Re: Uncle Sam Wants YOU!

[James A. Sutherland]

On Sun, 1 Jul 2001 20:19:07 -0500 Mon,  2 Jul 01 12:25:43 BST, you
wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "William T Wilson" <[e-mail]>
>> On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Ben Ford wrote:
>>
>> > This seems to be meant as a joke, but I don't think it's all that
>unlikely.
>> >
>> > I seem to recall that MS products cannot be used in aircraft control
>> > rooms for this reason.
>>
>> It's not just MS.  Aircraft control rooms (as well as nuclear power
>> plants, spacecraft mission control, etc.) require special certified
>> software to be used - it's not simply that they avoid MS, they avoid all
>> software that hasn't been blessed.
>>
>> My understanding is that astronauts going up on the shuttle take turns
>> bringing a laptop computer so they have actual computing power available
>> to them.  The shuttle computer is not adequate for many tasks because it
>> is something like 30 years old, but that's what they use because it is
>> certified.  So somebody has to bring along a non-certified system in their
>> "personal effects" allowance to get real work done :}
>
>From what I've heard, NASA relies heavily on modified Linux.

Last time I was in Mission Control at JSC, some of the consoles I
looked at were very obviously X desktops. I didn't look closely enough
to identify them more specifically - I'll take a closer look next
month when I'm out there again...

James.