Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jeremiahbuckley 695 days ago
"to begin with" is expecting miracles we don't have today. Delta has been around forever and presumably runs a lot of critical stuff was written in the 90s, or (hopefully not by now) even the 60s. And, as cool as Linux is as an OS, many smart people program in C#/MSFT-stack, and you don't want to remove them from a talent search if you're Delta and need 1000s of developers. And this CrowdStrike thing wouldn't have been mitigated by running a Windows App in a container, it would have killed the Windows OS supporting the container (I'm pretty sure...).

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is a common architecture guideline. Well, in a way Delta (and any company 30+ years old) optimized all their business processes using old coding standards. Now they have to effectively change the oil while the car is driving down the highway. Whoever figures out how to get AI to assist in this will make the first AI fortune.
1 comments
dboreham 695 days ago
Ok. But I think it's reasonable to ask why flight arrival information displays have to run Windows. And even if they have to run Windows why not some embedded ROM-boot library kiosk version? Why does a sign need to have a fully featured desktop OS?

(I have a picture of said sign displaying its blue screen lest anyone think I'm making this up).

link
jeremiahbuckley 694 days ago
Best answer I can guess: because it's easy and cheap to set up, and the dev team involved was moved to another project years ago.

Windows is dominant for UIs because of a long history of having drivers for all the various peripherals which eases hw procurement issues. Sure that advantage went away long ago but the momentum takes a long time to die out. The brains with the expertise know how to do it on Windows. Combine that with the fact that Windows UI is not something you have to train new hires on and it makes business sense that all the user-facing interfaces ended up Windows applications. Sure, over time they should be migrated to containerized web UIs, but there's a lot of work to be done. Updating the flight arrival display isn't mission critical; it's at the end of the backlog.

I believe I heard one thing that got screwed up was a crew-scheduler product. Like: they couldn't check in crews or get their schedules written in so a system (presumably something on a mainframe) could work out where all the people needed to be at what times. Much more mission critical! The central big brain was (probably) not Windows, but those user inputs at the end were enough to screw up the whole business process.

link
pintxo 694 days ago
Maybe because airline traffic is a hard business (airlines make cents per passenger per flight).

And thus airports are pressured by airlines to minimize costs. In the end, the answer is probably, that it's just cheaper to use windows than to invest any more effort into the task.

link