>By 2013, the International Space Station (ISS) switched out its Windows laptops for Debian Linux machines for mission-critical work.
Fairly damning statement about Microsoft.
analysisdead on
>A survey of practitioners identified [Yocto](https://www.yoctoproject.org/) as the “clear winner” among embedded Linux distributions. However, we still have a fragmented landscape of teams “building their own version of Linux from scratch” with “no shared foundational layer,” Roche said.
>“Everyone agrees that Linux is the answer,” he said. “But nobody agrees on which Linux.”
SOON: Situation: there are 15 competing standards.
somethingtc on
this is it, the year of linux on the ~~desktop~~ moon
peterabbit456 on
I believe that software is a large fraction of the cost of developing a working spacecraft. With growing computing power, hardware things like navigation and propulsion can become generic and off-the-shelf, leading to lower costs in these areas. The cost of launch has already dropped dramatically, and will continue to drop further.
When the hardware and software of spacecraft become generic and standardized, spacecraft become more repairable, with faulty modules swapped out or upgraded in space. As people move into new environments beyond the ISS, like L4/L5, the Moon’s surface, and Mars, being able to repair equipment with generic hardware will be vastly cheaper than sending a whole new spacecraft. It also might become a matter of life and death, within the next decade.
If you look at Boeing’s Starliner, you will see the controls are something out of the 1970s. Everything looks proprietary. This gives me little confidence that the software is built to modern standards of reliability. PaperMoon could go a long way toward improving a living fossil like Starliner.
4 Comments
>By 2013, the International Space Station (ISS) switched out its Windows laptops for Debian Linux machines for mission-critical work.
Fairly damning statement about Microsoft.
>A survey of practitioners identified [Yocto](https://www.yoctoproject.org/) as the “clear winner” among embedded Linux distributions. However, we still have a fragmented landscape of teams “building their own version of Linux from scratch” with “no shared foundational layer,” Roche said.
>“Everyone agrees that Linux is the answer,” he said. “But nobody agrees on which Linux.”
SOON: Situation: there are 15 competing standards.
this is it, the year of linux on the ~~desktop~~ moon
I believe that software is a large fraction of the cost of developing a working spacecraft. With growing computing power, hardware things like navigation and propulsion can become generic and off-the-shelf, leading to lower costs in these areas. The cost of launch has already dropped dramatically, and will continue to drop further.
When the hardware and software of spacecraft become generic and standardized, spacecraft become more repairable, with faulty modules swapped out or upgraded in space. As people move into new environments beyond the ISS, like L4/L5, the Moon’s surface, and Mars, being able to repair equipment with generic hardware will be vastly cheaper than sending a whole new spacecraft. It also might become a matter of life and death, within the next decade.
If you look at Boeing’s Starliner, you will see the controls are something out of the 1970s. Everything looks proprietary. This gives me little confidence that the software is built to modern standards of reliability. PaperMoon could go a long way toward improving a living fossil like Starliner.