Windows: Warship edition in-store now!
The Register surprised me with a weird news article yesterday: ‘Windows for Warships nears front line service‘. It seems like the British Royal Navy made a deal with uncle Bill to equip their antique ships with Microsoft. I can only imagine what the crew might think when they’re served error messages, blue screen of deaths or received updates – but I doubt they will be positive.
My first thought was; ‘oh my god’. Why didn’t they pick some Linux variation for that? At least they can control all of that code. OpenBSD for instance (also a free operating system), use an a bit older and reliable version of the core, equip it with just the things you need and you’ll have a light ánd powerful system. But instead they’re using Redmonds closed source software to run on these battleships. As I’ve read commentators say on various news sites already; ‘At least the crew can play minesweeper now.’ and I think that might be just about the advantage of using Windows for this goal.
The Register wrote this down as well pretty fine;
There may also be perfectly valid criticisms to be made regarding Windows useability. When triggering missile decoys with seconds to spare, one doesn’t need a superfluous pop-up box saying “Do you want to use soft kill?” with “Confirm” and “Cancel” buttons. But this kind of thing isn’t going to faze you if you’re used to entering instruction sets such as “PE L5414.10N L00335.67E R6000 TMDA [INJECT]” from memory without backspace or delete. During combat, mind. The one group of users to whom Windows 2000 might look pretty marvelous are RN warfare operators.
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