4 ms·
I would have expected qnx or vxworks rather than any open source UNIX personally.
by cperciva 10y ago
I would have expected qnx or vxworks rather than any open source UNIX personally.
- vostok 10y agoFair point. When I said "mission critical systems that aren't as mission critical as nuclear submarines" I meant that a mistake can result in us losing $400 million in 30 minutes rather than the destruction of civilization as we know it. I don't know what people in the latter case use, but it sounds like they use Windows for Submarines.
- noir_lord 10y ago> $400 million in 30 minutes You write systems to autoplay Free to Play games?
- Pyxl101 10y agoHigh frequency trading, more like! Or just trading. Mistakes such as selling 610,000 shares at 1 yen, instead of 1 share at 610,000 yen. Clash of Clans only makes on the order of ~$2M-$8M per day, according to estimates, so it'd be tough for a Clash of Clans outage to cost $400M. Only when playing with money, or with equipment worth $400M can you lose that much in 30 minutes. (What kinds of equipment costs $400M and can be ruined in 30 minutes? Offshore oil rigs, I'm guessing. According to Quora, the least-expensive offshore rigs are $200M, while average is $360M. Ruining one of those with a software error would be a very bad day. Another option might be equipment in space such as satellites, though I imagine those are relatively harder to ruin.)
- snovv_crash 10y agoAlso think stuff like tunnel boring machines, or a dragline from a coal mine. Autopilot software for cruise liners. Power station control software. I think there is another side as well, software that may incur a liability if it fails due to loss of human life or recall costs. Eg bridge control, pharmaceutical QA, even electronic manufacturing (think Galaxy Note 7 design phase).
- tibbetts 10y agoI've worked on high frequency trading software infrastructure, including having been involved in serious bugs which lead to a lot of broken trades and lost money, and would have said with anything like proper architecture and governance you can't lose $400 million in 30 minutes. But Knight Capital did manage to lose $440 million in 45 minutes, due in large part to what I would call improper architecture and governance. So there you go. https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/amp/ https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...
- user5994461 10y agoAdd life-critical systems to the list. The damages/insurance/claims can be in this order of magnitude. Just need to kill enough people at once, like a big plane or a big boat or a big building. By the way, trading [should] have fail safes (i.e. stop after some amount of losses). A plane doesn't have fail safe, when the plane goes down, there is never enough parachutes =D
- ptero 10y agoVxworks, IME, is the option of choice for hard real time components. For other (e.g., soft real time) critical components a solid Linux distribution works better -- smaller code, easier checks. I have seen implementations as Linux systems with a few dedicated vxworks boards for specific small components.
- wycx 10y agoRTEMS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTEMS
- ptero 10y agoVxworks, IME, is the option of choice for hard real time components. For other (e.g., soft real time) critical components a solid Linux distribution works better -- smaller code, easier checks. I have seen implementations as Linux systems with a few dedicated vxworks boards for specific small components.