I will never knowingly get on any aircraft that contains microsoft products.
And this is NOT a joke.
Microsoft products, however, are.
I should add to my above comment, howwever.
NO competent pilot would have allowed any of the reasons stated in the article to cause a crash.
Somehow, without computers, pilots have managed to check flap positions, etc. using (wait for it) their own eyes.
I laugh when I fly with some of the recent private pilots, who would be lost without GPS and computer aided auto pilots. I could only wish they were piloting Air Force One. (However, our AF-1 military pilots - no matter what they think about the Loon-In-Chief, wouldn’t be fooled by faulty computer readings).
Microsoft, which I now call MacroSludge.
I just upgraded to Office 2010. This is the biggest POS that I have run into from Macrosludge. I have had complete system lockups requiring hard reboots, and also multiple times where the software dumps, claiming to be unlicensed.
To bad DEC was a company with piss poor management, since looking back X-Windows had much more potential and stability. A Windows style GUI running on top of UNIX - or is that what Mac OS-X is supposed to be?
This is what’s scary in my line of work. A lot of industrial automation systems (operator interfaces, data historians, fortunately not the logic/control engines in PLC’s yet) are based on some MacroSludge operating system. This includes refineries, power plants, and pipelines. I have referred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as anal retentive, but if they decide to decertify any control equipment (including operator interfaces, and anything else directly associated with plant operation) that runs MacroSludge, I would in this case see their point.