British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows 725
meist3r writes "On his Government blog, Microsoft's Ian McKenzie announced today that the Royal Navy was ahead of schedule for switching their nuclear submarines to a customized Microsoft Windows solution dubbed 'Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG)' which apparently consists of Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations. In the article, it is claimed that this decision will save UK taxpayers £22m over the next ten years. The installation of the new system apparently took just 18 days on the HMS Vigilant. According to the BAE Systems press release from 2005, the overall cost of the rollout was £24.5m for all eleven nuclear submarines of the Vanguard, Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes. Talk about staying with the sinking ship."
Saving the tax payer £22 mil (Score:5, Informative)
Summary fails to mention, and sort of implies the opposite; The cost saving is down to using off the shelf hardware, not switching to windows.
Re:Saving the tax payer £22 mil (Score:3, Informative)
On the OS side they will have problems as well. The version of windows they deploy will eventually reach end of life. If they deployed on a Free OS they (supplier or customer) would have been able to maintain it themselves regardless of what happened upstream.
Re:save UK taxpayers 22m? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I would have thought the military would want Op (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft do have source sharing programs with some partners. This sort of project would be one example of that.
The reason the Windows 2000 source code got leaked a few years back is not because of lack of security at Microsoft itself but because a partner leaked it.
Even Microsoft realises that the source code needs to be available for some projects and they have a choice of either allowing just that or losing some of the most high paying contracts.
Re:Saving the tax payer £22 mil (Score:5, Informative)
Was custom built hardware running Ada86 custom software
Then Mixture of SPARC's running Custom Solaris system, and custom hardware, and the same Ada software
Now some off the shelf hardware (PC's) running custom version of Windows somewhere between Win2k and XP?
N.B. The Sonar system however run Linux ....
Re:And the scary thing is.. (Score:2, Informative)
Not only that, but they can launch if they can't receive the Radio 4 Today Program.
Re:I would have thought the military would want Op (Score:2, Informative)
What makes you think they haven't got a contract with Microsoft for access to the source code ?
Even if they do, unless they compile the source code themselves with a compiler they know they can trust there's no certainty over what is running.
Ken Thompson pointed that one out [bell-labs.com]. What a lot of people don't mention is the date at the top - he pointed that one out in 1984 .
Re:Next generation? (Score:3, Informative)
It's mature and stable by now - unlike any newer MS server OS.
Re:Classic title! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rubbish (Score:2, Informative)
It's still legal to use pounds and ounces, or gallons, or miles or any other imperial units, but you are equally welcome to use metric units if you wish.
Actaully that's not quite true. Shops must display a) both metric and imperial or b) metric only)
Steve Thoburn, a greengrocer who worked at a local market in Sunderland who gained a criminal conviction in 2001 by breaching the Weights and Measures act by selling bananas by the pound.
Re:How deep? (Score:2, Informative)
Not quite true (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BSOD (Score:3, Informative)
__declspec dllexport pascal WINAPI DWORD NSAAccessFunctionEx(
__in HWnd window,
__in HWnd theOtherWindow,
__in HWnd someHandleToSomethingThatsNotAWindow,
__in DWORD PRRRRRT,
__in const HANDLE SHMWFTPFQ,
__in NSAStructEx* nsastruct,
__in BOOLEAN reallytruly
__in RESV reserved1
__in RESV reserved2
__in RESV reserved3
__in RESV reserved4
__in DNULL mustnotbenull
__in HNULL mustbenull
__in DDOC notducumented
);
There fixed that for you.
Re:How deep? (Score:2, Informative)
In Holland, we usually measure beer in the type of glass it comes in. The most common types are (approximated):
fluitje - 200ml
vaas - 300ml
pint - 500ml
pitcher - 2000ml
It's not a replacement for metric units, but even we (as a perennial metric country) do not use the metric system for everything.
Re:Learning from prior mistakes (Score:1, Informative)
The OS didn't got belly-up. It continued to run perfectly.
The user-land software that ran the ship crashed due to a divide-by-zero. The OS properly caught the exception and killed the app.
With the control application crashed, the ship couldn't be controlled, since there were no manual overrides.
So the ship was dead in the water due to horrible design.
The flaw was NOT with Windows, it was with the userland software. Linux would have had the same result - the userland would have crashed.
Re:BSOD (Score:3, Informative)
It's often called Hanlon's razor because he quoted that in a 1980 book, but it was originally used by Robert Heinlein in his 1941 short story "Logic of Empire".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor [wikipedia.org]
Re:How deep? (Score:1, Informative)
in the universally recognised mpg
Which is quite different from US mpg, leading to lots of heated confusion on the internet, since it is possible for people to communicate with people living in foreign countries now. Remember that the US pint is different from the British pint, and they have several different sizes of gallon (and mile).
Re:Keep Linux out of defense (Score:3, Informative)
The same way the Russians make sure that Linux doesn't contain sleeping trojans written by Chinese or Americans - by performing a full security audit of the source code of specific kernel & userland versions, and standardizing on those versions for military purposes. Russian result is called MSVS [linux.com], and is used by the military today.
Re:BSOD (Score:2, Informative)
Generally, there isn't.
Sometimes, there is.
Back in 1605, a bunch of guys really did conspire to blow up Parliament. In 1776, a couple of rabble-rousers really did conspire to break off the American colonies from the British Empire. In 1968, during a student protest the Mexican Presidential Guard conspired to use its own snipers to act as agents provocateur and get the Army to open fire on the protesters [npr.org]. In 1972, a bunch of idiots from Nixon's "Committee to Re-elect the President" really did conspire to eavesdrop on and steal records from their Democratic opponents. In 2001, a couple of nutjobs really did conspire to hijack planes and crash them into high-value American targets.
Was the Lusitania used as some sort of agent provocateur? I don't know. It's certainly not as batshit crazy as the "the U.S. government set up the WTC and Pentagon destruction with missiles and explosives" 9/11 theories.
Did Microsoft and the NSA conspire to put backdoors into Windows? I don't know. But given the track records of the two organizations in question, it's certainly conceivable.
Re:How deep? (Score:5, Informative)
The real failure here is in not teaching graspable examples and estimates.
For everyday tasks, simple but rough conversions convey a lot more understanding than tables of four-digit factors. And so here it is, from a native metric user who has had to parse some imperial in his time, unsuitable for exacrt measurements, but helps you understand your world:
The rough imperial/metric survival guide
Basic equivalences:
* A litre and a quart is roughly the same
* A yard and a meter is roughly the same
* A imperial ton and a metric tonne (1000kg) are almost exactly the same.
Rules of thumb:
* A US quart is almost one liter.
* A UK quart is a bit more than a liter.
=> a pint is about half a liter a liter is about 2 pints
=> a gallon is about 4 litres
=> a cup is about a quarter liter
* A pound is almost half a kilo
* A stone is just over 6 kilos
* An ounce of weight (any kinds) is almost 30 grams
=> there are about 35 ounces in a kilo
=> 100grams is between 3 and 4 ounces.
* A CD is 12cm wide
* The hole in the CD can contain a 1cm square
* A foot is about 30cm. A metric desk ruler is typically 30cm long.
=> an inch is about 2.5cm.
=> 10cm is about 4 inces
=> 1m is about 40inches
* A yard is about a meter
=> There are about 3 feet to a meter
=> A fathom is almost 2 meters
* An imperial mile is about one and a half kilometer
* A league is almost exactly 5555m.
* A league is roughly five and a half kilometers
* For typical oven temereatures Fahrenheit is roughly Celsius * 2
This is less than 10% off from 150C through 300C, but possibly not exact
enough for sensitive baked goods.
* For typical weather temperatures, don't even bother beyond some selcted
datapoints, choose the ones you feel are handy:
F and C equal. Awfully, fiercely cold weather, but can be found:
-40F = -40C
Temperature of a good home freezer. Skiing starts getting chilly:
0F = -18C
Reliably thaw-free. Lasting good skiing conditions:
25F = -4C
Water freezes/melts:
32F = 0C
Maximum density of water, commonly the temp of water below the ice:
39F = 4C
Standard "room temperature" in chemistry. A bit too cold for T-shirts though.
68F = 20C
Perfect balmy weather IMO, but then I am a northerner:
77F = 25C
Body temperature, or bloody hot weather:
100F = 37C
I can't really grasp how far a kilometre or mile is
If you do any walking, running, or cycling: measure your most common route on
a map in kilometers or miles, that should give you a very intuitive scale on
those.
And remember: Google is your friend! You can type straight in stuff like:
"2.4 us pints in l"
Re:How deep? (Score:3, Informative)
No, its anybody who ever had to do an engineering or physics calculation, ever. You can take your bullshit English/Imperial system and go dance in the trees or whatever your trying to get at there.
Remember folks, English Units Crash Rockets.
Re:How deep? (Score:4, Informative)
Notice that if you lay out a square field such that an ox team can plow one furrow across then rest, you get a square with sides of exactly one furlong or 660 ft. The area of that field 43,600 square feet, which is nearly exactly one acre (43,560 ft).
Sorry, but that's off by a factor of ten. A traditional farmers acre is indeed 660 feet long, but only 66 feet wide. (That is, one furlong by one chain). A furlong square field would be ten acres.
Long, narrow fields allow the farmer to plow the field with the minimum number of turns. Turning an ox team around is not quite as easy as you might expect.
The same reason for long-narrow fields still applies to tractors, which also take time to turn. Of course, tractors do not need to rest, so the fields can be longer. Fields of a mile or more in length or not uncommon in the US and Canada.