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Computer Error Grounds Flights In the UK
Rambo Tribble writes: Reuters reports that flights from Heathrow, Gatwick, and many other airports have been shut down "due to a computer failure." The information comes from European air traffic control body Eurocontrol. No official word as yet as to the nature of the failure. "One source told the BBC the problem was caused by a computer glitch that co-ordinates the flights coming into London and puts the flights in sequence as they come into land or take off. He described it as a 'flight planning tool problem.'" Incoming flights are still being accommodated.
Every time I see those words, I want to know what OS.
Tea may be good but coffee is not tea.
The user interface looks strangely similar to Galaxians.
Hope they have lots of parking space for those airplanes, because they're going to pile up fast. And they're also going to be out of circulation for who knows how long?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Don't they know about the backups on the planes in-flight? Shouldn't they just have one do a fly-by and drop an ethernet cable to a car pacing it on the runway below? Stupid Brits, don't know how to get things done in a crunch ;-)
And anecdotally, it seems many, if not most, of the ATC failures I remember hearing about in the US have also been power problems. These are kinda hard to test, as I wrote to a friend, "The on-duty ATC controllers get irate when you 'pull the big power plug' on their shift."
Usually failures like these are chains of events, e.g. "UPS ran out of batteries more rapidly than expected, and then we couldn't get the generators started."
Power problems are what doomed Fukushima, too, by the way.
Villain Kim Jong Un makes his next move with his team of super-hackers.
who kicked the power cord out of the wall or failed to renew the license for Excel because you know, you can use Excel for any data challenge you're not willing to research. i.e., "Computer glitches" are notoriously hard to pin down and are a great diversionary tactic.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No, reports now are a computer failure - and the Reg now reports they run MS stuff - seems like the dodgy update that MS retracted is the smoking gun.
Thank you for your uninformed and nonsensical speculation. People like you are what makes /. the enlightened community it is renowned to be.
That was me. Occam's razor.
Let me guess: Systems were down momentarily while doing a hard reboot, hence the power "outage," in an attempt to resolve an otherwise unsolvable Windows computer glitch?
Tea may be good but coffee is not tea.
Likely some supplier had their rates downgraded long enough that they could not deliver good quality anymore. These "savings" are always exceedingly expensive in the long run.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That explanation isn't likely. They have pen and paper backup solutions for simply putting planes in order for landing and takeoff. To shut down to that degree, it would have had to be something more important like radar shutting down so planes might collide.
Or they're idiots and didn't have a backup pen and paper solution that was used for decades before computers and all staff should have been trained on.
maybe someone at the airport dared to download a torrent and then got hit by sony :)
I guess they just switched to systemd. :-)
I'll just make this one little change here...it won't affect anything.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It must be difficult being an on call windows shill. So many problems...
KB 3000061, KB 2553154, 2726958, KB 3004394.
Not a computer failure as such, according to my source.
Are your planes belong to us.
It's great to see for once that a glitch has been doing something worth-while, rather than just causing problems.
It's unfortunate, then, that this glitch has fallen-back to the errant ways of most glitches, which typically just cause trouble, without doing something useful.
I'm not sure it is time for a 12-step program for glitches, though, because I think most glitches do not want to change.
Older systems did that by hand but newer systems have algorithms which guide the trajectories of aircraft on approach so they finish up in a nice sequence. Thats what it sounds like in the summary.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Have gnu, will travel.
Looks like they are using hand me down software from the US from the 1960s written in a language called Jovial.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
"Prof Thomas said the NAS system was written using a now defunct computer language called Jovial, meaning Nats has to train programmers in Jovial just to maintain the antiquated software."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I saw people at Oslo Gardermoen airport get thier London flights cancelled.
When I worked on the radar system for south east England in 1977, the requirements included allowing for a madman in the computer room with an axe.
It was supposed to fail back gradually, eventually all the way to analog passive radar.
Whatever happened to decent requirements?
And get off my lawn!
"Cats like plain crisps"
...you use atan instead lf atan2 in your autopilot software.