In message <[email protected]>, Rob Seaman writes:
>Again - why are engineering best practices regarded as an annoyance? Rob, They are not, but they are far different from what you think they are, and they are slavishly adhered to. I know several astronomers, including the one who I think were the first to use a computer observationally. And they are a really cool crew, and fun to be with, but they wouldn't last 10 minutes in the real IT world. None of them, and obviously you in particular, have any idea what "safety of life" means in an IT context. Yeah, sure: you could knock a phd out cold with a radio-telescope, but that is just an average industrial accident, that has nothing to do with computers really. Real "safety of life" systems often must be approved by several authorities, and tested to predetermined and randomized scenarios, and then, likely as not, you will end up not rolling them out, likely for several months, because some other issue, anomaly or just operational pattern prevents it. Getting a new OS rolled out under an ATC system every six months ? F'get it buddy, not even close, lets talk about it in 2012, OK ? And you know what ? That _is_ good engineering practice for systems like that: you do not risk blacking out an entire ATC sector, just because some raving astronomer cannot find stars with his telescope. Dream on in your own little world, Rob, but please stop thinking that the rest of the world is like your sandbox. Poul-Henning (Who has waited 3 months for the paperwork to move, so he can install patch which changes the color of a touch panel button in an ATC system.) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
