Kudos to MS for being good sports about it.

I don't think this should be modded as flamebait. Personally I view the article with a similar degree of skepticism and incredulity. I have a good friend who works at a major chip manufacturer and specializes in fault detection. He related to me that, essentially they have never seen a case of an undetected (by the CPU) fault, despite running tests like this on massively huge systems. Between a game programmer and the company who makes their bread and butter doing this, I'm going to have to go with the latter until someone posts code or something more concrete than what I view as a lot of speculation.

As a government employee I can assure you our incompetence knows no bounds.

Yeah, the government never makes mistakes.

Actually I read something interesting about WWII One Time Pads. Apparently the pads were generated by women (typically) drawing ping pong balls out of a hopper and writing down the letters. The problem was if they drew the same letter multiple times in a row, they might put it back thinking that it wasn't "random" enough. Of course, in doing so they changed the distribution of letters to no longer be uniform. My understanding is that this very quickly erodes the cryptographic integrity of the one-time pad to the point where you can start to look for the plaintext based on letter frequency. I'm not saying that's applicable here (and I have to imagine the cryptographers would have looked at this) but interesting nonetheless.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The analogue is Windows, not Windows 8.

Wouldn't this require the OS to be complete or something? E.g. if the OS only turned on a light, surely that's provable secure?

Yeah, I agree. In fact, I think that was the point I was trying to make (albeit unsuccessfully as it turns out).

Yeah, I agree except that wasn't really how his argument goes...and yes, old stuff works. But new stuff works too (also, new here could be 5 years old). Anyway, I'm not really (or at least overly) questioning their rationale. I've just seen too many programs where the same people have been there forever and it's easier to keep doing the same thing rather than try something new. Again, hopefully that's not the case at NASA but it's sure as hell the case at the Pentagon.

Oh good, someone more embittered than me. I especially like how rather than provide any sort of argument as to why an RTOS is required (because...a pedestrian might walk in front of the rover?) you'd rather insult me.

Not for nothing but I'm about a step away from being a hippie and I've served the government faithfully for many years. I work with some of the best and brightest and if you weren't able to cut it there, the fact that you're incredibly negative and seem like a jerk would likely only be a few of the reasons why.

While I buy that the landing systems need an RTOS, I doubt Curiosity does. Image processing that happens with "precision"? Do x86 processors not process images precisely enough? I get the idea of being hardened to radiation but it was my understanding we have newer processors that fit the bill on this. The rest of this seems like a rationalization for using old hardware. However, as an engineer for the government it's possible I'm just old and embittered.

You're right about embedded systems (not counting smartphones, I personally think android is sort of crappy). I guess I was sort of lumping headless systems like set top boxes in with servers (possibly unfairly). That being said, I spent years programming on Linux including both user land and kernel level stuff so you can take your righteous indignation to someone who cares.

Well it's a matter of personal preference but personally I think android is pretty lousy and suffers from many of the same issues that desktop Linux does such as lack of standardization and a somewhat clunky interface.

Ok oddly enough this I agree with.

This is just a rant session about Atom. Someday linux devs will resign themselves to the fact that linux is (somewhat) great for servers and terrible for almost everything else. This will probably get modded as trolling but if I said the opposite thing about MS it would be insightful. In my opinion this entire article is trolling.