Reality finally sinks in at the International Space Station
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
This is not just about saving costs... it is about rock solid performance.
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/191-linux-training/711318-linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/191-linux-training/711318-linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration
Comments
Further, it would be interesting to know what hardware & software is actually controlling the mission-critical & life support systems on the ISS. Prolly not Windows...!
I do get that with Linux you have access to everything and if the API is not to your liking you can be free to alter it. Makes sense. I can imagine the pucker factor is a lot higher when applying that kernel patch to the system that makes it possible for you to continue to breathe.
I'd say Windows has stability issues beyond what Linux has. It seems that having to always verify that software is properly registered to the right own is a big techinical quagmire for MS.
And it seems that MS support starts with a] ask a friend, b] hire a professional, and c] don't call us. There is just too many aspects that are proprietary and uneconomical that the Linux community carries the ball and explains clearly.
Those systems having a descendence from the earliest days of spaceflight...mostly controlled by (best way I can describe simply)
a style of TTL based legacy computers (hardware controlled and determined) and sub-systems that do the root level computations and thruster firing sequencing and timing. Especially on the Russian side of things.
Its understandable, to me completely, why this would be preferrable.
Using some contemporary OS controlled top teir heirarchy system would be (and is) just asking for trouble...at this level of operations.
As for the ISS, Surely the high level, user interface stuff will be running contempo OS as mentioned.
I wouldnt want it to do it ALL though , lol //
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36TcG5XZDg
Well Apple also has proprietary code in spite of having origins in Unix (Linux also has origins in Unix).
There are a few good reasons to avoid Apple.
A. The world community is much more aware of the details of Linux rather than Apples or Windows.
B. Public peer review will always produce a better OS than proprietary code... over the long run.
Windows historically tried to support everyone's gadget and 'secret code'. In doing so, application installation and maintenance is a mess.
1. Everybody is doing something differently or thinks theirs is the next great break through.
2. Companies grow weary of the cost of licensing and try to avoid upgrades that are costly, in spite of the validity of improvements.
3. Historically, a lot of utilities that are free on Unix and Linux, have been claimed to be proprietary software in Windows that one must pay for.
4. The dark side of computing is always trying to hack the OS that is most available as their first choice. Why bother looking for machines that are either very hard to hack or very few in number, when MS makes it so easy?
Apple has some of these issues by the nature of being a commercial venture, but it certainly doesn't have all of them. But Apple has other issues.
1. It simply costs more to do most things.
2. You are never going to get all the source code. It is a 'need-to-know' basis.
3. You work for Apple, not yourself, not your country, not your employer.
Are you sure that you are taking about smart people? It sounds like you are talking about a sub-set of 'greedy smart people'. There are a lot of smart people in the world that are generous and humble. But the greedy smart people tend to dismissed them as dumb.
The simple fact is that the backbone of the internet is 70% or more Linux, not Windows. The big buyers in the know, choose Linux to set up an ISP, while US corporations that are intimately tied to the US government buy Windows in bulk to be part of the American corporate culture. But if they really need unified global computer services, they may contract with IBM as well. So you see Windows as the 'office machine' of choice in the US corporate culture.
In Europe and China, Linux is widely accepted as an excellent work station OS.
What is used in your ubiquitous ATM? Windows, Apple, or what?
There are computation worlds that avoid Windows, Apple, and LInux. They still might use Unix, or something else. Governments around the world seem to be still working with IBM for solutions to their data processing that needs to be extremely secure. And Solaris is still a player in many behind-the-scenes big servers, but is now owned by Oracle. I miss Sun.
You are joking? The idea of Apple collaborating or letting others introduce changes and new configurations to an Apple OS seems beyond
remote - they are the most secretive and control-freaky OS vendor of the lot. And I'm sure one of the requirements was to not be dependent on a single
company or organization.
PS, my hippie, free world spirit was crushed; er.. Hacked with that old BSD, and other old kernel experience...
ok, I'm done... just had to vent a little... thanks for listening guys, no harm intended...
Why?
Because all the wheels on the cars are square.
Why?
Because the first car was built with square wheels.
Why?
Because before the first car, all the horse carts had square wheels.
Why?
Because the first horse cart had square wheels.
Why?
Because the first wheel was made square.
Why?
Because the first wheel was made out of a window frame.
Why?
Because all the windows were made out of square frames at that time.
Why?
Because everybody had square windows, everybody was accustomed to looking through square windows, and so it only made sense that windows should be square.
Seriously, how much farther can civilization advance while it's still yoked to this misery?
Smart engineers will be minimizing costs for their projects and employers and customers whilst maximizing functionality, reliability, safety etc etc. And if you look around that is what they do. Google and friends make a pile of money and they run on Linux.
Also, like Loopy, I question the idea that smart people are only motivated by money. If you got yourself a degree in CS even though you have no passion for the subject then find you have no job, well, that's doubly sad but tough. Those smart ones with the passion for the subject will get that CS degree without any regard for future employment. They will get pleasure from the degree itself. That other sad guy won't even have had that. That's odd. So did I. Except I started with a 14400 modem:) That was exactly the point when the internet starting to take off big time. Google arrived on the scene. All kinds of help was just a google search away. All of a sudden you were in a community covering the world. Anything but left alone. I see. You have no idea what you are talking about. There is no code of honor that will stop some bad guy or state or criminal outfit from hacking your systems. Unix security does not rely on a "code of honor". How dumb woulld that be? Don't we all. Working hard has never been a guarantee of good pay. In the Windows vs open source/free software debate paying to do stuff you can do for free hardly seems like a smart way to maximize you profit. Which has nothing to do with any topic on this thread.
I wonder who Travis Linux is? In any event, Linux changed significantly with version 2.4, and again with version 2.6. The current version is 3.0, but it really is a cosmetic number change as 2.6 was so well coded that Linus Torvalds declared it was time to mark the main work done. It really is a wonderful OS that is ignored by many just because they feel safer by spending money for something that they don't fully understand.
The same thing goes for the Bible. It seems more people read the ones they buy than the ones that are handed to them for free. Some aspects of human behavior are still a mystery to me.
Mike... just try a LIveCD of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 in Demo mode and you will find you are living with resentments of past struggles.
I do see where you are going with your statements about reward. But I think you have a fundamentally flawed view of what is going on in the open source / free
software world.
It's not built on hoards of unpaid hacker building software for free.
A lot of the most successful and widely used projects are being contributed to my companies who are in the business of making money and pay software engineers to get things done.
In times gone by when all was closed source there were a lot of companies employing software engineers to endlessly recreate the same thing over and over again. That's good reward for the hard work of the software engineers but basically a huge waste of effort. Very in efficient. Not to mention soul destroying for the guys who would actually like to see things progress.
What we have now is communities of, not of lone hackers, but companies and other institutions contibuting software effort into a common pool. There is no point in the keeping that code closed source as it is often not their core business. But there is great benifit to opening up and sharing that code. Other companies may also want to use it and contribute development even if only bug fixes.
Profit hungry businesses will closely guard their core business but realize there are advantages in sharing non-core stuff.
This is all driven by cold hard economics, not some hippie fantasy.
Now, you can be smart and get in on that or you can hope to take what you learned in your CS degree and hope to find a company to pay you to write yet another splay tree implementation.
It's quite a treat to do something you really like, work on cool stuff and get paid too.
Hehe...I dont have to read even a portion of "whats been written -out there" to know.
On the net, the majority of whats written -and available to a browser- is rubbish, or so passed-along / doctored and distorted its fit for the catbox anyway.
As for rover programms sent out recently, with the public involvement and information sharing with all the universities and followers, contemo OS interfacing was definitely a required element. But as I said earlier, the root level command and control systems ALL supercede any GUI based BS connected outside. And, if this were not implemented that way, I could say the process of human de-volution has begun! (movie:Idiocracy)
To me the stability depends on proper programming, testing, implementation, execution, and redundancy. Without those even Linux can be unstable at times. I have never had a favorite OS, but indeed some are better suited for certain tasks than others. I still wouldn't call either one better than the other. Certainly if every home user was running Debian 6 it would be a mess as is Windows. I'm not saying NASA's engineers cannot properly administer Windows, I just don't like the fact they summarize it as "unstable".
If they had said we don't like Windows because it is very bloated I'd agree. Microsoft has never made a non-server OS that is nothing more than a shell. For that reason alone I'd definitely put Linux on a robot. I'm sure a robot in space has no use for a "desktop" OS preloaded with solitaire.
I'd still love to read some for instances on what problems they had.
Still Windows had it's charms admin wise. Once you had it set up right, it ran real smooth. If you had problems it was usually a app not the OS. Server side it was a PITA.
As far as the space station, goes, all Linux is doing is the back office/logistics stuff. Nothing to do with life support, etc. Remember that side was designed way before Windows became available.