Windows For Warships Nearly Ready

mattaw writes "The Register is carrying the sanest and balanced article on Windows deployment in UK warships that I have read to date in the public domain. As an ex-naval bod myself we have long considered that this is potentially a REAL problem. The main issues are the huge amount of unrelated code that is imported with the kernel and the need for incredibly fast response times."

Comments

reading but not thinking.

[twitter]

The only problem with that "big step forward" assessment is that it's not true. Windoze is not going to replace all of the unreliable equipment, it's going to interpret and control it. In that capacity, it could only make things better if it were perfect .... ha! Reliability is multiplicative. If the embedded systems give you the right answer 3/4 of the time, and windoze does not make a mistake 3/4 of the time, the result is something that won't sink you 0.56, or a little better than half of the time.

When you consider the cascading style failures seen with Windoze before, this choice is a real disaster. It is going to kill a lot of good people if there's any real conflict.

Re:I can see the commercials...

[rtb61]

More likely, your anti-missile response system exceeds your DRM rights and will be cancelled, do you wish to just fire in the general direction of the target instead. The whole idea is daft, keep it simple, a light wieght OS distributed on many independent devices with only links where required.

Just think the Chinese, Russians etc. and anybody they wont to sell it to now have access to the source code powering the computer systems on that vessel. They miss one line of code that the opposition don't and they are right 'royally' screwed, you really wont as many eyes as possible or none at all, looking over critical code as possible.

Sure you might have windows on the captains notebook so he or she can play command and conquer, so what if it crashes, gets a worm or virus, but you certainly don't wont it on the navigation or the weapon systems. Oh well, every one knows on only get second rate coders work on defence systems, first rate coders have fun and either go for the money or full fill a service to humanity need and go open source, so a windronish nature is only to be expected in, 'murdering as many human beings possible in the shortest time possible' styled industries.