Faulty hardware found on shuttle

"Kevin Willoughby" wrote in message
...

There are legitimate arguments that Windows machines are not just a
hazard to their owners, but also endanger non-Windows systems since
Windows-born malware can seriously disrupt the shared resource of the
Internet. No other operating system has been singled out for this kind
of disruption.
(see http://www.newsforge.com/relocate.pl?id=
31a5092ddba1fec14d06b2e38a44232a for this argument)

How quickly people forget the Sendmail worm which was quite disruptive in
its day.


--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

Kevin Willoughby wrote:
forcing the programmers to be careful with memory allocations. Let the
machine keep track of memory usage (keyword: "garbage collection").

My immediate reaction to that is sloppy programming where the programmer HOPES
the "system" (or more precisely, the run time library) will fix the stuff the
programmer forgot to do.

If you allocate some memory and the code that deallocates it doesn't always
get executed, it means that your logic is flawed and you haven't done the due
diligence to ensure your code reflects the intentions all the time.

Kevin Willoughby wrote:
a newsletter, or a book, or a Wanted-Dead or Alive poster, but MS Word
was the first (and still only) word processor that let you do all of
these.

Wow, what brainwashing. Ever heard of Wordperfect ? Ever heard of Quark, Page
Maker et al ?

Word is loaded with too many features for what it is used for by 99% of the people.

Marvin wrote:
The ideal is to have *just enough* computer to comfortably do the job,
without tempting to excess growth. Unfortunately witht he tempo of computer
growth nowadays, matching this balance is a bit tough.

Or worded a different way: justify the computer resources you really need. If
you do this justification in front of peers, it motivates you to remove bloat
that you know your peers will tell you is not necessary.

Kevin Willoughby wrote in
:

Youch! In software engineering (heck, all forms of engineering), the
development cost is a strong, non-linear, function of the number of
constraints on the system. A computer that is almost too small
provides a number of constraints that make it *much* harder to build a
good system.

Quite correct, bit a somewhat myopic view of a real-life problem.
Having a computer that is more than ample in abilities virtually forces the
developers (via management's imperative not to 'waste') to utilise it to
capacity, even when it is not really needed. This causes code and
especially data bloat, which leads to exponential increase in cost of
quality control.

The ideal is to have *just enough* computer to comfortably do the job,
without tempting to excess growth. Unfortunately witht he tempo of computer
growth nowadays, matching this balance is a bit tough.

"Kevin Willoughby" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...
Thus, the free market in action. Nobody is forced to buy MS products.

Wrong. My brother is a Linux guru, hates Windows, so his new laptop was
purchased with, yes, Windows. The manufacturer can't sell him a laptop
without some version of Windows on it.

Get a new manufacturer. I can name several big name ones that will sell a
laptop w/o Windows.

In fact, I thought since the last Justice department settlement, they ruled
Microsoft in fact could NOT sign OEM's to single-source OS deals.



Several recent court actions have demonstrated that Microsoft has used
its monopoly position to do coerce the purchase of MS products.

This is true. But on the some token, some of the best examples I've seen
used of this in fact turn out to be weak. Off the top of my head, I'd
probably grant that bundling Word killed Wordperfect, but in several other
cases, the competition was weak or offered poor products.

Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows never made the transition partly because they bet
the farm on OS/2 and because when they did release their Windows product it
sucked.

Netscape can complain all they want, but the fact is, up through IE3 (or was
it IE4) I consistently downloaded Netscape... up through 3.12. IE sucked
initially.

After that, IE became a faster, more stable product. Price had nothing to
do with it as many claimed (considering NS was originally free for
non-commercial use and then eventually dropped their charging for commercial
customers.)

There's no doubt MS has taken advantage of their position. The
single-sourcing OS deal I think is one of the stronger examples.

On the other hand, they didn't get where they did either by making unusable
products.

It's not black and white.

Getting back to MS writing code for flight systems... no, I wouldn't trust
them. Any more than I would most major vendors of software out there. It's
a specialized field that relies on a different skill set. For one time, in
many cases you want a real-time OS, something most programmers have little
clue about.


--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

On 29 Mar 2004 11:04:57 GMT, rk
wrote:

Mary Shafer wrote:

On 29 Mar 2004 03:16:58 GMT, rk
wrote:

So, would you go with complex software-based fly-by-wire system with
extremely elaborate sets of computers that have very complex design
considerations?

Or fly-by-steel and fly-by-oil which is simpler and has less possible
failure modes?

Yes, I would. Yes, I have. The F-4E for the latter and the NF-16D
for the former. Yes, I'd do it again.

OK.

Now, drive-by-wire (braking and steering) for your family car?

Sure. And adaptive suspension, too. Of course, I'd expect a little
more redundancy that I have now.

Close those loops. Optimize that gain. Feed those parameters back.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

In article ,
Herb Schaltegger writes:
In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

Every time I read a post like this, I laugh at thinking about just what
archeologists are going to make of all this terminology a couple of
hundred years down the road....it will be about as comprehensible as
Etruscan. :-)


Hell, Pat, in 200 years, I'm sure folks will still be bitching about
Windows XP 2204 being too bloated and crash-prone to run ANY of the
latest 4D-games in 37.1-channel psionic surround-think. I mean, come
ON! Win2200 rulz! W00T!

And MS_Word 2204 will require a semitrailer full of terabyte
SVHDDVDs. run like a Sloth on your MeraHertz Anthill processor, and
provide no more useful functionality than Word 6.
ANd the Stupid Paper Clip will still be standing over your shoulder in
3-D. (I don't wnat to think about the Idiot Butterflies)

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

In article ,
"Ami Silberman" writes:

Since I have on my desktop three non-MS Office suites that easily read the
Office files I produce, this is clearly demonstrable nonsense. My system,
which runs Win98SE, came with StarOffice. I also have OpenOffice and
EasyOffice (which I include on my real estate book's CD to use the MS
Office
files I've created). I have yet to have a problem, and I use Office 2000.
I'm about to add another workstation to my office, and it will have
EasyOffice.

Star office does not handle certain Windows formatting correctly. (Most
notably, certain table formats.)

Actually, it does a better job than WordPerfect, or, for that metter,
most version of Word that are different than the version used t write
the document.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

In article ,
"Scott Hedrick" writes:

"Paul Blay" wrote in message
...
That may be what users /need/ but what they /want/ is a stable,
predictable and
secure system with those *particular* bells and whistles that take their
fancy.

Along with a low learning curve, and for which they can get loads of help
from friends who know about it.

Or think they know. Or storefront "Experts" who can berely handle a
point/click/drool interface, and fear actually having to know what
they might be doing.
Hmm. It must have been about 5 years ago. I was browsing in one of
those storefronts, looking for some Potentially Useful Stuff, when a
call came in. It was one of their clients, and they had a Mail Server
in their office that needed a client added. It seems that this was an
impossible task for the Current Employess at this place, they they
tried to sell the customer 2 brand new (and expenseive) Windows NT
servers, running Exchange adn Outhouse. Filled with curiosity about
what could possibly be so arcane, I approached the Droid that had
taken the call, and enquired about the system in question. I was told
that it was running Red Hat Linux, and using some strange proprietary
Red-Hat only mail system. This piqued my interest, so I enquired
after what this peculiar Mail System could be. "sendmail", was the
reply. It happened that I was passing the poor guy's location. I
stopped in, asked for the boss, told him that I'd heard that he had a
small problem, and showed him how to set things up himself. All in
about 10 minutes time.

I'll admit that systems with Windows Servers can be made to run
acceptably well, but that it's much more likely to occur when they're
being run by *NIX Sysadmins. (It's all in knowing the fundamentals)

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster