Talk about 'Mission-critical', I was involved with the
preliminary design competition phase of the Space Shuttle. NASA had a
criterion for the design of the Shuttle systems. It was, as best I
remember it: Fail Operational, Fail Operational, Fail Safe.
That meant that after two independent failures (it might have been three)
an additional independent failure had to not threaten safe recovery.
That is why flights are still cancelled because of bad weather overseas,
so that a pre-orbital abort must be able to recover safely at a downrange
site. Challenger's destruction taught them that they had not thought of
everything, but they tried.
Hersch
At 08:37 PM 08/26/2001, you wrote:
> > I'm quite amused at your
assertions at who my
> > customers are.
>
> All you've described thus far is desktop users, and desktop systems
are
not
> production systems in any mission-critical sense. The company
will not
fail
> because a desktop computer isn't working.
>
> > Most of them are indeed in a production environment,
> > most of them upgrade often and run current
technology.
A large part of my business deals with 3D animation, video editing,
and
pre-press graphics. You may call these desktop systems, I call
these
production systems.
> See above.
Please do.
> > I personally don't know of anyone, other than you,
> > that takes two months to upgrade their system.
>
> Spend a couple of decades working with real production systems, and
you'll
know
> lots of people like that. In fact, you'll know people who take
a year to
> upgrade a system. I've certainly had to deal with people like
this quite
often,
> and in fact I've been one myself, when I was working on that side of
the
fence.
In the context of this scanner newsgroup, I doubt you'll find that
anyone
takes a year to upgrade their systems, especially if their
livelihood
depends on it. And when their livelihood depends on reliable systems,
they
probably won't be saddling them more than 100 applications, as you
yourself
have done. But they will upgrade often to take advantage of newer,
faster
hardware and software upgrades.
> You make the same mistake that many microcomputer companies
make,
including the
> big ones like Microsoft. Their employees have never dealt with
true
> mission-critical systems, in the mainframe or NASA sense (for
example),
and are
> so completely ignorant of these domains that they refuse to
acknowledge
their
> existence.
Your are right in that I haven't dealt with NASA and have very little to
do
with mainframes. Perhaps you can discuss those systems on a more
appropriate
newsgroup.
