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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> IVAS is a Microsoft-designed heads-up display that functions as a fight-rehearse-train system, among other roles.

So... no invasions on patch tuesday? In all seriousness, I'm in the military myself and therefore have to use microsoft software products (outlook, windows, edge etc) every day. When they work they work, but every few weeks something just gives up the ghost. A patch, a new config .. some thing is changed an I have to spend an entire morning hammering away in config windows before I can continue my real job. The concept of a mircosoft-powered weapon or tactical information system is scary.

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Similar anecdotes could be made for Linux or just about any technology under the sun. Have you seen some of the code for embedded Linux drivers? It can get downright nasty.

Every day anyone turns on a Windows machine they roll the dice. Maybe it works. Maybe a security patch was applied last night that borked the firewall. Maybe today you are checking the leave system to see which offices are free so you can borrow thier machines. Linux machines aren't like that. Errors happen but they don't generally just stop working. When you have a faulty linux machine you get the sense that it is at least trying to work. It feeds you data about what is wrong. It throws errors, list everything it has done or hadn't done, and defaults to some sort of backup mode.

A windows/microsoft system just stops. You get a generic error notice, a insulting "click to diagnose" option, and it is up to you to figure our why Outlook is no longer accepting calender events from some other system that, until now, it has been playing nice with for years. (My issue yesturday.) That is IF it even admits there was an error. Often it will just not work but fail to tell you that anything is amiss until you get a note from your CO that you missed a meeting because reasons.

No, it's different with windows. Linux doesn't have constant forced patches from the mothership that kill your system. It can happen but it's much rarer. Windows used to be better of course (back when i worked there, even though I didn't work on that part ;-)). It's staggering how bad windows maintenance is now.

Have you met my friend Ubunto 20.04?

touche

This was my chief complaint working in a military intel shop. It's insane trusting their products in highly critical situations. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to use a radar workstation that ran on Linux. Everything worked, could do dynamic operations right from the terminal, it was so sweet!

I've been in those areas too. What drove me nutz is not being able to automate things. I've spent days doing something by hand that, if I were on a less-restricted system, I could do in literally seconds in a terminal interface. Want to convert a movie file from one resolution to another? "ffmpeg -input -output" No. You have to use a video encoder from 1995 that only outputs into avi, doesn't understand modern audio formats and can only extract screenshots from reference frames.

Yeah, the amount of data entry I had to do by hand was killer. I eventually got a Linux laptop cleared, set up scripts to scrape data and generate briefings, documents, formatted images. My productivity went up so much (a week's worth of work in a couple hours) that my command started an investigation to see if I was siphoning off my work load to other shops. When they figured out I was just automating everything, they shut it down because the "software was not government approved" lol. So much for military intelligence...

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