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It takes 1,000 sailors “just to get a ship moving,” Williamson said. Microsoft software could let the ship’s crew know when there’s a pending failure in a ship’s engineering system, for example, he said.

A few years ago a naval ship, the USS Yorktown (http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov2.htm), had to be towed back to port (more than once) after it experienced a Windows NT 4 crash. I'm not a "windows hater," or whatever, I've been developing for, deploying, and hardening Windows servers going back to NT 3.51. Those are three good reasons I think Windows 2000 is not up to this task. You'd think they could use a nice, non-bloated RTOS for the job... A general purpose OS is just too big to be adequately tested. There are lots of good, well tested RTOS designed for embedded applications, such as QNX and many others.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199807/msg00056.html

"We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain and, when it fails, results in a critical failure," DiGiorgio said. It took two days of pierside maintenance to fix the problem.

The Yorktown has been towed into port after other systems failures, he said.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/11929.html
But there's a funny coincidence too. The CVN 77 is being built by Newport News Shipbuilding Inc., and that name may be familiar to you. Yes, that's right, a little while back Bill Gates invested in... Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. He holds an eight per cent stake. Newport News Shipbuilding is one of only two companies in the US which are capable of building nuclear submarines, and has built ten of the last 12 aircraft carriers commissioned by the US navy. It'll launch the USS Ronald Reagan (again, no kidding) next year, and it seems horribly possible the thing will run Win2k (with SP2?).

http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/1308-1.html

FEB. 11—The Navy’s No. 2 civilian official yesterday launched a surprise attack on Microsoft Corp., threatening to take the service’s business elsewhere if the company does not improve its products.

“I’m going to Microsoft at the end of this month to say to [chief executive officer] Steve Ballmer, ‘You talk about how you create a business group process system, but I’ll tell you [that] you don’t come close to giving us what we need,’ ” undersecretary of the Navy Jerry MacArthur Hultin said. He spoke at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s West 2000 conference in San Diego.

Hultin oversees how the Navy’s 674,000 active duty and reserve forces and 215,000 civilians spend the service’s $88 billion annual budget. He said that he intends to tell Ballmer that “we are your biggest customer and either change, or I’ll tell and encourage the Navy and Marine Corps to look someplace else for services.”

There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products, he said, drawing applause from the audience.

Do you think Windows is a mature technology to use for this purpose? I don't.