Does Windows versus Unix count as "culture"? It's probably stretching things a bit, but this is my ego trip blog. My other place is for disciplined sticking to the point. And in any case, software is culture. Where is the serious aesthetic effort of a non-decadent sort now being made in our society? In the museums of modern art? Hardly. In the software dens is where. Why, I'm even working away myself at making this blog look nicer, and any month now …
Anyway, Peeve Farm has a nice bit about the software and automotive industries colliding, the point of which is that software folks (if they are Windows software folks) are free-wheelers who take chances to stay ahead of their competitors, while the carmakers don't like to take chances because when they do people die. Ditto the airplane and spaceship makers, only more so.
Contractors who write software for jetliners or the Air Force get to work under banners that say "When our software crashes, so does the plane"; you won't find those kinds of banners in Redmond. (One hopes there's a banner somewhere on the campus that says "Remember the Yorktown", but I'm not holding my breath.)
Yorktown. That was the one that got mended really, really quickly during the Battle of Midway, right? "Yorktown" was in link-lettering, so I went there. No, this Yorktown is Midway Yorktown's great grand-daughter, or some such, and a quite different ship.
Here's the story, from Wired:
Microsoft continues to trumpet the success of its NT operating system over Unix-based systems, the US Navy is having second thoughts about putting NT at the helm. A system failure on the USS Yorktown last September temporarily paralyzed the cruiser, leaving it stalled in port for the remainder of a weekend."For about two-and-a-half hours, the ship was what we call 'dead in the water,'" said Commander John Singley of the Atlantic Fleet Surface Force.
The warship was testing its new Snart Ship system, which uses off-the-shelf PCs to automate tasks that sailors have traditionally done themselves. "The Navy started the Smart Ship program with three essential goals in mind: improve combat readiness, reduce crew workload and operating costs, and to do it safely," said Singley.
The Smart Ship program is still in development, and officials said glitches are to be expected, but in this case the problem appeared to be more political than technical. Using Microsoft's Windows NT operating system in such a critical environment, some engineers said, was a bad move.
"The simple root of the problem on Yorktown was that politics were played in the assigning of the contract -- there was not a discussion of engineers, it was just a very small group of people pitching for it," said an engineer close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a statement issued this week on why NT was chosen over Unix, the Navy said that while Windows NT was specified in the Statement of Work as the operating system for the workstations in question, other components of a coming upgrade will primarily utilize Unix-based systems.
"They rushed this stuff on the ship, there was no real prototype, and then they tried to make things work as they went along," the source said. "I don't think that Unix or NT were ever really evaluated -- it was just somebody thinking this was good, with no knowledge."
The statement said that Unix is still being considered for future Smart Ship technologies, acknowledging that many systems already utilize Unix-based systems and that a "government team is currently researching the best technical and financial solution[s] ... of which the decision to use Windows NT or Unix will play a major role."
My understanding, which is kindergarten level but which does exist, is that Unix is pretty good for running something like a warship, while Windows is seriously bad. Windows is cheap and messy, for allowing cheap and messy people like me to have something almost as pretty looking as a Mac which will be able to do most of what I want cheaply and messily, without always having to dive down into the code and be a geek.
They still haven't got Unix working as a non-geek civilian alternative to Windows. But if you are running, or trying to run, a "tight ship" of some kind – such as, e.g., a ship – which has a predictable and listable list of functions that the system has to do anddo right, then Unix is definitely preferable to Windows. You have the money to bring in the expertise to set everything up shipshape, and you should.
I did a piece a week or two back about the educational edge that having a big military may be providing to the USA in the form of a society that is permeated with military procedures and military habits of organisation and training. Europe has had this for centuries, but has now lost it, and it could make for a deeply ignorant Europe. That was the speculation.
And I further speculate that the military superiority of Unix could be a more particular thing that spreads outwards from the US military to the wider society. This Yorktown story is a story of the temporary pollution of naval discipline by civilian sloppiness. I surmise that, the US military being the US military, the permanent influences are more likely to flow in the opposite direction. The USA will in due course make the big Windows-to-Linux switch under the influence of a generation of ex-military types who learnt, the hard way, that Linux is in lots of ways (crucially in being more "solid" and less crash-prone, but also being less virus-threatened) better than Windows, and who have learned how to make it work, or failing that who know of someone they bunked with during Gulf War 3 who can make it work. Surely one of the guys now wrestling with applying Unix to missile systems or satellites or submarines or inventory will demob, and finally crack the problem of that Linux front-end-good-enough-for-civilians which keeps being promised but which never seems to materialise. The US military may not have that many people in it at any one time, but the total number of people who pass through it is huge, and more and more of those will be using and learning about computers.
The blogosphere is full of people who combine geekness with humanity to a degree that surpasses me on both fronts, and some of them may be able to comment usefully. I'm sure that to lots of folks what I've just put has been obviously true, or obviously false, or obviously oversimplified for years now. But other culture blog readers, the artsy types, might be worth reaching on all this. If you do comment though, remember who you're writing at.
