51–60 of 117 posts
Was reading this on HN and heard it on NPR simultaneously. I have a sneaking suspicion that booking systems for most airlines run atop legacyware. It just seems like the type of thing that would've been put in place long ago and then be very expensive to migrate/updgrade.
http://www.pacbiztimes.com/2012/04/06/united-takes-a-step-ba...
United is a mess. I had the misfortune of flying with them a couple months ago. I ended up in a city a 2 hour drive from my actual destination and had to rent a car on my own to get to where I was going. That was the worst of it, but almost every flight I saw on the way (both ones I was on and other flights at nearby gates) was delayed or overbooked or otherwise messed up in some way.
Was there a storm or something? Usually there is some motivating reason why flights are screwed up.
That's twice in a short time now - 'coincidence' on Ian Fleming's scale. A third time is enemy action. Airlines do seem like a pretty juicy target for cyber war operations - you can cause a gigantic amount of disruption with a successful attack on a single system.
Or, you know, the load is increasing over time, and the system is failing to scale to it, and so will fail more and more frequently as the load continues to increase?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Planes with pilots in them are mostly autonomous and can avoid each other as well as the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_syste... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Collision_Avoidance_Sy... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collis...
Automated, yes. Autonomous, no. The plane voices an alert, but the pilots still have to react to it.
I bet this is an issue with an old mainframe used somewhere in the booking system, something that has worked well but is difficult to fix when things go wrong. I think there is / will be a lot of money to be made trying to solve the problem of software security and reliability. This is obviously an extremely difficult problem, however the number of ancient systems that we currently have interconnected I think more la…
Nice reminder about a "glitch" happening in one of the datacenters use at the airline I used to work. Went like this: Guy who shows around the new datacenter/ops guy demonstrated how the emergency power off works by lifting the protection plate. Protection plate unhinges suddenly and droppes onto emergency power off button. Hilarity ensues.
Good thing we deployed those EMCs in pairs. But then curiosity gets the better of a DC ops guy wondering how the plate got jammed. So he punches the plate on the 2nd EMC causing it to similarly jam and power-off. Doh.
When we told EMC about this flaw in the design, they deployed a fix to the production line - a rubber stopper under the plate next to the switch to protect the switch from the protection plate.
I have a nagging (intuition? feeling?) that software safety/reliability/security needs are going to explode soon (because unreliabilities multiply in non-resilient systems interacting with each other) and that these are simply foreshocks. (yeah, I know security is already a huge deal, but as we come to trust software systems more and more, the safety/reliability factor will come more into play) EDIT: This is also par…
I doubt it. Nobody wants to pay for that.
Off-topic: Please use ISO 8601 format(YYYY-MM-DD) for dates in titles. The US date format hurts my poor logical soul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
There's little endian, big endian, and the US date format, which I like to call middle endian.
United is a mess. I had the misfortune of flying with them a couple months ago. I ended up in a city a 2 hour drive from my actual destination and had to rent a car on my own to get to where I was going. That was the worst of it, but almost every flight I saw on the way (both ones I was on and other flights at nearby gates) was delayed or overbooked or otherwise messed up in some way.
Was reading this on HN and heard it on NPR simultaneously. I have a sneaking suspicion that booking systems for most airlines run atop legacyware. It just seems like the type of thing that would've been put in place long ago and then be very expensive to migrate/updgrade.
Oh, it's not a suspicion. http://www.pacbiztimes.com/2012/04/06/united-takes-a-step-ba...
Well, that answers that.