[Discuss] ten more years

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 01:11:10PM -0500, Kent Borg wrote:
> Airlines have been computerized for decades, but recently have major
> carriers had multiple global ground stops because their computers don't
> work--how many in the last couple years? (There aren't that many global
> airlines anymore either...)

...except that these computer systems which are failing and grounding the
carriers are actually the same ones they've been using for decades.  I
presume you're referring to the high profile ground stops for United,
Delta, and American in the last few years?  Running on SHARES, Deltamatic,
and SABRE respectively, as they (or in UA's case, Continental Airlines)
have been running basically forever, on the same TPF mainframes.  I
would argue this is an example which goes directly against your point --
for more robustness they should have moved to more modern systems, and
their reluctance to do so is causing major failures.

> And for all the hardware power we keep throwing at our work, latencies go
> up. My early Macintosh Powerbook--a desktop OS merely adapted for portable
> use--woke up from sleep faster than do my Androids (which never really sleep
> long, and were designed for waking and sleeping from the start).

Curious.  I hit the power button on my sleeping android phone and I get a
login screen ready to go in about a half second.  Ditto for going back to
sleep.  This was the case on prior phones too, even when other operations
on them got sluggish to the point of irritation.

> But Google's Calendar app can't reliably give me notifications of events...
> (Oddly, it seems to work better if I say "send me an e-mail, too", then I'll
> probably get the regular on-device notification.)

Hmm - again, WFM.  What phone and OS are you running?

--grg