All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004.<p>Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between software cycles and capital good replacement cycles. Airplanes, factories, HVAC systems, even home appliances last for decades. Software on these systems needs to get upgraded, I can't even imagine the number of security patches that have gone into the Linux kernel in the last 11 years.