201–210 of 257 posts
can't find a wikipedia article on it but the times had an article in 1981
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/10/us/computers-to-have-the-...
apparently the 5th was standby, not the decider
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For errors due to radiation the probability is extremely low, since it would need to flip the same bit at the same time in two different places.
Then why 8 instead of 3?
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We have a lot more software developers than 50 years ago and intelligence is still normally distributed.
What’s your point?
The quote from the CMU guy about modern Agile and DevOps approaches challenging architectural discipline is a nice way of saying most of us have completely forgotten how to build deterministic systems. Time-triggered Ethernet with strict frame scheduling feels like it's from a parallel universe compared to how we ship software now.
During the time of the first Apollo missions, a dominant portion of computing research was funded by the defense department and related arms of government, making this type of deterministic and WCET (worst case execution time) a dominant computing paradigm. Now that we have a huge free market for things like online shopping and social media, this is a bit of a neglected field and suffers from poor investment and mind…
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there's a different level of 'good-enough' in each industry and that's normal. When your highest damage of a bad site is reduced revenue (or even just missed free user), you have lower motivation to do it right compared to a living human coming back in one piece.
Yes, of course, but a culture of “good enough” can go too far. One may work in a lower-risk context, but we can still learn a lot from robust architectural thinking. Edge cases, security, and more. Low quality for a shopping cart feels fine until someone steals all the credit card numbers.
This is not to say your code should be a buggy mess, but 98% bug free when you're a SaaS product and pushing features is certainly better than 100% bug free and losing ground to competitors.
NASA describes some impressive work for runtime integrity, but the lack of mention of build-time security is surprising. I would expect to see multi-party-signed deterministic builds etc. Anyone have any insight here?
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Yes, of course, but a culture of “good enough” can go too far. One may work in a lower-risk context, but we can still learn a lot from robust architectural thinking. Edge cases, security, and more. Low quality for a shopping cart feels fine until someone steals all the credit card numbers.
Likewise, perfectionism when it is unneeded can slow teams down to a halt for no reason. The balance in most cases is in the middle, and should shift towards 100% correctness as consequences get more dire. This is not to say your code should be a buggy mess, but 98% bug free when you're a SaaS product and pushing features is certainly better than 100% bug free and losing ground to competitors.
That's one thing I think is good to learn from mission critical architecture: an awareness of the impact and risk tolerance of code and bugs, which means an awareness of how the software will be used and in what context by users.
The part about triple-redundant voting systems genuinely blew my mind — it's such a different world from how most of us write software day to day, and honestly kind of humbling.
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Contrary to propaganda from the likes of Ludwig von Mises, the free market is not some kind of optimal solution to all of our problems. And it certainly does not produce excellent software.
I can't think of a time when I've found an absolutist position useful or intelligent, in any field. Free-market absolutism is as stupid as totalitarianism. The content of economics papers does not need to be evaluated to discard an extreme position, one need merely say "there are more things in earth and heaven than are dreamed of in your philosophies"