Looking at your comments here, what do you think about Windows shutting down air traffic control communications over the Southwest some years back?
They replaced a UNIX-based communications system with one running Windows 2000. The system used RPC. Windows 2000, and well through XP IIRC, had a bug where RPC would start taking all the system resources, basically making the computer unresponsive. This happened when the 32-bit RPC clock rolled over at 2^32 milliseconds, or 49.7 days. To avoid the bug the authors of the commo software put into the user manual that it was supposed to be restarted about every 45 days to avoid this, and programmed auto-restart code just before the 49.7 days. I presume the latter is because it’s easier for users to respond to a restart than wonder why commo is randomly getting dropped as the system slowly eats itself and dies.
Well, somebody didn’t read the manual, didn’t restart, and the system restarted itself, shutting down commo for a while. You might want to blame the developer, but that’s wrong. A system like that shouldn’t be regularly restarted, especially when they’re used to UNIX that just keeps running. The eventual “solution” was to put in an alarm before it shuts down. All of that was hacks to get around a fundamental operating system flaw.
Here’s a hint: If you want a system with high uptime, don’t use one that you KNOW FOR A FACT will crash on you every 49.7 days. Find an operating system that doesn’t have that flaw.
“Here’s a hint: If you want a system with high uptime, don’t use one that you KNOW FOR A FACT will crash on you every 49.7 days. Find an operating system that doesn’t have that flaw.”
Having a mission critical system that could result in deaths rely on a single desktop is foolhardy, regardless of the OS.
The accident was the result of pilot error. The pilots did not do their job. Perhaps they were trusting to the poorly designed automated systems, a sure sign of their inexperience and poor training.
On another note I wonder how many times this story will get posted.