4 ms·

It depends on what you mean, but as a general rule? A very long way. There is far more to military tech than the speculative lab and consumer goods startups tha

by polemic 13y ago

It depends on what you mean, but as a general rule? A very long way. There is far more to military tech than the speculative lab and consumer goods startups that Google has acquired. There is a good reason that the latest fighter jets run software that is ancient by Google's standards: it has to be a 100% rock solid in a deeply hostile environment, it is tightly integrated into other systems, and it builds on many years of practical war fighting experience. A company like Google would theoretically have the resources and expertise to begin the process of militarizing their acquisitions, but it would be many years before they could come close to the operational capability.

bigd 13y ago
>>it has to be a 100% rock solid in a deeply hostile environment, it is tightly integrated into other systems, and it builds on many years of practical war fighting experience. This sounds too good to be true. In a perfect world maybe, but we are speaking of people who love to cut corners to save few bucks, and who price very little the life of a person/soldier. If federal contractors can't do a website right ( healtcare.gov anyone?) what are the chances things are as rock-solid as you say? I honestly can't say from the outside, but I am skeptical.
- polemic 13y ago
  It's not just the human cost: in a billion dollar nuclear bomber you have powerful economic and political motivations on making sure it doesn't fail at an inopportune time.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    But if it does, you will always be able to blame things on user error so long as a user is in the loop. I'm sure the crash diagnostics output from a billion dollar bomber is only available to the manufacturer and if it is available to an independent third party investigating a crash, it's probably only parseable/understandable by the engineers who wrote the code in the first place. If there is only place where corners definitely get cut, it's on returning diagnostic for functions/processes that didn't need to be debugged/logged in order for the product to make it not just out of the lab but into production. Production bugs are the hardest to diagnose, because they are the least likely to have their causes instrumented/measured/logged.

by polemic 13y ago

bigd 13y ago

>>it has to be a 100% rock solid in a deeply hostile environment, it is tightly integrated into other systems, and it builds on many years of practical war fighting experience. This sounds too good to be true. In a perfect world maybe, but we are speaking of people who love to cut corners to save few bucks, and who price very little the life of a person/soldier. If federal contractors can't do a website right ( healtcare.gov anyone?) what are the chances things are as rock-solid as you say? I honestly can't say from the outside, but I am skeptical.

polemic 13y ago
It's not just the human cost: in a billion dollar nuclear bomber you have powerful economic and political motivations on making sure it doesn't fail at an inopportune time.
- malandrew 13y ago
  But if it does, you will always be able to blame things on user error so long as a user is in the loop. I'm sure the crash diagnostics output from a billion dollar bomber is only available to the manufacturer and if it is available to an independent third party investigating a crash, it's probably only parseable/understandable by the engineers who wrote the code in the first place. If there is only place where corners definitely get cut, it's on returning diagnostic for functions/processes that didn't need to be debugged/logged in order for the product to make it not just out of the lab but into production. Production bugs are the hardest to diagnose, because they are the least likely to have their causes instrumented/measured/logged.