From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,499dc364d2fd8ade X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!r19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: sjw Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada in Boeing 787 Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 12:14:17 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <56eb5a1a-4fb7-48ef-9ab0-c096abd73346@k2g2000pro.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.30.110.254 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1265314457 31817 127.0.0.1 (4 Feb 2010 20:14:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 20:14:17 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: r19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=82.30.110.254; posting-account=_RXWmAoAAADQS3ojtLFDmTNJCT0N2R4U User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:8897 Date: 2010-02-04T12:14:17-08:00 List-Id: On Feb 4, 5:02=A0pm, jonathan wrote: > The cynic in me pictures management types saying: > "Oh good, its not flight control software. Its in-flight > entertainment software. It doesn't actually > have to work. We have just the right tools for that!" I > picture off-the-shelf commercial software, an army of entry > level commercial programmers, and pointy-haired bosses who > were convinced that the combination would save time and money. I know a little about one of these systems. The main problem IIRC was that the hardware was wildly underpowered and underresourced, with banked EEPROM, and there was something like a 10% chance that an in- situ software upgrade would brick the module. It may well have been written in C; I don't know if there was an RTOS, but if there was it most certainly wasn't Windows. The most problematic module was the Video-Audio Control Module, aka VACM; there was a rueful sign on the wall, "Nature abhors a VACM" :-)