycle, such that when they say it's 93% done, it really is 93% done.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
computers in airplanes get rebooted all the time. Plus on the F-22 advanced fighter, every computer system is redundant. There is no SPFs (single points of failures) excluding the human element. Who cares if the computer ### was rebooted in midflight. There is at least one more that does its job onboard and functioning. Plus the aircraft is in what the software industry would call BETA stage. The code is still being developed and bugs are being worked out. Once the aircraft becomes "GA" the computers will not have to be rebooted as often and if they do, so what that is why there is multiple computers in it. No effective downtime.
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
If you're at 0-0, you can just, well, get out of the plane.
paintball
Besides that, I think the best way to depose Saddam Hussein would have been assassination. Why is assassination considered so dishonorable?
Historicly assassination in all it's forms has been considered cowardly. It was thought that if a man was so eager to kill someone he should at least be willing to risk his own flesh in the process.
As for Saddam Hussein, he was known to have adopted a number of paranoid and obsessive security precautions which would have made killing him very difficult.
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
So that's what they call a "killer app".
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Who is General Fault, and why is he reading my hard drive? /obvious
Classic playground defense, "I know the answer, I just don't want to tell you." What a loser! Robborg wins!
We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill them