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"Wait, I need to land this plane - how do you do that in Excel?"
It is a truth universally acknowledged that, as George Santayana put it so pithily in The Life of Reason, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Shirley Bassey even sang a song about it. In the world of grey-bearded computer old-timers, there's a version that goes "Those who do not know Unix are destined to re-implement it, poorly."
We all painfully learn lessons as we go through life. If you don't bother to find out what your predecessors learned by their mistakes, you are probably going to go through the same pain yourself - unnecessarily.
A few years ago, Airbus announced that some of its new models would come with Bluetooth integrated, allowing passengers to use wireless headphones. This quickly led to much amusement if the plane's control systems were accessible over the radio connection, as immortalised in Heise's cartoon by Ritsch & Renn. If your German's not up to it, it shows a very startled airline passenger whose laptop screen reads "Bluetooth Connection Manager. A new device has been detected. Device: Airbus A310. Start the auto-configuration wizard? [Start] [Cancel]"
The humour, of course, was that nobody would be so stupid as to connect an airliner's control systems to the same network that passengers were able to access. That would be madness, suicidally daft.
So really we shouldn't be surprised that Boeing has gone and done it. Ironically, in the 787 Dreamliner, a new product specifically designed to compete with Airbus' latest and greatest, the A380 super-jumbo.
These days, TCP/IP networks are cheap, standard, universal and ubiquitous. It makes sense to use this standard technology to interconnect a large machine's parts - for example, a large aeroplane's control systems. What some inspired young designer at Boeing decided to do, though, was to use the same network backbone for the control systems network and the passenger Internet connection.
Happily, the USA's Federal Aviation Administration spotted this in a report on the new aircraft.
So, happily, perhaps nobody will find themselves in the position of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss in Scott Adams' strip, wondering how to land a plane in Excel...
We all painfully learn lessons as we go through life. If you don't bother to find out what your predecessors learned by their mistakes, you are probably going to go through the same pain yourself - unnecessarily.
A few years ago, Airbus announced that some of its new models would come with Bluetooth integrated, allowing passengers to use wireless headphones. This quickly led to much amusement if the plane's control systems were accessible over the radio connection, as immortalised in Heise's cartoon by Ritsch & Renn. If your German's not up to it, it shows a very startled airline passenger whose laptop screen reads "Bluetooth Connection Manager. A new device has been detected. Device: Airbus A310. Start the auto-configuration wizard? [Start] [Cancel]"
The humour, of course, was that nobody would be so stupid as to connect an airliner's control systems to the same network that passengers were able to access. That would be madness, suicidally daft.
So really we shouldn't be surprised that Boeing has gone and done it. Ironically, in the 787 Dreamliner, a new product specifically designed to compete with Airbus' latest and greatest, the A380 super-jumbo.
These days, TCP/IP networks are cheap, standard, universal and ubiquitous. It makes sense to use this standard technology to interconnect a large machine's parts - for example, a large aeroplane's control systems. What some inspired young designer at Boeing decided to do, though, was to use the same network backbone for the control systems network and the passenger Internet connection.
Happily, the USA's Federal Aviation Administration spotted this in a report on the new aircraft.
So, happily, perhaps nobody will find themselves in the position of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss in Scott Adams' strip, wondering how to land a plane in Excel...