[jr2]

Eh, UNIX?

[MarkN]

Nuke: It's 5 independent systems on smaller commercial aircraft, and 7 or 9 on larger ones.
On the A320 it is actually 5 different computers, with 3 architectures.
as for In-flight entertainment systems. The 777 was delayed by 6 months just to deal with bugs in the entertainment system, and it is rumoured that this is the same problem with the A380

[Fozzy]

I have got Vista,  , i have seen that screen on many occasion

[Descenterace]

Yup, aircraft need a lot of redundancy, and they use multiple software systems too. No point having five copies of the same software, because they'll all have the same bugs.

[vyper]

Generally speaking, mission-critical/safety-critical software for devices like aircraft electronics, lift controls, medical equipment, et al do not have "bugs" as we know them. You don't get away with putting "this can sometimes crash" in the comments section of an app that runs the flow control on a life support machine; Nor in cockpit control software.

[Centrixo]

damn, i would hate to think what would happen to many f1 cars that will run microsoft's ECU, which itself will be standard soon.

[SadisticSid]

My friend works for Goodrich aerospace and works on code that's millions of times less complex than that of a modern operating system, is completely tied to the hardware, and yet thousands of man hours go into it to make sure it's rock solid. If the same principles were applied to operating systems, we might get a solid version of Windows or Linux every two centuries or so.

[asyikarea51]

O_O

Microsoft is supplying what?!

I can't bear the thought of an expensive 800bhp++ engine blowing up thanks to a simple crash...

[Unknown Target]

My friend works for Goodrich aerospace and works on code that's millions of times less complex than that of a modern operating system, is completely tied to the hardware, and yet thousands of man hours go into it to make sure it's rock solid. If the same principles were applied to operating systems, we might get a solid version of Windows or Linux every two centuries or so.

Except that software is, like you said, less complex, and bound to the hardware that it supports OSs need to be much larger, and support many different hardware configs.

[Descenterace]

Generally speaking, mission-critical/safety-critical software for devices like aircraft electronics, lift controls, medical equipment, et al do not have "bugs" as we know them. You don't get away with putting "this can sometimes crash" in the comments section of an app that runs the flow control on a life support machine; Nor in cockpit control software.

'There's always one more bug.'

In other words, there's still a tiny probability that a piece of software, no matter how well tested, will fail under a certain unknown set of conditions. Two or three different programs tested to the same standard are a lot less likely to all fail under the same conditions. Which is why they use multiple software architectures for the same task as well as varying types of redundant hardware.