[maddog is the Chief Linux Proselytizer and Evangelist. See his sig below for more info.]
-- -Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have - -happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ -Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- -individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? steveo at syslang.net ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 13:30:23 -0500 From: Jon maddog Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Pirates and Angels Several years ago I was attending a trade show in Dallas when I got an emergency telephone call from one of our product managers for Digital Unix. She was in Houston, and wanted me to leave the trade show and fly to Houston to visit a customer site. She was in a panic, and told me that my absence from the show had been approved all the way up our management chain. I drove to the airport and grabbed the next airplane. The next day we visited the Johnson Space Flight Center, and met with a rather intense man who told us about the computer systems at the center. He told us how the old systems were built from scratch, with operating system software designed from scratch, and how all of these systems were now 20-30 years old. He told us that the costs of maintaining these systems were now well over 200 million US dollars per year, and that NASA was afraid that if they did not trim money where they could, that the whole space mission might be scrapped. More importantly, the people who built these systems were not only retiring, but they were dying. It is one thing to get a retiree to come back to make a small change to the system..... In any case this man and a small group of people under him, who he code named "The Pirates", had put together a plan to use modern-day computers, modern-day standard operating systems (called Unix), and re-write all the application code developed over 30 years. They argued that after this was done once at a cost of 200 million USD, the annual cost of maintenance would be about 23 million USD, about 1/10th the current yearly maintenance cost. This project had already been done, and over 200,000 hours of mission telemetry data had been fed into both systems to see where they differed. If one system got a different answer from the other, the simulations were stopped, and the differences were understood. The project was now finished. But before the project was put on line, there was still one last detail. The manager of the project wanted to meet with representatives of the company supplying the computer systems. He wanted to tell us how much he was depending on our systems to work flawlessly...absolutely flawlessly. He wanted to tell us that if he even THOUGHT for one brief moment of time that our systems were not up to the job, that he would scrub the mission, even if it meant losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-launch staging. He wanted to know at this meeting if we knew of ANY REASON why our operating system and hardware architectures were not up to the job. The DEC product manager's hand had been lying on my arm. As the NASA project manager kept telling us how much he depended on us, how much he was willing to throw accolades our way if things went well, and how much he was willing to drag our company down if things did not go well, her hand tightened around my arm. Finally I had to hiss, "Pat, I can't feel my fingers any more." Her hand loosened a bit. In the end, the NASA project manager turned to us and smiled. He said, "I know that you feel I have been very intense during this meeting, but I want to let you know why. I was the flight manager the day the Challenger blew up, and even though that was not my fault, I lost a billion dollar payload and seven good friends that day." I looked him in the eye and said, "Even though I know that no complex system is free of bugs, given the level of testing and the level of redundancy that you have here, I believe that the system will perform to your needs." He thanked me, and the meeting was over. I never heard directly from him again, and for the next few shuttle launches I held my breath to see if there were any delays that could be attributed to our gear, but apparently there were not. Eventually I saw a Rolling Stone article about "The Pirates" and their work at saving NASA money and creating greater flexibility by using "standard" hardware and software, and it included an interview with that same NASA project manager. In it he briefly praised our operating system and hardware for its dependability. He was true to his word. Now as I see articles criticizing NASA for its lack of efforts in saving money, or its efforts of trying too hard to save money, therefore jeopardizing safety, I think back to that project manager and remember that the only break in his steely reserve that day was when the tear rolled down his face at the mention of the Challenger crew. Somehow I doubt that he, or anyone at NASA, would have given the "O.K." to launch if they thought it did not have an acceptable chance of coming back again in one piece. Sincerely, Jon "maddog" Hall -- ============================================================================= Jon "maddog" Hall Executive Director Linux International(SM) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 80 Amherst St. Voice: +1.603.672.4557 Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A. WWW: http://www.li.org Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association (R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. (SM)Linux International is a service mark of Linux International, Inc. 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