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Windows 3.1 Glitch Causes Problems At French Airport -- Wait, 3.1? (vice.com)
OakDragon writes: Microsoft has tamped down the earth on XP's grave, steered Internet Explorer toward the nursing home, and is trying to convince everyone Windows 10 is a bright up-and-comer. But in the Paris airport of Orly, a system called DECOR — which helps air traffic controllers relay weather information to pilots — is running on Windows 3.1. That program suffered a glitch recently that grounded planes for some time. The airport actually runs on a variety of old systems, including Windows XP and UNIX. Maintenance is a problem. There are only three people in Paris that work on DECOR issues, and one of them is retiring soon. Hardware is also an issue. "Sometimes we have to go rummaging on eBay to replace certain parts," said Fiacre. "In any case, these machines were not designed to keep working for more than 20 years."
and lock the dinosaurs back in their cages
My favorite I've encountered about ATC systems is how the documentation lies. For example, how checksums are to be computed computed for a particular broad class of messages. The ARINC specs go into detail, with diagrams and everything about the computation process. But when you look at existing samples of code, they don't do this - they do this weird thing with a lookup table and uncalled-for bitshifts and the like. After spending a day or so studying the code, I finally figured out what they were trying to do - they were trying to "optimize" the algorithm in the specs. But in the process they made it deviate from what is actually supposed to be computed in about four different ways (plus, their "optimizations" don't actually save compute time, the simple math operations are faster than the lookup in the "precompute" table that they made).
So what do we do when we need to compute and check checksums? We use the wrong code, of course! It's what's "out in the wild", so who cares what the specs say we're supposed to use, it's what we have to use if we want checksums to ever to come up valid. Hopefully they'll eventually update the specs to reflect the reality.
Hello from Sputnik 2. I am receiving you.
Primarily because I'm betting the interface from that Windows 3.1 machine has some very specific DOS "driver" (TSR for us old-timers) that even Windows 95 would kill.
There were some very interesting hacks that could be done on a DOS box. I remember writing a TSR that bumped up the system timer to allow a finer grain on the timer events. It also sent out the "normal" system event to the rest of the OS so Windows would keep running.
I was able to create Virtualbox VMs with windows 3.1, 3.11, and even DOS 3.3 (!), all with networking enabled, and I even browsed some websites with them. I mostly used this guide:
http://www.kompx.com/en/arachn...
and less snoopware
Table-ized A.I.
In 25 years, there've probably been 25 managers who have walked away with fat bonuses for keeping this department under budget. The current one will get a slap on the wrist. They're just playing the odds to get the best outcome for themselves.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?